This issue of the existing Developer Friday series takes place today on Thursday - after all, we wouldn't want you to wait for more information about Armored Warfare development just for the sake of naming convenience. Without further ado, here is another set of the answers the developers have provided!
Balancing vehicles
There are two things that are taken into account when determining whether a vehicle in Armored Warfare is balanced or not:
- Statistics
- Player feedback
When it comes to Statistics, the developers are taking the main indicators into account, such as winrate, average experience and many others. Winrate in particular is an interesting indicator – for it to be useful, it has to be disassembled based on the winrate of particular players groups. To put it simply, the winrate of the vehicle has to generally match the winrate of the particular investigated player group. For example, if players with 52 percent average winrate achieve 58 percent winrate with that particular vehicle, it might indicate a problem even if the average winrate of the said vehicle is well within acceptable parameters (roughly 49-51 percent). The developers are taking the results of all the player groups into account. Another thing taken into account is how well the vehicle is in its assigned role (for example for AFVs it’s scouting and spotting).
Player Feedback is another important part of the balancing process. It is acquired by two means. The first and obvious one is the developers directly reading the European/North American forums and sometimes discussing their opinions with the players. The second one is the community managers from all the communities making detailed weekly summaries of the player feedback for the developers.
As for Premium Vehicles, the developers do adhere to the previously published rules, according to which the premium vehicles can be rebalanced if the statistics show that they are overperforming. On the other hand the developers – aware of the sensitive nature of premium vehicle rebalances – are doing their utmost to avoid such situations by carefully balancing the premium vehicles before the release. More about the balancing process can be read in our dedicated article.
In Other News...
- There are plans to completely overhaul the commander and crew systems. Switching crews from one vehicle to another however is not planned
- The developers are planning to eventually split maps by tiers to ensure the vehicles of appropriate tiers are played on appropriate maps. This will however only happen once more maps are introduced.
- Introducing the possibility to upload custom battalion logos is not planned for now. The developers are however planning to introduce a “logo generator” that will allow the battalions to customize their logo from existing elements in the game.
- There will be the possibility to give the command of a platoon to another player
- One of the highest priorities is the performance optimization. The developers are aware of the performance losses on certain maps and are working on finding a solution.
- Armored Warfare is currently not featured in the list of games in GeForce Experience (a tool to optimize the settings) – the reason is that the game itself optimizes the settings based on the GPU the game detected. It's possible this feature will however appear in the future.
- There are no plans to introduce the possibility to mount more consumables of the same type on a vehicle.
- Different ammunition loadouts for PvP and PvE are not planned for now, since it would make the already complex UI in the garage even more complicated. Additionally, statistics have shown that most players are using identical ammunition setup for both modes anyway.
Interested in more information? Please ask your questions in the discussion and our community managers will be happy to either answer or relay them to the developers! See you on the battlefield.
