Can bliss hire an ML engineer / data scientist already?

Community General Discussion
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It’s 2023 almost 2024 and data driven AI/ML everywhere, why hasn’t blizzard invested in making a model for arbitrarily balancing classes?

Literally the technology is there to balance classes in every context to an arbitrary degree and it wouldn’t even be that difficult with modern tools…

I’ve made a post about this in the past. There are multiple routes they could take to implement this balancing model, the easiest being to leverage the massive amounts of training data available from their own data collection methods let alone with Warcraft logs.

It’s tiring.

You can literally develop a tool that would allow you to specify balance parameters of your choice and it could output different possible tuning values in abilities that amount to the same DPS so the devs could even pick the values which thematically match the ability

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What’s ML dude?

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What would the point be? No matter how much they balance classes, people would still rather complain about their class than improve.

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I always love posts where some random person just happens to have the easy fix all button and knows more than the multi-billion dollar mega company with a literal army of top talent at their disposal. Good stuff. :popcorn:

I know that it’s a joke to poke fun at Blizzard, the whole “Small Indie Company” but seriously, if what was suggested was that easy to implement and fix so many issues I am pretty sure they would have done it.

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Honestly, I think if all classes were considered “balanced” by Blizzard (the players never would think that) and they stopped making adjustments people would get bored of the stagnation.

But, there are WAY too many variables I think, many of which are regarding encounter design rather than class/sped design, to make anything balanced. It also changes a lot depending on the difficulty level of the content. Some are more nebulous utility as well.

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I’m not sure what Bliss does or doesn’t do has to do with what Blizzard does or doesn’t do.

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who is bliss? it’s called Microsoft now…

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you don’t need to hire anyone . here is the solution . have only one class with one ability , mic dropped

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Hire the people who run raidbots to balance DPS (of each role), the people who run QElive to balance healing (of each role - yes you need to balance DPS healing!!), and then adjust the numbers for tank playstyles and mitigation.

Or just give up, you know. With all the compositions you can have in a group, and all the talent combinations the group can have, just give up and let the players figure it out like you have forever. But if you go this route, STOP re-balancing in the middle of the season.

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That would only work if the same AI is also designing the dungeons and raids. Because the encounter is equally as important as the classes themself when it comes to balance, if not more so.
Because there is no way for, say and Arms warrior, to compete with a Destro Warlock on fights that requires spliting two bosses far apart. Or ones that summon a decently strong mini boss frequently.

Machine Learning, i presume. At least in this context.

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Alright then. This is the problem with that which my smooth brain is seeing. There is no way to balance the specs/classes perfectly. Yes there are balancing issues. Always have been. But with the very different damage profiles present both within individual specs, and that are required in different content, even on a dungeon to dungeon, or fight to fight basis, balancing perfectly is not possible.

If you were to try to balance every class, for all forms of content, you would end up at a bad point. Every class would have the same damage profile, with the same CD times, similar resource generation ect.

I do think some class imbalance is appropriate and necessary. Specs should have strengths and weaknesses. The issue with balance is there are specs that excel in an area and are 25-35% stronger than most other specs in that area. I think that should be closer to 10%. But tuning is way more complex than I can figure out. And way too complex for most in the GD forum with solutions crowd can understand as well.

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Dude out here thinking balancing all classes around a training dummy fight would fix the game

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I know how to fix balance. Prune everything down to one button.

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I mean I tried to say everyone should have the exact same HP pools and stats, and everyone only have 1 ability that does 1% damage and its trigger automatically

People would still say its unbalanced though

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It’s crazy the amount of lack of information about the power of machine learning in this context.

Enterprise Machine learning models have millions of parameters. World of Warcraft would have far less, even when incorporating PVE, PVP, dungeons, raids, open world, etc

You CAN balance it to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, that’s kind of the point of this technology.

It is a black box system where you don’t necessarily need to know how it all works but that it will output the desired results.

The tool CAN provide multiple solutions for the same result which allows the devs to pick which specific solution they choose.

For example, the tool might produce a solution where the spell power coefficient of
SW:P is 50% and vampiric touch is 25%, and an equivalent solution with SW:P = 10% and VT at 40%. This gives the devs the ability to say that we want VT to be thematically stronger than SW:P and choose that specific solution.

People really really really need to stop thinking that arbitrary balance is not possible in every form of content across the whole game because it literally is. Machine learning abstracts away all of the interactions and uses the data to compute the intended result. It’s kind of the whole point of the technology

Also, having arbitrarily balanced classes does NOT mean homogeneity. The point of the ML model is to eliminate human inability to measure compounding interacting systems (talents, gearing, rotation, borrowed power, etc) and still find solutions that fit these parameters.

It would actually give the devs more freedom to get creative because then they don’t have to try to anticipate all of these effects because they just have to press f5 on the computer to run the code and find the balance

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I dont see why we need

checks notes

based on random choice or personal rather than any reason or system balancing

Can we see how many more times we can say we want things “randomly balanced based on personal whim and no system” in another post?

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The problem with this sort of modelling is that you first need to train that tool, and humans are wildly flawed and subjective as it is. When you couple that with the fact that no one at blizz actually plays their own games we’ll end up with [current top meta dps] being given staggering buffs while the [current worst meta dps] is nerfed in to oblivion.

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That argument is like saying that the problem with living is having to breathe…

Writing a model is literally the whole job of an ML engineer / data scientist but it’s way easier today than even last year; it’s really exploding right now. It’s also part of the fun of that job

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I want things balanced to where when I log on all other players automatically die and I earn 2000 gold per player.

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This sentence isn’t wrong though. Imagine not needing to breathe!

While I get what you’re going for here it has been proven time and time again - tools are only as good as the people using them.

Look at details/warcraft logs/raider io for recent WoW examples of what can happen when tools are misused.

I’m not saying the data scientists wouldn’t be superb at their jobs, I am saying I don’t have faith that blizz would be able to make appropriate use of the tools that would be provided to them.