Steve496 wrote:
You understand why that puts a damper on people's desire to design interesting and balanced alternatives and playtest them to verify they work as intended, right? I mean, if its never going in the game (implying its probably not going in the app or on snellman), the absolute best case scenario is that the changes we make are popular enough that we split the online TM community between snellman and test_platform, which is probably worse for the community than the existing imbalances.
And yeah, reducing Darklings dig scoring would be a bad change. But reducing their SA to 4w8c but only producing 1p might not be. We'll never know unless we test it out. And if that doesn't work, I'm sure there are other ideas out there that could be tried. What's being discussed is not "we made a thread and 10 people liked it so it should go in the game". Its "we made a change and 100 people played 1000 games with it and it definitely seemed to help".
Granted, that doesn't change the problem that it requires reprinting game boards (or at least making stickers to go over the changed pieces) rather than just throwing a PDF up online. But is there no interest in a faction variants mini-expansion? No chance of a full reprint a couple years down the road?
Ultimately: I'm speculating here, and there may be other good and legitimate reasons why they want to do the quick and dirty fix rather than a proper rebalance, no matter how well that rebalance is done. And if that's the case, well, then, so be it. But the consequence of that is that there's very little reason for us as the community to put work into playtesting such changes.
And yeah, reducing Darklings dig scoring would be a bad change. But reducing their SA to 4w8c but only producing 1p might not be. We'll never know unless we test it out. And if that doesn't work, I'm sure there are other ideas out there that could be tried. What's being discussed is not "we made a thread and 10 people liked it so it should go in the game". Its "we made a change and 100 people played 1000 games with it and it definitely seemed to help".
Granted, that doesn't change the problem that it requires reprinting game boards (or at least making stickers to go over the changed pieces) rather than just throwing a PDF up online. But is there no interest in a faction variants mini-expansion? No chance of a full reprint a couple years down the road?
Ultimately: I'm speculating here, and there may be other good and legitimate reasons why they want to do the quick and dirty fix rather than a proper rebalance, no matter how well that rebalance is done. And if that's the case, well, then, so be it. But the consequence of that is that there's very little reason for us as the community to put work into playtesting such changes.
Well, first of all, the main purpose of the playtest server would not be rebalancing the existing factions, it would be testing at a minimum 2 new expansions and possibly future ones because the purpose of a game publisher is creating new content for sale to make money. It doesn't make any additional money for them to ask volunteers to spend time fixing the factions when those same volunteers would probably enjoy even more to play with new content.
I don't know, maybe they are open to doing what you desire. I do know that if you become a major volunteer in the effort for play testing the new content then you are more likely to be indulged with what you and many others desire regarding the 20 factions.