Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Edax]

OP, you bring up good and interesting points, many of which I've pondered myself as well. I tend to agree with much of what has already been said by others. Some of my favourite RPGs of all time threw balance out the window and ended up being better for it - Final Fantasy Tactics, to name but one.

Part of the fun of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was building some disgustingly broken class combinations, but that's kind of thing you can only get away with in a single player game. If there are broken classes in a multiplayer game, the entire meta shifts around it which will annoy the majority of players because they are being forced by said meta to use the broken classes.

What I mean to say is this: The debate of balance vs. variety in games is a hard enough one already, as the two often come at each other's expense, but with so many classes and people who play them, and subsequently many, many interests at odds with each other, I just think it's the easier and less stressful path for the devs to balance, and thus homogenize, as much as they can, both from a game design and business standpoint. Things like depth, variety and class identiy will necessarily suffer from this, and this is indeed a problem, but I feel that the more discerning player base who favours more depth and variety while accepting a certain loss of balance will always be in the minority.

Yes, I remember WoW when it was "young" it had tons of class identity and even broken racial stats. It was all so horrifically unbalanced and I still remember the videos made of players who hated it. If you weren't in an optimum spec or class, you were basically worthless and under extreme pressure to just start an alt with the "correct" class. Homogenization fixes this to some extent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5mD1n4v2JA