Participating in a Guild Warrior's Favorite Sport

As I said somewhere else, "We're PvPers. We fight about everything."

Tip of the straw boater (Or however this works) to Clamatius for finding this thread in the weave.

Let me just say, what...the...hell.

It's going to take two weeks for the next rebalancing to go live? And in the meantime we're going to be dealing with skills in the same state they've been for months now? Seriously?

I mean, I can understand the need to have a reassessment period. I can, even though I disagree with it, see why a rollback would be needed. But two weeks is just way too long. As I've said before, these sort of balance changes need to happen more rapidly.

I'm in agreement, though, with Wasteland Squidget who goes on to say in that thread that such changes happening too rapidly (The given frame was every week, but I'm generalizing. I've seen what happens when the game is rebalanced every week, by the way, we called it “beta”.) is just as harmful as them happening too slowly. If skills are constantly in flux then the game becomes a race to find what's imbalanced and to exploit it. It takes some time for a metagame to be established as counters to counters to counters are explored and developed. The problem right now is that certain things are grossly overpowered (You can argue about just what they are, of course, but personally, I'd flag Shadow Prison and the Melandru's/Wearying Strike combination. The whole Soul Reaping nightmare is something that requires a redesign and isn't really the province of a simple matter of rebalancing a few skills – you have to gut a class, reshape it into something new, and deal with the fall out. That happens over the course of a few patches, not just one.) – there are no effective counters to develop just better ways of running the standard – and they're not being addressed.

This is why I favor skill balances that happen on a monthly schedule, by the way (And shortening the various PvP seasons to go along with it. But my biggest suggestion would be to post the changes well in advance.). That's long enough for new tricks to prosper but quick enough to shake things up before they get too static. Gross imbalances like Destructive Was Glaive get fixed on a much quicker schedule – perhaps not the next day but soon enough that they don't warp everything. And evaluations of the process are going on all along. Start every month with a test weekend, roll back the changes, mull over them, get that mythical feedback, and put them back in place with whatever tweaks you want the next weekend. Watch what happens and take the foam bat to anything that's getting out of hand but otherwise let things develop. See how things are headed and where changes might impact things – what are people playing? What aren't they playing? What strategies are unpopular? What's the reason skills aren't getting used? What are people saying on the boards? And the answer to those questions and more are how you start planning for the next month's changes.

But that's just details. Pick any timeframe you want, really. The principle is not that it's taking forever for skills to be rebalanced and it needs to be happening faster but that it needs to be happening in less monumental updates. These patches shouldn't be heroic endeavors, they should be course corrections. If that means updates happening every day, I'd be fine with it. Just as long as they're a lot smaller than the list from last Friday. While it might look good that so many things are being addressed and tried, I take it as a bad sign. All those changes, all those experiments, all those updates, are ones that have been waiting for who knows how long? That they come in a lump like this means that there's been things that have needed correction but have been allowed to continue. The more problems there are in such an interlocking system the harder it must be to find a solution – you can't fix just one thing without affecting so many others. And that makes the job of addressing the game's balance much more difficult than it would be if there were smaller updates happening constantly. Each one addressing a minor point and being allowed to play itself out to see how it performs. Taken in total, they'd add up to the massive sort of restructuring it seems we're in for on the 2^nd but the process (And any errors that creep up along the way) would be much easier to control.

Because that's the real problem I have here. Skill balancing shouldn't be an event. It should be a process. Going on constantly and subtly to shape the game. There's a point where you go too far, of course, and in days past when updates flew around and nerfed things during the middle of competitive seasons we were at that point. But we seem to have swung too far in the opposite direction – towards the hands-off approach that resembles nothing so much as apathy. The ladder's useless. The promised tournament system hasn't materialized yet. And now the metagame's going to be stagnant for another week – right after we got to see how refreshing a breath of fresh air could be?

Remind me why I play this game again. Someone.