I'm Off Balance

The latest episode of Guild Wars 2's current Living World went live a couple of days ago.  It labors under an awkward portmanteau title that varies depending on where you see it. The full version runs to Icebrood Saga: Episode 5: Champions: Chapter 3: Balance. Chew on that for a while.

At this point you might normally expect a capsule review or some pithy comments about it. Sorry. I don't have anything. For the first time in probably the entire history of GW2's Living World project I haven't been able to summon up the enthusiasm to play it yet. 

And that's not really ArenaNet's fault. As I've said consistently since it started, I've found the Icebrood Saga to be a distinct improvement over what we were getting before. In normal circumstances I'd have logged in my heal-spec druid, the one who gets to do all this stuff, pretty much as soon as the update landed.

The reason I haven't is, of course, Valheim. I'm still at the stage where I begrudge any time spent in other games. I know a recurring theme for years here has been how short the Living Story episodes are but it's all relative. It may only be three hours but that's three hours I could have been mining iron, chopping trees or sailing my longship into uncharted waters.  

I also wasn't super-hyped by the very weak trailer. That's long been another theme here; the extraordinarily variable quality of the promotional material ANet release before each of these chapters drop. This one is particularly lackluster. Here, take a look for yourself.

The worst thing about that trailer is how old it makes the game look. If there's one thing most people seem to agree on, even if GW2 is not a game they personally care to play, it's that ArenaNet has one of the better art departments in the genre. Guild Wars 2 is known for its good looks.

You wouldn't know it from that trailer, would you? It's a lot of not very convincingly animated characters engaging in stilted, cumbersome combat against a series of largely featureless backdrops. The colors are muted and muddy, the action is unconvincing and the impression I'm left with is of something discomfortingly close to a decade-old free to play import, one that probably didn't do well in the west and which few now remember.

Is that really how the way to promote a game that's still widely reckoned to be one of the larger, more successful Western mmorpgs? 

But then, I don't imagine it's intended to promote the game to anyone who isn't already playing it. Almost the entire trailer is taken up with listing the benefits to existing players, all of which could be summed up with the simple phrase "More of the same".

The one shot in the Balance trailer that actually looked interesting.

 

Massively OP's Guild Wars 2 correspondent, Colin Henry, (who, I only now realize, is also Chaosconstant of the Occasional Hero blog) sounds world-weary as he gives us his first impressions piece: "Another month, another round of Dragon Response Missions", he says, scarcely inspiring me to jump into the game to see what's happening for myself.

He goes on to clarify:

"If you have played the last couple of chapters, nothing in this release will blow your mind; everything here is the same old DRM formula. There is a pre-event with two different “click the things” objectives and one “defeat the things” objective that give everyone in the party buffs upon completions. After that, we must fight our way through some dragon minions and defeat a boss".  

I generally try not to let other people's opinions influence my behavior but that rang altogether too true to be ignored. Here's what I said about the last round of Dragon Response Missions, back in January:

"The format is different to what we've been used to but I suspect not to what we're going to have to get used to in the future. After years and years of muddling around with various combinations of open world and instanced content, none of which ever seemed to suit enough people for ArenaNet to stick with any of them, we've arrived at something called "Dragon Response Missions". 

Theese are repeatable, instanced sequences of events that can be done either solo or in groups of up to five players, either premades or put together by the game, as you prefer. They seem to tick more boxes than most of the previous content delivery systems while avoiding some of the most egregious pitfalls. They also bundle up into a relatively saleable package for the Gem Store so they would seem to have a better chance of sticking around than most of the gimmicks ANet have tried over the last eight and a half years."

And yes, it appears DRMs are here to stay, at least for now. Oh well. If ArenaNet can recycle ideas to pad out what passes for content in the game I guess I can do the same for the blog.

At this point an astute reader might be tempted to interject something along the lines of "Hold on a minute! Wasn't it just a few days ago you were praising Daybreak for adding "another by-the-numbers instance that follows the well-trodden path of many similar holiday quests before it", which you went on to emphasize was "absolutely fine", since you "don't come to EQ2 for cutting-edge innovation or out-of-the-box thinking." ?"

Yes, well, unlike the convoluted syntax of that last paragraph, I can't fault the logic. Guilty as charged. In my defence I refer you to my oft-cited favorite quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the one about consistency and hobgoblins, something about which I've been remarkably consistent over the years. Ironically.

Wow! That really makes me want to see more!

 

And really there is no logical fallacy here. I'm quite pleased that ANet are sticking to their last, at last. Foolish inconsistency may be something to avoid but giving the customers what they want is a tried and tested maxim. It's about time they gave it a try.

I guess the question ought to be is it what the customers want? I pulled the trailer above from ArenaNet's official YouTube channel. It was posted two weeks ago and as of this moment it has 1240 views and four comments. One of those comments bluntly states "Stop producing single player content, nobody cares about the story... and even if, it has little to no replay value. Focus on wvw, spvp and challenging late game pve content. You know those game types where you have to work together... after all it is a mmo....". A second commenter agrees.

The other two comments all too predictably welcome the return of the irritating and incomprehensibly fan-favored avian race, the Tengu. Certain sections of the GW2 playerbase go into conniptions at the mere mention of these overgrown starlings and any suggestion the annoying worm-botherers might make some kind of a comeback, let alone become a playable race, has comment threads lighting up all over.

So, two votes against and just two for tengu, then? Maybe no-one really looks at YouTube any more. Just over a thousand views and four comments seems like not very much to me. I have videos on my YouTube channel with more views than that. Alright, I have one video. But the point stands.

Not if I see them first...

 It's probably safe to assume that anyone who actually cares saw the trailer on the official GW2 website and that pretty much no-one not already playing has seen it at all. It's very much a case of catering to the converted. It's not surprising the trailer has all the zest and sparkle of a contractual obligation.

Speaking of which, I think I've strung this out for about as long as I need to. I'll be back with more if and when I get around to playing through those Dragon Response Missions. Oh, and the story instance that barely even gets a mention in the trailer, the one where, bizarrely, we get to play as Braham but with the abilities of the class of whatever character we normally play. I wonder if that's contextualized in any way?

Guess I'll find out... eventually. Right now, though, I'm off to play a different surly-looking viking with bad posture and an unconvincing gait. 

In Valheim, that is. In case you couldn't guess.

Always The Same

Several bloggers I follow have been weighing in with opinions and speculations based around information coming out of World of Warcraft's Shadowlands beta. Enthusiasm seems lukewarm at best.

The last expansion, Battle for Azeroth doesn't seem to be held in much affection. The only blogger I can think of who seems genuinely fond of it is Syp, who writes "I really, really enjoyed the questing and leveling through the Alliance zones". Other than that, most people seem to have had more than enough of BfA by now.

It's hardly surprising, given how long its been hanging around. As Wilhelm points out, with an official launch window of "Fall 2020", even should Shadowlands hit the front of its time-slot, this will be the longest ever gap between WoW expansions. That might make people really keen to buy a new box or it could just make them question whether the time has come at last to climb down off the merry-go-round for good.

One big caveat appears to be something known as "Covenants". Even after reading quite a bit about them I only have the vaguest idea what they are but I do know people don't seem very keen.

Flipping through the overview of the concept at WoWHead it reminds me of Orders in Guild Wars 2. That's a concept that once seemed crucial but now rarely merits a mention. If you followed your class story back at launch, as most people did, about half way through you had to make a choice about which of three "Orders" to join. It was painted as a big deal at the time and people did get a little angsty about it but like most things in GW2 it turned out to be mostly cosmetic.

Secret hideout of the Order of Whispers. Knock twice and ask for Charlie.

Shadowland's Covenants look to be a much more substantive gameplay decision. Marathal, in the post I linked earlier, suggests any imagined choice will burn away in the fires of pragmatism: "...if you are interested in playing any end game content, you will be forced to choose from one, maybe two options. The bonuses available will be so skewed that you will be forced to take the one that gives you the best bonuses so that you can clear content more easily". Kaylriene, discussing the issue at length, hopes that a meaningful beta process will allow Blizzard to tune the system until there's "...a real choice that allows you to pick the experience you want rather than picking the mathematically best spell and being stuck with all the dressing around it".

In a follow-up post he goes on to examine the wider issue of class balance in MMORPGs and the way players work to game any percieved deviations from the norm. Talking specifically about WoW, he says "World of Warcraft has, undoubtedly, nearly always had balancing problems with the viability of talents, abilities, and whole classes. One of the recurring themes of every expansion for over a decade now has been a discussion over which classes and specs are meta, which talent choices are absolutely necessary for top performance, and things like best in slot lists and group composition guides." You could almost certainly say the same for any remotely popular or successful MMORPG during the same period.

Comparing WoW with  Final Fantasy XIV, Kaylriene points up the very significant difference in design approach applied by the two development teams. As the parse charts show, FFXIV can make a convincing claim to have arrived closer to a point of equilibrium between classes than most games across the genre.

Keep ladling it on, guys.

And yet that difference still exists. They haven't eliminated it entirely, it appears. So, here's my question to anyone currently playing FFXIV: by reducing the parse gap to 10%, have the developers successfully avoided the issues of elitism that plague almost every other MMORPG? From comments I've seen in a number of blogs over the last few years, I suspect not.

My feeling is that in any MMOPRPG that becomes successful enough for there to be a surplus of players relative to the content, the perceived importance of any relative differential in efficiency will constantly adjust to match whatever difference can be measured. If there's only 10% between top and bottom then every percentage point will matter. If the developers could balance so brilliantly that there was only 1% difference, then every 0.1% would matter.

So long as people are able assign numbers they'll use them to make whatever points they want to make, be that about classes or the individuals playing them, regardless of the objective relevance of the numbers. In most cases, whether the content in question can be completed with different classes in various roles won't be at issue. Even if it demonstrably can, the question will be whether it should. There will always be a "right" way to do everything. For some, any other way is heresy. It must be shunned by all right-thinking players.

As Wilhelm rightly observed in a comment on Kaylirene's post, all of this is primarilay an issue of information flow: "With WoW Classic we have a solved problem issue, the way we have had on the EQ retro servers. People are able to take advantage of all of the meta gear and class discussions of the past that figured out the best path forward. There is no discussion as to what the path should be, it is just a matter of digging up what path was decided on back in 2006 or so and running with that".

Wisdom of crowds, is that it?

When games are new, no-one really knows anything. The goal is to complete content any which way you can. Whatever combination of classes, using whatever mish-mash of talents or builds, if it gets the job done, that's all that matters.

Then, as time passes, if the game is even moderately successful, two things happen. First, players learn what works and what doesn't through trial and error. Second, someone inevitably comes up with a means of measuring player efficiency. Numerically. The dreaded parse has arrived.

Once people know both what should work in principle and what is (or isn't) working in practice, they can start taking names and kicking ass. Kicking your ass out of their group for not measuring up, that is.

Anyone who plans on playing nicely with others is going to have to make some kind of peace with those who don't want to play nicely at all. Even those who plan on soloing, either from natural inclination or as a way of exerting control, may end up having to contend with DPS checks margined against an optimized meta they don't follow and never signed up for.

As has been discussed many times, balance is a never-ending, ever-failing sisyphean task. It's been with us for what seems like forever. I remember talking about the folly of "cutting the legs off the table" to try and achieve balance as far back as the original EverQuest forums in the early 2000s. Put simply, true balance is never going to happen.

Except, could it? Let's try a thought experiment. What if every class - or at least every archetype - Healer, Tank, DPS, for argument's sake -  was exactly the same? 

Role model.

What if there was no choice for players to make, none at all, other than which role they wanted to perform? Neither at character creation nor ever after? What if  all skills, attacks, talents, weapons and gear were held in common? What if every Warrior was always identical in all abilities and stats to every Paladin? Every Rogue to every Wizard?

Well, for a start, with no intrinsic difference between character classes, any difference in efficiency would unequivocally come down to differences between the players, not the characters. It might not entirely be explainable by personal skill and ability - things like hardware and latency would be factors (and, for sure, excuses) - but in most scenarios the expectation would be that if the player wasn't hitting their benchmarks the only explanation would be incompetence or inabilty.

It probably wouldn't be a panacea for elitism and social maladjustment, then. I suppose it might just push some of that to the margins. Bullies and jerks are always going to find a way to be bullies and jerks but I guess it could conceivably put paid to the arguably more difficult social issue of someone helpfully sending you tells explaining how to optimize your build while they somehow manage to imply criticism of your life choices.

But it would also be a bit boring, wouldn't it? Everyone being the same? Why even have classes if they all do exactly the same thing?

For flavor, that's what. As progression and rpg mechanics you could replace statistical advantage with cosmetic advantage. Plenty of games are half-way there already, GW2 more like two-thirds. It's not for nothing the game's nickname is Fashion Wars.

No-one tells me how to dress. Apparently.

The problem with that idea isn't that people don't find dressing up sufficiently motivating. The evidence is that they very scarily do. It's that placing high value on what your character looks like actually risks making that the meta. If it feels bad enough being told you don't know how to play, imagine being told you don't know how to dress.

Maybe none of this goes far enough. If we're looking for a truly radical solution, why not set a time-to-kill on every mob then adjust it proportionally to the number of people on its hate list so that TTK  never varies, regardless of who's there and what they're doing.

It's all notional, anyway, isn't it? In almost every encounter between players and mobs in almost every MMORPG the outcome is never in doubt, only how long it's going to take. It would certainly be easier to manage your game session if you knew, to the second, precisely how long every kill was going to take.

If all of this seems unlikely, even insane, it's no more ridiculous than believing we can have multiple  classes making genuinely meaningful choices that significantly impact gameplay and yet expect that there won't be winners and losers depending on what choices are made.

Balance is a lie. Unless Covenants turn out to be true magic, after all.