Thank you for posting your thoughts
@Hayate Tarzanino, I really hope you continue to comment as the re-balancing process advances.
You eloquently and precisely described the situation and the issues of fort fighting, and actually had constructive comments about Pay-to-win, which is incredible to see, especially since I've just had a moan about exactly the
issue of pricing in this game on another form. I, of course, wish for this version of the game to be hugely successful again, and want good friends of mine to still have jobs and maybe a nice bonus for the dev for literally having to treat the symptoms of mismanagement, the game has to be playable to be sustainable though, and let me stress in no uncertain terms that 10,000 quests and 4 tombolas do not count as a playable game in the context of The West. Duels are too far gone to save but forts, and The West, can be great again.
I too am concerned about completely destroying the damager vs tank dynamic of the fights, and it's one of the main things I'll try to advise on going forward. Ideally a pure damager should still absolutely out-class a tank-hybrid in that regard, but the tank should also be able to dodge or resist a lot more.
I also really like that I, as a tank, am not just sitting inside a tower for 30 rounds to be used up in 1 or 2 anymore, and contributing no damage whatsoever to the team. I went from dealing 300 damage to dealing 500-600 damage on the rare occasions i make a hit (more against bad builds), and leaderships who understand what's going on here went from dealing ~1300 damage to ~1000 (again more against bad builds like pure HP), while
knuckle-draggers who only ever had to consider pure leadershi* now do less damage than tanks. It already feels much closer to the good old days to me but I have no idea how this all translates to our regular worlds where most remaining players are dueller class damagers or the direct counter to those as pure HP adventurers, as a symptom of the mangled wreck of Tombola Simulator - a
potentially massive issue we'll have to prepare for in our communities. I still seem to dodge like 1 in 100 shots from damagers.
~Union officer rant incoming~
Another concern is obviously union officer set and how it will interact with these changes. Further than that with the game mechanics designed for 2013 West and the players making it clear that forts can't handle the modern sets in 2017, the fact that a set that powerful was then created, just after new worlds were opened, without even an equivalent tank set, is a huge problem, there's no safeguards or quality control to stop us from slipping back into breaking the game in the future, so unless Diggo's formulae can take that into account too, I feel that I can't trust the current people, who i'm convinced don't even play or understand the game to the point a lot of the sets have irrelevant skills, to make the next generations of fort sets which will surely follow these changes. Remember we are treating the
symptoms, not the cause here. It would be pretty amazing to keep this world around after the balancing issues and use it to QC new sets without disturbing the revenue streams of the "Beta" world, but I know that's unrealistic as every Fort Fighter already probably prefers ts to their home worlds, there's nowhere else in the entire game where we can have large fights.
And i'm gonna stop there before it turns into a migration rant.