Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

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enclave
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by enclave »

Krogen wrote:I think that the Default Era is not at all well-balanced, and has a lot of problems. The Drake Burner is not one of them.
as many people as many opinions.. and opinions are mostly different ones.. because somebody prefers one faction over another.. and finds one disadvantage over other.. big maps have one problems, small maps have other problems.. etc.. etc..
name
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by name »

Pentarctagon wrote: If you're going to approach anyone with balance suggestions, it'd be zookeeper, but it is true that there's really no single person or group that's in charge of balancing mainline anymore.
What about promoting zookeeper to this position then?

enclave wrote: In my opinion all default factions are very well balanced..

You don't have to listen to me, all you have to do is look top50 ladder and ask them what they think,
enclave wrote:
Krogen wrote:I think that the Default Era is not at all well-balanced, and has a lot of problems. The Drake Burner is not one of them.
as many people as many opinions.. and opinions are mostly different ones.. because somebody prefers one faction over another.. and finds one disadvantage over other.. big maps have one problems, small maps have other problems.. etc.. etc..
Well you told us to ask the ladder players, then ladder player Krogen answered, but I suppose you forgot to specify we should only listen to them when they agree with your opinions. :P
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Elder2
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by Elder2 »

Technically it depends on how you interpret enclave's statement XD

Default era has some issues with balance even though I think overall balance is pretty good, I don't think it is as bad as Krogen's response would suggest.

But default factions? That is open to interpretation actually, because the issues happen only in specific matchups, is any faction inherently weaker than the others? I don't think so but there are specific problematic matchups.
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The_Gnat
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by The_Gnat »

ElderofZion wrote:But default factions? That is open to interpretation actually, because the issues happen only in specific matchups, is any faction inherently weaker than the others? I don't think so but there are specific problematic matchups.
I agree: the default era as an overall entity is reasonably well balanced (as well as could be expected). However, certain matchups arguably do have balance issues.
enclave
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by enclave »

Cold Steel wrote:
enclave wrote:all you have to do is look top50 ladder and ask them what they think,
Well you told us to ask the ladder players, then ladder player Krogen answered, but I suppose you forgot to specify we should only listen to them when they agree with your opinions. :P
As ElderofZion said it depends how you interprete my words :)
Firstly if you look here http://wesnoth.gamingladder.info/player ... =&country= and count, Krogen will not be top50, but more close to #62.. Which doesn't mean he is bad or anything, he still knows more about balance than me for ladder maps. Still he might not be the most reliable source since he only played 160 games (Elder can probably play them in 1 month time if he wanted, apart from playing 300 more other games and watching 600 more other games). Anyway.. if we remove banned and fake accounts from top50, then possibly Krogen would get there.

When thinking of balance what comes to my mind is maybe Northerners faction.. They might do with +1g price increase for grunts and trolls or maybe -1 damage for grunts. But it doesn't mean that loyalist can not win against Northerner.. They still have good chance even if we decrease the prices for grunts to 10g I guess.. It all depends on time of day, rng, skills, positions on map etc.. Adepts easily kill drakes if adepts attack, but drakes easily kill adepts if drakes attack.. depends on time of day and rng mostly.. I'm not sure why trying to balance something if rng will still probably have more influence.

On the other hand ladder organizers could create a statistics for matchups when you report win and this way we could see the numbers instead of 1000 different opinions.. For example when 1900elo report win against 2000elo the matchup would go into statistics (since there is no big difference between skills of these 2 players, just 100elo), and then we could see that undead win against drakes in 70% cases or northerners win against drakes in 70% cases or something similar.. and thats where we could start thinking of balancing something, knowing the real numbers and not a small-talk. Question is, do you really care? As purely isar player I don't care, I can win with any faction, I can lose with any faction.. and any potential imbalance would have the SMALLEST impact on result.
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Krogen
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by Krogen »

Im not here to brag about anything, but how many of those so called top50 players can tell that they won an International 1v1 Tournament against players with far more ladder games? XD (Just kidding.)
When i said Default is not balanced, i also meant some of the matchups. I agree with the factions themselves and how they are built. (Thats one of the reasons im not a fan of Khalifate.) I dont want drastic changes, i dont want to add new units etc. but some matchups are just so ridicilously one sided it hurts. Loyalist vs Knalga is the best example. It's a nightmare. So when people are talking about balance, matchups should be the main focus, not units. Drake Burner is powerful, but its also the rarest drake unit on the field. Thats not an opinion, its a fact, and its a good sign that its not overpowered.
"A lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of the sheep." - Tywin Lannister
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Elder2
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by Elder2 »

Wow this escalated quickly XDD

One player did make ladder statistics and they were based on thousands of games, however their reliability was questionable because they accounted only for games which ended in a leaderkill, and tehse are a minority of ladder games.

Btw orcs are definitely not op but because you say you are an isar player I have an idea why you could think that. Orc is very strong on isar and troll spam on isar is the best possible strategy in most cases.
name
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by name »

enclave wrote:On the other hand ladder organizers could create a statistics for match ups when you report win and this way we could see the numbers instead of 1000 different opinions.
Well there was in the past an even more precise opinion filtration system, where a specific opinion would be tested by the opinion holder against anyone that challenged that opinion, in battle.

So let us say a high level player is of the opinion that ghosts cost slightly too much but a second player feels this will disadvantage knalgans. The first player would then play knalgans against the second player with undead and an 18 or 19 cost ghost. If the first player can win an expected amount of these matches it evidences that there is no imbalance to the change. The same technique can be used to make a case for when there is an imbalance in the existing statistics that needs to be leveled somehow. Of course, the evidence gets stronger still when many players try out the same match and produce similar results.

This is the way things worked until the last multiplayer balance lead retired with no replacement (as I understand it). Since then, advanced players have had a lot of time to develop some of the better possible strategies for the current balance... as well as exploitable weaknesses in certain match ups (even if none of these is dramatic). So there are likely a number of improvements that could be clearly evidenced by the community if there was someone, with the proper authority, available to review this evidence presented and commit changes.
enclave
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by enclave »

Cold Steel wrote:
enclave wrote:On the other hand ladder organizers could create a statistics for match ups when you report win and this way we could see the numbers instead of 1000 different opinions.
So there are likely a number of improvements that could be clearly evidenced by the community if there was someone, with the proper authority, available to review this evidence presented and commit changes.
It's not really an authority needed in a way.. at least it is not 100% dependent on Wesnoth developers and people in charge. Rather it doesn't depend on them nearly at all..

The balancing could only require 2 people..
Person 1 would modify the ladder web page or create his own where when you report a game you would input the matchup for both sides, and if your elo is above certain number (1900 or so? would be silly to count 1500 elo people into statistics, since there is no evidence that they know how to play at all) and if there is only a tiny difference between 2 players skills (less than 100-200elo?) then the game would go into statistics of matchups resulting a win and a loss. Also of course if a very low elo player wins against a very high elo player, it could go into statistics too, but not the other way round.
Speaking about leaderkill wins, this might better be excluded at all from statistics :D but that's a hard to do thing.. People could just be lazy to report games at all if it would require them to input 100 things..
Person 2 would create add-on or modification with changed prices or unit stats and everyone could play it and discuss it all in forum :D

I would not want to be any of these 2 people, despite the coding part would be really easy - it's a huge work to argue with everyone and make everyone happy.

I don't even take Khalifate faction seriously at all, they don't even have basic animations on 1.12 - so it's just a joke to speak of them as part of default era.. many many add-ons have much better care of their units. Not even mentioning their resistances while they are human race.. it all just doesn't make any sense.
name
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Re: Why is the Drake Burner so powerful

Post by name »

Krogen wrote:I agree with the factions themselves and how they are built. (Thats one of the reasons im not a fan of Khalifate.) I dont want drastic changes, i dont want to add new units etc. but some matchups are just so ridicilously one sided it hurts. Loyalist vs Knalga is the best example. It's a nightmare.
What are the specific changes you would make to knalgans and/or loyalists to improve their interplay?

enclave wrote:It's not really an authority needed in a way.. at least it is not 100% dependent on Wesnoth developers and people in charge.
Ultimately you need someone with commit access. Further though, to have received that level of trust (commit access) said someone generally has proven to be level headed and evidence oriented, which matters because they will have ultimate say as to when a a change is mainlined. They also would need to be still active enough of course.

Pentarctagon suggested zookeeper for the job and if he is willing to take this on, I see only reasons he would be perfect for it.
enclave wrote:...the game would go into statistics of matchups resulting a win and a loss.
If you want to write and maintain this statistics gathering system, the developers could very well be interested in your proposal.
A purely statistics based approach is never without its bugs though, because how you interpret statistics always has a degree of subjectivity. So you would not necessarily want to abandon the champion approach (the one I described earlier) which wesnoth used in the past. But it could prove quite helpful to the balancing process.
enclave wrote: I don't even take Khalifate faction seriously at all, they don't even have basic animations on 1.12 - so it's just a joke to speak of them as part of default era.. many many add-ons have much better care of their units. Not even mentioning their resistances while they are human race.. it all just doesn't make any sense.
Well I have argued on the Khalifate re-imagining thread that the only or best way to start fixing that could be to make them a new race separate from humans; a race with its own appearance as thoughtfully unique as the other races used in mainline multiplayer factions. And abandoning liminal alignment... They would still need a lot of fine tuning to be mainline quality though.
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