16 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

That's a weird thing to say. Does TLT not improve Y-Wings because it's better on the Scurrg? Can FCS not improve the performance of B-Wings because Corran Horn gets more mileage from it? Lightweight Frame is amazing on the Special Forces TIE - does that mean it can't also be used to buff the Striker, Bomber or Punisher?

Of course not. The only upgrade card that can be considered buffs to specific ships only are titles.

Trajectory Simulator - if it does what we think it does - it going to be a very effective new tool, and the only way you'll currently be able to use it in the Imperial faction will be on a Punisher. Meaning the Punisher will have a unique and potentially very useful role. I'd definitely consider that to be a buff.

OK, I'll agree @FTS Gecko, that it could actually buff the ship in a vacuum, and assist if you want to run Imp bombers in a mission like @heychadwick's Punisher Mission; but in 100/6, this doesn't allow the Punisher to gain ground on the much better choices when looking for a list in which to competitively fly that uses bomb ordinance. It simply doesn't. What the Punisher gains from this, Nym (of either faction) can use it better. So yep, I agree, and yep, I don't agree.

I'm a mess of a guy like that, just ask my wife, haha!

21 minutes ago, SabineKey said:

What do you think, a general fix by way of title or mod, then some Imp only tricks to make up for the missing Illicit slot?

Honestly there's a plethora of ways to buff the firespray.

At the moment I think this might be the best option:

Generic Title - Firespray Only

Add a crew slot and illicit slot to your upgrade bar. You may equip another title.

Cost: -2

Makes them cheaper or gives you a free or discounted 2nd crew. I would love adding a tail gunner or tactician for free myself.

28 minutes ago, clanofwolves said:

OK, I'll agree @FTS Gecko, that it could actually buff the ship in a vacuum, and assist if you want to run Imp bombers in a mission like @heychadwick's Punisher Mission; but in 100/6, this doesn't allow the Punisher to gain ground on the much better choices when looking for a list in which to competitively fly that uses bomb ordinance. It simply doesn't. What the Punisher gains from this, Nym (of either faction) can use it better. So yep, I agree, and yep, I don't agree.

I'm a mess of a guy like that, just ask my wife, haha!

I don't think Tie Punishers are that bad. I know a local that can regularly beat tournament lists with 2 Tie Punishers in it. They may not be the cutting edge of meta, but it doesn't mean they are bad. I mean, how many people actually TRY to play the Punishers these days, with all the new toys?

Also, it's hard to say that Nym does something better than a Punisher....when you can't even take Nym for Imperials. I mean, the rest of the list does kind of matter, too...

The FFG employees have just a hint of defeatism in their voice... discussing solutions for how to better balance the game... seems like the No 1 reasoning is that they must test the game against a meta that doesn't exist! I get the impression that Xwing is a victim of it's own success, after 5 years of pumping out ships and cards they have reached the point of critical mass where its hard to balance this system that has a giant player base that includes some very intelligent characters and many many interactions of card combinations. Add to that a 'power creep' where standards have slowly crept up in the dials and the upgrades.

Makes me wonder just how much will there is in the community that if a company like FFG figured out how to ask the players for money that would go directly towards design, to do things like hire more and better playtesters and pay for more of designers time. As the whole industry grows and changes, and you can even see a system like GW responding to pressure... and comparing xwing to it's special cousin Star trek Attack wing (neglected in large part to balance issues)... i have hopes that the free market eventually solve this problem. But hey, it's possible that the casual side of the game actually has more purchasing muscle and in the end it's more lucrative to just pump out pretty ships with pretty cards in fancy plastic packagin... I certainly will keep buying them until something better comes my way...

18 hours ago, Stay On The Leader said:

There are a couple of things on the menu that are actually quite nice. So long as I'm careful to choose dining companions who aren't going to eat the sort of things that are so bad it will put me off my food then it's ok.

I gave some thought to your reply and your analogy is pretty good. I would think that if you're going to continue to frequent that establishment, you'd want to talk up the meals that are "quite nice" and refrain from bad mouthing the other meals, the restaurant and chef.

On ‎10‎/‎18‎/‎2017 at 8:00 PM, Kdubb said:

In short- they would rather design around their errors and give us a poorer product than attack those errors directly.

C-ROC blue line.

19 hours ago, ImperialPropaganda said:

The game is still fun, but for the moment I drifted towards Epic/HOTAC and other games.

And why is that bad? 100/6 is not the only form of the game.

1 hour ago, Darth Meanie said:

And why is that bad? 100/6 is not the only form of the game.

Attendance, mainly.

Most people I know are into the WWI dogfighting part, and Epic can become a little confusing with squadrons facing each other, missile carriers, etc

On the other hand, most people also love flying multiple ships, so HotAC can be a little underwhelming (while I love co-op play).

The trouble with HotAC in particular is that it's much more difficult to get pickup games. If you're playing in a multi-week campaign at the FLGS, I can't easily just come along and play one of you, because either I can't easily join your campaign halfway through, or I stop one of you playing it.

Ongoing campaigns are inherently exclusionary - which is fine, but it makes them much more difficult to play publicly.

Well, it took me two sessions to get through it as I had to turn it off after talk of Whisper... it was ALL down hill from there. I gleaned exactly 0 nuggets of hope. 0.

I have less hope than ever that this game will return to somthing resembling the game I started playing in wave 1 and 2.

The Funboat article today couldn’t even inspire. The empire finally gets slam! Just in time for it to be nerfed (admittedly it will be better at it post nerf).

Thank you S&V for hosting. Thank You Devs for showing but... wow... You guys need someone to light a fire under you.

The best selling minis game out there with maybe the most exciting intellectual property rights AND a company that used to be known for fan support deserves so much better than “our job is hard”, “math is hard, especially when we ignore it”, and “we know there are massive problems but STAR WARS”...

The amazing @Ablazoned transcribed the entire interview here! Experience the joy, the wonder, the excitement all over again!

Someone should help with the citations there, but good to get the interview transcribed!

1 hour ago, sozin said:

The amazing @Ablazoned transcribed the entire interview here! Experience the joy, the wonder, the excitement all over again!

I do love me some corporate speak that deals exclusively in platitudes.

Jokes aside, I found the transcript much better than the interview (as well conducted and presented as it was). The interview was just really difficult to listen to and I had to stop it several times in frustration.

Job well done.

Thanks for the transcript. There's three things I pick up on:

1) I pretty much agree about not using mathematical analysis in costing, I think that would just get in the way. It's much better retrospectively and I think of limited use predictively.

2) They really hurl themselves under the bus a bunch of times with comments they seem to make offhand (like the burying TIE Fighters comment, and the X-Wings have always been bad so **** them). That shows a remarkable schism in how they create product vs how their customers consume it. Overall they said a bunch of quite sensible stuff, but people have been tilted on the worst bits... which were definitely pretty bad.

3) their 'if we knew people were going to play 2 ship builds we would have made Kylo cost more' comment is just TERRIFYING. Firstly you have to cost a card appropriate for all time, and you have to expect 2 ship builds to wax as well as wane, so they were gonna be big at some point. Secondly Kylo is a great control on the dominance of 2-ship builds so if you expect them rising up you should cost him lower not higher - you try and slow the runaway train down, not get out if it's way! "If we knew people were going to play turrets we'd have made Autothrusters cost 5".

Seriously. Most of it was pretty innocuous, but there are a few really, really concerning comments that seem to be pretty offhand in nature, and display a worrying level of... wrongheadedness... about game design, or indeed logic in general.

In particular 'x is bad already because of a, so adding some b that makes x worse can't hurt'. Yes, it can. As and when a wanes in the meta, x has a chance to come back. But if b is out there still suppressing x, x can't come back. So if a and b are usable on different archetypes, x is probably screwed for good, rather than just for now.

It's just painful to listen to.

9 hours ago, Stay On The Leader said:

1) I pretty much agree about not using mathematical analysis in costing, I think that would just get in the way. It's much better retrospectively and I think of limited use predictively.

Historically the opposite has been true, math has had better predictive power of game balance than the designers' intentions. There's a very long list of pilots / mechanics (especially when I was evaluating most everything during waves 3-7) that this was true for either pre-release, or very shortly after once I ran the numbers:

• TIE Fighters being better than anything else in wave 1 by a wide margin (post-release but I was the first to actually "prove" it)
• B-wings vs X-wings (also technically post-release, but I was ahead of the meta by about a year here)
• Original Defenders (nailed this even before the dial was spoiled, much to the hostile reaction of several playtesters)
• Autothrusters (hello 35 Fel)
• Palpatine (technically post-release, but did the math after one game with him, and demonstrated how bonkers he was with 35 Fel)
• TLT
• x7 Defenders (related: I created/popularized Commonwealth Defenders right after the preview article.)
• Inquisitor (it turns out that jousting efficiency > 110% is really good at PS8 with reposition, go figure)
• Parattanni (was late running the numbers on Attanni anything, but when I did it demonstrated that it was the best jousting list in the history of the game).
• ... and more that I can't think off of the top of my head.

Having worked on Community Mod for a couple months now on and off, I believe I am the only person who has rebalanced (or designed) X-wing using a comprehensive mathematical analysis as fundamental to the design. So, I have a unique perspective which has yielded several conclusions:

1. You need to really get the high level theory down before you can even think about getting useful results from any sort of mathematical implementation. There's a lot of components in here, like: deriving what the fundamental power:cost curve looks like (and why); quantifying the general-case for how PS and the glass cannon/tank ratio specifically affects the raw efficiency numbers; how firing duty cycles, efficiency, and 'break even points' are all related; what efficiency numbers should be ideal for any given archetype and why. There's enough content in here that's worth writing an academic journal article, which in theory (no pun intended) I would like to publish someday. If you can't get past this point as a designer, then math might be useful, but frankly you really don't know how to use it. Just knowing how probability works, but without understanding all of the above would be like a carpenter having a hammer and banging some 2x4's together, without having a blueprint of the house that he's building. You'll get something, but don't be shocked if it doesn't do what you wanted.
2. A proper and thorough implementation of the above theory is also not trivial, but of a different kind of not trivial. Think more code-monkey elbow-grease kind of not trivial. For context, I have >10k lines of MATLAB code.
3. The mathematical implementation (i.e. matlab scripts) has to assume some trigger rates for every ability that you're evaluating. How often does x7 trigger? If you're taking Backstabber, then how often does his ability trigger? There's a very long list. You can't just pick numbers out of thin air and expect it to be right -- you need analytical playtesting to see what the trigger rates are. The best you can do is set up a framework to evaluate everything, and then get some data analytics from real-world testing to see what your mathematical coefficients should be to best reflect reality.
4. Everytime there is a new mechanic introduced, you need to think about it very carefully to see how it can be modelled mathematically, and with what degree of certainty. Usually after some analytical playtesting, you can get a pretty good approximation of "ability X" that reflects reality.

After their responses to my question of "what if there were an equation that could help balance the game", I wasn't going to turn around and offer a literal graduate level course lecture on how they actually could execute such an approach. We were already poking at them enough, and the point of the interview was to get them to share their insights. Plus I don't think it would really matter unless they would be willing to listen - in general they seem to be very confident about what can and cannot be done mathematically, despite the fact that they "don't know what they don't know" when it comes to mathematical analysis. Frank's response that (paraphrasing) "there isn't an approach that simultaneously works for jousters, arc dodgers, and turrets" was a little suprising, considering that a) he has an engineering background, and b) he has to know that I have pioneered that field. I liked Alex's response much better, pointing out that math is good for evaluating existing mechanics that are well understood. However, I am much more optimistic that it is possible to understand a new mechanic and its implications before you are done playtesting, especially if you have the right tools that can realistically model the mechanic.

@MajorJuggler

First of all the stuff you contribute to the community is awesome. Always a helpful perspective.

My reaction to the interview was basically this.....these guys are drastically underpaid and understaffed.

Their departments budget is no where near the level that would be required for them to even spend 5 days a week working on just X-Wing.

Driving X-Wing stats/point cost via machine learning is 100% possible and absolutely something I imagine could be done with some $s.

The question is.....would it be significantly better than just running their ENTIRE testing cycle through a program like Vassal with a much wider audience of testers?

It took all of 24 hrs for Genius/Nym to spread like the Borg on Vassal. The same thing is happening right now with the Gunboat, the "exploit" builds will be discovered in a matter of days, probably overnight to be honest.

15 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

Historically the opposite has been true, math has had better predictive power of game balance than the designers' intentions. There's a very long list of pilots / mechanics (especially when I was evaluating most everything during waves 3-7) that this was true for either pre-release, or very shortly after once I ran the numbers:

It was a bit disappointing to hear their brush-off response, and it was another discouraging aspect to the interview. IE, I'd have felt to hear them admit that they don't have the staffing or money behind it (sort of as they did when Lyle asked about machine learning). Ironically, I felt like they'd done that in the past, but maybe they are being directed in some respect in their responses even if they were more open about other aspects. I don't know.

One question is that your calculations have the advantage of knowledge of a current meta (in some cases after the fact), correct? How much of a difference does this make? I have little doubt your math would still be better than what they are doing but how much additional error do you think you'd see if you were having to predict as far out in advance?

1 hour ago, AlexW said:

One question is that your calculations have the advantage of knowledge of a current meta (in some cases after the fact), correct? How much of a difference does this make? I have little doubt your math would still be better than what they are doing but how much additional error do you think you'd see if you were having to predict as far out in advance?

A change in the meta, say between high AGI targets and low AGI targets, or a change between high firepower ships and low firepower ships, will generally move a ship's efficiency by a few percentage points, which is noticable, but not enough to dramatically affect a ship's overall viability. Looking under the hood, what the different meta assumptions are actually doing in my scripts, is changing each ship's average action economy, expected durability, and expected damage output. This is not the same thing as hard counters, like PS10 Bombs, or PS8 Miranda action bombs, either of which murder low hit point PS9 aces.

Nerd sidenote: solving the the action economy coefficients everytime I change the meta assumptions (or generating a new meta testbed) is a high-order multi-dimensional problem (i.e. there's a variable for every possible attack/defense permutation). The probability of spending focus when attacking is essentially unchanged regardless of meta, but the probability of spending a focus on defense is very much a function of what's shooting at you. This in turn affects how likely you are to have focus on offense, which in turn affects how often everyone else has to spend their focus on defense, and this cycle keeps repeating. So solving this set of equations is an iterative problem until all the action coefficiencts settle out at a final result. So, in my scripts I literally have a step labelled "calculating hyperspace convergence".

Edit: Maybe this would have made for an even better Star-Wars-ey sounding question:

"Are you aware of how calculating hyperspace convergence can affect game design?"

5 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

A change in the meta, say between high AGI targets and low AGI targets, or a change between high firepower ships and low firepower ships, will generally move a ship's efficiency by a few percentage points, which is noticable, but not enough to dramatically affect a ship's overall viability. Looking under the hood, what the different meta assumptions are actually doing in my scripts, is changing each ship's average action economy, expected durability, and expected damage output. This is not the same thing as hard counters, like PS10 Bombs, or PS8 Miranda action bombs, either of which murder low hit point PS9 aces.

Nerd sidenote: solving the the action economy coefficients everytime I change the meta assumptions (or generating a new meta testbed) is a high-order multi-dimensional problem (i.e. there's a variable for every possible attack/defense permutation). The probability of spending focus when attacking is essentially unchanged regardless of meta, but it is very much a function of what's shooting at you. This in turn affects how likely you are to have focus on both offense, which in turn affects how often everyone else has to spend their focus, and this cycle keeps repeating. So solving this set of equations is an iterative problem until all the variables settle out at a final result. So, in my scripts I literally have a step labelled "calculating hyperspace convergence".

Fair enough and that's kind of what I thought. What do you find are the hardest things to predict? Cards like Palp, bombs, combinations like Dengaroo?

1 hour ago, MajorJuggler said:

Having worked on Community Mod for a couple months now on and off, I believe I am the only person who has rebalanced (or designed) X-wing using a comprehensive mathematical analysis as fundamental to the design. So, I have a unique perspective which has yielded several conclusions:

1. You need to really get the high level theory down before you can even think about getting useful results from any sort of mathematical implementation. There's a lot of components in here, like: deriving what the fundamental power:cost curve looks like (and why); quantifying the general-case for how PS and the glass cannon/tank ratio specifically affects the raw efficiency numbers; how firing duty cycles, efficiency, and 'break even points' are all related; what efficiency numbers should be ideal for any given archetype and why. There's enough content in here that's worth writing an academic journal article, which in theory (no pun intended) I would like to publish someday. If you can't get past this point as a designer, then math might be useful, but frankly you really don't know how to use it. Just knowing how probability works, but without understanding all of the above would be like a carpenter having a hammer and banging some 2x4's together, without having a blueprint of the house that he's building. You'll get something, but don't be shocked if it doesn't do what you wanted.
2. A proper and thorough implementation of the above theory is also not trivial, but of a different kind of not trivial. Think more code-monkey elbow-grease kind of not trivial. For context, I have >10k lines of MATLAB code.
3. The mathematical implementation (i.e. matlab scripts) has to assume some trigger rates for every ability that you're evaluating. How often does x7 trigger? If you're taking Backstabber, then how often does his ability trigger? There's a very long list. You can't just pick numbers out of thin air and expect it to be right -- you need analytical playtesting to see what the trigger rates are. The best you can do is set up a framework to evaluate everything, and then get some data analytics from real-world testing to see what your mathematical coefficients should be to best reflect reality.
4. Everytime there is a new mechanic introduced, you need to think about it very carefully to see how it can be modelled mathematically, and with what degree of certainty. Usually after some analytical playtesting, you can get a pretty good approximation of "ability X" that reflects reality.

After their responses to my question of "what if there were an equation that could help balance the game", I wasn't going to turn around and offer a literal graduate level course lecture on how they actually could execute such an approach.

47 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

Nerd sidenote: solving the the action economy coefficients everytime I change the meta assumptions (or generating a new meta testbed) is a high-order multi-dimensional problem (i.e. there's a variable for every possible attack/defense permutation). The probability of spending focus when attacking is essentially unchanged regardless of meta, but the probability of spending a focus on defense is very much a function of what's shooting at you. This in turn affects how likely you are to have focus on offense, which in turn affects how often everyone else has to spend their focus on defense, and this cycle keeps repeating. So solving this set of equations is an iterative problem until all the action coefficiencts settle out at a final result. So, in my scripts I literally have a step labelled "calculating hyperspace convergence".

So, I mean, how many game companies actually have a PhD mathematician working on game balance for them??

It seems a bit unfair to bash 3 guys for not being able to use graduate level math to design a plastic and paper game. Unless we all want to given them 4 years off from XWM to go back to school.

Or you are willing to work for a pittance as a game designer.

I think what all 4 of you have done is great. It's just too bad the real world issue of game biz finances is likely to prevent a union of those two sets.

And I agree with @Boom Owl. I strongly suspect they all feel like butter spread over too much toast.

1 hour ago, AlexW said:

Fair enough and that's kind of what I thought. What do you find are the hardest things to predict? Cards like Palp, bombs, combinations like Dengaroo?

In short yes. Identifying combinations is a very different problem than quantifying them. Sometimes after doing analysis some things become obvious, like Commonwealth Defenders, but other times you either need Jeff Berling or deep machine learning to find the Dengaroo style interactions.

Bombs are actually pretty straightforward, although I haven't yet sat down to rigorously go through them yet. But you know that Cluster Mines + sabine autodamage on a 3 hit point 35 point ship is going to be worth a lot. Most of properly quantifying bombs goes back to step 3 above, i.e. by analytical playtesting find out how often the bombs are actually going off and hitting their targets. Then it's much easier to go back and calculate what they are actually "worth" in squad points.

But the maths will tend towards helping you maintain a status quo of power level, while the job of game designers is the opposite of that.

A properly creative and varied game environment should desire to be unsolveable because the permutations and variations are too fluid.

28 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

So, I mean, how many game companies actually have a PhD mathematician working on game balance for them??

It seems a bit unfair to bash 3 guys for not being able to use graduate level math to design a plastic and paper game. Unless we all want to given them 4 years off from XWM to go back to school.

Right, this is exactly why I wasn't going to push the point during the interview. I could have corrected Frank's response during the interview, but it wasn't worth getting into. FYI, Jay Little has said essentially the same thing in a back and forth online Q&A I had with him a few months ago. I think both Frank Brooks and Jay Little fall into the trap of thinking that since they are really good at game architecture and content development (which they are!), that they are also the most experienced/knowledgable people in the discussion with regards to technical balance, just by virtue of being employed in the games industry and having experience in the industry. Unfortunately this leads to all the kinds of design issues that I mentioned offhand a few posts earlier.

10 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

But the maths will tend towards helping you maintain a status quo of power level, while the job of game designers is the opposite of that.

A properly creative and varied game environment should desire to be unsolveable because the permutations and variations are too fluid.

Math is just a tool. It doesn't "do" anything, it's just a reflection of reality, or more specifically, what reality will be after you release your new content. So if you want to mix things up in the future, or to create perpetual (but controlled) power creep, then you can use math to accomplish those goals too.

Edit: every complex system still has a steady state solution. I.e. the meta settles out. There's no such thing as an "unsolvable" system, the community itself works it all out pretty quickly after product gets tested at tournaments anyway.

One element that's surprising in all of this is a realization of just how shoestring-y the budget for x-wing development seems, at least in terms of the game mechanics. X-wing must have been an immensely profitable product so far, given how successful it's been in the stores. My impression is that X-wing doesn't get a heavier touch in terms of game development compared to much less popular games - that's just a feeling, though. In any case, it doesn't seem like X-wing gets an appropriate amount of investment from a company level. I'm not saying that the designers don't try hard and do their best; just that this task merits more investment.