Age of Conan dev on class moaning

By Robert Purchese Published 1 June, 2011

"It's so inherently biased."

When the Age of Conan community moans about class changes, executive producer Craig Morrison knows his game isn't an isolated case - "You go to any MMO forum and you look for PVP balance discussions and you'd think the game was the worst balanced pile of crap you've ever seen."

Morrison, speaking to Eurogamer, declared MMO class balance - not just in Age of Conan - an "eternal argument".

"Whenever you have balance changes it's almost impossible to get neutral or actual feedback from a forum on whether they like the nature of a balance change, because it's so inherently biased towards their class preference," said Morrison.

"They're not actually considering the balance of the game as a whole, they're solely considering how it's affecting their particular experience. And if they're one of the classes that's been adjusted down rather than up, they dislike it, and you'll see the people posting who play the classes that got a little boost saying it's a great patch.

"It's one of those eternal arguments. You go to any MMO forum and you look for PVP balance discussions and you'd think the game was the worst balanced pile of crap you've ever seen. You can almost do that for any MMO."

"The challenge is ... sitting down and figuring out which complaints are valid."

Craig Morrision

The Age of Conan backlash stems from a change to the crowd-control abilities in the game: the roots, the snares, the stuns - spells and abilities that incapacitate, slow or stop other players. Morrison said incapacitating opponents had become "a little bit too easy" in Age of Conan, and that most groups relied on this tactic as "a crutch". By weakening those abilities and freeing players up, Morrison hopes he has encouraged strategical thinking.

"Whenever you make balance changes like that there will always be players that like them and dislike them," he shrugged. "It's one of the challenges of taking feedback from players; there is very often good feedback buried in there - the developers spend a lot of time with the community particularly on our test realm servers, and they go through and they talk to people and they play in the game, so they can see through the bias and emotion.

"The challenge for the systems guys is sitting down and figuring out which complaints are valid."

In general the changes seem to have helped. "Generally when we see more PVP happening, that's a good sign that the changes are prodding in the right direction," said Morrison.

Funcom announced last week that Age of Conan will turn free-to-play this summer. The MMO will have its name changed to Age of Conan: Unrated to coincide with the F2P launch.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (16) Latest comment 12 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • StolenGlory #1 12 months ago

    Ya think?

  • Dizzy #2 12 months ago

    TBH CC is the bane of MMOs. When will devs be brave enough to dump these abilities? Imagine having CC in FPS games, players would just go insane with rage.

    Maybe GW2 will show the way?

  • TheDudesRug #3 12 months ago

    People love moaning about stuff!

    For one reason or another you will never acheive true PvP balance unless all parties are using the same devices and methods as each other.

    As for the comments on people bemoaning changes to their class of preference. What do you expect, they are relaying their own experiences of the game, they are gamers not systems designers.

    For, er.. balance, it's also important to note that those claiming the end of the world is nigh and shouting their heads off because their class now uses a different resource or rotation priority are, without exception, complete bellends and should be treated with the appropriate level of contempt.

  • Toothball #4 12 months ago

    No matter how balanced developers try to make their game, the players will always find the most unbalanced setup in almost no time and proceed to use it until the developers decided to adjust the balance further. At this point the players moan a load before finding whatever the next most unbalanced setup is.

    In general I'd still rather them making changes more often than not, as if they don't the game stagnates pretty quickly.

  • RichyRichh77 #5 12 months ago

    @Dizzy Try Bioshock2 multiplayer. :) Electro bolt stuns combined with instant headshot kills or Winter Blast to slow your opponent & lower their defence.

    I can confirm that it does lead to numerous nerd rage moments but is still quite enjoyable.

    I rarely ventured into PvP when I was playing WoW but when I did I have to confess to loving the CC abilities of my hunter & stomping Gorilla. :)

  • DefendoCroc #6 12 months ago

    Remove *balanced* from his sentence and you would be forgiven for thinking hes played is own game "was the worst pile of crap you've ever seen"

  • kangarootoo #7 12 months ago

    I think he has just described pretty much every discussion that takes place on these pages too :)

  • butler` #8 12 months ago

    @FluffyTucker

    ‘Tis a good point. There's a lot to be said for inaction when it comes to patching. If you leave the game alone, a metagame develops. For every relatively overpowered thing, there tends to be a counter in one form or another, and so the metagame evolves and matures. This is what happened, to a fair degree, in vanilla.

    But this runs against Blizzard's current goal, which is to milk the cow for all its worth, and inaction is not something they want to be easily accused of. So what you end up with is a constantly shifting metagame: great for customer retention but not so good for player experience. Which is a sentence that, for me, pretty much sums up modern-day WoW in its entirety.

    Ironically, there is no such thing as a balanced MMO, so I don't see what Mr Funcom is getting so upset about.

  • Softie2k #9 12 months ago

    @FluffyTucker and Butler.

    You guys serious? Vanilla was moaned about just as much. We just didnt' have arena back then.

    The guys that balance the game will have nothing to do with the commericial side of things, they just want to make the game better.

  • PixelPirate #10 12 months ago

    GW2 will lead the way.

    The rest will facepunch themselves for not doing it sooner
    Edited by PixelPirate at 01/06/11 @ 13:21

  • levitate #11 12 months ago

    I think a lot of people, in general, can't see the big scope of an MMO. The developers aren't balancing classes for fun, they do it to prepare for future content as well. Sometimes they get it wrong and have to rethink their position. They mostly get it right though, otherwise people wouldn't play their game.

    Unfortunately Conan is sufficiently flawed in many other ways that it doesn't matter what they do with the classes.

  • BuckEntropy #12 12 months ago

    The thing this blurb fails to touch upon is the fact that player bias DOES affect re-balancing decisions anyway. Unpopular classes get screwed over more often than popular ones, because there will obviously be more complaints from people who don't think they should have lost to them that way.

    Not just in MMOs for that matter, it's no accident that Ken and Ryu players can still rely on virtually the same play style from 15 fucking years ago! Think anyone else can? lol

  • cyber_nicco #13 12 months ago

    What does the acronym "CC" stand for?

  • butler` #14 12 months ago

    crowd control

    which isn't terribly helpful, because these days it's applied to anything that takes either partial (say, movement) or full (any action) control away from the player.

  • Compass #15 12 months ago

    @cyber_nicco : cc = crowd control. Pretty much anything that allows control over another player or npc. So snares, roots, stuns, stuff that reduces the effectiveness of your opponent.

    I don't personally think there is anything wrong with cc in an mmo as it adds more tools to play with. The balance should come from other tools to remove or mitigate the cc.

    The problem in mmo's is that most (all?) developers failing to get the right skills balance in both pvp and pve environments.

    Personally, I avoid pvp in mmo's and it's a pita when abilities are changed as a result of pvp 'balance'. Then again, I'm sure pvp players feel exactly the same way about pve changes.

    Note to mmo devs: any chance we can get games that are either pvp or pve? I really don't think trying to milk cash from both groups at the same time really works.

  • brod #16 12 months ago

    "You go to any MMO forum and you look for PVP balance discussions and you'd think the game was the worst balanced pile of crap you've ever seen."

    To be fair, most MMOs *are* piles of crap when it comes to PVP balance, as most of them don't even try to balance for PVP.