Balance issues in N4

Calling an inquisition over the perceived slight by another members signature? I mean, that was in the answer I gave you. Please do read more carefully. You’ve also continually bombarded Psychoticstorm with accusations over his perceived behaviour.

“You now have 10 minutes to reach minimum safe distance”…

(This due to the impending eradication of the thread by Psychoticstorm)

 

Again. Perceived double standards. To others, psychoticstorm could be simply performing his job to the letter.

As for “an unreachable standard of perfection”… each and every Wargame in existence has issues and always will have. There’s no standard of perfection to be reached. You can at any point state for the fact that a game (in this case Infinity) is imbalanced and your statement would be true. It’s the manner in which your points are then argued that cause the issues you see, not necessarily your arguments themselves.

“You now have five minutes to reach minimum safe distance”…

 

Just saying that he wasn't arguing for a perfect game, but against the notion that there needs to be "perfect information" before it's allowed to say the game is unbalanced. Which, honestly, as much as I disagree with Hecaton, it sometimes feels like that's what psychoticstorm is doing. I have never so far hear him simply admit that anything anyone ever raises as a concern is actually a concern. And his reasoning always seems to be "well those data points may not paint the full picture, let's get more data points first." Which to me is a bit of an ingenious argument, since CB by now has three years' worth of N4 data points, yet still refuses to address the issues the community has been raising for those three years. I'm a bit frustrated by that as well.

 

I mean there are 2 guys that are in permanent "CB can do no wrong" mode here, one is our moderator. IMO he does good job moderating, but his defense od CB is so bad at times I usually don't even read his posts unless they are in red.

 

And that’s a completely fair and valid point using what you have seen on the forums here. I’m here in such a fair weather fashion that I see only a fraction of what people who’ve been here for ages see. I’d posit though that the issues regarding the data useage from N4 is due to CB not being able to utilise it properly (this could be due to staff levels, time management, staff ability etc.) I’m not saying that it’s right that for years nothing is seemingly addressed, only that there may be reasons behind it. I completely agree that it’s frustrating since I can see via a cursory glance that multiple arguments and threads on a variety of topics have been opened and discussed over the years to no avail. I’m of the current opinion that the Squalo Mk1 thread will be unlikely to see an answer from an employee. But I digress.

Now. Since the thread is about to be cleansed in fire, I’m going to retreat ten paces back from the “minimum safe distance” and plant my damn Squalo Mk1 forever flag. Gotta pick a hill to die on.

 

Lets for a moment be realists here, even if there are actual concerns, trends and opinions to be addressed.

Assume I point to this thread, full of posters been terrible to other posters not raising a discussion with points but attacking the other poster as someone who does not know anything when their viewpoints are challenged.

What reaction do you think such a thread will get?

CB does not have years of data it has years of threads that posters continuously sabotage themselves with their behavior and make the job of everyone who tries to convey any message at least ten times harder.

 

The root problem isn't the insults, the insults come because people are frustrated with the forums, because a lot of activity on these days is essentially endless tiresome negativity and has been for some time and it killed what was once a great community on here

And the people who use the forum as a space to be endlessly and tiresomely negative have been told this but rather than self-reflect on that they just get defensive and double down and insist that they have the right to do this, which is even true, and nobody's saying its not, just that it basically murders the interest that people have in coming on here because everyone knows it's a complete waste of time and everyone knows why.

And eventually the forum will approach a heat death where its just arguments over rules minutiae, complaining and subforum inactivity and nobody actually comes here to talk about something they like any more. Which is why of all the places that you can talk about infinity, this is the worst. Largely due to the presence of literally less than a dozen people who'd rather bloody-mindedly destroy the community through literally years of objectionable behaviour than ever admit that they might just want to change what they're doing.

 

You are the only mod this forum has. It's discursive trends and norms are not your fault but they are your responsibility. As you say, years of abusive and negative threads. It comes down to this: you often treat your job as a curator, going through threads to clean them up, when in fact your primary role surely has to be the proactive shaping of discourse so that it doesnt need post hoc censoring? Nothing personal, I often enjoy your posts, but please, do think about a more stern approach to your role. You have the power to make everyone's use of the forum 'ten times easier'. Inaction is and always has been a form of action.

 

This is quite the statement. I sincerely thought that CB has access to the same data from the ITS events that the nicest gentleman @HeadChime have:



And if they do, then they can know not only which armies are popular and which armies are efficient, like @Bostria nicely share with us in his GenCon 2022 video:



But they can also dissect the data as @HeadChime did, and match it with the popularity/efficiency data in a cross-section, to finally obtain what I did already talk before in this thread:

CB and their development cycle

And that I am bringing it here again for the sake of the main topic of this thread, “Balance Issues in N4”:

Being a forum moderator, or a community manager, is a daunting task that lots of times requires quite the mental resilience. We are naturally ingrained to not take in proper consideration those people which we feel that have attacked or slighted us. But even if they do not have the best of manners, even if they are people who one do personally dislike, even when they’re actually not doing themselves a favor by not presenting their ideas in a gentle and constructive way… It is the task of the person who has been chosen to collect the feedback of the community to be able to buckle up, and be able to see the ideas, critics and suggestion that are behind those posts with bad behavior.

The crux of this thread was that some people of the community, @gravitypool included among others, predicted that SSA and Guided Attack Missile Launcher would define the meta of the Interplanetario. In the end that was true, with some caveats. There was not a full Top 10 SSA/GML split in both Pulpis and Krakens… but there was indeed an strong presence of both in the TOP 10 and others who were in the TOP were using strategies that in some way ‘twist’ what is expected in the game and where prepared to such meta. Like what @Melmak, who used Equipe Mirage to its fullest as it’s Parachutist:DZ is a hard bone to chew to those GML-centric lists. But even players such as Lobo (which I do not know its handle here, sorry) agree that they are forced to use GML tools in their lists as they’re a natural counter to SSA double eclipse meta. He has been quite open to share such point of view in the Discord channels that are linked to Infinity.

So we have a meta with a current strong presence of “Double Eclipse SSA” on one side, and lists that either are “GML full focused” or have “GML as a tool” to deal with the previously mentioned SSA Double Eclipse. With a second presence of lists that are tailored to fight against either one, or both, of the strong presence meta. This is something that we, as players with no access to the full ITS data, perceive. And this is the point of the thread. There is a perception of a reality, and this perception is shared to the persons in charge of the game: the developers. It is now the task of such developers to acknowledge such perception, and contrast with the data they hopeful have to see in what direction the game should stern.

EDIT - In a nutshell and to sum up: Both “Double Eclipse SSA” and “GML full focus/GML as a tool” are being perceived by the players as Heavily Overperforming and Heavily Overrepresented. And this is being perceived by the players as skewing the gaming experience of everyone involved in the game and defining a meta in which some armies directly has no tools nor answers to it. The players community is sharing this perception to the developers, and wonders what to do.

 

That was in context to what has been said and not an absolute statement.

I thought it was clear, my bad if it was not.

To be cleat CB has data from the tournaments, ITS results, army lists, units usage to individual profiles ectr ectr.

The thing I was replying to was essentially, that posters through the years of N4, with the attitude displayed here, have provided data about their opinions and complain why CB has not acted accordingly, most of the time data provided in such manner is unusable and will not convince people.

To be clear this thread is ruined a lot of pages ago, on one hand it is only logical to close it, on the other hand there are some quality posts here I want to see preserved, I fear that if I close it and open a new one people will not post again the same posts there.

 

I restarted the thread here.