I’ve seen a lot of really poor class balance lately. This knows no single game or company. As the industry moves away from class interdependency and defined roles we’re getting less of a unique feeling and more of generic console like experience. These days pretty much everyone is playing Mario or Luigi. Sure there are lots of other choices. You can be Yoshi, Toad, or that other princess but they either play like Mario or Luigi. I’ve brought a chart to help!
In 2000 MMORPG companies used to be able to tell people that they didn’t get to do everything. They’d set up clear hierarchies based around balance issues. As class X you might be great at one thing but totally dependent on class Y to do another. Yes, that means that sometimes you had to rely on others to achieve something!
Here is the 2010 class balance model. It was leaked to me by my contact in a very well known MMORPG company. I dare not say who though!
All characters are © 2007 - 2012
That set diagram is spot on. I wonder how much this is to do with experienced players using the 2000 experience to pick classes in 2010 which are most likely to be able to do everything.
For example, I used to happily heal in DaoC and not care about my lack of soloing. But one of the lures into WoW was that every class could solo. And that respecs would be cheap and easy. Even for healers. And then I realised how unfair it was that I hadn’t been able to solo up until then without being harassed by everyone for taking a smite spec.
And once you see the unfairness, you can’t go back. MMOs have only themselves to blame. By making tanking/healing group only, but dps useful everywhere, they had that unfairness built into the earlier class design.
Great points there! I agree, I don’t think you can go back. At least not with the average MMO player for sure. Old cranky ones like me might accept it but I don’t know actually. If I had to group and all my DPS friends could solo, they’d go solo. You’d almost have to make it to where nobody could solo for it to work.
Or, alternatively, that the benefits to grouping were so overwhelmingly better that players couldn’t stomach soloing. Ways to do that: Exp, loot, fun factor and probably all of the above. Make soloing gain significantly less exp, significantly less loot and significantly less “fun” — ie less challenging, more boring environments/foes/quests, etc.
Of course, even that game is probably going to have a smaller player pool than, say, WoW. But every game in the fantasy genre will have a smaller player pool than that. The only legit ‘challenger’ to WoW on the horizon is The Old Republic… and probably whatever else Blizzard and/or Bioware have up their sleeves.
Nice diagrams. Very accurately illustrates exactly how balance is changing these days. Throw in ability to solo, contribute to a group and do well in PvP and you’ve probably go an even more complicated graph