Just because the majority does not use something does not in fact make it useless. There are more variables involved than just taking the data on how much a skill is used. Going your path would just be balancing things to the masses, removing the chance for others to rise to the top based on their ability to see opportunities where others can not. The usefulness of a skill is not cut and dry, and it is definitely not always possible to determine just by how many people are using it.

I can also tell you plenty of times there are arguments among the envoys on whether some skill is useful or not, because things are not always cut and dry. While some people may have a problem using a skill well in combat, you have other people who find dazzling ways to use the same skill. The judgments people make on whether a skill is worth using must also include how much effort those same people are willing to find a use for it. Like I have said before, creativity is not equally spread across the spectrum of combatants. Some create ways to accomplish things, and others follow in their footsteps. Sometimes those others seem to be completely unable to follow in a person's footsteps, even when the person gives them the exact information on the methods they use.

So in summary, what the masses consider useful or not is a poor indicator on whether something is actually useful or not.

Personally, I think that the skills that can be used in dazzling ways are the exception, rather than the rule. I think the masses have a decent idea of what makes a useful skill.

With that said, I don't believe that every skill should be useful. It's not possible. You can only enter one command every X seconds, you'll -have- to make the choice sometime.

Sure, it'd be really, really nice to have every skill be useful, but that's just never going to be the case, as I see it.

Sap isn't my most used skill. Does that mean it's underpowered?

@geb Dont base it just on total numbers....

Yeah, of course there are exceptions geb, but you still get the data, to base changes on to attract people to use diffrent skills.

And yes there are people making a new 'metagame' of abilities to use, but those are rare exeptions.

If you could pull out reports, for example what the top combatants of have used in the last month, you get some data that would prove to be useful for balancing out some new changes.

For example you could get info of what blademasters have used pinleg as 90% of their offense or for more obscure ones who has used the clumsiness toxin envenomed vs mantakaya & dendroxin.

Or measure what instakill has highest success rate (which class kills most by instakills)

Or what power skills that has been used in combat for .. alot you can do with statistic to bring changes that arn't biased.

@myndaen, they could be useful in their 'catagory' be in a instakill, travel ability, affliction for purpose(paralyse vs clumsiness vs dendroxin is a good one. Who uses clumsiness toxin?) etc..


anyway i made my point of idea ;P

I disagree, because too many times I have seen the masses possess poor information on what some skill can do, when is a good time to use some skill, or how well to combine some skill with another. I've also seen plenty of times people complain about something, because they've heard others complain about it. Also, plenty of times some consider something overpowered, when all it took were just an adjustment in how one fights to deal with it. Granted there are times that the masses do agree, but truthfully I weight the opinions of those who have demonstrated an ability to figure out how things work on their own more than I weight the opinion of the general population. In real life a prudent person does not take the opinion of a layman over the opinion of a recognized master of a particular subject.

My experience in this realm has taught me not to take on face value what the masses may consider useless, impossible, or under/overpowered. I will listen more intently to those who have shown an ability to rise above the masses and accomplish things, but even then I feel it is prudent to go test things out for myself. That is even why when people ask me about tactics, I explain to them that they should not just take what I say as the definitive answer; they should also go and test things out for themselves. Those who learn to do that seem to be the ones who also become capable of rising above what the masses consider possible.

Somewhat, but here's the thing/s:

1 - Demesnes produce different effects. They don't all affect groups the same way. So, you have to find some way to determine if demesnes are equitable.

2 - There are enemy/ally effects that are not demesne related (see Bards). How do you balance those with each other and against demesnes?

3 - Demesnes hinder, deliver afflictions, deliver damage, sometimes deliver sleep or hunger, and sometimes move people around. How does this figure into the "you demesne" versus "you keep him still" and "you kill him" dynamic?

4 - Not all ways of keeping still are created equal. How do you make them equitable, and if you make them equitable, are you creating imbalances somewhere else? For instance, how do you compare vines versus deepsleep in terms of balance? They're both designed to keep people still, but the factors involved in how they're used, cured, complexity, and synthesis with other abilities to weigh together would make for a very complex discussion. And that's just two abilities.

5 - What about passive versus active effects? How much less powerful should a passive effect be to balance with an active one?

6 - Sometimes, there's more than one bastard, and even if your group is doing single targets (which seems to be easier said than done, in practice), the Chain of Bastard Killing Priority is constantly shifting depending on who dies and who leaves. So, are effects that affect all enemies "better" than effects that affect one person? Does it depend on the effect? What about damage?

I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just trying to illustrate that even small-scope balance discussions can be complicated, much less trying to balance all character classes around one of those factors. What possible common denominator could you even use to "balance" hindering methods? You'd have to take into account availability of the ability, ease of curing, duration, complexity to pull off, and the relative strength of other abilities that get used with it. Even doing that for just two classes would be a very long discussion trying to compare attributes that don't even compare easily, and that's just talking about hindering abilities!

I don't know. I look at all these calls for "balance," and most of them to me look like, "Class P does activity Q consistently better than I do. I should be able to do activity Q just as well, or they should not be able to do it as well." Considering how pretty different the abilities and potential combination of abilities are in each class, I just don't see how you're going to do it with the level of granularity people want unless you create a lot more similarity. And I think the seemingly endless debates about this or that ability or class on the forums illustrate this point.

And that's why Geb's the best

Akui: I went to sleep!
Daevos: Precisely my opinion. I'm not talking about JUST group combat, it's just easiest to present it from that perspective. I'm also talking about utility skills and things that are useful to groups like astrology and tracking.
Xinemus: It looks a lot like you're giving up. Everything you said can be applied to a lot of stuff in Lusternia, and I don't accept "it's really complicated" as a reason to not try and get some basic principles out there.

Well, first of all, I'd have to think balance needed fixing, and nobody's convinced me of that, yet, to any great extent. Monks could use some work, probably, but that's largely because they were just released. So, it's not so much giving up as not yet being convinced I need to sign up.

Second of all, I do think there's a generic sense of if something's out of balance, but this happens at a pretty general level, and I think actually knowing what to fix and how to fix it involves having pretty intimate knowledge of all the classes, which few players have. From the discussions I've seen so far, I don't think hardly anyone has even the first idea of how to address the issue of balance that does justice to all the factors involved, so to keep the discussion manageable, they pick one.

The problem with picking one, though, is that you can't balance around one aspect of a character's constitution. Let me offer an example:

Back in UO, Bards were bashing machines. Their skills enabled them to solo the strongest creatures in the game. However, they were incredibly weak when it came to anything else, especially PvP.

Well, the other players complained long enough about the Bard's amazing bashing ability, which far surpassed all the other classes, and the admins scaled their skills down in the name of "balance." Nobody thought one class should outstrip all the others in bashing.

The problem, of course, is that Bards went from Excellent Bashers/Terrible PvPers to Average-Above Average Bashers/Terrible PvPers. Even though their bashing aspect had been "balanced," they were now way out of balance with the other classes, and the main reason anyone wanted to play a Bard to begin with went away, and people left the class in droves. Sure, they could have bumped up the PvP abilities, and they should have, but that would have just made the Bard class the same as, say, a Mage.

If you look at Bards in Achaea, something similar happened. Bards there were Below Average Bashers/Below Average PvPers/Above Average Tanks/Excellent Group Support. Well, abilities got smooshed and moved around, and they became Average Bashers/Average PvPers/Above Average Tanks/Below Average Group Support. Did this really help anybody? Well, a lot more people joined the class who were interested in single combat, but my motivation to play one went out the door, because I always loved being group support.

To bring this a little closer to home, when Bards were Below Average Bashers/Below Average PvPers/Above Average Tanks/Excellent Group Support, people would complain that their tanking abilities needed to be "balanced" because no other class had tanking abilities that were as good, and that was unfair. Their abilities to heal needed to be nerfed in the name of "balance." Well, that wouldn't have balanced the Bard class at all. It just would have made them suck more. But people latched on to their one "balancing factor" and couldn't see the forest for the trees.

So far, that's more or less what I'm seeing here - a rather large number of people who feel they are behind the curve in a particular thing and feel all classes should be at the same level at that one thing. I just think there's a bigger picture than that.

Yes, I see a lot of that. I'm not referring to monks (or rather, not solely them) but all of this 'grass is greener' tends to overlook other facets. People see one or two things a class is better at than their class, or even most others, but don't see where that class is behind the curve in other facets.

Can you give me more information on this "bigger picture"? I have no idea whatsoever about UO, but looking at your bard example, they went from awesome basher to ok basher and terrible pvper to terrible pvper. You then say they should have been upgraded in terms of pvp, but also that that would have made them the same as a mage. Why? There are ways to have different -styles- without things being out of whack. In starcraft, Zerg and protoss are both, in the end, able to win a game of starcraft roughly as easily, even though they're not the same. There is room for different roles without everything being cookie cutter AND without one class having much more relevance than any other. If you don't have it set up so every class is equal in solo pvp, one class will always beat another even if the players are of equal skill, which is boring and should be avoided if a game is to be fun. A similar principles applies to general usefulness - one class is Just Better - and the fact that numbers, location and coordination competence are also factors don't obfuscate the matter quite enough to avoid looking at it altogether.

Even if you accuse people of feeling they're behind the curve in a particular thing and wanting to get ahead, if the envoys aren't like that then it doesn't matter, and if the envoys are like that then we're screwed even with the current system. Getting additional direction can't really hurt.

Actually, it could hurt which is why I don't make sweeping or closed-ended statements of what is "expected" from balancing. In other words, sometimes thinking out of the box, without worrying about what is expected or being confined to strict guidelines, produces stronger and more creative suggestions, solutions and ideas.

I don't think that's worked out here. I always heard that restrictions breed creativity, though maybe that isn't true all the time.

People claimed bonecrusher sucked until people actually used the skills properly (now everyone says blademaster is crap in comparison, the exact opposite of roughly a year and a half ago... *shrug*)

Well, bonecrusher has gotten upgrades since then.

Even before the upgrades, there were bonecrushers who were beating the snot out of people. While the masses were saying they sucked, a few creative ones were kick arse and taking names.

Oh, and bonecrushers also received some downgrades before those upgrades.

Well, Bards now have Glamours, and with speed eq recovery, you could plant a number of afflicts on a person. Match that with the improved-magical-damage ability, you could do good in combat.

Demetrios was talking about UO bards, not Lusternian ones.

Murphy has been a BC forever. It has always been a matter of being creative, and working on your offence without regard to feeling 'underpowered' or anything else.

This is part of why you can't use usage to measure ability strength without impractically large data collection.

The choice to use any ability at any given time is based on the particular situation and the marginal advantages of that ability over alternatives.

In addition, abilities that require substantial set up would need to have some sort of coefficient that accounts for this. I don't use stag stomp, for example, as often as I might because the target needs to be prone for me to break legs with it, which, as a pureblade, means that I'm not going to have as many opportunities as, in a general sense, a bonecrusher who is otherwise identical to Akui. Thus, such coefficients would either have to be somewhat sloppily assigned by "well I think this is a good rule", (which is sort of self defeating for the whole exercise), or determined through some complex analysis of the likelihood of the conditions arising where it becomes the most marginally useful ability to use. This is, as in the above example, compounded by shared skillsets between different classes and alternative skillset choices.

So, while it may be technically possible, it's probably never going to be worth the exercise.




I agree with Geb, though my reasoning doesn't really come from the game itself. People in general operate on feedback loops. X did A, so Y becomes more likely to do A as well, and because X and Y did A, Z is even more likely to do the same. With something like a game, we have competing loops among classes and specs and such, but ultimately the vast majority of players relies heavily on mimicry, especially in their learning stages (myself included). It's not a bad thing, it's one of the particularly efficient ways that human beings learn- think of how much small children learn from copying the actions of others.

When people suddenly realize the usefulness of an ignored ability, it's usually a loop in itself stemming from one or two people finding out that a previously poo-poo'd ability is actually much better than thought, and the idea spreading rapidly from there. The system really relies on people like Geb and Murphy above, who have the experience, willingness, and knowledge to break out of the learned behaviors, or even on people who just have the willingness to try, and, like an archer shooting in the dark, sometimes hit a target.

But as Geb was saying, this, too, is why mere usage of an ability doesn't provide a particularly effective measure of one ability against another. It mostly says "Yes, this ability is useable for some acceptable effect", and little else.