Out of all of those activities, the one that the developers explicitly balance for is 3v3 arena.
You say this like "Blizzard do it, so it must be done".
Add in there PvE of differing types, and then make the assumption that rather than trying to balance classes for any one of these activities, a good developer will try and balance classes across all of those activities.
It is perfectly ok to have a class that is overpowered in 3v3, if they are underpowered in both PvE and PvP .content over 20 players, as an example.
It is your notion of there must be one specific case that Intrepid will balance classes for that is incorrect. There is no such need for it.
In your situation of rogues being too weak at one 8v8 and too strong at 3v3, leaving it be is a perfectly valid thing to do.
Out of all of those activities, the one that the developers explicitly balance for is 3v3 arena.
You say this like "Blizzard do it, so it must be done".
Add in there PvE of differing types, and then make the assumption that rather than trying to balance classes for any one of these activities, a good developer will try and balance classes across all of those activities.
It is perfectly ok to have a class that is overpowered in 3v3, if they are underpowered in both PvE and PvP .content over 20 players, as an example.
It is your notion of there must be one specific case that Intrepid will balance classes for that is incorrect. There is no such need for it.
In your situation of rogues being too weak at one 8v8 and too strong at 3v3, leaving it be is a perfectly valid thing to do.
Say that Intrepid makes a change. How do you measure if balance has gotten 'better' or 'worse' if their goal is to vaguely 'balance for group play'? What does this even mean?
How is it "perfectly valid" if rogues are too weak at 8v8 and too strong at 3v3? What goal are they balancing for? If they make rogues take less incidental AoE damage (which makes them stronger at 8v8, and slightly stronger at 3v3, which they were already strong in), did balance improve or get worse? No one knows!
If the answer is "there isn't a goal, they aren't trying to balance for any specific concrete thing", then that's my whole point!. The game won't be balanced, at all. That's what I've been saying the whole time. You can definitely just make a sandbox for players to play in, and then whatever happens, happens. If something is obviously stupid good and a bunch of people complain, you nerf it. Is this balance? Absolutely not. It isn't even "balance for group play". It's just a big, complicated imbalanced sandbox.
Can this big, complicated imbalanced sandbox still be a ton of fun to play in? Yeah. Absolutely. That's what super smash bros melee is.
Say that Intrepid makes a change. How do you measure if balance has gotten 'better' or 'worse' if their goal is to vaguely 'balance for group play'? What does this even mean?
You're arguing with a person that needs DPS Meters to test changes etc. I really doubt you can get a straight answer as you have so far found out.
Say that Intrepid makes a change. How do you measure if balance has gotten 'better' or 'worse' if their goal is to vaguely 'balance for group play'? What does this even mean?
You're arguing with a person that needs DPS Meters to test changes etc. I really doubt you can get a straight answer as you have so far found out.
I don't condone arguments directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining!
I don't condone arguments directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining!
that said, I tend to agree with your prediction
Noanni's Badge is ACT - 'Active Combat Tracker'. Noanni is in a constant state of maintaining the position for DPS Meters. I merely pointed out the overall position Noanni takes on every post ever made by Noanni because that is how Noanni would check balance, changes and combat efficiency- whether IS state Combat Trackers are allowed or not.
On the topic of balance we won't see balance until all the classes are available because hard counters (if hard counters will continue to exist) are required to stop Cleric being OP, Mage being OP and Tank being OP. We are in a weird situation where each class controlled by a decent PvPer can take on an outnumbered position and still win the fight.
Say that Intrepid makes a change. How do you measure if balance has gotten 'better' or 'worse' if their goal is to vaguely 'balance for group play'? What does this even mean?
This is in no way at all how Intrepid would actually do things, but as a pure illustration, imagine it like this.
Find yourself 6 different PvP sizes that you care about, 6 different PvE sizes that you care about, and 4 levels of gearing that you care about.
This gives you 48 points at which to collect data for each build.
Now assign a possible score from 1 to 100 for each of those points. This gives each build a possible score of 48 through to 4800.
Take each of these builds you have, and organize them in to their primary archetype. Within that primary class, ensure that there is a score of over 50 for each and every data point - this is to ensure players have options for what ever they are doing, since they are able to alter their build within their primary archetype.
If there are any builds that score under 30 in any situation, buff them. If there are any builds that score over 70 in any situation, nerf them. Now add up the score for each class and for each primary archetype. If there are no outliers, you have something resembling balance.
I don't condone arguments directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining!
that said, I tend to agree with your prediction
Noanni's Badge is ACT - 'Active Combat Tracker'. Noanni is in a constant state of maintaining the position for DPS Meters. I merely pointed out the overall position Noanni takes on every post ever made by Noanni because that is how Noanni would check balance, changes and combat efficiency- whether IS state Combat Trackers are allowed or not.
On the topic of balance we won't see balance until all the classes are available because hard counters (if hard counters will continue to exist) are required to stop Cleric being OP, Mage being OP and Tank being OP. We are in a weird situation where each class controlled by a decent PvPer can take on an outnumbered position and still win the fight.
Yeah - I'm familiar with ACT - I use it in FFXIV. Unrelated to this post, I also think that having some way to surface performance information is really important (even if it doesn't show up in an in-game interface). I don't want to derail, so feel free to DM me if you are interested in this topic.
Re: balance. Even if there's some sort of rock-paper-scissors game going on that keeps all of the 1v1s in check (I don't call this balance, see previous definitions), what I was talking about is creating an 8-man team where your team has 1 of each primary archetype, and then fighting other 8-man teams where that team has one of each primary archetype.
Since each character on each team has their "hard counter" on the opposing team, you would expect that things would definitely be balanced, right? No!
Because some builds are stronger than other builds, some sublcasses are more effective than other some classes, some combinations synergize better than other combinations, etc, you wind up with some 8-man teams having lopsided matchups against other 8-man teams.
As in, say that you and your friends play the following team:
won't have a fair matchup against you. There are ~4.2 billion ways to make such teams (assuming that each class has two notable builds). What are the chances you have no lopsided matchups? As soon as your 8-man team runs into such a matchup, then the game balance has decided that you've won or lost before you've even started playing, so long as there isn't an extreme difference in gear or skill.
Say that Intrepid makes a change. How do you measure if balance has gotten 'better' or 'worse' if their goal is to vaguely 'balance for group play'? What does this even mean?
You're arguing with a person that needs DPS Meters to test changes etc. I really doubt you can get a straight answer as you have so far found out.
I don't need a DPS meter to test changes, I just know that using one will save actual hundreds of hours.
It's funny, there was a stream a while ago where someone asked what feedback is useful to Intrepid. Margret replied with an anecdote about receiving feedback that a weapon or ability in a game didn't do enough damage. They looked through the logs for the game, spent quite some time on it, and found that the attack in question was perfectly well balanced. The player was complaining that the attack didn't "look" like it did enough damage, and that them not being specific enough with their feedback (I assume this was a few complaints) caused the CS team to waste a lot of time on it.
The whole time you could see Steven shuffling in his chair, wishing Margret wouldn't say that the best thing for good feedback from players is for them to have access to a combat tracker, which is basically what she said.
Say that Intrepid makes a change. How do you measure if balance has gotten 'better' or 'worse' if their goal is to vaguely 'balance for group play'? What does this even mean?
This is in no way at all how Intrepid would actually do things, but as a pure illustration, imagine it like this.
Find yourself 6 different PvP sizes that you care about, 6 different PvE sizes that you care about, and 4 levels of gearing that you care about.
This gives you 48 points at which to collect data for each build.
Now assign a possible score from 1 to 100 for each of those points. This gives each build a possible score of 48 through to 4800.
Take each of these builds you have, and organize them in to their primary archetype. Within that primary class, ensure that there is a score of over 50 for each and every data point - this is to ensure players have options for what ever they are doing, since they are able to alter their build within their primary archetype.
If there are any builds that score under 30 in any situation, buff them. If there are any builds that score over 70 in any situation, nerf them. Now add up the score for each class and for each primary archetype. If there are no outliers, you have something resembling balance.
Okay - following so far. We also know that these builds don't operate in isolation - it's about the team. So swapping out a rogue for a cleric, for instance, makes a huge deal.
Now, we're concerned with making sure that all of the teams in each of the PvP sizes we care about are balanced via tweaking the individual builds that compose those builds. When you tweak one build, it simultaneously affects thousands of teams, so you have to be careful.
So, you try to create some sort of objective function that says "we're balanced" by weighting the balance of all of these different "important brackets" simultaneously. Am I following?
I think balance will be none existent at all. The problem is you can build narrow or you can build deep. You can get guild buffs or you can get guild size. You can lean towards a counter or you can stay straight. You can choose 1 of 4 different augment schools and 4 toons the same class could have 4 different outcomes. The stats are currently very nominal and very simplistic. Steven said the current builds were not specific to each archetype but were to test out the actual abilities etc.
In a 500vs500 fight you'd have people in Tier 5 gear against people in Tier 1 Gear. You'd most often have a mixture in the early days on both sides. You would have to draw solid lines to create balance with all of the variables or you would have to match the overall damage outputs. If you match the overall damage outputs then buffs and nerfs would be limited because balance could be lost.
In a 8vs8 Guild vs Guild Group Fight, one 8 man team could be from a buffed small guild while the other 8 man team are from a larger guild based on size. Even if the exact same builds were used for balance, the guild buffs will make the smaller guild more powerful. I'm not sure when or how guild buffs are applied though. If they are passive then you could only balance small vs large rather than overall damage vs overall damage.
Everything is subject to change though and I've been focussed on work more than the forums.
I think balance will be none existent at all. The problem is you can build narrow or you can build deep. You can get guild buffs or you can get guild size. You can lean towards a counter or you can stay straight. You can choose 1 of 4 different augment schools and 4 toons the same class could have 4 different outcomes. The stats are currently very nominal and very simplistic. Steven said the current builds were not specific to each archetype but were to test out the actual abilities etc.
In a 500vs500 fight you'd have people in Tier 5 gear against people in Tier 1 Gear. You'd most often have a mixture in the early days on both sides. You would have to draw solid lines to create balance with all of the variables or you would have to match the overall damage outputs. If you match the overall damage outputs then buffs and nerfs would be limited because balance could be lost.
In a 8vs8 Guild vs Guild Group Fight, one 8 man team could be from a buffed small guild while the other 8 man team are from a larger guild based on size. Even if the exact same builds were used for balance, the guild buffs will make the smaller guild more powerful. I'm not sure when or how guild buffs are applied though. If they are passive then you could only balance small vs large rather than overall damage vs overall damage.
Everything is subject to change though and I've been focussed on work more than the forums.
Everything you're saying is true - balance goes out the window when the players involved don't:
have similar skill
have similar gear
have similar buffs (guild or otherwise)
have a similar number of players
The reason we're even talking about balance is that if your game is imbalanced even when all of those variables are equal, then things get weird. Say that me and my mates are in a small guild, just like you and your mates. We both have an 8-man squad, 1 of each archetype. We're both equally good at the game, skill wise, etc.
The only real difference between our groups is that my group is playing "meta builds", and your group is playing "non-meta builds".
In a "balanced" game, this doesn't matter! We can have an even matchup and a fair fight. Whoever plays better in the moment will win, and then if we come back to the same place, we might be able to make some adjustments and turn the tide if we lost.
In an "imbalanced" game, this matters a lot. Whichever team is playing "the meta" will fkn crush, depending on how oppressive the meta, or how imbalanced the game is. If this happens, you guys might be left scratching your head and your mates might start wondering "should we abandon our current builds and copy what those guys are doing? It looks way more powerful than what we're doing."
This has happened in tons of games, to varying degrees!
edit:
Some folks are completely okay with this. They want to "discover" the meta, play in it for a while, and then have the devs "shake it up". This is how League of Legends works, at a broad level, for instance.
It tends to be that the more choices you have, the more oppressive the meta is (because there is more room for optimization), and the bigger of an effect what I'm describing has.
Now, we're concerned with making sure that all of the teams in each of the PvP sizes we care about are balanced via tweaking the individual builds that compose those builds.
No we aren't.
That isn't a concern at all.
If each archetype has a build that offers more than a score of 50 for what ever it is you are doing, you should take that build when you are doing that thing. If you don't, it's on you, not the developers.
If you manage to find a combination of 8 classes that is more powerful than any other 8 classes, good for you. It's not like you are going to just come up against other groups of 8 players anyway, and Intrepid are keen on the idea of well organized groups hitting above their weight (hence the buffs for small guilds).
---
The only real balance that Intrepid have talked about so far is in the desire people will have to bring along as many primary archetypes as they can. They will consider the game balanced if all large scale PvP forces make sure that there are some of each archetype present.
Comments
Reminds me of Lord Farquad from Shrek. "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
Add in there PvE of differing types, and then make the assumption that rather than trying to balance classes for any one of these activities, a good developer will try and balance classes across all of those activities.
It is perfectly ok to have a class that is overpowered in 3v3, if they are underpowered in both PvE and PvP .content over 20 players, as an example.
It is your notion of there must be one specific case that Intrepid will balance classes for that is incorrect. There is no such need for it.
In your situation of rogues being too weak at one 8v8 and too strong at 3v3, leaving it be is a perfectly valid thing to do.
Say that Intrepid makes a change. How do you measure if balance has gotten 'better' or 'worse' if their goal is to vaguely 'balance for group play'? What does this even mean?
How is it "perfectly valid" if rogues are too weak at 8v8 and too strong at 3v3? What goal are they balancing for? If they make rogues take less incidental AoE damage (which makes them stronger at 8v8, and slightly stronger at 3v3, which they were already strong in), did balance improve or get worse? No one knows!
If the answer is "there isn't a goal, they aren't trying to balance for any specific concrete thing", then that's my whole point!. The game won't be balanced, at all. That's what I've been saying the whole time. You can definitely just make a sandbox for players to play in, and then whatever happens, happens. If something is obviously stupid good and a bunch of people complain, you nerf it. Is this balance? Absolutely not. It isn't even "balance for group play". It's just a big, complicated imbalanced sandbox.
Can this big, complicated imbalanced sandbox still be a ton of fun to play in? Yeah. Absolutely. That's what super smash bros melee is.
You're arguing with a person that needs DPS Meters to test changes etc. I really doubt you can get a straight answer as you have so far found out.
that said, I tend to agree with your prediction
Noanni's Badge is ACT - 'Active Combat Tracker'. Noanni is in a constant state of maintaining the position for DPS Meters. I merely pointed out the overall position Noanni takes on every post ever made by Noanni because that is how Noanni would check balance, changes and combat efficiency- whether IS state Combat Trackers are allowed or not.
On the topic of balance we won't see balance until all the classes are available because hard counters (if hard counters will continue to exist) are required to stop Cleric being OP, Mage being OP and Tank being OP. We are in a weird situation where each class controlled by a decent PvPer can take on an outnumbered position and still win the fight.
Find yourself 6 different PvP sizes that you care about, 6 different PvE sizes that you care about, and 4 levels of gearing that you care about.
This gives you 48 points at which to collect data for each build.
Now assign a possible score from 1 to 100 for each of those points. This gives each build a possible score of 48 through to 4800.
Take each of these builds you have, and organize them in to their primary archetype. Within that primary class, ensure that there is a score of over 50 for each and every data point - this is to ensure players have options for what ever they are doing, since they are able to alter their build within their primary archetype.
If there are any builds that score under 30 in any situation, buff them. If there are any builds that score over 70 in any situation, nerf them. Now add up the score for each class and for each primary archetype. If there are no outliers, you have something resembling balance.
Yeah - I'm familiar with ACT - I use it in FFXIV. Unrelated to this post, I also think that having some way to surface performance information is really important (even if it doesn't show up in an in-game interface). I don't want to derail, so feel free to DM me if you are interested in this topic.
Re: balance. Even if there's some sort of rock-paper-scissors game going on that keeps all of the 1v1s in check (I don't call this balance, see previous definitions), what I was talking about is creating an 8-man team where your team has 1 of each primary archetype, and then fighting other 8-man teams where that team has one of each primary archetype.
Since each character on each team has their "hard counter" on the opposing team, you would expect that things would definitely be balanced, right? No!
Because some builds are stronger than other builds, some sublcasses are more effective than other some classes, some combinations synergize better than other combinations, etc, you wind up with some 8-man teams having lopsided matchups against other 8-man teams.
As in, say that you and your friends play the following team:
The worry is that
won't have a fair matchup against you. There are ~4.2 billion ways to make such teams (assuming that each class has two notable builds). What are the chances you have no lopsided matchups? As soon as your 8-man team runs into such a matchup, then the game balance has decided that you've won or lost before you've even started playing, so long as there isn't an extreme difference in gear or skill.
I don't need a DPS meter to test changes, I just know that using one will save actual hundreds of hours.
It's funny, there was a stream a while ago where someone asked what feedback is useful to Intrepid. Margret replied with an anecdote about receiving feedback that a weapon or ability in a game didn't do enough damage. They looked through the logs for the game, spent quite some time on it, and found that the attack in question was perfectly well balanced. The player was complaining that the attack didn't "look" like it did enough damage, and that them not being specific enough with their feedback (I assume this was a few complaints) caused the CS team to waste a lot of time on it.
The whole time you could see Steven shuffling in his chair, wishing Margret wouldn't say that the best thing for good feedback from players is for them to have access to a combat tracker, which is basically what she said.
Okay - following so far. We also know that these builds don't operate in isolation - it's about the team. So swapping out a rogue for a cleric, for instance, makes a huge deal.
Now, we're concerned with making sure that all of the teams in each of the PvP sizes we care about are balanced via tweaking the individual builds that compose those builds. When you tweak one build, it simultaneously affects thousands of teams, so you have to be careful.
So, you try to create some sort of objective function that says "we're balanced" by weighting the balance of all of these different "important brackets" simultaneously. Am I following?
In a 500vs500 fight you'd have people in Tier 5 gear against people in Tier 1 Gear. You'd most often have a mixture in the early days on both sides. You would have to draw solid lines to create balance with all of the variables or you would have to match the overall damage outputs. If you match the overall damage outputs then buffs and nerfs would be limited because balance could be lost.
In a 8vs8 Guild vs Guild Group Fight, one 8 man team could be from a buffed small guild while the other 8 man team are from a larger guild based on size. Even if the exact same builds were used for balance, the guild buffs will make the smaller guild more powerful. I'm not sure when or how guild buffs are applied though. If they are passive then you could only balance small vs large rather than overall damage vs overall damage.
Everything is subject to change though and I've been focussed on work more than the forums.
Everything you're saying is true - balance goes out the window when the players involved don't:
The reason we're even talking about balance is that if your game is imbalanced even when all of those variables are equal, then things get weird. Say that me and my mates are in a small guild, just like you and your mates. We both have an 8-man squad, 1 of each archetype. We're both equally good at the game, skill wise, etc.
The only real difference between our groups is that my group is playing "meta builds", and your group is playing "non-meta builds".
In a "balanced" game, this doesn't matter! We can have an even matchup and a fair fight. Whoever plays better in the moment will win, and then if we come back to the same place, we might be able to make some adjustments and turn the tide if we lost.
In an "imbalanced" game, this matters a lot. Whichever team is playing "the meta" will fkn crush, depending on how oppressive the meta, or how imbalanced the game is. If this happens, you guys might be left scratching your head and your mates might start wondering "should we abandon our current builds and copy what those guys are doing? It looks way more powerful than what we're doing."
This has happened in tons of games, to varying degrees!
edit:
Some folks are completely okay with this. They want to "discover" the meta, play in it for a while, and then have the devs "shake it up". This is how League of Legends works, at a broad level, for instance.
It tends to be that the more choices you have, the more oppressive the meta is (because there is more room for optimization), and the bigger of an effect what I'm describing has.
That isn't a concern at all.
If each archetype has a build that offers more than a score of 50 for what ever it is you are doing, you should take that build when you are doing that thing. If you don't, it's on you, not the developers.
If you manage to find a combination of 8 classes that is more powerful than any other 8 classes, good for you. It's not like you are going to just come up against other groups of 8 players anyway, and Intrepid are keen on the idea of well organized groups hitting above their weight (hence the buffs for small guilds).
---
The only real balance that Intrepid have talked about so far is in the desire people will have to bring along as many primary archetypes as they can. They will consider the game balanced if all large scale PvP forces make sure that there are some of each archetype present.
I feel it is worth keeping that in mind.