Seriously though, why doesnt blizzard just develop a script that can balance the spellpower/attack power coefficients on spells to create an arbitrary level of balance across AoE/ST/PvP?
It would only take like 1-2 coders to be able to implement this. Why dont they invest in technology like this and then they would save tons of money in developer time because the balance is then automated for all future changes?
Add new spells? Simply add them to the automation code and let it process them.
You could even create flexibility like â Oh we X spell to be the hardest hitting spell in this toolkit, so you could just write the code in a way that keeps X spell at some value and then adjusts the rest of the toolkit so that the overall dps is within some specified value.
Im nearly at the point of frustration with class imbalance where I might develop this code myself just to prove a point. Its not even like its that difficult of a code to develop either, and all it really takes is processing time to crunch all the numbers.
People talk about class balance like its some impossible problem to solve, but why not just use the computing resources at hand and let an automation code just balance the classes?
Iâve thought this many times, it would make life so much easier to have some base algorithm work on tuning.
It doesnât even need to be fancy AI or reinforcement learning. Just something to balance it out and keep it interesting. Itâs probably the interesting part that is hard.
Like guardian druid.
Balance druid.
Frost mageâŚ
How do you make things interesting with an AI? Idk, but these classes are marvelously painful and unfun.
Why is this ridiculous? Simulation technology is used all the time in high tech fields to reduce the cost of developing prototypes and they dont have huge teams of coders implementing the simulations.
And the vast majority of them contract out or buy an existing product and modify it to fit their needs. They donât write them from scratch, there is no fâing way you could develop a quality simulation application with robust enough parameters with â2 codersâ and not have it takes years.
Besides, its not like blizzard doesnt have access to all of the data on warcraft logs either. Youre telling me that it is unreasonable to develop an algorithm that simply applies a % change to specific damage sources in the logs until the overall damage is within a specified margin of eachother?
Balance is an NP complete problem, itâs the equivalent of the traveling salesman problem:
So it literally cannot be solved optimally in the death heat of the universe as the classes and specs are currently designed. So⌠yeah itâs not impossible per se⌠but it might as well be.
So no there is no solution that would make sense that 1 or 2 coders could come up in a reasonable amount of time.
Let it suffice if you can solve this problem⌠there is a million bucks waiting for you.
The fact of whether the problem of âClass Balanceâ is P vs NP is irrelevant⌠You can easily develop simulation tools that SIMPLIFY the process of balancing.
Like its just simple arithmetic here its not like quantum computingâŚ
Too much variables in their design, to now spend the time, resources, etc, to create something that would âstreamlineâ balance. Itâs not that ez, certainly not a 2 coder job.
Except you canât, the problem is NP complete. That means that it can only be properly solved via the deep brute force approach. Any other solution is a compromised solution using optimizations. So no⌠P=NP absolutely applies in this case. The computational complexity is insanely high because itâs non-polynomial.
No offense man but there really isnt such a thing as âtoo many variablesâ unless you are talking billions of variables. There are computations on millions of variables all the time, we have INCREDIBLE processing power with modern computers. Blizzard has NOT developed a system that cannot be balanced with simple guess and check iterationsâŚ
There are too many variables in their class design and design philosophy to have me believe what you wrote that this would be an easy job. I feel you donât understand in what position they have or their inner workings.
If it was that easy, and would only take 1-2 people to pull it off, then why havenât they done it already? Why hasnât any MMO or any other competitive online game done this already?
But there really arent that many variables dude⌠there is a finite list of spells and a finite list of spell modifiers and they arent even arrays longer than 20 elements each. Even if the lists were 100 elements each it really wouldnt take that long to brute force calculate the most efficient order of abilities and then adjust their coefficients so that the total DPS is within a specified margin of variance.
I mean cmon, the game is so simple nowadays that average people can theorycraft what the best talent and gear choices are, and the community has already developed simulation technology that can choose your best gear. There is no way Blizzard couldnt simply code something that could automate class balance.
