The need for a Balance Team

[Pentarctagon]

Who needs stats for something that obvious.
Same with Kalifat, they are out there for ages but almost nobody likes Dune, since they have no identity.
Can you prove me wrong on the 2nd and explain why they're or should be added to default instead of getting removed?

The Default+Dunefolk era was the 4th most used era in September 2024, as per the Multiplayer Activity Reports that I upload each month.

[ChaosRider]

Make WOTG default era ! Random recruits era is best one! You never know what types of units you will be able to recruit!

[DuncanDill]

Make WOTG default era ! Random recruits era is best one! You never know what types of units you will be able to recruit!

...

[ChaosRider]

What DuncanDill? Im serious!

[Skyend]

Who needs stats for something that obvious.
Same with Kalifat, they are out there for ages but almost nobody likes Dune, since they have no identity.
Can you prove me wrong on the 2nd and explain why they're or should be added to default instead of getting removed?

The Default+Dunefolk era was the 4th most used era in September 2024, as per the Multiplayer Activity Reports that I upload each month.

Data from: viewtopic.php?t=57533
ERA ERA_COUNT
era_default 4483
era_dunefolk 1082

Sure 19.44%, but 80.56% are playing pure default instead. Well, hard to compare since default is set per default, could be more playing with Dunefolk if that's vice versa. On the other hand player might just try it out, time for a survey right?

[Pentarctagon]

No, the decision for that has been made. For 1.20 they're going to be in Default era unless an After the Fall era is added.

[ForestDragon]

By the way, on the main topic about the team, there is an important question about the members that will be chosen by the PM. I agree with name that the reasoning for/against picking specific candidates should be visible to the public.

I highly recommend keeping the actual team member selection process / discussions out in the open. Transparency can do a lot to prevent further controversies and is in the spirit of an open source project like Wesnoth.

[Roge_Tebnelok]

By the way, on the main topic about the team, there is an important question about the members that will be chosen by the PM. I agree with name that the reasoning for/against picking specific candidates should be visible to the public.

I highly recommend keeping the actual team member selection process / discussions out in the open. Transparency can do a lot to prevent further controversies and is in the spirit of an open source project like Wesnoth.

Yeah, that's the reason this thread was created in the first place. The exact changes probably should be discussed after the members of the team are selected.

[Pentarctagon]

I know very little about most of the proposed candidates in the first post, so the process essentially will be:
1) Ask a couple specific people what they think.
2) Pick names based on that.
I'm not going to be doing anything particularly complicated or documentable.

[Roge_Tebnelok]

1) Ask a couple specific people what they think.

Who, for example? And why so few? How can it be possible for them to express the opinion of the wider community?

I'm not going to be doing anything particularly complicated or documentable.

If it's not documentable, how can it be verified as a community-wide decision and not one made by a few members?

[Refumee]

What many people are upset about is drastic changes to classic units who had their current stats for over a decade - tweaking the gold price or hp/xp numbers by a bit is one thing, but completely redesigning how one of the main 6 damage types works (arcane), or nearly doubling the damage of a unit (shyde's thorns) is another

I believe that a large-scale revert (can be partial not even full) would be far less destructive to UMC than the precedent that 1.18 sets of what is and is not acceptable for the game's balance, and I agree with SkyEnd's ideas outlined on the previous page.

That's not what had me upset about 1.18. I was upset because the shift wasn't across the board. If you're going to shift that drastically, it needs to be done across all factions, which I would've supported. Moving backwards is exactly that. We can keep everything the same and keep our low number of active nostalgia players happy while forcing our players looking for alterations and shifts to be stuck in the same gameplay loop and we might as well just get rid of the idea of a balance team. We can shift everything to 1.16 and then leave it at that. Or, we can actually develop the game, move forward, attract players who enjoy a mixup, bring old players back to receive a different experience this time around, and still have the option for having the old stats like you mentioned some do, or the old versions if you so desire.

What you're suggesting makes a balance team pointless, so how can you approve of a balance team if you don't actually want balance changes? Change everything to 1.16, take 3 days to balance the new units (no balance team required for that, just make your PRs and we'll call it a day), and then we're done.

It is much better to progress and develop as a game and as creators. Obviously we shouldn't be trying to break everything with every patch, but this is a consistently updating game in that it is consistently making updates. New stable cycle releases (1.16>1.18) imo should be permitted to include differences that may require some work from umc authors. There's nothing wrong with that. Why should we act like it's dead without an active team where the game remains the same? How about we, as umc authors, simply appreciate that we are still getting updates, with new tools, new graphics, new units, and new stats, bringing in new players? I think it's ridiculous of us to accept that this game was built and has been developed to this point, but because now we've put our own work into it, it needs to stop developing because otherwise we would need to actually develop our stuff too. That's lazy selfish thinking imo. If the devs want to switch things up, we can tell them why we think it's a bad idea, we can switch it back to the other way ourselves, but to say "no, you can't switch that up because I don't like that and I'm too lazy to switch it back myself or to develop my umc around that change" that's petty, presumptuous and arrogant imo.

Mirion I like your way of thinking. Before everyone is getting mad and asking if little 4 year old Refumee is out off his little lizard mind, read till the end. I am against radical changes like arcane resistance changes from 1.18. It confused me a alot.

Anyway, back to Marion's point I liked.
Yeah let us change up the meta or give this game a fresh new breath. But I think it can't be done in radically changing stats of units. I think more in in creative way.

How do games do that nowadays? With seasons.
I think Dalas proposed that in the forum.
We could highlight seasonally UMC Campaign or just content. That could be further supported by WMG members, who can propose addons to the devs.

We could build in seasons to MP, like anti arcane damage month +20% resi for all (I know it is bad idea) or default lvl 0 era. Something like that could be interesting, in my eyes.
People can still decide, if they wanna play with such modifications or not. At leat they get the option to it. That could be done also with the help of WMG members.

I know that wesnoth is developing slow and maybe it is hard to keep players interested, but radical changes will not help keeping players interested.

[Refumee]

No, the decision for that has been made. For 1.20 they're going to be in Default era unless an After the Fall era is added.

Lately we started on the WMG discord server a collaboration to develop a After thr Fall era.

It is like we think a like

[Tezereth]

1) Ask a couple specific people what they think.
2) Pick names based on that.

This seems.... odd to do, in the current context. And I don't think it goes well with the open source nature of Wesnoth, one of the reasons of this whole situation was caused by changes most peoples weren't aware of.

[Pentarctagon]

1) Ask a couple specific people what they think.

Who, for example? And why so few? How can it be possible for them to express the opinion of the wider community?

If I provide names, then people will just start arguing over that too.

I'm not going to be doing anything particularly complicated or documentable.

If it's not documentable, how can it be verified as a community-wide decision and not one made by a few members?

My understanding is that the list of candidates in the first post are essentially the short-list of people who would be generally acceptable to have on the balancing team. Is that not the case?

[ForestDragon]

My understanding is that the list of candidates in the first post are essentially the short-list of people who would be generally acceptable to have on the balancing team. Is that not the case?

Not quite, iirc it was just the people who volunteered, no further filtering has been done at the moment besides an informal poll conducted on a sample size of WMG members and even then that didn't remove candidates from the list, just added a bit of extra info.