Arenas anytime soon?

[Aiden]

(01-31-2012 03:13 AM)Antares Wrote:  Blizz calling it a big mistake has to be put in perspective, arenas and warzone pvp in general didn't come into play until 1-1.5 years or so after wow opened so there was really no forethought of having to balance classes when they built the game.

I think balancing pvp and pve is very possible if it is taken into consideration when first developing a game which Bioware has probly though of. Arenas where a nightmare for the development aspect but Arena tournaments was a great marketing tool for Blizz, with purses of up 50k it attracted a lot of hype and attention to WoW.

The reason why people whined and complained so much about arenas in WoW was because of how much they loved them and how passionate they were about them. Everyone wanted arenas to work and be balanced, unfortunately WoW never really acheived that. But I do think that Bioware can learn from the mistakes of Blizz and implement an arena system that can be somewhat balanced and give players another option of in gameplay style without having it negatively impace pve and wz/opne world based pvp.

I'm all for arenas in swtor not offering any better gear or rewards than wz/open world pvp rewards. Instead just give titles or cool in game speeders, stuff like that so people can still have something to stroke their ego with. I personally love the competitive high action environment of arenas as an option to add variety to the game.

Its always been a major problem for game developers especially in these themepark MMO's since it revolves around vertical progression, and power curves of various archtypes always change with vertical progression. We can already see the issue starting in relation to raiding gear being useful in pvp, even without the expertise bonus, the extra stats, and set bonuses for certain classes are to good to pass up. right now, a mix of rakata and BM gear is superior by a decent margin to anything else, especially with the ability to strip and install mods as the player sees fit.

other issue is frankly the players themselves. People want new shinies and really want them every time they log in. Coupled with the class balance system, at some point other classes will be extremely powerful similar to the Operative/scoundrel issue early on, with consumable stacking & power ups.

[Ramrok]

you cannot balance classes, you simply cannot... WoW did a good job imo, but there is always someone complaining because they blame the shortcommings of their skill on class balance... balance can only be achieved when everyone complains equally not when everyone is happy because you cannot please everyone, and balance is just someones biased perspective.

the truly skilled excel even when the odds are against them, i cant tell you how many times i see underdogs just destroy people they should normally loose to and those are people that complain less too because real skill is when you win given through the parameters of the game and not by complaining to change the game to your own parameters.

[Antares]

I agree that you cannot balance classes perfectly, but you can get to a point where there are no absurd advantages one class has over the other and allow for an arena like environment where teamwork and individual skill outweigh that of gear and class make up. Thats all people want and it is not an impossible problem to solve, might be difficult but certainly not impossible.

I really feel that is possible with careful analysis of combat log parsing and stats. Have 1 rule set for arena/wz pvp and 1 for pve, that way changes to pvp universe don't affect those in the pve universe. Its very easy to distinguish between the 2 and little to no amibiguity as to which universe a player is in. I don't really care if my ability x does 10% less dmg to class y in the pvp universe than to a mob in the pve universe as long as its in the name of balance which was assessed via heavy statistical analysis and that was the best course of action. Its just bunch of formulas and simple equations that govern how dmg is received and dealt not to hard to optimize that sort of thing in this day and age. Just because Blizz couldn't balance things does not mean its an impossible task for BW.

[tinlar]

Some of the anti-arena posts I see make me LOL.

Foremost I doubt that a representative of Blizzard has come out and said that one of the biggest marketing pieces and player draws of their game was a mistake to implement. I challenge anyone to show me where they said it.

Beyond that; PVP already happens in TOR. You can in essence say that the current war zones are 8 man arena teams. There really isn't that much difference between a War Zone and an Arena other than map size and that you don't have full pre-made teams. The give us the ability to queue with an 8 man ops group and most of the problems are solved. Or give us the ability to queue into a 4v4 version of the existing War Zone maps.

The biggest LOL of all is the folks that say the fact that Arena forced the developers to see, admit to, and work to correct class balance issues. As I've said, PVP happens already in TOR. If there is a class that is balanced above or below the other classes how is that fair? Why would we as players not want that fixed? This is an argument for arena teams, not against them.

[Kaedis]

(02-20-2012 11:12 PM)tinlar Wrote:  Foremost I doubt that a representative of Blizzard has come out and said that one of the biggest marketing pieces and player draws of their game was a mistake to implement. I challenge anyone to show me where they said it.

As you command. Rob Pardo, VP of Game Design for Blizzard (source):

Quote:If I was going to pick on a game design thing that I look back on and think was a mistake? We really never designed WoW to be a competitive e-sports game; it was something that we decided to start tackling because there was such a desire and demand to evolve it in that direction, to introduce competitive arenas. I'm not sure that that was the right thing to do with the game.

We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction. Either I'd go back in time to before WoW ever shipped and change the rules to make the basic game more conductive for being an e-sport, or if not that, just say it doesn't make sense. Right now, WoW has a bit of a schizophrenic philosophy behind it, and we're trying to figure out how to guide it.

It's tricky, now that we've gone down that road, because we have a passionate, large audience that enjoys it - the Arena, the e-sport - so we can't just chop off that head. We can't just say, "We fouled up and will go back to how it used to be before," because we have a really passionate audience that wants it in the game.

If I could go back in time before we shipped WoW, I would have either made serious changes to basic class balance to facilitate that type of play, or if I went back to when we had the idea two years later, I would have said, "Maybe we shouldn't go there."

The problem with arenas isn't really the forced focus on balance. It's the fact that they are significantly smaller groups than standard PvP (current warzones are 8, Arenas would likely by 2-4), and the microscope that it puts on even the smallest imbalance. A pair of class specs that synergize very well together can have an impact on a warzone, but in an arena, where there's only 2 or 3 people in the zone on each time, a pair of classes that have very synergistic mechanics can absolutely destroy competitive balance.

Instead of balancing teams of 8, with all combinations therein (which is many more combinations, but each combination has less of an impact overall), they now have to balance every possible pair of classes/specs. The dev team of WoW has stated a number of times over the years, often implicitly but a couple of times explicitly, that Arenas put their balancing under such a precise microscope that it became almost an impossible task to balance it properly. Large-group PvP is significantly easier to balance than small-group PvP, because tactics and strategy start mattering a lot more than specific class strengths/weaknesses and the RPS nature of most MMO PvP.

[NegativeChirality]

(02-21-2012 08:50 AM)Kor Wrote:  The problem with arenas isn't really the forced focus on balance. It's the fact that they are significantly smaller groups than standard PvP (current warzones are 8, Arenas would likely by 2-4), and the microscope that it puts on even the smallest imbalance. A pair of class specs that synergize very well together can have an impact on a warzone, but in an arena, where there's only 2 or 3 people in the zone on each time, a pair of classes that have very synergistic mechanics can absolutely destroy competitive balance.

Instead of balancing teams of 8, with all combinations therein (which is many more combinations, but each combination has less of an impact overall), they now have to balance every possible pair of classes/specs. The dev team of WoW has stated a number of times over the years, often implicitly but a couple of times explicitly, that Arenas put their balancing under such a precise microscope that it became almost an impossible task to balance it properly. Large-group PvP is significantly easier to balance than small-group PvP, because tactics and strategy start mattering a lot more than specific class strengths/weaknesses and the RPS nature of most MMO PvP.

I always felt that the "arena microscope problem" for Blizzard was essentially impossible for them to solve, simply because they couldn't properly change core mechanics when needed due to PvE concerns and, often, casual player's complaints. The implication of "we didn't design WoW to be competitive" was always "we can't remove X or Y or change Z for reasons unrelated to PvP".

Put another way: they lacked the resolve and (more importantly) justification to balance Arena. They made progress in Wrath simply because they homogenized the classes a bit more (which was uniformly good, in my opinion), but at the same time their desire to make "every spec viable in both PvE and PvP" just added too many variables back into the game. It was a bit easier to balance PvP when you could assume that the only valid PvP Warrior spec was Arms, the only valid Mage spec was Frost, etc. But even then, super-hybrid classes (Paladins and Druids, mostly, able to fill more than just 2 roles) were always a problem.

A few weeks ago, Ghostcrawler talked about this 'Role of Role' problem, saying that they're not really sure if the PvP-spec vs PvE-spec divide is good or bad, even in retrospect.

[Kaedis]

Quote:Put another way: they lacked the resolve and (more importantly) justification to balance Arena.

What it came down to more was simply that they refused to destroy PvE in order to balance PvP. Arenas put enough of a microscope on PvP balance that they managed to find themselves very often wedged between the rock of PvP microbalance and the hard place of PvE balance.

[ShinobiX]

@Kor, lol, nicely played /w Pardo quote. Gotta love the clowns not having been there making up history. Also @Alterac Valley discussion... AV was not "invented" as a 40 man BG. It was meant to be a regular questzone. Hence the tons of dailys (that most of you monkeys have never seen... those goats? Back then they were not decoration, you had to catch them fuckers, yeah that's right... Build up your ressources MANUALLY, baby! Same with 'dem wolf skins!)

As for the whole arena discussion: The first game, that has the balls to seperate PVP from PVE, will pull something like proper arena off. Think Fireball doing 1.5k dmg to players and 3k to mobs. Or a backstab doing 1k + stun to a player and 5k to a mob. It's easy enough to think up various paper/scissor/rock scenarios that work for PVP and other balancing numbers for PVE.

But of course, that would require people to remember twice as much spell data and most of them ain't smart enough for one set, let alone two.

[Devizz]

If they will ever decide to add arenas it is still a long, long wait so just enjoy and focus on playing ranked warzones for now.

[frmorrison]

(02-26-2012 11:56 AM)ShinobiX Wrote:  @Kor, lol, nicely played /w Pardo quote. Gotta love the clowns not having been there making up history. Also @Alterac Valley discussion... AV was not "invented" as a 40 man BG. It was meant to be a regular questzone. Hence the tons of dailys (that most of you monkeys have never seen... those goats? Back then they were not decoration, you had to catch them fuckers, yeah that's right... Build up your ressources MANUALLY, baby! Same with 'dem wolf skins!)

I played WoW back when AV first came out. It wasn't designed as a questzone, it was always meant to be a PvP area. The quests were there to add something for people to do other than just kill players. You had to collect materials to strengthen your troops and also to summon the boss mob to help you attack the base. The developers were trying things out to see what worked.