Guild Wars 2

One of the obvious reasons that an mmo can’t achieve close to the level of balance of a pure PvP game such as SMITE/LoL/HoN/Dawngate/BLC is because of lack of resources. Those games have a dedicated team who all work on PvP balance while an mmo has to divide its resources.

That’s the obvious reason, but a far less obvious reason is the fact that an mmorpg endeavors to give you many customization options, to a fault. It is well known that more diversity = less balance.

This game, for instance, has trait lines and utility slots. These customization factors add a lot of variables, and as a result it becomes extraordinarily difficult to balance the game.

In MOBAs there is diversity to be sure, but there is very limited diversity hermetically contained in packets. Each packet in turn is easy to balance as there isn’t any diversity in skill options; the only diversity comes from item options.

Honestly I think the MOBAS are unbalanced, the only MMO’s that can balance well that I have seen are Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.

At this moment, I don’t find anything particularly overpowered.

You may be right about the ressources. For Mobas the only source of income is the pvp and everyone works to make the pvp balanced.

However, balancing a Moba is different for a couple of reasons. The picking and banning takes care of some unbalances. In addition, every hero or champion can only exist once per map.

Oh yeah, that’s a good point. Yet another reason why MOBAs are more balanced.

I’d like to point out that the fact that MMOs tend to have different game modes is a huge factor as well(sPVP/PVE/WWW). MOBA diversity also comes from the number of heroes and the combos you can come up with by using them or the counters that you can come up for some heroes.

It’s not really about the PVP resource, as long as there’s another game mode like PVE it will always be in the way of balancing around PVP no matter the resources.

Iceflame.5024:

I’d like to point out that the fact that MMOs tend to have different game modes is a huge factor as well(sPVP/PVE/WWW). MOBA diversity also comes from the number of heroes and the combos you can come up with by using them or the counters that you can come up for some heroes.

It’s not really about the PVP resource, as long as there’s another game mode like PVE it will always be in the way of balancing around PVP no matter the resources.

I feel like I’m repeating myself. Each hero has a single set of skills, and two additional configurable skills on an incredibly long cooldown. Furthermore, the additional skill choice pool is very limited (4-5) and doesn’t necessarily have a big influence on the hero’s gameplay. The only other customizability comes from items, which are very limited in how they impact the end hero. The devs do not have to account for too many variables within the context of a single hero.

By contrast, consider this game. Imagine each weapon skillset is a hero’s skill set, there are are a total of 5 customizable skills out of which the utility skills have an incredibly diverse choice pool. Oftentimes these skills have short cooldowns and impact the character’s perfrormance greatly. Furthermore, there are traits with built in stat mods which add a lot of customization. All this results in too many variables to account for within the context of a single weapon set.

In MOBA picking and banning does care of some balance but on the other hand in moba you take counters to your enemy heroes. And you won’t go in lane with some hero you don’t stand a chance, someone else will.

In open world pvp there’s no lanes, you can’t ban proffesions and that’s why it’s harder to balance. If you would put heroes from MOBAs in any MMO they would be imbalanced really hard.

What I DO really miss from MOBAs are great combos. In gw2 noone really cares about combo fields. Well maybe some players combo off of their own fields or some players in WvW accidentaly do combos on fields placed somewhere around them but that’s it.

A while ago I saw a fun video of lik 4-6 people in WvW holding back zerg of 25+ people at some choke point and that’s what WvW should look like. Not just mindles zergs all over. :/

Geff, please do not limit the word MOBA to the league of legend system, HON and DOTA as well as bloodline champions do not have any summoner spells. I was talking from a general point of view and I agree with your point about having too many variables, I just wanted to point out some things and I guess disagree with the resource argument.