Why are so many class reworks needed so often in modern MMOs?

[Norfleet]

Any good plan can be sabotaged by incompetence or malice.

A "good plan" tends to incorporate a level of resilience against incompetence. Plans that assume absolutely nobody will be incompetent tend to be too brittle to succeed in the real world.

You don't build "warrior content". Using a WoW example, you just build content that doesn't actively punish groups for bringing more melee damage than ranged damage.

That's the thing: As a rule, melee damage > ranged damage. If ranged damage was superior to melee damage, there wouldn't be much of a point in melee damage for anything, since if you can deal better damage at range without ever having to close, why wouldn't you? That's why guns have supplanted melee weapons in the real world: they deal better damage without the need to close for action. Therefore, if content is tilted so that warriors can leverage their intrinsically superior damage without penalty, people will prefer to be warriors because this allows them to complete content faster. Thus warriors tilt towards becoming the majority class. Gear design then prioritizes warrior gear, and the cycle drives increasingly towards them. This is pretty much the inevitable outcome of majority-driven design, and inevitably leads towards a tighter and tighter cookie cutter.

[J1M]

We simply disagree about which things are immutable and if it is possible to taper off positive feedback loops.

It's basically a discussion that boils down to "these things could be done differently" vs. "this is what happened in the past".

[Norfleet]

We simply disagree about which things are immutable and if it is possible to taper off positive feedback loops.

Well, when your initial decision is aimed at perpetuating a positive feedback loop, and is driven by chasing a financial incentive, then I would find it very unlikely that the feedback loop can be tapered off from.

It's basically a discussion that boils down to "these things could be done differently" vs. "this is what happened in the past".

There comes a point at which you sort of see that the same thing that has been tried repeatedly and led to the same results, is going to lead to the same results when tried again. I mean, it's not like we're talking about Communism, where MAYBE IT WILL REALLY WORK THIS TIME!

[Kalarion]

That's not a modern thing. Rangers in EQ needed numerous reworks because they were downright worthless when the game was released. Monks also underwent numerous changes. Paladins received their special stun line as I recall to help them stand out.

Wizards were underpowered and second fiddle to almost every other int caster until Luclin or PoP, I can't remember. It took SoE to give them their role of low cost/fast cast dps and slower casting/unresistable nukes.

In UO tank mages won everything forever until Origin finally came up with channeling and meditation to put an end to the unbalance plate mages were causing. Suggestions made by several of us to the developers made anatomy useful in melee combat instead of just being for healing. There's always something that needs fixing or balancing in a game that big.

I agree that class balance and its concerns have always been a thing, but EQ didn't really do what the OP is talking about. Classes got tuning passes, buffs and nerfs etc, yes, but none of those things fundamentally changed how you played the class.

Compare EQ Ranger, which never changed from its fundamental identity of dual-wielding bow user who casts druidlike spells (even though spells and abilities got added and tuned), to for instance the major reworks of WoW Retribution Paladins. They went from buffbots fishing for massive Command crits to whatever they were in TBC to button mashers (I mean this literally, look up the WotLK retadin FAFP "rotation") who spammed all abilities on cooldown to whatever they became after Wrath.

I think what J1M said earlier is key to this:

1. Developers do not publish a clear vision for each class that the community can hold them to. For example, "durable lumbering melee combatant: moderate APM, slows targets to close distance, weak movement abilities, massive critical hits"

EQ actually had The Vision (TM), and it made a huge difference in their stability with how they approached class balance and mechanics for years (whether they implemented their vision appropriately or not is another kettle of fish).

[rusty_shackleford]

just tell the devs to go get hit by a bus
enhancement shamans told the guy designing their class to go get hit by a bus and then got ignored by the devs for a couple years

(this is 100% real, look up bus shock)

[J1M]

We simply disagree about which things are immutable and if it is possible to taper off positive feedback loops.

Well, when your initial decision is aimed at perpetuating a positive feedback loop, and is driven by chasing a financial incentive, then I would find it very unlikely that the feedback loop can be tapered off from.

It's basically a discussion that boils down to "these things could be done differently" vs. "this is what happened in the past".

There comes a point at which you sort of see that the same thing that has been tried repeatedly and led to the same results, is going to lead to the same results when tried again. I mean, it's not like we're talking about Communism, where MAYBE IT WILL REALLY WORK THIS TIME!

If you extrapolate everything someone says to the extreme and argue against it you will of course be arguing against an extreme position.

The core of my points has been about aligning the game design to the natural distribution of the audience. Which is the exact opposite of trying to drive player behavior via power/convenience incentives as you have interpreted it.

[TKVNC]

Any good plan can be sabotaged by incompetence or malice.

A "good plan" tends to incorporate a level of resilience against incompetence. Plans that assume absolutely nobody will be incompetent tend to be too brittle to succeed in the real world.

You don't build "warrior content". Using a WoW example, you just build content that doesn't actively punish groups for bringing more melee damage than ranged damage.

That's the thing: As a rule, melee damage > ranged damage. If ranged damage was superior to melee damage, there wouldn't be much of a point in melee damage for anything, since if you can deal better damage at range without ever having to close, why wouldn't you? That's why guns have supplanted melee weapons in the real world: they deal better damage without the need to close for action. Therefore, if content is tilted so that warriors can leverage their intrinsically superior damage without penalty, people will prefer to be warriors because this allows them to complete content faster. Thus warriors tilt towards becoming the majority class. Gear design then prioritizes warrior gear, and the cycle drives increasingly towards them. This is pretty much the inevitable outcome of majority-driven design, and inevitably leads towards a tighter and tighter cookie cutter.

The problem is melee is rarely better than ranged. In TBC you'd have raids of almost just warlocks due to this.

The short reason why games like WoW are like this is because, aggro and AOE makes mobility quite useful. Melee has a hard time keeping up damage when mobs move, and can die instantly if aggro is ripped from a tank. Ranged barely have this issue, and a boss has to run toward them which allows for taunts.

MMO content is not designed with melee in mind.

Why do people play melee? Fantasy. It’s a game, and people think human knight with a longsword is cool.

You have to purposely design content around that, but Blizzard barely ever has, normally due to crybabies who **** and **** themselves if knight with longsword outperforms their edgy incel class.

[Norfleet]

just tell the devs to go get hit by a bus
enhancement shamans told the guy designing their class to go get hit by a bus and then got ignored by the devs for a couple years

Honestly, you can tell the devs are not real gamers just by the way they react to receiving Internet abuse and death threats. A real gamer would be long used to this and it would just be hilarious. Hell, I'd publish every death threat I got. Admittedly, this seems to result in a sharp decrease in the number of death threats I get. I remember back in the Sims 2 days, I had a section on my site JUST for displaying all the cool death threats I got. The result is that people didn't bother to send me terribly many death threats compared to my peers.

I remember seeing some game that used the negative Steam reviews they got as material for their marketing trailer, of people whining about stuff in the game. It worked, I really did want to play it more specifically because of those negative reviews. Alas, it would not run on my potato, so I forgot the utterly forgettable name of the game.

If you extrapolate everything someone says to the extreme and argue against it you will of course be arguing against an extreme position.

I'm not EXTRAPOLATING, though. What I'm talking about isn't a HYPOTHETICAL. THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

The core of my points has been about aligning the game design to the natural distribution of the audience.

That's what happened, yes. The natural distribution of the game was heavily biased in favor of one race, one class, and one faction. The devs, therefore, aligned the game design to that, which thus exacerbated the bias. Eventually it got to the point where the bias had gotten extreme to the point where, after years of insisting it wasn't possible to do, they finally caved and just started selling rerace/reclass tokens so people could just complete the defection process because they got tired of the bitching from the remaining 10% of players who didn't want to reroll. I am not talking about an extrapolation to an extreme or a hypothetical. This happened.

[TKVNC]

just tell the devs to go get hit by a bus
enhancement shamans told the guy designing their class to go get hit by a bus and then got ignored by the devs for a couple years

Honestly, you can tell the devs are not real gamers just by the way they react to receiving Internet abuse and death threats. A real gamer would be long used to this and it would just be hilarious. Hell, I'd publish every death threat I got. Admittedly, this seems to result in a sharp decrease in the number of death threats I get. I remember back in the Sims 2 days, I had a section on my site JUST for displaying all the cool death threats I got. The result is that people didn't bother to send me terribly many death threats compared to my peers.

I remember seeing some game that used the negative Steam reviews they got as material for their marketing trailer, of people whining about stuff in the game. It worked, I really did want to play it more specifically because of those negative reviews. Alas, it would not run on my potato, so I forgot the utterly forgettable name of the game.

If you extrapolate everything someone says to the extreme and argue against it you will of course be arguing against an extreme position.

I'm not EXTRAPOLATING, though. What I'm talking about isn't a HYPOTHETICAL. THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

The core of my points has been about aligning the game design to the natural distribution of the audience.

That's what happened, yes. The natural distribution of the game was heavily biased in favor of one race, one class, and one faction. The devs, therefore, aligned the game design to that, which thus exacerbated the bias. Eventually it got to the point where the bias had gotten extreme to the point where, after years of insisting it wasn't possible to do, they finally caved and just started selling rerace/reclass tokens so people could just complete the defection process because they got tired of the bitching from the remaining 10% of players who didn't want to reroll. I am not talking about an extrapolation to an extreme or a hypothetical. This happened.

Yeah, with Orcs, because 90% of people at Blizzard are either: fat, ********, ******, or any combination of the three.

[Stack of Turtles]

It is okay if Warrior is 40% of the population as long as you are building content that aligns with your population.

That's a bit of a problem as well. Let's suppose that, because of poor class balancing, Warrior is 40% of your population. Because this now represents a plurality of the population, you build "content that aligns with your population", meaning, "caters to warriors". The result is that there is now an increasing bias towards warriors. Now 50% of your population is warriors, as those who are not warriors are marginalized, lose interest, and start quitting. Seeing that warriors are the majority of your population, you cater to warriors more. Eventually the game is just warriors and little else. But hey, you build more warrior-centric content, because this is your majority playerbase. Also, most warriors are using swords, only a minority of warriors focus on non-swords. We should cater to that. Make more cool swords, that content sells the best!

Any good plan can be sabotaged by incompetence or malice. You don't build "warrior content". Using a WoW example, you just build content that doesn't actively punish groups for bringing more melee damage than ranged damage.

The key point here, I believe, is that it's very hard to write content that specifically favors warriors staying exactly 40% of your population. Content that "doesn't actively punish groups for bringing more melee damage than ranged damage" is very likely to work if warriors are 50% of your population, and may not work as well if warriors drop to 30% of your population, so it introduces a natural bias to the drift that does in fact result in warriors becoming more rather than less common... especially because people really like playing them.