by Steve496
jsnell wrote:
So here's the thing: a reasonable (or at least not-unreasonable) approach exists, and has been very vocally rejected with no testing. There are of course all kinds of reasons to dislike that solution. Disagreements about specific values, a belief about VP adjustments somehow being unsatisfying, annoyance that the numbers were just thrown over the wall rather with no community input, or whatever.
I certainly won't tell anyone how they should play. But it feels crazy to have these "man, I can't believe the developers can't fix this game" and "I think we should start an 18 month project to rebalance all the factions" discussions without first getting some proof that the existing fix isn't good enough.
I certainly won't tell anyone how they should play. But it feels crazy to have these "man, I can't believe the developers can't fix this game" and "I think we should start an 18 month project to rebalance all the factions" discussions without first getting some proof that the existing fix isn't good enough.
I won't speak for anyone else - I'm not trying to criticize how anyone else plays the game (or the volunteer work they do or don't do to support it) - but just to provide an alternative perspective:
I'd argue that the strong reaction against the proposed fix *is* the evidence that it isn't good enough. The very notion of VP offsets is sort of inherently targeted at players who are reasonably skilled at the game. The first couple dozen games you play aren't going to be determined by the fact that Darklings are, in the abstract, 5 points stronger than Halflings; they're going to be determined by who makes the fewest egregious mistakes. Balancing the games to within 5vp (never mind 1vp) isn't necessarily that critical even in D4, matters little if at all in D7, and *really* doesn't matter for people who just break out the physical board game once a month. It is the experienced, passionate, competitive community for whom balance changes matter the most, and if that community broadly dislikes the proposed solution... isn't that kind of a problem in its own right?
More generally, though, I don't really care if balance changes are made or not. I enjoy discussing the abstract balance of factions and speculating on what might be done to fix them, but if it remains purely theoretical, I'm fine with that. There are still plenty of things about the game I still enjoy (even in its unbalanced state), and when/if that stops being true I can always stop playing.
That said: the flip side of that is that if they're not interested in making the sort of changes I'd like to see, I feel no obligation to help them in making changes I disagree with. They can do what they want with their game, and I'll play it for as long as its interesting to me (but no longer).