JusticeRetroHunter.7684

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Would it actually be better to watch a recording, by yourself, several hours/days after the event? There's alot to be said for the hype and communal feel of watching a match with a large group of other people 'live', with commentary, banter etc. Pretty much every sport is best watched live. As long as there are streamers actually streaming, this setup is fine. Sorry but not everyone likes a bumbling streamer to yell and scream their coverage of a match, only watching X guys for 3 seconds then switch to other x guy for 3 seconds and then talking about stuff that you don't really care about or need to hear. The key difference between gw1 and gw2 obs systems is essentially choice. I can choose to watch player A or player B the entire match...I can choose to watch this match, that match or that match, and i can choose to watch said match at any time. Gw2 choice hierarchy is the opposite really...You have no choice and you are at the mercy of what someone else decides they want to show you, if they decide to do it at all.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Yeah, and if you come to me for an apple, and I present you an apple, and you say "but it doesn't have the exact same quantum state as the apple I meant" I'm going to tell you to get lost. Heh, and that would be a funny joke because I'd tell you that such an apple doesn't exist anyway. > > And I never suggested that the current state of balance was perfect. Merely that it is possible to reach a state that is functionally balanced "enough" for us to be happy with. This is what I'm trying to say here...that balancing for equality kills player choice (aka build diversity), for the reason that as Anet tries to make the elements in the game equal, the description of differences between skills and classes are lost in the attempt to make them balanced via this equality. When applying nerfs and buffs in the attempt to balance the game, that is what happens...the heat death of player choice. Because like i mentioned before, numerical nerfs and buffs that are made, are made in the interest of trying to make the elements of the game equal, and the mechanisms I described from now pages ago is the reason why it happens. But, there is more then one kind of "balance." Rather then balancing for equality, you instead balance for diversity, and this is where evolution and complexity science come into play. It's not like balancing for equality is the only kind of "balance." Real world systems in nature like evolution are balanced via a different mechanism...which is that the system is highly diverse... which is essentially the complete opposite of balancing for equality...it's a balance of differentiation. It's a completely different mechanism at play but it's the same mathematics we've been discussing that allow it to work, and it's the reason we see real world systems exhibit diversity rather than equality...because the mathematical mechanism is efficient, or rather that complex systems tend towards being highly diverse because they are more efficient. It's like swimming in a river. Swimming uphill is like balancing for equality, while swimming downhill is balancing for diversity. Gw2 is a mimicry of evolutionary systems and we see it play out in real time. Builds are made, builds compete and cooperate, builds die and go extinct, builds exist in consort with other builds. It's the players that are the driving force of this adaptation, and Anet fights this by trying to homogenize the game with nerfs and buffs, when really the opposite of these actions should be taken, to spur on heterogeneity like every other complex system in the universe. I mean seriously when was the last time you saw a perfectly balanced homogeneous ecosystem? It doesn't exist, and there's a good reason why.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > No, I can put an equals sign between guardian and warrior, if I'm defining my metrics and stating what is being approximated and what is not. Just as I can say that Apple = Orange, if I qualify that the metric is monetary value. And that's how approximate your evaluation will be...it's monetary value and nothing more, if you come to me selling me an apple when i ask for an orange, I'm gonna look at you funny. Say if you were to use DPS Benchmarks as your metric for equality in SPVP I wonder how far that will actually get you...well A-net kind of already did this once upon a time so we can "see" what the consequence of using such broad metrics actually do to the game. >We can take a black-box approach and simply observe the resultant performance in games, leaderboards, tournaments. This approach, incidentally, has the added bonus of also covering several other factors which are not directly part of the builds themselves, such has how players approach playing them, how they interact with maps, objectives, etc. CMC 'probably' uses performance in AT's as a metric for his balancing in SPVP...that's gotten us pretty far this past year hasn't it...If you think that this is the best balance in the history of every game ever because of his usage of this godlike metric then...okay whatever that's your opinion if you think this is remotely a healthy state of the game. > And no, we don't need to go to the level of each individual skills, down to every minute detail. This is what I basically said. It's non-sensible to try to balance every metric of every skill into equality because it leads to the inevitable conclusion I've said many time before now, that a perfectly balanced game is the heat death of player choice in a game like gw2 which survives at it's core, on player choice. Balancing using broad. mediocre metrics like AT performance is at best, throwing darts at a dart board, especially when the only changes that can be made are numerical ones, which are by proxy of the already mentioned concepts are meaningless to the balance of the system as a whole.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > By this logic, no 2 warrior builds are the same, since they're equipped at different times by different users in different locations etc etc. Even if they select the exact same traits, equipment, utilities, they're still not equal to each other. > There you go! Now your catching on. Even in a perfectly balanced, completely deterministic game of stick wars 2, because agents exist in a world governed by real world physics, you can NEVER have a perfectly balanced game there will always be near infinite amount of variables and metrics that you can not evaluate, like player skill. This is why it is important to understand why you can't just insert an equal sign willy nilly into whatever equation you want to create, especially in complex systems and games like gw2. > Now, I ask, is it really useful to go to this level of detail, or can we grow up a bit and use a sensible approximation? Newtonian physics is a suitable approximation for day-to-day usage. I don't need to define the exact quantum state of every particle in the universe to make a statement on GW2 PvP balance. I mentioned this earlier but DPS Benchmarks is the metric Anet and other game companies use to determine balance between classes that are different to one another. It is merely an approximation based on repeated observation and experiment, much like the real world. So now when you talk "sensible" you have to define your metric. You want Warrior to equal Guardian but by what metrics? By their DPS benchmark on a golem? By their performance in AT's? By their individual skills and their coefficients...There are an infinite number of metrics you can attempt to define the equality between the elements in a system, and it doesn't stop at the level of classes...it goes down to skills and their mechanics... How do you evaluate the equality between Thief dagger autoattack and Elementalist staff autoattack? How do you evaluate the equality between Stability and Immobilize? The truth is that it is non-sensible to attempt to equalize things based on metrics at all. Such mechanics are so estranged that they can't be compared in any truly meaningful way, and therefor changes in the coefficients or whatever other numerical changes in an attempt to make them equal actually becomes non-sensible.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > The notation of "warrior" and "guardian" there is obviously representative of their strength. > > Oranges and apples are bought and sold with currency. If both are valued at 1$ I can write an equation that states Apple = Orange, where those terms are representations of their values. It is obviously not meant to imply that an apple is actually the same thing as an orange. I thought you were smarter than this? > > You're the one that invoked algebra. Now you're saying it's not possible to employ it in this scenario. Make up your mind. We are just getting started, don't worry. You've taken your first step. In order to define one thing to be equal to another, you define that equality with a common metric, in the case of the apple and the orange, it's monetary value. But now, you know that the apple and the orange even though they have one metric that is equal, you know they still aren't the same right... Do they have the same weight? The same shape? The same color? The same composition? The same malleability? The same mass? The same Buoyancy? To define the equality of two objects, you further and further evaluate it for an infinite number of metrics, which you will eventually find that the two objects are never and can never be equal. This is because if they were, the two objects would have to be in the same exact quantum states, which by no-cloning theorem is impossible to have. This is why the apple will NEVER be equal to the orange, because down to their very atoms they can never occupy the same quantum state. This is the hallmark of why chaos theory exists. Any small difference between elements in a system, even if it's a deterministic system, cause the system to become chaotic and unpredictable to due those said infinitesimally small differences between each element. In addition, even if many of those metrics are equal, their equality further determines that the two objects become closer and closer to being the same object. If they are both red, both made of carbon, with the same mass, have the same buoyancy, and shape...the description of the objects converge to being the same object. Therefor, apples and oranges are never the same, and the equal sign is an approximation based on the number of metrics used to define that equality. In the case of Warrior equals Guardian, this is the exact reason why the two classes aren't equal, and in fact are inherently different. You simply can not say that Warrior equals Guardian because it's simply not true, and when you do say Warrior equals Guardian, you are using in your case just a single metric to define that, which is like again saying that the apple is equal to the orange. If you wanted to say the two are the same, then you have to go down skill by skill, metric by metricto see if both are equal to make such a determination. If every metric is equal, then the guardian is infinitely non-different then the warrior, where the two are no longer considered to even be different classes...again because if all metrics define that they are equal, means they are descriptions of the same object.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Since you like algebra, here you go: > > Guardian = Warrior + 1 > -> > Guardian + 1 = Warrior + 2 > > Adding +1 to both sides results in no change to the relative strength of guard and warrior. > > Guardian = Warrior + 1 > -> > Guardian = Warrior > > To make guardian=warrior, we have to add +1 only to the right hand side, (or -1 to the left and shift if across). Which, of course, is not something you can do in an equation. > > However, GW2 is not an equation. It is perfectly within the devs power to +1 to warrior without also +1 to guardian. Idk if you are trolling or serious right now. But like I thought, I think you're just not ready to have a conversation about how diversity and balance in systems and games like gw2 actually work. I mean you don't even understand the significance of the equal sign or why you can't just willy nilly use it for everything because you think you can. Listen to what I'm bout to say very carefully. You have an apple, and an orange.**..just because you put an EQUAL SIGN between them does not make the apple and the orange the same.** Do you understand that concept? Go read up on chaos theory and understand why perfectly equal ordered systems don't exist in reality. Everything is different and nonlinear down to the very atoms or bits of data they are made of. This is true in all systems, even perfectly linear ones, in both reality and in computer games...it doesn't matter....why? Because it's a feature of mathematics...not science. In simple terms, your algebra is complete nonsense, because Warrior does not equal guardian...am I being clear enough?

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > It's as relevant as anything you've brought in. Funny cause i actually remember that book. Look if you want to actually talk about diversity and balance, then you got to at least show me some shred of evidence that you know something about nonlinear dynamic systems, Thermodynamics, or Evolution...if you don't then you won't get past the first couple sentences...because surprise surprise, diversity is FROM the understanding of evolution, and "balance" comes from study of thermodynamics and complex chaotic systems. If you don't have at least a basic grasp of those things then you can't really talk about any of those subjects without being total nonsense derived from your experiences in gw2. Newsflash, just cause you play gw2 doesn't mean your actually able to talk coherently about diversity and balance.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > > @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said: > > > @"Ragnar.4257" said: > > Look buddy you can cop an attitude all you want, but you're stubbornness is not my problem. This is all stuff you can do research on and figure out on your ownbecause it's it's mathematics that you can learn online or in school. I'm doing you the favor of explaining it to you in simple terms so that you don't have to go and do years of research into diversity and complex systems which I've done. > > > > So ya, people like you that think you know it all and have it all figured out without going into the books and doing the work is your issue and I don't have to deal with that snarky-ness. > > > > I don't have to deal with your inferiority complex. As I've said to you before, you aren't the only one capable of reading a book. lol and what book have you read exactly cause i think you should start with 101 Algebra

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: Look buddy you can cop an attitude all you want, but you're stubbornness is not my problem. This is all stuff you can do research on and figure out on your ownbecause it's it's mathematics that you can learn online or in school. I'm doing you the favor of explaining it to you in simple terms so that you don't have to go and do years of research into diversity and complex systems which I've done. So ya, people like you that think you know it all and have it all figured out without going into the books and doing the work is your issue and I don't have to deal with that snarky-ness.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: Read my comment above, there's more that i added there.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > If Guardian and Mesmer are +/- 5% strength of each other, that's a better scenario than if they're +/- 50% strength of each other. These are not equally good situations. if A and B are within 5% "Strength" of each other (where A is 5% stronger then B ), then they are closer to a perfectly balanced state then if A is 50% stronger then B to each other. This is correct. Both states of this system however are imbalanced, and this is what I said. It's either a perfectly balanced state, or it's not. Any player looking for optimal strategy will by default choose A in both scenarios, and even at .000001% strength, A will still be the most optimal choice until A becomes equal to B. This is why it's either perfect balance or failure, there's no middle ground, if the goal is to reach a perfectly balance state (through equality). It's like looking at the difference between an attack that does 9 damage and an attack that does 10 damage. You're always gonna pick the attack that does 10 damage. You're always gonna pick the class that does 10 damage over the class does 9 damage. The differential between what players will choose to play, is always going to be down the path of most optimal usage of what they have available to them...Whether that's 5% or 50% doesn't actually matter until we look at how these paths of optimality are spread out between richer and richer variety of choices. If something does 50% damage but punishes you by taking away 50% of your health, is that a better attack then something that does X damage from 600 range and is a slow projectile. The question of whether it's stronger or not becomes harder to solve. This is one of the key components of what diversity really establishes. It's the differences between the two attacks that make it harder to quantify if the two skills are actually imbalanced or not. I warned you that the topic on diversity goes deep i don't know if your exactly ready for that conversation.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Yes, you can achieve the same result by either buffing or nerfing, I've already agreed with that several times. > > But if mesmer < guardian currently, i.e. the game is not balanced, then you can either buff some of the numbers on mesmer, or nerf some of the numbers on guardian, to make mesmer = guardian. The fact that they are numerical changes does not make them meaningless. How is that so difficult to grasp? Great, this is better question. **Why exactly are numerical changes meaningless?** They are meaningless in the sense that all changes are the same as any other change you can make in the system, thus no change is more significant than any other change to the system as a whole. Like you said, you can either buff Mesmer, or nerf Guardian, by any set of operations with any scale and you'd still get the same result state of the balance in the system...it's either perfectly balanced, or it's not. If it's not perfectly balanced, then what is the point of that change if it wasn't to perfectly balance the game...then the end result is that any and all changes HAVE to be changes that make things equal (to set the state of the system to be equal) in order to be "balanced." This is a flawed procedure because if all things are equal, then there is no diversity in player choices. Now we can move on to the other half of the conversation...which is about build diversity, and how it's an additional level of complexity that further tears apart the idea of balancing for equality. The question : How do you get Mesmer equal to Guardian? What operations do you have to do to get them equal to one another. Do they have to do the same amount of auto-attack damage? Do they have to have the same range? Is 600 range more op then 300 range if this does X amount more damage then Y. Every metric you adjust can be broken down into components similar to the first example proposed at the start of this conversation. You have a skill with some number of metrics, being weighed against some other skill or set of skills with some other number of metrics. If you want to make the two classes equal, start by making the metrics on these skills equal. Start making those things equal, and you quickly find yourself in the same situation as before. That any number you change on one skill can be done inversely on another, and at that point the amount of damage each skill actually does, doesn't matter. If you wanted them both to be equal, you'd give Skill A 100 damage, 300 range, 500 projectile speed, with 10 second cooldown, and Skill B 100 damage, 300 range, 500 projectile speed with a 10 second cooldown. Any change you make to any of these metrics, if they are not equivalent, result in an imbalance...and thus how do you reconcile two metrics that aren't alike in any way? Like Projectile speed and range. Does 100 projectile speed justify 100 more damage and 100 more range? You can go on and on and realize that in order for these two skills to even be balanced via equality, they need to be exactly the same across all of their metrics, otherwise it is just guessing between what one believes one metric is balanced to another. This form of guessing is CURRENTLY how most games like gw2 balance their games when it comes to numerical changes. And there are all sorts of more and more clever ways to do this kind of thing. You're probably also familiar with DPS benchmarks. This is essentially what ANET looks at, as a general form of trying to see how different classes and builds do damage against a golem to see if they do the same DPS. If one build is "underperforming" they give it some more damage or whatever until they observe it doing the same benchmark damage as everything else. This is basically how sciences approach problems through repetitive experiment. Because of all the variables and differences between things in a system, one can only guess and estimate what things in that system are doing with a finite level of accuracy, and this accuracy is determined by repetitive observation and experiment. This applies to gw2's current balance regiment and many other games that test player choices. So the point here is that this form of guessing is what current balance models are based on, because you simply can not make Class A equal to Class B, without them being the same class with the same skills and the same XYZ attributes. This is why Build Diversity comes into the fold here. If Class A and Class B were to be equal in everyway, they would HAVE to be the same in every way possible...again because it is impossible to make two things that are different equal to one another. One thing is always going to be stronger then another thing in one situation or another until all elements in the system become equal to one another, and when those elements are equal, they are just the same class, with the same skills with the same metrics. Diversity itself as a topic is a huge can of worms, that goes into why nerfs generally are worse then buffs, which i briefly allude to in one of my first comments here about barrier for entry for build variety. Diversity is a very complex topic and it's intricately connected to balance...in many ways they are one in the same thing. In fact the many reasons you are misunderstanding the key concept of balance for equality is because diversity is literally the other half of that concept that is required to understand why the two are both the same and also incompatible (They have what's called [complementarity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarity_(physics)))

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Buffing damage by 10%, yes, you CAN offset that by also buffing healing by 10%, but if you don't buff healing by 10% then you've not kept it equal. Exactly, you are not making the game equal therefor you are NOT balancing the game. What is so hard to understand about that? You are literally pushing numbers around and that is all it amounts to. >Just because you "could" have buffed healing by 10%, doesn't mean that buffing damage by 10% has a net-zero effect. It only has a net-zero effect if you actually DO buff healing by 10%. No that's exactly what happens. It's net zero. Buff damage by 10% or nerf healing by 10% gives you the same result. Nerfs and Buffs are cut from the same cloth, one gives you power creeping, the other gives you power dipping, and applying both give you a universal increase in power level, or a universal decrease in power level or no change in power level at all, which is NET ZERO. That's what it really means to make things equal to each other, both sides of an equation have to cancel out.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > You said add a bunch of 0's to the end of each skill. I've bolded it in the quote for you.Each skill. Each skill. As in, every single one. In that case, yes, you've not changed any balance. But that is not the scenario being discussed. > > What if you only change one skill, and none of the others? > You keep talking about scenario's different to the one I've posited. Why don't you let me know when you're ready to actually address even a single one of the points I've made instead of making up points of your own to argue against. Dude i keep saying this, you need to go back and just re-read what I keep saying because you clearly do not understand this basic math here. Buffing ONE skill is just as meaningless of an operation as any other, because you can do the same inverse operation to SOMETHING ELSE and get the same result. If what you are doing makes the two things EQUAL then you could have made them equal at a lower power level or a higher one, and this is now relative to their HP, to their toughness, to their whatever attributes you can list in the game. If even one thing is not equal to everything else, you purposefully imbalance the system. Therefor balancing using nerfs and buffs to make things equal means nothing. Again even further you cant even make things equal without stripping the game of build diversity. That's the other half of the topic but you haven't even gotten past the first one. > For the millionth time, I am not positing a scenario where you universally adjust all attributes by the same amount. I am positing a scenario where you change ONLY ONE attribute, Again, read above, very slowly and use your thinking cap.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Let's imagine that there are only 2 classes, mesmer and guardian, each with only 1 build. And lets say that guardian is twice as strong as mesmer. > > You're actually saying that there are no number tweaks you could possibly do to make them equal to each other, either by nerfing guardian or buffing mesmer. > > Just..... what?? I'm saying that whatever nerf or buff you make to this system are meaningless. Because whatever Nerf you introduce you can instead give it an equivalent Buff to the other. Thus nerfs are no different then buffs. If you do make both of them equal (which realistically you can't without removing what makes both classes different) then you are just pushing the power level of both classes either up or down.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > It's totally fine to give guardian +10k HP, because we COULD have added damage to Warrior, even though we didn't. But we COULD have done (but we didn't). > > Just..... lol. > This is exactly my point. We are NOT making them equal. YES I am purposefully im-balancing the system. YES. Yes in fact you could have just added HP and damage into the game and you'd still have the same state of the system as we have in the game now... Is that not obvious to you? Add a bunch of 0's to the end of each skill and attribute, or whatever operation. The overall state of the balance of the system doesn't change. Go a step further and realize that, even trying to QUANTIFY a system with as many parts as gw2, and see if it's even logical to assume one can even balance gw2 by trying to make things equal. Hint, it's impossible. To even attempt balancing a system to be equal actual means removing build diversity. That's why this argument exists at all, because mathematically, this is what happens. You can now understand the logic behind why buffs and nerfs when aiming for balance through equality lead to less build diversity and not more of it. > @"Ragnar.4257" said: > This is exactly my point. We are NOT making them equal. YES I am purposefully im-balancing the system. YES. > Right there you go...Now if you aren't making things equal then what are you trying to accomplish? Because surely it's not balance...and that is my point. > However, that assumes that the system was balanced to begin with. If A is 10x stronger than B, then buffing B **and only B** by 10x is not making the system more im-balanced.... because it wasn't a balanced system to begin with. Great Now you are starting to use your thinking cap. But It doesn't assume that the system was balanced to begin with. You can take any state of any system and the same rules of math apply. The reason this happens is because it is a CONSEQUENCE of trying to make things in a system equal. If a system is already equal, then any change you introduce will purposefully imbalance the system, or raise or lower the universal power level if the changes you make are again, equivalent. This idea of making things equal goes far beyond the scope of just gw2 and is just the tip of the iceberg....it's also the reason your struggling to grasp the concept because it seems intuitive to think of it the way you do, but it's wrong. These things go so deep into mathematics that you will find that it is these kinds of basic misunderstandings about equality that it is one of the main reasons why Newtonian physics had to be replaced with Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. Yes it was as simple as the idea of how things in a system inherently can't be equal to one another.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Let me ask once again: > > Scenario 1: > Buff A by 100, Buff B by 100 > > Scenario 2: > Buff A by 100, leave B untouched. > > You're actually saying that Scenarios 1 & 2 are equivalent and indistinguishable? Yes, they are equivalent because you could do the same thing by just nerfing the other by 100. If you make both A and B equal through your operation, you are just moving the basic (universal) power level, and any operation you could have chosen would suffice to do just that. if you are not making them equal then you are purposefully im-balancing the system.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Exactly, we're NOT making a change that's equivalent to something else. > > We're NOT buffing A by 100, and also buffing B by 100. We're ONLY buffing A by 100. So yes there is a difference. > > Scenario 1: > Buff A by 100, Buff B by 100 > > Scenario 2: > > Buff A by 100, leave B untouched. > > You do accept that scenarios 1 and 2 are different, right? zzz. Listen they are not different. Player A has 90 damage, Player B has 100 damage. You can either +10 to Player A, or -10 to Player B, and the result is you get Player A 90 / Player B 90 Player A 100/ Player B 100 No matter what operation, buffs or nerfs you do to make it equal, you are just moving the power level up or down universally. Doesn't matter if it's 10, 100, 1000... You are just MOVING the basic power level. Any other operation that is not equivelent makes it imbalanced. If you add +11 to Player A and do nothing for player B (or whatever configuration of operations you desire) then the two will not be equal Player A 101/ Player B 100 This is not philosophical, this is mathematics. There is LITERATLY no operation you can do to change the system in anyway to make it equal without it being equivelent (duhh right?), and if it's equivalent it is just moving the power level up or down universally.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Also: "The only thing that "changed" was what builds we used" - you say that like it doesn't constitute a change at all. What? If we used builds A, B and C pre-February and now we use builds X, Y and Z, then qualitatively how is that meaningful? We used 3 builds then, we use 3 builds now...there is no meaning in that. >"the number of meta builds didn't increase (it decreased actually)" - wrong, the diversity of builds being played now is much greater than a year ago. Look this is something that is much more complicated to argue about. You are gonna say there is more, I'm gonna say there is less...there is no real way to measure build diversity before and build diversity after Feb patch in gw2. We could go back and forth on this but we won't get anywhere. >Of course it makes a difference if you're only changing 1 number vs All numbers. You yourself made that very point earlier in this thread. If you multiply every number by the same amount, then there is no change. But if you only change 1 number while leaving all other numbers the same, then that DOES result in a change. no there is no difference at all, that's what you need to understand. both operations are meaningless. 1 operation, 10 operations, 100 operations...they do not amount to any meaning in the balance of the system, because any nerf you do can be done with an equivalent buff somewhere else. It's when they aren't equivalent, when the system becomes imbalanced...and if you make a change that doesn't make it equivalent to something else, then what are you even doing other then purposefully imbalancing the game?

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > But you're talking about a universal multiplier applied to everything. > > The scenario I posted was ONE change to ONE number. NOT universal. It was therefore NOT relative. NOTHING TO DO WITH ADDING EXTRA 0's ON THE END. > > Jesus christ. The point is that it doesn't matter if you change one number, 10 numbers 100 numbers...what makes you think the rules change between 1 number and infinity numbers? Surprise, there is no change in the rules. You're not thinking with your logic cap on and your trying to reconcile that the February patch had anything meaningful, other then "upsetting the establishment" or whatever reason someone could explain any meaningful change between then and now. The only thing that "changed" was what builds we used...the number of meta builds didn't increase (it decreased actually) the player population went down, and a whole lot of off meta builds were gutted, and a few off meta builds saw some shine (and sometimes quickly nerfed again) Here's another clue. There will always be a meta game in a game like gw2....there will always be some set of traits, abilities or whatever that is the most optimal set of choices, and the only day when there will be no metagame, is when all choices are simply the same choice...and it's because of the effect in trying to bring nerfs and buffs together to make things equal, which is fundamentally impossible to do, especially in a game like gw2.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > I'll say, yet again, that the solution I gave was not to multiply by 10. And neither, as it happens, is the solution you posted here. You did NOT multiply by 10. You added 1000HP to Class B while leaving Class A untouched. That is NOT a universal operation. You're just straight up lying at this point, and very poor lies because it's easily disprovable by reading up a few posts. Dude you are MISSING the point here...im saying it doesn't matter what operation you do...it is ALL THE SAME because it's relative, therefor no CHANGE has any fundamental meaning...You could pump an extra 3 0's to the end of every skill and HP, toughness, whatever into the game, and you will still have the same balance. Want a real example? Look at WoW gear Treadmill reset after Pandara. Level 100 Gear had stats skyrocketing into the 10's of millions, and it completely invalidated gear that was 10 levels below them, because they were WAY below the barrier for entry. You could take a level 90, and solo ICC 10 man, and invalidate a level 80 40 man raids. this was a clear result of how Powercreep and Powerdip are relative, and it is the reason why they were able to just reset the gear stats on gear so that dungeons could no longer be completely irrelevant 10 level above you.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Aaaaaaaaaaaand, you're STILL talking about balance. Not about pace/flow. Which is what this is actually about. Pace and flow is exactly what changed, Balance is exactly what DIDNT change and that is what i said...you responded to what i said right? you kinda hijacked my point to make your own i suppose. Pace and flow is nothing more then the result of Powerdip / Powercreep. You could have a slower pace by just reducing damage...or you can have a faster pace by reducing HP...none of the changes made in February actually mattered in the interest of balance at all...that's my point man.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > And no the solution was not just the same as multiplying each number by 10. What are you talking about? The solution was to add 100 HP to only 1 of the 2 classes, and to leave the damage numbers unchanged. Prepatch: Class A: 1000 Dmg / 2000 HP Class B: 500 Dmg / 3000 HP Class A > Class B Postpatch: Class A: 1000 Dmg / 2000 HP Class B: 500 Dmg / 4000 HP Class A = Class B ^^^Multply everything by an order of magnitude, and the changes are relatively the same, just with bigger numbers. > @"Ragnar.4257" >>@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said: >>I could have given you an unbalanced system (Feel free to go and do that yourself)... there is no operation that makes that system balanced without universally effecting >>all things in that system. >????????????? >I just made it balanced, without universally effecting all things in the system. You said feel free to go and do it myself, and I did. It's just a mistype. What i meant to explain, was that there is no operation you can do in the system, that has any meaning* That the system is only balanced, when all things are universally equal. This is why buffs are just as "meaningful" as nerfs. Just like how Class A Class B, you can have any configuration of numbers, so long as they are equal the system is balance EI nerfs and buffs have the same effect, so long as the two sides are equal...anything less then equal is imbalanced.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > > Okay, yes, correct. But this, is scenario is about balancing, not about changing the pace/flow of the game. Which is what the Feb 2020 patch was actually about. > > I'm still waiting for you to address the scenario I posted above. You're strangely quiet on that. You're writing a bit too fast, and I'm trying to keep up with that here and address all your talking points. As for this example here : >If it was changed that baseline HP was 1,000,000, suddenly the way everyone would play the game would be different, because there'd be no danger of getting 1-shot, and you could maybe accept face-tanking a big burst to achieve some wider strategic goal. People would change their playstyle to min-maxing damage/healing efficiency, because the game would change from being based on twitch reactions, to being about strategically managing resources and maximising efficiency. Your contention that tweaking numbers changes nothing is untrue. >Likewise, if we consider the inverse, where all damage numbers are multiplied by 1000, and HP remains the same, again people would have to change how they play, because taking even 1 hit would be death. The above example is just a varied version of the examples we've been talking about. The numbers themselves are all relative, and thus, any change you make, say to give Class A 1,000,000 HP is going to shift the balance of the game to be bunker meta...because the barrier for entry for doing damage is now much higher. To deal with an enemy of a million health, requires an enemy that does some significant fraction of that health. Likewise the same happens in reverse with damage. You either get Power-Dips or Power-creeps, and we've been down this road in gw2 history. Either attempt to move numbers around just leads to the above scenarios because making things equal is in itself a fundamentally flawed procedure. Now i don't talk about this here, but the logic goes further when we talk about the meaninglessness of buffs and nerfs, and how from that, build diversity comes into play. Imagine if in your previous example, you added Class C, D, E...etc. All numbers when comparing them can essentially be different but they all average to the mean number. The mean number at infinity "classes" is going to have both sides equal one another. In other words, having more builds, even with widely varying numbers will equalize. Again this is why @"Arheundel.6451" point about why diversity is so important and comes into play here.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Here's an operation for you: > > Prepatch: > > Class A: 100 Dmg / 200 HP > Class B: 50 Dmg / 300 HP > > Class A > Class B > > Postpatch: > > Class A: 100 Dmg / 200 HP > Class B: 50 Dmg / 400 HP > > Class A = Class B Which is the same as just making Class A do 75 damage, which is also just the same as multiplying each number in the above example by an order of magnitude (x10). In both cases, the NERFS are just as "meaningful" as the BUFFS you add. Do you not understand this?