Dawn of War 3

That's right, I said it.

Now that the game is being officially released to all the public, the typical influx of your average players are coming to the forums.

The official forums are flooded with some pretty terrible posts with a lot of players talking about "OP this" and "UP that" or "this feature is broken." (these comments are all over the place - literally saw 2 posts near each other saying Turrets/Shield gen are too strong and another saying they're useless - LOL).

As im sure a lot of you know, most balance forums suffer from this effect - with every scrub and his mother thinking they have the right idea about balance - where in reality their biggest problem is simply poor skill.
- Most of their concerns can be proven to be demonstrably false just by actually playing these guys. Hell, you don't even have to that good to crush most of the people commenting on the forums.

And like other successful developers who inculcate competitive balance (Valve, Riot, Blizzard, SD44), Relic needs to reach out to those community members who play at a high skill (where the element of "improving your play" is drastically reduced and a more clear picture of objective OP/UP is found).
- Invite these players to a chat room or forum page for easier, more direct communication with balance team.
I really want DoW3 to be the most refined, well balanced, and competitive Dawn of War to date.


Elitist talk? You bet. Beneficial to balance? Absolutely.

There was some talk of them having done this already; Day[9] was invited to their studio very early on. I hope it wasn't just so he could be a part of those cheesy promotion videos.

What's more I don't think they read their forums anyway. Even the community managers don't post anything unless Gorb is getting harassed.

I would hardly call day9 a DoW expert. I am in huge favor of balancing the game around top level of play. I am sure they are recording stats behind the scenes, so it should be easy for them to invite the top X player to a secret forum.

Should not overbalance a rts game though.

Just let it go, you might think one thing is OP and then 2 months later everyone knows how to deal with it just fine.

Top players are often biased for their own faction as well (even if they think they're not).

You need 1 smart individual that is a good rts player as well in charge of the balance team.
He will naturally weed out all the noob complaints.
A guy like David Kim was perfect for sc2 (though even then players cried non stop about him).

Problem is - Based off of their past and recent CoH2 balance, I assume that they don't have anyone playing the game near a competitive level.
- bC was pretty competent back in DoW2/early CoH2, but he's not here anymore.

At least talk to the Elite mod guys. If they're not already.

Would definatelly subscribe to the notion. However I would not lose sleep over them listening to the crowd of random people on their official forums, I think they're smarter than that.

However the most important part in all of this is that these regular random people need to stay in the game in order for the matchmaking to not take 15 years and for new players to be able to come later down the line.

But that is the community's job - to keep these people in I mean. We gotta have some youtubers and maybe streamers who will be willing to carry the torch and show these people how to improve on video by making tutorials, casts and other such material, otherwise we will find ourselves in a situation, where half the playerbase will just leave in 3 months, and we'll be left with a balanced game that's gonna be impossible to play fopr lack of opponents.

We need our own DoW Day[9]. Maybe Relic/Sega shoyuld look into sponsoring a chanel for someone who knows how to play and would be willing to make such instructional casts of both high and low level play or at least help promote one.

The community engagement has been really weird, I worry that Relic just doesn't get it, lots of good players from their own games were getting skipped over for the NDA beta and I can't recall a single time a developer responded to or even acknowledged our feedback, including when the beta feedback subforum was set to private.

The game has a lot of potential but it seems like, for whatever, Relic just does not have the mindset to channel the energy of it's community.

You said what I've been thinking all week. There has been a massive influx of whiners on the DoW forums. It's a bit ridiculous. It seems like they played like 1 or 2 games (probably just 3v3 or 2v2 games) got crushed by a strat, then immediately cried in a forum post...the same goes for the people complaining that the game lacks depth. It's obvious they haven't played it enough.

I think everyone needs to shut up about balance for 6 weeks. No one has played the game long enough to offer meaningful feedback yet.

In DoW2 there was an invite only balance forum on here and it was terrible 99% of balance discussion between higher level players is just people comparing e-peens. It was an unremitted disaster and Relic eventually just stopped using it because of how toxic it was. Everyone was usually biased towards one faction or another as well.

I 100% agree with Technique. You have to just let these things simmer for awhile. Task3r was amazing for this with DoW2 and I always felt like bC simply implemented things that people suggested to him, while Task3r would filter through it and remain more objective. Elite mod and CoH2 both suffered heavily from over-reactive balancing over the years.

I can't speak for DOTA 2, but I can say that both Riot and Blizzard are terrible about balancing. League of legends is literally "THE WAY IT IS MEANT TO BE PLAYED" the game and Overwatch has been a much weaker game ever since they implemented the one hero limit due to competitive players whining early on. Starcraft 2 is a much more solid game because of David Kim's level handed approach to balancing. (And the Korean scene is way more open minded than the NA or European scenes and most of their meaningful feedback comes from pro korean players.)

imo, while it's important to weigh top player feedback more heavily, listening too closely to it is just as big of a mistake as listening too closely to low level feedback. People live in a bubble that is the metagame and rarely consider the game outside of it. Sometimes all it takes to drastically change how the game is played is for someone to try something unorthodox. The reason Brood War is the king of all RTS games is because no one fucked around with balance patches every few weeks and the metagame evolved naturally as players competed with each other.

A bit off topic...but for the record, one hero limit in OW was necessary. Watching the same fucking team comp in OW tourneys over and over was the most stale shit...not to mention the d.va cheese strat amongst many others that had no place in competitive play.

No one is good at the game right now. Some are better than others obviously, but they still only know so little about it. Game isn't even released yet and things will change once more people try different things.

So much this. People are insanely entitled nowadays although thinking they are objective doesnt matter noob or top player. Instead of sitting down and innovating the meta or coming up with new ways to deal with things like ranger spam its easier to cry of forums. Glaring issues should be fixed but that doesnt mean the community shouldnt come up with ways to deal with balance issue through innovating. Brood war is the best example on how there was pretty much no support for thr game but the korean pros came up with new ways to shake up the meta.

Actually I'm not a fan of citing Brood War because that a) that game is from the previous era, before big data, and b) Brood War is kind of a fluke, bugs like stacking mutas and worker-mineral micro are unintentional yet affect balance in a huge way.

Modern games require frequent, iterative patches because the community converges on optimal strategies so quickly these days. First of all, because of automatch it's very easy to find players close to your own skill level, so your strategies are constantly tested. You can't really measure how strong a strategy is if one player is has significantly better mechanics than the other, this was very true in early 2000's Brood War where players on forums would argue whether using hotkeys was necessary or superfluous (we know better now).

Secondly, because of automatch there is a huge volume of games being played, and moreover Relic has access to all of the results. With so much data, Relic can spot unhealthy trends in the metagame. Of course, this depends on Relic building infrastructure to do the requisite data analysis, and perhaps more importantly it requires the developers to interpret the results correctly. But it doesn't take a genius to spot the most egregious imbalances.

Is that the point of any competitive game to see if you are the best and you have what it takes the best not only in pure mechanical skill but in utilising all of the tools offered to you?
Yet it is still on relic to decide on whether they want to use a hands off approach (which i mean let community to try to find a new meta and evolve it) to balancing or choose the Riots way of steering the player base into playing a certain way. But data can be a tricky thing, sometimes unit on paper and unit in game are absolutely 2 different things and how players utilise them. It does speak volume though that of the most popular and successful games currently have a person with a vision of the game in the future a.k.a Icefrog, Playerunknown and even a corporate entity as Riot for the player base to be confident and safe in the fact that there is actually a person who considers this thing to be his creation and take care in it.

I don't think you really understood what I meant. From the balance team's perspective, player mechanical skill is a conflating factor and can disguise the true state of balance. For example, if all the best players are Terran, then maybe the average win rate between TvZ is 60-40. Does that mean Terran needs a nerf? No, that would be ridiculous. So you should make balance decisions based off of games where both players are close in mechanical skill.



The point that I was making is that a 'hands-off approach' can never work in a data-rich environment. Actually, Icefrog is a perfect example of what I'm saying - Dota 2 has relatively frequent patches but changes are often small. In other words, they use a highly iterative balancing process. Because the community plays so many games, the effects of small changes can be understood with relatively high levels of confidence and statistical significance. Basically, it's the law of large numbers - it's simply easier to have sample size in 2017 than in 2001.

Coming from table-top (I play Warmahcine, but familiar with some 40k as well), the idea of having many army composition being viable to use is a huge factor in balance. Why? The game would be boring and stale if only the "meta" strategies could ever be competitive. The updates to Warmachine tend to directly address this problem - nerfing OP and overbearing units, and buffing underused units, to achieve balance.
- each unit then, more or less, fits their role better and not "spill over" to other roles because they have unintentionally designed strengths (in some instances, clearly making the unit perform in a way clearly not in the intended design).

Is SC1 balanced? Ya, probably. But the way I understand it, the meta is pretty consistent and restrictive (at least, competitively).
DoW1 is definitely like this: if you don't do, like, 1 of 2 opening builds as a race, it's almost instant GG. Balanced? Probably - but only if you play along the meta lines.

This is the type of balance I want to avoid (and, fundamentally, don't think it's balanced). To me, good balance means both players can win while inputting similar skill AND the internal balance of factions is good - you should be able to execute a multitude of strategies and not be so punished for it because it's not "meta."
- Particularly in RTS, and 40k, having balanced, combined arms forces seems to not only be the general game vision of Relic (having each unit fulfill a certain role: melee, anti-melee, anti-tank, harasser, etc.), but also promotes creative and innovative strategies.

A too restrictive meta goes against the "spirit" of balance (if that makes sense).

Didn't you have things to say about the beta about balance? Like a huge post on it. So you pretty much did the same thing you don't like people doing?

Also, Relic has always had a stance of having the game being more "fun based" than "balanced based". Think of it like what Blizzard did with Hearthstone sort of thing.

Relic did have back when DowII was released a group of pros/bigger community members that they talked to, I would know being I was apart of that group. There philosophy then was still fun based instead of balance plus they had the whole problems with GFWL where they couldnt patch simple things for months. I still remember (as an Ork player) trying to get them to let the freaking Warboss destroy light cover where he walks and he would become so much better with that one fix, but they implemented kit changes before just doing the pathing changes.

Maybe they will support a more competitive thing this time around. However judging from how they used to be I dont see this happening.

This post has been edited by God_Aries: Apr 27 2017, 19:52 PM

I disagree. I think people should have tried new strategies, or the devs could have adjusted the specific heroes that were problematic.


It's not like competitive overwatch is any better today. There's just less options.



There's no such thing as an optimal catch-all strategy, only an optimal against the common strategy.

For examle lets say most players use Strategy X. The optimal strategy to beat Strategy X is Strategy Y. But what if someone uses Strategy Z? Suddenly Strategy Y isn't optimal anymore.

The problem with iterative patching is that people never spend the time to find Strategy Z. They use Strategy X and Y against each other, complain to the devs, and then something is tweaked and the entire metagame shifts.

I think it's okay to make very small nudges in patches to encourage players to try new things. Very minor buffs to underused units are often enough to encourage people to use them for example. But if everytime the community whines "Strategy Y is too strong, plz nerf" they follow through then the game will go to shit very fast.





This post has been edited by Dullahan: Apr 28 2017, 01:52 AM

Our arguments are orthogonal. I'm merely stating that large amounts of data allow game developers to patch frequently - no reason to assume that those patches need to be huge metagame-shifting overhauls. You said it yourself - it's probably healthy for patches to make minor buffs to underused units. This is a form of iterative balancing. What's important is that the developers monitor the game closely with their internal metrics and act with that information in mind.



First of all, I never said that the game developers should listen to the community when making balancing decisions. It's probably a bad idea to completely ignore the community, but on the other hand I agree with you that the community doesn't have the tools and data to make good judgments about the overall metagame. The whole point that I'm making is that the game developer's own data is reliable enough due to high sample size for them to make informed decisions, and therefore they should patch more often (with smaller and smaller tweaks as the patches cause the game to converge towards some balanced equilibrium).

Secondly, your "X Y Z" example doesn't always happen. Sometimes there actually is one strategy that dominates all others. Of course, it's difficult to tell just by looking at games. Maybe the community hasn't found strategy Z yet. But maybe strategy Z just doesn't exist, because strategy X is simply the dominant strategy. It's pretty damn hard to distinguish between these two situations. However, if Relic decides "let's wait a couple months and see if strategy Z gets invented" then the risk is obvious - strategy Z never emerges, the metagame becomes stale, the community loses interest, DoW3 dies, and Relic loses money.

Ultimately, what matters is customer retention. Even if the game is completely balanced at the highest echelons of play, if at the casual level some strategy like ASM spam (or something) is completely dominating, then Relic loses market share. So patches can be used as a way to freshen up the game and lure back players who found the metagame unsatisfying. Like what VindicaireX said earlier - Dark Crusade/Soulstorm is totally boring to some fraction of the player base because the metagame completely revolves around listening posts and early game melee units. Is it balanced? Maybe. But it certainly isn't very fun.