Forget about balance already

Monday 15 August, 2011 at 4:20 pm / 0 comment

Forget about balance already

If you were to ask me, I’d reply rather cynically that balance has become a dirty word. An “I want to eat my cake and still have it so I can eat it again and again and…”. Who’s idea was it that equalizing classes was the way to correctly balance an MMO and make it more fun to play?

Give me imbalance any day. PvP will be infinitely more fun. We’re looking down the wrong pipe dream and missing all the better ways to balance MMOs that are all around us.

I’m in favor of a rock-paper-scissors type of balance, my self. You like Priest, but you don’t like being ganked from behind by a rogue or one-hit by a warrior? Too bad. Cloth wearing classes used to be called squishies for a reason. Classes can have weaknesses and strengths to add variety and open up the way we strategize and run-around inside an arena.

Now? Every class is very close to being the same. It’s not about the classes actually behaving differently anymore, but about simply liking a flame of fire spewing forth from your finger tips instead of wielding two knives. Classes are the same. We pretty much are getting down to having only one class. Mr. Universal, the one and only class that everyone plays. Everyone simply puts different skins on him.

The rogue killed me with his 340 DPS slice-’n-dice special attack so I force developers into giving mages a spell that can behave identically and dish out 34o DPS? Not only that, but I demand all skills work the same. Mages must be able to have attacks that are as fast and efficient as a rogue and give the same results in every exact way. I don’t think so.

On a long enough time-line all our classes have already been pretty similar. If we stop looking at the trees for a minute to look at the forest, we’ll see that there was already a finite amount of variations between classes. I don’t understand why anyone would want to further limit those differences down to one master archetype.

We should want a lot less of the balance that is being thrown around today.