Thread: 4.1 patch notes

Originally Posted by Shirolumi

The developers recently said that when they balance PvP, they are doing it with The Feast (4v4) in mind.

Heh, I did read that and I'm still chuckling about it, because the implications of that are grave.

I mean, do you know what balance is? Imagine a pair of scales. The two scales should keep an even weight and the indicator should remain horizontal.

And so, if you weigh a mouse against an elephant, you'll find that the scales are very uneven, the mouse is going to sit considerably higher than the elephant, the indicator is skewed.
You can solve that issue easily by putting an elephant and a mouse on both sides of the scales, though. Suddenly, the scales seem a lot more even and you only have to make sure that any pair of elephants and mice you put against each other are roughly equally heavy, which means you only need to balance your elephants against other elephants and your mice against other mice. And then you add a Lion to one side and a dog to the other, realize they're unbalanced again and pull the same trick again to have a mouse, a lion, a dog and an elephant on both sides of the scales.

That is precisely what they are doing when balancing around 4vs4 Feast, because 4vs4 Feast has a forced role composition. It's a dreadfully defeatist statement, because you can balance "anything" without putting in any actual balancing effort by simply putting the same things on both sides of the scales. You don't even need to balance the jobs within the roles if you simply match every job only against the same job, if every summoner can only play against another summoner and every WHM only against another WHM, then it doesn't matter if a scholar is ten times as strong as WHM, they'll never play each other anyway, so the scholar won't have an advantage from that - until they meet in frontlines or other modes and completely rek the WHM. And the same applies to roles in general.
The deeper meaning of balance is the ability to substitute two things without changing the overall weight, which is apparent when you play around with a pair of scales. 100 gram chocolate weigh the same as 100 gram tomatoes, they are balanced and you can freely pick either if you need 100 gram for anything. If you cannot substitute two things, they aren't balanced - the chocolate and tomatoes may be balanced in terms of weight, but they aren't in terms of nutrients, so you cannot substitute them in that regard. A forced role composition admits that roles cannot be substituted and thus, it admits that there is no balance to be found. Balancing around that means that you don't and won't care about even glaring imbalances between the roles.
That in itself is a terrible statement. And that in turn makes any existing imbalance within the respective roles ten times worse, because it means that even though they only balance 3-4 jobs (the options within a role) against each other at a time and don't care about the rest, they still manage to create considerable imbalances with such a limited balancing scope.

I'm surprised people aren't more outraged about that, but I wager most people simply don't think about it. Or maybe the elephant is happy if he can jump off the scales and go into a room without people talking about him. Who knows? Either way, it is not a very confidence inspiring statement of theirs. But it does explain a lot about their overall balancing approach.


And as an addendum: In a game with group synergies (AoEs, buffs, CC etc), it is necessary to balance for a set group size, because they derive their value from the amount of directly or indirectly affected players and the total weight of a job thus depends on party size (See also: Trick attack value in 1-4-8-24 man groups - the dog is heavier the more people sit on the scales). You need to nerf jobs with such effects down from their base power level to be balanced in a group and the amount of nerf depends on the value of the effect which depends on the size of the group. In that regard, setting a group size to balance for is not just fine, but necessary. But they failed to establish the basis to nerf from.