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The Challenges of Class Balance In MMOGs
Karen Hertzberg writes "Balancing classes in MMOGs may be one of the most daunting challenges of the industry. Few games are immune, and no game has ever claimed complete, perfect balance. So how does a developing company deal with the ever-impending demand to keep their games fair in both PvE and PvP environments? Ten Ton Hammer spoke with four industry professionals about the issue in an effort to glean some answers. Age of Conan's Craig Morrison said, 'It is part science and part intuition and experience, I think. We do, of course, have all the ... "spreadsheet" work in the back-end and development tools that calculate as many of the parameters as possible. On top of that, though, you then have the knowledge and skill of the designers involved. Working with a system, you have the general overview of how things interact and how players tend to behave in your game. Sometimes nothing beats spending time in the game itself and actually seeing how the players have been using the skills and abilities you have provided for them. Players are nothing if not inventive, and they never cease to surprise designers with their ingenuity, so it is vital that the designers are also watching and learning themselves.' "
...why Blizzard completely abandoned the notion of difference between Horde and Alliance in WoW, in favour of focussing on class balance. Naturally, if you ask a lot of WoW players, it hasn't even helped them do that. In fact, I see there being more and more class overlap instead of class balance in WoW, especially amongst hybrid classes. You can balance the game by making hybrid classes able to do everything well, but it kind of sucks balls for non-hybrid classes.
I hope that the backing away from balanced-but-distinct factions and classes doesn't represent a wider change of philosophy at Blizzard. It wouldn't bode well for Starcraft II.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It's easy to balance a few diff classes. I would way rather have 4 characters classes that were near perfectly balanced than 10 classes that were a mess. This is the problem of WoW and other MMOs. They keep trying to add more and more classes when they haven't balanced what they have. But what does your average fan want?? They scream for more! Give us new! I'd way rather WoW, Aion, etc fix what they have in an expansion and with their manpower than create the placebo of new classes. It can be done but since there is no money in it and bad/newer/casual players are using capitalism to vote for NEW things instead of a balanced games these companies are just going where the economic vote is and giving what they want. In short if you were going to play in an Adult rec sports league would you rather have a league of 4-6 teams where you were all equal or would you rather have 10-12 teams where 4-6 teams were equal and 2-3 teams you absolute crushed and 2-3 absolute crushed you? I don't know about you but i'd take the smaller league with a ton of parity any day and twice on any given sunday.
I don't see why we have to have classes in an MMO. I much prefer the Ultima Online system of choosing your own skills and in effect, creating your own "class". This type of system is far easier to balance since you can modify each skill "in a vacuum" without upsetting anything else.
That, and the very old idea of the holy trinity (healer, tank, damage-per-second) needs to die, it is sucking all of the creativity out of game design. Real people are not specialists, they are capable of learning many different things.
Unless you have your class one hundred percent nailed, the differences are cancelled out by differences in individual skill, approach and work-ethic in most games. Personally, I prefer to pick a class which is inferior in some respects and work against that. It's more of a challenge. I would say that the imbalances only really show up at the uber-hardcore level and of course those folks are often the most vocal.
Balance is probably not even achievable, I think the joy of playing within a class system is the constantly shifting class balance. Good players deal with the shifts well, other players go between classes depending on what's stronger this month/patch.
True balance would probably be really boring, unless the game itself is completely actionpacked (think Quake). I don;t think it can even be the intention to balance a plate wearing behemeoth with a 2handed sword with a wand wielding dude in a robe.
Rock/paper/scissors, anyone?
The requirement to have a range of significantly distinct classes in raids, with their own strengths and weaknesses, opens up the possibility of having a rock/paper/scissors arrangement of class superiority in PvP. I'm amazed it wasn't implemented in the first place - it makes much more sense than trying to balance all classes to have the same chance in any given duel.
That way, a player of greater skill will not necessarily beat a player of lower skill if they are "out-classed", as it were. It means that players have to pick their fights wisely, be more opportunistic, be more alert, and maybe go around in pairs or impromptu groups to increase their chance of survival. That would greatly enhance the experience, in my opinion - it would prevent the loss of that feeling of threat and danger when you hit the level/gear cap, and would enhance the in-group/out-group, us & them relationship between the two factions as a result.
Meta will eat itself
balance is all illusion, created by corporate shills to distract gamers from what they actually want. The fact is that no game is unbalanced. each player has the equal opportunity to research which characters are powerful. if i said x is unbalanaced, it could mean i thought it was too weak or too powerful. to determine which of those i meant depends on context. we should no longer use a word that relies on context to have any meaning. BAN THIS WORD
It means that players have to pick their fights wisely, be more opportunistic, be more alert, and maybe go around in pairs or impromptu groups to increase their chance of survival.
That's the PvP in Eve. And there are no classes, just skills that take a fixed and finite time to acquire (i.e., no such thing as "power leveling"). A group of small ships, with skilled pilots, can bring down a battleship. DPS, range, speed, tank, evasion, cloaking, resistance to specific types of damage, capacity to make money, and a hundred et ceteras all exist on a highly granular scale, and all affect play immensely. I can't imagine that there are two players in the game with the same sets of skills.
But you'd be amazed at the whiners, who don't fight wisely, aren't opportunistic, aren't alert, fly around by themselves, lose their ships, then cry that the game is too hard or that the players are "mean." Others join the game and ask, "What's the best ship?" and are baffled when told "There is none." WoW and EQ have bred a "sprint for the Uber" that takes a while to get out of the system...
PvP and PvE are so fundamentally different that balancing all the classes for both at the same time, with the same skills, is nearly impossible. The best way to deal with it is to have two different sets of rules, with some skills working differently depending on what you're doing.
A one system fits all solution just results in either serious PvP imbalance, or seriously nerfed PvE.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
in AoE, there were 12 choices, but the Assyrians and the Yamato had an initial speed advantage, to the point where they became the only teams played, particularly the Assyrians. A 3v3 match usually had both sides with 2 Assyrians and 1 Yamato. The Assyrians were so favored, sometimes all 3 would be Assyrians. For Deathmatch, the Choson and Hittites were the favored choices. Usual 3v3 teams would be 2 Choson and 1 Hittite.
In MMOG's you have larger parties, so more of a mix is OK. I am usually a mage, but mages want to be with a tank (like a warrior) at lower levels...and even higher levels. But having a priest to heal people is helpful to.
I think its natural in these games to have two main classes, a third class which is somewhat popular, and then a bunch of more minor classes for people who like to try different things. I think there's probably some mental thing where people can't handle more than three types of warriors. Look at the armed forces - army, navy, and due to technology, air force. Before the airplane, there were two divisions of service. Then within these were sub-divisions - infantry, cavalry, artillery. This just seems to be the way these things go.
The problem with balancing classes is that all classes are essentially expected to fulfill the same basic role - namely, that they are adventurers (well, in sword&sorcery/fantasy MMOs) out to kill monsters for xp/lewt. Can you please explain to me how a wizard's training would be furthered by killing hordes of monsters? Or a thief's? Or a cleric's? For some kind of a warrior or gladiator or what have you, I can see it making sense, at least to a point.
Sure, some MMOs feature class-specific advancement quests, but nobody's really tried taking an EQ clone with advancement radically different for different classes. Imagine being a wizard with four times the dps potential and more survivability than any melee class while being completely unable to advance by killing monsters or doing conventional errand-boy quests. You would think that everyone would want to be wizard on that basis alone, but the shake-out would be pretty fast when the wizard would have no "noob zone" or "bat yard" in which to squish little monsters and do pointless little n00b quests because, to get to level 2, they'd have to find some rare reagents and solve a complex puzzle. Combat with creatures might be an occasional nuisance and little more. If some sword n' board type wanted the wizard in his party, he'd have to give the wizard a damn good reason, such as serving as a meat shield for the wizard while in pursuit of said rare reagents, making for a party that might resemble one from real fantasy literature rather than from a standard MMO. The fighter might complain as the wizard out-dpsed him like mad for awhile until after the adventure was over, whereupon the fighter might realize that he just gained two levels whacking all the monsters the poor wizard had to wade through to get to the ancient ruins where his rare reagents were supposed to be, only for the poor wizard to miss one reagent or screw up the puzzle and not advance at all. Wah wahhh.
Seeing as we haven't managed this in the real world, I'm not holding my breath. It should be easier in a game, but the more complex the world, the harder it's going to be, and I'm guessing they're getting more complex.
The idea of "Why should I bother being a monk, when a soldier can blow up mountains by sneezing?" being a bad thing is utterly stupid. If you want to blow up mountains by sneezing, you won't be a monk. If you don't want to, you'll be a monk. If you don't want to, and still want a sword, you'll play a different game.
It all comes down to the stupid enshrinement of a statistic: People want it so that "when these two numbers are near eachother, they should be able to do similar things", ie: a "level 80 shit-stormer" should be able to contribute as much to defeating a Monstrous Foo as a "level 80 shit-shoveler". This is ridiculous, and helps no one. Some things are more effective than other things, no matter how experienced you are with either of them. Some people want to run around pretending to be gods all day long, other people don't, and both of those styles of play are cast aside in game developers' endless quest to make everyone feel "just a little better than mediocre" at all times.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This would never fly in a modern MMO, as it requires that player to plan ahead from the very beginning or to re-roll once they learned how the system worked.
A number of third party software tools exist for Eve which allow a player to plan his character skills out across years, if he so desires. And the player can have a "neural re-mapping" once a year to change his attribute numbers -- the stuff like Charisma, Intelligence, Willpower, etc. -- which affect how fast he learns new skills, so if he made a choice early on to be a combat pilot and wants to change to an industrialist, the transition is not so dire.
To me, the ideal approach to class balance is rock, paper, scissors. Using WoW as a frame for my post (since most people will be familiar with it), I liked the days when rogues were cloth killers but hunters were rogue killers but most mages were able to dismantle hunters. It was a perfect rock - paper - scissors balance. Sure, all the mages felt that rogues were over powered and rogues constantly complained that they couldn't get away from hunters and hunters bitched and moaned that mages 'sploited but, in the larger sense of the game, things were balanced. One-on-one, there were fights that you relished and fights that you had to run from and hope one of your teammates could pick up. It created an over-all balance.
The benefit to this approach is designers can overlook one class beating the crap out of another the majority of the time so long as the first class gets its ass handed to them by a third, and so on. It allows the game designers to not struggle with ensuring that every class is balanced against every other class which is an impossible, moving target. It simply cannot be done and any attempt to do so will only end in gamers complaining. If WoW (for instance) had come out and said "we balance PvP around rock - paper - scissors and hunters are the rock to your scissors, dear rogues - deal with it" I think the game would be in a better place.
Unfortunately, it is a very rare approach to class balance in an MMO because all those rogues are going to spend all their time on the forums complaining about hunters and demanding nerfs while the mages will complain about the rogues and the hunters will complain about the mages and nobody will realize the instances where they shine and instead focus only on the situations where they get their asses handed to them. Thus, game designers attempt to appease people and balance everyone against everyone else... Unfortunately...
Am I the only one who *doesn't* want balanced classes. Part of the fun of an RPG is to make a character who is totally badass, and the best part is to find the things & select the right class which make you badass--then working and grinding for it. Prime examples:
Final Fantasy 1. The black belt was the best character, by far. Level to 50 (I think the max was 50 in that game) and do a whopping 2000 damage, even on Chaos! This was important, as the highest any other class could do was maybe like 700 IIRC (the Knight with the sword Ragnarok I think).
Final Fantasy 3. Terra, Celes, and the other two (can't remember) who could use the Atma weapon. The others couldn't even come close. Atma weapon, with 9999 health, would hit for an insane 80,0000 damage! 9999 damage each and would hit 8 times with the item that gave you double hits. A party of four and you could destroy even all the ending bosses in one shot!
Balanced? No. Fun as hell? Hell yes.
>>The term "balance" is about balancing classes, not players. If everybody had your perspective, then everybody would play Death Knights or Paladins or whichever class is currently considered slightly overpowered, and it would be a very boring world indeed.
Funny. I'm leveling mining on my Death Knight (created at launch, of course, when it was quite overpowered - but since then they've fucked it sidewise about a thousand times) and all the new characters I see running around in the old zones are paladins, currently the overpowered class of choice. The last battleground I played in had two paladins at the top of the charts, with 4 times the kills of the third place character (a warlock), with the second place paladin having 0 deaths. They weren't in a premade either, just doing random battleground running-around-asshattery.
I also don't play WoW very much, since the game designers (as revealed through an enlightening series of "community interviews") have revealed they don't have the slightest idea of what they're doing. However, as long as the other MMORPGs fuck up more (and I'm looking at you, Warhammer, and you, Age of Conan) and can keep their momentum going without pissing off too many people, they'll do fine, doing what they do best: bumblefucking around.
There's a reason I don't play WoW much any more - about 40 hours since April. Well shy of the thousands of hours I have on /played on my mage, from back in the day. I enjoy the occasional BG, but most of the time playing the game feels like the developers are stabbing me in the eyeballs with a sharp stick.
>>That's what you enjoy; fine. However, there are many players out there who just want to build a character that they like, for whatever reason, and to enjoy the game as it was intended - a massively interactive RPG.
Not really. If WoW was an actual "roleplaying" game, where people, you know, roleplayed, then this statement would be true. Certainly in D&D there are groups of people who will give their character a high charisma even though it has no game mechanic benefit, but in WoW people want to make their character the best at whatever their goal is. No Death Knight will wear cloth +spirit and +mana gear for "roleplaying" reasons. People might go about optimizing their characters in different ways, and some might be quite stupid at it, and some might just copy builds they find online, but the game essentially forces you into it by picking talents in a certain order: oh, okay, you're now a "Frost Mage", the game says. You can't just pick willy-nilly from the menu of options available.
When I heard about Warhammer Online, I really had this insane hope that it would be like the Warhammer pen and paper roleplaying game. Essentially, the RPG has a web of classes to pick from. Some are starting classes, and then others that connect to that class unlock as you level them up. So if you are (just making up terms here), say, a "warrior", when you hit level 5 in it, you then unlock the ability to start levelling a new class, which takes you into different directions, such as "Holy warrior" or "Guerilla", with some levels in holy warrior taking you deeper into Priest territory, and guerilla taking you deeper into roguish territory. So the best classes, like Witch Hunter, or Paladin, or whatever, could be reached via multiple paths (Witch Hunters, for example, could be started as rogues and work their way over through the web of classes that way). It's been ages since I played the game, and so the names are probably all wrong, but I think that would be an awesome design for an MMORPG. Instead of being completely freeform, like in UO or EVE, or completely class-based, like in WAR or WoW, you could sort of build your own class, with the individual smaller classes being given related abilities and balanced against each other that way. You can have good options (even very good options), as long as these principles are followed.
In short, though, I think TFA makes class balance sound harder than it i
Through all the games i have played balancing or 'nerfing' has come along in one form or another. Rather than get along with the game and try to figure out how to use the new balance to your advantage most people decry it without thinking of the larger picture. In UO pre-casting and tank maging was effectively destroying the game outside of towns (pre carebear sharding) so changes were brought in to even out the odds. UO allowed you to unlearn skills overtime so you could change proffessions, that was handy. Starwars galaxies allowed you to unlearn proffessions and had a lot of freedom for character development (pre-nge) Neocron had a LOM pill (loss of memory) that allowed you to re-assign skillpoints and re-spec. the likes of everquest, age of conan, war, wow, city of heroes which have pre-determined classes with subskills, rather than a blank characters that you can develop, requiring you to use respec points or pay for the privilege with real money to alter your end character to suit the current flavor of the month spec. these games are where you see the most whining about balancing despite them being the easiest to reconfigure. some games even un-assign all your points for free when they do a major change. In eve-online they threw the whole book out the window and left most of the balancing up to the player via ship and module selection (gear) this has led to very few elemental changes to the available ships (excluding the speed patch) Long rambling diatribe summarised in 10 words Learn to roll with the punches and come out swinging
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
If you're a warrior you jump in and save that priest from the mob of 3 striders...and she runs away instead of healing you.
If you're a druid you start to heal that protection pally who's pulled 5 to many bristlebacks...then you lose agro, he heals himself and finishes off the 2 that killed you.
Eventually you ding 31 and start to realize that your class isn't all that special...but that shaman that just owned your face is!
...and you re-roll.
By the time you hit end game all you really want is a class that can heal, kill or survive...just like everyone else.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
âoeI say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.â
Why are people so obsessed with balancing these classes. It's stupid and impossible in the long run to create this kind of balance. Rather, classes should be considered "easier" or "harder" to play. If the Rouge class is under-powered then it just makes a high level Rouge player that much more impressive. If a Fighter is easy to level, then you might go that route when you start playing. Instead of wasting time trying to balance the classes, the designers need to focus on making each class fun to play, which is infinitely more important than supposed game balance.
Besides, all this nerfing and buffing of classes just annoys people. Get back to making the game fun.
That is all
And how do you want to sell that expansion? With new content alone? C'mon... After a while, your players will notice that your new content is just the old content in a new dress, the game itself does not change at all.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you enjoy reading about class balance, you can see a lot of insight from the WOW game designers (especially Ghostcrawler, lately) at the following sites:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/
The latter is a compilation of every Blizzard post in the WOW forums, while the former is just the highlights of meaningful class changes and discussion.
The Blizzard devs used to be much quieter, but coming into the latest expansion Ghostcrawler started exposing a lot of detailed reasons behind their design and balance decision. Of course everyone still QQs massively when their class gets nerfed.
But anyone willing to take a step back and think about game balance has all the design reasons there in the forums to explain why they make the changes they do. Blizzard even had a "Class Q&A" recently that covered a lot of questions about the design goals and directions for each class.
Unfortunately the blizzard devs get a ton of trolls and QQ in response to anything they do (no matter how kind or innocent). So be sure to watch this peephole into the design process while you can, before the whiners get Blizzard to revert to silence about their design reasons and goals.
Sometimes, when you have a problem that bugs and bugs you, and won't go away, you take a step back and realize that it was your initial assumptions that are the problem.
Classes are a dumb shortcut to simplify game mechanics. They were invented for pen-and-paper RPGs, where you need to juggle things in your head so gameplay can continue smoothly, and where you need graspable concepts or you're busy looking things up all the time.
With computers, you don't have to look things up, or crunch numbers, the machine does that for you. Classes are unnecessary.
Fortunately, there's a number of classless (usually skill-based) MMORPGs coming out. They'll probably prove the point, namely that you don't need classes in an MMO. It would certainly help if you have things like professions, just so you can communicate to others what your role in a team is. But humans can do that pretty well. If I think I'm a warrior, then I can say so, whether or not the numbers justify it.
Me, I've always enjoyed breaking class boundaries. I've played tanking magicians and healing warriors. If the class system doesn't limit you too much, it's fun. When it does, the fun is in seing how much you can bend it before it breaks. :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's pretty simple really. You DON'T. What you do is you create a mechanic that is closely tied to the story which will lead to certain classes or even entire factions being stronger in certain situations. Then you balance to the number of situations. And then you develop a method that rotates those different situations through the various content of the game. This way everyone gets their piece of the pie and the rotation ensures the pieces are equal. At this point the player can enjoy their class because they are playing the style of character they want to play, not just playing the character that the Developers seem to love the most at the time.
An example might be if you had a "Vampire" class in a game. Obviously the Vampires are stronger at night, so during a battle situation when nightfall comes the Vampires would reign.. Or the Werewolves.
Then when daylight comes, they would fall behind the classes based on the power of the sun, say like some kind of Mayan Shaman.
In the above example, the trick would be the length of the day/night cycle so that when a casual players jumps in the game they don't have to wait too long for their cycle and their time "in the sun" (or out of it!).
It is inherent game mechanics like these that can keep a game interesting.
But look at WAR for example for a BAD way to balance. Every single class in that game feels like it has the same skills just with different artwork. It's incredibly annoying if you like PvP, because it's just the same old thing over and over again.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
In this game you have 25 different char to chose.
Sure, is no MMOG, but is very well balanced.
In SSFIV you never lose at the seleciton screen, but still all the 25 chars are very different. As example, take 2 similar, like Ryu and Ken. You'll be amazed discovering how the playstyle has to be different between them. If you don't believe me, here there's a link to one of the most comprehensive guides. Take a look to see that even the basic attack moves are different between 25 of them.
This is balance.
This is why I left WoW.
Cheers,
what we need is true classless games like eve to take the fight to the consumer. no game should be won or lost at character creation, but through the choices you make in advancing your character as you play.
black and white is boring, grey is where its at.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
I have never understood the fascination with classes. A person is capable of learning a lot of different things - so should a character in a same. Sure, you may start with a certain set of skills and characteristics that may make you better at one thing over another, but ultimately, nothing should stop a character from learning anything in a game.
This is why I prefer the World of Darkness rule set for PnP role playing over that of, say, AD&D. Your attributes will naturally make you able to better utilize certain skills, but you can still learn anything.
As far as MMOs go, this is also why I prefer Eve Online. Your character starts out with a certain set of skills based on your starting race, but after that, there's no restrictions on what your character can learn. I have heard that Ultima Online is similar.
In some games there may be a "Best Build", but in games with the depth of Eve (or if you have a good GM for the PnP RPGs), then there really isn't a "best" character. There is only "best" for a certain set of circumstances, which can change at any moment.
In Eve, people post on the forums, "What's the best ship for X" and "What is the best fitting for ship Y", and very rarely do the people reply with a unanimous answer. That's balance, especially in a game that has analyzed to hell and back.
Even better, I have seen month-old characters wreck incredible damage against an older character with more skill points and experience, simply because the younger player is more clever. I find that to be a good sign of balancing too - where a player's ability to think and respond actually does matter. A character's abilities on paper help of course, but they don't mean a damn thing without a brain controlling them.
Love sees no species.
This class vs skills discussion has been kicked around since the beginning of MMOs of not since the beginning of pen and paper games (DnD vs Marvel, for example). Here are my thoughts, selectively culled over years packed with wisdom and experience (translation: "off the top of my head") --
HEALING
Cut healing from a distance and hit points too. Your character gets injured and this effects swing speed, concentration, movement, etc. It doesn't lower a health bar. Healers are battle clerics or paladins. No one just hangs out in back meditating.
CLASSES
Classes right now are player-dependent, not world-dependent. Designers create a world with lore and interesting features, then let people play X number of classes per race. Races and classes should be based on the lore of the world. Perhaps death and healing can't go together easily -- hence you can't distance heal the beserker while he's dicing creatures. If you want to be a paladin (a warrior with powers of light and healing), you can't go around hunting intelligent creatures without cause or you'll lose your paladin powers. If you want to be a combination of warrior/mage/healer -- there are certain things that don't overlap. Perhaps certain magic doesn't work while wielding or wearing (or even carrying) certain types of iron. Perhaps you can't have damaging magic mixed with healing magic -- you can be a utility sorcerer and healer, but not a fireball caster and healer.
Then don't make definites either. Allow people to play what they want with penalties. If I'm wielding a sword but could really use a fireball right now, let me cast it, with non-reliable results: perhaps it explodes in my face; maybe my sword disintegrates; maybe it casts, but knocks me unconscious; maybe it works just fine.
Let players make decisions with more than just "which template should I pick" but based on the positives and negatives delivered by the world's lore.
QUESTS
Allow players to quest for powers; allow them to quest to overcome penalties for conflicting cross-skills; make it fun to do these things.
In eve, your 'class' is largely a function of what ship you have and how you have outfitted it. So, you can pretty easily switch ships and 'change class', but when you are actually out in the game, in a particular ship, you are limited to what you can do by what your ship can do. Final Fantasy XI is sort of similar - you can go back to a city or village and change 'jobs' whenever you like, but when you are any given job, you can only do the things that job/class can do.
Easily switching classes is altogether different from a 'classless' system where anyone can do anything at any time as long as they have learned how to do it, and have whatever resources are required.
...that when all of them bitch equally, it was balanced.
In good complex games, class balance is not important because there are many objectives in the game. 1v1 PvP is not a good measure of class balance. Even if an Archer can kill a Swordsman at far distance, it does not make the Archer better because a Swordsman can kill the Archer at short range. The Archers are good at long-range fighting while the Swordsman is good at short range fighting. A better example is an Archer vs. a Medic. The Archer will always win, but people will still want to play the Medic because Medics are needed in teams.
It is only in simple games, where the objective is only to kill the other players, that class balance becomes very important. If Zerg always beats Terran early-game, then it is pointless to play ZvT games. There are many degrees of freedom that determines the strength of a race: cost per unit, unit speed, size of unit, attack strength, hit points, special abilities... When these are pitted against one another on the simple [new HP] = [current HP] - [attacker's attack] algorithm, not one class should have a solid advantage.
It is only in large 3v3 or 4v4 Starcraft games that other objectives materialize. If Terran always loses to Zerg early game, then the Terran's Zerg allies can protect the Terran in early game. The Zerg can therefore play the objective of early defender, as opposed to just killer of opponents. In 1v1 games, this is not possible to do.
Also, it is bad when players can only play with one class. Chess has this: black pieces move the same as the corresponding white pieces. An alternative would be where all the black pieces move like pawns and all the white pieces move like bishops. The patient player who wishes to squeeze the opponent to death would want to play the black pieces while the aggressive player would want to play with the bishops. This customization is good because the game would be more personalized for the players. Chess does offer this in the form of aggressive and passive opening positions, but not in the form of pieces. The pieces are orderly enough in the meager 64 squares and one-move step-by-step play that positions can be highly customized, while the units in Starcraft can only pull off positions such as flanks, surprise attacks, etc.
So in summary, in good complex games like World of Warcraft, class balance is not important because there are many objectives such as healing teammates and making weapons that can make the "weaker" classes fun to play. Class balance in games like Chess and Starcraft is important because there is not enough degrees of freedom to offer objectives other than kill Enemies.
Skill-based systems, where there is only one class and all of the customization is done with talents, are interesting. They are only truly interesting when there is synergy between some skills - for example, a skill that makes you shoot bolts 40% faster and a skill that gives each of your bolts a chance to stun for 2 seconds synergize well because the second skill becomes stronger if you have the first one. The key to balancing them IMO is to have a few synergies that clearly stand out, so you have to have them, but you don't have enough skill points to get all of them so you have to settle for some. That way you only have to balance all the powerful synergies (multiplicatively stacking damage multipliers, short term damage increase + high burst damage, temporary shield + ability that makes you vulnerable but benefits you in some other way are some ideas that I've seen) and still have a lot of customization.
Balance between classes w.r.t. PvP is heavily weighted to the massive differences between PvP and PvE.
The solution? Stop making PvE so stupidly unrealistic! Then the "fix" falls out naturally.
No, I'm not saying magically come up with human-level intelligence for monsters. I'm saying just throw out the root of all evil. Not money, no.
Taunt.
Yes, you read that right. Taunt is the root of all evil in these games, and is at ground zero in the PvP vs. PvE balancing act, which is at the root of class vs. class balancing in PvP.
"But I love taunt!" Good for you. Doesn't mean it doesn't stomp around like a bull in a china shop, wreaking havoc on balancing. Read on, dear fellow.
Way back when, people looked at movies and books and saw guys withs words attack and kill monsters. The guys were tough, loaded with armor, and very skilled and deadly with a sword.
But along comes a game, and they don't want people standing there killing things easily and gaining levels.
So they disallow opponents too "easy". They become green...then gray, and you get no xp at all.
So you have to fight tougher stuff. Stuff that may very will actually kill you.
Well, at that point, a tough guy (let's call them generic melee), a melee guy will still be able to stand up to the monster better than a caster. They may not do as much damage, especially to many monsters (a sword isn't a fireball after all) but one at a time, they're awesome.
So you have to wimp out their damage. Or leave their damage high, but wimp them out making them partially squishy.
This is where melee forks. On one side are the traditional tankers, high defense but mediocre (at best) offense, and single target at that.
On the other side are squishier melee who do much more single-target damage. The thief/rogue, monk, and scrapper fall into this class. They turn into essentially single-target melee specialists, who go down fairly well one-on-one, and very fast if they're ganged up on.
So what does the other fork do? The high defense guy? He's the "tank", who can take it but not dish it out.
And as a result, he's fairly useless as all the monsters ignore him and go for people who, hehe, are an actual threat.
So to compensate, you give this guy a special, magical power that is a fake, high-damage attack that gains the attention of the monster.
This power is called taunt.
Now the gameplay falls out fairly directly. Super-tough guy runs in, starts spamming fake damage attacks that exceed the real damage of his colleagues, and everyone goes home happy and wealthier, loaded with busted antennae and spoiled gizzard linings.
Then along comes PvP. Well, humans aren't stupid. Well, they are, but not as stupid as the monsters. They know to ignore the guy with the fake high-damage attack and go for the squishy, high-damage people first, and the squishy healers, and the squishy controllers/mesmerizers.
And there you have it.
So take a deep breath, and envision a world without taunt. What happens?
Suddenly there is no super-tough guy, in the sense of taking a beating. There are just high-damage, single-target melee and high-damage, multi-target ranged casters, and every variation inbetween.
"Ok, then. Isn't the fireballist now an endangered species? Even if the melee can out-damage a single target, one burst of a fireball will send all the other monsters to insta-kill the caster!"
Yes. And that's where the controller/mesmerist comes in. They specialize in locking down whole groups of monsters, in one way or another. And they're plentiful. People love to play them.
So technically speaking, the tank really isn't needed. (The single super-boss we can deal with in a moment.) The controller can handle 99% of the situations.
And what does this buy you? Now switch to PvP. Controller powers still work, everyone's attacks still work. And the taunting tank isn't "broke" because he doesn't exist. (Oh
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
EVE
The only game I found that really gives players the ability to balance themselves.
Your ability to interact with other players is what is important, whether that is in ability to play market, lead others, decieve others http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/06/0714218 scam others http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/07/04/021218/Massive-Bank-Fraud-In-EVE-Online
And as for PVP, you might be the biggest baddest player in EVE, but it really doesn't matter when you come upon 4 friends who set a trap for you. And you better play like you mean it, when you lose something that took you a week or months to earn, its gone, no cheesy repair bill. If you cant beat them in a fair fight, uh... why again were you trying to fight fair?
http://www.memorableplaces.com/mudwimping.html
Old yet worth the read.
Because in the end, as Tenny says, "Hell if you took all classes off your mud except say warriors, and then you copied all of the skill set into 4 other named classes, renamed the skills and classes, making no adjustments, people would STILL say they weren't balanced."
Neither developers nor players will ever learn, however.
This is precisely what happened in Asheron's Call. That was a classless, skill-based game, and while it was very neat at first, a wide open game full of possibilities, within a year or two there was a "best class," and everyone used it. Even worse, since everyone was using it, devs created new dungeons with that class in mind - i.e. they tweaked things to be challenging for people with a particular set of skills, since nearly everyone had them. This had the effect of not making the dungeons difficult for the rare players of other builds, but instead impossible. That in turn created a feedback loop: it's too hard unless you're the "right" build, so you reroll to have the right build, and more dungeons are made for that build, and more people switch to that build, and...
A trap that sucked all of your mana away as a combat / mage hybrid (the "right" class) forced you to fall back on your combat skills. Challenging. Unless you were a pure mage, in which case it rendered you completely vulnerable, unable to attack, defend, or heal. Similarly, unless you had Life Magic in PVP, which allowed you to put up elemental resistance and create elemental vulnerabilities, you could expect to be killed in one shot by someone who did have those skills.
Incidentally, I may have some of the finer details incorrect, as when this all started to fall out was just about the time that I quit playing. The definitive rant on the subject:
http://mu.ranter.net/asherons-call/my-brain-explodes
And choice quote:
"[...] new high level content is geared specifically for one type of character design and approach to play and if you do not follow this mandated play style you can do NOTHING AT ALL. In addition, since this is a seemingly unstoppable trend, this means that eventually if you are not playing in the mandated style there will be no new high level content at all appropriate for you and the game life of your character ends with infinite tuskers and certain parts of Aerlinthe if you are lucky. "
Such skill based systems are the domain of the min-maxers. People who combine skills to get the ultimate figthing machines who then scream like babies because they still lack some skills like healing and nobody wants to heal their min-maxed asses.
The class system is the best way to enforce at least a minimum of variance where not all the kiddies are running out as max-dps while the entire system falls apart because DPS only works for some fights.
Go ahead, come up with a better system and then let it loose into the hands of the min-maxers, your system will fail.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Balance is easy. Any character with a 3-level or more advantage or more should win 90% time when played by players of relatively equal skill. That advantage should go up to 99% with a 10-level advantage. Now how hard is that to implement?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have HUGE problems listening to one of the g*** responsible for the huge ass-f****** that was experienced by players of the DT class in Age of Conan. I'd turn to this f****** for insights about class balance in the same way I'd turn to Howard Stern for insights on womens rights. F******.
And yes I AM still angry.
F*******.
I too am in the "learn as you use" camp of classless gaming. But I would go further.
Especially given the lessons we can learn from WAR and other more PvP based games.
When you think of all abilities in all games, you can classify them as Healing, Damage, Cleansing, and Crowd Control.
You also have 4 different deliveries: Point target, target AoE, point blank AoE, and front arc/directional.
You also have a number of other effects like: Action time, energy consumption, critical change, range, chance to disrupt, penetration, cooldown, etc...
The biggie from every PvP game I've seen is the balancing of Crowd Control. IMO, you should never lose control of your character completely for more than 2 global cooldowns (3 seconds in most games). You should never lose the ability to move for more than 3 global cooldowns, you should never lose the ability to attack/cast for more than 4 global cooldowns, you should never be stuck with a movement debuff for more than 5-6 global cooldowns, etc...
All those numbers can be balanced, but you can classify them all down to:
1. Knock down - can not attack/cast/move
2. Snare - movement speed debuff only
3. Root - movement halted
4. Disarm/Silence - appropriate abilities are unusable
5. Knockback/Pull in - target is moved rapidly away from or closer to the caster
And you would have to have immunity timers built in based on the classification of the CC, not the specific CC ability nor as a blanket 'all CC' immunity.
My argument is to open it all up. Lets say you start out a new character. You find a "scroll of Lightning". You read it. You now have a very basic lightning spell. It does a small amount of damage to a point target with a small chance to crit, a long cast time, and little likelihood of penetrating armor/resists or causing a disruption. After casting it 10 times, you learn a bit more about the spell. You can then put a point in to damage, crit chance, cast time, etc. Or you can save your points up till you've cast it 30 times and spend 2 points to make it heal your friendly target at the same time it damages an enemy. Of course, each time you increase any effect of the spell, the cast time, cooldown and energy consumption will increase as well. So sure you can get a super powerful spell, but you'll have to get a 15 second window to queue that bad boy up and it'll drain every bit of energy you have. But honestly, if someone is sitting in range of your shot from hell for 15+ seconds, they probably deserve to get hit ;)
It would be a completely dynamic system where you could have a melee attack that does a frontal cone knock down, or a bow shot that drains life from the target, or a blast of icy water that slows a target down.
At that point, the balancing become easier, IMO, as you have a set of abstract functions that you can adjust as needed. What would be the truly challenging part, would be a dynamic animation system that could generate the required graphics for the huge array of possible attacks.
Anyway, that's been rattling around in my head for a while now. Go find a developer crazy enough to try it with better production quality than Darkfall!
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
IMHO, effects which incapacitate or cripple players are going to be the hardest thing to balance - when they are coupled with high damage output, they become at best who can get the lock off first, and at worse a total imbalance. Consider any effect that cripples a signifigant part of a classes functionality as "lockdown" regardless of whether it renders them completely unable to act - a caster class that can't cast probably becomes useless unless already you have casters heavily reliant on weapons (particularly ranged ones) for damage. A healer that can't heal is similarly useless. These are the things that wreck the balance spreadsheets - sure class A may have equal damage output and damage mitigation to class B, but if class B can do it's damage while keeping class A unable to act, it's broken. Balancing these over short fights where burst damage rules is going to be near impossible - losing 3 seconds of a 5 second fight is more or less a fatal disadvantage. In longer fights, you have to look a how much of the fight you can take a player out of the equation, and how much damage can be done to them, as well as how many players it will take to effect that. One character shouldn't be able to both keep another locked down and take them from full health to dead, except possibly through miracles of random chance. A few ways to balance this: - Tie up both attacker and defender when appropriate - a silencing effect (preventing spellcasting) might have to be channeled. A fighter might grapple with an opponent to keep them out of the fight - doing only negligible damage in the process. - Put a high resource cost on pure crowd control effects. - Pure crowd-control effects should be broken by damage, and should come with a residual immunity to the same when they break. - Pure crowd-control effects should have disadvantages. (healing the target, making them immune to damage during the effect, etc) - Lockidown effects shouldn't facilitate large amounts of damage. - Consider triggering certian buffs as a response to lockdown attempts - repeated stunning attacks might enrage a target, making them harder to stun and increasing their physical damage.
What are these 'classes' you speak of?
*goes back to playing EVE Online*
Ideally, it would mean that any new class or race with over, say, m/2n active characters (where n is the number of character categories on a server and m is the total number of active characters in play on the server) would have its stats multiplied by m and divided by the number of active characters in that category. When a new category was introduced, it would become quickly popular with players as it would be up to twice as powerful as the average balanced character (even though starting at level 1). As the number of characters of that type increased, the stat/effect multiplier would fade until there were an equal fraction of new characters and old ones running around at any given time.
The advantage would be that if a character type got its baseline nerfed a little too much, it would become less popular to play at any given moment, making its multiplier increase, making it more popular again, bringing its multiplier back into balance with its popularity. Likewise, if it was made too powerful, more people would play it, its multiplier would drop, and it would effectively re-nerf itself back into that same balance again.
Sure, it'd only work on servers with enough players and active characters to make gaming the system more trouble than it was worth, but it would have the positive side that tracking the multipliers for each type would allow gaming companies to spot overpowered/nerfed classes fairly easily, simply because their multipliers would be consistently out of whack.
In reality, there is no such thing as "perfect" balance. In most games I have played, people tend to stick with only 1 build/strategy because of some more highly skilled player succeeding with it (for him). Then for some time, this "ultimate" build is considered overpowered, until time goes on and some other intelligent individual figures out a way to counter (so people either believe the counter is overpowered or their once thought of ultimate build is underpowered). Balance is countered by strategy/skill. Sure, there requires some balance, but you can never perfect it.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.