Bang for your buck: an overview on balancing, communication and community from an economists perspective.
Hi. I'm Midan. I've played on Arcadia for some time now and I have experienced many facets of the game. I've been active on the forum for almost half a year now, voicing both my applause and frustrations with the game; in comparison to the other servers, this place is an absolute dreamland – but even dreams have their dark corners. I'm here to explore some of them.
Balancing:
The balancing of this server and the efforts of the development team are a literal godsend. It brings out so much potential of the game that the original developers ignored or were ordered to be ignored in order to increase profit margins.
But what even is balancing? What are the exact goals of the balancing?
Balancing, to put it bluntly, just means that you get equal bang for your buck, regardless of class combination one aspires to play.
To be more precise, this means that the creation of an equilibrium between each individual milieu of player, whereas a certain input1 begets certain output2 takes precedent over
For exmaple the D/W has a much lower output at the same input as the Ch/Wd. This is a microscopic analysis.
Healers before the general update had a much lower input for the same output (= viability in the highest instance) in comparison to other fractions like tanks or DPS. This is a macroscopic analysis.
To put it mathematically, one could theoretically take a coodinate system (CS) and assign said CS diametrically oppossite values on it's axes, whereas survivability vs. damage as well as selfishness vs. support form a pair.
One could then sort the classes into these quadrants. Looking at only one quadrant at a time to compare classes occupying those spaces is called microscopic analysis, while the look at the whole picture is called macroscopy.
1Anything that a character can equip, buff, use to make them stronger
2Approximated strength in accordance to one's input
1) Macroscopic view on balancing or: extremists win when there is no limit; generalizers win when there is one.
The whole name of this post, Bang for your Buck and the entire balance section revolve around the principle of x * y = z.
Your input (x) times the optimal class modifier3 (CM) for the role the combination may be viable in (y), begets the output of (z).
Let's assume the barrier of entry (BoE) for tanking is a survivability output of 0.6 while the BoE for DPS is 0.85. Any output below said values can be discarded as, just like the BoEntry suggests, invalid simply due to there being no place for it. (e.g. the Warrior/Priest can theoretically heal and wield heal gear but... yikes.)
As was established before, classes can be sorted in their respective corners – and soon we will find that the champion-combinations are dominantly seen in both the damage and survivability quadrants with the same type of gear equipped. This is a great source of anger, as the conversion of the champion in general secures the class a spot on both the survivability and damage axes – adding another calculation to our base that can be factorized.
Input * CM1 + Input * CM2 = Output
or
Input
* (CM1 + CM2) = Output
The secondary multiplier breaks the base formula. It deviates to a point where no proper balance can ever exist, so long as the number of CMs isn't equal on all sets of gear, as an additional CMs will artificially increase the output and thereby push other types of equipment out of the market.
The Champion fits that description perfectly. It transforms the Input of Chain gear (1) into some of the Top DPS classes, as well as a very viable tanking options. The output will thereby always be greater than 1. This goes directly against the idea of balance and has to be remedied in order to restore other classes integrity.
Due to the inherent competetiveness within each role (except for supports and heals), combinations that do not exceed on any axis are not very useful to the raid, as they cannot compete with „pure“ classes. We econonomists call this „being stuck in the middle“; a position where you have nothing special to offer and thereby you are not picked.
A perfect example for this is the Rogue/Champion; a class that deals mediocore damage and has mediocore support – leading to the class never being played; even though it's damage is at least 5x higher than the Warrior/Priests and it's support is more than triple that of the Rogue/Scouts. This is why the „offtank“ isn't viable in Runes of magic, too.
The options to remedy these issues are plentiful, but they boil down to the core issue: The ceiling of usefulness of plate gear is too low in comparison to chain gear.
Plate gear limits you to being a tank, granted, a much better one than a chain-only tank, but just a tank nonetheless. The principle of minimality dictates that "just enough" already classifies for viability in terms of tanking. In order to keep the champions integrity intact but also push chain-wielders out of the tanking-sphere for the very endgame, a few options present themselves:
- Crank up the support of plate tanks to a point where said support significantly impacts the damage of the party.
- Increase the BoE for tanking significantly, to a point where the additional defense from parry and the reduction from both shields and jewellry become a necessity to tank comfortably.
- Grant viable DPS options to plate-wearers in plate gear and viable tanking options to leather-/ and cloth-wearers.
Some of these steps must be taken in order to even out the playing field.
3relative strength of a class; e.g. the CM of ch/m is higher than the CM of ch/wl
2) Microscopic view: Establishing a base line
The established factions (Tanks, Heals, Supports and DPS) are quite well balanced within themselves. You can basically play any combination you want right now – with some oddballs here and there that just don't work in the current meta.
There are some notable outliers though, as warlocks usually do not overperform to a point where it trivializes any other class as a DPS – but they bring so many other qualities to the table that they just overshadow many other damage classes. The same goes for the champion, where a tank might get the impression to be trivialized by a the class just pressing shield form. This is not good, as too much utility being brought to the table will inevitably force artificial dominance into a hypercompetetive market simply by way of efficiency.
Communication between the development team and the playerbase:
The community is filled to the brim with great ideas about all facets of the game; we all are evidence of this. Yet at times, the changes that are being made seem random, partially grabbed from thin air and most of all – poorly communicated.
Here is my main criticism: We do not have a balancing manifesto – and even though the team balances many things that they source from the community, the communication is rather poor about these things. The general playerbase has no idea what direction the development team is going to take next; leading to two things:
- an absolute flood of complaints at major changes, no matter if they're good for the health of the game or not (just look at the overall 30% nerf)
- a wall of posts about literally any and all aspects of the game at all times; too much to comprehend and too much to work on.
One of the many roads to success companies can take is providing goods and services measured to their audience. This is why companies like MyMuesli or even Nike see such massive success.
The business-model of granting a platform to your customers to ask of you what they want to see will guarantee any companies survival so long as they are not outpaced. Since the only direct competition is the official servers, people would rather quit than go back.
To put that into perspective, the main reason why people are happy with the other servers, even though many aspects are so much worse than here, is simply that there's comfort in stability.
The patch 10.4.1.1000 broke the perception of stability on this server. People got mad over a patch that was supposed to be good for the health of the game - and rightfully so: There was little to no reason given as to why. Many players had the feeling of personal progession suddenly wiped away and the main reason why the endgame players were complaining disproportionately affected the players not getting easy access to their gear – which obviously made them angry.
It also doesn't matter if people were able to run the instance with just gorge gear and the past and it's still easier now – people feel cheated because they missed the window where things were easy(er) for everybody. Those that only run rofl by choice, profit or for fun now have the priviledge of not feeling like they're missing out.
These issues get elevated because the pure existance of a feedback thread creates the entitlement to change; frustrations may grow from there, as one may get the feeling of not being heard. This is worsened when you see other changes being pushed through almost verbatim; it doesn't matter whether your own change was objectively good or not in that regard either, as this is purely a subjective feeling. It makes people think that there is favortism being practiced where there (hopefully) isn't any.
Much of the anger simply comes down to human nature: We have a loss aversion bias – and when we feel like we're losing something, almost no positive change or rationalization can offset this.
This poisons further communications between the team and the community, causing many valuable players to disengage completely from the discussions or even calling for the removal of certain members of the balancing team.
And frankly spoken, radical changes that affect the entire playerbase and disgruntle a good part of them can't be good for the game's bottom line. I've not taken a marketing course in a couple years – but I know that annoyed customers don't like spending money.
Here is what needs to happen for so much of the anger to go away:
A regular update for the community on what is being worked on, a one pager thread that details what is being worked on. No changes to be announced, just a heads up on what to expect.
This would both focus the communities efforts and activate the passion, giving both the development team the opportunity to crowdsource and the
activate the already buzzing body of the community to show their passion.
The vast minority will be genuinely mad if new content isn't released on time for valid reasons (covid, data setbacks, loss of productivity, other difficulties or even mistakes in development) - but those reasons have to be communicated to prevent frustrations. The recent explanation about the delayed card system is living proof of that.
Community:
This is an open letter to the community. I know it's cheesy, but there are some big issues in the way that the facets of the community interact with each other. Long time players are often treating other, disagreeing opinions with much disrespect while newer players, well, simply quit the forum after a short amount of time.
The community is in parts insanely abrasive – simply because we don't give each other the benefit of the doubt. It is poisoning the conversation and denying everyone the chance to learn and try to get a new point of view; it creates the appearance of a disappointed teacher getting angry with their students – at least from the outside. When looking through it from further away though, the „credentials“ are arbitraty, the position of power that is assumed is nonexistant and the students are not consenting to even be lectured.
Nobody is happy here. The midgame isn't being properly represented as any viewpoint from them is being shut down, the endgame folks are annoyed that they „have to“ repeat their points over and over again. The dev team has to sift through a million posts about the same topic and probably want to gauge out their eyes. Nobody wins.
Please, do yourself the favour and try to be objective about these things. As much as you want to roast the newbie that thinks giving the warrior a 30% damage boost is a good idea, you do not want to destroy your own reputation – especially when you're actually nice to talk to in person or via voice chat. Neither do you want to kill off this servers offspring; they're a good part of the reason this server is alive and part of it's longevity.
No tier of weapon makes you better than anyone else. In the end we're all just sweaty gamers playing an 11 year old MMORPG. Stay humble and friendly. Shed the negativity. Getting mad means you're passionate, it's a good thing. Getting mad also lets people to make stupid mistakes. That is not a good thing.
I hope we can positively try and build a sense of community here – by dropping our pre-concieved notions about each other and just listening to the words. Let us cooperate. I know it sounds like hippie gibberish - but lets give it a try. The goal of basically everyone here is to improve the game one way or another. We should work together.
Also, I would like to thank Zyrex and Clarie for proofreading this!
Thank you for reading.
Have a blessed day,
Midan