I've done sandbox FPS PvP balances before, AMA (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, February 09, 2017, 17:10 (2890 days ago) @ BeardFade

As a former lead production tester, I've done a few sandbox PvP playtests for balance in my day. I've also had the honor of working directly with the devs who write the actual code for pvp balance on a handful of games.

"How can they fix it if they're so bad?"

The devs rarely, if ever, play their games in a competitive way. They usually want to see if the new thing they did works, or see the new thing someone else put into the game. There are usually a handful of exceptionally high skill devs, and those guys are typically of the following varieties:

- Top tier god level player who doesn't understand why other people can't beat his "simple" challenges which require pixel-perfect accuracy and millisecond-specific timing.

- Really really good players who insist on rebalancing the meta to fit their exact play style, letting them feel like god tier players when they really aren't. These guys often reinforce the god tier dev's opinions: "See? When shotguns were the only meta, Jim could finish my challenge, but now that you broke weapon balance he can't." But the actual problem is that the challenge is too hard. I hope that explanation makes sense.

- Terrible players who don't know why they're even working on an FPS. They just want to dance! These guys often have great insight, since they're always coming at the game from the perspective of a noob, but they also frequently discount their insight as "I'm just not very good" instead of truly identifying what's wrong. I include these guys in the "high skill" category here because they are incredibly highly skilled at being noobs, which is actually very, very difficult (possibly the most difficult thing) to do in terms of playtesting.

"Do they even test this?"

Yes, I'm sure they do. We playtested the crap out our games at every company I worked for. Balance is always being tested. So what gives? Honestly, I don't know. Hazarding a guess, I'm going to assume that bungie does not give its playtesters any respect when it comes to design elements. It certainly looks that way to me. Bungie also seems to ignore the meta when making changes, and seems prone to blanket nerfs once every few months rather than small adjustments on a more frequent basis (which is my preference in all cases). It's also possible that most people respect the hell out of the playtesters, but one head honcho type guy absolutely refuses to listen to reason and dictates "my way or the highway" to everyone beneath him. This would mesh with the shakeups we saw before the game launched, as well as changes since launch on a grander scale. It might not even be a Bungie employee; this could be edicts from Activision on High. I would also believe that (though, having worked at Activision and knowing Vohnderhaar personally, I would be very - VERY - surprised if it came out of his office. Either he's not involved in Destiny or it's someone over his head making the calls).

There's a third, sadder option, and that's that bungie is using a metrics-bases approach to game balance. This seems to be the case, since they LOVE to trot out the metrics and show us charts about which classes have the higher K/Ds etc.. The problem with a fully metrics-based approach is that if your metrics are off at all, you screw up the balance. For example, Bungie is showing us that Defenders have the lowest K/D and says "so they need a buff." No. No they don't. Your metrics aren't looking at how having a defender on the team improves the K/D of the surrounding players. K/D is not everything. If you pretend it is, then your balance will suck. This is, imo, the most likely scenario. Everyone means well, but the methodology they put in place to determine balance is fundamentally flawed and no one is going to bother to fix it at this stage in the game's life. Des2ny *might* go differently, but I have zero hope that D1 will. It's just too much work to fix with too little return.

Anyway, that's all just guesswork. The point is that I firmly believe there are testers who know that the play balance is fucked. There are coders who know it, too. I feel like the corporate culture around the game is the real hindrance, preventing positive changes, probably despite the best interests of everyone involved.

We can also infer from the way that most changes are blanket changes that the code of Destiny simply doesn't allow for weapon specific tweaks outside of exotics. That means whole classes of weapon have to change, which becomes a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. Poor design at a fundamental level, most likely due to the PvP being an addition to the PvE game and not the basic building block upon which the rest of the game was constructed.

Anyway, if anyone has balance questions or playtesting questions (including methodology), feel free to ask me. I spent a lot of time making games and have very strong opinions on them as a result of my experience, as I'm sure you all know.