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Asking for nerfs is not asking for balance


Supreme.3164

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@"Ghos.1326" said:While it's true that tradeoffs are very integral in balance, it's also untrue that only nerfing something is pointless. The one time it would be pointless is if it truly did not need to be nerfed. Otherwise, a nerf without a buff is perfectly feasible.

This is true. This is why the video and I say that nerfs are necessary and should only be reserved for extreme cases. Game breaking cases that the community can come together(at least for the most part) and say "Yeah, this is broken and makes the game less fun."

The goal isn't even to balance the game. Balance is meaningless on its own. It's supposed to be an effort to make the game more fun to play and watch, and tradeoffs are the best way to do that. Not the only way, no. Not even the only necessary way, but the best.

The Feb 25th had a little bit of this, but; aside from 1 or 2 outlier changes that were meaningful trades, didn't target elite specs or any moot points with balance. It targeted everything so essentially the power curve was just shifted down and barely anything was solved while a ton of new problems surfaced.

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@"Shiyo.3578" said:Buffing only is what trashy mobile F2P game do because they are scared of losing their players and is a HORRIBLE way of balancing a game. You end up in a power crept game(you know, the thing we just escaped) due to constant buffs.

Here's the thing that most people need to understand.

Both Buffs and Nerfs are equally horrible ways of achieving balance.

Almost nobody here can even tell me what balance actually means or how it is actually achieved in any fundamental or meaningful sense. Nobody is asking bigger questions...everything is "nerf this buff that, it will fix everything..."

and yet every time buffs or nerfs happen problems crop up and balance gets worse...The reason this happens is because there is a fundamental problem here, and nobody is asking the bigger questions, or doing proper analysis on the subject area. and it indeed is a subject area...not some simple change a few numbers here and there...it is a highly complex and completely nuanced thing that nobody is even talking about in the correct perspective.

@Kuma.1503 and i'm sure a few others now are asking the right questions and looking at the problem through a more sophisticated lens.

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@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@"Shiyo.3578" said:Buffing only is what trashy mobile F2P game do because they are scared of losing their players and is a HORRIBLE way of balancing a game. You end up in a power crept game(you know, the thing we just escaped) due to constant buffs.

Here's the thing that most people need to understand.

Both Buffs and Nerfs are equally horrible ways of achieving balance.

Almost nobody here can even tell me what balance actually means or how it is actually achieved in any fundamental or meaningful sense. Nobody is asking bigger questions...everything is "nerf this buff that, it will fix everything..."

and yet every time buffs or nerfs happen problems crop up and balance gets worse...The reason this happens is because there is a fundamental problem here, and nobody is asking the bigger questions, or doing proper analysis on the subject area. and it indeed is a subject area...not some simple change a few numbers here and there...it is a highly complex and completely nuanced thing that nobody is even talking about in the correct perspective.

@"Kuma.1503" and i'm sure a few others now are asking the right questions and looking at the problem through a more sophisticated lens.

I think we had this topic recently so often ^^

1.) Like wasss.1208 said people come in here which are salty and doesn't know why this build/class is so OP the topic goes over multiply pages and sometimes it got piked up multiply times in new threads and it still unclear why this build is OP only wild accusations . Only for an individual then taking research weeks and months later to realize what is going on.e.g.

  • Heal Tempest
  • The new Minion Master build where I only heard 2 days ago that the minions are supposed to be buggy and way stronger . Don't know if this is true but I only heard general complain about it in the threads nothing about bugs /buffs.

Basically you need good knowledge and external resources to make sense of some complain posts on this boards besides this other reasons are people don't know better or they straight up trolling e.g I complains about the needed teamwork in an teamwork centric gamemode xD.

Actually a moderator would need to look over it and ask questions... a more active moderator on this board would be nice anyway.

2.) About the builds themselves and balance yeah people don't know how the balance should be . How could they when they even don't know how to play it ?I play Heal Fb in PvP. WvW and PvE, Heal Tempest in WvW ,Weaver in PvE and DPS Tempest in WvW. Builds in wvw are very conservative but when I hear from our (twitch)commanders how to use (heal) build or their newest build ideas it is often cringeworthy. For reference I'm not only playing those builds I play them on a top level and tweak them myself often ,problem is I'm not in a WvW guild, only in a big causal PvE guild ^^

Indirect I have the feeling that metabattle became a platform where twitch players dominate the pvp and wvw section so I take metabattle with a grain of salt.

In general we need a public testing server before the release of a balancing patch to collect feedback and fine adjust a balancing patch. I know there were some in the past for LWS? and they have certainly some internally but not for general balancing purpose.

Edit: sry my englisch was so bad happens when you doesn't write it in one go and pause too often

I would also add letting some people who are famous to breaking stuff lose on the test server could be also a good idea :https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRHXUZ0BxbkU2MYZgsuFgkQ

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@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@"Shiyo.3578" said:Buffing only is what trashy mobile F2P game do because they are scared of losing their players and is a HORRIBLE way of balancing a game. You end up in a power crept game(you know, the thing we just escaped) due to constant buffs.

Here's the thing that most people need to understand.

Both Buffs and Nerfs are equally horrible ways of achieving balance.

Almost nobody here can even tell me what balance actually means or how it is actually achieved in any fundamental or meaningful sense. Nobody is asking bigger questions...everything is "nerf this buff that, it will fix everything..."

and yet every time buffs or nerfs happen problems crop up and balance gets worse...The reason this happens is because there is a fundamental problem here, and nobody is asking the bigger questions, or doing proper analysis on the subject area. and it indeed is a subject area...not some simple change a few numbers here and there...it is a highly complex and completely nuanced thing that nobody is even talking about in the correct perspective.

@Kuma.1503 and i'm sure a few others now are asking the right questions and looking at the problem through a more sophisticated lens.

Balance - To be in a state of healthy give vs take, where the rewards are properly granted for the amount of risk presented for any specific thing or task, of course per the task and its difficulty as well as other factors that take a part in determining this data.tldr: a healthy give and a healthy take.That's what true balance is. <3There I answered it.

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@"Ghos.1326" said:Balance - To be in a state of healthy give vs take, where the rewards are properly granted for the amount of risk presented for any specific thing or task, of course per the task and its difficulty as well as other factors that take a part in determining this data.tldr: a healthy give and a healthy take.

Define healthy...

If a rabbit and a wolf coexist, the wolf has to kill and eat the rabbit. Not so "healthy" for the rabbit huh?

I'm telling you that people have no idea what balance is in any meaningful sense. "Healthy" is a subjective and arbitrary descriptor that lacks any sort of real world application.

Me eating "Healthy" in a first world country means some poor kid somewhere in a 3rd world country is working 22 hours for 5 cents a day to make the product that i consume so i can be "healthy."

So i'll ask you again...what is true balance huh? Cause it's certainly not about healthiness.

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@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@"Ghos.1326" said:Balance - To be in a state of healthy give vs take, where the rewards are properly granted for the amount of risk presented for any specific thing or task, of course per the task and its difficulty as well as other factors that take a part in determining this data.tldr: a healthy give and a healthy take.

Define healthy...

If a rabbit and a wolf coexist, the wolf has to kill and eat the rabbit. Not so "healthy" for the rabbit huh?

I'm telling you that people have no idea what balance is in any meaningful sense. "Healthy" is a subjective and arbitrary descriptor that lacks any sort of real world application.

Me eating "Healthy" in a first world country means some poor kid somewhere in a 3rd world country is working 22 hours for 5 cents a day to make the product that i consume so i can be "healthy."

So i'll ask you again...what is true balance huh? Cause it's certainly not about healthiness.

"Balance is a fool's master"

-A Quote from a movie I watched once. Idk, it sounded profound so I thought I'd quote it.

Balance is overrated. No game worth playing ever gets it perfect. I'm not saying it doesn't have value, I'm saying people overestimate its value.

Going back to your rabbit example... Rabbits are well known for their explosive birth rates. Allowed to reproduce unchecked, their populations would quickly overwhelm potential food sources. In order to keep those numbers in check, predators like the wolf are needed. It's not so healthy for the individual rabbit to be killed by the wolf, but it's death serves a greater purpose that will allow its fellow rabbits to continue existing in harmony with nature.

--Which sounds nice and all but how do we apply it to games?

My take away from this example is that when you lazer focus in on a single interaction, it can appear to be heavily imbalanced. A wolf kills the rabbit. Good for the individual wolf, bad for the individual rabbit. But when you look at the greater picture, both parties benefit.

I'll use WvW as an example. You lazer focus in on a class and what it does. Claim it's OP.

"Guardian gives out too much stab to allies. It's not fair or healthy that they can turn their teamates into unstoppable death machienes".

So you remove their ability to grant stab to allies. Suddenly a new problem emerges.

"Playing melee in large scale fights is impossible. You get perma CC'd or you get pulled into the enemy zerg and die. Nerf spectral grasp, it shouldn't be able to pull your entire frontline out of position"

Our friend the wolf helped keep the rabbit population in check, just like our friend the Guardian helped keep crowd control in check.

As I always say, people should consider the broader effects of the nerfs they're asking for.

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@"Kuma.1503" said:

Great post here man. This is a great way to practically explain what real balance is.

Most of my efforts in trying to explain the problem has mainly been just dispelling what people think balance actually is. Scientifically, Balance is not the same as making something equal, and i think this is the biggest misconception most people have about it.

I like to refer people to study up on Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory is known for it's pretty fractals and The Butterfly effect, but it's much richer and goes deeper then that.

Essentially Chaos Theory explains the behavior you describe in your post by laying out these sort of phases that occur in a chaotic system...which is that complex systems (Systems with many components) move from Equilibrium -> Chaos -> Balance -> Equilibrium -> Chaos -> Balance etc...

Equilibrium in this case is a state of a system in which the entire system is completely homogeneous (This is what most people get confused with, as a system being balanced). However Equilibrium is an impossible state to attain, because it is unstable.

A state of balance, is when the forces caused by the previous initiated chaos begin to oscillate from one state to another. The more states there are in the system, the longer it takes for the system to approach equilibrium (exponentially) , and the more the oscillations are smoothed out between all other states in the system (exponentially), and this perfectly describes why rabbits and wolves live in harmony with each other in nature...because there are a near infinite number of things in that system that smooth out those oscillations, to the point where no single oscillation has any major impact on the system as a whole.

In other words, the more viable builds that exist in the guild wars 2 possibility space, the more the system will self balance following the above principles....where one single build is not OP if there are builds that exist that can counter that build. Removing options and decreasing diversity fight against these principles, and patches try to move the game into a state of equilibrium (by trying to make things equal) which is categorically unstable and actually just impossible to attain anyway.

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U kno its funny when these forumers squeak their beaks oh thiefs complain lmao when 90% of ALL their post are these very (whiny) players CONSTANTLY spamming nerf thief and thief op posts. Almost all my post regarding thief and warrior are in defense of thief or warrior in reply to these whines, In 3 yrs or more of being on these forums I dont think I have more than a few even "this class is op".Anyway I could care less, the vocal players can go down with thier dying game that they are helping kill :)Enjoy ur trash game with ur now abysmal pvp population, no surprise why, if it were up to these players half the roster would be removed or completely useless and only the three or so spammed classes like guards, necro and holo would exist. Funny thing is then they start complaining about these and wonder why there spammed every match lol pvp community for this game is halarious.

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There are lots of paths to a balanced state. The question is which one to take (and yes, nerfs could be a path to that) and if it's even worth the effort to try ... I like that some astute people here have pointed out that a balanced state in this complexity is unstable. Even if Anet attained it (however that's measured) ... players wouldn't accept it and they couldn't maintain it anyways.

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@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@"Ghos.1326" said:Balance - To be in a state of healthy give vs take, where the rewards are properly granted for the amount of risk presented for any specific thing or task, of course per the task and its difficulty as well as other factors that take a part in determining this data.tldr: a healthy give and a healthy take.

Define healthy...

If a rabbit and a wolf coexist, the wolf has to kill and eat the rabbit. Not so "healthy" for the rabbit huh?

I'm telling you that people have no idea what balance is in any meaningful sense. "Healthy" is a subjective and arbitrary descriptor that lacks any sort of real world application.

Me eating "Healthy" in a first world country means some poor kid somewhere in a 3rd world country is working 22 hours for 5 cents a day to make the product that i consume so i can be "healthy."

So i'll ask you again...what is true balance huh? Cause it's certainly not about healthiness.

Actually it is about health (not literal HP). You bring up the wolf and the rabbit but fail to mention that the rabbit eats plants to survive. And when both die, the plants will consume the dead bodies, starting the cycle all over again. Give vs take. Healthy.

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@"Psycoprophet.8107" said:U kno its funny when these forumers squeak their beaks oh thiefs complain lmao when 90% of ALL their post are these very (whiny) players CONSTANTLY spamming nerf thief and thief op posts. Almost all my post regarding thief and warrior are in defense of thief or warrior in reply to these whines, In 3 yrs or more of being on these forums I dont think I have more than a few even "this class is op".Anyway I could care less, the vocal players can go down with thier dying game that they are helping kill :)Enjoy ur trash game with ur now abysmal pvp population, no surprise why, if it were up to these players half the roster would be removed or completely useless and only the three or so spammed classes like guards, necro and holo would exist. Funny thing is then they start complaining about these and wonder why there spammed every match lol pvp community for this game is halarious.

Thief and holo are the two most overpowered classes atm by a pretty large margin.

The game is in the worst balanced state it's ever been. You can get top 50 as minion scourge and 2 button symbol bunker guard.

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Especially when there aren't even that many skills in the game that are truly broken, with Deathly Claws being the only thing that feels somewhat out of place.

Most things that are broken either lie in passives/traits and other busted mechanics. Fixing or reworking many of them would even lead to situations that could use buffs instead of all the nerfs.

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@"Obtena.7952" said:There are lots of paths to a balanced state. The question is which one to take (and yes, nerfs could be a path to that) and if it's even worth the effort to try ... I like that some astute people here have pointed out that a balanced state in this complexity is unstable. Even if Anet attained it (however that's measured) ... players wouldn't accept it and they couldn't maintain it anyways.

Let me explain for a moment why that state of Equilibrium i mentioned is unstable.

Equilibrium is the state of complete uniformity, or homogeneity, in which the distribution of all things in the system is equal. There are degrees of equilibrium, so for example, a system with 10 orange cats is homogeneous, and a system with 5 orange cats and 5 black dogs is also considered homogeneous but the system with 10 orange cats has a higher degree of uniformity and has a higher degree of being at equilibrium. Therefor the degrees of uniformity stretch from homogeneous to heterogeneous...where a heterogeneous system is just a system with lower degrees of uniformity and at a lower degree of equilibrium. The differing states of equilibrium define the entire system as a whole at all times, and so you can describe any system's balance by looking at this equilibrium.

You can visualize the entire system by thinking about it like an abstract geometry.gg80Bue.pngThe above is a Mexican Hat Potential, where we can think of the state of a system as a ball. The ball on the top of the hill represents the state of a system at equilibrium, where the system is completely homogeneous. We can imagine now, that if this system describes GW2, all classes would have the same HP, same toughness, same utilities same weapons, same traits... Literally everything about the game has to be absolutely perfectly equal to one another in order to be in this initial state, and any infinitesimally small deviance from this state will result in the ball rolling down the hill (This is known as symmetry breaking.)

So now imagine if you were a game dev, and you make 2 changes to the system. One change is changing a single trait on one of the classes to have 5% more damage (or whatever, it's arbitrary) and another trait change to another class that's 5% damage reduction.

The moment you introduce this change, the state is no longer at equilibrium, and the ball will roll down the hill.gIdP4u9.png

This is where chaos occurs, and players are messing around with whatever choices they have to accommodate those 2 changes, the ball will then eventually start to oscillate most of the time, between two different states... one state being players that are picking the 5% damage builds to counter act the 5% damage reduction builds and another state where more players are picking the 5% damage reduction builds to counteract the 5% damage builds. So at some instances in time you might have 70% of players playing Build A, 20% playing Build B and 10% choosing neither...or at other instances in time you can have 90% players choosing Build B 5% players playing build A and 5% playing neither...etc... This is the part of the system in which the game is at balance.kc9LCap.png

Now, once 50% of players are playing Build B and 50% of players are playing Build A, the system has now returned to a state of equilibrium at a lower degree than it was before. This is where the ball falls into the Inverted Mexican Hat Potential, and the system has returned to a state of homogeneity (again, at a lower degree than it was before). You can think of this part as the part of the game that has an established meta.Soy3Jnc.png

The above is essentially the description of Attractors (the "Attractor" in Chaotic Attractors), where the state is either attracted to the inverted Mexican Hat trough or attracted into the valley of the Mexican Hat (Surprise fact, they are both the same geometry, the trough is the valley). In both ends of this attractor, any infinitesimally small differences in the system will cause the ball to once again fall into the valley, or to become attracted to the trough. So in guild wars 2 if you were to, as a game dev, introduce another change to a trait...if the trait change does basically nothing different than it did before, the attractor would oscillate very quickly, and quickly pull the system back into the trough, where players remain at 50% Build A and 50% Build B. If you introduce a change that actually does something, and changes the dynamics of build interactions or has some meaningful effect on the system, the ball will fall into the valley and oscillate for a longer time period before falling back into the trough.

So when we describe equilibrium as being unstable, it's because the more homogeneous the system becomes, the more sensitive it becomes to any infinitesimally small differences that cause "the ball" to fall into the valley, and return to equilibrium faster than a system that is heterogeneous, and so states at lower degrees of equilibrium oscillate for a longer period of time before coming to equilibrium. That seems pretty obvious, but the above is needed to mathematically explain something that we kind of take for granted or as common sense.

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