The cost of balancing, or RvR vs RvRvR

[Speedbrusher]

Hi guys, I wasn't sure whether this thread was supposed to go into the MMO discussion or this category.

I'm not writing this to offend or troll anyone, but I'm genuinely trying to figure out why Mythic decided to go with only two realms when designing WAR. I mean, considering the Games Workshop IP, with everyone at war with each other, it would be pretty easy to split the realms into three as they did in Dark Age of Camelot. I know WAR isn't officially DAoC 2, but as far as I understood, RvRvR (realm vs realm vs realm) was a great success, why change that?

Is it because it's more expensive compared to what the player sees? (considering someone who plays on one realm on one server only sees 33% of the available content as opposed to 50%?), or is it about class balancing? I'm asking you, because I don't know the answer myself :)

Personally, I always thought one of the clever things with a three realm model, was that if one realm got too powerful, the two other realms would instinctively team up against their shared foe.

I know I'm completely lacking any sources here, but I read somewhere that at one point the server population on our European DAoC server was 49% Albion and the rest was somewhat 20% Hibernia and 30% Midgard. Even if the numbers are pulled out of my ass, what do you believe can be done to re-align things on a skewed population server?

Mythic talks about adding NPC "Dogs of War" to the battle fields, to restore the balance, but one thing that I remember from playing DAoC myself, was that the NPCs in PvP (guards, keep lords etc.) were a lot easier to whack than enemy players.


To sum up, why do you think they decided on two realms?

And what would you do, as designers, to prevent skewed realms from happening?

Can NPC replacements for players even be done successfully?

[cmlancas]

1) See successful MMO exhibit 1.

2) See successful MMO exhibit 1. (In my personal opinion, there will always be a skew -- Why are elves so popular?)

3) This is a serious question that I would like to answer. I think the answer is yes but only to a point. I hear that GW does it alright with the mercenary system, but I truly think that there is not a way for AI to match that of humans in an MMO setting. I'd personally like to know how much AI group dynamic work has been done. Instead of moleing it up though, why not post what you think about the idea?

[KyanMehwulfe]

A matter of simplification, I believe.

It basically means that they only have to worry about 2 entities now instead of 3. If they want to add a new high-end dungeon, they can concentrate on 2 instead of 3. New expansion races? 2 instead of 3. They can worry about trying to balance out 2 realms with actual feature mechanics, instead of adding a 3rd to the mix, further complicating things -- topped with a lack of confidence in relying on 2 weak realms teaming up against the 3rd constantly (not that I disagree that such could be gameplay encouraged, but perhaps they want more hard control over the balance).

It's hard to know exactly why yet without listing all the features they'll be using to balance each race within the realms (normally and when one race loses its realm), the population of the realms as a whole, any disparities in guilds, economy, and any other infrastructure they're trying to use to make the realms evolving entities... Basically, as a whole, understanding how they're treating the 2 realm balance and how it's relevant to the 2v3 debate.

But it really likely just comes down to trying to simplifying it: worrying about 2 realms instead of 3.

[Schazzwozzer]

Yeah, Warhammer strikes me as a very tightly designed game.  I think that's one of WoW's big lessons, not creating more options or content than the game mechanics will really support.  So there's just that guiding philosophy of making sure everything fits together tightly.

Also, in a game that is HUGELY reliant on the quality of the PvP experience, it's a real danger to spread the player population too thin.  You want EVERY PLAYER at ANY LEVEL to be able to get involved in some meaningful PvP.  To use the DAoC realms as examples, it's easy to imagine that certain Hibernia / Midgard battlefronts might be real ghosttowns.  This is probably going to be a challenge anyway (I expect the greenskins and dwarves will be the two most underplayed races of the game, though at least they're balanced against each other), but I think only having two factions will make it more manageable.

Re: skewed realm populations.  I think everybody knows this already, but the majority of players just go off looks.  Especially when they're not familiar with your game lore / world, they're going to go with what is attractive (tall, athletic, beautiful, and badass), what is familiar (knights in castles in familiar, shamans in yurts not so much), and what feels safe (with a human warrior, you have a pretty good idea what you're in for).  Make sure all realms/factions cater to these desires and you're reduced the chances of major population imbalances greatly.

Re: Can NPCs make up for lacking players.  I think so, or, at the very least, they can help.  As long as the NPC can actually stay IN the fight, and not disrupt the team's tactics (attacking "sheeped" enemies for instance), they can at least be helpful.  Once you've got to that point, I think it's just a matter of exposing it to play-testing, finding out how the NPCs function in real PvP fights, and then tweak numbers accordingly.  Do they die too fast?  Boost their HPs.  etc etc.

I don't know how Mythic is doing the Dogs of War system, but I was reading up on Warhammer the other night and saw that the tabletop game actually has different Dogs of War mercenary bands.  This got me to thinking how cool it might be if, instead of just NPC guardsmen or whatever, you got big Ogre mercenaries or other unique units.  Players might actually be excited at the prospect of fighting alongside such NPC allies.  So again, stylistic implementation would count for a lot.

[Speedbrusher]

It basically means that they only have to worry about 2 entities now instead of 3. If they want to add a new high-end dungeon, they can concentrate on 2 instead of 3. New expansion races? 2 instead of 3. They can worry about trying to balance out 2 realms with actual feature mechanics, instead of adding a 3rd to the mix, further complicating things -- topped with a lack of confidence in relying on 2 weak realms teaming up against the 3rd constantly (not that I disagree that such could be gameplay encouraged, but perhaps they want more hard control over the balance).

Good point - it makes sense to keep things simple, but in a RvR centric game like WAR I'd almost expect them to place such high-end content with all the sweet loot in the contested zones (much like they did with the Darkness Falls dungeon in Dark Age of Camelot), with the added benefit that they'd only have to do it once, regardless of the number of realms.

I don't know how Mythic is doing the Dogs of War system, but I was reading up on Warhammer the other night and saw that the tabletop game actually has different Dogs of War mercenary bands.  This got me to thinking how cool it might be if, instead of just NPC guardsmen or whatever, you got big Ogre mercenaries or other unique units.  Players might actually be excited at the prospect of fighting alongside such NPC allies.  So again, stylistic implementation would count for a lot.

That's a possibility I never thought of. Having ogres on the team also makes it easier for the designers to tackle the problem that they may have to adjust the level/hit points on said mercenaries to compensate for them being bots instead of players. I wager it'd be a lot easier for a player to accept an ogre having a metric fuckton of hitpoints, compared to some notched up realm guard.