Balance, Accessibility, Diversity

[SaberMaxwell]

Someone in the "will you accept total balance" thread brought up that "balance" may not be the enemy of diversity so much as accessibility may be. But balance is so much more fun of a piñata that the conversation got stifled in there, and one could argue pursuing that conversation in that thread is off topic anyway. Hence new thread.

Honestly the issue could be they're pursuing balance *and* accessibility, so if we look at this as a triangle of "Balance, Accessibility, Diversity," what two would you pick and what would you drop?

[Kabooa]

Accessibility and Diversity.

We like to cry foul of 'balance' but the reality is that when we talk balance, it's almost always just a numbers issue, and we know that SE balances around the average of the lower end than it does around the average of the higher end. Number issues are easily solved by just scaling things up or down.

Diversity, however, is what makes playing different jobs exciting. Seeing the game through a different lens, seeing the problems and solutions an individual job is privy to, and having that widen your scope of the game.

Accessibility is a mixed bag. Almost all the complexity in the game is in clearly marked content, Normal - Hard - Extreme - Savage - Ultimate. However, it is better for content to be widely accessible as opposed to not - The gaming community will always find ways to add more challenge to content no matter how "easy" it is. That said, the game could use some more initial complexity with its jobs. Some more crunchy feedback for when you do things wrong and right. (RE: Tornado Kick Monk) As it currently stands, since Stormblood, you can generally hit about 80-85% of a job's maximum output with basic understanding of overall game knowledge.

[Wayfinder3]

Accessibility and Diversity.

We like to cry foul of 'balance' but the reality is that when we talk balance, it's almost always just a numbers issue, and we know that SE balances around the average of the lower end than it does around the average of the higher end. Number issues are easily solved by just scaling things up or down.

Diversity, however, is what makes playing different jobs exciting. Seeing the game through a different lens, seeing the problems and solutions an individual job is privy to, and having that widen your scope of the game.

Accessibility is a mixed bag. Almost all the complexity in the game is in clearly marked content, Normal - Hard - Extreme - Savage - Ultimate. However, it is better for content to be widely accessible as opposed to not - The gaming community will always find ways to add more challenge to content no matter how "easy" it is. That said, the game could use some more initial complexity with its jobs. Some more crunchy feedback for when you do things wrong and right. (RE: Tornado Kick Monk) As it currently stands, since Stormblood, you can generally hit about 80-85% of a job's maximum output with basic understanding of overall game knowledge.

I pretty much agree with this, Balance tends to just be a numbers issue and that can be tweaked. Accessibility and Diversity are job design specific and are much harder to determine once we reach a certain threshold of options available. In order for true diversity to take place, the content in the game would need to shift from it's dps heavy metagame. Until this happens, everything is largely better off similar but with added flavor much like tanks. The problem isn't completely with the jobs, it extends to the content too

[Nedkel]

You cant have everything.
People claiming accessible classes can be diverse and balanced are denying themselves.

Reality shown us already that in order to make each job accessible SE deleted certain mechanics from these jobs that made the diverse from the rest, thus making every jobs closer and closer in gameplay to each other. There is no other way to do that, you cant have engaging and enjoyable job that is easy to play and at the same level as the rest.
And its not like SE have no idea what they are doing, their team is balancing each job to the exact decimal, in fact there is NOT OTHER mmorpg on the market that has such a great balance between classes, this speaks for itself and people claiming SE are bad at balance are one big ignorants. So its not the problem with SE employees creativity and knowledge, but the share fact that leads us to simple equation.
Easy job + balanced = boring as hell

[Shurrikhan]

People claiming accessible classes can be diverse and balanced are denying themselves.

Developers claiming they can't are deluding or merely excusing themselves; at the core, they're unwilling to put in the effort and expense necessary to design fights that meaningfully accommodate varying composition-based strategies, usually overpowering whichever jobs/specs/classes have the fewest or least significant design idiosyncrasies.

As often as MMOs have made this claim before major homogeneity or streamlining changes, balance has more often worsened thereafter, not improved.

The bottleneck is development time and coordination between class designers and fight designers and how informed those designers are of player trends and compositional synergies -- all of which can produce higher qualities of balance+diversity when well managed -- not some grand, fatalistic compromise between making outputs effectively equal and inputs perceivably different.

[Vendalwind]

Personal choice. Id like diversity and balance. With diversity some will be accesible anyways, but of course ive always argued difficulty should be rewarded soooo. Im not really sure you can pick two perfectly.

If all classes are diverse, and some are difficult (inaccessable) then balance wont be perfect either because difficult classes aren't balanced via that alone.

If diverse and accesible are conflicting goals often, but honestly there is always room to grow both.

Arguments such as the ones i threw out above can be used in myriad ways to similar result for any pairing because our preposition statement is false OR not well enough defined.

Ie since many things people said above are sound arguments the proposition must fail cause the truths conflict.




You dont have to pick two. For lack of a better word "balance" between these three goals can grow upwords like a tetrahedron and the true goal of developers should be just to not ever forget one side.

[Shurrikhan]

@Main Topic

It depends what you mean by Balance. I don't care for every job to perform equally well in every comp in every fight. In fact I'd consider that likely a failure of design.

Ideally, the vast majority of jobs should each be able to slot into a slight majority of compositions and multiple compositions should be very near to each other in performance. However, if the difficulty as can be influenced by compositional choice via short-term checks are so insignificant that only long-term checks (e.g. beating enrage) matter, that too is generally going to be a failure of design. No concept of balance should have so little to form parity from.

A better balance is one in which you can pick your leniency on a level of what individual job bring to the table, what their synergies bring, and what the sum of their relevant capacities bring with more choices that feel "good" (or, "competitive") choices than feel "bad" (or, "sub-optimal"), which has more to do with how advantages are presented to players than it does actual parity. It should not mean that all parts are interchangeable. The closer we get to that point, the more noticeable (and negatively perceived) even the tiniest imbalances become because there's no variance in context or experience. If everything feels the same, and we've no agency over the fight except what numbers we throw at it, then gameplay really is at least half just number-crunching and gameplay becomes less and less about reaching success than just how quickly one can reach it. Difficulty comes to exist increasingly in leaderboards alone and inventiveness the result of precise detail in a single fight at a time rather than awareness, instinctive coordination, or general knowledge. That can work for some content, but it shouldn't be the whole of it.

[Satarn]

Diversity > Balance >>> Accessibility.
It shouldn’t really be just “pick two” however, but rather what is prioritized, so you can still try to pursue the lowest priority to a degree, as long as it doesn’t take too much from the higher ones.

Diversity is the highest priority as it ensures that everybody can find something enjoyable for themselves, regardless of their preferences. Besides, there isn't much of a point to having many job choices if they boil down to mere aesthetics. It also means that while accessibility is the lowest priority, by making jobs diverse you can have a few which are simpler, without taking away from those which are more complex.

Balance is also important, as nobody likes to feel useless and because keeping the options balanced ensures players can make their choices based on gameplay preferences, rather than feeling forced into something they dislike for the sake of effectiveness and not dragging their team down.
Balance itself is also not that difficult to accomplish without detriment to diversity, because you can have lots of different ways to achieve specific output numbers. Balance doesn't care about the road but merely destination. 1000 damage is 1000 damage, regardless if you accomplished it with several small hits or one huge hit, whether you had to manage your resources and ogcds or were just hitting 1-2-3 sequence of gcds and if that damage came directly from you or through boosting your party - the end result is all that matters.

Accessibility is not only less important in my opinion, but also directly detrimental to diversity and enjoyment when excessive. That doesn't mean things should be complicated for the sake of it of course, there is a certain limit at which things may become too complex as well. However whenever you try to make something simpler, you do need to cut out some things while leaving the essentials and at certain point(one which I believe ffxiv tanks and healers have sadly pretty much achieved) those shared essentials is all that's left, while all that's unique is gone.
Moreover, people often ask for removal of limitations they see as "clunky" and "unfun", while failing to realize that those limitations are a base for job mechanics that actually make them enjoyable and diverse. Games are about overcoming challenges and solving problems - if there's nothing to overcome or solve then what is there really to have fun from?

[SpeckledBurd]

I would say that diversity in Playstyle should always be the priority, but when that diversity is extended towards basic utility they need to be very, very careful that if it's doing something different it isn't overly hamstrung in comparison to other jobs. This has been the biggest problem when it comes to Monk's buff upkeep with Skills like Riddle of Earth and Anatman. Sure they fulfilled the same basic role as Transpose/Umbral Soul/Blood of the Dragon/Armor Crush but they were objectively worse by every metric and left Monk with tons of situations where it would just lose GL when no one else would (which included taking no damage due to a shield), or require it to do something stupid like picking up Vuln Stacks by charging into AOEs.

At that point there's 'diversity' but it isn't a boon, it's a hindrance that makes the job outright infuriating to play compared to another job that doesn't have to suffer that sort of inconvenience.

Some more crunchy feedback for when you do things wrong and right. (RE: Tornado Kick Monk) As it currently stands, since Stormblood, you can generally hit about 80-85% of a job's maximum output with basic understanding of overall game knowledge.

That's probably a bad example of things going right considering how divisive it was. That said they could have at least taken away "Hey we want to use Tornado Kick more often, if you don't want us losing our stacks to use it then change it.".

[Vulcann]

the problem is the endgame when it becomes "raid or die". when you have the "savage" raiders coming here complaining that X class does more DPS than Y class. if you open up the "endgame" to more playstyles less people would care about balance.

look at a game like Path of Exile sure there is balancing but there is never a focus on "this class does too much, buff my class to match"