If you remember my posts on the old DC server, you may think I am an opinionated malcontent. You would be right.

So let me start by giving a bit of history from a medics perspective. I came a little late to the DC server. Maybe a year or two into its run. I stayed because of the family oriented theme, no swearing, etc. and the people were friendly. It was a safe place for my kids to play. Also, it was an invasion server - I had grown tired of playing PvP style games against people who were playing hacked clients. With invasion, I wasn't up against borgs.

When I first started, I immediately knew I wanted to be a medic. I enjoy playing a support role, helping the team to get to the end of wave 16. There were Weapons, adrens, and medic/mms. This was before the xp column on the scoreboard, but I was watching the exp meter carefully. At first, I was consistently on the bottom of the scoreboard. But I was content watching my xp go up with exp healing. As I gained levels and spent points, I eventually was near the top of the scoreboard much of the time. I wasn’t thinking about balance then. Maybe having monsters, awareness, lightning bolt, and the ability to create a link medic gun was unbalanced. Maybe it was because I almost exclusively played medic, but it seems like when the major changes started happening that most of the concern over balancing was that the medic was overpowered.

Engineers were introduced in there somewhere, and as many players started leveling up, it became increasingly difficult for a medic to score points. Almost everything an engineer does lowers the potential for a medic to score healing points. BLocks, defense sents, shields... if people don't get hurt, they don't need healing.

Then subclasses came along, and the extreme monsters was indeed over powered. Three lava guys running around was awesome while it lasted. So the extreme monster subclass was taken down a notch. Or three. The healing weapon was not strong enough to keep yourself alive. And the constant crashing was annoying. I’m not sure how much xp I lost from crashes, but it was a crapload. So I switched to the extreme medic subclass. It's where I wanted to be anyway, in a support position. It is a lot of work keeping monsters alive and chasing after the bad guys, activating artifacts, and all that.

I've been rambling, sorry. So... Balance. Why do we care? Presumably, if a class is more powerful than another, then the weaker classes will become discouraged and quit. Is that it? People will be irritated or jealous or whatever because another class has it better? Well, I was irritated by the whole engineer thing. Ever since they were introduced, most of the programming and tweaks were in the engineer's favor. Since I wasn't playing the other classes, I'm not sure what was lost from them, but the medics were always being taken down a notch. Medics lost awareness, the ability to use the lightning rod, and even the ability to create a medic link, which I had been using to help engineers. Then the extreme medic subclass came along, and I could get xp by healing. Lots of it. But the thing is, that xp was not at the expense of the other classes. I was not taking xp from others by virtue of healing. As opposed to engineers, who protect everyone on the map and reduce the chance to heal. Extreme medics can’t kill monsters without pounding and pounding them down, so they don’t take xp from the offensive classes. Quite the opposite, extreme medics help everyone stay alive to continue to score xp. But until the extreme medic came, I was discouraged and close to quitting.

How do we measure balance? It cannot be with xp alone. I really wish the other forum was up because I pointed all this out before. People play certain maps, in certain situations, and leave in others. I prefer smaller, confined maps. I prefer to play when an engineer can’t see the entire map from one corner and knock everything down too easily. I prefer playing with weapons and adren masters. They get hurt. Even with their vampirism, there is still plenty to heal. Depending on the level of the various players online, the xp earned by each player will vary greatly. On the DC server, when the subclasses were being tweaked, there was a ton of discussion on balance. Composite statistics were compiled and conclusions drawn. I don’t know those conclusions were used to tweak the subclasses. I submit that using statistics in that way is totally worthless. There are too many variables involved, not the least of which is the decision of the player to leave and come back later when the potential for xp is higher. I would do just that. When too many engineers were playing, and not enough WMs or AMs, I would simply some back later. So measuring my xp against Engis was useless. I wasn’t playing at the same time. At that time, the server was still pretty busy and there were more low level players on. That meant more healing when they were on.

The only way to compare class balance would to do it systematically. The same players need to be on at the same time playing the same maps over and over and over. But would it do any good? Aren’t there still too many variables involved to get a real read on this thing called ‘balance’?

I get on and play to have a little fun, to get away from the cares of life from time to time. I don’t know why I waste so much time at it. Anyhow, the upshot is, if people don’t have fun at it, they won’t play. So do we really need a perfect balance on a server, or do we just want a place to come and kill monsters with friends?

Give us time. Remember Jefe, Hollon, and I have only had the servers merged for little over a month. We're still working on things.

...........And I want you to be more vocal on this forum.

...........Also, remember that the medic was the 3rd original class Dru's server had and was pretty much set up at that time.

I didn't pay much attention to the DC forums, so I don't remember your posts. My history on DC was that I played for a year or so off and on before starting up DEK in July 2010. I had a level 80ish medic and 120ish engi, and didn't play the other classes. Subclasses and the gen class came out around that time.

I agree that the engi class got pretty crazy, especially with the sents that healed everything. They were pretty much untouchable. That's not the case here.

I don't get too analytical about balance. If I see that one class or tactic is being played by a variety of people, on a variety of maps in a variety of situations and they consistently outscore other classes, then I make adjustments.

One thing that DC didn't do in attempting to balance the server was adjust maps. I'm not crazy about the majority 1-room maps either, and the ones we do have on here (at least the one's I've edited) I try to make sure that all classes and levels of characters have something to do on those maps. If analysis is based mainly on 1-room spamfest maps, then yeah, results are going to be skewed. I accept that on some maps, some classes will do really well, and some won't... I often switch characters based on the map and I know a lot of other players do too. I know that might be inconvenient if you mostly just play just one class.

We'll probably disagree on this, but I think the extreme med subclass is unnecessary when the regular med has most of its functionality. I want the base classes to still be useful for high level players. That's why I've made a number of adjustments to the base class to make healing easier and cheaper, some of the things that were part of the extreme med subclass. To make up for easier healing, you don't get as much of the experienced healing skill. This includes:

*cheaper heal sphere and blast
*higher max hp (475 for regular med)
*normal damage from medic weapon
*can pick up rod/td/etc.

I completely agree that crashing is super annoying. Hopefully we'll figure it out, but as coders, Hollon and I aren't anywhere near szlat's level.

As you said, the whole point of all this is to have fun. That goes for us as admins too. I don't want to spend all of my free time working on the server or troubleshooting bugs.

Cribbage,

I can definitely see where you are coming from. I remember playing before the engineer came out, and the style of playing was quite different then.

Let me ask you then, what is your definition of support because that seems to be a huge word over the medic class. Some people here define it as keeping players alive and giving extra support in fighting. Isn't that, though, what Engineers essentially are like? It seems to me like you're on it about keeping players alive in compensation for experience. That is also my opinion of what medics should be- healers, who do less damage. Go see the medic subclass topic, there was a little discussion about that.

In terms of engineers, I'm afraid that class won't go away simply because a lot of people love playing it. It doesn't mean, though, that changes to it can't be made. Who made the decision to give the engineers 15 blocks? Or to increase turret damage output when people are linking?

The thing with engineers is, do we want one, lone engineer to be able to survive by themselves, or will survival require a team of engineers? Like you and Jefe have said, it depends largely on the map and it's layout. One lone engineer can survive on a small map. A team would dominate it. One lone engineer will have troubles on a large map. A team of engineers have a chance of surviving it. It is very difficult to determine these things.

As for engineers taking away healing potential for medics, yes, I do agree with that. Without bases and the 'safety net' engineers provide, health is, largely, less likely to be always full. One thing that DEK did not like on DC was engineer defense sentinels giving away health, ammo, and adrenaline. It didn't make sense, and that won't be coming to the server here.

With the implementation of the engineer subclasses, my goal was to split up their power, and require more team-based effort. With a few engineers on, for example, it'll be harder to get the best all engineers could get because you only have a choice of a builder, a regular engineer, or mechanized infantry, all of which have different constructions. See the engineer subclass section on how we designed these subclasses to nerf them.

Here is the huge difference between DC and DEK in terms of subclasses. I don't think Szlat considered the fact that subclasses doesn't have to necessarily mean adding on more things. Jefe and I are very controversial about this. Instead, we're approaching most things in terms of "taking away from the base class" which would then become the subclass. That is what we've done with the Engineer.

I'll also be introducing monsters that deal considerable damage to engineer constructions in hopes that it will offer a more balanced play.

As for the extreme medic, I've rooted for that too and even personally believe the base class should get lower healing than it does now, but keep the normal damage, and extreme medic the healing it has now, but halve the weapon damage. However, there are those people who want to play the medic as more the attack role, and my suggestion is that they remain as the base class for that. This will give options to people on their preference.

My main issue was that medics perform just as good as a WM in some cases.

Additionally, I believe it was DoubleMint who said monsters were doing too much damage on this server. Any inputs on that?

jefejefejefe wrote:

I completely agree that crashing is super annoying. Hopefully we'll figure it out, but as coders, Hollon and I aren't anywhere near szlat's level.

I do have an e-mail in Szlat but he has not answered as yet. You want me to try Battlemode?

hollon wrote:
Additionally, I believe it was DoubleMint who said monsters were doing too much damage on this server. Any inputs on that?

The problem is two-fold. First, we are running at an "adept" level instead of "experienced". Secondly, as a level 800+ WM, it can take 3 or 4 shots to bring down a brute (using a p6 flak). I have emptied the total shots (600) from a mid-level mini on a regular titan and have to switch to another weapon to finish it off. So, there may be some truth to Double's claim.

That's something I'm unclear on. Wasn't the same situation harder on the old DC?

Monsters were geared to the lowest level players active on the map. For example, if we have myself at 800+, a couple of 400's, and a newbie or two, the monsters would be geared towards the lower levels. As each of the lower levels died on the map, the monsters would ramp up until I was the only one left and would be battling 1000+ level monsters.

What's actually changed is monster damage bonus and damage reduction, and this is based on the lowest level character as you said. DB and DR increase until reaching their maximum value. The values used on the old DC were the defaults of:

MaxMonsterDB=374
MaxMonsterDR=250

I've currently got it set to

MaxMonsterDB=374
MaxMonsterDR=50

Does this feel too much DR at high levels?