Rosangelina.3694 Posted February 26 Share Posted February 26 21 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said: It's capped to 30sec a couple years ago, swiftness is 60sec. But before that yeah it wasn't unheard of to get 1min+ of boon duration stacked outside of combat. Maybe they should have designed it to be overwriting instead of stacking durations. The system is bloated and needs a trimming or an overhaul, which won't happen. Ah, thanks for the explanation. It seemed like after watching zergs that the boons were up practically infinitely, I didn't realize it had an actual cap. Even 30 sec seems a bit high for some boons but I'm no expert on balance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MedievalThings.5417 Posted February 26 Share Posted February 26 19 minutes ago, Rosangelina.3694 said: Ah, thanks for the explanation. It seemed like after watching zergs that the boons were up practically infinitely, I didn't realize it had an actual cap. Even 30 sec seems a bit high for some boons but I'm no expert on balance. It is. Blobs can cast every boon at max stacks or duration nearly every second while you can maybe strip one or 2 boons every 30 seconds roughly. Anet really doesn't want giant blobs to fight each other. They want boonballs running around fighting empty buildings and roamers while the blob is near immune to damage. That way, no one gets their feelings hurt and stops playing. Every change to the game mode is about hard carrying boonballs to the detriment of the game mode. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JusticeRetroHunter.7684 Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 (edited) On 2/20/2024 at 9:32 PM, DeceiverX.8361 said: Having a role-based system where gameplay is dependent on certain core foundations is far from a niche by definition, specifically if everyone can contribute to it. A niche is covering edge cases or divergent strategies. Things like running extra mesmers for fake portals or thieves in the blob to assassinate high priority targets. Things that can't just be optimally brought into every single encounter from a tactical point of view unless the overarching strategy of the group depends on these play patterns. You mention academic study of [game] diversity, but I'm going to have to challenge that given your stance on the issue. And that the topic isn't really one in academic game theory, specifically because video games like these are so complex and a huge meld of basically all the game theory types such that there really isn't much to study. "Game Diversity" really is an observation on metagames through meta-analysis-of-metagame-analysis, and well, really boils down to an arbitrary benchmark of representation of different strategies based on solely the combinatorial nature of optional discrete game elements and how successful those strategies are in respects to defeating other combinations. Consider your quote: Yet you also admit in defense of your stance the following: So which is it? Anet reduced their observed diversity by removing static trait bonuses and effects. And I want to make it clear, I'm not in support of traits like "When X happens, gain Y effect for Z seconds." I'm talking about traits like "Gain X% damage while attacking a bleeding target." Simple and reliable things, which slowly aggregate into a character's overall function, that players can choose to work with or not. But these work *with* a player's decision to specialize, not totally irrespective--or even in spite of--them. By this nature, boons as a system do not create a sufficiently complex metagame. They create a mostly-solvable optimization problem wherein while not solvable, does get one sufficiently close to solvable. And by your own admission, such dramatically high-level tactics of boon "roles" are grossly-ineffective at creating a compelling game. Even under the assumption of the addition of a rhetorical gameplay pattern where boon-denial builds somehow could be exclusively countered (this isn't possible when all systems choices players interact with--traits and skills--are consolidated to generate boons as a "simplified" experience, instead of non-boon mechanics, per above), the game boils down to rock-paper-scissors at character creation. The nature of combat is settled before the first actions are taken, based on selected strategies. At best, there's some level of psychology in there for predicting what people will choose seeing as it's still an imperfect information game. But I challenge this proclaimed merit again through pragmatism: Games have different designs in how they're made to be played, and ones like these require upkeep and maintenance overhead; this format does not lend itself well to something focusing on real-time action, but moreover a turn-based prediction game. And even under the assumption that we're going to champion Rock Paper Scissors as a viable competitive product (which it isn't, otherwise everyone would be doing it free with their friends and not action video games, card games, board games, etc.), it undermines the purpose of the media being served: the Action RPG. Much like how people don't watch Michael Bay films for amazing screenwriting, they also don't turn to read classic novels for an heart-pounding action sequence. GW2 was designed to be a specific type of product - the ARPG+MMO - and the idea of making these macro-strategies the deciders in how its action plays out really boils the game down to a slightly more blurred version of RPS. Generally, totally missing the target audience with the product is bad for the ability to sustain the game itself. Your defense of your two arguments makes some major assumptions and makes some weird assumptions about 1.) You assume a "normal scenario." This needs definition and depends on varying factors, and is also a problem with the boon system itself being very asymmetric. One second of 25 might and fury on a 25 second cooldown while someone's opponent has no boons used midway through a major damaging combo may be able to end a fight outright, whereas 1 second of might and fury applied each second infinitely means absolutely nothing when the opponent is getting the same constant pulsing 1 second of protection. Most boon durations in the core era of the game were short enough where getting anything to become permanent was just not possible without other characters or very specifically building to a very specific boon, like the old Rune of Speed or grandmaster traits requiring constant attacking and use of skills landing like No Quarter and Forceful Greatsword. In World vs World, groups stacked up before engaging to get area swiftness from Guardian's Staff to last enough of the fight so they weren't kited by people with 25% movespeed signets. The current level of boon availability broad-spectrum is just simply too high. By extension, this extends to Concentration. The maximum all-boon duration increase at launch was around 20% and sacrificed all rune slots, meaning huge hits to stats. And people still paid a heavy premium in gold for them due to how strong boons were even in this era. But this also helped normalize the power of boons as well, making things like reductions to base boon duration easier to balance. Changing a boon to a 4s duration meant it would have uptime of 4-5s, not 4-8 seconds as it does now. With boons so easily-achieved, radical reductions on boon sources can absolutely be performed without much issue, though I still believe fewer sources and removing the Concentration stat altogether to help normalize them is the better course of action. This gives value to burst-of-power effects like the old Blood is Power and Signets of Power traits which came at significant cost for huge gains in raw stats for a very brief window, while still allowing more spread-over-time effects to help push all-rounder builds to exist. In support of my original statement: The "simplification" is failing to achieve letting players make these choices, and simply makes boon builds inherently dominant via extended durations which equal or exceed their cooldowns, often without substantial risk-taking or consequence. Power budget on traits and skills should primarily not be in boons, and any unique effects should be made obvious by character animation. The "Block" skill effect when a warrior uses a shield to block is not visually unclear, despite functionally being the same as an infinitely-fast reapplication of fraction-of-a-second-duration Aegis. I'm going to touch on the merits of this below, and why it's just downright better than making boons so ubiquitous. 2.) It may sound snyde, but... the skills will do... other unique things than just give boons, and do their damage and effects like they did before. Cleave, stunbreaks, mobility, unique multi-hit patterns that are meant to disrupt being blinded, multi-part flip skills, conditions and cleanses, heals, summons, passive bonuses, you name it. Actually-creative mechanics remove the need for boons to be applied all the time, and boons can be either the main driver of the skill (like For Great Justice!, Hold the Line!, Advance!, etc.), or a nice little bonus added from a trait, to provide just an ounce more of specialization. If everyone runs around with permanent 25 might/fury and protection, there's numerically almost no difference in damage dealt/taken to each respective build by nobody having any of it. I already explained why Quickness and Alacrity are bad for the game in terms of clarity and TTK. Only Stability and Swiftness are really essential to maintaining integrity of skill effects based on facets of the core game. Weapons *are* damage sticks. But they're tools and should have resources worth managing. Mashing every ability off cooldown to provide more damage and/or support just to fuel the boon blob and churn out numbers is what we have now. It'd be better to have people actually compelled to maybe save their multi-hit skill for when they get overwhelmed by thieves recasting blinds, save their mobility skill to escape for when the enemy Reaper DCharges in. To block when a Warrior jumps in the air to cast Mighty Blow. To immobilize an enemy who just used a cleanse so they can't dodge your damage. This is dynamic combat where just the very nature of how skills are used interacts primarily with what your opponent is doing. If ANet needs constant boon application to make their PvE compelling such that the fear of removing boons wholesale makes people afraid their weapons just turn into damage numbers sticks, they need better encounter design. But frankly, without all the insane level of support and durability coming from boon builds, I think you'd be surprised just how quickly groups would wipe when they can no longer skip entire phases and facetank a majority of otherwise lethal damage. I'd wager the game would become *much* more interactive and less about optimizing numbers with players unable to access most of their raw stat power with permanent uptime. Based on your comments, I suspect you largely just play PvE. It's significantly less obvious of a problem there because honestly, ANet's encounters largely suck for an MMO and aren't that interesting. They mostly cater to "single big boss HP sponge" that most other MMOs do. So I can see why you think they're necessary. But the boon metas have eviscerated WvW and sPvP, which is what my post is about. When permanent, they actively create an anti-fun environment for competitive play and undermine the game's mechanics just as much as Quickness and Alacrity. Full boons is more than a second whole set of equipment in stats. It's literally more stark than just taking an exotic weapon to combat with white gear and nothing else. And for combat clarity, boons absolutely cut into it significantly more than unique effects. Like the Aegis/block example above, there's no way to really know where a boon comes from unless you know exactly what just happened already. Was it a trait that just activated? A utility skill that got animation-cancelled? A relic? An ally or a stealthed thief nearby? There's no way to tell. Meanwhile, if I care to look, I can mouse over the enemy's effect, and type "/wiki <effect name>" and be taken directly to what the other player had or did that caused it or at the least a short list of things that grant it. Boon stacking makes hacking harder to detect, because I just *don't* know whether or not that 14 seconds of Protection is in their build, if it was on multiple skills activated at once, if it's been modified by concentration, or whatever. There is just so little information about its sources that you simply cannot learn as a new or returning player by engaging with other classes. And that's demonstrably a bad thing when discussing clarity. It genuinely does make the game harder to understand when in the PvP context, and thus, is also self-defeating. So i read this last week, and was intending to reply earelier, but realizing that this comment is just so far from away, that it takes a lot of my time and effort to clear up every misconception you made, and also reinforce things that you did conceptualize correctly. It was exhausting, and this subject is also exhausting to talk about so I'm just gonna try to explain stuff as simple as I possibly can, without going in too deep. The first thing about diversity, is that it stems from Biology, Complex Systems and ultimately fundamental physics. There's no field of "game diversity" you see. So what you do is you study biology, because Earth's biome, is the most diverse system known to exist. As it goes, the way it's modeled is as a complex system. Quote And that the topic isn't really one in academic game theory, specifically because video games like these are so complex and a huge meld of basically all the game theory types such that there really isn't much to study. And so this quote block would be the first misconception that you have, is that Diversity, is a result of a system being complex. Quote "Game Diversity" really is an observation on metagames through meta-analysis-of-metagame-analysis, and well, really boils down to an arbitrary benchmark of representation of different strategies based on solely the combinatorial nature of optional discrete game elements and how successful those strategies are in respects to defeating other combinations. This isn't that bad...but it's not correct for a number of very subtle reasons and I'm going to explain why. Diversity is a fundamental behavior of systems, one of four called the four fundamental classes of behavior: Homogenous, Patterned, Random and Complex. "Maximal diversity" would be considered a maximally random system; where all of it's elements are different to each other. It's opposite, a "maximally homogenous" system would be completely uniform, where all elements are the same to each other. Diversity as observed in biological systems, but more generally almost all systems that exist, sit in the complex category, an intermediary state of the other three behaviors. At base level, this stuff really has nothing to do with strategies. Diversity is abstractly and fundamentally, this idea that a system is "doing something interesting." To elaborate : When you look at a fish, a dog, a tree, a chair in your room...All of these different objects just "exist" in the same system, but they do not compete with one another in any way we would consider as a strategy. You might have some objects that do exist in a kind of strategy such as the classic Grass, Rabbits , Wolves example, or the Rock, Paper, Scissors example...but those strategies need not be, nor usually are RPS like strategies. Things "just exist" and have relationships to each other...like a sucker fish and a shark are not defined by an RPS dynamic, nor are chairs, dogs and fish. They "just abstractly exist" in the world, and they do interesting things. Mathematically, all these things are formalizable in one way or another, and it depends on how rigorous or theoretical you want to go, but it can be described pretty simply by a state-space. Using pixels on a grid, you can imagine each configuration of the grid as a state, within this statespace. If you have 16 pixels, than the grid has 16^16 possible configurations, and each of those configurations can be mapped as coordinates to the statespace. In Guild Wars 2 you do roughly the same procedure; every state of the game, is a configuration that you map to the statespace, and the system evolves through that statespace as it goes from one state to another. It then becomes trivial to model, what a boring game looks like, and what a game that is "doing interesting things" looks like. A game in which the statespace visits the same state over and over and over again, is a boring game. The following criteria would give you this behavior: 1) All the elements in the game are the same, thus constituting the same state. Ex: State A -> State A -> State A and so on... 2) That as the number of possible states decreases, so does the behavior of "doing something interesting" decreases. EX: State 1 -> State 2 -> State 3 -> State 4 ->State N is going to be a more interesting game, then a game that goes State 1 -> State 2 -> State 1 ->State 2 etc... 3) It then becomes obvious, that a game with one, or no states, is equivalent to a game where all elements are the same. 4) A non trivial fact is that the more states that exist, the more supersets of states can exist. EX: If State 1 -> State 2, is equivalent to State A, and State 3 -> State 4 is equivalent to state B, then the superset of State 1 -> State 2 -> State 3 -> State 4 is State A -> State B and this constitutes a unique coordinate in the state-space of the game (state 5.) You can imagine all possible permutations of states, has an arbitrarily large number of possible macro states with which to make from them up to the size of the statespace. What this all means is that the more, different elements that exist in the game, the more possible states that can exist, and the "less boring" the game becomes by virtue of just "different things existing" because you guarantee the existence of more possible state transitions in which the game will be interesting. It's this mathematical bias, for why we live in a world where things exist, rather than not exist. Remember this next time you go outside, and just ask yourself why all the stuff around you exists at all, and why we don't just live in a void...or ask yourself this when using a computer, and able to play a myriad of games on it, even though the machine code operates on only combinations of 0's and 1's. But unlike Nature, we don't have to enumerate the existence of all possible, completely random things, we can just program the different things that we want, with the behaviors we want them to have, and this is why I began from previous posts, with strategies, and counter strategies. But the ultimate point is that, diversity is a result of things existing, not from not existing and that should now, be an obvious fact. A diverse system is going to have many different things in it, not nothing in it. If your goal is to slowly eliminate all of the different things, then you've got it wrong friendo. Quote It may sound snyde, but... the skills will do... other unique things than just give boons, and do their damage and effects like they did before. Cleave, stunbreaks, mobility, unique multi-hit patterns that are meant to disrupt being blinded, multi-part flip skills, conditions and cleanses, heals, summons, passive bonuses, you name it. Actually-creative mechanics remove the need for boons to be applied all the time, and boons can be either the main driver of the skill (like For Great Justice!, Hold the Line!, Advance!, etc.), or a nice little bonus added from a trait, to provide just an ounce more of specialization. If everyone runs around with permanent 25 might/fury and protection, there's numerically almost no difference in damage dealt/taken to each respective build by nobody having any of it. I already explained why Quickness and Alacrity are bad for the game in terms of clarity and TTK. Only Stability and Swiftness are really essential to maintaining integrity of skill effects based on facets of the core game. Weapons *are* damage sticks. But they're tools and should have resources worth managing. Mashing every ability off cooldown to provide more damage and/or support just to fuel the boon blob and churn out numbers is what we have now. I don't disagree with this at all, in fact this is inline with most of what i usually say and talk about on the topic of homogenization, But don't misinterpret the message because by and large, the message behind homogenization is that, nerfing and removing things, is what causes the elimination of diversity from the game. It is this procedure that causes Stickwars 2, and I proved this stuff with math about 4ish years ago now. I took a lot of hatred from people for it because at the time "nerf everything" was all the rage and hearing any idea to the contrary was heresy. It's only been more recently that i realized this "streamlining" that arena-net has been doing, is also homogenizing the game, just this time without it being behind number changes, but flat out just making all the skills do the same stuff. I'm not gonna argue that we don't have a homogenized game now, because it's not wrong, we don't have a completely homogenized game (although it is and can be debated). But its very clear to see that they have been removing unique elements from the game, and just replacing it with streamlined mechanics...stuff that they know is "easy to balance" like boon durations and whatever other easily numerically parametrizable thing. Removing Boonstrip is enough evidence of that but we could talk about the target cap normalization, or how banners now do boons, how classes like elementalist, ranger and whatever all got ways to do alacrity and might and stability now...you folks wonder where the boons come from? That's where they come from: Anet is just slapping it on everything as a replacement for all the other mechanics that they didn't want to balance. Quote By this nature, boons as a system do not create a sufficiently complex metagame. They create a mostly-solvable optimization problem wherein while not solvable, does get one sufficiently close to solvable. Well yes and no... Solvability comes from the triviality of numeric operations one does in the game. for instance, this is a solvable problem : 1 + 1 = 2. In computability, you would say that this computation has halted (it stopped) because the same answer (2) would repeat forever as a result of doing that problem (adding 1 to 1). Undecidability, or non-solvability, is when the problem is as complicated as trying to solve the halting problem. The Mandelbrot Set equation for example (Zn+1 = Zn2 + C ) is not solvable, because when the output of the answer, is fed-back into the input of the problem, it spits out a new answer, that is fed back into the problem and so on. The computation never halts, and always produces new values each time...like exploring a new state in a state-space. Rock Paper Scissors is also undecidable. This property of undecidability is actually incredibly important but I'm not gonna talk about it right now because i really don't want to go into fundamental physics, the nature of undecidability and why its important in giving state-spaces, larger than finite sizes for simple rules and games. What's relevant here and now, is that what causes problems to be solvable, has to deal with the input output interface or just more appropriately "the rules" which govern the game mechanics and how those elements interact with each other. If the inputs always produce the same outputs then this is equivalent to halting and that would be a solved game. in the same token, If the inputs are always generating different outputs, this would be an unsolvable game. Asking whether boons are doing this depends on the context. If boons and boon-strips exist together, then this is an undecidable computation in the space of fight dynamics. Without boon-strips, it would be decidable, because you put your boons on and that's it. The biggest problem of decidability just comes from the fact that this game is described by numbers, which are inherently decidable constructs. So until mechanics start being described less by simple addition and subtraction problems, and problems less parametrizable by numbers (or at the very least, have certain properties that make the mechanics non-trivial, like tradeoffs, and variable human input), this game will be for the most part, always trivial. Quote Based on your comments, I suspect you largely just play PvE. Nope. This is just wrong. All i ever do is play PVP and WvW, and this extends back to Guild Wars PVP and GVG, since Factions release. I havn't even played POF or IS storyline lmao How can i prove that to you...i guess showing you that i only have 87 mastery points? The absolute bare minimum to get gliding, mounts and raids... I have no legendary gear.. No map completion, This is how "unPVE" i am. IDK what else to tell you. Anyway I wanted to not talk about this topic for the hundredth time because ive talked about this so many times and i already made pretty clear what i said i'm certain, in previous comments. For some reason you think I'm "pro-boon" no...wrong...I'm "anti-nerf" and "anti-removal" because that is what caused the boon-spam we have to begin with...you know...removing all the boon-strips and unique abilities so that all that's left in the game is boons. (I'm also anti-buff but that's a talking point for a different time) It took me about 2 hours of my life to write this, and I'm far too exhausted to proofread, or cite the sources currently, but I'll probably come back and cite a few things so that its easier to follow. Edited February 27 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeceiverX.8361 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 11 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said: So i read this last week, and was intending to reply earelier, but realizing that this comment is just so far from away, that it takes a lot of my time and effort to clear up every misconception you made, and also reinforce things that you did conceptualize correctly. It was exhausting, and this subject is also exhausting to talk about so I'm just gonna try to explain stuff as simple as I possibly can, without going in too deep. The first thing about diversity, is that it stems from Biology, Complex Systems and ultimately fundamental physics. There's no field of "game diversity" you see. So what you do is you study biology, because Earth's biome, is the most diverse system known to exist. As it goes, the way it's modeled is as a complex system. And so this quote block would be the first misconception that you have, is that Diversity, is a result of a system being complex. This isn't that bad...but it's not correct for a number of very subtle reasons and I'm going to explain why. Diversity is a fundamental behavior of systems, one of four called the four fundamental classes of behavior: Homogenous, Patterned, Random and Complex. "Maximal diversity" would be considered a maximally random system; where all of it's elements are different to each other. It's opposite, a "maximally homogenous" system would be completely uniform, where all elements are the same to each other. Diversity as observed in biological systems, but more generally almost all systems that exist, sit in the complex category, an intermediary state of the other three behaviors. At base level, this stuff really has nothing to do with strategies. Diversity is abstractly and fundamentally, this idea that a system is "doing something interesting." To elaborate : When you look at a fish, a dog, a tree, a chair in your room...All of these different objects just "exist" in the same system, but they do not compete with one another in any way we would consider as a strategy. You might have some objects that do exist in a kind of strategy such as the classic Grass, Rabbits , Wolves example, or the Rock, Paper, Scissors example...but those strategies need not be, nor usually are RPS like strategies. Things "just exist" and have relationships to each other...like a sucker fish and a shark are not defined by an RPS dynamic, nor are chairs, dogs and fish. They "just abstractly exist" in the world, and they do interesting things. Mathematically, all these things are formalizable in one way or another, and it depends on how rigorous or theoretical you want to go, but it can be described pretty simply by a state-space. Using pixels on a grid, you can imagine each configuration of the grid as a state, within this statespace. If you have 16 pixels, than the grid has 16^16 possible configurations, and each of those configurations can be mapped as coordinates to the statespace. In Guild Wars 2 you do roughly the same procedure; every state of the game, is a configuration that you map to the statespace, and the system evolves through that statespace as it goes from one state to another. It then becomes trivial to model, what a boring game looks like, and what a game that is "doing interesting things" looks like. A game in which the statespace visits the same state over and over and over again, is a boring game. The following criteria would give you this behavior: 1) All the elements in the game are the same, thus constituting the same state. Ex: State A -> State A -> State A and so on... 2) That as the number of possible states decreases, so does the behavior of "doing something interesting" decreases. EX: State 1 -> State 2 -> State 3 -> State 4 ->State N is going to be a more interesting game, then a game that goes State 1 -> State 2 -> State 1 ->State 2 etc... 3) It then becomes obvious, that a game with one, or no states, is equivalent to a game where all elements are the same. 4) A non trivial fact is that the more states that exist, the more supersets of states can exist. EX: If State 1 -> State 2, is equivalent to State A, and State 3 -> State 4 is equivalent to state B, then the superset of State 1 -> State 2 -> State 3 -> State 4 is State A -> State B and this constitutes a unique coordinate in the state-space of the game (state 5.) You can imagine all possible permutations of states, has an arbitrarily large number of possible macro states with which to make from them up to the size of the statespace. What this all means is that the more, different elements that exist in the game, the more possible states that can exist, and the "less boring" the game becomes by virtue of just "different things existing" because you guarantee the existence of more possible state transitions in which the game will be interesting. It's this mathematical bias, for why we live in a world where things exist, rather than not exist. Remember this next time you go outside, and just ask yourself why all the stuff around you exists at all, and why we don't just live in a void...or ask yourself this when using a computer, and able to play a myriad of games on it, even though the machine code operates on only combinations of 0's and 1's. But unlike Nature, we don't have to enumerate the existence of all possible, completely random things, we can just program the different things that we want, with the behaviors we want them to have, and this is why I began from previous posts, with strategies, and counter strategies. But the ultimate point is that, diversity is a result of things existing, not from not existing and that should now, be an obvious fact. A diverse system is going to have many different things in it, not nothing in it. If your goal is to slowly eliminate all of the different things, then you've got it wrong friendo. I don't disagree with this at all, in fact this is inline with most of what i usually say and talk about on the topic of homogenization, But don't misinterpret the message because by and large, the message behind homogenization is that, nerfing and removing things, is what causes the elimination of diversity from the game. It is this procedure that causes Stickwars 2, and I proved this stuff with math about 4ish years ago now. I took a lot of hatred from people for it because at the time "nerf everything" was all the rage and hearing any idea to the contrary was heresy. It's only been more recently that i realized this "streamlining" that arena-net has been doing, is also homogenizing the game, just this time without it being behind number changes, but flat out just making all the skills do the same stuff. I'm not gonna argue that we don't have a homogenized game now, because it's not wrong, we don't have a completely homogenized game (although it is and can be debated). But its very clear to see that they have been removing unique elements from the game, and just replacing it with streamlined mechanics...stuff that they know is "easy to balance" like boon durations and whatever other easily numerically parametrizable thing. Removing Boonstrip is enough evidence of that but we could talk about the target cap normalization, or how banners now do boons, how classes like elementalist, ranger and whatever all got ways to do alacrity and might and stability now...you folks wonder where the boons come from? That's where they come from: Anet is just slapping it on everything as a replacement for all the other mechanics that they didn't want to balance. Well yes and no... Solvability comes from the triviality of numeric operations one does in the game. for instance, this is a solvable problem : 1 + 1 = 2. In computability, you would say that this computation has halted (it stopped) because the same answer (2) would repeat forever as a result of doing that problem (adding 1 to 1). Undecidability, or non-solvability, is when the problem is as complicated as trying to solve the halting problem. The Mandelbrot Set equation for example (Zn+1 = Zn2 + C ) is not solvable, because when the output of the answer, is fed-back into the input of the problem, it spits out a new answer, that is fed back into the problem and so on. The computation never halts, and always produces new values each time...like exploring a new state in a state-space. Rock Paper Scissors is also undecidable. This property of undecidability is actually incredibly important but I'm not gonna talk about it right now because i really don't want to go into fundamental physics, the nature of undecidability and why its important in giving state-spaces, larger than finite sizes for simple rules and games. What's relevant here and now, is that what causes problems to be solvable, has to deal with the input output interface or just more appropriately "the rules" which govern the game mechanics and how those elements interact with each other. If the inputs always produce the same outputs then this is equivalent to halting and that would be a solved game. in the same token, If the inputs are always generating different outputs, this would be an unsolvable game. Asking whether boons are doing this depends on the context. If boons and boon-strips exist together, then this is an undecidable computation in the space of fight dynamics. Without boon-strips, it would be decidable, because you put your boons on and that's it. The biggest problem of decidability just comes from the fact that this game is described by numbers, which are inherently decidable constructs. So until mechanics start being described less by simple addition and subtraction problems, and problems less parametrizable by numbers (or at the very least, have certain properties that make the mechanics non-trivial, like tradeoffs, and variable human input), this game will be for the most part, always trivial. Nope. This is just wrong. All i ever do is play PVP and WvW, and this extends back to Guild Wars PVP and GVG, since Factions release. I havn't even played POF or IS storyline lmao How can i prove that to you...i guess showing you that i only have 87 mastery points? The absolute bare minimum to get gliding, mounts and raids... I have no legendary gear.. No map completion, This is how "unPVE" i am. IDK what else to tell you. Anyway I wanted to not talk about this topic for the hundredth time because ive talked about this so many times and i already made pretty clear what i said i'm certain, in previous comments. For some reason you think I'm "pro-boon" no...wrong...I'm "anti-nerf" and "anti-removal" because that is what caused the boon-spam we have to begin with...you know...removing all the boon-strips and unique abilities so that all that's left in the game is boons. (I'm also anti-buff but that's a talking point for a different time) It took me about 2 hours of my life to write this, and I'm far too exhausted to proofread, or cite the sources currently, but I'll probably come back and cite a few things so that its easier to follow. I'm gonna just respond in one response because quotes-in-quotes-in-quotes is something I'm not really willing to manage from a formatting POV after a long day of work lol. I appreciate you trying to break things down, but one of my degrees is in computer science. I'm intimately familiar with problem sets and solvability. Honestly, your argument just doesn't make any sense. A complex system inherently is a function of complexity, which is... what you're saying is critical for diversity... which is what you're both presenting in combinatorics of states and then arguing against? I point to combinations of discrete elements in games as being the underlying basis of metagame creation and analysis as is relevant in the subject of game theory. The more easily-computed set of these discrete inputs, the easier it is for a metagame to emerge. This is analogous to the selections of traits, weapons, gear types, etc. GW2 is a complex system, absolutely. Simultaneous movement games with massive positional variable data in two-dimensional space alone akin to the game of "tag" is already in that problem set when looking at things from the Complex System lens, ignoring the rest of everything available to GW2 players. The sheer quantity of possible states of actors in this game is totally irrelevant and so astronomically large and impossible to compute (being this is also a simultaneous game) it's not actually genuine to discuss them in the context of game theory. A diverse environment by your definition is is one where all players randomly cast their skills and movements blindly and at random. This may mimic some biological models, but is is decidedly *not* in the lens of game theory. The very nature of game theory, by definition, absolutely mandates both strategic decision-making and crucially, rational agents. So when discussing the problem set of player interactions where both are assumed, we can boil away many, many variables and are inherently looking for ones which can be controlled for. All those combinations in respects to the players and environments do not actually matter when performed irrationally. This is an inherent assumption required when studying diversity in gameplay balance systems from discrete, quantifiable sets. Again, this boils down to easily-observed things like builds. Builds are inherently discrete systems and are one of the methods (and the sole one relevant to discussion when talking about boons in builds as this thread is about) in how the game is played with strategies devised, and subsequently, a metagame even be possibly emergent. For any such diversity to exist, rational actors must reach possible conclusions N>1 when optimizing for a solution. Diversity as a whole, however, is a much bigger problem, and is measured arbitrarily when considering macro-strategies and repeatedly running meta-analysis on these complex systems. One could mathematically argue that the game is both diverse and balanced with a healthy metagame if there exist strategies which are uniquely optimal to counter the previously-dominant ones with doing something as substituting one class for another with functionally the same identity (a la providing boon coverage). But from a high-level systems perspective, we agree this is not a diverse environment. It is this, where differing mechanics must exist to intrinsically compete with that high-level optimal design. These are profession-specific ones, boon denial, and the likes. It becomes significantly computationally easier to create more diverse solutions when the high-level balance woes become decoupled from the low-level ones. This is the crux of my argument for why boon dominance is bad; being a shared, streamlined system, it inherently eliminates optimal possibilities from what's otherwise in the optimal subset from the high level. As for your late statement about being anti-nerf; the game is powercrept and boons are overpowered because of their application being buffed repeatedly for years. Boon duration is quite literally up by at minimum a factor of four compared to years' past, even when comparing unchanged skills, due to concentration. Many coefficients have been slashed because of the huge increases in raw attack power, critical hit chance, etc., true, but it's all been because stacking boons inflates damage to untenable amounts with no real drawbacks. The entire game is fundamentally not designed with this numbers creep in mind, and it's entirely in the pursuit of the optimal solution of more boons. Strips/corrupts/denial only shifts the problem closer to N=2 optimal solutions around boon play when the baseline for the rest of the game in non-boon-builds has been nerfed on their existence and constant abuse, while doing nothing to expand upon the solution set any further, if not actively stifling it. Viewing game/build diversity as a problem of a complex system where diversity as a measure of unique states in such a mathemtically complex model is inherently flawed because it fails to define scope and simply can't be calculated. Boons are a higher-level problem driving the metagame into a very specific direction which cannot simply be course-corrected until they are removed. Promoting anything that plays into the boon system as a counter either creates only more illusion of choice and not actual diversity in the metagame, or simply creates an identical metagame scenario with some other exploitative system instead. My supposition would be an overabundance of CC and stunbreaks, where boons are the only counter. Then the pendulum needs to swing back and you're back at square one. Which is really what you're describing with the balance philosophy you disagree with, which is what ANet has been doing for years; ignoring game theory and good design principles to further a very specific path of symptom alleviation which ultimately results in collateral damage to other systems taking the limelight of oppressiveness. In the example here, it'd be blanket-nerfing CC, which still hurts more builds than it helps. Sometimes, you need to just remove the bad thing at the source and re-adjust. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JusticeRetroHunter.7684 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 3 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said: I'm gonna just respond in one response because quotes-in-quotes-in-quotes is something I'm not really willing to manage from a formatting POV after a long day of work lol. I appreciate you trying to break things down, but one of my degrees is in computer science. I'm intimately familiar with problem sets and solvability. Honestly, your argument just doesn't make any sense. A complex system inherently is a function of complexity, which is... what you're saying is critical for diversity... which is what you're both presenting in combinatorics of states and then arguing against? I point to combinations of discrete elements in games as being the underlying basis of metagame creation and analysis as is relevant in the subject of game theory. The more easily-computed set of these discrete inputs, the easier it is for a metagame to emerge. This is analogous to the selections of traits, weapons, gear types, etc. GW2 is a complex system, absolutely. Simultaneous movement games with massive positional variable data in two-dimensional space alone akin to the game of "tag" is already in that problem set when looking at things from the Complex System lens, ignoring the rest of everything available to GW2 players. The sheer quantity of possible states of actors in this game is totally irrelevant and so astronomically large and impossible to compute (being this is also a simultaneous game) it's not actually genuine to discuss them in the context of game theory. A diverse environment by your definition is is one where all players randomly cast their skills and movements blindly and at random. This may mimic some biological models, but is is decidedly *not* in the lens of game theory. The very nature of game theory, by definition, absolutely mandates both strategic decision-making and crucially, rational agents. So when discussing the problem set of player interactions where both are assumed, we can boil away many, many variables and are inherently looking for ones which can be controlled for. All those combinations in respects to the players and environments do not actually matter when performed irrationally. This is an inherent assumption required when studying diversity in gameplay balance systems from discrete, quantifiable sets. Again, this boils down to easily-observed things like builds. Builds are inherently discrete systems and are one of the methods (and the sole one relevant to discussion when talking about boons in builds as this thread is about) in how the game is played with strategies devised, and subsequently, a metagame even be possibly emergent. For any such diversity to exist, rational actors must reach possible conclusions N>1 when optimizing for a solution. Diversity as a whole, however, is a much bigger problem, and is measured arbitrarily when considering macro-strategies and repeatedly running meta-analysis on these complex systems. One could mathematically argue that the game is both diverse and balanced with a healthy metagame if there exist strategies which are uniquely optimal to counter the previously-dominant ones with doing something as substituting one class for another with functionally the same identity (a la providing boon coverage). But from a high-level systems perspective, we agree this is not a diverse environment. It is this, where differing mechanics must exist to intrinsically compete with that high-level optimal design. These are profession-specific ones, boon denial, and the likes. It becomes significantly computationally easier to create more diverse solutions when the high-level balance woes become decoupled from the low-level ones. This is the crux of my argument for why boon dominance is bad; being a shared, streamlined system, it inherently eliminates optimal possibilities from what's otherwise in the optimal subset from the high level. As for your late statement about being anti-nerf; the game is powercrept and boons are overpowered because of their application being buffed repeatedly for years. Boon duration is quite literally up by at minimum a factor of four compared to years' past, even when comparing unchanged skills, due to concentration. Many coefficients have been slashed because of the huge increases in raw attack power, critical hit chance, etc., true, but it's all been because stacking boons inflates damage to untenable amounts with no real drawbacks. The entire game is fundamentally not designed with this numbers creep in mind, and it's entirely in the pursuit of the optimal solution of more boons. Strips/corrupts/denial only shifts the problem closer to N=2 optimal solutions around boon play when the baseline for the rest of the game in non-boon-builds has been nerfed on their existence and constant abuse, while doing nothing to expand upon the solution set any further, if not actively stifling it. Viewing game/build diversity as a problem of a complex system where diversity as a measure of unique states in such a mathemtically complex model is inherently flawed because it fails to define scope and simply can't be calculated. Boons are a higher-level problem driving the metagame into a very specific direction which cannot simply be course-corrected until they are removed. Promoting anything that plays into the boon system as a counter either creates only more illusion of choice and not actual diversity in the metagame, or simply creates an identical metagame scenario with some other exploitative system instead. My supposition would be an overabundance of CC and stunbreaks, where boons are the only counter. Then the pendulum needs to swing back and you're back at square one. Which is really what you're describing with the balance philosophy you disagree with, which is what ANet has been doing for years; ignoring game theory and good design principles to further a very specific path of symptom alleviation which ultimately results in collateral damage to other systems taking the limelight of oppressiveness. In the example here, it'd be blanket-nerfing CC, which still hurts more builds than it helps. Sometimes, you need to just remove the bad thing at the source and re-adjust. I'm glad you know Computer Science cause that will make this a lot easier. I'll just quote block by quote block: Quote A complex system inherently is a function of complexity, which is... what you're saying is critical for diversity... Yes. Systems that are diverse, following non-trivial rules are also by immediate proxy, complex. Complex Systems isn't a function of complexity, it is a way of modeling, for systems that are complex, and therefor Complex Systems models diverse systems. This modeling is general enough that it is a field in and of itself, and it encompasses both Computability and Game Theory. If you follow the link to this 10 minute video, it's a very simple introduction to it that will tell you all that it is about, and pretty much all you need to know about it. More-over, diversity is a property of systems in general (a class of behaviors) which I mentioned is one of four (homogenous, patterned, random and complex) where diverse systems that we see in biology, or any system that appears to us to show diversity as its understood in any system (like game diversity) sits in class 4 (complex). As stated earlier, the complex class of behaviors is an intermediary state of the other three behaviors. Quote ...which is what you're both presenting in combinatorics of states and then arguing against? I point to combinations of discrete elements in games as being the underlying basis of metagame creation and analysis as is relevant in the subject of game theory. The more easily-computed set of these discrete inputs, the easier it is for a metagame to emerge. I'm not arguing against combinatorics here. Combination (of discrete elements) is how systems become complex and therefor diverse. The creation of a meta-game however is specifically, the process that turns a system that would be random or have many different things, into something uniform with many of the same things. Meta-games are not diversity, they are the anti-thesis of it. It is a grinding down of those combinations into "the one" combination that repeats over and over again. It is the proverbial state of the game that is "solved" and if you were to see it as a computation taking place, a metagame would be the halt state. Just to get this easier...you have a system of elements that are exploring some state-space: H->J->A->D->E->F->Z->B->A...which as a sequence appears random. At the end of this "interesting process" the system state ends like this: H->J->A->D->E->F->Z->B->A->B->A->B->A->B->A. The system repeats "A->B" forever. This state is the "meta-game" of this system and computationally, this is the halt state. By contrast, If you have some system with 3 elements ABC, and if the function that is computing the transition between each state seems random (ABBCCBACBAA etc...) Then a computer, doing this computation could go on to compute this sequence forever, and be formally undecidable. In this case there is no metagame between the three elements. In other words, the evolution of a system that approaches an equilibrium state, is a process that transitions random state transitions, into homogenous ones. In a game, this process is carried out by human players. We are presented with many different elements...we enumerate them according to rules (game mechanics) and if we end up playing the same things, the game has since crunched down to this uniform/repeating halt state. For all intensive purposes the game has been solved, and diversity has ceased to exist. Having a "metagame" at all is not a good thing, and this is intuitive. If the objective is diversity, then one prefers the game to always be entering new, always different state transitions, not repeating the same one. This is why I'm saying you have a misconception. Diversity is not a description of the metagame, it is an observation of what happens before a metagame occurs...it is the part of the evolution when "interesting things are happening," And ideally, you want this evolution where interesting things are happening, lasts forever...for long periods of time. Alternatively, you can look at the size of the metagame (are we cycling through 2 states, or 300 states) and see this as the size of its "diversity" which is how it is understood in mathematically (rather than computationally). The example of the state-space and size, is a simplified version of browers fixed point theorem, which a mathematician here on the forum outlined. The larger the size of the fixed point (in a series of state transitions where each state can be thought of as a unique metagame) the more "diversity" there is. Personally I'm not a fan of that alternative explanation but I used it because I figured you would know that and not about computability. computability is however, the far superior way to understand this topic, because it is joined at the hip with Complex Systems. Quote Viewing game/build diversity as a problem of a complex system where diversity as a measure of unique states in such a mathematically complex model is inherently flawed because it fails to define scope and simply can't be calculated. I realize now that it was a mistake to give you that state-space explanation first, over a computability explanation. But I'll explain this again : Diversity is not specific to games. It is a behavior/feature/facet of systems that are complex, and it is studied using complex systems to model that behavior. Games are not anymore special than any other system. If complex systems was useless at defining diversity for a game like guild wars 2, then why is it useful in modeling systems that far more complicated...like biology and the universe since that's what it was put together for to describe. Guild Wars 2 by comparison, is a piece of cake. Quote Promoting anything that plays into the boon system as a counter either creates only more illusion of choice and not actual diversity in the metagame, or simply creates an identical metagame scenario with some other exploitative system instead. So here you are making a distinction between an "Actual Diversity" description that you seem to have, against the "diversity" that the world already has an established definition for. This sentence is riddled with conjecture and you'd need to actually prove some of them. For instance presenting options that are different is no illusion. Different options are real choices. Illusion of choice, is when those two options are the same thing. Boons and boon-strips are not the same thing, hence the choice is not an illusion. Additionally, why would you say the metagame would be identical with or without boonstrips, when we already know that the metagame would not be identical since we've experienced the game both with and without boon-strips? Furthermore, nerfing boon duration isn't going to make the game any less trivial or any less solvable than it is now. No mechanics or relationships (functions) are being changed. Obvious example: here's a problem to solve : 400 - 150 = 250. Now lets "nerf" this to the problem 40 - 15 = ? . Does this nerf make the problem harder to solve? no. The problem is still trivial and always will be, because what defines the complexity and therefor solvability of the problem is the function (subtraction). If you have a computability degree, then you know exactly what kind of changes the game needs to have, in order to not be trivial at the level of skills. Quote Diversity as a whole, however, is a much bigger problem, and is measured arbitrarily when considering macro-strategies and repeatedly running meta-analysis on these complex systems. One could mathematically argue that the game is both diverse and balanced with a healthy metagame if there exist strategies which are uniquely optimal to counter the previously-dominant ones with doing something as substituting one class for another with functionally the same identity (a la providing boon coverage). But from a high-level systems perspective, we agree this is not a diverse environment. It is this, where differing mechanics must exist to intrinsically compete with that high-level optimal design. These are profession-specific ones, boon denial, and the likes. It becomes significantly computationally easier to create more diverse solutions when the high-level balance woes become decoupled from the low-level ones. This is the crux of my argument for why boon dominance is bad; being a shared, streamlined system, it inherently eliminates optimal possibilities from what's otherwise in the optimal subset from the high level. Diversity is arbitrary in the sense that measuring differences between things, is a relative construct. How different this thing is, to that thing over there, has no objective form. But this is by natures design. Diversity is not something you can parametrize trivially, with numbers. "Things just exist," and those things just "do what they do" and we humans, create formal systems, to try and describe what it is that it is doing. Sometimes those are solvable, sometimes they are undecidedly complex. Balance is an illusion, it doesn't exist, we just have some "notion" that it exists, but its not real...really what we are doing is looking at a system that is either doing interesting things, or at a system that is doing boring things, and this is as far as it goes. Once you understand that Balance does not exist in any objective form either, that it is an illusion of us trying to parametrize a thing that is not parametrizable, then you gain a greater appreciation for the mechanisms themselves, and what it is showing you. The mechanism of instantiation (combination) letting those combinations follow rules, interact with each other to create higher level constructs, is the essence of what the universe does. Taking things away...killing instantiation...making those rules trivial is how you kill that mechanism...and that actually shows up in the mathematics of combination, computation and so on as i pointed to earlier. It's painfully obvious how powerful permutation is, as a force for creating new forms...new builds... whatever... it is a universal property of everything, and its not hard to see it, once you get past those misconceptions. So strip away the fluff, the solution is not complicated, its very simple. Create things, let the things interact and nature by proxy of just how it operates...of existence, sorts out what works and what does not work. It's done that for billions of years, does a great job of doing it and it does that now in guild wars 2 with or without human intervention. You won't know what mechanics will create solvable or undecidable behavior...but there are procedures that help one know how to cultivate such mechanics. Pretty sure that earlier in this thread...someone gave a great idea (to create a hex/curse like mechanic as a counter to boons). I mean...It's so simple...just "hey look...a thing in the game that can interact with this other thing," and that is enough to solve the problem. It's incredible to me that the solution can be as simple and as elegant as "lets create something" rather than "we need to tear down everything." 1 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Salt Mode.3780 Posted February 28 Author Share Posted February 28 Diversity means that each class has unique uses in WvW not that everyone can do the same thing as the next being able to blob the same way as a way of diversity or being able to contribute to a fight the same way. However, with where gw2 is heading, they want every class to provide heal/boons in different ways but it doesn't change the fact that they act the same way in terms of function as pumping heals/boons. Diversity in WvW should be classes that excel at roaming, classes that excel in small man skirmishes, and classes that excel in big zergs. However like what I mentioned is that boonball has completely killed that diversity. High risk High reward builds are no longer a thing. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JusticeRetroHunter.7684 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 2 hours ago, Salt Mode.3780 said: Diversity means that each class has unique uses in WvW not that everyone can do the same thing as the next being able to blob the same way as a way of diversity or being able to contribute to a fight the same way. However, with where gw2 is heading, they want every class to provide heal/boons in different ways but it doesn't change the fact that they act the same way in terms of function as pumping heals/boons. Diversity in WvW should be classes that excel at roaming, classes that excel in small man skirmishes, and classes that excel in big zergs. However like what I mentioned is that boonball has completely killed that diversity. High risk High reward builds are no longer a thing. Yep. Classes (but more generally just mechanics at the level of skills) just need to be different and do different things. Nerfing boons does not do this procedure…it just nerfs boons, it doesn’t make a class do different things. It’s the actual implementation of different mechanics into the game that makes things do different things… like boon-stripping. This is why I keep saying that my points should be obvious, even through all this dense science talk…it’s intuitive to understand this. Edited February 28 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KrHome.1920 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 Quote Diversity in WvW should be classes that excel at roaming, classes that excel in small man skirmishes, and classes that excel in big zergs. Guild Wars 2 has always been that game that does not force players into the holy trinity. This is a key design choice since 2012. The whole specialisation mechanic is based on that design. Everyone is meant to be able to play dps or support with his favored class. With a proper balancing this is a great design with lots of freedom in gameplay choices. 1 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aeolus.3615 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 2 hours ago, KrHome.1920 said: Guild Wars 2 has always been that game that does not force players into the holy trinity. This is a key design choice since 2012. The whole specialisation mechanic is based on that design. Everyone is meant to be able to play dps or support with his favored class. With a proper balancing this is a great design with lots of freedom in gameplay choices. Yes on open world that's how it works, outside open world? NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Salt Mode.3780 Posted February 28 Author Share Posted February 28 2 hours ago, KrHome.1920 said: Guild Wars 2 has always been that game that does not force players into the holy trinity. This is a key design choice since 2012. The whole specialisation mechanic is based on that design. Everyone is meant to be able to play dps or support with his favored class. With a proper balancing this is a great design with lots of freedom in gameplay choices. This was thrown out the window when they decided to make raids back in HoT days so it's no longer the case. 3 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said: Yep. Classes (but more generally just mechanics at the level of skills) just need to be different and do different things. Nerfing boons does not do this procedure…it just nerfs boons, it doesn’t make a class do different things. It’s the actual implementation of different mechanics into the game that makes things do different things… like boon-stripping. This is why I keep saying that my points should be obvious, even through all this dense science talk…it’s intuitive to understand this. Again, dancing around, the whole point is we need more boon rips instead of nerfing them, which was this whole thread to begin with. They clearly aren't going to nerf boons but they aren't buffing strips/corrupts either instead the opposite. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kash.9213 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 26 minutes ago, Salt Mode.3780 said: This was thrown out the window when they decided to make raids back in HoT days so it's no longer the case. Again, dancing around, the whole point is we need more boon rips instead of nerfing them, which was this whole thread to begin with. They clearly aren't going to nerf boons but they aren't buffing strips/corrupts either instead the opposite. I get what you're saying but most people didn't and don't raid. A lot of people don't do Strikes either and demanded other ways to get the last expansion stats for Trinkets. The playerbase didn't really accept the trinity even when game development and resources were funneled towards it. I agree with more boon rips along with more deliberate counters to things in general that require timing or precision. I don't think boons need to be nerfed but they need to be regulated to being powerful and potentially decisive windows of opportunity. Or else, the entire game is a cycle of boon and boon rip tradeoffs considering the durations and potential upkeep we have right now. Edited February 28 by kash.9213 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JusticeRetroHunter.7684 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 43 minutes ago, Salt Mode.3780 said: This was thrown out the window when they decided to make raids back in HoT days so it's no longer the case. Again, dancing around, the whole point is we need more boon rips instead of nerfing them, which was this whole thread to begin with. They clearly aren't going to nerf boons but they aren't buffing strips/corrupts either instead the opposite. How am I dancing around? I’m literally saying that boon strip needs to exist in the game…that the existence of boon-strip is a balancing mechanism against boon spam. The other person does not think so (they’d rather nerf boon duration or get rid of boons outright) Edited February 28 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XenesisII.1540 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 4 hours ago, KrHome.1920 said: Guild Wars 2 has always been that game that does not force players into the holy trinity. This is a key design choice since 2012. The whole specialisation mechanic is based on that design. Everyone is meant to be able to play dps or support with his favored class. With a proper balancing this is a great design with lots of freedom in gameplay choices. Except it has, with the introduction of certain specs, stat sets, and being able to "taunt" with the highest toughness, starting in 2015 when they also decided to bring raids which works well with trinity setup. What Gw2 did well in the beginning was all classes were mostly hybrids, you could mix and match traits and stats to make whatever you wanted, and had self sustain with their own personal heals. But over the years it has switched itself to more holy trinity design in mind. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeceiverX.8361 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 15 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said: I'm not arguing against combinatorics here. Combination (of discrete elements) is how systems become complex and therefor diverse. The creation of a meta-game however is specifically, the process that turns a system that would be random or have many different things, into something uniform with many of the same things. Meta-games are not diversity, they are the anti-thesis of it. It is a grinding down of those combinations into "the one" combination that repeats over and over again. It is the proverbial state of the game that is "solved" and if you were to see it as a computation taking place, a metagame would be the halt state. ... This is why I'm saying you have a misconception. Diversity is not a description of the metagame, it is an observation of what happens before a metagame occurs...it is the part of the evolution when "interesting things are happening," And ideally, you want this evolution where interesting things are happening, lasts forever...for long periods of time. ... So here you are making a distinction between an "Actual Diversity" description that you seem to have, against the "diversity" that the world already has an established definition for. This sentence is riddled with conjecture and you'd need to actually prove some of them. For instance presenting options that are different is no illusion. Different options are real choices. Illusion of choice, is when those two options are the same thing. Boons and boon-strips are not the same thing, hence the choice is not an illusion. Additionally, why would you say the metagame would be identical with or without boonstrips, when we already know that the metagame would not be identical since we've experienced the game both with and without boon-strips? So this is fundamentally why there's a disconnect. Your definition of a metagame is inherently indicating a solved or near-solved state. This is often a misnomer acronym of "most effective tactic available." It is not used in academia, and I dislike this definition because fundamentally, the terms are at odds when broken down. A solved game must be provably solved to be considered such with outcomes of either "win" or simply "not lose." When a game is strongly solved, there is no longer a metagame occurring; a solved game, played by rational actors, will not have a metagame *because* there cannot be further analysis to change outcomes. And so the definition I am referring to is in reference to there being a current dominant strategy, but crucially, where there must exist additional available emergent winning strategies at any given time when compared to any other given state--that there is inherently something to do outside of the formal game loop towards defeating it. A healthy metagame subsequently has some significant number of these strategies simultaneously available such that there are a number of unique solutions to a given scenario, each potentially interacting with different mechanics and subsystems in the game's overarching large Complex System. In respects to the way original post, the term "build diversity" is inherently focusing on these discrete elements acutely. Because, as we're seeing emerge in common competitive play now, we're witnessing the dismissal of subsystems in favor of patterns which inherently simplify the System overall; not moving, not dodging, minimizing spacing, removing decision-trees for skill activation, and so on all contribute towards degrading the complexity (as in Complex System) of the game itself. Reductions in these options fundamentally *does* limit diversity, in both regards, through trivialization of these mechanics; not only does it degrade diversity by your own definitions since solvability is being precluded on simplifying what actually makes the game a complex system regardless (because the very nature of these interacting systems are no longer relevant to be considered part of the system itself), but also means there are no divergent or unique choices to deal with the strategy, either. And I'll point out that the term diversity carries many definitions in various contexts. You speak of definition, but verbatim, per Merriam-Webster, it is defined thusly: "the condition of having or being composed of differing elements." The term "build diversity" which I use *repeatedly* inherently means one thing and one thing only: Its options. Its combinations. And in reference to a metagame, means there must be many combinations available to navigate closer to solving the current state of the unsolved game, each with their own limitations and counters to allow a metagame to exist. Your definition of "Illusion of choice" is also just completely wrong. The term itself means is that the person making decisions doesn't really have true control over the outcomes of their decisions, not that all outcomes are equal. In what I stated above, basing all gameplay around the existence of boons and boon systems forces players to still play within those boundaries because boons will still dictate how the game is played, deliberately used, countered, or otherwise. When framed in the context of the metagame, all options not operating in this schema can intrinsically be discarded. Thus, there is an "illusion of choice" to play without these options or optimizing around the boon system itself; the raw combinations exist, but they are not inherently viable solutions and never will be. Players pushing competitive boundaries navigating the metagame are simply unable to further look into those options in pursuit of winning. At best, your idea can corroborate mine if the rhetorical anti-boon measures available would be made particularly punishing considering the relative power of playing with boons has over playing without. The problem here is then that you still need differentiators to ensure anti-boon options are countered just as aggressively by something else entirely, and that some in-between isn't easily-determined. But as it stands, there are no builds which are better playing without boons than those which are, and there is an over-dependence on boons for critical gameplay mechanics like Stability, or professions which were designed to depend on them from day 1. All your proposed solution does is wash the problem around a bit and make things *slightly* better by allowing the emergence of a metagame to remove the presence of boon play entirely, or simply demands that the entire rest of the game be re-designed with non-boon mechanics to be able to absorb whatever counters boons. But that means more unique mechanics... things you advocated against in the very first place. So something must give. And pragmatically, it's boon stacking. Remove permanent 25 might from an attacker and permanent protection from a defender and power damage incoming is basically identical to what it is now. Is activating permanent boon uptime on rotation to swing your stick to do the same exact amount of damage and take the same exact amount of damage any more compelling of a gameplay pattern than just... swinging the stick? Barely, I guess, if you're stimulated by repeating rotations ad nauseum. But I'd say having to navigate the moments of strength and weakness by having entire groups of players have to respond to those brief moments of boons activating from one side or another creates a way bigger disparity in stats and much more compelling gameplay in the demand for decision-making of who should use how much of their resources and when. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeceiverX.8361 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 7 hours ago, kash.9213 said: I get what you're saying but most people didn't and don't raid. A lot of people don't do Strikes either and demanded other ways to get the last expansion stats for Trinkets. The playerbase didn't really accept the trinity even when game development and resources were funneled towards it. I agree with more boon rips along with more deliberate counters to things in general that require timing or precision. I don't think boons need to be nerfed but they need to be regulated to being powerful and potentially decisive windows of opportunity. Or else, the entire game is a cycle of boon and boon rip tradeoffs considering the durations and potential upkeep we have right now. I mean, creating those windows of opportunity is precisely what nerfing boons entails; a reduction in duration. Which is entirely predicated on the concentration stat, which is the lion's share of the problem, since variability between boon uptime is grossly variable between builds. Consider this case of a rhetorical skill without boon duration: 1 second of self-stability on a 2 second cooldown. Sounds OP, right? Well, it's is honestly a pretty mediocre effect on its own because it still makes you plenty liable to getting CC-locked every other second. One remotely good use of a CC skill by your opponent and you get stunned. With a boon duration build, you're suddenly immune to CC forever. More examples: In another case, 5 seconds of bulk Might can let you maybe burst someone down when you align everything right for a combo, burning multiple skills. 10 seconds of bulk might means your entire combo can land *and then some.* If you want to use 10 seconds of protection to give yourself time to recuperate after burning a ton of skills on an offensive combo or negate an incoming burst combo yourself, with boon duration, suddenly you can pretty much just ignore needing to operate on when your opponent is strong and when you are; you just get to stat check them the entire fight. Quickness and Alacrity are overpowered and deserve nerfs or removal because of combat clarity. They exist for PvE and only do harm to the rest of the game. But boons are OP and need nerfing in their quantity of application and alongside the removal of the concentration stat, because having tons of sources even on shorter durations de-values strips and concentration makes these windows of vulnerability and decision-making too short. Adding more strips though just hurts occasional-boon-sources like builds relying only on some Swiftness. Imagine getting outrun by a necromancer spamming nothing but corrupts on you making you on average 50% slower. A thief wants to close the gap and uses Steal, but is running ToTC for the Fury to land a reliable damage combo, then immediately gets crippled again. "More removal" isn't a viable answer when so many sources provide so many boons. Not even all boon removal is created equally. That's really what it comes down to. While I'd still wholly support a game without boons at all, the crux of it is just that there are too many sources and too many methods to modify their durations in extreme ways that make them impossible to balance as-is. They *need* to be infrequent. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JusticeRetroHunter.7684 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 (edited) 30 minutes ago, DeceiverX.8361 said: But that means more unique mechanics... things you advocated against in the very first place. What? I never advocated against this. I think you and others here don't seem to understand my position at all. My argument is specicially that unique mechanics MUST exist in this game (if you want diversity)...mechanics like boonstrip and ive repeated this like 4-5 times. The creation of unique things...is how diversity works...is the ultimate premise of my responses. I'll respond to the rest of your comment later, but just putting this here now. Edited February 29 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enzo.7823 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 We need a special event weekend with no boons and insta death, no downs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkBecks.6453 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 Unfortunately, the builds have developed too far where initially an engineer had resistance and now every kitten build having resistance and boons and buffs so their is actually none, zero, nada, nil damage done. I cannot understand why they don't address this, as the fights have become 30 minute pointless exercises. My question is simply, where is the balance? Please enlighten me 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kash.9213 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 18 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said: I mean, creating those windows of opportunity is precisely what nerfing boons entails; a reduction in duration. Which is entirely predicated on the concentration stat, which is the lion's share of the problem, since variability between boon uptime is grossly variable between builds. Consider this case of a rhetorical skill without boon duration: 1 second of self-stability on a 2 second cooldown. Sounds OP, right? Well, it's is honestly a pretty mediocre effect on its own because it still makes you plenty liable to getting CC-locked every other second. One remotely good use of a CC skill by your opponent and you get stunned. With a boon duration build, you're suddenly immune to CC forever. More examples: In another case, 5 seconds of bulk Might can let you maybe burst someone down when you align everything right for a combo, burning multiple skills. 10 seconds of bulk might means your entire combo can land *and then some.* If you want to use 10 seconds of protection to give yourself time to recuperate after burning a ton of skills on an offensive combo or negate an incoming burst combo yourself, with boon duration, suddenly you can pretty much just ignore needing to operate on when your opponent is strong and when you are; you just get to stat check them the entire fight. Quickness and Alacrity are overpowered and deserve nerfs or removal because of combat clarity. They exist for PvE and only do harm to the rest of the game. But boons are OP and need nerfing in their quantity of application and alongside the removal of the concentration stat, because having tons of sources even on shorter durations de-values strips and concentration makes these windows of vulnerability and decision-making too short. Adding more strips though just hurts occasional-boon-sources like builds relying only on some Swiftness. Imagine getting outrun by a necromancer spamming nothing but corrupts on you making you on average 50% slower. A thief wants to close the gap and uses Steal, but is running ToTC for the Fury to land a reliable damage combo, then immediately gets crippled again. "More removal" isn't a viable answer when so many sources provide so many boons. Not even all boon removal is created equally. That's really what it comes down to. While I'd still wholly support a game without boons at all, the crux of it is just that there are too many sources and too many methods to modify their durations in extreme ways that make them impossible to balance as-is. They *need* to be infrequent. I feel like we're saying the same thing. I think of messing around with boon effect numbers and percentages or the entirety of what they counter as nerfs while reducing duration or making it reasonably costly or labored to generate would be regulating. I appreciate the input though and you're probably more correct. 15 hours ago, MarkBecks.6453 said: Unfortunately, the builds have developed too far where initially an engineer had resistance and now every kitten build having resistance and boons and buffs so their is actually none, zero, nada, nil damage done. I cannot understand why they don't address this, as the fights have become 30 minute pointless exercises. My question is simply, where is the balance? Please enlighten me I agree with all that, but they have to tie us up with that 30 minute exercise. There's no story, missions, bounties, persistent frontline battlegrounds for people who want to dip in and out of large fights, and no worldbuilding on our maps. Even with near proper balance, we'd need some gimmicks to draw out a fight, which sieging should be, but getting a long siege fight with dynamic plays and heroic moments kind of requires a perfect storm and is dampened by more than just the thread issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JusticeRetroHunter.7684 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 (edited) 36 minutes ago, kash.9213 said: I feel like we're saying the same thing. Not really. He doesn't want boon rips back in the game...he wants to nerf or remove boons all together, and get rid of concentration stat. The funny thing is that A-net is already doing this. They just removed everything else instead, including boon rips, and all they've been putting on skills is short duration boons. Keep in mind...most boons in the game last 1 - 8 seconds. How much more duration do you think its going to take to solve the problem? .5 seconds? .25 seconds? What happens when those boons have such a short duration? They can't even be properly utilized because it takes LONGER to cast a skill following the application of the boon in question. There is a lower limit to how short the duration of boons can be...which is the cast time of skills in the game, which ranges from 1/4 seconds to 1.5-ish seconds. Many of the boon duration on skills and traits are already close to these limits. Idk if he plays zerg but Ministrel Gear doesn't even give you max boon duration, it gives about a 50% increase. the reason Minstrels is meta is because it is BIS for most class combinations as it gives the most Outgoing Heal % on Bountiful Maintence Oil. Additionally it gives the highest healing and highest survivability, and the concentration is just a good bonus. That's why WVW zergs dont run around in harrier gear lmao. Other classes in the zerg dont even run concentration stats...they run full damage gear...zerkers and dragons...0 concentration. The place where all the boons come from, is literally just output of people hitting their damage buttons...since boons are on every skill and practically every trait. There's also no boonstrip in the game so there are no sinks for it anymore. Nerfing boons will only create bigger disparities between big organized groups, and smaller unorganized groups, since big groups by virtue of having more buttons being pressed will make them hit higher boon uptime. But whatever anet should hire this guy because he fits right in with their agenda of squeezing out all the unique mechanics in the game like boonstrip, and wants to just nerf and remove everything like they've already been doing...cool. Don't be surprised pikachu face, when you find that zergs STILL output massive boons after they remove ministrel gear. People will just run whatever is next in line that is BIS for Bountiful Maintence Oil, healing power and survivability. Edited February 29 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kash.9213 Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 (edited) 42 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said: Not really. He doesn't want boon rips back in the game...he wants to nerf or remove boons all together, and get rid of concentration stat. The funny thing is that A-net is already doing this. They just removed everything else instead, including boon rips, and all they've been putting on skills is short duration boons. Keep in mind...most boons in the game last 1 - 8 seconds. How much more duration do you think its going to take to solve the problem? .5 seconds? .25 seconds? What happens when those boons have such a short duration? They can't even be properly utilized because it takes LONGER to cast a skill following the application of the boon in question. There is a lower limit to how short the duration of boons can be...which is the cast time of skills in the game, which ranges from 1/4 seconds to 1.5-ish seconds. Many of the boon duration on skills and traits are already close to these limits. Idk if he plays zerg but Ministrel Gear doesn't even give you max boon duration, it gives about a 50% increase. the reason Minstrels is meta is because it is BIS for most class combinations as it gives the most Outgoing Heal % on Bountiful Maintence Oil. Additionally it gives the highest healing and highest survivability, and the concentration is just a good bonus. That's why WVW zergs dont run around in harrier gear lmao. Other classes in the zerg dont even run concentration stats...they run full damage gear...zerkers and dragons...0 concentration. The place where all the boons come from, is literally just output of people hitting their damage buttons...since boons are on every skill and practically every trait. There's also no boonstrip in the game so there are no sinks for it anymore. Nerfing boons will only create bigger disparities between big organized groups, and smaller unorganized groups, since big groups by virtue of having more buttons being pressed will make them hit higher boon uptime. But whatever anet should hire this guy because he fits right in with their agenda of squeezing out all the unique mechanics in the game like boonstrip, and wants to just nerf and remove everything like they've already been doing...cool. Don't be surprised pikachu face, when you find that zergs STILL output massive boons after they remove ministrel gear. People will just run whatever is next in line that is BIS for Bountiful Maintence Oil, healing power and survivability. Sorry if not entirely on topic but Anet did a poor job explaining or guiding people through their respective boon rips and then made those only a small factor anyway in the face of persistent boon generation. Even in the thief forum if you ask about boon rip order on stuff like Bountiful Theft or Larcenous Strike or if you're ripping the boon duration or the boon stack count, people will likely have to dig for that info as a refresher since it's kind of failed to become of pillar mechanic being a sustained effort instead of deliberate and precise. I used to factor those elements of my boon rips into a fight more often but I kind of lost that as a priority over time and only bother to think about it once in a while when I really feel like plotting. Even then it might only be a muted effort anyway absorbed by the meta. Edited February 29 by kash.9213 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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