Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Gecko said:

Dozens of failed MMOs later, and designers and teams still forget that rule.

I personally hate balancing. Balance is overrated. Fun should be the requisite goal, and every class should not be equal. Enact enough variety and different encounters that the min/maxers have no easy answer.

I agree with Bongk that too much PVP/PVE balance juggling goes on, especially in WOW. PVP is easy, just put firm CC rules and DPS limits in place solely for it that make it balanced.

At the end of the day, just keep it simple and add content and appropriate skills.

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I pretty much agree with this. I wouldn"t go so far as to say I hate balancing and it shouldn"t be attempted, but it is overrated and, especially in Blizzard"s case, it is often overdone.

I think their main issue is 1.) too many specs, and 2.) too many buffs/debuffs.

Homogenizing a lot of those buffs/debuffs was a huge step towards cleaning up some of the mess they had created, but at the end of the day they"ve still got 30 different specs that the playerbase expects them to balance, and on top of that, they want them balanced in PVEandPVP. It"s impossible.

That"s why I"m often arguing against specs that completely change a class. Holy Priest and Shadow Priest should not exist imo. There should never be a class where you can learn playing it one way, raid with it one way, and then when asked to respec you literally do not know how to play because it might as well be another class. While some might like that versatility I just think it"s a bad idea.

I like being able to customize a bit (such as augmenting certain abilities I favor over others, or boosting certain stats), but at the end of the day I want my class to be what it is. You never saw a Warrior LFG in EQ and wondered "is he a tank or dps?" and SoE never had to worry about balancing Warriors vs. other DPS, whereas Blizzard is forced to balance not one, but two DPS Warrior specs.

I guess you could argue that its healthy for an MMO to constantly be changing and evolving, but for my money I"d rather see more content and other additions to the game over endless class balancing and rebalancing.

One of the biggest problems is that the game designers aren"t planning properly. You really want an outline of how things are supposed to be before you get involved and need to realize its all connected.

One thing that Everquest did well was that certain things were based on stats that couldn"t be changed. For example, hit rate being tied to weapon skill and offense. This allowed them to adjust hit rates based on class. Defense adjusted how often people were hit. Having set stats like that simply based on class that could not be improved upon really let them start with a good foundation for class balance.

Sometimes developers don"t realize how powerful certain things are to certain classes. If hit rate could be improved through gear, and there is a soft or hard cap they might forget that a caster could stack the gear and end up getting near the defensive abilities of the defensive tanks due to their cap while maintaining their superior offensive ability. Something simple like a defense or offense rating that doesn"t move really lets them start the balance where they want it to be. The same thing was accomplished with the AC softcaps, it allowed them to maintain the ratio of damage against the various classes as they wanted it. You couldn"t stack things to get around it.

Class balance is simply a mix of utility, defense and offense. If a class is high in utility, they should be proportionally lower in defense and offense. If a class is high in defense, they should be proportionally lower in utility and offense etc so that you end up with classes with various levels of offense, defense and utility while maintaining balance.

Classes that are in the middle should be given abilities to make them useful on raids without compromising the balance. Something that makes them different and unique. As an example, if you have two classes where they are primarily focused around offense but one is lower because of additional defense or utility, there needs to be something else specific to that class that makes it so a raid or group would want that class instead of just bringing the higher dps class. Otherwise you get stuck with the holy trinity where people want only the best DPS class, the best healing class, and the best tank.

The problem that Everquest had was simply that they had too many classes and had trouble differentiating the classes. From a game design standpoint, the less classes you have the easier things are to balance.

When certain things are set, such as basic offense, defense and weapon skill the gear can really focus around improving the primary job of said class. For tanks, this would be the ability to reduce or eliminate damage. For DPS, the ability to increase their damage and for healing, the ability to increase the effectiveness of their heals.

It"s a lot easier to design raids when certain elements are for the most part controlled such as hit rates, resist rates etc. You also know what damage tanks with certain gear should be taking, how much DPS the classes should be doing, and essentially from a mathematical standpoint, what the guild burnout level would be. You could easily design difficult raids just by adjusting the numbers if you had control of the variables. Most developers don"t do this, so it"s really hard for them to "balance" raids because its more of a clusterfuck. They don"t accurately know how much damage a raid can do, how much and how long the healers can heal so they just throw together some numbers and hope it is difficult then adjust after they see how the raids perform. If the math was properly controlled, the raid mobs should be close to balanced with almost no testing. Testing shouldn"t really be needed for the difficulty, it should be there to find any bugs or unintended exploits associated with the encounters.

Lastly, everything needs to be planned for the future. Everquest didn"t predict its success and ran into this problem. Instead of using gear caps, if you have formulas that are compared to defense or resist ratings you can really adjust and reset everything on an expansion by expansion basis.

If damage is done based on an ATK rating compared to your opponents AC rating, it allows you to raise AC in new expansions to maintain the same ratio of damage regardless of how high the numbers get. As weapons and spells improve, the mobs can be given additional hitpoints so that every expansion the ratios are maintained. The difficulty stays the same, and caps are never reached. It also would allow you to adjust the difficulty level on a mob by mob basis by changing levels of hitpoints, resists, AC, defense etc. In essence, you want formulas that interact with other statistics so that as one side of the formula increases, you can offset it by increasing the other side.

EDIT: I"m going to try to explain that last part. What I mean is that the formula should be able to be adjusted on both sides and the damage should scale around the equilibrium. Let"s say a caster has a spell damage rating of 200, and the mob has a resist rating of 200. The spell would do a set amount of damage, say around 65% if the numbers are offsetting. As the caster improves his spell damage rating to say 300, his number is improving over the mobs resist of 200 so the damage would scale up and over 65%. As an example, he might start seeing spell damage land around 80%. This allows the caster to improve his spell damage. It always goes up as gear improves without a cap. The balance would be obtained when new mobs now have 300 resist rating and the damage is back to 65%. The difference between spell damage rating and the opponents resist rating simply scales the damage around an equilibrium. That allows you to adjust the resist rating to maintain equilibrium no matter how high the spell damage gets. The same holds true for melees using ATK versus AC. As ATK increases relative to the opponents AC, the damage scales up. This can be offset by increasing AC. When new spells or weapons are introduced that change the data for the damage, it can be offset by an increase in hitpoints so the ratio is still maintained. If you introduce a way to increase hit rate, then the formula should interact with avoidance. The actual numbers don"t matter and can be adjusted however the developers see fit, what matters is that the formulas are interacting and that both sides can be adjusted.

The "stats" that go on the gear can simply be attributed to the various formulas however the developers want. Strength could go to ATK. Intelligence could increase spell damage rating equivalent to how Strength would increase ATK. As a caster increases Intelligence, their damage would improve relative to how a melee improves his damage from Strength. Wisdom could increase healing power etc. Each class might get two associated stats with certain stats being universal for all but maintained by a ratio for class balance such as AC, hitpoints etc. For example, Stamina could equate to hit points but the amount of hitpoints gained could vary based on class. That allows you to maintain the proper ratio of hitpoints per class based on already determined values of where their health should be in regards to other classes for class balance purposes.

That"s how games should be designed on the very basic level. They need to be planned through from the beginning. It"s absolutely shocking to me to see a game like Age of Conan released with almost no thought put into stats or gear when those things should be part of the initial planning process early in development.

Grave said:

I think their main issue is 1.) too many specs, and 2.) too many buffs/debuffs.

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Gecko said:

Dozens of failed MMOs later, and designers and teams still forget that rule.

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Mippo said:

One of the biggest problems is that the game designers aren"t planning properly.

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First off, balance is necessary for fun. Nobody wants to be the shit class. Trust me, after spending 2 years in every way inferior to Paladins as a Priest and then in a feat of massive irony switching to Paladin and spending the next 4 years getting more and more inferior to Priests...it isn"t fun.

Easiest solution:

Abandon the concept of the "pure" dps class. This is the root of the problem. If one person"s sole purpose is to do DPS, he"s going to feel pointless if the healer or tank gets to dps just as well. Likewise the support classes are going to feel like shit if they have nobody to support.

This is why talent spec"s came to prominence in WoW.

Second is to abandon the heals concept as well. Heals are another problematic part of MMO design. This invariably leads to encounter design being "Bring enough tanks and healers to survive then stack the shit out of dps." Being able to help mitigate/avoid damage is one thing. Repairing it, first of all, makes little sense. You"d think with this mighty power at my side I"d use it to prevent my friends from getting hurt in the first place.

Don"t get me wrong, I don"t mind feeling like a sadistic dick, but watching as my allies get beat to shit then healing them, then letting them get beaten to a bloodly pulp again only to repair them and send them back into battle...it just doesn"t click.

Now balance and distribute your utility support, defensive support and offensive support so that abilities amongst the classes such that they have relatively the same impact on boss fights.

The ideal here is that you can bring just about anybody. Blizzards ideal of bring the player, not the class, only done properly instead of their failed attempt.

I"d go into the math but I think you get the concept. Toss in job system as well for extra lulz.

Anyways...

As for PvP, there"s no reason you can"t design abilities so that they do only a % of your opponants life. I don"t know about you, but as much fun as stomping people in green gear is, I"d much rather it always be a relatively fair fight no matter how much I outgear them.

There"s something to be said for "But...but...I worked for that gear!"

Yeah, and that"s why there"s PvE content for you to steamroll. But against players in set battlegrounds and wherever, really? Allows you to achieve a much smoother PvP balance as well because then you don"t have to worry about the scaling of abilities vs. mob and player HP as much.

"But what about the carrot? What keeps me playing if I just want to pvp then?"

Easy, the thrill of pvp. Come up with new maps and new modes of play every month or so and I garuntee you people will continue to play that shit. It"s only when you do stupid shit like take 2 years to introduce a new BG and then it doesn"t even bother to play anymore unless you"re a PvE geared out dk or paladin that it becomes really, really boring.

And if you really want to, add shit they can buy like Goblin Claymores, a special mount that radiates an aura of command like old school AV bosses did, for the equivolent of 200k honor in WoW you get the ability to once per day call in an airstrike. And so forth. Give me a bottle of whiskey and an hour and I"ll come up with 300 things you can buy in addition to it just being an alternate progression path to PvE.

Sure, some balance is necessary, but there"s no reason to constantly change and rearrange everything seeking some semblance of true balance which can likely never be achieved anyway.

Paladins never should"ve been main healers. What if they were inferior to Priests in healing, yes, but got to be up on the frontlines hammering the shit out of the boss with a giant 2-hander, doing respectable DPS while still healing (preferably automatically via procs or smart auto-targeting)? You could tie it together nicely, making it so that the more damage you deal the better your heals are, or vice versa. Toss in their fantastic buffs and you"ve got a class that wouldn"t likely be sitting on the sidelines. It"d be an exciting, fun way to heal.

I believe most classes should be hybrids in some way. If you"ve got a tank, make sure they can DPS or heal as well, at the same time, without respeccing. Gear swapping and certain other aspects could obviously make them better at one role or the other, but the idea is to let them do both at the same time. If there is no "pure" tank or healer then you suddenly don"t have to worry about the hybrids encroaching upon their role and doing it better or being more desirable by raids or groups. Then, for the classes that do need to be non-hybrid (like Rogue and Mage perhaps) you can simply make them top DPS (though not by much) and then give them some kind of stackable buff/debuff that makes everyone else in the raid better. Rogues could buff melee, Mages buff casters. What would happen then is you"d need to make sure you have the right amount of tanking / healing, but it can come from any of the hybrid classes and they"re also going to bringing another element to the raid alongside what you need them for, then you just grab rogues/mages/whatever DPS to stack their buffs/debuffs.

I don"t think we need to get rid of the tank/healer/dps archetype, but instead change how they are played and what kind of class can do it. I know I"d be a lot more likely to play a healing Paladin if it was a frontline fighter like what I described above, in the thick of things throwing out auto-AE heals and such.

Give most classes something similar to Death Knight auras or Warrior stances to increase their ability to perform a particular role and leave it at that instead of having it determined by specs. Done.

Grave said:

Sure

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Well, that"s kinda just what I said. Make everybody a hybrid. Nobody is pure DPS solves the #1 problem of having hybrid classes. You don"t have to abandon the damage/support archtype. You just have to abandon shitty design.

Hybridism fails hard in the presence of pure classes because it never works like it"s supposed to. You"re either GCD or resource locked. EQ druids were supposed to 50% nuker and 50% healer, but in the end you were EITHER 50% nuker OR 50% healer which made you basically just shit at whatever you did.

The Retadin is a good example of how Hybridism should work, but it again fails because every ret past the first one is a waste of raid space. None of his utility really stacks so you"re better off bringing a pure DPSer in his place, or pure healer if that"s what you need.

The problem of gimping someone"s DPS because they have utility fails hard whenever you ask, "But what if you don"t need that utility?"

Keep it simple. Rather then trying to arbitrarily judge how much DPS a certain utilitiy aspect is worth, just do your best to equalize everyone in that aspect and then go from there.

Oh, and while it"s bugging me...as awesome and important as animations are to a game, don"t add an instant-cast ability and then make the effect go off only after a 2 second animation. What"s even more insulting is when it forces you to stop moving to play the animation.

I bring this up because in Aion the sorcerer has basically a frost nova clone from the WoW mage. Only problem is first he leaps into the air, then summons a frost globe, then smashes it at his feet. While neat looking no doubt, in any situation where you have 2+ targets on you, you take more damage then you prevent from using this ability.

I stop appreciating pretty animations on life saving get away abilities when I die half way through the animation the third time in a row.

I get that having pure healing classes is a problem. Yet the "have tank/heal him" raid model has worked for a great many games.

Is there another MMO that has endgame epic fantasy fights that does not have this model? If not, how do you see something like this working?

WoW has had a handful of fights that don"t use this mechanic and they"ve worked out fine. It"s pretty easy to design for and the best part is it really reinforces the "bring people who are good at the game" vs. "we need at least 5 priests to beat this fight, I don"t care if they are mouth breathers or not" gameplay.

khalid said:

I get that having pure healing classes is a problem. Yet the "have tank/heal him" raid model has worked for a great many games.

Is there another MMO that has endgame epic fantasy fights that does not have this model? If not, how do you see something like this working?

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It doesn"t have to be that much different from the standard model, it"s mostly tweaking how the classes are played.

For example, you might have a Healer/DPS who can place a buff on a target, and that target will be healed for X amount of the damage done by the healer. In addition, anytime the healer crits with a damage spell, that healing not only heals their buffed target, but several targets in a radius around them. The healing could also build up some sort of charges that could then be used for a larger damage spell or a bigger group heal of some kind. That"s just a quick example off the top of my head, still fulfilling the healing role while doing DPS. The idea is to not only make both roles possible at the same time, but give it synergy.

Tank hybrids are even easier, you simply give them DPS tools if they are a DPS/Tank hybrid - picture a furious berserker wading into a pack of mobs and dishing out AE damage with a 2hander - maybe make it something like the more damage they take the higher a self-buff stacks that increases their DPS, and then the more successful DPS combos they pull off the more heightened their battle frenzy becomes and allows them to shrug off painful blows. Again, just a simple idea for making both roles mesh well together and have some synergy.

When everyone is a hybrid of some kind you can then just balance content around that fact. You don"t have to worry that a DPS/Heal hybrid might not be able to heal a 5-man instance as well as a pure Healer, because pures do not exist. You just balance it for every hybrid.

Zehn - Vehx said:

Comments on class roles.

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I could be reading it all wrong, but it seems like what you"re suggesting is that every class in an MMO should be DPS-based with an innate sub-class/secondary trait. If every class can DPS, and each class has it"s own forte in terms of their secondary traits, doesn"t that still lead to players min-maxing--and then developers designing content--based around the most successful combination of sub-classes? If the aim is to make the players beat the content given their own skills and the sub-classes they have at their disposal, it would takeat leasttwice as long to properly develop content for a game when factoring in such a diverse class combination (12 Warriors vs. 10 Warriors with 2 CC"ers are vastly different fights, with just 2 different players).

My post was getting ridiculously long so I cut a lot out of it. One of those being that yeah, you"d need to avoid hard counters like that. Rather then including 2 mobs that need to be CC"d....the two mobs can be CC"d, or if you have no CC"ers they can be off tanked, or they can be flat out DPS"d down, whatever you prefer.

WoW doesn"t have many hard counters like that to be honest. On Freya hard mode and Vezax you need people who can interrupt. Depending on the fight ranged vs. melee dps is a bit of a concern, but other then that barring stacking debuffs you could bring 15 mages as your dps and do just as fine as if you brought 15 rogues or 15 hunters or whatever.

One of the big things helping class diversity is going to be personal preference. I know I"ve brought this up before but you can play any class in TF2, but people naturally gravitate towards the class that fits them the best. I dabble in most classes but I tend to play the Medic or Demoman the most. My brother prefers the heavy and one of my friends prefers the sniper over all others.

WoW can assume you"re going to have at least one of every class, but they rarely put in hard counters like that because it hinders the ability for raids to bring what they have. Nobody likes to be forced to play a class they don"t enjoy because we need 13 healers for Eredar twins or you can"t do Felmyst without 4 priests.

(Hint: Sunwell is pretty much the poster child for raiding gimmicks done wrong.)

The chance of a guild bringing 12 warriors is going to be pretty slim. On top of that if loot is done correctly you"re only going to be fucking yourself as it takes that much longer to gear up as your class diversification sucks. Greed is as strong as a force as any. I know I"ve switched from my Paladin to my Warlock for a couple pug events simply because there were no locks on the raid but already 4 paladins. <3

Well, I"ve fed Zehn all the rep I can at this point so let"s just say I agree with much of this.

Lose the pure DPS role for certain (and I say this as a Rogue in EQ and followed that up as a Mage in WoW) unless you are going to abandon the "modern" everyone-can-dps business. One could also lose the pure healing role and just allow for raid-wide/group-wide healing auras or heal-on-hits or whatever. It could easily in a new game be styled after the raid buff/debuff system now kludged into place.

However you get at it though, the paradigm from here really should be bring-the-player while at the same time allowing the cutting edge raiders to do alittlemin-maxing around that. A job system is ideal here, allowing the pure t/c crowd to change elements minorly as the encounter dictates. Then you allow the loot system to sort out your actual class mixture where progression may be slowed if you bring all plate or something along those lines.

We"ll see what the next generation brings but WoW certainly has a lot of lessons for the attentive.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Second is to abandon the heals concept as well. Heals are another problematic part of MMO design. This invariably leads to encounter design being "Bring enough tanks and healers to survive then stack the shit out of dps." Being able to help mitigate/avoid damage is one thing. Repairing it, first of all, makes little sense. You"d think with this mighty power at my side I"d use it to prevent my friends from getting hurt in the first place.

Don"t get me wrong, I don"t mind feeling like a sadistic dick, but watching as my allies get beat to shit then healing them, then letting them get beaten to a bloodly pulp again only to repair them and send them back into battle...it just doesn"t click.

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I agree with this totally. It would be a great day when combat is based on avoiding damage and mitigating it, only having those hard hits that put someone on the brink of death be a rare occurance when a heal is nessesary. Utility classes should play a huge role in making NPC"s miss their opponents as well as weakening their attacks, shields should do what they are supposed to, a melee class can have offensive moves that lower the ability for the NPC to attack such as attacks that blind the mob, attacks that result in the NPC missing the chance to attack altogether for a short while such as knocking the NPC off it"s feet, ect...

It would be no easy task to create a game that greatly lowered the tank/heal formula but it would be an amazing thing if they could figure it out.

Bongk said:

Not saying any are good, but here is the upcoming MMOG release schedule. (2 football MMOG? huh)

Upcoming ReleasesParabellum - Q2 2009
Football SuperStars - Q2 2009
Jumpgate Evolution - Q2 2009
Fallen Earth - Q2 2009
The Warlords - Q2 2009
CrimeCraft - 08/25/09
Champions Online - 09/01/09
QuickHit Football - Q3 2009
CitiesXL - 09/03/09
Aion - 09/22/09
Mortal Online - Q3 2009
World of Cars Online - Q3 2009

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I"m looking specifically for a game that takes the old EQ approach of "PVP? Fuck off". Sadly, none of the MMORPGs I"ve looked at recently do.

I just clicked on this thread and havn"t followed it in 10 days.

Which retread discussion are we having? Getting rid of healers?

Draegan said:

I just clicked on this thread and havn"t followed it in 10 days.

Which retread discussion are we having? Getting rid of healers?

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I think it was something about making everyone play a single Ur-Class capable of doing everything at once and shooting flames out its arse, with a different name based on your race.

Kuro said:

I think it was something about making everyone play a single Ur-Class capable of doing everything at once and shooting flames out its arse, with a different name based on your race.

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Oh we had that dumb argument back in 2007 I think.

Draegan said:

I just clicked on this thread and havn"t followed it in 10 days.

Which retread discussion are we having? Getting rid of healers?

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wouldn"t be that bad an idea. Get rid of combat healers and of classes that do nothing but heal in a fight.

Was there any combat healing in LOTR?