[...] the Burning Crusade era was one of the better ones for multi-role characters. The system offered balanced but not equal options for characters. Warrior, Paladin, and Druid tanks had different strengths and weaknesses [...]

@Brian: I think Blizzard's recent push for standardization of tanks and healers is driven much more by a desire to see more players included than having the game balanced per se.

I think they're much less worried that individual powers and specs are overpowered/underpowered than they are in having every tree of every class be someone who is allowed to join groups.

This makes sense to me for casualish audience that WoW caters to. People get sad and quit if they feel left out. A game like EVE, filled with min-maxers makes more sense to me as a game focused on a more classic notion of balance, although I can't say whether that actually is the case.

Mike
mikedarga.blogspot.com

[...] Balanced but not Equal [...]

Appealing to the playerbase for the game, whomever that is. Before launch, that is your target audience; after launch it's your actual playerbase.

You can't build an MMO for a single person. Well, you could, but they'd better be willing to pay a lot to play it. Even then it wouldn't really be considered "multiplayer" if it only appealed to only one person, correct? Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but you cannot balance a game to only one person's tastes.

This is the main reason why "making a game just for yourself" is a cardinal sin; you're making the game for an audience of one. Bad move unless you want to be the only person playing it.

In the tank example above, a person's individual styles of play and interests are going to probably lead them to favor one class over another (if they even want to play a tank). I preferred the Feral Druid because it allowed me to be flexible; I could fill in different roles as needed. This is something I couldn't have done quite so easily with a Paladin or a Warrior. Yet, I think when measured against the playerbase as a whole, the tanks were fairly well balanced when I look at things through the lens of a game designer.

[...]it means that every player is likely to have just as much overall fun playing a game as every other player.

I think this is a less specific way of saying what I said. I think seeing what choices players make is much more concrete than trying to measure "overall fun". I'm always wary of definitions that try to measure "fun" as if it were an element we could easily measure. Even though we have some excellent research about why people play games, I don't think we'll ever be able to define what "fun" is to an exact science and have it still be meaningful and useful for developing games.

So what does Blizzard understand about "balance" that I'm missing?

Honestly, I don't think Blizzard fundamentally understands more everything about balance; they do get it right fairly often, though. But, I'm just pointing out a situation where, as a developer looking at the situation, I felt things were "balanced but not equal" in regards to the tanks. I could pull other examples from the same era of the game to show things that weren't very well balanced (Feral Druid DPS in cat form, as an example), so I don't think the dev team necessarily had any magical insight. I also think its interesting that they seem to be going toward the "make everything equal (and therefore boring)" false definition of balance in the current era of the game.

More thoughts,

I agree... but "appealing" to whom?

When this old question of balance comes up, there are always two points I want to make:

1. "Balance" by itself isn't a goal. It doesn't tell you what needs to be balanced, nor does it hint at what needs to be measured to determine whether you've achieved such balance. The goal for making commercial games is. I think, more specific: a "balance of fun." Emphasizing that distinction helps to keep the discussion focused on the real goal.

2. In a MMOG. a balance of fun doesn't imply that one player must find every single bit of content to be equally enjoyable -- it means that every player is likely to have just as much overall fun playing a game as every other player.

That second point is crucial. It speaks to the misapprehension that leads to dysfunctional designs in which everything is so similar that it has the consistency of tepid mush.

I interpret "balance of fun" to mean that pretty much any gamer has an equal shot of finding gameplay that they can enjoy. What I think that means is that it's OK if I run into some content that someone else likes but I don't, as long I can easily find gameplay that I do enjoy (even if it doesn't excite other players).

That's the big-picture view. The narrower picture of balancing combat mechanics that people have been using as a basis for discussion would work the same way. If I'm playing some role in combat with mechanics that are fun for me, and you're got a set of role-based actions your character can take that you find enjoyable, then from a customer satisfaction standpoint it doesn't matter if those mechanics are completely different -- we've established a balance of fun.

From a code standpoint, it could be important if gameplay mechanics within one core system very wildly. That can increase implementation, maintenance, and enhancement costs, which has indirect customer satisfaction effects. But in terms of direct perception by players of gameplay mechanics, "I'm having fun" is all that matters. Whether the kind of fun that someone else is having differs from mine is nearly irrelevant as long as we're both having about the same amount of fun.

In which case, I conclude that Blizzard's changes are completely bogus and their game can't possibly ever make any money now.

Or something like that. :)

So what does Blizzard understand about "balance" that I'm missing?

PvE is a completely different beast however. For example healers in MMOs can rarely solo at the levels that tanks can and yet most people consider healers balanced with tanks. In this case it seems that the players who are healers have a perceived benefit that offsets the ability to solo; for example they have a very easy time finding groups because they are a very critical team member whereas the role of a tank can often be filled by a number of characters though perhaps less optimally.

In both cases I believe that the balanced but not equal is always the best choice. It may be more difficult to get right and it may be a moving target as the players' skill levels increase, but I can't help but feel that making everything equal is just design laziness.

One possible solution is to create ways of feeling special that don't rely on zero-sum or high-score games, but which have social context. Requiring the recitation of a chant that only a Paladin knows, for example. A dark room where only Rogues can see. A cone of silence where only classes with no magic can speak.

So the paladins had a thing they could do, tank multiple mobs better than anyone. That was kind of a niche, a point of pride. So why ruin it? What interest is served. Was nobody playing a feral druid? It doesn't sound like it.

When a class has abilities that have no credible use, that's a problem with class design. When a class has good abilities, but no opportunity to use those abilities (Enchanters in EQ2 have had this both with mez and with power drain.), that's a problem with level design.

What's the evidence for poor balance? Certain classes are played not just less, but a LOT less. Some ecological niches are just smaller. But if nobody raids with a Conjuror any more, then maybe something's up. If nobody so much as plays a conjuror any more, something is definitely up, and maybe it's balance, or maybe it's just no fun to play the class. As always, the players could be wrong about something, it could be they just don't understand how the class is supposed to work.

Sure, players can provide very important information about gameplay that the people making the game may not otherwise have discovered... but beyond that, I'd say it's foolishness to listen too closely to the general demands, which tend only toward the "make my class more powerful at the expense of everyone else" extreme.

Balance itself is a slippery concept in games. I would *love* it if it weren't necessary, because it would open up tons of play/playstyle/content creation opportunities; but one of the underlying laws of most games we play is that the rules need to be equitable to everyone playing (aka Balance), so that everyone playing has more or less the same experience. This works well -- and is probably essential -- in Scrabble and Monopoly, but I'm not so sure it really works for MMOs, in the long run.

However, if you remove the balance-the-classes concept, what do you replace it with so that you don't end up with a) one class to rule them all (in which case the design is flawed) and/or b) an incredibly irate player-base (assuming you have a player-base at all by that point)? I've been gnawing on this one for a long time, because while I am fanatical about "fairness" in general, I don't think "balance at all costs" makes a good game -- but I've no solutions yet.

Might not be as true today but from the time I played, often it ended up to "did you faced the deck using the color that was meant to beat you". Of course, in tournament colors matters not, it's just deck building skills and getting the best cards/combo so balance between colors here matters not.

I'm not sure if "balance" can really be achieved. Mostly because I never experienced it. Balance meaning I can play differently and still get away with "victory". If I remember right, in SWG at one point, TKM/pistoleer (and maybe a bit of something else) was hard to beat in 1on1. Me I was a doc/pistoleer (meaning people were having a hard time to beat me and I was unable to beat anyone...).

But a source of the problem is there. If you want balance but not equal, one class will do better than the other. But players will request to be able to beat anyone 1on1 whatever class they are. It seems they don't want to hear that X class is better than anything else 1on1 even if yours is too powerful in a group. That's when classes look all the same. For example, one has more HP and the other more avoidance skills. In the end, that's just the same. It just depends on what you like most. That's balance but boring balance. You could be of the same class that it wouldn't changed a thing...

That's the boring thing about computer RPGs. Players will always find the perfect combination (they are way better at this then devs...). If you don't want to hear complaints, you make all the calculations end up to the same result. That's when I miss my days of AD&D. We had GMs that were getting players to fight against each other and I have great memories of beating "boosted" characters (black books anyone?) not because of my class but because I had some clever ways of using it (my favorite character was a magician that invented some stupid but very annoying spells like a sneezing spell that would remove all bonus to initiative... you can attack before I can even think about it? ah! sneezing spell! you're as slow as everyone...). In a computer RPG, you're limit is the rules set by the computer. Your math skill matters most than your imagination.

So my take is that if you want balance as players see it, you'll keep changing data over and over until all classes are the same in the end. Doesn't matter if this priest is too powerful in a group, it's just bad 1on1... So give multiple similar options to these players and alternatives to players that don't mind to do bad in duels?

Isn't the question "who said it's not balanced and in what circumstances"?