No more Balance Council...

That's right folks, as of this last balance update, the balance council is done working on the balance of 1.0 cards as they're far too busy working on the balance (and design) of 2.0 cards to be devoting as much attention to the balance process as they were before (though do expect them to still be around to comment on threads and such).

So what does this mean for the balance forum? Well, likely that it will revert back to the old majority rules system before the balance council came to be (with the minor exception of the mods being able to veto things that are a little too out there, or are simply undoable), but we'd like some input from you fine folks before that.

In the meantime, the balance forum is still open, so feel free to make new threads and such (within reason) as we sort this out.

One thing I liked about the balance council was that a lack of interest no longer killed a thread. If I created a thread during a lull of activity during which people didn't really feel like balancing things, it would stay around until people felt like discussing it again.

Something like "Threads won't die until they have X votes" would be nice.

Is it too much to hope that the balance forum can run effectively itself without a mass of rules by which it is bound?

Of course, the answer is "yes".

I feel like at this point it should be able to run with a fairly loose set of rules. We could just bring back the 2/3rds majority for if the card is changed, 50% majority for the specific change rule. And also the "threads stay open until they've gone X days without votes" rule, maybe with a minimum vote requirement attached to that. But beyond that I don't think we need much else. I guess we'll see.

Since the whole game is being re-vamped, does it even really matter that much how we balance cards at this point? So long as mods have veto-power, I don't think things will get too crazy. But, again, I guess we'll see.

What about when there was a lack of interest from the council itself, causing them to vote for a card being "fine as is" just to avoid dealing with it?

Oh right, that never happened. Not once.

I would like to get to work on the partial rollback of the removal buffs, but it is hard for me to conform that thread to a set of rules that aren't posted anywhere.

I intend to open a thread for laser specifically, which would give us a reference point to deal with the others.

Eh, let it work through a sort of peer review. If nobody thinks "wait hang on, this is a bit ridiculous", you're alright.