DUST Search - Balance Methodology And The Downfall of Nerfing

Ryder Azorria wrote:

I'm guessing that the words 'power' and 'creep' meen nothing to you?

For future reference, power creep is incredibly dangerous for games like Dust and EVE, and the developers are right to try and avoid it. Additionally, it is much, much easier to nerf one thing than to buff everything else, giving you much more bang for the devs buck.

EDIT: This is a post by CCPs balancing wizard, CCP Fozzie, and explains rather well why nerfing somethings instead of buffing everything is often the best course of action.

CCP Fozzie wrote:

Why nerf things when you could buff things instead?

This is a question that comes up often in any thread where we are discussing decreasing the power of an item or ship. I can completely understand where it's coming from. Buffing things makes people happy in much larger numbers, it simply feels good to see the effectiveness of your equipment increase. Many other games rely on constantly improving gear to drive engagement in their content and that method of development can work very well for those games.

I'm going to start by quoting my answer to this question from the Heavy Missile thread before Retribution, because what I said there still applies.

CCP Fozzie wrote:

When we are balancing in a game like Eve we always need to be conscious of the danger presented by power creep. In some games where the progression is tied to ever advancing gear stats power creep isn't a big issue as it is built into the whole premise of the game. In a sandbox like Eve player advancement is tied to individual freeform goals and we need to make sure that the tools available are both interesting and balanced. Any time we buff something in Eve, we are nerfing every other item in the game slightly by extension. In a case like this we believe that the best course of action is to adjust the Heavy Missiles downwards to achieve balance.

I would be lying if I said that we never allow power creep in EVE. It's quite simply much much easier to balance upwards and considering how powerful of a tool it is for creating short term customer satisfaction, some power creep is very hard to avoid. However we do need to be very mindful of how much we let ourselves indulge. There are cases where for the long term health of the game ecosystem we simply have to reduce the power of certain items and ships. We believe this is one of those times. I can promise you that we're committed to eating our vegetables and making adjustments either up or down based on our best estimation of what the game needs. We won't decrease the power of items and ships unless we deem it necessary but we also won't forget that our job is to manage the health of the game over the long term. This will not be the last set of "nerfs" you see us make for Odyssey.


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Himiko Kuronaga SyNergy Gaming EoN. 220	Posted - 2013.05.01 15:55:00 - [1] - Quote When a weapon is OP and in your hands, it tends to be fun. Why? Well look at the Viziam currently. It melts people, but has very obvious drawbacks up close. It has a weakness, but its strength is so abornally good that people dont let that get them down. The people getting killed by it however, feel helpless. So they rage and cry for nerfs. This is understandable. The worst feeling in the world is being helpless. But ask yourself something, is that really necessary? Nerfing the weapon makes it less fun to use. People who enjoy the weapon will be disappointed. Something has been taken away from them, and this leads to one part of the audience being dissastisfied. When scout speed was nerfed, this lead to disatisfaction. When heavy HP was nerfed, disatisfaction. When various forms of the AR were nerfed, same deal. Basically anyone who was a fan of something because it was "good" has had something taken away, and is now having less fun than they used to have. So what is the answer to pleasing both sides? BUFFING everything. That may sound crazy, but it has a proven track record of success with almost every major competitive game. LoL, WoW, SC2 are games of broken abilities. But most things are "broken" so it actually ends up making it balanced. Street fighter is another example. Marvel vs Capcom Ultimate is another example -- it's currently the single most popular fighting game in the USA, and is making a strong push for the entire world. It's one of the most uncontestedly "broken" games in existence. So why is it so popular? Because EVERYTHING FEELS GOOD TO USE. This is not a lesson I should have to teach CCP, however. The Dust team, perhaps, but not CCP at large. Ever since the buffs they made to Pirate ships a couple years back CCP has been making strong pushes to basically make everything really damn awesome. BC's with BS sized guns, and most recently a total revamp to the battleships themselves. There are a few groans here and there, but anyone who is actually decent knows how awesome most of the changes coming into that game are. The thing to remember is, a weapon, suit, ability, or whatever is only "broken" if nothing else can possibly fight it. Broken =/= Insanely Good. If you make everything insanely good, then everything is insanely fun to use. As such, I advocate the removal of disappearing bullets. Let projectiles fly, accuracy rating is there for a reason. I advocate saving the Viziam. I advocate a better tactical AR and Assault HMG to combat it. I advocate better heavy dropsuits with increased HP, faster scouts (with fixed hitboxes), and Breach AR's that aren't complete trash. I think Missile tanks/installations should be terrifying as hell. I think if a person is going to sink 2.5 mil into a blaster tank, it should be doing 2.5 mil worth of damage at least. And I think this game should have some ridiculously awesome defensive abilities as well. I think we should damage type specific hardeners to combat a super powered viziam, so you have a chance to get in close and take him down before he melts you. There is nothing wrong with using a hard counter to win a fight. There are a thousand new and interesting ways the game can be balanced without making everything less fun to use by simply nerfing it into oblivion. Its the automatic response most people have, but that doesn't mean its the best possible way to develop a game. Consider this the next time you get angry at a certain weapon, vehicle, or ability. Maybe the issue isn't that their weapon is overperforming. Maybe the issue is that yours is underperforming. And maybe there is a more interesting side-solution that can be implemented as well. Things to consider. Don't ask CCP to nerf your game until its boring for all parties. Ask them to buff it until its awesome for everybody.
Himiko Kuronaga SyNergy Gaming EoN. 223	Posted - 2013.05.01 17:16:00 - [2] - Quote Ryder Azorria wrote: I'm guessing that the words 'power' and 'creep' meen nothing to you? For future reference, power creep is incredibly dangerous for games like Dust and EVE, and the developers are right to try and avoid it. Additionally, it is much, much easier to nerf one thing than to buff everything else, giving you much more bang for the devs buck. EDIT: This is a post by CCPs balancing wizard, CCP Fozzie, and explains rather well why nerfing somethings instead of buffing everything is often the best course of action. CCP Fozzie wrote: Why nerf things when you could buff things instead? This is a question that comes up often in any thread where we are discussing decreasing the power of an item or ship. I can completely understand where it's coming from. Buffing things makes people happy in much larger numbers, it simply feels good to see the effectiveness of your equipment increase. Many other games rely on constantly improving gear to drive engagement in their content and that method of development can work very well for those games. I'm going to start by quoting my answer to this question from the Heavy Missile thread before Retribution, because what I said there still applies. CCP Fozzie wrote: When we are balancing in a game like Eve we always need to be conscious of the danger presented by power creep. In some games where the progression is tied to ever advancing gear stats power creep isn't a big issue as it is built into the whole premise of the game. In a sandbox like Eve player advancement is tied to individual freeform goals and we need to make sure that the tools available are both interesting and balanced. Any time we buff something in Eve, we are nerfing every other item in the game slightly by extension. In a case like this we believe that the best course of action is to adjust the Heavy Missiles downwards to achieve balance. I would be lying if I said that we never allow power creep in EVE. It's quite simply much much easier to balance upwards and considering how powerful of a tool it is for creating short term customer satisfaction, some power creep is very hard to avoid. However we do need to be very mindful of how much we let ourselves indulge. There are cases where for the long term health of the game ecosystem we simply have to reduce the power of certain items and ships. We believe this is one of those times. I can promise you that we're committed to eating our vegetables and making adjustments either up or down based on our best estimation of what the game needs. We won't decrease the power of items and ships unless we deem it necessary but we also won't forget that our job is to manage the health of the game over the long term. This will not be the last set of "nerfs" you see us make for Odyssey. I have heard this before, actually. The problem with this theory is that it doesn't really apply here. Buffing the numbers is only one way to buff, and in some cases it has nothing to do with damage or health at all. That is why I mentioned hard counters like a damage-type specific hardener. There is no power creep there, you have made a choice to buff yourself up against one type of threat and will likely suffer in some other manner as a result of that. But on Manus Peak, it would be insanely good against lasers. Speed, too, is a side solution. You could go for a sneaky, cloaky scout. Or you could go for a fast-as-balls speed demon capable of ninja badassery. Both options would be incredibly fun to play and effective in the right hands. With the heavy, math boosts are the most obvious answer because, well... you are defined as a walking tank, basically. And tanks, above all, absorb damage. That's just what they do. Having ridiculous amounts of HP makes sense there, but because there are side-solutions to beating it such as running circles around the heavy with a scout, its not power creep. It's a hard counter. Where dust is now, however, is in a very uncomfortable spot. Things "work" in their established role, but not enough to be really satisfying. Too often do you come across the helpless feeling. I can see someone with my AR, and I know I can aim well enough to hit him at a certain range, but the game says "No. You can't do that. I don't care about the amount of damage you'll actually do from this range, i forbid it." Thats not satisfying. That's taking away a possible use, however small, from a weapon. With a scout, I can move fast, but if seen even a moment in advance I'm still going to probably bite the dust regardless of whether im more skilled than my opponent or not. If the speed role was made a little more over-the-top, this would all be worth it. As an HMG'r, if im holding the line and we're firing across the bowl, I can't really do much to contribute with SS gone. If they enemy decides to rush us down, then i'm doing something sure, but if they decide not to I am basically useless. If my shots would reach them, I could contribute to the long range war, even if in a small way with greatly reduced DPS. I could be assisting our AR/LR guys slightly, even if nowhere near the same effect. This is the feeling of helplessness I talked about in my first post. Even if I could just graze them I wouldn't feel like this, because I could be assisting someone with the established role of taking them out at that range. Hence my desire to let projectiles be what they are and just fly. So yes, I know of power creep, but I don't think Dust is in danger of that at this point. I believe, if anything, it is having a problem at the far opposite end of the spectrum.
Himiko Kuronaga SyNergy Gaming EoN. 224	Posted - 2013.05.01 17:20:00 - [3] - Quote Sleepy Zan wrote: Scramble Scrub wrote: No fun allowed. Nerf everything. Correct! this is New Eden, it is a cold and harsh place. If thats true, you should want people to die in more interesting ways :)
Himiko Kuronaga SyNergy Gaming EoN. 224	Posted - 2013.05.01 18:37:00 - [4] - Quote From Eve side yes, I think they get it. Sound Wave especially seems to have a very clear vision of how awesome everything should be. Dust side, I just see tons of nerfs and really awkward solutions to problems that don't make any sense (disappearing bullets, again. VERY weird solution). Nerfing of speed, nerfing of HP levels, nerfing of weapon damage, nerfing of ability to damage the MCC with installations (which was done to effectively make skirmish a BF3 conquest clone instead of its own unique beast). I get that this is CCP's first FPS. I get that they are being careful with it. But if you are too careful, you suck the life out of everything and kill it. If something isn't absolutely awesome, it is mediocre. This game has a lot of very, very mediocre things. It needs to crank up the awesome a bit.
Himiko Kuronaga SyNergy Gaming EoN. 226	Posted - 2013.05.01 20:24:00 - [5] - Quote Justin Tymes wrote: Edit: Seems to be a bit more to the post than just that. Still countering broken stuff with more broken stuff doesn't make anything balanced at all. Actually, it does. It makes things more interesting, too! And it has been proven by just about every major competitive game in its genre. It's easy to say it won't, but the games I listed are all the most competitive and popular games of their genre and follow that EXACT formula. So clearly, it works. (also, i don't main an AR. I'm just attempting to be fair to the people who do.)
Himiko Kuronaga SyNergy Gaming EoN. 227	Posted - 2013.05.01 20:47:00 - [6] - Quote From a developer standpoint its fairly intimidating trying to please everybody, which is a big part of the problem. Most people when killed will initially cry "BS!" regardless of whether or not it is. Thats just the human state. Unfortunately, most developers feel compelled to try and please what they perceive as the "majority" of their fanbase, so what they hear most often is a call for nerfs. What they don't hear are the people who are perfectly content with the way things are, because they don't feel a need to really post "Yo, im content." as much as an emotionally charged individual who just got run over by a free LAV for the 50th time. The other problem with early adopters of a game is many of them are still wrapped inside of the scrub mindset, which basically means that they will always ask for a developer to eliminate a problem that they themselves do not already know how to overcome. An old, but incredibly good article as it pertains to this type of individual can be read here in their relation to fighting games. The scrub is traditionally the most vocal part of a game's playerbase, especially towards the early life of the community. This can and usually does completely destroy the foundation of a game in its early life, especially if the developers are well intentioned and actually listen to them. It's something of a curse, really.
Himiko Kuronaga SyNergy Gaming EoN. 228	Posted - 2013.05.01 21:25:00 - [7] - Quote Rynx Sinfar wrote: The downfall of a term I have heard and seen used since playing Planetside at release (probably existed before, but when I first saw it) is not something I imagine just happening. However I didn't read it because something that is a product of a crap ton of local systems balancing (game, player psych, business psych, business tactics, developer psych, and developer tactics, etc) I don't think I can just whip up solutions or explanations that handle half the necessary data. So I'm sure as hell not bothering with a random post on a forum with a dramatic title And yet I still got an entire post out of you. Would you like to.... talk... about it?