Gaijin has always bent over backwards to equalize the lowest denominator, common or not. Most base bombers in air RB and bot scripters in sim for example are just module grinding for ground RB. Ever since ground got added air has been a mess in terms of mechanics and balance.
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It may be old but time and time again Gaijin’s actions show that they in fact don’t play their game very often or at all and just look at excel sheets of K/D, WR and SL/RP gain of the vehicle
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I’ll just quote myself from a couple of posts back…
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What would you suggest? That they constantly play every vehicle of the game for hundreds of battles in all game modes themselves, to determine if all vehicles across the board are balanced?
You really don’t see how that is an absolutely ridiculous proposal?
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Even then, my statement applies. The top 1000 M24 players would all have insane KDs and 95%+ winrates. The same applies to a lot of low tier stuff, especially in arcade.
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And that exactly shows that in this example, in capable hands the M24 wreaks havoc and makes it overpowered, and it should be balanced. ie. moved up in BR.
Yeah fair, and probably easier for Gaijin to implement than my idea. Though this also lowers the sample size per vehicle, and might still be affected by the individual skill level of the top % players.
Still, it’s better than what we have now
I know, it just makes for a much easier example with simple single % values rather than a combined sum of multiple values, over certain periods of time that Gaijin have already vaguely confirmed they use.
Of course winrates generally suck for vehicle balancing, being the one main stat that doesn’t actually depend on the individual vehicle, but also the team or lineups, but it’s also irrelevant for my idea what value you use. Basically it goes something like this:
Example
With the current system, desired value (D) must be equal to or within a certain margin of tolerance to 50%. For that the players vehicle value (V) is taken and divided by the desired value (D). So if a player has 70% value on a vehicle the calculation simply goes:
V / D → 70 / 50 → 1.4
The resulting value of 1.4 shows the vehicle overperforming by 40%. For this is is absolutely irrelevant that the specific player here has an average value (A) of 80%, meaning in this specific vehicle he is underperforming, even if statistics show the exact opposite. However to filter out player skill is quite simple, by using individual player average (A) in place of a global desired average (D):
V / A → 70 / 80 → 0.875
This then clearly shows the vehicle is underperforming by 12.5% relative to the player skill, and allows the vehicle to be objectively balanced. This can then be applied to players of any skill level equally, and will still give vehicles more objective rating.
The only issue I can think of is that it doesn’t account for differing skill floors and ceilings on vehicles, but that seems like the lesser evil compared to “If played by good players → moved up”, at least in my own opinion.
Now, for a realistic implementation, all of these values would be split up into different subcategories or earnings, kills, assists and/or whatever other values Gaijin use, and also generally being taken only in from a certain recent timeframe, perhaps the last month or two, to reflect only the current game, but none of those things are relevant to the example at all.
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Ridiculous proposal to make the devs play their own game? No one is saying to play hundreds of battles on a single vehicle (even though that’s what play testers should do), but you don’t need massive sample size to actually understand the game especially when you are the dev and you don’t have to grind anything. FYI Gaijin is bigger than 10 people and they do a lot of outsourcing often so they have or would have enough man power if they wanted to.
Imagine if any other company didn’t even launch their game before and after shipping it
Screw it, i think Gaijin should return to the form and balance vehicles solely on the basis of their SL/RP gain
Actually, win rates in Arcade (where all vehicles can face all vehicles, so there is no possible nation imbalance) is the perfect example, why including win rates in BR calculations is a completely stupid idea.
My stats in Ground Arcade, using exactly the same M44:
According to win rate logic, German M44 should go up from 4.0 to 4.7 (it’s massively “overperforming” with 77% win rate), French should go up to 4.3, American and Japanese should stay at 4.0, British should go down to 3.7 and Italian to 3.3 (it’s clearly “underperforming” with only 40% win rate).
I use one vehicle lineups, so I only used M44 in these battles (with eventual backup, when I die). These win rates are not affected by any other vehicle I used, these are pure M44 performance stats.
It’s actually pretty funny that some people read things like who is a good player, or which vehicle is better by looking at win rates. Win rates are almost completely random and luck based in 16v16 players battles. That’s exactly why the devs don’t take them into consideration.
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Obviously devs dont have to grind vehicles. And im well aware that their company size exceeds 10 employees. But to have a meaningful sample size they’d have to play more than a couple of games, per vehicle, per gamemode, constantly. Because after balance changes, they need to re-evaluate EVERY vehicle affected by BR changes (vehicles now facing the newly moved vehicles etc), not just the ones that have had their BRs changed.
Personally i don’t consider your example to have a sufficient sample size per M44 to have a conclusive outcome.
But that’s beside the point, like i stated later on, i used WR % as a broad example (which has been largely ignored, oh well, my fault for cutting corners in the initial post), and later reiterated that more statistics should be take into consideration for a more precise evaluation of performance.
Of course vehicle duplicates in different nations should have the same BR anyways.
You are extremely overestimating sample size and time needed, and it’s not like we are getting BR changes every week or two, it takes Gaijin several months (sometimes much much longer) to just look and excel sheets and change BRs of obviously broken vehicles, which would take much less time if someone at Gaijin actually launched their own game once in a blue moon
What determines an “obviously broken vehicle”? Community complains? Are we going to take into consideration feedback from people who don’t have it or play it, but struggle against it? “My friend has it and says it’s op” isn’t valid feedback, get that friend to voice their opinion then.
What about the people who have it and say it’s not OP? Are we not listening to them?
Are we assuming that all of the devs are actually good at the game? If they are dogpoop at the game, is their poor performance in an “broken vehicle” valid?
Edit: Family friendly cleaning
But this example shows that you can’t trust such stats. They depend from so many different factors, it’s impossible to control them.
This is why the devs decided to use efficiency (which is based on the economy, it’s actually action SL/RP per battle/spawn).
This is also the only sensible way to balance different type of vehicles. Because you can say to use for example K:D to balance vehicles. But then how will you balance e.g. bombers? They need something that can be compared between different vehicle types, and that’s why they use efficiency.
Is efficiency a perfect solution? Of course it’s not, there are definitely issues with it. But there is no perfect solution.
Manual balancing is out of question, especially vehicles can perform differently in hands of different players. There are vehicles my friend loves and he can do wonder with them, but I can’t play them well and vice versa. Even on the forum you can see some good players arguing should some vehicle go up or down. They have opposite opinions, because their playstyle is completely different (even if they are good and experienced players).
Doing community votes about BR changes is a laughable idea - most players don’t play all vehicles, but they love to talk about balancing (this Pz.IV can kill my poor and totally underpowered KV-1! I must vote to move KV-1 down and Pz.IV up, obviously).
I’m not saying that I completely agree with how the devs balance vehicles (I often disagree with some specific vehicles going up/down in BR). I’m just saying that I understand why they do what they do.
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Lmao i think we’re arguing about nothing here mate.
I never meant that only WR% should be used to balance, i clarified that later on.
I also don’t argue about which statistics are used for balancing.
I was simply saying that instead of using ALL players in a certain vehicle to balance it. They should use the X% of top performers in Y vehicle to balance THAT vehicle only.
Then use that method across the board, per vehicle basis.
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Imagine combining the graphs and actual experience of team (not a 1 person) dedicated solely to balancing which they would discuss after combining all the factors, i think it would be overall net positive to the game, no?
Obviously broken vehicles? IDK maybe something like German KV-1B or T-55AM1/Fuji stomping and ruining every match in downtier.
Not saying they should only balance this way but it should be another factor taken into consideration
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Your examples come from personal experience? I have noticed little to no trouble dealing with those vehicles myself.
See how that is instantly skewed because of different experiences?
Im not saying that im against it, just that it’s not as easily achieved as people generally think.
We have some agreement in the overlap here, but further it feels like we’re gonna just continue going in circles with this argument, so im not gonna discuss this further. But i do appreciate your point of view.
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Same, have a good day/night
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This was already explained by Ion_Protogen. It won’t work if you use e.g. top 1000, because there are players who play for stats and also some vehicles are much more popular than other vehicles. I can even see some vehicles that won’t be played by 1000 players in specific period of time.
If you take specific % of players, you again deal with the fact that some players play for stats. And the BR of some specific vehicles that are barely used could be decided by literally just a few players. At the same time, the % sample of very popular vehicles will still give you data from way too many players. This data can’t be accurately compared to data from unpopular vehicles. Imagine taking e.g. top 5% data from 200000 players that played a very popular vehicle and 1000 players that played unpopular vehicle in specific time period and then balance both vehicles based on the efficiency result.
This will only create chaos, especially with unpopular vehicles BRs that will be decided by a very small number of players. That’s why the devs take whole the sample (from 200000 players and 1000 players), which is still problematic, but not as much as mentioned 5% of top players (that will give crazy efficiency results with unpopular vehicles).
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