Here:Foundations of Balance and Diversity

Personally, I have a more tolerant view towards broken skills, which I believe came from my background playing Magic: the Gathering. Notably, I played through the Onslaught-Mirrordin and part of the Mirrordin-Kamigawa T2 scenes. During this time, a deck "build" called Affinity ruled the roost. It utilized undercosted artifacts (a type of card) to quickly smash the opponent. In response, all decks began packing cards that countered artifacts. The existence of Affinity basically made any deck that could not effectively deal with artifacts unviable. In addition, non-Affinity decks had to be very careful about using artifacts themselves, because of the sheer amount of artifact hate in the metagame.

Despite this, however, "builds" that could hold their own against Affinity sprung up, and while the metagame wasn't as diverse as it could have been without Affinity's strength, there were many different deck "builds" floating around and winning tournaments. Not only that, but strategic build-creating was still present even in Affinity as different people sought to tweak their build in ways to give themselves an advantage against othe Affinity decs. I still had quite a bit of fun playing during this time.

Overpowered decks were not limited to that one instance. In Apocalypse-Odyssey, we had Upheaval-Psychatog decks that basically sought to prevent the opponent from doing anything important while it builds up a huge amount of resources and then wins. It was definitely the best deck of the period. In Odyssey-Onslaught, UG Madness used a mechanic to churn out undercosted creatures and was arguably the best deck at the time. The larger formats were more balanced, but that was due to the sheer amount of cards available for them. When Guild Wars gets another two or three expansions of skills, it might get to the point where just about everything has a counter and there is no overpowered build. Right now, due to the limited amount of skills and the newness of the game, things will not be perfectly balanced.

However, there were times when cards needed to be banned. In Type 1, where every card could be used, there were incidents where certain cards allowed for overpowered decks. They were eventually restricted (max 1 copy of that card per deck instead of the usual 4), but it took a while for them to be banned. In fact, Gush, a card that allowed the user to draw cards and at times reuse resources was restricted only after the deck it powered had been around for around a month. This was in an environment where there were multiple cards that could serve as back-up counters to various strategies, and this involved a card that was not itself a counter to anything. In the case of Nature's Renewal, there currently aren't enough back-up counters to enchantments that are good enough. The balance changes that must be made should be meticulously considered before being implemented, or we'll go right back to an unbalanced metagame.

It's true that there are balance issues with this game, but these issues do not eliminate strategic choices made before and on the battlefield, and they certainly do not eliminate the fun in PvP. Changes need to be made to fix these balance issues, but let's give Arena.Net some time, k? <cliche>Rome wasn't built in a day</cliche>.

Two things:

1) I don't see your point with damage necros. One of the top American guilds runs damage-focused necros, which seems to constitute prima facie evidence that necro damage is usable.
2) In my opinion, the reason the metagame sucks right now is that skills like ER, Oath Shot, and Rituals are balanced as Spike skills instead of Johnny skills. Clearly Oath Shot and ER are very fun combo pieces, but we see with things like Tolarian Academy that combo pieces are hard to balance near an adequate competitive level. The problem with Nature Rituals is identical -- because their effects are symmetric, they have to be more powerful than skills affecting only the other team, because otherwise there's no real point in using them over the asymmetric skills. For the Magic analogy, consider Stax -- this card wasn't especially unbalanced given it affecting both players, but games often got a lot less fun after it came out. The same is true of QZ and to a lesser extent NR. Their impact on gameplay with regard to balance is more a consequence of the necessity to balance symmetric effects above asymmetric ones. This makes the whole ritual system as it stands a bit of a nightmare.

Necro damage is usable, it's just balanced to take the health gain into account. Under most circumstances, that health gain simply does not matter, and Necro damage is poor because of it. If you can make use of that health gain, through good use of health sacrifice skills for example, then Blood nukes start to be attractive.

I'll propose that those characters are not run because they are optimal nukers, but because they fill other roles in their build in addition to being good enough nukers to justify the slot.

Peace,
-CxE

This post seems like a good place to clear up the common misconceptions about how things work, which there are quite a few in gwg posters. There's a lot of people who really don't understand how warriors work and are claiming they are underpowered. Quality discussions seem to be semi-rare around here. Hopefully this one stays this way.

First look at warriors vs rangers vs eles. Eles deliver the best spike damage but run out of steam the fastest (with the exception of the broken ether renewal). Rangers can deliver pretty decent dps with stuff like Melandrus arrows and never run out of steam but on the other hand they have only one way to spike and that's with Quick Shot, which requires a whole build tailored to it. In other words, they are generally stuck on a constant dps level. Warriors have the flexibility of both. They can save up adren and unleash it at once with frenzy on (adren spiking) or they can spend adren as it comes and sustain a higher dps than rangers.

Now if you take a warrior to random arena with just warrior skills, you'll quickly find that their dps is not all that great and that they can't spike well. However, there is another element to warriors and rangers that eles do not have, as blackace mentioned. You can buff stack warriors and rangers and amplify their damage tremendously. Orders, Conjures, Strength of Honor, and Judges Insight all accomplish this purpose (preparations as well for rangers). When you throw these on a ranger or especially warrior, they become just scary damage machines.

A buffed hammer warrior can solo a monk single handedly because of knockdowns (within the span of two kds the monk will be dead). Hammers, due to swing time and skills, achieve the weakest dps of all weapons. To make up for that, they have knockdowns, making them 'always useful' rather than sword/axe, which really need a buff to shine. I believe that if you buff a sword or axe warrior enough they can also solo a monk (assuming the monk isn't completely tailored for self heals using something like AoF). If you know anything about GW balance, you know that monks need to be able to outheal damage in order for them to be useful. Because you can buff stack a warrior to out dps a monks hps, warriors have to have some way to be stopped outside of healing.

Warriors have by far the most counters than anything else. Ward against Melee, Aegis, Guardian, Empathy, Price of Failure, Spirit shackles (to some extent), soothing images, sympathetic visage, shadow of fear, and enfeebling blood to name a few. Now some of those suck (empathy and pof in that list), others are simply amazing (WaM). Most of those work against Rangers, but some such as Sof/EB work best vs warriors because they clump up when surrounding a single target. There was a rather large thread awhile back where people were complaining that warriors have too many counters and therefore are bad. Some skills which are countered are above, others induce things like weakness or blindness, which are severely harmful to ones dps output. However, through an able team, most of those counters are limited at best. Mend ailment absolutely owns blind inducing skills in terms of energy. Blinding Flash is 15, mend is 5. Throw dirt is cheap with expertise but has a long recharge. In a war of weakness/blind inducing vs removing, the removal will win (only exception being signet of midnight, which is elite). As I've already hinted at, warriors need to have this many weaknesses in order to be kept in check. Otherwise they will just tear through the enemy defense with their absurd damage potential and force the enemy team to attack the warriors or die. Warrior vs warrior hate balance, NR excluding, seems to be pretty well balanced to me.

Energy denial is imo a pretty big issue. When concerning shutdown, you have a couple of choices: hexes like guilt/shame (screwed somewhat by NR), interrupts like power leak, and energy denial like edrain. But I honestly don't see that these are balanced at all. Energy Drain, Debilitating Shot, and Fear me! are the top 3 energy denial skills and can be tailored to make edenial far stronger than normal shutdown. With interrupts you have to be skilled and react fast. Doesn't leave much room for errors without something like arcane connundrum on. Hexes are vulnerable to removal. A big part of that is that like Blackace said, energy management skills are mostly elite and those that aren't elite (like attunements) are not the greatest thing. And the best way to shutdown an elite is with signet of humility.

I don't believe there are any counters, besides ranger interrupts/cof/leech sig to sig humility, and nothing you can do once it's up. It's free, and normally you can disable someone's elite slightly less than 3/4 of the time. Now, with stuff like edrain/offering that requires precise timing or otherwise it's affect is little. On the other hand, with QZ (screws up balance greatly imo, since many things are balanced by recharge times) you can keep their elite permanently disabled. With proper sig humility use, you can keep any good energy management methods shut out completely, and there's really no other counter to strong edenial builds incorporating debilitating shot+echo, edrain+arcane echo, fear me+echo, and signet of weariness besides using it yourself. It seems to be stronger than normal shutdown, and that's where a balance issue may lie. I would like to see others thoughts on this.

I don't have the background or history that some of you do with the game, as I have only been playing since retail release. However, some thoughts nonetheless:
If we are to assume that the goal that the collective "we" are striving for is to reward those with certain intangibles, like skill (outisde of the game definition), intelligence, intuition, etc., with success, over those players who do not possess those intangibles to the same degree, I think we need to examine how - operationally - success is currently achieved.
Success can be defined as victory in PvP, mission completion in PvE, or perhaps even as being a valued member of a team or group.
I'm sure I am excluding certain aspects of play, but in my mind the relative "ability" of a player can be seen to essentially fall into one or the other (or perhaps some combination) of two categories; the strategic and creative combination of skills seems to be an integral design feature, as is the player's ability to read and react to a dynamic situation in "real time".
As to determining skill bar makeup, and crafting team builds, with experience comes advantage, as it should be. But also with forethought and intelligence, unique or unusal, yet successful skill or team combinations can be achieved by a reasonably new(er) player. As such, diversity is achieved through a blend of experience and creativity.
So too a player's ability to react to a situation, to "read the play", to borrow a sporting analogy, improves with time and practice. Even though this is not a FPS, some of the same skills apply, particularly in PvP, with regards to processing information quickly, corresponding twitch reflex reaction, picking out targets rapidly, attacking, defending.


At least, I believe that, from the game designer's perspective, this was how "success" was meant to be achieved.


From my perspective, alot of the allure of competing and developing my skills, game knowledge, and experience so as to give myself and my team the greatest propsensity for success is hampered by both the metagame knowledge that myself and so many others possess as well as a "mis-balance" of a few skills and their corresponding team builds. Although I am by no means a regular in the Hall of Heroes, I know that my and my team's success will be determined by our ability to execute - by rote - one or the other of a set of teambuilds that currently have no effective counter. Victory seems to be, more often than not, defined as the team that either executes the same routine more efficiently or flawlessly than the other team's ability to execute the very same routine, or else the team that has better access to metagame information.

It's complete foolishness, from the point of view of being competitive in PvP, to enter a team that does not run one of a few certain builds. Quite simply, any "success" you may achieve will be shortlived. Understandably, most/all teams that wish to be competitive run those builds, which rely on an individual's ability to perform - again, by rote - the same limited and specific role within the greater context better or quicker than your counterpart on the opposing side.

Certainly this situation does not foster growth, experimentation, or longevity, as it's essentially a closed system. There is a learning curve to aquire the neccessary skill to execute in a competitive format, the gameplay experience plateaus rapidly, which in turn fosters ennui and departure, leaving room for new players who have completed the learning curve to step into the vacated role.

It may sound corny, but I kinda yearn for there to be a place for the creative, quick reflex and quick minded, experienced player at the victory podium that isn't a function of their ability to slot into a pre-given position on a pre-given team composition. What makes a really good air spiker, or spirit ranger, or smiting elmo? Or even worse, 105 monk in PvE? Success, within certain contexts, are their province based not on the intangibles referred to above by rather by virtue of metagame knowledge of the situational application of each build.

I've played the game for many hundreds of hours, enjoyed it immensely, and feel that I have had my 50 dollar investment returned to me a hundredfold already, with the promise of more to come. For that, the game and its developers have my loyalty and great support. But I do believe a critical reassment of the underlying principles of how in-game success is conceptualised versus how it is currently achieved, and a corresponding redefining of certain skills, and the intra-team combination of said skills, is required.

Otherwise we have exactly what we have now. Which is that success is defined, after acquiring a base level of skill and game knowledge, as the ability to follow a template.

That would make them situationally good, due to the fact that the enchantments can be removed rendering them back to the sub-par damage dealing levels. In the instance of offense loaded buff stacked warriors could be used against them as indirect time bombs for damage through mesmer, necro, and ranger means. This would be opposed to trying to use those means as a way to break defensive loaded buff stacked teams and not even scratching the surface.

The same could be said for elementalist energy management skills being weak versus enchantment removal as well, but the elementalist is not totally dependant on those energy management means in order to be effective. The duration of uptime changes, but the effect applied per cast is the same and just as immediate when felt, unlike the physical damage users.

It would be a very different story if all sides of the equasion had the same style of hurdles to overcome or enhancement options to choose from.

One of those spells I listed is a maintained enchant (soh). The others are constant recast, especially the orders. Conjures suffer from long downtimes if removed though.

The thing is that enchants vs removal sucks. There are many chafe enchants, making single enchant strips (like shatter and strip) crappy for that purpose. The things like Rend or Lingering have horrible recharge and cost respectively. Chilly is still a single enchant strip, making it bad outside of an anti-healing ball (mediocre at that). WotP is too situational to be of use. This is also quite a large problem that needs to be addressed as soon as idiotic renewal is nerfed.

Unless you severely gimp your team so that everyone carries rend or lingering you will have to make a choice: aim for the buffed warriors, and forced constant recasts (which with things like JI or orders you will be anyway, not a big issue), or aim for the monks who will be defensively stacked as well, because you won't be able to do both. You probably will only be able to annoy 2 or so targets given reasonable limits of a normal build (i,e not many /n). I say annoy because you will lose a removal vs buff war eventually.

Nah, with the layers you are talking about on an offensive build like the warrior support you could think outside the box and just use it as a means to bypass armor and spike out the damage source. As an alternative just one shot it with lingering and remain behind the standard anti-warrior defenses. Granted, it wont keep orders down, as they are designed to be chained. In this instance, i am merely taking the position of proactive damage disruption against the standard passive/reactive style. The sources of the enchants arent really relevant, as they just have to cycle through recasting or choose to heal the target or themselves depending on where the focus of the other team's offense lies opposed to the focus of the support style spells.

Against defensive style buff builds it wont really do anything, but that is more the nature of the buffs involved, that need to be re-tuned if NR ever gets changed.

there are a few remarks here..
1) in the end, affinity was CASTRATED to the bone by killing (banning) an incredible 7 (or was it 8?) cards (compare to 7-8 skills). This was done because the format was not 'fun anymore' as stated by R&D. Altough the stats showed there was a reasonable rock-scissors-paper environment (X beats Y, Y beats Z, Z beats X), the grieve it brought to the game was deemed intolerable. Spiritspam is quite a grieve technique also.

2) the environment existed of a bigger pool. 7 sets during Affinity's horror-reign vs 1 in GW now. A bigger pool usually means more options to find a suitable couter to something. Yes, you can argue that chances of a killercombo also increase. But more diversity means also more things to react with.

An interesting read Blackace, will browse your articles. Looking forward to the next post. As for Spike-Johnny-Timmy: yeah, they certainly are here. Altough i must add here that Timmy is NOT equal to noob. This is a common misunderstanding. Just to clarify.

One of the most informative thread I've ever read concerning GW. I come froma background of T1 MTG tournament (had all the moxes and broken cards)/ T2 (was able to create creative AND winning decks). I was an excellent player (I paid my first University year playing and winning MTG tournaments) so balancing issues are extremely important to play.

I appreciate your input as it wraps up what I thought of GW so far.

Thank you again!
-Louis

OK, just before my head explodes with all this information I want to say that this has been extreme helpful to me in explaining what I've been struggling to define. The contrast between the "Play to Win" style and the "Play to Play" style is something I've been debating to myself for some time.
Overall I think Arenanet has done a pretty good job balancing the game, however having said that I do think that Nature's Renewal is overpowered. Using a specific build is a part of the metagame for just about any game. Play only breaks down when there is only 1 build that works. Spirit Spam builds are entirely too close to that for my intellectual comfort. On the other hand I look forward to seeing where the game goes next.

Thank you Blackace for your work putting this together. I look forward to reading the additional topics you mentioned.

Nice to see intelligent posts again. I am inclinded to agree with what has been said.

The balance issues have, in addition to ruining the diversity and fairness, also created noskill builds that require no thought to play, where you mainly jusy mash the same button over and over. Sprit spam builds (and before that it was healing balls) are also incredibly frustrating and boring to play against even when winning, because they just take long and mess you up so much, by blocking and changing how your skills work. I doubt ArenaNet intended rituals to be used to build walls etc when they made them spirits, the point was probably to make the rituals counterable by any team (killing the spirit) rather than having just a single skill in the game to remove them (and a trash one at that). Of course, with Oath Shot thrown in the mix, and the collective efforts of countless members of the PvP community, we ended up with the perversion that today is the spirit spam.

As a former Magic player myself, I figured I would keep with the metaphor to make my own comparison. While I can't comment on post Mirrodin environments, I can certainly think of one example that I believe more closely resembles the current problems in Guild Wars. If any of you can remember back to the Extended environment about 4 or 5 years ago, before the mass rotation of Ice Age/5th edition from the format, there was a deck called Trix that absolutely dominated the format. It basically became a case of "either play Trix, or play a deck that can only beat Trix".

It was very similar to what we're seeing in GW right now with spirit spam/NR builds. You either play them, or play to beat just them. And like 5 years ago, when WotC/DCI did NOTHING to stop Trix, ANet has to this point done nothing to stop spamming/NR builds.

That article about Timmy, Johnny, and Spike is a VERY good article that really helps to illustrate the different points of view that go into gaming. If you haven't yet, please do give it a read.

Blackace,
I've enjoyed your post and I've been sure to read the links you mentioned. As I have a long history with chess, Starcraft, CCGs, and an assortment of fighting games, these are issues that I am not entirely unfamiliar with. However I find this an interesting quote:
in light of this quote from Sirlin (http://sirlin.net/Features/feature_GameBalancePart1.htm)
It would seem to me, that Anet with elites has engaged in what Sirlin would call, "The Capcom Principle." As far as how people feel about gold borders and rareness and such, I feel that's beside the point (if the discussion is balance, then people's perceptions are a separate issue). If I understand your argument correctly (and please speak up if I don't), you're claim that adding another level of balance is a problem. In some of TGH posts, the argument seemed to be that making a skill "elite" was a poor method of employing balance, and that it lead to degenerate game play (yes, glib summaries I know).

Now, if the argument is that adding another thing to balance is a problem, then doesn't that simply restate the very balance vs diversity argument that has been rehashed on the sites you mentioned plus many others ad nauseum? Shouldn't the answer be, "Yes, it does make balancing more difficult, but we can try and work through that?" A reply may be, "But lo, a balance issue and it has gone unresolved!" To which I would feel a just response would be, "The the problem lies with ANet not taking action rather than that the idea of having elites are the problem."

So then, I would like to try and talk about TGH argument that this is a poor method of balance and leads to degenerate game play.

I hear this point and it makes a good deal of sense, however I believe that this may be an instance where the words "better" and "different" may be applicable. I would argue that many games involve super moves. The Sirlin articles constantly mention Marvel vs Capcap 2 (a great game btw) where you have a power bar that builds up allowing you to unleash a super move (but not all the time). In a similar way, a queen in much stronger than a pawn in chess. It is in essence a "super piece", but you only get one of them and it may be difficult to position well. I would argue that this may be a case where "elites" or "super moves" /unarguably/ can bring /focus/ to a strategy. I will agree with Ensign on that. However I'm not sure that bringing focus is a bad thing so much as it is a different thing. Now mind you, Ensign may be writing about how elite skills used to be. I started playing at retail and hence do not know all the incarnations that this game has been through.

First, I realize that martyr and other skills have clearly changed since this was posted. However, I would ask if this wasn't a general balance issue rather than an argument against the idea of elite skills. If every party needs one, then isn't it a sign that other skills either (a) are not balanced or (b) not balanced with the presence of Martyr? In either case, isn't that a balance issue, not a problem with more powerful skills that bring focus to a build? And if the answer to (a) and/or (b) is yes, then that simply means that the game needs more work, not that elites must be tossed (see my comment above).

I actually disagree the most with this part. Having one skill that is a cross-class skill so to speak is, IMHO, a /good/ thing for the meta game. Here's a good excerpt from Sirlin that speaks to the issue (I'm using this website as it seems to be a respected source in this discussion).

I would argue that in some respect, cross-class skills are the yomi layer 3 of GW. When you see a class combo, you have a reasonable idea of what you're going to see coming out of it. However the inclusion (and restriction) of just a few abilities that break this rule allow players to escape the trap of having their strategies guessed after I observe your class and the first few skills you use.

Anyhow, thanks for the post Blackace, I hope to hear more on the subject and some feedback what I may or may not be understanding about the game at this moment.

-Diomedes

Great post blackace, I'm especially pleased that you outlined the misconception that many players have about elite skills. Many really do believe that they are "rare".

I do look forward to your ideas about WW and MW. I remember the 10+ page thread over at TGH about the same thing. It was a very convincing arguement then and still is now.

As already mentioned, enchants vs enchant removal shows the obvious flaws of the enchant removal system. Low Cost, Fast Recharge v. High Cost, High Recharge, Situational spells. The disparity is quite obvious and must be addressed. Had it not been for the NR mess we would still be talking about enchant removal problems.

Speaking of which... any build or skill that has no counter other than running it yourself is broken and must be fixed in order to maintain balance in the game.

My big problem with elites now is how they're implemented. On one level, elites let them push the envelope with powerful, unique effects without opening themselves up to as much degeneracy. Skills like Illusionary Weaponry or Tainted Flesh or Martyr or the like do unique, powerful things, and if elites followed that template I'd like the mechanic a lot more.

The problem is twofold. The first is that they didn't just make elites the province of unique effects, but instead lumped in cool, unique effects with straight up overpowered stuff that everyone wants - energy and cooldown management. Why's this a problem? Because while the former tends to alter builds to create unique and interesting strategies, the latter just get plopped into every powerful build, period. If you're building a Mesmer around an elite you can get some solid, creative builds - if you're just making a powerful Mesmer based upon his normal skill selection, you're going to run Energy Drain 90+% of the time.

My other complaint stems from this, that elites destroy diversity. Powerful normal skills with unique effects, at least historically, have gotten slapped with the elite tag to break up combos. While that's a brainless solution to the problem, I dislike seeing dozens of excellent skills that would be fun to play with, but I cannot justify running over Energy Drain / Ether Renewal / Blood Is Power / whatever. With normal skills, there are some underpowered but unique effects that slip in on the 7th or 8th slots of a build because they fit right. Elites don't have that option.


I agree with this, but I think the emphesis needs to be on the word *can*, and that comes down to implementation. I think that if the elite skill mechanic had been loaded up with powerful, unique effects that pulled characters in different directions, I'd like the mechanic a lot more - while those effects could still be in the game without the mechanic, you could make them that much more powerful, and thus actually desirable instead of fringe, due to the elite mechanic.

Problem comes from the implementation. Skills were not designed to be elites initially - they just grabbed some of the best skills in the game at the time and slapped the tag on them, buffing up several in the process. On top of that, not all elites fall into the interesting category. There are quite a few elites that are simply overpowered, general effects, and got the tag slapped onto them because of it. These skills don't generate any sort of creativity, and in many ways defocus strategies because 1) your most powerful skill is nice and vanilla and broken, and 2) the most interesting, focused effects are hedged out because of the elite mechanic. The prime offender here is Energy Drain. Sure, there are a bunch of interesting skills you might want to run, but oftentimes just grabbing the Drain and cranking up your energy, and with it the effectiveness of all your other skills, is the best option. This doesn't bring focus to a strategy, or show of any of the strengths of the elite mechanic at all. All it did was put some degenerately good skills into the game and let you pretend that they're balanced because you can only run one.

So yes, the mechanic *can* be a good thing. I touched on how to make it a good thing in one of my posts on TGH. As it currently stands, though, the mechanic is not living up to its potential and that's simply a fundamental failure in the implementation.

But enough about that, I'm sick of this topic.


Obvious? OBVIOUS? Oh, that's how it goes now, right? After months and months of pointing out the "obvious" fact on these boards and being told to shut up by the alphas who know better and who say that enchantment removal is fine, it's now "obvious" that there's a huge problem with the state of enchantment removal.

What people consider obvious now was not considered obvious at all three months ago. While I'm pleased by the change I can't help but express a bit of frustration over how invisible the process seems to have been.

Peace,
-CxE

Thanks for the input, didn't mean to beat a dead horse with you, I was just trying to participate in the discussion that blackace started

-Diomedes

Don't worry, Ensign was sick of the topic last year, but can't help being drawn in whenver the subject comes up.

That said, thanks for the links Blackace, and the post. And for not flaming anyone. Troll.

in Random arenas N/me are probably the most popular class do to their ability to do damage and NEVER fail or miss. Random arena games are some kind of retarded sick joke. They flat suck.

I used to find the random arenas fairly fun. You could pop in, kill some stuff, and walk away with a little faction for your time. Now... all you find are griefing rangers who do nothing but run constantly until you get fed up and leave. Seriously, the last time I tried the random arena, there was at least 1 running ranger in every match I played. Totally defeats the purpose of the random arena IMO. I think of them as quick, CS like matches... not 30 minute bore-fests.

Excellant post. It seems a bit of intelligence wasn't annihilated on release.

I think you're also missing a very pertinent article: When Cards Go Bad (substitute the word "skill" for the word "card").
To quote from the article:
There's a corollary to the "There must be bad cards/skills" rule: there must be good cards/skills. Some of those skills will be better than others, and a certain skillset will almost be inevitably be better or worse than another skillset. This was evident in Magic The Gathering, where well-performing decks were posted on the net and copied (netdecked) by players. Those are the decks you see frequently making Top 8's. In fact, you could make the argument that all good decks are netdecks; as soon as a "rogue" deck (a deck that's not a netdeck) gets a good showing, it gets posted online and will become a netdeck. Also note that the chances of such a thing happening gets smaller and smaller as the cardpool remains the same for longer and longer, as chances are that most of the ideas would have already been explored by other people.

The more I look at it, the parallels between M:tG are more and more appropriate. ANet needs to not be afraid to be proactive to protect their game. In Magic complaining about the DCI was practically a holy ritual, but they weren't afraid to get involved if they had to. They owned up to their mistakes in the Urza cycle and banned a bunch of BROKEN cards, and created one of the most fun T2 environments when Invasion came around (to this day my happiest Magic moments came during that cycle ). Nature's Renewal is the Tolarian Academy of GW PvP right now.

I think that the biggest problem here is that there are too many weak skills that can fit in massively with elites to make the "invincible build". For example, Ether Renewal is a great skill on its own. It gives moderate energy and health regain with some enchantments. However, when mixed with certain monk skills, Ether Renewal becomes a source for practically unlimited energy and health. Something as simple as causing exhaustion (like Ether Prodigy) would deter people spamming it. Actually, I believe that a good balance would be to add a side-effect to every elite. Elementalist elites should all have exhaustion, necro elites should all sacrifice health, etc.

ALL elementalist elites should cause exhaustion? Have you looked at the full list of elementalist elites? Sure you have some uber goodness like Ether Renewal, but you also have total junk like the Mind Burn/Shock/Freeze series. Heh, and those DO cause exhaustion. It's almost like all the wrong ele elites have exhaustion. :P

Considering the design build options, comparing exhuastion in the elemental realm is not the same as life sacrifice in the necro domain. Exhaustion cripples over time, while life loss can just be erased a several different ways.

I'm sure we'll all agree that there are several ways to make competitive games and several different goals that a game designer can aim for when making one.

In every competitive game, there's the strange group of people who will do anything to win, especially playing in a repetitive fashion, abusing imbalances as much as possible. I guess these are "Spikes-gone-bad". To me, the best games are those which are built such that "Spike" gameplay behaviour is indistinguishable from "Timmy" or "Johnny" gameplay behaviour. In other words, make What Wins = What Looks Cool = What Is Creative And Unexpected.

Highly competitive players may not think much of this, but I'm getting the feeling that some sort of meta-meta-game would be useful to add more variety. It might be seen as just an application of the "Capcom principle", ie. increasing complexity such that it will take too long for optimal play to emerge, but here goes.

What about some sort of auto-balancing system that gradually downgrades skills that are popular and upgrades skills that aren't? It wont fix NR, because part of what makes it broken is that it has very little numeric qualities, and those it does have can be partially sidestepped by Oath Shot. But it will change the quality of skills which are currently good or bad based on some combination of their damage/cost/time. NR and skills which are useless because they do nothing will still need to be fixed directly.

The way I see it, a lot of grief comes when developers try to actively balance things. People who were abusing it complain. People who cared about things that didnt change complain. People who didnt get the change they wanted complain. Having a built-in mechanism that does things addresses this a little, since it becomes "part of the game". Also, I prefer to have "skill" in making builds be more of a "ability to think on the move and adapt to changing conditions" rather than "ability to look up the forums to see what is good". In other words, I'd rather hit a moving target :P

Also, it rewards people who go against the trends, and penalises people who copy the trends. A possible degenerate outcome may be, that all the cool skills that get chosen by people interested in such things will get downgraded, only leaving the very plain skills to be used by people who want to win. I have no solution to this other than making sure all skills look appropriately cool in line with their effects.

Also, as we can see with the traders, it's very difficult to make a dynamic system that doesn't go off the rails into some extreme direction. I guess this is where the devs need to step in and keep an eye on things. However, they would be changing how skills are effected by the balancing system, rather than directly changing the skills themselves, so their actions would be "hidden" to a degree, reducing complaints. They would also need to monitor things so that they dont fall into extreme values, because people complain if they spot it too late and reset it back to a sane value. How the balancing system is designed is obviously very important here. Maybe a skilled mathematician / statistician needs to be employed to design it?

Another hurdle is the different game types present in the game. pve, pvp, tombs, etc. NR is very popular in tombs, but it's much less useful elsewhere. It may be that a game-wide balancing system wouldn't see a skill such as NR as being "popular", because it is only widely used in a certain game type. I'd have to say that's a problem with the maps, not the balancing system. We need to have a variety of maps that duplicate many different conditions. We need to have pvp situations that suit AoE/Fire. We need to have pve situations that suit disenchant/utility skills, etc.

I haven't played much online games - most of my competitive gaming experience comes from fighting games and RTS's. Has anyone seen any sort of attempt at a self-balancing game elsewhere? How did it work? Was it successful, or crap?

Also a reply to Phades. I was just giving examples of possible ways to go about this. And although life sacrifices can be reversed, it would take that one extra skill and possibly make those builds useless. But the general point I was trying to make is that there should be a penalty (downside) to every elite.

Unfortunately, that would imply that no matter which build choices you make, your build will be successful if you play it right. I'll try to explain why I think this is: Johnny will actively seek out seemingly weaker builds (weaker according to Spike) because they're not being run by either Spike or Timmy, in order to be different. If those seemingly weaker builds that look cool to Johnny turn out to be what wins as well, Spike will be dissatisfied that even though Johnny ran what he deemed an inferior build, he was still able to win. Because of the player stereotypes, the best thing a gaming company can do is a form of conscious unbalancing, which is I believe the purpose of the M:TG article: they try to appease each player stereotype in a way that does not directly conflict with the other (since appeasing all three all the way is impossible - Johnny won't be caught dead playing the same build as Spike, but Spike will be upset if Johnny's unorthodox build is as good as his proven build). Effective but possibly inefficient skills for Timmy, odd and possibly underpowered skills for Johnny and optimally efficient skills for Spike keep each sufficiently happy.

I don't think what is popular is a good guidance for balancing. Sometimes something that is moderately powerful and easy to understand/wield will become popular, but that doesn't necessarily hint of imbalance - the meta-game is there to make the better players equip a simple counter to the fad which will push back the usefulness and thereby eventually the popularity of the build. A good example of this was air spikes - it gave a good chance of success when it was first introduced, but was quickly adapted against, and thus became less popular. No balancing was necessary. It does become problematic when a single skill is so influential to the game that counters to it are more burdening than simply accepting the skill to be present and working around it (or counters are not available in the first place) - the meta-game at this point fails to push back the popularity of the skill, and the game degenerates. Current examples are Nature's Renewal, and on a smaller scale, Putrid Explosion.

Ofcourse the practical issues with automatic balancing are that many skills can't be quantified purely on their variable ranges, and thus can't be properly scaled up/down by any algorithm. If we look at Nature's Renewal, at which point should an algorithm decide to drop the activation effect, rather than just tone down the aftereffect duration? When should it decide to introduce some secondary penalty to tone down its usefulness, and how will it decide which one is proper? Deciding these things require an extensive understanding of and experience with the game, because in a sufficiently complex game there are always outcomes a numerical model simply cannot predict.

I don't recall many cries of outrage from PvP when skills got balanced. Most top-level players are fully aware that the broken skills they're abusing are imbalanced, and often see their enjoyment reduced by passively being forced to abuse those skills in order to be competitive, and actually welcome the rebalancing. Ofcourse those people who lack the playing skill to win without abusing the broken skills (many spirit spamming rangers right now fall into this category) will be upset, but nobody will shed a tear for their loss, and the game improves.

Active balancing is needed, and I believe the best source of information to support this balancing is to listen to the players who win and complain about how they win, because that is when game degeneracy becomes evident.

um.....and if you remember affinity was banned and for good reason. it warped the metagame so much that you either had to play with it or play specificly against it. did you take a look at your local stores during mirridon? less and less people were showing up every week because it was the same thing. ok how many people are playing affinity? ok how many people are playing against it? no matter what you did affinity won. only exception was which mirror match got aether vial out first. which in both cases it was still affinity decks.

upheavel was pretty brutal but there where dynamic decks. you could use the sideboard to play or interrupt the upheavel deck where affinity you had to main deck to win.

do agree that maybe later on it maybe interrupted by new skills from new chapters but as it is just make it an elite and problem solved. you don't take too much power away from it just changes how many people bring it into battle with them. so that way its not spammed so much. btw the w/n still owns it with conditions.

Right, but how long did it take for them to nerf Affinity into the ground? I think it took them months to finally ban those seven cards in Standard (I wasn't around at that time due to Halo and WoW, and I was mostly playing T1 before that). The point I was making was that R&D will make mistakes, and that it takes time for balancing changes to be implimented. This is with a game that's been around for a long long time, and with game designers who had around 10 years of experience with their product.

I don't have that much experience with Tombs, but I don't think NR nearly as broken as Affinity was (but maybe more than FoF-Tog? Hmm...), and 4-Gush GAT made Affinity look wimpy (There was a time when I drew all 4 Gushes, a Fastbond, and 2 fetchlands as my opening 7... I was very happy). It still needs to be fixed though.

I love magic, but can you please keep your posts understandable for non-magic players? this is not a magic forum you know... To me, your post is understandable, but to a lot it won't.

as for comparing 'brokeness' (a term used by magic players to indicate that it wrecks the playing scene. Often used wrong unfortunately, a noob will label any powerfull card 'broken'):
I don't think it is much use to compare this. What good does this do for GW?

But yes, the comparisons between GW and Magic do become scary. I see more of them everyday in gamemechanics (anyone damage vs lifeloss? no, they are not the same.) and environment (the ever going discussion about balancing issues).
Yes, R&D is bound to screw up. Creating balance is no small thing. I reckon that 'perfect balance' will never be attained. You are correct that they were slow on the bannings of Affinity (a gamemechanic that basicly meant: the more you have of X, the cheaper X becomes to play). They admitted it themselves that they should have done it 3 months before on the previous banning opportunity.

This is why I had mixed feelings of ANet introducing their cycle of 'balancereviews'. Also a 3 month cycle. If they goof up on just one of these moments, the game will suffer tremendously. Because it will be another 3 months before issues at hand will be fixed...
Just after release, I told my Magic playing buddies that Anet could fix balancing issues when need arised and not be strained by organisational laws. We were pleased by it, and a few joined GW. I feel a bit silly now. :/
I agree that having transparency is great, and you know now that skills might be adjusted at timepoint Y. But really, is having an announcement maybe 2 weeks ahead not good enough?

my 2 cents,
grtz Makk.

Since I come from a fighting game perspective (and a King of Fighters perspective, where you do have to build a team of sorts) I have no problem with that idea at all. It's probably harder to pull off in an online game where latency and lag (and avoiding client-side code) means that many types of game playing skill can't be used, but my ideal for this kind of game is that there are many, many, viable builds, and they are all more or less equal in power, providing you are able to play them right. If GW wanted to move in this sort of direction, they would need to provide more avenues of skill. Timing, reflexes, and physical dexterity are kind of out the window due to its online nature, so they need to make positioning, situational awareness, knowing when and how to use skills, target choosing, etc more important in the game.

(eg. Currently it's generally advantageous for most of your damage dealers to attack a called target. What if a game mechanic was introduced, where attacks from the front are more easily defended against, and especially attacks from your current target? Then there'd be a lot more maneuvering that you'd imagine would occur in real life, trying to avoid being flanked or surrounded by the enemy - a pair of warriors standing back-to-back etc. And then correct use of AoE spells might be useful.)

Hmmm, from my own experience, looking at some players of really balanced games and some not-so-balanced games, "Spikes" tend to respect people who win with a weaker character or build. They might not be absolutely happy about it, but it often makes them think again about what is strong and what isnt. After all, all Spikes care about is what works, and what doesnt, in an empirical sense. They dont hold preconceived notions of what should be strong or not.

And there's simply the possibility that Spike was outplayed in that match - if a "Spike" expects his "superior" build to win "all the time", then he's got some funny ideas of what a game should be like.

The only sort of player that might get pissed off is the sort of cheap powergaming player that does jump-kicks with a certain character all day and expects to win easily... and I dont think appeasing them is terribly beneficial.

It depends on what your goal for balancing is. Popularity might not be the best criteria for spotting overpoweredness and fixing it - but that isn't my main goal. My main goal is to increase diversity, mainly by buffing unused skills so they become more attractive. And reducing extremely commonly used skills so they become less attractive.

I'm less interested in some possibly ambiguous or impossible to define state of "perfect balance". I'm more interested in making every skill good/bad enough so that we're equally likely to see any of them used on the battlefield. Then it becomes a matter of what gets used with what, and how you use it. I think statements like BlackAce's "Mind Wrack is shit. There's no reason to use it." highlight that some loss of variety is going on.


I agree. In my original post, I did specifically say that something like NR would be difficult to address with an automatic system. So some "bugfixing" would be required to ensure that skills vary properly in usefulness based on their current popularity. It also adds another axis of skill variety in the game. You might have Damage Skill X which varies its damage based on popularity, and you can then also have Damage Skill Y, which is similar, but varies its Energy Cost based on popularity.

And I also said that the dev's would still need to keep an eye on things (as they do now) and to take prompt action to prevent any excessive run-away results. (as some evolutionary systems sometimes fall over - depending on the design of the system. Asymptotic (sp?) behaviour?)

But the role of the system is to provide a dynamic system that encourage the maximum variety of skills to be used by the players.


I think my main fear with active-human-balancing is, it's *work*. So eventually it will reach a stage where its declared "good enough" to stop. (ie. when all the major concerns are dealt with, and no new unbalances are popping up.) Then, after a period of time, when most of the experimental builds have been tried, the game will fall into one of 2 possible static states:

1 - All the optimal builds have been discovered and published. Gameplay now revolves around taking the optimal build of your choice, and playing it as best as you can. Skill at using these particular builds determine victory.

2 - All optimal builds have been discovered, however, these builds have mutually exclusive weaknesses. The game settles into a paper-rock-scissors format. Victory now depends completely on luck - whether you draw an opponent that is strong or weak against your chosen optimal build. To a degree, playing your build properly and not screwing up affects your victory, but its a matter of "not losing the match" rather than "winning the match" with skill.

"Experts" may make variations out of boredom, to show off, and to generally give themselves an extra challenge. n00bs run in with suboptimal builds and get squished, because they suck and their builds suck.


It might be a matter of personal preference, but I feel that a better game is one that keeps things mixed up, rather than the 2 scenarios above, thus the automatic balancing. Possible alternatives include a regular schedule of skill additions, similar to a release of a new set of cards in M:TG, but that kind of process tends to make it horribly difficult to balance things in the first place. I also like games where surprise and just plain dumb ol' luck have an effect, where an obviously lesser skilled player can occasionally pull off a spectacular and logic-defying victory. That's why I prefer TA or C&CGenerals to StarCraft.

Oh, in BlackAce's opening post, he cites the motto "Options and Restrictions". It's similar but slightly different, I prefer "Variety and Tradeoffs"

Edit:
Oh, another reason why I support automatic balancing (or some sort of human process that mimics it) is that, with any reasonably complex game, it's probably incredibly difficult to get the balance right. Some games have achieved it by sacrificing complexity, but I dont like that. Some games have thrown up their hands and gone, "Ok! Well, the weapons aren't balanced, but, -everyone- can use the rocket launcher, so if you're complaining, just get it and use it better than your opponent!". The "let's give UAX to everyone" smacks of this to a degree - the notion that the only way to be balanced is to give everyone equal access to the same things. It's certainly true, but you're improving balance at the cost of variety. (The argument being, if you fixed all the crappy skills instead, then people would have a better chance of coming up with a viable build with whatever subset they had available.)

I don't believe the Guild Wars community is even close to discovering all combos and their counters, but I don't think (in a balanced environment) such an eventual situation (the 'static state' you mention) is bad. Even without further innovation a lot of fun can be had duelling back and forth with the tools laid out, much like in a FPS it would become a matter of how you wield those tools. Ofcourse much of that sentiment is based on personal preference.

Even in a static environment, fads will keep the playing field somewhat dynamic, even if through a rock paper scissors scenario - for Spike minimizing chances of lucking out would be key, Timmy would defy the meta-game by playing the build that will roll opponents if he gets lucky, and Johnny could play whatever is not part of the fad (build or counter). I think the rock-paper-scissors environment works better in this regard than an environment where one build is clearly most efficient since although gambling shouldn't overshadow playing skill, there would remain more play diversity in the rock-paper-scissors scenario.

The promise of expansions should ensure that even if the situation stagnates in this fashion there is a new injection of skills to inherently shake up the playing field, typically deepening the game through added complexity requiring a lot of reinvention and inviting innovation again. M:TG clearly saw a lot of this, Starcraft had it on a smaller (but no less significant) scale with Broodwars. Whether or not it will be difficult to balance these new skills isn't the issue I think, that's simply 'more of the same' responsibility for the game designers - if their expansion imbalances the game, they're stuck with the responsibility to fix it. The opportunity to breathe fresh life into their product to re-invigorate a stagnated game should outweigh such fears.

I don't think the availability of skills should be part of this balancing discussion for GW, since no one skill is strictly rarer than the next; elites are somewhat more difficult to get, but are balanced in accordance with the 'one elite per bar' restriction rather than availability. I don't think a limited toolset strictly encourages experimentation, that would only apply if that player would take the popular tools if he had a full toolset. I could even argue that a full toolset gives a better chance of making an underplayed skill work, because there are more opportunities to find a setup in which it can play a valuable role. The actual decision to experiment remains up to the player.

In the case of UAX, that call is made to get a level playing field where skill and build choice determine victory, not where you can get an advantage having more options at your disposal because you spent twice as long playing the game as someone else; it's not a balancing concern. Incidentally, this is what always turned me off from playing M:TG - buying more packs of cards boosted your playing potential through a larger toolset, so even if you could win with a smaller selection of tools, you were playing at a disadvantage. Anyway, shouldn't be part of this discussion.

One potential problem I see with Anet that I hope they consider is the future metagame. We all know that NR is going to get nerfed, one way or the other, sooner or later.

But what then? It seems obvious to me that 'invincible' enchantment builds will dominate in that environment. It will become your team of guys with a ridiculously powerful enchantment based combo against my team with a ridiculously powerful enchantment based combo.

The solution is to look down the road and make multiple changes at the same time. If they nerf NR without touching ER, then they will have not done their homework.

They should first consider how A, B and C interact now, and why people don't use D. Then, when they cripple B, see how A, C and D interact, and/or what E's new role is. The worst case senario is if by removing C they make D just as powerful as C was in the first place. The ideal is obviously an enivironment where A,B, and C are equally good and equally viable, but not so dominating that a guy playing D can't come in from time to time and steal a win creatively.

This would be ideal, but guild wars runs on a very A>B>C>D>A system most of the time. the fact that currently A>B>C>D<A exists is a problem. There IS a VERY dominant form of defensive altar holding which is used to milk tombs, and GvG is still very much a ninja GL gank or camp the GL game. At least they fixed grenths.

By the way, here's another very nice article. It talks about a possible rubric to use to determine when a skill is overpowered. That rubric is found at the very bottom. For those who are not interested in the Magic The Gathering history (replace "deck" with "build" and "card" with "skill", also note that "restriction" means only 1 copy of that card in a deck instead of the normal 4 copies):
The fourth criterion would only apply after new chapters are released, thus introducing a need to balance both the Chapter 1 and the Chapter 1+2 skillsets.

Also note that one huge problem right now is we have very limited knowledge of the metagame due to the lack of public tournaments where the results are published down to the individual skills and attribute points used by the players. This could be rectified to a certain degree by more tournaments being run and Observer Mode, but player skill plays a larger role in GW than in M:tG, which complicates things a bit (was it the build or the player that's so good?).

Meh, and here i would have thought wizards of the coast would have learned their lesson with spam use, 0 mana, and refresh hand ideas by now. That is like sooo alpha/beta (might as well say first 5 sets)esque.

Uh, Charles, I hope you weren't addressing all that anger towards me. It's not as if I am new to GW or joined after release. I know that even during the betas people have complained about the lack of strong enchant removal. I thought it was obvious then too. While I did not have access to the alpha boards and could not see much of the intelligent GW discussions going on at TGH (Still can't find too many of these over there) I did agree with those who said there needed to be a more effective form of enchant removal.

Yes, I know it's frustrating to make your point after the game is released. I know that it's hard to try and change something, and not have anything to show for that until much later, but you have to understand that unlike the beta and alpha players, the majority of the people playing GW are just now waking up to it's flaws and problems.

Elitism... well that always happens, but don't vent frustration on me

Keep this thread alive... we need more intelligent discussion!

No, I wasn't directing it towards you, you just brought up the subject and the way you did so struck a nerve and put me into rant mode.

Particularly, if intelligent people in the community were saying it, and it was so obvious, why didn't it get fixed during the months and months of testing they did?


Sure, and that they're waking up to the flaws is a good thing. People learning these things makes for a better game in the long run. On some level I should just be happy that people did come around to the 'enchantment removal is weak' point of view. At the same time, I'm a bit let down by how these things are just treated as common knowledge after there were pages and pages of arguments made on both sides months ago. I guess I just missed the whole process in between. =)

Peace,
-CxE