In World of Warcraft I have encountered an interesting game balance phenomenon. It is the first time I have seen a character class balanced based on the number of players who play a faction, and not any other factors.
It is no surprise that on many servers, the Alliance outnumbers the Horde. But developer feedback regarding the Shaman, along with discussions at E3 have suggested that part of the Shaman’s recent feedback and improvements had to do with the fact that since Horde players are outnumbered on a server scale, their characters should be a little ‘better’ to compensate. This seems kind of messed up, since the actual imbalances really depend on the server itself, the time of day, the actual location in the game, etc etc. In other words, I think it is a pretty poor reason to balance a class.
The WoW forums bug me, because very few of the discussions are rational, and those that are get quashed with bitterness and flames. The Paladin forum is in awful shape and I really think the attitude of the community is what is holding them back. But even so, it is surprising what the Devs are willing to stoop for and what they aren’t. For example, at one point Warriors had some problems, so the Warrior community banded together and staged a mass protest. They took their warrior toons and crowded in areas like Ironforge, making the game lag to the point of crashing servers. Crummy move? Probably, but it got their problems fixed.
The optimistic part of me sees this as a grand experiment on the part of the developers, testing community reactions (i.e. actually listening to the suggestions from one class community, and totally forsaking another, and seeing what happens).
We’re still in the very early stages of MMORPGs, and it’s an appropriate time for experimentation.
My thought is that if you’re going to base a classes abilities on how many people are playing it, you’d best be able to respond to shifts in the population quickly.
That’s my thought exactly… if you give a certain character type certain advantages in certain situations, and make this public knowledge, EVERYBODY and their dog-bot-familiar-character will be there, trying to take advantage of it.
So your solution is to figure out which character type to improve next, causing THEM to suddenly overpopulate.
Repeat this enough times, and you have a game completely different from the original intent.
It’d be interesting if the game were capable of dynamically adjusting to the relative proportions of different characters. You could reach a point of stability, or you could have a wildly chaotic system.
I had an idea a while back, let me see if I can 'splain it.
I think you should dynamically adjust the skill affects based upon the number of characters WITH that skill. In other words, if only five people have skill A, it’s extremely powerful… but if 100 have it, it’s nowhere near as effective. If the number of players with skill A drops, then the skill improves in effectiveness again.
To do this, you’d have to “hide the numbers” on all the skills, so that players don’t know that their skill is more/less effective than it was the day before.
Another thing I’d do is have a classless system- anyone can learn any skill they want, and those skills are given as a reward for quests. You could have quests that are hard to find, as well- and the resultant skills would be pretty rare. One side effect of this would be that players would try to keep those rare quests from becoming well-known, so that the reward skill is only known by as few as possible… theoretically, you wouldn’t have walkthroughs for all the quests posted on the net.
Incubus, could you link to some places where you see this happening? I’ve been prety fanatic about reading WoW stuff, and it was on my primary server where the imbecilic warrior “protest” occurred, and I’ve simply not seen any of that stuff happening.
Well, as a person with a paladin as a main, I’ll try to do my best to keep this in Cafe Society.
In theory, the two faction-only classes should at least somewhat balance each other out, or at least there should be some sort of advantage of some part of the faction over the other. In truth, this has not happened. I doubt anyone would say that the paladin is evenly matched with the shaman (in fact, it’s probably not even close). Furthermore, the Alliance-only doesn’t have any real advantages over any of the Horde, not even the ones they should have over the Undead (probably the highest % race of all Horde players, and for good reason…grumble).
I’ve also been to the paladin forums, and they certainly aren’t pretty (mostly a malaise of “when’s the next nerf coming down the pipe?”) and they sure didn’t fill me with confidence to continue on into the endgame portion (right now, my main is a 43) or even continue on with my WoW account (I’ve had a blue bar for more than a month and a half).
It might be interesting to do it as part of the world itself (the more people it a class, it loses something) which would encourage people to spread out among clases and characters. But I think most of the games go way too high in the numbers and tweak it far too much.
If there weren’t boning it up every minute, they shouldn’t have to patch the character abilities. They shouldn’t be nerfing or boosting any characters ever.I suspect they don’t mathematically sit down and calculate out how it will work beforehand, is the problem, though that may not hold true anymore.
I think that the PvP rewards system could be used to balance things out. If the number of rankings given out is a static number for each class for both the Horde and Alliance. That would mean that for the classes that were underrepresented, there would be a higher chance that a person could get a higher PvP ranking, as they would only compete with other folks of the same class. It would give people an incentive to create characters of that faction/class.
Personally, I’m fine with paladins being inherently inferior to shamans in PvP, as long as shamans are inherently inferior to other classes, and paladins superior so other classes. One giant game of roshambo. I think that Blizzard has stated that a couple of times, but it would be good to hear from them which classes were intended to be superior to which other classes. I’m guessing that paladins were supposed to be superior to rogues and warriors (in terms of PvP) since it’s pretty obvious that Blizzard intentionally disallowed any kind of snare or ranged attack. (Yes, there are items that give those kinds of powers, but they have their own restrictions.) I think it’s clear, though, that a rogue played properly will never be defeated by a paladin, although a paladin played properly will be able to force the fight into a stalemate. I don’t know about the balance against warriors, though.