Age of Conan Exec Producer talks melee balance
The folks over at mmorpg.com managed to tie down Age of Conan Executive Producer Craig Morrison and get his opinions on the future balance of melee versus ranged/casters. The article sheds some light on the developers perspective while still not giving us that ever elusive “balanced” pot of gold for the poor melee classes out there.
Check out the original article here. You can read below for an excerpt from the post.
“I think before you look at the challenges specific to MMO combat in terms of balance between any two sets of character types you have to define what we are usually trying to achieve in terms of balance.
You might think it was easiest to define it very straightforwardly as ‘every time I fight I have a 50/50 chance of winning or losing based my skill and approach’ but when you actually push players about what many feel about gameplay the reality is that they would feel balance was better when they have a chance of losing, but that they should win more than lose. Most seem to tend towards wanting something like a 75/25 mix of winning to losing…so they recognize the need for, and want, a chance of losing, but they generally feel that its more fun when they win more often than they lose, as long as it isn’t too much.
So that is where the old ‘rock, paper, scissors’ approach comes in. Someone always has a chance to beat someone and lose to someone…but that isn’t directly translatable into an MMO setting as you don’t want to establish any situation where a player will lose every time. So we end up with systems where certain classes have advantages and disadvantages against others and thus can win more often that lose if they pick their targets correctly (and learn when to run away!), but with MMO titles often having up to a dozen classes that balance also has various pitfalls…is it fun to have classes you almost always have to avoid? Is that balance? That is not a fun scenario if the chances are absolute, you don’t want any class to always win over another, so we as designers have to have a form of weighed chances. You might want Class A to have an advantage against Class B but you rarely if ever want it to be absolute, rather you want the various balances weighted in specific ways across the total number of classes you have.
In terms of controlling that there are three main elements that we as designers have to control. Maximum values, Availability and Mechanics…..”
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