Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiery
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Imbalance has everything to do with diversity. This applies to games as much as in the real world. If everything was balanced, there would be no diversity.
|
You have much to learn, apparently about both game design and life. There are hundreds of ethnicities in the World. It's generally considered that they are "balanced" - australians are equal japanese, spanish are equal to french, etc. And, yet, these cultures are all very different.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiery
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
If you're looking for homogenization and the same abilities with different names that function nearly identically on a surface level, then Warcraft pretty well has that perfected.
|
THAT'S NOT WHAT BALANCE IS.
Holy shit.
Balance is taking any number of DIFFERENT variables and combining them such that one set of variables is roughly equal to another set of variables.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiery
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
For the sake of the conversation at hand, lets look at it from another perspective. If the classes were "balanced", all tank classes could tank all mobs with the same effectiveness, all dps classes would provide the same total number of dps given any encounter, all healers could effectively heal all members of a similarly comprised group, and all classes could solo with equal effectiveness.
|
It's not just about the numbers, it's about the METHOD. Fighting as a Warrior should be much different than fighting as a Monk. Fighting as a Ranger should be much different than fighting as a Rogue. It's about different playstyles and each class should require skill and experience to play very well. There are all kinds of mechanics that can be implemented in a game to make each class distinct.
If they were well balanced, they wouldn't be equally as good as the other in any given encounter. They would be equally as good as the other
over the course of a number of different encounters and at the highest level of play. Moreover, if you had a great amount of diversity AND a great amount of balance, then you would be able to mix and match a wide variety of characters to create a strong team. Each team would be very different, though. That's where part of the fun comes in.
As far as numbers go, assume that each "tank" has 4 different attributes. Now assume that "Tank A" could do each of those those things at a rating of 7 + 3 + 8 + 2. His score is 20. Now assume that "Tank B" could do each of those things at a rating of 4 + 6 + 4 + 6. His score is also 20, but his skills are
completely different. That's balance. They would each be better than the other in different situations and in varying degrees. It needs to be more complex than this example and some abilities can't even be strictly "rated", but that is the overall idea.