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Top 5 PVP Design Flaws | TaugVlog
Master10K
Member Posts: 3,065
I found this 16min video very interesting. It's basically MMORPG PvP'er, Ed (Taugrim) Park's top 5 PvP design flaws. Although you may have other PvP design flaws in mind, when it comes to your top 5 (for me it's the PvP gear stat treadmill), you have to admit that these are design flaws that have plagued some of the popular MMORPG's PvP.
f you're lazy, here's a basic run down...
#5: 50% healing debuffs
E.g. Mortal Strike for pre-Cataclysm Arms Warrior in WoW.
#4: Asymmetrical damage scaling
E.g. Bright Wizard's Combustion mechanic in WAR.
#3: Asymmetrical CC
E.g. RIFT Pyro Mage's Ground of Strength indefinite CC immunity. I remember this.
#2: Overpowered passive procs
E.g. Lingering Wounds, Vampiric Munitions, and Fell Blades from RIFT. I definitely remember this.
#1: World PVP based on 2 factions
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Taugrim's blog is awesome. His builds are excellently theorycrafted and I like how he explains the build and then shows you how to use it.
My only criticism is he gets a little sidetracked sometimes and mis-speaks at other times in some of his videos. Minor stuff.
Thx for sharing.
Since they removed that, healers with decent gear have become immortal gods who can heal themself from the damage for 2-3 dps while stopping everybody from capturing an objective.
The healing problem in Wow comes from resilience. Resilience reduces incoming damage, therefore negatively affecting DPS, yet don't affect healing at all. Result, a healer with 4500+ resilience is almost god mode, and tanks better than a dedicated tank in PvP.
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I loved Taug's blog.. BUT..
I wanted to add that anytime you have PvE and PvP using the same classes and skill, there will always be imbalance.. The things that Taug brought as imbalance issues are great for PvE encounters.. What game devs have down now is nerf or remove PvE skills in PvP play, but when you do this, you often hamstring the PvE encounters.. Removing or nerfing skills in PvE makes for a boring homoganized experience for the sake of PvP balance..
For a good PvE game I want my mage to NUKE a boss, but I don't want him doing that in PvP play.. There are countless examples of this in every game that tries to please both crowds.. Another example is that 50% healing debuff.. I want that ability in a PvE fight, it adds more complexity to an encounter, but to nerf that skill just means you are nerfing the PvE fun.. Anyways..
Good point and the answer to that is Guild Wars 1 & Guild Wars 2. The devs for that game split each skill into 2 categories. PvE & PvP and gave them the appropriate stats, so that the skills in both PvE & PvP mode will be as balanced as it can be. It's quite surprising that no other devs have done this. Trion did this to a small degree in Rift, but it certainly wasn't enough.
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Feels like the happy middle ground is by not having these debuffs on a standard rotation ability. Healing Debuffs can be an incredibly useful tactical tool, but if it's just this automatic trait of a class then there's not going to be much depth.
But you'd want varying levels of healing coming out of a healer to really make a periodic healing debuff useful (although the resulting situation doesn't sound a lot better: I pop my anti-heal when the healer pops his healing-surge ability, and healers pop their healing-surge when I pop my anti-heal. Clearly some work to be done, with the goal of some clever back-and-forth tactical skill usage.)
@Master101k: Great video, thanks for sharing.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Abilies andd classes having a single set of values to determine their effect, in a game where you will balance the game in two different gameplay aspects. Each abiliy should have two ets of values that can be adjusted based on which aspect of the game combat (pvp, or pve) that you want to effect. That way you can balance pve an pvp independently of each other without too much fear of imbalance from the adjustment.
Any pve or pvp centrict abbility or stat that has largely no effect on other asspects of the game, looking at resilence for this one as it makes you actually become unviable in anythign but gear that is for the sole purpuse of pvping or pveing. I would go wiht gear that is itemized towards a certain aspect of the game stat-wise, but not solely created for just one aspect so that you can have multiple ways of gearing an still being viable (equal more people willing to fight in pvp.).
No reason to do pvp outside of just fighting another faction in the open world zones, and no penality for actions like ganking or griefing players in places (looking at serverly out-gearing, or leveling players and killing or camping them just for spite repeatedly.). Just like in the real world you can do it if you so desire griefing an ganking people, but you will have to dea with the negatives of ding that in the game, such as forced spawning if you log, npc guards hunting you, and random bounty requests to players on the sever.
Overbalancing of classes, or completely removing uniqueness to ensure a completely balanced pvp matches, when these really only make the game shallower an the fights less interesting for all invoved.
I disagree that debuff is to blame.
The biggest problem that plagues WoW is that they have everything bound to gear, and over the course of expansion, accumulation of certain stats screws balance hard.
Simple example (numbers made up):
At version X.0 (expansion just came out), DPS kills a DPS in 15 seconds.
At version X.3 year later, when gear significantly went up over couple of tiers of content and gear, DPS still kills a DPS in 15 seconds.
If this number would change, then it would imbalance the game as it would feel as if you become more "fragile" as time goes by, and combat becomes spiky and nukes become too powerful and its hard to keep people alive.
However, Healing Power went up during those gear stat increases. HP pools increaed (which decreased % healed per second), but a lot of other stats (crit chance, spell power, haste) increased (and they can be increased further by gemming and reforging while getting more health is useless). This means that you can now actually heal a target faster than you could before!
This is why healers become OP.
They always will over the course of content patches and gear tiers, until Blizzard learns the lesson and makes it so that all numbers stay consistent over the course of the content patches. However, this in turn will probably make game not so fun to play since you'll be only seeing bigger numbers, but not seeing any difference (i went up 5 tiers of PVP gear but nothing changed, i'm still pvping same as it was when tthe xpac first came out).
I think these top 5 fail to look at the actual why something is unbalanced, and just see the effect. When you are talking about design flaws, there are some more general things then just how 1 skill in 1 game works. However, a few of them are good points. Here would be my top 5.
[*]Stuns. Any pvp that relies on making another player unable to play the game is not good pvp.
[*]World PVP based on 2 factions.
[*]Cookie cutter builds. Warrior does X, Wizard does Y, Healer does Z. Makes it too predictable.
[*]Single variable damage reduction formulas.
[*]PVP dependant on PVE performance.
Eh, stuns don't automatically prevent a game having good PVP. They're not great (especially when they completely disable players) but they certainly don't prevent games like League of Legends from having good PVP (heck I think PVP is one step short of fantastic PVP.) Would games like LoL be substantially worse PVP with the slightest increase in CC frequency/duration? Absolutely! Could games like LoL be even better without stuns? It'd take some work to design suitable mechanics, but yes. But they're not brutal enough to prevent the game from being fun.
Cookie cutter isn't a big deal. You still want some form of hidden knowledge -- trump cards players feel like they can hold back to play at the right moment and surprise their opponent. But having classes whose capabilities are known to a degree, that actually empowers a certain game depth where players can adapt to their opponent immediately. Too predictable is bad, but some predictability is required for a good PVP game.
Single variable damage reduction formulas? Haven't you played Street Fighter or Chess or Tribes? These games have no damage reduction whatsoever and manage to be deep, competitive PVP. And several others like League of Legends and Starcraft survive on only the barest of damage reduction formulas.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
#1 PvP design flaw: Basing your game around beating a "boss" NPC with 1billion HP (to make up for pathetic AI) and then turning characters built to fight that "boss" loose on each other. Make "boss" encounters take/do a somewhat reasonable level of damage and you will find most of the PvP "balance" issues go away.
#2-5: See #1
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2 faction pvp...the BANE of mmorpgs.
Lets divide the community so they cant speak with eachother, creating a faceless pvp enviroment. Also what that guy said about the strong side getting stronger while the weak side shrinks and becomes pointless. Sucks for all.
Im a firm believer that the best world pvp mechanics include no real factions, no community divide and base it on guild vs guild.
This way you can talk with everyone, you can kill people who suck or troll ect...also it creates a real need for people to ally against the strong guys, who would typically dominate the strong faction on 2 faction games...they have no factions and you can bet they are cocky and dont need a lot of noobs helping...its great, allows them to get spanked by zergs and allows for drama which can bring down the strongest of pvpers from the inside.
I will always choose a factionless ffa guild based pvp over any other type, even 3 faction pvp...because with 3 faction people still mirgrate towards the strong faction.
No list without "gear" and "stats" is worth its wieght in cow dung.
Remove both and suddenly PvP is player skill based...no amount of PvE raiding or level will help you.
You also might want to take out levels too, thats not skill based.
Hell why not just go playt a FPS, everything fair and balanced and skill based!
RPG's were never suppose to be about everything being fair/balanced and skill based...its suppose to benefit people who have spent the time made the right choices and used their brain. mmorpgs continue to suck more and more as they keep removing RPG elements to suit e-sport pvpers.
I would say that faction basedd pvp weither it is two, three or five sided will always have one major issue. That is the devs give the player that option to choose their faction, as such a vast group of players will chose the faction with the higher population to stave getting ganked while playing. Now if you had it that the server actualy would disalllow players to choose a faction that is over-populated compared to the other factions (atleast where pvp-servers or servers with active open world pvp.) some of that imbalance could be curbed. Though i would much rather see less of a mandatory faction set-up like wow or other games, an more that your character after creation can elect to join a faction of your choice, and if the faction you apply to is to havily populated your application can be denied.
I never seen stuns or such as an issue, but more what you see with many clases like roges or such that are stun heavy making them able to lock a player out of taking action if done correctly. Always seen an issue with giving to many cc or stuns to classes to use, as they are able to deny the other player the option to fight back, and yet also it makes stuns or cc less of a skill-move an more of just fodder to fill your rotation. What i mean by a skill-move is using your stuns or cc to deny a player the use of an ability, or to gain range upon you, and as such i would want cc/stuns to be much more rare an not as common place in games. Seeing classes with five or six stuns or other forms of cc kinda defeats the purpose of learning when, or what to use that cc/stun skillfully.