If I were GPG I would log (at the end of each game) all ingame decisions like which item gets bought how often, which Demigods and which skills are chosen. All items in the same price class that are bought very rarely by the gamers are apparently not worth buying and should be buffed/changed. Same goes for skills.
If that is too complex, I'd just look at the already available win/loss ratio of each Demigod and balance accordingly. The win/loss ratios are already okay, but for a competitive game like this they should be 50% ± 2% at most. Perhaps the easiest way to balance is to change the Demigod's stat improvements or mana costs of skills.
That would balance the game as objectively as possible, which is very important imho.
The way I've been using balance is in the context so many people think X needs a nerf. Some things could use a boost, yes. But that's it. You're right on that part CosMoe.
I'm afraid this doesn't take into consideration personal taste and a Demigod's general appeal. For example, I play Erebus because I like the Demigod, I play Rook because a Walking Castle is kick ass. I don't play Reg because his design doesn't appeal to me what-so-ever, despite him being a generally good performer.
To make my point more clear:
It's good that one DG is better versus some other DG, actually I think this is essential for the game (rock-paper-scissors). But the win/loss ratio is calculated form thousands of matches and its average clearly shows that certain DGs are simply worse than others. All the possible combinations of matchups are already in the average! It's not surprising that the 4 DGs with more than 50% wins are (at least for me) perceived as the more dangerous of all eight: UB, Sedna, Erebus and Oak.
Picking and choosing some points from this thread:
1)
Stats are not a good method for balancing the game. Balance is dependent entirely and only on the effectiveness of skills and tactics used at their highest level. This means that something can only be overpowered if it is unfair in a game between experts. The overall win rate statistic is completely corrupted with the results of average and low level gameplay.
2)
5v5 is "more balanced," but not because it requires any extra skill or teamwork from the players. It doesn't, the playing skills are the same, just applied to a larger arena. Obscenitor explained the reason quite well here:
In other words, small imbalances in the game are much more noticeable in smaller games, because the overall power levels are lower and thus small discrepancies result in a larger percent difference.
That said, 3v3 is the most popular game size. 3 is the size of nearly every premade team. I don't think its a stretch to say that 3v3 IS Demigod. Therefore the core game mode that the game should be tuned to is 3v3.
3)
Sedna + UB IS the metagame. All of my experience indicates that these two DGs are the most effective at the highest levels of play. I could care less about what happens when noobs play each other, or when good players stomp noobs. When the DGs are played to their potential, Sedna and UB are advantaged. Not so much that you can't beat them by outplaying them, but still advantaged. I suppose if you don't believe me we could argue why/why not, but perhaps that would be better suited to its own thread.
Its impossible to balance 3v3s though. You just can't do it without making more imbalances and more problems. You nerf demigod A too much and demigod B isn't nerfed enough so demigod C just happens to now be better than everyone. In a roster as large as Demigod's you cannot really balance small games. This is not an issue of popularity, its an issue of logistics people are moaning about. You cannot ask GPG to "balance for 3v3s". Its not possible. The more Demigods you add the more difficult its going to be to make sure 1 3 demigod combination is not strictly better than another. Its simple not possible. You just need to build demigods that don't seem overpowered, and if they are tone them down. Dawn of War 1 had a ton of races but was that balanced? No.
While this may be true in a larger sense, I don't see where you're going with it. Is it your contention that we should simply ignore all balance concerns? Sure, DoW1 was never balanced across all 9 races but at least Relic put some effort into it and I feel a lot of good came of it.
If your goal is simply to say "PUG's and newbies don't know jack about balance and their suggestions should be taken with a grain of salt," then yeah. I agree but I don't think that should stop the conversation about balance improvements entirely. If nothing else, making sure that everything in the game is viable to some degree is worthy of discussion.
My point is the game is fine right now. Some things could use a boost yes but I don't think everything needs a nerf like so many people are complaining about right now. People who are complaining about balance are PUGs and newer players. They play in games with no coordintion or organized teamwork so yeah things may seem to be overpowered when they constantly find themselves in 1v1 situations.
Hahaha. Lets play a 5vs5, my team takes all UB. You will loose like hell, i swear. We all stack HP Items and Spit all on one of you, or use all ooze. No way to secape, if you arent prepared, believe me. A double UB is already very hard to fist.
Now to your point, "Demigod has no balance issues". You forgot Sednas Yetis, which really NOBODY uses because they are so underpowered, u forgot that HP Items are much better than every Gloves or DPS Items (later the Artifacts are more DPS-like, anyway), u ignored that the win rations are imbalanced. I mean there are osme DGs with win ratio 65% and some with 41%. Ok now you say "UB is much easier to play thsan some other DGs. My point is that is has something to do with imbalance. In an Ego-Shooter, for example CoD4: CoD4s Balancing is fucked up. RPD and MP5, Ak74u and Barret dominate all. There are 3 MGs. In every situation RPD is better than the other twos. Then why did they implement three MGs???!!
Let a noob play a game the first time. He tries 3 Weapons/DGs. He finds out that one is much better than the rest. From this he will take it all the time. OK her you say, maybe this one is easier to handle - Another weapon is more difficult, and if youre better, this weapon is superior to the "noob" one. But I think thats wrong. A player which played 20 hours QoT will always loose vs a player played 20 hours UB.
Polynomial all the time you say, Demigod is a team Game. It is. But this game should also balanced if the team is smaller than 5 persons. It ios possible to balance a game into that way, i think. Also there is not such a tight role allocation as in Wow. There is not a tank, and in the background a damage dealer. i mean, of course its good to play that way. But the items and the way you skill SHOULD ALLOW you also to play more allrounded and so on. but ATM, HP Items destroy this customization a little bit. The Gap between the Top DG winrate and the worsest DGs winrate shouldnt be bigger than 10%or even less!! Atm its 24%.
For the record, 5 UBs is an illegitimate team. Stacking Demigods on a 5 player match is ridiculous and should not be considered when speaking in the context of a competitive setting.
5v5s balance themselves due to the size of the game. When it comes to 3v3s its more about Demigod combination. There are more Demigods so you don't feel a Demigod's advantages over another as much in a 5v5. But answer this. Hypothetically speaking Regulus cannot beat a Queen of Thorns. So you need to make it so Regulus has a chance against Queen of Thorns. But what about the other 7 Demigods? How do you ensure the changes you made to Regulus that helps him against Queen of Thorns does not tip the balance against the other 7? This is the type of stuff people are asking for and its ridiculous. No game can accomodate that and GPG certainly cannot balance like that.
Demigod does not have serious balance issues. Somethings could use a boost but nothing is seriously "OP". Don't fix what is clearly not broken.
I think in DotA it works, doesnt it? Im not sure...
Not remotely.
You shouldn't balance the game with the objective of making sure every DG can beat every other DG 1v1, thats stupid.
Btw in a "competitive environment" all team combinations are allowed unless explicitly banned by standard rules, i.e. game-encoded restrictions installed by GPG or official rules governing a specific tournament. At present there are no such rules, and it would be foolish to implement any because "stacked" teams are in general, weak. Therefore 5 UBs is a completely legitimate choice of team, however, it also happens to be completely terrible so no one with any brains would ever use it.
New school games with RPG elements have characters which do have niches but are still competent on their own. So for example Regulus may not be able to kill a good Sedna 1v1, but he can still push her off a tower with a burst of damage from mines, mark, and autoattack. If you leave Reg alone with Sedna he'll tend to lose control of the lane and will probably eventually lose a tower, but he's not so weak that Sedna can just send him home the instant she hits the scene.
In some cases (now that priests are nerfed) a Regulus may even be able to OOM a Sedna if he dances back and forth keeping autoattack and mine pressure up and has a tower up to help deter her pushes. Regulus can still get plenty of HP, armor, and regen to recover from the occasional pounce so long as he plays well enough to not get pounced every cooldown. Priests are especially helpful for that. In fact once priests hit the field reg's AoE capacity can let him push Sedna back to her own tower during those brief periods when the lane fills up with friendly reinforcements.
All that in spite of the fact that 1v1 regulus shouldn't be beating Sedna.
An old school game is roshambo. You see this in Everquest, early WoW (and late wow depending on your perspective and the patch number), and a number of other RPG games and aspects of RTSs.
Polynomial doesn't seem to see much tactical merit in this game, so he's a proponent of macromanagement, which you only approach in 5s, and I think he's mistaken even though I can still readily agree that not every DG should be able to hold their own 1v1 against the DG of their choice.
In 5v5 the games are about macro (Zikurat), where in 3v3s the game is determine by micro (Cataract, and even more so Prison).
While our views on the game are clearly different, there's something I'm sure we can both agree on. The rampant "NERF X" posts of lately are more or less garbage. This game does not require major balance tweaking. Some things could use a boost, but no super nerfs are in order. This discussion has mostly been on different viewpoints of the game.
It depends on the definition of balance in this game for the DGs. Item balance is a different matter.
There two main definitions in this thread or for the game :
1. Balanced play is where every DG should have an equal chance of winning against an opponent DG.
2. Balanced play is where a tactic/build can be countered effectively.
For DG, definition 1 is not really appropriate. The game is not an individual death match.
Definition 2 is more appropriate, however it must be further defined.
In terms of DG balance the "countered effectively" needs to considered, an effective counter would be :
a) There are multiple forms of counter through varying mechanisms. Having only one specific counter would likely mean the tactic/build is not balanced.
Multiple forms of counter does not mean that EVERY DG needs to have access to that counter, that is the point of it being a team game.
c) A counter should ideally have no more cost than the tactic/build. Providing a counter where a DG has to be level 20, in order to beat a level 10 tactic is not balanced.
So using this we can theorycraft some scenarios mentioned :
5UB's - Their skills are easily countered, through Shields, Heals and Pots. Imagine 5 Spit UBs attacking 5 HP stacked Sednas. Not a pretty sight. 5 focused pounces and 10 focused Bishops. Spit DoT would not cut it, can be outhealed. I would say the Sednas would win every engagement, they can focus fire, whereas if the UBs were to try and interrupt heals etc, they would have to split their attacks.
An example, where a build is possibly unbalanced would be Minion Erebus. This build is not effectively countered at the moment without bringing substantially more cost to the table. It can kind of fit Definition 1, however, it is not really the argument that X DG cannot beat him. The argument is that the cost to counter, likely 2 DGs, far outweighs the cost to make the build.
I won't go into reasons, that is for another thread, but that would be my take on balancing for this game.
I would say that stats can fit well for item balancing, which is a slightly different topic. However, stats for DG win percentage and skill usage would have to used carefully. They can show where a DG or skill is woefully out of balance, however to truely determine the balance it would need thorough playtesting by expert players.
If you read the OP you must know that this thread is about buffing or changing unused items or skills to make the game more fair and more complex.
It's in no way about nerfing.
I think the game is not really perfect balanced. Lets say if there were 10 points for balancing, Demigod would get 7. Qot and Sednas Yetis are too weak. And Minion EB is imba. But the real point i think where the game is imbalanced is when it goes to the items, specially hp items vs DPS Items.
How many games have you actually played Juarezz?
I agree. Easy to beat.
5v5 is not about DG selection, its teamwork and sinergy. Theres only 8 DG, and MAYBE, the only way to screw things up is to pick 4 Sins and 1 General, considering no doubles, or 5 Sins, with doubles, again, on a competitive game.
The "problem" of DG balance is the slim choise of DG, only 8. There arent enough DG counters to each DG, there isn't enough diversity, so there will be better selection of DG for 3v3 and 2v2 games.
I have seen 5v5 games where the opposing team chosed to put on a lane 1 Reg + 1 TB. WTF they were thinking, but I digress.
The first reply to this thread is the only one you need to read. DG is balanced to the point where only fine tuning is required.
Want to find imbalance? Have a cash reward tourney. You'll see players pull out all the stops in order to win, and there will be no illusions as to whether tactic A or tactic B is OP/UP because the players will all be trying to exploit their way to victory. It has worked for other games in the past and it would work for DG. I suspect you would find in a 3v3 tourney exactly what Facet said: the metagame is all UB/Sed and everything else is secondary.
I think you would find there is a tiny pool of items being chosen by the teams that perform well, and that the variation in item choices across all teams would be minimal, whether you call that balanced or not is subjective: the playing field is even but it is by no means an ideal situation.
What do we need before this can happen? Replays. You can't judge skill from results alone, certainly not from stats, and you can't demonstrate the (in)effectiveness of a strat/build/team combo without them either. The problem with all these ridiculous balance threads popping up is they are supported by nothing but speculation and theorycraft, and result in little more than accusations of ineptitude from all parties since nothing can be proven/disproven via a replay.
Your OP and your thread title don't match, and it's not very clear what question you're asking. You could have just revived Aroddo's large balance thread from a few weeks ago since it was on roughly the same topic.
about 30 within 2 months. half vs ai.
So this gives you insight on big balance issues how...?
Look at WoW tournaments, they were all just RMP vs. RMP for the majority of the game's lifespan up until now, and even now they're still mostly that combo. They provide very little to the big picture.
Also they already announced one but are waiting on rock-solid stat reporting to happen first.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
