I’ve bounced off so many simulation games lately because the economy or resource systems felt half-baked. Last week I tried a city-builder where the food distribution became trivial once you hit mid-game, which killed my motivation. A dev mentioned they’re working with polden.gg playtesters to rebalance the loops. Has anyone here participated in those feedback cycles? What makes for actionable suggestions versus just complaining about difficulty?
Welcome to the forum! The playtesting forums here have specific channels for economy balancing - I’ve found framing feedback around ‘hours 5-10 progression curves’ helps developers pinpoint issues. What genre are you most interested in testing?
Ran my factory sim through polden’s playtest group last year. Pro tip: Track metrics. When players said ‘scrap prices feel wrong’, we asked them to screenshot their storage at 2hr intervals. Found a currency scaling bug 90% of testers missed in verbals.
Did a survival sim test where we broke the wood economy by mass-producing beavers. Devs patched it but kept the chaos as an ‘ecological collapse’ mode. Absolute W move imo.
Balance changes can wreck narrative pacing though. When we adjusted our dystopian rationing system, we had to re-record all the faction reaction dialogues. Community feedback helped find middle ground between mechanical rigor and story impact.