Whee, another collection of links! Yes, I feel lazy because of it, but there’s just so much going on that I wanted to highlight. Plenty of good discussions going on lately in game design.
Eric poked the beehive thisaway:
I don’t care for his tone. I don’t agree with his assertions, either about players or designers. It’s worth reading, though.
Naturally, others have responded.
Ysharros: Classless is a pain in the assless
The Rampant Coyote: Defending the Lack of Class
I find myself largely agreeing with Brian (Psychochild). In fact, I wrote about a hybrid system before:
Autopilot Character Development
Similarly, Big Bear Butt has taken a stab at the trinity of WoW combat roles, spurring some good discussion about where things might go if we open up a little. It’s a fantastic article that echoes a lot of my own thoughts on the matter:
It’s no secret to anyone who reads around here for much that I’m a firm believer in agency for gamers. To me, that’s the point of gaming. Blizzard’s tendency to angle in the other direction might be better for some things (development schedule, balancing), but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way or the best way for everyone. There’s even a subtle undercurrent of resentment afoot these days against the restricted agency, diagnosed interestingly thisaway:
Players want to make choices. If they didn’t, they would watch a movie. To be sure, there’s a difference between problems and choices, and some have different tolerances for each, but I believe that gamers want more than barely interactive movies. Learning is a core component of gaming, and when choices are made for you, there’s less to learn. At least, that’s one theory.
One recurring theme I see is the idea that classes are easier to balance than an open skill system. On that I agree, but the difference is small. As Brian has noted, balance is hard. Period. Also, as he and The Rampant Coyote suggest, it’s best to look at what you want to do with your game first and then balance around that. Choosing a game design for ease of balance (a mirage at best) is a valid strategy, but not necessarily the best way to make the best game you want to make. It’s certainly not the Only One True Path of Game Design or even game success.
I go further to suggest that Balance is overrated. You will never have perfect balance. Even Chess, where both players have the same pieces, isn’t balanced, as players take turns (chronological imbalance), and the Queen and King are situated differently per side. Even Go has the chronological imbalance. That’s just the game design, never mind potential huge imbalances in player skill. (Though I’d note that with enough turns, chronological imbalances diminish in importance. Similarly, with enough choices, the impact of any one imbalance can be minimized.)
Further, even if we’re going to make one of those huge baseless scientific assumptions that class balance can be perfected, we’re still talking about MMOs that have a huge power band, big variances in gear, significant differences in player skill and even hardware issues. These things will never be balanced. That’s not a reason not to try to provide a level playing field for gameplay that likes it (PvP, for instance), and you can certainly do worse than to aim for something approaching balance, but balance can’t be the shrine at which agency and fun are sacrificed.
Life’s not fair. Get over it.
It’s OK (and even healthy) to have gimped choices, so long as those choices can be changed easily. Mark Rosewater of Magic the Gathering fame, has even noted that they intentionally design sub-par cards so that players can make choices. Sometimes, even those “bad cards” wind up synergizing with other cards in new and interesting ways, making for a lot more fun than a bland, whitewashed balanced system. This is important for game design; for players to be able to make choices, they need to have options. That means there will inevitably be some bad choices. Designers have to have the self-control to let players make those choices.
…and then the mercy to let them change their choices and learn from their mistakes, to help them dust off, learn something, and go try again. That’s play. That’s fun. If the designers are making all the choices, players are missing out.
To be sure, an MMO is different from a brief MtG duel or game of Chess, but I’d argue that the long time investment in these games is greater incentive to give choice in play other than “reroll, noob”, especially when rerolling costs time and money.
… more on balance later. Gotta go draw some stuff for it. In the meantime, go check out those links and the discussions afoot. Most are more interesting than my blather anyway.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
I’ve been mulling this one over.
Much as I like having lots of flexibility in play, I love the identity that comes with a class based system. I like the notion of being a warrior/ whatever, that has a lot of interesting identity based baggage with it, and all the various lore, gear, et al that goes with it. Bringing too much flexibility into how easily you can shift between them really does water the identity down.
So the question in my mind is how far you can go with dropping the mechanics of classes but retaining the identity in game. In Vampire (pen and paper) for example, much of the difference between the different clans was to do with lore, background and setting, and they were important differences. Mechanically, they had abilities that were cheaper for each clan but if you really wanted to be more flexible, you could. Also, in a pen and paper game with no notion of the trinity, there’s more scope for how classes get defined.
Balance seems to rely heavily on the assumption that players have an ideal role or style of play, from which they cannot reroll or respec, so that any imbalance will inevitably ruin the game for a portion of the population, driving out that class (let’s pretend we’ve translated skill sets into classes, it’s easier to talk about), and causing greater homogeneity in the game. Of course this is a reasonable concern if say, warlock did 10% as much damage as mages. But 95%? 105%? 100% at this gear level but due to scaling only 90% at higher?
Players have become increasingly goal focused, so they’re going to prefer whatever helps them get to that goal, and discourage anything else. So the warlock at 95% of mage damage could seem fine for almost any scenario, except for overly stat-sensitive players obsessing over DPS meters. Clearly this is a social problem pretending to be a balance problem, but how do you deal with that? The social aspect is probably harder than any other aspect of game design (from my perspective as a player who has seen balance and bugs get fixed up a lot while seeing the community collapse).
Here’s a bad idea: make it hard to find other players, meaning that if you can find anyone, you’ll take them, because 5% damage isn’t worth another half hour of searching.
“Players want to make choices.”
I didn’t think this was what was under debate — though actually, what’s under debate has morphed into a many-headed hydra anyway, as it will tend to do in the blogosphere.
Certainly what I took from the original article wasn’t that classless is bad, it’s that classless is HARD, both to design and balance *and* for players to apprehend. I still don’t think that’s an inaccurate assertion.
The rest of this has gone so far beyond what I, certainly, was trying to say (which is pretty much what I paraphrased above), that I’m not sure what I can add that will be meaningful. Somehow it seems I’ve ended up saying classless is bad, classes are good, I want to be a sheeple, and please take away all my choices.
Chinese whispers? Try the blogosphere sometime. 😛
[…] Tish Tosh Tesh – Classes, Trinity and Balance, Oh, My […]
Spinks, that’s another good tangent; how much should lore tie in with mechanics or vice versa? Tabletop games do indeed have a lot to offer. I’ve come to believe that templates are a good thing for those who don’t want to make skill-based choices (as outlined in that Automatic Character Advancement article); maybe those templates are themed, like the theme decks that MtG offers.
Klep, that makes me wonder what hiding the numbers would do. Y’know, just for another bad idea. If players don’t have the system telling them that a Warlock is only 95% of a Mage (balanced out with utility, of course, but who puts that into the DPS calculus?), but the numbers aren’t obvious, do we really notice that 5%? It’s definitely a social problem
Ysh, nah, your article stands on its own. I also concede that skill-based design is harder to balance, but I think the difference is negligible. Balance is tricky hard with any more than a couple of variables, and player skill will *always* be a huge unknown.
Harder for players to understand? Maybe, but if they have clear information and the ability to change their choices, we get to call that “depth” and it’s an addition to the learning potential of the game. Instead of calling our players stupid and giving up, why not teach them? Sure, some will always want the easy choices, but that doesn’t mean we need to make those the only choice. (That’s another tangent; does the difficulty that “true hardcore” players want come from execution or education?)
Choice isn’t in the forefront of Eric’s screed, but it’s certainly a subtext. If those *players* (spit) wouldn’t make the *wrong* choices when we give them options, we wouldn’t have to constrain them to classes, after all. They are always screwing up our delicate balance with their min/maxing, playing it in ways we didn’t intend. See also: WoW 4.0 Talent tree revamp.
It will be interesting to see what Champions Online winds up playing like. The F2P players will be stuck with skill templates (classes, effectively), but subbers will have a (mostly) skill-based system to play with. I wonder how many players will pony up for more choices. It’s not a balanced scientific experiment showing player preferences between otherwise equal choices (the business model skews things considerably), but it could prove interesting.
I don’t think it’s possible to hide numbers. Just thinking of aggro, for years we had no numbers at all, but very patient, deliberate people were able to get a pretty good idea of how much aggro was generated by all the abilities in WoW. Numbers can’t be hidden, but the importance of them can be reduced. For example, a mage will get a spot if the only way to stop a mob from healing 100% health per second is to sheep it, regardless of the damage output of a mage. But then every other class is denied that guaranteed spot and must compete on damage, so then we give them their gimmick and now every raid must have a mage, warlock, rogue, priest, druid, DK, warrior, paladin, shaman, and hunter, or it will fail.
This is something that I think BC got right: buffs. It didn’t matter so much if a warlock was lower than a mage if a warlock brought a buff that helped offset that, so mage+warlock > mage+mage, but the buff couldn’t be so strong that mage+warlock became mandatory. So a raid would prefer diversity, but if they cannot get it, they are not missing a critical ability.
Spinks wrote:
Much as I like having lots of flexibility in play, I love the identity that comes with a class based system.
The problem is, as a player, I may not agree with what the developer assigned as the “identity”. For example, for me Clerics are holy warriors that go around in heavy plate and can wield a mace with some proficiency. So, I was really turned off by the “caster with a robe” identity that WoW defined for Priests. It’s says something that I have 2 developed Cleric characters in DDO, but never got a Priest above level 15 in WoW.
A system that allowed for both identities (and more!) would be great. Let me have my guy in plate mail, and someone else can have a character in robes with other trade-offs.
In Vampire (pen and paper) for example, much of the difference between the different clans was to do with lore, background and setting, and they were important differences. Mechanically, they had abilities that were cheaper for each clan but if you really wanted to be more flexible, you could.
Yeah, pen and paper games do a great job with having a lot more flavor. But, a lot of players will ignore that flavor and focus on mechanics. Personally, I think the root problem is that most games focus on serving Achievers, whereas people who had that mindset in pen and paper games were usually shunned or mocked.
Ysharros wrote:
Certainly what I took from the original article wasn’t that classless is bad, it’s that classless is HARD, both to design and balance *and* for players to apprehend. I still don’t think that’s an inaccurate assertion.
I think it’s inaccurate. As I’ve said, I was able to balance Meridian 59 without defined classes. So, unless I’m some sort of idiot savant or god-king designer, that’s nto the case. The part that one might consider harder is starting from a blank page and coming up with something original rather than copying another system as a starting point. If you can’t start with some default classes, the job starts out more daunting. But, as I wrote in my post, some structure can help with that problem.
Anyway, even if the original discussion has morphed a bit, still interesting to read. 🙂
I totally agree that letting players make bad choices in an atmosphere of complete control is a fun mechanic for some games. I even referenced the same M:TG material you did as a case where it works well. But remember that their entire product is new verbs (cards), and Magic releases LOTS of them every year. This is not something an MMO team can currently do reasonably.
Spending a ton of resources on something that players will find fun for just a few months is a great plan for a card game that intends to release tons of expansion packs. It’s just flat out stupid for most MMOs, unless they believe the majority of their customers will be flocking in from the first initial game release. That assumption limits us to a pretty small number of AAA brick-and-mortar-launch products these days. It used to be a generally true assumption, though. And for a game with a $50m budget, spending ten man years of effort to have an extra-fun first month of launch may be well worth it. I don’t see that scenario very often though.
I also totally agree that games can’t be balanced perfectly; that’s an argument I made in the initial post, actually, and one I have argued ad nauseum. I think designers should take that as a given. But this isn’t about “perfect balance”, it’s about “ballparking” — you need to be able to give your game roles some structure and you need to be able to create content that is fun for the majority of your players.
I just want to reiterate this very simple thing: if you don’t apply strict restrictions on what verb sets each player can get to, then your roles will be eternally hard to define and your content will be forever near-impossible to balance.
I’ve read a lot of really great posts as a result of my hornets-nest post, and people have definitely changed my mind about a number of things. For instance it seems mind-bogglingly logical in retrospect that EVE has classes — for many purposes of that word — because ships tightly constrain verbs.
But I have yet to see anything that suggests “the difference is small” between the balancing issues of a truly open-skill system and a closed-skill system. If you’ve played Champions a while, you’ve seen a game with an open skill system that is struggling desperately to provide some semblance of ballparking, and I’m not sure it ever can. Their balance problem is not even the same dimension as a game like WoW. (I agree, WoW should “get over it”.)
But WoW’s imbalances are puny; it’s still quite easy to make content that is fun for most of WoW’s players. In Champions, not so much. The difference between gimps and ‘leets is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE. They’re screwed. Well… actually they aren’t screwed at all. It’s just that most of those skills they made are abandoned and seem like a waste of development time now. If they’d added fewer verbs and more content, would they have had a better launch? I think so. Adding more verbs after launch is fun and interesting. Desperately balancing those same broken verbs again and again… not so much. But I’m wandering off topic pretty badly.
My point is that this horrendous imbalance is typical of a game that lets you have key verbs from multiple different job roles at once. It’s not something you can “get over” and it’s not something to pretend doesn’t happen and it’s not something to say “well a clever designer, cleverer than you, Eric, can fix it”. Well, yeah, maybe so! I accept that a genius designer, which I surely am not, could change the whole equation, rendering my argument moot.
But I want people to stop thinking that it’s a trivial hand-wavy problem… unless you’re the genius in question. Or, I suppose, unless you have the resources to spend multiple man-years of effort on the first couple months of your RPG’s life, and then watch as the vast majority of that work is almost never used again.
(And the “but I’ll still play the gimpy template” argument isn’t really very fair to the developer. In my experience, people WILL keep playing the gimpy template, and they will keep bitching about it for years, and there will be considerable pressure on the developer to FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT BECAUSE WE CAN’T EVEN PLAY THE NEW CONTENT YOU ADDED WHY ARE YOU NEGLECTING US?! Those people far outnumber the ones who will happily play a gimped class and never complain about it.)
Brian: “The problem is, as a player, I may not agree with what the developer assigned as the “identity”.”
Well if you don’t like the lore, don’t play the game 😉
Balance is a funny old beast. I’m PvPing a lot (it’s all I do, really) with my Warrior in WoW at the moment and whole “community” is up in arms because the class is getting some nerfs next patch. Meh. The problem is balance can never be achieved in most sort of MMOs and when combined with the fact that usually the most vocal players are obsessed with min/maxing everything to squeeze out one more tiny point of advantage then it all becomes a hideous affair of whines and complaints on forums and in-game chat channels.
I’d argue the chess assertion, but anyway…
Balance depends on whether it’s PVP or PVE. In PVP you can give both sides in the competition the same stuff and it’s player skill that breaks the tie.
In PVE, basically someone has to either be better (or someone has to be worse), otherwise all of the numbers actually boil down to an exact 50%/50% split. That’s what perfect PVE balance is – a flip of a coin. I don’t think all the pro ‘balance’ people get that.
The funny thing is, with classes in PVP, the classes themselves essentially make it partially PVE. Because classes are part of the game environment that makes the PVP match not exactly equal in resources on both sides (unless everyones the same class, for example).
As much as I agree with a lot that’s been written here, Blizzard’s answer to the ‘idenntity vs balance’ issue has been given a long time, halfway through TBC: bring the player, not the class. that was the end of the discussion.
And as Kleps said, WoW is goal-focused, or rather: loot-focused. it’s not about identity or lore as much as it’s about the means to get what you’d like to collect. and ofc, any means are acceptable, even if it means everyone can do everything pretty much, no matter what class, race or faction.
balance is like a compromise that leaves everyone unfulfilled. in WoW’s case, it makes collectors the happiest, I’d assume. it is a horribly outrageous idea to the average WoW player that he should be denied any part of the game. In that respect Wolfshead is right: this self-entitlement is baffling for the MMO genre.
The weird thing about that is that isn’t the very idea of ‘loot’ lore based? I mean, it’s ascribing the lore of ‘this is ye old weapon’ to a set of database entries. Can someone say they aren’t about the lore, when they set about collecting ‘loot’? Probably off topic, but I kept it short…
[…] a furor in the blogosphere with replies and rebukes coming in all over the place – both Tesh and Nils have roundups of replies on this debate along with their own thoughts on the subject. Much […]
[…] leap into the breach. Big Bear Butt ranted magnificently on it not so long ago. I’ve written about the trinity before, here and there. I agree with these fine authors, that the trinity is […]