I agree to an extent. For a mod just starting out that needs a vision, direction, and is being built the dev definitely needs a strong hand in guiding the mod. It should be the dev who owns the vision in order to maintain consistency, continuity, and cohesion.Devilfish wrote: ↑06 Jan 2021, 14:31@kwok
The proposer might hold the burden of truth, but a concept of developing the mod by making the players proposers and devs the judges is just wrong.
If you are truly developing this mod and not just doing a minimum maintenance (which doens't seem to be the case as you've done a complete doc rework) you need to stand behind every value set in the mod. If you don't know or can't explain why there are discrepancies between accuracy values of certain units, you need to put the revision of these values into the roadmap and not challenge the players to prove something.
But, as the mod (or any system) is matured and starts to be a part of the life of its players (users), then the mentally switches to maintaining status quo rather than try to revolutionize anything because impact to players becomes a major factor in development. BK has been in this mode for a long time, only recently taking a more "hybrid" approach. The devs will decide when to apply which mentality to where it best fits. Examples:
Learnings from the 2019-2020 beta where doctrine reworks were being built for the first time: it was important for devs to maintain their end-state vision instead of focusing on maintenance of what was built. There were mistakes on the way no doubt, but the devs definitely needed to force people along with envisioned changes in order to be successful otherwise we'd still be in beta testing today and 5.1.7 would still be the live patch. Even to today, any changes requested/needed that relate to the rework philosophy are usually dev owned/driven. See latest examples on panzer support, propaganda, and airborne changes. The players were split in opinion, we called the shots on what needed to happen because these were big changes needed.
Updating a value that has existed before multiple generations of patches falls under maintenance. For years players just "got use" to certain values and performances. Shifting those values even just a little bit has shown to send huge ripple effects in balance. When a single players comes to challenge 1 value that has been adopted by the community for years, frankly sometimes the answer is just "because it is". The history of the mod is a weird one to being with where it wasn't even built by the current managing team. There are values in the game that are older than the team itself in Xalibur's time. When Xalibur handed the ownership to Wolf, Wolf's philosophy wasn't to develop his own mod but to keep it in the vision of Xali. Now, the philosophy is changing even more/again where the mod is dedicated to being a PvP-immersion mod which is why the doctrine reworks took place. When you have prehistoric values that players are loyal too since the Xali time, you keep those because at the very end of the line it was Xali's mod. Additionally, if we needed to provide an exact answer to every single value in corsix we would get no where. If you want devs to spend the time building a case for why something has a marginal difference, then the dev team would need to be comprised of more lawyers and historians than solutioners. We challenge players in their complaints (not even solutions) because we owe it to the PvP community to maintain stability and status quo in their games. Think about how often do the rules change for chess. It's super rare and player driven because at this point the game is a part of the lives of the players not the creators. I'm not saying BK is a 1500 year old game, but there are extreme versions of concepts on direction driving I'm trying to explain.