Xendran
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Balance is a lot of things.
Balance is in a great place when each intended playstyle has at least one competitively viable build that does not take above average effort to use or create.
These builds should be equal in win ratios. Based on the class themes and design choices of ed, the minimum we can get away with on ED is 3 equally viable builds per class*: Focus, Support and Main Stat (Str for merc, Dex for hunter, Tech for mage).
To bring these builds into a good competitive balance, build archetypes need to have an equal ratio of Strengths and Weaknesses.
Having 4 main stats is a very good choice, because you can add in a neutral matchup for each stat as well, instead of a pure Rock Paper Scissors matchup. This increases the number of meta appropriate builds at any one time, and is especially beneficial for players who do not follow the meta as it gives them a higher chance of picking a build that isn't the worst choice in the meta at that time.
The original Epicduel actually appears to have been set up in this style.
If you look at the stats (again of the original ED) we see:
OG Epicduel Matchup Graph
quote:
Support specialized in crits and deflections and only has room to either boost one defense to a reasonable level or leave them both fairly low. Strength builds carve right through that with their undeflectable damage source having no cost.
Strength specialized in having multiple types of damage and multiple ways to constantly apply them with low energy cost. Because of this 'freebie' scaling, most strength skills are weapon-based rather than unavoidable. Dexterity builds to absorb most of this damage with blocks.
Dexterity specialized in physical defense and blocks. The offensive skills are fairly versatile and unspecialized. Technology builds bypass this with energy damage and unblockable skills, while maintaining high resistance that dexterity characters cannot deal with in the way that other stats can.
Technology builds specialized in resistance and unblockable damage. Support builds ability to put out extreme physical damage helps solidify this matchup. The ability to Crit to cut through their resistance, as well as the Tech Mage's ability to lower technology with a support-powered skill further reinforces this matchup.
Once you get a core system like this in place, you use it to tweak your matchups by adjusting the tools each playstyle has available. (A "tool" referring to the classes ability to do something or deal with something. Defense Matrix is a tool against physical damage, for example.
The groundwork was there, but lacking the design skill necessary to flesh it out into a combat system with depth, variety and longevity.
Since the game never got past this phase and has instead been stuck repeating it over and over, we ended up with no variety in skills because all the time has been spent trying to get the combat to actually feel right, let alone having to deal with constantly changing the game with new skills.
Consider how ridiculously long of a time it's been that they've been balancing the same skills and stats we've had for half a decade. You'd think after 5 years something would have clicked, and that's the perfect thing to exemplify the fact that balance is more than just about tweaking the skills and stats.
When we got our first expansion, the tree new classes we got weren't even fully new, they had repeat skills. Then we never got another expansion.
Because of this, not only do we end up with a stagnant meta, but every little issue with every aspect of the balance will start to reveal itself overtime due to stagnation, familiarity, and analysis over time.
Variety can directly compensate balance as long as there is no obvious best build rolling around. While it may seem like increasing the number of skills increases the workload at having a balanced playing field, it's not as black and white of an issue as people think.
Having a large variety of skills brings along with it the inherent understanding that not every possible combination of skills is good, nor should they be.
If you have a whole bunch of different ways to play something, it doesn't matter as much if an update causes one of them to be underpowered because you can just switch to something else in that playstyle. It will still be effective as long as you are using a meta-appropriate playstyle at the time.
If your playstyle only has one possible good combination of skills and it becomes underpowered becuase of an update, your entire playstyle is now worthless and your class effectively unplayable.
At this point, it's obvious which choice players will pick between finding a better game, or paying money for a class change that doesn't even permanently unlock it in a 7 year old flash game.
"The developers ruined my build for no reason and want me to pay them for the "privilege" of changing to a good one? They'll probably do this again next month too, I'm done with this."
This makes players view of the balance become extremely poor, which is another key factor: The perception of balance from players does not represent the balance of the game.
It doesn't matter if the game is 95% balanced if it's designed in a way where there are so few skills that it's highly likely that any failed balance update will render your build unplayable while having no similar options available to replace it.
The ultimate goal though as a game comes down to being fun for the player.
I genuinely think players in EpicDuel would be far less upset about the state of the balance if we were getting batches new skills every so often. The more skills there are to work together, the more likely it is that there's a good combination for each play style.
This means you can work FAR less on bringing weak playstyles up to power, and instead can focus on the builds that go above the power curve and bring them back down.
With so few skills in the game right now, bad combinations are considered imbalanced rather than just being a bad combination. If tech mage had 30 skills and you found a combo that seemed like it would work well but doesn't, you think "Guess i had better tweak the skill choices" rather than "These skills are underpowered and nonviable, but they should be because it's the only way to play like this".
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Now for that little asterisk from the start:
*Because it costs real money to change classes and you cannot permanently unlock a class, you are pretty much forced to make each playstyle equally viable on each class, rather than any sort of thematic or limited choice (An example being if Focus + Tech + Support were the "mage stats", with few or no effective pure str or dex mage builds).
That means you would need at least 30 equally viable builds (5 playstyles x 6 classes). Not because that's what is best for the game design, but because unless you do this, the design of the class change system costs you money in lost players that quit when the meta shifts to a point where their class is borderline unplayable. I'd bet you the money lost from players quitting over this is more than the money gained from class changing if you look at the big picture of the game's entire life span.
You would have to spend more money on development time in order to achieve the same result in terms of balance, while simultaneously engaging in high-risk behavior with your player retention by not only putting a price on something that successful competitive games offer for free, but a high price at that. While there is a free credits option, it's out of reach of the 99% of players to use it once, let alone multiple times as the meta shifts, or let alone multiple times in one day to test something.
The alternative, which we have currently, is to have the restrictive class system in place but without the extra balance work done that you would need on top of an unrestricted system.
We can all see how that one turned out.
In the end, like i said before, balance is a lot of things.
Balance is variety, competition, player perception, numbers, meta cycles, win ratios, matchmaking, and more.
What creates a balanced situation in a game depends on the circumstances of the game, with ED being a great example of a non-gameplay feature massively interfering with the player perception and meta cycle aspects of balance, in a way where compensating for it would require a large amount of extra balance work compared to not having it.
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I'd like to address a comment Satofu made:
quote:
Ideally no class should be a hard counter towards another class
Something to consider here is that while this statement is true, it's actually not a bad idea to have a stat be a hard-counter to another, especially if you introduce a way for the stat getting hard-countered to actually negate the counter at the expense of something else. Brings really interesting build making decisions to the table based on what kind of builds you are seeing.
< Message edited by Xendran -- 10/25/2016 8:46:22 >
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