HB, New Modes, and Normal Mode

[IlPalazzo]

Some personal thoughts, which don't reflect any devteam discussion/devteam statement and should be seen as a tentative thesis:

The underlying problem of hb is not the balance, are not the feeder problems, etc. The problem has to be seen from a game developing point of view: The status of hb made it hard (impossible?) for developers to increase the map quality. Why?
It will allways be impossible to balance difference modes in a way creating equal gameplay, therefor in each mode imbalances might (will) occur. Every change to the game will have different impacte on each game mode. By focusing on one mode, namely normal, it's possible to get this mode to a state of balance (from one point of view) which is acceptable, but all other modes won't be taken into consideration - making them what we might call 'funmodes' or 'alternative modes'. The task for those modes is with the focus on normal newly set: They need to exemplify their being as a 'funmode' or 'alternative mode'. They need to express their non-balance. When this doesn't happen problems for the game developers are the result: players playing mostly one of those non-balanced modes complain about gameplay problems in them (you can see that for example here: http://btanks.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2546). Without knowing which modes who plays and with people playing multiple modes the feedback is given in a way which can hardly be sufficient for developers. This problem is intrinsic in any non-normal mode becoming as popular as hb (it can also be found in the mode refered by the hcl 'pro', tho in a far smaller scale).

It is possible to have bt as a closer to normal balance gamemode, but the problem will still exist. Hb needs a way to exemplify it's non-balance, the 'alternative-mode' essence. There are different ways to react to this problem, the one which had been chosen was found in a democratic way in the devteam discussions and is a viable one, tho not my personal favorite.

I agree that the game should be balanced around one mode, because attempting to balance multiple modes simultaneously would be a nightmare if not impossible to solve when modes have different attributes required to be balanced. However, I still disagree that popular fun modes are necessarily an intrinsic bad thing for the community or even bad for it’s developers. To the contrary, I think they're essential to increasing map quality and understanding of what players are looking for.

Over the past year new tanks and weapons have been pushed out the hooplah – and still are. Yet at the same time, the gold flow into the game has remained the same. Some players were simply sick of playing the same set of tanks and using the same set of weapons in normal, when some of the upper tier equipment was sitting on the shelf waiting to be used. A wide reach of strategies are seldom touched upon in a typical normal game because the low gold influx and the limited gametime (which is another issue) which simply didn’t permit them to come into play for a majority of players. The only time I see a tier 4 tank in normal is when a game runs near or past 1:00. I haven’t seen a Swarm of Chaos or Frost Lasers yet. With the game set-up now, only a handful of good pub games and a niche of pro games ever reach this point. With the drive to shorten up the gametime – this number will go down.

HB, even if it was imbalanced, showed that some players’ desired a gameplay shift. HB shouldn’t have been taken as a bad sign of where the community was going, but a valuable indicator on how the game should continue evolving to become better. If the proper changes were made to make normal more attractive for these players, but left HB in – “High Bounty” would have become ‘too much bounty’ just like 10k/30k feels like too much starting gold to the average player now. It would still be played, yes, but the mode would slip into obscurity like any other fun mode.

With High Bounty (even though it’s gone now), we least we now know what is unintentially changing when we increase gold flow… Creeps become weaker, player skill level becomes more important, breakers/nets/teleporters are easier to obtain, etc. We would not have that luxury, had HB not been in game and if players merely said “this game feels too slow.” We would have likely found these problems anyway, but by taking steps in the dark with normal mode. So it's not all bad.