#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Magikazam]

Agreed. My experience with PvP games being balanced for the top players has been nothing short of horrible. In games where roles exist, the vast majority of them are DPS mains and that leads to every other role being nerfed to the ground, which in turns alienates large parts of the playerbase.

It depend what you mean by ''balanced for the top player'' I've never really seen a game like that at all tbh.

WoW raid design was balanced for top player, but not the classes. You could clear contents even with hillariously bad classes or spec. Hell I did some legion raid on dps feral, during the time it was extremly weak due to the last rework gutting it energy management and lowering it dps greatly.

League of Legend don't balance for top player especially either. They mostly ignore the ''casual'' meta and focus more on midcore meta, all while just nerfing/buffing random stuff around to shake the Meta up.

I don't think those 2 games are near perfection in term of balancing, but I rarely see people bringing real proof that some game are balanced around top player.

[Packetdancer]

It depend what you mean by ''balanced for the top player'' I've never really seen a game like that at all tbh.

WildStar.

Sort of.

To elaborate: WildStar was made by a bunch of the original WoW devs and a bunch of the original Everquest devs. And there were a lot of old-school raiders who were like "oh man, it would be amazing if you had those 40-man raids like in the old days, that you really had to work to unlock and clear!" And the devs listened, and they tuned the entire endgame around those (loud) requests. Moreover, the fact that they made the endgame combat pretty tricky led to a rather dramatic difficulty curve that was more like a difficulty cliff after a certain level.

As you might guess from the fact that WildStar is not still around, this did not end well.

Because it turned out that:

1. The loud old-school raiders were vastly outnumbered by people who just wanted to play an MMO, and when they suddenly slammed into a difficulty wall where the combat difficulty suddenly scaled dramatically upwards, many went "nope."
2. Those who stuck around past the difficulty increase got to endgame, and found there was little to do but the large-scale raiding, so then many of them noped out.
3. And even the loud old-school raiders had things like "jobs" and "families" and "social obligations" and it turned out that a solid chunk even of that group didn't actually want what they said they wanted.

Mind you, the focus on Serious Endgame Raiding to the exclusion of everything else was not the only decision that led to WildStar's downfall, but it was sure a contributing factor. And while it wasn't exactly "balancing for this specific group," it is sure an example of "heeding the requests of the 'top players' to the exclusion of all else can be harmful."

(Despite its flaws, I do miss WildStar, though.)

[SeriousPan]

Mind you, the focus on Serious Endgame Raiding to the exclusion of everything else was not the only decision that led to WildStar's downfall, but it was sure a contributing factor. And while it wasn't exactly "balancing for this specific group," it is sure an example of "heeding the requests of the 'top players' to the exclusion of all else can be harmful."

(Despite its flaws, I do miss WildStar, though.)

It didn't help that a lot of countries had wildly high ping when playing, like Australia, and were essentially blocked off from feasibly doing any end game content. I loved Wildstar and I miss it all the time but yeah for all the reasons you said it shot itself in the foot. Hell of a cautionary tale for MMOs.