the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

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Greece BrookG
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

Post by BrookG »

That is a bad example, Japan is a top tourney civ. Kynesie easily proves that. Japan's water and general turtle are very strong options for the player and with lots of effort to break them for the opponent.
Correlation doesn't mean causation.
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No Flag 91
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

Post by 91 »

BrookG wrote:
91 wrote:First of all I want to highlight something: Balance at rank 40 is not necessarily balanced at rank 20!. If you balance for top players it might cause issues for rank 15-30 games, so having a perfectly balanced tournament final doesn't mean the majority of people will enjoy playing the game. Not many players are at the top level.

Call me blind, but I don't see much truth into that. Can a MU weigh towards one civ when 2 players of pr40 play and the other way when they are pr25? Or is it possible for a MU to be 50-50 at pr40 and 70-30 for pr20? Could it be that the skill of the players is that equal that MU balance doesn't matter at all?

Also, one point that needs a lot of attention is for whom is EP designed? Is it only for those same 40 people that are playing in the late tournament rounds? It sounds pretty undemocratic and unfair for a community patch. Then the biggest part of the community (players between pr20-30) aren't voiced, assuming they don't know anything and they will be pleased regardless.


It doesn't have to be different. But a good example is that the more micro intensive something is, the less effective it's gonna be in lower ranks (as long as the counter doesn't require the same level of micro). High ranked players are generally very good at defending vs rushes for example.

Lower ranked players are going to benefit more from attack-move-friendly army compositions if the counter requires more micro. But at top level it might even out.

It's those kind of differences I mean. And especially strong rushes that top level can hold might get a lot harder to defend the lower rank you get.
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

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Post by momuuu »

It's a bit of a tricky thing to consider balance at the lower levels for a strategy game. Ultimately much of the skill is strategic of nature and thus it makes little sense to balance for a pr20 meta. After all, you're then ultimately balancing for mistakes that people are making. That's a bit like balancing a shooter by adding an aimbot to the game. In the end, the reason people are losing is because they are playing poorly, rather than because the balance is off. But this is only true to some extend. It is indeed a possibility that playing some civs properly is extremely complicated and thus it should be taking into account. However, I would argue that even the top players represent 'lower levels' relatively and that pr20 players are just straight up casual players that have no reason to complain about balancing because of how bad they really are at the game. Their gameplay is so filled with mistakes that a good player could beat them with the most nonsensical, underpowered strategies.

I think that when you want to consider balance at lower levels, you should purely consider the mechanical requirement of some civs. For example, in a shooter where one weapon has a great spray and good damage output regardless (thus making it very easy to be accurate) and another weapon is a sniper that only barely outdamages the former weapon only if you're getting a very high percentage of headshots, there is obviously a balancing problem: It's extremely hard to be as good with the aim intensive weapon as with the large spray weapon. Thus there is a bit of a skill disparity and at lower levels there wouldn't even be a reason to use the sniper. That's probably poor balancing. But I dont think aoe3 faces any of these problems.
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Canada Warno
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

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Post by Warno »

The solution I had always thought of was pretty simple, not sure it could work:

Go back to RE. Get the EP leader to put out a few obvious changes (Iro, Otto). Put them to a vote - 75% to pass from the top 20 ELO.
Next,
Give the top 20 ELO players one change to make each after that. Put them to a vote - 75% to pass.
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France [Armag] diarouga
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

Post by [Armag] diarouga »

Warno wrote:The solution I had always thought of was pretty simple, not sure it could work:

Go back to RE. Get the EP leader to put out a few obvious changes (Iro, Otto). Put them to a vote - 75% to pass from the top 20 ELO.
Next,
Give the top 20 ELO players one change to make each after that. Put them to a vote - 75% to pass.

That was my suggestion, except it was only top 5.
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

Post by Cometk »

the thing is that you can't make changes in a vacuum. every change interplays off of each other. imagine 3 nerfs to india getting approved while every other civ receives a buff or remains neutral so you have the top civ go to the bottom in an instant. or you have 1 nerf for india go through, but because the group doesn't want to overnerf the civ, they don't approve any of the changes proposed later on. it's just not a tempered approach.

you have to approve batches of changes together. there's a specific vision and reasoning for each change to exist in any given patch, and that is heavily influenced by how much impact the other changes will have that they're being implemented with.
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

Post by pecelot »

PR20 gameplay can be taken into account to measure OP-ness of certain aspects. Such a player beating his high-skilled counterpart with a cheesy jan rush should tell you that it might be a bit too strong. Other than that, it's clearly a logical fallacy. Jerom explained it well.
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Greece BrookG
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Re: the patch and all of the changes it has gone trough

Post by BrookG »

Clearly the tops are aware of the mechanics of most MUs and civ-specific specialities, and this is the main reason they are the ones for whom EP caters. I have been thinking whether accepting balance isn't a matter of its goodness, but the way it's marketed. Recently I played some person on ESO and he wasn't even aware of our forum. I want to pose the following questions: Which audience does EP address? Is it designed solely for tournament reasons or do we want to make EP the norm of playing the game? Why is it that people prefer not to bother much with EP and stick to RE?
Correlation doesn't mean causation.
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

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