GW2: How2Ballance without making PvE people whine.

If Anet wanted, they could make any mob unbeatable by giving them the perfect skill combinations. All executed with perfect reaction time.

However, who would ever enjoy an unbeatable game? Ever played Ikaruga?

What would be the point of crafting an unbeatable AI? That would just promote finding ways to abuse the game to beat it, rather than playing tactically.

I seriously doubt people in favor of balanced, synergized groups are asking for every mob pack on the radar to be a full party-sized super-AI group of death. As you said, that would not exactly be fun.

Unless it was a final boss-group fight in the endgame or something.

skipping past all the PvE vs. PvP nonsense that's going on in this thread and concentrating on the topic of balance. I'm a PvE'r and never touch PvP, so don't think this is biased towards PvP, but having a PvP beta to balance skills for the whole game to start with is a pretty good idea.

From what I understand, they're planning on a smoother transition between PvE and PvP in GW2, so I don't think splitting skills is one of the options they will have.

PvE players will know that most of PvE revolves around tank'n'spank tactics. The PvE game evolves, but only to different tank'n'spank tactics (ie. instead of a warrior with fire ele's, we now have permasin's with cryers or RoJ's). Having a game with skills balanced for PvP would most likely reduce the effectiveness of this tactic as it obviously is not valid in PvP. PvE players would therefore be forced to run balanced builds and actually think about what how they play the game.

Yes, in the current game PvE players would whine that the game is too challenging without their perma's and AoE damage, but this thread isn't about the current game. Starting fresh with GW2 players would not be starting with the game they have had and would be adjusting their play for a new game anyways. Don't start GW2 with available tank'n'spank tactics and people can't complain that it has been taken away. Make the average PvE player think about how they play and they'll find it easier to join in PvP should they choose to.

because the PvP portion of the game is what gave us the PvE... it came first and deleting that portion of the game would break the PvE

The OP is pretty good in pinpointing how the chronology really matters, because people get attached to things before they're balanced properly. I think the obvious flaw is how to pull off implementing that timeline realistically, and clearly there are tons of different viewpoints on what should be done (so few responses even addressing the original point). But at least it generated some other good posts.

You mean which came first, the chicken or the egg ? I was only kidding by the /delete comment but how can you honestly say deleting pvp would break pve ? Thats an insane comment. Actually, if Guild Wars never had pvp it still would be a great game and the time spent trying to balance the 1 billion skills we have, we could of had a ton of more content added to the game.

Check out this 2 page article and perhaps some can be enlightened. It absolutely 100% true and it has already been proven.

http://www.massively.com/2009/04/15/...essful-honest/

If guild wars did not have PvP based design it would be Yet Another Cookie Cutter MMO. And seriously crappy game.

PvP served as handbrake against diku mud insanity. Insanely dumb thigs like increasing level cap and making levels matter. Hard to reach equipment that matters. No protection prayers ... all that stupid stuff.

It has done it well. GWs PvE was interesting for me because it was PvP ballanced PvE. A gem in stinking dump of MMO games. Sigh.

That article has no relevance regarding this game, as PvP wasn't a tacked-on afterthought, but designed as an INTEGRAL PART of the game. Unlocking runes, the array of varied foes, the slower pace to learn the intricacies of your character, henchies being such crap that you are encouraged to play in TEAMS...all designed to learn the mechanics of your character and of the game, essential to playing good PvP. Despite this, they still were able to write a decent storyline and make PvE challenging and fun. As for WAR, if anything, the whole game was incomplete. It felt too small, as a whole, and had more leaks than the Titanic regarding memory usage, all for character mechanics that looked as stilted as LotRO.

Yes, you don't NEED PvP to be a successful MMO. I would argue, however, that all that made the original GW unique would be lost if PvP weren't an integral aspect of the game. The point of World vs World is the same as CM's/AB in GW: to give the average PvE player a taste of PvP and, if they want, to make the transition easier. The fact that, above a certain level, the benefits in power will drop(as in a player at level 80 wouldn't be far under a level 95, as opposed to the difference between a level 80 and a level 60). There are a lot of people not playing GW much anymore, who are hoping GW2 will bring back that complete game that was there when GW was released.

The games the article mentions do not have PvP, they have PKing. Guild Wars has PvP, you can only engage in combat against others who want to engage in combat, in a controlled environment as well. It wasn't tacked on as an after-thought or expansion pack, the game had PvP before it had PvE, and it was planned all along that the game would have both with as much integration as possible. The entire first campaign was designed to teach you how to get better at team work and your class to ready you for PvP. Some of the PvE missions were even based around PvP maps to teach you how to do things.

It's been said in numerous articles that GW's PvE was always designed from the ground up to get casual players and PvEers ready for PvP. They weren't trying to force everyone to PvP, they were just trying to make it as friendly as possible for people to try out and experiment in. Almost all PvEers don't like PvP just because they are afraid. Afraid someone on their team might get mad at them, afraid they'll die, afraid someone on the other team will make fun of them. It's too bad because as much as you like PvE, you'd like PvP 100x more if only you gave it an honest effort.

I lol'ed at some here that think making mobs with human-like AI would solve everything.

It doesn't.

People are not all alike.

People do not always play to win. People do not always look for challenges. People do not always want a difficult opponent.

Despite the label on GWs being the PVP game it supposedly is, the game also has to generate enough interest among the less "gaming" inclined.

It is afterall a business, this game. A cash cow.

GW mechanics are clearly PvP-influenced. The strictly limited attribute/skill system, item homogeneity, lack of consumable items like health/mana potions, etc. all point to PvP balancing.

The "perfect AI is no fun" argument is a strawman. The point is to make the AI play like humans, rather than like AIs. Strictly PvE tactics like tanking should never have worked in the first place. Any human player would ignore the invincible guy and go straight for the delicious squishies in the backline.

If PvE were more like "PvP with AI opponents", there would never have been any need for PvE/PvP split; anything that balanced PvP would also have balanced PvE. People would also have felt more comfortable with the PvE-PvP transition, because PvP would just be the same stuff you did in PvE (just with human opponents instead of AI ones). I've always wondered why PvE content was so different from PvP, if PvP was supposed to be the real GW endgame.

That also means that PvE needs to be constantly rebalanced to counter what players run. PvP does this "automatically" through the player-controlled metagame, but the monsters in PvE don't have this capability. The easiest way to tone down PvE abuse is to have monsters run hard counters to popular PvE builds; sure, this takes more effort than tweaking numbers on a few "overpowered" skills, but it's generally a more elegant and effective solution.

The point is, if you're going to design a game where PvP is a fairly large part of the deal, why make PvE so drastically different?

You can't have human-like AI because it is too expensive computationally. Each machine must run hundreds of instances, each with dozens of monsters `active` at any given time. There is a reason MMO's and online action RPG's always have bad AI, because it's all technology allows for.

Guild Wars will never be balanced because of the amount of skills the game currently has. It is seriously too much work at this point to try to balance everything and not to mention no matter what skill update Arenanet has done, pvpers has never liked any of it from the get go. The best thing to do is do with what we have and show more interest in Guild Wars 2 because if Guild Wars 2 isn't a success do you actually think people will be coming back to the same ole same ole Guild Wars ?

human-like AI would mean unpredictable and prone to messing up. As far as i know, no AI ever messes up at what it's supposed to do.

GW was really balanced towards the end of its first year, during the first tournament season. It's not even my opinion, it's an easily proven fact, because every decent guild at the time had 3-5 builds they'd run every night. Rarely did a guild run a build more than 1-2 times before changing to a completely different build. Te had 4 solid builds and 1 iffy, and after every match we would randomly change to another build. It was by far the best time in GvG history to play, it was GW at it's absolute peak. Factions ruined it, although unintentionally, and it would never recover.

Sorry...but I don't want to have 10 minutes "matches" with every mob I come across. If I want to play a strategy game I think I'll reinstall starcraft.

epiphany. I've got it.
get this...
NO SKILLS! just auto attacking. Super balanced, no worries about future skill balances either.

What are you playing for? This is the complete wrong game for character-building, loot farming, or power trading. If you just want a fantasy genre level grinder with no monthly fee, then you're part of the crowd whose $50 should be taken from and ignored.

Less human like, more hero-like. Even the Zaishen can function with their terrible bars.

It's a step away from creating 'challenge' by pumping monster stats and then filling a zone with supercharged mobs. Players end up exploiting the obvious weak point (ie: bladed aatxe) - I'd rather see synergized skill bars rather than double stats and monster skills.

Don't put words in my mouth. I was responding to those people thinking super AI = balance.

This is what I was talking about, people play RPG for the adventure, aka Role-Playing. There's no way to have a PvE that can be balanced in a PvP way unless Anet can create the perfect AI, in which afterward they might as well remove the PvE portion and just make a small arena where players fight AIs for 10 minutes, just like those ridiculously long GvG matches. Then GW becomes a RTS game with RPG elements...