GDC :"how to ruin your game in 4 steps"
Even though this is just a comic relief, I think there is a lot of truth about it.
I have worked as game designer and programmer and I am still teaching game design. Few of the key principles of designing MMORPG, fighting and action game skills and mechanics:
1. Each well-rounded skill should do one thing well e.g. damage, utility or defense, maximum 2 from that list and that should be countered with heavy cost (mana, energy, sacrificing own life force etc) and/or long cooldown. E.g. a well-rounded defense skill only provides defenses and does no damage or does very little damage and offers no utility. If skill does two things well at same time it should never have a relatively cheap cost or cooldown.
2. Each powerful game mechanism requires a hard counter counter e.g. direct damage can be blocked, evaded or fire damage can be countered with complete fire immunity or partial fire resistance. The most problematic powerful game mechanics are invisibility and stealth, which some wise game designers leave out of their games. Invisibility could have “see invisibility” or “invisibility purge” or they must be balanced with extreme rarity and very heavy cost. Teleport could have a counter skill which prevents teleports happening or foils them (forcing random wrong target). Both teleportation and invisibility often allow to skip game content and can create very cheap and annoying tactics in pvp. Imagine how bad CS:GO would be with group stealth and teleports.
3. Fully passive mechanics should be clearly weaker than any of the active ones, more like secondary things.
(DISCLAIMER: This is far from a complete list)
It is very easy to break these rules and invent too powerful skills for your favorite professions. In general almost every game of this type starts to suffer from skill and trait inflation aka power creep. Year 2015 was very bad for Guild Wars 2 as the power creep was massive, first with June 2015 trait rework and later with HoT. Almost all got tons of power creep except the warrior.
Deniara / Ayna – I want the original WvWvW maps back – Desolation [EU]
1. Each well-rounded skill should do one thing well e.g. damage, utility or defense, maximum 2 from that list and that should be countered with heavy cost (mana, energy, sacrificing own life force etc) and/or long cooldown. E.g. a well-rounded defense skill only provides defenses and does no damage or does very little damage and offers no utility. If skill does two things well at same time it should never have a relatively cheap cost or cooldown.
While reading this open a new tab go to the wiki and stare at the scrapper hammer skills. They all completely ignore this step. Infact most of the elite spec weapons ignore this step. What was anet thinking?
see no evil ,until i stab you
Even though this is just a comic relief, I think there is a lot of truth about it.
I have worked as game designer and programmer and I am still teaching game design. Few of the key principles of designing MMORPG, fighting and action game skills and mechanics:
1. Each well-rounded skill should do one thing well e.g. damage, utility or defense, maximum 2 from that list and that should be countered with heavy cost (mana, energy, sacrificing own life force etc) and/or long cooldown. E.g. a well-rounded defense skill only provides defenses and does no damage or does very little damage and offers no utility. If skill does two things well at same time it should never have a relatively cheap cost or cooldown.
2. Each powerful game mechanism requires a hard counter counter e.g. direct damage can be blocked, evaded or fire damage can be countered with complete fire immunity or partial fire resistance. The most problematic powerful game mechanics are invisibility and stealth, which some wise game designers leave out of their games. Invisibility could have “see invisibility” or “invisibility purge” or they must be balanced with extreme rarity and very heavy cost. Teleport could have a counter skill which prevents teleports happening or foils them (forcing random wrong target). Both teleportation and invisibility often allow to skip game content and can create very cheap and annoying tactics in pvp. Imagine how bad CS:GO would be with group stealth and teleports.
3. Fully passive mechanics should be clearly weaker than any of the active ones, more like secondary things.
(DISCLAIMER: This is far from a complete list)
It is very easy to break these rules and invent too powerful skills for your favorite professions. In general almost every game of this type starts to suffer from skill and trait inflation aka power creep. Year 2015 was very bad for Guild Wars 2 as the power creep was massive, first with June 2015 trait rework and later with HoT. Almost all got tons of power creep except the warrior.
I’ve stopped playing the game since HoT’s release, and I only occasionaly lurk these forums.
But the 2nd point of this post is hilarious. Even trying to compare GW2’s mechanics to CS:GO’s ones is just plain wrong.
You having worked as a game designer (even assuming that it is true) is absolutely irrelevant. It’s not like every game designer knows how to properly design games – let alone balance them.
Each game has its own set of “rules” that must be balanced within itself. You claim that “there should be a way to prevent teleporting”, yet one of the most successful competitive games of all time (League of Legends) has entire matches relying on the proper use of Flash – whose CD is huge but not-that high – and this without considering the many teleporting abilities that a lot of Champions have.
With this I am not saying that GW2 doesn’t have its problems. Heck, I’ve stopped playing the game because of how terrible (at least for me) it became after HoT (no, actually, after the 23rd June 2015 patch). However, coming here and trying to apply “set-in-stone” (?) rules to GW2’s combat system is just plain wrong.
EDIT: points 1 and 3 of your post are valid. It’s just the second that is out of place. I clarified this.
(edited by hihey.1075)
Each game has its own set of “rules” that must be balanced within itself. You claim that “there should be a way to prevent teleporting”, yet one of the most successful competitive games of all time (League of Legends) has entire matches relying on the proper use of Flash – whose CD is huge but not-that high – and this without considering the many teleporting abilities that a lot of Champions have.
Well, of course the rules can be broken and nobody can condense complex thing as game design into just few rules, which would always applt. You probably misunderstood me. I tried to express that it is also possible to balance a very powerful ability like teleport without a hard counter by making it a scarce resource, in other words: make it really expensive to use (e.g. high mana/energy cost or life sacrifice) or give it a very long cooldown. Long range teleport which you can use very frequently without any cost will make the game very difficult to balance.
I’m not expert in LoL, but to my knowledge Flash has 300 s cooldown, which can by reduced masteries and enchaments, but never below 180 s. And that spell used to have shorter cooldown. It seems Riot Games decided to increase it cooldown multiple times, aka nerf it.
I know it is unfair compare to a totally different game, because the games have totally different pacing and mechanism, but a fairly equivalent skill in GW2 would be mesmer’s blink which has mere 30 s cooldown (24 s traited CD). That is a very low cooldown for a stun break which also serves 1200 range instant cast teleport. It is arguably one of the best utility skills in the game and the best stun break mesmers have. Increasing its untraited cooldown to 40 s wouldn’t necessarily be a bad move. Portal has 72 s cooldown, but can be used up to 20 times with 1 cast, which is massive.
Anyways I wish Arenanet would adopt the balance strategy seen in several other:
Frequent small updates. And please tone down the power creep.
Tone down the Hot specializations so that they are seen as choices instead of mandatory picks.
Deniara / Ayna – I want the original WvWvW maps back – Desolation [EU]
(edited by Deniara Devious.3948)
i wonder if they take ideas from esl players.
wouldnt surprise me.
Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE