Stability is a foundational problem in balance

[Chaba.5410]

3 minutes ago, jul.7602 said:

Your original quote claimed to be an authoritative definition of balance

You're right it's more authoritative than yours.  Yours seems just on the precipice of agreeing with Sirlin then you used examples that are contradictory.

If you don't like Sirlin, start with GW2's own balance philosophy post since it's their game after all:

They use a lot of the same conceptual language as Sirlin and the LoL devs.  Wonder why that would be?
 

Quote

"capitalize on the depth of the combat system to build a fluid and fast-paced combat experience that allows players to express their mastery of mechanics. We also want to create a substantial number of viable build options and allow for a broad set of combat strategies in order to enable a wide range of playstyles."

the builds that are effective can vary significantly between different levels of mastery. Our goal is to create a fun and diverse metagame for as many players as possible, and that involves addressing builds that are problematic at any level, even if they aren't problematic at every level. When bringing down a build that only overperforms at a particular level, we'll try to target changes to minimize the impact on other levels or attempt to otherwise compensate in a way that is less problematic at the targeted level.

Minimizing Bad Choices
This is just another way of saying that we want as many build components as possible—weapons, slot skills, traits, etc.—to have situations that they are viable in. Some skills may be restricted to more niche applications, but we want to avoid cases where a skill simply has no relevant use case. This can sometimes be difficult when considering the needs of multiple game modes, but that leads to our next topic: skill splits.

- Anet

 

 

Quote

"A multiplayer game is deep if it is still strategically interesting to play after expert players have studied and practiced it for years, decades, or centuries.

Viable Options: Lots of meaningful choices presented to the player. They should be presented with enough context to allows the player to use strategy to make those choices.

Fairness: Players of equal skill have a roughly equal chance at winning even though they might start the game with different sets of options / moves / characters / resources / etc.

If an expert player can consistently beat other experts by just doing one move or one tactic, we have to call that game imbalanced because there aren’t enough viable options. Such a game might have thousands of options, but we only care about the meaningful ones. If those thousands of options all accomplish the same thing, or nothing, or all lose to the dominant move mentioned above, then they are not meaningful options. They just get in the way and add the worst kind of complexity to the game: complexity that makes the game harder to learn yet no more interesting to play

While we require many viable options to call a game balanced, the requirement about giving the player a context to make those decisions strategically and the requirement that the decisions have something to do with the opponent’s actions are really about depth. They’re worth pointing out though because we should attempt to increase the depth of the game as we balance it, not decrease it."
- Sirlin

 

 

Quote

"We split players into four groups so we can take a more holistic approach to champion balance, where the needs of each audience can be considered equally. This framework also allows us to be more consistent and objective in identifying champs who are overperforming, even if it’s just in one group. If a champion is overpowered at any level of play, they’re making the game less fair by simply existing in Champ Select. Having champions who are too strong can also reduce champion diversity, as we expect players to gravitate toward the top picks. On the flip side, we buff champions who are underperforming across the board because our goal is to ensure every champion is strong for at least one audience.

A mastery curve is a representation of how much more effective a player becomes on a champ as they play them more. Champions with steep mastery curves, like Aurelion Sol and Katarina, typically have a much higher win rate when played by experienced players than newcomers to the champion.  .... 

if a champion’s power when mastered is out of line, then it will show up as highly present in Pro play or highly banned in Elite play—both of which will lead to nerfs"
- LoL Devs

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-balance-framework-update/
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-champion-balance-framework/

 

 

[Mabi black.1824]

Interesting discussion

[Leger.3724]

53 minutes ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

The problem isn't stability, the problem is that the combat system isn't designed for large scale combat and trying to "fix" that would just ruin the system as a whole. It is simply not possible to balance arround situations where players can be exposed to skill spam from 50+ othes.

I'm not sure what this combat system is designed for. There are no dedicated healing/protection classes like most other games in the MMO genre like Guild Wars 1, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 14. Yeah Firebrand, Mechanist, Druid. Half-measures added way too late and they still don't feel like a traditional support class in an MMO.

Guild Wars 2 feels like it's trying to bridge the gap between DOTA style games like League of Legends, single player action combat RPGs like Elden Ring and traditional MMORPG combat like GW1/WoW/FF14 and instead of an interesting and unique system that is fun it just ends up being everything you dislike about the three combat systems smashed together.

If the combat system was good for small scale combat... some form of sPvP would have been successful. It's not.

So the question now is what do we do about WvW? You're completely right - large scale combat means people blow up in 1-2 seconds, stability is necessary because of all the crowd control. But there are ways to change WvW specifically to ease those problems. Diminishing returns on condition stacking and crowd control as examples but there are more things that can be done. It seems the current WvW community doesn't want this. And if they don't want it maybe there should be a way to make it easier for players to return to zergs after they die since people are dying so quickly, maybe people would stick to playing WvW if it wasn't a walking, getting ganked simulator and they were spending most of their time fighting. But then that would kitten off roamers who would have to fight each other and not the people trying to return to the zerg. And I've just now typed out why no matter what Arena Net does, the "WvW community" is going to be unhappy and complain that they aren't being listened to.

[Chaba.5410]

2 hours ago, jul.7602 said:

we assume that those that are trying to balance the game want the victor to be the person with the highest skill. In mathematical terms I would express that as: The probability that person 1 defeats person 2, given person 1 has higher skill than person 2, is 100%.

And grass is green?  Not sure what you're trying to say here about game balance other than stating that skilled players should always beat unskilled players.

If the winrate when using a certain champ is low when taken by an unskilled player against a skilled player, it would lead to the mistake of buffing that champ.  Explain.

[Zyreva.1078]

53 minutes ago, Leger.3724 said:

[...] instead of an interesting and unique system that is fun it just ends up being everything you dislike about the three combat systems smashed together.

If the combat system was good for small scale combat... some form of sPvP would have been successful. It's not.

The - for many players fun and engaging - combat is what kept the game (and WvW in particular) alive for so long. Trying to ruin it in an attempt to cater to a fundamentally imbalanced playstyle is not going to help improve anything (for example the mount already made it way way easier for zerglings to get back to their zerg, yet it hasn't increased the popularity of WvW. Neither did dmg and cc nerfs, the increased boon/stab access and overall increased survivability).

Bad players - the vast majority - are going to die regardless, no matter what and if the game ever reaches a state where players aren't dieing anymore, it will be the death of the game mode for sure.

sPvP used to be pretty successful, the main things that were holding it back and ultimatively lead to it's neglect and decline is that it isn't very viewer friendly, as well as some very questionable class balance and design decisions, starting with the pre HoT trait rework, and culminating in a meta where players simply didn't die anymore.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Zyreva.1078

[jul.7602]

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

And grass is green?  Not sure what you're trying to say here about game balance other than stating that skilled players should always beat unskilled players.

If the winrate when using a certain champ is low when taken by an unskilled player against a skilled player, it would lead to the mistake of buffing that champ.  Explain.

That's why we are conditioning the probability of winning on all variables besides skill. In other words, if Skill1>skill2 P(player 1 beating player 2)=100%

[Chaba.5410]

37 minutes ago, jul.7602 said:

That's why we are conditioning the probability of winning on all variables besides skill. In other words, if Skill1>skill2 P(player 1 beating player 2)=100%

How does that say anything about balance?  If you aren't segmenting by skill level, you end up in a situation where newer players don't find fun because of the long climb towards mastery and experienced high level players end up with a single domination build.

Skill levels do not get segmented in WvW.  Nor does the unfairness with the numbers game.  That's why there's usually constant calls on these forums for nerfing or buffing around certain conditions like defending while outnumbered.  That's why I point out often that offense/defense on objectives should only be balanced around even numbers.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Leger.3724]

23 minutes ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

The - for many players fun and engaging - combat is what kept the game (and WvW in particular) alive for so long. Trying to ruin it in an attempt to cater to a fundamentally imbalanced playstyle is not going to help improve anything (for example the mount already made it way way easier for zerglings to get back to their zerg, yet it hasn't increased the popularity of WvW. Neither did dmg and cc nerfs, the increased boon/stab access and overall increased survivability).

Bad players - the vast majority - are going to die regardless, no matter what and if the game ever reaches a state where players aren't dieing anymore, it will be the death of the game mode for sure.

sPvP used to be pretty successful, the main things that were holding it back and ultimatively lead to it's neglect and decline is that it isn't very viewer friendly, as well as some very questionable class balance and design decisions, starting with the pre HoT trait rework, and culminating in a meta where players simply didn't die anymore.

sPvP was never successful before Heart of Thorns. That was probably the time I played the most Guild Wars 2 including sPvP.

League of Legends, Counterstrike and other games were popular before streaming them became popular. The game is good, people play it and then they want even more content so they found people streaming it. World of Warcraft isn't viewer friendly, neither is Runescape or Final Fantasy 14. They all seem to do well with streaming numbers. You have to make something people want to play. That's step one.

sPvP and WvW both fail at this. PvE succeeds because Arena Net can scale boss fights and difficulty at will. They can invent new NPC-only mechanics to spice up fights.

Arena Net has a few options in front of them:

Continue 'balancing' here or there and not having much success.

Drastically increase the rewards to essentially bribe the PvE playerbase to spend more time in these modes.

Abandon pvp and leave up the automatic tournament and matchmaking systems. Put it in maintenance mode.

A drastic overhaul to combat and scaling that will kitten off people like you and the core dedicated pvp "community" if we can even call something so small a community.

Arena Net is unlikely to take this option:

Cater to the tiny community of players in these game modes by giving them a greater share of development resources than they deserve while also simultaneously making no attempt to grow the playerbase because it might upset that small existing community.

[Sereath.1428]

2 hours ago, Leger.3724 said:

sPvP was never successful before Heart of Thorns. That was probably the time I played the most Guild Wars 2 including sPvP.

League of Legends, Counterstrike and other games were popular before streaming them became popular. The game is good, people play it and then they want even more content so they found people streaming it. World of Warcraft isn't viewer friendly, neither is Runescape or Final Fantasy 14. They all seem to do well with streaming numbers. You have to make something people want to play. That's step one.

sPvP and WvW both fail at this. PvE succeeds because Arena Net can scale boss fights and difficulty at will. They can invent new NPC-only mechanics to spice up fights.

Arena Net has a few options in front of them:

Continue 'balancing' here or there and not having much success.

Drastically increase the rewards to essentially bribe the PvE playerbase to spend more time in these modes.

Abandon pvp and leave up the automatic tournament and matchmaking systems. Put it in maintenance mode.

A drastic overhaul to combat and scaling that will kitten off people like you and the core dedicated pvp "community" if we can even call something so small a community.

Arena Net is unlikely to take this option:

Cater to the tiny community of players in these game modes by giving them a greater share of development resources than they deserve while also simultaneously making no attempt to grow the playerbase because it might upset that small existing community.

sPvP players are also like this (the 50 of them), they think that perfectly balancing the game around their imaginary roles/single-game-mode is going to somehow make the playerbase grow, or stop it from bleeding out.
"Come on devs, just a little more of that perfect balance and Conquest sPvP will be saved and tons of players will come back! Maybe if we could just remove this and that build as well."
When in reality everything about sPvP is just boring and rigid: Severe lack of stat personalization, lack of runes, sigils and all builds have been strictly balanced around very specific "roles". Anything that goes against that philosophy gets completely deleted from the game.

Back to WvW

The fact that some people are already convincing themselves that a relatively small change like giving diminishing returns to CC would ruin the "gameplay".
This kitten is tragic.

Edited June 12, 2023 by XxsdgxX.8109

[Zyreva.1078]

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

League of Legends, Counterstrike and other games were popular before streaming them became popular. The game is good, people play it and then they want even more content so they found people streaming it. World of Warcraft isn't viewer friendly, neither is Runescape or Final Fantasy 14. They all seem to do well with streaming numbers. You have to make something people want to play. That's step one.

By those metrics the entire game is a failure and yet here we are more than ten years later and the game is still alive and doing better than many other games of the same genre, despite it's rather lacking marketing. This is especially true when you compare pvp/wvw to similar game modes in other mmos. Relative speaking it's likely PvE that's lacking numbers in comparison.

And while GW2 wont ever be as popular as giants like WoW, i'm very glad it is different from those and there are good reasons why i (and many other's) are playing gw2 instead of those other games. If i wanted to play a WvW, LoL, CS, ... copy - i'd just play those games instead (also twitch views =/= active players, there might be some correlation, but it's not a 1:1 relation).

And if you ask people why they like gw2 - the combat tends to be one of the main merits according to many.

That's not to say everything is perfect, obviusly not, but again, changing fundamental aspects of the combat system when it's widely considered one of the game's strengths doesn't appear like a smart move.

41 minutes ago, XxsdgxX.8109 said:

The fact that some people are already convincing themselves that a relatively small change like giving diminishing returns to CC would ruin the "gameplay".
This kitten is tragic.

So you think rewarding players for facetanking stuff is a good thing (That's not a small change btw unless we are talking about something actually minor like -1% duration per cc within 5s or something like that - but that's not what you have in mind, right?).

Most games with dr for cc have way stronger baseline cc, cc stacking and/or way less counters to it than gw2. So would you accept massive buffs to cc as well as nerfs to stun breaks and stab in return for dr, making the game more passive as result? Or do you just want to get rid of an entire combat mechanic, that has been an integral part of the combat system since release, because you haven't learned how to deal with it?

Edited June 12, 2023 by Zyreva.1078

[Cuks.8241]

On 6/11/2023 at 10:10 PM, jul.7602 said:

Balance is a narrow term describing the mathematical probability of defeating your enemy conditioned on some set of variables. When that probability approaches such that probably of defeating your opponent is the same for any set of build, you can say that the combat is perfectly balanced, conditioned on the choice of build.

Sure that is balance. But that is also a very bad game design at least for rpgs. Because that pretty much means player made builds are irrelevant and might as well completely remove them.

No, not all builds should be balanced. There should be good builds and bad builds and up to players to figure out what is good and what is bad and synergies between builds. And there should be a large enough available variability to suit different play styles.

As for your solutions. I think they are bad for the game. It's just dumbing down the game and makes roles in a squad less distinguished and make different CC type abilities more homogenised. I'm fine with fine tuning stability and CC sources and/or spreading out stability sources in a squad (Spb frontliner with better stability source). But just giving everyone anti cc kit without any investment? Nah. Most if not all classes can already build heavily in anti CC. But the beauty of cooperative playing is in role specialization and not homogenisation. Homogenisation just takes away another skill factor. Group composition, communication and coordinated play is skill and it feels very satisfying when your group is well coordinated. Even the little things feel very satisfying when you get 30 people to move, dodge, bomb, blast... at the same time.

[Leger.3724]

I just have this nagging feeling the people who blame Arena Net while also complaining about change are people who flunked out of competitive pvp games and just want Arena Net to funnel PvErs into a PvP game mode so they can farm and feel good about themselves.

[Kirevey.5079]

All this math talk and then giving a guess solution to a guessed problem is just funny to me.

I could argue that stun breaks are the most important thing in the game, or resistance uptime, or protection uptime and i would have the same amount of data to back it up: none.

In the spirit of math, unless you can map all the variables of a model, you will only reach a percentage of correctness on w/e analysis u want to perform using said model. Even then, you have to start with some kind of hypothesis.

Balance is a subjective term. It only makes sense with context, and the context for games has always been what the game devs want it to be.