Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Shurrikhan]

Players just don't want simplicity, they want depth and engagement.

Modern Dev: *Sees modular and intuitive elements of difficulty that allow for a smooth and comprehensible yet eventful and exciting difficulty curve over the whole of the player experience.*
Also Modern Dev: "Look at all that wonderful simplicity!" *Ignores the forest. Stares at tree.*

[Stanelis]

Maybe you are right. To me, it seemed the right time for this debate because in three days the MMO which arguably is the most popular of all time will relaunch its 1.12 version, a project run by a company that recently went full "shareholders revenue". An hypothetical success of the product could completely redesign the balances of the MMO market and influence future design choices.

If vanilla wow is sucessful in the long run maybe some developper will look back at things and notice how the genre got trapped in the evolutionary dead end it is currently in, and then start to develop something new with the same principles. But don't expect this to happen before a few years.

[DPZ2]

If vanilla wow is sucessful in the long run maybe some developper will look back at things and notice how the genre got trapped in the evolutionary dead end it is currently in, and then start to develop something new with the same principles. But don't expect this to happen before a few years.

RIP Wildstar.

[Ultimatecalibur]

And that problem is the staleness of encounter design. Every single choice in terms of balance, class design and homogenisation was taken just because the devs sticked to the same encounter model from day 1. Imagine a different world: in a world with mob kiting, ranged jobs would be mandatory; in a world where healers are needed to separate ways from the rest of the group, RDM heals and actions like raise would be a hundred times more meta definining than DPS numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I like combat in this game, but I think the current system with circular/square arenas and (interesting and challenging) mechanics is basically gutting class design.

I want to tell you a bit about a game that released just over 6 years ago. It had the things you are asking for but due to various reasons things did not work out like you would hope they would.

The game had a fair number of uniquely shaped boss arenas with varied terrain. In fact the game's most difficult fight on release was set on the palm of a gigantic dragon's hand. These irregular arenas while cool had their fair share of problems; things like ranged classes being able to avoid a mechanic because they could stand on top of a pile of sand and players failing to dodge a fight's mechanics because the irregular terrain prevented them from moving away fast enough. From the second update cycle and on the designers ended up changing to flat arenas to prevent these problems.

Homogenization came about because the designers needed to insure that any balanced party composition had all the tools they needed to complete content. Early on in the games life the first fight of high end content required 2 different characters that could interrupt a mini-boss's attack. There were only 3 classes that could do the interrupt out of the 9 classes the game had. One major boss fight could be cheesed easily (before the nerf) because the boss could be stun locked by the one class that had a gcd stun.

Kiting used to be a thing in some of the high end fights, but due to their only being one ranged non-caster at the time that class became a mandatory class to complete content.

For those that have not realized it yet: I am describing FFXIV between patches 2.0 and 2.55. The designers were originally doing what you asked but problems and complaints caused them to slowly stop doing them over the course of their first expansion cycle.

Every class is tailored around DPS numbers because every activity in the game gravitate towards this dicretion. By patch 5.1 we will probably be playing 3 jobs instead of 3 roles, the differences being just in rotation nuances; the question that worries me is: what will happen in the next patches? Will we ever reach the desired “perfect and purely balanced” world, where in return it doesn’t matter at all which job you choose to play?

Truth be told the DpS focus of this game is more the result of all high end fights having tight hard enrage timers. Its hard to not be dps focused when completion of a fight is more determined by doing X amount of damage before X minutes are up than being able to repeatably do mechanics.

[Stanelis]

RIP Wildstar.

Wildstar was marketed as something oldschool but it was actually designed along the same principles as modern MMOs. And I cleared the raids on this mmo back in the day.

[SturmChurro]

If vanilla wow is sucessful in the long run maybe some developper will look back at things and notice how the genre got trapped in the evolutionary dead end it is currently in, and then start to develop something new with the same principles. But don't expect this to happen before a few years.

I'm not seeing it, classic WoW certainly has boosted WoW's subscribers a significant amount, but classic I think is a big gimmick. It will probably keep a fair few dedicated players, there is definitly a demand with so many people playing on those private servers, but I think the mass audience will fade fairly quickly. I'd say within a few weeks to a couple months at most. Even with the patches to come.

Personally I hate sandbox MMO's and prefer themepark mmorpgs. I prefer a game that has more structure and a set path, rather than "make your own fun". They need to find a perfect balance between class identity;unique play, and the true "balance" they are going for. While we will never get truly what you want in this game. It would require a complete overhaul of everything, and probably the introduction of support classes. I however do think they could probably do more with their encounter designs within the bounds they have chosen. Personally, I think the dungeon design is fine, however I think they should also add more varied content, or rather, more content in general. The structure is too simple, and more would be better. As it is, it's throwaway dungeon, trial, extreme, savage.

Making the classes more homogenized is a side-effect of them simply trying to lessen their workload, in my opinion.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Personally, I think the dungeon design is fine, however I think they should also add more varied content, or rather, more content in general. The structure is too simple, and more would be better. As it is, it's throwaway dungeon, trial, extreme, savage.

You left out Alliance Raid. They have also added 2 more reoccurring content types Deep Dungeons (PotD and HoH) and Exploration Zones (Diadem and Eureka). Part of the problem with 5.0 is that it really needed to include either a deep dungeon or lvl 80 exploration zone between 5.0 and 5.05.

Making the classes more homogenized is a side-effect of them simply trying to lessen their workload, in my opinion.

More them trying to limit outside design cases based on job differences. I can thing of several cases where problems occurred due to different jobs in the same role not having the same capabilities.

[CapricaLangley]

I want to tell you a bit about a game that released just over 6 years ago. It had the things you are asking for but due to various reasons things did not work out like you would hope they would.
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Good read, I actually remember something about just the first patch because i was part of ARR beta and took a long break afterwards. By the way I didn't want to list down examples of good and bad design. Some of the things you mentioned were good ideas, but flawed or badly executed. Some were just bad. Some other design choices, like world bosses and non-instanced dungeons, or unexpected results, like people tanking with Ninja in FFXI, are just a beautiful magic that happens when you are not tunnel visioning on design rails you yourself built.

Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.

This is probably a terrible idea, just wanted to say that we are too biased because of mechanics we know from the past, things we saw succeed in other games or interesting ideas that didn't work as expected.

[RokkuEkkusu]

It's an unfortunate double-edged sword we'll have to deal in FFXIV with the "High DPS" mentality in stuff that used outside of EX trials, Savage Raids, and Ultimates.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Good read, I actually remember something about just the first patch because i was part of ARR beta and took a long break afterwards. By the way I didn't want to list down examples of good and bad design. Some of the things you mentioned were good ideas, but flawed or badly executed. Some were just bad. Some other design choices, like world bosses and non-instanced dungeons, or unexpected results, like people tanking with Ninja in FFXI, are just a beautiful magic that happens when you are not tunnel visioning on design rails you yourself built.

That "beautiful magic" of emergent play while it can be cool was more often than not part of flawed design. Ninja tanking in FFXI was pretty much a failure of design just like Tank jobs (Samurai and possibly Dark Knight) being better at dpsing than their intended role.

Instanced Dungeons came into existence because of problems with players arguing over non-instanced dungeon areas after capacity reached a certain level.

Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.

That is pretty much the reoccurring version of the Doom debuff that is cleansed by healing the victim to max hp and similar "don't let the victim die or it is a wipe" mechanics have appeared in various EX and Savage fights. Burst healing checks are not that unusual in things like the Extreme Trials, Alliance Raids and Savage Raids.

This is probably a terrible idea, just wanted to say that we are too biased because of mechanics we know from the past, things we saw succeed in other games or interesting ideas that didn't work as expected.

That is fair, but I also wish to point out that the other side of the coin is that many changes have very good reasons for being made and being different just to be different is not always good. "Homogenization" sometimes is sometimes a very good thing.