Hello all! With all the talk of community errata going forward, I put together a survey to help identify the problem spots. Hopefully it will give us an idea of the absolute worst offenders out there so we can figure out exactly what to do with them!

https://goo.gl/forms/j8C5zm23US0NGQLe2

Voted

And made a link to it in my "Community Errata" thread.

19 responses so far! A few pretty obvious frontrunners, but a couple surprises too!

We have a small community, and fall was really busy, so I actually have never played against Lord V or anything newer than him. My voting may be a little skewed for that reason.

I think I'll let it sit for a week or so, then work on a set of recommendations for playtesting. Probably 1-2 things per army, small changes. Tell your friends to vote!

Great survey. Asks the right questions in the right way so as to start building a consensus...

On 1/17/2019 at 12:47 PM, Parakitor said:

We have a small community, and fall was really busy, so I actually have never played against Lord V or anything newer than him. My voting may be a little skewed for that reason.

Which is one reason not to base balance decisions on perception, rather than raw data. 🙄

Ready to release the results yet?

16 hours ago, Xelto said:

Ready to release the results yet?

We're creeping up on 50 responses, so I figured I'd wait to hit that.

That’s a great showing. One of my friends said he was going to complain that Rune Golems were overpowered because I wiped out his Elves the past couple of showings. Besides using Zacareth, I rolled double hits with my Fire Runes and 4 unstables a couple of times. Wiped out two ranks of Leonx Riders in two shots.

LOL, but this reinforces why we need to get a lot of responses- gotta even out the rage moments... 😂

41 minutes ago, sarumanthewhite said:

That’s a great showing. One of my friends said he was going to complain that Rune Golems were overpowered because I wiped out his Elves the past couple of showings. Besides using Zacareth, I rolled double hits with my Fire Runes and 4 unstables a couple of times. Wiped out two ranks of Leonx Riders in two shots.

LOL, but this reinforces why we need to get a lot of responses- gotta even out the rage moments... 😂

Let's just say that although your friend's perspective isn't quite unique , it's pretty close.

The survey should be a pretty good way to figure out how to reduce NPE and will be a good starting place for what units to look at if we do community rebalancing

And we've hit 50! Check out the results here.

Curious enough is how much disagreement the results represent. Some of that, I suspect, is our low sample size, and the fact that for any given player, you can only see a fairly small subset of match-ups. After all, as a Latari player first, but with two Daqan and two Waiqar opponents primarily, I get to see those specific match-ups. As an Uthuk player, I again get to see those specific match-ups. When you add that people frequently settle into liking certain units and builds, and that there's always one player who makes some given unit work, then you suddenly get a smaller subset of units.

If we look at what was overwhelming:

Ravos: 80%

Spined Threshers: 82%

Rune Golems: 86.7%

Ardus: 80.4%

An adjustment to terrain also has overwhelming support.

To me, that looks pretty much exactly like we've discussed in the last week. Everything else also looks like the fidgety parts where we disagreed with ourselves and couldn't really come to a consensus about whether there was a problem or not.

1 hour ago, Vergilius said:

To me, that looks pretty much exactly like we've discussed in the last week. Everything else also looks like the fidgety parts where we disagreed with ourselves and couldn't really come to a consensus about whether there was a problem or not.

I think that another part of it was that there were really only three choices: overpowered, underpowered, or balanced. So, take heavy crossbows: I would rate them as strong. Not quite overpowered, but on the other hand, strong enough that I had to think about it before answering that one.

2 hours ago, Xelto said:

I think that another part of it was that there were really only three choices: overpowered, underpowered, or balanced. So, take heavy crossbows: I would rate them as strong. Not quite overpowered, but on the other hand, strong enough that I had to think about it before answering that one.

That's the weakness of any survey. If we treat it as a polaroid camera rather than a video recording, we handle the evidence better. When an item looks overwhelming, there's a pretty good bet something should be done, and that something can be done in a way that will keep the community happy. Start messing with anything more than that, and you'll lose the half of the community that disagrees with the change.