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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?
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.
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
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.
It sounds like you're saying that class balance doesn't matter. The situation you're describing only happens if the classes are balanced.
If classes aren't balanced, then one class will almost always beat another in a fight, no matter how good or bad the classes are. Differences in skill determining outcomes is a sign that the game is balanced.
The complex metagames that spring up around MMOs are very difficult to keep on track, but at least game designers can change things. If you want to see a metagame that can be completely broken, look at a collectible card game like Magic. Once the cards are out, you can't change them, and so some horribly broken decks can dominate the metagame.
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...
Then you'll wind up with a population of sneezing soldiers, with very few monks. So how do you design content for that game? If you design content to need a strong mix of soldiers and monks, it will be railed against as too hard (since there aren't monks to fill the monk aspects of the encounter) or it will be ignored. If you design content to be doable by a mostly- or all-soldier force, then you're just reenforcing the bias against monks, and so why bother including monks at all?
It comes down to questions of diversity, complexity, and time. Diversity in an MMO is usually seen as a good thing - a variety of classes or skills, a variety of roles, etc. Diversity also gives you more ways to do the same thing, adding potential for more variety and complexity to content. And arguably most importantly, there is the finite amount of development time - in a perfect world, there would be content designed for every concievable playstyle and group/raid makeup, but in the real world you can only design for a tiny fraction of that space. By (attempting to) create content that, in general, requires that diversity of skills/classes, you hit the broadest swath of players and encourage players to take advantage of the diversity.
But all these things require balance to be meaningful - if soldiers are superior to monks in most or all ways that most players find significant, then the player population will probably be heavily biased towards soldiers instead of monks, and there will be real trouble trying to create content that works for your population without destroying what little diversity you have.