Curse

Scaphism · Aug 12, 2005, 08:54 PM // 20:54

Don't worry, Ensign was sick of the topic last year, but can't help being drawn in whenver the subject comes up.

That said, thanks for the links Blackace, and the post. And for not flaming anyone. Troll.

Mhydrian · Aug 12, 2005, 10:18 PM // 22:18

in Random arenas N/me are probably the most popular class do to their ability to do damage and NEVER fail or miss. Random arena games are some kind of retarded sick joke. They flat suck.

Aracos79 · Aug 12, 2005, 10:58 PM // 22:58

I used to find the random arenas fairly fun. You could pop in, kill some stuff, and walk away with a little faction for your time. Now... all you find are griefing rangers who do nothing but run constantly until you get fed up and leave. Seriously, the last time I tried the random arena, there was at least 1 running ranger in every match I played. Totally defeats the purpose of the random arena IMO. I think of them as quick, CS like matches... not 30 minute bore-fests.

Weezer_Blue · Aug 12, 2005, 11:46 PM // 23:46

Excellant post. It seems a bit of intelligence wasn't annihilated on release.

Zelc · Aug 12, 2005, 11:52 PM // 23:52

I think you're also missing a very pertinent article: When Cards Go Bad (substitute the word "skill" for the word "card").
To quote from the article:

Quote:

That in a mutant-sized nutshell is why we make “bad cards." To recap (or to fill in for those unwilling to read the long version):

1. By definition, some bad cards have to exist. (The most important reason.)
2. Some cards are “bad” because they aren’t meant for you.
3. Some cards are “bad” because they’re designed for a less advanced player.
4. Some cards are “bad” because the right deck for them doesn’t exist yet.
5. “Bad” cards reward the more skilled player.
6. Some players enjoy discovering good “bad” cards.
7. Some “bad” cards are simply R&D goofing up.

There's a corollary to the "There must be bad cards/skills" rule: there must be good cards/skills. Some of those skills will be better than others, and a certain skillset will almost be inevitably be better or worse than another skillset. This was evident in Magic The Gathering, where well-performing decks were posted on the net and copied (netdecked) by players. Those are the decks you see frequently making Top 8's. In fact, you could make the argument that all good decks are netdecks; as soon as a "rogue" deck (a deck that's not a netdeck) gets a good showing, it gets posted online and will become a netdeck. Also note that the chances of such a thing happening gets smaller and smaller as the cardpool remains the same for longer and longer, as chances are that most of the ideas would have already been explored by other people.

Aracos79 · Aug 12, 2005, 11:59 PM // 23:59

The more I look at it, the parallels between M:tG are more and more appropriate. ANet needs to not be afraid to be proactive to protect their game. In Magic complaining about the DCI was practically a holy ritual, but they weren't afraid to get involved if they had to. They owned up to their mistakes in the Urza cycle and banned a bunch of BROKEN cards, and created one of the most fun T2 environments when Invasion came around (to this day my happiest Magic moments came during that cycle

). Nature's Renewal is the Tolarian Academy of GW PvP right now.

Aug 13, 2005, 12:06 AM // 00:06

This topic is getting very interesting. Dont worry though, I'll reply to everything in due time, I just havent been able to sit down for more than 10 minutes to get everything I want to say down.

Antonio Cappello · Aug 13, 2005, 12:27 AM // 00:27

I think that the biggest problem here is that there are too many weak skills that can fit in massively with elites to make the "invincible build". For example, Ether Renewal is a great skill on its own. It gives moderate energy and health regain with some enchantments. However, when mixed with certain monk skills, Ether Renewal becomes a source for practically unlimited energy and health. Something as simple as causing exhaustion (like Ether Prodigy) would deter people spamming it. Actually, I believe that a good balance would be to add a side-effect to every elite. Elementalist elites should all have exhaustion, necro elites should all sacrifice health, etc.

Aracos79 · Aug 13, 2005, 12:33 AM // 00:33

ALL elementalist elites should cause exhaustion? Have you looked at the full list of elementalist elites? Sure you have some uber goodness like Ether Renewal, but you also have total junk like the Mind Burn/Shock/Freeze series. Heh, and those DO cause exhaustion. It's almost like all the wrong ele elites have exhaustion. :P

Phades · Aug 13, 2005, 12:38 AM // 00:38

Considering the design build options, comparing exhuastion in the elemental realm is not the same as life sacrifice in the necro domain. Exhaustion cripples over time, while life loss can just be erased a several different ways.

Rieselle · Aug 13, 2005, 12:53 AM // 00:53

I'm sure we'll all agree that there are several ways to make competitive games and several different goals that a game designer can aim for when making one.

In every competitive game, there's the strange group of people who will do anything to win, especially playing in a repetitive fashion, abusing imbalances as much as possible. I guess these are "Spikes-gone-bad". To me, the best games are those which are built such that "Spike" gameplay behaviour is indistinguishable from "Timmy" or "Johnny" gameplay behaviour. In other words, make What Wins = What Looks Cool = What Is Creative And Unexpected.

Highly competitive players may not think much of this, but I'm getting the feeling that some sort of meta-meta-game would be useful to add more variety. It might be seen as just an application of the "Capcom principle", ie. increasing complexity such that it will take too long for optimal play to emerge, but here goes.

What about some sort of auto-balancing system that gradually downgrades skills that are popular and upgrades skills that aren't? It wont fix NR, because part of what makes it broken is that it has very little numeric qualities, and those it does have can be partially sidestepped by Oath Shot. But it will change the quality of skills which are currently good or bad based on some combination of their damage/cost/time. NR and skills which are useless because they do nothing will still need to be fixed directly.

The way I see it, a lot of grief comes when developers try to actively balance things. People who were abusing it complain. People who cared about things that didnt change complain. People who didnt get the change they wanted complain. Having a built-in mechanism that does things addresses this a little, since it becomes "part of the game". Also, I prefer to have "skill" in making builds be more of a "ability to think on the move and adapt to changing conditions" rather than "ability to look up the forums to see what is good". In other words, I'd rather hit a moving target :P

Also, it rewards people who go against the trends, and penalises people who copy the trends. A possible degenerate outcome may be, that all the cool skills that get chosen by people interested in such things will get downgraded, only leaving the very plain skills to be used by people who want to win. I have no solution to this other than making sure all skills look appropriately cool in line with their effects.

Also, as we can see with the traders, it's very difficult to make a dynamic system that doesn't go off the rails into some extreme direction. I guess this is where the devs need to step in and keep an eye on things. However, they would be changing how skills are effected by the balancing system, rather than directly changing the skills themselves, so their actions would be "hidden" to a degree, reducing complaints. They would also need to monitor things so that they dont fall into extreme values, because people complain if they spot it too late and reset it back to a sane value. How the balancing system is designed is obviously very important here. Maybe a skilled mathematician / statistician needs to be employed to design it?

Another hurdle is the different game types present in the game. pve, pvp, tombs, etc. NR is very popular in tombs, but it's much less useful elsewhere. It may be that a game-wide balancing system wouldn't see a skill such as NR as being "popular", because it is only widely used in a certain game type. I'd have to say that's a problem with the maps, not the balancing system. We need to have a variety of maps that duplicate many different conditions. We need to have pvp situations that suit AoE/Fire. We need to have pve situations that suit disenchant/utility skills, etc.

I haven't played much online games - most of my competitive gaming experience comes from fighting games and RTS's. Has anyone seen any sort of attempt at a self-balancing game elsewhere? How did it work? Was it successful, or crap?

Antonio Cappello · Aug 13, 2005, 01:12 AM // 01:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aracos79

ALL elementalist elites should cause exhaustion? Have you looked at the full list of elementalist elites? Sure you have some uber goodness like Ether Renewal, but you also have total junk like the Mind Burn/Shock/Freeze series. Heh, and those DO cause exhaustion. It's almost like all the wrong ele elites have exhaustion. :P

Also a reply to Phades. I was just giving examples of possible ways to go about this. And although life sacrifices can be reversed, it would take that one extra skill and possibly make those builds useless. But the general point I was trying to make is that there should be a penalty (downside) to every elite.

Silmor · Aug 13, 2005, 02:39 AM // 02:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rieselle

In every competitive game, there's the strange group of people who will do anything to win, especially playing in a repetitive fashion, abusing imbalances as much as possible. I guess these are "Spikes-gone-bad". To me, the best games are those which are built such that "Spike" gameplay behaviour is indistinguishable from "Timmy" or "Johnny" gameplay behaviour. In other words, make What Wins = What Looks Cool = What Is Creative And Unexpected.

Unfortunately, that would imply that no matter which build choices you make, your build will be successful if you play it right. I'll try to explain why I think this is: Johnny will actively seek out seemingly weaker builds (weaker according to Spike) because they're not being run by either Spike or Timmy, in order to be different. If those seemingly weaker builds that look cool to Johnny turn out to be what wins as well, Spike will be dissatisfied that even though Johnny ran what he deemed an inferior build, he was still able to win. Because of the player stereotypes, the best thing a gaming company can do is a form of conscious unbalancing, which is I believe the purpose of the M:TG article: they try to appease each player stereotype in a way that does not directly conflict with the other (since appeasing all three all the way is impossible - Johnny won't be caught dead playing the same build as Spike, but Spike will be upset if Johnny's unorthodox build is as good as his proven build). Effective but possibly inefficient skills for Timmy, odd and possibly underpowered skills for Johnny and optimally efficient skills for Spike keep each sufficiently happy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rieselle

What about some sort of auto-balancing system that gradually downgrades skills that are popular and upgrades skills that aren't? It wont fix NR, because part of what makes it broken is that it has very little numeric qualities, and those it does have can be partially sidestepped by Oath Shot. But it will change the quality of skills which are currently good or bad based on some combination of their damage/cost/time. NR and skills which are useless because they do nothing will still need to be fixed directly.

I don't think what is popular is a good guidance for balancing. Sometimes something that is moderately powerful and easy to understand/wield will become popular, but that doesn't necessarily hint of imbalance - the meta-game is there to make the better players equip a simple counter to the fad which will push back the usefulness and thereby eventually the popularity of the build. A good example of this was air spikes - it gave a good chance of success when it was first introduced, but was quickly adapted against, and thus became less popular. No balancing was necessary. It does become problematic when a single skill is so influential to the game that counters to it are more burdening than simply accepting the skill to be present and working around it (or counters are not available in the first place) - the meta-game at this point fails to push back the popularity of the skill, and the game degenerates. Current examples are Nature's Renewal, and on a smaller scale, Putrid Explosion.

Ofcourse the practical issues with automatic balancing are that many skills can't be quantified purely on their variable ranges, and thus can't be properly scaled up/down by any algorithm. If we look at Nature's Renewal, at which point should an algorithm decide to drop the activation effect, rather than just tone down the aftereffect duration? When should it decide to introduce some secondary penalty to tone down its usefulness, and how will it decide which one is proper? Deciding these things require an extensive understanding of and experience with the game, because in a sufficiently complex game there are always outcomes a numerical model simply cannot predict.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rieselle

The way I see it, a lot of grief comes when developers try to actively balance things. People who were abusing it complain. People who cared about things that didnt change complain. People who didnt get the change they wanted complain. Having a built-in mechanism that does things addresses this a little, since it becomes "part of the game". Also, I prefer to have "skill" in making builds be more of a "ability to think on the move and adapt to changing conditions" rather than "ability to look up the forums to see what is good". In other words, I'd rather hit a moving target :P

I don't recall many cries of outrage from PvP when skills got balanced. Most top-level players are fully aware that the broken skills they're abusing are imbalanced, and often see their enjoyment reduced by passively being forced to abuse those skills in order to be competitive, and actually welcome the rebalancing. Ofcourse those people who lack the playing skill to win without abusing the broken skills (many spirit spamming rangers right now fall into this category) will be upset, but nobody will shed a tear for their loss, and the game improves.

Active balancing is needed, and I believe the best source of information to support this balancing is to listen to the players who win and complain about how they win, because that is when game degeneracy becomes evident.

twicky_kid · Aug 13, 2005, 02:52 AM // 02:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zelc

Personally, I have a more tolerant view towards broken skills, which I believe came from my background playing Magic: the Gathering. Notably, I played through the Onslaught-Mirrordin and part of the Mirrordin-Kamigawa T2 scenes. During this time, a deck "build" called Affinity ruled the roost. It utilized undercosted artifacts (a type of card) to quickly smash the opponent. In response, all decks began packing cards that countered artifacts. The existence of Affinity basically made any deck that could not effectively deal with artifacts unviable. In addition, non-Affinity decks had to be very careful about using artifacts themselves, because of the sheer amount of artifact hate in the metagame.

Despite this, however, "builds" that could hold their own against Affinity sprung up, and while the metagame wasn't as diverse as it could have been without Affinity's strength, there were many different deck "builds" floating around and winning tournaments. Not only that, but strategic build-creating was still present even in Affinity as different people sought to tweak their build in ways to give themselves an advantage against othe Affinity decs. I still had quite a bit of fun playing during this time.

Overpowered decks were not limited to that one instance. In Apocalypse-Odyssey, we had Upheaval-Psychatog decks that basically sought to prevent the opponent from doing anything important while it builds up a huge amount of resources and then wins. It was definitely the best deck of the period. In Odyssey-Onslaught, UG Madness used a mechanic to churn out undercosted creatures and was arguably the best deck at the time. The larger formats were more balanced, but that was due to the sheer amount of cards available for them. When Guild Wars gets another two or three expansions of skills, it might get to the point where just about everything has a counter and there is no overpowered build. Right now, due to the limited amount of skills and the newness of the game, things will not be perfectly balanced.

However, there were times when cards needed to be banned. In Type 1, where every card could be used, there were incidents where certain cards allowed for overpowered decks. They were eventually restricted (max 1 copy of that card per deck instead of the usual 4), but it took a while for them to be banned. In fact, Gush, a card that allowed the user to draw cards and at times reuse resources was restricted only after the deck it powered had been around for around a month. This was in an environment where there were multiple cards that could serve as back-up counters to various strategies, and this involved a card that was not itself a counter to anything. In the case of Nature's Renewal, there currently aren't enough back-up counters to enchantments that are good enough. The balance changes that must be made should be meticulously considered before being implemented, or we'll go right back to an unbalanced metagame.

It's true that there are balance issues with this game, but these issues do not eliminate strategic choices made before and on the battlefield, and they certainly do not eliminate the fun in PvP. Changes need to be made to fix these balance issues, but let's give Arena.Net some time, k? <cliche>Rome wasn't built in a day</cliche>.

um.....and if you remember affinity was banned and for good reason. it warped the metagame so much that you either had to play with it or play specificly against it. did you take a look at your local stores during mirridon? less and less people were showing up every week because it was the same thing. ok how many people are playing affinity? ok how many people are playing against it? no matter what you did affinity won. only exception was which mirror match got aether vial out first. which in both cases it was still affinity decks.

upheavel was pretty brutal but there where dynamic decks. you could use the sideboard to play or interrupt the upheavel deck where affinity you had to main deck to win.

do agree that maybe later on it maybe interrupted by new skills from new chapters but as it is just make it an elite and problem solved. you don't take too much power away from it just changes how many people bring it into battle with them. so that way its not spammed so much. btw the w/n still owns it with conditions.

Zelc · Aug 13, 2005, 04:12 AM // 04:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by twicky_kid

um.....and if you remember affinity was banned and for good reason. it warped the metagame so much that you either had to play with it or play specificly against it. did you take a look at your local stores during mirridon? less and less people were showing up every week because it was the same thing. ok how many people are playing affinity? ok how many people are playing against it? no matter what you did affinity won. only exception was which mirror match got aether vial out first. which in both cases it was still affinity decks.

upheavel was pretty brutal but there where dynamic decks. you could use the sideboard to play or interrupt the upheavel deck where affinity you had to main deck to win.

Right, but how long did it take for them to nerf Affinity into the ground? I think it took them months to finally ban those seven cards in Standard (I wasn't around at that time due to Halo and WoW, and I was mostly playing T1 before that). The point I was making was that R&D will make mistakes, and that it takes time for balancing changes to be implimented. This is with a game that's been around for a long long time, and with game designers who had around 10 years of experience with their product.

I don't have that much experience with Tombs, but I don't think NR nearly as broken as Affinity was (but maybe more than FoF-Tog? Hmm...), and 4-Gush GAT made Affinity look wimpy (There was a time when I drew all 4 Gushes, a Fastbond, and 2 fetchlands as my opening 7... I was very happy). It still needs to be fixed though.

Makkert · Aug 13, 2005, 07:41 AM // 07:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zelc

Right, but how long did it take for them to nerf Affinity into the ground? I think it took them months to finally ban those seven cards in Standard (I wasn't around at that time due to Halo and WoW, and I was mostly playing T1 before that). The point I was making was that R&D will make mistakes, and that it takes time for balancing changes to be implimented. This is with a game that's been around for a long long time, and with game designers who had around 10 years of experience with their product.

I don't have that much experience with Tombs, but I don't think NR nearly as broken as Affinity was (but maybe more than FoF-Tog? Hmm...), and 4-Gush GAT made Affinity look wimpy (There was a time when I drew all 4 Gushes, a Fastbond, and 2 fetchlands as my opening 7... I was very happy). It still needs to be fixed though.

I love magic, but can you please keep your posts understandable for non-magic players? this is not a magic forum you know... To me, your post is understandable, but to a lot it won't.

as for comparing 'brokeness' (a term used by magic players to indicate that it wrecks the playing scene. Often used wrong unfortunately, a noob will label any powerfull card 'broken'):
I don't think it is much use to compare this. What good does this do for GW?

But yes, the comparisons between GW and Magic do become scary. I see more of them everyday in gamemechanics (anyone damage vs lifeloss? no, they are not the same.) and environment (the ever going discussion about balancing issues).
Yes, R&D is bound to screw up. Creating balance is no small thing. I reckon that 'perfect balance' will never be attained. You are correct that they were slow on the bannings of Affinity (a gamemechanic that basicly meant: the more you have of X, the cheaper X becomes to play). They admitted it themselves that they should have done it 3 months before on the previous banning opportunity.

This is why I had mixed feelings of ANet introducing their cycle of 'balancereviews'. Also a 3 month cycle. If they goof up on just one of these moments, the game will suffer tremendously. Because it will be another 3 months before issues at hand will be fixed...
Just after release, I told my Magic playing buddies that Anet could fix balancing issues when need arised and not be strained by organisational laws. We were pleased by it, and a few joined GW. I feel a bit silly now. :/
I agree that having transparency is great, and you know now that skills might be adjusted at timepoint Y. But really, is having an announcement maybe 2 weeks ahead not good enough?

my 2 cents,
grtz Makk.

Rieselle · Aug 13, 2005, 10:54 AM // 10:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silmor

Unfortunately, that would imply that no matter which build choices you make, your build will be successful if you play it right.

Since I come from a fighting game perspective (and a King of Fighters perspective, where you do have to build a team of sorts) I have no problem with that idea at all. It's probably harder to pull off in an online game where latency and lag (and avoiding client-side code) means that many types of game playing skill can't be used, but my ideal for this kind of game is that there are many, many, viable builds, and they are all more or less equal in power, providing you are able to play them right. If GW wanted to move in this sort of direction, they would need to provide more avenues of skill. Timing, reflexes, and physical dexterity are kind of out the window due to its online nature, so they need to make positioning, situational awareness, knowing when and how to use skills, target choosing, etc more important in the game.

(eg. Currently it's generally advantageous for most of your damage dealers to attack a called target. What if a game mechanic was introduced, where attacks from the front are more easily defended against, and especially attacks from your current target? Then there'd be a lot more maneuvering that you'd imagine would occur in real life, trying to avoid being flanked or surrounded by the enemy - a pair of warriors standing back-to-back etc. And then correct use of AoE spells might be useful.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silmor

I'll try to explain why I think this is: Johnny will actively seek out seemingly weaker builds (weaker according to Spike) because they're not being run by either Spike or Timmy, in order to be different. If those seemingly weaker builds that look cool to Johnny turn out to be what wins as well, Spike will be dissatisfied that even though Johnny ran what he deemed an inferior build, he was still able to win.

Hmmm, from my own experience, looking at some players of really balanced games and some not-so-balanced games, "Spikes" tend to respect people who win with a weaker character or build. They might not be absolutely happy about it, but it often makes them think again about what is strong and what isnt. After all, all Spikes care about is what works, and what doesnt, in an empirical sense. They dont hold preconceived notions of what should be strong or not.

And there's simply the possibility that Spike was outplayed in that match - if a "Spike" expects his "superior" build to win "all the time", then he's got some funny ideas of what a game should be like.

The only sort of player that might get pissed off is the sort of cheap powergaming player that does jump-kicks with a certain character all day and expects to win easily... and I dont think appeasing them is terribly beneficial.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silmor

I don't think what is popular is a good guidance for balancing. Sometimes something that is moderately powerful and easy to understand/wield will become popular, but that doesn't necessarily hint of imbalance

It depends on what your goal for balancing is. Popularity might not be the best criteria for spotting overpoweredness and fixing it - but that isn't my main goal. My main goal is to increase diversity, mainly by buffing unused skills so they become more attractive. And reducing extremely commonly used skills so they become less attractive.

I'm less interested in some possibly ambiguous or impossible to define state of "perfect balance". I'm more interested in making every skill good/bad enough so that we're equally likely to see any of them used on the battlefield. Then it becomes a matter of what gets used with what, and how you use it. I think statements like BlackAce's "Mind Wrack is shit. There's no reason to use it." highlight that some loss of variety is going on.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silmor

Ofcourse the practical issues with automatic balancing are that many skills can't be quantified purely on their variable ranges, and thus can't be properly scaled up/down by any algorithm. If we look at Nature's Renewal, at which point should an algorithm decide to drop the activation effect, rather than just tone down the aftereffect duration? When should it decide to introduce some secondary penalty to tone down its usefulness, and how will it decide which one is proper? Deciding these things require an extensive understanding of and experience with the game, because in a sufficiently complex game there are always outcomes a numerical model simply cannot predict.

I agree. In my original post, I did specifically say that something like NR would be difficult to address with an automatic system. So some "bugfixing" would be required to ensure that skills vary properly in usefulness based on their current popularity. It also adds another axis of skill variety in the game. You might have Damage Skill X which varies its damage based on popularity, and you can then also have Damage Skill Y, which is similar, but varies its Energy Cost based on popularity.

And I also said that the dev's would still need to keep an eye on things (as they do now) and to take prompt action to prevent any excessive run-away results. (as some evolutionary systems sometimes fall over - depending on the design of the system. Asymptotic (sp?) behaviour?)

But the role of the system is to provide a dynamic system that encourage the maximum variety of skills to be used by the players.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silmor

Active balancing is needed, and I believe the best source of information to support this balancing is to listen to the players who win and complain about how they win, because that is when game degeneracy becomes evident.

I think my main fear with active-human-balancing is, it's *work*. So eventually it will reach a stage where its declared "good enough" to stop. (ie. when all the major concerns are dealt with, and no new unbalances are popping up.) Then, after a period of time, when most of the experimental builds have been tried, the game will fall into one of 2 possible static states:

1 - All the optimal builds have been discovered and published. Gameplay now revolves around taking the optimal build of your choice, and playing it as best as you can. Skill at using these particular builds determine victory.

2 - All optimal builds have been discovered, however, these builds have mutually exclusive weaknesses. The game settles into a paper-rock-scissors format. Victory now depends completely on luck - whether you draw an opponent that is strong or weak against your chosen optimal build. To a degree, playing your build properly and not screwing up affects your victory, but its a matter of "not losing the match" rather than "winning the match" with skill.

"Experts" may make variations out of boredom, to show off, and to generally give themselves an extra challenge. n00bs run in with suboptimal builds and get squished, because they suck and their builds suck.

It might be a matter of personal preference, but I feel that a better game is one that keeps things mixed up, rather than the 2 scenarios above, thus the automatic balancing. Possible alternatives include a regular schedule of skill additions, similar to a release of a new set of cards in M:TG, but that kind of process tends to make it horribly difficult to balance things in the first place. I also like games where surprise and just plain dumb ol' luck have an effect, where an obviously lesser skilled player can occasionally pull off a spectacular and logic-defying victory. That's why I prefer TA or C&CGenerals to StarCraft.

Oh, in BlackAce's opening post, he cites the motto "Options and Restrictions". It's similar but slightly different, I prefer "Variety and Tradeoffs"

Edit:
Oh, another reason why I support automatic balancing (or some sort of human process that mimics it) is that, with any reasonably complex game, it's probably incredibly difficult to get the balance right. Some games have achieved it by sacrificing complexity, but I dont like that. Some games have thrown up their hands and gone, "Ok! Well, the weapons aren't balanced, but, -everyone- can use the rocket launcher, so if you're complaining, just get it and use it better than your opponent!". The "let's give UAX to everyone" smacks of this to a degree - the notion that the only way to be balanced is to give everyone equal access to the same things. It's certainly true, but you're improving balance at the cost of variety. (The argument being, if you fixed all the crappy skills instead, then people would have a better chance of coming up with a viable build with whatever subset they had available.)

Silmor · Aug 13, 2005, 02:30 PM // 14:30

I don't believe the Guild Wars community is even close to discovering all combos and their counters, but I don't think (in a balanced environment) such an eventual situation (the 'static state' you mention) is bad. Even without further innovation a lot of fun can be had duelling back and forth with the tools laid out, much like in a FPS it would become a matter of how you wield those tools. Ofcourse much of that sentiment is based on personal preference.

Even in a static environment, fads will keep the playing field somewhat dynamic, even if through a rock paper scissors scenario - for Spike minimizing chances of lucking out would be key, Timmy would defy the meta-game by playing the build that will roll opponents if he gets lucky, and Johnny could play whatever is not part of the fad (build or counter). I think the rock-paper-scissors environment works better in this regard than an environment where one build is clearly most efficient since although gambling shouldn't overshadow playing skill, there would remain more play diversity in the rock-paper-scissors scenario.

The promise of expansions should ensure that even if the situation stagnates in this fashion there is a new injection of skills to inherently shake up the playing field, typically deepening the game through added complexity requiring a lot of reinvention and inviting innovation again. M:TG clearly saw a lot of this, Starcraft had it on a smaller (but no less significant) scale with Broodwars. Whether or not it will be difficult to balance these new skills isn't the issue I think, that's simply 'more of the same' responsibility for the game designers - if their expansion imbalances the game, they're stuck with the responsibility to fix it. The opportunity to breathe fresh life into their product to re-invigorate a stagnated game should outweigh such fears.

I don't think the availability of skills should be part of this balancing discussion for GW, since no one skill is strictly rarer than the next; elites are somewhat more difficult to get, but are balanced in accordance with the 'one elite per bar' restriction rather than availability. I don't think a limited toolset strictly encourages experimentation, that would only apply if that player would take the popular tools if he had a full toolset. I could even argue that a full toolset gives a better chance of making an underplayed skill work, because there are more opportunities to find a setup in which it can play a valuable role. The actual decision to experiment remains up to the player.

In the case of UAX, that call is made to get a level playing field where skill and build choice determine victory, not where you can get an advantage having more options at your disposal because you spent twice as long playing the game as someone else; it's not a balancing concern. Incidentally, this is what always turned me off from playing M:TG - buying more packs of cards boosted your playing potential through a larger toolset, so even if you could win with a smaller selection of tools, you were playing at a disadvantage. Anyway, shouldn't be part of this discussion.

Dzan · Aug 13, 2005, 03:16 PM // 15:16

One potential problem I see with Anet that I hope they consider is the future metagame. We all know that NR is going to get nerfed, one way or the other, sooner or later.

But what then? It seems obvious to me that 'invincible' enchantment builds will dominate in that environment. It will become your team of guys with a ridiculously powerful enchantment based combo against my team with a ridiculously powerful enchantment based combo.

The solution is to look down the road and make multiple changes at the same time. If they nerf NR without touching ER, then they will have not done their homework.

They should first consider how A, B and C interact now, and why people don't use D. Then, when they cripple B, see how A, C and D interact, and/or what E's new role is. The worst case senario is if by removing C they make D just as powerful as C was in the first place. The ideal is obviously an enivironment where A,B, and C are equally good and equally viable, but not so dominating that a guy playing D can't come in from time to time and steal a win creatively.

Orochim4ru · Aug 13, 2005, 04:22 PM // 16:22

Quote:

They should first consider how A, B and C interact now, and why people don't use D. Then, when they cripple B, see how A, C and D interact, and/or what E's new role is. The worst case senario is if by removing C they make D just as powerful as C was in the first place. The ideal is obviously an enivironment where A,B, and C are equally good and equally viable, but not so dominating that a guy playing D can't come in from time to time and steal a win creatively.

This would be ideal, but guild wars runs on a very A>B>C>D>A system most of the time. the fact that currently A>B>C>D<A exists is a problem. There IS a VERY dominant form of defensive altar holding which is used to milk tombs, and GvG is still very much a ninja GL gank or camp the GL game. At least they fixed grenths.