Can you prove something is balanced or not?

[EnderzShadow.2506]

@"BlackTruth.6813" said:Use game mechanics? Look at how something baits dodges and defensive cds really well (BECAUSE the game is not about trading hits, it's about trading dodges and defensive cds if it's hard for people to understand how GW2 pvp works), for example, like Ranger. You have an AI pet baiting dodges with obnoxious damage and random CC, you have soulbeast damage + CC baiting dodges, and then you get evade spam from the soulbeast as well ridiculous mobility, is that balanced? All of those factors prove that soulbeast has a lot going for it.

It really CAN be simplified to dodge baits and defensive cds, literally ROM just delays a point and ganks really well with soulbeast and he probably won't play anything else because he would be at a disadvantage if he was in terms of baiting dodges and cds.

At this point, if you had common sense then you would understand that Soulbeast isn't balanced.

EDIT: replaced ranger with soulbeast, although ranger as a class has been historically low skill because automatic dodge baits from pets are obnoxious zero skill garbage. And some ranger "pro" mains who have tried different classes back in the day (who I won't name) got destroyed every time they tried a non-AI pet class.

Tell us how you really feel about Ranger

[otto.5684]

@derd.6413 said:balancing is more an art then a science

Honestly, Anet does neither...

[xp eke xp.6724]

@ blacktruth:It´s a resourse battle at end too. And yes you dont have only hit trades as a ressource fight, like you said "You have different defences" and that means:

• some ressources are cd-based
• others are statik (like vitality, armor,...)
• each ressource has different ways to be used: you can traid, bait, outscale, burst, and more...

one of the best ressource fighters is the warrior cause he has a lot of hard hitting dmg skills with low cd. But if you play him the first time on pvp, you will ask yourself pretty fast: " why the hell, am i just swinging my weapons randomly at all directions and miss most times?". But you ofc misses most times, cause you take theyr ressources down and if they are mostly at cd (or bad used) you will finally hit (and like i said most of his hits hurts badly) and/or your team can also spike without fearing a counterpressure if you play him correctly.

@getalifeturd.8139in gw1 you have the same base heal, but not energie or energieregeneration. you still have also different armor.I loved gw1 also, but have to say, that its more unbalanced then gw2:

• you have a 6 sec cd aoe blind + a 8 sec blind (without more cd-reduction) + snares + blocks + disables + cc + hexes + kites to outplay every physical attacker completely, means you delete them even if you have a necro/monk that removes all 2/3 sec blind from him...
• assasins can´t even use theyr daggerskills cause if one of them got disabled the hole combo do nothing. If u play him as mage, you have better options...
• Mesmers delete all mages, depents how well you play it (you also can interrupt stances, and they are instand....)

I think the biggest problem is balancing for different skill levels. Because some players have better reflexes or more experience playing a profession. This means that it is not even the professions that are unbalanced but the actual players themselves.yes players are unbalanced, but it´s the same problem like on gw1: easy to play hard to master.

There is a general lack of sustain and too much dps (both conditions and power). What is the counter to DPS? Nothing…but in GuildWars 1 it was a Monk and that is why this game lacks depth. Dodge rolls aren’t a replacement for healing and protection that a monk class would offer.i want you to prove it... cause im pretty sure you have more then enouth sustain:

• at the least 3-4 years, you loosed more and more carry-options (less overkill on defences and yes i know some classes still feel like they have too much...)
• for that you had more reactive options (you have to use finally a stunbreak as warrior instead of having perma stance just as one eg.)
• the dmg at all growed but not esp on dps => means you do little more dps but not cause you loosed more defence options, its more that you gain better bursts. => you get a more reactive game then before. Just stop dodging an autoattack or for moving a little faster (btw you dont), cause you need that one dodge on that one burst that takes you out.

you have base resourses to sustain different types of dmg:protect, regeneration, weakness, eg. to reduse the dps (means autoattack and other low cd skills)and blind, block, evades for burst....if you don´t, you use them wrong or your build wasnt made for a ressource fight at duell format.

[Swagg.9236]

@xp eke xp.6724 said:Can you prove something is balanced or not?

Yes.

@xp eke xp.6724 said:[i want to see a] theoretically optimal game and base on that we don't have the datas to prove how strong the classes are (maybe single mechanics).

You won't get that because instances of consistent competition in video games occurs due to the interaction of many mechanics (often which are available to every player in some way). People take for granted that even things as simple as jumping or panning the player camera while moving are game mechanics. However, it is up to a given game itself (and its developers) in order to allow those mechanics to provide players the opportunity to outplay opponents (either intentionally or accidentally). Intentional examples may be how strafing and jumping in Quake can allow one to dodge incoming attacks; unintentional examples may be rocket jumping, bunny-hopping or wave-dashing. The key here is that a game must have mechanics in place which players can utilize, outside of scripted actions, which will allow one to come out on top over someone else.

GW2 doesn't really have this. Every game-changing mechanic is arbitrarily sprinkled around classes, and the core mechanics of the game itself are not equipped to counter them. There is only one paradigm which defines combat in GW2: ranged burst, protracted invulnerability, stealth and instantaneous movement (i.e. teleports). Raw movement and the two dodges (every 20s) that a player is provided are simply not enough to adequately counteract shorter cooldowns which can just teleport enemies into melee or deal lethal damage from 1200 range. Effectively, there will most likely never be an outright "forumla" for a "balanced" game; rather, this sort of paradigm of viable options and a high skill ceiling comes out of carefully looking at what sort of mechanics are in the game and then building around a functional, universal core. GW2 did not do this, so its combat effectively distills down into rock-paper-scissors after a certain point. Mind games only really occur between classes which are not entirely hard countered by each other, and that gives this game's combat an element of RNG to it: if one team's comp isn't well-matched against another comp, then the former team will most likely lose due to the lack of counterplay options based on intuition (in a game that already tells you where everything is due to an incredibly lenient minimap).

If you want to look at some more incisive questions regarding what a fair or "balanced" GW2 might look like, then here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/58676/what-is-a-fair-defense-what-would-it-look-like-in-gw2

If you want to look at "balanced," PvP games with high skill ceilings and a variety of viable strategies or playstyles:

• Starcraft
• Age of Empires II
• CS:GO
• Smash Bros. Melee
• Team Fortress 2
• Quake

will probably get you started.

[Ragnar.4257]

Honestly, I think this thread summarises neatly what is wrong with modern society, politics, fake news, etc etc etc

"I can prove X"< proceeds to give subjective opinion >"See, I proved X, and if you disagree its because you're biased"< Shouting match ensues >

Do you understand what the word "prove" even means?

[freedomtolove.5476]

Let me give you an interesting link that might open your eyes to GW1's true complexity. If you look through this website and its archived builds you will find over 1000. This is the website that defined all the builds considered viable over the years:https://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/PvX_wikiThe game still has new builds being discovered today. There were over 1000 skills and a dual class system that allowed combining professions.https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Skill

Teamwork and synergy being encouraged makes a good game. Compare GW2 fights to videos like these:

@getalifeturd.8139 said

I think the biggest problem is balancing for different skill levels. Because some players have better reflexes or more experience playing a profession. This means that it is not even the professions that are unbalanced but the actual players themselves.

So in conclusion Balance is very subjective but if you balance for different skill levels it becomes much easier. And that is why a game can not ever be truly balanced. Because players and people have so many different skill levels.

The way we experience competition is by winning or losing. But also I understand that by being too subjective in our opinions of balance is bad feedback. By making the pvp combat challenging but also not too hard to learn creates a diverse pvp community.

The problem is when the game is objectively balanced completely without any player feedback then it becomes very unpopular quickly. This is why Balance is subjective because players who pvp want to have fun which is highly subjective. This is just my opinions of course because I’m sure that general balance is much harder than it seems.

Read all of that and truly understand that perfect balance is impossible without turning the gameplay into rock/paper/scissors. On second thought the trinity was Tank/Healer/DPS so maybe we really are all just playing rock/paper/scissors. But GW2 doesn't have the trinity so I guess it's not balanced? The puzzle of imperfect balance is definitely a paradox.

[xp eke xp.6724]

@ swagg

You won't get that because instances of consistent competition in video games occurs due to the interaction of many mechanics (often which are available to every player in some way).You can do this like on one of my eg. => you just take a situation and play it so long you played it correctly. For that you ofc also need some players that also play the situation correctly. Maybe someday you can reproduce a hole battle or match.

if i understand u right, the game is unbalanced cause the mechanics are different difficult to be used and they arent really to counter/check themselfs dirrectly. I think thats a good point, but how can we intigrate this on our calcs?On top there are some similar effects but with different effectivness on theyr posibilities (on the last point it still means you could still calc how many drawback they give).

For an eg. you have blocks and evades. Both reduce the dmg to 100%, but evades dont have a counter and blocks have only a small counteroptions. If the small counters to blocks arent effective enought it goes to the same dirrection: means both are same effective even if blocks might have a counterpart.

On our block/ evade eg., we need to say: ranger has good options to use unblocks, so blocks are weaker then evades at situations you have a ranger. But only if you have no other option to play around the unblock... (and that means you have to use minimal an evade at this situation instead of blocking). Cause ranger also has one of the highest range, it means there is no option to use debuffs against him (blinds, weakness), but you could use buffs instead (protect and regeneration to reduce the burst from an lets say 14k dmg to a at all 8,5k (4,5k reduced by protect+1k healed at the time he bursts) if you would dodge after the first hit you loosed maybe 1k... So lets say you have no protect and/or regeneration, you can also calc this and at end say how strong is the burst on different conditions.

So back to the question: how can we intigrate this (mechanics are different difficult to be used and they arent really to counter/check themselfs dirrectly) on our calcs?

• Pushing your burst
• dodging
• proc boons at right time (as long you can´t have them permanently)
• you still can sidestep to reduce the hits
• how about using unblock/blocks/evades at this situation?

and thats not all, but at least i would say that are all mechanicals most of us can learn to use.with other words: unique variations of the same mechanic, aren´t far more difficult then others, but the part of timing and reaction need a special formula. Do you think there are other points that can´t be calced/ played or need a special assessment?

Down below i explain whats wrong about thinking gw2 is a rock/paper/scissor.

Mind games only really occur between classes which are not entirely hard countered by each other, and that gives this game's combat an element of RNG to it: if one team's comp isn't well-matched against another comp, then the former team will most likely lose due to the lack of counterplay options based on intuition (in a game that already tells you where everything is due to an incredibly lenient minimap).And mindgames doesnt exist against mental-strong players, cause they react on your gameplay instead of thinking why you do something another way. Means they adapt your mistakes and know how they have to use theyr recources to punish it without using too much. So on the scenario we want to prove the mechanics, mindgames doesnt exist at all.

@"Rangar.6091"i know what prove means. atm i just have argues about:

• how players affect balance
• and points where we dont know how we can realize different aspekts about balancing

the second point is also important cause otherwise we will never answer my question correctly, or better said we can´t even try to prove the balancing and we have to answer my question with "no, its not posible to prove them correctly". And this would mean the game has to be unbalanced, cause its not transparent enought/ we don´t reached the lvl to understand the game well enough.

@getalifeturd.8139

I think the biggest problem is balancing for different skill levels. Because some players have better reflexes or more experience playing a profession. This means that it is not even the professions that are unbalanced but the actual players themselves.

So in conclusion Balance is very subjective but if you balance for different skill levels it becomes much easier. And that is why a game can not ever be truly balanced. Because players and people have so many different skill levels.It just means its less work for us, cause we want the perfect game, to test how balanced the mechanicals are. Based on that you can take the random-entcounter: the human base. Means you can say, its not really realistic to break stuns instand, so we have to bring an reaction timer to have a more realistic entcounter. On that eg. we can discuss if we use a pro-gamer, a average, so on as base.

gw2 isnt a rock/paper/scissor system, not dirrectly: Cause everyone has a big pool of all options. So it´s about having the biggest rock, paper and scissor instead of having only one of them at all. you also need to use them correctly, cause even a big rock don´t do mucht against a small paper, but they do something against each at this gamemode, even if its only that you loose cds (and we are back to the resources).

you can see it well on the 1v1 situation. But more important it gets on Teamfights: cause your scissor/paper/rock counts together with that of your team. (well on gw1 you also put them together but you normally had then one tool per player).

Edit: good video there, ill ceep it in mind, to see how much inbalanced the game has, if it has one (outside of players^^) :+1:

@all: im finally online again, means i know how many gold i have, and i pay at all 800g if you help me out! (it doesnt mean each player gets 800g, ill have to split it with each and the players that helped me at most gets the biggest part)

I know thats not really much based on how much time it needs and how difficult it is to realize that, but i have after that only my materials that i can sell to get a bigger goldpool ^^.

[Swagg.9236]

@xp eke xp.6724 said:

You won't get that because instances of consistent competition in video games occurs due to the interaction of many mechanics (often which are available to every player in some way).You can do this like on one of my eg. => you just take a situation and play it so long you played it correctly. For that you ofc also need some players that also play the situation correctly. Maybe someday you can reproduce a hole battle or match.

The issue with assuming a "correct" way to play is that you are assuming that there is only one true way to play a scenario. That immediately careens into rock-paper-scissors territory. You can't assume a "correct" way to play any given scenario if you are attempting to craft a game with a high skill ceiling for participants; instead, you're just making PvE content (i.e. Simon Says). If you want a game to have longevity in its PvP scene, it needs to be almost infinitely varied, and while there can be some immutable aspects to a game's optimal meta, the parts that are framed within that metagame must be able to move freely without much restriction. An example for this might be in Team Fortress 2's 6v6 scene in which "rollouts" (the process by which players reach a midfight as fast as possible via a series of rocket jumps) are more or less perfectly established by this point (as in people immediately know when one is doing something wrong during a rollout), but the rest of a match can be entirely unpredictable due to individual playstyles or team preferences.

@xp eke xp.6724 said:if i understand u right, the game is unbalanced cause the mechanics are different difficult to be used and they arent really to counter/check themselfs dirrectly. I think thats a good point, but how can we intigrate this on our calcs?On top there are some similar effects but with different effectivness on theyr posibilities (on the last point it still means you could still calc how many drawback they give).

For an eg. you have blocks and evades. Both reduce the dmg to 100%, but evades dont have a counter and blocks have only a small counteroptions. If the small counters to blocks arent effective enought it goes to the same dirrection: means both are same effective even if blocks might have a counterpart.

On our block/ evade eg., we need to say: ranger has good options to use unblocks, so blocks are weaker then evades at situations you have a ranger. But only if you have no other option to play around the unblock... (and that means you have to use minimal an evade at this situation instead of blocking). Cause ranger also has one of the highest range, it means there is no option to use debuffs against him (blinds, weakness), but you could use buffs instead (protect and regeneration to reduce the burst from an lets say 14k dmg to a at all 8,5k (4,5k reduced by protect+1k healed at the time he bursts) if you would dodge after the first hit you loosed maybe 1k... So lets say you have no protect and/or regeneration, you can also calc this and at end say how strong is the burst on different conditions.

Instead of juggling all of this trash, just focus a game design effort on damage fall-off and providing high mobility options to everyone so as to allow players to effectively break from tab-target attacks. The best way to balance a game around individual player skill and game sense is to make the damage in said game travel about the same speed (or slower) than the speed at which players move, and give a benefit to damage inflicted in close range over damage inflicted at far range (or if you're going to invert that damage paradigm, make it so that such ranged damage is difficult to hit). Again, Team Fortress 2 does a decent job at this (a lot of RTSes do this well too such as AoE2 and Starcraft along with some FPSes such as Quake and UT, but I'll stick to TF2 for these next examples). In Team Fortress 2, it's very easy to dodge projectile attacks that are fired from halfway across the map, but they can still be used to pressure or lock off choke points due to their AoE. Moreover (and this is perhaps the most important aspect of TF2's damaeg paradigm), everything in that game deals the maximum damage in melee range, even things like rockets, traps and shotguns. Everything has damage fall-off (except for Sniper, but that class is the most overpowered and un-fun field presence to play around, and it exists solely for the sake of countering something like a super-buffed Heavy or another Sniper; it's not really a healthy mechanic).

Point is, imagine if Ranger longbow only inflicted half damage when somebody decided to use every skill on the bar from 1500 range away, and it would only deal full damage if used at something like 600 range. Once a player locks a target in GW2, that target is not going to be able to avoid getting hit in any real way shape or form unless they can just magic themselves out of LoS with a teleport; and even if that player manages to just negate all incoming damage to 0 for a bit (which is still technically allowing themselves to be hit), it wouldn't ultimately remove the problem of some player spamming lethal damage from max range, nor would it truly discourage that spammer from stopping the spam. Basically, GW2 is super easy to play, and it encourages very passive play. If damage could be avoided more manually, or there was a direct incentive for players to put themselves at risk in order to deal optimal damage, then the paradigm would shift from scared baby footsies with a 1200 range berth to people going in and moving around each other in order to get their hits off.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

A game like GW2 is very complex to say "what is balanced and what is not" but it can be done within the ballpark of "proper changes" if the right people are suggesting and making those changes, who have enough first-hand subjective experience playing and knowing the game. The problem in a game with 9 difference classes and various different unique abilities, is that it can't be so simply mathematically gauged in terms of balance, in the way that you're hoping to gauge it. This is mainly because of how certain abilities that would otherwise be viewed as equal mathematically, are not equal, because Ability (A) is difficult to land or use, while Ability (B) is very easy to land or very easy to use, regarding animations and other various aspects that can't so easily be gauged mathematically.

Noticing the state of game balance properly, must and can only begin with looking at every aspect from the ground up, starting with the very first differences in an engine that begin to separate the abilities of two otherwise mirrored characters.

A good example, that steers away from the idea of "viewing things mathematically":

• You're playing classic Street Fighter II. Ryu and Ken are exactly the same. This is perfectly balanced.
• But what if Ryu's Hadoken moved a bit faster than Ken's Hadoken? Well this clearly means' Ryu is OP. <- Easy to figure out.
• What if Ryu's Hadoken moved a bit faster than Ken's Hadoken, but Ken had an uppercut that was faster than Ryu's uppercut? <- This is a more complex balance issue. Now we're talking which attack is more viable, which is more practical to use. It sounds fair and balanced on paper, but in application one of these characters is probably going to yield higher win rates than the other, depending on which setup happens to be most useful vs. the mirror split and all of the other characters in the game.

So if you consider the detrimental difference between just that single mirror split "who was given the more useful attack, not necessarily the stronger mathematics", you'll see that viewing things mathematically often has little to do with anything at all in competitive modes. Probably the 1st best example of this in GW2 are Staff Eles. If you were to compare this mathematically to other classes, on paper and in theory it's going to look like by far the highest damage potential class in the game. Not only can it nuclear bomb a single target, but it can nuclear bomb large AoE as well. On paper and in theory, this outstanding damage potential should make up for it's lack of defense in a balanced way. But does it? Hell no it doesn't, Staff Ele is completely useless for various mechanical reasons that couldn't be gauged mathematically without digging so far into simulated physics, that it wouldn't be worth the time to do. The 2nd best example I have to give is Thieves. If you were to look at Thief on paper mathematically, it would appear to be incredibly underpowered compared to every other class in the game, statistically, in every way possible. But the truth is that due to the strong mechanics Thief was granted, it has always remained useful and in the meta, because it's mechanics allow players to out-play attributes.

@xp eke xp.6724 With all due respect, the request in your OP statement is sort of a waste of time. The only way to gauge balance in a game with 9 different classes and various different abilities, is simply time spent evaluating the game's dynamic intra-class wide across all of the demographics of players, and making small tweaks here and there, over the course of time.

[Exedore.6320]

The best way to approach balance like this is to try and assign values to stats, boons, CC etc. so that they can be scored against each other. Similar to what CCGs do. That way everything is close to a power curve and you don't have any ridiculous abilities like CC with heavy damage or easy 25 might.

[Arheundel.6451]

@"Skotlex.7580" said:Too much faith on maths. :P

Calculations may not lie, but they still must be designed: what exactly is calculated, how are different parameters weighted against each other? These cannot be objectively measured against each another, so the end result will always be subjective and thus vulnerable to bias.

Objectivity is gone the moment humans get involved. Math only works on an abstract level, on their own realm, outside reality.

Anyway, there are other ways to measure balance. One simple measurement is simply spread by popularity. If every class has nearly equal representation within a PvP format, and all utilities and traitlines have pretty much "significant" representation as well, then the game is balanced enough to make diversity viable (meaning, most likely, that the build itself doesn't contributes as much to victory as the player's skill).

But that's just how I would approach balance criteria for a game. Certainly there are other methods.

Your method is the best one and certainly not the one used by Anet, as you suggest : "Objectivity is gone the moment humans get involved"..and the devs are humans and susceptible to strong/mild bias