Fixing Weapon Balance - the Methodical Way

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

I will post more later on when I have a proper keyboard in front of me. I am a massive supporter of small changes a little at a time not radical sweeping cchanges that have been proposed historically.

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Small changes are fine when you've tweaking a system that you understand that is close to where you want it.
Sadly, little about Neocron is in that state right now (amusingly, pre 2.2, while much worse for being single-class dominated, was probably much fewer tweaks from something farier). Instead, we've got systems that don't work like they are supposed to, or acheive exactly the opposite to what they are supposed to, and numbers that are miles out (you yourself mentioned laser beam cannons outdamaging semi-auto pistols by 200-300%. Small tweaks won't cut it.)

Also, the more that I look at the numbers and setup, the more convinced I am that a "balanced" APU in terms of damage/resists will plunge us back into monk-o-cron, if nothing else is changed..

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

DJ if you're mad about something then come out with it. I was quoting someone else's post. Nothing to do with yours. You can calm down now.

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I'm not mad about anything, someone responded to your post in a manner that seemed misunderstanding of your point, I attempted to clarify the issue.

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Originally Posted by CMaster

Also, the more that I look at the numbers and setup, the more convinced I am that a "balanced" APU in terms of damage/resists will plunge us back into monk-o-cron, if nothing else is changed..

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Could you expand?

Related to your pure vs mixed comment, what is the advantage of high dps teams? If the combat classes are balanced, then they are all dmg dealers since they can take equal punishment relative to their defence.

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Originally Posted by Dribble Joy

Related to your pure vs mixed comment, what is the advantage of high dps teams? If the combat classes are balanced, then they are all dmg dealers since they can take equal punishment relative to their defence.

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I think I may code up a simulation tool just to test scenarios. Anyway, if we set up a situation with a high damage/low def class and a low damage/high def class, we can adjust defense and offense so in a 1 on 1, they both drop at the same time. If we expanded this to teams of high damage vs low damage, again everything is nice and equal, with one member of each team dropping at the same time.

However, if we look at the case of a pure high damage team 1 (say 4 APU) vs a mixed team 2 (say 2 APU 2 Tank). Both sides focus fire one APU from the other team. However, team 1 has more damage, so they take down team 2's APU first. Team 1's first APU falls shortly thereafter, but not before they land a few hits on Team 2 APU2. Team 2 APU 2 then drops next, taking damage from 3 enemy APUs these 3 APUs then begin on the tanks. The 2 tanks of team 2 do take down APU2 from team 1, and we're in a 2 tanks vs 2 APU situation - except one of the tanks is now down to half health ish. So at the end, team 1 wins. If you make the pure team 100% tank, you see the same result - the pure team has periods where they outnumber the mixed team, so they win.

I'm not sure what happens when you start adding in "in between" classes etc. But you get the picture.

I think that trying to balance the game based on multiple teams is futile. There are just too many variables to take into account. If they can achieve balance in 1v1 universally common scenarios then that is likely to be much more popular. I don't understand why small changes are a problem and why you would be against them. Common sense needs to weigh in here at some point. Yes there are some glaring issues. These should be resolved. The issues with certain guns not even being remotely viable being one of them. However making an entire patch full of huge changes is what got us into the current mess that is NC 2.2. It is like trying to make souffle with a sledgehammer.

I propose a series of very small changes to individual areas of the game and see the heavily tested effect of these changes on overall pvp. Weapon balancing based on TL is a huge change. It is one I have suggested many times. AOE being limited to a maximum number of targets is a massive dynamic change but again it is probably really necessary to balance AOE across the board without nerfing anyone in particular. Things like this however need to be tested thoroughly before you start making multiple changes because someone somewhere will always think up an insanely overpowered class/abuse of mechanics and make everyone else bitch about it.

Clearly there are issues such as the Disruptor needing to be fixed. The beam weaponry needs to have its hits registered etc. However based on current damage values people have already said that if the accuracy of beam weapons is fixed then the damage may, on some weapons, go through the roof.

This is a situation again which needs to be avoided.

Having a small RoF buff for example or a small range buff for APU's would help them in a small way. It is not an overpowered sweeping change to fuck up/overpower the class. It is just the same as fault finding. You find something, test it, adjust it and move on. It is the most scientific way to do it. I cant understand how that is a problem.

Also bear in mind you have to add the human element to these simulations. It is all well and good saying Team 1 has this many ppus and team 2 has this many apus. What if team 1's best skilled apu has to go for dinner during the op fight.... team 1 will then lose I guess. Shit happens. Oh well.

I think most people would be happy if the classes each stand a chance in pvp against their counterparts. All of this stuff about mixed teams and pure teams.... i dont think anyone really thinks like that. You take your best players on their best chars and wait and see what the other clan brings and have a fight about it. If you lose then you get poked up, lick your wounds, call some more mates and go back. You dont get your calculator out and your white board and start drawing up equations about why you lost... if you crunch too many numbers I think you will lose sight of the logic of common sense.

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Originally Posted by CMaster

the pure team has periods where they outnumber the mixed team, so they win.

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I'm not so sure that's true, though I might be wrong.

If we take the X tanks vs X APUs, then if they all focus fire on one target, then both targets will drop at the same time. If the offence/defence balance of all the classes are the same, then both targets will drop together.
As in your example, yes one APU drops before another, but the remaining dps and defence potential of the other team (afaik) is still higher.

I may have to crunch numbers as well.

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

I don't understand why small changes are a problem and why you would be against them.

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Because it's a band-aid solution if the under-lying system is a mess. There's a difference between patching something that's inherently flawed and tweaking/calibrating a strong base.

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All of this stuff about mixed teams and pure teams.... i dont think anyone really thinks like that.

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I think people do want a situation were they can bring whatever they want to a fight rather than having to have the right chars. Monocron came about because in order to win they needed APU/PPUs. If mixed vs pure teams can be balanced then people are going to enjoy team PvP much more.

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You dont get your calculator out and your white board and start drawing up equations about why you lost... if you crunch too many numbers I think you will lose sight of the logic of common sense.

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No, but there's no point in trying to be a better team/skilled with the chars you want to use if the under-lying balance isn't there. You want to win because you are better.

Small changes are hardly a band aid solution if the end game goal is balance. 100s of small changes are better than one big change that creates a new set of problems. We all want the same end game goal. That much is crystal clear. However the method to achieve that is clearly a disagreement. I dont want wholesale changes to nc. That would make it worse than it is now. I want a few changes at a time that are fully investigated before we move on to the next issue at hand. Not change 20 problems to create 40 more.

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

Small changes are hardly a band aid solution if the end game goal is balance. 100s of small changes are better than one big change that creates a new set of problems. We all want the same end game goal. That much is crystal clear. However the method to achieve that is clearly a disagreement. I dont want wholesale changes to nc. That would make it worse than it is now. I want a few changes at a time that are fully investigated before we move on to the next issue at hand. Not change 20 problems to create 40 more.

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^^ This.
Sorry for not comming with more input on the subject. I just cba.. Theres so long to any kinds of balancing..

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

However making an entire patch full of huge changes is what got us into the current mess that is NC 2.2. It is like trying to make souffle with a sledgehammer.

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No. Implementing changes that make no sense (look at my armour/resist thread, or just take a glance at the implant system) and then failing to respond to playtest feedback gave us the mess of 2.2. And the point is that it is a mess. Also, go read up on developers of games that have gone along way to balance. They'll tell you that huge changes are the way to go - if you do small tweaks, you'll either never get there, or you'll end up with a system that's so special-cased that it makes no sense to anyone. Instead, you make big changes (although yes, on few things at a time) until you get somewhere near. Then you release it and make incremental tweaks from there in response to what's happening on the ground.

What any new balancing program needs (and I do agree with you that a program, a series of patches moving towards something, rather than a huge take-it-or-leave-it-lump is a better idea) is a good playtesting regime. So before each step hits retail, it goes through several iterations on the test server. And the test server isn't like it was for 2.2 - just a space where people are left to their own devices and rage at GMs that "OMG I NEED WOC NOW< WHER R U?". Instead, there's focused testing. "Tonight we want to do lots of duels", "can we get a couple of chaos cave teams going", "firemobbing tonight", op wars with invited complete clans, etc. Reward people who help with something ingame when the patch goes live, boot people off the test server who don't join in.

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

Also bear in mind you have to add the human element to these simulations. It is all well and good saying Team 1 has this many ppus and team 2 has this many apus. What if team 1's best skilled apu has to go for dinner during the op fight.... team 1 will then lose I guess. Shit happens. Oh well.

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Well yeah. You can't balance from numbers alone (well, you can, but it will make for a really dull, inflexible game). What you need to do is set up coherent systems, ones where you know (roughly) what effects changes will have and can be acheived. Then you play it. Lots. Then you feed the results back and change it again and so on. Realistically, balancing is something of a moving target, as player fashions and understanding changes. It's not something you just do and end of. It's these coherent systems that NC lacks at the moment. It's also things not working as they were supposed to (weapon balance is the big one here).

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

All of this stuff about mixed teams and pure teams.... i dont think anyone really thinks like that. You take your best players on their best chars and wait and see what the other clan brings and have a fight about it. If you lose then you get poked up, lick your wounds, call some more mates and go back. You dont get your calculator out and your white board and start drawing up equations about why you lost... if you crunch too many numbers I think you will lose sight of the logic of common sense.

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No. But what will happen, is people will notice they do better when they bring more of a certain class to the fight. They'll say "tanks and APUs are just as good, but we need hackers, so as many APUs as possible please". And then they'll notice that the further they go down that path, the better they're doing, until we're back to monk-o-cron. (Alternatively, we'll end up with some other single class dominating). My point was mostly that balancing is hard, and that I think DJ's idea that if all classes are equally matched, we'll see all classes equally is rather naive. PEs and Spies (and hybrids to some extent) have a lot more options for supporting themselves than other classes - so that's going to encourage seeing them in raiding and solo-hunting contexts. Meanwhile, the nature of teamfights being different pushes other classes to the fore.

There is an escape from a lot of these teamfight issues in the form of metagaming. As in, if APU-heavy teams becomes the standard, and everyone always focuses the APU, then you could counter that by getting your clan to make a couple of tough-APUs (spec as much psi resist as they can get away with, + PPR, energy/fire resist). Then build some tanks/spies to specificially target common APU build weak points (force? xray? posion?) and spec for damage, ignoring defense. And this counter-monk team would then be in turn countered by a conventional, low-monk team. This works in a lot of games, but we'd need to support setup variety a lot better than it is at the moment. There'd need to be ways to build tanks weaker but more punishing, and so forth.

Also, it's worth saying that I don't think making all weapons viable in a methodical way is a big change. There's no underlying mechanics change, just a few numbers set to where they SHOULD be already. Why tweak a couple of over-and-under powered weapons of the week, when you could make them all useful? Sure, something is probably going to come out a bit over-strong, but that can be then tweaked back easily. All I'm suggesting is what 2.2 was supposed to do in the first place. The only big changes I've put out there are the APU suggestion and the Weapon TL-stretching one.

I have honestly never started up an op fight team and thought to myself hey I had better bring 10 apus to this fight due to blah blah..... I have thought to myself right today we have 10 people. Ok the other team (we fancy attacking) has roughly the same number. Ok 2 ppus and 8 fighters. Hey Rabbi Fang is on - hey rabb come on your spy he is pretty good. Hey Doc is on, hey Doc you can ppu your guy is the best levelled and so on and so forth.

You cant predict what people will do en masse. You're just MASSIVELY overcomplicating a really simple thing. We have an endgame. That is set in stone. We NEED a yard stick. Something to accurately measure balance by. Weapon TL balancing is something I have posted about tonnes of times because many years ago someone else suggested it and we campaigned for it like anything. This should be our yardstick. I think we can all agree on that.

Then we need to establish "roles" for the classes. They need a reason WHY we want to use them in an op fight but no one of these reasons needs to be ANY more important than any other. Monks and Spies can hack for example. Tanks and PE's can take the beating so lets use them. The problem is the group dynamic needs to be resolved AFTER the 1v1 dynamic or we will never get anywhere. If this game achieved an equal (relatively) 1v1 dynamic in pvp it would be doing better than over half the MMO PVP games out there in a heartbeat.

We are clearly going to disagree on a tonne of points here. I am fine with that, it is healthier for discussion. I dont need to read dev forums to see how stuff got done elsewhere. I am not a scientist per se but I am an analyst by trade. I work in a methodical, logical way. I like a dash of ingenuity and creativity to go along with that but after 10 years of nc and being involved in 5 heavily pvping clans I have never once heard anyone say OMG I am getting beat by that gun I must spec more (whatever) resist. If people find they are getting beaten by a particular gun then 2 things happen - one they cry on the forum about it, two the price for that gun goes up astronomically as everyone wants one. You dont hear about people changing set ups to counter it. I am not arguing that they dont do it but you wont ever hear about it. In NC1 some of us so closely guarded our con set ups that we would let you sleep with our sisters before we let you look at our F5 screen.

Also you have to take into account the variable ability of player skill. It will impact greatly on this "class of choice" argument. Some players are great tanks and shit monks. Other players are great PE's and relatively shit at everything else. Some people will wake up one day and just naturally want to go play with their tank this evening and not have to go ppu or whatever else. These are all natural traits. The problem is they will shit all over your scientific theory about the "supergroup" because they spit in its face.

What I am trying to say is I think that you're trying to impress too much science on something that is essentially entertainment and therefore fun. If the game stops being fun it doesn't matter if the guy is a tank monk or spy, he will still log off.

This is far too long a thread and wordy and tbh boring. i have scan read each post and its the same rhetoric being quoted over and over.

Im gonna keep it simple for the plebs out there. Surgeons dont use sledgehammers. Small changes and adjustments are best.


As for that whole well i got a team of 4 apus vs 2 apus and 2 tanks.

Dude. HELLO???? Major Variable factor. Human Error? skills etc. This must be accounted for. do not use science to argue anything in this game when human influence can/will fuck something over.

as for the rest of it it truly was tl;dr. i hope someone makes some sense of it. I will come back and read more later when i can find my reading glasses (not sarcasm)

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Originally Posted by Doc Holliday

as for the rest of it it truly was tl;dr. i hope someone makes some sense of it. I will come back and read more later when i can find my reading glasses (not sarcasm)

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I'd suggest just reading the first 12ish posts. After that the thread rather veers off from the original topic.

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

I have honestly never started up an op fight team and thought to myself hey I had better bring 10 apus to this fight due to blah blah..... I have thought to myself right today we have 10 people. Ok the other team (we fancy attacking) has roughly the same number. Ok 2 ppus and 8 fighters. Hey Rabbi Fang is on - hey rabb come on your spy he is pretty good. Hey Doc is on, hey Doc you can ppu your guy is the best levelled and so on and so forth.

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You might not have done. Plenty of others have. Back in the monk-o-cron heydey, the competitive op fighting clans often had rules like "must have one high level monk to join" or "no more than 2 non-monks brought to op fights". Sure, nobody carefully built to counter the likely opposition, but they assembled a team to the optimum for the current balance. All my point about counter-builds was saying is that in some games, there is such a thing as an "optimal" build or playstyle, yet nobody uses it because everybody knows how to counter said optimal setup. And hence you get back to more variety. Over time the "metagame" moves to countering that counter and so on.

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

Something to accurately measure balance by. Weapon TL balancing is something I have posted about tonnes of times because many years ago someone else suggested it and we campaigned for it like anything. This should be our yardstick. I think we can all agree on that.

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Yes. The real point at the start of this thread was to make that point. Make weapon damage scale off TL like it's meant to. 2.2 was supposed to do this and didn't, so I was just listing some factors that can easily get overlooked.

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

Then we need to establish "roles" for the classes. They need a reason WHY we want to use them in an op fight but no one of these reasons needs to be ANY more important than any other. Monks and Spies can hack for example. Tanks and PE's can take the beating so lets use them. The problem is the group dynamic needs to be resolved AFTER the 1v1 dynamic or we will never get anywhere. If this game achieved an equal (relatively) 1v1 dynamic in pvp it would be doing better than over half the MMO PVP games out there in a heartbeat.

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Again, agreed. All the rambling about teams up there was to do with pointing out that having everything nice and balanced for 1vs1s doesn't mean that teams will be balanced, as DJ seemed to think (Hell, look at 2.0 - 2.1, drug abusing PEs and hybrids dominated in 1vs1, while pure-monk teams dominated in larger fights.). While making PPU effects more equal across the classes will definitely help, but I believe that what's really need is a reason to bring a mix along to the op fight. Sadly however, bringing someone to be a damage sponge isn't actually useful against an enemy team that have a brain to share.

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

after 10 years of nc and being involved in 5 heavily pvping clans I have never once heard anyone say OMG I am getting beat by that gun I must spec more (whatever) resist. If people find they are getting beaten by a particular gun then 2 things happen - one they cry on the forum about it, two the price for that gun goes up astronomically as everyone wants one. You dont hear about people changing set ups to counter it. I am not arguing that they don't do it but you wont ever hear about it.

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Surprises me, because I've heard it. I've heard people calling out that their target in a fight is really weak to a certain damage type and people should pull out their devs/gats/FAs/whatever. I've seen the popularity of the devourer and poison resist wax and wane roughly oppositely. I've heard people telling their clan mates they need to spec more X, after watching them get beasted in a fight. Don't get me wrong, the response is slow and muddled across the population and time, and lots of people just copy others. But if people aren't doing this sort of thing, why even bother having con setups? Just have HP and be done with it...

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Originally Posted by William Antrim

Also you have to take into account the variable ability of player skill. It will impact greatly on this "class of choice" argument. Some players are great tanks and shit monks. Other players are great PE's and relatively shit at everything else. Some people will wake up one day and just naturally want to go play with their tank this evening and not have to go ppu or whatever else. These are all natural traits. The problem is they will shit all over your scientific theory about the "supergroup" because they spit in its face.

What I am trying to say is I think that you're trying to impress too much science on something that is essentially entertainment and therefore fun. If the game stops being fun it doesn't matter if the guy is a tank monk or spy, he will still log off.

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You've missed what I was trying to say entirely. Yeah, player skill matters, and if the gap in strength isn't too big can overcome the imbalance. What I'm trying to do is make it so things are equal and fair, so player skill is what triumphs at the end of the day. So that people can play what they like to and not what they have to to be competitive. So we have variety, that people enjoy, can find what they like from, rather than much more easily balanced but indistinguishable from each other. The example teams I gave were just example numbers for the sake of it, not some kind of perfect plan. I was just trying to show that balance goes weird some times, and we need to give people reasons for bringing a mix of character types along, or we'll drift back to a "one class for op fights" situation that we've seen so often before.

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Originally Posted by Doc Holliday

Dude. HELLO???? Major Variable factor. Human Error? skills etc. This must be accounted for. do not use science to argue anything in this game when human influence can/will fuck something over.

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Again, now quite what I'm getting at. The point of balancing is to make it so that player skill is (as close to possible) all that matters. To avoid where a worse team can win just by having lots of people with the same "I win" character class.


Although it has to be said, we're defiantly at the point of too much theorycraft, not enough playtest at the moment. What works and doesn't is decided in the game at the end. All I was trying to do with the latter half of this thread was point out that there's a lot of complex relationships and you have to be careful with what you do - a lot of what goes on is actually quite unintuitive.

Oh, and one last thing. Saying you've missed the point is not intended to imply the error was on the readers end. It could well be that the writer (me in this case) didn't make what they were driving at clear enough (which also applies to the APU range-boosting argument earlier. The push back was because it wasn't clear what was meant (leading to misunderstandings about sniper holy lightning), nor were clear reasons given as to why it would be a good change). So sorry if I misled anyone here.

APUs could have all their spells doing pure PSI damage instead of classic energy/fire/poison/etc. That may increase their strength a bit without any other changes. That will make resist psi more useful so people may choose where to spend psi skillpoints. Then psi resist could affect PPU spells aswell - like if you have more psi resists, PPU spells will affect you worser.

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Originally Posted by Linear

APUs could have all their spells doing pure PSI damage instead of classic energy/fire/poison/etc. That may increase their strength a bit without any other changes. That will make resist psi more useful so people may choose where to spend psi skillpoints. Then psi resist could affect PPU spells aswell - like if you have more psi resists, PPU spells will affect you worser.

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No thanks.

I am in favour of PSI damage being removed from the game. I am also in favour of having RESIST psi being removed.

If you give APUs their own special damage type then Tanks (for a start) need to have some resist against it. Spies would get the shaft hardest as even though they DO have some psi ability they have such low health that they would get nailed. Only the Private Eye (with some psi chips - so basically a gimp) would have any chance of having any kind of resist to the APUs damage.

I would much rather have conventional damage flattened out across the board so that there is a level playing field. Everyone can do fire poison etc. The APUs limit of one damage type per time (compared with ammo mods on weapons) is in my opinion adequately compensated by his ability to have a VERY short reload time compared to his peers with conventional weaponry.

As for the APU thing I will clarify.

I would like a range of spells added to the current mix and available at all levels (4 plus a rare spread across the PSI levels) that will give the APU a long ranged attack. An existing weapon would be fine. Even make one of the Lance spells do uber range. I would rather see this used (to start with) and see how it gets on in game before thinking about buffing the entire APU range ability.

This entire thought process came from the lack of APU pve weapons. It was intended to help APUs in PVE. PVP it would also help but only for maybe the first 1 or 2 shots before the range closed and PVP started (and ended) in the short ranged clusterfuck that we have all come to know and love.

I am done posting in this thread. I agree with Doc. It is too wordy and is just a mix of a rehash of old ideas and wish lists. The devs will have seen it and if there is any weight in the arguments they will have taken note of the key points further back.

i oppose the use of the word "balancing" here. yes, there's agressive psi, and you can play in this role and have some pointy eared fun, but it's unlkely you'd roam op wars with an apu. fine. same with melee, and HC pes (or spys or monks), or pistol tanks, or ppu pes which are not exactly viable atm. so what? this is a post-apocalyptic, post-nuklear mmo, and they put in some sorcery to attract elf huggers from other MMOs of lesser interest. but ffs, maybe some future patch will boost apu and melee damage a little, while reducing WOC and TC damage bonus. who knows?

On the monk-o-cron thing :

APUs peak pvp performance was acheived with teaming a dedicated PPU to and APU.
Back when APUs had HAB, APU were mandatory because you needed them to take down almost any PPU buffed class.
OP teams were assembled based on the number of APU/PPU duos, with usually 1 PPU for all the non-APUs.
Switching HAB to PPU and generally making PPUs weaker changed this.