"I asked [Trion Creative Honcho Scott Hartman] about [Rift's] plans to deal with [PvP] balance issues and he had a pretty surprising response. Scott actually enjoys people thinking about the balance challenges, as he feels that people are thinking of ways that combinations could end up being “too much fun” and that their stance is that they don’t even really want the system to be perfectly balanced. Indeed, Scott doesn’t even believe achieving perfect balance is something to aspire to, as players would be able to do everything and no one would feel special. Scott doesn’t view balance as a huge issue in a game like Rift where you can switch things at a whim, as opposed to your typical MMO where if something gets nerfed you may be stuck with it. Ultimately, Scott expects that there will be “out of balance” builds, but that the possibilities are so great with the soul system that players can discover new “out of balance” builds to trump or counter one already in existence."
Translation: PvP in this game is going to be a wild hayride of cookie-cutter Flavor of the Month builds, but that's part of the charm of PvP, no?
"expect to see three quality warfronts (battlegrounds) at launch, as they are testing five or six right now and they expect the best ones to rise to the top. The idea being that they’d rather have three solid offerings over six that are “meh” as “no one comes back to meh.” One of the warfronts they are testing at the moment actually incorporates the rift gameplay as well."
MEH.
No, I'm fine with this as well, I suppose. I think Warhammer players learned this eventually, it's better to have a handful of well-liked battlegrounds and look forward to the introduction of other, fun new ones, as opposed to just throwing out 12 different instances and 8 of them range from being painfully lackluster to lustlackingly full of pain.
Throwing rifts in there sounds fun, too.
"Scott and I discussed the impact of population balance on their game as they make use of a two-faction system which has been shown to be problematic for other games in the past, but Scott feels trying to win that battle isn’t really possible, so they intend to make up the player deficit by introducing NPCs where necessary."
Wait, what? You can't just say that and not explain it!
"What happens if the population imbalance gets too out of hand?"
"NPCs"
"What?"
"The jeeps come."
"I don't understand."
"Listen, asshole, we're making another Everquest, we don't give a shit about all this PvP balance shit."
"Oh, OK then."
I also love the line 'trying to win that battle isn’t really possible'.
Is this attitude towards balance completely crazy, lazy, or genius...?
It makes me afraid, yet also oddly titillated.
