I think that here you’ve gotten to the heart of the matter. What is your goal in balancing weapons?
In my opiniön, the goal is to avoid ſituätions in which ſome weapons are ſpurned by the majority of the community, while others are uſed the moſt by far. If weapon A performs better than weapon B, people are goïng to pick weapon A every time, once they’ve figured it out. I think that the balance of eaſe of uſe, ſatisfaction in uſe (i.e. the pſychological component), overheat, damage, fire rate, and ſo on is nigh on impoſſible to effectively model. Eventuälly, you juſt have to let the community to pick the beſt one.
I can only speak for myself here. I would prefer if weapons generally performed at a similar level (taking into account factors such as ease of use, of course), so that the player would have a choice of what weapons to use, whether based on their performance or more subjective factors such as gameplay style and the audiovisual aspect. Let’s leave popularity/weapon usage out of this and just let the players use whatever they prefer, that’s my opinion on this.
Indeed, however I can’t say they’re enough to draw conclusions. I don’t know how often the virtuosity bonus resets (and when the most recent reset occurred), but it’d be worth measuring it a few more times to see how the reworks affect the weapons’ popularity.
Though if Photon stays this high, then something’s definitely up.
For some reason, the time ago thing does not update automatically, you have to click on it to see the new time:
this is before clicking it:
this is after clicking it:
Yes, that’s becauſe it only updates when the liſt item is refreſhed ſhowing the newly calculated value.
Workaround:
Don’t take 6 minutes to decide on a miſſion.
No, you’ve got that backwards. Virtuosity is proportional to weapon UNpopularity. Utensil Poker is at 0% because it’s the most popular weapon. It would never get a damage boost. Damage boost (if ever implemented) would be directly proportional to virtuosity.
Sorry, misunderstanding. Yes, you’re right.
Reworks are only the first phase of balancing. Some of your own suggestions require changes to the mechanics, and these take iterations to get right. No one (hopefully) is assuming that the current state of weapons is anywhere close to being finalized.
Also, just because I can’t keep up with suggestions doesn’t mean they’re ignored.
I’ve just noticed an oversight in the way corn shortgun handles manual firing. This is a mistake more than anything else. From memory, laser is as close to the WBP suggestions as I could make it, but it’s possible I messed up something there, too. Will have a closer look.
Same with the other weapons. Don’t assume the worst. I’m not purposefully ignoring anything. Much like everything else, WBP is not immune to implementation bugs at my end.
I don’t see why you treat it as an attack on WBP if I want to have a couple of weapons in the game with non-standard power levels. Currently, all weapons (sans Absolver) have the same number, so I see it as an unreasonable (or at least premature) complaint. There’s plenty of existing weapons to choose from. I agree that an overpowered niche weapon can mess things up, but this is not the case now and, if it ever becomes the case in the future, it will be nerfed. There’s no reason to be preemptively offended.
Competitive is important, otherwise I wouldn’t have even tackled WBP in the first place. I know how competitive feels like, I was ranked #1 in the world back in my day. It’s a constant optimization battle and search for the dominant strategy. If you let it, it will destroy all enjoyment. But you can still have a competitive core (say, 10 weapons) while still leaving room for individual player expression. Or for those poor casual players that just want to have fun
You might want to take a look at its manual overheat.
It’s mostly a result of releasing frustration that’s been slowly growing for the past few weeks.
As far as introducing such weapons, the way I see it, balancing all weapons for the competitive sphere* will not harm casual players (Am I wrong?). I also can’t really imagine any case in which a weapon would have to use a different model than 0-10 + 20 due to its inherent design.
And if boron got 0-11 + 20 in CI4, why only add such weapons now? I could easily imagine Positron and Riddler having 0-20 and yet you didn’t do that.
I know we disagree on that, but I don’t view the number of power levels to be a part of a weapon’s character (referring to Absolver here). Audiovisuals and gameplay, absolutely.
*I should probably elaborate on what I actually mean by this. In my opinion, if weapons, taking into account how they are used (how much “skill” or care they require), can be judged as performing relatively equally on high (within reasonable bounds, anyway) difficulty, then they can be considered as balanced, or “competitive”.
I appreciate that, however resigned we may be. We were on the verge of cancelling this project several times before, and after the conversation about Boron (and the admittedly rather short-lived 11 upgrade on Vulcan), we decided it’s probably for the best to just leave it and let you and the rest of the community sort it out. We decided that we were getting nowhere and admitted failure (there died the DM and the weapon ideas).
When I talked about getting ignored, I wasn’t really talking about the reworks themselves, the raw values. Rather about your design philosophy (different numbers of power levels, damage stages instead of smooth ramping for Boron, powerups resetting Boron to 0% heat, and so on), which we know we disagree on. We have no reason to believe that we can change your mind about these things, and that’s okay. After all, it is your game and the final decision is yours. We tried to help, and at least we might’ve managed to make the weapon roster a little bit better.
I might stick around a little longer, if you’re interested in tweaking some stuff. I don’t know if I’ll end up making more elaborate posts like the Plasma/Positron and Absolver ones, though.
what if i want to add something to my name, I have to pay 90 keys can IA make it 45 keys instead of 90 keys (if i want to add something to my name not changing name)
11 upgrade on Vulcan), we decided it’s probably for the best to just leave it and let you and the rest of the community sort it out. We decided that we were getting nowhere and admitted failure (there died the DM and the weapon ideas).