Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Try your hand at game balancing
Wandering Mist
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Game balance is an interesting thing and I feel a lot of players don't appreciate just how hard it is to do. I received the following comment on my latest video:
So, if "can't balance" is just an excuse, let's do a little balancing exercise. Feel free to do this yourself too if you like.
This took me about an hour to do, and that's for just 2 classes with 2 abilities each. Your average mmorpg has anywhere from 5-15 different classes, with up to 30 abilities each.
Have a go yourself and see what you come up with. If you managed to do it, try adding a cleric class also with 2 abilities:
If I hear one more person say cant balance rather than wont balance as a feeble excuse for not having the competence to balance a game.... XD
If you cant/wont balance a mutiplayer game, where game balance is critical/crucial, should you really be making one ?
For me you are in the wrong industry.
So, if "can't balance" is just an excuse, let's do a little balancing exercise. Feel free to do this yourself too if you like.
Imagine you have a mage and a ranger. Each class has the same health, defences and range, and they each have 2 abilities:
mage skills:
fireball - deals [x] damage | 2 second cast time | no cooldown
power enhancement - increases mage damage output by [y] amount for 10 seconds | 30 second cooldown
ranger skills:
power shot - deals [a] damage | 1 second cast time | no cooldown
focus mind - decreases the cast cast time of power shot by 0.5 seconds for [c] seconds | 30 second cooldown
Balance these abilities by changing the variables [x], [y], [a] and [c] so that both the mage and ranger deal the same damage over 30 seconds.
This took me about an hour to do, and that's for just 2 classes with 2 abilities each. Your average mmorpg has anywhere from 5-15 different classes, with up to 30 abilities each.
Have a go yourself and see what you come up with. If you managed to do it, try adding a cleric class also with 2 abilities:
cleric skills:
exocism - deals [d] damage | 0.5 second cast time | no cooldown
drain life - deal [e] damage every second for 10 seconds | 1 second cast time | 10 second cooldown
5
Comments
We're assuming for this that there are no resource costs for any abilities, but yes you're right that this also plays a part in balancing combat, especially in long drawn-out fights.
Yup. As well as the influence of:
They have stated that they don't want to balance on the basis of 1v1 scenarios, but rather larger scale battles.
My only issue with that direction, is that it disregards World PvP where it is more than likely to be 1v1
Balance in PvP?
Balance in ability to earn money?
Balance in ability to be asked into parties?
Balance in ability to level up quickly?
Balance in the ability to tame animals, fish, or grow crops?
As a prospective cleric, I don't expect to be a PvP player and kill like a mage or an archer. But I do expect to be asked to parties, particularly after I gain a decent rep. So it will be my reputation that impacts how fast I level...and so on.
Perhaps it is more a function of the person at the computer? Someone who is smart will have an advantage over someone who isn't. A player with experience over a new one and a friendly player will do better than one who isn't. Just like real life, which isn't balanced very well at all.
So I don't think that a game can ever be perfectly balanced any more than life can be. Sure, it is good to strive towards balance just like we should strive always towards equity in life. But both equity and balance are hard to define.
You're right there, you can balance classes around a number of different things. Also regarding player skill, yes it is important but at the end of the day, the numbers (usually) have a bigger impact than anything else. It doesn't matter how skilled you are or how bad your opponent is if you do no damage to them and they can one-shot you.
I have not shipped any game, but I'm actually making my own game Battle Arena.
Objetive view
Asking for balance in Alpha is dumb.
Subjective view
-I think that when it comes to balance, starting from the bottom to the top is not the best method.
-I envision the woods and then I trim the trees to fit the whole. There will be an appropiate time to micro manage numbers but I think that having an idea about where you are going serves best as a starting point.
alright let me give a crack at this.
mage skills:
fireball - deals [5] damage | 2 second cast time | no cooldown
power enhancement - increases mage damage output by [100%] amount for 10 seconds | 30 second cooldown
ranger skills:
power shot - deals [2.5] damage | 1 second cast time | no cooldown
focus mind - decreases the cast cast time of power shot by 0.5 seconds for [10] seconds | 30 second cooldown
cleric skills:
exocism - deals [.5] damage | 0.5 second cast time | no cooldown
drain life - deal [2] damage every second for 10 seconds | 1 second cast time | 10 second cooldown
If you change the .5 to a 0.48148148148 for the exorcism you should get a perfect 100. Or you can just stay at .5 for 101.
Total damage after 30 seconds for all three classes: 100
Now this *should* be the exact same damage in a vacuum.
Edit: What's crazy is there is already a clear difference in who is better at what between these three classes. Mages are great for fights that do not require a lot of movement and need burst for various scenarios. Rangers are decent for movement fights and dealing burst damage, so kind of a middle ground between the mage and cleric. Clerics are the best for movement fights however lack burst.
Now add crits, then hit chance, damage type, resists, dodges, damage reductions, damage penetrations, mana costs, and range. It's a ton to think about, and honestly I would never expect a game to be able to balance all this out. That's why i play an MMO, and not a freakin FPS.
Good job. And yeah just with this simple example you can see that different classes are more suited to different types of fights, even though they do the same damage overall. This is something I also think players don't consider - the effectiveness of a class depends a lot on the type of fight, and that plays a big part in balancing the classes.
Oh and as one final point, I would let the Cleric do 101 damage because it is impossible for a human player to activate the dot ability as soon as it comes off cooldown. This is a situation where you have to account for the players not being able to do the same things as bots or simulations.
Took me about 10 seconds, and about 2 minutes to check my thinking.
I am assuming no latency issues and a skill queue so there is no delay while the ranger is casting an ability every half second, and also that both buff abilities have no cast time.
Edit, didn't read Sathragos post - decided to work it out before I even finished reading the OP. He basically came to the same conclusion as me.
Don't know where the hour came from for the original post but that question is a matter of seconds, although doing same damage over 30 seconds doesn't mean balanced and looking at it on a vacuum like that would cause imbalance e.g. ranger having more frequent opportunities to dodge and less overkill damage from the ranger and drain life doing damage even if the target breaks LoS.
Also these would likely be values that's scale from stats (in a vacuum [X] still = 2[a])
It's harder when it comes to aoe and much harder when it's buffs, debuffs or cc e.g. if the is a damage increase buff, a flat amount would benefit the ranger most and a % would make the mage burst more of a threat.
But game devs can at least balance a few outliers per patch, to keep broken shit under control and introduce new viable builds.
They can run statistics on actual data from people playing the game. And they can check the math with simulations of common situations. With some effort, they can see what is imbalanced, exactly how imbalanced it is, and which abilities are contributing the most.
Players do half of this already, with combat trackers and parsing websites, and lots of spreadsheets. And I would hope the game devs have a somewhat more efficient process, and better tooling than we have.
Once they know where a balancing problem lies, the hard part is changing it without messing something else up, whether that be the balance of related builds, the overarching meta/strategies of the community, or the vaguely defined and tenuous fun of it all. In other words, numerical balance is easy, but game design is hard (and beyond the scope of this comment).
So I guess I would agree that it's impossible to balance a decently complex game to perfection. But it's not impossible to work on. And it's not impossible to "succeed" at balance, if you just set reasonable expectations for how many things should be viable and how closely balanced they should be. Note that they do not have to be wholly equivalent, they just have to be close enough to allow player preference to make the difference between choices.
But what you said is definitely right, its extremely hard time finding a way to get things completely balanced on the first go. Especially when you account for a variety of situations, abilities, stats/gear and levels.
But then again they don't really need to either...
I don't think Devs need to get everything right on the first pass based on theoretical outputs. What really makes or breaks how people feel about balance is in the long term, and to do that they can instead monitor how successful people are in different roles on average and at high levels. If they are doing that they can still find emerging issues and adjust them without necessarily understanding the full scope of details behind it. My main concerns with balance in mmo's in the past (and I assume others as well) haven't been at the start of the game, but with long term issues that are left unaddressed. I can forgive short term issues, but if they aren't taking steps to understand the situation then that's where the experience starts to get a bit frustrating and touches on your sense of equity if you feel like you don't have a niche in a raid group due to your class choice or have no real options against an opponent as they mow over you.
L2 did not have balance, the classes were complimentary and purpose focussed. Whilst there was little complaint during pve, the bigger differentiation was pvp.
In pve, group leaders sought specific classes to make up optimum parties which differed for mob types (aoe, group, clustered, dungeon and/or spread out, and different for many of the larger bosses/raids). There were a number of classes that were staples, some that were picked and chosen for specific needs and a number that were not valued for their pve capability so low/last on the list for pickup parties.
In pvp, the differences were even more exaggerated:
And solo or in duo, this would stand out in pvp and be great or poor or anywhere in between depending what one was up against, but in larger groups, each had their role to play, this is what I see in AoC.
There was a comment some time back by the Dev`s that there was not the intention to achieve balance. I`m of the thought that like for like skills could achieve relatively similar impact but there is a greater dynamic to play if there is variety.
So rather than overall balance, prefer Rock, Paper, Scissors extended to Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock.
The game should be a multi-player experience hence group result.
Balancing a few similar abilities is very much a science. Not an easy one (I've been looking at MMO balance for 20 years), but a science non-the-less.
Class balance as a whole though, that is more of an art than a science. There is no way to mathematically equate something like avoidance, range or even the ability to cast while moving with something as specific as damage dealt.
Even things like available gear and the specifics of content affect class balance (or perceived class balance).
I am a huge fan of balance, as many here would know. I think it is something to always strive for, something players should help developers with when we are able, but it is not something that could ever actually be achieved.
Edit ti add; I can absolutely see how this could take an hour. If you dont immediately attempt to equate the value of the two buffs, this would be somewhat harder.
Also, I only just finished reading the OP (as I said earlier, I worked it out before I finished reading the OP).
The cleric one is a bit harder, but if [d] = 33% of [x], and [e] does 72.6% of [x], this should also be balanced (note, I am not in a position to check this right now, someone please feel free to check these numbers).
This is not as clean as I would like, with a decimal place in there, but it is still balanced.
First of all when people say that a company is unwilling they usually refer to grieviously obvious things like refusing to separate pvp values from pve values for the sake of "not overwhelming the player with too many values".
2nd of all a class usually has an identity. You will always have someone be better because of their class in some scenarios compared to your own, that's natural. It's not so much about the 1v1 aspect, in general.
When there is a general consensus over months that certain classes are overtuned in all regards, when they are refered to as S tier constantly over half a year, when you see 2 classes be able to do solo what is to be group content and nothing is done about it, then a company is refusing to do anything about it.
When a class can literally not participate in any bigger open world events because they are designed in a way that directly opposes the requirements to participate thenI think that, in general, is what people mean with such comments.
There are always people crying wolf without knowing anything or investigating what they are talking about, but there have been enough cases that I think it warrants such statements.
You can balance a game around that philosophy. You can say, if a class is good at aoe, then it has to lack a bit in single target dmg. You can make a baseline what you want approaching top single target dps (burst 15sec max.), single target dps (sustained 1minute+), AoE burst blablabla. You can say if it's top in this topic, it has to be B class in the other topics. A company can design encounters around that/ or a dungeon as a whole to give everyone a sense of importance or their moments to shine .
You can establish such parameters and if a certain class (combination) with certain augments and gear goes over those parameters or vastly under it even tho it SHOULD be up there, it needs to be fixed.
This doesn't need inter- class comparison because most of the time, a company won't even bother to keep a class in itself consistent. It's most often a flavour of the season deal.
Sure we can go into detail now and establish how much a cc is worth capable of interrupting key abilities or just slowing someone down and such, but in principle, in general, a company most often simply refuses to do even the part i mentioned before.
I went through enough games and as a math person I went deep enough into this "mess" often enough to know it's not because they can't in a lot of cases.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
The math itself is pretty simple, just some basic algebra. The real difficulty isn't in trying to make different classes have equal output. You want to give classes niches that they excel in, but make it so they don't excel in those niches more than others do in their niches.
League of Legends is a perfect example. There are over 150 characters, and they all have a little something they're good at. Darius is a bruiser/brawler type character. He has a hard time catching up to his enemies, but when he does, he's incredibly strong. Caitlyn is a long-range marksman. She has lots of tools to stay away from her enemies and deal damage at range. Completely different characters that fill completely different roles, but they both have a 50% winrate. This is kind of balance is super difficult to achieve.
Now all we have to do is equate these 5xy + 10x = a(30-c) + 2ac this can be simplified to
5x(2+y) = a(c+30) from here we can set any two values as whatever we want and then find an infinite amount of values for the other two. So lets use an example where both a and x are set to 10 damage from this we get 50(2+y) = 10(30+c) simplify to 5y - 20 = c now we have to apply a few more rules for these to make sense first. y has to be greater than 1 and c has to be an integer greater than 0. Pretty simple answer at this point is y=6 and c=10.
You can prove these values work pretty easily as well by putting a,x,c = 10 y = 6 into the first equation or just thinking about it conceptually. For 5 attacks the mage deals 60 damage for 300 damage then deals 10 damage for 10 more attacks for a total of 400 damage over 30 seconds. The ranger deals 10 damage for 20 attacks over 10 seconds for 200 damage then 10 damage for 10 attacks over 20 seconds for another 200 damage for 400 damage over 30 seconds.
This doesn't mean that game design or balancing is easy however the example you gave is an example of how people can over complicate some of the simplest things I'm going to be honest with you there is no way this should take you an hour to do just to find one solution. This process takes less that 20 minutes on a piece of paper and you get infinite solutions. Game balance is a series of these types of equations but they become increasingly difficult when you add more abilities and healing and CC abilities as well. Game balance is not easy thats why its rare to find a game with classes or heroes that is balanced perfectly however it can be done especially on this level. I'll be honest your example here is very poor cause if a game has only health, range, damage and damage modifying abilities or damaging abilities then it would be very simple to balance. The differing systems is what makes a game difficult to balance correctly, add healing, movement and CC and all of a sudden your game can't be balanced with JUST equations. You need to understand how abilities interact with each other and with each character. Game balance is hard your example does not illustrate that.
The more variables there are, the more interesting.
The greater the standard deviation of the variables, the less predictable the outcomes. Then introduce other distributions than the normal distribution (binomial, poission....) and you will need a group players who can really think on their feet. @grisu and @Yaku are correct, math wins.
I believe the real balance comes into play with class role fulfilment and providing said roles within the game to fulfil. using the above classes as an example, you would create an encounter with a boss that needs the best of all three. Let's take a crack at that too.
We have a giant slime boss inside a large underground sewage room with 4 tunnel entrances on each corner. You then have pipes that run diagonally up and down the sides of the room like ramps. The boss leashes if you exit into any of the tunnels.
For this fight there are going to be three mechanics. The first mechanic, The slime boss creates slime droplet adds that are slow with high health but deal a ton of damage if they get near someone. The second mechanic, the slime boss will squeeze itself down into a condensed form charging up a high damage aoe and generating a shield on its health. Breaking the shield interrupts the aoe. Third mechanic, the slime boss gets worked up, becoming untargetable as it starts rapidly bouncing around the room for 10 seconds dealing damage to those it rams into.
In this scenario, the ranger or the cleric can take on the role of kiting the slime droplets around the room or up the pipes on the walls. The mage and ranger can deal with the second mechanic with their burst cooldowns. Lastly, the bouncing mechanic allows the cleric to deal damage over time to the boss when the others can not target it.
Even here, not everyone can do everything, but most everyone can help out in various ways and there are things that they can excel at or accomplish.
You didn't quote so I don't know if you are referring to my comment or not but if you are please read the entire section at the end where I specifically say that game balance is a difficult multi varied process my point is this example is dog shit. This example makes game design and balance seem easy. If you are making a point about how balance can be hard then give an example f balance that can be boiled down to a simple equation you didn't make a point at all. This post does not accomplish its goal, this post says one thing but illustrates another and it weakens the whole argument. This post is counter productive to its goal.
The hour came from the fact that I'm terrible at maths, but still, congrats to the people who found this easy.
You're right that this simple example in a vacuum doesn't equal balanced, especially if we were to pit these 3 classes against one another in pvp.
My point is that a lot of players demand having tons of gameplay choices and then complain when the game isn't balanced. As found out by Sathrago, even this simple example has some nuances to it that need to be taken into account, like burst vs sustained damage output.
The fact that some of us were able to easily find a way to make it work does not mean it wasnt a good example, as we all came up with the most basic, most boring way of achieving balance - and in my case that is after 20 years of looking at MMO class balance (and often being disappointed by what I saw).
In ESO, from memory, my character had something like 7k HP with a reasonably solid build, but to be killed with a single 30k hit...that`s not particularly conducive to engaging pvp.
So long there are sufficient mechanics to ensure as at least a good few volleys back and forth before death, then all good with me.
Dmg output doesn't equal play style, dmg output doesn't mean all classes look at the same things.
Dmg output is just the result AFTER you played your way.
One thing WoW did amazingly well was their class identity. A Beastmaster Hunter would play extremely different from a Shadow Priest. One used rotations, other used priority lists. One used dots, one relied on your pet. One needed to find opportunities to stay still, the other needed to make sure their pet stayed alive.
This has nothing to do with how much dmg anyone does, this is the play style and if you played your role well you should be rewarded with similar results and not just feel like a burden because your class just isn't capable of dealing any adequat dmg "cause balance would ruin my class".
Do you even realize how contradicting you sound in the context of Ashes? There will be SO MANY options for a class. Gear choices, SPELL CHOICES, Spell progression. How will they make every possible combination feel "diverse" hu?
Just completely undervaluing parts of those choices to funnel you into certain other choices that fit the class identity better?
Ashes wants to be driven by choices, if you want to make your thief that cannonically is a single target burster into an AoE monster because the class OFFERS those AoE spells (let's say in the form of traps and using a bow with explosive arrows) WHY in the name of anything that makes sense, should you not be allowed to be as successfull with it playing that way as is a mage that chose to go with all the ice aoe spells his class offers? One will rely on setups(for example), or has to get close and personal to set the traps, the other can stay save at a distance. The thief is harder to execute(for example) and yet, due to class "identity" he will never even come close to the output of the mage. sure. top kek.
Explain that to me how this example kills diversity.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
I think you need to go read up on how the class system works again, calm down, and try that response again. The main archetype choice determines your primary skill set and the second one alters it to a small degree.
I do not expect rogues to be able to pump out aoe on par with mages.
Which is kind of besides the point anyway. Point was dmg output does not equal class diversity like some people keep demanding. Just because someone is capable of doing the same amount of dmg in a category with a vastly different play style doesn't make it the same class identity somehow.
A beast hunter is not the same class identity as a shadow priest just because they both focus on single target dmg in pve. What an absolutely ridiculous notion to try to establish or defend.
It was a what if to illustrate the point. What you expect is non of Intrepids concern. If they choose to make bard a non musical class against everyone's expectation then that is how it is. If they offer thieves a way to be an AoE centered class then that is how it is. If they want to offer choises they will have to stray away a bit from the usual and...!! Oh wait, they did do two of those already!
Kek
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Class balance is far more complex then most people think. It cannot be boiled down to math in a vacuum. Every variable complicates the whole thing and changes things in ways most people will never understand or care about.