A No-Nerf Approach to Balance

With impending combat updates in the coming days and months I’ve been thinking a lot about metas, pvp balance, and the long term experience I’ve had with MMOs in the past. It’s my great hope that Intrepid will maintain a no nerf philosophy when balancing the game post launch.

I think it goes without saying that there will of course be fringe cases where players will find things that are so game-breaking and disruptive that there will need to be a nerf, but ideally these things will be fully flushed out in Alpha 2 before we get to launch and people fully commit to their builds. Post launch, they should be the rare exception and not the rule in my opinion.

One of the most soul crushing things that can happen in an MMO is having your main build nerfed into the dirt, especially when you deliberately started with a build you knew would be off-meta at the time you chose it. I’m not arguing that this will make players quit as I have no data to back this up. Creating new builds and alts can be fun. I have never quit a game over it, but I can say anecdotally it has demoralized me and contributed to my ultimate disillusionment with games in the past. The nerf bat comes for all players eventually.

The idea is that Intrepid should use a combination of data on the efficiency and popularity of classes, weapons, augments, etc. as well as constructive player feedback to buff underutilized playstyles to bring them in line.

Only buffing could, over time, lead to higher damage output and lower time to kill. Time to kill too low across the board? Buff base HP and defense stats for all classes. Yes, this is still a net nerf to damage, but everyone gets stronger (increased defense) instead of weaker (decreased damage).

To me, this is ultimately a design philosophy that I believe will keep the morale of players higher, and I hope Intrepid balances Ashes in this way. I know this is a very complex problem (especially with Ashes being class balanced around group PvP) and I’ve given a very simplified opinion on it, but I’m curious to hear everyone else's opinion on this.

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Dygz

LMAO

Sigtyr

Okay maybe everyone except Dygz's opinion on this lmao.

George_Black

This is treating the symptom, not curing the disease. And even thought it seemingly makes sense to make adjustments to background numbers in order to preserve the spectacle of the actual gameplay, eventually changes will have to be made that will result in a nerf.
For those familiar with ESO, I was playing a stamDK in eso since 2015. Everybody was crying about Wings, (reflect all ranged dmg to caster), but never once did they mention that it was the magDKs that were abusing that ability. It resulted in a massive nerf for a class with no mobility, in a game that sorcerers and nightblades could reset the fight at will, until chance and circumstance favoured them. So yeah, I get what you mean about nerfs.

Anyway. In an open world pvp mmo, in which there are these pvp scenarios:
Dueling
Ambushing
Smallscale
Largescale
Siege/wall fights
Possible BGs

and these PvE scenarios:
Solo lv up that gives you a headstart (until the point of diminishing returns, which should be around lv25 in the game aims to be meaningful).
Purpose in group lv up (tanks, dd, healer, support, pvp reliance in the event of an encounter)
Open world Raid killing
Instanced raiding

it is obvious that there are many gameplay features that one class can outshine, while another is top at something else. So where do you begin with the nerfs and buffs?

I would go with preventing the disease from launch, till the end of time. So I will say what I have said before. There must be a group of IS employees that will be required to report in the viability of each class. Maybe 2 or 3 employees per archetype as well as weapons. These employees should report and compare the viability of the classes and weapons, have meetings every so often and fairly, professionally say "ok. The Dreadnaught is overperforming and the Charlatan is lackluster on all aspects of the game. The magic wand is OP. The XYZ weapon is useless. Let's propose fair adjustments."

I think that such a team would rly help the game and its reputation. Think back to all video games you played where you said "this game.. they nailed XYZ system".
Ashes could be the one game to truly nail classes and weapons in the mmo genre by having paid professional developers take on the role of balance, but actively playing the classes and weapons, by composing realistic, first hand arguments for and against nerfs and buffs.

Or we can go with the ESO method. All classes are homogenized, all classes can perform all gameplay features (there aren't that many anyways) and every 3 months 2 classes are OP and the next 3 months these classes are bad.

There must be enough IS employees that will want to play AoC full time and can perform the role of class representative at the Viability meetings. Paid professional developers and actual gamers.

Caww

If you exclude the A2 persistence time, after the official launch the game may well have very few hard-to-take nerfs... but, in the meantime, they don't call it Alpha for nothin'...

SongRune

Sigtyr wrote: »

Only buffing could, over time, lead to higher damage output and lower time to kill. Time to kill too low across the board? Buff base HP and defense stats for all classes. Yes, this is still a net nerf to damage, but everyone gets stronger (increased defense) instead of weaker (decreased damage).

But now defense gear is less effective proportionally, and players get their gear they've worked so long for weakened, even if the numbers on it stay the same. Want to scale that too? Now attack stats/gear are relatively weaker. And since we wanted to reduce TTK, maybe that was the goal. But as much as "only raising every OTHER stat in the game, and leaving one the same" doesn't have the psychological effect of "seeing numbers go down", the loss of relative effectiveness which was the point, will still be felt. The class, ability, gear piece, whatever it may be, still got nerfed. Player who use it will still experience that nerf. All you've achieved is some of the less calculative ones not understanding WHY they suddenly suck, or exactly WHICH thing was nerfed, so they can adjust their build. And of course, since they have to change literally everything else, increasing the chance that the devs missed something, that has now been incidentally nerfed (or even completely destroyed, because it wasn't intentionally managed). And the worst part? Especially if you got hit by the accidental stealth nerf? A lot of people who weren't affected aren't going to believe you. Not everyone thinks these things through, and certainly not everyone has the awareness and patience to do the math, especially if it's a subtle, emergent interaction.

A global buff to everyone but you is still a nerf. It's just a deceptive one that hurts you without revealing itself. (Sometimes to you, sometimes to others.) And that can be a lot more dangerous than "ugh I gotta fix my build now", and "yeah but that was kindof unfair before" or "sucks, man".

Sigtyr

SongRune wrote: »

Sigtyr wrote: »

Only buffing could, over time, lead to higher damage output and lower time to kill. Time to kill too low across the board? Buff base HP and defense stats for all classes. Yes, this is still a net nerf to damage, but everyone gets stronger (increased defense) instead of weaker (decreased damage).

But now defense gear is less effective proportionally, and players get their gear they've worked so long for weakened, even if the numbers on it stay the same. Want to scale that too? Now attack stats/gear are relatively weaker. And since we wanted to reduce TTK, maybe that was the goal. But as much as "only raising every OTHER stat in the game, and leaving one the same" doesn't have the psychological effect of "seeing numbers go down", the loss of relative effectiveness which was the point, will still be felt. The class, ability, gear piece, whatever it may be, still got nerfed. Player who use it will still experience that nerf. All you've achieved is some of the less calculative ones not understanding WHY they suddenly suck, or exactly WHICH thing was nerfed, so they can adjust their build. And of course, since they have to change literally everything else, increasing the chance that the devs missed something, that has now been incidentally nerfed (or even completely destroyed, because it wasn't intentionally managed). And the worst part? Especially if you got hit by the accidental stealth nerf? A lot of people who weren't affected aren't going to believe you. Not everyone thinks these things through, and certainly not everyone has the awareness and patience to do the math, especially if it's a subtle, emergent interaction.

A global buff to everyone but you is still a nerf. It's just a deceptive one that hurts you without revealing itself. (Sometimes to you, sometimes to others.) And that can be a lot more dangerous than "ugh I gotta fix my build now", and "yeah but that was kindof unfair before" or "sucks, man".

I agree with everything you are saying here. What I was suggesting was purely a theoretical example of how they could handle things long term. I don't really have the time to come up with a well thought out scenario and how I would handle it if I was in charge of such matters.

To me this is more about the overall mood in the community. It happens every game where large balance patches range anywhere from 50% nerfs and 50% buffs to sometimes just straight up 100% nerfs. In the beginning it's only a small percentage of the community feeling betrayed or annoyed, but over time every class, every playstyle suffers some kind of game changing nerf and forums are overflowing with people complaining their class is too weak and lashing out at other classes and play styles.

I'm also not suggesting that they never nerf anything, even though the title I chose might suggest that. I just wish that balance patches in stead of being largely nerfs would be largely buffs in stead. Maybe a 90/10 split, not really sure just kind of tossing the idea around. Many times I've seen this happen in the last decade and beyond people demanding nerfs are simply having a "learn to play" issue.

SongRune

I think the most viable solution to this problem is to make sure that you as a developer have a clear and specific vision of what you want your combat to be like, and then clearly explain that vision to your community, and get a lot of hands-on feedback from players on whether your early iterations live up to that vision.

Whenever you make one thing stronger, other things get weaker by comparison. There's no way around that. It's why the process of tuning a game is called balancing. The question is how to get your balance as close as possible to the ideal from the beginning, and how to make sure players understand the decisions you make, and can help you make good ones, or have something to focus on other than "the devs hate me" when those decisions affect them negatively.

By getting your vision out there clearly, and letting players point out to you where your work doesn't match your vision, you gain several very important things:

- People can catch your mistakes.

It's easy to get lost in arguments or contemplations of "well maybe that's what the devs intended..." when something feels off, but if they set clear expectations for what they want the experience to be like, you can immediately tell them "this isn't working, and here's the part that's wrong", and that means they can fix it faster, and cleaner.

- People can know what is a mistake.

If you get over-nerfed, or someone else gets over-buffed, you don't have to be salty. You can look at it and go "there's no way this matches the vision". You can complain. But more importantly, know that your complaints will probably be taken seriously, that it's not just you, and that the nerf (or buff) will likely be adjusted.

- People who don't like the game's intended style can just leave.

You don't have to waste time trying to figure out if you're going to get nerfed in the next patch, or if the last nerf was a mistake. You also know not to waste your effort trying to get them to change the game, if you don't like the VISION. This results more applicable feedback because your community consists of people who want the same game the devs do, and know how to target their feedback at that, and both players and devs waste less time and energy.

- People know what to TALK about.

They know what things are problems, and can provide suggestions that suit the vision, without having to guess what that is. There's a lot of brainpower out there. Don't let it go to waste.

I play another competitive PvP (non-MMO) game which has periodic balance patches. Something they've started doing in the last year or two, is explaining what their vision for how a particular character/class should work, and how the changes they are making are supposed to bring the character back in line with that vision. Whether it's a buff or a nerf, (and sometimes the technical details that are tweaked can be really eisoteric) it's easy to understand it in context. Even if it hurts you, you can understand why the change was made. (And sometimes, the community as a whole can decide they screwed up, and push back.) I feel like this is a step forward in giving players a way to process the negative experience of having their style nerfed.

At the end of the day, a nerf's a nerf, and players will notice. Trying to hide them in various ways won't help. The goal should be to make sure the vision is clear, so that changes can be interpreted in context. So that people don't get caught up in bad expectations. So that people can expect buffs or nerfs in the future if something doesn't live up to the vision.

There's no way around nerfs, but there's a lot you can do to build trust in the developers, and make sure that people who are hurt by new changes have a framework to process them, a way to feel heard, and a clear vision of the game that they can rely upon to think about the future.

Dygz

Very well said, SongRune!
Thanks for sharing those words of wisdom!!

JamesSunderland

The main flaw of a no-nerf balance method is that it will always move towards power creep of the original design balance(at a faster pace than it already usually happens) and it eventually requires way deeper changes to prevent things from becoming obsolete as players will only get more powerful than the original design expected them to be.

One of the most frequent fast power creep results is the one you've mentinoned, higher damage outputs messing up the game's TTK and creating burst metas, the most logical solution is also the one you mentioned, buffing up HP and defensive stats across the board, the problem becomes:

How much do you buff? If you buff too much you move into a sustain meta.
How do you buff? Individually is usually better and more precise but way more time consuming and complex.
How about the influence of all those offensive and defensive buffs in regards to the PvE aspect of the game?
You can start to see how this becomes a vicious cycle that spirals out of control.

I believe neglecting Nerfs as a balancing tool is a disfavor for devs that only limits their balancing potential.
I don't think things needs to be necessarily "game-breaking" to require a nerf, small nerfs of things beyond the balancing line a lot of times prevents them from snowballing and reaching game-breaking status due to lack of preventive action.

In the end, what makes a good balancing isn't a anti-nerf or a pro-nerf approach but:
The current state of the meta, how impactiful to said meta the changes are,
how many variable the change takes in consideration and accounts for,
how much data do you have to avaliate those variables,
how properly do you interpret said data and many other things.

Ferryman

It is true that hard nerf-bats does not feel good and the worst result is that if the hit pushes people to change characters. You basically take the power from the strongest and give it to the weakest. This FOTM balancing system at least works even it can sometimes feel bad. Using buffing only can lead to power creep increasing too fast like JamesSunderland mentioned. I do not have a strong opinion on this topic but I have personally liked small buffs and nerfs approach because if the changes will be too small you can continue making these changes small steps at the time. At least this approach should prevent nerfing to the ground result.

PenguinPaladin

Balance shifts in general should be a sweeping thing. Single target nerfs or buffs is a numbers tweeking thing. If certain CCs are too much, more counters to the cc should be made and dispersed among the other classes.

AidanKD

I think you have to be able to buff and nerf, it has to go both ways surely. If something is overtuned bring it down, if something is undertuned bring it up. If something ends up overtuned it inevitably can only be brought down to bring it in line else bring everything else up comparably.

I like @SongRune 's take on the vision and transparency on the intentions of how something should feel - at the end of the day if you have something under-represented it probably needs some love, and vice versa if something is smacking up everything indiscriminately then it can probably be taken down a notch.

But I get the sentiment that far too often is buffing weaker classes pretty neglected. Ergo the numerous specs in MMOs which just don't get played due to the disparity between other more "meta" specs.

Plutar

If all you do to combat ONE archetype/build from being overpowered, relative to the other archetypes/builds, is increase ALL player/mob HP/Defense, you have failed to solve the problem while creating a new issue. The overpowered archetype/build is still, relative to all other builds, overpowered. Now everybody EXCEPT the overpowered class has a LONGER than intended TTK, and essentially nerfing EVERY archetype/build in all content.

If one build is overpowered due to unforeseen interactions, shame on the developers but it does need to be fixed. Otherwise everyone will just swap to the overpowered archetype/build and create further issues.

Sigtyr

Plutar wrote: »

If all you do to combat ONE archetype/build from being overpowered, relative to the other archetypes/builds, is increase ALL player/mob HP/Defense, you have failed to solve the problem while creating a new issue. The overpowered archetype/build is still, relative to all other builds, overpowered. Now everybody EXCEPT the overpowered class has a LONGER than intended TTK, and essentially nerfing EVERY archetype/build in all content.

If one build is overpowered due to unforeseen interactions, shame on the developers but it does need to be fixed. Otherwise everyone will just swap to the overpowered archetype/build and create further issues.

In my scenario global buffs would only happen if every class felt too powerful, not just one.

Anyways, most people seem to be against this idea right now. We'll see if that changes on these forums post-launch when the first major nerfs happen.

PenguinPaladin

The real question is how to balance things further post release... the real topic of this thread is, i dont want my build ruined 2 years in because people didnt complain about it in alpha

Dygz

The devs don't want that either, but...
That's the nature of the game.

Veeshan

Here the problem with only buffing for balance.
lets say 1 class is 20% stronger than everyone else as example
we now buff all the other classes by 20% to bring them inline to class 1

now we have a problem all PvE is to easy so now that all throwing into chaos and this become a huge balancing issue sure i guess we can just do a time consuming of buffing every mob in the game and give them say 20% bonus hp and dmg but now glass cannon might get 1 shot in PvE cause there 20% increase to be briought inline went into offence instead.

there better off picking one class they want to be the Anchor and balance mobs around the anchor and then tweak other classes to be inline with the anchor either via nerfs or buffs it so much less time consuming this way and doesnt throw pve elements into chaos aswell.

the important thing with balancing is if a class gets over buffed or over nerfed try fixing that relativly quickly even with minor tweaks to bring it closer to the anchor point just to mitigate the nerf/buff if it went overboard dont sit on a class or skill being overpowered for months before it gets fixed cause thats the real problem with balance.

Tragnar

no nerf approach is sure-proof way for balance to be utter dogshit

thing is that we don't even know the depth of the balancing variables because augments leave enormous room full of possibilities

PenguinPaladin

The reason for thinking about a no-nerf approach is outliers further hide outliers.

Nerfing "the meta" without effecting all other classes. Can allow a new class to stand out. Then nerfing that may cause another class to stand out. And so on, until all classes are kind of powerless.

That shouldnt be a major concern with ashes as they are balancing around group power. 1v1s are expected to be somewhat "unbalanced"

Tragnar

nerfs and buffs are not mutually exclusive

balancing team that wants to have longetivity in mind will use both of those tools to change unforseen(mostly just misunderstood) cumulative scaling of a build

and it literally doesn't matter if you balance towards solo play or group play - you choose one that takes precedence and go from there case by case with what the augment guys came up with

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