Balance in MMOs - Methods?

Hi all,

I'm bored at work and am thinking about MMO Class Balance in general, and wondering if anyone knows of any 'official' doctrines of MMO Class Balance, or methods that modern companies use to tackle this issue.

Here are some questions which will help me out!

What is the most Balanced MMO you've played. What made it Balanced?

What is the most fun MMO you've played, overall. What was fun about it?

What is the most fun single situation you been in, in an MMO? What was fun about it? If you can't decide about what was the most fun, perhaps you can make a correlation between the activities, and give a general rule of what 'fun' is to you.

Thank you!

A really good question - I'll take an amateur stab at this

Take street fighter 2, where the basic skills for each character were the same, but they then had some special skills to differentiate, whether it's speed, power, range etc...

Then add in the possibility to button mash, some kind of learning curve with complexity, thin women with breasts and metal armor covering useless parts of the body (for fighting, that is), a fat guy, a cool guy, a guy with spiky blond hair, plenty of 19th century morals in relation to gender equality, and maybe someone wearing a robe, eyeliner and a glowing wooden stick to boot.

I'm getting carried away here...

The point about class balance doesn't extend just to MMO's; but it's certainly the most complex as you have more abilities and an open world with some kind of physics which means the combinations are virtually endless. This is why trying to balance PvP is impossible and WoW is failing at it by providing the same talents to every class, thus removing some of the differentiation of why you would choose lock over druid, for example.

To prove this point, you wouldn't choose yoshi over bowser for the ghost circuit 1 in super mario kart on the snes, would you? Horses for courses.

For PvE I would imagine the companies would use a combination of total dps with perfect rotation to start ranking the classes, then provide additional talents for the ones with less DPS, such as utility. Then run a simulation of different classes using optimal rotations to get to a level playing field, then build raid bosses which require half of theses rotations/dps.

For PvP I would run a 1V1 comparison for each class combination taking into account all abilities (including sentry totem) and make sure they stack up. All while ensuring the resources get depleted evenly for each character, whether it's mana, health or bedtime ;)

Essentially it's just an incredibly complex resource planning exercise.

In a perfect world it would be balanced similar to chess.

Each piece has it's strengths and limitations, but as a whole works together to pwn noobs.

There is no easy, pat answer. You didn't mention PVE or PVP so I'll assume both apply.

What group size are you trying to balance for?

Is there content that you want to balance for multiple group sizes? (solo, 5-man, 10-man, 25-man, etc.)

What mechanic(s) determine damage in/out? Resists? Buffs/Debuffs? Interrupts? Group size? To-hit? NPC assists? Pets?

What effect do levels have on dmg/resists/to-hit/scaling?

What groups of NPCs are you balancing players against?

Does PVP use the same mechanics as PVE?

How does aggro management work?

How does healing scale and does it depend on stacking effects/buffs/resists?

Originally, I was looking for an answer more along the lines of Process.

The HOW of the Balancing. I realize Spreadsheets play a big part, but how do you numerically factor in mobility, position and combat pace/timing?

Do they create the arena and actually test abilities/builds/roles out? Although this might be the easiest way to determine if what you changed created balance, somehow I doubt developers have time to do this. Also, it is apparent, in some situations, that a concept was not tested in some environment/application, based on how unbalanced it is.

I'm not looking to balance something myself (I'm not in that profession), but I'd like to understand why some MMOs are more balanced than others. This would also help in determining why the combat of some MMOs is fun, while other's is not (and this is an opinion, varied by the individual).

I would postulate that Balance Combat doesn't necessarily make a fun MMO, but an unbalanced one certainly makes for an overall less fun experience.

Another post, to avoid the random text I concoct! I'm going to edit my OP with these questions.

Question!
What is the most Balanced MMO you've played. What made it Balanced?

What is the most fun MMO you've played, overall. What was fun about it?

What is the most fun single situation you've been in, in an MMO? What was fun about it? If you can't decide about what was the most fun, perhaps you can make a correlation between the activities, and give a general rule of what 'fun' is to you.

Well just start with X power points.

Each point you put into dps, movement speed, defensive, rez ability etc. whatever adds to that area.

See what the customers gravatate to.

Nerf the one everyone uses to be more equal. (i.e. if everyone puts 10 points in movement speed and zero into defensive then lower the amount of speed you get per point, and increase the amount of defensive you get per point).

I'm not a huge fan of the concept of balance in an mmo. It tends to undermine the individual importance of players in favor of bringing the class. I would prefer a system where abilities are based on how you do a job rather than the numbers, ie some classes are better at burst dps, some are better at DoT, some are great burst healers, some are better utility healers, some tanks focus on avoidance, some on absorption, etc.

That, and taking out fixed party sizes for content. It makes everything too formulaic.

Balance starts with maths. Thats as far as you can reasonably take it. Imbalance is when the math is wrong, but is often mistaken with player skill differences.

SC2 is a good game to see skill imbalance taken as game imbalance. If you're familiar with blink stalker micro there are games where a protoss player can totally decimate an opponents army and not loose a single unit.

ROOTDestiny a week or so ago used a smurf account to prove that all the little things like scouting, and army composition, tactics and the like didnt mean squat till you had your base mechanics down pat. He even told his opponents that he would beat them using a specific unit and walked all over his opponents from bronze to the platinum league using zerg and a mass queen only army.

Same for WOW, look at some raid logs and see identical classes/gear have wide variances.

In terms of design driven class balance, there are a couple of methods that come to mind -- both driven by pvp, but that can be adapted easily to pve, and both of which can be altered to accommodate gear grinds, skill levels, etc.

First, there's the rock-paper-scissors method -- Class A kills Class B (but not C), Class B kills C (but not A), Class C kills A (but not B). The idea behind r-p-s is that no one is OP, everyone dies (in theory). In practice, r-p-s isn't perfect, and tends to lead to fotm class development. DAoC was a perfect example of this (and many many others).

The next is something called time-to-kill, or ttk. With TTK, each class starts with an initial TTK value -- if the class is killed too fast or too slow, buff/nerf the class. This get interesting when the initial TTK values don't lead to fun combat (see Warhammer for pretty much it's entire run). The idea is that everyone stays alive long enough to feel like they are contributing. The down side is that no one really feels like they can kill anyone efficiently, and it may end up feeling like skill is negligible, and attrition is the real decision maker. It's been a while since I played WoW, but I think WoW is at least partially balanced using TTK. Warhammer is another obvious example.

Both of these are statistical methods at heart, which means there is some variance from player skill, cds, etc.

It should be noted, however, that the anecdotal "class balance" most players believe in is a complete myth -- something that is never intended by MMO designers -- perfect balance = perfect boredom where everyone has a counter to everything and no one ever gets killed. Also, that both methods assume a perfect, bug-free code base...