Community Balance Beta + Scary Ghost's Super Zombies intergration.

[|WC|Capt.525]

It's no secret that quite a lot of people on these forums would like something done in the way of balance. There are also those people that complain that "gaem 2 ez". So what if we had the opportunity to fix that, to have a balance beta involving a wide variety of people, from the Newbies to the Vets, so that the changes made aren't too severe to new players, and aren't too ridiculous to old ones. Things like the M99, Buzzsaw, Xbow, Flares, Musket, Zerk, Pistols, M4-203, etc could all be balanced or modified slightly to be brought back into line, or to be made useful.

However, that's not all. I was also thinking about what differences there are between HoE and Suicidal: what, a health boost, less starting dosh, and Sharp's 9mm doesn't destroy absolutely everything anymore? So what if we changed it up a little? What if we integrated Super Zombies, and made that the new HoE, so that players really did have to adapt to survive. I'd also suggest making the Stalker in Suicidal have the same traits as the Super Zombies one, as well as possibly making the 9mm nerf cover Suicidal as well? This way there is more of a noticeable change between Suicidal and HoE, and the differences between Hard and Suicidal will be noticed earlier (and Stalkers will move from being a minor annoyance to an actual threat).

 

[DarkFalz]

Boy we'd probably be in for a tsunami of complaint threads if Super Zombies got integrated into HoE (ZOMG GAEMZ 2 HARD NAO!!!). But then again, it would hopefully have the positive effect of making everyone more inclined to work together (and further weed out the power levelers from HoE). That alone would be would be worth all the complaining IMO. Well there's always the option of instead making it something the admin can toggle on and off or making it a new difficulty above HoE.

I definitely agree with doing a community balance since TWI seems unwilling to do any serious balancing changes themselves. (Simply jacking up the price on weapons isn't balancing them)

 

[|WC|Capt.525]

Yeah, the changes would probably be disliked by a lot of people, but honestly HoE and Suicidal are so similar and easy to transition through that I think we need to make the differences more defined, to make players adapt, and punish them for sloppy work (oh, you're a Sharp/Zerk and keep missing the head after the first stun on a Scrake? Boned).

I keep thinking about how some of the older players would talk about how good the balance beta was, and how it got rid of the power creep (until the Summer Sideshow of 2012; then it was all downhill from there) and brought many things back in line (*cough* M14 *cough*) as well as giving buffs to other things.

 

[scary ghost]

I did do this 2.5 years ago:

http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=52521
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=52654

 

[larkstongues42]

Rather than changing the current game/diff levels, I'd suggest adding a new difficulty where these changes were made. Honestly, TWI or the community making some sort of mut and then white listing it would work too. It keeps the current status quo while adding something other than upsetting the status quo.

 

[Darkseed5]

I'm with larkstongues42 on this one. Trying to balance everything would only result in complaining about UP weapons. And the upside of a mutator would be, that the COMMUNITY will be making the tweaking and not TWI, which would result in faster updates, as TWI also has also other projects on the line.

 

[FluX]

This was done before, and it's the very reason why HoE was made (I think). Apparently it got messy and time couldn't be done to keep this up.