Re: KanColle Headquarter! 発令！第十一号作戦
Well I thought Truk's last dance was pretty poorly balanced myself so that's that, but that isn't the point at all.
The comments in question were about the system as a whole. Even if the system is designed with a certain methodology in mind, failures in numbers tweaking can completely change things. What you mentioned would be one of those cases. But if anything, things like E4 Autumn 13 and Truk last dance are proofs for the validity of the system as a whole. They were obviously tested and found to be possible to be beaten. The parameters for testing, however, simply didn't include natural constraints for players like resources. Having realistic constraints in the testing process would ultimately be the test for difficulty within a limited period, but what if we extend the period out?
Take 5-5 for example, which people whined endlessly about during original implementation. Some dubbed it impossible, others pinned the cost of clearing at 40k+ resources, etc. A year later most people experienced with doing the content from release and on would just brush it off as a hassle rather than some insurmountable obstacle. New players can easily look at the templates of existing methods and try to copy it as well as they can. Is there RNG involved? Yes, I can't say I will always beat it every month under X attempts. Is it something that you can only resign to RNG and resource count? No, while resource usage and the return on investment might not necessarily be worth the effort, it has always fallen well within natural regen level figures even on a week level. New mechanics have hardly changed the map for the sub route (if anything, it made it harder for players), but over time as we learned more about the game mechanics and took the time to minmax, the random elements are reduced.
You mentioned people who have all the LSC ships and ringed them all (btw, Kaga >>>> Taihou for that map). Did that mean they took enough precaution? No. Definitely not. How about equips? How about fine tweaking of support and your own fleets in order of attacks and range? Taking necessary risks with the whirlpool if the Akashi/Katori approach was not working? I am not suggesting that everyone should be farming nikousens out of their ass to fill their support CVs with Ekusa planes, nor am I saying that people should pay up for screws to fully Akashi upgrades. But when there are people who started 1.5 months ago clearing the event on hard, paying obvious attention to equipment setups with the little variations that they have on equips. People who failed in spite of having all these things that new players don't have need to be either supremely unlucky, or to pay attention to finer details.
What I mentioned last page with balancing atk and acc for support is just one of those things that people could've paid attention to but don't. It is easy to look at templates and copy them, but unless you know why these things are made to be templates, simply copying them without having all of the pieces is just a sure way to failure. A key thing for this system is the transmission of information and actually utilizing them. If you ask me, people who failed because they just ran in headfirst deserved it. There are ways to brute force past RNG like that and you can see it easily with people who try RTA with events, but if you are not willing to pay $$$ or to have the investment ahead of time to enable such methods by, say, having maxed resources. Failure is just a given.
What if people don't want to pay that much attention to a game? Should they be forced to? That's really where the question of balance comes in. In the sense that Truk last dance required people to have a good grasp of the unpublished game mechanics and a stroke of luck on top of it, it was definitely poorly balanced. But does it really speak anything of the system? There are definitely areas for improvement for balancing, like the talk about CVs some time back concerning those particular areas of mechanics. But those are finer details unrelated to the fundamentals of what makes up the kancolle game system.
EDIT - Frankly, drops and LSC are a much better example of getting screwed by RNG than anything else. Those two pretty much have no real reasonable methods for approach short of big data. Even after automatic collection and analysis it is still just pure luck.
