Automatic Job Balance System

[TwiibieTwuu]

I like the idea of an AI controling the game. When one class gets overpowered and becomes the new go to and you que up as it, the
"Hydaelyn ALgorithmic computer" denies you saying: "I'm sorry PLAYER NAME, I'm afraid I can't let you do that."

[LeoLupinos]

It's actually much more simple than what you guys are thinking.

Let's say the maximum potency per second BLM do is 100, and SAM is 99. This is the maximum these two Jobs will ever do on it's own.
Now, let's say Eden Savage every BLM still do a max of 100, but every SAM is doing a max of 96 because of the encounter design. The Auto balance system would buff SAM in order to reach 99 potency per second.
That's it. The success of this system entirely depends o how SE will program the data collection of it. Just by looking at FFlogs we can see that every encounter has different Job rankings, and this is because of the encounter design.

This can even be a not automatic system. But SE still needs to implement this feature to adjust inbalance of encounters between Jobs.

[PatronasCharm]

Instead of an AI just have a devoted team in focusing on Job Gameplay. AND, perhaps have that team, tweak jobs weekly / bi-weekly, and even every major patch have some fun changes to jobs.

I don't like pointing other games out, but something I enjoy about Destiny is that they have that "Weekly communication" news letter, "This week at Bungie?"

I believe we just need to ask for more transparency on a week to week basis, instead of having to constantly wait for a Live Letter or a 5.08 patch, 5.09 patch, hell, 5.1 patch etc. it seems that a lot of players are eagerly anticipating some sort of news that "hey, this week at Square Enix we've been researching some ongoing issues with [insert Job Here] or hey, Gunbreakers we hear you, your sounds sound like a wet towel being smacked into someone's behind" we hear you, we're working on a fix.

If they had a devoted team that communicated to the players, I know I for one would be calm knowing that the team is looking at these potency issues with certain jobs.

Now, SE, give Red Mage some love, and give them water and ice magic, thank you =D

[LeoLupinos]

Instead of an AI just have a devoted team in focusing on Job Gameplay. AND, perhaps have that team, tweak jobs weekly / bi-weekly, and even every major patch have some fun changes to jobs.

I don't like pointing other games out, but something I enjoy about Destiny is that they have that "Weekly communication" news letter, "This week at Bungie?"

I believe we just need to ask for more transparency on a week to week basis, instead of having to constantly wait for a Live Letter or a 5.08 patch, 5.09 patch, hell, 5.1 patch etc. it seems that a lot of players are eagerly anticipating some sort of news that "hey, this week at Square Enix we've been researching some ongoing issues with [insert Job Here] or hey, Gunbreakers we hear you, your sounds sound like a wet towel being smacked into someone's behind" we hear you, we're working on a fix.

If they had a devoted team that communicated to the players, I know I for one would be calm knowing that the team is looking at these potency issues with certain jobs.

Now, SE, give Red Mage some love, and give them water and ice magic, thank you =D

Perfectly stated. Every Job balance feels like forever.
And, it feels like if we don't ever complain or send them feedback they will do nothing. Like, FFlogs are there for them to look at if themselves don't have a source of information, and yet they say "players are complaining about x job damage" instead of "we noticed a disadvantage of melee jobs in x encounter by collecting data from encounters".

[Makeda]

The problem is that the goal is not to make every job do equal damage. The goal is to have some do other things as well.

If I have an ability that provides a group wide mitigation or movement buff or that can give me intense mobility... how much DPS should I lose for that is pretty fuzzy and can often depend on things like player skill. That’s just some of the reasons dancer SPS is low. Does the community value that high mobility more than they would another X points of DPS? What if it’s equal value? How does an automated system know which to favor? What if it’s equal today but tomorrow the community has a preference?
What is the neef is because the community has too much of a preference? As in weaken a job to encourage other jobs to be played...

A major amount of balance is actually balancing not the numbers but the moods and expectations of the players and the design team. Something best left to human hands.

[Mystrum]

I believe we just need to ask for more transparency on a week to week basis, instead of having to constantly wait for a Live Letter or a 5.08 patch, 5.09 patch, hell, 5.1 patch etc. it seems that a lot of players are eagerly anticipating some sort of news that "hey, this week at Square Enix we've been researching some ongoing issues with [insert Job Here] or hey, Gunbreakers we hear you, your sounds sound like a wet towel being smacked into someone's behind" we hear you, we're working on a fix.

If they had a devoted team that communicated to the players, I know I for one would be calm knowing that the team is looking at these potency issues with certain jobs.

We have a dedicated and devoted team, however what you desire is more communication.

That said, it took over a year to create new formula for damage calculations in encounters and overworld with an overhaul of combat systems. Tweaks occur at patch intervals and major changes happen in planned segments. The Chinese Fanfest translation gave an incredible amount of insight into how YoshiP and the FFIX Team plan their resources and how it is mapped out over a two year development period and the patches therien while coordinating all teams involved.

I am going to sound incredibly patronizing saying this, but to expect at least four different teams (Encounter, Job, Coding, and Translation) on the FFXIV Dev team to bend over backwards in their already full schedule to sit down with community Reps for every region and YoshiP to detail every bit of their work just so a few people can feel better about what may or may not be in development for every job on weekly basis is absurd.

It is a wonderful notion I agree with the sentiment honestly. That said SE is a Japanese video game developer, not an American one. There are social and cultural precedents in office environments that differ greatly from Western preconceptions which must be acknowledged. The easiest way I can sum this up is the Vulcan proverb from StarTrek "Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." In this case as it is a need of the few it would be illogical to deviate from an effective schedule that has been used since HW. If the state of the business demands it then you can expect change.

I realize this is a poignant response, and we are all human in the end after it is all said and done. So we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

It's actually much more simple than what you guys are thinking.

Let's say the maximum potency per second BLM do is 100, and SAM is 99. This is the maximum these two Jobs will ever do on it's own.
Now, let's say Eden Savage every BLM still do a max of 100, but every SAM is doing a max of 96 because of the encounter design. The Auto balance system would buff SAM in order to reach 99 potency per second.
That's it. The success of this system entirely depends o how SE will program the data collection of it. Just by looking at FFlogs we can see that every encounter has different Job rankings, and this is because of the encounter design.

This can even be a not automatic system. But SE still needs to implement this feature to adjust inbalance of encounters between Jobs.

Encounters are not designed to have everyone do the same damage outputs. And that is taken into account in the calculations and the overall fundamental design. YoshiP explained in the SHB Job Preview live letter that they look at the "Role" first and then move from Pure DPS down to DPS with Utility. Pure DPS will and or should be at the top of the list as BLM is. They recognized that SAM was not and have started tweaking as required to fit that paradigm. In the Ranged Physical Role as an example it is MCH > BRD > DNC, with MCH having the highest personal dps potential to the DNC having the lowest but the largest group enhancement potential. It is on the players to take the tools given in their chosen job to make that job achieve its maximum designed potential in the framework created by the game designers. If there is a glaring fault in the chosen design the Dev team will make the choice to change it. They themselves do play this game as well.

And if I may be so bold how would a composer know the beauty of different conductors and orchestras playing their music with the varying tones and pace if they are all uniform and the same! Where is the exaltation of practicing your job and seeing improvement as you master it? How would you know when the player who does nothing to prepare themselves does the same output as someone who spent weeks honing themselves?

This is not about numbers it is fundamentally about a mind set. A mind set that I can only see as wanting to turn combat in FFXIV into that of a mobile game or something you could play on a tablet. WoW did that and look where that got them along with the other poor design choices.

On a technical level the very system you want even if done by real people is only suited for PVP centric MMO's whos source code has been designed with instance specific controlled encounters or mobile games with limited skill sets. In those settings Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) works just fine. In FFXIV we have Overworld combat, Instanced Combat, PvP Combat (I list it separately because its done separately with its own skills), Raid Combat, and Solo Trial Combat. All of these are worked with in job balancing were talking the flying spaghetti monster from hell in coding trying to put DDA into all of that. And it would have to be uniform or portions of the community would scream from the deepest pit of the seven hells to the very pinnacle of the heavens. FFXIV just does not have the hardware, software, or human base required to do this cost effectively at this time. Even then if it was integrated it would be done as a tool to make it easier for the Dev team to do their jobs not to make it so every player no matter how good or bad they are does the same damage.

[LeoLupinos]

Encounters are not designed to have everyone do the same damage outputs. And that is taken into account in the calculations and the overall fundamental design. YoshiP explained in the SHB Job Preview live letter that they look at the "Role" first and then move from Pure DPS down to DPS with Utility. Pure DPS will and or should be at the top of the list as BLM is. They recognized that SAM was not and have started tweaking as required to fit that paradigm. In the Ranged Physical Role as an example it is MCH > BRD > DNC, with MCH having the highest personal dps potential to the DNC having the lowest but the largest group enhancement potential. It is on the players to take the tools given in their chosen job to make that job achieve its maximum designed potential in the framework created by the game designers. If there is a glaring fault in the chosen design the Dev team will make the choice to change it. They themselves do play this game as well.

And if I may be so bold how would a composer know the beauty of different conductors and orchestras playing their music with the varying tones and pace if they are all uniform and the same! Where is the exaltation of practicing your job and seeing improvement as you master it? How would you know when the player who does nothing to prepare themselves does the same output as someone who spent weeks honing themselves?

This is not about numbers it is fundamentally about a mind set. A mind set that I can only see as wanting to turn combat in FFXIV into that of a mobile game or something you could play on a tablet. WoW did that and look where that got them along with the other poor design choices.

On a technical level the very system you want even if done by real people is only suited for PVP centric MMO's whos source code has been designed with instance specific controlled encounters or mobile games with limited skill sets. In those settings Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) works just fine. In FFXIV we have Overworld combat, Instanced Combat, PvP Combat (I list it separately because its done separately with its own skills), Raid Combat, and Solo Trial Combat. All of these are worked with in job balancing were talking the flying spaghetti monster from hell in coding trying to put DDA into all of that. And it would have to be uniform or portions of the community would scream from the deepest pit of the seven hells to the very pinnacle of the heavens. FFXIV just does not have the hardware, software, or human base required to do this cost effectively at this time. Even then if it was integrated it would be done as a tool to make it easier for the Dev team to do their jobs not to make it so every player no matter how good or bad they are does the same damage.

Why do you think every job will do the same damage with this system?
I explained that it will do little adjustments to the damage just for it to reach the EXPECTED damage for that encounter for that Job. It does not mean BLM that do 14k will make all of other jobs do 14k too. I does mean that If BLM is underperforming in that encounter, because there is no time to cast spells and is doing 13k, it will get a buff for that encounter to reach the expected damage of 14k. I'm saying damage, but in reality it needs to be potency. I'm sure every Job has a maximum output of potency per second that no matter what they do, they only reach that number. The only time where they don't reach that expected number is bases on encounter design, ex caster not having time to cast, melee not having time to stay near the target to damage it, boss jumping off the targetable view and thus expiring Job buffs etc...

It's not homogenization, it's balance. Because there is already a expected ranking in personal DPS in the dev team creation, and some encounters make it impossible to reach the expected value.

[NekoNova]

Why do you think every job will do the same damage with this system?
I explained that it will do little adjustments to the damage just for it to reach the EXPECTED damage for that encounter for that Job. It does not mean BLM that do 14k will make all of other jobs do 14k too. I does mean that If BLM is underperforming in that encounter, because there is no time to cast spells and is doing 13k, it will get a buff for that encounter to reach the expected damage of 14k. I'm saying damage, but in reality it needs to be potency. I'm sure every Job has a maximum output of potency per second that no matter what they do, they only reach that number. The only time where they don't reach that expected number is bases on encounter design, ex caster not having time to cast, melee not having time to stay near the target to damage it, boss jumping off the targetable view and thus expiring Job buffs etc...

It's not homogenization, it's balance. Because there is already a expected ranking in personal DPS in the dev team creation, and some encounters make it impossible to reach the expected value.

Classes not reaching the expected damage is not an issue of the class needing buffs, it's an issue of that class needing better players, unless there's a fundamental design flaw in the class, which needs to be addressed by human intervention, not an automated number tweaking system. I'm really curious how you're going to define a system that basically needs to rewrite mechanics and aspects of a class to fix the design, like what they are planning for NIN and SMN in the next patch.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Would it be possible to implement a system that collects data from all encounters and changes the base damage of the Job automatically everyday differently for each relevant duty?

For now, I see that FFlogs is used by the players to judge if a Job has unbalanced numbers. Isn't this process the same for every time a Job Balance patch is implemented? And if it's always the same... Program it!

By adding a Trait (or invisible trait) to every Job that has a variable number that adds or subtract primary stats (INT/STR...) based on the data collected for each encounter, the dev team could put their time into other things and only focus on balancing Job internal potencies.

It would surely take time. But once it's done, it would be rewarding for everyone.

@Edit: Let's say the maximum potency per second BLM do is 100, and SAM is 99. This is the maximum these two Jobs will ever do on it's own.
Now, let's say Eden Savage every BLM still do a max of 100, but every SAM is doing a max of 96 because of the encounter design. The Auto balance system would buff SAM in order to reach 99 potency per second.
That's it. The success of this system entirely depends o how SE will program the data collection of it. Just by looking at FFlogs we can see that every encounter has different Job rankings, and this is because of the encounter design.

This can even be a not automatic system. But SE still needs to implement this feature to adjust inbalance of encounters between Jobs.

Disclaimer: Obviously, it is my humble example of implementation, and I'm aware of the level of spaghetti code FFXIV has. But even with spaghetti code FFXIV has some of the best systems of any MMO, and this could be another one. Since the game tend to follow the same formula for everything combat-wise, this system is imaginable, and I believe if anyone can imagine it, it can to be programmed.

Let's discuss.

[LeoLupinos]

Classes not reaching the expected damage is not an issue of the class needing buffs, it's an issue of that class needing better players, unless there's a fundamental design flaw in the class, which needs to be addressed by human intervention, not an automated number tweaking system. I'm really curious how you're going to define a system that basically needs to rewrite mechanics and aspects of a class to fix the design, like what they are planning for NIN and SMN in the next patch.

I already said multiple times how it would buff the damage, read properly, please. It's all in the first post tbh.