Explain to me how you would theorize a matchup chart in Ashes. Would " the best tactics and strategies available to them" be based on the idea that they know who they are going up against? Because that drastically changes things.
But then what is that going to tell you about anything actually real? If my matchup chart against one class requires one build, and against another class requires a totally different build, which build do I take with me on a siege?
I can't take both.
How does the matchup chart account for this?
I mean, the chart is all about " the best tactics and strategies available to them" in a theoretical sense, and that will always fall totally flat in a practical sense.
You're super, super lost!
In 2v2, each "row" in a matchup chart will be every possible combination of all builds.
So, in 1v1, you had a row for each build, so mace fighter/tank had a row and staff mage/mage had a row etc
In 2v2, you'd have a separate row for mace fighter/tank + mace fighter tank (which would be a team of two mace fighter/tanks), and a separate row for mace fighter/tank + staff mage/mage, and a separate row for mace fighter/tank + dagger rogue/mage, etc.
You hopefully see how there would be a lot of rows and columns in the 2v2 matchup chart (because you need a row and column for every combination).
Then, imagine how many rows and columns you'd need to represent every possible 250-man team! That's what me and @bigepeen are saying. It's more than the number of stars in the universe. The number of matchups is impossibly large, and impossible to balance.
Even if you only consider primary archetypes, that's (8+8-1)! / (8! * (8-1)!) = 6435 possible combinations for each group. In an 8v8, this would be 6435 * (6435-1) / 2 = 20701395 potential matchups. If you consider secondary archetypes, that's (64+8-1)! / (64! * (8-1)!) = 1.3 x 10^9 possible combinations for each group. So that would be 8.5 x 10^17 potential matchups.
Yeah, trying to take any useful information from a matchup chart in Ashes is a great idea!
Yes! Trying to keep a matchup chart would be beyond pointless. It would be an impossible task. There are too many matchups. This means that having any guarantee about balance is also impossible. This has been my claim the whole time.
Maybe instead, since I've already wrote this 5+ times in this thread, you can tell me what you think - just for 1v1s (since large scale is more complicated), and then we can go from there
Fair warning: @Noaani will argue ANY topic straight to death.
You guys have *valid* points/concerns. I just wouldn't worry about things like group balance in specifically Sieges; There's really no point - unless you really, REALLY want a system where someone's picking and choosing 250 players in a queue to battle in a Siege. Then I wouldn't mind having charts like these to possibly know what kind of a super-group to build. However, this probably isn't worth it, as your selections will then to to sub-organize themselves into cohesive units. It's been my experience in MMOs that the larger a group is, the less-wieldy and cohesive it becomes - even with *everyone* on a voice chat, as AoC plans to feature, in-game.
The smaller group assembly can benefit from knowing things like performance of classes vs other classes for things like Arena group-matches and PvP. However, it seems like they're working hard to make it so that there's not an inherent benefit to ALWAYS having specific classes in a group's make-up for PvE. There will always be leet-ists who will FIND specific group-builds AND insist upon them - but typically players will determine for themselves if this is the right group/guild for them. At that point, balance becomes more of a players' concern, and less of a concern from the development point of view.
Again, a matchup chart for sieges is an inappropriate comparison tool for siege combat.
The specific class make up of a siege is going to have less of an impact on who wins than the ability and effectiveness of the leader on each side.
A siege isn't going to be a mass of people attacking a mass of other people, it is going to be a mass of people being broken down in to smaller groups to each perform a specific task (sieges have objectives).
A matchup chart only works when you have two groups of players with the singular goal of defeating each other. When you factor in other goals, a matchup chart simply isn't appropriate to use.
Even if we assume 250v250, and even if we assume this is closed, if I am a better leader than you, and I send the appropriate number of players to each objective as it comes along, forcing you to have to redirect your forces (which means I will have 250 people in play at any given moment, while you may have 220 in play and 30 in transit), then I am going to win. Class ratio be damned.
I get that you are trying to use tools that you are familiar with from games you have played in the past, but Ashes is not like the games you have played in the past, and so can't be explained using the same tools.
So, with hopefully newfound understanding of what the matchup chart tells us, here's the key:
In a siege, the goal of 250 people is to win the siege against the other 250 people. That's the objective.
This often gets broken down into sub-tasks, in the same way that in order to win a match of smash melee, you have to win sub-tasks (take 4 stocks). Then to actually take a stock you have to accomplish sub tasks like "control the stage" and "outspace them" and "defend properly" and all of that.
In Ashes, in order to actually "win the siege", that gets broken down into sub-tasks like "defend the gates" and "destroy the ballista", and "kill the dragon for the buff", etc.
Whether or not a particular match at all follows the optimal matchup theory is entirely a different story.
This post is premature.
You have still not realized the futility of a matchup chart in Ashes.
That said, the goal of a siege will not always be to win the siege.
Again, a matchup chart for sieges is an inappropriate comparison tool for siege combat.
The specific class make up of a siege is going to have less of an impact on who wins than the ability and effectiveness of the leader on each side.
A siege isn't going to be a mass of people attacking a mass of other people, it is going to be a mass of people being broken down in to smaller groups to each perform a specific task (sieges have objectives).
A matchup chart only works when you have two groups of players with the singular goal of defeating each other. When you factor in other goals, a matchup chart simply isn't appropriate to use.
Even if we assume 250v250, and even if we assume this is closed, if I am a better leader than you, and I send the appropriate number of players to each objective as it comes along, forcing you to have to redirect your forces (which means I will have 250 people in play at any given moment, while you may have 220 in play and 30 in transit), then I am going to win. Class ratio be damned.
I get that you are trying to use tools that you are familiar with from games you have played in the past, but Ashes is not like the games you have played in the past, and so can't be explained using the same tools.
So, with hopefully newfound understanding of what the matchup chart tells us, here's the key:
In a siege, the goal of 250 people is to win the siege against the other 250 people. That's the objective.
This often gets broken down into sub-tasks, in the same way that in order to win a match of smash melee, you have to win sub-tasks (take 4 stocks). Then to actually take a stock you have to accomplish sub tasks like "control the stage" and "outspace them" and "defend properly" and all of that.
In Ashes, in order to actually "win the siege", that gets broken down into sub-tasks like "defend the gates" and "destroy the ballista", and "kill the dragon for the buff", etc.
Whether or not a particular match at all follows the optimal matchup theory is entirely a different story.
This post is premature.
You have still not realized the futility of a matchup chart in Ashes.
That said, the goal of a siege will not always be to win the siege.
Yes, the above is a matchup chart, but what you're describing is not how such a chart is created. We don't compile those charts by looking at win/loss records and entering data points or wondering what the players were doing or if the data was valid.
Matchup charts are theoretical. As I've mentioned several times throughout this thread, each cell answers the question "if a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the player playing row_character to win cell_value % of the time"
If a new strategy is discovered, the matchup chart is updated before the actual matches between top players even happen.
It is an understanding of the state-of-the-art.
To understand how this applies to groups of players playing a team, you would get a statement like this:
"if a group of top players playing row_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a group of top players using column_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the players playing row_team_composition to win cell_value % of the time".
In a game like ashes, we can inform our understanding of the most effective strategies and tactics, and inform our analysis of a particular matchup like "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" by looking at a lot of VODs of tank vs mage fights.
Maybe we watch hours of footage and we notice "oh but the tank could have done thing thing, and they didn't, and that's why they lost, but they could have won here", and at the end we conclude that the "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" matchup on an open field is 35:65 in the mage's favor.
This 35:65 conclusion might be pretty different from the historical statistical sampling, but the historical statistical sampling also does not at all represent "top players on both sides playing as well as possible".
Does all of that track?
This is no longer true of the state of the art of matchups or tier lists outside of games like Smash.
Everyone seems like they will repeat this at you, me included, until you shift or get frustrated. I know it isn't fair to tell you 'just take that as truth' but I can't spare the time to give you huge data until later.
Does your concern or argument have any other basis that can be addressed in the meantime?
You are absolutely right in that there would need to be an entry for each build. Not just each weapon, but each weapon for each subclass.
This would mean you don't have a mage with a staff, you have an Archewizard with a staff, a sorcerer with a staff, etc.
This means that a chart that has the potential to contain any useful information would have to have each of the 64 primary classes, along with at least three weapons per class. You are likely to have 200+ builds to compare against each other in just 1v1 combat - more than 40,000 different combinations.
This is assuming only three viable weapons per subclass.
This is why I have been saying since well before this thread that the kind of thinking used in Smash just doesn't work in a game like Ashes.
Which is, I am sure you will agree, the over all point I have been making for a while.
People won't have a good reaction to your posts if you say that you have some secret data that you aren't willing to share that you can supposedly use to prove that the person you're responding to is incorrect.
Edit: This game won't be very well balanced if the balance is based on 8v8, unless Intrepid hits the jackpot of balancing. There's simply too many combinations to balance, so they would have to resort to complete trial and error. Also, each change could have unintended consequences due to any interactions with skills from the other 7 primary archetypes, and 63 total classes. It would just be a cycle of buffing and nerfing the strongest things in the meta, but this will for sure leave tons of combinations completely unbalanced.
Yes, the above is a matchup chart, but what you're describing is not how such a chart is created. We don't compile those charts by looking at win/loss records and entering data points or wondering what the players were doing or if the data was valid.
Matchup charts are theoretical. As I've mentioned several times throughout this thread, each cell answers the question "if a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the player playing row_character to win cell_value % of the time"
If a new strategy is discovered, the matchup chart is updated before the actual matches between top players even happen.
It is an understanding of the state-of-the-art.
To understand how this applies to groups of players playing a team, you would get a statement like this:
"if a group of top players playing row_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a group of top players using column_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the players playing row_team_composition to win cell_value % of the time".
In a game like ashes, we can inform our understanding of the most effective strategies and tactics, and inform our analysis of a particular matchup like "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" by looking at a lot of VODs of tank vs mage fights.
Maybe we watch hours of footage and we notice "oh but the tank could have done thing thing, and they didn't, and that's why they lost, but they could have won here", and at the end we conclude that the "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" matchup on an open field is 35:65 in the mage's favor.
This 35:65 conclusion might be pretty different from the historical statistical sampling, but the historical statistical sampling also does not at all represent "top players on both sides playing as well as possible".
Does all of that track?
This is no longer true of the state of the art of matchups or tier lists outside of games like Smash.
Everyone seems like they will repeat this at you, me included, until you shift or get frustrated. I know it isn't fair to tell you 'just take that as truth' but I can't spare the time to give you huge data until later.
Does your concern or argument have any other basis that can be addressed in the meantime?
I'm not especially swayed by populist arguments, but I'll certainly take a logical one. What does "Ryu has a 55:45 matchup against Sagat" mean if not what I described?
As for whether or not it has any other basis, I don't think my argument to "how will intrepid ensure that the trillions of matchups will all be relatively balanced" has been addressed yet, which was the whole reason I brought up the matchup chart in the first place. I don't think a matchup chart is useful for something like ashes. There are too many matchups to keep it maintained. But, I think that's the definition of a "balanced" game - that the if you were to fill out such a chart, then the values would be all close to 50:50. I'm asking "how can this be the case, given that there are so many values?" Would not a lot of them stray away from 50:50?
As for whether or not it has any other basis, I don't think my argument to "how will intrepid ensure that the trillions of matchups will all be relatively balanced" has been addressed yet, which was the whole reason I brought up the matchup chart in the first place. I don't think a matchup chart is useful for something like ashes. There are too many matchups to keep it maintained. But, I think that's the definition of a "balanced" game - that the if you were to fill out such a chart, then the values would be all close to 50:50. I'm asking "how can this be the case, given that there are so many values?" Would not a lot of them stray away from 50:50?
The answer is to not even attempt a theoretical balance.
Just like every other complex game out there.
There are too many variables to ever be able to account for them all, so the answer is to not account for them all, to look at what is happening in the live game, and to make adjustments if things are getting out of hand.
Again, this is why the thinking you are applying to this game is just not applicable to an MMO.
You are absolutely right in that there would need to be an entry for each build. Not just each weapon, but each weapon for each subclass.
This would mean you don't have a mage with a staff, you have an Archewizard with a staff, a sorcerer with a staff, etc.
This means that a chart that has the potential to contain any useful information would have to have each of the 64 primary classes, along with at least three weapons per class. You are likely to have 200+ builds to compare against each other in just 1v1 combat - more than 40,000 different combinations.
This is assuming only three viable weapons per subclass.
This is why I have been saying since well before this thread that the kind of thinking used in Smash just doesn't work in a game like Ashes.
Which is, I am sure you will agree, the over all point I have been making for a while.
Yes, and that's just for 1v1, and just for weapon combinations. If then you have to add more rows for skill builds, more rows again for armor selections, etc.
Eventually, you have a row in the chart for each build. Not class. Build. Just for 1v1s.
Then, to make a chart for 2v2s, you need a row for every possible combination for builds. That's a lot of rows!
Then, according to some definition of balance (like rock-paper-scissors balance), you add up all of the rows, and so long as the standard deviation is close to zero, your game is balanced (because all the teams are relatively equal in power).
Or, according to my definition of balance, you're more balanced the closer to 50:50 matchups you have across the board. You can measure this by taking the absolute distance from 50 of each cell, and then taking the standard deviation of that. The closer to zero you are here, the more balanced your game is.
I'm saying that when your game has billions of rows (and quadrillions of matchups), that keeping it anywhere near balanced is completely infeasible.
Here's what I wrote in the original post:
What then, does "balance" mean at the 250v250 scale? Are we saying that every possible combination of 250 characters has a 50:50 matchup against every other possible combination of 250 characters? That's absolutely inconceivable. Linear increases to team size lead to exponential growth of the number of matchups that the devs have to balance. Couple this with the fact that they don't even control how the players build their characters (you can choose to build your character in a nonsense way), and I don't know how this phrase has meaning.
As for whether or not it has any other basis, I don't think my argument to "how will intrepid ensure that the trillions of matchups will all be relatively balanced" has been addressed yet, which was the whole reason I brought up the matchup chart in the first place. I don't think a matchup chart is useful for something like ashes. There are too many matchups to keep it maintained. But, I think that's the definition of a "balanced" game - that the if you were to fill out such a chart, then the values would be all close to 50:50. I'm asking "how can this be the case, given that there are so many values?" Would not a lot of them stray away from 50:50?
The answer is to not even attempt a theoretical balance.
Just like every other complex game out there.
There are too many variables to ever be able to account for them all, so the answer is to not account for them all, to look at what is happening in the live game, and to make adjustments if things are getting out of hand.
Again, this is why the thinking you are applying to this game is just not applicable to an MMO.
For my sanity's sake, can you summarize what you think my position is?
Yes, the above is a matchup chart, but what you're describing is not how such a chart is created. We don't compile those charts by looking at win/loss records and entering data points or wondering what the players were doing or if the data was valid.
Matchup charts are theoretical. As I've mentioned several times throughout this thread, each cell answers the question "if a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the player playing row_character to win cell_value % of the time"
If a new strategy is discovered, the matchup chart is updated before the actual matches between top players even happen.
It is an understanding of the state-of-the-art.
To understand how this applies to groups of players playing a team, you would get a statement like this:
"if a group of top players playing row_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a group of top players using column_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the players playing row_team_composition to win cell_value % of the time".
In a game like ashes, we can inform our understanding of the most effective strategies and tactics, and inform our analysis of a particular matchup like "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" by looking at a lot of VODs of tank vs mage fights.
Maybe we watch hours of footage and we notice "oh but the tank could have done thing thing, and they didn't, and that's why they lost, but they could have won here", and at the end we conclude that the "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" matchup on an open field is 35:65 in the mage's favor.
This 35:65 conclusion might be pretty different from the historical statistical sampling, but the historical statistical sampling also does not at all represent "top players on both sides playing as well as possible".
Does all of that track?
This is no longer true of the state of the art of matchups or tier lists outside of games like Smash.
Everyone seems like they will repeat this at you, me included, until you shift or get frustrated. I know it isn't fair to tell you 'just take that as truth' but I can't spare the time to give you huge data until later.
Does your concern or argument have any other basis that can be addressed in the meantime?
I'm not especially swayed by populist arguments, but I'll certainly take a logical one. What does "Ryu has a 55:45 matchup against Sagat" mean if not what I described?
As for whether or not it has any other basis, I don't think my argument to "how will intrepid ensure that the trillions of matchups will all be relatively balanced" has been addressed yet, which was the whole reason I brought up the matchup chart in the first place. I don't think a matchup chart is useful for something like ashes. There are too many matchups to keep it maintained. But, I think that's the definition of a "balanced" game - that the if you were to fill out such a chart, then the values would be all close to 50:50. I'm asking "how can this be the case, given that there are so many values?" Would not a lot of them stray away from 50:50?
Alright, I'm back at my main terminal, just in time it looks like. Let's do this rapid fire (I'm really thankful to not need to do this trying to make all points at once). Balance side first.
Step 1 is to define every interaction you want to be available within a virtual arena space.
Step 2 is to determine the value of the outcome of the interaction for a character, build, or group, within that space.
Step 3 is to remove all abilities that break or bypass an interaction in a way that gives a clear advantage without risk.
Step 4 is to define the fractal of steps involved in a competitive encounter between your systems.
Step 5 is to ensure that the physical difficulty of any given action aligns with your intent for the above steps (i.e. don't make powerful low risk things too easy to execute).
I'm glad you played GG Strive because it's a good example of this design style. The fractal of that game is pretty well defined and the important thing is that it's really crafted, the downside of new modern games is that players often complain that their creativity is limited due to the above.
So, can you accept that the above is possible as a design style that would result in a very curated system, whether you accept that it would result in balance within Ashes? How about 'balance within Guilty Gear' or a game with only 16 characters?
Yes, the above is a matchup chart, but what you're describing is not how such a chart is created. We don't compile those charts by looking at win/loss records and entering data points or wondering what the players were doing or if the data was valid.
Matchup charts are theoretical. As I've mentioned several times throughout this thread, each cell answers the question "if a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the player playing row_character to win cell_value % of the time"
If a new strategy is discovered, the matchup chart is updated before the actual matches between top players even happen.
It is an understanding of the state-of-the-art.
To understand how this applies to groups of players playing a team, you would get a statement like this:
"if a group of top players playing row_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a group of top players using column_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the players playing row_team_composition to win cell_value % of the time".
In a game like ashes, we can inform our understanding of the most effective strategies and tactics, and inform our analysis of a particular matchup like "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" by looking at a lot of VODs of tank vs mage fights.
Maybe we watch hours of footage and we notice "oh but the tank could have done thing thing, and they didn't, and that's why they lost, but they could have won here", and at the end we conclude that the "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" matchup on an open field is 35:65 in the mage's favor.
This 35:65 conclusion might be pretty different from the historical statistical sampling, but the historical statistical sampling also does not at all represent "top players on both sides playing as well as possible".
Does all of that track?
This is no longer true of the state of the art of matchups or tier lists outside of games like Smash.
Everyone seems like they will repeat this at you, me included, until you shift or get frustrated. I know it isn't fair to tell you 'just take that as truth' but I can't spare the time to give you huge data until later.
Does your concern or argument have any other basis that can be addressed in the meantime?
I'm not especially swayed by populist arguments, but I'll certainly take a logical one. What does "Ryu has a 55:45 matchup against Sagat" mean if not what I described?
As for whether or not it has any other basis, I don't think my argument to "how will intrepid ensure that the trillions of matchups will all be relatively balanced" has been addressed yet, which was the whole reason I brought up the matchup chart in the first place. I don't think a matchup chart is useful for something like ashes. There are too many matchups to keep it maintained. But, I think that's the definition of a "balanced" game - that the if you were to fill out such a chart, then the values would be all close to 50:50. I'm asking "how can this be the case, given that there are so many values?" Would not a lot of them stray away from 50:50?
Alright, I'm back at my main terminal, just in time it looks like. Let's do this rapid fire (I'm really thankful to not need to do this trying to make all points at once). Balance side first.
Step 1 is to define every interaction you want to be available within a virtual arena space.
Step 2 is to determine the value of the outcome of the interaction for a character, build, or group, within that space.
Step 3 is to remove all abilities that break or bypass an interaction in a way that gives a clear advantage without risk.
Step 4 is to define the fractal of steps involved in a competitive encounter between your systems.
Step 5 is to ensure that the physical difficulty of any given action aligns with your intent for the above steps (i.e. don't make powerful low risk things too easy to execute).
I'm glad you played GG Strive because it's a good example of this design style. The fractal of that game is pretty well defined and the important thing is that it's really crafted, the downside of new modern games is that players often complain that their creativity is limited due to the above.
So, can you accept that the above is possible as a design style that would result in a very curated system, whether you accept that it would result in balance within Ashes? How about 'balance within Guilty Gear' or a game with only 16 characters?
Following so far! When you constrain the design space, you also constrain the matchups to more evenness. And yeah, you'll often hear Strive guys complain "I feel like I can't do anything creative without meter", which is by design
Yes, the above is a matchup chart, but what you're describing is not how such a chart is created. We don't compile those charts by looking at win/loss records and entering data points or wondering what the players were doing or if the data was valid.
Matchup charts are theoretical. As I've mentioned several times throughout this thread, each cell answers the question "if a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a top player playing row_character using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the player playing row_character to win cell_value % of the time"
If a new strategy is discovered, the matchup chart is updated before the actual matches between top players even happen.
It is an understanding of the state-of-the-art.
To understand how this applies to groups of players playing a team, you would get a statement like this:
"if a group of top players playing row_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them plays against a group of top players using column_team_composition using the best tactics and strategies available to them, then we expect the players playing row_team_composition to win cell_value % of the time".
In a game like ashes, we can inform our understanding of the most effective strategies and tactics, and inform our analysis of a particular matchup like "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" by looking at a lot of VODs of tank vs mage fights.
Maybe we watch hours of footage and we notice "oh but the tank could have done thing thing, and they didn't, and that's why they lost, but they could have won here", and at the end we conclude that the "such-and-such tank build vs so-and-so mage build" matchup on an open field is 35:65 in the mage's favor.
This 35:65 conclusion might be pretty different from the historical statistical sampling, but the historical statistical sampling also does not at all represent "top players on both sides playing as well as possible".
Does all of that track?
This is no longer true of the state of the art of matchups or tier lists outside of games like Smash.
Everyone seems like they will repeat this at you, me included, until you shift or get frustrated. I know it isn't fair to tell you 'just take that as truth' but I can't spare the time to give you huge data until later.
Does your concern or argument have any other basis that can be addressed in the meantime?
I'm not especially swayed by populist arguments, but I'll certainly take a logical one. What does "Ryu has a 55:45 matchup against Sagat" mean if not what I described?
As for whether or not it has any other basis, I don't think my argument to "how will intrepid ensure that the trillions of matchups will all be relatively balanced" has been addressed yet, which was the whole reason I brought up the matchup chart in the first place. I don't think a matchup chart is useful for something like ashes. There are too many matchups to keep it maintained. But, I think that's the definition of a "balanced" game - that the if you were to fill out such a chart, then the values would be all close to 50:50. I'm asking "how can this be the case, given that there are so many values?" Would not a lot of them stray away from 50:50?
Alright, I'm back at my main terminal, just in time it looks like. Let's do this rapid fire (I'm really thankful to not need to do this trying to make all points at once). Balance side first.
Step 1 is to define every interaction you want to be available within a virtual arena space.
Step 2 is to determine the value of the outcome of the interaction for a character, build, or group, within that space.
Step 3 is to remove all abilities that break or bypass an interaction in a way that gives a clear advantage without risk.
Step 4 is to define the fractal of steps involved in a competitive encounter between your systems.
Step 5 is to ensure that the physical difficulty of any given action aligns with your intent for the above steps (i.e. don't make powerful low risk things too easy to execute).
I'm glad you played GG Strive because it's a good example of this design style. The fractal of that game is pretty well defined and the important thing is that it's really crafted, the downside of new modern games is that players often complain that their creativity is limited due to the above.
So, can you accept that the above is possible as a design style that would result in a very curated system, whether you accept that it would result in balance within Ashes? How about 'balance within Guilty Gear' or a game with only 16 characters?
Following so far!
Onward, one layer down!
Let's use Strive again because I can show the process by which I predicted to my group what the game would be like.
Sol Badguy is defined in previous games as being a character with a simple style and big damage who has difficult combo conversions with high rewards, and who can take big risks for big payoffs. The goal of Strive was to make the game simpler, so they had to reduce the difficulty of the combo conversions and allow him to get damage easier.
Since an unavoidable part of fighting games is 'be at risk of taking damage', obviously any character that does very large damage has a potential to be top tier if they have relatively easy access to it, and similarly, big damage openers with low risk involved are bad.
The important part here is that big damage is relative, and 'low risk' is explicitly relative. So in the fractal, for Sol to be balanced, every character would probably need a way to get some meaningful advantage when Sol's risk does not pay off. Any character who cannot do this well (Faust, as of this writing) is low tier.
So from the designer side, and from the 'theorycrafter' side, both can go 'this character does not have a high enough damage vs Sol's big risks'. That means the Sol Player can be put into a 50-50 situation that technically favors them. RPS, you know the rest.
At no point did anyone need to play the game to know this. The designers should have been able to go, from the start "Sol's Archetype is strong due to X risk option, any archetype without an advantageous situation within Y range is either too strong (if their option is huge damage) or too weak (more common from inattentive developers). Note that the baseline for this must of course be the Sol Mirror Match. If you don't get as much out of punishing Sol's risk option as Sol himself or have a really good way to prevent him from doing things, then Sol is the top Tier.
Many designers resolve this by going 'well we should make sure that characters that don't have strong advantage are good at stopping Sol from doing his stuff with less risk'.
This is wrong.
To make them good at stopping Sol with less risk to themselves breaks Step 3. And since Sol players could just be surprising, the matchup is now just 'volatile' which is your complaint. It's 'fair', but it's not 'good'. Part of the reason this is hard to explain, I believe, is that 'detailing step 1 for a game takes a really long time'. I'm happy to do it almost entirely for Guilty Gear Strive, or skip it if you're good with all this and possibly can see where I am going with this, i.e. that most designers used to do so reactively instead of proactively. They worked on making cool characters rather than good systems.
(I've played nothing but Sol Badguy in strive for about 300 hours at celestial)
No previous frame of reference to understand the other guilty gear games on, but yeah, I get what you're saying. Deb will often beat people with Sol in two openings, and I think that's intendedish.
If your conclusion is that Strive is balanced, then I'm confused. If your conclusion is that Strive is imbalanced because they broke some of those rules (like how at release Sol was clearly way better than Faust), then I'm following so far.
If you want to say that the Ashes dev could apply this sort of reasoning to all possible builds that players could dream up (and then further to all possible reasonable 8v8 team comps that players could dream up), I'm super not-on-board.
(I've played nothing but Sol Badguy in strive for about 300 hours at celestial)
No previous frame of reference to understand the other guilty gear games on, but yeah, I get what you're saying. Deb will often beat people with Sol in two openings, and I think that's intendedish.
If your conclusion is that Strive is balanced, then I'm confused. If your conclusion is that Strive is imbalanced because they broke some of those rules (like how at release Sol was clearly way better than Faust), then I'm following so far.
If you want to say that it's the Ashes dev could apply this sort of reasoning to all possible builds that players could dream up (and then further to all possible reasonable 8v8 team comps that players could dream up), I'm super not-on-board.
Ok great. For the record I'm saying that Strive is not balanced, and moreso making the point that I did not need to play Strive to know this, I did not need to watch a large number of matches. I still have not.
Every prediction of capacity of characters I have made (some had conditionals but those were very clear conditionals) was borne out on day 1. I need to know why you're not on board? What, if anything, am I 'trying to demonstrate' here? Computational capacity? My own genius? The effectiveness of the methodology?
If we parallel this to Ashes, and the FOO Strategy from just the basic sieges we ran a while back, which I believe you read a long time ago as part of another thread:
Tanks can pull in with Javelin. This is a small risk. The Tanks stand at the front and try to get access to any non-Tank enemy with the Javelin, technically Mages since Clerics can keep themselves alive too.
The interactions in just completely open field 3v3 PvP were as follows:
1. Players can remain in a state where they are in their chosen formation and they are not committed to an attack, and no damage is really being done.
2. Clerics can heal damage being done, and pre-emptively set up for damage they expect to be done.
3. Clerics can deal damage, increasing in value by enemies standing in a given space.
4. Mages can deal damage, increasing in value by any CC that keeps the enemy within a space.
5. Tanks can resist damage, increase resistance of damage of others
6. Tanks can pull enemies into range and do damage with melee
7. Tanks can rush toward enemies faster than the other classes and engage in melee.
Now, these things are limited by build, one could choose not to take damage as a Cleric, or a Rush, as a Tank, but it gives us another step, because those points went somewhere else, but until they introduce a new ability or a deviation in the systemic outcomes of possible options to the point where step 3 is broken, you can maintain your understanding of the fractal.
There is nothing that prevents the above other than 'the character died' or... wait... #1 can be broken, by #6! And #6 is lower risk because the frontal character needed to do it is easily prepped against damage, healed, and has mitigation.
The result would be that the fractal instantly tells you "Javelin is the strongest deciding factor in the battles, because it is the Fractal Break for this system".
That list has to get to about a length of 300 before I can't do it anymore, without notes (this is almost the bare minimum for a card game designer). It has to get to over 1200 before I need to call in the Neural Networks. Is this believable to you or should I just stop there?
For my sanity's sake, can you summarize what you think my position is?
Honestly, I'm still in the process of working through the misconceptions you have about Ashes with you.
You state that 1v1 will be the predominant PvP in Ashes. It won't.
There will be very few times in Ashes where it is the same number of players going up against each other. That just isn't what Ashes is about.
Since your position seems to be based around this notion of the same number of players squaring up against each other, and this is simply not how this game is being designed, I don't see any point in discussing your position, as your position needs to be re-thought to account for the fact that these match ups are not what this game is about.
My argument is less about what it is that you are saying, and more about the assumptions you are making about the game that has lead to the position you have. I may well even have the same position you have if I had made the same misconceptions about the game that you have.
However, rather than debating the game based on misconceptions, I would much rather attempt to correct those misconceptions, give you a bit of time to re-form your opinion, and then see where we are at.
Perhaps a more productive suggestion would be for you to consider this; sieges will be open world in Ashes (most likely).Make the assumption that the cap on players in a battleground is a technical issue and not a cap on players in a siege, and then think about the arguments you are making in terms of matchups.
Does it make any sense in the context of one side just being able to bring in more players?
I mean, I could humor you and engage in a flawed discussion (though others are doing a better job than I likely would), or I can opt to instead try to correct those flaws in the discussion so that we are actually talking about this game.
This reminds me a little of the thread recently where two of you went deep in to a discussion on economics, only to realize that the premise that you had both assumed was not the case in Ashes.
I need to know why you're not on board? What, if anything, am I 'trying to demonstrate' here? Computational capacity? My own genius? The effectiveness of the methodology?
Having trouble following these questions and then the javelin example.
I'm not on board because there are, at conservative estimates, 4e15 matchups for just 4v4. People are allowed to play silly builds. You can put points in bleeding effects and not equip a weapon that causes bleeding.
These teams won't have equal matchups against teams that don't do dumb stuff like that.
Even if you discount dumb-teams, you still have quadrillions of matchups that you have to make sure are fair. I understand that if the devs commit to a design process in which they rigorously make sure that they never cross the boundaries for how they want abilities to work, this is possible, but I also don't think there's even a remote chance that will happen.
They want to give players the freedom to make builds where you can equip passive skills that boost your bleeding damage, while never causing any bleeding damage!
For my sanity's sake, can you summarize what you think my position is?
Honestly, I'm still in the process of working through the misconceptions you have about Ashes with you.
You state that 1v1 will be the predominant PvP in Ashes. It won't.
There will be very few times in Ashes where it is the sane number of players going up against each other. That just isn't what Ashes is about.
Since your position seems to be based around this notion of the same number of players squaring up against each other, and this is simply not how this game is being designed, I don't see any point in discussing your position, as your position needs to be re-thought to account for the fact that these match ups are not what this game is about.
My argument is less about what it is that you are saying, and more about the assumptions you are making about the game that has lead to the position you have. I may well even have the same position you have if I had made the same misconceptions about the game that you have.
However, rather than debating the game based on misconceptions, I would much rather attempt to correct those misconceptions, give you a bit of time to re-form your opinion, and then see where we are at.
Perhaps a more productive suggestion would be for you to consider this; sieges will be open world in Ashes (most likely).Make the assumption that the cap on players in a battleground is a technical issue and not a cap on players in a siege, and then think about the arguments you are making in terms of matchups.
Does it make any sense in the context of one side just being able to bring in more players?
I mean, I could humor you and engage in a flawed discussion (though others are doing a better job than I likely would), or I can opt to instead try to correct those flaws in the discussion so that we are actually talking about this game.
This reminds me a little of the thread recently where two of you went deep in to a discussion on economics, only to realize that the premise that you had both assumed was not the case in Ashes.
Can you link the quote that gave you the impression where you think that I think that 1v1 will be the predominant form of PVP?
But also, just humor me. I'd love to hear what you think my current position is. Misconceptions and all.
I need to know why you're not on board? What, if anything, am I 'trying to demonstrate' here? Computational capacity? My own genius? The effectiveness of the methodology?
Having trouble following these questions and then the javelin example.
I'm not on board because there are, at conservative estimates, 4e15 matchups for just 4v4. People are allowed to play silly builds. You can put points in bleeding effects and not equip a weapon that causes bleeding.
These teams won't have equal matchups against teams that don't do dumb stuff like that.
Even if you discount dumb-teams, you still have quadrillions of matchups that you have to make sure are fair. I understand that if the devs commit to a design process in which they rigorously make sure that they never cross the boundaries for how they want abilities to work, this is possible, but I also don't think there's even a remote chance that will happen.
They want to give players the freedom to make builds where you can equip passive skills that boost your bleeding damage, while never causing any bleeding damage!
I definitely am not trying to argue against this concern of yours. I am only 'here' to point out that the perceptions others have of your concerns don't lie in the same place.
I don't think they have any intention of balancing 'objectively bad builds' against 'objectively good builds'. I don't think they intend for Fighter+6 Healers+1 Ranger to be a functional group without those Healers explicitly having builds intended entirely to synergize with that specific Fighter.
But this came about as a concern of 'balance for 3v3' or 'balance for 8v8' as an example. Are you ok with discussing '8v8 where both teams have one of each Primary Archetype'? That's the only thing we've even been tentatively promised.
If that's not fulfilling your concern, then thanks for the clarification.
I need to know why you're not on board? What, if anything, am I 'trying to demonstrate' here? Computational capacity? My own genius? The effectiveness of the methodology?
Having trouble following these questions and then the javelin example.
I'm not on board because there are, at conservative estimates, 4e15 matchups for just 4v4. People are allowed to play silly builds. You can put points in bleeding effects and not equip a weapon that causes bleeding.
These teams won't have equal matchups against teams that don't do dumb stuff like that.
Even if you discount dumb-teams, you still have quadrillions of matchups that you have to make sure are fair. I understand that if the devs commit to a design process in which they rigorously make sure that they never cross the boundaries for how they want abilities to work, this is possible, but I also don't think there's even a remote chance that will happen.
They want to give players the freedom to make builds where you can equip passive skills that boost your bleeding damage, while never causing any bleeding damage!
I definitely am not trying to argue against this concern of yours. I am only 'here' to point out that the perceptions others have of your concerns don't lie in the same place.
I don't think they have any intention of balancing 'objectively bad builds' against 'objectively good builds'. I don't think they intend for Fighter+6 Healers+1 Ranger to be a functional group without those Healers explicitly having builds intended entirely to synergize with that specific Fighter.
But this came about as a concern of 'balance for 3v3' or 'balance for 8v8' as an example. Are you ok with discussing '8v8 where both teams have one of each Primary Archetype'? That's the only thing we've even been tentatively promised.
If that's not fulfilling your concern, then thanks for the clarification.
Yeah, absolutely fine going in that direction.
Quick napkin math:
if there are 5 "reasonable" builds for each class, then each archetype has 40 builds. This means there are 40^8 = 6.5 trillion 8v8 teams that all have 1 of each archetype.
So, given just those, there would be (6.5 trillion ^2 - 6.5 trillion)/2 = 2.1e25 matchups, all of which would need to be evenish for the game to be "balanced"
I'm saying that there will probably be a bunch of lopsided matchups in there.
After all, if you're 1 of those teams, you have 6.5 trillion matchups to worry about. What are the chances that all of your matchups are even? You probably have some losing matchups and some winning matchups right?
players will be doing a lot of their PvP in 1v1 situations
and even that isn't true.
This is an MMO, Intrepid want you to bring a friend to a fight, not fight alone. 2v1 PvP will be 10 times more common than 1v1.
This is why balance in the way you are talking about simply doesn't matter.
The other thing about what you are doing here is you are only looking at one facet of the game.
If Intrepid intend for some builds to be PvP focused and some to be PvE, what is matchup chart able to tell you then? How are you to even know if Intrepid have achieved the type of balance they want?
What if Intrepid want a balance over time thing - where one class or build is super powerful with one patch, and then with the next patch it is a different class or build? This kind of thing happens in a number of online games.
basically, you have taken a singular, static notion of balance from one genre and tried to apply the notion to one aspect of a totally different genre, a genre where the developers need to balance more than just that one aspect that you are talking about.
I mean, it may well be that a tank/tank with a sword and shield would be expected to lose in 1v1 PvP 99.9% of the time, yet if that class is the hands down best PvE tank, it could well be considered balanced.
I'm not interested in stating what I perceive your opinion to be, because if I do, and if I get the smallest thing wrong, you will laser-focus on that rather than looking at the bigger picture of what it is I am saying here - as you did in the post above wanting a quote where you said predominant. That isn't and wasn't the point, you know this to be the case, yet it is a thing you can jump on to detract from said point.
In the end, my point was that in a complex game, the abilities of any given character, assuming you do not break the rules described, matter way less than the length of the list. Ashes' design intent appears to be explicitly based around 'having control of the list and keeping the list itself within a reasonable length', which is how balanced fighting games are currently designed. You can see it in their patch notes. Players can look at an ability, use their experience to say 'this breaks a rule/breaks the fractal' and then go 'this character is otherwise average and has a Fractal Break therefore this is a top tier' (Sol, Nagoriyuki original form if Ram hadn't been unbalanced, Ramlethal because she did turn out unbalanced). They can also suggest fixes to make the move or ability no longer a Fractal Break, and patch notes often consist of nothing more than 'a list of things that are known Fractal Breaks, or buffs to characters whose abilities are not up to spec relative to the fractal'.
Now, you said that you don't see even a remote chance of Ashes following such a process. Is this a general lack of faith in Intrepid based on their design systems and information provided so far? I.e. you're not giving them the benefit of the doubt or taking them at face value because of the possibility that they will allow players to make substandard builds. I'm neutral here, and should get out of your way.
Moving on to actual stuff though then.
I don't see 6.5 trillion matchups. I see the list. Now I admit, it's a LONG LIST, but it's not 6.5 million datapoints long. Rough estimate is that if the rules are followed, there would be around 128 points on the list. Basically that there are 2 different potential entries on the list for each Class. Is this acceptable?
i.e. that while a Tank/Fighter and a Fighter/Tank are not the same class, their abilities and their effects on the battle that are unique to them are limited on a spectrum. You can have a Tank/Fighter that ignores their Fighter side and plays more like a Tank/Tank or Tank/Mage (closing in and doing more damage) and you can have a Tank/Fighter that plays into the Fighter side until they move far enough along the spectrum to become more like a Fighter/Tank. Their weapon choices matter, yes, but the weapons are not massively different because weapons and their abilities also can be a shorter curated list.
If we can agree that one will only get 2x or even up to 5x entries on the list per Class, then the challenge is 'don't break 128-800 rules'.
I definitely don't mean this to be a counter to your point either, this is just another step. 8x8 with one of each is still small compared to what they have in front of them.
But that's why I see 128 and not 6.5 million. We diverged yet?
This is an MMO, Intrepid want you to bring a friend to a fight, not fight alone. 2v1 PvP will be 10 times more common than 1v1.
you just pulled this 10 number out of thin air.
Also, the reason I suspect a lot of 1v1s will happen is that I suspect that while folks are waiting for their friends to get on, they'll farm alone. Then, they'll run into other solo players doing the same thing and squabble. I think that since Intrepid wants 1v1s to be RPS based, you'll want to flee as soon as you recognize that the other class is the scissors to your paper, and so there will be a lot of fleeing.
I suspect that the most common form of PvP will be whatever the economy incentivizes. If the best way for an individual to make gold/hour is to join an 8-man (but not more, because of some group size xp or loot penalty or something) dungeon group, and then carve out a section of a dungeon, then I expect we'll see a lot of 8v8 fights, because other folks will have similar ideas.
I also expect that there will be a lot of unfair fights.
There is nothing that stops anyone from doing the matchup analysis and creating a matchup chart what a 6v7 would look like. Likewise, there is nothing that stops anyone from doing the analysis for a particular build vs another particular build in a 1v1 setting, even if the first build was geared for PvE, and the second for PvP.
I suppose I've asked twice, and you've refused twice, so I won't ask again.
Here's my position:
I don't think Intrepid should attempt perfect balance.
There are too many variables to ever be able to account for them all, so the answer is to not account for them all, to look at what is happening in the live game, and to make adjustments if things are getting out of hand.
This will mean that the game will often (and for a large amount of teams) be imbalanced.
Sound familiar?
The question wasn't a trap, I just thought it was hilarious that you thought you were arguing with me, when you were actually agreeing with my original proposition! I figured that this was because you had no idea what my position was, and so I asked. This hypothesis was correct.
This is an MMO, Intrepid want you to bring a friend to a fight, not fight alone. 2v1 PvP will be 10 times more common than 1v1.
you just pulled this 10 number out of thin air.
Nah, experience from Archeage.
In many years of playing that game, the 1v1 I took part in could be counted on one hand.
I took part in literally hundreds of 2v1, both as a part of the 2, and as the 1.
I guess you could say that I pulled it out of thin air, and the real number based on my experience is actually 100 times or more - but I am giving credence to the fact that my experiences are that of one person - and while I do not expect them to be out by a factor of ten, I fully accept that they will deviate from the norm.
There is nothing that stops anyone from doing the matchup analysis and creating a matchup chart what a 6v7 would look like. Likewise, there is nothing that stops anyone from doing the analysis for a particular build vs another particular build in a 1v1 setting, even if the first build was geared for PvE, and the second for PvP.
There is nothing stopping people doing it - yet people don't because they realize it is of no real value in an MMO.
Since best in slot gear is not going to be valid as a concept in Ashes, such a chart can't even account for gear. You can't just say "best available" because this means the chart is rendered obsolete as soon as the best gear available changes - not every class scales the same way with gear in most MMO's.
The question wasn't a trap, I just thought it was hilarious that you thought you were arguing with me, when you were actually agreeing with my original proposition! I figured that this was because you had no idea what my position was, and so I asked. This hypothesis was correct.
I'm not arguing with your position, I am arguing with you constantly comparing MMO's to fighting games.
It means you are purposefully blinding yourself to aspects of the game, forcing your own discussions to be one dimensional.
No where in your comment on balance did you talk about any form of balance other than the form present in Smash. That is what I have been saying all along - and you keep trying to drag me in to petty shit about what your point is. I don't care what your point is, I care about the framework you are looking at MMO's through, and how that is hampering your view of them.
In the end, my point was that in a complex game, the abilities of any given character, assuming you do not break the rules described, matter way less than the length of the list. Ashes' design intent appears to be explicitly based around 'having control of the list and keeping the list itself within a reasonable length', which is how balanced fighting games are currently designed. You can see it in their patch notes. Players can look at an ability, use their experience to say 'this breaks a rule/breaks the fractal' and then go 'this character is otherwise average and has a Fractal Break therefore this is a top tier' (Sol, Nagoriyuki original form if Ram hadn't been unbalanced, Ramlethal because she did turn out unbalanced). They can also suggest fixes to make the move or ability no longer a Fractal Break, and patch notes often consist of nothing more than 'a list of things that are known Fractal Breaks, or buffs to characters whose abilities are not up to spec relative to the fractal'.
Now, you said that you don't see even a remote chance of Ashes following such a process. Is this a general lack of faith in Intrepid based on their design systems and information provided so far? I.e. you're not giving them the benefit of the doubt or taking them at face value because of the possibility that they will allow players to make substandard builds. I'm neutral here, and should get out of your way.
Moving on to actual stuff though then.
I don't see 6.5 trillion matchups. I see the list. Now I admit, it's a LONG LIST, but it's not 6.5 million datapoints long. Rough estimate is that if the rules are followed, there would be around 128 points on the list. Basically that there are 2 different potential entries on the list for each Class. Is this acceptable?
Couple of things up until this point:
The class design we saw so far was, as far as I understand, explicitly not intentional balanced game design. As in, they were giving classes abilities because they wanted to test game systems, not because they were trying to design within a fractal. I, at this point, only have impressions they're trying to design cool abilities and classes, rather than trying to deliberately create long-term healthy fractalized design systems that'll hold up with bunches of augments, passives, actives, etc. I'll think on it more.
As to how you got "2 different potential entries on the list for each Class", that's extremely confusing and low to me. Can you elaborate more there?
But so say what you're saying is true, and that the archetypes all sort of meld together, and so there's really only 2 really distinct builds worth thinking about per archetype.
This puts us at 2 builds per archetype, and 2^8 = 256 teams, and 33k matchups. We're not at incomprehensible numbers, but we're still at way-too-many-to-balance, (and that's at 2 builds per archetype, which I don't really buy).
So, as a single team, you're still worrying about 256 matchups, and you're hoping that none of those are lopsided, and chances are some of them are.
In the end, my point was that in a complex game, the abilities of any given character, assuming you do not break the rules described, matter way less than the length of the list. Ashes' design intent appears to be explicitly based around 'having control of the list and keeping the list itself within a reasonable length', which is how balanced fighting games are currently designed. You can see it in their patch notes. Players can look at an ability, use their experience to say 'this breaks a rule/breaks the fractal' and then go 'this character is otherwise average and has a Fractal Break therefore this is a top tier' (Sol, Nagoriyuki original form if Ram hadn't been unbalanced, Ramlethal because she did turn out unbalanced). They can also suggest fixes to make the move or ability no longer a Fractal Break, and patch notes often consist of nothing more than 'a list of things that are known Fractal Breaks, or buffs to characters whose abilities are not up to spec relative to the fractal'.
Now, you said that you don't see even a remote chance of Ashes following such a process. Is this a general lack of faith in Intrepid based on their design systems and information provided so far? I.e. you're not giving them the benefit of the doubt or taking them at face value because of the possibility that they will allow players to make substandard builds. I'm neutral here, and should get out of your way.
Moving on to actual stuff though then.
I don't see 6.5 trillion matchups. I see the list. Now I admit, it's a LONG LIST, but it's not 6.5 million datapoints long. Rough estimate is that if the rules are followed, there would be around 128 points on the list. Basically that there are 2 different potential entries on the list for each Class. Is this acceptable?
Couple of things up until this point:
The class design we saw so far was, as far as I understand, explicitly not intentional balanced game design. As in, they were giving classes abilities because they wanted to test game systems, not because they were trying to design within a fractal. I, at this point, only have impressions they're trying to design cool abilities and classes, rather than trying to deliberately create long-term healthy fractalized design systems that'll hold up with bunches of augments, passives, actives, etc. I'll think on it more.
As to how you got "2 different potential entries on the list for each Class", that's extremely confusing and low to me. Can you elaborate more there?
But so say what you're saying is true, and that the archetypes all sort of meld together, and so there's really only 2 really distinct builds worth thinking about per archetype.
This puts us at 2 builds per archetype, and 2^8 = 256 teams, and 33k matchups. We're not at incomprehensible numbers, but we're still at way-too-many-to-balance, (and that's at 2 builds per archetype, which I don't really buy).
So, as a single team, you're still worrying about 256 matchups, and you're hoping that none of those are lopsided, and chances are some of them are.
A meaningfully bad matchup almost always exists because someone got a Fractal Break for that matchup, not because of any specific ephemeral 'balance is hard and there's a lot to balance' concept. Sometimes one character Fractal Breaks the entire cast. Sometimes they Fractal Break just one other character or some subset of other characters.
But the definition of what makes a matchup worse than 6:4 in almost every modern game is 'someone broke the fractal for this character or this matchup', not some specific 'well this character's zoning is pretty oppressive'.
That's my stance. Matchup charts, at least in recent years, are the outcomes of this. Sure, uneven matchups exist, but there's uneven and then there's lopsided. You can use methodology to avoid 'lopsided'. You can tweak from there (as you suggest and I agree) to help 'uneven'. But 'uneven' is still in the range where things like 'I have one more friend nearby', 'you can't possibly know what I'm setting up for', and 'this map will let me do this weird thing' matter enough to flip the unevenness of the matchup and not just 'make it bearable for the underdog', when skilled players are involved.
So I outright don't believe in the same things as you.
I don't believe that curated games have lopsided matchups.
GG Rev 2. Nothing worse than 6:4. Tekken 7, nothing worse than 6:4, SFV, nothing worse than 6:4, Under Night, nothing worse than 6:4 (there used to be one character, and everyone told them so, and now it's fixed).
Avoid the Fractal Break and you avoid lopsided matchups. That's my stance. The list matters, not the number of combinations.
SFV has 40 characters, 1 V Trigger and 1 V Skill for each, a total of 4 ways to play each character (at the level of Ashes Augments at least), for 160. That means it has 25600 matchups, right?
If 6:4 isn't lopsided, then there you go. The reason? SFV's list is somewhere between 47 and 80 (New characters just released and tech is still being figured out). They fixed their Fractal Breaks except for one, and that one exists because of the ease of execution on the characters that have it (they're underpowered because their moves can't be allowed to be too strong).
In the end, my point was that in a complex game, the abilities of any given character, assuming you do not break the rules described, matter way less than the length of the list. Ashes' design intent appears to be explicitly based around 'having control of the list and keeping the list itself within a reasonable length', which is how balanced fighting games are currently designed. You can see it in their patch notes. Players can look at an ability, use their experience to say 'this breaks a rule/breaks the fractal' and then go 'this character is otherwise average and has a Fractal Break therefore this is a top tier' (Sol, Nagoriyuki original form if Ram hadn't been unbalanced, Ramlethal because she did turn out unbalanced). They can also suggest fixes to make the move or ability no longer a Fractal Break, and patch notes often consist of nothing more than 'a list of things that are known Fractal Breaks, or buffs to characters whose abilities are not up to spec relative to the fractal'.
Now, you said that you don't see even a remote chance of Ashes following such a process. Is this a general lack of faith in Intrepid based on their design systems and information provided so far? I.e. you're not giving them the benefit of the doubt or taking them at face value because of the possibility that they will allow players to make substandard builds. I'm neutral here, and should get out of your way.
Moving on to actual stuff though then.
I don't see 6.5 trillion matchups. I see the list. Now I admit, it's a LONG LIST, but it's not 6.5 million datapoints long. Rough estimate is that if the rules are followed, there would be around 128 points on the list. Basically that there are 2 different potential entries on the list for each Class. Is this acceptable?
Couple of things up until this point:
The class design we saw so far was, as far as I understand, explicitly not intentional balanced game design. As in, they were giving classes abilities because they wanted to test game systems, not because they were trying to design within a fractal. I, at this point, only have impressions they're trying to design cool abilities and classes, rather than trying to deliberately create long-term healthy fractalized design systems that'll hold up with bunches of augments, passives, actives, etc. I'll think on it more.
As to how you got "2 different potential entries on the list for each Class", that's extremely confusing and low to me. Can you elaborate more there?
But so say what you're saying is true, and that the archetypes all sort of meld together, and so there's really only 2 really distinct builds worth thinking about per archetype.
This puts us at 2 builds per archetype, and 2^8 = 256 teams, and 33k matchups. We're not at incomprehensible numbers, but we're still at way-too-many-to-balance, (and that's at 2 builds per archetype, which I don't really buy).
So, as a single team, you're still worrying about 256 matchups, and you're hoping that none of those are lopsided, and chances are some of them are.
A meaningfully bad matchup almost always exists because someone got a Fractal Break for that matchup, not because of any specific ephemeral 'balance is hard and there's a lot to balance' concept. Sometimes one character Fractal Breaks the entire cast. Sometimes they Fractal Break just one other character or some subset of other characters.
But the definition of what makes a matchup worse than 6:4 in almost every modern game is 'someone broke the fractal for this character or this matchup', not some specific 'well this character's zoning is pretty oppressive'.
That's my stance. Matchup charts, at least in recent years, are the outcomes of this. Sure, uneven matchups exist, but there's uneven and then there's lopsided. You can use methodology to avoid 'lopsided'. You can tweak from there (as you suggest and I agree) to help 'uneven'. But 'uneven' is still in the range where things like 'I have one more friend nearby', 'you can't possibly know what I'm setting up for', and 'this map will let me do this weird thing' matter enough to flip the unevenness of the matchup and not just 'make it bearable for the underdog', when skilled players are involved.
So I outright don't believe in the same things as you.
I don't believe that curated games have lopsided matchups.
GG Rev 2. Nothing worse than 6:4. Tekken 7, nothing worse than 6:4, SFV, nothing worse than 6:4, Under Night, nothing worse than 6:4 (there used to be one character, and everyone told them so, and now it's fixed).
Avoid the Fractal Break and you avoid lopsided matchups. That's my stance. The list matters, not the number of combinations.
SFV has 40 characters, 1 V Trigger and 1 V Skill for each, a total of 4 ways to play each character (at the level of Ashes Augments at least), for 160. That means it has 25600 matchups, right?
If 6:4 isn't lopsided, then there you go. The reason? SFV's list is somewhere between 47 and 80 (New characters just released and tech is still being figured out). They fixed their Fractal Breaks except for one, and that one exists because of the ease of execution on the characters that have it (they're underpowered because their moves can't be allowed to be too strong).
Yeah - sorry let me say: I fully support your conclusion that the methodology works. If you can be disciplined about your design space, and make sure that you're limiting yourself to this constrained space, then I think you can make it happen (and SF5 is evidence of this).
I think it gets harder in 8v8 than 1v1 (where now you have to worry about how teammates interact with each other, than just how 1 character interacts with one other character), and I think it gets harder when you have passive skills (player's choice) interacting with active skills (player's choice), interacting with weapons (player's choice) interacting with ...
Then, it gets harder again when the players start complaining on the forums that such-and-such weapon is underpowered, and ask for it to be made stronger in some way.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that Intrepid wants to put the RPG back in MMORPG and they want to make sure that RNG is always a factor. I'm saying that I think it's a longshot that it works out like this, but I really, really hope I'm wrong!
Comments
You're super, super lost!
In 2v2, each "row" in a matchup chart will be every possible combination of all builds.
So, in 1v1, you had a row for each build, so mace fighter/tank had a row and staff mage/mage had a row etc
In 2v2, you'd have a separate row for mace fighter/tank + mace fighter tank (which would be a team of two mace fighter/tanks), and a separate row for mace fighter/tank + staff mage/mage, and a separate row for mace fighter/tank + dagger rogue/mage, etc.
You hopefully see how there would be a lot of rows and columns in the 2v2 matchup chart (because you need a row and column for every combination).
Then, imagine how many rows and columns you'd need to represent every possible 250-man team! That's what me and @bigepeen are saying. It's more than the number of stars in the universe. The number of matchups is impossibly large, and impossible to balance.
Yes! Trying to keep a matchup chart would be beyond pointless. It would be an impossible task. There are too many matchups. This means that having any guarantee about balance is also impossible. This has been my claim the whole time.
Fair warning: @Noaani will argue ANY topic straight to death.
You guys have *valid* points/concerns. I just wouldn't worry about things like group balance in specifically Sieges; There's really no point - unless you really, REALLY want a system where someone's picking and choosing 250 players in a queue to battle in a Siege. Then I wouldn't mind having charts like these to possibly know what kind of a super-group to build. However, this probably isn't worth it, as your selections will then to to sub-organize themselves into cohesive units. It's been my experience in MMOs that the larger a group is, the less-wieldy and cohesive it becomes - even with *everyone* on a voice chat, as AoC plans to feature, in-game.
The smaller group assembly can benefit from knowing things like performance of classes vs other classes for things like Arena group-matches and PvP. However, it seems like they're working hard to make it so that there's not an inherent benefit to ALWAYS having specific classes in a group's make-up for PvE. There will always be leet-ists who will FIND specific group-builds AND insist upon them - but typically players will determine for themselves if this is the right group/guild for them. At that point, balance becomes more of a players' concern, and less of a concern from the development point of view.
You have still not realized the futility of a matchup chart in Ashes.
That said, the goal of a siege will not always be to win the siege.
this is deliciously rich
This is no longer true of the state of the art of matchups or tier lists outside of games like Smash.
Everyone seems like they will repeat this at you, me included, until you shift or get frustrated. I know it isn't fair to tell you 'just take that as truth' but I can't spare the time to give you huge data until later.
Does your concern or argument have any other basis that can be addressed in the meantime?
You are absolutely right in that there would need to be an entry for each build. Not just each weapon, but each weapon for each subclass.
This would mean you don't have a mage with a staff, you have an Archewizard with a staff, a sorcerer with a staff, etc.
This means that a chart that has the potential to contain any useful information would have to have each of the 64 primary classes, along with at least three weapons per class. You are likely to have 200+ builds to compare against each other in just 1v1 combat - more than 40,000 different combinations.
This is assuming only three viable weapons per subclass.
This is why I have been saying since well before this thread that the kind of thinking used in Smash just doesn't work in a game like Ashes.
Which is, I am sure you will agree, the over all point I have been making for a while.
Edit: This game won't be very well balanced if the balance is based on 8v8, unless Intrepid hits the jackpot of balancing. There's simply too many combinations to balance, so they would have to resort to complete trial and error. Also, each change could have unintended consequences due to any interactions with skills from the other 7 primary archetypes, and 63 total classes. It would just be a cycle of buffing and nerfing the strongest things in the meta, but this will for sure leave tons of combinations completely unbalanced.
I'm not especially swayed by populist arguments, but I'll certainly take a logical one. What does "Ryu has a 55:45 matchup against Sagat" mean if not what I described?
As for whether or not it has any other basis, I don't think my argument to "how will intrepid ensure that the trillions of matchups will all be relatively balanced" has been addressed yet, which was the whole reason I brought up the matchup chart in the first place. I don't think a matchup chart is useful for something like ashes. There are too many matchups to keep it maintained. But, I think that's the definition of a "balanced" game - that the if you were to fill out such a chart, then the values would be all close to 50:50. I'm asking "how can this be the case, given that there are so many values?" Would not a lot of them stray away from 50:50?
The answer is to not even attempt a theoretical balance.
Just like every other complex game out there.
There are too many variables to ever be able to account for them all, so the answer is to not account for them all, to look at what is happening in the live game, and to make adjustments if things are getting out of hand.
Again, this is why the thinking you are applying to this game is just not applicable to an MMO.
Yes, and that's just for 1v1, and just for weapon combinations. If then you have to add more rows for skill builds, more rows again for armor selections, etc.
Eventually, you have a row in the chart for each build. Not class. Build. Just for 1v1s.
Then, to make a chart for 2v2s, you need a row for every possible combination for builds. That's a lot of rows!
Then, according to some definition of balance (like rock-paper-scissors balance), you add up all of the rows, and so long as the standard deviation is close to zero, your game is balanced (because all the teams are relatively equal in power).
Or, according to my definition of balance, you're more balanced the closer to 50:50 matchups you have across the board. You can measure this by taking the absolute distance from 50 of each cell, and then taking the standard deviation of that. The closer to zero you are here, the more balanced your game is.
I'm saying that when your game has billions of rows (and quadrillions of matchups), that keeping it anywhere near balanced is completely infeasible.
Here's what I wrote in the original post:
Does that help provide context?
For my sanity's sake, can you summarize what you think my position is?
Alright, I'm back at my main terminal, just in time it looks like. Let's do this rapid fire (I'm really thankful to not need to do this trying to make all points at once). Balance side first.
Step 1 is to define every interaction you want to be available within a virtual arena space.
Step 2 is to determine the value of the outcome of the interaction for a character, build, or group, within that space.
Step 3 is to remove all abilities that break or bypass an interaction in a way that gives a clear advantage without risk.
Step 4 is to define the fractal of steps involved in a competitive encounter between your systems.
Step 5 is to ensure that the physical difficulty of any given action aligns with your intent for the above steps (i.e. don't make powerful low risk things too easy to execute).
I'm glad you played GG Strive because it's a good example of this design style. The fractal of that game is pretty well defined and the important thing is that it's really crafted, the downside of new modern games is that players often complain that their creativity is limited due to the above.
So, can you accept that the above is possible as a design style that would result in a very curated system, whether you accept that it would result in balance within Ashes? How about 'balance within Guilty Gear' or a game with only 16 characters?
Following so far! When you constrain the design space, you also constrain the matchups to more evenness. And yeah, you'll often hear Strive guys complain "I feel like I can't do anything creative without meter", which is by design
Onward, one layer down!
Let's use Strive again because I can show the process by which I predicted to my group what the game would be like.
Sol Badguy is defined in previous games as being a character with a simple style and big damage who has difficult combo conversions with high rewards, and who can take big risks for big payoffs. The goal of Strive was to make the game simpler, so they had to reduce the difficulty of the combo conversions and allow him to get damage easier.
Since an unavoidable part of fighting games is 'be at risk of taking damage', obviously any character that does very large damage has a potential to be top tier if they have relatively easy access to it, and similarly, big damage openers with low risk involved are bad.
The important part here is that big damage is relative, and 'low risk' is explicitly relative. So in the fractal, for Sol to be balanced, every character would probably need a way to get some meaningful advantage when Sol's risk does not pay off. Any character who cannot do this well (Faust, as of this writing) is low tier.
So from the designer side, and from the 'theorycrafter' side, both can go 'this character does not have a high enough damage vs Sol's big risks'. That means the Sol Player can be put into a 50-50 situation that technically favors them. RPS, you know the rest.
At no point did anyone need to play the game to know this. The designers should have been able to go, from the start "Sol's Archetype is strong due to X risk option, any archetype without an advantageous situation within Y range is either too strong (if their option is huge damage) or too weak (more common from inattentive developers). Note that the baseline for this must of course be the Sol Mirror Match. If you don't get as much out of punishing Sol's risk option as Sol himself or have a really good way to prevent him from doing things, then Sol is the top Tier.
Many designers resolve this by going 'well we should make sure that characters that don't have strong advantage are good at stopping Sol from doing his stuff with less risk'.
This is wrong.
To make them good at stopping Sol with less risk to themselves breaks Step 3. And since Sol players could just be surprising, the matchup is now just 'volatile' which is your complaint. It's 'fair', but it's not 'good'. Part of the reason this is hard to explain, I believe, is that 'detailing step 1 for a game takes a really long time'. I'm happy to do it almost entirely for Guilty Gear Strive, or skip it if you're good with all this and possibly can see where I am going with this, i.e. that most designers used to do so reactively instead of proactively. They worked on making cool characters rather than good systems.
No previous frame of reference to understand the other guilty gear games on, but yeah, I get what you're saying. Deb will often beat people with Sol in two openings, and I think that's intendedish.
If your conclusion is that Strive is balanced, then I'm confused. If your conclusion is that Strive is imbalanced because they broke some of those rules (like how at release Sol was clearly way better than Faust), then I'm following so far.
If you want to say that the Ashes dev could apply this sort of reasoning to all possible builds that players could dream up (and then further to all possible reasonable 8v8 team comps that players could dream up), I'm super not-on-board.
Ok great. For the record I'm saying that Strive is not balanced, and moreso making the point that I did not need to play Strive to know this, I did not need to watch a large number of matches. I still have not.
Every prediction of capacity of characters I have made (some had conditionals but those were very clear conditionals) was borne out on day 1. I need to know why you're not on board? What, if anything, am I 'trying to demonstrate' here? Computational capacity? My own genius? The effectiveness of the methodology?
If we parallel this to Ashes, and the FOO Strategy from just the basic sieges we ran a while back, which I believe you read a long time ago as part of another thread:
Tanks can pull in with Javelin. This is a small risk. The Tanks stand at the front and try to get access to any non-Tank enemy with the Javelin, technically Mages since Clerics can keep themselves alive too.
The interactions in just completely open field 3v3 PvP were as follows:
1. Players can remain in a state where they are in their chosen formation and they are not committed to an attack, and no damage is really being done.
2. Clerics can heal damage being done, and pre-emptively set up for damage they expect to be done.
3. Clerics can deal damage, increasing in value by enemies standing in a given space.
4. Mages can deal damage, increasing in value by any CC that keeps the enemy within a space.
5. Tanks can resist damage, increase resistance of damage of others
6. Tanks can pull enemies into range and do damage with melee
7. Tanks can rush toward enemies faster than the other classes and engage in melee.
Now, these things are limited by build, one could choose not to take damage as a Cleric, or a Rush, as a Tank, but it gives us another step, because those points went somewhere else, but until they introduce a new ability or a deviation in the systemic outcomes of possible options to the point where step 3 is broken, you can maintain your understanding of the fractal.
There is nothing that prevents the above other than 'the character died' or... wait... #1 can be broken, by #6! And #6 is lower risk because the frontal character needed to do it is easily prepped against damage, healed, and has mitigation.
The result would be that the fractal instantly tells you "Javelin is the strongest deciding factor in the battles, because it is the Fractal Break for this system".
That list has to get to about a length of 300 before I can't do it anymore, without notes (this is almost the bare minimum for a card game designer). It has to get to over 1200 before I need to call in the Neural Networks. Is this believable to you or should I just stop there?
You state that 1v1 will be the predominant PvP in Ashes. It won't.
There will be very few times in Ashes where it is the same number of players going up against each other. That just isn't what Ashes is about.
Since your position seems to be based around this notion of the same number of players squaring up against each other, and this is simply not how this game is being designed, I don't see any point in discussing your position, as your position needs to be re-thought to account for the fact that these match ups are not what this game is about.
My argument is less about what it is that you are saying, and more about the assumptions you are making about the game that has lead to the position you have. I may well even have the same position you have if I had made the same misconceptions about the game that you have.
However, rather than debating the game based on misconceptions, I would much rather attempt to correct those misconceptions, give you a bit of time to re-form your opinion, and then see where we are at.
Perhaps a more productive suggestion would be for you to consider this; sieges will be open world in Ashes (most likely).Make the assumption that the cap on players in a battleground is a technical issue and not a cap on players in a siege, and then think about the arguments you are making in terms of matchups.
Does it make any sense in the context of one side just being able to bring in more players?
I mean, I could humor you and engage in a flawed discussion (though others are doing a better job than I likely would), or I can opt to instead try to correct those flaws in the discussion so that we are actually talking about this game.
This reminds me a little of the thread recently where two of you went deep in to a discussion on economics, only to realize that the premise that you had both assumed was not the case in Ashes.
I'm not on board because there are, at conservative estimates, 4e15 matchups for just 4v4. People are allowed to play silly builds. You can put points in bleeding effects and not equip a weapon that causes bleeding.
These teams won't have equal matchups against teams that don't do dumb stuff like that.
Even if you discount dumb-teams, you still have quadrillions of matchups that you have to make sure are fair. I understand that if the devs commit to a design process in which they rigorously make sure that they never cross the boundaries for how they want abilities to work, this is possible, but I also don't think there's even a remote chance that will happen.
They want to give players the freedom to make builds where you can equip passive skills that boost your bleeding damage, while never causing any bleeding damage!
Can you link the quote that gave you the impression where you think that I think that 1v1 will be the predominant form of PVP?
But also, just humor me. I'd love to hear what you think my current position is. Misconceptions and all.
I definitely am not trying to argue against this concern of yours. I am only 'here' to point out that the perceptions others have of your concerns don't lie in the same place.
I don't think they have any intention of balancing 'objectively bad builds' against 'objectively good builds'. I don't think they intend for Fighter+6 Healers+1 Ranger to be a functional group without those Healers explicitly having builds intended entirely to synergize with that specific Fighter.
But this came about as a concern of 'balance for 3v3' or 'balance for 8v8' as an example. Are you ok with discussing '8v8 where both teams have one of each Primary Archetype'? That's the only thing we've even been tentatively promised.
If that's not fulfilling your concern, then thanks for the clarification.
Yeah, absolutely fine going in that direction.
Quick napkin math:
if there are 5 "reasonable" builds for each class, then each archetype has 40 builds. This means there are 40^8 = 6.5 trillion 8v8 teams that all have 1 of each archetype.
So, given just those, there would be (6.5 trillion ^2 - 6.5 trillion)/2 = 2.1e25 matchups, all of which would need to be evenish for the game to be "balanced"
I'm saying that there will probably be a bunch of lopsided matchups in there.
After all, if you're 1 of those teams, you have 6.5 trillion matchups to worry about. What are the chances that all of your matchups are even? You probably have some losing matchups and some winning matchups right?
Perhaps not majority, but you did say and even that isn't true.
This is an MMO, Intrepid want you to bring a friend to a fight, not fight alone. 2v1 PvP will be 10 times more common than 1v1.
This is why balance in the way you are talking about simply doesn't matter.
The other thing about what you are doing here is you are only looking at one facet of the game.
If Intrepid intend for some builds to be PvP focused and some to be PvE, what is matchup chart able to tell you then? How are you to even know if Intrepid have achieved the type of balance they want?
What if Intrepid want a balance over time thing - where one class or build is super powerful with one patch, and then with the next patch it is a different class or build? This kind of thing happens in a number of online games.
basically, you have taken a singular, static notion of balance from one genre and tried to apply the notion to one aspect of a totally different genre, a genre where the developers need to balance more than just that one aspect that you are talking about.
I mean, it may well be that a tank/tank with a sword and shield would be expected to lose in 1v1 PvP 99.9% of the time, yet if that class is the hands down best PvE tank, it could well be considered balanced.
I'm not interested in stating what I perceive your opinion to be, because if I do, and if I get the smallest thing wrong, you will laser-focus on that rather than looking at the bigger picture of what it is I am saying here - as you did in the post above wanting a quote where you said predominant. That isn't and wasn't the point, you know this to be the case, yet it is a thing you can jump on to detract from said point.
In the end, my point was that in a complex game, the abilities of any given character, assuming you do not break the rules described, matter way less than the length of the list. Ashes' design intent appears to be explicitly based around 'having control of the list and keeping the list itself within a reasonable length', which is how balanced fighting games are currently designed. You can see it in their patch notes. Players can look at an ability, use their experience to say 'this breaks a rule/breaks the fractal' and then go 'this character is otherwise average and has a Fractal Break therefore this is a top tier' (Sol, Nagoriyuki original form if Ram hadn't been unbalanced, Ramlethal because she did turn out unbalanced). They can also suggest fixes to make the move or ability no longer a Fractal Break, and patch notes often consist of nothing more than 'a list of things that are known Fractal Breaks, or buffs to characters whose abilities are not up to spec relative to the fractal'.
Now, you said that you don't see even a remote chance of Ashes following such a process. Is this a general lack of faith in Intrepid based on their design systems and information provided so far? I.e. you're not giving them the benefit of the doubt or taking them at face value because of the possibility that they will allow players to make substandard builds. I'm neutral here, and should get out of your way.
Moving on to actual stuff though then.
I don't see 6.5 trillion matchups. I see the list. Now I admit, it's a LONG LIST, but it's not 6.5 million datapoints long. Rough estimate is that if the rules are followed, there would be around 128 points on the list. Basically that there are 2 different potential entries on the list for each Class. Is this acceptable?
i.e. that while a Tank/Fighter and a Fighter/Tank are not the same class, their abilities and their effects on the battle that are unique to them are limited on a spectrum. You can have a Tank/Fighter that ignores their Fighter side and plays more like a Tank/Tank or Tank/Mage (closing in and doing more damage) and you can have a Tank/Fighter that plays into the Fighter side until they move far enough along the spectrum to become more like a Fighter/Tank. Their weapon choices matter, yes, but the weapons are not massively different because weapons and their abilities also can be a shorter curated list.
If we can agree that one will only get 2x or even up to 5x entries on the list per Class, then the challenge is 'don't break 128-800 rules'.
I definitely don't mean this to be a counter to your point either, this is just another step. 8x8 with one of each is still small compared to what they have in front of them.
But that's why I see 128 and not 6.5 million. We diverged yet?
Also, the reason I suspect a lot of 1v1s will happen is that I suspect that while folks are waiting for their friends to get on, they'll farm alone. Then, they'll run into other solo players doing the same thing and squabble. I think that since Intrepid wants 1v1s to be RPS based, you'll want to flee as soon as you recognize that the other class is the scissors to your paper, and so there will be a lot of fleeing.
I suspect that the most common form of PvP will be whatever the economy incentivizes. If the best way for an individual to make gold/hour is to join an 8-man (but not more, because of some group size xp or loot penalty or something) dungeon group, and then carve out a section of a dungeon, then I expect we'll see a lot of 8v8 fights, because other folks will have similar ideas.
I also expect that there will be a lot of unfair fights.
There is nothing that stops anyone from doing the matchup analysis and creating a matchup chart what a 6v7 would look like. Likewise, there is nothing that stops anyone from doing the analysis for a particular build vs another particular build in a 1v1 setting, even if the first build was geared for PvE, and the second for PvP.
I suppose I've asked twice, and you've refused twice, so I won't ask again.
Here's my position:
I don't think Intrepid should attempt perfect balance.
There are too many variables to ever be able to account for them all, so the answer is to not account for them all, to look at what is happening in the live game, and to make adjustments if things are getting out of hand.
This will mean that the game will often (and for a large amount of teams) be imbalanced.
Sound familiar?
The question wasn't a trap, I just thought it was hilarious that you thought you were arguing with me, when you were actually agreeing with my original proposition! I figured that this was because you had no idea what my position was, and so I asked. This hypothesis was correct.
In many years of playing that game, the 1v1 I took part in could be counted on one hand.
I took part in literally hundreds of 2v1, both as a part of the 2, and as the 1.
I guess you could say that I pulled it out of thin air, and the real number based on my experience is actually 100 times or more - but I am giving credence to the fact that my experiences are that of one person - and while I do not expect them to be out by a factor of ten, I fully accept that they will deviate from the norm. There is nothing stopping people doing it - yet people don't because they realize it is of no real value in an MMO.
Since best in slot gear is not going to be valid as a concept in Ashes, such a chart can't even account for gear. You can't just say "best available" because this means the chart is rendered obsolete as soon as the best gear available changes - not every class scales the same way with gear in most MMO's.
I'm not arguing with your position, I am arguing with you constantly comparing MMO's to fighting games.
It means you are purposefully blinding yourself to aspects of the game, forcing your own discussions to be one dimensional.
No where in your comment on balance did you talk about any form of balance other than the form present in Smash. That is what I have been saying all along - and you keep trying to drag me in to petty shit about what your point is. I don't care what your point is, I care about the framework you are looking at MMO's through, and how that is hampering your view of them.
Couple of things up until this point:
The class design we saw so far was, as far as I understand, explicitly not intentional balanced game design. As in, they were giving classes abilities because they wanted to test game systems, not because they were trying to design within a fractal. I, at this point, only have impressions they're trying to design cool abilities and classes, rather than trying to deliberately create long-term healthy fractalized design systems that'll hold up with bunches of augments, passives, actives, etc. I'll think on it more.
As to how you got "2 different potential entries on the list for each Class", that's extremely confusing and low to me. Can you elaborate more there?
But so say what you're saying is true, and that the archetypes all sort of meld together, and so there's really only 2 really distinct builds worth thinking about per archetype.
This puts us at 2 builds per archetype, and 2^8 = 256 teams, and 33k matchups. We're not at incomprehensible numbers, but we're still at way-too-many-to-balance, (and that's at 2 builds per archetype, which I don't really buy).
So, as a single team, you're still worrying about 256 matchups, and you're hoping that none of those are lopsided, and chances are some of them are.
But the definition of what makes a matchup worse than 6:4 in almost every modern game is 'someone broke the fractal for this character or this matchup', not some specific 'well this character's zoning is pretty oppressive'.
That's my stance. Matchup charts, at least in recent years, are the outcomes of this. Sure, uneven matchups exist, but there's uneven and then there's lopsided. You can use methodology to avoid 'lopsided'. You can tweak from there (as you suggest and I agree) to help 'uneven'. But 'uneven' is still in the range where things like 'I have one more friend nearby', 'you can't possibly know what I'm setting up for', and 'this map will let me do this weird thing' matter enough to flip the unevenness of the matchup and not just 'make it bearable for the underdog', when skilled players are involved.
So I outright don't believe in the same things as you.
I don't believe that curated games have lopsided matchups.
GG Rev 2. Nothing worse than 6:4. Tekken 7, nothing worse than 6:4, SFV, nothing worse than 6:4, Under Night, nothing worse than 6:4 (there used to be one character, and everyone told them so, and now it's fixed).
Avoid the Fractal Break and you avoid lopsided matchups. That's my stance. The list matters, not the number of combinations.
SFV has 40 characters, 1 V Trigger and 1 V Skill for each, a total of 4 ways to play each character (at the level of Ashes Augments at least), for 160. That means it has 25600 matchups, right?
If 6:4 isn't lopsided, then there you go. The reason? SFV's list is somewhere between 47 and 80 (New characters just released and tech is still being figured out). They fixed their Fractal Breaks except for one, and that one exists because of the ease of execution on the characters that have it (they're underpowered because their moves can't be allowed to be too strong).
Yeah - sorry let me say: I fully support your conclusion that the methodology works. If you can be disciplined about your design space, and make sure that you're limiting yourself to this constrained space, then I think you can make it happen (and SF5 is evidence of this).
I think it gets harder in 8v8 than 1v1 (where now you have to worry about how teammates interact with each other, than just how 1 character interacts with one other character), and I think it gets harder when you have passive skills (player's choice) interacting with active skills (player's choice), interacting with weapons (player's choice) interacting with ...
Then, it gets harder again when the players start complaining on the forums that such-and-such weapon is underpowered, and ask for it to be made stronger in some way.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that Intrepid wants to put the RPG back in MMORPG and they want to make sure that RNG is always a factor. I'm saying that I think it's a longshot that it works out like this, but I really, really hope I'm wrong!