When it comes to game design, there is an overwhelming importance for solid foundations, and sound positions. Sadly, very few people in the gaming industry have these. In many cases like guild wars, it’s more or less coders doing design aspects; the simple truth is your not a good designer just because you can code.
The concept of “every spec is good” is a dream, one that has not been realized yet, and which will likely never happen. I am of the opinion that we are no where near close enough to the ability to do this, especially with the current mindset our industry has of “copy paste” concepts from other games.
This means, that Guild Wars 2, In my opinion will never get the concept of “all specs are good” Right. Why Do you ask? I’ll explain.
Complexity Vs Depth
It’s a bit tricky to explain the difference of complexity and depth, so i wont go to much into it but the simple way i put of defining the two is as follows
- Complexity is an option, that will benefit another through investigation of the situation, and what benefits might arise from finding out how to exploit that situation.
- Depth is an option, which is clear at first glance (the first time you read it) and requires little or no further thought or investigation.
Now that we have fined these lets look at why the game will never be balanced
Describing the situation of the game in a metaphorical way
“the balance cycle of gw2 is equal to a doctor giving pain killers to kill the pain, only to ignore what is causing it. If you want to stop the pain, you cure the problem, not conceal it”
understanding the metaphor
Basically in a short, the current development process is something to the effect of, nerf buff nerf buff nerf buff. It’s an endless cycle, and it will never end if you continue to repeat it in this manner.
Why?
The reason for this is because there is a lot of shifting parts. Lets say we have a list, something like
1 Power
2 Condition
3 Precision
From this list, we have this situation that the meta in general favors option 1 ) power.
After a nerf, condition comes up, and then it gets nerfed to give way to precision. This cycle will repeat over and over. Expecting a different result will only designate you as an insane person.
This is important to understand because this is the exact situation that is taking place. however, the game does not need to be like this. hence we come to the metaphor.
So What Gives? What is the cure for the disease?
This question brings us to a very important discussion and before i give an answer to this i want to point out some very important points.
First we have to meet some conclusions
- The majority of players do not have the desire, or the time to invest in finding broken builds.
- Complexity offers no benefit that depth does not, and brings with it major problems, including game decline and potential population limits, and major instabilities in balance.
The disease
In truth, the major problem to game balance is the developers way they go about doing their development process. What i mean by this is that they are not well founded in their foundation concepts for the games balance.
For Example lets look at blizzard
- blizzard understands how to use metrics, where many others do not. this is probably due to the people in charge of values like this being more founded in math then most coders are. in short, their specialists are good.
- part of the reason blizzard is so good at what they do is because they are very well founded in base concepts, think of them as the gaming worlds version of isaac newtons laws of physics ,only for gaming. these concepts include things like (but not limited to)
- sticking to their concepts with an iron fist (your laws are only good if you stick to them)
- Keeping livability rates in target time frames.
for example, 20-30 seconds is the sweet spot for fast game pvp (Which is where gw2 should be imo)
- adjusting anything that does not offer competitive play, or is overly competitive
- Keeping an important rule in mind “game development is not just coding, its also psychology”
- Paying attention to play trending and demands, so you keep everything “balanced”.
- putting classes into key aspects of game play
- Last and most importantly, they recognize that there is a breaking point. It took me a few years of game balance work to even become conscious of this, but in short there is a “golden ratio” to game balance across all genre, that is a max variance of 13%. It seems that when classes differ from other classes by an amount greater than this they become broken. This is a general application there is a few situations where it can be exceeded slightly, but the true target “gold zone” is about 8.5%.
- Understanding how to make both aspects of the player base happy (Hardcore/softcore).
Recently blizzard made a bold move to define the value of “skill” a previously very subjective and highly debated concept. They did this by defining it as “ability to micromanage”. In Warlords of draenor this ended up meaning “tracking /proc/buff management” This is highly important, because it gave hardcore players the ability to exceed the casual players due to their skill, but retained the principle of the “golden ratio”. As a result they came out with a system that was balance no matter if your casual or hardcore, but rewarded you marginally for being good, and skilled.
Gw2 and how it fits in
We look at guild wars 2 we seem to come into issues when it comes to such principles, for example
- there is a massive variance in damage rates of each class, but those classes retain superior survivabiltiy rates. A great example of this is the necro’s reaper shroud.
- In many cases a class invalidates itself, again point in case is shroud, and repear shroud.
- in many cases, some classes are near unkillable because of having massive amounts of stability issues when it comes to addressing survivability rates. Examples are Guardian, and elementalists perma 33% Protection builds.
- in some cases classes depend on a very specific build, or would other wise be highly ineffective in pvp. A great example is elementalist. Auramancer is probably the only really competitive build of the class. Other specs just dont compete with it.
- In many cases skills are very unpractical, which violates the concept of makings things feel psychologically feel “good”. For example elementalists dagger abilities for lighing basic attack is highly unpractical for a some what squishy class.
- In some cases, their is classes that offer so much damage, they instantly kill someone. Examples of this are thief, and dragon hunter.
So to sum all of this up, this game will never be balanced until major issues are addressed, these issues have nothing to do with what to change as much as they do to guide the developers in the direction of how to implement changes.
For this reason the game is destined to repeat this cycle of massive instabilities.
I call on the development team to engage me in some form or way to discuss these things. My teamspeak is open to anyone who is wanting to have conversations about them (as well as the devs) contact me via pm to obtain the info (additionally if your a clan that needs a voice chat we can set up you with a place on our ts, we have a 500 slot server).
Thanks for the read.