Return of Reckoning

wargrimnir wrote: Wed May 08, 2019 2:54 am Feel free to not participate if you feel it's going to change nothing. Filtering through the feedback is hard enough as is, one less critical voice isn't going to bother us.

I've been in the background of the balance team since the first iteration on the forums, and there have certainly been mistakes. Before client control, that statement that balance was where proposals go to die, was simply a reality. We had very limited ability to make changes, did what we could, and learned quite a bit about the community. Towards the end of the first version, all kinds of strange things were getting implemented which was dismissed as burnout as opposed to malice. Then things went quiet until client control became a real thing.

In the last iteration of the balance forums, well, they stopped being used after a rather hostile period in our history, but TONS of items were worked on during that time anyway. Just not at a level of transparency that anyone wanted to sacrifice their time to present to you. Why? No idea. It seemed like the primary job of moderators to move threads, present changes, declare rejections. It wasn't my group at the time, just the writing on the wall. The most recent discussions you might note had been started around October. Most things by that point had gone internal, or even outside of RoR entirely to private groups who were doing all the discussion without any public community to scrutinize or participate. The balance forums were dead, any changes made were done without discussion and usually little explanation in the patch notes.

Things could have stayed that way. But I like structure. I feel the community that engages on the balance forums has a wide enough range of experience with various playstyles that ideas and conversations can be meaningfully had. Often times I think they're a bit stuck in their ways or have expectations that are unrealistic to be implemented, but I would rather slog through that mess than have no feedback at all. Cue Guard changes (also check out this thread where the same concept was discussed in regards to FO by some of the very loud detractors to the recent Guard change) that got tested for a week, were loudly rejected, but the in-game polls showed 50/50 split on opinion. There wasn't another topic presented for discussion from October, until the Guard changes came through. A change that was forced on the balance team after their refusal to even discuss it at any length, along with a few other issues that had been lingering for quite some time. Shortly after, that team dissolved.

That wasn't a great way to force balance changes, and the internal/non-RoR structure wasn't any better, so we took it back and decided even if engagement with the community was going to be a battle every time, even if we get the stones thrown at us, and the thorns jabbed in our sides, it's still worth leveraging this community for their feedback at very least before we push out significant changes. Engaging in the balance forums as a staff member is not a fun responsibility to have, and it's also one that requires a lot of trust. Not only that the people who are making recommendations for what avenues of balance we take are doing it in good faith, but also that they have the resolve to follow through with the responsibilities that come with it, whether or not they like the outcomes.

In the end, you are guests on the server. Anyone to take up a balance moderator role is still a moderator, not a developer. Even the developers answer to a handful of leads who are more roadblocks to new content than anything else, out of caution and having had our hands burned far too many times. I don't consider most guests I've ever had to be a bad thing at all. Relative to the health of the server, guests are downright required. So we will take the good with the borderline, and filter out the bad when they're unruly. The good might not agree with us, the borderline might serve as an overly critical sanity check, but anyone can have a good idea, and catching the eye of people specifically looking for good ideas really can't be all that hard.

So consider the balance forums however you want. I consider them a big wide net, with layers of nets beneath, that create a fine filter that hopefully only catches the gold we're looking for. That's going to look like a lot of rejected ideas, but hopefully when we get good ones, there will be some proper followup on a more regular basis. That's my goal at the very least.