Is Balancing SPVP Challenging or Impossible ?

[DragonFury.6243]

Keep in mind

 

1- enemy team get a thief and your team low mobility professions

2- you team get 2 to 3 support professions leave you with little dmg

3- core professions are equal to hot elite / hot elite are equal to pof elite

4- profession/elite staking and player refuse to swap

5- player still play an under performing elite and forget its teams fights that mean advantage to 5 player and disadvantage to the other 4

6- bunker builds bitter than dmg build in SPVP ! because they can go full bunk and the dmg build cant go full Berserk-er or they ll get one shots

7- you are good in SPVP because of your profession/elite not your skills ! elite that give you so much VS elite that need a lot from you

8- toxic player (i might be one of them IDK)

 

So in general its depend on the PVP community/Anet balancing teams

And i know i missed a lot but Is Balancing SPVP

[ZeroXell.5172]

Balancing as not only in sPvP, but rather in general, requires looking at the game from multiple perspectives. So many in fact, that if you don't use any kind of data analysis, you are going to make more harm than good with your patches because of your own bias. Game complexity makes balancing a game a challenging task, but it is impossible only if you follow your guts instead of hard data.

 

In order to provide a known example of using data for balancing, look at League of Legends. Their balance patches usually move in the range of 5-10% modifications, often even less than these. Meanwhile GW2 is getting 50%-75% increases/decreases on skills. This very often makes skills/traits bounce between useless and completely broken.

 

Luckily enough for this discussion, League recently published some screenshots from the inner analytics tool, so you can actually take a look and get an idea how they analyze the impact of changes, individual champions, etc. You can find them here:

 

http://www.surrenderat20.net/2018/05/red-post-collection-quick-gameplay_23.html#more

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z0oTdmBnlWU/WwXAnvfVPyI/AAAAAAABAFk/wPKIvLNEPtgXRaCkwVySYcf399jkGJrJQCLcBGAs/s1600/B8FJ9V7.jpg

 

Looking at these, you can check how your changes (whatever they were) affected a champion (or class in the case of GW2) in all kinds of situations.

 

Now, before someome comes in and says "League has less variability than sPvP". Setting aside all other factors, Do you know how many champions are in league? 142 with the upcoming new support. The potential number of champion combinations is around the order of tens of billions at the moment, 53.768.680.560 potential combinations to be exact. If you think you balance that based only on people complaining and cool edited videos on youtube, be my guest.

[LONGA.1652]

Even Overwatch still have this issue . People play only one character not swapping. Being toxic calling out names .That pretty much human side of the game requie something more than MMR to sort with.

 

Despite the game having Less set of numbers to tweak with people still having issue with Meta. Rework on toon who's is problematic when show up in game cause people to rage.

[pah.4931]

I think you'd have to better define "balance". And in what environment. There are currently too many assumptions. In our current status quo (random queues, profession swapping)... I'd say it's almost impossible.

 

If you mean in a world where ANYTHING can be changed to acquire balance, then I would say its just challenging.

[Kako.1930]

It's never going to be perfect. The best the system can do is create matches where the odds are close for either side to win, but there will always be times where one person goes afk, or the comp of one team is superior to the other, or people make bad plays, so there's no way to make sure that every match is a close and enjoyable match. It can balance out over time, but the matches themselves will always be at least a little unbalanced.

[Chaith.8256]

System is balanced around giving people freedom in switching to fix their god awful comps. Comp is realistically a part of player skill, almost all of your examples of imbalance are class/comp related.

 

 

[Vagrant.7206]

While I don't believe there's such a thing as "perfect" balance, it is achievable. It would take (as suggested above) a rigorous AI system to monitor various metrics for each skill and trait (too much to get a small team to do with any amount of consistency), but it's certainly possible.

[Brujeria.7536]

Well BASICLY its rather easy. You need to approach balance on certain aspects: Balance decisions should ALWAYS be made on a 1 vs 1 basis in general. Every class should be on equal footing against any other class, the outcome should only be based around the skill of the individuals involved if the build is centered around it. This is the base concept. Every profession should have this very core build rooted in its BASE Profession. You then factor in the other crucial aspects for the gamemode. In PvP and Conquest these are:

 

Target caps. If a skill or a class affects multiple enemies / foes the skill should be SIGNIFICANT weaker. You should have a REMARKABLE defecit in power against classes that focus on single target /dueling damage. Same goes for healing / buffing / debuffing skills. A class like tempest for example, thats so much trimmed around AOE damage and effects shouldnt be able to win against a class thats trimmed around single target damage. Tempest shines in teamfights.

 

Mobility. In a capture and hold points based game game like it is currently mobility is the most valueable thing. A class having that much mobility as a thief should generally be weaker in 1v1 scenarios. Skills like mesmer portal should be an elite skill with a long cooldown. Shadowstep "shortcuts" should be removed, if they intend to keep them further decrease the power level of the classes associated. You can either NERF the classes with mobility power and damage wise to compensate for the added impact trough mobility or you significantly nerf the mobility of the classes. You could go the other way around and give great mobility to every class, but this leads to even more power creep.

 

Then, for the fine tuning:

 

Similar roles should be roughly similary in terms of power. Bunker builds should be around equal, bunker builds that heavily support or heal allies should always come at a cost. If a skill buffs 5 targets its duration should be maximum 40% of the duration of a similar single target / self buff skill.

 

Stop the powercreep. Not every class and every skill needs to be flashy and overloaded with effects. The more you get these back to the ground the more you can actually create builds and options that matter. Take rune or sigil and most traits for example. Nobody really cares about single effects any more, boons, conditions, effects in general are in such vast quantity and duration that each individual application and way of application.

 

Some of these sound complicated, but really they aren't. You can easily measure a skills power based on its cooldown, target cap, and numbers as a rough baseline. You dont need to do this on a per skill basis, you have a pretty "easy" ground with the weapons - 5 skills that are glued together and defining for a class or playstyle. Utility skills should be just that - utility. Playmakers, skill based effects or tweak to adapt a build. Skills like Glyph of Storm or Sharpening Stone should not exist, thats pure power that should be tailored in and around the weapons. Class effects should give flavour and define the distinct playstyle of a class.

[DragonFury.6243]

> @"Brujeria.7536" said:

> Well BASICLY its rather easy. You need to approach balance on certain aspects: Balance decisions should ALWAYS be made on a 1 vs 1 basis in general.

 

well to TBH i cant imagine core necro have a chance in 1 v 1 core warrior , thief or even guardian without rework to death shroud and i dont think increase or decrease some no. well help in this case

 

>Nobody really cares about single effects any more, boons, conditions, effects in general are in such vast quantity and duration that each individual application and way of application.

Lol that a Painful Truth

 

[Delweyn.1309]

The difference between spvp and ranked matches is that in ranked, the "difficulty" can be lowered id you lose many matches.

 

In spvp, if you have a high pvp rank and matches played, you are doomed to have very hard matches most of the time, even when you test a new build or play a reroll. It's impossible to lower the "difficulty" to have fun to test new things.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

Challenging. You're never going to fix toxic people, bad matchups, or bad connections, but you should still strive to acquire class balance to make sure that losses largely stem from player failings. Once you give imbalance to a class, you will still have player failings but they will be exacerbated by people playing the specs with the largest safety net.

Losing due to a bad comp will lead some people to refine their skills. Losing because there are builds in game that counter the majority of the other playstyles generally causes people who would otherwise practice to quit.

 

It's in no way easy, but it's one of those things you should keep hitting frequently, so that there is more initiative to practice, a foundation for a healthy meta, and a use for most specs in the game in the PVP sphere.

 

Keep in mind there is a difference between "Spvp balance" when applied to "player experience" and "Spvp balance" when applied to "class balance", though the two overlap.

 

There will be players who never understand how to rotate. There will be players who have egos so fragile they afk the moment nobody pushes far with their slow class when the opposing team is on respawn and they get ganked. Those things will cause games that would be otherwise fine to crumble. That being said, there should still be the potential for comps to rival each other on equal tactical footing without one class being able to cover multiple tasks at once in any scenario. We are slowly approaching that, even with the existence of scourge.

 

It's going to always need tweaking, but there's a threshold where it would be considered adequate and reasonable.

[NuhDah.9812]

> @"Brujeria.7536" said:

> Well BASICLY its rather easy. You need to approach balance on certain aspects: Balance decisions should ALWAYS be made on a 1 vs 1 basis in general. Every class should be on equal footing against any other class, the outcome should only be based around the skill of the individuals involved if the build is centered around it. This is the base concept. Every profession should have this very core build rooted in its BASE Profession. You then factor in the other crucial aspects for the gamemode. In PvP and Conquest these are:

>

> Target caps. If a skill or a class affects multiple enemies / foes the skill should be SIGNIFICANT weaker. You should have a REMARKABLE defecit in power against classes that focus on single target /dueling damage. Same goes for healing / buffing / debuffing skills. A class like tempest for example, thats so much trimmed around AOE damage and effects shouldnt be able to win against a class thats trimmed around single target damage. Tempest shines in teamfights.

>

> Mobility. In a capture and hold points based game game like it is currently mobility is the most valueable thing. A class having that much mobility as a thief should generally be weaker in 1v1 scenarios. Skills like mesmer portal should be an elite skill with a long cooldown. Shadowstep "shortcuts" should be removed, if they intend to keep them further decrease the power level of the classes associated. You can either NERF the classes with mobility power and damage wise to compensate for the added impact trough mobility or you significantly nerf the mobility of the classes. You could go the other way around and give great mobility to every class, but this leads to even more power creep.

>

> Then, for the fine tuning:

>

> Similar roles should be roughly similary in terms of power. Bunker builds should be around equal, bunker builds that heavily support or heal allies should always come at a cost. If a skill buffs 5 targets its duration should be maximum 40% of the duration of a similar single target / self buff skill.

>

> Stop the powercreep. Not every class and every skill needs to be flashy and overloaded with effects. The more you get these back to the ground the more you can actually create builds and options that matter. Take rune or sigil and most traits for example. Nobody really cares about single effects any more, boons, conditions, effects in general are in such vast quantity and duration that each individual application and way of application.

>

> Some of these sound complicated, but really they aren't. You can easily measure a skills power based on its cooldown, target cap, and numbers as a rough baseline. You dont need to do this on a per skill basis, you have a pretty "easy" ground with the weapons - 5 skills that are glued together and defining for a class or playstyle. Utility skills should be just that - utility. Playmakers, skill based effects or tweak to adapt a build. Skills like Glyph of Storm or Sharpening Stone should not exist, thats pure power that should be tailored in and around the weapons. Class effects should give flavour and define the distinct playstyle of a class.

 

If you want every thing to be on equal footing in 1v1s, than thats bound to kill any role diversity in the game since the effects in the different possible match ups need to be similar and only skinning abilities to look different or to be activated from another key isn't making it's not changing it. Between a "perfect" balance that offers no diversity and a balance designed on effective couners, ability to choose something between at least 2 similar roles and so on without going into extremes, for example fighting against a counter is never a fair 1v1, but there should be ways that let you disengage, stall etc. if you play with decent skill, and should never be an 100% death penalty if you engage in a fight like that.

[KrHome.1920]

> @"ZeroXell.5172" said:

> Balancing as not only in sPvP, but rather in general, requires looking at the game from multiple perspectives. So many in fact, that if you don't use any kind of data analysis, you are going to make more harm than good with your patches because of your own bias. Game complexity makes balancing a game a challenging task, but it is impossible only if you follow your guts instead of hard data.

 

>Meanwhile GW2 is getting 50%-75% increases/decreases on skills. This very often makes skills/traits bounce between useless and completely broken.

I am pretty sure they use a data analysis tool.

 

**The real problem is skill design.** The game is full of skills that just do too much. It's too easy to completely shutdown the mechanics of other classes.

 

I mean what do you expect of a balancing team that probably thinks:

_"There are too many boons in the game that create unkillable comps. Let's introduce a spec that corrupts boons with every thing it does (scourge). [...]

Oh now the specs that relied on boons for survival are too squishy. Let's give them insane burst (holo) to destroy the boon spam spec before it can corrupt. [...]

Well that burst spec is pretty strong, so lets create a spec that is invulnerable to bursts for somewhat around 10 seconds (mirage, spellbreaker, soulbeast)." [...]

Oh now we have specs, that don't rely on boons but are still too durable. Damn, didn't see that coming..."_

 

They just could have decreased the boon spamming and **boon sharing**...

 

**TL;DR:**

Powercreep

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

Balancing sPvP (like all other balancing things) is challenging, because there are a wildly huge number of variables involved.

 

I think your poll will be tainted by the other problem, though, which is that *player perception of balance* is not the same thing as balance itself, and so you get the sort of speculation about "developers never playing the game", etc, because people can't tell what is, or is not, actually balanced, and they magnify personal perception, or skill differences, or random noise into complaints -- along with legitimate issues they complain about.

[Brujeria.7536]

> @"NuhDah.9812" said:

> > @"Brujeria.7536" said:

> > Well BASICLY its rather easy. You need to approach balance on certain aspects: Balance decisions should ALWAYS be made on a 1 vs 1 basis in general. Every class should be on equal footing against any other class, the outcome should only be based around the skill of the individuals involved if the build is centered around it. This is the base concept. Every profession should have this very core build rooted in its BASE Profession. You then factor in the other crucial aspects for the gamemode. In PvP and Conquest these are:

> >

> > Target caps. If a skill or a class affects multiple enemies / foes the skill should be SIGNIFICANT weaker. You should have a REMARKABLE defecit in power against classes that focus on single target /dueling damage. Same goes for healing / buffing / debuffing skills. A class like tempest for example, thats so much trimmed around AOE damage and effects shouldnt be able to win against a class thats trimmed around single target damage. Tempest shines in teamfights.

> >

> > Mobility. In a capture and hold points based game game like it is currently mobility is the most valueable thing. A class having that much mobility as a thief should generally be weaker in 1v1 scenarios. Skills like mesmer portal should be an elite skill with a long cooldown. Shadowstep "shortcuts" should be removed, if they intend to keep them further decrease the power level of the classes associated. You can either NERF the classes with mobility power and damage wise to compensate for the added impact trough mobility or you significantly nerf the mobility of the classes. You could go the other way around and give great mobility to every class, but this leads to even more power creep.

> >

> > Then, for the fine tuning:

> >

> > Similar roles should be roughly similary in terms of power. Bunker builds should be around equal, bunker builds that heavily support or heal allies should always come at a cost. If a skill buffs 5 targets its duration should be maximum 40% of the duration of a similar single target / self buff skill.

> >

> > Stop the powercreep. Not every class and every skill needs to be flashy and overloaded with effects. The more you get these back to the ground the more you can actually create builds and options that matter. Take rune or sigil and most traits for example. Nobody really cares about single effects any more, boons, conditions, effects in general are in such vast quantity and duration that each individual application and way of application.

> >

> > Some of these sound complicated, but really they aren't. You can easily measure a skills power based on its cooldown, target cap, and numbers as a rough baseline. You dont need to do this on a per skill basis, you have a pretty "easy" ground with the weapons - 5 skills that are glued together and defining for a class or playstyle. Utility skills should be just that - utility. Playmakers, skill based effects or tweak to adapt a build. Skills like Glyph of Storm or Sharpening Stone should not exist, thats pure power that should be tailored in and around the weapons. Class effects should give flavour and define the distinct playstyle of a class.

>

> If you want every thing to be on equal footing in 1v1s, than thats bound to kill any role diversity in the game since the effects in the different possible match ups need to be similar and only skinning abilities to look different or to be activated from another key isn't making it's not changing it. Between a "perfect" balance that offers no diversity and a balance designed on effective couners, ability to choose something between at least 2 similar roles and so on without going into extremes, for example fighting against a counter is never a fair 1v1, but there should be ways that let you disengage, stall etc. if you play with decent skill, and should never be an 100% death penalty if you engage in a fight like that.

 

Not everything should always be on equal footing per se - but each class should have a working easy achieveable build in its base class thats equal to every other class in 1v1 if they spec for the same purpose. That means a thief should not be good in 1v1 just because he has weapon X if lets say a mesmer needs weapon X and all traits and abilities to make it work - a dedicated 1 v1 build vs a dedicated 1v1 build. Its completly fine that traits, weapon sets, etc. change this up by a lot. Classes also achieve this in different ways, a necro shouldnt play like an ele or a warrior like a guardian. In the bottomline it should be about skill, not class if both are specced for it.

 

As for counters yes - a build that focus on group support and group fighting should have very little chances of success against a 1v1 build - same for any counter. Variations could drift out a lot for the different specs, an ele supports different then a engie, etc. Offensive or defensive support etc should fill profession based playstyles and its okay for some classes to not have a support build, but another niche they excel in.

[Kraitan.8476]

Its not impossible but with 1 (usually unimpactfull) patch every 3-4 months it is. Especially when that quarterly patch is 90% underwater stuff & skill unsplits for pve..

[Eddbopkins.2630]

Almost impossible becuase of class mechanics...look at mesmer how can u balance a class that has excess to everything, nerfing it will make it useless buffing it will make it to strong against classes that dont have 1/5th of what mesmer has......for example fa ele vs mesmer shatter.... Going invisable to do a surprise 15k+ attack on a class that has a starting hp value of 11.6k and 1800def how do u balance something like that against each other? You really cant its just the nature of the classes mechanic that makes it strong, not the skills it self per say....imo

 

Look at warrior skills ypu got nearly all there skills doing 3k+ damage from rush to every f1 skill from sword 3 to axes spin all single skills that acheive 4k+ damage with easy with 1 button, take ele now and u have to chain so many skills together to get the same results...its juat the nature of the classes mechanic...it cant really be balanced...imo

[Leodon.1564]

Balance is subjective and as such can never be achieved in the current gaming model (that pretty much every game follows) where the developers manually tune things for the masses. In this model, you can only hope to get to a point where the outcries of imbalance are as low as possible. Even if balance is fairly good, you are going to still have tons of people who are going to complain their way to nerfing others and buffing themselves. A lot of these people do it unconsciously because their Ego causes them to pick up on every imbalance that affects them negatively while ignoring the things that affect them positively. In this narrow and skewed perspective, they really do feel they are "right" in their arguments. In this model, the pendulum of balance never stands still as it just swings from group to group based on who screams the loudest.

 

True balance can only be achieved in a gaming model where you give players the tools and options to balance things for themselves. Every player needs to have the ability to customize their character to counter whatever it is that they feel is overpowered in the game. In this model, players can't blame anyone but themselves if they feel another person is OP. If the meta or common perception is that "rocks" are too strong, then the player needs to be given the ability to counter it with plenty of "paper" options.

 

I don't think the rock, paper, scissor model works in a practical sense in today's games or someone would probably have already done it. It's my belief that the core way we conceptualize combat has been hijacked by years of indoctrination into the current format we see today and is preventing us from thinking outside the box. I think having a PVP game based on rock, scissors, paper (or a similar idea) is possible but would require companies to really break down combat to its core elements and redesign it from the ground up. For example, floating damage numbers and health bars numbers are a bad idea in a PVP model as those things always need to be balanced over and over again and will never be "perfect". (Not to mention its unintuitive as hell; why does one skill do "x" damage while another does "y" damage?) Having numbers assigned to skills and such have been around from the earliest days of gaming and served its purpose but we need to move beyond this imperfect design choice if you really want to take PVP gaming to the next level.

 

Edit: The reason eSports was bound to fail in GW2 is that no one but a handful of people knows what the hell is going on in a PVP match. eSports can only really thrive in an environment where any casual observer can look at the action and understand what's going on. (You know you have a winning formula if a 5 year old can follow it.) The fact Anet decided to spend big money to promote eSports when their gaming model is not designed to support it is an indication that the people making decisions there really don't understand what they are doing or were desperate.

 

[AegisFLCL.7623]

Impossible, if in general one assumes the game is balanced based on how close matches are.

 

You make up 1/5th of your team, and you can only have so much influence on the game. Due to low player population, class stacking, lots of people flocking to fotm classes, and occasional dc's/afk's, there is no way the mmr system could accurately calculate a player's skill level; there are too many random factors.