Do some research!

[PingBong]

Player feedback is great and all but honestly its just biased speculation at best. What i think fc should do is implement some type of statistics gathering device (if they havent alread), for example at each duel end a hidden record is made that includes the opponents levels, profs and the approximate value(in time or brownie points or whatever) of their setup, based on these records it wouldnt be hard to formulate viable statistics to better overview whats actually going on. I know there isnt much bling factor to this idea as the players will never see it and there wont be anything to brag about in the next fwm but if done correctly we most certainly will feel it and personally i would appreciate something like that much more then a mail system or targets ncu or the numerous other half way pointless features

[Axtilmor]

Player feedback is great and all but honestly its just biased speculation at best. What i think fc should do is implement some type of statistics gathering device (if they havent alread), for example at each duel end a hidden record is made that includes the opponents levels, profs and the approximate value(in time or brownie points or whatever) of their setup, based on these records it wouldnt be hard to formulate viable statistics to better overview whats actually going on. I know there isnt much bling factor to this idea as the players will never see it and there wont be anything to brag about in the next fwm but if done correctly we most certainly will feel it and personally i would appreciate something like that much more then a mail system or targets ncu or the numerous other half way pointless features

I love target NCU; it's invaluable for those professions that need to keep any sort of nano running on the target in PvM, and it's a much better visual indication of whether or not your debuffs landed in PvP than trying to parse battle spam. The mail system needs better user feedback (I'm looking at you, Mail Icon--or I would, if I could find you), but it definitely has potential. Besides, the players have been requesting it for a long time.

I like the idea, but one problem with collecting duel statistics is that it contradicts their official position. They're balancing for team PvP. Why, then, limit it to duels? Take a snapshot of each character that enters BS, and log all battles. With some smart parsing, they could gather a lot of very interesting statistics.

Come to think of it, they might already be doing this.

[DePreach]

I think this should have been implemented when the PvP system changed. Great idea.

The stance that FC don't balance for individual PvP is flawed. It is a cop out from proper balancing and allows them to hide behind hidden numbers, it is practically impossible to design PvP around a team unless they count the team as 1 of each profession.

Every profession should have an opportunity to win against any other profession, in a perfect world there would be a 50/50 chance of a prof beating another prof. The fact they are not balancing for 1 v 1 is the reason we are seeing such a decline in non lovechild professions and a growth in overpowered professions. Shades and keepers are pretty rare and more and more get shelved while people roll NTs Advies or Enfs.

The "we only balance for team zerg Pvp" makes balancing impossible. In a 1 versus 1 situation there are 105 combinations. In a team this grows exponentially into the thousands, on a BS of 20 it is 10s of thousands and NW of 80 per side it is in the millions. So balancing for team PvP actually means, yeah you might be a nerf profession but luckily you have OP professions so it all balances out! Fundamentally flawed as a concept and in my opinion a stance that is either hopelessly naive or at best condescending.

On the other hand if each profession in our original 105 combinations was pretty much balanced then ANY team would have a 50/50 chance of winning.

The way FC treat PvP at the minute means all they have to do is compare the duel wins against the duel losses against the entire playerbase and check they are 50/50. Well surprise surprise as many duels are won as are lost... it's all balanced.

The main problem of course is the way this is done. There has to be an equation that can be applied to each profession that takes into account heals, hp, crowd control, pets, specials, perks, weapon, nano damage and evades over time. Personally I would find myself an awesome mathematician to model it.

To summarise coz I do have a habit of writing walls of text. Yes duels should be logged, no they won't be because FC use the team PvP cop out, yes the team cop out is fundamentally flawed and yes there is a better way.

[Axtilmor]

Pedant alert: your math is way off There's 196 prof vs. prof combinations. A full team of 6 vs. a full team 6 has 5x10^13 combinations. Actual perfect balance in the face of such variety is only feasible when professions are all identical.

I disagree with you about all professions having a 50/50 chance against every other profession. A 0/100 chance sucks, too. The better balance lies somewhere in the middle. Intuitively, this should mean a mixed team with a broad range of skills will be better off than a team of a single type of prof, too.

They certainly could lay out a big table of all prof combinations and make sure each and every one was balanced; a counter for each ability of every prof. It would be extraordinarily tedious, and I think it would result in tedious gameplay. Data and quantitative analysis should certainly inform balancing decisions, but balancing is ultimately more art than science.

[PingBong]

I love target NCU; it's invaluable for those professions that need to keep any sort of nano running on the target in PvM, and it's a much better visual indication of whether or not your debuffs landed in PvP than trying to parse battle spam. The mail system needs better user feedback (I'm looking at you, Mail Icon--or I would, if I could find you), but it definitely has potential. Besides, the players have been requesting it for a long time.

target ncu is a lazy tool - it makes the game easyer and isnt really necessary to get the max out of ur toon
the mail system - is not what players wanted, most of the trades in game are done by the same person with himself and currently its much faster+cheaper+less clicks to just dual a froob for these purposes

as for the difficultys of balancing, yeah its a hard and epic task but whats the alternative? there is none

[Kinkstaah]

I dunno, kind of leave it as it is now, as.. all things considered it works for the most part?

[NoGoal]

fc should do is implement some type of statistics gathering device (if they havent alread)

Sil stated something about statistics and agents back then!

[DePreach]

196? Are you counting crat v shade different to shade v crat? Not sure if thats right or not.

But yea after that the maths gets frightening. so team pvp of 6 v 6 is 12^14 BS is 40^14 and a small zerg NW is 80^14 (4.2 * 10^26?) roughly speaking

The game will always be balanced in the specific case where team 1 = team 2 but will only be perfectly balanced when each profession is balanced against every other profession individually. You will get emergent properties then which will throw the balance as each of the rest of the team buffs an individual.

If they continue to maintain the stance that -yea you will be a gimpy endgame pvper because thats the profession you chose, but we need you to balance out the OP pvpers- then we will see the gimpy professions disappearing or being retired and OP professions being the only people left. Mainly because the endgame phats are easy to get hold of these days. Once a toon is finished all that is left is PvP.

In the past perfection was very difficult to attain; farming symbs, creds for symbs, BoCs for twinking etc etc and it was nigh on impossible to estimate how much better you would be when you did get completed... AND the majority of your opponents were still going through the pain of getting their intelligent symbs and AI30 so there was always the option of being much better equipped than they were. Now the majority of toons are finished as opposed to unfinished and the only differentiation left is your toolkit versus their toolkit. That is why the whining has increased coz people are saying I cannot make my toon any better and I still suck!

The only hope lies in each profession being balanced towards a median line where they can fare well against 50% of the playerbase. (In my case take an average of all crats duel wins versus duel losses against each profession or if that is too difficult, across the entire playerbase and the proportion should be 50/50) of course your excellent toons of each profession will have a much better ratio and your gimpy toons will have a much worse ratio, but on the whole it gives people something to aspire to. Even that will be skewed because people choose who they will fight and there isn't a valid statistical sample to work from.

You will get 2 diametrically opposing views in this thread though, I can say quite conclusively that half of the people will agree and half will disagree and it might be interesting to check the duels scores of each camp. Guess which camp I am in

[Gridpain]

Pedant alert: your math is way off There's 196 prof vs. prof combinations..

double pedant alert .... 105 was good


about this thread ... I wonder what is the balance that is sought...

PvP TL7 1 vs 1 ?
PvP TL7 team vs team ?
PvP TL 1 to 7 ?
PvP and PvM TL7 ?

PvP and PvM TL 1 to 7 ??

dunno why, but I fear it's not the last one that is being researched