"knobs to turn"

[The Ogdru Jahad]

Lately GC has been throwing around the concept of knobs which they can turn to regulate and keep content balanced. Am I the only one here who finds this to be one of the worst game designs possible? So let me get this straight... because numbers are so inflated beyond belief, classes are so blatantly overpowered/underpowered, healing is so out of control, and burst is so crazy... by adding blanket % nerfs that scale with patches etc... the content is suddenly fixed?

That sounds like a terrible game design when you need to blank nerf/buff entire aspects of the game to keep them moderated. The fact that we have a healing debuff in pvp now is ridiculous, now theres an ilevel cap? I dont think the devs know what they're doing at this point. The same can be said for just buffing/nerfing presences like windwalker monks. So because the devs cant balance a classes abilities, they just give them a presence which can be adjusted as numbers are needed. There is a serious flaw in the devs mentality.

Thoughts?

[Sunnydruid]

With the ongoing changes of the game, they can't always revert back to their old methods so scaling to balance is honestly one of the best ways to go. It doesn't have a detrimental impact on a players gameplay and it doesn't cause to much griefing from the majority of the playerbase. With a lot of mmo-games you see things like this, in GW2 for example you saw this, as well as in Aion ect. It seems pretty outrageous atm, and it's understandable that you feel this way. But in the end if you look at it from their perspective, it's one of the few ways to even out gameplay without a HUGE overhaul that would cause some heavy problems for awhile.

[unholytestament]

Do you have a better idea?

[Belloc]

I think I'm more willing to trust the game design decisions from developers of the most successful MMO in history than some random forum poster who almost certainly has no game design experience.

[dryankem]

I think I'm more willing to trust the game design decisions from developers of the most successful MMO in history than some random forum poster who almost certainly has no game design experience.

Dude, I'm totally making that my signature (as long as you don't mind =)

[The Ogdru Jahad]

Do you have a better idea?

Number crunch? It's going to happen, they should have put it in this game while the numbers were in the transition phase of getting stupidly huge. I don't care if it "doesn't feel right" it needs to happen. It's going to, just get it over with.

---------- Post added 2013-04-19 at 12:00 PM ----------

I think I'm more willing to trust the game design decisions from developers of the most successful MMO in history than some random forum poster who almost certainly has no game design experience.

It doesn't take game design experience to see flaws in game design itself. It's an issue when devs resort to bandaid fixes using the same mechanic such as blanket buffs/debuffs to keep numbers in check. When you get to that point, other steps need to be taken. Don't act high and mighty.

[Ealyssa]

I don't think it is bad actually. IMO the only real problem of GC is that he always say "I don't have to agree with the community" asking for feedbacks but not taking them as is (wich is obviously the right thing to do). But in the same time when their is some "nerf hype" going on GC tend to follow it too much, last exemple was the windwalker monk nerfs just after 5.2 wich clearly was NOT needed (and will be reverted to some degree in 5.3).

GC sometime "panic" (a bit strong, but still) and overnerf. On the otherside he rarely hotfix buff class/spec that need it, like retribution, enhancement, windwalker, feral, hat will have to wait until 5.3 to actually compete in dps... It is broken to have to wait until the tier is nearly over to finally see so balance.

So knobs imo aren't bad, but GC should turn them FASTER and in BOTH way. Not only hotfix nerfs.

[unholytestament]

Number crunch? It's going to happen, they should have put it in this game while the numbers were in the transition phase of getting stupidly huge. I don't care if it "doesn't feel right" it needs to happen. It's going to, just get it over with.

And how can you say when the best time to do this is? What if in doing this they opened up a slew of new problems that took longer to fix?

I agree that it should happen. I'm pretty sure Blizzard does too. But doing it right now just because it sounds like a good idea isn't gauranteed to fix everything.

[MoanaLisa]

Number crunch? It's going to happen, they should have put it in this game while the numbers were in the transition phase of getting stupidly huge. I don't care if it "doesn't feel right" it needs to happen. It's going to, just get it over with.

Well, the numbers we see today are potentially a problem but how much of a problem depends more on who's looking at it than anything else. Whether or not you view big numbers with alarm or pleasure is primarily a personal thing. As long as those numbers are not affecting game and client performance I don't think it's anything to necessarily be angry about. They could just as easily bury the actual numbers altogether and present everything as percentages but I understand the psychological satisfaction of hitting for a higher number at 90 than at 20 rather than 7% in both cases.

[Groobie]

Why do you think "blanket" changes are a bad thing? All you say is that they're ridiculous and bad game design. What are your reasons?

I don't see anything inherently bad about changes like this.

[The Ogdru Jahad]

And how can you say when the best time to do this is? What if in doing this they opened up a slew of new problems that took longer to fix?

I agree that it should happen. I'm pretty sure Blizzard does too. But doing it right now just because it sounds like a good idea isn't gauranteed to fix everything.

Blizzard released a graph when they posted about the number crunch concept, it showed the drastic growth in ilevel across every expansion and how ilevel is growing faster as time goes on. Cata numbers were already getting crazy, blizzard had the system working. There reason for not putting it in? Didn't feel right. Would you rather put in the number crunch when numbers are still reasonable or when players get used to seeing massive numbers?

[Rivin]

I'm not really sure what the issue is. If their data suggests that a class is 10% behind where they should be, having a "percent increase" knob that they can turn up by 10 is a lot simpler than having to go through every spell, running simulations on all possible uses to get it just right at 10%.

And it's not like Blizzard doesn't adjust individual spells anymore. Having those knobs to turn is useful, but not the only thing they do.

[unholytestament]

Blizzard released a graph when they posted about the number crunch concept, it showed the drastic growth in ilevel across every expansion and how ilevel is growing faster as time goes on. Cata numbers were already getting crazy, blizzard had the system working. There reason for not putting it in? Didn't feel right. Would you rather put in the number crunch when numbers are still reasonable or when players get used to seeing massive numbers?

What was working? How?

[Crym]

Their original design didn't balance player health against player damage (since gear progression was entirely PvE when it launched). At this point they've tried compensating for that early design oversight with all sorts of mechanics and PvP only stats (resilience, mortal strike abilities, etc...)

Actually, I'd like to see them just outright increase player max health across the board a lot more. Healing is more interesting when it's about using the right ability for the right situation to preserve mana, and it would make PvP battles a matter of counters more than popping cooldowns and burning the healer (because if they're still alive you're all out of cooldowns).

However, there are plenty of issues that come along with doing that. Sometimes they want a specific mechanic to be a struggle to keep a tank (or randomly targeted member) up, but to scale damage for that ability to that level means that healers now have to waste much more mana recovering that health. Things like that take a lot of rebalancing, and ultimately they're probably doing what they can to get the desired results with minimal rework of existing content.

Especially now that we're so many expansions deep. Any change to non-top tier specific stats (like PvP stats) would have to be considered across all levels.

[leaks]

Do people actually think moving a decimal point will make balance easier? Are there really so many people in the word that don't understand how numbers work?

[Deleted]

Things like LFR, scenarios and ilvl cap in PvP mean the devs have no clue about MMORPGs and should be designing Dora the Explorer games instead of WoW.

[Prokne]

Number crunch? It's going to happen, they should have put it in this game while the numbers were in the transition phase of getting stupidly huge. I don't care if it "doesn't feel right" it needs to happen. It's going to, just get it over with.

It doesn't take game design experience to see flaws in game design itself. It's an issue when devs resort to bandaid fixes using the same mechanic such as blanket buffs/debuffs to keep numbers in check. When you get to that point, other steps need to be taken. Don't act high and mighty.

I dont think you understand the point of the "knobs." They arent there because of ilvl inflation. Even after a squish they would have to adjust things to balance out all the specs and tune encounters. They also have nothing to do with blanket nerfs. Those are done when Blizzard feels too many people are stuck at some point and would probably do it regardless. They have been nerfing raids after they are obsolete since BC.

The point is that they can slightly adjust abilities and mechanics instead of vastly changing them. If two specs are 5k dps apart, just buff one ability a little to close the gap instead of a whole spec. It also implies that they dont need to fix bugs or broken mechanics which is not really true. Personally I dont see why they havent been doing this all along instead of changing how abilities work to nerf them even if it isnt necessarily the problem.

What was working? How?

Blizzard said how they implemented a squish on their servers and played with it but it felt bad to do much less dps/healing and have to deal with the new talent system. It was basically a huge waste of time since anyone could have told them that going from 100k dps to 1k dps while going up 5 levels would just feel wrong. Hopefully they never implement the squish.

[toychristopher]

"Lately"? GC has been talking about having knobs to turn since forever. He is a knob turner that guy.

---------- Post added 2013-04-19 at 01:46 PM ----------

Their original design didn't balance player health against player damage (since gear progression was entirely PvE when it launched). At this point they've tried compensating for that early design oversight with all sorts of mechanics and PvP only stats (resilience, mortal strike abilities, etc...)

Actually, I'd like to see them just outright increase player max health across the board a lot more. Healing is more interesting when it's about using the right ability for the right situation to preserve mana, and it would make PvP battles a matter of counters more than popping cooldowns and burning the healer (because if they're still alive you're all out of cooldowns).

However, there are plenty of issues that come along with doing that. Sometimes they want a specific mechanic to be a struggle to keep a tank (or randomly targeted member) up, but to scale damage for that ability to that level means that healers now have to waste much more mana recovering that health. Things like that take a lot of rebalancing, and ultimately they're probably doing what they can to get the desired results with minimal rework of existing content.

Especially now that we're so many expansions deep. Any change to non-top tier specific stats (like PvP stats) would have to be considered across all levels.

As a healer I would love that! That would let them drop heatlh rapidly and make flash heals actually useful again. Right now so much of the healing toolkits they give us is useless as we can just fall back on a few of the most efficient heals.

[unholytestament]

Blizzard said how they implemented a squish on their servers and played with it but it felt bad to do much less dps/healing and have to deal with the new talent system. It was basically a huge waste of time since anyone could have told them that going from 100k dps to 1k dps while going up 5 levels would just feel wrong. Hopefully they never implement the squish.

I was fishing for a direct Blizzard quote because there is no doubt in my mind that the OP was misrepresenting what Blizzard said. They always do. And if your interpretation of what Blizzard said is true, then I was right.

[The Ogdru Jahad]

What was working? How?

Blizzard had the number crunch running on their own private servers or w/e. As in, you could be a lvl 80 warrior, and mortal strike would be hitting for like 789 damage. But they said it felt "wrong" coming from it hitting in the thousands etc. It WILL feel wrong. People don't like their big numbers going down, but i'd rather see that than "MEGA DAMAGE!" like they joked about.

---------- Post added 2013-04-19 at 04:53 PM ----------

I was fishing for a direct Blizzard quote because there is no doubt in my mind that the OP was misrepresenting what Blizzard said. They always do. And if your interpretation of what Blizzard said is true, then I was right.

You weren't right. I know what I read and discussed it when it was relevant on the forums. What I'm saying is they had it fully implemented and running on their own servers. But it felt wrong. They never said it was a waste of time though, they said they didn't feel now was the time to implement it and that it would most likely be coming in the future as numbers exponentially increase with each expansion.

At this point unholy, you're only on this thread to start problems. You made your point, I refuted it and offered my interpretation of the problem/solution. You're not high and mighty for going out of your way to prove some random user wrong. No one is right and no one is wrong here. I stated my facts/evidence to the best of my knowledge. I'm not making things up.