Originally posted by gaeanprayer

It's funny, a lot of the people in this thread complaining that it doesn't have to be fair, are the same ones ranting and raving at the idea of weapons and such getting added to a cash shop.

Can't have it both ways, people.

Thats because you understand "it doesn't have to be fair" the way you want, not the way those people understand it and write about it.

Flame on!

:)

Originally posted by Latella

I thought mmoRPG´s were pretty much online RPG´s and as such, half the fun was that  every soul in them should be different, unique, chaotic, unbalanced and sport a different growth and powers and obtained different gear and abilities depending on how they chose to interact and partecipate within the world and the story.

So why is everyone obsessed about balance, fairness, other classes having cool spells or some guy obtaining the sword of doom when they do not?

Why are mmorpgs being turned in some kind of medieval fps?

I thought rpgs were about the story, the interactions and  not the pew pew and how that n00b warrior does moar damage with his e-peen strike than the mage with his flaming ballz of domination.

*shrug*

So when you play monopoly you don't care if the other player takes as much money as they want?

It depend on the game.  The problem to me is too much emphasize on raids, arena etc.

I know when I played certain class, I simply can't find a group, because my class is underpower compair to other, so other class will always get pick over me.

Same with pvp.  Back when wow arena is unbalanced, all the top pvp is the same class.  Rogue was underpowered at the time, I can't get a high arena ratting with rogue.

Those kind of game have to be balanced, because dungeons/raids/arena is 100% of it's content. 

You need to break from the mold of the game play to make unbalanced class.  The game play itself determine if it can work or not. 

Because on a level playing field skill becomes your greatest asset.

Imagine chess had gear for pieces. Someone that had played chess for years had a completed set and you wanted to join in. You can't because the field is not balanced. The beauty in the game lies in the fact that each side has the same strength but it is the player that decides how to use them.

Would you want your fighting games (the most pure form of pvp) to have levels and gear? No because you want your SKILL to matter. 

Originally posted by RefMinor

Originally posted by Latella

Originally posted by dave6660

MMORPG's seem to be striving for equal result instead of equal opportunity.  That's where I see the problem.

I think this is exactly where the problem is at.

 

Nicely put dave6660

I concur.  :)

"Balance" and "Fairness" are the screams of the average MMO gamer who usually doesnt progress well in an MMO.

Originally posted by Dragonantis

"Balance" and "Fairness" are the screams of the average MMO gamer who usually doesnt progress well in an MMO.

You would be terrible at chess or card games. There's no gear to grind there. 

i think the best solution would be to make group tactics, enviroment and other factors as important as character ability and player skill.

So a mage might be able to throw out ten damage per second. but a warrior with a thousand hitpoint would be able to run up to the mage and kill him every single time. why not have your own warrior distract the enemy warrior till the mage kills him.

and if an enemy archer is attacking the mage, why not have the mage hide behind a large rock timing his attacks to when the archer is reloading.

and terrain could be done in a number of other ways. Mud and swamp would slow heavy armour allowing light armour and cloth to attack [agincourt wasnt just bows you know]. or the heavy armour could wait on hill with mages and archers and force the enemy to come or have them slowly be picked off.

The main thing thats needed for this to work would be a ton of possible options for every class combination. That way there would be less dead ends.

of course then groups that can't plan or coordinate would whine that its not fair. but its still a lot closer to fair than having one class be able to kill another class with zero risk.

I dunno about "fairness", but game balance is of course necessary to assert people actually consider using all possibilities you offer them.

For example if you have one of these skillbased systems many people here are fan of, its very likely some skills are better than others. While small differences might be tolerated, if balance gets too much out of hand, people will focus into the more powerful skills - and the presence of the other skills will be simply superflous.

There are of course always these roleplayers who dont care if a game is balanced and rather want a funny or something character, even if its underpowered. But those are quite frankly a minority. The average player of course /ragequit-s if you underpower them too much compared to other players.

---

Originally posted by Latella
I thought mmoRPG´s were pretty much online RPG´s and as such, half the fun was that  every soul in them should be different, unique, chaotic, unbalanced and sport a different growth and powers and obtained different gear and abilities depending on how they chose to interact and partecipate within the world and the story.
So why is everyone obsessed about balance, fairness, other classes having cool spells or some guy obtaining the sword of doom when they do not?
Why are mmorpgs being turned in some kind of medieval fps?
I thought rpgs were about the story, the interactions and  not the pew pew and how that n00b warrior does moar damage with his e-peen strike than the mage with his flaming ballz of domination.
*shrug*

---

What's the last big MMO where you could lay out multiple persistent traps to avoid whole group fights and cripple them? Build / cast a barrier where enemies could not pass?

Such clear meaningful distinctions of utility got erased from modern MMO design. Now they are only short time "spamable" skills. Lure enemies away, pick locks? Help identifying magical gear?

How about a more free approach of class design? Make a suppot character and mix it with 5 others?

And look at the typical themepark Boss designs (raid). Enrage Timers. Oh to low DPS because you took two healers instead of one? You took the class x with lower dps instead of y?

All we do is damage/healing/Tanking with different flavors today, so what's the reason why 3 out of 4 should suck at it?

Just take the elemental system of older mmos, Frost mages sucked at ice snow golem's den. But they really shined at desert's reach full of fire elementals. The game both had those two places at endgame. It was a meaningful decision to go Frost or fire mage. (No respec!).

Or just take "Ranged" classes, all monsters either reset, teleport to your high ground or go into exploit if they can not reach you. What's the purpose of being "Ranged" when you just start of in range. Can't use the terrain to your advantage etc.

Lack of distinction
Lack of deep gameplay mechanics
Lack of freedom in Class / Gear choices
Lack in World design
Lack of proper deep Combat mechanics

if the game is faction vs faction then i dont like when developers use "balance" word as a reason to mirror every class between faction. 2 different factions most of the time mean 2 different ways of life, 2 different groups of people that train their own ways. When you, as a developer, take faction A and mirror every class to the faction B classes, why not just remove the factions?

I know taht not mirroring classes can have sometimes population imbalance between factions, but hey... hasnt anyone noticed how umbalanced it gets even with identical class mirroring.

Thats the only thing i will always dislike about balance. Combat is never about fairness and balance specially when it comes to faction vs factions.

Maybe jedi went to the same schools as sith? or alliance were once training partners to the horde? that they learned the same things but only changed the way to cast them lol

BOO to class mirroring

Because if someone loses, it obviously wasn't a fair fight.

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Starpower

You are asking why people in general are jealous or envious? That's a pretty big question. How much time do you have

It's a big question, but the answer is pretty short, "Because it's more fun."

Players like interesting decisions.

Balance creates interesting decisions.

No and yes.

I don't think most (mmo) players like making decisions in general.  Many seem to indicate that they want to be the tank mage that wears the best armor and can cast the most powerful spells with minimal or no downtime.  They want to change classes and powers/skills by simply blinking (if that) and be able to solo everything.

Good game balance creates situations where you must make a decision -- and it creates replayability because you want to go back and try a different build/make a different set of decisions.  Now, one could argue that (historically) in an mmo it can be painful to level up another character to try out different builds, but I think we all see that power-leveling is largely a non-issue in most games today.  Therefore, one would expect a shallow leveling curve would empower a developer to create classes that are very different. 

This is one of the things I like about City of Heroes -- diverse classes with some unique mechanics and a relatively short but diverse set of paths to level up.  The only downside to CoH now is that the "incarnate" levels seem to obliterate the uniqueness in favor of layering on other archtypes' powers on top of your own.

Originally posted by WhiteLantern

Because if someone loses, it obviously wasn't a fair fight.

When I lose, the other guy cheated.

Originally posted by evolver1972

Originally posted by RefMinor

Originally posted by Latella

Originally posted by dave6660

MMORPG's seem to be striving for equal result instead of equal opportunity.  That's where I see the problem.

I think this is exactly where the problem is at.

 

Nicely put dave6660

I concur.  :)

That is a very astute and succinctly-put observation Dave.

Luckily there's a game coming out for all of us in a few months ;)

The only thing I have to say is that BALANCE is not an opinion, it is a fact.

The opinion is just what people think without the facts, and that isn't balance, it's what people think (without evidence) what is balance.

Once again, BALANCE IS NOT AN OPINION, it is complex mathematics.

For example... let's take an imaginary game with 3 classes, a Warrior, a Cleric, and a Paladin (a mix of both).

Warriors do 10.0 damage, have 100 hp, and have no spells.

Clerics do 5.0 damage, have 50 hp, and have a heal spell that heals 50 hp per cast.

Paladins do 7.5 damage, have 75 hp, and their heal spell heals for 25 hp per cast.

It's all balanced right? Probably not. A simple change of, say, attack speed, and balance can drastically change. Typically slower attack speed but higher damage is favorable because players run away from one another. If you can only ever hit your opponent one time every 3 seconds of running, then a 3.0speed halberd that does 400% damage is far superior than a 0.5speed dagger that do 50% damage.

Unfortunately, even if the above #'s were true and there was balance, most likely the Paladin class would be significantly more powerful, because although their hp, damage, and spells seem balanced, their instant-heal-all or full-invulnerability spell makes them win every single time.

The cleric will most likely never be able to win because they can't do any damage. Although they can out heal any damage done to them, they will lose mana and eventually have none left. If facing the warrior, they may be able to win a far of attrition. The paladin, however, will hands down beat the cleric because he does significant damage, can heal the non-existent damage of the cleric, and probably wont even run out of mana because he has more hp. This makes the Paladin far superior to the Cleric.

Now the warrior? He has more hp and does more damage, but that Paladin, once again, will still win. The healing is exactly why, as the warrior can't heal.

The paladin's REAL stats would be something clsoer to 75 hp + 25 hp * (Mana / Cost). As long as the Paladin can heal more than once without running out of mana, he has significantly more hp than the warrior. If the Paladin can heal more than 2 times in the fight, he will win hands down.

The Cleric has 50hp per heal, and 50 hp. The Paladin has 75hp an 25 hp, making both have an effective hp of 100. Yet the Paladin does more damage, despite their effective hp being identical. Thus the Paladin is superior once again.

BALANCE is about mathematics and to a lesser extent physics (chasing enemies and speed of weapon or range of attack). It's not an opinion, it's a fact. The physics are still fact, but that is what everyone argues about when it comes to their opinion, usually void of the actual math.

Originally posted by therain93

No and yes.

I don't think most (mmo) players like making decisions in general.  Many seem to indicate that they want to be the tank mage that wears the best armor and can cast the most powerful spells with minimal or no downtime.  They want to change classes and powers/skills by simply blinking (if that) and be able to solo everything.

Good game balance creates situations where you must make a decision -- and it creates replayability because you want to go back and try a different build/make a different set of decisions.  Now, one could argue that (historically) in an mmo it can be painful to level up another character to try out different builds, but I think we all see that power-leveling is largely a non-issue in most games today.  Therefore, one would expect a shallow leveling curve would empower a developer to create classes that are very different. 

This is one of the things I like about City of Heroes -- diverse classes with some unique mechanics and a relatively short but diverse set of paths to level up.  The only downside to CoH now is that the "incarnate" levels seem to obliterate the uniqueness in favor of layering on other archtypes' powers on top of your own.

If they didn't like decisions, they'd be watching TV or a movie.

And if they have terrible ideas about balance (such as wanting to be a tank mage) then those ideas are easy to ignore (and it's rare that a game makes that mistake; even bad games avoid it.)

But yeah I agree that MMORPGs should strive for as much playstyle asymmetry as they have the capability to balance, since both aspects (balance and asymmetry) are how developers cram the most interesting decisions into a game.

Originally posted by Latella

I thought mmoRPG´s were pretty much online RPG´s and as such, half the fun was that  every soul in them should be different, unique, chaotic, unbalanced and sport a different growth and powers and obtained different gear and abilities depending on how they chose to interact and partecipate within the world and the story.

So why is everyone obsessed about balance, fairness, other classes having cool spells or some guy obtaining the sword of doom when they do not?

Why are mmorpgs being turned in some kind of medieval fps?

I thought rpgs were about the story, the interactions and  not the pew pew and how that n00b warrior does moar damage with his e-peen strike than the mage with his flaming ballz of domination.

*shrug*

Because at the end of the day, it matters?

Would you like to spend months leveling up a character, only to get to max level and have other players tell you that your character is worthless because it does less damage or less utility than another class that can do excatly the same job?

Would you like to be killed repeatedly in one hit in PvP by that 'e-peen' strike? Would that be fun for you?

I dont think that every class should be balanced against one another, they should all have strengths and weaknesses. Making everything carbon copies of each other like WoW has done just ruins the flavour of the game.

For example a healer can easily kill a tank -> tank can beat mages -> mages beat scouts -> scouts beats healers. That sort of advantage chain doesnt bother me, because I think PvP should be balanced for group / large scale, not 1 on 1s. But it does still need to be balanced. If a class gets too good at killing everyone else, then it becomes flavour of the month and ruins the diversity of the game. Which is what you were saying you liked about MMOs.

Different? Unique? Not if everyone is playing the same class. Thats why balance is important.

Rpg games have been infested with the disease called pvp, balancing is just a result of pvp. The only way a game can get rid of that, is by completely dividing pvp from pve, however that will cause problems with integrety.

If you like pvp you have to deny that fact offcouse.