Quote from D3adsThe X-Files, if you've never watched them... currently watching season 2, still the best American drama series ever made!
it just keeps going, only the two last seasons are really bad. but that still means 7 seasons of godlike tv series
the first 3 seasons of supernatural were good if you liked an x-files vibe
i reckon there's no chance this will ever get released outside of origin?
Quote from TaylorHe doesn't have time to win the internet. He's solving Chaos Theory.
stops arguing because of indifference, leaves spiteful remark about arguments... scumbag taylor
Quote from 2d-chrisI think that's a big problem today in that most people want results simply too fast. Of cource a few are very talented and with the right advice can get there very quickly, it's not everyone though
this is a very valid point. there was this guy who wrote that 10000 hours of work in a single field would make you an expert in that field. i think it's spot on basically. degrees may earn you merits and possibly connections, but in order to get skills you just need to work. hard.
Quote from e-freakDisplay MoreBasically game art courses boil down to two facts:1) Most course teachers usually really suck, unless they only come in for one or two courses and spend the rest of the time in the actual industry.
2) Most students usually really suck, because they have been told that this would be the right thing to do with a World of Warcraft Addiction and an over proportional amount of time spend on drawing Manga figures but can't be bothered to learn a 3D software or the basics of Object Orientation unless some one is babysitting them through it.
I'm a student and a lecturer right now (and trying to break the above pattern for both), as I'm writing my thesis from february on but I left uni 20 months ago because it didn't help me get anywhere. I went back to it because you need a degree (or years of experience and a good lawyer) to get out of europe (visas and work permits). Now I'm doing one day a week as a student and half a day as a lecturer and spend the rest in the company or with the team of (former) students that formed a small indie-team.
It pisses me off how much bullshit some of the professors are talking about stuff that they never experienced in the industry. At the same time I see enough students that will quit a course because they realise they'd have to invest time outside the lectures into it or get their technical issues sorted out by them selves to be able to follow the courses' speed.
My lesson on the entire thing: Use the university as an environment where you can do your own projects and get a degree for it. If a professor or lecturer knows his stuff, consult him and try to avoid the rest of them. Get some motivated people on your team (not even the most talented but those who are willing to learn and invest time) and then get the degree done as fast as possible.
Last but not least, the best meme on the internet:
agreed, so many teachers have nothing good to say, and some even harbor resentment towards the industry. i do believe that there are more theoretical things that need to be made/discovered/created for games, but right now around 90% of it is bullshit. but i'm thinking it's a phase, and that over time more people will get a more balanced view on both the industry and academia of games, that there is somehow a way that includes both. the games industry is still young, and the game academia is even younger, so it'll probably be a few score of years before anything happens to bind them together.
relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria
Schmitzberger stated, "[w]hat they are, I am not at liberty to disclose, but we will not stand for the Fucking signs being removed. It may be very amusing for you British, but Fucking is simply Fucking to us. What is this big Fucking joke? It is puerile."
Quote from TaylorI’m trying to avoid a quoteathon and distil this down to something manageable. My argument was that you can’t criticize something as 100% factually bad simply because it allows imbalance as the inevitable little imperfections can be enjoyable. Your argument seems to be that that perfection is actually achievable and thus my argument is irrelevant because any desired imperfections can simply be designed in.
i don't know if it is achievable, right now i am persuaded to think that it is. but either way, to a certain point it should be possible to measure balance objectively, since it's a part of a logical system. and yes, having that data would allow for better designs, and give further insight in how to better game experiences.
So the onus is on you to show us these tools, methods and procedures for making a game of massive complexity perfectly balanced while highly customisable and scalable; because as far as I’m aware you are dealing entirely with unsubstantiated theory. While there certainly are known techniques for helping you with balance generally their goal is information, as balance is currently handled more as an art than a science; and thus flaws are innate.
it isn't unsubstantiated, but it is vaguely defined at this point because balance is huge subject to deal with. i've already done a fair share of research in subjects that touch upon balance, but you can't expect someone to dig up a theory that fits perfectly overnight and uses all possible valid references to back it with. i already stated that i don't have any of the above mentioned tools or methods yet, and that i'm working on trying to see if it is possible to have them in the first place.
in the end, game balance is still a subset of game design, and design in itself is a merger of art and science. maybe balance will become next in the list of unanswered game design questions like, "what is atmosphere/immersion/narrative/etc.?"; and then all of this would be goddamn trivial. but hey, maybe, JUST MAYBE it could be something that could be discovered and used in games.
i can attest that this is a path that will move you towards suicide. doing stuff like this is exceptionally frustrating.
i don't know where you are based, but maybe i could get you in contact with people that have a line of study that would be interesting to you?
other than that, i greatly appreciate the studies of architecture, computer science and psychology. they may not be directly related to game design, but they are still things that are reiterated very much in it.
concept sounds interesting, what types of spells are there? are they skillshot based?
Quote from TaylorYou said the WoW Skill Trees could never be balanced because of differences per tier. I was trying to suggest a little bit of injustice in the tiers is fine, if not better, than clinically balancing everything to be even.
i realize that i have been unclear here. i meant tier as in level. so a tier would consist of any class of max level in a given match area (e.g. a special pvp zone for level 20-24 or similar). i didn't actually consider that you might have meant something else a la tier lists until now. my bad.
Choice and perfect balance are mutually exclusive in any practical application. Each meaningful choice you give the player is going to drive things more and more towards imbalance because it’s exponentially adding variables each time. Theoretically all this could be tracked and perfectly balanced, for better or worse, but I can’t see this happening in practice.
i don't see how you can equate imbalance with depth of complexity. no doubt it would be harder to balance out, but saying it would be impossible in practice? please, we live in an age where billions of units of information can be processed per second. it would absolutely be doable given the right tools and methods.
Companies don’t release tier lists because they design the game hoping everything is going to be even (ignoring comedy characters like Dan) but this is rarely the case. Sometimes the imbalances are
you wonder how they managed to ship but other times even years on people don’t agree as you say. Ono (SFIV producer) came out and said they purposely make characters stronger than others but I think he was trying to save face because Arcade Edition had Yun, Fei Long and Viper dominating so much the top players all dropped their main characters for them.External Content www.youtube.comContent embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.
i don't understand how a company could ever be as arrogant as to consider everything in a game perfectly balanced without any proper validation of this beforehand. i mean, in the case of SFIV, the designers must have had some sort of idea of what was going on when they designed the characters, and must have known that some characters would seem much better than others. i would have figured they would have seen the feedback from previous games, seen the tier lists created and acknowledged that perfecting a balance without any form of procedure for doing so would not make the game balanced.
Anyway, I don’t think Fighter approaches like tier lists or match-up charts really apply to a game like WoW because the fundamental mechanics make it hard or impossible to outplay the difference. At least in the video I just linked Tager still has to make a mistake before he takes 40% damage and is vomited to the other end of the obstacle course. It’s stacked but it’s not unwinnable, however this is not the case with WoW PvP. If you look at team compositions for Arena this season they’re almost exclusively based around legendary equipped Rogues. If you went in with some “low-tier” composition and/or gear disadvantage then how well you play is fairly irrelevant.
i never mentioned tier lists in my original post.
From a competitive point of view this is the main problem with the game; not the numbers, statistics, formulas, skill trees or whatever else. The root cause is WoW was designed as a PvE game and retro-fixed for PvP much later. It launched with a lot of easily identifiable problems (Ex: Stun Lock) and the delay on the honour system seemed to suggest they thought most people wouldn’t be too interested in it.
it might be true that the design of the skill trees originally may not have been with pvp in mind, but that still doesn't qualify them as well designed in the current state they are used in present day. it also goes to show that not enough thought was put into something that turned out to be a major game element. i would go so far as to say that the game isn't well designed simply because the designers didn't think these things through beforehand.
It absolutely is not moot because, as you have just spent several paragraphs explaining, designers don't actually know how to make their asymmetrical games perfectly balanced.
yes...
In a real project you will need to make this decision.
...and this is precisely why the point is moot. the decision is the answer to that question; and the decision is open for debate.
thanks, much appreciated!
what about the ladders and everything? the reason i ask is because i made something similar some time back and the reason i stopped was actually the lack of assets...
it's a given that it looks awesome. i'm also a bit curious as to how you managed to create some of the holes in the displacements, especially those that seem asymmetric. this was also a major problem of mine.
i never said that skill trees were incapable of balance, i said that the current implementation of skill trees that are perceived as balanced or well designed, in fact, aren't. does this mean that skill trees are incapable of balance? no. does this mean that there aren't skill trees that are well balanced? no. what it means is that i am refuting the claim that the skill tree of e.g. wow is not balanced or indeed well designed, and that many mmo's haven't balanced their skill trees because the designers behind them have little to no clue on how to balance them. currently this is done on a trial by error base, in the form of playtesting.
i'm advocating that there could be theoretical ways of balancing a game out; perhaps not in a complete way, but as a catalyst that would improve the base of the balance in a game faster than the amount of playtesting it would have to go through to reach the same level. i obviously don't have the answer, but i think it's something that could be interesting to create.
as for your controversial subject, first off: de gustibus non est disputandum. i cannot account for what you or anyone else likes in a game, nor is this in my interest for the subject at hand. i also think that you're arguing something a bit different here. choice and perfect balance are not mutually exclusive factors in a game. you can choose to play a class or character that has trade-offs if you are so inclined, with whatever implications this has for the match or match-up. but giving yourself a handicap in this way should have no effect on the overall balance of the game; this is your choice in the game, not a choice that the game does for the sake for balance.
secondly, balance is a fickle thing. how would you go about defining balance in a game? how would you go about measuring balance in games? you mention tier lists; most if not all tier lists are not made by the companies releasing the game, but rather as a subjective gauge from seasoned players. while these players usually know what they are talking about, they still make mistakes, and they are still learning from the game. since tier lists are dealt in the realm of subjectivity (at least at the time of writing), they are too baseless to use as a method of properly gauging balance. however, i concede that i would consider any official tier list released from a game company for a given game the gold standard of balance for that game for no other reason than i would expect them to have done the calculations beforehand. this is probably why game companies do not release tier lists.
and even if they did, chances are that those tier lists would be highly theoretical and nowhere near as thoroughly tested as those lists that are created after a game has been released for years. i don't have a universal answer for the above questions, but i just recently submitted an academic paper on balance in games, where i used a pragmatic approach in trying to define balance and use it in competitive games as well as attempting to devise formulas of balance. it's barely scratching the surface of all of this, and by no means something i would call finished, but at least it shows how deep the implications of balance actually are, and what you take into account when you try to "balance" something in a game. if it gets accepted, i can let you know.
but i digress. ultimately, the question of whether "perfect" balance is necessary or even desirable for any given game is moot. however, all game designers should at least be able to attain to the knowledge of creating perfect balance in any given game, simply because this insight would allow them to create games of any level of balance below "perfect". or if it isn't possible to attain "perfect" balance, then at least attain the closest upper bound to it.
are those standard textures for ep2?
i'm kind of hesitant to play with you... but i guess it doesn't really matter as long as it's beta.
Quote from Jake Gilladouble click on the hero's avatar image. or just change the mouse scrolling speed. why would you use arrow keys for that?
Because that is what the camera controls default to.
Edit: Again, I must not be playing the game right, because I can't figure out why you'd ever want the camera NOT centered on your hero.
to scout out distances, to use skillshot based abilities etc. it's a utility function that you need in a game like dota. clockwork's rocket ability or pudge's hook are just two examples of why you need it not centered. also i think recentering on hero key is c, which is also very useful.
product does not exist...
but that's the thing, something that is balanced is not necessarily dry. not every game has a balance as symmetrical as chess, and most games actually strive to create an asymmetrical balance. there isn't much research done on game balancing though, aside from games that have mirrored sides (which is a given basically), and most designers probably aren't fully aware of the implications of balancing a single object, so they come into the problem of creating imbalance instead. but i want you to understand that there is a difference between just having a mirrored game and having a balanced game - balanced games can have variety too. even mirrored games can.
for the most part i would agree with you, that there are few facts in design in general. but in creating mechanics and balance, games are a systematic construct. everything in a game happens for a reason - if you attack an opponent, there is a calculation for whether or not you hit the opponent. as such, one can deduct everything within the system of the game... including the game balance. that this formula may factor in things such as chance, items, difference in advancement (like game level differences between players) and difference in classes does not mean that it doesn't exist, it just means that it is that much more difficult to even out.
there is this guy called david sirlin who wrote a four part article on balancing multiplayer games, and basically he mentions in superficial terms how a multiplayer game can be balanced, and how it can even balance itself out (sort of like a cybernetic system). i recommend reading it, because it does give some basic insight into how balance works. and also just because it's one of the only genuine reads i have found on game balance.
part 1 can be found here (links to the other parts are somewhere on the page): http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancin ... tions.html
