That could also be achieved by having stat requirements - i.e., rather than getting stat bonuses for belonging to a race, you instead have to meet certain minimum and maximum stats in order to qualify for that particular race. Thus a halfling might require a dexterity of at least 12 and a strength of no more than 14, while orcs might a minimum strength of 16, etc.

Well, I think you're oversimplifying a bit. It's not that one race will never, ever be able to beat anyone from the other race, it's that ceteris paribus some races might have a hard time beating others.


Yes, I think that works too. Same idea as stat requirements for classes.

The only way to overcome a hard-coded advantage is to have a skill advantage though, so even if the implementation doesn't make it impossible in general, it will still be impossible to win against evenly skilled opponents, which is definitely frustrating.

There isn't just character skill, you know. A sufficiently intelligent (and interesting) game will allow for player skill as well to help even the odds. Even so, this makes sense in general: how likely is it that a bomber will defeat a fighter plane in a dogfight? Well, very, very unlikely. That doesn't make the bomber a useless element; it has incredible strength against other units.

This kind of style makes play diverse: you have a role that you can excel at, and other players have theirs, and together the sum is greater than the parts. Playing two different character types gives truly different play experiences. Trying to make everybody utterly even can reduce a game to being all the same. A halfling fighter and an orcish fighter are reduced to the same thing. The fact that one is "faster" and one is "stronger" is just an excuse put on top of the fact that they are evenly matched. Why should I play one instead of the other, if it ends up being the same thing in the end of the day?

We aren't talking about bomber vs. fighter (which are both significant parts of a whole military). We're talking about a singular character vs. another singular character. The kind of X trumps Y trumps Z trumps X system that you're talking about is fine when applied to things a player has control over (such as skills and spells), but it simply makes for bad game-play if you attribute it to races.

I am not sure I see the distinction. And no, I don't mean that in the dumb obvious way.


You keep oversimplifying it. :sad: I already said that the RPS analogy is imperfect and should not be taken literally. It is not as if all orcs will beat all halflings in all instances.

Well I'll tell you guys, I was very concerned about having a good balance of power, because I play deadlies myself, and like things balanced in battles. I made charts that balanced damage of spells/skills across the board for all my classes. If I took something from one race, I gave them something to balance it out.

I asked Matt from IRE how they did it, and he responded to me via email telling me that for them the key is nerfing classes in such a way, that it doesn't seem devastating to the players. He said that balance is critical and that they constantly have to adjust one class here and there to maintain balance of power. That's not word for word what he said, but the jist of it. I agree though balance is critical for deadly muds, and I would further argue that it is very beneficial for peaceful player muds.

I will say however, in order to keep things some what realistic I did break my rule on balance for the dragon race. Dragons are more powerful then other races for my game, but I put a rule into effect that dragons cannot group/pkill other races unless then dragon is 10 levels higher then them. I haven't tested this rule much yet, other then from seeing a few arena battles, but doing this allowed me to not isolate dragons from other races even though they are overpowered compared to other races. Right now this is just a rule, and as I iron out the details more on this and see how it affects things, I may have it hard coded.

Vladaar

<sarcasm>So if I took away the pointy ears of an elf, do I need to give them some kind of accuracy bonus to balance it out?</sarcasm>

Anyway, There's no such thing as perfect balance when it comes to PvP situations. You can't actually balance for a PvP situation, you can only balance for outright damage potential. To truly balance you'd have to be able to take into account all the unmeasurables that affect a PvP situation, for instance; player skill, player tactics, and player intelligence. All three of which you can't measure or take into account in you calculations. Even if you were to completely balance every race and class in the game (which would be boring as hell, btw) There would always be players that come out on top, no matter what race/class they play.

I've always been more partial to the muds where, like David said, there's a RPS like setup. For instance, You have a human, an Orc, and an Elf. Now, The Elf excels at Magic and Archery, because that's the stereotypical elf, the Human is a jack-of-all-trades, and the orc excels at smashing heads. In a straight up fist fight, said Orc is going to beat the living hell out of said Elf. That's just the way it is. The Human will get the Orc after the Elf has worn it down a bit, because human ingenuity trumps all. And the Orc and the human will end up killing each other because the orc will fight to the last breath and the Human will let it go to their head. Just the way the world works.

(Note: I'm not the one in charge of balance on MW. :P)

It's not as if Bush says "I choose you, bomber!" and Medvedev says "I choose you, fighter!"….. "FIGHT!" and then duke it out for all the chips. Both planes are smaller parts of a whole. On a MUD, your character is not (unless you're playing a very team-oriented MUD, but I've yet to see one like that).



In an even fight, if orc is supposed to trump halfling, the halfling will always lose. That's not over-simplifying anything; I realize that even fights may or may not be hard to come by, but it's still frustrating for a player to know before entering a fight that unless he has some unfair advantage, he's going to lose for a reason he can't control.

No, like I said, I still don't really see the distinction. The whole point of those classes was to form teams in the first place where each person has a different role: different people in a party. You don't need to be "very" team-oriented at all for this to make sense; it makes sense as soon as you have groups of just two.


I just said that it's not as if all orcs will beat all halflings, so I'm not sure why you responded that way… It's not that orc is supposed to trump halfling. It's that the orc will simply be better on average at some things than halflings. That's not to say that a halfling could create a combat-oriented character and the orc a non-combat character.


Well, it's interesting that what you consider to be frustrating, other people consider to be strategy and the whole point of a game. But I guess that's a matter of perspective.

Nonetheless the position you are advocating means that even when you play solo, differences are basically erased. If my halfling warrior is just as good as your orc warrior, and both of us are just as good as that elven warrior over there, one wonders why the racial distinction exists in the first place other than to provide some superficial semblance of difference. If my speed is exactly canceled by your strength, then what is the point of differentiating between the two in the first place? If attributes mean so little as to mean nothing because characters with different attributes end up being precisely equal anyhow, why do we bother with the attributes in the first place? That is a very serious question.

Originally you said "Perhaps it is to be expected that some classes steamroll over others", and that was what I disagreed with. If instead some just have an advantage, then that isn't as bad (although IMO it's still an undesirable solution). Preferable would be if the orcs and halflings are each better at certain things, but equal overall, so that the outcome of a fight between an orc and a halfling cannot be predicted based solely on race.


No, those are the things you don't need to take into account. The idea of a balanced game is that player skill is the deciding factor, not that "morans" can compete with expert strategists.


I disagree with it being "boring" (once again, "balanced" doesn't mean "the same"). And yes, there would be players that come out on top - but they would come out on top because they were skilled players, not because they were playing half-orc assassins (or whatever race/class combination happened to be the strongest).



I originally approached the issue of balance by trying to assign values to different bonus types, but after a certain point I found myself relying more on instinct. Each class in my mud has a range of different powers, of which each player can only select a small handful, but players can also freely change them. This makes it fairly easy to nerf powers, because if people no longer feel a power is worthwhile they can simply drop it and pick something else (and if they decide to keep it anyway, it's obviously still worthwhile).

If lots of people are using a particular power, that's generally an indication that it's too strong. Equally, if nobody uses a particular power, that's generally an indication that it's too weak. Observing which powers are notably popular or unpopular can often be useful for deciding which powers may need tweaking.

Of course some powers are intended to be stronger than others, but these are small in number and represent the foundation that a decent character is built on. In such cases I need only balance these core powers against each other (they are usually mutually exclusive).

Equally, some powers are more popular because they're easier to use or more accessable, while new powers usually have a honeymoon period where everyone wants to try them out.

But overall, I've found it's a fairly effective way to balance the classes.

What if you can't find someone with a complementary race to be in your group? Most MUDs are realistically looking at less than 100 (quite liberal) players online at any given time, on average. If you have even a moderately good selection of races, you still have to worry about:

- whether someone even has a character of that particular race
- whether said person is sufficiently powerful to be of any help to you
- whether said person is on good terms with you and willing to help
- whether said person is even online

That's a lot of conditions just to make your character viable against certain opponents. These get exponentially worse as the size of your group increases, as well.



Because it is as if they will beat all halflings. All other things being equal, if orc has a hard-coded advantage over halfling, it will always win (barring any random factors, of course).



We were discussing racial "power" in relation to other races, and I think at least KaVir and I were speaking mostly in a character vs. character context. You can't really apply a rock/scissors/paper balance system to races unless you're speaking about this context, since there has to be some form of competition to accurately gauge what beats what.



I'd like to know how you consider there to be any strategy to a situation that you can't control…



Just because the potential for equality (in terms of balance) exists, doesn't mean that everyone will be equal, and, in fact, it's almost never the case.

As shasarak (I think) said, you pick your battles, and need to be clever in avoiding/tilting battles for which you are not the most suited. I.e., you need to be strategic. It suffices to look at the thought that goes into composing MMORPG groups to see that there is strategy.


These concerns go both ways so I'm not sure anybody is really being put at a disadvantage here.


Then we will never have these "all other things equal" situations that you describe either, will we? So it will not be the case that some people will always beat other people. :wink:

But more seriously, I'm not sure what you mean. If you make the above statement, then you have fundamentally undermined the very concept of balance. The whole point of balance as you have been advocating it in this thread is to equalize people. The above assumption, that people are almost never equal, seems like a self-defeating conclusion.

I don't think "he's better than me so I won't fight him" falls under strategic.

Also, I think the "MM" in MMORPG pretty explicitly explains why groups are a viable strategy for those particular games. When someone creates an MMOMUD, the same will probably hold true, but I don't foresee that happening…



The whole point in adding someone to your own group is to overcome the other person's advantage over you. The only way it would go both ways is if, by some rare chance, you were both racial complements to each other and so were your group members.



It's not whether they will or won't. It's that they have the potential.



No, balance != equality.

It absolutely DOES fall under strategy!

I don't know if you ever played paper role playing games, or if your DM was as sadistic as mine was, but he regularly would set up encounters that were designed to nudge us away from our current course of actions and into some other venue. They weren't impossible to beat, but we quickly learned that unless there was a really good reason to suffer (quest, uber-phat-loot, etc), running away (or sneaking around them) was indeed the better part of valor.

Blindly running in and attacking, in warfare, yields unacceptable losses. In business, it's called poor Return On Investment. In our D&D campaigns, we called it "Lawful Stupid".

You seem to be coming at this from a strictly one-on-one PvP perspective. In that narrow case, it certainly does make for a frustrating time if you really want to duel your worst-case opponant. Yet I will maintain that this only means you, as a player, have to be clever and find a way around the limitations of the system. The whole point of PvP is that you, the player, are proving yourself better at combat than your opponant player. If it were your epic pants fighting my epic shirt, it would be CvC (Character vs. Character).

In PvE, unless your game has chokepoints in the content which *force* you to fight a particular type of thing to get past a certain level, the player does have the choice to find other content. I'm also not advocating making it impossible to win. I'm talking that two evenly matched opponents of differing race will not always have a perfect 50/50 chance of winning… Maybe the halfling has 30/70 odds against him, but he could still win if the dice go his way.

I'm not a big fan of the blind mow-through-everything-that-moves mindset that so many games seem to encourage these days. It doesn't have to be an RTS game to expect the player to think before they act, or to be observant and flee when they notice themselves getting hammered into the ground.

Having said all that, I do like the idea of having racial requirements rather than bonuses or penalties. Coupled with unique racial abilities, it does shift the onus of balance towards skills and classes.

You have been making it sound like that: you seem to want all fighters to be on an equal footing, assuming same skills and equipment, and same player skill going into developing the character, no matter which race they are.



As for the rest, I think Quixadhal covered it pretty well so I won't repeat it. So, "what he said". :smile:

I agree. I just don't think that's to be considered "strategy" in the traditional sense. You're using a very, very loose definition of the term which could apply to practically anything you do, ever.



Yes, I am; however, there's no other way to apply a rock/scissors/paper balance system to a game outside of PvP (note: PvP encompasses any player/player competition; not just PK). You can try and extend it to PvE, but then you have the huge debate over how to balance player skill vs. mob scripts, or if it's even possible to do so.



All things being equal (meaning you're both equally skilled, have the same gear, etc.), there is no possible way to overcome a hard-coded advantage outside of random factors. In the cases where you are more clever than your opponent, you won't be in an "all things being equal" scenario. Again, I'll reiterate: it's the potential to have a 50/50 chance to kill anyone and everyone that matters - not whether you live up to the potential.



Relying on luck is rather silly. It's still a broken system.



What kind of requirements are you referring to?



No, I was talking about potential, not reality.

Look at it like this: a black man and a white man go to apply for the same job. Both are equally qualified with very similar backgrounds and work histories, blah blah blah. The hiring manager dislikes black people, though, so he hires the white man. Now - same situation, only the black man is far more qualified than the white man. The black man overcomes the manager's prejudice and gets the job. Does the fact that it's still possible to "beat" another race make it any less unfair that the black man is starting out with a disadvantage? Is this balanced? Nope.

That's exactly how economists (game theoreticians) and many others define it… What usage of the word would you expect?


Quixadhal explicitly said one-on-one, but you replied with PvP in general. The point was that you're not approaching this from a general PvP perspective, but from 1 vs. 1 only. It is very easy to use "RPS" (please remember that it is a simplification) over sets of players, not just pairs.


But if you don't expect your reality to actually occur, then what point is there in it? A bunch of potentials that are never realized aren't really interesting potentials.


I'm not sure that it is wise to realistically talk about real-world racial prejudices in the context of a fantasy game…

I already explained why "sets of players" don't solve the problem; especially not for a game of the magnitude that most MUDs qualify as.



You completely skirted the point. Now that was strategic ;)

But he explicitly told you that was a narrow case; basically you were replying to something he didn't say. :wink: You might disagree that it's narrow (clearly you do) but that doesn't mean disagreeing with the rest of that particular point.

By the way, it's not as if you need hundreds upon hundreds of players to be talking about groups of just two players to offset weaknesses…


No, I am saying that the point doesn't carry much weight. The real world functions completely differently than a fantasy world. In the fantasy world you can restart, switch characters, go away, come back, and so forth. The physics are completely different, so comparisons really aren't all that wise.

Besides, even if we did run with your point (which again is a very dangerous thing to do given how different the physics are): under the definition of "balance" we have been using so far, the black man, while disadvantaged in this case, would have an advantage somewhere else over the white man. And the situation in which he was disadvantaged would be equally important as the situation in which he was advantaged. So there is "balance". In your example there is no balance because the black man loses no matter what overall, even though that is not what was proposed in the fantasy world. But again – I don't think this avenue is worth pursuing at all given that the fantasy world functions completely differently… so for the sake of the argument, if you care to pursue it, it would be better to first persuade me (and perhaps "us" if others share my doubts) that the comparison is a good one to make in the first place.