Thank you so much for your review, I will return the favor later when I finish work. I wouldn't be here w/o everyone's feedback <3
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Regarding what scores from where, the game is roguelike-ish with 10 waves, and I do run some small tournaments in weekends and adjust the META. I know it sounds overcomplicated for a 'pinball game' but this was my twist, deep behind the simple gameplay the BUILD you do is often more important than anything else, and it's something players learn in time or they can go on leaderboards and check them out.
W/o you needing to play another game, if you just go main menu -> lederboards, you can open every game. After 10 waves I send the game data into a cloudflare database and I have many end points tracked, from build history to each type of lane, to bonuses that come from various cards. This project started as an experiment with BIG DATA in mind, and it was some PONG multiplayer that slowly took the shape of a pinball arena game.
Also I feed this data to some python scripts that simulate it and helps me take balance notes and even teach BOTS what is good and what is not, so they are more competitive. Even if the game is PvP focused, the bots do a half decent job.
But the most important thing is -> you score goals -> you steal land -> you score higher in your land. Then you slowly learn the meta.
Is it overengineered? YES. Is it still unbalanced? YES. But I'm on 3rd season and with every game I get more data that helps me balance it more. A bit TMI but I think your observation was very good: I can't see super ez how deep the rabbit hole go :D
Thanks again, will be back later tonite <3 GL HF!
