I FJ I: iEchoic: Pottinger's quote scares me. "Warthogs are too good". What warthogs? Pre-gauss warthogs are about as balanced as they can be, if Robot ends up nerfing gunner and grenadier hogs it's going to be a red flag that they put out patches as PR moves instead of seeking game balance, and will show they can't differentiate balance issues from community whining.
If Robot make changes to the hog based on people crying about losing, and not searching for game balance, then im out. I can not play a game where balance and improvements are decided by devs who are heavily influenced by 12 year old kids crying that they lost, then throwing a tantrum.
Robot (at least, Ensemble) has a history of listening to/hiring very good players to test their games. I remember back on AOE II they were involved with a lot of the top players to write strategy guides, get input on game balance, etc. So I do trust they'll do it right.
Pottinger's quote just scares me. I hope it's like the prophet fix, where the community was crying about the "prophet rush", but everyone good knew the real problem was that prophets could harass any covenant leader and UNSC player without warthogs by kiting (shooting and running). This meant that Arbiter and Brute had almost no chance to beat a good prophet player in 1v1. Good players didn't do a "prophet rush", they just harassed endlessly with their prophets 1:20 into the game while locking an army inside their base. RAYP mastered this, picking three prophets on every map and sharing #1-#2 on the 3v3 leaderboard (MiZ and W4RCRAFT - I played with W4RCRAFT and we always had at least two prophets for the same reason - kiting) and GB.
In the patch notes, though, I believe they said "this should help stymie (sp) the prophet rush a lot of players have been having troubles with)". But reducing the speed doesn't really slow down the prophet rush, just the prophet kiting. So they made the right change and made it sound like it fixed the newbies' problem. It was a good balance change wrapped into a PR move.
I'm hoping for a gauss nerf followed by "this should help the warthog rush that many players have been having troubles with", ha.
That post was needlessly long for an analysis of Robot's balance/PR philosophy.
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