I could at least respect you guys if you argued that the game is balanced now. But your complete neglect for the concept of balance is what is really riduculous.
+ 1000
They're only "discussing" by deliberately misunderstanding and misstating what the other side is saying.
***
In NFL and NCAA football, it takes 10 yards to get a first down. If you made it 30 yards, the game would be terrible. All games would be 3-0 "defensive struggles" in which 9 out of 10 series would be three and outs. This is not because quarterbacks suck or receivers are whiners or running backs have no 733t skillz, it is because in a game which balances skilled offensive players against equally skilled defensive players, the rules must create an arbitrary and artificial balance by making the goal for the offense something that is reasonably achievable, but not so easy that it's impossible for the defense to prevent. Given
equally skilled offensive and defensive players, it will be relatively rare for the offense to gain 30 yards in 3 plays consistently enough to move the ball downfield and score touchdowns.
Likewise, given
equally skilled offensive and defensive players, it would be so easy to move 5 yards in three plays that it would happen every series and no one would ever have to punt or try a field goal, there'd be a touchdown every time.
10 yards strikes a good balance and makes for good gameplay.
What a lot of us have been saying is that the base-taking aspect of AH has gotten out of balance. It takes 30 yards to get a first down, therefore first downs are rare and no one ever scores a touchdown. This isn't because the offense sucks - after all, 90% of the people who care about base-taking and war-winning play both defense
and offense in this game - it's because the arbitrary balance created by the game is out of whack. Given equally skilled play by offense and defense, the defense will usually win. It's not impossible to take bases, but it's difficult enough that no one can take enough in a short enough amount of time to win the map. There are no reasonably achievable strategic goals.
(The exception being the situation we saw earlier in SFMA, where two sides ignore each other and gang up on the third for an unusually extended period, but then of course you can't win the war that way either, as we've seen, all you can do is create an incredibly lopsided game.)
A bunch of people on thse forums read that, and somehow translate it to "I suck and haz no skillz and this game is 2 hard." Which is not remotely what is being said.
I think the root of the problem here is what grizz has identified: some of the "furballers" here don't care about that balance and don't even recognize its existence or the validity of the concept, because they despise the entire base taking/strategic aspect of the game. What they wan't isn't for base taking to be
appropriately difficult, it's for base taking to be
infinitely difficult, so that no one bothers with it and everyone plays the way they want, which is to mindlessly furball with no strategic goal in mind. Why should anyone ever want to end a perfectly good fight by taking the base?
That is, of course, not what HTC are trying to achieve - they are trying to make it appropriately difficult and strike a proper balance. The criticism is that they are in error and what we have now isn't a proper balance, it's an endless 3-0 "defensive struggle" (complete with massive hordes since that's the only remaining practical way to take defended bases). Their changes have not produced the results they intended.
And what unperked 262s have to do with any of this, I can't imagine. It's just something deliberately stupid that has been tossed out to derail the discussion. Guppy is trying to make the people he disagrees with look ridiculous and stupid, by saying something he knows is ridiculous and stupid and pretending it's what they're saying when it is perfectly obvious that it isn't.
