Adventures in Terraforming

 The Flautist and I have been trying more Terraforming Mars experiments in our 2p games.  First we tried a powered up version of the game where every turn we got two prelude cards each and picked one to keep.  This would clearly generate a ridiculous game, so we started at only ten Terraform Rating each to keep our incomes more in line with the base game.  A new prelude each turn is a lot more powerful than ten money, and the game ended early at turn nine.  I got lucky and hit 30 bucks and 21 bucks as my last two preludes, which was certainly a lot better than random income on the final turns.

The Flautist isn't one for half measures though, so she wanted to try that again but with full income.  Naturally getting a free prelude every turn made the game silly fast, and we ended on turn 7.  The board was mostly empty as we had just taken as much pure terraform as possible, due to the rapid game end.  It was an amusing experiment, but didn't really make for a great game.  Much like playing with five players, playing with that much extra stuff ends the game so fast that much of the game no longer matters.  Income cards and things that generate points over turns don't work, and that cuts out too much of the play for my tastes.

Our next experiment was aimed at finding out how it would feel if there were no randomness in card draws.  I usually win the games, in part because I memorize the whole deck and she doesn't.  If we drew exactly the same cards would I find it an advantage because I can predict her plays, or a disadvantage because she doesn't have to worry about what I might have because she has it too?

We decided to do this by taking two separate TM sets and building two decks ordered identically.  Every time she would draw she would do so from her deck and me from mine.  With identical resources, would our games play out nearly the same?

Our games sure didn't play out the same.  We each got the same corporations and preludes, and I selected Inventrix over Helion.  I don't like Helion at the best of times, though admittedly it has some sweet endgame angles when the Thermalist award is in play, but the extra three cards granted by Inventrix seemed crucial so I wouldn't fall behind in information.  Between preludes and ocean cards in our opening hands we got to four oceans on turn 1, and I used Inventrix's special power to drop Kelp Farming.

Kelp Farming turn 1 is a hilarious smashing, and could easily have gotten me the game by itself.  However, I leveraged Inventrix into AI Central to draw tons of cards, and Earth Catapult, Anti Gravity, and Research Outpost to give me -5 cost on all those cards I was drawing.  Six cards a round at -5 cost is preposterous, and we ended the game on turn 11 with me 50 points ahead.

The Flautist likes Helion, and didn't quite realize how powerful the extra three starting cards from Inventrix would be.  She chose Helion, which meant that the entire game I knew exactly what cards she would draw each turn, and knew what to play around and what to ignore.  Not having the extra science symbol from Inventrix also meant that she couldn't get a science set up going, and while she did play Earth Catapult she couldn't abuse it nearly as badly as I abused my discount / card draw engine.

Inventrix kind of broke our format.  We were supposed to be drawing the same cards each turn and then planning around that, but instead I got new stuff each turn and knew what she was getting before she did.

The Flautist wanted to change the format for another go at this, but this time remove all card draw from the deck to ensure that we would get the same cards every turn.  That is one way to go about it, but I came up with another idea I like:  Build 4 decks.  2 of the decks, using half of each of our sets, would be our decks to draw our standard 4 cards a turn from.  They would be ordered identically, of course.  This way no matter what happens we get the same cards on each turn.  Then build 2 more decks with the rest of the cards, also ordered identically, and use those decks for all other card draw.  This way card draw remains in the game and works fine, and there is an advantage to drawing more as you know what your opponent has access to, but you cannot completely predict their draws because each turn they get 4 cards that you don't know about until you get the same ones.

I like this theory a lot.  I don't think it would make a good long term format but it should give an interesting experience and let us actually do the thing we intended to do in the first place - each draw the same cards every turn and try to outfox each other given that information.

Cooling down

 WOW is getting a big patch today.  Blizzard is updating the game in preparation for the new expansion, and retribution paladins are getting a variety of changes.  One of the trends in the changes is to ramp up the cooldown based nature of the spec.  For a couple expansions now ret paladins have been in a frustrating place because everything about their play is based around a single cooldown - Avenging Wrath.

AW is a cool looking, iconic ability.  You grow glowy wings and get a huge damage bonus.  Angel dwarf smash!  Unfortunately for four years now the way you build your character is to stack everything that makes AW better.  You take all the abilities that make it last longer, and all the abilities that make you more powerful during it, and it adds up to doing four times as much damage during AW as outside of it.  This means that ret paladin play is largely about being a golden god for 30 seconds, and then being dumpster tier until AW is back up again.

I don't like that playstyle much.  For one, it makes selecting talents and traits boring.  You can't switch things around at all without becoming terrible.  Everything multiplies together, so the more AW stuff you stack, the more critical the next AW pick becomes.  I can't tinker with individual choices the way I want to - not without being terrible, that is.  It also doesn't leave much decision making in combat.  I hit AW as soon as it is up, and that is all there is to it.

I was hoping that with a new expansion coming and much of the AW boosting stuff rotating out that I would get to change this situation.  Unfortunately the new talents Blizzard has just rolled out are going to put me back in exactly the same spot I have been in for years now - take everything that boosts AW.

One new talent called Seraphim gives a 33% damage bonus for 15 seconds.  Of course you want to take this, and use it during AW because they multiply together.  Even though Seraphim has a 45s cooldown and AW has a 2 min cooldown, you will just use Seraphim every 1 minute so they sync up.  Another talent called Execution Sentence gives 20% bonus damage for 8 seconds and has a 1 minute cooldown, so obviously you take it and use it every 1 minute so it syncs up with both Seraphim *and* AW.

Having talents be cooldowns isn't a problem inherently.  The trouble is the kind of cooldown they are using.  Talents that read like "Do 4 damage to a target" and "Do 2 damage to all nearby targets" and "Deal 8 damage to a target over 10 seconds" are all fine.  You can use them on cooldown if you want, or save them for the right spot.  If you take one, you might take the others, or not.  Depends what you want to do.

However, talents that all act as multipliers to one another are an issue.  You end up doing monstrous damage for a tiny window and otherwise being bad.  Even if it is overall balanced in terms of damage output it sucks as a playstyle because you are locked in.  Everything has to be used in a specific optimal order as soon as it is available.  You can't effectively tinker with the build because it all multiplies together.

You get locked in to a specific play pattern, and that is boring.

It would be fine if other talent choices were reasonable, but right now nothing even looks close.  Having one loadout that was built for massive burst damage is okay; the problem is when other builds simply cannot compete.  The class and spec will be balanced around the best talent setup, which means you either play the cooldown stacking setup or you are going to be numerically inferior.

I like playing my paladin.  I don't want to play another class.  Unfortunately it looks like Blizzard has goofed on the numbers and ret paladins are again going to be locked into builds where they are ridiculous during AW, and pathetic otherwise, and that is not a great place to be.

What kind of game are we making, anyway?

 The WOW expansion Shadowlands has been officially delayed.  It was only about 4 weeks away when the announcement came, which is a huge disaster for Blizzard.  The state of the game on the beta has me convinced that Blizzard did the right thing in delaying and most everyone seems to agree with me.  People are pissed that it is happening, but given where they were they were either going to ship a shoddy product or delay.  No third option presented itself.

Much of the delay has to be chalked up to polish and bugs and such, but I won't talk about that here.  They need to do the work, they will, no big deal.

However, a significant part of the issue is that endgame balance is a total shitshow and they have no good way out of the mess they have created.  The core of the struggle is this:  They created an expansion that works great for an MMO game, but is a problem for an action RPG.  When WOW launched it was way more of an MMO, and it has slowly evolved away from those roots.

In an MMO things are unbalanced.  Some classes are just good and others aren't.  There are plenty of suboptimal choices, and many decisions that are made for flavour torpedo your character's power.  In an MMO you can fuck up big time, and it takes forever to do things.  The world feels big.  Content is extremely easy, built for lore and effect, though often crushingly time consuming.

WOW has shifted away from these things.  You can switch specs easily.  You can find groups through a special group finder window, and usually this will simply teleport you to wherever you need to be.  Decisions are easily reversible.  The world is small and simple to traverse.  Content is hard, tightly balanced, and designed for challenge.  This is more of an Action RPG feel.

In Shadowlands there are four major groups called covenants.  You have to pick one to ally with.  This choice gives you several powerful spells, one of which is common to all people who ally with that covenant, one of which is different for each class.  Then these covenants give you several trees of bonuses you can work on which have variable rewards based on class and spec.

In an MMO this is great.  The covenants have differnent visual themes, distinct philosophies and goals, and they each offer a different home zone.  This choice fits in, and getting a bunch of your abilities from this choice makes sense in this particular world.  You make a choice, it matters a lot, and you live with it.  In an action RPG this is a disaster.  For each spec there is going to be an optimal choice of covenant for each content type.  Kyrian looks superb for paladin tanking, but garbage for paladin dps.  I can't have two covenants, so if I want to maximize my power in high end content I literally need two characters.  

Balancing in WOW has always been a challenge, but this is a whole new level.  In the past if a spec was overperforming you could just nerf an ability or two.  But if a covenant power is too good for a particular spec, what do you do?  If you nerf it, all the other specs that use it get hit for collateral damage.  Then people want to swap covenants, but they are already invested in their current one.  Any tweak you make to the system affects a whole variety of specs in ways you can't easily predict, so balancing them becomes a terifying prospect.  Each change causes a cascade of other problems that all have to be corrected for in some other way.  We may well see logic like "Well, Divine Toll is too powerful for prot paladins.  However, we can't nerf it because it would hurt ret paladins, so because Divine Toll is too good, we will instead nerf some other ability instead."  This of course means that anyone *not* using Divine Toll gets hit even harder, just because Divine Toll was too good!

In addition to cross spec issues, you have cross activity issues.  There is no way you can make cool new spells and abilities and have them work for raiding, dungeons, and pvp.  You can have them all be bad and not worth using, or be extremely bland and similar, but those solutions both totally fail on the lore and feel fronts.  If you want those abilities to be powerful and unique you are going to face down people who pick a covenant that is excellent for raiding and then realize they are 20% worse than other people at pvp, which basically removes them from contention for any serious team.  Plus even if they get on a team, they will always know they are vastly inferior and that sucks as a play experience.  Blizzard has made it clear that swapping covenants and abilities is going to be extremely slow, suitable for someone making a long term choice, and not at all useful for someone wanting to do two different activities in the same week.

Previous versions of WOW had challenges with balance, but they were fairly careful to keep all power concentrated in spec specific buckets.  If ret paladins were too good, you could easily fix it without breaking everything else.  Even then, it was a thorny problem.  With the Shadowlands system it will be vastly more difficult.

All this matters because Blizzard declared that they are going to get balance within a few %.  They won't.  They never have, and this system is so much harder than any before it there is no way they will achieve their goal.  It is a fine goal and all, but the system is so interconnected now that balance changes will be extremely difficult to fully plan, and when you do people will be forced to abandon flavour choices to account for the new numbers, and people *hate* that.  It is the Action RPG problem of wanting extremely tight balance for challenging content but located in a game that is ostensibly an MMO.

Some games just have crap balance and content is trivial.  Look at Classic WOW - people clear new raid tiers within a couple of hours of the content going live, and then wait half a year for new content.  Some classes are obscenely overpowered and make others look like jokes *cough* warrior and mage *cough*.  That is an MMO.  Roll a good class if you want to perform... but you don't have to, because everything is easy.  You spend your time farming or cybering, not practicing.

In modern WOW though people expect tight balance, they expect challenge, and Blizzard has committed themselves to delivering it.  They are going to fail.

I am not saying that tilting more towards MMO type design is bad.  It sounds like a cool set of choices they are setting up, and a world that has important lore.  But if you want to have big decisions like this that have big consequences, and you want people to have to stick to their decisions to make those decisions feel impactful, then you aren't going to have tight balance.  Period.  I think the key in these situations is to admit what your priorities are and go with them.  Pretending that you can just do it all is simply setting yourself up for failure and disappointment.

You can ship a game where everyone just tools around and beats the stuff they want to.  In that game you can have choices like covenants and it works just fine.  You can have a game of high challenge and finely tuned balance.  In that game this version of covenants is a disaster.

Have your cake, or eat it.  But not both.