I watched this fantastic Dns interview of Showtime and he brought up some insight into the Balance Council I wanted to surface and discuss, some of which are deeply concerning for the future of the game.
For context, the Council recently released a laughably idiotic patch that demonstrated deep seated concerns with their process and structure. Summarizing some of the points in the video (minute 20:00 onwards) here:
- Enormous conflicts of interest - pros are vouching for things that not only benefit their race, but their own playstyle - Politics and negotiations - if your race has more passive person championing the changes, then you will lose out to others who are more aggressive. The people unwilling to compromise are rewarded. - There is an unnamed top-level Terran who is given extreme credence to his opinions (HM has publicly said he refuses to join because of such conflict of interest, so not sure who. Clem makes sense but doesnt strike me as the type, possibly Maru or Spirit). - Lower level pro's opinions are disregarded in favor of higher level ones, even when they bring "facts and replay evidence" - The person who is in charge of the actual balance patch changes ("the referee" in the video) has a noticeable bias against protoss, which was noticed by both Dns and Showtime.
I hope Dns doesnt get in hot water for adding the tiniest bit of transparency to the process, but nothing he said is surprising. Design by committee is always a subpar average that maximizes no optima, and that's without the massive conflicts of interest. For all the WoL problems, the balance was always done with high integrity - David Kim was a GM random player and forbidden to play in tournaments because he was a Blizzard employee. He used to cite win-rates across every sub league when justifying the balance of a change.
I'd much rather have a system where we have (pay) knowledgeable people who have the least conflict of interest themselves. Someone like PiG, possibly Rotti, (and of course they wouldn't be allowed to compete in tourneys). Thoughts?
EDIT: Risky has shared the selection and deliberation process of the council back when he was on it, mostly confirming the notes above. Players are invited by EPT points and 2 representatives per race make the calls.
Big props to bringing these issues forward. Insta-clicking the video to watch right now!
Kinda of sucks to hear that many of our fears/speculations/observations may be true, but also happy that someone reputable is willing to speak on it. Having pros in a Discord server try to design/balance the game might lead to a lot of issues in the design and balance process - who knew!!
On October 23 2024 12:20 luxon wrote: I'd much rather have a system where we have (pay) knowledgeable people who have the least conflict of interest themselves. Someone like PiG, possibly Rotti, (and of course they wouldn't be allowed to compete in tourneys). Thoughts?
Microsoft should move a couple of successful managers/employees away from their other RTS projects and onto the SC2 esports project. Those MS management people can then hire and pay a balance council.
You will have users in this forum wielding their pitchforks at the mere quoting of apparent malfeasance from some Balance Council members, but they can't say anything now that pros went on the record about it.
Somebody had to start it. So nice for DnS.
I might have to dig out some yellings from these kind of users, if they try to use their troll card again. Because this isn't really news but implied since quite some time. I don't really mind not knowing the identity of who pulls the curtain to themselves on a playing level, but if the referee has a bias, this is a nono.
It is a very interesting discussion, same as you, I hope DnS doesn't get into trouble for it. However, I think a balance council is still the way the go.
Realistically, we won't be getting community funding to pay people to balance the game, and anyway, ESL/Blizzard probably wouldn't allow it because of the potential legal/PR blowback.
It feels like it's either some kind of community advisory committee or letting a couple of ESL guys do it alone (or likely stop doing it). A balance council, however imperfect, seems better for the state of the game, even if it may be worse for the integrity of professional competitions.
I think a (relatively) easy fix would be to ban any top 20 or top 30 EPT finishers from being on the council. That way you would still have the opinion of high-level players that may be biased, but there would be a healthy distance between the council and the top players trying to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Maybe ESL could also try to change some procedural stuff to help, but we're not prevee to that.
(Also as a sidenote, we may want to take some of the finger pointing keeping in mind DnS is a (relatively) less well established protoss player, I imagine not everyone would see things the same way)
I think one thing that would solve a fair number of issues, would be having the council be more transparent.
Showtime made a really interesting point in that, he dosn't feel like the balance patches start from the stated goals and that the balancing comes first and then the text later. So, I think rather than having a bit of disconnected fluff, it would be better to have some of the discussion made public so that even if we don't agree with the changes, we can understand why the changes where originally made.
I think it also would be nice to get a bit more of a heads up as to what the balance council is looking at, so like 4-5 months ago, or whenever they started talking about this latest patch in earnest, it would have been nice to know about some concepts and ideas just so that when they release a patch for PTR. Because at the moment it feels like being in a car accident and suffering whiplash...
This is merely confirming what many of us thought when Blizzard stopped patching the game and SC2 got a Balance Council. We can tell who is being favoured in the last few patches and what race is being nerfed to oblivion. In the end, the pro scene has become worse and while I still say the drop in Protss win rate is partially due to the skill level of Protoss players compared to Terran and Zerg, these patches have a huge impact as well.
In my opinion, we need to get rid of the Balance Council and leave the game as is, with nerfs to both Terran and Zerg while keeping Protoss the same if we're not going to buff Colossus. The game is already at a poor state with the current maps, strengths, and weakness of each race, and it's only going to get worse after the patch.
Having worked in several early-stage labs and a startup... this is all entirely unsurprising and massively disappointing.
There is no design control. There is no mechanism to counteract conflict of interest. There is no procedure other than the feels of the loudest/most belligerent/most high-profile people at the table.
Might be time to hang up the mouse, so to speak, and find another way to spend my time.
ban any top 20 or top 30 EPT finishers from being on the council.
That's just halfway to my suggestion of "banning" all players in the EPT circuit. I know they probably wouldnt want to because of all the blame and hate headed their way, but casters are the best medium for this; deep knowledge of all matchups, and only financial incentive is for exciting gameplay, since they can't compete.
The world champion is decided by politics, not skill, and any player who is ok with that is no true fan of the game.
Agreed, can't even blame them. If pushing hard was the difference between 200k for me, I'd do it too. It's an incentives problem.
Having worked in several early-stage labs and a startup... this is all entirely unsurprising and massively disappointing... Might be time to hang up the mouse, so to speak, and find another way to spend my time.
Heh same, I've seen this in many other industries, it's not a unique problem. And yes, if this patch goes through I will almost unquestionably uninstall. Not that that's a bad thing, I've been playing on and off for almost 15 years, time to move on.
Going by this video, it seems like more of an ESL/Blizz problem than a player problem.
Having pros involved in balance is perfectly fine. It's not like Blizzard was making decisions out of nowhere back in the day—they were consulting pros regularly before major patches.
Players in that situation are obviously going to have biases (conscious and subconscious) and try to politick. That's no reason to dismiss the knowledge they've gained through thousands of hours of practice. It's the job of the final decision-makers to cut through the bullshit, see what the truly meaningful feedback was, and move forward in the correct direction.
While I don't want to jump to conclusions from the opinions of the two players in the video, it seems like ESL/Blizz just don't have the time/expertise to properly process the pro opinions. That should be no surprise, because that used to be the job of a full-time balance/design team at Blizzard.
In the big picture, I do think this is close to the best we can do given the current situation of StarCraft II. Getting casters or non-pros involved doesn't fundamentally change the situation where someone has to take all those opinions and make some hard decisions. The final decision-makers took on a task that they're not fully equipped to do, and that won't change unless Blizzard puts more resources into SC2 again.
[Also, it's not like people were perfectly happy when Blizzard's dev team was taking a more assertive role in patching either. That can go wrong in its own way as well. At the end of the day, balancing three factions for multiple levels of play is REALLY hard.]
Pros have a place on the council. Back when Blizzard was in charge talking to top level pros was a part of the data collected for balancing. The math can show you how things are working out, and Blizzard certainly had access to a bunch of data that we never saw, but talking to pros also helped collect information on "pain points" and relative effort that highlight potential issues. I don't say this to justify anything the Balance Council is doing, but to say I don't think outright banning pros is the right play. However, pros should not be the final word, they never were for Blizzard, but they do help highlight areas worth looking into.
The biggest thing is that the way the council appears to work currently is just plainly stupid. The council needs a standardized and transparent process to both create and communicate their objections. The apparent lack of a process other than "loudest voice wins" is stupid.
What I would suggest is a process like such:
A group of council members, randomly selected, is made into an executive council for each patch and is in charge of executing on the patch. Each patch, a new executive committee is created.
Patches should work in phases. Phase 1: The executive council sets out the goals of the patch, match-ups to change, units to buff, nerf, or re-work, unit interactions to change, etc Phase 2: The rest of the council (executive committee excluded) vote, anonymously, on which of those goals are most important and the top performers are selected for that patch Phase 3: Council members (executive committee excluded) submit ideas to address the goal Phase 4: The executive committee compiles the ideas, cleans them up, and submits them back to the council in anonymized balance packages for the other council members to review and vote on Phase 5: Based on the voted upon balance packages the committee puts together a rough draft of a patch for active discussion to refine Phase 6: Patch finalized by executive committee and resubmitted to the bulk of the council to review. If it does not clear a 60% yes vote then return to Phase 4/5 to further refine
Since the information is anonymized the various in-progress suggestions can always be released to the community for comments and feedback.
People aregoing to be people, if those in charge lack the ability to process their (naturally more or less biased) opinions, this is kinda unavoidable like Wax said?
But it IS interesting to get some tea about the process that's for sure, it has become somewhat quiet here. :D
The balance council doesn't seem to be following any kind of consistent philiosophy for balancing the game.
They're making changes geared at lower level play, while at the expense of higher level play. They're making decisions based on subjective ideas of what is "fun" and then not even following through on those ideas like in this patch wanting to nerf "camping" playstyles, but yet buffing Immobile units like Broodlords, Thors and Liberators that thrive in those playstyles.
They're making changes no one asked for, and then walking them back in the next patch cycle like the Mothership and Disruptor.
There's no consistent direction with any of it. It's all reactionary without a clear focus.
while I still say the drop in Protss win rate is partially due to the skill level of Protoss players compared to Terran and Zerg, these patches have a huge impact as well.
There's been enormous incentive to switch away from / not get competitive with protoss for many years now because of this bias. Everyone knows about it since a long time ago, especially high level players. Thx Dns for confirming a lot of things.
This one can't be laid at the feet of the balance council I don't think, it's not like the game wasn't biased against protoss before they came in. There were "passive decisions" that were worse, like letting zerg domination periods go on for way too long, but in terms of active decisions the way Neeb's playstyle was patched out is probably still the worst in the game's history.
On October 23 2024 17:53 Nebuchad wrote: This one can't be laid at the feet of the balance council I don't think, it's not like the game wasn't biased against protoss before they came in. There were "passive decisions" that were worse, like letting zerg domination periods go on for way too long, but in terms of active decisions the way Neeb's playstyle was patched out is probably still the worst in the game's history.
I'd still say the worst was the Observer nerf because of how "frustrating" it was for Terrans. However, you are correct that whenever Protoss has some new timing or exploitive strategy it gets rapidly patched out when other races don't receive the same liberal hits from the nerf hammer
EPT
