I had someone today surprise me, and tell me they felt that it was too fast, and unbalanced. This is surprising because I still get myself trashed against Musashi tankers, and other ‘Fast Response’ swords.

I guess it will take some time for the community as a whole to figure out the timing, both those of us using it, and those of us not.

It just startled me, because I really think it is balanced… But as with any new thing, it’s going to take time to figure out whether it’s truly balanced, or whether it needs some minor tweaking.

I myself will always fight with the ‘more balanced’ update, because I feel that fighting with an unbalanced weapon is against the spirit of the game, but I imagine that there are people out there who will abuse unbalanced weapons when they get the opportunity.

EA

I realize that the decision to not allow stacking is not the most popular decision I’ve ever made, and I’ll likely get more heat from it over time, but I strongly feel it was the right decision.

I did the same thing with the Wave Katana initially, and eventually backed down and enabled it. To be honest, while I enjoyed the additional sales from people who didn’t want a Wave because it didn’t have that feature, I felt that I had compromised perhaps a little too much.

Now that I have two weapons, I feel a little less need to bow to the pressure. I may re-enable stacking on the Taketori in time, but if I do it will be after very careful analysis and lots of feedback and testing. The testing and feedback will be absolutely critical, because when I tried to incorporate stacking into the Taketori, it simply didn’t play well with the style, and I want to do my best to ensure that the weapon is as good as I can make it.

As for timing, that’s a really tough subject… I have some beta testers that are insanely good at fighting who say that earlier versions of the Taketori were much faster than other C:SI weapons and it would not be balanced.

Balance is an issue that we take VERY seriously, so based on that feedback I slowed down a few things. Testers reported that it was more inline with the other weapons after that change, though I suspect that not everyone will agree. But here’s the thing : I can *always* speed up the weapon if needed, but if a weapon is released that is too fast, many people will not upgrade when the “more balanced” update is released.