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Reviewers Pile On World Of Warcraft Beta
Thanks to GameSpy for its 'Pile On!' feature discussing Beta impressions so far on Blizzard's long-awaited MMO title, World Of Warcraft. Reactions range from the effusive ("I'm more convinced than ever that this game may finally be the first truly mass-market MMO") through the delighted ("I'm... completely in love with World of Warcraft"), to the ecstatic ("World of Warcraft delivers just what people are expecting: a tight, fun MMOG from a trusted developer.") Elsewhere, a WorldOfWarcraft.com forum discussion has a Blizzard representative mentioning release estimates of early this summer are likely wrong: "Definitely not July. As you know, we never set release dates, but you can expect the beta to run for another 5+ months." But, more importantly, does anyone _not_ like World Of Warcraft?
Insightful? The game is in beta phase. One of the main purposes of beta is to balance. Now admittedly, Blizzard has a history of having balance issues in the release version of its games, but that remains to be seen for World of Warcraft.
I hope that Blizzard doesn't try to "balance" the game. ...
The situation you described isn't unbalanced. It's just "time-balanced."
"Game Balance" means "all of the players have roughly equal ammounts of fun." Usually, this translates to "all player choices mean roughly the same ammount of total 'power.'"
Leaving MMORPGs and CRPGs aside, and getting back to pen & paper, imagine the game that doens't care about balance--five friends pick fighters, rogues, or wizards, which are all moderately balanced with each other, and then friend number six picks "uber cleric of d00m!", which lets him outclass everyone else.
The game is unbalnaced, not because the cleric can do a lot or has the most power, but because it lets the player with the "uber cleric of d00m" do everything--and that means that he often will, meaning that he'll do more than anyone else--and he'll probably have more fun than anyone else.
Not even "old school" pen and paper RPGs are balanced when you look at distinct classes. Frankly, the issue of balance is usually an overreaction by the players. Having coded for Muds for many years, everyone wants the advantages of their class *plus* what everyone else has.
Running a mud for some time, our technique for determining balance was pretty simple: capture the "time between levels" of the players. Simply log the play time between each level for each player, and number of player deaths during that time. Sort them out by level achived, race and class. A little bit of statistics will show any unbalanced classes pretty quickly. It will also show your better players: they will level any class faster than average.
After doing this for a few years, we could calculate the level rates like clockwork. Yet, even with this "level playing field" the whining continued. My final realization: there is a level of "background whining" which reflects upon the players personality, not upon your game. Learn what this level is, and you only have to worry when the whining breaks that level.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Blizzard is very good at making games that are rock-solid, highly balanced, and immensely fun to play... alone. And the Beta is going to be a blast, at least at first, because everybody on it is overjoyed to be playing this lovely game with everyone else. Once the general public gets their hands on it, things may not be so pretty.
How does Blizzard plan to handle griefing? Has anyone in the Beta tested the degree to which they can make other players miserable? This is where Old Man Murray's review of Asheron's Call was so helpful - it pointed out, with dramatic effectiveness, that it was quite possible to follow the rules of the game, not attack anyone, and still bug the hell out of other players. Until the general public - including the hackers, griefers, scammers, spammers, trolls, and general scum of the Internet - get in on this game, it won't be possible to truly evaluate the gameplay experience.
Happened to a lot of people when FFXI went live in NA. Several people from the Vault boards quit the game because they felt it was impossible to establish any sort of level playing field. Sure, not everyone is going to feel competetive, but it's like taking someone who's just learned to play chess, and throwing him in a tournament. That person's hopes are going to be crushed, and it's unlikely they're going to see the better players as something to strive towards.