What Goes Up Must Come Down
Like the timeless Wheel of Fate that grinds you into the ground on one day and soars you into the heavens the next, the Nerf Cycle of an MMO follows a similar path. Being a fan of MMOs from the early days, I have seen nearly every title fall into this trap. The developers of a game always start with a set of assumptions and expectations for their class system. They plan, discuss, write memos, test theories, and craft solutions all in the aim of making a perfectly balanced system. Every choice has to be viable in some way and no one class can stand too far above the others without fearing a sudden revolution of the Nerf wheel downward. Sadly, like life, MMOs are inherently unpredictable. The quest for perfect balance is a fool’s errand but that doesn’t seem to prevent developers from pursuing it.
Perfect Build vs Perfect Balance
Just as it is the nature of MMO developers to seek balance, the players of that MMO naturally seek the best build for their role in the game. Players will always seek to minimize their weaknesses and maximize their strengths. As these two natures battle one another, they power the Nerf Cycle around and around again. As developers raise and lower various classes, different flavors of the month emerge. A few players may rage quit, reroll, or yell incessantly, but most should realize that it is simply the Wheel turning. In a few months, those on top will be on the bottom and vice versa; so it goes into infinity. A good example of this is the proposed changes in RIFT.
The Upcoming RIFT 1.3 Patch
Since I am already on the subject of the Great Nerf Cycle of Life in MMOs, the massive class changes in RIFT are an excellent example to use. As dual wielding warriors, Paragons started out as a role that did entirely too much damage. In response, the developers heavily nerfed them shortly after release. Sadly, that nerf effectively turned them into the EQ2 bruisers of RIFT. Now, the developers are drastically changing the role to be more viable. In turn, two-handed warriors will be complaining as they are now on the downturn. Don’t fret, however, my warrior friends. Give them three months and it will be someone else under the Nerf Bat. I fully appreciate the need to tweak games in order to make each class have a role, but the extreme shifts in the fates of classes are an unhealthy way to manage an MMO.
How Do I Get Off This Ride?
Since I presented a problem, I guess I should throw some solutions out there as well. Even though the Nerf Cycle is obvious, it is a hard thing out of which to break. Class systems, especially the role system in RIFT, will need constant tweaks to maintain viability. Nevertheless, the heart of the problem lies in the fallacy of expected perfection. Developers should not expect every role to balance perfectly against the others. This inherent inequality is a result of games that are overly focused on DPS. In old games like EQ, you had clearly defined roles of tank, healer, crowd control, damage, pulling (with feign death), etc. It didn’t matter if rogues did more damage than warriors and enchanters because the latter were focused on tanking and crowd control. Now, with everyone expected to DPS, it is a constant race to maintain a level playing field.
Developers simply need to wake up and realize that:
1. Players will always find the “best build” and, as long as the other builds are still useful, there is nothing wrong with that.
2. Roles in MMOs should provide ways for various classes to be useful without having be the best at a given thing. Rather than seeing roles as flavors of the same thing (DPS), you should use them as their name implies. Make them have vastly different yet equally important roles to play in a group/raid setting.
All characters are © 2007 - 2012
Well said, but one fundamental was left out. Trion has always tried too hard to listen to the QQ’s of its TERRIBLE forums. I can actually say I witnessed a mage (forgot his name) request that rogues be “86′ed” from the game. My instinct tells me that they are so afraid of pissing off that they just go from one extreme to the other to make the “lefts” happy and then swing it in favor of the “rights”, meanwhile everyone in the center is left with the tedious job of relearning how to play a certain “best build” because the “lefts” and the “rights” are never happy. The entire process was written out by Dr. Seuss in “The Sneetches”. It’s amazing how a kids book is so right in so many ways, yet adults (lets face it, adults do most of the QQ’ing) can’t even come to grips with the fact that there will always be “Sneetches”……
-Vudu
Excellent point. There are maybe 3% of the forum users who attempt to post useful information (Actual parse testing, bug reports, calm discussion about the game). The rest are chicken littles.
There’s also a vertical progression issue here. I have zero problem in a game like Rift with having a few useless DPS specs because the cost of switching is so low. The chances that you will spend however many hours leveling to endgame and discover that there is no tolerable role your character can play are relatively low. In a more traditional class system – especially if it has an excessive number of classes (EQ2) – the player might find out much later that their chosen class isn’t useful for anything at endgame and be forced to re-roll if they want to fix this problem. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing leveling times nerfed and discussion of free max level characters in that context.
I still think the worst nerfs are made in order to mitigate PvP advantage…
I dont know much about the warrior changes but I am pretty dishartened with the change to Stormcaller. Yea granted if you have a raid full of stormcallers numbers get skewed but that can be fixed with a single change of only allowing your spells to proc the charged field. There is no reason to kick them while they are down by which I mean nerfing SD, and lowering the base damage of the spells.
to me its just an MMO way of penalizing the players in an effort to draw attention to other soul builds and/or classes. The more a company changes the classes the more I dislike the game because it shows they have no real vision.
Q
I remember the days before multiplayer mode existed, and in those days there were some games in which all factions and classes were not equal. Some were beginner, some where intermediate, and some were termed advanced – a lose categorization of how much skill and effort it took to play that class or faction well. I really liked that flavor and the ability influence your personal challenge at this core level.
Unfortunately, this aspect of games seems to have vanished in many genres and I would directly correlate it to the rise – and later dominance – of multiplayer. You don’t see “advanced” or “expert” classes/factions in RTS and strategy games anymore becuase this wouldn’t be fair for multiplayer. I don’t think these distinctions ever existed in MMOs (where pursuite of balance rules the day) and it probably never will, at least not in the current concept. A shame, I say.
The closest I can think is the original Jedi class in Star Wars MMO. Also, possibly prestige classes in various games.
However, almost no MMOs take advantage of this concept for the fairness reason. I supposed Death Knight in WoW is about as close as you can get.
“Multiplayer” mode isn’t exactly what I would call the “Multiplayer” in MMO. Multiplayer in MMO just denotes that there are many other players playing the same game as you and you may interact with them as you wish. Multiplayer in the sense of a “Co-op” game like the new Dungeon siege 3, is not “multiplayer” as it doesn’t require more than 1 person to play the game it just means someone can grab a controller and hop in and out of battle with you.
I think the reason people think there is no “advanced” or “expert” class’s anymore is because there isn’t, instead you have “advanced” and “expert” players. The difference you ask? I played a feral druid in WoW (pre cata), it was one of the most complicated and hardest rotations to optimize DPS. You were either “Expert”, “Advanced”, “Novice”, or “Noob” (also called “bad”). This was the distinction, not a text blurb in the character creation tab explaining to me that this will be a “hard” class to play efficiently. In Rift I played a Rogue (Riftstalker / tank), I started as a ” Novice” tank and ended up tanking “Greenscale” and having healer’s request that I tanked (advancing to “Expert” status).
This is intentional, there is no reason to tell a player that a class is “too hard” for them to play when first starting a game, instead they are told nothing and it up to the player to choose the level of class competency they have. This makes for a better virtual world.
Example 1: I suck at baking cookies and cakes, so I would never apply for a job at a bakery.
Example 2: I’m an amazing “Griller” (cooking outside on a grill), therefore I would apply for a job as a grill cook at a restaurant.
Allowing the player to choose is a lot like the examples I just gave, for another example in Rift, I had a Melee DPS spec that I sucked at (“Novice”) yet I was an amazing Tank / Ranged DPS. This shows off the variety of my skills as a player instead of my skills as a class.
Balance is just there to make sure that each PLAYER has the same opportunity to make a niche in the virtual world for themselves. It’s also a way for [insert company name here] to give in to the QQ’ers and the people who think they should have it easier than those who just work hard to get to what they are (“Expert / Advanced” players). Balance is needed in PvP situations, but PvP is just a broken idea altogether, as it has too many inherent flaws. To balance PvP you need to balance skill / team / class, and most developers only see the smaller picture as the larger picture is too grand a scale for the budget. (Requires rethinking how they designed the game as a whole.)
-Vudu
That’s some good commentary. I’m not sure I agree that advanced classes/mechanics don’t exist and only advanced players do, though. Your example makes the feral druid sound like an advanced or expert spec to me because you said it takes more effort to learn how to play it well. And I’m glad to hear it, I agree it makes life more interesting.
Also, I have to wear my rose-colored glasses before I can agree with this statement: “Balance is just there to make sure that each PLAYER has the same opportunity to make a niche in the virtual world for themselves.” I would argue that balance in MMOs is more about opportunity *cost* than about opportunity. Games may start out with a vision similar to yours but I have seen them end up “balancing” until everything requires the same amount of effort/skill for the same reward.