Thread: Job Balancing 6.08 (still needs work)

Originally Posted by Sequora

There’s a reason there’s such a ranged DPS shortage. No one wants to play that role. The ranged tax needs to either be removed, or reduced.

It hasn't been a "ranged" tax in a while. It's a "somehow far simpler than even the average FFXIV job" tax atop rez perhaps being mildly undervalued relative to TacticalSambaToir (though that balance is difficult to pin down, since rez has no value until things go wrong). Note the accordant differences between Bard, Dancer, and Machinist. The Physical Ranged role is no monolith despite their shared relative hypermobility.

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

It hasn't been a "ranged" tax in a while. It's a "somehow far simpler than even the average FFXIV job" tax atop rez perhaps being mildly undervalued relative to TacticalSambaToir (though that balance is difficult to pin down, since rez has no value until things go wrong). Note the accordant differences between Bard, Dancer, and Machinist. The Physical Ranged role is no monolith despite their shared relative hypermobility.

The primary wall I run into with Machinist is that all the buffs people want to put into it means I start destroying literally everyone but the max parses they refer to when pointing out how weak Machinist is, and frankly to me that feels wrong. Maybe it's stockholm syndrome, but I don't consider myself good at the rooty tooty run and shooty, just practiced, so even something that sounds mild like "Just removing the ranged tax" or "Increase to be the same as X melee" or something similar seems excessive, and grossly so.

Insert blah blah role system needs to be revamp blah blah shove the problem children into one role blah blah.

Originally Posted by Kabooa

The primary wall I run into with Machinist is that all the buffs people want to put into it means I start destroying literally everyone but the max parses they refer to when pointing out how weak Machinist is, and frankly to me that feels wrong. Maybe it's stockholm syndrome, but I don't consider myself good at the rooty tooty run and shooty, just practiced, so even something that sounds mild like "Just removing the ranged tax" or "Increase to be the same as X melee" or something similar seems excessive, and grossly so.

Insert blah blah role system needs to be revamp blah blah shove the problem children into one role blah blah.

I think people just tend to forget that top-end balance, when some jobs are more difficult* than others, essentially obliges any less-skilled players towards playing whatever is easiest*, since there will never be a benefit for learning a more complex job as, even at the top 1%, they'll contribute equally.

* Though difficulty is idiosyncratic, hundreds of thousands of data points upon those idiosyncratic evaluations still creates... statistically relevant data. As such, yes, there are classes which are normally "easier". Those norms will not apply to every player (nor precisely to even a majority of players) but at the scopes which concern balancing decisions, they are wholly relevant.

I feel like a sensible general balancing paradigm, while perhaps difficult at times to calculate, shouldn't be that elusive:

• Jobs should be balanced for around the 90th percentile when including the more difficult to calculate in-practice rDPS effects of utility that isn't mere a damage bonus (e.g., Mantra, Shield Samba, or the rare ability to lose less party damage to doing a mechanic by having a hypermobile role take care of it). Prior to these calculations, jobs without "non rDPS" utility would appear to outperform those with it, while in practice they would be tightly balanced given a party of equal skill (percentile) to the contributor.
• Jobs favored below the 90th percentile should not also be favored above it.
• Ideally, jobs with utility value that is greatly increased at lower party performance (e.g., rez) should be "harder" to reach a comfortable skill floor on --preventing them from being locked-in at lower percentiles-- insofar as does not step excessively step on the toes of "pure" dps classes whose gameplay concerns must come solely from rotational complexity. (I.e., Ideally, SMN and RDM would have a noticeably larger % personal DPS gap between the 60th and 90th percentiles than BLM as to compensate for BLM's offering nothing else at lower skill levels.)

Now, to be clear, choosing to balance around a given percentile does not mean that you cannot make design decisions to further tighten balance at any/every given percentile, but it does set a threshold around what error we consider to be more or less a function of kit complexity vs. irrelevant/transient (soon to be passed through learning) player mistake. The higher a percentile we balance "around", the more the lower percentiles are obliged towards easier jobs and job diversity is reduced below that point; the lower a percentile is targeted, the more the mistakes made on theoretically stronger jobs are overcompensated for, thus reducing job diversity above that point (as the likes of Monk and BLM get buffed to the heavens to compensate for their being harder to learn).

(So long as the gaps at lower percentiles, too, aren't so huge as to make harder jobs seem a burden, I argue for a higher percentile because as we descend from the top 10% or so, aesthetic tends to have increasingly guided our job choice anyways.)

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Now, to be clear, choosing to balance around a given percentile

is completely irrelevant to how this game is balanced and we really need to abandon this mentality. Jobs are not balanced specific to any percentile. FFLogs is not a balancing tool, never was, and never will be.

The data more likely to be used would be clear rates, relative difficulty to clear across multiple spectra, range of damage outputs across intended skill levels of player, and other metrics FFLogs either cannot measure with accuracy (because of rounding errors due to incomplete information) or does not have access to at all.

Because we only have damage output though, that's all we think about. But a game designer of a game where speedrunning is not something they design the game for would not design the game around what people do in speedruns, and while farms are not completely irrelevant, they're not nearly as relevant as the community would hope.

And if you were balancing around damage, best practices for data collection would require that you look at spreads, standard deviations, exclude outliers, and look at what the experience is across all players. And you certainly would not only look at clear data and the intendent selection bias that forces. How does looking at clears tell you how difficult it was for a job to GET to a clear?!

Anyone arguing for a single percentile is automatically wrong at the outset and doesn't grok data. And FFLogs might be the best data we have, but it's not nearly complete or accurate or valid enough for most of the arguments most players want to make in game balance conversations.

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Then our balance is already perfectly sufficient. Every job can clear with little difficulty essential to its kit. Done.

The ability of high-tier players to clear with everything does not imply it's easier for lesser skilled players to have equal proficiency in clearing with every job. Job balance matters more than at the absolute top end.

utility is only as valuable as the average improvement to clear times (including whether you clear at all) it produces. If it does not increase your chances of clearing and/or reduce clear times, it has done nothing.

Which is not something FFLogs has any capacity to measure, but in-game tools can actually provide input for. However, DPS also only matters for balance with how it affects your ability to clear or reduce clear times. Which gets to the more important point: The vector of balance is capacity to clear across different play levels.

[quote[The criteria in the post you're quoting already follows from consideration of spread, deviation, and outliers. But let's be clear here: an entire 10% of players is not going to be an outlier. As you go lower, moreover, the parses are that much less representative of their kits, as opposed to simply varied, and often short-lived, forms of mistake.[/quote]

But people don't consider spread, deviation or outliers. Case in point:

But let's be clear here: an entire 10% of players is not going to be an outlier.

An outlier is based upon deviation, and it is quite possible for 10% of players to be deviated too much to be counted as normalized data.

How does the phrase "to be clear" have anything to do with clears? That's literally the only the time that word appears in my post -- within that phrase. Where is this strawman coming from?

You're appealing to FFLogs data. FFLogs data ONLY includes clears. That introduces sample bias that excludes aspects of balance (including difficulty to attain clear) that are more valuable and relevant to job balance than speedruns. What you said or what phrases you used is irrelevant--you're appealing to FFLogs, and this is a criticism of that appeal with regards to data-validity.

Originally Posted by Gruntler

You're appealing to FFLogs data. FFLogs data ONLY includes clears. That introduces sample bias that excludes aspects of balance (including difficulty to attain clear) that are more valuable and relevant to job balance than speedruns. What you said or what phrases you used is irrelevant--you're appealing to FFLogs, and this is a criticism of that appeal with regards to data-validity.

Which would be relevant only if clearing were significantly harder on some jobs than other. But it's not.

An outlier is based upon deviation, and it is quite possible for 10% of players to be deviated too much to be counted as normalized data.

If it's deviation sufficiently differed from those immediately above or, more importantly, below. But it doesn't.

We don't see any such leap until after the 95th percentile, which is not what I'm suggesting we balance around.

All that looking at 90th percentile gives you is a reasonable view of a kit's strength among a reasonable level of error; the impact of those errors have more or less standardized, their deviations shrunk. The jobs are still necessarily played perfectly, but at least those values indicate what a kit, for the most part, is capable of, not just an average player still learning how to use it.

And you absolutely should be balancing jobs primarily around their kits, not just how easy they are to push from poor performance to halfway decent.

Which is not something FFLogs has any capacity to measure

I never said it did. That's exactly why I said it'd require us to comb the context to take those things into account. Our evaluation must, further, include those things. To see whether they have practical chance of value, you look at better runs first -- those who'd actually know how to use them. Then you overpower them slightly in accordance with how difficult that utility's value is to exploit/coordinate.

Let's put it another way. X job is taxed Y value for having Z utility. But in practice, that utility doesn't save even a single GCD of healing except in the very most optimized runs. That will not be sufficient. That it can save a GCD in an optimized run should be noted so that we at least have some idea to the form of its potential value, but its tax should be diminished to reflect those constraints.

Originally Posted by Gruntler

The data more likely to be used would be clear rates, relative difficulty to clear across multiple spectra, range of damage outputs across intended skill levels of player, and other metrics FFLogs either cannot measure with accuracy (because of rounding errors due to incomplete information) or does not have access to at all.

Anyone arguing for a single percentile is automatically wrong at the outset and doesn't grok data. And FFLogs might be the best data we have, but it's not nearly complete or accurate or valid enough for most of the arguments most players want to make in game balance conversations.

While its true that FFlogs and the like can not be the only thing we measure balance with, they are the one of the only tools we as players have to utilize. Is it perfect? No. That being said, in the past if there was a problem with a jobs performance it would show in places like FFlogs. Granted there are a lot of people who dont always know how to read or analyze the data properly. I may very well be one of those people. But if there are a large number of people claiming that a job is underperforming and there is data on fflogs that appears to correlate with that complaint, it is not 100% absolute, but there is a good chance that that job is having performance issues.