The recent heated discussion of ridiculous, drastic and certainly gamebreaking balance demands does not go very well imo. Most of them are just theorycrafting and simple scenario editor testing, without involving the real game situation much.
I have seen some players manage to create their own experimental balance mod to reflect changes made by the forum. But, they suffer a serious issue of lack of exposure, as the player base of those mods are tend to be very small.
Starcraft 2 ladder (same as AOE2 ranked) has a balance testing feature where blizzard used to introduce new balance changes and implement them here for people who are interested to play around. Would it be great for Microsoft to also introduce an official balance test mod that players can choose to enable before going ranked play or just a new tab in the lobby? Afaik SC2 balance test mod has some nice discussions among master 1 players (similar to AoE2 1900+ elo). If Microsoft can have such test mod, top players like viper might get interested and we might have a chance to see how good or bad those balance demands can be. Maybe we can also put those theorycrafting analysis to an end or at least back them up with real world performance.
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Yep, in that case most “this unit’s OP” topics will be gone too hopefully
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Even better would be to have an official test server, where the patch is tested before being released. That way things can be tweaked and the actual final patch would be way more polished.
I mean, that would be decent too, or they can give pros a beta-like version and let them mess around a little bit.
But the balance mod is there to exterminate the “balance” topics
No way would it stop people complaining about ‘OP’ or ‘UP’ units/civs.
Unless literally all of these proposals were incorporated into the official balance mod, in which case 
It would however allow realistic balance proposals to be tested thoroughly (and hopefully implement) much more quickly than currently.
We’re a year into DE, and Islands is still dominated by 2/3 civs. And the islands meta fix proposals are fairly easy to understand, you can figure out (approximately) what the correct numbers should be with a little linear algebra.
There are other rework ideas which are much more complicated and could never be brought into a satisfactory form via theory crafting, even if it’s the pros that are theory crafting.
An official balance mod would also allow the Devs to work on these kinds of balance changes if they are willing.
I’m short, I think an official balance mod would be a great idea, though it’ll only amount to anything if the Devs actually want to try to balance (and hence change) the game.
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I should have completed that: This unit/strat is OP, add this bonus
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