LE Balance Committee - A serious suggestion for overall game quality

This is going to be a long post, but if you can bear with me to read, I think you should eventually come to agreement that this is a very good idea and something that should be brought to the developer’s attention as something serious to consider which would positively impact almost every area for the game in a huge way.

Some background about me. A bit over a year ago I was the first to popularize the ‘Earthquake Chargebear’. I streamed it and pushed it to over 700 waves to take Rank 1 on the arena ladder. Shortly afterwards, it became a flavor of the month as everyone else played it, including other big streamers like Steelmage and co. Binashole continued the build and brought it to new levels of power as a low-life variant with more damage again, and pushed over 1k waves to continue to retain rank 1 in coming months. But now I come back to the game a year later, I see the earthquake chargebear archetype is essentially dead, a shadow of its self, after being hit with a massive nerf that build archetype- A 5 second cooldown on its main damage.

I am most likely about to repeat the entire process again when the ladder comes up next month, except this time as I bring out and showcase the power of a Spriggan Form shaman utilizing totems, ward and freeze, and I don’t want to see the same result of spriggan form being chopped off at the knee and another cool build archetype lost in the name of ‘balance’.

I started out by trying to create what I had done with the earthquake chargebear, but realizing the extreme limitation of a 5-second downtime window for my main damage every 5 seconds, I came to the conclusion that the build would not be competitive in the endgame environment and temporarily shelved it. The weapon nerf was too big to overcome. Even earthquake itself got some cooldown nerfs on its biggest nodes, hurting the earthquake builds across the board even though they weren’t particularly powerful or popular, as most people could not overcome the extreme mana costs on earthquake. For this reason, as it stands, we will likely not see many or any earthquake chargebears in the endgame, nor will we see anyone playing Earthquake as a main damage skill (in human form).

The nerfs, which seem like an extreme kneejerk reaction to a ‘problem’ have effectively ‘killed off’ the earthquake werebear variant. A 5 second duration where you cannot deal your main damage, every 5 seconds, over and over all the time, is effectively a death sentence for the build in high arena. On top of this, there are now +2 and +6 second cooldowns added to the best nodes in Earthquake- collateral damage effectively weakening an already scarcely played skill because the skill itself was too mana intensive to be played as a main skill anyway. Earthquake itself got hit as collateral damage when it was an already underrepresented skill- almost nobody was playing earthquake (without werebear). Almost nobody will continue to play Earthquake in its current state (human form/beastmaster etc).

Ultimately, the result of this approach has removed what I thought was a very cool build archetype from the game. And its a shame, because its one less build archetype for players to enjoy.

GGG and PoE has taken this approach for years- every 3 months at every new league they go across all the most powerful/most played meta builds, and apply nerfs, until those novel, enjoyable builds become either too weak to enjoy, or they become inconvenient or fustrating to play, and fall out of the meta. Then the players move back to the boring ‘meta’ builds everyone plays, and become clones of each other, essentially playing the same builds. However, they never go across all the weakest, underplayed skills that everyone knows are terrible, and make buffs/adjustments to them. This results in a stale, boring meta where everyone plays the same stuff to be able to enjoy the game; you can play non-meta skills if you like, but you will endure difficulty and struggle for no fault of your own other than the skill itself is too weak or has fundamental problems that get in the way of enjoyable gameplay.

The result of GGG’s approach to balance means that ultimately PoE has 200+ skills, but only 5-8 meta builds that everyone plays. And everyone plays them and becomes a clone, there is no build diversity, and it is BORING. I have 6k+ hours in PoE, and I have played the same boring powerful meta builds for years because they work; I’ve also tried repeatedly to play what I WANT to play and enjoy (a bow archetype ranger using something like ice shot) and fail over and over again. I have 10+ rangers that I class as failed characters (half of which are dead in hardcore without even scratching the endgame). Its simply not viable to play those skills so I am pushed back to the boring ‘meta’ builds that everyone else plays or I struggle and fail on a skill I WANT to play but cannot because it is exceptionally weak, no matter how well I play, build or prepare for the content. I fail and die on those builds in Tier 1 maps, yet I have completed T17 maps/most endgame bosses and even survived to level 100 in HC on a ‘meta’ build.

I am concerned after seeing the Bhauldor’s Wrath / Earthquake skill changes that this similar approach to balance will be applied to Last Epoch and it will result in the same thing in time; a reduction in build diversity, possibilities, and eventually we will only have a few ‘meta’ builds that everyone plays, because playing ‘non-meta’ builds will be suffering for the reason that those skills are simply too weak/fundamentally inconvenient/ not fun to play, or are simply ‘not possible’ to be competitive because of too many limitations.

Of coarse, the most powerful builds will need to be addressed and ‘brought in line’, but they don’t need to be knee-capped and leveled to the ground like the Earthquake Werebear was. When that happens, we lose one more enjoyable build and have less possibilities for people to play with and group alongside. Group build compositions will become less diverse.

The priority approach should be that the weakest, least played skills should be constantly given attention, adjusted or buffed so that we have more build diversity and more options for people to enjoy.

For reference, human Earthquake has never been a popular build- the mana cost restraints are simply too big to overcome, and very few people would play it for this reason. Now with the extra cooldown on its best nodes, it also has to contend with damage downtime in combat alongside its mana constraints- I don’t see many people wanting to play a build that has to wait several seconds to do anything. Tempest strike also is extremely weak and rarely played by anyone, same with volcanic orb- it has a bland, uninspired skill tree and is a weak skill no matter which way you build it. Same with acid flask, I had a viewer say that he wanted to create an acid flask build. I had to sadly say tell him that I don’t think an acid flask build would be possible because it has no way to scale up the damage. Same with cinder strike, an extremely underpowered skill without any ‘oomph’ to make it feel good, regardless how you build or utilize it. These skills should be the priority to receive adjustments and buffs, the priority shouldn’t be going across the top builds that feel good and nerfing them. Bring up the weaker skills to become alternatives to the main meta builds first.

Those skills have stayed like this for years, never receiving adjustments or small ‘buffs’ to make them more appealing; they all have extreme fundamental problems (Earthquake’s insurmountable mana cost, for example) or weaknesses that are too big to overcome with player effort, skill or gear. In their current state, if it stays that way, nobody will play these skills, ever. They essentially suck, when compared to the other skills that are on offer which are far more fundamentally convenient, enjoyable and powerful- Glacier offers far better damage, clear, mana recuperation and control compared to volcanic orb- Why would anyone want to play volcanic orb over glacier? Nobody will, and its a shame.

This should be in my opinion, the #1 priority- always adjusting and buffing the weakest, underplayed skills every patch, until they show up in peoples builds and get played. This is what is going to lead to amazing build diversity and possibilities with hundreds of viable builds. Nerfing top builds should be a secondary priority, as it only results in less build diversity.

Sure, we should be curbing the overpowered skills too, but realize we don’t get much from this other than negatives ultimately, we usually lose a build variant or we make what is a novel or enjoyable build less enjoyable or convenient to play alot of the time when the nerfs are too harsh. And it should not be the main focus, the main focus should be to bring up the weaker skills until they rise to a point of being able to match those meta builds, or at least provide an alternative option for players to consider.

I am theorycrafting many, many builds and exploring many interactions, and I can tell you that there are some skills that I simply won’t bother with entirely because I have looked in detail at their skill trees and I can tell you that they have no build potential or options overall to be competitive, so I simply stay away and don’t touch those skills. It should be very obvious which skills those are, and skill playrates over the population will likely tell the same story. A skill that has 0.01% playrate most likely has some glaring issue that need to be addressed.

So it is my suggestion, and why I made this post, was to start a conversation that hopefully the devs pay attention to which is a solution I came up with - creating a balance committee. A balance committee would be a private group of 200-300 people, handpicked perhaps, of all the most passionate and loyal players, the best players, streamers, people that have thousands of hours in the game, etc. A private discussion group on discord, in liaison with the developers, that would discuss issues in the game together, like skill/class/ item balance, game direction, and bring to attention issues to the developers that they themselves may have overlooked or neglected if there wasn’t a committee pointing out things like this to them. Nothing changes for the dev’s development process, however they have access to very quality information constantly from which they can draw upon when it comes to making decisions and continuing to build upon the game.

At the end of the day, the dev’s time is valuable- would you rather them sitting around ‘theorycrafting’ for half a day on how to nerf some powerful build like Earthquake werebear in a suitable way, or balance some specific unique item interaction, or buff some weak skill, or rather spend that time IMPLEMENTING new content instead, when they would have sourced those solutions and ideas already from the committee, who would provide very high quality ideas to problems across all areas regularly. Similarly; while the developers are making the skills, a developer who might have 25-50 hours played in a class in LE as opposed to some guy who has 3k hours on that class played, whos input would be more valuable for overall class direction?

Some guy who played the game for 3k hours playing only primalist, all the primalist builds, skills, knows every tiny nuance, interaction and mechanic inside-out, would know exactly what makes a typical primalist player happy and what frustrates the primalist player. Their insight would be infinitely more valuable for what direction the class should be steered in, an insight that a developer simply would not have time to ever acquire because they are busy developing the game; they don’t have time to play every primalist build and experience every interaction from the player’s POV for thousands of hours. But a committee player does, and the developers can draw upon this insight if a focus group like this. And 200-300 diehard experienced players who have these insights across many builds, skills, interactions in the game with a combined hundreds of thousands of hours played overall, would provide invaluable game design insight and direction for the developers to utilize and create the best game ever.

I think that if this suggestion were to be implemented, the result would be that the game quality would SKYROCKET in every facet. Eventually, over time, constant great changes to build/skill tree balance / item balance, meaningful solutions to curbing overpowered builds without destroying entire build archetypes, meaningful adjustments and buffs to underplayed skills, and thoughtful, astute and eloquent endgame league mechanic direction with player enjoyment as a main focus would result in an amazing game with limitless possibilities, exorbitant build diversity, great balance and everyone happy as a result.

Precious developer time would be less spent on theorycrafting solutions and more on implementing content, eventually resulting in far more quality content for the players to enjoy. How much time is wasted figuring out solutions to nerfing/balancing overtuned/undertuned skills/builds/items, time which could be spent IMPLEMENTING new content and skills instead? The devs making a shortlist of issues and putting it to the balance committee to discuss, vote upon and respond with meaningful suggestions would save SO MUCH time for the devs and vice versa, when the committee could make a shortlist of important issues to be looked at for the devs. Meaningful, ingenious solutions to these problems would become a regular occurrence. It would streamline everything. The committee could provide short, one-page summarized writeups every week to the devs and it would save them so much time.

Can we get a discussion on this? Yes, we already have regular ‘suggestions’ from everyone across forums and discord, from the average player, here and there on forums/discord. This is the same concept except in a far more focused, organized and precise manner and from seasoned, experienced players who will discuss and vote upon proposed changes together before handing their well-deliberated ideas to the devs, in general agreement and unison as a whole, giving the devs the ammunition every week to quickly make genius design decisions across all areas of the game and saving them alot of time having to think up those solutions themselves.

So, what do you guys think?

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EQ werebear wasn’t even all that OP, it may have been able to do insane damage numbers, but it never hit the top tier dps of some other builds, plus it had a MANDATORY UNIQUE and not just any mandatory unique but one that could only be farmed in one of the last timelines that unlock.

The only thing that was putting it over the top was that insane durability, which wasn’t because of earthquake itself but because a bunch of entirely separate mechanics that just happened to slot into the build.

People only ran the unique weapon varient of EQ werebear because it was the only way to deal with the mana and cooldown issue that would otherwise make it completely nonviable.

I get the idea that too little a nerf may not solve a problem, but if you do the nerf then the skill becomes useless and then you do not proceed to BUFF the previously nerfed skill. Then it just remains a skill that may as well not exist.

Meanwhile there are skills that need huge buffs besides EQ:
Serpent Strike(despite good dps, the poison nerfs made it not worth picking a single target skill), tempest strike, Quite a few of the companions(the devs already know about this thankfully), Avalanche(nobody uses channelled, non-channelled too expensive to use, even if it were a mage skill instead), Very High cost mage skills(Glacier, Volcanic orb, black hole, meteor), Vengence, Rebuke(due to the minor issue that it does not scale from negated DAMAGE but due to number of hits taken, even though it reduces dot damage, makeing it bad vs bosses and also bad vs mob groups because you want to MOVE when clearing mob groups onto the next group), Smelters Wrath(beaten out by other sentinel skills), Summon skeleton(beaten out by skeleton mage and other minion builds), sacrifice(clunky to use, not large enough of a payoff), summon waith(temporary minion, not as good as zombies), acid flask(weakest of rogue thrown skills, even when stacking poison as shurikens can stack faster), some rogue melee skills(cinder strike, puncture, flurry - as they do not have a lot of dps or aoe, and are rogue skills, even though rogue is the glass cannon of the game)

And you can EASILY tell which skills are not being used, just check the forum for the last time it was used in a build and what it was used for. There should be no excuse for not knowing which skills need changing. I compiled this list of skills that need buffs in less than an hour.

But on the matter of your suggestion - I do not think that only pro players should have an input on balance, as these players have dozens of copies of every unique and even legendaries of things, they would not be good for the casual experience of just levelling a character with minimal unique slots.

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I strongly and vehemently oppose any form of official, player based committee that would in any way believe itself or be perceived by the community as having direct influence on game balance decisions. That goes especially if such a committee operates in private or is focused on “top” players.

Player feedback and experience is valuable, but it should never be put on a pedestal in that way. Players are too invested, especially “top” players, and they absolutely, unequivocally cannot be trusted to remain neutral and objective, or make suggestions that are not selfish. Our viewpoint for the game and our motivations are intensely singular and personal, and that doesn’t change just because someone is a streamer or has played for thousands of hours.

I would never play or spend money on a game that was doing something like this.

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This should be in my opinion, the #1 priority- always adjusting and buffing the weakest, underplayed skills every patch

I totally agree with this one. Instead of nerfing most-played skills due to either how popular or overpowered it is, why not buff the least used ones. Ofc, I’m not saying that the devs should leave the overpowered skills unchecked but rather tone it down and buff the others to match it.

The feeling of having your main skill get nerfed to the ground feels really bad and “”“might”“” force you to switch to other builds which is either bland or underwhelming or just plain bad. So again, I agree with other unused skills should be buffed and that will not take all the fun away from players and will have more builds to play and experiment on.

I haven’t really played Beastmaster since Primalist is my least favorite so I can’t comment much about your overall experience with it. All I can say about Primalist and its masteries in general is that the skill tree feels like a mess and quite hard to build around with. Druid is fun for me but it kinda suffers from other problem too like the Swarmblade Form skill tree feels too divided and trying to achieve so many things at once. Feels unplayable without having +3 Swarmblade form affix in your armor. Ofc this is just my opinion about the class.

But as for sentinel, I think it might share some issues. I feel like every sentinel build recently is about smite. Throw hammers? let’s proc smite. Throw Javelin? let’s proc smite, lunge? proc smite. Want to use multistrike? let’s proc smite. Want to use Aurelis? proc more smite…I’m quite guilty of this too except I use smite manually. I’m not saying this in any statistical perspective, this is just what I always see whenever I visit last epoch tools and what I see whenever I read skill tooltips. I probably just haven’t tried the class too much yet but it feels like that to me. Again, just my opinion.

Iirc the devs said something about updating the old skill trees, like marrow shards for example. It’s very old and “”“probably”“” haven’t received anything new over the years. Some nodes costs 6-7 points. SIX to SEVEN. Volcanic Orb and Ice barrage that doesn’t feel good to use and just too mana hungry, then we got Lament of the Lost Refuge…But yeah, they said it and I will get my hopes up for it, I believe they will do something about these skills as well as the least-used ones.

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It is completely bizaare that if you took the time to read my initial post instead of skimming over it, that this would be your entire takeaway.

The balance committee does not need to operate in private, it could be done in a public discord channel for everyone to see actually. The entire point was to help the developers by providing good feedback and helping them to make good decisions for the game. How on earth you thought that 200-300 people openly debating all issues in the game could be used as a forum for personal or selfish gain. You think that they are all going to be in agreement for massive buffs for one mastery because one guy players that mastery and wants to be king? Is that what you are implying? Your suggestion is completely bizzaare and would never fly when its a group based discussion/debate and I have no idea how you arrived at this conclusion. It just blows my mind.

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It’s completely bizarre that if you took the time to read my post, you would have noted the word “especially” preceding the concept of it being private. Not “exclusively” - especially. Do not accuse me of only skimming your post and not “getting it” after clearly having done the same and reacting to, let’s see, half of one sentence.

I don’t care if it’s public or private. Tack on any caveat or guard rail you care to come up with. There is no version of a specially endorsed group of players whose opinions about balance have been officially elevated in their validity that is acceptable. The very concept itself is fundamentally unsound, indefensible, poisonous, and offensive.

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I absolutely disagree. Period. Where would you like to get your balance decisions to come from, if not from the player base themselves? This stance you have is completely bizaare and rediculous. To say that a community based suggestion think tank itself is 'fundamentally unsound, indefensible, poisonous and offensive?

Give me a break.

I won’t be replying to your posts further as unless you are going to give a proper elaboration on why this suggestion is ‘poisonous and offensive’ and so on. You’ve stated it is, but you haven’t stated how or why.

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The people I want game balance decisions coming from are people who have a broad view of the game and are not going to be 100% self serving in their ideas - the devs.

You spent multiple paragraphs being salty that your EQ werebear build was nerfed as a preamble to your committee idea. Don’t act like everybody reading can’t see exactly where this is coming from. This isn’t about “giving good feedback to the devs about balance”, it’s about getting the devs to cater to a specific type of player.

A venue already exists for players to communicate their feedback about balance and discuss them amongst each other. It’s called the forums. Elevating “top” players to a pedestal of greater validity and influence just because they’re streamers or have played thousands of hours is insulting to every single other player, while adding no value of any kind. What you are suggesting is nothing more an elitist group with a myopic view of the game trying to browbeat the devs into doing what they want, for themselves.

There’s nothing more to say except: Give me a break.

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Absolutely and 100% agree with @BroncoCollider.

There’s so much community feedback already. There’s the CT program and the top content creators have their own connections to EHG.

Devs are already very open for feedback. This shouldn’t be taken too far. Nobody of the community and playerbase has background knowledge of how and why stuff is balanced the way it is.

Never ever you let your customers decide about your product. Feedback is fine. Everything beyond that is way too much.

Of course pro players have a deeper knowledge. But they also approach the game differently than the average player. I’m watching alot of streams and appreciate the game knowledge I can take out of it. But very often I see how different the attitude is.

This is not like we bought shares and now need to be involved in the important decisions.

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Good, so we’ve clarified it. You’d prefer the design decisions to come from the developer who has no time to spend thousands of hours playing the class because hes busy coding 60 hours a week, who might have 25-50 hours played on any specific class over someone who has played a specific class or achaeotype for thousands of hours over multiple years and knows every nuance and in depth experience with creating many builds on said class. I disagree that the notion that the point of the developer being ‘less-self serving’ is going to result in better design choices because hes not selfish, but the player is. That’s bullshit, and we can agree to disagree here.

You stated that I was salty that my EQ werebear was nerfed and that I was trying to get the devs to cater to a specific type of player. I don’t give a shit that my build got nerfed, I care that the build archaeotype is not going to exist in the future because it recieved such a harsh nerf that the build type won’t exist anymore. I play almost every mastery in the game bar one or two, I’m not invested in having one mastery being more powerful than another, I’m going to play everything anyway, and this is where you have misunderstood me. I am concerned that we are going to lose builds to this approach, as demonstrated by the loss of the earthquake chargebear archaeotype, if this approach is continued to be applied to other builds as they rise to the top of the meta. There are many, many multiple builds in that existed in the past and filled their own fun niches for players to enjoy, which no longer exist because they recieved negative changes that were too big and effectively ‘deleted’ them from the game.

Yes, a venue already exists for players to communicate feedback. But it isn’t in depth and concentrated on specific important issues, its just random comments thrown out by the average joe. Is that how you want the direction of the game to be steered, by whenever some average joe throws out his opinion and who knows what the experience of the guy might be, he might have only 50 hours played in the game and basically just arrived at the start of monoliths before he gave his conclusions on what should be improved.
The notion that ‘top players’ are going to offer poor or selfish suggestions towards the direction of the game is nonsense. And who said the committee would be only ‘top players’? I said it would include top players, but would include players from all walks of life and all levels of experience who enjoy different aspects of the game, not just the ‘top players’ or elitists as you put it.

Your entire attitude towards the suggestion itself is for some reason extremely negative, and you have discarded every possible positive outcome that having something like this would have, and instead bleated on about how it would be poisonous, selfish, elitist, and so on, with no real explanation of how a large community think tank would reach that state collectively. Which is the main part of what I cannot understand as a whole.

As it stands, skills like tempest strike, volcanic orb, cinder strike, acid flask, and so on have not received meaningful changes in the past 1.5 years. It is my view that unless the underplayed skills become a priority for adjustments when nobody wants to play or use them across most builds, they will never be used. Whereas it appears that the priority now is that we regularly had new and novel builds introduced which were then perceived to be ‘too powerful’ and hit with the nerf stick immediately, and which then just as quickly evaporated and disappeared, never to be seen again.

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Does that not happen already? How would it be different from the current discussions on discord?

Then surely that’s an issue with the givers of the feedback not taking advantage of the ability to create long form feedback (as does happen sometimes) on the forums. IMO, the forums are a better place to have more detailed, nuanced discussions than discord.

But there’s only been 1 patch plus 0.9 in that timeframe.

I thought it was, like, a year after Bhuldar’s Wrath was introduced that it got a cooldown applied? Maybe longer? Poison and Umbral Blades/shadow daggers has been unbalanced for several years. I’m not sure which builds you’re referring to (especially since it took them a year without any patches to get mp out the door).

I know i didn’t even skim your post, but if it’s a public discord the conversation happens in then its going to have an awful lot of “random comments from average joes”. The alternative is that it happens in private which apparently you don’t want.

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What if they DON’T come to agreement that this is a very good idea?

Feedback is awesome. Feedback is phenomenal. But I never understand people who start out by saying “my opinion is good and you should take it.”

In a game like this there are so many variables that us armchair quarterbacks have about 15-20% of all the information to make an informed decision about the game. Although with LE this might be higher as they are pretty open about a LOT of things.

Buffing weak skills isn’t necessarily the answer. It’s a POSSIBLE answer, sure, but what if the Devs are still fine tuning the strength of enemies and progression against those enemies and they don’t WANT 1000 corruption to be a norm? This single factor alone can touch on so many other things, like gear drops, movement rates, etc, that one simple ‘catch-all’ is like pulling at a thread in a weave, you’re likely to bring the whole thing down.

I don’t have any problems with your ideas and feedback, but keep in mind the Devs KNOW this game. They listen to everyone, including those who disagree with your ideas. They’ll make the call. They’ll decide, ultimately, what is good for the game.

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I’m not sure, honestly. I just wanted to put this out there as a possible solution to what I see as a flawed approach to build balance. Path of Exile already does the ‘cut off the top’ nerf every strong build but never buffing the bottom skills, and after many years we have arrived at a stale meta where everyone plays the same thing. I was just looking for/offering a solution for this in the hope it would result in a more diverse meta, because I am concerned that one day we will all be playing the same builds because everything at the top got nerfed and everything at the bottom never got adjusted and we were all sandwiched into it.

There was no specification on whether the group is private or public, or semi public with or without the public being able to comment or vote on decisions, etc. It was just a suggestion to get the ball rolling and a discussion going on this matter.

Build diversity and a healthy, competitive meta with many playerable builds should be the aim and end result here. Not a personal arguement about selfishness or elitism or raising problems BEFORE they even exist as a reason for not pursuing something greater than what we currently have.

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Honestly, a balance council sounds like creating another feedback forum but with extra steps. But I have to admit it’s an interesting idea, with a lot of problems. These problems are worth thinking about and addressing if you want the idea to be taken more seriously than a random what if thought.

I’m not sure if anyone is familiar with the game Warframe but early in its development you could buy a Founders bundle to support the devs. The most expensive bundle came with access to the Design Council. A private subforum of their official forums in which players were given the chance to talk with the developers and design parts of the game. Notably, 2 playable characters originated from the newly created Design Council. However, the Council’s responsibilities changed over the years. Instead of brainstorming new concepts, they are now given preconceived options which can be voted on. Access to the council has also changed. Access can be gained by having a positive and active presence in the game’s official forums. Also, instead of hundreds of players having access all the time 25 players are given access to the Council for 1 month.

People lament the changes that were made and many of the original founders decry that the Design Council is where ideas go to die but let’s think about why these changes were made.

  1. Reduction of responsibilities. It is awesome that players designed 2 characters you can play right now. The big problem I see is highlighted by the proverb, “A camel is a horse designed by committee”. Limiting input to 25 players per month and limiting options to dev-approved ideas makes things manageable and keeps expectations realistic. Getting hundreds of online strangers to thoughtfully discuss and come to a civilized agreement on something they are invested in is … well … give me an example of this working. Not to mention how much power will be given to this group? Many older founders are resentful of the Design Council because it ended up being an empty promise. It’s easy and fun to come up with ideas but implementing those ideas isn’t. I can’t blame the developers for limiting the Council’s scope of responsibilities. The game developers hired by DE or 11th hour games should be the ones dictating the design and balance of their game, not a collection of accountants, streamers, middle aged parents, ect. (No offense)

  2. Change of access. Rescinding the exclusive promise to founders that they will be given full access to the Design Council is not great. But, limiting such a feature to an unchanging group of players was a mistake in the first place. Having the Council consist of nothing but the top 1% of hardcore players means decisions will be made that don’t serve the rest of the playerbase. Also creating a situation of haves and have-nots in the community seems alien and hostile to the health of the game.

I think the Council’s scope of power and responsibilities need to be clearly defined. I think access to the council should be inclusive and temporary. I also think the integrity and vision of 11th hour’s developers needs to be respected.

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All pretty valid points, honestly. Nothing really to say to this other I appreciate the feedback and ideas, and its interesting to see how something similar was already done in another game and how it went.

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If such a commitee existed in an advisory capacity:

  1. How do you ensure this committee provides advice representative of and supporting the broader player base?

  2. How do you convince the broader player base thay their interests are represented?

  3. What happens when the committee’s advice is considered and then put aside for reasons that the committee is not privy to, or does not agree with?

  4. What happens if (when?) the committee is slowly undermined and corrupted by a small group of players serving The One True King (no, not Asmongold, but @Llama8 of course)?

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  1. I suppose the committee discussion group would need to be a public channel, but not neccessarily a channel where everyone would be able to post in, this would be the only way to guarantee transparancy and show that the committee is acting in the interests of the entire player base. That seemed to be the concern in the earlier posts in this thread, that somehow the committee would become self-serving and only seek to achieve changes that were beneficial for the players that played x class (?) I don’t actually see how a large group having in depth discussions would result in that. Ultimately its just a suggestion group, its still the dev’s job to make decisions, they’re only offering their input

  2. Answered above, the group discussions would need to be public, as this is the only way to guarantee this

  3. The devs are under no obligation whatsoever to take apply committees suggestions, its simply a think tank and a resource to be drawn upon, to help free up dev time and improve decisions that are made in the long term about any facets of the game. Its their game, we’re just trying to help.

  4. I suppose this one is a joke

Ultimately all I am trying to do is steer the current pattern which seems to be constant nerfs to top builds with little attention paid to underperforming and underrepresented builds, in order to achieve a healthy diverse meta in the long term. I don’t want the game to end up like PoE, with 200+ skills and only 5-10 meta builds that everyone plays because moving away from those skills results in unneccessary difficulty, inconvenience and struggle of no fault of the player.

Right now its very clear there are multiple skills and builds that are very powerful, but there are also skills and builds that are so weak and have such fundamentally large problems with that they cannot and will not ever become competitive. At the same time, the approach in the past to constantly nerf ‘overperforming’ builds and skills while neccessary, is often done too heavy handed and many times results in the loss of a build entirely when the nerf renders the build unplayable or obsolete. EQ werebear is only one example of this, there are other builds archetypes that appeared briefly and were judged as ‘too strong’, nerfed, then nobody plays them again because the changes were so heavy handed that they aren’t viable anymore.

Buffs and adjustments to underplayed skills results in more build diversity added to the build pool, where as nerfs to overpowered skills results in less builds available to play. While it isn’t so simple and black and white as this, this seems to be the main approach in the past.

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Half joking.

A committee is a political construct and public servants do not suddenly become virtuous and benevolent in all things.

Every member of the committee has their own interests and goals. Some members interests will align and others will not. Factions will arise and create private groups to converse in secret. People who think their view is superior will vie for leadership of the factions.

That’s just politics.

How would you convince people who are deeply invested in the game to engage long-term in a advisory commitee knowing their advice has no more significant weight than it would as a public forum post?

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Besides the fact I question if the pool of 200-300 wont be too large on itself, I also question if those players have the average gamer in mind. (Not all of them follows builds)

However I did miss what both you and the dev’s think what should consider the acceptable range players should get in terms of arena/corruption.
So if you double/tripple or go even go further than this, nobody should surprised an ogre with a nerfclub comes along. (speaking in general terms here, not your build).

Based on this I will wonder if all 200-300 people will agree with a stance like (random numbers), no build should ever achieve either 500 arena (or corruption)!

at the same time you might say any non-freak build should be able to do at least 250 arena (or corruption) (again random numbers, nor do I advocate that 500 arena=500 corruption)

I just try to figure out what you/the devs and the rest of the players think what the min-max range of player power should be, without this discussion acting surprised when builds gets nerfed is odd.