Post Second Balance Council Thoughts

So with the countdown now reset before the third round of Balance Council (BC) changes, I wanted to have a heart to heart with the Gwent Reddit Community (and others who may come across this post). Although I have seen a number of posts of surprise with the results of the 2nd BC, I can easily admit that I am not surprised.

First, let me admit that In all honesty I agree the nerfs that were implemented in the first balance council and that they were justified. Yes, you read that right. They were justified in my opinion. NG has always been a faction built around control and in my opinion (you’ll see this a lot), Gwent players in general don’t like control (RIP Lockdown). Decks are generally built in a greedy fashion to gain points quickly and a lot of NG tools are meant to limit or control the output of some decks (excluding greedy NG archetypes like Assimilate).

The core problem I found with the first BC related to the amount of nerfs assigned with no compensating buffs. In the first BC, 17 of 61 cards were nerfs directed at NG in some attempt to right the wrongs of past NG crimes. In that same balance patch that attempted to penalize NG, there were no compensating buffs for the faction, unless you count the buffs for the two key Assimilate units. In my opinion, NG was over nerfed but that's my view. With that said though, I think it was only fair to see compensating buffs appear in the second BC but I was not surprised to find that the compensating buffs would become the reversal of some of the previous nerfs.

I honestly do doubt the community’s ability to come to a resolution (I have a second post that I intend on posting later for that) but I would like to ask the community to give more thought to their process for changing cards. I think when we decide to nerf a number of cards within a specific faction, we should also seek to compensate that faction within the same patch. Not saying the ration of nerf to buff should be equal but something should be done to at least attempt to keep that faction playable.

Again, not sure if the community here is enough to create a concerted effort to ensuring proper balance and I do believe that it will take some of our content creators as well to become an outreach to the non-reddit Gwent community but I do think we should make every step possible to avoid the back in forth in the name of balance. The first two iterations of the BC seems to have started a divide of NG vs Non-NG when it really should just be Gwent players discussing what changes need to be made and why.

Anyway, I really wanted to get this out after what I have seen with the first patch. I think the mods here have done well with the weekly posts for suggested nerfs or buffs although I do wonder if there needs to be a daily thread that cycles between the factions for continued engagement and discussion. I do look forward to further discussions of balance, in between my Fantasy Football season, to keep Gwent alive for seasons to come.

TL;DR: We should seek to compensate a faction in the same BC patch, that has a number of suggested nerfs to prevent over nerfing of any faction going forward. I hope that the community and maybe with the help of content creators can agree on a method of how we go about balance and propose this to the non-reddit Gwent community so we have a unified approach to make meaningful changes to the game.