Random Talk.

[† Mute point]

I have a character from each class. All are fun in their own way.

 

Best change to the game as a whole so far? AOE looting.

 

Best change to hunters? No more melee weapons. The class was obviously never intended for melee fighting, so they shouldn't have ever had a minimum range for shooting things.

 

best change to mages? Rotation tweaks. First mage, I couldn't even play it I died so much... rotation was boring, and it just didn't work well. Now I have no issues.

[Dae314]

In GW2, I do a s*** ton of exploring ^^. Everyone says dungeoning is the fastest leveling, but I don't care. I like exploring. I'm nearly at top level and I still haven't even explored 80% of the world yet. If you count that as doing pointless stuff, I like doing pointless stuff ^^.

[Dark-hunter]

i await diablo 3 and sacred angel 3 for ps4 >>  i dont usually play alot of online games due to there constant nerfing of various things

[† Mute point]

It's called rebalancing. The hardest thing any developer can do is to have very distinct class differences, and keep them within a certain power level of eachother for multiple roles. The only way I could think of to do it, would be to take a template, assign a point value to each ability, and add things in until all classes are roughly equal. But to do that, first you'd have to decide how much heavy armor and weapons was worth vs light armor and weapons, and how they stack up to eachother in damage.

[Dark-hunter]

no its not re balancing not when u make a skill useless  not to mention  if some one builds a class or char a certain way only to have some of the skills completely mess it up  so they have to restart    but its whatever   opinions are of coarse  just that

 

its supposed to rain and storm today  >> but it hasnt done so yet  so disappointing 

Edited March 9, 2013 by Dark-hunter

[valko]

HERO CLASS.......come on DK's were supposed to stand out,now they are just like warriors,its just not fair lol.

 

On another note,the THUNDER KING RETURNS!!!!,they are offering 7 days free game play,to take the offer and play or not to,omg such decisions.

[Dark-hunter]

whats thunder king? havent heard of it  it finally started raining and thundering 

[valko]

beats me,i just recieved a email today about a new instance and the 7 days free time came with it.

[Dae314]

Having run the Forum RPG game thread thingie for a while, I can understand the balancing act. It's very hard to scale things to even be more or less equal even after extensive testing due to the fact that most games are pretty advanced simulations at this point. It was easy before with 2D dungeon crawlers not just because you didn't have multiplayer but also because it was easy to gauge power. For something like a first person shooter, it's very hard to say exactly what value bullet spread on every gun should be so that they're all usable with no clear winner except for individual preference.

What makes that whole individual preference thing even harder is the fact that lots of people will have the relatively similar preferences and may cause a gravitation toward a certain build. This gravitation is unpredictable and may cause problems. Rebalancing excessively though generally makes things less balanced, so you have to draw a line at some point and say "SCREW IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and make a whole new game. Nothing lasts forever ^^.

You guys talking about MS?

[Dark-hunter]

ms?  and i dont know i think were talking bout char balancing in general though  or it could be wow  lols >>

[† Mute point]

Character balancing in general, and a little bit in pertaining to WoW.

 

The big problem with a real time battle game, like WoW, is that everyone has different skill levels with different classes. The only way you could possibly test every single class for real balancing there, would be to design a bot that would use the perfect skill rotation for each build and situation, move exactly right to avoid AOE type skills, AND be capable of PVPing with a similar skill level.

 

The problem with that is two fold.. First, time spent writing the bot takes away from time spent working on new content. Second, as soon as they finished the bot, someone would find a way to steal it, and use it.

[† Emotional Outlet]

They probably wouldn't even need to steal it, haha. That kind of stuff people love to leak or "accidentally" leave unprotected somewhere. There was a controversy a while ago where some dude, who had farmed a bunch of public Facebook information, compiled it into a list and "accidentally" made it a public torrent. People immediately found it, of course.

[Dae314]

It's currently impossible to write a bot like you're describing because that bot would need true artificial intelligence.

If you don't have the bot thinking for itself, it's going to be inherently bias toward whoever (or whichever group) made it in terms of how many situations it responds to and how it responds to each situation. There's often no clear cut best way to respond to a situation, and especially for a bot trying to emulate the best of the best human players, the bot needs to also be able to predict the future (good players think ahead usually). How far ahead does the bot project? What model does it use to project ahead? Does it use its own model? If it predicts based on a static model then does changing enemy behavior slightly make the bot useless? Perhaps one response in a certain situation is appropriate, but given what will follow up for the current situation, that response is inappropriate. How is the bot going to know that? It gets even more complicated when you want said bots to work together in a group against another group.

There really is no good "lab" method to test the balance of your classes without getting a bunch of people to come and play the game for a while and give you feedback. The problem with the feedback approach is that you're inherently limited by your beta testers. You can overcome some of that with sheer numbers, but it's hard to control 1000+ beta testers.

Then there's even problems with balancing based on field tests like I mentioned earlier. How do you know whether people are gravitating toward an imbalanced class/build or they're gravitating toward one of your classes that most people feel natural using?

Basically, any scale you try to use to balance classes in a complex game is going to be bias toward the group that the scale is based on. If it's a lab team assigning point values to skills, it's going to be bias toward their opinion of skills. If it's a non-AI bot, it's going to be bias toward the developer's opinions. If it's beta/field testers it's bias toward the population's opinion.

[† Mute point]

The bot in question would have access to the game's programming, so they could easily set it up for every situation in the game. And then, if they got the classes balanced with the current stuff, they could just stop messing with it.

 

But like I said, theoretical bot would never get made. Because the people at blizzard lack the time to even consider it if you believe them when they say they're working mostly non-stop on new stuff.

[Dae314]

For a game like WoW, access to the game's source in no way gives you enough information to be able to craft every possible situation that can occur x_x. You give us programmers too much credit ^^. Coding, once you get used to it, is a whole lot of complex hand waving. Wave your hands at just the right rate and angle and you can make people think something's doing what its supposed to .

[Zanco]

OhH! I just got back from camping and I had a FABULOUS time! I didn't know that I liked the wilderness so much. ; D

[Dae314]

What'd you do? I mean other than the obvious sleep outside in tents...

[† Mute point]

Psh, people and their tents. When I go camping, I carve a spear, go find a cave, kill the bear that lives in it and use the corpse to make my bedding!

 

And then I wake up in my bed 8 hours later with the dream of a week's wilderness survival fresh in my mind.

 

 

Edit

 

Also, for the character balancing convo...

 

Other than a super compex bot, the only other option would be to kidnap/recruit the best players for every spec, record them playing for hours and hours and then analyze every aspect of it while the rest of the team hides the bodies/drives everyone home.

 

Then, if class A with spec Q does consistently more DPS than class B with spec X, you can look back and see why. Then you have to factor in other things like.. "Does class B survive longer if the tank sucks?" "Or is spec X the tanking spec for class B?"

 

In the end though, you have to accept the fact that, unless all of the classes are the same, there are going to be times that one is better than the other.

 

And in closing... Rogues do it from behind!

Edited March 12, 2013 by Mute point

[Zanco]

What'd you do? I mean other than the obvious sleep outside in tents...

 

I rafted down a river, got attacked by an armadillo, started many fires- most where intentional, made smores, and yelled all morning, every morning to poke fun at all the hung over spring break kids.

[Dae314]

By "yell" I assume you made your own war face paint out of the local plants and a spear made out of the finest twigs in the area then proceeded to terrorize the campers at 5AM. Then when everyone was cornered in some small building you yelled in your own voice and had some fake fight scene go on just outside the door. After a little bit of that you walked in the door scuffed up but with no war paint or spear to speak of on you and say you successfully slayed drove off the mad-forest-man-thing.