The Unskilled Argument and the Intricacies of Balance

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I'm getting a little annoyed with players complaining about everything and anything that always seems to come down to "buff my class and nerf everything else" or "remove this because it's unskilled and I hate it." So I'm going to lay somethings out that some people apparently don't understand.


The Unskilled Argument

Something lacks skill is not an argument for it's removal or nerf. Secondary nades lack skill, push lacks skill, dekas lack skill, clone blobs lack skill, darts lack skill, is screamed in caps about every third round of MB2 by someone. Being "unskilled" doesn't mean it detracts from gameplay, it doesn't mean it's imbalance, and it doesn't mean other people agree with your assessment.

Instead of complaining a weapon or ability lacks skill to use, maybe try and get more skilled at dodging it, learn to mitigate its effects when you do get hit, or adjust your play style or class/build to limit the it’s usefulness. Don't complain it's impossible to combat.

Everything in MB2 requires skill, go round up some of your friends who have never played MB2 and see how well they do.


The Lie of Balance

I’m going to let you on in a little secret, there is no balance in a single round of MB2. MB2 has too many variables account for: the class system, players doing different things every round, differences in skill levels, and the map itself for there to be balance. Anyone who remembers basic algebra knows, the more variables in an equation that harder it is to balance.

Classes

If the entire Imperial team is dekas and sbds while none of the Rebels are jedi and none of them brought emp weapons; the Rebels aren’t going to have a fun time will they. On the other hand, if all the Rebels bring frag grenades and rocket launchers and the Imperial team doesn't bring any push sith, while then the Imperial team is kind of screwed. These are extreme examples but I hope you are capable of understanding the point. Even one person changing their class or build can drastically affect team balance.

Try playing a round as Imperials with no sith, tracking darts, or advanced logic against a pro mind trick 3 jedi, not fun. Does that mean mind trick is overpowered? No, it means a Rebel noticed a deficiency on the Imperial side and used to it create an advantage for their team. That's what happens in a class based game, no class/build should be useful in every circumstance, they all have advantages and disadvantages that need to be played around.

Everyone’s has had that moment on Rebels when a sith ambushes a squad of gunners because all the jedi decided to go side that round. Or how about the time a wook hits his rage mode right around a corner while you're stuck in a narrow hallway. Does that make these classes overpowered? Again not necessarily, one team was in an easily exploitable position which was taken advantage.

The imbalance caused by the class system is further exasperated by just how intricate the game how gotten, the addition of new saber styles, force powers, features, weapons, and abilities, has certainly given the game new life but it also has made it harder to balance. The more variables in any equation, the harder it is to balance.

Rounds

MB2 is also a round based game. You play several five minute rounds on a map, one team or the other hits the round limit and “wins” the map. This used to be more visible with servers that changed the map on a set rotation after a team won fifteen or so rounds but the modern RTV and DOTF 24/7 servers obscure this part of the game for most new players. Competitive matches between teams is the only real holdout of this understanding.

MB2 is not a real time strategy game, you can’t scout the enemy base to see what they are building. MB2 is not League of Legends where both teams draft their classes before the round begins. You have to think about what classes and builds the enemy team brought last round and adjust your tactics, build, and/or class to give your team an advantage next round. Keeping in mind your opponents are doing the same.

Therefore

So in theory the inherent imbalance of a class based system would be offset by players adjusting their classes and builds before the next round. In theory, yes. In practice, no. Most players play what they want to play when they want to play it. I get it, you want to play what you're good at and/or what you enjoy. And not playing the class/build our team needs to counter the enemy. We are guilty of this. But this is a flaw of the players, not any particular imbalance to the game as a whole.

The typical measures used to encourage players to play to win rather than have fun are not viable in MB2. There isn’t enough of a player base to support a ranking system or a dev with enough time to waste to make one. There’s no leveling system when skins, classes, and builds are locked behind arbitrary numbers like playtime or number of rounds won. In summary, it’s a problem that there is no easy fix for because players play to have fun. While many people have fun winning, therefore they play to win the round, there are also a lot of one class players, ego scorers, and trolls more concerned with personal skill, their k/d, or ruining other people's fun then playing to win the round.

Skill

The next inherent imbalance is player skill. There is no matchmaking system, no in-game balancer, and even if there were there isn’t enough of a player base isn’t there to make it work. Player skill is made even more complex by the class system. Some of the best jedi are terrible gunners because they only play jedi. Hell even some of the best jedi are poor sith because they don’t know how to counter clones and wooks because they aren’t used to fighting them and haven’t developed the reactions and game knowledge to beat them.

Maps

I shouldn't need to explain why big open maps favor heroes and bounty hunters while smaller maps favor wooks and grenades. I'm also not explaining why the defenders having lots of cover and the high ground makes it hard for the attackers, figure this stuff out for yourself.

There is no balance on most maps in MB2 at all, nobody pretends there is. Many maps were only made for FA or Duel mode with little thought towards Open balance. Other maps haven’t been updated for several build for various reasons ranging the original creator leaving MB2 to a simple lack of player interest in the map. A map made for an FA without jedi or snipers will not be balanced in Open. A map made to balance Rebel and Imperial snipers with B19 classes in mind will not remain balanced five builds later.

If you know a map and know the positions the enemy is likely to take and what tactics they will use against you, give you a huge advantage. On Deathstar I often get two to three kills at the start of the round with a TD because I know how to bounce it across the bridges on side and the Rebels rarely know how to avoid it or push it away. Does that mean TD's are overpowered? Again, not necessarily, more likely my map knowledge is giving me and advantage which I exploit. Unfortunately most players appear to spend most of their time on DotF and don't learn other maps nearly as well.

Therefore

The closest thing to balanced there is in MB2 (outside of teams arranging competitions against each other) is a Hardcore server playing on Duel of the Fates. Duel of the Fates is the closest thing MB2 has to a balanced map (though snipers have distinct advantages). The Hardcore servers limits classes to two players per jedi/sith/sbd/clone/mand/arc, three players per sold/commander/elite trooper and one player per deka/wook. With fixed class numbers and a fixed map many of the variables of MB2 can be locked down, making the equation of balance much eaiser.

Currently (when I post this) there are two official Hardcore servers on my server list and they average less people then the FA servers. BG has shut down their own Hardcore (Competitive) server down due to lack of population. Even when we, BG, tried shifting the player base over to Hardcore servers, it only resulted in fewer players and complaints about noobs and trolls hogging the jedi/sith slots.

Conclusion

The majority of players do not want balance, they want to have fun. But what do I know? Maybe I’m talking out of my ass. Maybe you have the time, experience, and intellect to perfectly understand the interplay between all the classes, their builds, the maps, the various players, their differences in skill to truly understand balance in MB2. If so why don't you put your prodigious intellect to curing cancer or solving world hunger?

If not then acknowledge that your perception is limited. That the reason you can’t beat a particular enemy might be your fault. Let’s be brutally honest. At the end of the day, if you can’t blame lag or your teammates, you’re going to blame balance for your failures.


What You Should Take Away From All This

Stop complaining that something is imbalanced or unskilled when you don’t play the counter. Don’t complain a class is overpowered or underpowered until you’ve played with it, you've played in support of it, and you've played against it. Perception and bias needs to be acknowledged.

This is already gotten too long so I'm just going to post it, I'll touch it up later.
 

{Δ} Achilles

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Skill is currently a very strong deciding factor. A high tier single-life soldier will wipe the floor with any low tier player of any class.

Even further I would say that rock paper scissors is very much valid design for asymmetric games. This breeds variety and makes more things viable.

Let's make an example:

Droideka is a strong defensive tool. It can suppress an entire area. This will require a counter-action from the enemy that might not be otherwise necessary. In this example we will pick M5 pulse launcher ARC. This in turn warrants a Sith pick from the enemy so he can guard the Droideka against pulse spam. The Sith pick warrants a Clonetrooper with blobs to shut down the pushes of the Sith for specific time windows. The Clone pick warrants a BH pick to force the Clone to only take quick pop-blobs rather than more brash offensive blobs where they have longer time to aim...

Basically the desired end result is that we reach a wide variety of classes and build configs being represented. Each having this softly designated roles of being the answer to a specific situation, while still being generalists enough to handle most situations with a moderate success rate.

I think this is nicely present. Whether players understand to make use of this is of course up for debate. Negligence of this results in several lost rounds.

A key example of this is Overwatch. Initially Quick Play allowed all heroes without limits. This often resulted in the team with more variety and synergy picks winning while the one that just had everyone play as Genji lose flat out. Blizzard introduced a 1-per hero rule and the game quality in Quick Play increased greatly.

So far we haven't elected to coddle our playerbase in a similar manner. Should we?

Skill is not that strong of a deciding factor at the highest level, coordination is. That is why tR can stack and annihilate entire servers (often causing them to depopulate), not because any of them are good (only Paradine is worth anything), but because together they're unstoppable without a coordinated team to go against them. This has become a serious design flaw in the game that makes winning under these circumstances impossible no matter how good you are individually.

Rock paper scissors doesn't take any skill. You can have variety even in a symmetric game without the need for rock paper scissors. It is a foolish design choice utilized by lazy developers, because it is the easiest to 'balance'. Even a card game like Hearthstone requires more skill than a rock-paper-scissors balanced game, and don't give me that about strategy, because you require a cooperative team to employ anything, which is almost nonexistent in MB2. Rock paper scissors balance works in some RTS games, NOT in a action shooter/melee game.

The end result is an army of clones/heroes or Jedi on Rebels, and an army of T-21 Commanders/BHs/SBDs on Imps. That is the reality of every game of open mode that is currently being played on MB2. Why? BECAUSE IT ISN'T BALANCED WELL. If your desired end-goal was variety, then you failed miserably in every aspect outside of class-restricted scrims. And do not even consider balancing anything around Overwatch. If you want more variety implemented, then you need to uniform the classes so that they are more viable in other situations, not a one use gimmick whereas other classes like BH can be used anywhere.
 

k4far

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Battlefront 2 is a card game, Hearthstone is a card game, pay to win at that too.

Army of Jedi or Clones is just an after effect of boredom not a flaw in balancing (in bigger games you rarely see only one class being used.) Except for Hero. Hero is easy so it is always present.
 

NPC

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It is the level of players. The number of players doesn't really matter beyond 6v6. Anything below 6v6 and individual skill starts to matter a lot more, rather than class composition and coordination.
Nice perceptive, please note my own is different. I value skill at a far higher level across the board but as I've stated MB2 is a complex equation with many variables at play, assuming you have the insight to see which string needs to be pulled to make the game better is what I'm warning against. The web is large and we are small and only see a portion of it.

You can balance a game for all levels. The method of doing this is to make sure that weapons have boons and drawbacks that are relatively equal to each other. A weapon that is easy to use must not be as powerful as a weapon that is hard to use. There is no need to cut any content (Except for things that shouldn't really be there in the first place, and serve no purpose. Like blobs), when you can simply balance around them. You need to pick a class that is most balance to draw your median line, then balance the rest of the classes around that. You have to have some level of uniforming to the classes, otherwise they will be impossible to balance around each other, and have wildly different purposes/viabilities. Every class should be viable in every situation to varying degrees, and skill should always be the deciding factor, not a rock paper scissors game determined at the class menu.
Professional game studios have trouble keeping games balanced across all skill levels, expecting a game as complex as MB2 with an unpaid volunteer development team is insanity writ large.

I'm not sure why you hate blobs so much but I find them much more "balanced" with their limited ammo then recharging push or pull. Again just my perspective.

RPS mechanics are a consequence of a highly complex class based system. How would you even make a classed game with no counter? You want combat skills to always win over preparation, resource use, and team composition? Having classes with wildly different purposes is what makes MB2 great for me. I mean deka and wookiee are both extremely different takes on the tank class. Hero and sbd are almost polar opposites. A sith and a mando have wildly different toolboxes. I find that interesting, something that adds richness over a more bland games like Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2 which are much more balanced. Every class should not be viable in every situation, if that was the case then why have a class system in the first place? Skill should give you an advantage but it shouldn't let you beat rage wookies in melee as a bounty hunter.

Clone has 2 lives. The closest comparison is Commander. Clone has far greater life than Commander, with higher armor as well. Clone has a superior weapon in the form of CR2/3 (Discounting T-21, which is also overpowered). Clone has the same level of CC (If not better, due to various reasons and also the insanely long AoE CC from Ion) as Commander. Clone has far superior mobility in the form of sprint. The only advantage Commander has is with dodge and area-denial incendiary (Which is near useless at high level anyway).
Commander cannot be compared to clone because they are on different teams. An Imperial doesn't weigh the cost benefit of taking a T-21 over a CR because it's impossible for then to pick a clone rifle, visa versa.

Let me offer a way to fix your "imbalance" when comparing elite trooper and CR 2 clone: buff sonic grenades, rally, and make dodge 2 cheaper. You see one class that needs nerf and I see a different one needing a buff, wonderful thing perspective.

Frag grenade servers 2 purposes: The first and obvious purpose is to bounce off of walls/around corners to disperse enemies (You aren't going to get many kills with a frag at high level, but it serves as a utility).
The second purpose is for a cheesy gimmicky kill on a class without quick getup (Which is useless at high level, but annoying in pub games). The second function of the frag is broken, it takes 0 skill to use and is unavoidable on the opponent's side of the matter, granting a free kill based exclusively upon what class is hit by it. It serves absolutely no other purpose or utility. Therefore alt frag function should be removed, as it is beyond pointless and just cheapens the game play experience. Conc nades should be a less-than-lethal CC solution, but should be nerfed in damage or in CC as to how easy and powerful they are in normal games. Obviously by nerfing grenades, you would need to buff Soldier's other aspects, to make them more viable in other ways (Because at the moment, solds are basically just walking grenade holsters)
Nice perspective but I find alt nades and concussions serve a very important ability, to punish jedi who try to fight groups of soldiers alone. You claim something takes zero skill before but I don't agree with you, I think that there is a whole heap of skill involved in making sure your not in a position to be alt naded in the first place or that is you are, that your teammates can take advantage of the exposed grenadier. Further more I find it a pain to hit a jedi or arc who's hopping around like a rabbit on crack.

Neither of us have a way to prove our opinions. Removing or limited alt nades and conc nades, I suspect, will buff jedi/sith immensely and remove much of the utility of the soldiers/commander/elite troops classes. Considering there are almost always more jedi and sith then solds on the server, during the limited times and servers I play on, that must mean that jedi/sith are overpowered in comparison to solds so why should the devs nerf sold? If we want variety that is.

Thermal Detonator shares the same purpose as a frag, only less effective. Pulse Grenades are fine, and are exclusively used to counter SBDs/Dekas in high level, they don't need to be nerfed but it is important to note the tactics developed for use of them and how effective they can be when balancing other aspects. Such as the tactic of attaching a pulse nade to a friendly wookiee who is fury-charging at the enemy. If you nerf one aspect of the game, you may empower another, so you must always keep these things in mind.
OK at this point I think your just trolling. The whole point was that comparing different weapons that belong to different classes on different teams is silly, comparing apples to oranges.

The end result is an army of clones/heroes or Jedi on Rebels, and an army of T-21 Commanders/BHs/SBDs on Imps. That is the reality of every game of open mode that is currently being played on MB2. Why? BECAUSE IT ISN'T BALANCED WELL. If your desired end-goal was variety, then you failed miserably in every aspect outside of class-restricted scrims.
Are you sure it's the class balance or the fault of the map favoring particular classes/build or the fact most players play what they want without thought towards team composition? Furthermore, that has not been my experience lately. In fact, I've seen far more variety in the last couple of builds then any previous iteration in my experience. Pretending that I have an omnipresent view of MB2 is the arrogance I'm trying to warn against.

Skill is not that strong of a deciding factor at the highest level, coordination is. That is why tR can stack and annihilate entire servers (often causing them to depopulate), not because any of them are good (only Paradine is worth anything), but because together they're unstoppable without a coordinated team to go against them. This has become a serious design flaw in the game that makes winning under these circumstances impossible no matter how good you are individually.
Team coordination is skill, decision making in choosing a class/build before the round starts is skill, picking your ground is a skill, just as much as push timing and head shots are in battle. As I said, balance is found over the course of many rounds, not in a single one.

Also this isn't the time or place to insult others.

Rock paper scissors doesn't take any skill. You can have variety even in a symmetric game without the need for rock paper scissors. It is a foolish design choice utilized by lazy developers, because it is the easiest to 'balance'. Even a card game like Hearthstone requires more skill than a rock-paper-scissors balanced game, and don't give me that about strategy, because you require a cooperative team to employ anything, which is almost nonexistent in MB2. Rock paper scissors balance works in some RTS games, NOT in a action shooter/melee game.
This is a lot of false equivalence. RPS mechanics doesn't mean the entire game is decided by them, that's the entire point of the post. That there are a ton of variables like skill, maps, asymmetrical class system, teamwork, etc. to take into account.
 

{Δ} Achilles

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You have no concept of what you're talking about. You refuse to compare weapons to opposite classes because they are on different teams? How could you possibly balance a game if you refuse to balance opposing classes/weapons?

You also have clearly never seen any form of high level play to have suggested that Alt Frag is anything more than a gimmick to be used for pub-stomping.
 
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You have no concept of what you're talking about. You refuse to compare weapons to opposite classes because they are on different teams? How could you possibly balance a game if you refuse to balance opposing classes/weapons?

You also have clearly never seen any form of high level play to have suggested that Alt Frag is anything more than a gimmick to be used for pub-stomping.
I never thought I'd see the day I agree with Achilles
 

NPC

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You have no concept of what you're talking about. You refuse to compare weapons to opposite classes because they are on different teams? How could you possibly balance a game if you refuse to balance opposing classes/weapons?
Why do heroes get frags for 10 points and elite trooper need to spend 15 points on a frag? Because in the context of the class it makes sense. Comparing weapons or abilities without the wider context of the classes that use them, the maps they are used on, and the enemies they will face is foolish. A hypothetical question that only serves to reveal our personal bias not a deeper understanding of balance.

You also have clearly never seen any form of high level play to have suggested that Alt Frag is anything more than a gimmick to be used for pub-stomping.
Thank you for your polite and reasoned responses. As well as proving my point that far too many players are willing to dismiss an aspect of the game as unskilled or imbalanced without consideration to the balance of the wider game, what other people think, or the time and resources needed to input the changes.

Would a hypothetical MB2 clone without knockdowns be more fun? Or if you prefer skilled? I'm sure many people would think so. Is it realistic to adjust MB2 in such a manner without breaking the balance of the game and/or driving away players? Very doubtful.

You've manged to insult both myself others, continually shifting the goalposts of your argument, and refused to acknowledge my points beyond sneering dismissal. I think I'm done discussing this topic with you. Perhaps you should create your own thread to discuss your perspectives. Good day to you sir.
 
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Each class offers certain benefits/disadvantages.

How easy it is to abuse or hard to use determines if a class, ability, weapon, etc. is op or up.

Skilled players > greater than unskilled.
Good Teamwork > stronger than individual skill.

I forgot where I was going with this:)
 
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Gargos

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You also have clearly never seen any form of high level play to have suggested that Alt Frag is anything more than a gimmick to be used for pub-stomping.
99 percent of this game is random pub stomping anyways. The last srs clan matches were played long ago, no tournaments regarding open gameplay has been played in years.
 
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