Photon Swarm has good performing in all kinds of missions. Meanwhile Neutron has bad performing but we don’t buff it because of the damage. Edit: I mean the high damage doesn’t prove that a weapon is efficient.
Laser still didn’t finish yet we can’t use it because of the lack of vision.
You forgot Fork too fast.
For people trying to argue about the damage I’d say we can totally compare the weapons for SSH >100% only, then the damage outputs should be balanced. Weapons like corn, neutron, ion don’t work well in lower difficulty because they require time and overkill enemies, while weapons like lightning and photon can ace everything very fast and strong enough to kill bosses, so once all weapon are equal corn, neutron and ion are the very less used weapons in total playcount but still the highest ones in damage. Again it’s iA choice.
Really? I recall that a while back there was an argument over whether Lightning ſhould be fired manually.
Why would you try to balance all weapons with a max difficulty miſſion as a ſtandard model, given that if the difficulties were ſet properly only a tiny fraction of people would fly the hardeſt miſſions?
No I just say we can balance the damage output if we compare them in max difficulty.
I think it would be good to have ſome weapons that perform beſt in eaſy miſſions as well as ſome that perform beſt in hard miſſions, which would in turn make it harder to compare them directly.
It can’t be a specific, narrowed-down data set for technical reasons, I imagine. I don’t think iA will want to make a separate statistic for storing these values - it’ll be the “weapon virtuosity” that gets used, if this gets added. It will multiply whatever the base DPS value of the weapon is.
And if we are excluding stuff from these calculations, then you could make a gargantuan list of what “doesn’t count” - the immediate thing that comes to my mind is comet chases, which have virtually no reliance on DPS and the “best” weapon will remain stable through pretty much everything because firing pattern is all that matters there.
So Vulcan’s going to get wrecked under this system, surely. Anything that’s good for single-target damage (like Plasma) will also suffer far beyond the point of reasonable viability because people will still be desperately trying to use whatever scores best in their three dailies, and remaining competitive with pecking orders and meritorious marksmanship is probably going to pay off way more than changing to a “viable” weapon, so they’ll grow painfully weak to compensate.
And then there’s Absolver, which is likely to elicit some sort of backlash regardless of if it gets stronger or weaker. I suspect it’s going to get buffed by any sort of auto-system, but that’s only going to be a disaster because damage is literally the only thing about the weapon it doesn’t need more of. It will just grow in boss-destroying power while remaining unusable for many classic waves.
tl;dr - An auto-balancing system is not going to be smart enough to even figure out why a weapon is good or bad, let alone why it is popular. I can see no way to automate balancing that wouldn’t be more complex than just doing it by hand anyway. It’s unfortunate, and I do wish it could work, but I feel like it’s just the nature of the problem.
I think the WBP has done a very good job in a very short time, and similar manual tweaks are going to be much more reliable and productive than letting a spreadsheet micromanage the weapons.
Especially now that the firing system has been reworked and fire rates aren’t dependant on framerate anymore. It opens up a path to microbuffs and micronerfs that rely on subtle fire rate changes that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Short term yes, but I think long term an automatic ſyſtem would be good; ſooner or later new enemies or whatever will ſhift the balance in favour of different weapons, and it would be nice if it didn’t all require rebalancing every time.
Well this is proposing that the game rebalances all the time, 24/7. So while I agree that balancing is tedious, an automatic system is only going to make balancing continue indefinitely, like playing a game of ping-pong with the meta rather than trying to flatten it out.
Yeah now think about it I don’t think comet chases get affected by weapon damage so we can just filter them.
As I said before the data need to be standardized. Also if iA want Plasma to be only strong in challenge they’ll add it in the table, but i don’t think it’s a good thing because competitive is different from normal play. If you play LOL you should know Ryze champion, he’s very strong in pro play but weak in normal play, and company of LOL want to balance him in both pro and casual and he got over 5 reworks in one year and his winrate in casual matches are always the worst of all. From Ryze case I think balancing for both competitive and casual playing is near impossible so it’s totally okay if we don’t count challenges in balance.
Which are we trying to balance? Competitive or normal?
Because if you’re correct, and we can’t have both, we either need to balance one and skew the other, or compromise in the middle (which, at least out of those options, I’d prefer).
Really? what disaster?
It’s clearly for normal play, the ability of plasma and the medal system already gave it the throne.
Absolver deals a lot of damage and fires slowly, currently. People tend to say that it’s too slow, but also a bit too effective against some bosses.
If it’s unpopular (and according to the current weapon virtuosity stats, it’s not doing too great) then the damage will increase, making the part of the weapon that’s already a bit too powerful better, without fixing the issue that people have with it (which is that it’s slow).
I think at least a few people would be worried at the thought that the finished balancing system results in plasma always being the best for challenges…
Yes we can work on that too, we can expand damage zone/ reduce heat cost/ reduce charge time. They do increase total damage afterall. Yes Absolver is a special weapon and i also did propose it having permanent damage and reduce heat cost for leveling.
Plasma doesn’t make you the best in challenges btw. Really nothing can do about it yes?
Yes, I see how some weapons might become stupidly broken with an automatic system, but you can’t be sure if it’ll really happen unless it’s implemented. And if it does come to that, tweaking a global system that manages all the weapons might be technically easier than having to make changes to each weapon individually all the time.
“Absolver is not used a lot so it might get huge boss destruction potential.” Boss rushes exist. If it gets powerful enough people will start using it there until it’s no longer lucrative. “Vulcan will be the best in Comet Chases regardless of damage.” We’ve lived with a useless Vulcan for 3 games. I doubt it’ll get to that point, but it is not unfitting for a weapon with such a history to be usable only in a single mission type in CIU. “Plasma will be weakened because people will desperately try to get Pecking Orders with it.” It will happen if there’s enough people trying to squeeze every ounce of score from their missions. Which usually only happens in challenges, and the number of casuals is likely to be many times greater than people who actively seek the first place.
You can treat this problem in two ways: From a technical perspective, weapons are balanced when what you would call their objective performance is roughly equal. However, weapons are now even more situational than before, what parameter do you use to judge when a weapon is too weak/too strong/not good enough? From a real-world perspective, this performance loosely translates into the weapon seeing more use. You cannot decide this without comparing them with one another.
If you are into this, you would compare them yourself. Take every weapon to a “firing range” and test them until you are satisfied. But it’s more likely that you would rather play the game than test weapons, so better ask for opinions about what to use. Equal popularity means more diverging opinions and playstyles. You’re still comparing the weapons, just in a different way. Popularity is more straightforward than meticulous statistics and number crunching. The result of auto-balancing might not be “beautiful” but it won’t require so much manual maintenance.
You can view “a game of ping-pong with the meta” as either an advantage or a disadvantage. If the weapon stats are stable, then once you’ve done the testing, you establish the meta, and will use whatever weapons came out on top. With changes being made continuously by the algorithm, you don’t have this solid ground to stand on, so you’ll be forced to Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. You can’t flatten the meta, because some of the weapons are inherently situational. And there are others with fill in the same niche. At least let the ones which serve the same role trade places from time to time in the players’ arsenal.
Yes this is early access we still don’t know what stupid result this system will create but nothing is out of control here. We all can see the result. Everything can be reverted back. The system may has bugs and faults but it’s okay we are here to help iA to fix them and complete the game. Yes no one no group can perfectly balance there weapons as the gameplay changes, so is the algorithm. This is to help iA to focus on more important things.
Tell me. What is more important than weapons in a competitive game? And don’t even start with “but CIU is a casual game”. It has leaderboards, squadrons, races, challenges. It’s not casual if it has multiple forms of competition. If you want fair competition then this idea of automatic weapon balancing is a NO, because it destroys every weapon. All the different kinds of mission are best played with different weapons and you can’t magically drop that into some kind of pseudo AI algorithm. (BTW, I suggest actually watching some stuff about AI so you don’t go around and suggest it as a solution, idk, go watch codebullet on youtube to get basic ideas). And if you’re going to reply with “but we can just disable X type of missions from AWB”, then I have a question: why? Why exactly this type of mission should be disabled and what type of mission should be looked for? What is the reason behind it? After some time you are going to be left with big list of things that do not count for AWB and it will become crap. Not to mention everytime the player returns to the game he/she would need to learn the stats again so he can pick the weapon that just so happens to be the best because some fancy algorithm decided so.