Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[Faille]

Gamasutra - Opinion: Creating Balanced In-Game Economies

interesting article about economies and balance. Probably nothing new for anyone on this board though.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

OK, I stumbled on an analogy:

I can't read or speak Japanese. I can, however, read and speak English perfectly well. I might be hopeless at the job of translating a manga or anime or JRPG; however, were you to show me the average translated product the odds are that I could improve the translation's quality by a considerable amount. It's much the same with all of us 'armchair' developers. We may not be able to make a game but we can sure as shit look at the finished product and go "uh, you really need to tweak A, B, and C and just goddamned get rid of D," and we'd be right.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Fammaden

So like, Fog, Dumar, Makata and Zehn finally get to design a game together and....

Only if Digo agrees to do our companies PR.

[Ngruk]

Originally Posted by Daezuel

^^
I find it laughable people are pointing to the WOTLK expansion and saying anything positive about it. Yeah, the zones are nice and the leveling process was good. That's about it....

I don't mean this to be personal, but really? I mean I read this and the rest of the post is lost on me, not really interested in reading any further.

I am the farthest thing from an ass kisser, but can you honestly say that enormous piece of content they created was "meh"?

Is it a case of eating filet your whole life and not being impressed with a fantastic piece of Kobe beef?

No one touches WoW in polish. No one touches them in innovation imo, not yet anyway. Sad thing is I think the next game to 'touch them' in either area is going to be a game they are making...

[Ngruk]

Originally Posted by FoghornDeadhorn

You're making it sound harder than it is. Sure, these games are overwhelmingly complex, blah blah blah. In the end though, people are making lots of individual changes. Some are big; some are small. Some of these changes are predicted by the community with overwhelming accuracy to be too good or too bad and Blizzard goes forward with them anyway.

There's a big difference between "why don't you guys make it so Charge doesn't leave me trailing outside of melee range of something I'm following" (technical difficulty) and "Glyph of Holy light at 20 yards is overpowered" (obvious and easily adjustable).

I won't argue that at your stage, where your game stands, it takes some high-mindedness that most players don't possess to figure out how various things will impact the game. However, no matter how cocky developers get, they will always be massively outnumbered by their customers; and like it or not some of those customers will be smarter than them.

And some of those levers are really not that hard to pull.

I guess what I am trying to say though, is that you cannot do this. You cannot make 'small changes', there really is no such thing when you are talking about skills/spells/abilities in a game of this size.

And you can say or scream or yell or whatever about 'reckless' changes, 'stupid' changes or 'ignorant' changes and act as if there is one person or two, to blame.

It just doesn't work that way at companies that make great games that I know of.

WoW is 5 years old. Can you even think to make a smart guess as to how many man hours of testing has gone into every system in that game today? Are you saying that you, the gamer, noticed a blatantly ridiculous imbalance that is stupid simple and easy to fix that anywhere from 10 to 10,000 gamers have totally missed in the hundreds of thousands to millions of man hours in testing?

It might be stupid and simple as it applies to your experience, vs. your class, but you are in a world with a whole slew of other classes/races with a litany of additional skills/spells/abilities.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

If they can do X, they can do X+/-5. Or they can just not do X because it's a bad idea. I do actually comprehend the complexity of the picture even if I haven't seen it first hand. See my Japanese translation analogy.

[Kuro]

So, we shouldn't be allowed to make any balance commentary at all on games we play, since we're but lowly players?

Sweet.

Designers fuck up, they're human. Sometimes they have info the players don't have, sometimes they *don't*.

Having spent time in game design for CCGs (Living ones, which is a bloody rarity in today's CCG market ), where there are a metric fucktonne of variables involved in each new card designed, or errata issued, I've seen countless times where players uncovered things DT/PT didn't. I've also seen many times where the most worrisome thing in the environment was completely missed by the playerbase, and the DT breathed a sigh of relief that they weren't going to get called on it slipping through, and fixed it before it could cause problems.

The players may not always have the "big picture" in mind, but there are often instances where the "big picture" has blinded devs to how things work in the field.

[Ngruk]

Originally Posted by FoghornDeadhorn

OK, I stumbled on an analogy:

I can't read or speak Japanese. I can, however, read and speak English perfectly well. I might be hopeless at the job of translating a manga or anime or JRPG; however, were you to show me the average translated product the odds are that I could improve the translation's quality by a considerable amount. It's much the same with all of us 'armchair' developers. We may not be able to make a game but we can sure as shit look at the finished product and go "uh, you really need to tweak A, B, and C and just goddamned get rid of D," and we'd be right.

Wow, um, we disagree again So maybe we can agree to disagree then? You can look at the finished product and make those comments as they pertain to you, sure, and maybe your guild, your group of friends as well?

I'd argue I could then find an equal amount of players that feel diametrically opposed to the way you do.

The problem, at least imo, then becomes how you go from there. Do you appease your group? The other group? Or worse yet, both?

I think that is a massive game design flaw that's killled games and companies, straying from the initial target audience and product vision. Appealing to both groups makes no one happy, appealing to one makes one unhappy.

Do you appeal to the larger group, or the group you targeted if they are not the same?

WAR is a great example. They targeted PVP players, period. It takes about 12 minutes of questing to realize that imo. I haven't played in months so maybe that's changed but I am a quester, PVE guy first, PVP second. WAR absolutely ratcheted up my desire and enjoyment of PVP (and I hear it's gotten INCREDIBLY more fun in the past few months) to the point I finally started to see just how fun PVP can be if you play with friends. But I had so many issues with the quest system that I just stopped playing unless I knew I could log in with a bunch of friends on.

I am straight rambling now and think I've gotten off topic yet again. About 19 phone calls before, during and after trying to post this.

[Ngruk]

Originally Posted by Kuro

So, we shouldn't be allowed to make any balance commentary at all on games we play, since we're but lowly players?

Sweet.

The players may not always have the "big picture" in mind, but there are often instances where the "big picture" has blinded devs to how things work in the field.

Not at all, and that's not what I am saying or what I meant. But to read how incredibly 'simple' and 'easy' in many posts, people think it is to do this is not true in my opinion.

It's absolutely not rocket science, but it's damn hard. Far harder than I ever thought it would be.

Oh and it takes far longer and is far more expensive than I thought too

[Ngruk]

Originally Posted by FoghornDeadhorn

If they can do X, they can do X+/-5. Or they can just not do X because it's a bad idea. I do actually comprehend the complexity of the picture even if I haven't seen it first hand. See my Japanese translation analogy.

But it's not X or X+/-5 when a game is launched.

It's X, and then how X affects every variable it touches, or could ever touch, in a launched game.

There are some game examples I'll give or try to anyway, but right now I am just too tired.

Seeing my boys win ring #6 last night, arriving here at 4am and showering, heading into the office has taken a stamina toll on me...

[Gnome Eater]

Ngruk, I think the point is, if you look at the playerbase as a whole, most players have a horrendous track record as far as balance predictions. I completely agree with you.

Take hunter balancing changes though that they recently did to nerf BM. Sebudai (who posts here a few times) posted on EJ that those changes were overkill and would nerf it too far, and that survival was buffed way too much. He also posted exactly what changes they would have to do to get BM to do equal damage to survival and how they'd have to nerf survival.

3 days later, GC says, oops, we fucked up, and they would do x and y changes, which were exactly what Sebudai was suggesting.

Look at the mage changes. Every time they think of changes they would do to mages, Manly theorycrafts the highest dps spec, and how exactly it would play out, and if you look at his WWS parses they are within 1% of what he suggested.

Look at Serennia's suggestions about PvP balance. If you remove his ideas about AMS removing debuffs ala cloak, almost all his suggestions are spot on and Blizzard already implemented a few really obvious ones.

Most players are awful game designers and their idea of class balance is piling buff after buff on their own class.

A few players are really well ahead of Blizzard on the balancing sphere. Look at Manly's posts on EJ, Sebudai, Aldriana, and a few accomplished players who theorycraft in high end guilds. Noxn posted a huge all of text about the problems shadowpriests have in arena, and Noxn has been vengeful/brutal glad playing a shadowpriest. Gurg used to post a lot about more general problems with the end-game, but lately I think he mostly talks to developers directly.

I speak from personal experience - back when I still played EverQuest, me and Kirium (another high end mage) used to e-mail Rytan fairly frequently with our own parses and suggestions about game balance, and got a lot of abilities fixed. It is impossible to think that GC could have a direct dialogue with everyone, but pick out a few outstanding individuals, and LISTEN to them. I'd give examples of some suggestions I have given myself, but I enjoy the anonimity on this board beyond those that know who I am.

I can suggest right now about 10 changes that would make the current arena balance much better and wouldn't have much of an impact of pve. The problem is that to GC I am a nameless player who just throws his opinion in, so he thinks that the playerbase has a horrible track record at suggesting balance changes, because for every good suggestion I give, some other retard will give 25 bad suggestions.

If you look at a few really intelligent individuals and their personal track record for balance suggestions, I think you might end up changing your mind.

PS
I will add that I would only trust players about tclass balance. Balancing CONTENT around what end game players suggest is a sure way to alienate 99.9% of your playerbase.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

I keep wanting to write a response to all of this but it feels like I'm talking to Ghostcrawler at this point. People waving their hands going "you can't possibly understand how hard this all is!!!" doesn't change anything.

I am actually a reasonable person. I understand the difference between tweaking numbers (not hard!) and tweaking mechanics (usually harder). I will also simply say that there's probably a good reason that Blizzard never clearly communicates its goals with many of the more complex issues. Then we might be able to judge what they are doing with some level of clarity. Instead it's all of this 'mysterious hand of god' nonsense.

[darksensei]

Originally Posted by Gnome Eater

If you look at a few really intelligent individuals and their personal track record for balance suggestions, I think you might end up changing your mind.

I think this about sums it up. A random player can show bias to their class, inability to see the bigger picture etc. Certain players have distinguished themselves in being able to make very reasonable suggestions.

There can also be a lot of miscommunication, such as the developers thinking privately they want X spec to be 1k DPS lower than Y class, but players thinking it's supposed to be within 5%. Then you have a situation where reasonable suggestions are being made with unreasonable expectations. This is where honest and open communication from developers is very important.

[BurnemWizfyre]

Originally Posted by Ngruk

I don't mean this to be personal, but really? I mean I read this and the rest of the post is lost on me, not really interested in reading any further.

I am the farthest thing from an ass kisser, but can you honestly say that enormous piece of content they created was "meh"?

Is it a case of eating filet your whole life and not being impressed with a fantastic piece of Kobe beef?

No one touches WoW in polish. No one touches them in innovation imo, not yet anyway. Sad thing is I think the next game to 'touch them' in either area is going to be a game they are making...

The leveling process was great don't get me wrong, but to call WoTLK content enormous is wrong on so many levels. 2 Onyxia style boss instances and a rehashed Nax is not enormous in my eyes.

Sorry but you aren't going to win the argument about adding a blatantly over powered change into the game and claim its hard to figure out after all the things the one example had happened. Over a month on the PTR, A change listed on the PTR notes, and the idea had to have at least passed through 2 devs. Seriously they need to have a common sense test, that list small changes that have would have next to no effect (or so small it would be hard to actually realize) and then blatant game changing changes listed and if the dev cant distinguish between the two he/she should GTFO.

[Quince]

Originally Posted by Kuro

Having spent time in game design for CCGs (Living ones, which is a bloody rarity in today's CCG market ), where there are a metric fucktonne of variables involved in each new card designed, or errata issued, I've seen countless times where players uncovered things DT/PT didn't. I've also seen many times where the most worrisome thing in the environment was completely missed by the playerbase, and the DT breathed a sigh of relief that they weren't going to get called on it slipping through, and fixed it before it could cause problems.

Skullclamp anyone?