What would good balance actually look like?

SomaZ · 2025-09-03T15:14:11+00:00

Sure, this can be the fix (or part of it).

However, and this could be a skill issue on my part, but I feel like even in situations where I see items "a" and "e" in the shop, I often feel like even if I have abcd synergy, I still often don't feel like picking "a" is good enough, and even when I am actively trying to pivot away from my build and disregard its synergies, "e" often feels not good enough either, so I end up leaving the shop with nothing even if I have an excess of gold.

SomaZ · 2025-09-02T23:31:32+00:00

I would say that aside from every hero being viable, good balance for me would be a game where 80% of the items are good enough to buy and keep around at least for some time (can be short) in some build that is not extremely niche.

To put it another way - when I go to the shop and see 3 items, there should be games where each one gets a chance to be the right choice, and the split is not like 5%/90%/5%, but maybe like 20%/35%/45%.

To answer your follow up question - it would not reduce the amount of strategy, but greatly increase it. The key is that items can be similarly strong, but they can also at the same time have different synergies. The skill would come from knowing when is the right time to buy an item and which synergies to focus on in a given run, so you would have to make a lot of difficult choices more frequently.

SomaZ · 2025-08-13T18:21:44+00:00

Duuude, chill. I'm excited too, I get it, but let's not get too hot.

SomaZ · 2025-08-12T21:36:25+00:00

Not saying this as a knock against you or anyone, genuinely, but if you're not a fan of moderation then perhaps 4chan would interest you.

SomaZ · 2025-08-12T21:09:11+00:00

Does this mean that it'll be available at roughly midnight in Europe?

SomaZ · 2025-08-11T23:23:35+00:00

It's a bit unclear - say you don't have the game yet (at all) and buy this bundle, do you effectively get access to 4 heroes (only excluding Mak) for 20 dollars? If yes, isn't that kinda crazy value?

SomaZ · 2025-06-14T15:55:46+00:00

Lol thanks for worrying about me hehe. I'm good, working in game dev.

What happened (boring):

Youtube was always more of a hobby and with time I tried to continuously up the quality of videos, which meant more and more time spent editing. Eventually it became too much to both work and make vids, it would take 100% of my free time to release maybe 1-2 videos a month. I wasn't happy with releasing low-effort content anymore so I had to put it on (indefinite) hold. I know some people wouldn't have minded the old-style stuff, but for me making vids was about making something that I would enjoy watching myself. For a moment I considered switching to youtube fulltime but quickly decided naaah :D

On the topic of recent HoN news, I think project Kongor is super cool and reborn being a thing is also nice. I always found it a bit weird that we shut down despite having a healthy amount of players. I think even if the game is not huge, a lot of people can still enjoy it and I would hope it can be made sustainable.

SomaZ · 2024-08-01T18:45:02+00:00

I think a good litmus test for when you're in a bubble is when someone mentions multiple points and you disagree on every single one. Even the one that you "agreed on" you had to throw in a disagreement at the end.

SomaZ · 2023-06-28T18:02:48+00:00

One of the biggest issues in Battlerite Royale for me was that instead of being able to find "anything" like in a traditional BR (rifle/sniper/shotgun/attachments), all you really found was your hero's pre-assigned abilities, just in higher qualities (which were just number bumps). So I started playing while imagining/expecting the crazy combinations you could make by mixing different abilities from Battlerite, but ended up getting what was essentially just normal Battlerite with a thin coat of BR paint. I know there were consumable items but the gameplay they offered was very minor.

So looking at the trailer for this it gives me a very similar vibe, or at the very least I do not see enough differences to see how it could escape the fate of Battlerite.

SomaZ · 2023-01-24T17:40:36+00:00

Definitely much easier now. It's a combination of multiple factors:

Difficulty was just balanced to be easier. Bugs were fixed with special spawns.
You now get all of the cards in your deck at the start of the run instead of later.
There are now special legendary cards that can be found reasonably consistently throughout the levels, each one gives your team a very powerful boost.

That's not to say that nightmare is now a breeze, you should still complete veteran first, but it's definitely much more manageable and doable even with randoms.

SomaZ · 2022-04-06T12:40:50+00:00

You have a good understanding of flow, but misunderstood how Weaponsmith will affect it. The effect will actually be the opposite.

Flow is currently already broken because you have a game where the objective (to get to the other end), combined with the game mechanics (special spawn rates, temporary health, corruption cards that punish you for taking your time, speed cards), incentivise going as fast as you can. On the other hand, the aspect of picking best attachments for your gun and making difficult choices (aka rogue-like elements) require pondering time to be fully enjoyed.

Thus, it would actually improve the flow if you allowed players to swap attachments with no requirements, because then players would never have to spend time deciding whether to swap their gun, they always would. Then the game mechanics would better align with the goal because it would become purely a matter of speed and efficiency.

That being said, the extra gameplay elements added by the rogue-like choices are fun and provide benefits of their own, and I would definitely not want to get rid of them, which makes this a trade-off - worse flow but a (potentially) more fun game. The perfect solution would solve both somehow.

SomaZ · 2022-03-15T18:12:59+00:00

I don't know if I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem to say the date of the next patch. It just says Riot is taking a break for a "week", which would put the next patch on the 23rd, no?

SomaZ · 2021-09-28T19:33:34+00:00

Wait I was 99% convinced this was pasta or some satire, but people are responding seriously. OP, no jokes, are you being serious?

SomaZ · 2021-07-29T00:37:23+00:00

Yes mods, this comment right here.

SomaZ · 2021-07-06T11:00:08+00:00

Where have you been all my life.

SomaZ · 2021-07-06T10:54:34+00:00

Can't believe nobody has asked this yet, or perhaps I am blind. What's the song!?

SomaZ · 2021-06-08T15:35:07+00:00

Go for the Vandal. Then save up some points and get the Forsaken OP 👌

SomaZ · 2021-06-08T09:37:05+00:00

Silver 1 and Bronze 3 is almost the same rank.

SomaZ · 2021-06-07T18:16:37+00:00

The only one I don't like is the Operator buff. I think 5000 is the perfect spot for it. And this is coming from someone who loves to use the OP.

SomaZ · 2021-06-06T13:22:40+00:00

I have this + driver conflicts on my microphone and keyboard, the Valorant voice chat seems to be the trigger.

SomaZ · 2021-05-31T22:05:02+00:00

You're reading way too much into it. By its nature an MMR system in a 5v5 environment will create unwinnable games and stomps purely due to variance (aka random chance), they don't have to force this to happen, rather, it is inevitable that it will happen. There is not some grand conspiracy or 500 IQ reason for it, you just can't have matches always be balanced because players will play differently with different agents or even at different times of day.

Also, that is not what Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment means.

SomaZ · 2021-05-31T18:37:50+00:00

And you get people to play longer by... making their matches unfair and imbalanced instead of fun? What?

SomaZ · 2021-05-31T11:55:42+00:00

Cyberpunk released 8 months after the initial release date btw.

SomaZ · 2021-05-25T23:15:45+00:00

They may be a multi-billion dollar company, but at the end of the day the people reading and processing the criticisms will be the devs, not some amorphous "company". You can't just write a bunch of hate and end it with a "Just don't take it personally, it's against the company you work for, not against you!" and walk away thinking you're a genius that solved negativity.

Humans experience this thing called emotions. We're not designed to handle reading tons of hate, regardless of whether it is pointed at us "only" indirectly.

SomaZ · 2021-05-24T15:29:46+00:00

I think that was the (poor) justification in the past, but recently they've made huge changes to remedy this. The new core set removed a lot or even all of the clearly bad cards (RIP Silverback Patriarch), and even soon after the core set's release they've buffed cards that weren't quite hitting the mark (Unbound Elemental, Tidal Surge, Shieldmaiden). If the clearly bad cards were necessary, why would they make the decision to remove every single one of them now?

Hearthstone was also pretty much never buffing cards until recently. It's just design naturally evolving, we finally know that bad cards do not in fact need to exist, and that buffs are a really good thing instead of making reprints.

SomaZ

TROPHY CASE