What other company does it? I want recent examples of this occurring as well since we are speaking of recent CPG.
What cards did CPG constantly tweak in the past until it was widely accepted as perfect?
Oh and by the way this was also when CPG had less on their plate.
But i am humbly awaiting your examples.
You seem to be implying that the balance team is being overworked with designing the new cards, making art for the new cards, setting up in-game systems for the new cards, communicating with the community about new cards, setting up tournaments and doing the laundry while theyâre at it.
The balance team afaik consists of 3 members and a lead, of which only the lead actually has any non-balance designation. So play-testing and balance improvement is pretty much the entire workload of those people. Youâre calling the other guy out on his inability to understand things, yet your own knowledge of this particular situation is hazy at best.
Then we move on to the situation of if whether or not they have already decided if our current card pool is balanced for the time being. But I guess that is the answer you would all hate isnât it.
Clearly the balance team are happy without making changes, since it means they can sip their drink and spend time doing other more important things -
One of the balance team members is a part-time employee who does research in his main job, so heâs not going to have any problems calling the cards balanced if it allows him more time to do his primary job and earning more.
Another is doing a PhD on how players in a game respond to frustration, so his data is only enhanced by not making necessary balance changes.
The newest member of the team is a 17 year old, who can have great ideas, but is highly unlikely to get his voice heard moving up through the hierarchy.
So, yeah, our current card pool is balanced for the time being. Because it suits my narrative, clearly.
I know exactly what you mean, Iâve not even been playing this season, waiting for the faie nerfs.
@ZyX Thatâs good to know. I hope things will change sooner rather than later, though.
Lame comparison.
THIS IS NOT A CAR, ITâS A FUCKIN ONLINE CARD GAME.
And you didnât pay for it, or at least you didnât have to.
Give us a break or take one.
If you donât like what i have to say then stop reading my posts. If you expect me to stop posting just because you donât like what i have to say you are gravely mistaken.
@ZyX Thanks for the insight, didnât even know this. It all makes a lot more sense now.
Still, the balancing was quite solid before Ancient Bonds. I wonder if anything has changed in the meanwhileâŚ
All this hate⌠itâs really sad to see the community gnawing each other in two.
As if Duelyst wasnât a game but the most important thing of mankind.
This is a disingenuous statement, itâs almost like I canât criticize a game because somewhere in Africa a child is starving.
The way how itâs done is whatâs wrong about it.
Please keep personal attacks out of the thread or it will be locked. Thank you.
I totally agree with you. People do not understand that the problem we have does not lie with the fact that they perceive the game as unbalanced. The problem we have is that instead of having mature discussions they jump to assume the balance team is lazy and just sitting down at home scratching.
The problem with this stupid argument is that just because you know someoneâs professions does not mean you know their priorities and other events in life.
Everything you are stating zyx are ur assumptions and they are not facts. You do not know for 100% certainty that they are neglecting the game for their own personal gains. Then finally you are assuming that CPG does not take all balance suggestions of the already small balance team equally by stating that the 17 year old basically has no say in the matter. What did they hire him for? To rub their bellies?
CPG is a business at the end of the day and a business has employees. Do you really think that the employees of the other departments would simply allow the balancing team to slack off and be essentially hurting the game? Iâm still waiting for you to make a solid argument zyx cause so far all you have done is place stigmas on people who you do not know.
Theyâre assumptions, not facts. Fair point. But so are your so-called âpointsâ.
And Iâm the one making âstupid argumentsâ, and âplacing stigmas on people I do not knowâ. I simply responded in language you seem to wield, and therefore would understand clearly.
Just as a note - Iâm the same person who made posts such as these:
I have no vested interest in speaking against CPG after being really quite strongly involved with the game over 2 years - including times where people actually accused me of being paid by CPG to write and post about things in a very favourable light towards them! I speak simply because I still genuinely believe that Duelyst has the potential to be more, bigger, better - multiple things are stopping this from happening, on the non-balance end we look at how the Rift introduction was managed, how 2-draw went to 1-draw with very little beta-testing, how Shimâzar was introduced and so on. We canât go back and change what was handled badly, but there is something that can be changed to at least guarantee a better playing environment.
Now it seems to be the case that you say the game is balanced - but really, what youâre saying, is that you donât care about any changes, and you want others also to not care about any changes. Those are two different things - you are welcome to not post about keeping the status quo, we are obliged to post because a lot of us think there is something to be gained from CPG listening to us.
Now for my vitriol against one member of the current balance team - thereâs a decent backstory to this that there is no reason for you to have known about - but simply put, one of the balance team members thought it was fit to say that I should never be employed by CPG after I suggested a change to a card, on a public forum. That exact change was implemented 2 weeks later - now I am completely sure that the change had nothing to do with my suggestion, however the incident showed the first signs of someone who was just there for the ride, and wasnât critically analysing the card set. Further examples over the months have only served to strengthen the conviction that this member is just 'yesmanâning his way through. (Iâm still happy to be proven wrong by that person, and I will submit an apology if that is the case.) I donât have to reiterate current public opinion on Joseki, again, Iâm very happy to rescind my comments given evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately, my opinions have been formed over a year of observing the fiasco. This is also why I donât offer actual changes to cards - since that incident, it is presumptuous to offer if at least a quarter of the team thinks that the provider is incompetent. You are giving the team the benefit of the doubt, Iâm merely doing the opposite based on my experiences at large.
I honestly agree with everything else you have said.
But yeah I do advocate for people to speak up and host discussions if they are having a problem with something but what I am against is when people dramatize the situation as opposed to stating the problem in detail and suggesting solutions to solve the matter. What I usually see on this forum and this attitude doesnât just apply to Duelyst. But yeah what I usually see is people just complaining about things but the complaints usually add nothing to the table. I love to see suggestion threads and i am sure we all prefer them to rant threads.
You seem to have some kind of confirmation bias here. This forum as well as the reddit is full with well thought out posts of different people including myself providing analysis and possible solutions to the problems we see and all we get in return is silence.
So please tell me, why should i bother to make the same page long posts about the same old problem again and again when CPG doesnât bother to show even the slightest response and when i already know from about one year of experience that they wonât be considered anyway in the end? I mean Ryvirath can tell us all day he is reading and passing on everything we write here but what does that do for us if nothing changes? The game doesnât get better from his promises alone.
At some point the only things left to do are ranting or quitting. Both choices arenât really productive so it pretty much comes down to âAre you frustrated enough to quit the game for good or do you still have some hope that things might change at some pointâ? I am kind of in the middle, i donât really have any hope left that this game will ever become what it could be, but i am also not frustrated enough to just move on entirely.
I thought long and hard about replying to this thread and I think I will. First of all this thread is obviously click bait. This patch is obviously not a balance patch. To call it anything but an âimprovement toâ or ârelaunch ofâ gauntlet is foolish at best.
Anyway, I do feel that most people are pretty one sided in terms of how CPG engages with the community. I will preface my following statement by saying, I am talking as person who has and does work for software development companies. I have not worked for a game developer but since games are software there is at least some overlap about client engagement and releases that I feel my personal experience speaks to. I will also say that this is not a defense or attack on CPG. I will try to keep my personal opinion on how they have handled things to myself for the most part.
From my experience there are a few things to consider when performing releases in software. Of these things, from a more business standpoint, you have to consider 1) the overall stability of the product and 2) if you are setting a precedent for the future. Now, in the first case the stability of the product not only entails understanding if the product will have bugs (i.e. will it crash or not) but also it how much churn there is in released code on the software. This means that if youâre making constant, frequent, changes to so-called âcore functionalityâ this makes your software or release process look unstable to your clients. So while you may do frequent updates, doing them for the sake of testing new âfixesâ is inherently a bad idea from a business point of view. From the point of view of a game this means that doing something like releasing a card to change it two weeks later may actually be harmful in long run. People will see cards as being unstable and will actually lose confidence in your ability to maintain a stable product. This is something to consider when we have discussions about âquick, small, updatesâ. They sound good from a client perspective but in actual practice they may not work well.
On the second point, we do have to remember that when engaging with a client you need to also set an expectation of how interaction with you will go in the future. One of the worst scenarios is being in a case where you react to a group of clients nearly immediately because they are upset about something. The reason for this is that it sets an expectation for future engagement from clients, where they give threats rather than engaging in dialogue because they now feel they have power to get their way with you. Having been on the receiving end of this type of engagement, this is not a good situation to be in as a company. Generally, this is what all these posts about âIâm leavingâ or âIf you donât change this, I wonât play anymoreâ are attempting to do intrinsically. I say intrinsically here because I do believe that there are people that are honestly disillusioned with the state of the game and are offering solutions because they want to see the game thrive. That being said you do not want to be seen as unresponsive, but rather measured as to how you approach client grievances and concerns. This, however, does not mean you have to instantly (where instantly means something like a month) respond to your clients. However, if you are getting a number of negative, intelligent, responses from your clients I believe you should provide a measure of feedback. This may simply be a statement of acknowledgement that you are looking in to options (which is not actually an admission of guilt).
Anyway TLDR; remember that you are dealing with a company and as far as engagement goes with a company there is a business side to consider as to how they deal with you. No response does not mean inaction (especially in a short period of time), it may only mean there is no good, internally proposed, resolution at this time.
To look at the game from a competitive perspective, Duelyst is not in the best position, with Arcanyst Faie dominating the ladder. Of course, we have had this type of meta-shift throughout its history (including the Vetruvian era, the Songhai era, and the Lyonar era). I was extremely upset when I saw that there were no balance patches yesterday, and thought that the devs werenât paying attention to the community, or that they didnât care about their game anymore. However, the gauntlet patch was necessary for the game, and did address an issue I had with Duelyst early on.
In comparison to Hearthstone, Duelyst is going through a similar trend, with Duelyst experiencing a Shamanstone-like meta currently (or at least to me). However, this recent patch has helped provide more ways to help new players, and provide a more rewarding mode for players that can also act as an alternative to the ranked ladder. Gauntlet now has greater incentive for players (mainly with a way to get rid of those crates), and these new gauntlet cards provide a way to make decks more consistent and level-powered in terms of spirit when compared to Hearthstoneâs Arena. Furthermore, Boss Battles now occur weekly (it used to be every 2 weeks there would be a new boss battle, but I am unsure when the switch was made to every week), making it very similar to Hearthstoneâs Tavern Brawl with the additional Shimzar orbs provided on your first win (with Duelystâs added bonus of a boss crate that, if bought, provides 3 more orbs, a crate key, and 1 cosmetic item(?)). These modes will make it easier for new players to get into the game, while also giving players both an incentive to keep playing and an alternative to laddering.
I know things have been shaky as of lately, but we cannot turn on each other as a community. Each of you have concerns for the game, and want to see Duelyst flourish. But itâs hard to achieve that if we keep fighting against each other. We have an expansion coming up soon (about end of this month or so), and I have confidence that this next large-scale expansion will bring back the joy and excitement in the meta game that players have been waiting for. 
Really sad to read thatâŚ
I understand CPG is a small company and it needs ot make money anyway, but i believe it is quite always possible to aim for both a great game and profit. I, btw, also work part-time for a game developing company and iâve already seen many mistakes (from a gamer point of view) in the favour of making money. Now i am not saying CPG is like that, i really think it is not, in fact i always see theyâre communication with the community and support for the players. But sometimes things like this arcanyst meta come out and i start to think thereâs something wrong with it, i donât really know much about balancing things, i have a few thoughts about it, but i cannot figure out: is it really hard to do a nearly good balancing of the game, or is it needed to the game to be unbalanced, or are theese just mistakes of the workers? I think one dedicated employe is better then 3 non-dedicated.
Most of the modern online games are not very well balanced and balance changes with every patch (for example, after every patch of dota everybody sais âdota is broken uninstallâ but somehow the number of players dosnât decrease), and is similiar in duelyst. On one side i do not like all those complaints about the game balance, in the end is just a meta and it will change as soon as new cards come out. But on the other side i can understand all those players who play every day and the new expansion brings just new broken things.
I, presonally, do not play every day and have already dropped the game once (not because of balance 
), came back after the last expansion release, and for now i still find it interesting trying different kind of decks, may be is just a metter of time, may be not, who knows.
In the end i really hope things will change for good and CPG will work a little more on theyr balance team.
Edit:
And one thing to add here. From mine point of view it is not correct to balance the game by releasing a new expansion because of many reasons. It shall all be balanced already before deploying new cards. However, i understand that now the best choice is the expansion, and i hope it actually will do its job.