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Well I think someone should put their foot down and start drawing up a proposal. What's the plan? What's the philosophy behind it? What aspects are you going to try to balance? You can work from there and modify it as it goes. Otherwise it's all talk. I'd do it but I don't know much about the intricacies to do a decent job.

I'll give a rough outline of it. I've not been around as long as everyone else, but i think I know enough. Any vets feel free to make any corrections/totally re-write the thing. I'm just trying to help. I'll put parenthesis around stuff I'm not sure about

Plan: Create a 'Community Core' that is maintained and operated by the user base. A selection of three players will be put on a committee to implement changes into the core, taking suggestions from the main users on what to add/change/remove. (These players will change every X months/weeks to ensure no three players put a chokehold on the Community Core')

Philosophy: The philosophy is that a player maintained core will be more balanced, more used, and more reliably updated than a normal core. Instead of waiting months and months for any word of an update, players will know when updates are released (as the updates will be done on a schedule). Players will be able to suggest fixes to bugs, report bugs, and perhaps help in the execution of the fixes if they are on the committee.

Balance: (Each faction will be aimed to be balanced not only among itself, but among others. While one faction may be slightly off balance internally, with one object having a large advantage, other factions would have things to counter that advantage, and 'large advantages' of their own.)

Contents: The core will include most(/All) of the current factions (along with a few new factions), and will be regularly updated with new technology, ships, models, and other items. (Items that are rarely used will also be removed from the core to help reduce clutter from the new technologies. The creator of the faction will have some say in what happens to the faction, for example saying that a certain technology would/wouldn't be available to them as they do/do not use that kind of technology or that advanced form of technology, or creating faction specific tech. Original factions [IC, Giga, Bios, Belters, Rix] will be under the control of the Committee)

Usage: (The core will be used in storyline official games, and will be the 'Official' core of Allegiance, with all factions being 'Real' in the Allegiance universe. The core will otherwise be a normal core that players could choose/choose not to play on.)

Well, there's a lot that I'm not certain about, but hey, it's a start, right?

I'd take out the 'Official' core part, we don't want to enforce core choice on anyone.

Gappy wrote:QUOTE (Gappy @ Jul 11 2007, 12:34 AM) I'd take out the 'Official' core part, we don't want to enforce core choice on anyone.

I only meant 'Official' in that it is the 'official' one for the storyline and would be used in storyline-based games (Even though I've never seen one I've seen suggestions of one). Though Alleg could be left as is with no 'Official' core

Andon, I appreciate the effort but that wasn't what I was talking about. I know you're really enthusiastic about it but what you've written is a summary of what's already been said, things that are very broad and do not really have a definite meaning as to what the core is going to look like. I've been playing just barely longer than you and logged quite alot of hours here and I would be very reluctant to take on such a task. I feel that I hardly know anything detailed about the game. We need someone who has alot of experience comming and the like under their belt. Someone who knows specific faction weaknesses and strengths due to the way things are balanced/imbalanced currently. Having a knowledge of what has already been done is also helpful, something us newcomers don't have.

Let me rephrase again, what is the DESIGN philosophy of the core. This has nothing to do with who's managing it or when it's going to be updated. What is the philosophy behind trying to balance such a core? For instance, you can say Noir's philosophy as balancing factions by basing changes on faction win/loss stats regardless of the situation of the game (pickup game, squad game, stacked game, newbie game, etc). So what is the philosophy behind this core? What is the reason for nerfing ints and boosting figs and what not? What are you trying to achieve? How should weights be given to needs by pickup games and needs by squad games? Both are played very differently. I can't answer this.

In essence there needs to be a vision, not just a bunch of bureaucratic ideas of how it's going to be maintained and the committee that does it. Without a vision, you have no intention. Without intention, there's no will.

Ah. Ok. That makes a bit more sense. I definately don't know enough about that to try it.

Gappy wrote:QUOTE (Gappy @ Jul 9 2007, 03:58 PM) As far as a vision for the the core, nobody has really take a stab at it so far, so here's my shot: Balanced gameplay for all faction-techpath combinations, where balance changes focus more on balancing away from the 'norm' rather than toward it. Overpowered factions will be given new handicaps, underpowered factions given new perks, rather than removing perks or removing handicaps. New gameplay altering technology will be added, but at a slow pace, to test for balance and allow players to get used to it small bites at a time. The core will be updated on a One-month cycle, to provide enough time for obvious weaknesses/strengths to be displayed. The number of changes, however, will be lower than for a core which is updated on a much slower cycle.

My stab at the vision from above. Any specific gameplay element that gets overused (such as tacspansion) would be rebalanced ideally such that supticle and supspansion were just as viable as tacspanion. My thoughts on this are a reordering of GAs, such as moving sig GAs to tac from expansion.

Further adding to it, Expansion would be more focused on pushing cons, and sector domination of sectors already controlled, with much less emphasis on domination of the 'next couple sectors over'. Supremacy would fill more the role that expansion fills currently, ability to get 'one sector over, then get back home fast'. Tactical would be 'Large reach, slow response, impractical defense'. Shipyard would probably be largely unchanged from it's 1.25 realization, which actually seems to fit pretty well overall the way it is now. Shipyard should be a viable-end game, unrealistic early-game without large sacrifices.

Some random thoughts and questions:

A small group of people controlling a core (or democratically with the entire community) sounds nice but I don't think it will work. Lets say a group of people don't agree with your last post and say that sup/tac/exp are fine the way they are, but you go find yourself a bigger group of suckers who agree that they need a change. Every person who plays will think of "balance" is a different thing. Some think that current iterations of techs are fine, others will cry all day long about that same tech. I guess what I'm trying to say is which camp will you listen to when the community is deeply divided on a balance issue?

Aside from EoR, most of the other cores didn't have huge differences among them but somehow DN is currently the most played core. I'm sure you remember Spunky/Vegeta and later Spunk+Foho/Noir (A+/TF and A+/DN). People were boycotting A+ and others refused to play on TF or DN. I understand that a community core would try to alleviate that, but with multiple cores already running how are you going to prevent that from happening again?

Also, how would data be gathered to base the balance changes on? Personally I can tell a lot just by the "feel" of something (be if flying the ship or commanding the faction) but thats not a very quantitative way of going about things. Hard data works very well as a balance tool too but it also can be skewed or misinterpreted - say spicey goes on a rampage and commands nothing but Phoenix sup for a month. Skill also plays a large part in balance too. Allegiance takes a lot of practice to get used to. You might be a Rix SB god but the joeIcantflyrix could have no idea that he can stay out of the base's scan range. Result: Gappy kills all the bases, joe gets killed a lot and thinks rix sbs are worthless. Same goes with rix ints, the good vets will rip stuff to shreds while others who haven't had the time to practice will have a lot of trouble pointing the damn thing straight. Are you going to balance with a bias toward making things more accessible to joeIcantflyrix or cater to the veteran pilots/comms?

You also proposed a group of 3 to maybe lead development of this core. Who would be picking the three devs? A handpicked group will have problems but so will a voted group. Lets say for some off chance that fox_four, Spunk and Noir were the comittee. While I truly believe that all 3 seriously desire to bring balance to the game, I also think that nothing would ever get done. Ever. Just too much of a clash of ideals. The way the community has worked in the past is that the more vocal members draw the most support and attention. Even if its just a small group of people, they will constantly post and steal the spotlight for their own ideas. Who is going to moderate this stuff and decide which ideas have merit and which are just trash?

In an earlier post you said something about balancing away from the norm, be careful not to stray too far else you might have something like EoR (which didn't get the playtime it deserved IMO because it was too off the wall). Also you mentioned how everyone likes new tech. I hate some of the new tech. I hate quickfires. Dazzling people with new stuff isn't the way to go. "Game altering features" sounds neat but make sure its thoroughly tested before its release. TP2 with XRMs is almost too easy now. A half-assed TP2 drop has a good chance to succeed because of this tech, to me that isn't balance.


Most of this post probably isn't really leading to anything but I just started typing stuff and this is what spewed out.

A lot of excellent points, Culm.

I know this doesn't directly address your problems, but in many ways it indirectly addresses them, and solves some problems about how to start this approach. What I'm going to describe is an approach of how to bootstrap the Community Core.

First, independent, interested developers can develop their own core. Based off of anything they want as long as its with permission, they would create it with the ultimate intent that it would become the community core.

Once that reaches an acceptable level of development, it's released to the public, and playtested. After giving it some playtesting time, the community is allowed to vote on it on whether they want that core to be the 'community core'. It's going to be up to that initial developer to design the vision, and the initial release should be roughly representative of that vision. The goal of that first release is that the community will have a good feel of how the core will be designed. The initial developer is also going to be responsible for getting all required permission before starting. This person should make it clear that by giving permission to this core, that they're effectively also giving permission to all cores that will subsequently be based on the core.

Because the goal of the community core isn't to create an official core, the 'community core' will be the core designed to be a community core with the greatest preference of all the 'community core' candidates. It does not need the approval of a majority of the community to be the community core, simply needs to be the best of all the candidates.

Once the community core is chosen, that person would nominate two other people to be the other core developers. Ideally, that person would chose people that understand the core vision, and that have personalities that would reasonably work in concert. The community would then vote on whether to approve or disapprove those people as the assistants.

At which point, the core is created and developers are in place. Additionally, a sufficient motivation and vision of the core would already have been proven.

Some points which aren't directly addressed, which you brought up.

Culmination wrote:Also, how would data be gathered to base the balance changes on? Personally I can tell a lot just by the "feel" of something (be if flying the ship or commanding the faction) but thats not a very quantitative way of going about things.

The core developers would be experienced vets, with the ability to command a primetime game, even if not perfectly. Because it's a community core, balance would probably be skewed toward making sure that pickup games were reasonably balanced. Same as now, some tactics would be skewed in effectiveness in squad games (like galvs), but the primary audience would be pickup games, the 'bread and butter' of Allegiance.