Scheneighnay McBob
Bojo's School of the Trades
2795
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Posted - 2013.08.08 18:21:00 -
[1] - Quote
TL;DR at the bottom
From what I've seen, the current graphs to observe game balance work like this:
http://web.ccpgamescdn.com/dust/news.control/64942/1/flaylockgraph.png
The graph displays the number of kills with a certain weapon on given days. If there is a noticeable spike in performance, it's considered overpowered.
This is highly broken logic.
Was the graph demonstrates is how widely used it is, and weapons can suddenly become widely used without necessarily becoming overpowered. It's all about the perception of a weapon.
As long as the community thinks something is overpowered, you'll see a spike in the use of said weapon.
Look at mass drivers now- they're barely different from how they were in chromosome. Just non-terrible sights and slightly better hit detection. However, 1 or 2 people started a landslide on the forums of how "op" mass drivers are- if you read the actual thread, the vast majority of the forum community disagrees with them, yet the damage is still done- you can't look at the front page of the forums without 2 or 3 mass driver threads. Meanwhile in the actual game, mass drivers still aren't very common.
Regardless of actual performance, players who don't actually look far into counter-arguments start believing that mass drivers are OP, so they throw a ton of SP into them. Regardless of how difficult a weapon is to get used to (unless it's downright broken), players will eventually learn to compete with assault rifles; they might even start learning clever tactics. From this, the number of MD kills will spike simply because players see MDs being used more often, and their forum reputation.
While that is the majority of the problem with graphs, there's also one more part.
Specialist weapons such ass mass drivers get more kills than they probably should, because of the behavior of players in battle.
Tactics are what win battles- unfortunately, it's extremely common to see players relying on brute force rather than tactics, because the extremely popular assault rifle is good in all situations.
Specialist weapons, on the other hand, require good tactics to be effective with. Shotgunners learn to flank, laser and sniper rifles learn to stay at a distance and keep track of enemy movement, MD users learn to either go for the high ground or to avoid engagements that aren't in short range.
It's the use of tactics that allows specialist weapons to get so many kills; if the devs would join an instant battle and observe tactics, they would soon turn a deaf ear towards cries for a nerf; then players would adapt and learn counter-tactics.
TL;DR
Performance graphs only show how widely used a weapon is; reputation alone can easily cause a spike in use. Poor use of tactics by the average player doesn't help either. |