Here is the statistical data. I don't know what the situation was like in N3, since I only started playing Infinity in N4. However, I have always felt that there are several difficult-to-ignore issues with the game's balance. 1. Misjudging faction strength NW not only has a high win rate statistically, but also consistently performs well in tournaments. Yet the community often rates its overall strength as merely "average" or "good." O-12, on the other hand, performs poorly in the win-rate statistics, has a poor win rate in The Monday Signal, and has achieved very little in tournaments. Yet there are still people who describe O-12 as a very strong or solid faction. From my observation, part of this discrepancy comes from confusing how difficult it is to build a good army list with how high the faction's actual performance ceiling is. From my observation, this discrepancy mainly comes from confusing the difficulty of building a good army list with how high the faction's performance ceiling actually is. There are quite a few people in the community who claim that Infinity is an exceptionally well-balanced game. But I don't think the actual data supports that conclusion. 2. CB puts considerably more effort into factions that are popular or that it wants to promote When N5 was first released, CA was dominating the meta. The way CB nerfed CA was extremely careful, almost as if they were afraid of upsetting CA players. For example, Ikadron was not simply nerfed by increasing its cost or removing equipment. Instead, it received compensation in the form of Dogged and Discover (+3). Units that were previously underperforming were also adjusted. Overall, it felt like a very carefully designed balance pass. Then we have NW. I really don't want to keep bringing up NW, but the situation is simply too obvious to ignore. When NW was already performing quite well statistically, one of the complaints from the community was that its KHD options were not good enough. And shortly afterwards, Harbinger received a KHD profile. And, by the way, Harbinger is currently the cheapest Line Trooper in CA. Morat, Shasvastii, and Onyx all have a minimum-cost Line Trooper of 14 points. Harbinger is the only one that costs 13 points. It even has a 13-point FO profile with a WildParrot and a DTW. There are also many other units that are clearly undercosted, such as Wraith, Teucer, Puzzler, and Achilles. PanO has shown similar patterns over the past few versions. In N4, one of the common complaints was that PanO lacked access to Smoke. In N5, PanO received the Discoball. Apparently that wasn't enough, because if you're going to give PanO a Discoball, it has to be on the cheapest possible unit. And that's how we ended up with a 13-point Discoball unit. Then, if the goal was to let PanO participate more actively in the hacking game, giving them Pitchers apparently wasn't enough either. The unit also had to come with an Xvisor and BS Attack +1B, while still being relatively cheap. MO even has one of the highest-BS Pitcher units in the entire game, as well as the rather unusual combination of Infiltration + Minelayer + Deployable Repeater. 3. Balance adjustments can be heavily influenced by community volume Some factions that had effectively disappeared from N5 suddenly returned after enough community complaints. MO is another example. Because it is popular and the community complaints were loud enough, it has received some form of buff in almost every major update since N5 launched. The adjustments to CA and NW also appear to have a direct relationship with the amount of community attention and discussion surrounding them. Ariadna's adjustments seem to have followed a similar pattern, with a large amount of community dissatisfaction preceding major changes. Of course, from a business perspective, it is completely understandable for a company to prioritize the satisfaction of the majority of its customers. But if you happen to enjoy a relatively unpopular faction, then I guess you're just out of luck.
The statistics don't surprise. Corregidor had an increase, but Corregidor was not in a bad spot... only with old minis. Still NW has the biggest post-update increase of matches played. Very good analysis, but your conclusion is a bad market strategy: CB does not sell cars for which if you don't sell one line you just stop making it and nobody will complain. CB sells a game and one main parameter of said game is re-playability. Now with the number of factions available one would think re-playability isn't an issue... and one would be very wrong. The balancing of a higher number of faction is more complex and in turn there are not enough hands to keep an eye on everything. Both these end up leading to a reduction of variability in the game. The choice to satisfy only the vocal majority, without any regard for the game as a project of its own (I'm sure CB had an idea in the beginning of N1 and I would really like to know how far away are we today), often leads like in politics to horrible outcomes. Interplanetario is ongoing and I really want to know how differentiated it is. I have a friend who wanted to go to that event... long story short: he decided NOT to go because he did not want to play against just 2 factions. I work with customers, definitely not the kind CB works with, and I can tell you that sometimes the customer does not know that they satisfaction may lie where they don't think it possible to be. That happens when you have control of the data and the customer only has control of the wallet. They think spending less is better, but data tell a different story and it's the data you should follow, not the guts. That being said the customers I work with have a considerably higher amount of money to spend so everything gets a great deal more serious. Still, sustainability is a concept CB should be aware of because it doesn't take much to end up with 9 flavours of a single faction VS 8 different other factions. What do you think led other manufacturer to such an incredible disparity? Sales only. A statistical analysis of the market will reveal that a general alignment to the statistical norm means 80% of people will go to the average while 20% will populate the wings of a Gaussian distribution. What comes out first will be the market affecting variant. If you don't break the cycle you'll always have an 80/20 which is a non remarkable situation. The bucket of the "usual". What happens next is that in order to keep the 80, you loose the 20 that will never stick. Sure there will be turnover, mostly in the 20%, and so there will be no real affection to the game overall and for a low population game like Infinity that can lead to a sad outcome. The vocality aspect is the main reason why I keep this thread active...
If corvus sphere is accurate, the field is vast. Looks most rep'd factions appear to be next wave, oss, and vanilla haqq at a glance, but only na2 seems absent.
