A lot of players have been complaining about the factions being somewhat unbalanced S.V.E.R. in particular seems to be dominating all of the contracts every time I hop on the game. Do you think that has something with them being a stronger team? Or do you think there is some kind of balancing issue that has cropped up since launch?
It's actually kind of both. We've already released two or three patches post-launch. It's hard for me to remember because we always have a couple cooking in the oven here that we haven't released yet. We have two that are in the pipeline that'll be released in coming weeks actually, my community manager will probably kill me for saying that, but we have a number of patches that are already baking.
But I think it's both. It's that, actually, if you look at the faction numbers, by percentage, by distribution, they're really like within a percent or two of each other; kind of 33, 33, 33. They're really close, but there definitely is the perception that S.V.E.R. is more powerful and we spent a lot of time internally looking at that and we'll definitely be reacting to that. I think that the current belief is that there's a couple of S.V.E.R. maps that are slightly easier to defend and so they end up defending it more often, and then they end up winning slightly more often, and then they gain slightly more experience, and then they're slightly higher levels and it kind of cascades.
So, even though I think we've done a good job balancing each faction's gear and weapons and maps, I think what we're seeing are slight imbalances, in the short term. The early experience curve is where people are really jumping ahead the earlier part of the experience curve is far more conservative then the later part of the curve. So, in other words, to get from 1 to 20 is probably the same amount of experiences to get to from 50 to 51. I think you're seeing people jump out five levels, and then have five extra experience points, and then it feeds on itself a little bit.
When there's the slight perception that there's something different, then people will want to go to that faction, right? And so will the most talented players, the most hardcore players who are watching the forums, it'll imbalance it slightly more. It's something we're definitely aware of, and we've already got a number of fixes in the pipe. We're definitely committed to making sure all the maps, factions and gear is perfectly balanced.
