Hello i am making this thread to make some clarifications about balancing and why the devs have been doing things wrong, but is not only them it is also the forums user who are pushing and pushing with more balances changes that are unnecessary and could have a negative impact in most users.
The first lie or mistake i have been reading is that balancing should be based on 1x1 and only, well if you happen to browse the average profile of an aoe2 player he has x3 more games played on team games than his 1x1 games, in some cases there are profiles with players that don’t have any 1x1 at all, this is not new, this has been a tendency since vanilla release, we can even say that the multiplayer(tg) is the essence of aoe2, not everyone enjoys the 1x1 like they enjoy team games and the obvious reasoning is that balancing should be towards the majority of your users, making team games the most important aspect of the game, 1x1 is what twitch users sees and pro players makes profits of it, but enough with that they are not a majority, bad balance changes or design have more impact on team games, maybe you forgot it but imperial camel and arambai were broken for many years with not a single word or action from any dev, while lets say arbalest for indians just lasted like 5 months until it was fixed.
There is just too much attention in the 1x1 scene for less than 200 pro players, several common balance experts around this forum are all the talking about those players, their stats in tournaments, etc, to me they are more like specs or viewers of the game rather than active players, cause they are always talking about those players instead of their own experiences or what is more common right now, like the 2 castles War Wagon rush which is more complicated to deal with than the previous arambai meme, arambai was weak vs arrows and low hp, but ww has more endurance and now free armor, given its high attack it also melts buildings down, this issues was introduced cause users in forums were very vocal about how bad koreans were in their 1x1 arabia stats, well thank you guys, korean meme WW strat is now seen in 8/10 walled/fc maps, but the devs have also the fault, they have been focusing too much in that utopia called 51% winning rate on all civs based on arabia.
Burgundians are now the strongest civ when it comes to boom, yes they are better than vikings, but they have paladin, costillier, BBC, HC, halbs, hussars,cavaliers on castle age and the most obnoxious strat in the game that is now a thing just like the ww rush, yes i am talking about the 200 flemish militia rush, it affects both team games and 1x1 but it will be more abused on team games cause they can just ask for some food to remake their economy, making the flemish rev a total broken option, the design on this civ is just wrong.
The devs haven’t seen or they don’t want to see, that britons are being used in 97% of all team games, while the civ is not broken for 1x1, their team bonus stacks badly with other archer civs, i mean, this could have been fixed a year ago, just by changing their team bonus to a civ bonus and giving them a harmless team bonus like the inca team bonus, but nothing has been done, in fact i guess they are not even planning something about it, instead they just pinned a topic about inca team bonus, their balance priorities are not always on what the game needs.
I can continue all day talking about bad balance changes or balance design, like battle elephants, mamelukes,etc, that turned the units into a waste of resources or very very situational units, but that is not the intention.
While balancing has been a topic based in 1x1, they have been ignoring team games for too long, balance should be done thinking in both, i know tournaments and pro players/caster streams have more impact cause they are public icons, but the majority of the total players have to deal for years with balance issues that are not getting the same attention.
Balancing on team games is really not that complicated, you just need to decrease stacking bonus and boom civs powers pikes, for example during the korean balance rework, they gave them 20% cheap wood units which affected WW, later on they gave them another stacking bonus, the free armor which created the conditions to what we have now, this could have been predicted and adjusted the ww price in the same patch they gave them the free armor, but the devs were not thinking in the consequences, the same was about arambai having such high DPS with a civ that gets free wood upgrades but well that lasted for 4-5 long years, i have witnessed all those balance corruptions for years and i don’t see it stopping any time soon. In 2016 one of the biggest aoe events and finals, lierey vs viper, the decider game was burmese vs malians, everyone thought lierey made a mistake going for arbalest, but the thing was that he had no other options to stop arambais, if arambai wouldn’t have been that powerful back then, lierey would have won and the game history would be different, so yeah the bad balance unit design was reflected in that game and can anybody tell me when did they nerf arambai?
But i have seen that the devs or the guys in charge are not the same than before, the guy that just changed death match for empire wars, that is a good sign that the priorities could be changed and maybe emend the path and give us more solid balance changes rather than balance testing patches that can last several years before fixing them.
