Scott Jennings: PvP Fail: How PvP Can Break Your Game

We Need To Keep Everything Nerfed, Er, Perfectly Balanced Or Our Users Will Hate Us And Show Up At Our Door With Large Clubs

The reason the experienced PvP developer has a twitch and jumps whenever someone opens a door loudly? He read the message boards after the fourth “balance adjustment” in three months.

Message boards for live MMORPGs can be very ugly places. Especially for PvP-focused ones, because forum inhabitants begin to understand, that especially for message boards known to be read by the game’s developers, forum posting itself is a form of PvP. Especially in class-based games (note: every single game is class-based, all of them), it is the forum warrior’s job to minimize the power that their class has, complain about the unwarranted power that every other class has, and mobilize the game’s community to address this imbalance NOW NOW NOW NOW. PvP-focused players are insistent on this - if a class is overpowered, everyone uses it, they use it to kill them, this is bad, and it should stop. Now. Or they’ll leave. And take their entire guild... Of thousands.

Listening to this is death. Not recognizing that your users are trying to “play” you is death. This is because - wait for it - players don’t like nerfs. They don’t like logging one day and finding their character mysteriously weaker than it was the day before. It’s exactly the opposite of why they play MMORPGs. It’s not cool, man. And you’re not going to please the board warriors - they’ll simply move on to the next topic of contention elegantly. And the people you nerf aren’t going to be pleased, and they’ll simply move on, period. Players hate becoming weaker. It breaks the core compact of what most MMORPGs are - the exchange of time spent for greater strength.

Does that mean you should never nerf a class? Well, no. But sometimes, a class is just fatally flawed in its core concept. Take Warlocks in Dark Age of Camelot, a class introduced in a later expansion. In a game dependent on the concept of meeting engagements and inducing shock in your enemy by damaging them as quickly as possible, you have a class which... allows you to pre-load up to 4 powerful attacks for instant delivery. Yes, Ultima Online veterans - a class built around precasting. I’ve got no answer for what the designer was thinking on this one and I worked on this game. This is not a class that is open to elegant balancing. Or really, any balancing. I think the team finally just made the pre-loaded attacks sort of delayed and made them sort of weaker and the warlocks hated it because they were weaker and everyone else hated it because they were still able to preload attacks. No one was happy, because no one is ever happy when you nerf classes.

Or sometimes you have a class that is dependent on a core concept that is, um, a bug. Sticking with Dark Age of Camelot, let’s look at the Berserker class. It’s a class that swings two axes at people. This is a simple concept. Swing axes, do damage, fall down because you can’t take that much in return. Pretty much every game has some class like this - the melee glass cannon. Well, one fine day the game server programmer noticed that there was a fairly obvious bug in the way combat was calculated that made “Left Axe”, the Berserker off-hand weapon skill, do entirely too much damage. So… he fixed it. We fix bugs, right? Well, for all the Berserker players who logged in one day and did substantially less damage (in a class focused on... doing damage) it was not right, it was fairly wrong. And no amount of adjustments later fixed it. People got fed up, and left.

Dark Age of Camelot

Still, especially in a PvP-focused game, you can’t simply abdicate on game balance either. Sometimes you do have to make the hard decision of weakening an ability, because your in-game logging shows that players are pushing the button that triggers that ability 70 times as much as everything else in the game. But (a) you should give as well as take away, ensuring that the player itself does not have the experience of a baby seal being clubbed, and (b) know that your decision WILL cost subscribers, and WILL cost money. Are you OK with that? Does not taking that decision result in costing MORE subscribers, and MORE money? And how’s that ulcer coming?

Problems aren’t always that cut and dried. Take the struggles World of Warcraft has gone through with arena-driven class balance. Arena combat, Blizzard’s move towards turning World of Warcraft into an “e-Sport”, is one of the most directly competitive areas between players - it’s a very easy crucible to see which character builds work, and which don’t. And for a time, Blizzard started ‘changing character abilities’ (nerfing, for those following along at home) based on how classes were performing in arenas. This did not please those players who weren’t particularly e-Sporty. And it didn’t really affect arena players that much, because they were already busy theorycrafting themselves into the next build was 3% out of balance.

Finally, Blizzard hit on the solution of just changing abilities in arenas themselves, instead of affecting the game as a whole. Developers hate doing this, because adding “oh, act like this if you’re here, and act like this if you’re over here” levels of complexity to everything ensures you’ll get wacky bugs. But almost every game that isn’t pure PvP hits on this solution eventually, because it allows you to mitigate the effect of PvP balance “adjustments” on the majority of players who don’t really care if the guy next to him in a group does 3% more damage with a particular build.

There are other issues that MMORPG creators face with Player vs. Player development (I haven’t even touched on the fact that hardcore PvP players tend, as a stereotype, to be very unique and special snowflakes when it comes to customer service issues), but dealing with them in depth would result in, well, a never-ending argument. But for now, I’ll leave you with one word to research, that makes everyone who lived through it twitch, slaver, froth, or nod knowingly, that when you understand the reasons behind it explains much about why PvP-focused games stand or fall:

Trammel.