Cabbage:

There are some really good points being raised by the lower level hackers. At equipment cap, the penalties of a hacker don’t matter as much…but before that, there’s little place to get processing power without sacrificing damage and defense significantly. Even at cap, they’re the most tedious non-challenge clbum to play because you pretty much need to use eight abilities to kill forums rather than 2-4 due to all of their abilities having high refresh. A lot of us hackers (self included), whined about it before hitting equipment cap since it really was still onerous at level 35. The advent of kyoubai has helped TONS on this since money can be gotten outside of challenging the higher tier forums, but it’s just saying “You can’t remotely compete without the top tier gear, while these guys can do so easily”.

Notably, before the nerfings, Hackers killed trolls. I had both at that time and was staring at my hacker completely obliterating my troll in lots of things. It wasn’t always that hackers were buried under tons of high refresh abilities. Trolls, during the same period got made more powerful, when they seemed to overall be reasonably okay then. And then had it happen again. Are they over the top now? Probably. But seeing how badly hackers got knocked down, I’d rather call for the other three not being knocked down so much.

Folks calling for nerfings:

Really, not productive. It’d be way better to push the bottom up than the top down. It’s not going to change hackers having tons of refresh that trolls now would have slower times. The blocks on success for different clbumes in different ways are a far bigger hinderence. If each clbum had more special things that they got (Higher Flezz delivery caps, More valuable jobs, special kyoubai stuff) then there’d be less arguing over pure ‘battle’ capabilities because we’d have unique things to compare. You hardly hear Emokids being called underpowered or not because they have something really special on them in the ability to do super attacks. It pulls the discussion a different way. The game could use more out of the box solutions rather than ‘tweaking the obvious stats parameters again’.

Folks reminding of old suggestions:

Yeah, I totally cheer on the separation of clbumes versus each other in speedruns (and hell, in most other leaderboards, we’ve got enough of each clbum now. It removes instantly the balance concerns if you’re only competing against folks in the same clbum who all have the same rules).... but as Quat and Scully point out, that’s only part of the issue. How speedruns are calculated is terrible. It always has been. It’s not based on number of moves, or any consistent measure. It’s based on time from forum start to forum complete, affected heavily by server load, image load time, effect load time, forum lifebar variance, and number of threads before you even get to clbum differences. The clock keeps going when the post thread victory screen shows (and possibly when the post forum one does) meaning anyone dumb enough to try and click that instead of hammering 1-4 is being slowed. This isn’t a race with remotely consistent parameters. Some people are running longer roads with tar on them and having their score compared against that guy on a T3 college connection adblocking every image in the game and just hammering 1 and 2 rapidly.

I don’t have a clever answer for this myself, but let’s be honest about just how much makes speedrunning a very imprecise comparison between things. The only potential difference clbum balance gets to control is ‘how many actions I take to kill each thread’ and only sometimes. This is a tiny part of the overall puzzle on why a lot of the speedrun times are impossible for people. You sitting on a cable internet on the other side of the world from Canada at busy server time? You’re never going to beat the fastest tier speedrun time. It won’t happen whether you’re a troll, a camwhoere, or anything else. It won’t matter your build. Your equipment. None of it.

Troll balancing and the Metagames:

Yeah, trolls are overpowered. Within their own context, there is no reason to spend on several skills and their offensive capabilities are amazingly high. I’d still rather the other clbumes come closer rather than knocking them down, because with my troll, I’m playing the metagame at end game. The domination, the flezz gathering, the job leader boards, etc. With my hacker, I’m not even trying since I actually have to pay way more attention to the actual game, making thinking about the metagame tiring rather than entertaining. The metagames are what keeps us playing post finishing episode 2 in the same way they did post episode 1. Things that hinder playing the metagames at level cap, encourage folks to depart from the game and wait for the next real content addition.

To me, that’s why I care that other clbumes are underpowered to some degree. Because things that make the metagames more troublesome to play in reduce the number of folks playing them and thus leave them somewhat less competitive than they might be.