Game Design Choices and Overpowered Classes

[jpark]

http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/07/ghostcrawler-telling-nothing-at-all.html

I'd say that's a far better guess at Blizzard's design philosophy than the original posting.

Yes, that post by Ghost is the basis for this thread (linked in that article) where I was surprised he posed the problem of the "underplayed overpowered class".

[Jayce]

WoW stays a fad and in the driver's seat.  Meh.

WoW is still a fad?  Interesting.. I wonder how long something has to be around and popular before it becomes a trend, or worse, an institution.

[Ingmar]

Ghostcrawler catches a lot of shit but I think he's doing a pretty good job in general. Sure, even Blizzard has their blind spots (holy paladin mechanics). But speaking as a 'raiding protection warrior' I'm not really seeing much of a problem.

Thought, born out of some time I spent as an admin on a MUD: when all classes are unhappy, balance is usually pretty good.

[kildorn]

is that greedygoblin post really raging against "average players" and DPS, while insisting that ranged dps is king because it can happily stand in fires and just let the healer heal them through it?

And then after railing against GC for not getting how shit works, he goes on to say we should total all damage done in any heroic/raid by any class, average it, and balance against that?

Really? Because that's possibly the worst statistical analysis method on the face of the planet, clocking in beyond "multiple anecdote's from my friend's roommate's girlfriend's brother"

[Ratama]

WoW stays a fad and in the driver's seat.  Meh.

WoW is still a fad?  Interesting.. I wonder how long something has to be around and popular before it becomes a trend, or worse, an institution.

I'd base it on how fast the rats jump ship for the Next Big Thing (assuming anyone in this fucking incompetent industry ever manages to squeeze out another functional 'AAA' MMO).

Thought, born out of some time I spent as an admin on a MUD: when all classes are unhappy, balance is usually pretty good.

No, that just means your design is shit.  Look at Starcraft; different genre, but similar balance issues.  All three factions feel OP and dynamic/fun to play, rather than still balanced but UP pieces of shit.  That's good design.

Everyone feeling underpowered/incomplete = bad design.  Harder to pull off in an MMO, sure, but if the current monkeys can't do it, ship them back to the lab and try a different batch.

[Vash]

is that greedygoblin post really raging against "average players" and DPS, while insisting that ranged dps is king because it can happily stand in fires and just let the healer heal them through it?

And then after railing against GC for not getting how shit works, he goes on to say we should total all damage done in any heroic/raid by any class, average it, and balance against that?

Really? Because that's possibly the worst statistical analysis method on the face of the planet, clocking in beyond "multiple anecdote's from my friend's roommate's girlfriend's brother"

No, he's saying GC knows how shit works, but is not giving the truth or a strait answer because it wouldn't be popular with the masses.

Basically then he attempts to explain how all the balancing that gets done every patch is aimed mostly at keeping average players balanced, not cutting edge raiders.

It can be hard to pick up his message through his engrish and hate for the average WoW player.

Honestly I have no idea why so many people read or link his blog.  I mean I know his crazy views and morals are easy targets for mockery and criticism but it gets old real fast.

[kildorn]

is that greedygoblin post really raging against "average players" and DPS, while insisting that ranged dps is king because it can happily stand in fires and just let the healer heal them through it?

And then after railing against GC for not getting how shit works, he goes on to say we should total all damage done in any heroic/raid by any class, average it, and balance against that?

Really? Because that's possibly the worst statistical analysis method on the face of the planet, clocking in beyond "multiple anecdote's from my friend's roommate's girlfriend's brother"

No, he's saying GC knows how shit works, but is not giving the truth or a strait answer because it wouldn't be popular with the masses.

Basically then he attempts to explain how all the balancing that gets done every patch is aimed mostly at keeping average players balanced, not cutting edge raiders.

It can be hard to pick up his message through his engrish and hate for the average WoW player.

Honestly I have no idea why so many people read or link his blog.  I mean I know his crazy views and morals are easy targets for mockery and criticism but it gets old real fast.

But he goes on to prove this by referencing a lot of stuff about warlock DPS and how it's being balanced around idiots spamming shadowbolt, even while the active patch notes are directly altering the spec he's talking about for dps. Plus, that spec isn't entirely out of line in non gimmick raid fights, just pvp.

His essential complaint boils down to the normal "I feel I know how things  should be balanced" armchair dev QQ, and hating on GC for.. disagreeing? Being unwilling to talk in set in stone terms? I dunno. GC can say some stupid shit sometimes, but well, thus far Blizz has done a reasonably nice job with the classes, barring Paladins and DKs.

[Ingmar]

Thought, born out of some time I spent as an admin on a MUD: when all classes are unhappy, balance is usually pretty good.

No, that just means your design is shit.  Look at Starcraft; different genre, but similar balance issues.  All three factions feel OP and dynamic/fun to play, rather than still balanced but UP pieces of shit.  That's good design.

Everyone feeling underpowered/incomplete = bad design.  Harder to pull off in an MMO, sure, but if the current monkeys can't do it, ship them back to the lab and try a different batch.

I didn't actually say anything about the quality of the design, just balance. Bad games can be balanced, after all. But player complaints, even in the most perfectly balanced game, always take the form of complaining about what other classes get compared to them.

EDIT: I have some more thoughts here. Overpowered-but-underplayed classes do often exist. The classic example to me is the DAOC Healer. By any objective view the Healer was a broken class in RVR, but it never ate the significant nerfs that other overpowered classes did. Mythic was just afraid to nerf them (I am speculating here) because Midgard was already an underpopulated side on most servers and nerfing Healers would have disrupted the remaining Mid players' ability to form RVR groups so it got to stay too strong. Basically, their failure to deal with realm imbalances forced them to punt balance as a design imperative and from that root come all the many problems with DAOC.

Blizzard has a bit of that problem themselves to deal with, though not nearly as awful. Realm balance is basically irrelevant for the WoW PVP model of BGs and arenas and now even Wintergrasp, so they just have to worry about class population balance. I would argue that they should still nerf the overpowered/underplayed class, since class population doesn't *really* matter in a macro sense. WoW is more a game of roles than of classes.

[Sjofn]

WoW stays a fad and in the driver's seat.  Meh.

WoW is still a fad?  Interesting.. I wonder how long something has to be around and popular before it becomes a trend, or worse, an institution.

It doesn't matter how long WoW sticks around, the people who call it a fad now will call it a fad forever, because it has commited the cardinal sin of being appealing to a wide audience in the gaming industry.

[Merusk]

Much like the Wii.

See, games are like rock bands.  As soon as they make bucket loads of money, they're sell outs and the "True" fans will hate them forever.

[Jayce]

I sometimes feel bad that I only play the two MMOGs that aren't some brand of shit (as indicated by their position outside the Gaming Graveyard).

Then I get over it and go have some actual fun.

[kaid]

I am always amused when people say community managers "lie" or "hide the truth" community managers only say what they are cleared to say for info. I love when they try to do the whole gotcha thing to a community manager. Folks these guys are pure customer service reps they do not design the game they rarely have anything to do  with coding they are just there to act as an interface between those who do the coding and the heathen masses so the devs don't explode and really tell the truth to the player which would be that most blizzard main forum posters are utter mouth breathers of the worst sort and not a terribly good sample of the actual playing population.

As long as blizzard does not split PVP skills and abilities and PVE skills and abilities into two separate things that do not impact on each other balance is impossible. Skills that are fine for PVE are not for PVP such as the current Ret Paladin. Yes lets have a class thats damn near CC immune>can have total invulnerablity>can heal>does massive burst damage and decent CC ability. In PVE the skills are fine but in PVP the combo is so over the top the AV I was in yesterday our team fielded 20 paladins and the horde a similar number.

EQ2's pvp was not super great but one thing they did very right was making all skills/ability/gear have two sets of stats one for PVE one for PVP. So you could balance pvp to pvp and pve to pve and not have to worry about unintended interactions.

[K9]

THe problem is that Ghostcrawler is a Dev trying to a CM's job, and he is never going to win. If you watch him over the months since he appeared during the WoTLK beta he's become more sarcastic and jaded, and seems less in touch with the reality of the game than his ideal image of what the game should be in his head.

[Hindenburg]

TBH, when the CM's tried to pretend that they had constant contact with the devs and really understood how classes worked back in the day, they also failed pretty gloriously.
Problem's always appeared to be the same, community managers don't tend to know the classes they're assigned very well.

[K9]

I swear the notion that CM's were "assigned" to a class is an urban legend. Most of the CMs do a pretty good job I reckon, and would probably do a better job if GC wasn't posting stuff and cutting them out of the loop.

[Hindenburg]

There was a time when the assignment at least appeared to happen, circa 2004-2006. Now, I don't follow the official forums to know, or even appear to know.
Caydiem for druids and hunters, Drysc for rogues, Fangtooth for paladins  , and tseric for warriors, then mages, then shamans, then warlocks. Don't remember if tseric's order was exactly that, but I do remember him posting loads of terribly wrong information about how spelldmg was scaling with dots. Not completely his fault, but that's all that it takes to become a target.

But yes, if could very well be that there is no official assignment or anything of the sort, and he's simply the one that has to go to that forum in that specific day and report what he currently knows. That wouldn't be much of a surprise.

[kildorn]

EDIT: I have some more thoughts here. Overpowered-but-underplayed classes do often exist. The classic example to me is the DAOC Healer. By any objective view the Healer was a broken class in RVR, but it never ate the significant nerfs that other overpowered classes did. Mythic was just afraid to nerf them (I am speculating here) because Midgard was already an underpopulated side on most servers and nerfing Healers would have disrupted the remaining Mid players' ability to form RVR groups so it got to stay too strong. Basically, their failure to deal with realm imbalances forced them to punt balance as a design imperative and from that root come all the many problems with DAOC.

Another horrible offender were Sorcs. They were obscenely overpowered in pretty much every way, but due to their low showing in RVR, they got buffs constantly to get people to actually play them. Sort of the same reason Smite was nerfed: to get people to play a goddamned healer, not a nuker in chain.

[kildorn]

There was a time when the assignment at least appeared to happen, circa 2004-2006. Now, I don't follow the official forums to know, or even appear to know.
Caydiem for druids and hunters, Drysc for rogues, Fangtooth for paladins  , and tseric for warriors, then mages, then shamans, then warlocks. Don't remember if tseric's order was exactly that, but I do remember him posting loads of terribly wrong information about how spelldmg was scaling with dots. Not completely his fault, but that's all that it takes to become a target.

But yes, if could very well be that there is no official assignment or anything of the sort, and he's simply the one that has to go to that forum in that specific day and report what he currently knows. That wouldn't be much of a surprise.

iirc, the "assignment" thing was one of the CMs saying something along those lines and then trying desperately to walk it back. It was mostly that the CMs had all decided to play random classes to get more insight into them or something. Notable just for the amount of HAAAAAATE for fangtooth on the Paladin forums. So much seething raaaaage.

[Xanthippe]

THe problem is that Ghostcrawler is a Dev trying to a CM's job, and he is never going to win. If you watch him over the months since he appeared during the WoTLK beta he's become more sarcastic and jaded, and seems less in touch with the reality of the game than his ideal image of what the game should be in his head.

Blizzard should not allow Ghostcrawler to speak on the forums.  He's not a CM, and he pisses people off.

I think he's a terrible dev too.  The vision for hunters has been completely incoherent since Ghostcrawler appeared.

[Hindenburg]

The vision for hunters has been completely incoherent since Ghostcrawler appeared.

Haha, no.

[kildorn]

THe problem is that Ghostcrawler is a Dev trying to a CM's job, and he is never going to win. If you watch him over the months since he appeared during the WoTLK beta he's become more sarcastic and jaded, and seems less in touch with the reality of the game than his ideal image of what the game should be in his head.

Blizzard should not allow Ghostcrawler to speak on the forums.  He's not a CM, and he pisses people off.

I think he's a terrible dev too.  The vision for hunters has been completely incoherent since Ghostcrawler appeared.

You quickly forget the prior CMs.

Any CM who says a word about a class ever will be instantly reviled by the playerbase.

Think of the popular CMs. Now thing really hard about what they've ever said about the game.

[Xanthippe]

The vision for hunters has been completely incoherent since Ghostcrawler appeared.

Haha, no.

Can you please explain that vision to me then?

[Hindenburg]

There's never been a coherent vision for hunter. Ever. It always changes at least twice a year.

[Paelos]

There's never been a coherent vision for hunter. Ever. It always changes at least twice a year.

That's because they make no sense as a class in a raiding/pvp world. Ever.

[Righ]

That was a response worthy of the WoW forums.

[Paelos]

That was a response worthy of the WoW forums.

WoW forum comments deserve Wow forum responses, my good man.

[Hindenburg]

WoW forum comments deserve Wow forum responses, my good man.

You've a bit of a knack for it.

Walk away.

[Lantyssa]

I don't see why a class that uses melee attacks at range doesn't have a place.

(That's a joke for old time's sake.  Gods, please don't take it seriously.)

[Paelos]

Oh get over yourselves. The very topic of this thread could have been spewed from the Vault itself. If you can't have a little fun with it, you're doing it wrong.

But after all class wars are serious biz, right?  

PS - Night Elf Hunters suck!

[kildorn]

PS - Night Elf Hunters suck!

This is the line to get us all to agree with each other again, right? 

[Lantyssa]

Totally agree.  They should all be Draenei.

[Nebu]

My hunter is a dwarf.  I'd rather be a gnome.  Gnome anything is pure win. 

[Rasix]

My hunter is a dwarf.  I'd rather be a gnome.  Gnome anything is pure win. 

Especially for PVP.  Nothing beats being ankle-high.

[Paelos]

My hunter is a dwarf.  I'd rather be a gnome.  Gnome anything is pure win. 

Especially for PVP.  Nothing beats being ankle-high.

My maxed-out shorty lurikeen nightshade from DAOC concurs.

[Hindenburg]

I don't see why a class that uses melee attacks at range doesn't have a place.

(That's a joke for old time's sake.  Gods, please don't take it seriously.)