OpenRA

Introduction

Hello everyone. Recently a post about a "balance council" got some attention on the forum.
This isn't the first time it's been brought up. Last year Anjew brought it up to pchote in the IRC but nothing came of it.
In the last few months the OpenRA Discord Server has taken off and now has dozens of active users. As a moderator of the Discord Server and being interested in the balance council idea I have come up with the idea of holding a trial run in a restricted channel on the discord server.


Initialisation

Shortly after this has been posted I will be sending invites and instructions to the following players:

• SoScared
• Omnom
• AoAGeneral
• Frame Limiter
• Christian

These 4 have been very active in balance discussion and/or on github. They spend a lot of time arguing their points and produce a lot of evidence for them. Whether they participate is up to them and if there are any issues i will send invites to others. Once they have joined the council an opportunity will be given for them to invite anyone who they think also belong on the council which will provide a lot more voices and opinions but also reduces the bias of the council.


Process

Once the council has been formed the discussion process will begin. The council will bring up ideas and discuss them. When an idea is agreed on as being a good change for OpenRA then it will be tested until the council is happy or until the idea is discarded. The idea, now fleshed out and tested, is either submitted as a pr (where it is strongly agreed on) or a forum post where more opinions are wanted.


Future

The aim of this trial is to prove that a balance council is (or is not) a more effective way of balancing OpenRA's mods. If it proves very successful it could lead to a dedicated space here on Sleipnirs Stuff for such a council. Any feedback on the process would be great to have.

If this thing actually starts and works, thx you in advance to take care of the hard (and some time boring) work that is balance testing.

Not only does the current system work, but the folks who decide on the changes have done an excellent job.

Sleipnir did say some things about it though, here.

However, if SoScared and AoAgeneral are ok with it and still want to be the ones who more or less pass through the conclusions to github, then things don't have to bite eachother.

As I hope that it will work: In on place everyone can give input. Preferably with some explanation or support, but we will ofcourse also get people who think one line of text will change OpenRA. Anyway, it's the public balancing forum where everyone can participate to their own ability and where we can also discuss things that are written by the council.

The council has a seperate place where they discuss their own ideas and the input they deem sensible. In here only they can post, but hopefully everyone can read. Based on their long discussions they'll file PR's. This can be done by AoAgeneral/SoScared only at first since they have proven themselves.

I don't know discord very well, but I really recommend something which is easily searchable. At some point you will want to be able to read past discussions about things. Maybe discord is good for this, but if it depended on me, I would prefer a forum.

(Then again, it doesn't depend on me, which is the entire point

You either want 1 more or 1 less on the council to prevent ties correct?

I would like to mention that the formation of this committee isn't going to change the current balance process. It's just (experimentally) creating a formal chain-of-command where we can consolidate and organize the opinions on balance changes.

I will be continuing with my playtests after RAGL is finished, as will many others. Anyone and everyone is still free to make a pull request on github if they've come up with a change that they believe will be good. People will be able to give their opinions in the playtests games or in the forums here. We're also going to try figuring out how to get logs of the discord channel out to the people for full transparency.

Blackened wrote: ↑You either want 1 more or 1 less on the council to prevent ties correct?

I would personally make it so you need more than 50%. Changing something people are 50/50 split on just means 50% of people are unhapppy with the decision.

Realistically you need to evaluate balance changes on something more than opinion. Whomever is on this council, and however wise and experienced they might be, it's secondary to the evaluation method.

Simply the goal should be that the game is objectively balanced and for it to be objective you need evidence and data.

Seems viable and realistic. The work done since i've been here has been good

Feedback taken.
To answer a few questions/respond to some thoughts:

• We will mostly be focusing discussions and testing on changes that have already been brought up by the community here or github.
• We are currently working on getting everything publicly view-able/logged.
• If a vote comes to a tie then the subject change is not at a stage that is acceptable.
• The process used to test changes is as objective as possible, based on the current direction of balance. Individual bias will always play a part in balance discussions but with enough testing we can eliminate this as much as possible.

Thanks for everything that has been said so far!