My not so perfect but I'd love to try it idea for Weapon / Squad Balancing

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So, (this might be a long post, sorry in advance)

A small amount of history, I’ve done a lot of side work in the gaming space in my time here on earth. Not that that qualifies me for anything, but I’ve seen both sides of the coin. Developer, player. WG was one of my last Gigs, and it was quite fun. So, onto the brass tacks.
I’ve seen many posts that are “Add X because Y exists for the other side” or “Y is too powerful for all of my X soliders to be using”.
You can buff and nerf at leisure , but that is not always the answer in games. You can add more X, but that creates an unsustainable arms race in a game that doesn’t need it.
End of the day, a bullet at level 1 should be and will be as deadly as a bullet at level 29+, given the right situation.
So, what does this mean for balancing this game? Well, I might not know the framework and reporting that is available for the devs, but they should have telemetry on each weapons stat. How many times it is responsible for a kill and assist. How often it is used. How many end up in a match etc.

This data will be important. Because with it , you can assign this item a number.
With that number, you now have a value for the weapon, which brings me to the next step.

Take your Basic Infantry Squad - 9 Troopers, which can be configured in a multitude of ways.
Make each ‘Class’ have a value as well. Now, allow this squad, in its entirety have a balance sheet of points you are allowed to spend on it. If you use say an Assulter, it costs you 10 points, but a Engineer, only 5. So, if you wanted to use more FG42’s or Gw 43’s , you would forgo having an assulter and opt of an engineer as it allows more points for ‘others’.
Its much like some table top games use, or how ‘weighting’ works in other games.

By the Devs using the Average stat of a gun, it will eliminate the outliers whom can either make a gun look good or look bad. It will ignore the fact that I couldn’t buy a Kill with a MAS36 (ironically a gun I have shot) and the fact that I can kill 20/20 with my Mannlicher (A gun I have NEVER shot lol). Because it will see what we do, on average with a gun.
As well, because you will eliminate having ‘doom’ squads of all 1 gun type, it will make those soliders more important, it might slow down gameplay a little, make it more tactical.
And they want some tactical, or at least think they do. Giving us entrenching in Tunisia is cool but it doesn’t matter because of how the game is modelled. With some tweaking that could change.

If all this goes in, then small tweaks to guns instead of sweeping changes will be more meaningful. After all, they tried to solve the problem of Bolt Actions for some reason by giving them ALL cold bore syndrome, which was exactly the wrong thing to do, and was soon corrected.

Is this system perfect? Nope. And I will never claim my ideas will solve the world, cancer, or global warming.
But on the same token, you never know if something is going to work until you try.
One of the biggest changes, that WG changed in one game was ‘weighting’ making it harder for me to end up in a match being 3 tiers above someone else that couldn’t take me on a good day with the sun at their back. It fixed years of constant tweaking to the vehicles, when the vehicles were NOT the problem, how they were being used in MM was. It took a long time to fix that issue, but suddenly, the game was more friendly to new people, and made it so by the time you reached a lot of the veterans grinding, you were one yourself. And, if you ended up faced with veterans, chances are, you had the same amount on your team in turn.

There will never be a perfect balance , because people see balance in different ways on here. With everyone having an opinion, you can hardly please anyone.
But you , as Devs, do need to try thinking outside of the sandbox of sweeping weapon changes, and more into the realm of other possibilities.

Anywho, thanks for reading. I won’t pretend this is the answer. I just hope they try something like it. We can fix this game, we just need to go a little asymmetrical to do so.

/rant

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As a guy who’s been calling for weapon changes, I love this.

Could they implement a matchmaker based on skill, campaign level, or equipment? Sure.

Could they instead balance almost everything on the weight of effectiveness they bring? That’s better, and doesn’t increase queue times.

Like you said, it ain’t perfect, and you plainly know more about what you’re talking about than I will, but I’d happily accept this over what we have now.

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Where you actually employed by them? If so what did they hired you to do, if you don’t mind me asking?

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Thank you Squid.

We used to say in my old squad “Sometimes, we’re dangerously close to being competent”.

It would allow a lot more balance in the playing field.
I was Top Tier where I came from. Sitting on an almost 80% win rate. K/D of 14+ and survival rate of 60%. And I hated every moment of it, because I would be strung into matches of people not my equal, and that WAS not fun for them.

But then it got fixed. And suddenly my games were more meaningful. My Win rate went down and ‘normalized’, my K/D remained the same, and survival fell to a more reasonable 54%. And I enjoyed my matches more. The game was more of a challange. I still got my kills in, but my contribution was matched equally opposite of myself.

That can happen here, we just need to let it.

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Yeah - play to a points total, and everything has points costs - the better it is the more points it costs so the fewer of them you get.

Then you can give things reasonably realistic characteristics and just cost them accordingly - if something seems too cheap or expensive you change the points cost, not the characteristics!

But if some characteristics do get changed for any reason then you can change the points accordingly.

Been playing that system since I was a kid in table-top games.

What is WG??

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Hi Ricky,

I have signed enough NDA’s with them to say that I cannot say.

What I can say, is that I was a little cog in a very big machine. And it was the Player side of me, that helped incite the change.
I helped with Quality of Life, and some aspects that would effect balance. Along with checks and weighting on new items added.

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WG is Wargamming. Given that War Thunder is a direct competitor to them I didn’t want to say the name in full, as I was not sure if it Violates a rule here or not.

But you are correct. It existed in Warhammer for example (another game I was okay at) and it worked for the most part (with some outliers, i.e. Matt Ward incident).

Valuation, and having finite resources will change the dynamic of this game to the core. And perhaps in a good way.
Because lets face it, I love WWII , its history. My Grandfather was a Stug III Commander, so there is some sense of trying to understand him in playing this game.
We can make this better, and maybe just maybe help bring in some new blood to stay.

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Thanks and sorry if I asked about what you did I’m a player in some of WG more specifically world of warships and tanks blitz

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No need to be sorry at all. Only ever be sorry about the questions you don’t ask.

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Nah - only advertising or promoting their games would be a bit rude :slight_smile:

Only game of theirs I ever played was DBA Online - 20 or so years ago!! Great fun - and I can say so because it is defunct now! :smiley:

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I don’t know. This sounds to me like one of those things that look good on paper, but can eventually end up being mis-implemented and creating more harm than good, or abused to impose further bottlenecks.

Like, War Thunder is LITERALLY RULED by statistics, to the point of vehiches’ revenues and costs being periodically tuned even by just 0,0X % and battle ratings swinging back and forth as well, yet that doesn’t prevent absurd situations like subsonic, guns-only 1950’s jets facing supersonic, radar equipped, missile-slinging jets from some 15-20 years later; with the former being even more costly to repair than the latter.

Because A) statistics don’t tell everything about player experience; and B) the devs, even after some 8 years, still fail to see (or refuse to acknowledge) the vicious cycle that arises from balancing by restrictions according to statistics only:

  • X performs very well, stats are above average
  • X gets higher battle rating and/or costs
  • X keeps performing above its supposed average
  • X gets its BR and/or costs furtherly raised
  • X becomes so hard and expensive to play, that average players STOP playing it at all
  • X keeps being played exclusively by expert players who still manage to be proficient with it
  • Said players keep statistics of X above average
  • X gets its BR and/or costs furtherly raised
  • And so on.

The above doom awaits almost any vehicle that’s good but not iconic, while most famous ones from most popular nations keep being played by cats and dogs at all times, which invariably keeps statistics low.

If a similar system was to be applied in Enlisted, with weapons having a “deployment cost”, I fear it could lead to comparably bad scenarios of skewed statistics and game economy enforcing which weapons are viable and which ones are not.

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You don’t use player experience - you use the absolute capability of the equipment only.

Then you can look at what equipment players are favouring and perhaps change hte points cost accordingly.

When I was a kid I played a game where a Tiger 1 cost about 250 points IIRC, a Sherman 75 about 100 - people were happy to take Shermans at that value up against tigers - of course there was other stuff in the army - and because the Shermans were cheap you’d get more AT guns, Tank Destroyers, bazooka’s, air support…

The Tigers might take few casualties and kill many Shermans, but they’d lose the game often as not because they couldn’t be everywhere and do everything at once.

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I get your point, but mine is that I’ve seen in WT the consequences of applying sterile statistics doctrine.

Blatant example, vehicles in some nations having noticeably higher BR and costs than the same vehicles or nearly identical versions in other nations’ trees. Because “Statistics™ say they perform better”. Are the performances of an F-86 Sabre affected by the roundels painted on it? Or rather are statistics affected by different average player performance across different nations?

The caveat is not that “players of X nation are better”, but rather that casual players are more likely to play most popular nations and vehicles, while minor nations tend to attract less newbies and more veteran players who want to try different stuff. Hence the difference in average performances.

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I think the idea in WT is that they look at 10’s of thousands of games and are trying to do is get everythign to a perfect 50/50 level - which is nonsense of course - players look for advantages - perceived or real.

I don’t think “Players of Nation X” are better - if ther is such a statistic then it is probably that Nation X has a better lineup at that BR than Nation Y - so players gravitate towards it - especially those for whom winning is the thing, and so the same tank “appears” to perform better because of that.

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Yes, that is also true in several spots.

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You could be correct, although unlike games like WT and WoT / WoWP / WoWS there are not as many analogs to compare between the two because of the game design / mechanics.

You are definitely correct in assuming a 50/50 split. The flawed idea, before it was changed, was that balance should equal 50/50 insofar as a good player in a bad vehicle will win at least 50% of the time and a bad player in a good vehicle will win at least 50% of the time. It is so fundamentally flawed, and caused a LOT of behind the scenes arguments etc. The only way to Balance skill is to create ‘pools’ and ‘ranks’ and that is not always the best solution to a game as it makes for a lot of segregation. So you create an aggregate number that helps define skill and couple that with a vehicle weighted value and let MM try and pool two teams together. Its complicated, takes a long time to get right, but it can work.

Now, with Enlisted, it is a bit easier to pull off for a few reasons (assigning values to weapons etc).
First, the nations are separated, so you don’t have to worry about the weapon being on both sides in one conflict. You can get telemetry from it being used in an offensive role vs defensive role and help get an idea of its strengths and weaknesses.
As well, because you have said value, say you take that squad of 9 Troopers and outfit them. Well, given the FG42’s value (I am picking on this gun because it comes in one of every 2 balance posts lol) , you at most say can assign it to 2 of the 9 people in your squad, and because unlike vehicle based balancing , a single bullet can ruin your day (there is no pool of hitpoints like in vehicle based games that you have to work though), this helps mitigate the power of the weapon. And force the rest of your squad to say use the Kar98K. Because lets face it, we don’t see ANY calls to nerf that particular Rifle.

Suddenly now, do squads start looking closer to how they actually were. With lots of troops equipped with standard issue rifles and fewer with all these specialty weapons that we right now see.
And then we can start having fun with classes that seem like one trick ponies. Take the radio operator. Perhaps we have 3 different radios, worth 3 different amounts of points. One allows for a Wider Circle of Doom, but longer recharge between bombardments. Another allows for a cluster (fire for effect scenario) and the last allows for standard and Smoke. You can start making really cool adjustments and options to classes to keep it lively. And perhaps as well help promote using soliders for their cool abilities that I think get overlooked. My one infantry squad in Normandy, all have the Mannlicher M1895 4 star I think coupled with 12% faster rate of fire with Bolt actions. They can almost mow them down like troopers with submachine guns. You can really have some fun with skills at this point.

This can also tie into the current state of weapon and troop procurement.
Say you now have values for troops. Make that value their ‘purchase price’ in bronze orders. That way it allows F2P people (our lifeblood in this game) to not have to worry about silver orders to advance like premium players. They can accumulate at potentially a better rate, and choose weapons that are meaningful to them. And, because weapons that are higher powered are a bit more rare, even if newer players face veterans, the gap will not be as wide and they can contribute better (IMO).

Now, I also don’t just rely on statistics. One thing that helped WG when they were stuck in a rut was actual people (myself included) doing Quality of Life tests / passes on changes, upcoming content, balance adjustments etc. The human element can never be discounted in helping develop and make a game enjoyable.

Combine both, and you can make a game thrive. Deny both, and it will suffer in one way or another. The developer will decide how long really. It took WG quite some time (over a year) but they got their heads out of the sand and saw the light, and then it was good. No idea now on the states of all the games, as I have been disconnected for a bit, but at the time I was leaving , it was in a good place.

Thank you for the constructive feedback.

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Seems a little bit like reinventing the wheel to me.
Squad layouts and weapon limits are already tools the devs have access to, and they can be refined further to this point.

To the same effect, the devs could:

  • enforce stricter limits as to what classes can use each weapon, for example only let rifleman II use the FG-42

  • rebuild squad layouts to accommodate the previous change. For example let players unlock a rifleman II slot in the rifleman I squad.

I do generally like the idea of giving a rating to each soldier though.
Dust 514 had a similar rating system, but the rating was used for calculating rewards- in the case of Enlisted, killing a soldier with a high rating would mean more points.

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It can sound that way, perhaps it is, but it beats them doing sweeping weapon balance changes.

The issue with limiting to a class instead of ‘weighting’ the item, is you delay the problem, not prevent it.
By restricting to Rifleman II, you may make it take a bit longer to do it, but then suddenly I have squads, all Rifleman II with FG 42 II, and we are right back in the same problem.

And actually I like your idea of points distribution , because that would help reward players whom manage to take down ‘better’ troops. Thank you.

*** Edit - Now if you restrict the amount of said Class II or Class III solider to a squad, it accomplishes the same goal, just makes the said ‘number’ an internal one that players cannot see. But perhaps accomplishes the same level of balance (potentially).

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Only if the devs make squad layouts that are full of riflemen II

Pretty much yeah

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The definitely need to do something because the weapon changes they have made are not cutting it anymore.

Hoping they read and at least maybe take some ideas from what I wrote to help make this game better.

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