Silence through terror, intimidation, paranoia and/or fear is far different than silence through contentment. That's a poor comparison.

The bottom line is that if stardock/ironclad is doing their jobs (which I believe they do very very well), the vocal minority or whatever input only serves as a platform for ideas. Any professional knows you take what input you get but at the end of the day, the best solutions are devised by the governing body using a broader scope of reference.

It's the same concept as being a parent. You listen to your kids, you argue, you agree, sometimes you have to ignore.....but the decisions you make are going to be according to your more experienced judgement in the end. If you are controlled by your child's overemotional, adolescent whims as they try to find themselves then you are not doing your job as a parent.

Given stardock's history I think people have to have more faith and see what comes.

Again, the problem here is defining who those "experts" are.

Is it me? Some people agree, some don't.
Is it you? Some people agree, some don't.
Is it 1Spartan? Some people agree, some don't.

The inherent nature of balance changes is not as simple as a see-saw because we have so many different kinds of people playing. Everyone has their list of 20 items they want to see changed and nobody can ever agree on a definite list of changes. Yeah, I do have a short fuse with the competitive group since I think they think they're entitled to their changes, but let's be realistic and realize you can't please all the people all the time. Even with a group of "experts" there will still be people who have problems with the balance changes. Inside of that particular "expert" group, some people will articulate their changes differently thus giving some changes an advance head start and others a negative predisposition.

Nerf returning armada? Some people agree, some don't.
Nerf LRF's? Some people agree, some don't.
Bolster siege frigates? Some people agree, some don't.

The bottom line is that it's impossible to settle on one solution and achieve perfect balance. In my eyes, Starcraft is still unbalanced despite all the adjustments and popularity it got. People claim it's balanced and I don't agree. In order to really get the feeling of a game down, the developers have to sit in games and just see how things go and see how people are playing their game or see how the AI performs. People don't always play the game the way developers intended. These should be a mixture of both competitive and casual games to gauge a wide audience of players. Then an internal consensus is needed. Simply looking at stats and figures is not very effective. Even with changes made in this manner, balance still cannot be achieved because one change affects any number of other items. Someone will always be vocal about issues with a product and that's a fact of everything from cars to games to politics. There's always going to be someone upset. On top of that, it's not always in the programmer's ability to make the adjustments happen. Changes internal to some things, such as AI behavior, can effect any number of other things or create an alteration that is too difficult to distribute.

A poor comparison to what? You are vague.

The statement was "The vocal minority often represent the silent majority". If you are saying this statement is false then I am saying you lack knowledge of history.

Yeah I agree with the forum OP (why not? lol)

As far as Blizzard goes, they EMPLOY (read, pay a lot of money) progamers (Koreans ONLY) to balance their games. As in, ex-professional gamers who used to spend 18 hours a day playing SC 1 at the highest level are now the official word for balance in SC2. There goes that argument. But Blizzard isn't a big or important company in RTS right? SC is such a horribly balanced game. Let's NOT listen to the best players. Whoever brought up Starcraft earlier is... as I always say... an idiot. Further, ALL existing SC pros in Korea are given the opportunity to give feedback to Blizzard on current builds on SC2, while NO non-pros are given the same opportunity. The views of the current pros are WIDELY publicized (links and translated interviews will be provided on request) and are considered word of law on balance. Read again: the views of newbs are NOT taken into account on ANY level. They are IGNORED. This is as it should be.

This is how it goes in EVERY well balanced game. Sins is not that deep of a game. By that I mean, the skill gap between the bottom and the top is not that wide. It does not take long before the new player catch up and realize the same fundamental problems in balance as the best players.

What I don't tolerate is ignorant masses bandwagoning around some horrible idea and further unbalancing the game. 1.04 was a HUGE step in the right direction. As long as Stardock continues doing that, we have nothing to be worried about.

*edit

As far as WHO the best players in Sins are right now, I think the community as a whole have a good idea. There might be some hidden great players, but.. anyway I digress.

Basically, whoever doesn't post replays of themselves winning vs other "good" players, is not themself a good player. If you have no results to back up your claim, your claim is meaningless. On the other hand, if you have a mountain of evidence to back up your claims, your claim probably has some merit.

Me, an expert? No, not even close. No one would agree to that! I'm new to RTS games and have been kicked around by the AI more than once (and that's not on the hardest setting).

Anyway, basically what I was trying to imply, you spelled out much more eloquently.

Well that is what the forums are for and the forums have proven it works to prevent such a thing from happening.

That is the most stupid thing I've heard today in this forum. Any GOOD and INTELLIGENT developer/play tester/player will know the best way to test balance issues is by actualy running a simulation, not by simply looking at spreadsheets and numbers.

I hope this Megavolt guy never have a say on the development of sins.

I didn't say it.

All I was responding to is your assertion that comparing the populations ruled by dictators and tyrants in history to the silent majority of gameplayers is a poor analogy, as their silence is not derived from the same root cause.

There were no "assertions". Only a simple statement. The vocal minority often represent the silent majority.

Now that you mention it. Intimidation, harassment, and verbal abuse is a very real thing in every game forum. You often see people scared to death to make a comment.

Indeed, so perhaps you've a good point on that.

(1) The experts are those who consistently win against everyone apart from themselves. HuntingX hit the nail on the head here.

(2) You're right that it's not that simple (because the game would be boring if it were), but your reason is incorrect. Game balance has nothing to do with the people playing the game (given that the people have the physical and mental ability to understand how to play the game etc. etc.). It has to do with the rules of the game and exploiting those rules in the most efficient manner (efficiency defined by the chance that you will complete a goal of the game [e.g. winning]). Those who see and understand the rules will, not unlike a lawyer in a trial, find the best way to use those rules to their advantage.

(3) You're right here, and it's a good thing that game balance isn't a democratic process.

(4) You're right that you can't please everyone. But if we're talking about game balance, there's no need - the game is balanced or it isn't. It is up to the developers to balance the game in a way that won't disrupt their vision of the game.

(5) This overlooks the fact that most experts agree on most balance changes in most situations. In other words, the stuff they disagree on is generally a small subset of the problems being addressed.

(6) The articulation, or putting the problem into words, doesn't matter. You pay attention to what experts do, not what they say. If some guy rails on about the uselessness of unit B but uses it all the time in order to win (in other words, it's an integral part of his win rate), then it's clear that what he was saying was bullshit. On the other hand, if he destroys people that use unit B with an alarming success rate, then there is probably an issue that needs to be addressed.

(7) It doesn't matter if people agree. It only matters if the people at the top can demonstrate if it's overpowered.

(8) This really speaks for itself.

(9) The perfect is the enemy of the good. This is not an argument against balancing, however, since the bad is also the enemy of the good.

(10) Now you've got my attention (former competitive SC player). Talking about perfect balance is pointless in a game more complex than RPS. Starcraft is closer to being perfectly balanced (depending on the map, of course) than any other game in history even a fraction as complex (with the exception of Go, perhaps).

Consider a game that's just been created. In this game, there exists two players, each of whom try to win at the expense of the other - in other words, one winner, one loser. The rules in this game are very simple so it's easy to comprehend the totality of what the game might become.

The top players soon find out that there are only two strategies, A and B, and that strategy A is much stronger than strategy B. We can't do this in the real world with more complex games, but let's say that we've measured strategy A to be successful 90% of the time and B 10% of the time (given that the players are top players and understand the rules to the fullest etc. etc.).

Hopefully you can agree with me that strategy A is overpowered. The game designer is very upset so he adds some complexity to the game (still very simple, though). Now there is a new strategy, C, that top players have identified. After many tournaments and constant playtesting and training etc. etc., it is discovered that the new numbers are as follows:

Strategy A - 100
---vs B - 60%
---vs C - 40%

Strategy B - 100
---vs A - 40%
---vs C - 60%

Strategy C - 100
---vs A - 60%
---vs B - 40%

(note a strategy is 50% vs itself)

Now from a little examination, we can see that the new strategies in the game basically amount to Rock/Paper/Scissors. There is a system of counters where one strategy counters another and is countered by yet another. It's starting to get more complex, but we can do the numbers and see that, overall, each strategy has a relative strength of 1/3.

The game is now perfectly balanced. However, the designer finds it boring and so adds more complexity to the game. New strategy D is discovered etc. etc.

Strategy A - 170
---vs B - 60%
---vs C - 30%
---vs D - 80%

Strategy B - 140
---vs A - 40%
---vs C - 60%
---vs D - 40%

Strategy C - 140
---vs A - 70%
---vs B - 40%
---vs D - 30%

Strategy D - 150
---vs A - 20%
---vs B - 60%
---vs C - 70%

As you can see, their relative scores are not the same - they are unbalanced! But wait - the game designer added so much complexity to the game that players can now change strategies mid-game. So while playing A might be your best bet, if you are an A and meet a C, you are in trouble and better switch to the overall weaker strategy D.

Now this example isn't 'perfectly' balanced, but this is what happens in real-time games. Not every strategy is equal to every other strategy. There are overall-powerful strategies, but they (in a balanced game) are countered by overall-weaker strategies. That's the only way it can work and still be interesting.

Now you say that Starcraft is not balanced. What exactly do you mean by this? There are a lot of strategies in the game that are useless (for example, building all workers will generally lose you the game), but there are a very high number of strategies that are completely valid and used a LOT even in the highest levels of play. Sure you have 'standard' or 'orthodox' builds like the classic Terran sit-on-your-ass-in-your-base-and-don't-die-while-building-up-a-huge-army-then-attack kinda stuff, but there's also interesting things like TvT dropships - dropships aren't generally used in any other matchup. That means they're like strategy C up there sucking bigtime until the moment comes where they're needed.

Having played SC for years, I can testify that the diversity of strategies is huge. So you'll just have to take my word for it or disagree with me on that point. The large array of strategies that you can not only start out with but also end up doing (based on intel) is really mind-boggling and it's not something a single person can really wrap their head around all at once. The games come down to player skill. It comes down to execution because the difference between the strength of opposing strategies and sub-strategies is small - this means that the game is balanced.

(11) You got it right here.

(12) This has nothing to do with game balance.

(13) That's true, as in the example above. The developer likely intended in v1.0 that people would play both A and B. But top-level players will always understand a game better than the game developers (if they're not top-level players themselves). This is because they make it their business to win. They do this by learning every detail, every nuance of the game and then exploiting that knowledge to find all the strategies and to sort the strong ones from the weak.

(14) Developers should definitely listen to everyone about problems, but when it comes to game balance, casual players just don't have the knowledge and haven't spent the effort in getting to know the game enough to comment on game balance with any authority.

(15) This is why it's up to top players to discover the 'real' game underneath the interface and find all the bugs and weird nuances that make up the 'real' game rules.

(16) That's an unfortunate fact of life. Fortunately game balance doesn't care about unhappiness, so this isn't a big deal when talking purely about game balance. Hopefully in practical situations, developers find ways to balance the game without effectively gimping units for normal players (however, in Sins this isn't an issue since you can't do fun stuff like exploit unit movement to fire faster etc.).

I know what gets on my nerves:

People who try to hijack other people's posts by injecting whatever their issue or desire is.

I know when I speak of vocal minorities that's what I mean. People who try to falsely give the impression that their issue or request or what have you is shared by lots of people by making lots and lots of posts and comments which serves to give the illusion that a lot of people are having the problem the repetitive poster is having.

Last weekend I came on and there was like 8 posts talking about how "buggy" the game was (whether it be multiplayer connections, crashes, or balancing) and I slowly came to realize that all 8 posts were written and commented on by the same 4 people. 

But to a casual reader of the forum, you'd think there was some big problem with that that outweighs every other thing out there.

Now, given that we have a game that has got universally positive praise out of the box, has sold 200k+ copies you would think that the fact that we've released 4 free updates already that are mostly game improvement updates and not bug fixes we'd get some slack.  But some people are still quick to jump and assume that whatever issue they have is shared by all users and can't be bothered to show courtesy to fellow players.

Frogboy, I recognize those concerns. At the same time, it completely ignores what the OP is stating.

I personally find all the whining distasteful. I never post bug threads or anything of the sort. Frankly, stardock has been terrific on their customer support.

What the OP was addressing was how the majority of posts (from different people) on the issue of GAME BALANCE can be safely ignored. I don't make repeat posts on anything if I can avoid it, I don't endlessly whine about anything, and I always note when something is taken in the right direction. I think this holds true for many of the skilled players. When the community of people widely recognized as the best Sins players says: A is overpowered, B is underpowered, and then 10 random people say the opposite, Stardock might be confused about the community's actual beliefs.

Unfortunately, that's the wrong impression. In fact, as more and more people start multiplayer and learn the game, their template for the game are OUR builds, and OUR strategies (our referring to the top players). "Cookie cutter" builds are all too common in a game like this, and sometimes it is up to the devs to inject more variety through better balance.

That said, 1.04 was a great step in the right direction. The carriers/strikecraft need some serious work (so the drone carrier nerf was rather ridiculous), but every other change was well done. However, there is NO disagreement among players who understand the game that Strikecraft are near worthless, siege frigates are near worthless, etc. Please don't get the wrong impression by some people claiming there IS disagreement when there is in fact NONE.

A good example in the real world is the debate on global warming. Bush would present some fairy tale version where there global warming is unconfirmed. In fact, if you ask the average American, chances are he would say the consensus is not universal.

In reality, Global Warming (as you well know) is UNIVERSALLY agreed upon by all scientists as far as journal reviews go. Consider the scientists the top players, and the majority of uninformed public the majority of uninformed single player users. You can ignore one and listen to the other with no ill effects.

On the contrary, the OP's concern was that he was unclear if the "vocal minority noise" referred to the few people arguing for certain changes and thus being ignored because they're the minority.

Frogboy just pointed out what exactly is meant by the "vocal minority noise" as per Blair's comments on the podcast which the OP references.

The OP made a gigantic assumption that somehow linked this supposed vocal minority to balance changes, and that's what everyone picked up on, when it absolutely was not the case.

So, Frogboy answered the OP more directly than the majority of the posts in this thread. Rather than arguing for who they listen to and why, he defined the problem of the "noise", so that everyone can stop being paranoid and arguing who they should listen to more and why..

What HuntingX said He worded it much better then me, thanks.

On a sidenote: People always complain. You could ship Sins for free and attack 100$ bills to the package and people some would ask to get 200$ with the game. It's the fate of developing a product for the masses.

But rest assured that basically we all (or almost all ... I hope ;)) very much enjoy playing this game. If I didn't enjoy playing Sins to much I certainly wouldn't try to have it improved even further. I think Sins can make the step from "only" being a very good game into being an all-time classic that is enjoyable in multiplayer for years to come. But for that to happen, balance in multiplayer is needed and as HuntingX pointed out there is only one way to make sure this happens.

And it doesn't only affect Sins. Look at Demigod for example. It will have a huge multiplayer part and hopefully be very, very successful there. Since I with StarDock and their partners the best success I hope you learn from Blizzard (HuntingX made a great point there) in terms of listening to the guys that really play the game hours every day in terms of balancing stuff because on unbalanced game is dead in multiplayer after a very, very short time (after the majority of players figured out the one dominant race or strategy and got bored of using it or losing to to every single game - like the trade port / LRM thingy in 1.03).

About the vocal minority on bugs: Look at it from the customer side. I was lucky enough to enjoy a bug-free game and I didn't have a single crash ever except for some replays that didn't work (which was a little annoying but really not that bad).
But if I had a game that somehow crashes on my every 10 minutes I'd be very, very disappointed. Having an unplayable game is like the worst thing that can happen to the customer and it's quite hard to hear "hey, we have no idea why it is crashing ... sorry you can't play right now".


@Annatar: It was not clear who was meant with "vocal minority" and if it was meant in a wide sense. I didn't see any reason to assume that it was only concerning bug-reports. On the other hand, the changes to the siege frigats (nerfing them further in 1.03 while all the good players said they are bad already and need a buff) strongly suggests that in fact balance changes were made mainly with the majority of the players with little knowledge of the game in mind. So I think the assumtion that the statement about vocal minorities was not only targeted at bugs but used in a wider sense was a reasonable one. But I'm glad I was wrong

Can you not run a search program to see all the posts contributed by one user?

Anyway, forumns always involve non-response bias, undercoverage, and "trolls". I started posting frequently because :

a) I thought Stardock/Ironclad play-tested ideas posted by the "vocal minority" in order to evaluate how they influence game mechanics.

I got bored.

*The game was, in fact, amazingly well-programmed straight out of the box.

*To discard the arguments of a vocal minority without further reason is
circumstancial abuse. Just because only a few people repeatedly post something does
not immediately discount the truth of a conclusion, especially if no counter
arguments arise.

I remember I sent in one "bug" that involved the auto-cast feature not being flexible enough, and I suggested a fix. I do not think that many people are bothered by the problem. The problem does not destroy the game. I just thought the system could be improved.

I have to say that it's more than a little biased that the OP says it's wrong to listen to the vocal minority for campaigns but they should listen to the vocal minority when it comes to game balance. He goes on to say that only a few people understand the game well enough to be able to make truly educated opinions. It's fairly obvious that the OP has more than a few opinions on balance and he definitely considers himself one of the elite.

I am guilty of this at times and I do apologize.

The issue at hand in determining whether to weigh a hard-core strategist's opinion is whether that strategist has expert knowlege of the game's mechanics. I think it would be a little ad verecundium to blindly take a hard-core gamer's advice. But at the same time, seeing what people who play a lot have to say can be a helpful tool for directing game evaluations.

If the people who play a lot consistently say that LRMs are overpowered, that may not be the case. After all, those people do not know everything about how LRM's were designed. The LRM could just be an effective counter-strategy to a player's preferred strategy. But if enough people (not the same person's name over and over) say something, it might be worth looking into.

Here's a tip:

Instead of posting on other people's posts, create your own post. If no one responds to it, probably no one agrees with you.

For instance, I created WWW Link to address the concern that LRMs are overpowered, and it received some responses.

The OP recognizes that campaigns very rarely have any semblance of 'balance'. Because of that, it makes sense to take more an interest in what the highest number of people think would be 'cool' than to spend time mulling over balance issues.

Skirmish and multiplayer, on the other hand, are generally expected to offer players a level playing field (nobody wants to start a competitive game of chess without a queen) so the opinions of people with enough experience to know what that field actually looks like should have more weight.

Anyway, different games, different priorities and personally, I think the statistics of the two should be kept completely separate.

So, there's proportionately more experts for campaign games than there are for multiplayers?

I think the reality is that people feel it more personally when it comes to multiplayer. Where I used to work, you would not believe the amount of experts we had and still have in our forums. How did we know which ones to listen to? First off, we listened to the majority, not the vocal minority experts. Making a game is just as much about politics as it is about game design or programming. Second, after we took all the reasonable suggestions from the majority not the few that considered themselves experts just because they played the game 24/7, we took it to the designers, they would look them over, look at what our statistics showed. If the statistics supported the majority's claim, we'd usually act on it if it a relatively quick fix. If the statistics did not support the claims (which, by the way, they usually didn't) we would not implement the change.

Everyone considers themselves an expert. You cannot take people's word on that. "I know what I'm saying because I am really good at this game and I understand it the best."

So, there does need to be a level playing field but the fact of the matter is that the developers will most likely NOT act upon the suggestions (or more commonly, rants) of the self-professed experts. They will most likely act exclusively upon in-house information first (data mining, QE, etc) and the advice of the majority of players. So, people shouldn't take it personally if they don't implement their idea of balance. More than likely, it's just biased or simply wrong.

No. I'm saying that campaigns don't require much in the way of expertise to balance. Balance generally doesn't exist in that setting so what's left? Presentation. Something pretty much anyone can have a say in.

And to echo what's been said already, I'm not suggesting that the word of self-professed experts become law but I would suggest giving more weight to the guy who consistently wins every game against all comers than the guy who's been playing for a day and a half and considers siege frigate spam 'an unbeatable cheese tactic'.

As soon as I read that I switched from taking you seriously to wanting to type tl,dr. This isn't Starcraft and I don't want to play another Starcraft game. I remember what you competitive people did to the singleplayer aspects of both Starcraft and Warcraft, especially Warcraft 3. I'm not a competitive player. I'm a casual player. You competitive types have ruined everything you've touched, from Starcraft to UT3.

You people want to define "experts" as your own kind. So what about those of us, like myself, who have no trouble wiping the floor with 6 unfair AI's and primarily play singleplayer? Your objective is to squelch those who do not play the game like you in favor of changing things into this very narrow-minded view of how the game can be perfected and "fair". The AI is no match for me. The harder it is, the more time the game takes, but I still win. I do not care to play multiplayer and I do not care to sit here and analyze or share strategies. Sure, I'll play a few games against friends, and even they don't stand a chance. However, I don't give a damn about ranks, stats, achievements, and all that. I don't want ultra-competitive types defining how the game works, what constitutes balance, and making panic threads because they got rushed, don't like the price of a unit, or can't stand the fact that the people behind the game may not be treating each side equally. In excess of 200,000 people bought this game yet only a couple hundred or thousand actually play online. The silent majority could really care less about tiny little imbalances, what clans are doing, and what joe competitive person thinks about the game.

(1) Well I'm sorry you didn't read my post, but fortunately for you I do not want this game to become Starcraft. I was simply responding to someone who mentioned that Starcraft wasn't balanced, and I was trying to form a good definition of what game balance is.

(2) I'm not really sure what you mean here. That sounds kind of like 'Gary Kasparov destroyed chess.' I've seen this argument before and what a lot of people are talking about is execution-based balances. These are things like micro-heavy glitch exploits and so on. For example, in Starcraft there is a muta-stacking bug where if you have a larva in a group of mutas, they will all stack on top of each other very nicely. Mutas probably seem underpowered to players that don't know better, but this is not the fault of the competitive community. All they did was find it, akin to finding a faulty pipe in a water main. Blizzard decided that they did like game balance and didn't want to remove the glitch so you can send them your concerns and leave the competitive community out of it. All they are doing is discovering the game.

(3) Well I'm not quite sure what you mean by us ruining games. We usually just practice and playtest intensely until we find things that are the strongest strategies. We are normally the ones that find non-campaign-based bugs and glitches as well. It's not like we inject brokenness into the game, it's already there waiting to be found.

(4) You're clearly misunderstanding what's going on here. This is a game. The objective in a game is to win. Competitive players of ANY game (including tennis, baseball, chess, checkers, solitaire) want to win and find the best ways to win. Those who find the best ways to win are, by DEFINITION, the experts. I play BfMEII 'casually' and don't really care about winning. I just to play to tech to shiny arrows to see the animation. Are you suggesting that the developers ought to balance the game around my concern?

(5) AI's are pitiful in any game when compared to human intelligence. They may win by brute force but they'll never discover the best strategies to win, so they can't be even remotely as good as competitive players.

(6) Sorry, but you're wrong here. Our objective is to win the game. We do this by finding the best strategies. In finding the best strategies, we discover a handful that are much more powerful than any others. Usually, competitive players find this small handful of strategies boring and would like to let other strategies be viable. When a competitive player is saying something is over- or -underpowered, it's because the diversity of the strategies in the game is too low. So, in fact, we are likely to have a LESS narrow-minded view of the game than others.

(7) Not caring to analyze strategies is the reason you won't be knowledgeable enough to comment with authority on the game balance. If you don't understand the real rules of the game, how can you play it effectively? It's as if you're playing chess and didn't know that queens can move in any direction as many squares as they like. Maybe you thought it was just 2 squares and no one ever told you. How can you comment with any authority on game balance if you don't put the work and effort that competitive players do into finding the rules of the game?

(8) I think you misunderstand here. Especially in this game. The competitive players in this game don't just email Stardock with an itemized list of fixes needed and then get a response saying 'OK it'll be in the next patch'. In most games, developers decide whether or not to balance the game. Competitive players just find the broken things. That's all they ever do in the game. If something is broken or overpowered, they will find it because it assures them of winning. The developer does not have to fix imbalances. They could choose to reimplement 1.03 and leave TEC as being stupidly overpowered if they wanted. But they chose not to.

Are you really trying to make the argument that those who play only single player should be balancing the game?

(9) The game doesn't care how many people bought it. The game will remain just as broken if only 1 person bought it or if 5 Billion people bought it.

(10) That's fine, you don't have to care. You shouldn't waste your time worrying about things which you don't care about. There's already enough to do in daily life. Fortunately competitive gamers will game on, not needing anyone's permission or attention, and find all the imbalances of the game.