Originally Posted by PhoenixDog
My fear...And I'm not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread yet or not...Is balance. The big problem WoW had was balancing a PvE game in regards to PvP, moreso towards e-Sports. I'm concerned that if SoE pursues a e-Sports type environment, even with a dedicated server restricted to invitees...That certain flaws with this type of structure may be pronounced, and thus balanced on the live servers, skewing the balance of the real game.
Obviously balancing WoW between PvP and PvE is much different than with Planetside 2 which is 100% PvP...But having a game balanced around massive 2000 player battles is much different than with say 50v50 or even 100v100.
All I'm getting at is as long as they don't try and tune the game we are all enjoying to balance a smaller version of it...I really don't care either way. XoO may even delve into the idea as an outfit. But I play this game for the large scale PvP. I don't want it to be balanced for small scale.
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Agreed.
Balancing asymmetrically is a bitch. SC1 and SC2 are one of the very very few esports games that manage to have different abilities and strategies for each side. Development took so long because balancing asymmetric factions is very difficult. You need to get loads of data to do that - with SC2 you can just let alpha testers loose and parse the data, afterwards tweak the stats, rinse repeat until you get even wins.
PS2 however.. balancing is going to be very difficult. War is inherently unbalanced and I think PS2 is supposed to be more of a war simulator than a sport. Those two are opposite directions and I'm pretty sure that features which make it a better esports game also are detrimental to the war simulator experience.
Edit:
In addition it's hard to get reliable metrics with PS2. It's open nature means you can't reliably quantify the context of the events on which you're collecting data. With PS2 everything is interlinked, not segmented, therefore the only metrics of use are low level (kills per weapon, most preferred weapon, K/D ratios ect) - but if you give a AOE howitzer to NC and a nerve gas bomb to NC, comparing those two becomes impossible.
And I'd like to have different weapons for different factions. I really would.