(Mythic) origins of balance

[footpatrol2]

Does anyone want me to move forward? Should each talking point be a separate post? Do you guys want to know?

I have to do things in life right now. I can't respond for hours. I have to shut this down its too much of a distraction for me. To be honest, I shouldn't even be writing this right now.

[tomato]

As an elitist through and through, I feel greatly offended by this thread.

[Razid1987]

As an elitist through and through, I feel greatly offended by this thread.

I thought you felt like a tomato.

[tomato]

No, more like salad today.

[Genisaurus]

This is god-tier bait, and after 20+ pages I'm finally biting. I am compelled to bite, so succulent is the flesh of this bait.

You keep saying, "Mythic wanted this."

Where is your evidence? Do you have an old Grab Bag video stating that racial warbands were an intentional design goal? That the synergy between classes of the same race was supposed to represent anything other than just, "That's how this race operates?" Frankly, I think you're taking a small degree of correlation (Black Orcs have an armor debuff and Choppas do physical damage!), and assuming a large degree of causation. Moreover, there is more evidence that single-race warbands were intended to be crippled in lager play - such as every healer only being able to cleanse 2 out of 3 types of debuffs.

Additionally, you keep saying "Mythic did a good job" regarding anything, and one of those things is specifically "listening to their players." I'd say you were wrong on both accounts, and for evidence I would point to declining subscription numbers every month the game was alive until the company was shut down for what boils down to making a bad game worse. Oh man, remember when they fired their first community manager shortly after she passed the devs a giant list of community suggestions, including "Maybe Engineer spanners shouldn't have strength?" And then they made the change anyway, after the game had been out for a year! Oh boy, what jokers.

Lastly, I find your proselytizing and stance toward the entire community to be somewhat offensive. You can sit there and say that you didn't mean to offend anyone, and that you're "just trying to open our eyes," but let me make clear the assumptions you are implying:
1. Racial warbands synergize so well and are so powerful that they can be better than a diverse warband.
2. This is self-evident to someone who looks for synergy and good warband compositions
3. Nobody else in 7 years - literally over 1 million people - ever realized this.
4. You are the first person to ever have this idea.

The implicit assumption then is that the hordes of min/maxing powergamers that have ever played Warhammer Online in any of its iterations were somehow incapable of seeing these amazing combinations you're raving about. Rather than, you know, taking Occam's Razor to the hypothesis and arriving at the simpler conclusion, "a lot of people have probably thought about this, and dropped it for a good reason."

I mean, you're aware that we have had single-race roleplaying guilds on every server since launch, right? And you're aware that in the world of "competitive" RvR, that these guilds are mostly considered a joke? Don't get me wrong, I love what Bitterstone and all the others do as much as everyone else here - they form a solid backbone of our community, and we would be worse without them - but they do it for roleplaying and for fun. It's not an issue of communication, these guys use voicechat and run together frequently. Yet everyone know they're a themepark. Do you perhaps think it might be because their warband composition is underpowered and their players just prefer the challenge and the roleplaying aspect? That camaraderie of taking the hard road together, where every victory feels even more rewarding for being hard-won?

If your hypothesis were correct, any one of these 6+ guilds would be a much more worrying force in the lakes than they are.

Now if you wanted to have a conversation about what the design direction of Return of Reckoning should be, that's a different question. If that were the topic at hand, you would have a much wider acceptance, much more room to talk, and you would probably catch quite a few minds. Some people would still disagree, and your suggestions might not make it into the game, but we would all generally have more respect for you for pitching some original ideas and trying to add more flavor to the game. This kind of discussion would be the kind of valuable contribution that I and the other devs would love to see our community making toward this game, even if the majority disagrees with the proposition.

But if you're going to insist that this is some secret design principle that Mythic intended and everyone missed the memo on, and that the performance of the Vented, coordinated racial warbands that we already have is just inexplicable... then I'm going to join the overwhelming chorus of people saying you're wrong, and you should be embarrassed for the magnitude of your wrongness.

[Penril]

Geni, you should have just used your "Did Mark Jacobs fall from the sky on angel wings and whisper that into your ear" thingy...

[bloodi]

You guys should seriously stop with all this unconstructive negativity that only an elitist would have.

Open your eyes, drink the cool aid.

[Tklees]

This is god-tier bait, and after 20+ pages I'm finally biting. I am compelled to bite so succulent is the flesh of this bait.

You keep saying, "Mythic wanted this."

Where is your evidence? Do you have an old Grab Bag video stating that racial warbands were an intentional design goal? That the synergy between classes of the same race was supposed to represent anything other than just, "That's how this race operates?" Frankly, I think you're taking a small degree of correlation (Black Orcs have an armor debuff and Choppas do physical damage!), and assuming a large degree of causation. Moreover, there is more evidence that single-race warbands were intended to be crippled in lager play - such as every healer only being able to cleanse 2 out of 3 types of debuffs.

Additionally, you keep saying "Mythic did a good job" regarding anything, and one of those things is specifically "listening to their players." I'd say you were wrong on both accounts, and for evidence I would point to declining subscription numbers every month the game was alive until the company was shut down for what boils down to making a bad game worse. Oh man, remember when they fired their first community manager shortly after she passed the devs a giant list of community suggestions, including "Maybe Engineer spanners shouldn't have strength?" And then they made the change anyway, after the game had been out for a year! Oh boy, what jokers.

Lastly, I find your proselytizing and stance toward the entire community to be somewhat offensive. You can sit there and say that you didn't mean to offend anyone, and that you're "just trying to open our eyes," but let me make clear the assumptions you are implying:
1. Racial warbands synergize so well and are so powerful that they can be better than a diverse warband.
2. This is self-evident to someone who looks for synergy and good warband compositions
3. Nobody else in 7 years - literally over 1 million people - ever realized this.
4. You are the first person to ever have this idea.

The implicit assumption then is that the hordes of min/maxing powergamers that have ever played Warhammer Online in any of its iterations were somehow incapable of seeing these amazing combinations you're raving about. Rather than, you know, taking Occam's Razor to the hypothesis and arriving at the simpler conclusion, "a lot of people have probably thought about this, and dropped it for a good reason."

I mean, you're aware that we have had single-race roleplaying guilds on every server since launch, right? And you're aware that in the world of "competitive" RvR, that these guilds are mostly considered a joke? Don't get me wrong, I love what Bitterstone and all the others do as much as everyone else here - they form a solid backbone of our community, and we would be worse without them - but they do it for roleplaying and for fun. It's not an issue of communication, these guys use voicechat and run together frequently. Yet everyone know they're a themepark. Do you perhaps think it might be because their warband composition is underpowered and their players just prefer the challenge and the roleplaying aspect? That camaraderie of taking the hard road together, where every victory feels even more rewarding for being hard-won?

If your hypothesis were correct, any one of these 6+ guilds would be a much more worrying force in the lakes than they are.

Now if you wanted to have a conversation about what the design direction of Return of Reckoning should be, that's a different question. If that were the topic at hand, you would have a much wider acceptance, much more room to talk, and you would probably catch quite a few minds. Some people would still disagree, and your suggestions might not make it into the game, but we would all generally have more respect for you for pitching some original ideas and trying to add more flavor to the game. This kind of discussion would be the kind of valuable contribution that I and the other devs would love to see our community making toward this game, even if the majority disagrees with the proposition.

But if you're going to insist that this is some secret design principle that Mythic intended and everyone missed the memo on, and that the performance of the Vented, coordinated racial warbands that we already have is just inexplicable... then I'm going to join the overwhelming chorus of people saying you're wrong, and you should be embarrassed for the magnitude of your wrongness.

But will the OP actually read this....

[magicthighs]

You guys should seriously stop with all this unconstructive negativity that only an elitist would have.

Open your eyes, drink the cool aid.

It was Flavor Aid, actually.

[Razid1987]

But will the OP actually read this....

Spoiler: