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.' "

Comments

Re:This may explain...

[reverseclipse]

There are two sides to this and both are valid. On the one side everyone wants a unique experience with varied classes. On the other hand no one wants to play a class for months or years only to be underpowered in the endgame. Skills that are fun have nothing to do with survivability and damage output. Providing all players with the same chance to be great means that classes and races get more similar. This is not as important for parties where you can have varied pros and cons spread out between players, but for single player pve or pvp all the classes really need to be the same to allow for anyone to win based on skill and not racials/skills. ï It does seem strange for a game to lose so much "fun" and variety in order to provide everyone with a "fun" experience.

The problem is casuals & the placebo of divers

[TheRealRainFall]

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.

Roshambo

[tygerstripes]

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.

Class balance masks a larger problem in MMOs

[DrMrLordX]

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.

Re:Class balance masks a larger problem in MMOs

[Shihar]

There are alternatives to class balance, MMORPGs just are not capable of them. Look at a game like Armageddon MUD. It has zero balance. A n00b Templar will mop the floor against pretty much everything else in its home city. Being a Templar in that game is like being a level 50 in WoW mage when no one else can ever get past level 20. How do you balance such absurd power? Social pressure and enforced role play. You might be the high and mighty Templar, but you have certain responsibilities, everyone wants to kill you, you are never allowed to actually use your full power, and if you ever abuse it you simply die. The entire game is built like that. Magic users are epically powerful, but show that your a magic user in public, and you die. Oh, and death is permanent. It isn't for everyone, but it certainly takes rock, paper, scissors and flips it on its ass.

Personally, I think that the next "MMORPG" revolution will be a devolution. Server space, bandwidth, and general computational power is now cheap as hell. There isn't a reason in the world why a few individuals can't host a Not So Massivily Multiplayer Online RPG. (NSMMORPG?). Open it up for heavy modding, build it such that someone who wants to spend the money for a server can host a couple hundred people, and let the MMORPG ecology get some new blood. WoW is a lowest common denominator game. That is great for most people, but imagine the other possabilities. Imagine a WoW that was 100% PK all the time and super guild based. Imagine a WoW with permanent death, no levels, heavy into RP, and an iron fisted adminstrative staff that enforced it. Imagine a purely RvR game, or a game that is nothing but epic dungeon crawls.

WoW is most mediocre of games. They have to be to appeal to a wide audience. The result is that few people are truly happy with it. Most want it to be a little more of this or a little more of that. Never Winter Nights 2 came closer to this concept of a pint sized MMO, it just wasn't robust enough to really let people tear into it. You wait. MUDs are going to make a come back. The MMORPGs will always be there, but for people who want an extreme experience graphical MUDs will be the name of the game.

Re:Class balance masks a larger problem in MMOs

[thesandtiger]

The people complaining that the ideas discussed above won't appeal to everyone are missing the point - the OP is talking about being able to have smaller, niche "biggish but not massively" multiplayer games that will be able to give the people who like whatever kind of idea a place to play.

Having lots of smaller MMOs out there with a smaller investment of effort to set up means that designers can take risks and experiment. I really loved the age of MUDs when you could try out dozens of different games and find some that had interesting mechanics. Granted, there are a lot of clones or stock models, but there were some real gems.

I'm monkeying around with some OSS MMO engines & clients right now and they're really quite a pain in the ass to make work. However, once they've become more stable and usable, I imagine there will be a burst of creativity just like we saw with MUDs, where people can make games that cater to many, many playstyles.

Re:Class balance masks a larger problem in MMOs

[DrMrLordX]

You can RP your way into providing excuses for different classes to have a mutual interest in slaughtering things, but in doing so, you've eliminated the player's ability to RP as a class that is not primarily (or even solely) motivated by acts of violence. Take a look at what has happened to the old thief class from AD&D (AD&D/D&D hs been deeply and irrevocably affected by MMO design theory): the thief became the rogue and is now more focused on the ability to stab things in the back or use any number of other funky combat maneuvers related to stealth and/or dexterity and/or dual-wielding or whatever convention your rogue-of-choice chooses to abuse. I'm thinking more of the 3E/3.5E Rogue but you get the idea. It's not like 4E has added more depth to the class overall.

MMOs should have one or more classes dedicated to running around and whacking things to appeal to those who want to do such things, but there should also be room in the game for classes motivated by other goals, and those classes need not conform to the same balance equations. If you want to escape the balance grind, which I think a great many designers/developers do on some level, you have to change the goals of the class entirely, just as you have to change the way that class interacts with the rest of the world. In the end, the point is for the player to have fun, and if you have a small niche of players that a). don't have fun killing monsters over and over and b). can really shake up the server environment in a way that is fun and interesting for other players when given a fundamentally different class that both can and must do things that other classes can't (or wouldn't want to) do, then it behooves the designer to give that small niche a set of tool different from what your average MMO guy has.

Anyone remember Dark Sun Online on the Total Entertainment Network? At the close of one phase of beta, a powerful Preserver named Crom (well, mage, everyone was assumed to be a Preserver in that game if they were a magic user . . . no Defilers, boo) exploited various bugs and balance problems in the game to murder people repeatedly in the game's main city. Chaos ensued, NPCs died left and right, etc. The admins put a stop to the chaos (I think) eventually, though it lasted for hours. On the following day, they held an in-game execution of Crom with Crom's willing participation. He was probably one of the best villains I had seen in an MMO environment. The developers had to stop that from happening in the future, so they changed Tyr (the main city) to be an anti-magic zone for the most part, so future attempts by players to become arch-villains sort of devolved into your usual pointless griefing. Crom was the greatest villain in beta, and arguably the greatest villain the game ever saw, period.

If you gave the average player the power Crom had (and, realistically speaking, anyone in DSO beta could have done what he did . . . they just didn't figure out how to do it as well as he did), you get griefing or other nonsense. Give that kind of power to a player like Crom and you get something special. Similar events from my MMO past were the time that Rainz murdered Lord British (played by Richard Garriot) during a UO event with a scroll of firewall because someone forgot to set LB's invulnerability flag, or the time I essentially blacked out the res shrine in the first UO pre-alpha by spamming darkness spells on the shrine so often that nobody could see anything and got stuck in darkness after they ressed post-death (took a QA purging the darkness to get people out of there, but I had several dozen people trapped, ha ha). Griefing is dull, but epic events that significantly change the way people play can make a game a lot more fun to play, especially if it's a player that serves as a catalyst to that sort of event.

Then there was the time when a guy on a production UO server figured out how to create a mob of green slimes so large that it conquered all of Britannia and crashed the server (he trapped slimes in his house, purple potioned them to make them reproduce on one tile, and then unleashed them. They ate everything). Slimes were recoded to not split after that.

Re:Individual differences vs class balance

[sadness203]

Not necessarily.
I play blood bowl, the board game, not the new pc game. Some day ago, with a plain vanilla halfling team, I beat the shit out of a team necromancer. Yet halfling is one of the worse rated club. The creator of the blood bowl game even said they made it so they could be squashed.

Yet, I lost not even a squishy halfling, he lost 5-6 of his team of eleven. half of them dead, the other half injuried.

Even if you have odds against you, with skill, luck, and knowledge, you still can win.

Real World vs. MMO

[bencollier]

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.

class balance is stupid

[Lord Bitman]

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.

Re:Individual differences vs class balance

[loufoque]

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.

And that's just boring. I don't want my micro-management skill to determine the outcome of a fight, I want my strategic skill to do so.
That means I want the skill I put into building and setting up the character determine the outcome.

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.

MTG is arguably the only game with an interesting metagame.
Yes, there is a lot of creativity and players come up with smart combinations that are very effective against certain other decks, but that's kind of the point. If you're a serious player, you're supposed to keep yourself updated about that and construct your deck to face known strong decks accordingly. That's what makes the whole thing so interesting.
The thing is, there are so many cards, effects, and ways of playing that there is never a single deck at the top. At worse, all major decks contain the overpowered card, but that's not a problem.

I Want *Un-balanced* Classes

[MogNuts]

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.