Ok back to it.
On a fun note, I just came home to find 9 ventrillo private messages from people who seem to have been waiting for someone to take this issue to task for a while. The emperor has no clothes, we were all just waiting for someone to say it. Thanks for the support guys, we're gonna make them smarten up.
As for those individuals who still (surprisingly
) don't want greater accountability and transparency to come to the way the balance team works (for some strange reason).....Let's start from the beginning:
On The Issue of 'Wah wah it's unreasonable for us to have to put so much effort into balancing when it seems so much easier to us to just make it up as we go along without any checks and balances'1. If your a community player who can't commit to playing the units you are responsible for nerfing/buffing, do the mod a favour and get yourself off our balance team immediately. You're not helping the player base, and you are not helping yourself by letting your laziness and irresponsibility run rampant.
2. For an active player, 8 games a week is very manageable. That is enough to vote on multiple issues. If you can't meet this level of activity, then again do us all a favour and again remove yourself from the team. There are multitudes of people more qualified than the player element of the balance team who easily meet this amount and would have no problem playing any doctrine in question. When they eventually could no longer maintain this pace, they could then remove themselves to make room for newer, fresher, more active voices. This would keep the balance team fresh, motivated, and most of all on task.
That some people seem so opposed to the idea that they should actually have the requisite level of experience to qualify them to vote on something is just proof of how woefully unqualified they are in the first place.
3. The Balance Team right now does not function no matter how much you say it does.
Over the past month, over 60% of the team has been largely AWOL by their own admission and the first-hand testimony of one of the lead dev/mods on the team. Despite this, changes are still being made on a large scale. Further compounding this issue is the fact that 90% of the team has never used some of the units in question in this current metagame. This is what you call a broken system.
4. Greater Accountability will Take More Time and Effort, But Will Pay For Itself Ten Times Over In Improved Quality for the Mod
Speaks for itself.
These are so painfully logical that reading people try to argue them with things like 'dur, that would be too much work' and 'dur, we shouldn't try anything because we (the ones who are the most threatened by change in the first place) don't see a problem'. Is this the best reason we have to ignore these blatant holes in the integrity of this system?
Can you name someone you would think would be fitting for this job, wind? That's what it all boils down to isnt it?
I hope they exist, at least for the sake of argument
Absolutely.
A proper member of the balance team would fit the following criteria:
1) Regularily plays all four armies during each war.
-This will mean no more of this 'I used that doctrine 14 months ago so therefore I am still qualified to say it needs to be nerfed/buffed in this current metagame' bullshit. It's absolute and utter nonsense and if I hear one more unqualified balance team member use it I'm going to swear it's groundhog day.
2) Is known throughout the community as a good player, but more importantly as a good loser
A) If someone is a bad loser, such as yourself, they are not qualified to be a balance team member. Why? Simply because they hate losing. They are going to pull all kinds of shenanigans to make sure they are on the winning team, and when their plan somehow backfires they are going to start looking for excuses. Their teammates let them down, the enemy was using a cheap strategy, or a unit is overpowered. The second this kind of person loses, they might even say in the game 'Say goodbye to that strat, im going to make sure it gets nerfed as soon as I get back to the balance team forum'. They will be prone to post-loss balance threads that masquerade as legitimate concerns. They will also rarely if ever vote to nerf the units they love, while will pursue the units they never play with a vehement passion. This person is a very, very unqualified person to be on the balance team.
B) A good loser, on the other hand, is a good balancer because they are in the game for the challenge and for the experience. They will not always pick the most overpowered doctrines or units, and will try playing with something other than their two favorite armies EVERY SINGLE GAME and in EVERY SINGLE WAR. We have people on our balance team right now who almost ONLY play Wehr and Americans and who I don't think I've ever seen play Brits. It is inexcusable that they are on the balance team. It is absolutely embarassingly inexcusable.
3) Understands that they are inevitably, as players in the mod who are nevertheless trying to win, going to be biased
A player with a half-decent sense of self-awareness (something the current balance team player-members are completely absent of) is going to know that there is an ever present danger of letting their bias cloud their judgement. To that end they will be very cautious about voting to nerf units they never play, and because of that they will make every effort to make sure they get that critical experience before they vote. Or, they simply wont vote at all. These people know that fucking with other people's armies should be done with extreme caution and meticulous patience, and therefore want to make sure they have as much credibility as possible before they assist in that process. This is so that when the pendelum swings back the other way, they can clearly and unequivocally demonstrate their qualifications to do so.
4) Is Active, and if is unable to continue doing so, removes themselves from the team
Most important than anything else, is activity. As long as the Balance team works on a vote basis, then it is simply unacceptable to have periods of time when major changes to units are being made and up to 60-70% of the team (including the majority of its dev/mod team members) are absent.
Also, if there is someone on the balance team who is unable or unwilling to meet the simple requirements of the first post in this thread, then they simply shouldn't be a balance team member. A balance team member who is a player and not a dev/mod should be getting at least 6 games in a week. That is enough to vote on 2-3 issues a week. Yes it means they don't get to farm out their favorite doctrines all the time, but that isn't the point of being on the balance team anyways.
These are the criteria that should be the MINIMUM requirements for any balance member. And if your wondering, no I don't believe I meet these criteria. I don't have the abillity to meet the bare minimum activity requirements that a good balance member would need in order to do their job properly.
There are, however, people in this mod who can meet all of these criteria. You just aren't one of them by a long shot.
2) From your post it is clear you assume I'm a balance team member(first time you accidentally point fingers like that, isn't it?).
Truth #1: I have no need to assume anything when it comes to the balance team. I have been given full disclosure on who they are, and how they operate. This is knowledge every person in EiR should be entitled to have, but for some reason they are not. Not my call to make.
Truth #2: I'm not allowed to name the people on the balance team, or to say how utterly hilarious the choice of 'community players' who are on it are by name. I can only make generalized statements without disclosing identities. I had to make that agreement in order to make this thread.
-Wind
