Quote:
Originally Posted by Moglit Crimshine  Are MMO games capable of maintaining [class] balance if players are able to pick and choose their own skills?
In other words... you are not a "warrior" with a defined set of skills. You are a player creating what you want in a warrior; you collect skills and abilities available to all players.
I've had a rough time accepting the cookie cutter systems in MMO games after using class systems in single player games like FF Tactics and Morrowind.
Maintaining a certain level of balance is usually a problem even with a cookie cutter system. Too much freedom, like allowing massive spell damage with heavy armor would be unbalanced, but controlling skill/ability power with attribute or stat points could be a simple solution. Synergies could also play a vital role in power balance. |
I'm sure it's possible to work out an algorithm for balance using skill points. This is a math exercise, and I'm horrible at math, so I'm sure this is laughable. Plus I'm sure my math is pretty dubious.
Let's say you've got a warrior who's got 10 starting skill points. Being a min-maxing sort of guy who wants to play a tank warrior going against the big baddies, who drops 7 points into Heavy Armor, 2 points into Shields, and 1 point in One-Handed Axes.
Then you've got a Wizard who's got 10 starting skill points. He puts 8 points into Arcane Damage and 2 points into Concentration, for a boost to mana pool. (Go with me on these skills here, they're just for sake of argument)
Rogues, Rangers, etc., all the typical subtypes (again for the sake of argument) all get the same starting skill points. At each level you get four more skill points.
So at level 20 you've got yourself 90 skill points total. As you level up each skill, its price in skill points increases. So while Heavy Armor may cost 1 point per level up to level, say, 10, after that it increases to 2 points, then one additional point each 10 levels of that particular skill. So by the time you've got 30 points in Heavy Armor you've had to spend 60 skill points. Same deal with Arcane Damage.
But now if you've got a warrior who wants to throw a few points at level 10 into Arcane Damage, you've got some formula that says warrior.ArcaneDamageCost=([base.ArcaneDamageCost]+([base.ArcaneDamageCost]*.75)) rounded up to the nearest whole number. So one level of arcane damage would cost a warrior 2 skill points. 10 levels of Arcane Damage would cost 20. God this is getting complicated, lol.
Anyway, in my math/class balance hallucination I'm barfing onto the page here, it would be possible to have points left over if you're cross-speccing into different archetype trees at your current level. Like if a warrior has a lot of Heavy Armor skills, a high amount of One-Handed Axe skill, and a few Arcane Damage skill points at level 30, he might have three or four skill points left over. So instead of 90 points spent, he's got 86. This warrior would have a very difficult time against a Wizard (or an NPC whose design has spent certain skill points in certain areas) who has allocated carefully all of his skill points to spend them all by level 30. But at level 31 he might have enough skill points to buy another rank of One-Handed Axe and even out his points at 94 at level 31, bringing him into balance.
So basically with a skill point system you ought to have some sort of algorithmic balance inherent the nature of the thing, is my point. My math is probably all jiggered, I know. But letting a player choose whatever skills he wants should be a solvable thing using a skillpoint system that has a formula built in that says if a player of a given level has some number of skill points that is less than maximum, that player will be less powerful than another player of same level who has spent max skillpoints. But basically the trade off is that the warrior in this scenario is willing to trade off a level or two of being relatively underpowered to gain some personal preference of skill mixture.
A guy who has decided to min-max a tanking warrior was probably the worst possible example in this situation. It might have been better to make it some sort of psionicist-rogue who wants to cast illusions, or something, but it's too late now and I don't feel like going back and changing all of it.
What do you guys think? Is this viable? There should be some sort of mathematical solution to solving balance in a video game. That would also serve the double purpose of ending balance cry-titting if the algorithm is sound, and also giving players the freedom of building a character how they want.
The most obvious thing here is that players will still be tempted to create a powerful archetype instead of experimenting with different subtypes to create some sort of viable cross-platform badass.