Hi folks,

So having listened to the excellent X-wing podcast run by Scum and Villainy, a few important disclosures from the Developers made a couple points clear.

• Points are not on the table for adjustment, but the development of new mechanics (unseen to us yet but in a hidden 'balanced' version available to playtesters) are the way forward for keeping the meta fresh
• fixing the old ships, specifically pilots that have fallen off the radar, is going to be done extremely slowly, if at all, as they are in favour of disturbing the meta only in cases of deemed egregious and game-warping faults.
• if it's out of the meta "it doesn't hurt to release mechanics that hurt it more", given the example of harpoon missiles to swarms. So archetypes that have only fallen out of favour will only return if either a) they are buffed to a new power level with a new card or cards, or b) the thing keeping them down disappears from general use.

There were a few other points but these three are the ones I'm most concerned about. I think in the back of my mind I had always hoped that we would have a game where every pilot would have at least one squad where they did well and could compete on the table. Granted, there will always be some variation, but I had hoped the Devs would focus their efforts on levelling that divide with past ships. What seems to be more of the model however is to simply reset the power level with new ships and new upgrades that equal or compete with what is dominating in the current meta.

Well, I want to play Commander Alozen competitively, or Captain Jonus, or Garven Dreis. And I want those ships to feel as powerful as jumpmasters, bomblets, sabine, K-wings and fat turrets. And I believe everything can be recosted to the point whereby Dengar just runs out of points in the list to take all the things that make him delete other ships from existence, and still have a wingmate like Nym.

Therefore:
I know a few ideas for a community based X-wing have been tried out and are currently in progress, with fancy stats and math and so on. I very much look forward to seeing these come out. I'm going to propose something different, at least in the meantime. The devs made it clear in the interview that they don't know the true cost of something until it hits the public. Well, I'd like to try again, based on the meta as it currently exists now and has in past.

This would mean an online squad builder that starts off with just X-wings, TIEs, and every few weeks or months, add a few more ships back in, and many months from now, we'd probably be coming back up to Auzitucks and Scurrgs again. All aiming for an idealized standard where the X-wing is always level with the top of the power curve. We've been doing this informally offline with our local gaming group, it's fun. it's not perfect, but it's really really fun.

To do this in a semi-sensible way, points costs would be estimated based on which pilots sit where in the current meta, as well as where they have sat in the historical meta. each time new ships are added back in, if required, points costs of each other ship and upgrade in the squad builder would be adjusted again to compensate.

Caveats:

• This will be playtested based on local games and vassal games. this will not be perfect, but it may at worst be worth a laugh and at best be fun for you to try
• This is deeply flawed at its core because yes, the moment you start fiddling with things new things become possible and new things break. This is all understood. But if we fix two things for everything we break it might go somewhere.
• You probably won't agree with some or even a lot of the changes. That's completely fine, and expected. If you are interested in helping out and passionate about a certain pilot being bumped up or down too high or low just say so and we'll try it the other way in the next round. We're taking the whole "points as sacrosanct" and throwing it out the window and going to aggressively recost things until even you too will play Fel's wrath.
• VI is maxed out at PS9. Some very very few pilots (Han, Vader, Fel, Wedge, etc.) will be moved to PS10. Points costs will be adjusted accordingly. This is done for fluff reasons and we'll balance it out somehow afterwards.
• All Turrets will be initially nerfed to not do full damage outside of their firing arcs (probably by losing range bonuses and other ships always having them), and we'll sort out the mess afterwards. Yes, this is going to probably be overboard. I expect by version 5 we should have it approaching some semblance of balance.
• Some cards just won't make it back in, the mantra is, EVERY card has to have a use. It's probably unattainable, but that's the goal.
• some ships may lose hull, shields, or gain hull and shields. Everything is on the chopping block.
  
  If this works, for those of you who play the warcraft video games, this is a bit like when Defense of the Ancients, DOTA Allstars, and Aeon of Strife were all in play. They were all great in their own ways. Some, like DOTA allstars shamelessly poached ideas from the others and rebuilt them. This will be like one of these, a mod, that will be inherently unbalanced and unfair because I'm not a developer, and will have its own quirks and flaws, but will update quickly and expediently.
  
  Dota patches came out every month. Probably aiming for the same on this.
  
  Open to ideas and headsups on pitfalls.

Full disclosure, I have not listened to the podcast in question myself - but if the three points you identify are accurate, then it is some very damning evidence. It's almost exactly the opposite of what I was hoping for with the game - I was already vowing not to buy anything further until 'they sorted their **** out' but it seems as if they arn't planning to even try. Disappointing.

I know Majorjuggler is already working on a change of this scale- re-designing the game from the ground up.

I've tried to make my own FAQ/Errata with targeted nerfs to make ships that use their primary firing arc to shoot primary weapons usable, and I'll be moving to publicize it in the coming weeks if FFG doesn't release their own FAQ/Errata by the G4H release.

I'm always looking for more experienced people to give input on it as well.

Some friends of Mine and myself are working on a rebalancing attempt at this very moment. This will be Original trilogy only at first and when the system works out well we adapt the rest of the Game. We also intend to upload a special squad builder when its ready. Everybody who is intrested in playtesting may contact me via mail or pm.

On 10/17/2017 at 1:57 AM, citruscannon said:

• if it's out of the meta "it doesn't hurt to release mechanics that hurt it more", given the example of harpoon missiles to swarms. So archetypes that have only fallen out of favour will only return if either a) they are buffed to a new power level with a new card or cards, or b) the thing keeping them down disappears from general use.

I don't think this is really a fair to pick out as a core tenet of their design philosophy, it seemed like more of a one-off comment in response to that specific question. More like a "that might be true, but it's not the only factor" kind of thing.

The main point I took away from the interview that seemed most relevant to this thread though was just the idea that their biggest concern is maintaining a somewhat diverse competitive meta, with less concern over what that meta is composed of exactly, such as whether it contains the iconic ships that many people really want to see more often.

From that perspective, I think it's fair to say that it's officially time for a community-based custom rebalance of the game that caters to this demographic. If the developers aren't working toward the kind of game you want, fix it yourself. If we come to some sort of group consensus on it, then maybe it can really come to prominence as an alternative format and make the developers take note. That said, I really think a unified effort is needed here, which will be the tricky part. It's hard to get large groups to come to a consensus on things, which can lead to branching projects. It's fine to have various alternative formats, but if we can get everyone on the same page we could even see a more balanced format that you can have tournaments for across regions or travel to a new area and still play by the same rules as the local group.

I'm all for getting the balance back in the game, and if we have to do it ourselves, then so be it.

Admittedly, I haven't been actively looking, but I haven't seen anything of substance yet come from the Community X-wing. Having said that, I feel the best tool you can make in order for us plebes to adopt whatever version of X-wing you or the others end up generating is a decent squad builder.

Maybe you've already thought of this, but if we can print out the list with the adjusted stats, etc., that would serve the player well, versus using official cards that don't reflect the changes.

I have high hopes for this project and will stay tuned in.

The best way to even get players to test out your many changes is to have a squad building piece of software online that allows very quick changes to point costs.

@sozin and Guido Kessels have been eyeing a new type of squad builder, once that's built out of some data file which could have totally revamped stats and ship features. It's a daunting project but these peeps are pretty good with software engineering. This part is essential for Major Juggler's rebalancing act to become manifest eventually.

On 10/17/2017 at 0:57 AM, citruscannon said:

Caveats:

• This will be playtested based on local games and vassal games. this will not be perfect, but it may at worst be worth a laugh and at best be fun for you to try
• This is deeply flawed at its core because yes, the moment you start fiddling with things new things become possible and new things break. This is all understood. But if we fix two things for everything we break it might go somewhere.
• You probably won't agree with some or even a lot of the changes. That's completely fine, and expected. If you are interested in helping out and passionate about a certain pilot being bumped up or down too high or low just say so and we'll try it the other way in the next round. We're taking the whole "points as sacrosanct" and throwing it out the window and going to aggressively recost things until even you too will play Fel's wrath.
• VI is maxed out at PS9. Some very very few pilots (Han, Vader, Fel, Wedge, etc.) will be moved to PS10. Points costs will be adjusted accordingly. This is done for fluff reasons and we'll balance it out somehow afterwards.
• All Turrets will be initially nerfed to not do full damage outside of their firing arcs (probably by losing range bonuses and other ships always having them), and we'll sort out the mess afterwards. Yes, this is going to probably be overboard. I expect by version 5 we should have it approaching some semblance of balance.
• Some cards just won't make it back in, the mantra is, EVERY card has to have a use . It's probably unattainable, but that's the goal.
• some ships may lose hull, shields, or gain hull and shields. Everything is on the chopping block.
  

So let me get this straight. You want a homebrew system that will probably be a mess, but that's OK because it's your mess.

1 minute ago, Darth Meanie said:

So let me get this straight. You want a homebrew system that will probably be a mess, but that's OK because it's your mess.

I think it would be pretty egotistical to think that I could do a better job in one go than a team of professional designers and playtesters. That's the premise for those statements. But unlike the current system, where it is clear there is going to be very little in the way of revision. In an online electronic squad builder, there is vast room for revision.

So yes, I'm anticipating costing errors and mistakes. But like with the early versions of DotA and DotA allstars, these get shaved down and smoothed over time.

1 minute ago, citruscannon said:

I think it would be pretty egotistical to think that I could do a better job in one go than a team of professional designers and playtesters. That's the premise for those statements. But unlike the current system, where it is clear there is going to be very little in the way of revision. In an online electronic squad builder, there is vast room for revision.

So yes, I'm anticipating costing errors and mistakes. But like with the early versions of DotA and DotA allstars, these get shaved down and smoothed over time.

The thing that would interest me the most in an online electronic squad builder is the allowance for house rules along with the regular game. For example, Scum and Rebels blended into one list. Or, official ship stats that can be manipulated with concomitant changes in the ship's price.

2 hours ago, citruscannon said:

I think it would be pretty egotistical to think that I could do a better job in one go than a team of professional designers and playtesters.

Considering you would actually be building off their work and the gameplay data and borrowed game knowledge from an entire community over 5+ years, with the ability to freely change things and essentially "patch" the game in ways that FFG themselves are not allowed to, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say you could potentially yield better results. Tweaking something that's already solid and well-explored is much easier than creating it from scratch