Wait, what?


See now, thats a contradicting statement. If its broken, and thus imbalanced, then we have to balance it...


Hear, hear.

Care to elaborate?

Also, a statistic suggestion i made earlier would be good in terms of implementing nitehawk's suggestion...

Lost my first post somehow...



Sure.

Battletech is a futuristic army based board game with a variety of units. Megamek is a freeware PC implementation of the game. Mekwars puts a campaign front-end on it.

Originally BT was "balanced" using similar tonnage, but that was really bad. BV (Build Value) was then created for better army balancing by assigning points based on unit type, engine size, armor, weapons, etc. However, since some units are just better designed than others, it was still way off in many cases.

The Mekwars designers came up with the idea of dynamic BV to make things better balanced. Each week, the server would track the win/loss ratios of armies containing each unit. Once a week, units that had bad w/l ratios would have their BV reduced a small percentage, units that had good w/l ratios would have their BV's increased.

As a result, this week's best units would be not quite as good next week and the worst would be a little better. Units that were overused could overshoot parity, but would then drift back. Over a long period of time most units began to approach the point where the choice to use them was more about how they fit with the other units you were using and your personal play style than about just throwing the best units in the game together.


(Megamek currently uses BV2 which is supposed to be much better balanced than the original BV, but I think dynamic made the game much more interesting.)

As solid as a dynamic tracking balance system would be... the software will probably bankrupt the game.
I think looking at the market tells a lot about particular cards tho.

Considering it was done in a freeware game, I don't know the software would be that expensive. Then again, I don't know how much volunteer effort it took to develop it for Mekwars.

This seems like a great idea, basically a stock market for card value. I would suggest something as simple as tracking usage in the ECs and at the end of each month (or week) lowering the flux value by one of the 10 least used cards, and raising it by one for the ten most used cards. This could either be based on all cards used in EC, or just the decks that win at least one game.

I understand that FW seems in general opposed to nerfing/buffing too much because people then want to be compensated for card values. I would suggest getting over this idea sooner rather than later. One of the great benefits of an online TCG is that it can be dynamic and constantly evolving. People should be warned/understand before they buy cards that they may change. In regards to being compensated, are you also going to give up all the wins/associated gold that came with having super strong cards?

Good idea, nighthawk, and I second everything my man Huger said in ^ post.

I'm against the idea of "dynamic-tracking balance system" in far wilds for several reasons.

First, it takes the game designer out of the picture, and by extension, the voices of the people the designer listens to. Any act of balancing, algorithimized or otherwise, by definition requires the dynamic tracking of the state of the game anyway. Why would we need an automated system if the game designers can do the balancing? "Non-subjective" is also rhetoric, how about "artificial"? I prefer "subjective" and "organic" balancing.

Second, such a system is likely to oversimplyfy things. There are multiple card types, multiple domains, different rarities, different cards are available right of the bat to new players so on and so forth. The significance of this is that I don't think an automated system for balance would be able to take all this into account without some very careful study of numbers, which would be far beyond the scope of the (few, I assume) developers of TFW. If not, there will likely be some unexpected consequences. Say, certain domains might be nerfed harder just because their good cards are more accessible, or a really dominating card remains imbalanced for a long time because it is a rare and few players crack them, or several buildings remain imbalanced because they belong in the same domain, and players do not typically include them all in the same deck and therefore their usage is spread out. Way too many possibilities to take account of easily.

Third, balancing purely by Flux cost is a mistake because Flux cost shifts are more significant in low casting cost cards than in higher casting cost cards regardless of how much you subdivide the numbers and small alterations in Flux costs can have huge consequences, just to name two problems. The first one is pretty obvious. An example for the second one would be this: a small increase as low as 0.5 in flux cost might render a build order (say Base Building --> Bone Fortress --> Foul Obelisk) to be delayed by a full turn, rendering it completely unplayable.

How much is a share of AAPL worth?

I'd suggest it's worth whatever the market will pay for it. The idea with a dynamic balancing system is that it creates an environment that can make decisions that are too complex for any individual, group of individuals, or pure mathematical algorithm to solve. Each player makes the decision whether to play the card and how many to play of it. The balance is determined organically by the community as a whole through those decisions.

That said, at present the flux costs in TFW are not anywhere close to granular enough for this sort of system. It worked well in Megamek partly because BV is in the hundreds so adding a few points at a time is an almost unnoticeably small adjustment week to week, but can add up over time. The only way it could work in TFW would be something like I suggested where all flux and flux generation was multiplied by 10 or 20 before implementation.

I think there are going to be a lot of really tough borderland decks. Since we get compensation I guess the best thing to do is rush to find the OP combos. Right? So with the balancing system as is were just getting payed to own people with over powered cards until we run out of OP cards. Because If we buy the OP cards we will just get our gold back.



I found it wrong the beta test was competitive because im sure a lot of broken combos were purposely hidden.

I don't get this... making the beta test competitive would encourage people to find overpowered combos, no?