Frank: So we've got Nate Levy here, from Combat and Careers. Perhaps the most thankless job in the entire company.
Nate: Everybody loves us.
Jeff: *comes in from the side* We at RvR love C&C! *hugs Nate, goes off again*
Frank: Awwww. Team building. So nice. So the first thing I want to ask about is class imbalance. It seems like some kind of wild button stereotype, something you have trouble keeping under control. So tell me a couple of things you do to try and keep the classes fairly balanced and that kind of thing where it's just "oh my god, we made this change and this class is now crazy". What are some of the things you do to sort of minimize that?
Nate: One of the things we do, which is a very strong tool for us, we can pull everything off the servers. We can, we do pull numbers every week on what abilities do people use, hof often do they use them, how much damage do they do, what tactics do they use, what morale do they use? And as we're making our decisions, we can go and say "well, people on the forums and through feedback and through our community are telling us this, this and this, but we see numbers that say this, this and this. If we do this, what is the impact of that going to be? And we can kind of look ahead and go "well, if we make this change that everybody says they want, but what we see in our number is it's the number one damage ability in the entire game, we probably shouldn't go and give it more damage". So we can use a lot of the data to our advantage and we kind of do a little merging of what is the community feedback, what's our number feedback. We put those together, see what shakes out as ringing true and god down that route.
Frank: Some people in the community feel like you don't communicate enough, mostly in terms of providing regular updates in terms of what you're working on. The Archmage/Shaman roadmap, for example, was a good step forward, at least in my opinion about communitcating with the players about specifically what you have planned for classes. Do you feel the same way - or if you don't -
Nate: I actually feel that we communicate quite a lot with the players, but a lot of it is through the community team, it's not us directly. Part of that is pretty simple, it's an hour that we spend posting on the forums is an hour that we're not spending doing balance. We have a fantastic community team that gets a lot of feedback to us. That's something people may not realize: everything they say, it all gets back to us. Myself and the senior career designer have a running sitdown every week with the community team guy and go "okay, what does the communty think, what's the feedback, what's going on right now, what's the current hot potato, what do we need to know". And we're in constant back and forth with them. As the developers, we don't put out as much from us on the forums, partially because there's only so many hours to a day and we need to be doing balance work.
Frank: Adam Gershowitz has also mentioned that it's a very polarizing presence to have a Combat & Careers person...
Nate: Because as soon as a developer or lead or something shows up on a thread, everybody flocks the thread and it goes off track very, very, very quickly. That's why everybody has to get their issues out. We do also have our core testers, which are a small subset of testers which we actually do work much more directly with. And there is quite a lot of direct back and forth between myself and the designers and the core testers. They do get a lot of the plans beforehand and we do a lot of the philosophic "hey, what do you think about that" with them. And it's much, much more manageable to do that when it's a small group. If we'd try to do that thing large scale with the entire playerbase, that would get so out of control that no one would ever get anything done. I think we actually do a considerable amount of player communication but a lot of it is through the community channels and then we get tons of community communication to us. It's a little unfortunate that at times they don't see that their communication comes to us, but -
Frank: But this is what interviews like this are for.
Nate: Absolutely!
Frank: Video evidence. Alright, so let's get into some specifics. Those are the majority of the questions I have to ask. AoE skills and abilites are supposedly a significantly higher value than single target skills for a lot of careers. Was this skill focus accidental or intentional or if that isn't the case, why?
Nate: It's not necessarily that AoEs are higher damage than single targets. In some cases that might be, but overall, very broadly speaking, AoEs are just too good right now.
Frank: Wow, straight from the mouth.
Nate: Everybody knows that, it's not like it's a big secret. You do a scenario, get burned down by five people spamming AoEs. None of them were trageting you, they were all just spamming AoEs and you got caught and you died. It's pretty self-evident that AoEs are too good. Especially when it is just against one or two targets. You really should be using single target stuff against one guy. So we're moving a little in general, just towards how can we make AoE still useful, still productive. If you're fighting eight guys, yeah, you want to be AoEing them. But if it's 1on1, why would you use AoEs? You'll see some changes into that direction coming in 1.3 of just damping down AoEs just a little bit, pushing up single target a little bit. And it doesn't take much, it's only little touches. You'll also see a few changes - you'll see more when the patchnotes come out, but you'll see some changes to the way stats work and how stats contribute to abilities, they will help balance that out. Because right now there are things like a career that has a low damage AoE but piles on a 100 stat and is doing massive damage with their AoE. That's something else we are looking at, okay, how can we make that still productive, you still want your stat, but keep it reasonable.
Frank: Based on that, do the developers plan to review the effective resists and the difficulty in raising resists - like the butchering resist talisman, and high diminishing return are making resists nearly impossible to be raised to hardcap levels and this gives certain classes a high advantage.
Nate: Well, resists should be difficult to be raised to hardcap, that's why there's a hardcap. We really don't want people running around with capped armour, capped resists, capped everything all the time, because really at that point, what's the point? Everybody has everything all the time. We want it to be that if you decide you want this resist, you have to work towards it. You'll get it, you'll cap it out, but you have to make a sacrifice for it, you have to choose "do I really want to get my spirit resist through the roof". I have to accept that my strength is going to go down for it because I'm putting everything I have into it. There should be a tradeoff for it, you shouldn't be able to get everything for free.
Frank: Great. A large part of the tank userbase feels that "we're something of a PvE anachronysm stuck in a PVP world". Interesting. Does Comabt & Careers have any plans to update the archetype as a whole? Like adding incentive to play sword and board or adding utility or reorganising Crowd Control around the tank archetype. That's a comment I see a lot.
Nate: Crowd Control is kind of a general thing that comes up for everybody. Whether you have it or you don't have it, you' ve seen someone complain about it. Crowd Control is one of those things that we really are very, very cautious at doing small changes to because it's so pervasive throughout the game and it affects so many people in so many ways. We're a little lower key on Crowd Control changes in the make. For tanks though, we do very strongly try to give them roles in RvR. That's why they have thing like Hold the Line, where you can set up a wall of tanks in front, they can deliver a pack of people into the combat that otherwise couldn't get there. That's why tanks have things like Taunt that works in RvR, where when you taunt somebody and they choose to ignore you and not fight, you're probably going to wreck them. It's not like PvE, where you hit Taunt and he immediately runs at you, but it's similar. You're the tank, you should be the guy that you want them to come after. You taunt them, that guy thinks "Crap. I really better go and hit that tank" even if only a couple of times, otherwise I'm in trouble. So we do think they were all originally developed like that.
Frank: Let's see here. Oooh, this is a long one. I know balance is an issue, but from my point of view - not mine, but the poster's - it doesn't look like it's being taken seriously. It seems a lot of the mechanics favour Order - that's something I want to hear an answer about - the biggest example I can think of is Ironbreaker vs. Black Guard. Ironbreakers get Grudge easily, they're rewarded for hoarding it. Black Guards have to perform abilites to gain it and they have to spend it to gain benefits. The fact that IBs gain Grudge by guarding and having their damage increased again without doing anything is very contrary to the Black Guard. So that's one example - he was going to use a Sorc vs. Bright Wizard example, but I think that's enough.
Nate: They are probably the most extreme cases where it plays differently. Almost everything else is exactly identical. They actually work very, very different for them, though, it's really not an advantage one way or the other. For the Ironbreaker, if his Oath Friend is getting wailed on by a ton of people, he's going to power up very quickly. But for the Black Guard, he just has to go in and fight and he is going to power up quickly by himself. For the Ironbreaker for example, once his Oathfriend dies, he has to react quickly, put it on someone else, hopefully that person gets attacked. If he's the only person being attacked, it's a little harder for him and if he's trying to be very, very defensive he's going to be burning a lot of his grudge. The Black Guard has a little easier of a time getting at it solo.
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Part 2:
Nate: The Ironbreaker has a little easier of a time going at it grouped. That's really the most extreme example, everything else really is pretty darn even. And I honestly can't even say that it favours one or the other. Now if you ask any solo Ironbreaker if they'd like to gain Grudge as fast as a Black Guard can run off and gain hatred, they'll say "of course we would love to!".
Frank: Right. With the addition of Choppas and Slayers that can do massive damage and wear medium armour, and the pick lock ability and, obviously, the reduction in damage that have happened to Witch Elfs and Witch Hunters, what do you consider the current role of the Witch Elf and the Witch Hunter?
Nate: The Witch Elf and Witch Hunter are still, as the lightest armored DPS, they should still be the most impacting DPS. Because they have the most to risk. The Choppa and the Slayer kind of swing a little bit back and forth, if they are all the way to berserk, they do a lot of damage, but their armour and their resists go the levels below Witch Hunter and Witch Elf. So the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf have some advantage there in that they never really paid that price for their damage, they just have it. Obviously, they also have the stealthing bonus that no one else has, which can be put to pretty good use as long as think about it when you do it. One of the things that we do want to do, like I was talking before about Aoe vs single target stuff, the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf are obviously almost entirely single target damage. They want to come out on someone in the backline, focus on them and burn them down. So in general, as part of our move towards AoEs are a little too good, single target is not good enough, that's apparently going to buff the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf a little bit and bring the Choppa/Slayer down a little bit because one of their paths, a third of their abilities, are AoE. So that's all going to come down a little bit. The Witch Hunter/Witch Elf should be very effective ambush attackers.
Frank: Great. A lot of the answers you're giving me, and I think a lot of the players know them, I'm just goin to challenge you a little bit and say that perception is everything. So at least in my personal opinion, a lot of the point of view in this questions has been "I'm feeling this pain and I'm seeing this issue" and obviously you have explained some of the way the mechanics work, but what do you think you might be able to supply to players in order tu help them understand a little bit better about the whole global view of how class balance works.
Nate: Especially purely from a player's perspective, it's very, very difficult for anybody to think outside of what they are seeing and they're experiencing and feeling. If you're just playing your one character, and you're losing all the time you're obviously going to feel like your character is underpowered. It may very well be the case that standing 10 feet away is someone of your same career who's doing extraordinarily well, they feel "wow, I'm on top of the world". It's very, very difficult to address perceptive issues with mechanical changes. We try to keep our eye on, from the top down, very high level, how is everything working together. When we see that the entire community is all very vocal about one issue, we go and do the research and we see "is this really broken, is this really underpowered", and sometiems we find out that numbers show "well, this really is not doing enough damage" or "hey, we went to test this and we found out there is this bug, we should get that taken care of".
Frank: Do you think that metrics and numbers might actually help a little bit even though not everyone's a theory crafter, but perhaps they might want to know "this is the result of our test" or anything. How do you have to balance that, though?
Nate: It's honestly not as much use solely on a personal basis because if you have your issues that you personally feel good or bad about, be that as it may, and you see numbers for anything, the numbers don't matter because you know all your experiences. The numbers are more of a kind of supplemental tool for us. How can we put numbers to the players' concerns. We know there's this concern, we know there's this kind of emotional feedback about it, but how can we really quantify and see what's actual?
Frank: As far as trying to glean the best kind of feedback from the players in terms of Combat & Careers, what are some of the callouts that you would like the community to convey to you or the community team so they can best gahter feedback. Because I think that players will put down anecdotal accounts, some of them will crunch numbers, an dother people would just go off and rant off at you. But what are the things that people can do as players to be able to convey their concers properly? Are there really one or two or three things someone can do?
Nate: In general, the most useful feedback is specific feedback. If someone gives us feedback of "my career sucks" - okay. What about your career sucks? You know, if someone says "wow, I really think this and this and this feel underpowered, they don't seem like they do enough damage and this other guy with similar stuff is doing better than me" then that at least gives us something to look at. What is it about this, why is this underperforming?
Frank: How many people are on your team actually, I'm just curious?
Nate: A decent handful of four or five directly under me on the team, to make balances changes.
Frank: Wow. How do you keep sane in this kind of environment where changes can happen, you can have this one small change here and it has these massive implications. Sometimes you don't see them until the live patch. How do you kind of keep yourself grounded?
Nate: A lot of is it - I play too. When patch day goes up, I see the impact just as much as everybody else. A lot of it is just keeping in mind "if I do this, how will this also affect players" and to think about it as a player. "We really could give Witch Elfs and Witch Hunters a one-shot instant kill on a one-second cooldown" but then you think about it and go "it's just not the best thing to do". That's the kind of thing where, if you look at it just purely mechanically, you say "well sure it's insta-kill, but realistically, that's 10 DPS overall, that's no bigger DPS over the long term". But then you kinda switch your brain over to "and on aptch day I log in and go wow, this sticks".
Frank: I'm not sure how much you can talk about 1.3, but what are some of the things that you think you've been spending the most work or ressources on as you approach the next sort of major patch?
Nate: 1.3 has been a lot about large scale balance. So most of the ressources we have put towards have been on this general, broad-scope, gamewide "let's make lots of little nudges, a little nudge here, a little nudge there" on a larger scope let's see if we can get everything that we can addressed.
Frank: Great. In terms of the way that you've been putting patches out, some folks have said that these huge, giant patches, 55 pages of patch notes and things like that. Sometimes, if you don't have the right testing cycle, they tend to create more problems than they solve. Do you agree or understand that maybe patches need to be taken in smaller increments or do you still favour this whole chunk?
Nate: A lot of it is back and forth on what we're acutally doing. For example, let's say that all the tanks have a problem we need to fix. We can fix one this month, one the next month, one the month after that and the guy at the end of the chain is going tt be feeling pretty crappy. Because everyone else is getting fixed and he's like "when are you getting to me, guys? when are you getting to me, guys?" And there it would be better to do all at once. But at the same time, we can't just save everything up and save it and save it and save it or else we will never get done. So what we're doing is we're trying to hit the fine point of balance between how much can we do all at once and at the same time, how can we keep everything sane.
Frank: Are you happy with your current patching cycle time? From the time that you begin work on the next patch to PTS testing and finally releasing? There's some stuff about players feeling that the test period isn't long enough but I don't know what other factors get in to that in terms of the normal huge development timeline you're following.
Nate: No no, it's always nice to have a longer test period. But you also have to remember that we are working some couple of months ahead. So some of the things we work on now might not be seen until three or four months down on the read. So if we have a very, very long test period, PTS testing, we can get all the feedback from that testing but it's not necessarily going to get changed during the course of that test because we're working ahead. And oyu also kind of shoot yourself in the foot by having people say "now we have played and tested for two months and we gave all that feedback and you didn't act on a single thing of it". It's kind of hard for us to say "yeah yeah we know but it's going to be in the next patch, we took your feedback and we worked it into that". At that point it's also a little harder to say "we heard you, but we didn't do anything right then". So that's kind of another balancing act, but the longer we can test, the better feedback we can get, the more feedback we can get but we also don't want to go to long. Otherwise people get itchy about "when?"