Stating your opinion as fact, and why I don't think PvP can ever be truly balanced.

[Deleted]

I'm going to make this one topic because I'm aware that I've been making several topics lately, and I have some sort of weird complex about making too many threads because someone's going to kick my ass and go "Trihan, you're talking about too many things dude! Stop talking about things! There are many people here talking about things and most of them are better at it than you. Go post in a thread that already exists."

But I've got a couple more things I want to get off my chest before I stop talking about things.

I see so many people on here, whether it be for WoW, against WoW, quitting WoW to play GW2, asking for advice on making a sandwich, running for president or sending me murder threats (some of those people may exist only in my head) stating their opinion on something as if it's the one true undeniable fact and all who possess an iota of sense must agree or they're a "hater" or a "fanboy" or an "idiot" or just plain wrong.

Now correct me if I'm mistaken, and this is entirely possible because everything I say without presenting concrete proof is my opinion and may be refuted or openly debated by anyone who doesn't agree, but isn't everything you say without presenting concrete proof your opinion which may be refuted or openly debated by anyone who doesn't agree?

I will defend to the death anyone's right to state what they like, don't like, wish was different, or would implement themselves in any aspect of any game they want to discuss, as long as they don't start preaching the gospel like they're the only person on earth who developers should listen to.

Not only that, but what do threads/posts like this even actually accomplish in the end? It's just a massive online tug-of-war and nobody wins. (and I'm aware that this very thread is no better and there are a multitude of better things I could have done than post it). Put it this way: let's say you're hit by a bus/abducted by aliens/savaged by rabid dogs/raptured/disintegrated by an experimental laser tomorrow--would you rather your last moments as a member of society had been spent being happy with things that you like doing, or would you rather have spent them arguing with someone on the internet about pandas? (and just to clarify this applies whether or not you're for them, against them, or sitting on the fence).

There's a place for intelligent and open-minded discussion, and you're on it. There's also a place for hate, vitriol, idiocy, hypocrisy and bigotry. I'm not sure where it is, but I'm sure you'll find it someday.

Enough about that, let's talk about PvP. I've seen some people over my time on these fora and indeed in-game talking about how PvP isn't as balanced as PvE is (and how balanced PvE is is a subjective topic open to debate). To that I say: Of course it isn't!

PvE is a relatively rigid framework created by Blizzard wherein they know roughly what classes and roles will be in any given group and can design the encounters accordingly. You know you'll have a tank, and that tank is either going to be a Warrior, a Paladin, a Death Knight or a Druid. You know you'll have a healer, and that healer is either going to be a Paladin, a Druid, a Priest or a Shaman. And you're going to have a few DPS, which may be any class really but you know you're only going to have a certain number of them. So we know how many of the roles will be there, and we know what abilities/cooldowns they'll have. Cool! Let's take a look at the combinations we're likely to end up with and design encounters that are doable by as many of them as possible! Gravy.

PvP is a clusterfuck of uncertainty simply because you're introducing a variable that Blizzard can't design encounters around: all the other players. When you're against a monster, it uses AI to determine how it's going to handle the battle. When you're against a player, they'll use their knowledge of their abilities, their knowledge of their class, their knowledge of the other classes, their knowledge of which cooldowns have already been used by enemy players around them, and essentially whatever else they notice while fighting. People aren't AI. They watch their screens, everyone has their addons they use and their UI they like and all that other stuff.

Why does nobody ever consider the actual setup of the players when talking about PvP? One player of class X may do much better in PvP than another player of class X simply because of how their UI was set up. There are too many unknowns and uncertain elements of players battling each other for a true equilibrium to ever be reached in my opinion, so it seems to me Blizzard does the next best thing: monitor what's happening in PvP battles, look for weak/strong links, and try to strengthen/weaken them so that they're not failing/dominating as much any more.

And finally, going back to distribution of classes and whatnot, even if you were able to restrict which classes/roles joined a BG or group at any given time those players are free to go wherever they want and fight whichever classes they want.

But that's all just my opinion, and you're free to disagree with it and discuss the points I present. Have at it!

TL;DR: Opinions are not facts and not everyone agrees with you, but as long as you keep your points subjective there's no reason you can't talk about them. PvP can't be balanced because players aren't AI and Blizzard will never be able to account for every possible action players make in battle.

[Blood Crusade]

Blizzard, while they did not say PvP could never be balanced, did say that because of Arena, it is a fairly daunting task. That being said, I do feel that the game has lost the old feel of "Rock, Paper Scissors, Warlock" (which is a good thing, to be clear).

[Feranor]

Concerning the opinion vs fact part... most people are quite simply utterly incapable of reasoned logic. That's not necessarily due to a lack of intelligence, it's just that they never learned it. Arguing with them is like reading a scientific paper to a preschooler. Plus, even if your opponent is reasonable there's very little empirical evidence to use, most valueable PvP balance discussions come down to shared experiences that aren't very accessible to outsiders.

E.g. when I say "Feral died with 4.0.6.", most people misread it as "Feral can't kill anything and gets owned by everything since 4.0.6." because they have no idea what "Feral" in that context, or any context, really means. They never experienced it, neither first nor second hand.

The reason why we have a catalogue of fallacies and other pitfalls of thought is not because they are the exception. They are the rule. It's because humans that are not trained in philosophy are prone to make those mistakes. And not just that, they'll often find fallacious arguments more persuasive than sound ones because the former are generally simple, short and superficially plausible. Alas, we don't teach our children how to think in most of our schools.

Secondly, what you state as fatal problems concerning PvP balance I'd say are not problems at all. They are entirely irrelevant. When balancing, you aren't supposed to take into account different player skill levels, or how they control their avatar. A better player should win against a worse player. That's not a balancing flaw; on the contrary, when worse players win against better players on a constant basis, e.g. Arena, that's bad balancing.

[Korgoth]

What's the point of this thread? Because it seems like you are just being a Blizzard apologist about their lack of PVP balancing, while trying to shut down opposition to this by saying opinion is not fact. But of course you keep saying your opinion in a definitive way to try and make it seem like fact; and you keep talking about it like it's intelligent and reasonable. You are just bull shitting about opinion to try to make your opinion which is heavily flawed seem less so.

PvP is a clusterfuck of uncertainty simply because you're introducing a variable that Blizzard can't design encounters around: all the other players.

That is one the lamest cop outs I have read in a long time. They can't balance pvp because the players have minds of their own. Lol. Every multiplayer game balances around the players that they can't program yet many multiplayer games are very well balanced.

Or this fine gem of reasoning:

even if you were able to restrict which classes/roles joined a BG or group at any given time those players are free to go wherever they want and fight whichever classes they want.

You are able to restrict which classes join your group and where they go in the rated play which is what demands balance since it has rewards that are supposed to be as hard to achieve on one class as another. Furthermore what does this even have to do with PVP balance? You can't balance PVP because some players are idiots? Well luckily you don't have to play with idiots in the pvp that requires you to actually succeed to progress your character.

Blizzard can achieve a far better PvP balance for rated play then they have right now, I know this for fact since they have had it in the past. And from what I have seen of 5.0 are striving to fix these problems, and are just being way too slow about it and leaving the current game balance rather poor.

Will PvP ever be perfectly balanced? No, but they can get it so warrior and hunter arena rep is not 4-6 times lower that of warlocks and mages, that when they run a tournament they don't have 75% of the teams with the same 2 classes in them, and that player A has a chance at beating player B no matter what class they play.

[Wolfdragon]

You fail to understand what balance means, this isn't opinion- This is fact, balance means all classes have equally strong tools ways of surviving and controll abilities/burst, this is balance, if we all played classes that are relatively simmilar(homogenization) we'd be getting there-This is what I'm talking about, I don't know what you're rambling about Blizzard being unable to balance because of players, players have little to do with balance because they rarely(only the very best do) exploit EVERYTHING the class has to offer, meaning the class might have unrealised potential outside of those players thus being balanced whereas they simply aren't able to get there. Players aren't what the game is balanced around- it's tools vs. tools, and ability/burst vs. ability/burst, it could be alot more homogenised, but it isn't so qq.

[Napoles]

Does Balance exist? It doesnt in real life thats for sure.
I know we strive for but its not feasible, I think Blizzard has put in tremendous effort into their PvP/PvE balancing act and it will never be to everyone's satisfaction.

Korgoth which MMO is balanced? I call bullshit on this.

Unless there is 100% Homogenization there will never be true balance.

[Kenasan]

Believe it or not the brain is not designed to think logically.

[Stanton Biston]

Blizzard can achieve a far better PvP balance for rated play then they have right now, I know this for fact since they have had it in the past. And from what I have seen of 5.0 are striving to fix these problems, and are just being way too slow about it and leaving the current game balance rather poor.

This is what makes me want to torture small critters in game. Season 11 is going to be the most lame duck season of any season thus far.

But- The OP made a huge wall of text so, let's start with that.

RE the opinion part: There's two kinds of people. People that already knew that part and people that can't understand it. I don't think you've done a decent job bridging that gap since it's less of a gap and more of an intellectual canyon.

Regarding the balance part: People on this forum (like this Wolfdragon fellow) hear balance and immediately stop reading and go off on their own little crusade to fix things. It's some sort of bizarre literary triggered atavism. Three quarters of the way through your post you finally talk about PvP which is to say that Blizzard can't possibly balance PvP because of the human like nature of players, UI and comps.

I agree with Korgath in that saying balance is impossible due to players or comps is a cop out. It's certainly possible and Blizzard has shown it will be better in 5.0. And saying Blizzard can't balance due to the UI is kinda silly since the tournaments only allow the default UI.

So that leaves us with a lot of words and not much said.

[Wolfdragon]

I fail to see you disprove my point SB, the fact that I went on rambling about it doesn't change the fact that I'm right, and that it has very little to do with humans, it's just that I had very little to comment towards the rest of his post, because I thought it was something I didn't really care about(actually I did read it, but I thought it was kindof a phylosophical text trying to ease me into not replying against his post because it's his opinion or somesuch) Fact being-it isn't a crusade or me getting excited over it, it's knowledgable analysis of the points he made, and valid(thus overblown and somewhat flameboyant) critisism.

[Stanton Biston]

I fail to see you disprove my point SB, the fact that I went on rambling about it doesn't change the fact that I'm right, and that it has very little to do with humans, it's just that I had very little to comment towards the rest of his post, because I thought it was something I didn't really care about(actually I did read it, but I thought it was kindof a phylosophical text trying to ease me into not replying against his post because it's his opinion or somesuch) Fact being-it isn't a crusade or me getting excited over it, it's knowledgable analysis of the points he made, and valid(thus overblown and somewhat flameboyant) critisism.

Thank you for reinforcing my supposition.

I didn't address your post because there was nothing to address. It wasn't germane to the topic, so spending a page tearing apart faulty premises doesn't really forward the conversation the OP started.

[Rork]

I just don't understand why they don't balance the game around 1v1 give every class the same kind of ability

A silence/kick to stop burst
A snare to keep melee away or for mele to close gap
A dispel to burst
A sheep like cc to lock
A shield
A short speed buff

Normalize damage for PVP !!!! make every spell make x damage against player and x damage against NPC
Remove crit

Now that doesn't mean all class should be the same, but every class including healer should be able to kill each other 1v1.

[Deleted]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

First of all I wasn't stressing the opinion-as-fact part to make my flawed opinion seem less so--I'm honestly sick of people stating facts that simply aren't. I'm no exception, and anything I said in this thread is only how I see things. I'm not a huge PvPer so it's entirely possible that I'm wildly off the mark (which apparently I am given some of your responses).

I may have expressed entirely the wrong argument with my PvP part than was my intention. I didn't mean that PvP itself wasn't balanced, I meant that PvP is perceived as unbalanced possibly because of the disparity of player ability/knowledge which Blizzard has no control over. Maybe that's a bunch of bollocks, I just wanted to get some discussion going about the possibility.

[Wolfdragon]

Now this does make sence Trihan, you did hit it preety dead on, but ironically, pvp never will be (completely) balanced though, because it isn't very homogenized and if more homogenization was to incur the game would suddenly lose a big part of the fun factor. I know you'd expect me to comment towards the stating your opinion as fact bit, but there is nothing to discuss, you closed it off preety nicely. Btw the word percieved changed the look of your post from total bullcrap to yeah plausible

[takef0cusin]

Concerning the opinion vs fact part... most people are quite simply utterly incapable of reasoned logic. That's not necessarily due to a lack of intelligence, it's just that they never learned it. Arguing with them is like reading a scientific paper to a preschooler. Plus, even if your opponent is reasonable there's very little empirical evidence to use, most valueable PvP balance discussions come down to shared experiences that aren't very accessible to outsiders.

E.g. when I say "Feral died with 4.0.6.", most people misread it as "Feral can't kill anything and gets owned by everything since 4.0.6." because they have no idea what "Feral" in that context, or any context, really means. They never experienced it, neither first nor second hand.

The reason why we have a catalogue of fallacies and other pitfalls of thought is not because they are the exception. They are the rule. It's because humans that are not trained in philosophy are prone to make those mistakes. And not just that, they'll often find fallacious arguments more persuasive than sound ones because the former are generally simple, short and superficially plausible. Alas, we don't teach our children how to think in most of our schools.

Secondly, what you state as fatal problems concerning PvP balance I'd say are not problems at all. They are entirely irrelevant. When balancing, you aren't supposed to take into account different player skill levels, or how they control their avatar. A better player should win against a worse player. That's not a balancing flaw; on the contrary, when worse players win against better players on a constant basis, e.g. Arena, that's bad balancing.

I agree with this individual and their idea of what he/she considers to be balancing.

[Jackmoves]

A lot of the balance problems steams from the fact that blizzard are so set in stone on pvp and pve being ONE and that eliminate a lot of their options when it comes to balancing one part of the game because it will have at times horrible consequences for the other side. If changes are made to better pvp, pve players whine and complain about it... and the same goes for changes made to pve, pvpers has to suffer.

Perfect example being resto druids this xpac, strong/solid pve spec, worst healer of the xpac in pvp. Having a druid myself it's been quite annoying to see nothing done to the glaring weaknesses that even mediocre players could point out... and the opposit could e said about resto shamans, as far as ive understood they have been quite mediocre in pve(I dont pve a lot) but very strong in pvp.

[melodramocracy]

I will defend to the death anyone's right to state what they like, don't like, wish was different, or would implement themselves in any aspect of any game they want to discuss, as long as they don't start preaching the gospel like they're the only person on earth who developers should listen to.

This is a human trait that gets amplified greatly with the internet and anonymous posting. Folks will greatly hype their own opinion as fact, sometimes without even realizing it. It's why you see folks type with absolutes like "everyone does that" or "no one believes this" or use "/thread". It's self centered and shallow at best... but is also highly unlikely to change anytime soon.

Why does nobody ever consider the actual setup of the players when talking about PvP? One player of class X may do much better in PvP than another player of class X simply because of how their UI was set up. There are too many unknowns and uncertain elements of players battling each other for a true equilibrium to ever be reached in my opinion, so it seems to me Blizzard does the next best thing: monitor what's happening in PvP battles, look for weak/strong links, and try to strengthen/weaken them so that they're not failing/dominating as much any more.

Folks who research, contemplate how they play, and practice tend to be rewarded in PvE, and I don't see why PvP should be any different... doing all those things, knowing all the abilities of other classes (and recognizing when they're being used, anticipating when they'll be used, etc) all tend to improve one's game. Even in a game that isn't level-based, and the play itself is 'truly' balanced, UI and keybinds can make a difference, even down to ping times. I don't believe that player skill and effort falls under the umbrella of balance.

It seems that the game actually is, for the most part, balanced pretty well right now. I can certainly be honest with myself, and say that I'm by no means a good PvP player... while going against certain classes does make me rage a bit, if I were to fraps my bgs and watch them later (which is certainly a smart move), there's always something I could have done better during a given fight.

[xxdavxx]

because blizzard refuses to separate PVE and PVP....thats about the only reason

[Stanton Biston]

because blizzard refuses to separate PVE and PVP....thats about the only reason

Splitting a game in two doesn't suddenly balance either game.

[Deleted]

I just don't understand why they don't balance the game around 1v1 give every class the same kind of ability

A silence/kick to stop burst
A snare to keep melee away or for mele to close gap
A dispel to burst
A sheep like cc to lock
A shield
A short speed buff

Normalize damage for PVP !!!! make every spell make x damage against player and x damage against NPC
Remove crit

Now that doesn't mean all class should be the same, but every class including healer should be able to kill each other 1v1.

While possibly a solid fix, it's one step closer to class homogenization which, I believe, is just turning the ship in the wrong direction.

[Hoggs]

Splitting a game in two doesn't suddenly balance either game.

No, but it makes balancing each separate aspect of it much much easier