I didn't leave them out - they were quotes from my earlier posts. In fact I've found myself having to repeatedly quote sections of my own posts in order to (re)answer your questions, which makes me wonder if you're actually reading my posts at all, or just skimming them.

But even if you'd missed my earlier points, you've apparently still read enough to completely backtrack on your original claims of arena fights being the "wrong" answer, or something "so unimportant that it shouldn't be considered much beyond a cursory check" - even going so far as to admit that "obviously it can be used as a factor", and that it's even a "great thing for certain kinds of classes".

Or to put it more bluntly: As far as I can see, you now seem to have conceded the point I was originally arguing - that arena fights can be a useful tool for balancing classes, as long as it isn't the only method used. If that's the case, and we now actually agree on the matter, I'm not really sure what we're arguing about.



Because if you "balance only for arena combat", that means you're not balancing for other forms of combat.

Now just a moment: I was talking about using it as a tool to balance all classes with each other, as if warriors and wizards can be compared like this. I maintain vigorously that that is a disastrous plan. Now, if you make things more precise and specify that you are only talking about certain kinds of characters, things change, obviously.


Can be a useful tool for balancing comparable classes, yes, not classes in general.


Well, I'm not suggesting to balance only using arena combat, as you might have noticed by now. :smile: Quite the contrary, actually, my position all along has been to discount the importance of arena combats for class balancing (in general, not for specific class combinations).



(EDIT: fixed quotation tags)

If the game design states that a warrior should be twice as effective in basic combat as a cleric of the same level, and three times as effective as a wizard of the same level, then you could verify that requirement by running 100 tests for each of "level 10 warrior vs level 20 cleric", "level 10 warrior vs level 30 wizard" and "level 20 cleric vs level 30 wizard". Leave out the spells and special attacks - this test is just the first step to prove the raw relative strength of each class in basic combat. It'd be a good idea to verify the classes at a variety of different levels, to ensure that they scale properly relative to each other.

It is likely that further balancing will be based on the assumption that the above design requirement is correctly implemented. There is nothing "disastrous" about verifying that fact.

I fail to see how what you propose here is a good test of combat strength. How can you possibly leave out things like skills and spells?

To rephrase my surprise: if this is your definition of "raw relative strength", I'm not sure it's useful for balancing, because you are testing against something that never appears in the real world.

It's kind of like racing cars to find their "raw relative speed", but telling them they can't use their highest gears. Well, ok, you've established something, but it's unclear why it's useful…

In the example proposal I gave? Because one of the requirements in the design states that a warrior should be twice as effective in basic combat as a cleric of the same level, and three times as effective as a wizard of the same level. The purpose of such a test is to prove that the requirement has been met (aka "verification" if you're big on QM).



You are proving the assumption upon which all of the skills and spells are going to be built. You can then go ahead and balance those skills and spells against each other, knowing that inbalances in the next phase of testing aren't caused by false assumptions in the underlying class.

In essence, you're eliminating one of the possible causes of class inbalance - and that's really the only way to do it. There's no such thing as a single universal test of game-balance; you have to take it one step at a time.

I guess that yet again we are operating on very different basic assumptions. It's probably my fault for not specifying that I don't distinguish between classes as far as how the operate in their "raw combat". In other words, I don't have things like different THAC0 charts for classes or different HP gains. It's all based on skills. In fact, what I have been designing is basically a classless system, where a 'warrior' is just somebody who has gone down the warrior skill tree, and a 'wizard' down the mage tree. Therefore, in this context, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to test raw characters without taking into consideration the skills they have chosen, because it is precisely those skills that define the characters and differentiate them from each other.

My proposal for testing the relative strength of different classes was indeed based on the assumption that the mud wasn't actually classless, mostly because this thread was started by someone who was struggling to balance different classes.

However the same general approach could be applied to other types of testing. For example in my mud, players start out unclassed - but they still have a huge variety of possible character builds, so I've used similar tests to compare some of the more popular and/or extreme choices.

My coder likes the attributes option as well, and thinks I'm going over board on some on balancing, but this is what I'm thinking and why…

Since you brought up the Dice formula that sset will allow you to take Attributes into consideration for spell damage, like Intelligence? I don't see it as a problem, because we can still have that in our formula. If we do it hardcoded, there won't be any major changes between one person making a spell to another. Thus I won't have intelligence affecting damage by 100 damage, and the next having it affect it by 10. I am not a fan of having attributes affect damage that much, as in a place where you are trying to balance things, it can throw a big monkey wrench into it.

If we keep attributes affecting it, I would like them to affect the damage at a much smaller percentage. Then of course let players know in the help files, these spells/skills damage are affected by the amount of intelligence, or whatever attribute it is for damage. Does this make sense to anyone? Like I said player killing is an important aspect of my game, that I am balancing things for.

Well, if you don't want the Intelligence to affect it by that much, rewrite your equation so that Intelligence doesn't play as big a part, or do something like I/2 or I/3, or however small you want it to be.