Balance Implications of new weapon mastery

[draxynnic.3719]

10 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

I disagree. You said it yourself. A lot of the weapons can’t even be fully utilized because they were designed for a particular elite spec. And the elite specs even force you to take the particular weapon over core for the elite spec to work. The design of elite specs choke the game into preset builds and that was for the longest time their balance prerogative: less choices meant “easier balance” which turned out to not be correct and catastrophically screwed this game for the past 10 years.

The Relics will be a breath of fresh air. i can't believe people actually defend wanting to take useless stat+effect combos with their runes. 

I think this depends on the weapon and elite specialisation in question. Some are just kinda added on and aren't really linked to the elite spec apart from maybe a trait that has a relatively minor effect (dragonhunter longbow is an example - they have Pure of Sight but that applies to any ranged weapon). Some weapons are heavily enabled by the traits and playstyle of the elite spec so that they'd be hard to use without it (deadeye rifle could be considered to be one of these - daredevils and specters are probably going to find it hard to really use rifle effectively). Some weapons do the opposite, and it's the weapon that enables at least some of the features of the elite specialisation, but the elite specialisation has a strong identity of its own, so the weapon being available to other elite specialisations isn't going to stop the elite spec from being used (specter scepter is probably a good example here). The danger zone is when the weapon is, at least in the eyes of some, the identity of the elite specialisation. Now, placing weapons in this category isn't perfectly clear because there's no elite specialisation which brings nothing in terms of traits and mechanics, but vindicator greatsword and catalyst hammer would at least be candidates.

10 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

That's where you got it backwards, and it relays to the first comment i put on this thread. "Solving" the game is not what you actually want, especially not by the devs. You want the game to be explored and preferably, skills would be designed to be fundamentally unsolvable (undecidable). A game being "solved" is how you get meta gaming and homogeneity of the game state. 

It's a very human-centric notion to think that the world needs to be "solved" or that perfection is somehow attainable (For anyone that watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3, that's what aiming for perfection leads you). Being someone who has studied physics and mathematics for like 10 years now is i'm telling you right now, that objectivity is not real, math is arbitrary, and that solvability is not how the natural world works.

The natural world is nothing but unsolvable variables. It's the reason why you get to keep the illusion of free will...because you don't get to access all the answers. What is the point of playing a game, in which the developers have already solved the game for you? Already decided what build you should play and how to play it?

Only 10, huh?

I think the flaw in your analysis is that you're considering how long it takes to "solve" the metagame, and not the consequences on the game when that happens. It's not really a huge deal if the metagame is "solved" as long as the distinction between the optimal setup and other good setups is small enough that people don't feel like they're shooting themselves in the foot by not taking the optimal setup every time. It is, however, a big deal if the "solution" is found (or even something close to it that might not be the strongest thing possible, but is still much stronger than everything else), and that's so much stronger compared to everything else that people feel that's what you have to do or you're massively handicapping yourself, even if you'd rather play something else with a different theme or playstyle.

In a game like FF14 where (from what I hear) your class pretty much defines your build, it's fairly easy to get into that first position, where people might know what the best class for a particular role might be (even if it might vary between encounters), but the others are still close enough. If it turns out that any one class is too strong, you can nerf it without that nerf affecting anything else. If it turns out that one class is too weak, you can buff it, without being concerned that the buff will interact with something else that's going to propel that something else into the stratosphere (unless it's a synergy between different characters, anyway). The game might be 'solved', but the devs have a pretty good idea of what can be done, and while it's pretty much impossible for everything to be exactly level, they'll at least be within the same league.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a game which allows freely combining anything will take longer to find the best options - but this just means that it's likely that any superpowered builds aren't going to be identified until after it's already hit the general playerbase. And when something does come up that arises out of a synergy of several building blocks that would be fine individually, you can't just nerf the one overperforming build without possibly kicking out the supporting beams of several other builds which people enjoy playing and which otherwise would be okay. You're much more likely to get into that second scenario where the "solution" is massively overpowered to the point of being dominating, and if such a build does arise, you might not be able to deal with it without causing significant collateral damage. The combination of overpowered builds being much more likely to sneak past testing, and the collateral damage often inflicted when these builds do need to be balanced, makes this end of the spectrum much harder to balance. This was the general problem with the balancing for Guild Wars 1, and which the elite specialisation system was intended to prevent.

The Guild Wars franchise on a whole is trying to find a balance between the two extremes - where player expression through build design is possible, but where the complexity of balance remains at a level the devs can handle. Opening up elite specialisation weapons, for better or worse, is a step towards making balance more complex for a team that has already copped a lot of criticism for how balance is handled. We've already seen at least one outlier in testing that will likely result in nerfing - sw/wh elementalist (weaver specifically, I think, but I don't think it had to be weaver to post exceptionally high numbers).

Ultimately, the experience with GW2 is that Snowcrows and their like usually have the meta solved within a month of an update. I don't think weaponmaster training is really going to delay that by a significant amount. But it is entirely unlikely that it will create outliers that need to be nerfed, and when it all shakes down, the variation in the builds within the "good" category might have decreased rather than increased. Referring back to the sw/wh elementalist, for example: Currently, a DPS weaver might use sw/d, while a DPS tempest might use d/wh. Next week, they might both be using sw/wh. When sw/wh is brough under control, maybe they'll both still be using sw/wh, or maybe warhorn will have been nerfed so hard in the process that it falls out of favour and sw/d becomes the standard for both. Or the reverse might happen and d/wh becomes the standard for both. Maybe both get nerfed out and d/d wins. Thus, even in situations where there are still the same number of builds, they might end up feeling more similar to one another as the end up using the same weapons rather than being balanced with different weaponsets.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

8 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

i think the flaw in your analysis is that you're considering how long it takes to "solve" the metagame, and not the consequences on the game when that happens.

The solving of the game state is reflected in the meta game (that's kind of obvious) since the meta game is the result of builds going through an evolutionary selection process. Builds that work, continue to survive and get played more. Builds that do not work tend to die and get played less. The meta are the builds that “survived,” and you can also parametrize how diverse the game is by counting how many people are playing each unique build, typing them as “species.” Ex: If there’s 10,000 people playing thief build x, and 3 people playing thief build y this implies the builds fitness.

In a completely formal sense the game is never truly solved because human brains are involved in the picture and this is why we don’t see like mentioned earlier everyone just playing condition holo-smith right now. Humans are not totally logical beings…some of them want to have fun they want to have choices and free will and not to just play the solved game and in fact I’d argue people actively try to fight the will to play a solved game. Otherwise it would be pointless, boring and homogenous.

the human factor here is not what needs fixing nor can it really be fixed even if you think that it could…it is the game. Right like, you can’t expect to throw 3 trivial options at the player base and then just rely on them having free will to make your game interesting and deep.

Continuing with what I was saying... the metagame reflects the solved gamestate. Ideally, the metagame is never solved and always changing, usually as a consequence of meta builds having counters to them that exist out in the space of possible builds, and this acts as the driving force for people to play meta builds less, driving down that population and causing other builds to rise and become meta builds, and this cycle repeats over and over. This is the kind of game people actually want to play but they’ve never even experienced what actual true game balance looks like…a meta in which all your choices have meaning, where all your enemies are novel because the metagame constantly fluctuates among all the possible builds that exist. Instead what people experience in this game is the meta being solved within days and the rest of the fun is carried by people’s own freewill. That’s a statement on how sad this game is designed.

How do you stop a the game crunching down to a solved state? It’s like I said in the first comment and how I explain it in many other comments that I leave around; Is the fact that you can do mostly addition and subtraction problems to solve this game. Like the 4 choices offered to you earlier, choice D is the best choice, and it takes you hopefully, less than a second to decide that…

Undecidability is not hard to attain nor does it make the game needlessly complex and often this is what people don’t understand about it. The Mandelbrot Set for example is undecidable. It has infinite complexity all contained in that tiny equation (z = z^2 +c). You can literally stare at the Mandelbrot set forever and never encounter the same shape twice. RPS is also another Undecidable problem. But more to guild wars 2, the way you get undecidability is to just design skills in a way where they have benefits and penalties and that are not set numbers but variables decided with autonomy by human players…literally leveraging the fact that you have free will as the basis for the balance of the game.

Practically none of the skills have this property in this game. What you have instead are a bunch of addition and subtraction problems and what happens if you add more options when all the options are addition and subtraction? Well It would prolong and extend the games complexity and slow down the game state (by a lot) but in the end you are still just doing a longer addition and subtraction problem…so how long will solving the game take then…it’s a combination of both presentation of options and what those options do that decide whether the game will be solved either in seconds or never…but so long as we continue striving for a “trivial” and “solved” game your just gonna get worse and worse homogeneity and balance issues.

Edited August 18, 2023 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Doggie.3184]

Most of my Thief weapon sets have been useless for years, as well as Deadeye generally being useless majority of it's existance, so I'm already used to this problem. Thief Spec weapons didn't even work with other Elite specs in beta outside of Scepter being better on Daredevil than Specter.. Either way we'll always have useless stuff nomatter what.

[Infinity.2876]

In terms of balance implications of the new weapons mysteries some of the weapons are too tied to their representative elite spec (sword engi, hammer ele, etc.). Some of the weapons are good but would be too janky for the common playerbase (axe virt, and others). And some are just not good with the rest of the builds for various other reasons (warrior pistol, warrior torch, staff thief, etc.)

What I predict will be broken: axe/shield virt, axe/torch willbender, sword cata, sword tempest, and maybe a few others.

A large part of whether this release is going to be good is how they are going to change it afterward to work in relation to each elite spec.

[Stx.4857]

Yeah the balance is going to be pretty bad for the beginning of the expac, but hopefully they can make adjustments that bring the weapons closer together without ruining the weapons original e-spec.  
 

But yeah they haven’t really even managed to balance the weapon selection we have now, so I wouldn’t hope going forward.  When was the last time sword power thief was good in pve for example.  2013?

[Gotejjeken.1267]

The biggest question is what ARE they actually balancing towards?

DPS against stationary golems? Functional DPS in fractals / raids / strikes that require actual mechanics? Competitive?

In any case it'll be interesting.  Things like Untamed's Hammer came well after Soulbeast who I can already see using it to great unintended effect.  In that case, do you rework hammer because of the soulbeast interaction(s)? Nerf soulbeast around a weapon it was never designed for? Do nothing and watch the world burn?

[Fueki.4753]

3 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

The biggest question is what ARE they actually balancing towards?

DPS against stationary golems? Functional DPS in fractals / raids / strikes that require actual mechanics? Competitive?

In any case it'll be interesting.  Things like Untamed's Hammer came well after Soulbeast who I can already see using it to great unintended effect.  In that case, do you rework hammer because of the soulbeast interaction(s)? Nerf soulbeast around a weapon it was never designed for? Do nothing and watch the world burn?

They could also split the abilities between core the different specializations. That way, the weapons can work the intended way on the specializations the weapons belongs to, while being weaker (or stronger) on specializations that'd otherwise over- or underperform with it.

This isn't likely to happen, but it's still a possibility.

[Stx.4857]

19 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

The biggest question is what ARE they actually balancing towards?

DPS against stationary golems? Functional DPS in fractals / raids / strikes that require actual mechanics? Competitive?

In any case it'll be interesting.  Things like Untamed's Hammer came well after Soulbeast who I can already see using it to great unintended effect.  In that case, do you rework hammer because of the soulbeast interaction(s)? Nerf soulbeast around a weapon it was never designed for? Do nothing and watch the world burn?

It’s a tricky situation.  
 

you could just nerf the hammer, then buff untamed to compensate, but then what if hammer is already weak on Druid and core?  You’ve just made it even weaker.  And then if you buff untamed due to nerfing hammer, maybe now sword is OP.  
 

It’s going to be a LOT of work to balance this mess.  I hope they can do it.  

[Manpag.6421]

15 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

They could also split the abilities between core the different specializations. That way, the weapons can work the intended way on the specializations the weapons belongs to, while being weaker (or stronger) on specializations that'd otherwise over- or underperform with it.

This isn't likely to happen, but it's still a possibility.

I do think this is a good option, if ANet would consider it. For example, Mesmer scepter AA generates clones, but on Virtuoso it instead generates a blade to fit the elite spec mechanic. Main hand sword 3 is also reworked for Virtuoso.

With other specs not getting this benefit, why not do the same in reverse to allow dagger to generate clones after the same number of hits?

There aren’t actually that many espec weapons that are fundamentally tied to the elite mechanic. Scepter is very tied to shadow shroud, and could have some alternative effects on non-Specters (e.g. tethering your mark if you’re on a Deadeye). There are a few weapons (e.g. Revenant shortbow) that aren’t tied to the profession mechanic, but benefit strongly from elite traits (in that case, adding piercing). They could do some either/or splits though if they play around with augmentation — so they could make projectiles pierce by default, but bounce instead on an elite spec, while another elite spec removes the piercing but adds boons or conditions, etc.

 In short, a big trait rework could make elite spec weapons equally viable across all specs, while creating more diversity within those same weapons.

[Antrix.4512]

I'm amazed at how many people have blind faith in the so-called "balance team" and think they can balance everything. Guys, open your eyes and take a realistic look at things. It's like believing in Santa Claus or that an alcoholic with a 50-year habit will quit drinking of his own free will, unrelated to his health. What will they balance? They couldn't balance what's in place now; how can there be any talk of balance in SotO?

Their entire "balance" consists of randomly nerfing classes that dominate them in PvP and buffing classes they play themselves, making foolish decisions despite warnings from hundreds of players, only to later admit "yeah, guys, we messed up."

I don't know what rotation has occurred within the company, who's been fired or hired, but here's what I'll say - GW2 is a wonderful game, but the developers have no right to talk about balance or even use that word in their speeches or messages. Balancing any game, especially an MMO, is difficult. But in the case of ANet, it's impossible (at least with current so-called "balance team") because, at best, they'll break something, and at worst, players will say goodbye to their favorite class. Better that they just create new content and fix bugs. Hundreds of bugs. Thousands. But for kitten sake, enough of these grandiose talks about balance.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

3 hours ago, Stx.4857 said:

It’s a tricky situation.  
 

you could just nerf the hammer, then buff untamed to compensate, but then what if hammer is already weak on Druid and core?  You’ve just made it even weaker.  And then if you buff untamed due to nerfing hammer, maybe now sword is OP.  
 

It’s going to be a LOT of work to balance this mess.  I hope they can do it.  

Agree.  The example was to point out that interactions can exist 'backward', essentially, they can easily break something existing (soulbeast) even with something mediocre (hammer) because of interactions with might on merge, stances, etc.

Druid definitely could see some overturning with it as well due to the number of CCs Druid already has and that staff was balanced with that in mind to have no hard CC and only a slow moving targeted soft CC.  

This whole thing just seems like they should have rolled it out in phases.  Start with maybe unlocking one weapon for each spec and go from there and at the end do the rune decoupling thing.  All at once is pretty bonkers.  

[Bunny.9834]

The main thing I'm seeing now is what I feared would happen to the e-spec weapons.
They're not only losing their exclusivity/class fantasy to that e-spec but now the bond is getting weaker because they have to compensate when being used with a different e-spec. Ex: the DE Rifle. 

I still hope they just made the new SOTO core weapons change functionalities depending on the e-spec. 

[Leo G.4501]

On 8/21/2023 at 10:04 PM, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

 

This whole thing just seems like they should have rolled it out in phases.  Start with maybe unlocking one weapon for each spec and go from there and at the end do the rune decoupling thing.  All at once is pretty bonkers.  

I still think it would have been a great incentive if they only unlocked the elite spec weapons for core specs only. It would give something unique to non-espec builds. As of now, core spec builds are only ever niche and that's if the profession is lucky enough to have good enough core spec traits to pull it off, like core guardian. But most professions' especs are basically core++.

Later down the line, they could have expanded them to especs but this expansion's espec could have been their focus to revitalize core in post-80 content.

[Burnfall.9573]

On 8/14/2023 at 2:16 PM, Raarsi.6798 said:

Don't worry, I'm sure Anet will do damage control after some things are pointed out.

Maybe.

Probably.

-insert mad cackling in D/D berserker here-

Edited August 24, 2023 by Burnfall.9573

[Leo G.4501]

On 8/17/2023 at 4:20 PM, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

That's where you got it backwards, and it relays to the first comment i put on this thread. "Solving" the game is not what you actually want, especially not by the devs. You want the game to be explored and preferably, skills would be designed to be fundamentally unsolvable (undecidable). A game being "solved" is how you get meta gaming and homogeneity of the game state. 

 

I don't think the quote is talking about "solving the game" but rather solving the problems, i.e. balance issues, under-utilized specs or weapons, over performance, unengaging content, etc. When you have more variables, it makes a problem more complicated to address to the point it might not be solved at all and just linger throughout the game for years.

I will agree that sometimes, some problems should not be solved but rather, mitigated so the fun factor of the game remains intact. 

[draxynnic.3719]

On 8/19/2023 at 1:50 AM, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

The solving of the game state is reflected in the meta game (that's kind of obvious) since the meta game is the result of builds going through an evolutionary selection process. Builds that work, continue to survive and get played more. Builds that do not work tend to die and get played less. The meta are the builds that “survived,” and you can also parametrize how diverse the game is by counting how many people are playing each unique build, typing them as “species.” Ex: If there’s 10,000 people playing thief build x, and 3 people playing thief build y this implies the builds fitness.

In a completely formal sense the game is never truly solved because human brains are involved in the picture and this is why we don’t see like mentioned earlier everyone just playing condition holo-smith right now. Humans are not totally logical beings…some of them want to have fun they want to have choices and free will and not to just play the solved game and in fact I’d argue people actively try to fight the will to play a solved game. Otherwise it would be pointless, boring and homogenous.

the human factor here is not what needs fixing nor can it really be fixed even if you think that it could…it is the game. Right like, you can’t expect to throw 3 trivial options at the player base and then just rely on them having free will to make your game interesting and deep.

Continuing with what I was saying... the metagame reflects the solved gamestate. Ideally, the metagame is never solved and always changing, usually as a consequence of meta builds having counters to them that exist out in the space of possible builds, and this acts as the driving force for people to play meta builds less, driving down that population and causing other builds to rise and become meta builds, and this cycle repeats over and over. This is the kind of game people actually want to play but they’ve never even experienced what actual true game balance looks like…a meta in which all your choices have meaning, where all your enemies are novel because the metagame constantly fluctuates among all the possible builds that exist. Instead what people experience in this game is the meta being solved within days and the rest of the fun is carried by people’s own freewill. That’s a statement on how sad this game is designed.

How do you stop a the game crunching down to a solved state? It’s like I said in the first comment and how I explain it in many other comments that I leave around; Is the fact that you can do mostly addition and subtraction problems to solve this game. Like the 4 choices offered to you earlier, choice D is the best choice, and it takes you hopefully, less than a second to decide that…

Undecidability is not hard to attain nor does it make the game needlessly complex and often this is what people don’t understand about it. The Mandelbrot Set for example is undecidable. It has infinite complexity all contained in that tiny equation (z = z^2 +c). You can literally stare at the Mandelbrot set forever and never encounter the same shape twice. RPS is also another Undecidable problem. But more to guild wars 2, the way you get undecidability is to just design skills in a way where they have benefits and penalties and that are not set numbers but variables decided with autonomy by human players…literally leveraging the fact that you have free will as the basis for the balance of the game.

Practically none of the skills have this property in this game. What you have instead are a bunch of addition and subtraction problems and what happens if you add more options when all the options are addition and subtraction? Well It would prolong and extend the games complexity and slow down the game state (by a lot) but in the end you are still just doing a longer addition and subtraction problem…so how long will solving the game take then…it’s a combination of both presentation of options and what those options do that decide whether the game will be solved either in seconds or never…but so long as we continue striving for a “trivial” and “solved” game your just gonna get worse and worse homogeneity and balance issues.

Your model has little to do with the reality of the topic here.

Opening up the weapons hasn't done much to change the complexity of the game, really. The expert buildcrafters know what the weapons do. They probably narrowed down the best combinations to a handful per elite specialisation, if not per profession, to a handful within hours of the announcement. Snowcrows has already announced that they'll have the post-SotO builds available within three weeks of launch, and most of that is probably relics (including adjusting the templates on their site to account for relics). To create a system with enough complexity to be "unsolvable" would require remaking the game from the ground up. It just ain't happening. And in the real world, games like GW1 that did have a greater degree of complexity were harder to balance - since while that structure might be harder to find the absolute best build, there's always the possibility in such a chaotic system that someone's going to find it anyway, or find something else which is not quite the "solution" but is still so much better than what would otherwise be considered the baseline that it becomes a serious problem.

Ultimately, keeping the weapon part of the elite specialisation package makes the decision more complex for the player, since it forced the player to weigh the capabilities of the elite specialisation versus the capabilities of the weapon. Being able to make each choice separately makes it easier, not harder, to optimise. And some weapons and elite specialisations are going to feel the cost of that when their weapon gets nerfed due to what another elite specialisation can do with it (this might have already happened with elementalist warhorn...).

Is weaponmaster training the end of the world? No. Is it going to do anything to somehow make balancing easier or better? Kitten no. Some professions that were otherwise saddled with terrible weapons will be able to break out of that, but that's something that could have been solved by fixing those weapons and/or introducing new core weapons (something that is happening anyway).

Seriously, I've seen you present your arguments in a few threads, and you're really coming across as something of an embodiment of the stereotype experimental physicists have of the theoretical physicist who has a mathematically sound and even beautiful model, and then insists that the data is wrong when the data doesn't match the model. Your model seems to be that if a game has enough complexity and the meta is shaken up often enough, people won't be able to solve the meta before the next shakeup. I can see the logic, but it has two major flaws:

First, people finding the solution is not a predictable "it will take this long to find", but more of a half-life or quantum probability-like situation. You could have a system so complex that the expectation would be that it would take a thousand years to solve - and someone might still luck out and find the solution in a day. Think of all those calculations as to how long it would take to break a password - there's always the possibility, however miniscule, that someone will just guess it first try.

Second, as I've said a few times, the solution doesn't need to be found to be a balance problem - just a build that's strong enough that it becomes a balance problem. Higher complexity leads to greater variation between builds and more possible synergies which often leads to increasing gaps in power between the strongest and weakest builds.

The experiment has been run, and the results are that increasing complexity makes games harder to balance because they're more likely to have those overly tall poppies waiting to be discovered. Games with set builds are relatively easy to balance, increasing the customisation available to the player makes balance more difficult. Of course, the whole point of balance is to be able to give players a range of choices and have them all be meaningful - a game with only one choice is going to be trivial to balance (everyone has exactly the same build...) but is certainly no better off than a game which has multiple choices on paper but where one is so much stronger than the others that that's the only one anyone plays - you're going to have one build everyone uses either way. There's a balance to be struck between having player customisability, and having those options being close enough in power that there is a good number of practical options. Finding that balance is not something that I think can be analytically solved.

Edited August 25, 2023 by draxynnic.3719

[Burnfall.9573]

Breaking News:  Bad Design>Elementalist Profession - Catalsyst is preparing for another round of Catastrophic Toxic Comeback

 

 

Edited August 25, 2023 by Burnfall.9573

[draxynnic.3719]

.

3 minutes ago, Burnfall.9573 said:

Breaking News: Elementalist Profession - Catalsyst is preparing for another round of catastrophic Toxic comeback

 

 

41.5k damage shouldn't bring down too harsh a nerf in the current environment, and running mostly on just two attunements is something that weaver has been doing for months, so other elite specialisations doing it when using sword isn't too surprising.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

2 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The experiment has been run

No it hasn't. 

Look, you simply don't understand the the idea . The more possible builds that can exist, the more likely someone out there in the space of possible builds will find a solution to a problem (because the solutions to those problems, generate newer problems that need solutions and so on in infinitum). When the system is intractable (undecidedly difficult) there will never be a solved state of the game. Options and what those options do, determine whether the game is intractable. Like I mentioned earlier, practically none of the skills in this game have this property (of being undecidable) they are all addition and subtraction problems (decidable calculations)...hence why you are even able to optimize two choices in the first place...because they are all just numbers that you can add and subtract and get an answer.

You act like this I'm talking about is theoretical or doesn't exist, These things are well known, well studied and applied things...and I've mentioned that before. Your computer, the one you literally play this game on, operates on the same exact principles. Have you ever thought about how your computer works? It's permutations of 0's and 1's that are used to construct logic gates, that can then perform arbitrary computation...such as the construction of a language...which you can again construct through assembly, to perform arbitrary computation...This is why i can type to you on this forum, and play this game, and why millions of games exist in general on a single device...because all you are doing at base level is permuting different arrangements of 0's and 1's.

Think about it like this...in your world, you wouldn't be able to even make a computer because you don't even have a fundamental grasp for why it even works and how its able to even give you the diversity of programs that it does. 

When it comes to balance, it is in fact that SAME mechanism...of more things existing, that self-balances itself...hence why natural systems are well...also balanced systems too. The more builds that exist, the more likely counters to dominant builds will exist, and arise as a result of those builds being dominant...it's quiet literately the same dynamic as Wolves, Rabbits, Grass.

Rabbits eat the grass, they get bigger in population.

Grass population gets smaller, wolf population gets bigger...rabbits will decrease.

Because rabbits went down, grass grows again and wolves die out because there's not enough rabbits to support the population

the cycle repeats. 

Nature does this by simply creating all possible forms that can exist...and in the space of possible forms, solutions are found to problems, new problems arise, and new solutions are found, and this continues in an infinitely large endless oscillation of different dominance and subordinate relationships between all the elements that exist. Nature doesn't need to balance by eliminating anything...it simply creates more things...and it does this by simply making it possible for all things to exist...through this property of intractability and undecidability...hence why you, me and the computers we use all exist rather than not exist.

When you say the game gets harder to balance, you are assuming the answer to your own question...because your operating on the assumption that "equalizing everything" and going in and adjusting numbers, is the only way balance can occur, which is just plain wrong and everything that we know and have today does not operate like this. The reason we are literally communicating right now, is courtesy of the fact that your argument is wrong about how balance and diversity works, which is the great irony of this conversation.

Has the experiment begun? Hardly... We've only done one of the two things : Creating more options through this ability to permute what already exists...great...that's the first step...the second step is the turning the decidability of those options into undecidable ones...and clearly, that is what you see most people have a real issue with : The fact that the options are so easily comparable that you can do a simple addition or subtraction problem to optimize your choices. 

Something to mention, a few of the Relics we received, are well-designed...one of them actually has intractable behaviour...such as Relic of the Lhyr. It is in fact impossible to make an optimality calculation to this relic, and therefor it's usage will be endlessly novel. Some of the others are somewhat non-trivial as well. I counted 1 rune that is intractable, 2 that I suspect might be intractable, and 13-15 that are non-trivial (meaning they might be decidable, but the calculation seems difficult to do).

As for weapons, you are for sure jumping way ahead of the gun, literally crying wolf two days after the expansion. Builds have barely even had enough time to dive into the possibility space. I watched a video today of a meme power staff soulbeast build...who would have thunk that one, but that is the beauty of this mechanism at work...people are gonna generate ideas and find in the space of possible builds, things they find useful, carving out solutions to their problems, and as those solutions to their problems manifest, new problems will arise to those solutions, and new solutions will arise to address them...and that will continue for a while until everything that is "decidable" has been calculated and decided. If you have weapons and skills in the game that make that job of "deciding" easy to do...then those weapons need their mechanics adjusted to be more unique...and not decidable... this is my entire point i've been making for many threads now and most issues you will see in the game come from this ailment.

I'm ending this comment now, i haven't proof read it so gotta cope with the shotty delivery... because i don't wanna sit here and type all night, i got things to do.

Edited August 25, 2023 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Terian.8359]

7 hours ago, Burnfall.9573 said:

Breaking News:  Bad Design>Elementalist Profession - Catalsyst is preparing for another round of Catastrophic Toxic Comeback

Its easy mode -_-

pCata - 45k dps on golem

[draxynnic.3719]

On 8/25/2023 at 5:12 PM, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

No it hasn't. 

Look, you simply don't understand the the idea . The more possible builds that can exist, the more likely someone out there in the space of possible builds will find a solution to a problem (because the solutions to those problems, generate newer problems that need solutions and so on in infinitum). When the system is intractable (undecidedly difficult) there will never be a solved state of the game. Options and what those options do, determine whether the game is intractable. Like I mentioned earlier, practically none of the skills in this game have this property (of being undecidable) they are all addition and subtraction problems (decidable calculations)...hence why you are even able to optimize two choices in the first place...because they are all just numbers that you can add and subtract and get an answer.

You act like this I'm talking about is theoretical or doesn't exist, These things are well known, well studied and applied things...and I've mentioned that before. Your computer, the one you literally play this game on, operates on the same exact principles. Have you ever thought about how your computer works? It's permutations of 0's and 1's that are used to construct logic gates, that can then perform arbitrary computation...such as the construction of a language...which you can again construct through assembly, to perform arbitrary computation...This is why i can type to you on this forum, and play this game, and why millions of games exist in general on a single device...because all you are doing at base level is permuting different arrangements of 0's and 1's.

Think about it like this...in your world, you wouldn't be able to even make a computer because you don't even have a fundamental grasp for why it even works and how its able to even give you the diversity of programs that it does. 

When it comes to balance, it is in fact that SAME mechanism...of more things existing, that self-balances itself...hence why natural systems are well...also balanced systems too. The more builds that exist, the more likely counters to dominant builds will exist, and arise as a result of those builds being dominant...it's quiet literately the same dynamic as Wolves, Rabbits, Grass.

Rabbits eat the grass, they get bigger in population.

Grass population gets smaller, wolf population gets bigger...rabbits will decrease.

Because rabbits went down, grass grows again and wolves die out because there's not enough rabbits to support the population

the cycle repeats. 

Nature does this by simply creating all possible forms that can exist...and in the space of possible forms, solutions are found to problems, new problems arise, and new solutions are found, and this continues in an infinitely large endless oscillation of different dominance and subordinate relationships between all the elements that exist. Nature doesn't need to balance by eliminating anything...it simply creates more things...and it does this by simply making it possible for all things to exist...through this property of intractability and undecidability...hence why you, me and the computers we use all exist rather than not exist.

When you say the game gets harder to balance, you are assuming the answer to your own question...because your operating on the assumption that "equalizing everything" and going in and adjusting numbers, is the only way balance can occur, which is just plain wrong and everything that we know and have today does not operate like this. The reason we are literally communicating right now, is courtesy of the fact that your argument is wrong about how balance and diversity works, which is the great irony of this conversation.

Has the experiment begun? Hardly... We've only done one of the two things : Creating more options through this ability to permute what already exists...great...that's the first step...the second step is the turning the decidability of those options into undecidable ones...and clearly, that is what you see most people have a real issue with : The fact that the options are so easily comparable that you can do a simple addition or subtraction problem to optimize your choices. 

Something to mention, a few of the Relics we received, are well-designed...one of them actually has intractable behaviour...such as Relic of the Lhyr. It is in fact impossible to make an optimality calculation to this relic, and therefor it's usage will be endlessly novel. Some of the others are somewhat non-trivial as well. I counted 1 rune that is intractable, 2 that I suspect might be intractable, and 13-15 that are non-trivial (meaning they might be decidable, but the calculation seems difficult to do).

As for weapons, you are for sure jumping way ahead of the gun, literally crying wolf two days after the expansion. Builds have barely even had enough time to dive into the possibility space. I watched a video today of a meme power staff soulbeast build...who would have thunk that one, but that is the beauty of this mechanism at work...people are gonna generate ideas and find in the space of possible builds, things they find useful, carving out solutions to their problems, and as those solutions to their problems manifest, new problems will arise to those solutions, and new solutions will arise to address them...and that will continue for a while until everything that is "decidable" has been calculated and decided. If you have weapons and skills in the game that make that job of "deciding" easy to do...then those weapons need their mechanics adjusted to be more unique...and not decidable... this is my entire point i've been making for many threads now and most issues you will see in the game come from this ailment.

I'm ending this comment now, i haven't proof read it so gotta cope with the shotty delivery... because i don't wanna sit here and type all night, i got things to do.

As I commented in another thread - to achieve what you're asking for, you're asking for something Guild Wars 2 cannot do.

Look at your example from nature, for instance. That occurs because all of the factors are able to change. That could work in PvP, as players respond to shifts in the meta, but in PvE, rapid balance changes are only going to change the player side of the equation. Unless the devs are also adjusting the PvE enemies (that's a lot of work), the enemies (possibly the rabbits in your equation) aren't going to change. There's always going to be the same mobs, and there's rarely going to be a situation where the players starve due to a lack of mobs. Now, we had a situation like that in Guild Wars 1: because the mobs used the same skills as the players, they'd change when the balance did.

That's how the experiment has been done. Guild Wars 1 had the structure of having lots of small elements that can be chosen individually. It was harder to balance.

I'm also not crying wolf regarding weapon combinations: some have proved to be well above the previously established curve. Sword/focus ele has already been nerfed a little, but is still sitting at over 46k, condi scourge getting the best of pistol and torch is getting over 48k. Some of that is coming from the changed rune/relic system, but that just demonstrates the point further - allowing finer-grained choice allows greater optimisation, and that can lead to bigger gaps. As I said in another thread, if a gap is small enough, most players aren't going to bother discriminating based on it, and people are able to choose professions based on what they enjoy, and that's generally what most people regard as good balance. When you have scourges doing 8k damage more than the best engineer build, though, that's where you're likely to see engineers no longer being welcome as pure DPS. It gets a bit more complicated when you get into situations where you're comparing high damage output to lower damage output and some utility, but in Guild Wars 2, that's still a largely solved problem: you get the utility you need, and then you get as much damage as you can afterwards.

Relic of Lyhr is interesting, but I don't think it's intractable. Either you make a build around it, or you don't use it. That's pretty much as far as it goes. (Postscript: If anything, this feels like you think it's intractable because it can't be mathematically analysed... but it can be experimentally tested. It's a support relic, so people can find out through experimentation whether it's better or worse than others. My gut feeling is that in most situations, having most of the damage focused on the character who's bringing area healing skills wouldn't be a good plan, but there may be times when sacrificing one player so the rest survive might be worthwhile.

Edited September 7, 2023 by draxynnic.3719

[stormemperor.3745]

Herald is in good place don't nerf it. Boost vindi or ren

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

5 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Look at your example from nature, for instance. That occurs because all of the factors are able to change. That could work in PvP, as players respond to shifts in the meta, but in PvE, rapid balance changes are only going to change the player side of the equation. Unless the devs are also adjusting the PvE enemies (that's a lot of work), the enemies (possibly the rabbits in your equation) aren't going to change. There's always going to be the same mobs, and there's rarely going to be a situation where the players starve due to a lack of mobs. 

That's not true. The reason you think that, is because mobs in guild wars 2 skills are also mostly designed to be decidable... trivial addition and subtraction problems. If they were designed with undecidable mechanics...then PVE would be novel.

For instance : In PVE you fight a monster and the monster happens to always do this phase X and Time Y which always does Z damage. Then obviously everyone is going to take and do the same thing in response to this situation...forever, whatever that optimal response would be (perhaps dodge or something). But if the monster actually PLAYED rock paper scissors as a skill against you, you have no choice but to respond to what it played and therefor because of the undecidability of true RPS, you can't optimize a choice against the attack. There's no programing there, aside from more intelligent skill design.

Quote

It was harder to balance.

Guild Wars 1 is a good example (yet again) of how the undecidability of the skills, presented persistently novel PVE gameplay.

But you have this false perception of Guild Wars 1 (which makes me believe you never played the game and are just another one of the fakers that act like they did). GW1 was never balanced like Gw2...mostly the dude (Izzy) who balanced the game was altering or creating new and interesting mechanics for skills that existed in the game every patch. It never truly suffered from any real balance problems...Many many builds existed (because it was an extremely diverse game) and as a result, there were always counters to each other in the space of possible builds and the game would cycle between different metagames...new ones constantly popping up...including PVE...hence why it barely went through any truly serious balance issues during it's lifespan. 

The only true balance issue the game ever really had (in PVE), was that they created a skill called Shadow Form...which was basically a god mode button (You can't be targeted by spells, all attacks miss) and this skill was perma-able. This skill was obviously the "I win the game mode every time" button for PVE...and it could have been easily removed from the game but the issue was that they let this skill fester for so long, that the economy of the game was built on it by end of proph...and so when Anet claimed that they were going to nerf it half of the player-base started crying and complaining about leaving the game. They then backtracked and just added a little tradeoff...but the skill still exists today, in the broken state that it had basically been in for 6 or whatever years...a permeable I win button.

Fast forward to 2012..."lets take gw1's most broken designed mechanic and make that a feature of every build in guild wars 2" hence why you have all these mechanics that are based on dodges, evades, damage on dodge and evades. One of the worse aspects of guild wars 1 became a staple of guild wars 2's design in little tiny bits...would it surprise anyone that one of combats major issues is the fact you can chain together attacks while also being completely invulnerable? It's classic Shadow Form behavior.

But this story, is irrelevant to the topic...it was just the only real issue Guild Wars 1 had (and guild wars 2 has by proxy since it took this ridiculously designed skill and streamlined it into the very fabric of the game) the point is that your making claims that gw1 was hard to balance...it was never balanced like gw2 ever was...it never experienced any kind of homogenization issues (at all other than Shadow form) which is why when it was touched by devs it received mostly mechanical alterations and things like that to keep the game fresh. it was a totally different atmosphere in gw1. 
 

Quote

Relic of Lyhr is interesting, but I don't think it's intractable. Either you make a build around it, or you don't use it. That's pretty much as far as it goes. (Postscript: If anything, this feels like you think it's intractable because it can't be mathematically analyzed... but it can be experimentally tested. It's a support relic, so people can find out through experimentation whether it's better or worse than others.

It is intractable. Like stated before, you can't mathematically analyze it's behavior because it's behavior has no definite output, as it has no definite input (The output depends on the input of damage sources you have no control or knowledge over by agents)...it's therefor in the same problem class as the halting problem. There's literally no way to answer the question of whether it can be optimal or suboptimal for any situation (so long as the situation is is not obviously trivial), and that's a mathematically obvious fact about it. Experimentation is also literally, the only way to parametrize it's behavior, and that is the point. Players will "experiment" with it forever, creating builds, abandoning builds, approaching more encounters and encountering more possibilities to figure it out...that is the exploration of the possibility landscape that you want to attain. 

Edited September 7, 2023 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684