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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Oh, the one that is built on an incorrect assumption about the game having caps on players present?
Nope, don't care.
Not sure why you would either, since there is no meaningful content in Ashes in which players would expect to reach a cap.
Make the assumption that players will not reach the cap in siege, as this is the design intent.
Then, when you have a point to make based on this, I'll care. Then we can continue.
Refusing to do this is the same as refusing to accept the game is not an RTS, and that your point on RTS and corruption not working is valid in Ashes. Don't ask people to care about your point when it is built on incorrect assumptions - that is just weird.
Because your whole premise is comparing single player arcade fighting games some of them on discs and cartridges that cannot be updated or changed.
To MMO's in a constant development flux.
As for 1v1 competitive balance in a community driven MMO...nup it's not going to happen and I am personally fine with that.
If you want to micro manage 250 v 250 players all the best to you.
Maybe stop attempting to mesh different genres of games into something they are not and accept an MMORPG on its own merits and parameters.
How do you like them apples?
But do you care about his point?
We were talking about design philosophies and your claims about player psychology. Human psychology is a system and principles from one situation can apply to another similar if still different situation. It is why we are the dominant species.
The two games in my example were updated and balanced regularly. Major changes about twice a year with minor tweaks on each character release (an additional 3ish times a year for a total of 5.) Some mmos have a similar rate of rebalancing combat, some more. It depends on developer competency and payer base dissatisfaction. Modern fighting games are no longer solely a 'stagnant unchanging post release' genre.
We were talking about your currently unsupported claim that balanced games 'lead to lower player retention.' I was not arguing for or against '1v1 competitive balance' in my post.
Overall your response has no real rebuttal for the fact that I have demonstrated proof that your claim about balanced games loses player population is incorrect.
Can you show me counter evidence to my claim in an mmo setting? I'm really curious to hear about all these mmos that supposedly died due to 'too good balance.' Rather than marketing mistakes, budget issues, or design flaws not rooted in their balanced combat system.
Or how about at the very least give me your reasoning as to what factors are different in the mmo player base that would make the principles demonstrated in my examples not work the same?
In a fighting game, it is 1v1 (or, occasionally, 2v2).
You get in to your match, you fight, you leave. If the game isn't balanced, there is no game.
In a game like Ashes, not only do you not have that arena, you don't have 1v1. Even if no one joins in on a fight, there is literally always the chance that someone will.
This makes balance in a 1v1 sense totally pointless.
Intrepid know this as well. This is why they are not really intending to balance 1v1, and why they are quite happy to do things like make individual players in smaller guilds stronger than an equally geared, equally spec'd player in a larger guild.
The kind of balance that a game like Ashes wants isn't a 1v1 balance.
I and the poster are not discussing 1v1 balance. You aren't really paying attention.
I should have been more clear. Not just 1v1, but 2v2, 10v10, any time it is the same number verses each other. Quite happy to say that was my bad for not being more clear there.
When Intrepid say they are balancing 8v8, that doesn't mean they are balancing for every 8v8 to be equal, nor even that every 8v8 of the same characters be equal.
Again, the guild system is a key indicator of their intention here.
If Intrepid were after any kind of balance between like numbers of players, they wouldn't add in a system that does literally nothing other than upset that balance.
This would suggest that the balance Intrepid are after for the game is at least in part based on the guild level, not character level - or more specifically, some arbitrary point between the two.
They want the smaller guild to be able to punch above its weight, and the way to do that is to make each character in a smaller guild more powerful than if that same character were in a larger guild.
I'm really curious, how do fighting games deal with balance on the guild level?
I use the concept of a matchup to illustrate this. Matchups apply any time any sort of competitive event happens in any game genre. They're really easy to talk about in fighting games, so we tend to that, because we get tons of repeated, isolated matchups that occur over and over.
You don't end up fragmenting your discussion into a ton of maps, situations, builds, scenarios, etc, and are able to isolate your matchup discussion into just "How well does Ryu do vs Akuma?".
But, the same principles that allow us to talk about Ryu vs Akuma allow us to discuss Zerg vs Protoss in Starcraft 2, or "Mario vs Peach on Rainbow Road at 150cc in Mario Kart 64" or "Rogue Mage Priest vs Warrior Warlock Druid on Blade's Edge Arena in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade".
If Mario's Kart is better suited for driving on Rainbow Road than Peach's Kart (better turning, better acceleration, less top speed, if i recall correctly), then you might postulate that between top Mario Kart players, the Mario would beat the Peach on Rainbow Road 60 out of 100 times.
Here's someone doing analysis just like this
As the understanding of the meta of Mario vs Peach on Rainbow Road advances (it might never, because people don't care), you gain new knowledge and refine your prediction over time.
So, if you're wondering "what happens when one 8-man team is part of a small guild, and the other is part of a large guild", the answer is "the small guild team has a more favorable matchup than they would have had otherwise". Was that supposed to be an interesting question?
The reason we're concerned with balance in the first place is, as @bigepeen put it:
We would ideally like to be able to play whatever team fits our personal preferences or style, and not feel pressured to conform to the meta or else sacrifice performance (which is what happens in an unbalanced game).
If the 8-man-matchups are balanced (somehow) before you start factoring in guild stuff, then if one team is in a small guild and one team is in a big guild, then the small guild has an advantage, which is intended.
I think (because of the complexity involved, where the complexity is partially measured by the number of matchups), that there's an extremely low chance that we have a balanced game. Thus, we will probably be unable to play whatever team fits our personal preferences or style. Instead, we will probably feel pressured to conform to the meta.
I think, because of the complexity involved, that Intrepid will be unable to balance individual matchups, and that reasoning about individual matchups will be fruitless in a game like ashes. If I have 6.5 million matchups to worry about for just my team, why bother analyzing a specific matchup when I might never play against that comp in my life?
Instead, they'll have to resort to hitting obviously-too-strong things with the nerf-hammer, and buffing obviously-too-weak things, and then dealing with the unexpected consequences of this in a never-ending merry-go-round.
Does this all track?
As such, using a one dimensional tool to illustrate balance that works in a fighting game doesn't work in an MMO.
You being familiar with it does not make it valid as a comparison.
If you want to talk about MMO's you should learn to talk about them in terms of MMO's, not in terms of fighting games. It is the very fact that these things exist in an MMO but not in a fighting game that make matchups not overly valid in an MMO.
When you consider equipment, specifics of character build, social organization, religion, environmental factors (weather, terrain etc), miscellaneous buffs and passive abilities, etc, it is probable that no two fights will ever have the same parameters in a game like Ashes - while in a fighting game, you have effectively the same parameters every time the same two characters face each other.
As to your concern about an overly unbalanced game resulting in everyone being told to play the same few builds, this same thing happens in every MMO regardless of balance. This is a non-issue in this discussion because it absolutely will happen regardless of how well balanced the game is.
This is why neither developers nor players in MMO's ever even think about them, why they are not worth bringing in to a discussion, and why I have been telling you for a long time now to stop thinking about Ashes in terms of fighting games.
So, we agree that the concept of matchups in an MMO is stupid. Right?
Why did you even bring them in to the discussion then?
How's that? You can play any character you want in SF5, because they're all relatively balanced. You can't play any character you like in melee, because they're not relatively balanced. What's the difference in an MMO? Why wouldn't you be able to play any team comp (according to preference) if they were all relatively equally effective?
Here's what I want you to get through your head. I'm not thinking in terms of fighting games. I'm thinking in terms of abstract concepts (like matchups), and using fighting games (simple, sterile environments) to exemplify those abstract concepts. Is that clear?
The concept? Absolutely not, even in ashes. Attempting to calculate matchup charts in a game like ashes? Yeah, fruitless. Too many matchups. in MMO's? No. I've played thousands of rogue/mage/priest vs warrior/lock/druid games in WoW, which is a MMO, and being able to analyze the matchup was super useful there.
Here was my concern, summarized for daveywavey on page 1:
I use the concept of a matchup to illustrate this. Matchups apply any time any sort of competitive event happens in any game genre. They're really easy to talk about in fighting games, so we tend to that, because we get tons of repeated, isolated matchups that occur over and over.
You don't end up fragmenting your discussion into a ton of maps, situations, builds, scenarios, etc, and are able to isolate your matchup discussion into just "How well does Ryu do vs Akuma?".
But, the same principles that allow us to talk about Ryu vs Akuma allow us to discuss Zerg vs Protoss in Starcraft 2, or "Mario vs Peach on Rainbow Road at 150cc in Mario Kart 64" or "Rogue Mage Priest vs Warrior Warlock Druid on Blade's Edge Arena in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade".
If Mario's Kart is better suited for driving on Rainbow Road than Peach's Kart (better turning, better acceleration, less top speed, if i recall correctly), then you might postulate that between top Mario Kart players, the Mario would beat the Peach on Rainbow Road 60 out of 100 times.
So, given that your game has matchups (they all do), you're able to figure out if your game is balanced or not by whether or not it has a bunch of lopsided matchups. I provided a measurement which you proceeded to flat out ignore on page 3
So, in order to define what "balance" was, I needed to discuss matchups. That's why I'm talking about matchups.
An MMO does not.
Right, and the bulk of this discussion has been about the idea "Ashes will be balanced around 8v8 where each team has 1 of each primary archetype". There are still matchups there.
Other ways to create 8-man teams, and other bracket sizes (including non-equal player counts like 8v9) are considered "allowed to be unbalanced"
Each 8v8 team with 1 of each primary archetype is a "character" in a matchup chart. Those teams then 1v1 each other (1 team vs 1 team). Does this make sense?
If it turns out, for instance, that
has a lopsided matchup vs then your 8v8 bracket isn't particularly balanced.
(omitting skills, weapons, armor, the rest of the build, etc)
If a particular team is too strong, you nerf the components of that team (the builds that make up the team) in some way.
I may well have found it here, I am not sure.
Can you tell me where Intrepid have said they are balancing 8v8?
Because to my knowledge, they have never said that - with or without one of each archetype being present.
They have said they are balancing around having a variety of classes present, trying to make it so that this is the best strategy for anyone to adopt - but they have never said anything about the idea of balancing 8v8.
Nor would they, that would be very off-bran for them to say that, as they are going out of their way to make that not how the game works.
I was careful to say "the bulk of the discussion" and not "Intrepid has said", because I have no clue how they'll do their balancing. This is why it's one of my concerns.
I don't think their game will be balanced.
Rae wrote on page 5:
and since then, that's where the discussion has been.
I'm not attached to that particular bracket at all. I don't care if we're talking about 8v8, 4v4, or 250v250.
My argument is just this: when the devs go to balance the game, they have to balance it for something. Let me know if you disagree here. It's harder to simultaneously balance it for 8v8 and 1v1, than just one or the other. Whatever it is they pick to balance for, when they go to do that, there will be a matchup chart for that balance. That matchup chart will be too large for any reasonable balance to exist, and so I conclude the game will be imbalanced.
That's the whole argument.
You might have said "the game is too complex" and then stopped there, and that would have probably been enough for a lot of folks, but I don't consider "too complex" to be a sufficient argument, so I went further
In Ashes, the core unit in terms of balance seems to me to be the guild, not the player.
Perhaps a different way of putting it is using an astronomical term as an analogy (not an example). Imagine balancing players, balancing groups and balancing guilds to all be celestial bodies. Rather than the balance of the game being any one of these, the game is balanced at a Lagrange point between the three bodies.
It just seems boring to me that if you get attacked by x, y or z class as a spellblade or whatever while traveling, gathering, or farming, that your only realistic option is to not fight back because the rock, paper, scissors balancing has already predetermined the fight. I like 1v1s sometimes, because you win or lose based solely on your actions, not because of teammates. And not being able to have a fair 1v1 unless it's a mirror is just lame imo.
This is in no small part due to the notion that there is no reason nor means to cap players in 8v8 - there isn't even any suggestion of an 8v8 arena, so balancing 8v8 just seems outright wrong.
to me, the comments made were more in regards to a group (a collection of players, not a game mechanics group) will want some of every archetype present, and will want to be more well rounded. This is as opposed to the strategy that was popular in Stevens last game (Archeage) where the best PvP strategy was to get everyone to play a caster, and run around in as a tight a ball as you could get, AoE'ing everything you could, all at the same time(a mageball). Without a good strat to combat this, it was very effective. 20 people could take out a raid of a few hundred that was organized for regular PvP, and obviously any players not a part of a mageball did not like it.
Basically, the way I heard what Steven was talking about was more a reassurance that a mageball (or similar) strat won't be a thing in PvP - not that they were balancing PvP around 8v8. I can also agree with this perspective.
However, again my take on things is that Intrepid are not really interested in your 1v1 over a few resources. Sure, it may suck for you to not really have a chance, but what Intrepid are interested in is what you do next.
The most likely thing for you to do is to bring a friend. It may just be someone that wants to farm the same materials you want to farm, and you agree to mutual defense. It may be a guild mate, it may be the person you are selling the materials to.
What ever it is that you do, this seems to me to be what Intrepid are interested in. They have said the game is about creating stories, and someone attacking you while you are farming so you fight back is a bit of a shit story. Someone killing you while you farm, so you create an agreement with another farmer to defend each other, now that is a story - or the makings of one, at least.
The quote I found was the following:
"There will be match ups in 1v1s where one class will be superior to another; and that application should be a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. We want there to be counter-play between the different classes... Instead it's going to be a group focused balance, where as long as you have the diversity of classes present, that's going to be an equal level playing field. It's going to be very dependent on skill and strategy.[3] – Steven Sharif"
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Game_balance
It mentions "group" balance, rather than "party" balance, but does seem to suggest that an even spread of classes should be an "equal playing field".
"Group sizes
Ashes of Creation is designed for solo players as well as large and small groups.[2][3]
Parties have up to eight (8) players in a single group.[4]
Raids will have 40 man groups.[5]
Content will be tailored for 40, 16 and 8 person group sizes.[6]
Arenas will have 1 man, 3 man, 5 man and possibly 20 man Free-For-All (Deathmatch) group sizes.[7]
There won't specifically be guild vs guild arenas but team-based matchmaking allows teams to face other teams.[8]
Castle sieges are expected to have at minimum 250x250 players to be on a single battlefield, with the possibility of increasing this to 500x500 over time.[1]
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Group_sizes
Like you, I'd like to at least have a chance against someone else, but that falls down due to me just plain being awful at 1v1, rather than cos my class is paper against scissors!
Perhaps somewhat telling, and also the reason I always say that the wiki is a great source of information but you should always go to the linked source, is that ellipsis up there.
Where the quote on the wiki says simply Steven actually says
To me, the part that is missing from the wiki is no less important than the parts that are there.
To me, the language here makes it abundantly clear that he is not talking about a group as in 8v8, but as in any collection of players.
I got as far as
"Repeat for hundreds of hours and then eventually you can buy all of the best gear in the game."
1)
I'm not sure that it would work out exactly like that, Ashes got an Economist involved early on so that they can avoid the rampant inflation present in other games. The value of those crab certs drops as the local market saturates. The more local players trying the same hustle will make that hustle less efficient. There are also going to be "plenty of sinks", so becoming rich should take more effort.
2)
If I spent weeks/months working through multiple tough quests, interspersed with moments of ridiculously good fortune to get the various arcana unobtainia required for the best gear in the game then I doubt I would sell it. My understanding is that you will need the exotic materials that would allow you to craft more top tier gear to repair your existing top tier gear. i.e. you will either keep the mats (risky) or craft replacement top tier gear (safer) ready for when your current gear wears out.
You definitely should be able to buy good (2nd or 3rd tier) gear, but all the wealth in the world won't let you buy something that isn't for sale.
This could make RMT desirable, but the permanent ban for offenders should hopefully be enough to discourage it.
A lot of the concern comes from the fact that Intrepid isn't willing to just throw out an entire speculative (it would probably be speculative even for them) design document to say 'this is how we're going to balance things'. People would have lots of negative reactions.
I'm going to do it for them, as usual, so people can just have negative reactions to me instead. Fun!
The tl;dr beforehand for the people in the back is:
Balance is Mitigation->BurstDPS->Attrition->Mitigation and has nothing to do with Archetypes or Classes explicitly other than that they can make sure certain classes have more or less of those abilities. If you throw a super Mitigation build up against a super Attrition build, Intrepid is not gonna spend time figuring out how to make that fair for you. They will rely on the meta to make doing either of those things in the open world without a group, an overall bad idea, and you can do what you want in a group.
Ashes is currently a lower mobility, mana and cooldown based game with some abilities having a high damage potential with a high risk. This causes the game to have a certain type of balance emergent that they would then build from. I've mentioned it somewhere before but here it is again with the actual explanation. The RPS of this game type (which they could change, don't @ me on that point) is Mitigation-Attrition-BurstDPS (the last of which I tend to call Cooldowns).
A Mitigation class is definitionally not a mitigation class if they don't take less percentage HP damage than other classes. That means that when a Cooldown class meets a Mitigation class, every use of their Cooldown gated ability is worth less damage. Again. By definition.
If Cooldown can kill another Cooldown in 6 attacks, most people won't be satisfied with a Mitigation class unless Mitigation takes at least 9 attacks to die. in a game with longer cooldowns and higher TTK, that's an extra 10-20 seconds. If you give them lots of mobility too, they might get away, but Mobility is a different discussion.
Mitigation classes normally just 'plod on through' doing decent damage the whole way. Tanks, High Priests and defensive Bards are unlikely to have a ton of Burst DPS, right? So they stay alive and just keep slashing and stabbing you. In order to ever beat Cooldown classes this has to be tuned. It's fairly easy to tune. It's not necessarily less fun, for either side. The Cooldown player realizes 'wow this Bard does a lot of melee damage I need to change strategy a little'. The Mitigation player realizes 'this will be easy if they don't start trying to avoid or evade me, I better buff my movement/accuracy now before they do'. Fun?
Attrition classes find a way to win by minimal risk DoT while sometimes using melee. DoT is normally not affected by Mitigation abilities in the same way as big hits from Burst DPS, so they just have to do damage faster than the opponent in total, to win. But they generally don't win this damage race against Cooldown builds, they only win it against heavy Mitigation builds.
In general the result in a game with Ashes' current build would be 'Mitigation beats Cooldowns beat Attrition beats Mitigation'. And when Steven says things like 'you can use secondary Archetype to push you a bit' that's what it means. You can start as Mitigation build (Tank with mostly mitigation abilities and gear) and add BurstDPS (Mage damage or such to your strikes) to make you more able to have a balanced fight with an Attrition based opponent.
A group is likely to be balanced to need 'a certain amount of Mitigation, a certain amount of Attrition, a certain amount of BurstDPS'. We recognize this as the 'Trinity'. Some 5 person groups will push all their mitigation into one or two characters (Guardian/Paladin and High Priest), all their BurstDPS into some others (probably Assassin and Weapon Master) and all their Attrition into one (probably a Ranger build).
And others will spread that out. With a 30-60 TTK on a single character, (can we assume that 30 is for squishies and 60 for Mitigation?) you should be able to spread it out without it being ultra-suck. After all, if you choose 'all Burst Cooldown DPS' and anything stops you from killing that High Priest, the enemy group as a whole is going to beat you in the same RPS style. You went too hard on Cooldowns and lost to the Mitigation part of your opponent's group.
This means that in the random open world 1v1s, you are not going to actually just 'know'. You see someone who looks like a Tank, you don't know if they went for a Mitigation build or if they knew 'I'm gonna solo today, better stop in my node and switch to my hybrid build'. You only know that they are at least some percentage Mitigation build because their main Archetype practically demands it. And who knows, maybe not even that much will be true, but at least this is a framework they can balance around, that doesn't require even a single concept of Archetypes other than as conceptual groupings. "We are putting mitigation abilities mostly on Tanks, so we know that no one is likely to be surprised by extreme Mitigation from a non-Tank build" and "We are not going to bother to balance it so that if someone does make an extreme Mitigation Tank build, and get attacked by the extreme BurstDPS build, that the BurstDPS build has a totally fair chance'.
And you know what? This should even work socially most of the time. Because people are tribal, and the person who 'wants to play High Priest' probably hangs out with 'the person who wants to play Dreadnought and Guardian' whereas the person who wants to play DPS Bard with flashy moves probably hangs out with 'the person who will play a hybrid Highsword'.
(and now, for maximum effect...) Stop worrying until I sound the alarm. I just gave them a mini design doc above (as always, all yours, Intrepid! It's so obvious anyway), if you hate it, say so, if you want it, say so.
1) is more that beau doesn't want to play another game where "get rich = buy your way to win".
e.g. to get end-game gear, it usually takes waaaay more time to grind-gather-slay-loot-repeat-craft-etc, compared to specializing in economic activity and then buying the end product. (i.e. in-game P2W)
His concern with selling certs is that he's already found the source of all money in the game (so to his mind, he's solved the game before he's even played it) - he's not really concerned about inflation of the economy because he'll be one of the gears driving inflation, so he'll rise and fall with the market, thus it'll affect him less.
-
I still think interdependant systems that mess with: the spawnrates, the availability of quests and value of certs is the way to make this more interesting - but this has the danger of encroaching on the fun of people who want to own market niches.
This still doesn't solve the core of beau's issue though. @beaushinkle do you think it's too far of a jump to say that you're asking for a system that seperates money from power? Or makes the relationship between the two less direct?
Once you take guild size out of the equation (by making sure that the two teams in question were from guilds of the same size), why wouldn't you want the matchups to be balanced? (if the goal is to make the game balanced)
Balancing around "any collection of players" isn't well defined. Here's an MMO example:
In retail WoW, this is the list of common PvP activities:
Out of all of those activities, the one that the developers explicitly balance for is 3v3 arena. All of the PVP patch notes exist attempting to nerf the classes that are overperforming in 3v3, and buff the classes that are underperforming in 3v3. You hope that this doesn't mess with the balance in the other modes of play too badly, but if it does, that's not blizzard's chief concern, and that isn't the community's chief concern.
Sometimes, a class that is underperforming in 2v2 but overperforming in 3v3 will see a nerf and no one bats an eye. Sometimes a class that is dominating in ranked 10v10 battlegrounds but isn't great at 3v3 will see a buff, and then they'll be even better at ranked 10v10, and everyone totally understands.
3v3 is what blizzard is balancing for, and this is understood and accepted.
With this in mind, what does "balancing for any collection of players" mean? If rogues are "too weak at 8v8 but too strong at 3v3" what do you do if you're balancing for any collection?
Imagine a game as large as ashes, with 10k concurrent players, 103 nodes, and more importantly, a lot of different economic niches (different lanes) to and efficiently drive in. Certs aren't player-purchased, they're NPC purchased. Yes, there are explicit plans to make it so that the value of a cert decreases based on how many other folks are turning in the same cert at the same node, but you can always cart it them somewhere else.
I keep getting told "players just won't sell valuable items" as the kneejerk response. You're right in that if valuable items never found their way to the auction, this would not be a problem. I just don't think this will, with this many players doing this much farming, be the case.
Especially as the game gets older.
I heavily suggesting reading through
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/51160/fungibility-farming-and-degenerate-economic-efficiency/p1
If this is a topic you want to dive into. I don't especially want to re-hash things I've already said 3-4 times there, here
Yeah, that's a fantastic way to put it. I keep specifically asking to "make it so that players have to actually kill the forest dragon boss before they're allowed to equip the forest dragon sword crafted from forest dragon bones"
Now, power isn't just about wealth but also the in-game skill/experience of having done things like "killed the forest dragon".
The other concern is that I want the accruement of wealth to be efficiently done through a bunch of novel activities on a month-to-month basis. I'd love it if we're economically incentivized to go to dungeons with friends, show up to contest world bosses, attempt to raid caravans, etc.
Not just fun incentivized, but make sure that those activities are, for the players who excel at them, more profitable than your specialized mining loop, even if you're specialized at mining (when they're available).
That way, when I hear that the world boss is spawning, or that there's a big caravan going from node-18 to node-42, I don't have to decide between making better gold/hour by continuing to mine or making more fun/hour by going to play.
edit: As an aside, I don't predict that selling certs will be the most efficient way to make gold. Selling certs is strictly proof that the game will have a gold faucet, which is necessary to prove the rest of the economic ideas (but that gets complicated)
Once we actually have an 8-person group with Secondary Archetypes, it's going to depend on how each group synergize their active skills and augments.
I think we still have to learn when racial, social org and religious augments become available.
The Ashes devs are balancing combat based on the active skills of each Primary Archetype in an 8-person group - with a focus on 250 v 250 sieges.
WoW does plenty of nerfs based on complaints about a class being overpowered in 1v1.
In Ashes, Rogues being weak in 8v8 isn't going to be a dev concern... it won't really even be a thing.
There will be a wide variety of ways for any group to synergize with a Rogue to shore up whatever weakness there might be with that specific character build and player - especially by choosing to have one or more x/Rogues in that group.
Let's keep in mind that there is no way to alleviate beaushinkle's fears and concerns with logic and reason.
Might not even be able to alleviate those concerns once they can actually play the game.