11-04-2021, 12:51 AMspooked Wrote: I 100% agree that there is not enough player agency compared to even what we had in STHS. It has been something I have brought up in HO a few times mostly in passing (I would feel out of my depth to really try to suggest a balanced set of these in the FHM engine), but generally speaking it will take a lot of time for HO/someone to sit down and hammer out anything and frankly there are so many bigger issues at play that this ends up just getting put on the back burner to other things. Hopefully when we get some new hires in we can get someone who is wanting to look into this. Another major roadblock to this is finding the right balance as even with STHS this ended up becoming very much a meta-game league, which would lead me to think that whatever we put in place in regards to something like this, we would almost need to have some amount of focus on balancing and rebalancing these groups to make weak ones stronger and strong ones weaker, which is a whole other aspect that we currently do not have any coverage on. I think that was something we could have done more aggressively in STHS, but again, without some very clear responsibility assigned to that kind of effort, it ends up falling in priority to offseason tasks, issues with rulebook infractions, issues WITH the rulebook, etc.

I personally would love to see something along the lines of what you were suggesting with leveraging the FHM roles to some degree, either group them into 2-3 per archetype so we can maintain some control over player deployment (or do not include the option to use exploitive ones in the first place) or something more general with hardcore balancing to make sure the TPE scales all work out nicely and doesn't just make the most mixed builds the best.

EDIT: There has also been some minor discussions around helping FHM be less daunting to prospective GMs and moving some of that onto player agency is really one aspect I have been trying to voice a little bit as well as more limitations on GMs in lines/roles will really simplify at least some of the decision making.

I completely agree that doing this would be a huge undertaking. There'd be a ton of time and effort involved. I also think there are a ton of people who agree that this is an issue for the league who would be willing to put in the time to help fix it.

PBE has a department specifically for testing build balance. Creating a similar department here could be a good first step to getting this to be a reality. The commissioner of PBE Hummus God is always willing to talk about this sort of stuff, I imagine he'd be willing to talk about the sort of responsibilities their balancing department has and the steps they go through each time they implement changes to the archetypes.