[Celestin]

You know, I'm really tired of hearing all this stuff about rock paper scissors, especially when it is used in the context of preempting careful analysis of a class or an ability simply because "rock beats scissors, l2p." Honestly, there are few things that annoy me more than displays of ignorance or incompetence like that ( or conversely, people who straight out lie to preserver their overpoweredness ). For those of you people who are afraid of walls of text ( as if you have anything better to do ), I've bolded the important sections. Long story short, "rock, paper, scissors" is a convenient excuse for incompetent or lazy development.

So I'd like to open up discussion to a few other styles and hear people's opinions... I know we can't do anything about the development of AION, but this is all hypothetical.

Has anybody played or know of Guilty Gear? Guilty Gear is a cult classic 2d fighter among fighting game afficandos for it's excellent asymmetrical balance despite having a huge roster of fighters. While there is a tiering system in Guilty Gear, the tiering system is more relative than absolute unlike other fighting games where playing a certain character is a one way ticket to lose ( Marvel vs. Capcom, I'm looking at you ) and as a whole, the game is much more balanced than many other competitors.

Every character in Guilty Gear is initially cut from the exact same cloth. They have the same basic skeleton. Every class has the same initial characteristics as in the same amount of HP, the exact same core moves ( e.g. forward punch, for all but one character is a quick punch that hits mid and offers several frames of upper body invincibility, every character also can burst to break out of a combo, but only occasionally ). But after that, the character developer is free to add whatever they want to that skeleton to form a character ( within certain bounds of course ). They modify things like speed, number of dashes, defense and create the character's move list from the ground up as opposed to designing a move list to cater around defeating one character but loosing unconditionally to another.

You would think this would mean every character plays the exact same, but as anybody who plays Guilty Gear can testify, each single character plays in an unique way. Learning one character is a whole new endeavor from learning any other character. Some characters are best at trapping, some at pressure. Some characters are all about the mental game. The end result is that while some characters may be better than another character, the disadvantaged character isn't shutout from the beginning, and this is all thanks to the fact that at the very core, every character is built from the same skeleton, though everything else might be different.

For example, Dizzy, one of the playable characters is a pressure character based on lethal setups. To play Dizzy successfully, your play style must be highly offensive and you have to keep your opponent off balance. This is because while Dizzy has an impressive array of ranged and close combat abilities, Dizzy is light, her attacks tend to have low priority, and Dizzy has low defense. If you are forced onto the defense as Dizzy, well, it's hard to recover. To help Dizzy's offense, she can double air dash, has a lot of long range moves, a very powerful midrange move that can stagger ( stun ) and a lot of key bread and butter moves can be made to transition into other chains. Finally, four of Dizzy's ranged moves summon some kind of blue flying fish thing that either bites or shoots lasers. All of the four moves have the same initial animation, which keeps the opponent guessing, but all four have very distinct roles in Dizzy's arsenal in addition to serving as 1HP walls that can be used to cancel an enemy attack. Your goal is to get your opponent into a corner where Dizzy can dish out a huge amount of damage.

Now, I don't really know about this character, but I do sometimes play him, so correct me if I'm wrong. Ky Kisuke is more balanced than Dizzy. Though he also has impressive offensive capabilities, he has slightly better defense. His ground dash is a bit faster but he cannot double air dash. Ky's moves tend to be quick and middle to short range. Thus, he has a number of attacks that allow him to rapidly close distance with his enemy. In addition, a number of his bread and butter moves either knock an opponent off his feet or stagger. The standard thing to do, once an opponent is off his feet is to use the quarter circle forward hard slash which shoots a slow, lightning bolt that hits the opponent multiple times, so it's important to knock an opponent down as much as possible so you can get in that extra damage. As a result, Ky is a bit more robust than Dizzy and is comfortable anywhere on the screen ( cornering is a good idea in any fighting game ).

As you can see, the play styles are very different. So who wins? Well, Ky is a higher tier than Dizzy and is therefore at the advantage, but honestly, it comes down to the player. Both characters are very capable ( Dizzy players have to work a bit harder to minimize her weaknesses ). No player will enter a match thinking Ky is better than Dizzy so if I play Ky, I don't have to worry about Dizzy players.

This kind of game design is counter to rock paper scissors where the mentality is well, because if you're rock, you might as well pack your bags and go home when you meet paper. All classes have a good fighting chance against every other class.

As my counter example, let's take WoW. The druid class in WoW is kind of like rock, paper and scissors rolled into one. So what do you get? You kind of get a intercontinental ballistic missile. And as most WoW players will testify ( I asked every single one of my WoW friends on this one and all non-druid players agreed ), druids are damn overpowered. Logically, this sucks. But in a rock, paper scissors world, well, a druid is rock, paper and scissors and therefore, should win and everything is still fair.

So, do you think this kind of game design can be successfully applied to a MMO? Would it work better than the traditional rock paper scissors, which while I admit is great for a RTS, is cumbersome in a MMO?