Thanks for the kind words, it really does mean a lot.
I'm sure my addictive personality will lead me back one way or another.
@NMM: Technically I'm not really in a position to decide who takes on the league but if the choice were to exist I'd naturally want to see it continued by someone capable. I see the interest has sprung up already, which is great, and I do feel responsible so what I'll do during this week is to address the league management so that those who are interested might have their decision made easier and the job less tedious.
@Jazz_KCS: Yeah sorry about the sudden turn of events. As far as I'm concerned you're now currently head the league, if you'd want the job it's yours
Besides anyone would be a fool not to take advantage of your resourcefulness in any future event.
I'll also pitch one final balance PR out of the playtest series as the workload on that was for the most part done prior to my summer vacation. It was halted for the most part due to the work on the trailer and in anticipation of the hitshape/unitstance playtest but it would be pretty stupid to throw away hundreds of observed matches with map distribution reaching 6k downloads on team- and 4k on 1v1-maps for the 1.6a version alone. I never did the count with 1.6b but shouldn't be too far behind.
A few more words on that since I managed eventually to sneak a balance hijacker into OpenRA's flagship mod:
When it comes to game balancing I've learned to trust numbers, not theory-crafting. Naturally as a content creator and with easy access to both competitive and casual players I've been in a unique position to earn the trust and authority on the matter but I've used that position to crank out bigger numbers over time which allowed me to fight for influence and eventually exclusive access to the RA mods' balance for the current 20170517 release. Producing the numbers is the most tedious thing but at the end of the day as a player that's what's needed in order to inspire confidence in what you've changed as you can address them in pretty much any context brought up and, best of all, prove yourself right when your change goes live. This is the point which for has been hardest to address to others simply because of noone having anything that resembled my platform and to reiterate that point would feel disingenuous. "But balancing skill and insight SoScared, what about those?" I honestly don't know. You either have it or you don't but honestly it's not that hard. My changes has been inching forward, building up a set of changes that started with a couple of ideas a year ago, most of which weren't mine, slowly up towards a big symphony of changes that works together on all maps and all player setups. It's a turtle race. I mean if you stumbled over
this thread (link) today without any knowledge on how it got to that point, you would think I'm a wannabe mad scientist but this list of changes came out of a very long series of tests allowing me to continuously layer one change on top of another with a certain level of confidence.
For me personally game balancing has always come before the league reason being that the league's growth and potential rests on the former. The game balancing streams has always been the most successful ones and for me to this day I can't really think of a more colorful experience with OpenRA than to tap into the potentiality of change into something better. I also can't think of any more frustrating venture as you will inevitably have to battle naysayers, theorycrafters, alarmists and what not. Although there definitely is a certain division between the developer branch and player base, getting through isn't necessarily that tough but it does require a certain investment in time learning how they work and a shitton of patience. As long as one enjoy the process there is no problem but if you're a moron like me you do this while forming a league, maintain a community stream and produce video content that cuts into your sleep hours.
I'd love to see the RA mod and future mods balanced in a way that promotes both fun and competitive spirit but there are no short cuts and no-one is getting paid. I really do hope players will commit but I'd strongly recommend to put in the work
first and try avoid writing a thesis. Learn brevity. The latter part I learned the hard way when I first attempted to get aboard some changes with the 20161018 release. I can see that part being a challenge to some in the future
In any case patience is key.
As mentioned I'll be back with some stuff on the league later this week. glhf