Balance Team Activity Reports - Q1 2026

[JadeTornado]

Each quarter, Balance Devs are asked to submit an activity report. This needs to be posted in this thread by the end of the quarter, which for Q1 is 31st March 2026.

The template for the report can be found below. The report can be posted by the Balance Lead Dev or the official Dev's shared forum account.

An active balance dev is a player who has logged at least 3 hours this quarter. New recruits to the balance team also count towards this number, so long as their recruitment is documented on the forum.

You may want to run a balance devs rolecall for the end of each quarter to help with judging this.

Please note that not submitting a report will result in the balance team automatically failing the activity check.

Code:

[size=large]Name of Balance team:[/size]
[size=large]Name of Balance team Lead:[/size]
[size=large]Number of Active Balance devs this Quarter:[/size]

[size=large]What have you done to advance your balance team’s goals this quarter?[/size]

[size=large]What are your balance team’s goals for the next quarter?[/size]

[size=large]What have you done to drive patches and promote high quality fixes this quarter?[/size]

[size=large]How would you like your Balance team develop moving forward?[/size]

[size=large]What changes, votings, or info gathering have you done this quarter to promote this development?[/size]

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In a live role playing environment, you are not owed or mandated to be given a duel. Fights develop differently every time and people have varying degree of time to log on their hands or have their own plans.

Cap PVP discord server

[EisenSeele]

Name of Balance team: John Balanceman
Name of Balance team Lead:
Number of Active Balance devs this Quarter: √-1

What have you done to advance your balance team’s goals this quarter?

Crushed Kai's dreams of dual rage and dual harpoon gunboats

What are your balance team’s goals for the next quarter?

Crush Kai's dreams of converting the Uruz into a bulwark-ized heavy frigate

What have you done to drive patches and promote high quality fixes this quarter?

Repeatedly told Kai he is retarded

How would you like your Balance team develop moving forward?

Outsource an LLM to telling Kai off so as to streamline the whole process

What changes, votings, or info gathering have you done this quarter to promote this development?

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FEEDBACK

[Amba]

Why just balance and not the rest of the dev team smh

[JadeTornado]

Why just balance and not the rest of the dev team smh

Because I can see the rest doing something. Not always positive, but they are trying, experimenting, learning.

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In a live role playing environment, you are not owed or mandated to be given a duel. Fights develop differently every time and people have varying degree of time to log on their hands or have their own plans.

Cap PVP discord server

[Utsunomiya Commonwealth]

Who balanced this team, Haste?

[Haste]

Number of Active Balance devs this Quarter:
The Universal Discovery Freelancer Balance Dev Constant (1)

What have you done to advance your balance team’s goals this quarter?
Suggest to people they learn the tools of the trade, like MaxLancer, so we can increase our bus factor a little bit.

What are your balance team’s goals for the next quarter?
Not necessarily next quarter, as development teams for mods sometimes have to think a little longer-term than factions, but in no particular order:

• Do an initial rework of 5,000 cargo transports, focusing on making piracy encounters more fun for all involved parties. The "reinforced train", intended to function as the "civilian" 5k, is largely done as a testbed ship and sits on a git branch along with a bunch of new weapons.
  
• Do another pass of cruisers focusing on making them deliver on a satisfying power fantasy. At the moment, shield drain and toggling feels like a "punishment" mechanic, when originally it was intended as a defensive & offensive mode, with the offensive mode feeling very powerful and dangerous to face. In reality, of course, this didn't survive testing, as the numbers all had to be drastically toned down to make the class even remotely balanced.
  
• Do a component-focused battleship rework. We can likely avoid an insurmountable amount of workload by making the components have health equal to the ship root, and making them work like damage multipliers (or damage reducers) via armor mechanics. Destruction of these components would result in the death of the ship, avoiding the need for damage models, which are an insane amount of work to produce for all battleships in the game.
  
• Chew through the "ship models that are ready for implementation" backlog, which has some cool stuff in it like the Xeno Corvette.
  

What have you done to drive patches and promote high quality fixes this quarter?
Quite a lot of work on a non-Discovery project that, in theory, could result in cool & good additions and changes to Discovery. Or better yet, result in a cool & good mod for Freelancer for people to enjoy.

How would you like your Balance team develop moving forward?
Get one or more people with solid MaxLancer-fu to make projects like Battleship & Transport reworks much more viable.

What changes, votings, or info gathering have you done this quarter to promote this development?
https://codeberg.org/TheStarport/freelancer-retold/

Yw, I took this pretty seriously. A random sidenote: working on a volunteer project like this as a full-time job in addition to, you know, needing to work a job and live a normal life is something everyone needs an occasional break from.

[Emperor Tekagi]

Very cool, Haste. Genuinely nice you took the time to turn the joke serious and turned it into a dev advertisement. Someone with talent please get into MaxLancer for reals :pensif:

[Soban]

How would you like your Balance team develop moving forward?
Get one or more people with solid MaxLancer-fu to make projects like Battleship & Transport reworks much more viable.

Eh I have some freetime on my hand. I'll give it a try and see if it sticks.
Then I will try to get some maxlancer-fu skill.

We will see in a few month if I'm still on it.

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