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[Magicman10893]

Dokteur Kill wrote...

Tronar wrote...
And apparently they have the resources to nerf the crap out of all the weapons every week and even introduce the option to get stomped now by enemies on Gold and Platinum (before only on silver) without  "all of the time-consuming in-house and third party verification" or any other ado.

Completely different things. Balancing changes are just about altering run-time parameters that are loaded at startup, not making changes to the actual game source.

But they also have to go through their data to determine what is over/underpowered, plan a way to fix the issue, test it in-house and continue to monitor the effects they have on the community to see if they need to keep changing things. For instance, the Tactical Cloak nerf. About two weeks before the nerf Fagnan revealed they had data that indicated Infiltrators (specifically Tactical Cloak) was too powerul since 1/3 of the players on Gold were using Infiltrators. He mentioned they have been overpowered for quite some time. This means that for weeks or even months before the nerf they have been working on how to "balance" it properly. 

The actual fix may be easy (changing a few server-side variables and values), but the full process is more complicated, much like how patching requires testing to be done by 3 or 4 different companies in addition to actually rewriting the lines of code.

[Dokteur Kill]

Magicman10893 wrote...
The actual fix may be easy (changing a few server-side variables and values), but the full process is more complicated, much like how patching requires testing to be done by 3 or 4 different companies in addition to actually rewriting the lines of code.

Sorry, it's nowhere near the same.

Balance changes require a small team or even just one person to analyze the statistics and decide on some changes, and then pure in-house testing to see how they pan out. Just the fact that they don't have to involve multiple third-parties that have their own requirements shaves enormous amounts of time off it. Not to mention the fact that most balance changes don't require all of the hours of head-scratching that it can take to find the cause of a bug and to figure out a good, robust solution to it. As soon as you start thinking in terms of algorithms rather than just parameters, the time spent thinking about a problem goes up exponentially.