When you donate a certain amount you get a gold helmet. (See here for the ranks and which helmet they receive.)
Back when they got introduced, I talked to sjoerdtim about them and strongly disagreed with the donor helmets. I told him that they made donating pay to win. Later when I noticed that they only got added on the human/blue team. I told him that it would likely ruin the balance of a game and make it very unattractive to play on the other team. Well, Tim disagreed with me and pretty much ignored the issue, so I stopped talking about it for quite a while.
Yet, right now I am writing this thread. Why? I believe things have gone exactly the way I predicted them to go back then. Donators, who are often better players, most of the time stack up on the human/blue team, ruining the balance of teams and having their helmet advantage, which ruins balance even further. This basically means that the teams get unbalanced and in many cases only unbalanced when there is a certain amount of donators online. Because of this, it will be very hard to balance the teams at all.
Back when I argued with Tim about this issue, he has said that the donator helmets barely have any effect and that it was just so people knew who has donated and could follow as a leader (hence the crown we see nowadays). I believe it has turned out to be false. The donator helmets pretty much always tank a whole hit and makes you win 1 vs 1 scenario's where the opponent is just as strong or stronger. I feel like classes with lower armour, especially archer, ranger and likely berserker as well, benefit a lot from the helmet.
I think something has to change as soon as possible. As possible solutions I propose that either the donator helmets get removed entirely, replaced with something else that has less impact on gameplay (such as an item as helmet with a custom texture), or both the human/blue team and the Mordor, etc/red team have to get them as well, or at the very least something similar. I'm not making a poll because I am afraid that both donators and non donators will simply choose the option that is best for themselves, without thinking about the server and team balance.
tl;dr: donor helmets cause unbalanced teams, something has to happen.
Back when they got introduced, I talked to sjoerdtim about them and strongly disagreed with the donor helmets. I told him that they made donating pay to win. Later when I noticed that they only got added on the human/blue team. I told him that it would likely ruin the balance of a game and make it very unattractive to play on the other team. Well, Tim disagreed with me and pretty much ignored the issue, so I stopped talking about it for quite a while.
Yet, right now I am writing this thread. Why? I believe things have gone exactly the way I predicted them to go back then. Donators, who are often better players, most of the time stack up on the human/blue team, ruining the balance of teams and having their helmet advantage, which ruins balance even further. This basically means that the teams get unbalanced and in many cases only unbalanced when there is a certain amount of donators online. Because of this, it will be very hard to balance the teams at all.
Back when I argued with Tim about this issue, he has said that the donator helmets barely have any effect and that it was just so people knew who has donated and could follow as a leader (hence the crown we see nowadays). I believe it has turned out to be false. The donator helmets pretty much always tank a whole hit and makes you win 1 vs 1 scenario's where the opponent is just as strong or stronger. I feel like classes with lower armour, especially archer, ranger and likely berserker as well, benefit a lot from the helmet.
I think something has to change as soon as possible. As possible solutions I propose that either the donator helmets get removed entirely, replaced with something else that has less impact on gameplay (such as an item as helmet with a custom texture), or both the human/blue team and the Mordor, etc/red team have to get them as well, or at the very least something similar. I'm not making a poll because I am afraid that both donators and non donators will simply choose the option that is best for themselves, without thinking about the server and team balance.
tl;dr: donor helmets cause unbalanced teams, something has to happen.
