Quote Originally Posted by Carighan View Post
It really is that different nowadays. BLMs explode at Pictos doing 4% more damage while being easier to play, back in the days (/grandpamode on) you'd be delighted if your favorite class dealt 50% of the damage of whatever was the overpowered meta, and the killspeed would vary massive based on whether you got 40 random people vs 8 parties all hyper-optimizing.

That is not to devalue our own balance struggles at all, though. Rather, our current balance struggles exist on a platform on which everyone can do anything, and we're worried about someone doing it better or worse. Previous MMOs often intentionally did not create content to say, have a tank of class X or Y. It was only tank Z that was ever created to tank this, bring a tank of class Z if you want to do it. The context changed wildly in the past ~20 years.
i don't know if that was better or worse, the only game where that ever "worked" was vanilla World of Warcraft, you really had the feeling of class identity, every class had its own strenghts and weaknesses but balance were thrown out the window.