Open player data and player Match History
In the early days of the most famous MOBA game in the world, a certain European team crafted a meta and dominated the game, eventually winning the first world tournament.
The tournament happened no more than 2 years after the game had officially launched.
In strategy games, maintaining a character's distinct characteristics and balancing them is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's even harder when you keep releasing new characters that come with new gameplay styles. A study once revealed that after 2 years have passed, pro gamers have very different opinions on strategy/meta/character roles. Games evolve -- it goes without saying that balance will evolve with the meta.
Eternal Return might face similar issues. We here at Nimble Neuron all play the game, read all the balance discussions on Discord, and analyze the game data from many angles. However, in the eyes of some very skilled players, this might not be enough.
What we can do now is learn and grow from changes we've made -- even "erroneous" ones. We plan to have balance updates every 2 weeks that we expect may gradually improve balance issues.
We also want to foster more in-depth strategy discussions among our community, so we plan to host events to share strategy guides and videos. We believe that it is also very important to have "open player data" to support this initiative.
After the last Alpha ended, we shared an early Match History site with you all (http://matchhistory.playeternalreturn.com). New information, like stats per mode, hunting, etc will be added. We also plan on eventually adding other data, like masteries.
At the moment, we only have individual records. The eventual goal is to support data related to Eternal Return's competitive meta. Data on victory rate, player kills, hunting, main builds per character, weapons, etc are all very important to this. Once the data structure backend is more stable and accessible, we would also like to provide our API so that players can make their own sites or apps.
The data becoming more detailed in public will likely result in more criticisms for us. As a result, to decide on balance changes, the team will require more preparation for each patch. Compared to the speed of the community opinion, and how fast we receive feedback, this process might feel slow.
Even with open game data, balance issues will still present themselves. The data, on some occasions, fails to fully explain the gamepay of outliers -- like the highest tier of players. For example, there might be a character that seems to be overperforming, but is a result of being in the hands of a skilled player.
However, we will put a lot of effort into having more and more open player data, so we can develop deep strategy and make a fair game for all of our players.
This may take a long time, but we hope you keep a close eye on the future of our open player data philosophy that we will be developing little by little!
The tournament happened no more than 2 years after the game had officially launched.
In strategy games, maintaining a character's distinct characteristics and balancing them is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's even harder when you keep releasing new characters that come with new gameplay styles. A study once revealed that after 2 years have passed, pro gamers have very different opinions on strategy/meta/character roles. Games evolve -- it goes without saying that balance will evolve with the meta.
Eternal Return might face similar issues. We here at Nimble Neuron all play the game, read all the balance discussions on Discord, and analyze the game data from many angles. However, in the eyes of some very skilled players, this might not be enough.
What we can do now is learn and grow from changes we've made -- even "erroneous" ones. We plan to have balance updates every 2 weeks that we expect may gradually improve balance issues.
We also want to foster more in-depth strategy discussions among our community, so we plan to host events to share strategy guides and videos. We believe that it is also very important to have "open player data" to support this initiative.
After the last Alpha ended, we shared an early Match History site with you all (http://matchhistory.playeternalreturn.com). New information, like stats per mode, hunting, etc will be added. We also plan on eventually adding other data, like masteries.
At the moment, we only have individual records. The eventual goal is to support data related to Eternal Return's competitive meta. Data on victory rate, player kills, hunting, main builds per character, weapons, etc are all very important to this. Once the data structure backend is more stable and accessible, we would also like to provide our API so that players can make their own sites or apps.
The data becoming more detailed in public will likely result in more criticisms for us. As a result, to decide on balance changes, the team will require more preparation for each patch. Compared to the speed of the community opinion, and how fast we receive feedback, this process might feel slow.
Even with open game data, balance issues will still present themselves. The data, on some occasions, fails to fully explain the gamepay of outliers -- like the highest tier of players. For example, there might be a character that seems to be overperforming, but is a result of being in the hands of a skilled player.
However, we will put a lot of effort into having more and more open player data, so we can develop deep strategy and make a fair game for all of our players.
This may take a long time, but we hope you keep a close eye on the future of our open player data philosophy that we will be developing little by little!