About the approach to game balancing

Hi guys,

I was wondering many times how exactly game balancing works in AoE III DE. Requests for civilization buffs and nerfs are being visible in the forum almost every day. Some of them (like requests for lowering the strength of Sweden or for increase Aztec’s power) are pretty much constant over time.
However developers are not willing to listen these suggestions.

So I’m curious how exactly this problem looks from developers point of view. I would really appreciate team response for these questions which probably are bothering many players here:

  1. Do you have a dedicated team which is investigating balance issues?
  2. Are you not following some suggestions from community because our requests are not matching with your civilization’s win/lose statistics? (btw. we would like to see them very much!)
  3. Or maybe our requests with particular buffs/nerfs does not have enough “likes” for you to consider it?

Of course fixing crashes/critical bugs are top priority for developers to address. However some of our suggestions are for sure easy to implement (change units/building statistics). So that’s why I’m quite surprised that we are not seeing balance changes much more often.

PS I am very happy seeing that game is evolving and developers are in touch with community. Keep it that way! :wink:

/M

2 Likes

i would guess that the answer to this is yes within limits.

sweden got some of their blueberry nerfs reversed because it just made the faction harder to use, to a point where it wasn’t really fun to do. but i would guess the change also came as a reaction to the fact that the civs pick rate plummeted, and i am guessing higher end winrate in both supremacy and treaty likely suffered as well.

They won’t be interested because they enjoy watching arguments between players with different ideas. And the winning rate and pick rate of civs, which are what real players want, are not revealing at all.

The Top 200 can also be seen in the game, but there is no understand why developers added only that.

That sweden nerf reverse came out of nowhere. The sweden players had been accustomed to OP eco and units. Ofcourse they were finding it difficult to play like a normal civ. Also, playing sweden boosts your ELO by a large amount. If the players had waited for their ELO to settle down at their normal level, they would have started having 50/50 win rate again. But no, they wanted their OP eco back.

It would be better if devs had a small testing team made of higher as well as lower level players who have good game knowledge, instead of forum posts. A guy was literally complaining about town militia being underpowered - which it is NOT!

5 Likes

It seems strange to me. Definitely developers are reading the forum on regular basis, looking for reported bugs or suggested improvements. They are solving so many problems reported by us here, but at the same time we can’t convince them to implement some balance changes.

While the most critical bugs are being fixed it looks like the most important topic for the community is to properly balance all the civs. And I guess it probably does not require that much work. Most of the civs are pretty competitive right now.

Nerfs for 1-2 civs, buffs for 2-3 civs and we will be happy.

Yeah, fixing the game and making it playable is #1 for them. I don’t think balance is a priority, since the game has proven to still retain players despite broken civs (France in Vanilla and Japan in TAD).

I believe that the focus on bugs is mainly due to the fact that some people have paid their hard-earned money on this game and can’t even play it on their old systems. The original player base in Oct 2020 plummeted due to unplayability, so bug-fixing makes sense to me. And I understand that it’s a long, arduous process of coding and testing to push it out, etc.

I was the one who made a big post on civilization balance some time ago. I came from a history of playing TAD for 8 years and definitely noticing that the devs implemented ESOC balance changes in DE. Excited that devs listened to players, I made the post to push for balance changes, hoping it would make a change. And although the post got relatively popular, I realized that nuanced civ balance just wasn’t a big concern at the moment because of the state of the game. To them, there’s no one civ ruining it for others at the moment (based on civ win rates), so it doesn’t seem like a problem. But to the players in-game, day-in and day-out, it’s the constant “Ugh, why do I have to play against another booming Sweden” for 1v1ers. Or the hardcore treaty player seeing Dutch or Lakota player - “Oh what an easy win. Their ecos can’t handle treaty - easy day”. 2 different perspectives.

Maybe if something really did break the game, or if a forum post about one civ got really popular, that’d be heavily considered. But I wouldn’t expect it. Zer0pntEnergy has been rooting for China’s age 2 for months, and WiryScissors465 has been around the block here, echoing what AOE3 players have said about Japan for 10+ years.

We’ll just keep voicing and see.