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 metagame of Sedna/UB is sure to change anyways. I'm sure of it.
Here is a problem you run into if you do not balance all DGs for 1v1... Dgs will have different playability in 3v3 then 5v5 brackets. Like some DGs may be too good in 3v3 but normal in 5v5. Some may stink in 3v3 but be acceptabnle in 5v5. There will still be DGs that stink in both compraed to other DGs! And like you said you don't even want to discuss stacking DGs!
This can all be observed in WoW Arena right now. A format where they had 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5. You quickly realize that because the game is not balanced in 1v1, some classes get pushed a side in different formats. So while refusing to balance the game 1v1, blizzard esentially fails to balance the game at all. What end up happening is that both sides have same line up, and people who play classes not in the "best" lineup are SOL!
I have searched through almost all ESL tourneys (2vs2 and 3vs3; one 2vs2 even with a Logitech Sound Sytem prize).
The teams consist only of UB, Erebus, Oak and Sedna. There are no TBs, no Regulus, no Rooks and no QoTs. This outcome correlates nicely with the win/loss ratio statistic.
Right.
Now please tell us what you think would be any better than teams and matches from the Electronic Sports League.
If you don't actually know anything better I suggest that you make thhat "cash reward tourney" where everybody attends.
From my experience cash reward tourneys always do bring out the imbalances in a game. No matter how lame, obscure, imba, glitched, or w/e, people playing for cash prizes will pull out all the stops and (ab)use whatever they percieve to be the strongest. Over the 3+ year lifespan of Guild Wars, the metagame has undergone literally hundreds of changes, and many of them were driven by the results of tournaments, the proliferation of tourney-winning tactics immedieately following the tourney.
Of course, even more of them were driven by patches following the tournaments which steadily nerfed whatever was popular in the preceeding tourney, a balancing policy I disagreed with.
You yourself said you want to see QoT buffed, how exactly is that going to happen if she's not even featured in a tournament? It's a shot in the dark, maybe they'll increase her HP, maybe they'll increase the damage of uproot or buff compost, but you're not especially likely to see anything intuitive or thoughtful if she's buffed solely because of a tournament in which she wasn't even played.
As SoFFacet said the only real balancing you'll see come out of tournaments is nerfs to the competitors, not buffs to the guys on the sidelines.
Which is exactly what I meant with my OP.
I just wanted to show that the good teams (premades) which account for a lot of wins are usually the same Demigods as you would see in a tournament: Erebus, Oak, UB and Sedna. The 4 Demigods with more wins than losses.
Most players adapt their playstyle after they see a more efficient one in their matches. We can clearly see that with the popular Minion Erebus build, which almost nobody played in the beginning. So imho the available data is quite representative for overall balance. Average favor points do not seem to be representative for balance.
I'm just waiting for the Spirit Oak hype...
I would agree that this is mostly true and I basically looked at it the same way. I saw absolutely no reason to use tb/reg/rook/qot in 2v2/3v3 over the others. For 4v4s we usually added slam rook, ice tb, or really rarely a reg. QoT I really didn't care for even in 4v4.
The tournaments themselves really aren't that insigthful compared to the large amount of data generated every single day.
Most of the data is noise generated by bad players, and without actually watching a game to see what happens statistics can only tell you so much. Tournaments demonstrate what happens when good players compete against each other, which is the level the game needs to be balanced at. There is so little micro involved in playing Demigod there's really no need to cater to poor play when balancing, the effort required to get good is minimal.
well ... from the few things I have seen, it seems there is a problem into items combo (I think).
In a local/offline tournament, I have played a game vs an immortal Regulus dodging almost 50/60% of our/enemy blows, and firing at an insane rate.
He flies into our base, and he stands against me and the other 3 demigods with almost no effort.
ps: I won the game by powering up troops, and succeded to destroy the enemy tower.
I observed the game stats for a while now and saw that the win/loss ratio of the "weak" (<50%) Demigods is slowly but constantly dropping even further.
This means that the more experienced the players get, the more pronounced the difference between "weak" Demigods and "strong" Demigods gets.
Soon Erebus or Sedna will, on average, win 2 of 3 matches and QoT or TB will lose 2 of 3 matches.
I agree that without closely monitoring games the stats will not really tell us much. We need to really see who does what and why people lose in order to make adjustments. Mee stats cannot provide this insight. Sure winning stats can give you some insight into what DGs are the most popular, but it cannot tell you how any DG should be buffed.
Monitoring the vast majority of games would be a bad idea I think. Monitoring the tournaments that mean something would be a good idea. Balancing those so that each and every DG can be made just as good as the next one in the right hands is the ultimate goal. It seems only fair that this game should be made about viable builds, startegy and good teamplay and not about four DGs that are owning all else.
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