Chill Daz, new players are a priority we need the population.

We can play armchair balancers when theres 1-2k concurrent.

please dont pretend you have been participating in last 2 years

k thx bye

To not be completely negative, new players are a priority, and I know work has been done on the NPE and the mission system, good stuff (I assume, I haven't tried them), hopefully gamma revamp will address some of the serious problems with that system (although I dunno how much that will be for the newbies).

But, "yeah we're working on paint jobs for bots but not any balancing since we see that as low priority "(for two years + so far) and "hey we had these cool bots we wanted to add but couldn't because we couldn't figure out a way to balance them, well GOOD NEWS!! problem solved, we just won't bother balancing them at all, randomly generated pink bots are teh future!!!!!" are pretty depressing things to hear for me at least (I'm sure plenty feel differently).

Dazamin: you're seeing this too much black&white I think. Obviously hybrid robots will need some balancing too, like not letting people put together heavy mech legs with light robot chassis, but the random system would let us not worry about nerfing each and every possible combination on its own.

And low priority for balancing doesn't mean that we won't change stuff if there are any glaring imbalances, what I meant is that we currently wouldn't want to make any in-depth balancing changes since that usually generates a butterfly effect, possibly making things worse than before. Balancing is a delicate issue and any change needs to be checked from different angles, but I'm sure you know that.

* Except Armored teleport beacons.

The game is more balanced now then it ever was.

All 3 colors are equally viable, followbot spamming was negated, beacon blueballing was negated, there's no more glaring stupidities like troiar mk2 tackler (a small part exists in the castel mk2, but nowhere near as ridiculous as the old troiar).

And more importantly people are having fun in PVP, there's more and more fights going on the market is growing great...

No reason why not to focus on more quality-of-life improvements for the new players (and vets maybe too, corp production comes to mind!).

Daz look at it from another perspective,

After 4 years we've finally got their thickheaded skulls to accept they're not the smartest thing in this game and start testing stuff on the test server & taking player feedback in a public form, not via skype. Stuff is being publically tested, publically discussed, and the attitude of "we definitely know better then you" is gone.

Look at the Gamma testing, that's our community's biggest win and perp's biggest gain.

It's more important that we continue emphasizing how important player testing & feedback is, backed up by facts of how many times they didn't listen and screwed something up - not out of malicious intent, but as a reminder of when things started going better for this game.

If we work to create this culture of dev-player interaction working towards a common goal of a good game, then singular balancing questions will automatically be solved on the test server far more competently then what they would come up with on their own by theorycrafting while doing hookers & blow.

It's nice to see you reply to this topic.

I can't help but think that the glaring imbalances would be easier to avoid, in the first place, if equations like X^(number of tunnings) or Y^(extension level) were not used.

Also it would be nice to hear from the devs what pvp is intended to look like in this game.
How much should be down to chance or EP or skill or numbers?
How active should support roles such as remote repair be?
Should fast tackle also be tanky?
Should retreat ever be a practical option after a fight starts?
Should ewar form the bulk of an effective force?
Should ewar have a counter other than more ewar?
Should certain bots require a hard counter (bring A or automatically lose to B)?
What role should relatively new accounts have in pvp?
How much space should one faction hold with ease?
How safe should pve activities in pvp zones be?
How expensive (in man hours) should a top of the line pvp bot be?
Should roaming be a viable option for finding fights?
Are sap defenders expected to sit there for the whole hour?

These questions don't really have a right or wrong answer but it's difficult to even discuss balance when we don't know what the goals are.

I am not asking for a specific answer to each of those here and now but some idea of the way things should be would be great.

And like other have said, please try to balance with small changes first
Have you ever looked at the patch notes for blizzard's multiplayer games or eve?