12 Years of EBF, 2 Years of Balancing

On September 2nd 2008, Brawl Royale was released on Newgrounds. While Matt had made a few animations and an interactive dress-up previously, this was the first game he had ever published. How far we have come. The massive v2 update for EBF5 was released on 15th of February 2020, marking the final step of the EBF franchise for the foreseeable future. Barring some revision done to release his older games on Steam, the series has come to a close. What started as a one man team eventually became a huge community willing to provide designs, ideas, feedback and even find bugs in the code for Matt. In some way, we have all become a part of the development of the series. We're not professionals, and we made mistakes. We've made some choices that we now look back to and joke about. We couldn't satisfy everyone, and there were many who weren't happy with the large changes we pushed into implementation. We're just a bunch of people who spent way too much time than necessary arguing about the balance direction of a game that isn't even ours. But my god, was balancing an experience. We've formed a sub community of expert players that, while not always having a positive effect on the server, provide with many not only effective but highly entertaining strategies to beat the game. The modding community of EBF5 takes on the spirit of balancing that wasn't implemented in the base game, and hopefully will be able to foster for a long time after the final update. Without making anything too personal, I want to celebrate balancing as a whole by looking through its history and notable events. Maybe you can find yourself in the video. Maybe there's changes that you wouldn't have agreed with at this point. Maybe you've pushed super hard for a certain change that didn't go through. My hope is that we can all look back on what's been said in the past and smile. I want to conclude by saying my thanks to everyone involved. To all those who participated in balance discussions, thank you for your time. Even if your ideas were contrary to the rest and mostly ignored, you still gave us something different to think about. Thank you for trying your best to improve the experience for everyone playing. To Matt Roszak/Kupo Games, thank you for giving us the EBF series and the opportunity that is ebf5_balancing. Even though we didn't always agree on what changes should be made, you gave the community a chance to have a creative input on what is entirely your work and took many of our ideas and suggestions seriously. Thank you for putting up with us for the past couple of years. To Phyrnna/HalcyonicFalconX, thank you for providing the series with iconic music tracks to this day. You were my childhood idol, and your music has given me motivation to pursue higher education in music when I was having doubts about my academic choices. Though I'm trying hard to remove your style from my music, you'll always be my mentor. To Ronja, thank you for providing the community with a server mom. When Matt was busy working on the game and putting up with us, you've provided the server with a friendly dev face. Even before you took over as the server owner, you've always had the most presence in it. Thank you for actively trying to make the sever a better place. To the mods, thank you for keeping the server a mostly dramaless and friendly place. Modding any community is a difficult task with many grey areas. While no one agrees on exactly how a server should be moderated, you've all done a better job than most, and weren't too strict or lenient. To the translators, I understand the hard work you've put to making this game accessible for others. You've done better work than some professional, paid translators. Thank you all for dedicating so much of your time for this game. To the artists, I never actively comment or react to your posts, but I still check and appreciate them. Drawing fanart takes time, effort and is completely unpaid. Thank you for showing appreciation for the game in such a selfless way. To all of the community, thank you for being there. Thank you posting on his website, Steam forums, Kongregate, Newgrounds, Twitter and the Discord server. We're often too critical of Matt and forget to offer him the words of compliment that are needed by everyone. Every comment of yours showing your appreciation for the hard work he's put into the series helps. As I was only able to provide snippets of information for our discussions, you can have a look through these links to see the actual major balance events for yourself: Demo Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13... Post v1 Balance Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10... ACES Report: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l... Remix Balance Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10...