Look, if you want a perfectly balanced game, go play rock-paper-scissors.
Even chess isn’t perfectly balanced, since white is slightly better simply by moving first.
Every Blizzard game is designed this way from hearthstone, to diablo, and wow. Its a rotating meta where every class gets seasons to shine. They are not trying to balance. The balance suggested here would ruin the game.
Achieving chess levels of balance should be the goal of any game, otherwise the game is not fair.
Yes, chess has, ostensibly, because it cannot be proven, a very small advantage from white’s half tempo.
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So in your mind you think in 20+ years Blizzard just cant figure it out? That they are working towards balancing? We will have to agree to disagree there. I think your suggestion to balance things out is a good one, I just dont think thats what Blizzard wants.
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I am not here to tell you how to play but just from my opinion, I like when specs are closer together in terms of balance. It feels good to me to play the specs I like and feel relevant or included
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And the only way to achieve that across all situations is to have all classes be homogenized to the point where they are basically just re-skins of the same class. Chess is as balanced as it is because both players have the exact same set of pieces in the exact same starting formation.
Creating this many interesting and diverse classes inevitably leads to imbalance. Other games have achieved better on paper balance than wow has, but they offer much more homogenized classes, and going down that route would result in loosing part of what makes wow good.
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Yes.
Have you ever tried balancing a game yourself (custom game in Starcraft or a mod of civilization)?
I gave up, because no single human being can do it without tons of sample sizes, which requires thousands of hours of playtime.
Right now Blizzard has a handful of devs, spilt between PvP and PvE and the many modes of PvP and PvE, all trying to balance, with very limited information and parses (because a single human being can only analyze so much data at a time).
@Capslock
You are wrong here. You can certainly have classes with different toolkits and abilities, and so long as they are doing the same damage overall and same completion rates for the same key levels (not completion times) as all other classes and specs in the top 10% of each class and spec, then you have a balanced game.
Yet starcraft was a game where they had to re-introduce imbalance because it was no longer a strategy game when it was closest to perfect balance.
People knew what the best thing to do was, and the game just tuned into who could execute the build faster, and who could micro better.
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You were the one balancing it?
Also post your source on that from top players and devs.
Keep in mind the meta classes for each season are determined long before the season starts. Just by looking at set bonuses you can determine which classes will be overpowered for the season. Every season so far the tier lists have been pretty accurate before any data is collected on live servers. Youtubers can determine which classes will be overpowered but somehow Blizzard developers cant? Thats just a hard idea for me to wrap my head around.
Regardless of whether or not they do it on purpose, using the Neural Network for hourly changes would negate such boneheaded decisions within an hour, instead of having to wait months.
I guarantee they lose more players and revenue from people quitting altogether from having to reroll, then the players they retain on timelogs that go through the reroll and re gearing process.
If it wasn’t for classic, I’d be gone already. At least in classic I know that nothing can be changed, and thus I never have to reroll (regardless of the imbalances).
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I don’t know I just like the idea. I think if they do it well it could be fun for me. I would be open to trying it especially in fated season 4 when it’s kind of an experiment anyways
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Think of it this way, could it be any worse than the current system in place?
Yeah but you’d REALLY upset the players who are convinced everything should be/is merit based. They insist that specs with complex rotations should be rewarded with higher DPS.
This would negate the advantage they insist MUST be present.
After years of poor decisions after poor decisions. I for one do believe this to be true.
Rotation simplicity or complexity has nothing to do with mathematical balance, nor should it.
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Oh, what would it do for Aug?
Spec is currently the consensus best or 2nd best spec in the game for keys, yet when you check overall logs, it’s either last or 2nd from the bottom.
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Big data, machine learning, blockchain
It’s already been said in this thread that human intervention is still required and the the Neural Network would still be able to assist the devs by telling them where they need to focus their attention.
Yet because (as described here) it’s oblivious to context, so it would give red herrings like “Buff obviously OP spec because it’s intended weakness is indeed weak”
This is why going off damage alone is bad balancing.
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