Would you rather Anet focus on making professions Fun and unique or Balanced and homogeneous?

[Silph.5976]

Since this poll asks me to choose between two things that are not mutually exclusive, i would like to elaborate that i want unique things, because this makes it more likely for every player that there is at least something that is fun to them but at the same time i also want it to be reasonably balanced.

Nothing wrong with certain classes being a bit better than others at certain tasks, as long as the gap isn't too big or is otherwise offset by unique things. What i don't want is a homogenisation (if that's how you spell it) of everything, because that takes away reason to play things for their uniqueness in class identity, when other things are objectively better, because they now all rely on the same homogeneous mechanics that can be compared like apple to apple.

Apples to Oranges may be harder to balance, because you have to have expierience with all of the "fruits" so to speak or trust and rely on expierienced feedback regarding this, but the alternative is plain boring - and for my part, games are mostly for fun, so taking that away also takes away a big part of the reason why i play in the first place.

[draxynnic.3719]

11 hours ago, Saharo Gravewind.5120 said:

Wouldn't be an issue if anet capped alac at per interval/had other comparable alac options besides chrono.

Missed the point. We have other options now (chronomancer itself has been bad for a while), but if you make it so that one person can't provide 100%, people will just take two that are calibrated to provide 50% each and still have good DPS (staxe mirage is a good example). Unless you bring in a hardcoded 'any given player can only have so much alacrity per interval' mechanic, which is a massive feels bad for people who don't know about the hard cap until after they've made the investment.

The 'you shouldn't be able to 100% it' argument just doesn't work short of boonsmiting the boons entirely and rebalancing accordingly. And then you'd just have a healer plus four of whatever provides the best DPS meta.

[Kozumi.5816]

15 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

You can have fun and unique classes that are balanced (see FFXIV)

what

Literally every class is the same and nothing is unique in it's role. 

[AliamRationem.5172]

36 minutes ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

what

Literally every class is the same and nothing is unique in it's role. 

Sticking the word "literally" in front of it doesn't make it true.  You may not like their class design or their game (I don't), but they have a bunch of classes that all do different things, they have trinity gameplay, and they have balance.  Much of that is a consequence of their locked-in system, which comes with pros and cons just as GW2's free-form system does (most notably trash balance).

[Mik.3401]

The question in the OP is biased and stupid. What needs to be delivered is unique set of classes which are balanced. Good games can come close to that. 

[Woof.8246]

For PvE , i don't really have correct answer .

At the high end we have people from various guilds that feel that their Power character cannot compete with Condition .And now that the casual community is using LI builds (easy builds) , people demand high skilled specs to do more dps .Even with unique buffs in the past , we saw people only using the most op specs in Raids (4-5 Scourges- spam Barriers) .

 

It would be better if Mightyteapot could inv the 2 female streamers + Malluk = any other smaller youtuber that wants to show his face ,for how they would envisioned things to go .

They are causal minded ++ they won't try to push a meta favoring them ++ they tend to "switch sides" all the time.

Nyke would envision a world full of warriors and Sneb would try re-install a shadow council and Mightyteapot would do the "hmm"

Edited July 3, 2022 by Woof.8246

[Kozumi.5816]

3 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Sticking the word "literally" in front of it doesn't make it true.  You may not like their class design or their game (I don't), but they have a bunch of classes that all do different things, they have trinity gameplay, and they have balance.  Much of that is a consequence of their locked-in system, which comes with pros and cons just as GW2's free-form system does (most notably trash balance).

They don't. Class homogenizaton is that player bases #1 complaint.

[Ascency.3580]

one does not invalidate the other.  unless by fun u mean overpowered in any way making it better based on numbers alone. also killing off class identity becouse of some arbitrary 'balancing' reasons is bad for the game. any class having some kind of theme, and having its gameplay revolve around this theme that allows for achieveing viability in the meta in a balanced way is the goal they should be going for.

Edited July 3, 2022 by Ascency.3580

[Saharo.5381]

14 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The 'you shouldn't be able to 100% it' argument just doesn't work short of boonsmiting the boons entirely and rebalancing accordingly. And then you'd just have a healer plus four of whatever provides the best DPS meta.

 

Somewhere in my original comment I said you'd need to mess with 100% boon uptime, which is unlikely to happen.

Healer +4 DPS would only be the sole comp if alc/qck providers were not optimized such that taking a boon provider pretty much equals same total squad DPS. Variety of options with near similar results.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

16 hours ago, Silph.5976 said:

Since this poll asks me to choose between two things that are not mutually exclusive, i would like to elaborate that i want unique things, because this makes it more likely for every player that there is at least something that is fun to them but at the same time i also want it to be reasonably balanced.

Nothing wrong with certain classes being a bit better than others at certain tasks, as long as the gap isn't too big or is otherwise offset by unique things. What i don't want is a homogenisation (if that's how you spell it) of everything, because that takes away reason to play things for their uniqueness in class identity, when other things are objectively better, because they now all rely on the same homogeneous mechanics that can be compared like apple to apple.

Apples to Oranges may be harder to balance, because you have to have expierience with all of the "fruits" so to speak or trust and rely on expierienced feedback regarding this, but the alternative is plain boring - and for my part, games are mostly for fun, so taking that away also takes away a big part of the reason why i play in the first place.

22 hours ago, Rider.6024 said:

this false dichotomy is dumb

 

unique and balanced , they are not mutually exclusive 

 

The following two things; homogeneity and heterogeneity are mutually exclusive. Like mentioned on a previous page when people say "balance" they often refer to balance as one would on a scale. If one approaches balance with this methodology, then it means one is homogenizing a system (making different things equal to one another) and the only way to make the entire system "perfectly balanced" is to make it all equal to each other and thus completely uniform. Therefor perfect balance is synonymous with homogeneity and this doesn't work. 

 

 

An alternative perspective people take, is the kind of balance one sees in an rps game. But does anyone stop to think how RPS actually works? The truth is that is a perfectly balanced homogeneous game, where one asks an undecidable question of its homogenous components. Rock, Paper and scissors are functionally the same thing with the same properties...but when one asks a question like "which one is the best one" Then you are asking something that is formally undecidable, in that it doesn't have an answer. You can play this game of RPS forever, and never know which one is the best. This is the "illusion" of diversity that's often brought into the same conversation...because indeed such a thing is just an illusion...and therefor is not a solution either.

 

What people actually want thought is the kind balance one sees in nature. Thing is, people have no where near a real understanding for how this thing works. And to be fair, that's not a strange thing. It requires a theory of everything and right now there is no consensus on a theory of everything.

 

Right now the leading theoretical frameworks on how diversity in nature works are based on computational theories...which are elegant but also conceptually deep;

 

 

This is an example of the differences of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Class 1 is near maximal homogeneity. Class 3 is near maximal heterogeneity. Class 4 is a combination of all three classes. It is this class 4 where most of the things we see in the world occur, and it is the state of the game that is "balanced" like how nature is balanced, and is an intermediate phase between all 3 classes. 

 

If you look at these classifications it becomes a bit more visually obvious why "perfect balancing" by trying to make things equal (through homogeneity) does not work...because what ends up happening is you get what is just a class 1 automata...where everything is the same, nothing is different. The key is that Class 3, which is maximally heterogenous, will statistically produce class 1 and class 2 behavior (by random chance) and this is what makes way for class 4 behavior (the intermediary of all 3) to emerge. In other words: The world is mostly random, and the regularities, patterns and complexity we see in the world, are the inevitable statistical consequences of the world being random in this way. The world is only a one way process...which is that there is simply more and more randomness and more and more regular things being made by chance from that randomness...This is "self sustainable" complexity in the sense that so long as the world is increasing in entropy, there will always be an ever increasing void of regularity that can arise from it.

 

People want to talk about diversity and balance of nature and dismiss just how deep the topic actually is....but that's not surprising. If people want the balance of nature, they have to come to terms with the fact that "things being equal" is not in the dossier. It was never in natures plan for things to be equal...if it were the world would look very different.  

 

@Silph.5976 It's just like your Apples and Oranges example...the two things can never truly be "balanced", and the more you try, the closer you are to just making them the same cluster of atoms. Apples and Oranges already have a lot of similarities in common to begin with right... They are both sweet, both fruits, both warm colors, roughly the same size and weight...

 

Compare the apple or orange, to Water...drinkable water...H2O. It doesn't have a taste or color...doesn't even have much of a shape...it's a liquid rather than a solid (but can be a solid and a gas). It does completely different things... and it's probably impossible to quantify it as a relation to apples or oranges. So when folks bring up the idea that balance just has to be "close enough" it doesn't actually make any sense. Water is no where near the same thing as an apple or orange, yet it still has a vital and important role in our lives...so if one were to ask how to "balance" the two...how do you make the two things "balanced" till they are close enough...This is just one example of a plethora of just "things that exist" which we find both vital, harmful and sometimes a mixture of both (cigarettes and liquor).  So when anyone brings up "close enough" balance it doesn't cut it as an explanation. This is also easy to see with Rock Paper Scissors... "close enough balance" doesn't work there either for obvious reasons.

 

 

Edited July 3, 2022 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[draxynnic.3719]

2 hours ago, Saharo Gravewind.5120 said:

 

Somewhere in my original comment I said you'd need to mess with 100% boon uptime, which is unlikely to happen.

Which I addressed in the part of my post you didn't quote.

Quote

Healer +4 DPS would only be the sole comp if alc/qck providers were not optimized such that taking a boon provider pretty much equals same total squad DPS. Variety of options with near similar results.

You're never going to get it that precisely balanced. At the bottom line, the boons will either be worth taking or they won't be. At best, you'll have a meta that flip-flops between those two states, but that'd just make it more confusing for everybody.

[Saharo.5381]

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

You're never going to get it that precisely balanced. At the bottom line, the boons will either be worth taking or they won't be. At best, you'll have a meta that flip-flops between those two states, but that'd just make it more confusing for everybody.

Is there not a massive difference between "pretty viable" and "absolutely optimal"?

The reason people can bring at least a bit of diversity in current squad comp is because multiple classes are viable in different roles. Only the uber elite are going to be hardliners about only bringing the most optimized classes for each role, and they don't represent a large portion of the playerbase anyway.

[draxynnic.3719]

4 hours ago, Saharo Gravewind.5120 said:

Is there not a massive difference between "pretty viable" and "absolutely optimal"?

The reason people can bring at least a bit of diversity in current squad comp is because multiple classes are viable in different roles. Only the uber elite are going to be hardliners about only bringing the most optimized classes for each role, and they don't represent a large portion of the playerbase anyway.

If the difference between 4dps+heal and 3dps+quick+alac is small enough that it doesn't really matter, those who aren't optimising are just going to default to the former because why bother with support gear and learning support rotations when you can take the same berserker or viper gear that you're probably running in open world solo and just unga bunga? Especially if there are periods where 4dps+heal is the optimal choice?

"Either it's worth taking or it's not" encompasses more than just squeezing out a few more percentage points of DPS, it also covers things like whether it's worth investing time to learn the build, the gold/materials for the build, and the storage space (possibly including templates and/or additional character slots) to be able to keep switching between builds. If you make the current teamcomps only roughly equal to 4dps+heal, the non-optimisers will drift to the latter just because it's easier. (Not to mention less susceptible to boonstrip.)

[Tescao.3042]

18 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

The following two things; homogeneity and heterogeneity are mutually exclusive. Like mentioned on a previous page when people say "balance" they often refer to balance as one would on a scale. If one approaches balance with this methodology, then it means one is homogenizing a system (making different things equal to one another) and the only way to make the entire system "perfectly balanced" is to make it all equal to each other and thus completely uniform. Therefor perfect balance is synonymous with homogeneity and this doesn't work. 

 

 

An alternative perspective people take, is the kind of balance one sees in an rps game. But does anyone stop to think how RPS actually works? The truth is that is a perfectly balanced homogeneous game, where one asks an undecidable question of its homogenous components. Rock, Paper and scissors are functionally the same thing with the same properties...but when one asks a question like "which one is the best one" Then you are asking something that is formally undecidable, in that it doesn't have an answer. You can play this game of RPS forever, and never know which one is the best. This is the "illusion" of diversity that's often brought into the same conversation...because indeed such a thing is just an illusion...and therefor is not a solution either.

 

What people actually want thought is the kind balance one sees in nature. Thing is, people have no where near a real understanding for how this thing works. And to be fair, that's not a strange thing. It requires a theory of everything and right now there is no consensus on a theory of everything.

 

Right now the leading theoretical frameworks on how diversity in nature works are based on computational theories...which are elegant but also conceptually deep;

 

 

This is an example of the differences of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Class 1 is near maximal homogeneity. Class 3 is near maximal heterogeneity. Class 4 is a combination of all three classes. It is this class 4 where most of the things we see in the world occur, and it is the state of the game that is "balanced" like how nature is balanced, and is an intermediate phase between all 3 classes. 

 

If you look at these classifications it becomes a bit more visually obvious why "perfect balancing" by trying to make things equal (through homogeneity) does not work...because what ends up happening is you get what is just a class 1 automata...where everything is the same, nothing is different. The key is that Class 3, which is maximally heterogenous, will statistically produce class 1 and class 2 behavior (by random chance) and this is what makes way for class 4 behavior (the intermediary of all 3) to emerge. In other words: The world is mostly random, and the regularities, patterns and complexity we see in the world, are the inevitable statistical consequences of the world being random in this way. The world is only a one way process...which is that there is simply more and more randomness and more and more regular things being made by chance from that randomness...This is "self sustainable" complexity in the sense that so long as the world is increasing in entropy, there will always be an ever increasing void of regularity that can arise from it.

 

People want to talk about diversity and balance of nature and dismiss just how deep the topic actually is....but that's not surprising. If people want the balance of nature, they have to come to terms with the fact that "things being equal" is not in the dossier. It was never in natures plan for things to be equal...if it were the world would look very different.  

 

@Silph.5976 It's just like your Apples and Oranges example...the two things can never truly be "balanced", and the more you try, the closer you are to just making them the same cluster of atoms. Apples and Oranges already have a lot of similarities in common to begin with right... They are both sweet, both fruits, both warm colors, roughly the same size and weight...

 

Compare the apple or orange, to Water...drinkable water...H2O. It doesn't have a taste or color...doesn't even have much of a shape...it's a liquid rather than a solid (but can be a solid and a gas). It does completely different things... and it's probably impossible to quantify it as a relation to apples or oranges. So when folks bring up the idea that balance just has to be "close enough" it doesn't actually make any sense. Water is no where near the same thing as an apple or orange, yet it still has a vital and important role in our lives...so if one were to ask how to "balance" the two...how do you make the two things "balanced" till they are close enough...This is just one example of a plethora of just "things that exist" which we find both vital, harmful and sometimes a mixture of both (cigarettes and liquor).  So when anyone brings up "close enough" balance it doesn't cut it as an explanation. This is also easy to see with Rock Paper Scissors... "close enough balance" doesn't work there either for obvious reasons.

 

 

Hi JusticeRetroHunter. I enjoy reading some of your texts on the balance of nature, wanted to give you some details. Mystics consider the scientific questions as well, especially those where the scientists have given up. For example, one such question is whether hydrogen and oxygen cease to exist when they combine to form water. This can be a very long discussion, but even there people begin to divide into two groups, in short, many mystics convinced that non-existence can be an absolute reality that the mind cannot comprehend (because the mind will always try to escape into the past or the future, avoiding the present). In turn, being is a shadow, a kind of illusion of Maya. 

As for me, I do not think that a drop ceases to exist when it falls into a river; it simply loses its boundaries, just as a river loses its boundaries when it flows into the ocean.

P. S. Jesus, Buddha, Laoji, Socrates, Krishna, Mohammed, Osho (the words above are Osho's words) and many others were able to throw off their boundaries in their lifetime. Even the resurrection trick Jesus could only pull off as a yogi of the highest order(Samadhi), perhaps the rest is the fantasy of fanatics.

Edited July 4, 2022 by Tescao.3042

[Valisha.8650]

Neither. I pick balanced+fun. Uniqueness is not that important for me, as long as the profession itself is fun.

[Elseworlds.6042]

You can have one, but not both. In a pvp game where everyone has access to the same stuff? Sure, but not in an MMORPG. Otherwise you get FFXIV, where there's no unique utility or flavor in the class design except what their spells look like. And that is shallow and completely uninteresting.

[Puck.3697]

On 7/2/2022 at 9:18 PM, AliamRationem.5172 said:

You can have fun and unique classes that are balanced (see FFXIV).  GW2 struggles with this because the developers make stupid and obvious mistakes like daring to be different with non-trinity gameplay and then overemphasizing the support role when that game plan fails

I'd Respectfully disagree with this statement. 

FFXIV was made into a very easily balanced game by simple achievements 

- no builds, no speccs, no choice. Classes are sold statically set up. This means they don't have to worry about X while buffing Z. 

- pvp doesn't exist nor is it balanced in any aspect as the playerbase largely igbore it and so do the company. They just try to do some funny gimmick with it every now and then. 

I wouldn't say this is a no trinity issue. WoW is a trinity based game and isn't close to as balanced. Because WoW balances for more then pve content. And have choices. 

Choices. Builds. Speccs. The more pf them exist the harder it is to balance. They can't just buff X weapon set because they have 4 accessible versions of the proffession accessible by the player to worry about everytime they make a change

[Antycypator.9874]

Balance means you can have fun with every class whatever you want. Having more sources of important boons (Quickness and Alacrity) makes squads unique — do you really want to be chrono-jailed, because it was the only one source of these two boons? IT WAS SO UNIQUE. Now you can support allies with quickness as a firebrand, herald and warrior, or grant alacrity as a ranger, renegade and tempest. It gives you a choice, so screw that illusion of uniqueness which had you chrono-jailed, or tied only to banners. Half of every squad was literally the same: chrono, druid, BS, Firebrand, Renegade. This is the opposite of uniqueness.