Guild Wars 2

I have a masters level degree in computer science and in trying to solve hugely complex problems with potentially millions of combinations of factors.

This game’s PvP system feels like that. There are SO many possible interactions among the class attacks, defensive moves, timing factors, and debuffs… that it will never be balanced for all players.

It’s what they call a “combinatorial explosion”.

For one thing, new players and experienced players are playing two different games. New players don’t know how to counter Hundred Blades. Experienced teams now often don’t even bother to bring a warrior to tPvP because the warrior is shut down by players who understand how to counter the warrior.

Balance the game for experienced players, and the noobs get smashed.

In that respect, ArenaNet is absolutely correct to FIRST: get ranked matches working. Let people play against people with the same limited knowledge and skills.

That, and their plans to revamp the sPvP points system to reward a different sort of play style.

That may be all they will be able to ever achieve, as far as leveling the playing field.

“Balance for all players” is an impossibility if you are basing ideas of balance around people’s perceptions.

“Noobs” in any game always get smashed, and in pretty much any game with profession differentiation you will have new players calling things imbalanced which experienced players think is fine. This doesn’t mean that aspect is actually imbalanced, nor does balancing around experienced players guarantee that “noobs get smashed” as you put it.

There will always be balance complaints since it seems to be a part of human nature to whine when one isn’t being as successful as one would like , at least for a subset of people who like playing games and don’t like losing/learning.

Laserbolt.6731:

I have a masters level degree in computer science and in trying to solve hugely complex problems with potentially millions of combinations of factors.

This game’s PvP system feels like that. There are SO many possible interactions among the class attacks, defensive moves, timing factors, and debuffs… that it will never be balanced for all players.

It’s what they call a “combinatorial explosion”.

For one thing, new players and experienced players are playing two different games. New players don’t know how to counter Hundred Blades. Experienced teams now often don’t even bother to bring a warrior to tPvP because the warrior is shut down by players who understand how to counter the warrior.

Balance the game for experienced players, and the noobs get smashed.

In that respect, ArenaNet is absolutely correct to FIRST: get ranked matches working. Let people play against people with the same limited knowledge and skills.

That, and their plans to revamp the sPvP points system to reward a different sort of play style.

That may be all they will be able to ever achieve, as far as leveling the playing field.

i’m just glad that anet at least tries to balance. other mmos I’ve played treat pvp as an afterthought

i have to agree but disagree with the warrior thing though

i agree that tpvp teams are not bringing hblade warriors but instead bringing
more support and hammer warriors to the scene

imo give the warrior issue more time and theory crafting before giving the verdict

ive already started running a titan build http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mMRzcc0zMMGnxMMGnFMGG0GaVaMmzkz8kij7khs7khS7070M7kGL70V7ofD8ofy

Kline,

Good points on the warrior.

I could never see why the issue of new players getting rocked being such a big deal. That is in effect balance, the person with more skill wins. If you don’t want to get rocked, you get better at the game and beat people with your superior ability. If you don’t have that kind of motivation you shouldn’t be playing in a competitive format. For an example of a game balanced around the unskilled: Candy Land, it doesn’t matter how often you’ve played, it is random if you win.

Ideally to ease players into competitive formats and prevent complete stomps that leave some feeling demoralized you have bracketing to keep players in pools of those with a similar level of experience. Using the current system to join matches based on rank works fairly well until you get somewhat deep into ranks at this point in time. At that point your rank is so high is becomes all but impossible for you to find a match with that function, because the pool of high ranked players is so much smaller than those with lower ranks. The option then is to play in tournaments because they are more competitive.

Numot.3965:

For an example of a game balanced around the unskilled: Candy Land, it doesn’t matter how often you’ve played, it is random if you win.

Well, that’s taking it to an extreme. People just don’t want to get stomped constantly such that they feel they are terrible and are making no progress.

A scoring system that accurately reflected a player becoming steadily more competent, even in small increments, would be great in that regard.

Laserbolt.6731:

Numot.3965:

For an example of a game balanced around the unskilled: Candy Land, it doesn’t matter how often you’ve played, it is random if you win.

Well, that’s taking it to an extreme. People just don’t want to get stomped constantly such that they feel thay are terrible and are making no progress.

A scoring system that accurately reflected a player becoming steadily more competent, even in small increments, would be great in that regard.

I agree and think they are working on some things in that regard.

In general I agree it’s best to balance the game around high level comeptitive pvp, but there are some exceptions. Hundred Blades and Backstab, for example.

At a competitive level, these things are reasonably well balanced because the experienced player knows how to anticipate and counter them. At the casual level (read: 80% of the playerbase) it’s incredibly frustrating and off-putting.

Ultimately, a game like this one can’t survive without a healthy population. The tactics which most egregiously punish noobs should be scaled back even if they’re not a problem at high levels of play, because they’re roadblocks to the creation of a large, healthy community.

That said, the classes that rely on these tactics should be compensated in a way that keeps them competitive at all levels of play.

mouse.1689:

Ultimately, a game like this one can’t survive without a healthy population. The tactics which most egregiously punish noobs should be scaled back even if they’re not a problem at high levels of play, because they’re roadblocks to the creation of a large, healthy community.

That said, the classes that rely on these tactics should be compensated in a way that keeps them competitive at all levels of play.

Excellent point. I agree.

I gotta disagree with the whole catering to newbie thing. With ANY PvP Oriented game, you are gonna get stomped when you start out. Why? most people know their class and their class only. If they don’t have say, a thief or a mesmer or something they have no flipping idea how that thief can stealth x-amount of times, or why that mesmer can make so many clones so quickly and blink around y-amount of times.

You see this sort of learning curve in every pvp game where there are classes that have vastly different skill sets. You think anyone walks into LoL/dota2 and starts smashing faces without knowing anything about the game beforehand? Everyone gets bodied when they start mainly because they have very limited knowledge of mechanics and abilities outside of what they have experienced first hand. The only way to fix that is……. to get more experience. There should never be a game where you dominate someone else without knowing what they are able/are doing, and that is true for gw2. (well bs thieves are the closest to achieving this i guess…. but not against all matchups)

So how do you get more experience? Let newer players experience PvP in an even more casual environment (ie: dueling) where they can learn what other classes do etc without the pressure of worrying about objectives. Nerfing Certain glass cannon skills that “seem” OP isn’t gonna help, because it will just make people complain about something else. People that are legitimately interested in sPvP though have a very easy way to learn the other classes, which is roll an alt of that class. That whay they know what are the fundamental weakness/strengths of the class and what/how their combat tricks function. This isn’t some sort of online FPS game where any shmuck can pick up the biggest gun their first time and do reasonably well; this game has alot of different mechanics and skills unique to each class and the only way to get better is to learn through experience.

Numot.3965:

I could never see why the issue of new players getting rocked being such a big deal. That is in effect balance, the person with more skill wins. If you don’t want to get rocked, you get better at the game and beat people with your superior ability. If you don’t have that kind of motivation you shouldn’t be playing in a competitive format. For an example of a game balanced around the unskilled: Candy Land, it doesn’t matter how often you’ve played, it is random if you win.

Ideally to ease players into competitive formats and prevent complete stomps that leave some feeling demoralized you have bracketing to keep players in pools of those with a similar level of experience. Using the current system to join matches based on rank works fairly well until you get somewhat deep into ranks at this point in time. At that point your rank is so high is becomes all but impossible for you to find a match with that function, because the pool of high ranked players is so much smaller than those with lower ranks. The option then is to play in tournaments because they are more competitive.

The issue of new players “getting rocked” is bigger than you think.

Mmos need new players to sustain them, people leave games for various reasons balance and amount of fun are 2 reasons off the top of my head and either take breaks or don’t return. With the population continually dwindling over an MMO’s lifespan a big portion of the success is whether the MMO can draw new players into the game to fill gaps and sustain the population of the ones leaving. If new players are getting insta-gibbed by combos before they can even react the first time they play the game over and over, there’s a kitten good chance they are going to get frustrated and leave and not come back.

I don’t have problems with any Insta-gib combos this is not a complaint about them, and I’m not taking a stance either way, this is just a response to not understanding why new players getting rocked is a problem.

Recently.1043:

I gotta disagree with the whole catering to newbie thing. With ANY PvP Oriented game, you are gonna get stomped when you start out. Why? most people know their class and their class only. If they don’t have say, a thief or a mesmer or something they have no flipping idea how that thief can stealth x-amount of times, or why that mesmer can make so many clones so quickly and blink around y-amount of times.

You see this sort of learning curve in every pvp game where there are classes that have vastly different skill sets.

There’s such a thing as too steep a learning curve. When new players die in literally two seconds, they have absolutely no way to learn from that experience, and very little motivation to keep playing.

I’m not suggesting that everything which might be difficult or complex for new players to learn should be removed from the game; that would be ridiculous.

But the 100 blades combo is a very good example: it’s incredibly frustrating to new players, and not particularly good against experienced ones. It’s bad for casual play because it scares off new players, and it’s useless for competitive play because good players know how to avoid it. So what good is it doing the game?

Combos and abilities like these simply need to be scaled back and replaced with ones that are still competitive but less frustrating to new players.

Nerf bunker guardians just for a bit and the game will be perfectly balanced

Laserbolt.6731:

Kline,

Good points on the warrior.

thanks =) btw on that build you want to use a soilders amulet or a knights for dmg
and a signet of stamina not dolyak

Laserbolt.6731:

For one thing, new players and experienced players are playing two different games. New players don’t know how to counter Hundred Blades. Experienced teams now often don’t even bother to bring a warrior to tPvP because the warrior is shut down by players who understand how to counter the warrior.

Your whole premise is wrong, learn to data collect.

You will never get proper balance in an mmo, as OP points out, too many variables. It is the goal they should be striving for nonetheless, as closer to balanced they get, better the game will be. They have given themselves a headache however with the stealth and clone classes. Harder to balance than usual.

you can balance a MMO very easily you just have one class with one set of items for each slot so everyone is using the exact same items

I’m not sure how your master degree fits in the post lol.. but regarding the rest of the post; I think objective balance is possible, and subjective is impossible. You can give the players a perfectly balanced game, but the human mind is exceptional in making failures everyone else’s fault.

Yeah I have a masters degree in EE, this game is played on computers and computers use electricity therefore its clear I have a plethora of knowledge on game balance Elguapo.

Nerf Thiefs

if each prof has 3 viable specs that do different things, then we’ll be in business.

Coming from one of the oldest genres of “esport” (before esport was even a word, hahah), Fighting Games, we see that perfect balance is not necessary or even desirable, as long as everyone has equal choices, and a reasonable variety exists at the top level.
(of course, gameplay being fun at all levels is also important, but that isn’t strictly dependent on balance.)

There has never been a fighting game in history that has had perfectly balanced characters, and some of the most competitively viable and popular games are also less balanced than some of the less popular games.

None of that has stopped FGs from being respected and enjoyed at top level competition.

ANet just needs to follow these practical rules when balancing:
- Remove unfun elements
- Increase variety of good & viable classes/builds/weapons/skills.
- Reward skillful play (bearing in mind “Skill” in GW2 is mostly about how well you coordinate with your team, rather than how well you fight and kill.)

Yes they can, but you need good feedback mechanism, like (for example): ranked single match, 3v3 and 5v5 que and you need 1v1 and 3v3 (and 5v5) ques and (separate) rankings.
Then you look at the feedback data: If you detect that among the best 100 players (or pick a number to have large enough samples) you see only 1% of class_X in particular type of ranking (1v1, 3v3, 5v5) you know you have an issue with that class in such-and-such sized match. Then you ask yourself how could you buff them up for match of that size without affecting 1v1 too much for example (if class is well balanced there) (maybe you need to generalize some ability to apply not only on caster but also an allies etc).
If you see 50% of top rankings go to class_Y, you know you need to nerf them in some sense, then you start investigating what the issue is. Such a feedback mechanism would eventually lead to a decent balance.
But you need good feedback mechanism in order to establish a ‘control’ (balance). Otherwise you will keep randomly applying control (‘fixes’) based on bad/biased feedback (forum whining, asking few ‘top’ players(having too small of a sample size), etc).

The only way for new players to learn what they need to is to be given a tough time.. This is what makes experienced players.. Things are balanced in my opinion.. You need to expect everything your opponent throws out which takes research.. No not everyone wants to do this.. These are normally the people who complain of OP classes or just flat out never reach full potential. I have played less than 200 games of sPvP and only 14 tPvP.. The only imbalance I find is sPvP putting you 1v2 or 3v5. tPvP i have won almost half of the battles with complete pugs. 6 to be exact. If you go through the effort to communicate, research, and improve, then you will be a better player and will most likely look down on the biased “OP Classes” as if nothing more than another player kill.

The classes are fairly balanced ( aside certain bunker speccs ) , you can only solve this problem with some kind of matchmaking …

Otherwise new players will always get stomped if some expirienced comes into a hotjoin match to do his daily etc pp … .

Rieselle.5079:

ANet just needs to follow these practical rules when balancing:
- Remove unfun elements
- Increase variety of good & viable classes/builds/weapons/skills.
- Reward skillful play (bearing in mind “Skill” in GW2 is mostly about how well you coordinate with your team, rather than how well you fight and kill.)

Props ~

Reaglass.9658:

The only way for new players to learn what they need to is to be given a tough time.. This is what makes experienced players.. Things are balanced in my opinion.. You need to expect everything your opponent throws out which takes research.. No not everyone wants to do this.. These are normally the people who complain of OP classes or just flat out never reach full potential. I have played less than 200 games of sPvP and only 14 tPvP.. The only imbalance I find is sPvP putting you 1v2 or 3v5. tPvP i have won almost half of the battles with complete pugs. 6 to be exact. If you go through the effort to communicate, research, and improve, then you will be a better player and will most likely look down on the biased “OP Classes” as if nothing more than another player kill.

Just would like to say that I agree with this post, as well as having the ability to duel people as a mini-game type thing where people can learn about other classes very quickly.

I was a newb once, and I got wrecked constantly by people who were more experienced. Then I got some more experience, and got wrecked less and less. Now, I’m excited if I get beat 1v1 in a fair fight, it means I’ve found a guy who has worked hard and tpyically knows both of our classes inside and out. I congratulate these guys, offer to re-duel and see if I can learn something.

Catering to people who don’t understand the mechanics yet is only going to fully break the mechanics. If people aren’t willing to learn, then PvP is probably not their cup of tea.

Finally, to answer the OP directly… the utopian idea of pure game balance will probably never happen, but I believe the devs still work for this as best they can. They may make mistakes sometimes, but in my opinion this game has some of the best balance I’ve seen from an MMO.

Laserbolt.6731:

I have a masters level degree in computer science and in trying to solve hugely complex problems with potentially millions of combinations of factors.

This game’s PvP system feels like that. There are SO many possible interactions among the class attacks, defensive moves, timing factors, and debuffs… that it will never be balanced for all players.

It’s what they call a “combinatorial explosion”.

For one thing, new players and experienced players are playing two different games. New players don’t know how to counter Hundred Blades. Experienced teams now often don’t even bother to bring a warrior to tPvP because the warrior is shut down by players who understand how to counter the warrior.

Balance the game for experienced players, and the noobs get smashed.

In that respect, ArenaNet is absolutely correct to FIRST: get ranked matches working. Let people play against people with the same limited knowledge and skills.

That, and their plans to revamp the sPvP points system to reward a different sort of play style.

That may be all they will be able to ever achieve, as far as leveling the playing field.

There is no need to balance the game a 100% for every scenario, you need to set priorities:

- No game is completely balanced and the one that came probably closest to it (Starcraft Broodwar), achieved their balance mostly by coincidence and very skilled mapmakers.
- Balance is an ongoing process: The Metagame evolves and with it, new inbalances are discovered, changes in balance or just natural changes due to the time-factor and creativity and versatility in strategies will make the metagame shift in another direction.
- a perfect balance isn’t necessary, it just needs to be at a point, where the game is fun to play and skill is more important than other factors. Every sport and game is somewhat imbalanced, but that’s no problem, because these imbalances are small enough not to make the game bad.
- You cannot balance the game for every1; changes that will affect players on a high skill level, might affect lower level players in another way or not at all, thats why you should balance the game towards the top-end of players, because thats the direction the game needs to go in if it wants to be a serious e-Sport and will naturally evolve towards even for lower-level players.
- You can also segment off certain parts of the game, which Anet already did with some skills working different in PvE than in PvP and with certain changes only affecting structured PvP and not Hot-Join as well (15 seconds respawn-timer for example).

→ All that being said, I think that ANet does an incredibly well job at balancing the game: The changes might not be big ones and some changes that we think necessary might take a little while longer than we hoped for, but pretty much every change was one in the right direction, which is a good way of balancing a game which isn’t very old, nor much figured out by the top-players as of yet.

Here’s the tricky thing about balancing for multiplayer games: You need to balance for both new and veteran players. For new players, the devs need to provide low input-high output tools to give these players a chance against more experienced players and get them to be comfortable with their profession before they’re introduced to higher skill builds. For veteran players, there needs to be a greater focus on counterplay.

So far the current meta has failed to balance with respect to both of these groups. Thieves, bursty mesmer specs, and to an extent wariors (classes which not everyone wants to play) are downright too powerful in the hotjoin meta and new players trying any other class will be farmed. It’s definitely not a fun experience for the latter group. Furthermore, hotjoin doesn’t prepare players for tournament level play. Those running teams that aren’t premade are likely to be farmed by more experienced premade teams.

If players even manage to get into a paid tournament, the current meta provides too few options to play as there is too much emphasis on bunkering.

Class balance is always going to be complained about and is not nearly as important as you people think.

Problem is overall combat design and other things…like a 5v5 on a 3-flag map ends up causing lots of very small fights where class balance issues will of course look like a major issue…whereas in a 10v10 or even a 5v5 where everybody is together…it becomes less about what buttons one person mashes.

I’m only r7 in PvP so I probably don’t have a lot of room to talk, but a few insights from someone just leaving the “noob” phase…

I do feel that pvp caters to bunker builds, but why not? It’s about taking, and more importantly holding points. Two solid bunker-build teams against each other, it becomes a fight to “who get’s the point first.” A good bunker guardian can at least keep the other team from capping a point, so if your team got it first, even if they only get 3 or 4 points towards their score early on, it can make the difference.

I would love to see tPvP an 8v8 instead of 5v5 personally. While I don’t feel any class is OP in PvP, I do think some of the bunker builds just can’t get brought down unless the whole team is there to do it, and that’s painful to leave the other two posts just to kill one guy, who’ll respawn and be right back 20 seconds later.

Other than that, I’ve enjoyed tPvP a lot. I play mostly d/d ele and mesmer, my d/d ele can sometimes hold a point against 3 or 4, that’s awesome, because that means the rest of my team can get the other two points before I die. Other times, a single player cuts through me like butter. It’s all about experience, and every time I play I see something else in another class and just learn how to counter that.

I don’t think things should be nerfed just to encourage more pve’ers and wvw’ers to come play pvp. There should be a learning curve, especially in tourney play. There should also be an understanding that bringing your pve skills to a pvp tourney, you should get smashed. My guild is primarily a wvw guild, but we’ve been putting pvp teams together more and more. Teamchat on raidcall has consisted, not of complaining about OP teams, but instead of how we can make our team better to be more competitive. We’ve placed 3rd and 4th consistently in every tourney we’ve played, but it will require more experience, communication and most importantly a willingness to not only play, but really learn other professions if we want to be successful.

My personal opinion, the best teams for a 5 man pvp tourney is two guardians, two mesmers and a dps roamer with speed buffs, like my d/d ele or a thief.

I think all this talk about balance is meaningless until they set up infrastructure to provide objective criterion to evaluate balance.
Correctly implemented ladders (1v1, 3v3, 5v5) and looking at subset of X top players in each segment (X being 100+) would provide such objective criterion.
Each class should be about equally represented at the top (Z classes -> 1/Z probability of finding the class among top X). If class is represented below the percentage it needs buff. If it is overrepresented it needs nerf.
There is simply no need to talk so much nonsense (ppl claiming balance is nonexistent and cannot be achieved, others claim all is peachy…both are wrong, balance is pretty ok but some fixes are needed).
What is there to talk about if class_A is represented 30% or 40% among top 1v1 players? Or if it is represented at such level among the pool of players of top 5v5 teams? Anyone thinks it does not need a nerf?

And to balance the classes should become pretty easy once you get objective criterion and the feedback mechanism:
So many useless/subpar skills/utilities hang around in the available pool that it is easy to scratch them completely and put something else in its place that buffs the class in some particular aspect of the gameplay without affecting too much (or at all) other aspects. Also, it is easy to see what top players utilize the most to hit it with nerf.

tOss.9024:

I’m not sure how your master degree fits in the post lol..

tOss and Xom…

Look up “NP complete problems” on Google.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/421370/NP-complete-problem

I honestly feel that the answer to this thread’s title is as follows:

“Scissors are fine. Nerf paper.” -Rock

This is not ‘np complete problem’. It is easily solvable in the context of control.
1. You just need to define objective measure of ‘balance’ (what ‘balance’ means; I suggested it means having the same probability of finding the class represented in the top X players on ranked ladder in different types of games (1v1, 3v3, 5v5) ).
2. You need good feedback that tells you how far away from the target (balance) you are and in which direction to move classes (nerf or buff).
You will hit the target pretty quickly.
Without objective measures there will always be drama on the forum. With objective measure you can always point to ladders and say: Your class is correctly represented among top players….l2p, class may have steeper learning curve but you want to play it so live with it …etc.
Not only this, but as players find new builds that disrupt the balance, you will get the info quickly and be able to adjust again.

Laserbolt.6731:

I have a masters level degree in computer science and in trying to solve hugely complex problems with potentially millions of combinations of factors.

This game’s PvP system feels like that. There are SO many possible interactions among the class attacks, defensive moves, timing factors, and debuffs… that it will never be balanced for all players.

It’s what they call a “combinatorial explosion”.

For one thing, new players and experienced players are playing two different games. New players don’t know how to counter Hundred Blades. Experienced teams now often don’t even bother to bring a warrior to tPvP because the warrior is shut down by players who understand how to counter the warrior.

Balance the game for experienced players, and the noobs get smashed.

In that respect, ArenaNet is absolutely correct to FIRST: get ranked matches working. Let people play against people with the same limited knowledge and skills.

That, and their plans to revamp the sPvP points system to reward a different sort of play style.

That may be all they will be able to ever achieve, as far as leveling the playing field.

I took a class called linear algebra in college that dealt with matrix opperations… seems like some function of the skill damage matricies and the time vectors should be set to equal zero and solved for the necessary equalibrium. Balance thru math! But ill leave setting up that equation to someone like you because i get a headache just trying to outline the structure of it mentally.

The balance will never be perfect, but can be pretty good, right now I would say balance is ok.

Somethings clearly are not attractive enough options for people to play them, same with some traits and that hampers builds. Some builds are excessively strong in some aspects and should be adjusted to be more balanced across the board. As the game ages what those things are will change and hopefully the respective list becomes smaller.