A plea to the Devs- Let the community have an active role in Faction Balance

[Reapy]

I know a bit off topic on the matchmaker but I'm a bit hesitant too about how it'll go.  There is a part of me that just loved going to a server and sitting there round after round with no interruption and just straight playing the game. No waiting a few minutes for a game or having to drop out and reload after each game or have to deal with 3 people leaving after they start losing or whatever.

If it's like 5v5 match making don't get me started in the moba level of *****ing at your teammates... "1h sword vs cav you ****ing scrub!"

That said matchmaker might help keep the under populated game modes going and keep the game rules stable. EG I was turned off when NA decided to go fastest and it was hard to find a medium server, same with starting gold amounts fluctuating. Not to mention poor map and faction rotations that decimated server populations. But that would have been countered with well run official servers too.

Anyway I hope both can exist side by side, a competitive format matchmaker and the pub server mess.

Finally with the no factions... Maybe! Maybe just classes? Though faction flavor is kind of cool too, but does complicate things a lot, might get more quality going with lots of different classes, though I guess factions are just sets of classes, eh.

 

[Lord Rich]

We can get balanced factions now by playing mirrored (i.e. swadia vs swadia). We don't do this though (generally), probably because having asymmetrical factions is generally more interesting and challenging. The only place we do is for tie breakers, usually nords vs nords on winterburg and even then the rules usually allow teams to play any faction they want there and people choose nords because they're the strongest faction on closed maps.

The problem with the factions is that they tend to exaggerate a factions traits really far, like for instance nords are good with throwing weapons, to the point they get free javelins, the highest throwing skill, the most power throw. The downside being that their cav cant afford or get decent equipment and they have no long range firepower. As such the faction dominates when it can fight within its range and remove the long range power of other factions.

There needs to be an attempt to give all factions a means of winning in different types of terrain, otherwise maps will always make faction strength swing around wildly.

I like the matchup between vaegirs and sarranids on open as an example of this. The sarranids will dominate with cav as they're good at swarming and will generally win an engagement against vaegirs. However if vaegirs can use their strong archers smartly they can win through positional plays and simply gunning down the sarranids. It's interesting and has a lot of tactical depth to it in terms of picking the engagement as sarranids or succesfully taking positions as vaegirs.

Each faction needs something like this for each map type, nords have very strong tools on closed but actually end up quite weak on open, with no long range firepower, glass cannon horses, lack of long or effective anti cav polearms etc... Likewise vaegirs suffer on closed since they have a serious lack of high damage 1H weapons and so struggle as soon as the other side gets armour if they cant get a cav engagement or a crossfire.