Recenly i started taking active engagement in balance discussions. Also started studying Lumberyard Engine source code to understand what actuall problem is. What i took from those both:
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Engine itself is probably not root cause for our large problems with lag, desync, fleaky combat system etc, actually is done quite smart and interesting. So most of problem probably laying in implementation of New World what was result of AGS management pushing hard on Dev team to deliver, resulting low quality spagetti code.
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Most of “lack of balance” feeling is caused mostly because core mechanics is not working as designed so some classes have advantage in playing in evironmentt with huge lag and desync, (heavy armor builds) because missrate is very high. This results in endless posts on forums to NERF everything. Because players feel that some of their actions ingame are pointless.
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AGS is not using power of data to make decisions narrowing only to unhappy casual players that dont know most of game mechanics - reason for this, is probably missing mechanics to gather game data. This results punishing players that does not complain because they learned how to exploit/fight agains this broken core mechanics.
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Community Moderators (eg. @FancyFenrir ) have problems with keeping neutrality, causin point 3. to be extreme problem, because opinions they feed to dev team are not covered by data, but by emotions. Also this reveals lack of competent Lead Game Designer in studio, becasue this discussions would never pop out. Also it looks like CM has no clue how idea of combat system was designed and transfering their own personal biases inflaming already divided community. I would likt to remind CM that community sees in you representive of AGS and your opinions are taken seriously - because they dont know you dont have technical knowledge and you are not writing game code, they treat you as DEV Team.
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Dev team working on crunch to deliver unnesesary content to keep some of playerbase instead of delivering working version 1.0 that is working as it was designed.
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Balance changes are delivered based on adjusting classes to work in broken core environement instead of putting 100% effort in eliminating root problems that makes game unbalanced what are core mechanics problem (why root is OP? Becausse when you play melle it is only way to avoid desync)
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Lack of clear roadmap and direction, goals etc. AGS decided to take path fixing things on production instead of delivering proper testing. PTR phase shoiuld be atleast 3 weeks for every patch and players should be rewarded by taking part in free testing, because tester base in AGS seems to not exist.
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All of above results in diminishing product quality and loosing playerbase that does not belive anymore in Product Team Wisdom.
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If there left any Wisdom at all…
Thank you.