The King is Back

Okay, I’m going to put on my authoritative, forum dwelling, know-it-all hat for this one (I know, I know, I shouldn’t, I just can’t help myself lately). So be warned, I’m swinging some pipes here even though, as usual, I have very little idea of what I’m talking about. I really should break out the dialectic here (I do so love my synthesis) and bounce teh PK against the Carebear in order to seek the middle ground but, meh, I don’t have the time. So, let’s just skip to the fun part.

Thesis: There is no PvE balance[1].

Antithesis: Untrue.

PvE balance is much less rigorously maintained but it is still present. PvP players are much more accustomed to and trained to voice their concerns with any perceived imbalance or exploit. While most PvE players are more accustomed to carefully hoarding anything that gives them an “undue” edge.

But there are still no skills that break the PvE game. Balance doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is resting in equilibrium on the point of some imaginary pivot. It means that the system is regulated someway so that gross abuses are corrected in order to create a level playing field of ‘fairness”. This fairness is different in a PvE context than a PvP context because, in part, of the fact that in PvP there are two human perspectives to consider. For every “imbalanced” skill that creates an advantage for a player there’s another player who’s had a disadvantage created. The goal of balancing in a PvP context is to make sure that there are no skills or, even, techniques that causes that gap to be too wide. At the absurd extreme you don’t want one player to be able to push a button and automatically win any and every battle. But you still want to allow for a disparity in terms of relative position – through any number of means – because otherwise neither player would be able to create an opportunity for victory. In PvE there is no other human concerned with things being “fair” but the game itself, the system of rules and designs that govern how actions are performed in the game. What is “fair” to that game is anything possible within its ruleset. Not merely that which creates widely disparate advantages for a player. On the contrary, the game is designed to allow for players to come up with their own advantages and to exploit them for effect. It’s just that the tolerance for the limits of those advantages are much higher in PvE than they are in PvP.

What needs to be understood is that things like using skills to avoid knockdowns to make the Droknar’s run or careful management of self-healing buffs that allow a single Warrior to tank huge groups of enemies are not exploits as far as the PvE game is concerned – even though such things would be incredibly out of place in the PvP side of things. They are intended accidents. No one person set out to create a system where such things are possible but the sum total of the efforts of everyone from developers to testers to players makes the situation where players are driven if not encouraged to seek the best and most permanent advantage in any given situation. And the tools are in game and in potential in players to create those advantages. And no one, least of all the developers, is quite sure just where they’ll come from. In PvP the goal is to defeat your opponents, somehow, who are other persons sitting behind computers of their own. In PvE the goal is likewise to defeat an opponent but that opponent is not merely the monster or obstacle placed in front of the player, it’s the very game system itself – which uses various mobs and other things as a chess player uses their pieces. The game system is trying to, at the same time, defeat a player’s character and encourage the player to keep playing through the means of rewards like XP or loot for bypassing speedbumps. This is a radically different approach than the average PvPer where the ethos is victory at any cost.

Again, at the logical extreme a situation where any player could press a button which would automatically win a mission or even complete a campaign is intolerable and would not be allowed to happen. Even if such a device was perfectly acceptable in terms of PvP. Something like that would break the game not because it’s a gross violation of the rules but because it has created too much of a gulf in advantages and removed all sense of risk – there would be no way for an opponent to overcome something like my doomsday button – and ends the game itself (or at least transforms it into an extremely different game). It’s only the logical extreme of what already takes place in PvE gaming. Because the game there is not necessarily about defeating a pack of enemies it’s about defeating them *faster. PvE can be seen as a race or a marathon where the player is trying to complete as much as they can as efficiently as they can in a finite amount of time. The advantages they seek are not those to defeat the advantages of their opponent (the so-called threat and response) but those which allow them to optimize their playtime. They want to have a surefire way to defeat one mob because there’s going to be another one and another and another. The more packs they can kill off, say, during their limited gaming session, the more gold or experience or items or progress they’ll have made. And the further they’ll have run in their own, personal race. Balance in a PvE sense is not to make sure that there are no “overpowered” or exploitative techniques but to make sure that no single technique is perfectly viable in any and every situation. The player seeks advantages to shorten or compress the game while the game seeks to make sure that there is no way for a player to completely compress the gaming experience into a single point. It’s that tension between expansion and contraction of the time line that the balancing of PvE lies (Lays? Fuck. Me fail English.). Not the adjustment of points or percentages in minor mechanics. Even though the tweaking of a damage range on a fireball spell, say, will impact the PvE game.

This is because PvE and PvP are not all that different. They are not separate games but variations on the same game. In the same way that different dialects are both facets of the same basic language.

PvE and PvP are played by the same contextual ruleset. A point of energy or a point of damage behave the same in both, among other things. However, what I’d call the intertextual context is widely different. What those points – among other things – mean, exactly, when shifted or affected in any number of ways is altered not by different rules but by different interaction with those rules. It’s the player’s expectations and actions that create the difference just as much as the programmer’s designs. If PvP can be balanced then so can (and is) PvE because they’re not simply two games joined by the same interface they’re separate ways of looking at the same game. This, I’d like to think, holds true for any number of other “games” that are present from the economy to the “games” of leveling up or high end raiding to the various venues for PvP play.

Each presents its own separate dialect to the same language which is encoded in the game’s basic rules. And which is discrete from and cannot be described by those universal rules. It’s only a matter of which perspective you take and how much effort is devote to and how much energy is required for maintaining each separate branch of the overall system. Since there’s a decided PvP focus to the game and, indeed, the developers it gets more attention and more rapid response and not only because the effects of even a minor imbalance to other game systems becomes crippling in the cut-throat world of PvP. But any attempts at balance in one particular area can also be seen as attempts to safeguard the overall continuity of the larger game – the one that encompasses all the different ways the game can be played.

All of which is to say: Scaph, you’re a dick. I kid because I hate you.

[1] – In Guild Wars.