More Complexity != Better Gameplay

[SpaceMarine.1836]

I keep seeing thins pattern ever since EoD. It appears that the gameplay team is unable to realize that simply adding more complexity does not mean better gameplay. 

Since EOD, there have been some weapon skills that have their mechanics more complicated that the entire weapon skillbars from the core game. At some point, this complexity becomes so frustrating and hard to keep track of the players just give up on it. Notable examples:

- Nearly no one plays Bladesworn

- Nearly no one uses Guardian off-hand pistol

- Nearly no Rev players use Scepter

This complexity enshittification has unfortunately crept up also into the Spear skills design, where once again, mechanics of some skills are a whole book to read. As an example - Guardian Spear skill 5 tooltip has more words than all Guardian Greatsword skill tooltips combined. 

New weapons should open up new gameplay styles, but skill complexity does not mean opening up new gameplay style, it just means more complexity to deal with. 

The Warrior spear is relatively OK for example, since it provides much needed ranged non-condi weapon for Warrior (the Rifle has been brutally neglected for years), but in many other cases, skills of these weapons are so overcomplicated people just give up on using them. The skills still need to be balanced, so even the complex skills must not be outliers in terms of capability. But this ultimately means than even if you learn overly complicated, perfectly timed chain of actions to executed the complicated skill precisely, you will often not get any better result than pressing a single key of some simple, basic weapon skill. 

Apparently programmers have given up too, since the overcomplicated wonky behavior is hard to bugfix. Guardian pistol 5 still doesn't work reliably to this day (over half a year after being added).

Sure, we players always welcome more playstyles, but complexity is not a playstyle.

Edited August 25 by SpaceMarine.1836

[Dadnir.5038]

You need a change of perspective.

What you perceive as "complexity" is merely the devs trying to introduce "fun" elements in the game.

Nowaday's player focus to much on the output and the number of button necessary to achieve "optimal output".

You want a stick that does the job for you, while the devs want their customer to go "Woah! Those skill really make my character look like a [insert profession]".

[draxynnic.3719]

Dear Dwayna, guardian pistols...

They removed "press again to detonate" skills years ago because they're impractical for anyone who isn't practically in the server room to actually pull off the skillshots they expect people to pull, and they combined it with a chargeup mechanic so you also have the risk of accidentally detonating it in your face because you wanted to fire at charge level 2 but the second button press was just a little too late. I always just double-tap it because that way at least I know what it's going to do.

And then there's having a ranged weapon where you want the enemy to be within a symbol that you can only place at your own feet. I've seen people trying to defend that, but the situations where you'd want it at your own feet rather than under the enemy, and where ground-targeting wouldn't do the job, are pretty niche.

Don't get me started on elementalist pistols.

Ironically, I was listening to a podcast talking about the difference between complexity and depth earlier today. A lot of the recent weapons do seem to be introducing a lot of complexity without bringing much depth in the process. 

Edited August 25 by draxynnic.3719

[Xelqypla.6817]

3 hours ago, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

At some point, this complexity becomes so frustrating and hard to keep track of the players just give up on it. Notable examples:

- Nearly no one plays Bladesworn

- Nearly no one uses Guardian off-hand pistol

- Nearly no Rev players use Scepter

I understand where you are coming from.

However, many of us enjoy the complexity as it keeps us engaged.

The reason I, and I imagine many others, don't play with your notable examples is because they aren't very enjoyable. Like, with the case of Revenant Scepter, I'd much rather just play Thief Specter.

[Dean Calaway.9718]

4 hours ago, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

At some point, this complexity becomes so frustrating and hard to keep track of the players just give up on it.

You mean SOME players, mostly cat owners, give up on it, I love the Ranger spear, I haven't had time to try any others yet but I have seen players complain how "complex" it is... really?

It takes a whole of 2 minutes to read all the skills and start practicing with the thing, I haven't enjoyed the game so much in I don't remember how long and right now I'm just concerned people will QQ enough to get it nerfed since there's plenty of enemies in Janthir that I'm one-shoting.

[SpaceMarine.1836]

1 hour ago, Xelqypla.6817 said:

I understand where you are coming from.

However, many of us enjoy the complexity as it keeps us engaged.

The reason I, and I imagine many others, don't play with your notable examples is because they aren't very enjoyable. Like, with the case of Revenant Scepter, I'd much rather just play Thief Specter.

 

57 minutes ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

You mean SOME players, mostly cat owners, give up on it, I love the Ranger spear, I haven't had time to try any others yet but I have seen players complain how "complex" it is... really?

It takes a whole of 2 minutes to read all the skills and start practicing with the thing, I haven't enjoyed the game so much in I don't remember how long and right now I'm just concerned people will QQ enough to get it nerfed since there's plenty of enemies in Janthir that I'm one-shoting.

This is not just an opinion. I would not have written this if I saw players actually running with these weapons in PvE, WvW or PVP. If the opposite was the case I would have assumed it's just me. There are many other complex systems like for example Vindicator's Double-Legend or Harbinger's Blight, and people seem to use those because the complexity is rewarded by better gameplay, but there are other cases where it's just complex, without any reward in terms of more interesting gameplay.

People simply don't use these weapons or profession mechanics. It's not that I think it, it's that it is easily observable.

What really made me post this is that's it's frustrating that some weapons on some professions are just a "spacers". They occupy a list of the available weapons so the class has more playstyles on the paper, but they aren't viable due to unfinished design. And the most frustration comes from the fact that the design will probably never be fixed, because they essentially haven't touched the new weapons after their official launch. Warrior's "melee Pistol" debacle is another notable example that comes to mind.

Edited August 25 by SpaceMarine.1836

[Dadnir.5038]

2 hours ago, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

There are many other complex systems like for example Vindicator's Double-Legend or Harbinger's Blight, and people seem to use those because the complexity is rewarded by better gameplay

You associate Harbinger's Blight with the term "complexity" and think it's rewarding the game with "better gameplay"? Reaaaaaaally?

[draxynnic.3719]

Again, I'd note the difference between complexity and depth.

Complexity can probably be best summarised as "barriers to entry" - through either being difficult to understand, or difficult to implement. It's generally a bad thing.

Depth, on the other hand, is more along the lines of how many meaningful decisions you have to make. This is usually a good thing.

This is why elementalist pistol is often regarded as "complexity layered on complexity" - elementalist naturally requires learning a lot of skills, a rotation, and in many cases, keeping mental track of where your cooldowns on your non-current attunements are likely to be. Pistol adds to that complexity by giving most of the skills two different variants depending on which order you use them in, and having an interface that makes it easy to lose track of where you are in that rotation. However, this doesn't really add a lot of depth. If you're looking to do damage, the skills are mostly just "shoot gun" so you're not really making any decisions, just trying not to mess up your rotation. The only actual decision-making inherent to the weapon is whether to use the utility in air, and if you do need to use the weapon's sustain features, swapping the order to get some extra healing or barrier. Complex, but ultimately shallow - if you have problems running pistol it's probably due to the technical aspect of making sure you press the buttons in the right order and can prevent anything from disrupting your flow and getting your bullet generation and consumption the wrong way around. (Weaver pistol I'm not going to comment on because that's even more complex.)

Harbinger shroud is something of the opposite of this. It's pretty simple to understand and use - get power at the expense of making yourself more fragile in turn. But along the way it generates depth - how many blight stacks do you actually want to build up, how long do you stay in shroud, do you use your elixirs (if any) to gain stacks or to lose them? I'm not claiming it's the deepest build in the game, but it does have a high depth to complexity ratio.

Generally speaking, increasing the depth is correlated with increasing complexity, since having more options means more meaningful decisions but also more that you need to learn and keep track of. Game design often aims to manage this balance, achieving depth without creating too much complexity. Some of the recent weapon design, though, feels like it's just creating complexity for complexity's sake and then trying to force the weapons to be used by inflating the numbers... but that only really works in instanced PvE (I much preferred condition guardian when it wasn't P/P and P/T...). Competitive modes aren't likely to tolerate weapons where you need to keep so much attention on what your own weapons are supposed to be doing that it gets in the way of keeping track of what enemy players are doing.

[Ashen.2907]

10 hours ago, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

enshittification

I am stealing this word. 

And, agreed. Complexity should come from how you use the tools provided not from the tools themselves. The rules of chess are really quite simple, mastering their use is a lifetime experience.

[coro.3176]

14 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

I am stealing this word. 

It's already a word, and OP is misusing it here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[Ashen.2907]

13 minutes ago, coro.3176 said:

It's already a word, and OP is misusing it here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Okay then. Learn something new every day.

[SpaceMarine.1836]

15 minutes ago, coro.3176 said:

It's already a word, and OP is misusing it here.

 

What you mean misusing? We are users of a "live service" game and we are getting some new "features" (weapons) that are more difficult to use but offer no added value in exchange for that difficult. It fits well. 

Or would you argue that ANet puts as much or more effort into iterative improvement of gameplay/skills design now than it did post launch?

Edited August 25 by SpaceMarine.1836

[coro.3176]

8 minutes ago, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

What you mean misusing? We are users of a "live service" game and we are getting some new "features" (weapons) that are more difficult to use but offer no added value in exchange for that difficult. It fits well. 

Or would you argue that ANet puts as much or more effort into iterative improvement of gameplay/skills design now than it did post launch?

Yes, I think making them difficult/complicated to use, shows some level of care. Enshittification would be more like if they just made it braindead easy and obviously better than all other weapons, just to sell expansions.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

11 hours ago, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

I keep seeing thins pattern ever since EoD. It appears that the gameplay team is unable to realize that simply adding more complexity does not mean better gameplay. 

Since EOD, there have been some weapon skills that have their mechanics more complicated that the entire weapon skillbars from the core game. At some point, this complexity becomes so frustrating and hard to keep track of the players just give up on it. Notable examples:

- Nearly no one plays Bladesworn

- Nearly no one uses Guardian off-hand pistol

- Nearly no Rev players use Scepter

This complexity enshittification has unfortunately crept up also into the Spear skills design, where once again, mechanics of some skills are a whole book to read. As an example - Guardian Spear skill 5 tooltip has more words than all Guardian Greatsword skill tooltips combined. 

New weapons should open up new gameplay styles, but skill complexity does not mean opening up new gameplay style, it just means more complexity to deal with. 

The Warrior spear is relatively OK for example, since it provides much needed ranged non-condi weapon for Warrior (the Rifle has been brutally neglected for years), but in many other cases, skills of these weapons are so overcomplicated people just give up on using them. The skills still need to be balanced, so even the complex skills must not be outliers in terms of capability. But this ultimately means than even if you learn overly complicated, perfectly timed chain of actions to executed the complicated skill precisely, you will often not get any better result than pressing a single key of some simple, basic weapon skill. 

Apparently programmers have given up too, since the overcomplicated wonky behavior is hard to bugfix. Guardian pistol 5 still doesn't work reliably to this day (over half a year after being added).

Sure, we players always welcome more playstyles, but complexity is not a playstyle.

Yes. This trend has become obvious post EOD, but its been around in this game for far longer, it was just way less obvious. 

Colloquially, there are two "kinds" of complexity. There's the kind you observe by and large in the game right now: Many many shallow and meaningless (trivial) game mechanics...and then on the other end, the kind which we don't observe in this game but often observed in other successful games, is that simple deep stuff, creates endless complex behavior...like say, the Mandelbrot set equation, which is a simple equation giving rise to an infinitude of complexity in its output.

That 2nd "kind"...the good kind...can be parametrized formally...the idea of simple elements, giving rise to complex behaviours, so complex that those behaviors are undecidable. This is a key property in successful games.

The first kind...the bad kind...seeks to do the same thing, except there are just many complex elements...in an attempt to give rise to complex behaviors.

The problem is that the intuition that you need something complicated in, to produce complexity out, is wrong...and people STILL believe that.

Here is a video, by a computer scientist named Stephan Wolfram, that explicitly talks about this false intuition.

The thing to understand about this problem is that the "depth" of games mechanics are a critical factor in determining the space of interesting behaviors that players can explore. Most people don't realize that having a bunch of +5% skills and traits doesn't add depth to the game, and what makes it more difficult is when these "+5%" skills are dressed up as "unique mechanics," that get their own unique skill icons!

What skills do, matters, and the above illustrates that Anet does not know how to design games. It is a lack of imagination that one can not come up with skill interactions such that they would be undecidable, and not just the same +X% effects. Keep in mind that they do this because they believe it is easier to balance the game that way.

Such is also the fate of the pointless discussions on this forum : People want a "balanced game" they don't actually want a diverse and fun game, which is why the conversation is always about "We want nerfs! 3% instead of 5%" rather than talking about game mechanics, and what those game mechanics do. Hence until people realize how important the topic is, there will never be a motivation for Anet designers to change what they've been doing to the game for...10 years now, which is slowly balancing the game into a trivial soup. 

 

 

Edited August 25 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[igmolicious.5986]

The biggest issue with complexity here is that ANET has already taken the stance that complexity shouldn't be grounds for better performance (dps/support/etc.), so the complexity is only there as a gimmick, and not as a means to do more damage/healing. When given the option of a complex solution that performs the same as a simple solution, most people are going to pick the simple solution.

[Triptaminas.4789]

3 minutes ago, igmolicious.5986 said:

The biggest issue with complexity here is that ANET has already taken the stance that complexity shouldn't be grounds for better performance (dps/support/etc.), so the complexity is only there as a gimmick, and not as a means to do more damage/healing. When given the option of a complex solution that performs the same as a simple solution, most people are going to pick the simple solution.

This^ 

Player skills gets eliminated from the game with each passing year. Complexity yields no reward, if a complex build that actually perform above most primitive rotations surface out anet nerfs it to irrelevancy with haste, most of skills and weapons now is obsolete and completely ignored by playerbase because said skills/traits got reworked and nerfed into state where it's useless, it have nothing to do with it being complex and everything to do with performance/reward.

For some reason cool and complex gameplay isn't allowed in this game. Which is kinda funny considering the gear progression is non existing and "player skills carrying" is this games "hook" and main marketing talk point.

I know you guys see it, the skill and complexity disappearing, and gap between experience players and completely new ones is being erased, build diversity destroyed. 

....

 

Also for OP of this thread.. bladesworn isn't played not because it's complex, it's because it's biggest pile of kitten in this game, had a niche in some game modes but they patched it out.

Og warriors would build a shrine for anet in their basements if kittensworn actually becomes playable

[draxynnic.3719]

4 hours ago, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

What you mean misusing? We are users of a "live service" game and we are getting some new "features" (weapons) that are more difficult to use but offer no added value in exchange for that difficult. It fits well. 

Or would you argue that ANet puts as much or more effort into iterative improvement of gameplay/skills design now than it did post launch?

I think the distinction is that enshittification usually involves making the base system worse in order to raise more revenue (through create-the-problem-then-sell-the-solution measures, through prioritising advertising over content, perverse incentives where the company makes more money by avoiding providing the outcome the customer wants, and so on). What's going on with the weapons isn't even good enshittification, because I don't see how the company is benefiting from it. Even in the most basic sense of cutting corners, I don't think they're actually gaining by making the weapons more complicated - guardian pistol 5, for instance, would probably have been simpler to implement if it was simply a ground-targeted skill that knocked enemies away from the centre, or if they'd just made guardian pistols a proper ranged set by not having the symbol/projectile combo interaction, had a symbol that could be placed at range, and made pistol 5 a simple knockback. The issues with guardian pistol that people complain about would have taken more resources than simply making a simple but solid ranged set would have taken. 

Elepistol is harder to say, since in that case it seems like the bullet mechanic was intended to paper over most of the skills being "fire bullet" (compared to the wide range of effects seen with, say, sceptre).

I daresay the current implementation of engineer shortbow probably took less resources to make (even including the art assets shared between the two versions) then the original chain reaction mechanic it had when first presented. 

It's costing the company resources to do it, and when there are people who are choosing not to buy expansions because of it, it's costing them revenue as well. When it's probably causing the company to lose money rather than gain it, it isn't even enshittification, it's just flat-out making bad decisions.

[SpaceMarine.1836]

9 hours ago, igmolicious.5986 said:

The biggest issue with complexity here is that ANET has already taken the stance that complexity shouldn't be grounds for better performance (dps/support/etc.), so the complexity is only there as a gimmick, and not as a means to do more damage/healing. When given the option of a complex solution that performs the same as a simple solution, most people are going to pick the simple solution.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean. If overly complex skills can't output more value (damage, conditions, CC, healing or boons) because they'd became unbalanced if used by people who've mastered them, then there's no incentive to use overly complex weapons/abilities. And the main problem then becomes that you have so many playstyles on paper (the weapons and skills are available) but no one uses them in practice, because it's not viable. You pay with increased cognitive load and chance of failure, and you get nothing in return compared to simple skills.

I am a bit biased because I spent overwhelming majority of my time in WvW, where by the time you are done chaining your 5-action combo to perfectly execute complex skill, the thief has already exited and re-entered stealth 3 times and is already mounted on warclaw on his way to capture camp on the other side of the map, so your slow moving explosive orb of doom or something hits the place where the thief's grandma used to live many decades ago.

Edited August 26 by SpaceMarine.1836

[SpaceMarine.1836]

9 hours ago, Triptaminas.4789 said:

Also for OP of this thread.. bladesworn isn't played not because it's complex, it's because it's biggest pile of kitten in this game, had a niche in some game modes but they patched it out.

Og warriors would build a shrine for anet in their basements if kittensworn actually becomes playable

I think this kind of proves my point. It doesn't perform above the average, but not below the average either. They balanced it on level with other warrior specs, but now no one wants to deal with all the clunky and complicated flow charging, perfect timing and gunsaber BS when the damage output doesn't exceed berserker monke pressing F2 followed by F1.

Edited August 26 by SpaceMarine.1836

[Asum.4960]

12 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

I think the distinction is that enshittification usually involves making the base system worse in order to raise more revenue (through create-the-problem-then-sell-the-solution measures, through prioritising advertising over content, perverse incentives where the company makes more money by avoiding providing the outcome the customer wants, and so on). What's going on with the weapons isn't even good enshittification, because I don't see how the company is benefiting from it. Even in the most basic sense of cutting corners, I don't think they're actually gaining by making the weapons more complicated - guardian pistol 5, for instance, would probably have been simpler to implement if it was simply a ground-targeted skill that knocked enemies away from the centre, or if they'd just made guardian pistols a proper ranged set by not having the symbol/projectile combo interaction, had a symbol that could be placed at range, and made pistol 5 a simple knockback. The issues with guardian pistol that people complain about would have taken more resources than simply making a simple but solid ranged set would have taken. 

Elepistol is harder to say, since in that case it seems like the bullet mechanic was intended to paper over most of the skills being "fire bullet" (compared to the wide range of effects seen with, say, sceptre).

I daresay the current implementation of engineer shortbow probably took less resources to make (even including the art assets shared between the two versions) then the original chain reaction mechanic it had when first presented. 

It's costing the company resources to do it, and when there are people who are choosing not to buy expansions because of it, it's costing them revenue as well. When it's probably causing the company to lose money rather than gain it, it isn't even enshittification, it's just flat-out making bad decisions.

It's not "enshittification" that is at play here, it's sheer hubris. 

It's the same thing that killed the Elite Spec System - Anet could have hooked so many players by making and advertising simple (but deep), well established, fun archetypes, catering to and capturing both existing and potential player's fantasies. 

But instead of easily marketable fantasies like Paladin, Warlock, Psyblade; Anet insists on making things like Willbender, Harbinger and Virtuoso - terms that say absolutely nothing to nobody. 

Why? Because they don't want to (re)create something that already was before them. Instead, they are desperate to leave their mark, to be the person who invented x. 

That's why we get quirky Specs, using weapons in quirky ways with quirky mechanics. Simply because it hasn't been done in quite such a way before. That such was for a reason seems to go overlooked.

 

This is not just an Anet thing either, but a wider industry issue (even beyond gaming into hollywood and entertainment as a whole), with seemingly a whole generation of creators that seem to think themselves above established, working, tropes. 

 

We get clunky, unfun complexity over simple but deep and fun mechanics because those have already been done before, they are already taken, claimed. In their minds at least.

 

TL;DR:

Creatives have become so obsessed with creating something new and unique, that they are forgetting to create something good.

Edited August 26 by Asum.4960

[draxynnic.3719]

1 hour ago, Asum.4960 said:

It's not "enshittification" that is at play here, it's sheer hubris. 

It's the same thing that killed the Elite Spec System - Anet could have hooked so many players by making and advertising simple (but deep), well established, fun archetypes, catering to and capturing both existing and potential player's fantasies. 

But instead of easily marketable fantasies like Paladin, Warlock, Psyblade; Anet insists on making things like Willbender, Harbinger and Virtuoso - terms that say absolutely nothing to nobody. 

Why? Because they don't want to (re)create something that already was before them. Instead, they are desperate to leave their mark, to be the person who invented x. 

That's why we get quirky Specs, using weapons in quirky ways with quirky mechanics. Simply because it hasn't been done in quite such a way before. That such was for a reason seems to go overlooked.

 

This is not just an Anet thing either, but a wider industry issue (even beyond gaming into hollywood and entertainment as a whole), with seemingly a whole generation of creators that seem to think themselves above established, working, tropes. 

 

We get clunky, unfun complexity over simple but deep and fun mechanics because those have already been done before, they are already taken, claimed. In their minds at least.

 

TL;DR:

Creatives have become so obsessed with creating something new and unique, that they are forgetting to create something good.

Not sure I agree with your examples there. There was a lot of hype when willbender was first teased back in IBS, and most of the EoD elite specialisations are essentially responses to things people were asking for (albeit not necessarily always the majority of the existing player base for the professions in question) before the teases started. Catalyst and bladesworn are the main exceptions to that, and in bladesworn's case it feels more like ArenaNet was bandwagoning an anime trope rather than coming up with their own special snowflake.

For the new weapons, especially the SotO weapons, though... they do seem to have focused more on quirk than actually being fun to play. They're not all bad, but they've definitely been hit or miss, and the better ones have generally been the simpler ones (for SotO anyway, I haven't given a fair try to all the spears yet).

But yeah, enshittification is usually a case of deliberately making something worse, or at least accepting that they're making something worse, for a profit motive. I don't think that's what's been going on here. I think they've been genuinely trying to make weapons they think players will enjoy, but have been missing the mark at a distressing rate, and overcomplexity is often the cause. Hanlon's Razor definitely applies here, although there is a sense by which it feels that unless there are bigger things being worked on under the hood, they haven't really been picking up on feedback very well.

[AliamRationem.5172]

On 8/25/2024 at 6:00 AM, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

You mean SOME players, mostly cat owners, give up on it, I love the Ranger spear, I haven't had time to try any others yet but I have seen players complain how "complex" it is... really?

It takes a whole of 2 minutes to read all the skills and start practicing with the thing, I haven't enjoyed the game so much in I don't remember how long and right now I'm just concerned people will QQ enough to get it nerfed since there's plenty of enemies in Janthir that I'm one-shoting.

I expect what they mean with ranger spear is that you have an extra step to do the same or less damage as other weapons that don't require that step.  It makes the weapon feel cumbersome.  When timing matters you're having to activate a 0.5s skill before you can use the skill you need or you lose a ton of damage because the non-ambush versions are strictly inferior.  There's no choice involved, which might be associated with complexity.  You just need to spam stealth to boost your skills and it's an extra button and extra 0.5s every time.  It just feels slow when you need it to be faster.

[Zok.4956]

19 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

Such is also the fate of the pointless discussions on this forum : People want a "balanced game" they don't actually want a diverse and fun game, which is why the conversation is always about "We want nerfs! 3% instead of 5%" rather than talking about game mechanics, and what those game mechanics do. Hence until people realize how important the topic is, there will never be a motivation for Anet designers to change what they've been doing to the game for...10 years now, which is slowly balancing the game into a trivial soup. 

You blame the players for Anet's decisions? And you have a strange idea of "balanced".

For example: Rock-Paper-Scissors is balanced. And fun (for some). There are skills and there are good countermeasures for all skills. No skill is fundamentally better than another. It always depends on the opponent and their skills/decisions. The player decides what they want to take.

If, generalized and a little more complex, there was a (suitable) disadvantage for every advantage, it would still be balanced. If you take a skill/combination with higher damage, but have to forego other things (e.g. healing, mobility, etc.) or have to do a more complex rotation or take a high risk of defeat, you can still see it as balanced.

Of course, with this higher level of complexity there are outliers that have to be mitigated so that individual classes do not dominate and the variety does not suffer.

That's exactly what Anet tried to do when HoT was released and Anet had big ambitions in eSports with sPvP. But that's exactly what Anet didn't manage back then. For whatever reason. Which is why the eSports scene in GW2 disappeared.

The fact that Anet didn't manage it was only Anet's fault, not the players'. The fact that Anet now seems to be running out of ideas and still can't get the balancing right isn't the players' fault either.

 

On 8/25/2024 at 9:47 AM, SpaceMarine.1836 said:

Apparently programmers have given up too, since the overcomplicated wonky behavior is hard to bugfix.

Yes, it seems so.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

5 hours ago, Zok.4956 said:

You blame the players for Anet's decisions? And you have a strange idea of "balanced".

For example: Rock-Paper-Scissors is balanced. And fun (for some). There are skills and there are good countermeasures for all skills. No skill is fundamentally better than another. It always depends on the opponent and their skills/decisions. The player decides what they want to take.

If, generalized and a little more complex, there was a (suitable) disadvantage for every advantage, it would still be balanced. If you take a skill/combination with higher damage, but have to forego other things (e.g. healing, mobility, etc.) or have to do a more complex rotation or take a high risk of defeat, you can still see it as balanced.

Of course, with this higher level of complexity there are outliers that have to be mitigated so that individual classes do not dominate and the variety does not suffer.

That's exactly what Anet tried to do when HoT was released and Anet had big ambitions in eSports with sPvP. But that's exactly what Anet didn't manage back then. For whatever reason. Which is why the eSports scene in GW2 disappeared.

The fact that Anet didn't manage it was only Anet's fault, not the players'. The fact that Anet now seems to be running out of ideas and still can't get the balancing right isn't the players' fault either.

 

Yes, it seems so.

And that’s where you are wrong and where 99.99% of people also get it wrong.

the computer scientist in the video states this error in the beginning of the video: he believed that this problem would be “easy to crack” in the same way that people here think balance should be easy to crack…

“if only I was the dev this game would be balanced in a few days.” —every forum goer said ever

Until one realizes that this problem (between balance, simplicity, complexity and diversity) is a paradox. Hence why he brings it up that he wasn’t able to accomplish what he thought would be a simple task.

This paradox is a formal one: it is impossible to have nor prove that you have both a numerically balanced game and a diverse one. It means that if you were given the job of doing balance you will realize that trying to get this idealized idea of balance is not possible in any way that is logical. 

Everyone here I’m sure believes that a balanced version of this game exists…why wouldn’t we…it seems very obvious that we can build a game such that we should know exactly how it’s components should behave and that this behavior should be non trivial (not a glorified stick simulator). But it is simply not true. And that is the point being made in the video. what is actually the case, is that Balance is the perception of our experience of this games complex evolution through time. There’s no objective parametrization of that and it can’t even be described by a logical numerical system : it is unknowable (undecidable) to know how even simple rules will behave (hence the paradox).

To summarize the point, is that no it’s not just arena net at fault. Most people (my past self included) think exactly this line of fallacious thinking: that balance can be achieved and that it should be easy. What turns out to be the case is that the opposite is true (it’s not possible through any logical system)

I do blame anet too, for not understanding this either when they should…but players think they know better? Nope they do not and the proof is in the pudding when we have two pro pvp players as balance devs. 

Edited August 26 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Mell.4873]

I would like narrow the perspective. There are lots of amazing builds in this game especially in PvP/WvW. 

Most of these builds use some of the quirky weapons or skills becouse absent of the requirment of let's say having well rounded rotation. you can focus on something else. 

For example in WvW if let's say you are on Ranger and want to take advantage of all the poison and bleed utility on-hit skills you can equip staff and just use solar beam to pierce any shield in the game. 

Ranger Spear could fall into a similar category, now that you have access to reliable stealth you can focus purely on damage/cc utilities.