Guild Wars is too balanced, so they need to start banning skills. Huh? That statement seems to contradict itself. I play PvE (cooperative multi-player) almost exclusively and find Guld Wars too balanced for its own good. A lot of the fun for me comes from seeking new builds that make me more powerful. Unfairly powerful even. Muh ha ha ha! In GW its a no go. Everything that looks promising has already been balanced. Dark Aura Pinata? Balanced. Bonetti's Defense Nuker? Balanced. Some builds are definitely better than others - especially when designed for one specific opponent (farming). I just never feel satisfied that I've found something really cool. How did Guild Wars get so balanced? Testing and fixing and testing and fixing. Anything that's not fairly balanced gets fixed (nerfed) in the next patch. For PvP players this is ideal. Nobody wants to keep losing to an optimal strategy. That would quickly remove all variety (and fun). In PvE though, the monsters don't cry foul if you keep using the same killer combo over and over and over. If that's what you like you should be able to do it! Magic the Gathering has a similar problem. They try to please casual players and tournament players with the same cards. Tournament players want a perfectly fair balance while casual players (at least the ones I know) like to play with quirky combos and unfair exploits. Even getting a Lich/Mirror Universe thrown your way is fun when there's nothing on the line. Wizards of the Coast hasn't yet found a way to stream text changes out to all existing printed cards. Sometimes they do post changes and everyone is supposed to pretend their cards have the new text printed on them. Usually though, they just ban broken cards from tournament play. Banning cards is a good solution because it leaves them in the hands of the casual players while removing them from tournament play. Guild Wars should follow this example and ban skills from PvP while leaving them available in PvE. There's a balance to be struck here. Sometimes changing a skill is best and sometimes banning it is best. ---------------------------------------------------- Warren Spector is proud of some of the strange exploits players used to complete missions in Deus Ex. Would it have been better to patch these out of existence? Should you leave the game in a state where clever players can cross walls they're not supposed to by climbing sticky bombs? I think so. ---------------------------------------------------- I've been thinking about Guild Wars because I've been playing a lot of it and it's a great game. This could be a broader discussion though. Do you enjoy games more if they're balanced? I have the impression that most players like to seek out and use creative exploits. Do you think that's accurate? Balance is surely needed in multiplayer competitive games. How can you keep balance in multi-player, but leave exploits in single-player? How could you do that in, say, an RTS? Should you?

Absolutely not. Cheating, and lacking any sort of sportmanship doesn't suddenly become okay because nobody's watching.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster sounds like you want them to make the game so you have an unfair advantage over everyone else...dream on

Sounds more to me like he's tired of everyone in the game having pretty much the same build. You mix any combination of skill a, b and c and regardless, you have a character of equal effectiveness.

It's like nerfing a character in q3 because he found a rocket launcher and armor, while another player may not have found it. So the player with the new gear is leveled off to be the same as the character without.

Also, it removes the ability to create flawed characters on purpose, for experimentation. You have 5000 players on the server, and they only come in one average vanilla flavour.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster sounds like you want them to make the game so you have an unfair advantage over everyone else...dream on

No, like he says, he doesn't want an unfair advantage over anyone except the MOBs. I think this sort of thing is better suited to a carebear server than one with PvP. In Deus Ex, putting a LAM on an alarm was fun, even though a smarter AI would probably see it and back off, or to get through without even killing Agent Navarre (I never tried, but people have). In Sonic 3 it was fun to get all the emeralds and just run through with no worries (especially with the lightning shield!). However, it's not cool for the better player to consistantly lose to a worse player who found a loophole in the rules.

Of course, I'd rather it be perfectly balanced, with nothing being always better. I think it leads to interesting decisions (as opposed to the no-brainer "upgrade at every town" cRPG approach). One reason I still think of Infantry as one of the greatest games (even if I am too cheap to pay for it now): there was no "best" setup for any class (except maybe medics and engineers, but they had other interesting aspects).

I think it's important to have consequence for the choices you make in building a character. I also think that it's important to balance the game in such a way that there is not one killer strat that defeats all others. In fact, if you have an unbalanced method of going about things, that forces players to all follow the same path and I would argue that this actually hurts the diversity you seem to imply is missing. If someone doesn't go that route they would be left with an inferior character, and they would in effect be punished for not following the "god build". I'd like your response on that.

Now, with that said, balancing gameplay doesn't have to be vanilla flavoured. If you've ever given Warcraft 3, the frozen throne a try I would suggest getting into a custom type of game called DOTA. It is perhapse the most well fleshed out system of diverse, yet balanced players I have ever played. There are truly unique spells and abilities which tend to balance out and play to your advantage (or disadvantage if you buy the wrong items and play with the wrong style) and the items purchased add a whole new level of complexity to your strategy.

That said, Dota is still balanced because even though a character might have a really, really good build against one other character, any two characters in a 1v1 could be prepared to face eachother with the correct items. Provided each player knows what they are doing with the given character there is a relatively equal chance for success. Plus, the fact that it is a team game (generally 5v5, 4v4 or possibly 3v3) that means that where you may be weak at one thing, a teammate might excel and thus you have support characters and lead characters, both of which are integral to the team's success.

It's the same thing I see in FFXI, players are vastly different in their abilities, but generally you require a good mix to get anything done. It's a very neat environment with another well balanced, but interesting system.

I haven't played guild wars so I can't speak to it directly, but it does sound like all you're in it for is a quick advantage in the game, possibly cheating. Everyone likes a game they do well at, this generally translates into people looking for an "edge" possibly unfairly, and this leads to cheaters in various online games. When it comes down to it, people may wish to be a moderator or an admin simply to have "god powers" but let me tell you, the thrill wears off the moment you attain that status. If you actually do attain an untouchable status in a game, the mystery is removed and you end up confused after all that buildup to find out that the world really hasn't gotten any better just because you had a powergasm.

</mini rant>

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sounds like you want them to make the game so you have an unfair advantage over everyone else...dream on

Who WOULDN'T want that? :) That's not what I'm saying though. I'm talking about finding and exploiting advantages over computer-controlled opponents.

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Absolutely not. Cheating, and lacking any sort of sportmanship doesn't suddenly become okay because nobody's watching.

Interesting that a sense of sportsmanship is part of the experience for you in a single-player game. I might worry about ruining the fun for myself, but using things like cheat codes doesn't have anything to do with sportsmanship/honor in my mind.

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Also, it removes the ability to create flawed characters on purpose, for experimentation. You have 5000 players on the server, and they only come in one average vanilla flavour.

In Guild Wars anyway, you can easily make a terrible character who can't kill anything or survive very long. Thought goes into creating an effective character. There just don't seem to be any outlier "uber" builds. Following what you're led towards (by your original class selection) is as effective (or better) than creative combos. Yes, everyone is normalized towards Vanilla.

Maybe I wouldn't like the game better if combo exploits were still there. Maybe I'd find one and ruin all the challenge/fun. It just feels like the game is encouraging you to find creative combos. The problem is that when you do find one you soon discover that it has already been found and balanced so that it isn't too powerful. It removes or diminishes the reward for experimenting with skills.

I conjecture that a possible solution is to build in highly powerful combos, but design them in a way that leaves them vulnerable to a wide class of other combos. Balance can either be homogeneity, or an equal number of pros and cons across the board; the latter leaves the opportunity for clever players to find a rush of power, while ensuring that other clever players can eventually dethrone the first group.

M2tM and Way Walker: You're right. If you leave exploits in the game then players are effectively punished for not using them. Everyone becomes the same. Worse still, the player has a powergasm, sees that there's no challenge left in the game, and never plays again.

It would be nice for a game to have:
1) Effective strategies/combos nobody has thought of before. Or at least ones that nobody has fixed before.
2) No loopholes that ruin the challenge.

I also don't see how you can have both. Given that, I'd choose to close all loopholes whenever possible.

It sure is a shame though.

The thing about leaving these super-builds in the game is that someone will eventually discover it and write up how to make the character the best. Others will proceed to do the same thing, so if one particularly good build is left in the game, everyone will tend to move towards it... eventually, everyone will come in one overpowering vanilla flavor.

One solution could be to leave a server for those who want to play on a previous patch, but this runs into the issues of money and maintenance. While it might be nice, the developer's job is to make the game as fun for as many people as possible. They can do this in the short-term, by leaving really good builds for people to follow. This wears off when too many people gravitate towards it. The long-term solution is to keep the builds as balanced as possible, which seems like it offers a game that is more fun in the long term, especially for more-casual players who don't spend their time power-leveling their way to greatness along a build they read about on GameFaqs.com.

In theory, you do have a point about everyone ending up with one power-level (mediocre), but I think the trade-off is that what Guild Wars is doing is allowing everyone, no matter what build they use, to have fun and be assured that they will not be wasting their time making a sub-average character.

That said, I haven't actually played Guild Wars, so I'm speaking in generalities and may be totally off the mark. You decide. Wish me luck on the finals I'm not studying for!

Cheats are an intersting phenomenon in games. There is a bit of the old, "A good lock! But I'm a better lock picker than you are a lock smith!" for the developers of cheats. The majority of people who use cheats seem to because they are frustrated with some aspect of the game. Some players though, especially young players, seem to want to use them just because they can. For them, it really doesn't seem to matter whether or not the cheat is actually useful in the game.
"A level playing field" reduces the reward for player advancement. That will eventually lead to player dissatisfaction. If players are looking for cheats at the beginning of the games, perhaps the initial difficulty is a bit too high.