If someone likes a particular design, then that may well make it justified, but it doesn't necessarily make it a good design decision - otherwise we might as well not bother discussing design decisions at all, and instead just say "create anything you feel like". Equally, trying to appeal to the masses can often result in poor design decisions, giving the players short-term satisfaction at the expense of long-term playability.

What advantages do you feel a game offers when every other player has the same character as you?

I honestly feel like there's only one real advantage (for a player) to a system like this.

If everyone is able to gain the exact same powers at the exact same level, then it calls comes down to a player's skill in situations such as PvP or even PvE, assuming that the players play the exact same amount, which never happens.

As a developer, it could be potentially easier to balance a class system if everyone had the exact same powers simply because players would not be able to choose certain powers for min/maxing purposes. Specific builds would not be favored over others for pure powergaming purposes. Still, again, the ability to do something like this could easily be a design problem as KaVir has stated before.

True, but you could achieve the same result by balancing the different classes or possible builds.

Now one might argue that by giving all the powers to everyone, you no longer need to worry about game balance - but I'd disagree with that, as well, unless you not only want everyone to have exactly the same abilities, but also to use exactly the same tactics.

That's very true, but we all know that balancing the skills/powers/builds in a game is a lot easier said than done most times. Even when you think that things are balanced, players are incredibly innovative. They will find a way to use things in ways you never intended. Sometimes, that's perfectly fine. Othertimes, it can be game breaking. Sometimes, an extremely good player (good as in good at game mechanics) can make a skill seem unbalanced simply by how well they employ certain powers/power combinations. Then, you have powergamers vs. casual gamers. When they start going at each other, balance issues can seem incredibly muddled.

Even if you give all the players the exact same powers, you have balance issues because you still have to balance player powers against the game itself.

Given all that we've said, this is why I prefer a system where you DO NOT all have the same build. Even where everyone is able to have the exact same build, you're going to have balance issues. Since that was the biggest benefit I could see to having a same-skilled system (it being "easier" to balance), I think the benefit isn't enough to justify everyone having the same skill.

Now, another reason some players might like a skill system that allows everyone a set path of powers could be simply because they like simpler games. When you have a lot of choices, you could potentinally "mess up" your character build, and for some, they really don't like to have to think about what they're going to train next or make that kind of choices for their character. This, however, could be remedied by having build guides and auto-training available in your game.

That's true, but you could cater to those players as well - as long as the powers are reasonably well balanced against each other, you could provide players with a tiny subset of optimised choices. You could even name these subsets 'warrior', 'mage', etc. Meanwhile, the more advanced players could create their own variants, or even design their own character builds from scratch.

It could also be remedied by not locking the player into their build - instead, allow them to later change their setup if they don't like it, or discover that they've made a mistake.

I believe that a good design decision is one which moves the game towards its goal. If that goal is simply to entertain the creator, then anything that does so, including implementing what you personally feel is a bad decision, is a good one.

Equality. Different classes can never be perfectly balanced for every situation, unless they are functionally identical. One can balance different classes/capabilities to perform roughly equal in certain defined and controlled situations (damage output per minute for instance) but without 100% functional sameness, one can always find situations where there is not balance.

Another reason may be cost: Developing many classes means you're developing content for a subset of players rather than the set of players, and is more expensive as a result. The budget (whether money or time) is an extremely important factor in the creation of any game.

The point is that there are more potential designs than you, me, or everyone together on this forum will ever think of. To just blithely claim that designs that have never even occured to you are bad designs unless they conform to what you view as 'good' is odd.

--matt

If 'good' is defined in such a subjective manner, how can one ever quantify any design decision? And if you don't question the value of your design decisions, how will you detect potential flaws with the goal of the game itself?

But where does one draw the line?

Bubba is a warrior, Boffo is a thief. Bubba has better armour, but Boffo has a nasty backstab. The two classes can be balanced out against each other, but there will be many situations in which one has the edge. So the classes are dropped, and Bubba and Boffo now both have good armour and a nasty backstab. The possibilities for strategic gameplay have been reduced in order to promote equality...

But is there really equality? Bubba and Boffo now have the same abilities, but what about their stats? Bubba is stronger and tougher, while Boffo is faster and smarter. These attributes may have been mathmatically balanced against each other, but they will still result in situations where either Bubba or Boffo has the advantage. So we strip out stats, removing even more options for strategic gameplay.

But we still don't have equality, because Bubba is wielding a two-handed sword and wearing platemail, while Boffo is using leather armour and a pair of daggers. Numerous tests have been run on the various weapons and armour in order to ensure that they are well-balanced against each other, but there will still be many situations in which one set of equipment has the advantage over the other. Do we strip out equipment as well?

You cannot achieve true equality for all situations without literally making all characters carbon copies of each other - but the more you try, the fewer strategic options will be available to players. And for a game which focuses on competitive gameplay (which is also the type most likely to be worried about game balance) strategy is likely to play a very important role.

This comes back to the point I made earlier - if every design decision is only ever judged relative to the goal, how will you recognise flaws with the goal? If attempting to design a PK mud, and the goal is to create a mud in which there is "perfect equality" between characters, the above scenarios should be flashing up big red warning lights that shouldn't be just blindly ignored. Instead, the designer should be reconsidering their goal to take into account the problem they've just overlooked, and deciding where the line should be drawn between 'equality' and 'strategy'.

This is actually a very serious point, and once which I've seen many mud developers stumble over - so eager to create their cool new feature that they don't stop to consider whether it's really going to do what they thought it would. You'll hear things like "I'm going to add 1000 levels!", from people who obviously haven't stopped to consider what the players are going to do once they get past level 50. The end result is a lot of bored and frustrated level 50 characters who can't progress any further because there's no content for them, and (with such a huge increase in levels) there's unlikely to be sufficient content for many years to come.

Once again this comes down to design decisions. For example, if the amount of effort required for the class content is very high, then the design document should consider how best to take advantage of that new content - for example, is it sufficiently new that players will want to create additional characters in order to play the game from a new perspective? Even if the average player were only to create one secondary character, it would still double the effective game content. Another option might be to allow players the chance to redesign their characters at specific points during the game, allowing each character potential access to all of the abilities - just not all at the same time.

This isn't a design that's never occurred to me. I implemented a mud in which every character could max every skill, over a decade ago, and had the opportunity to see first-hand the pros and cons of such an approach within a mud environment. I later created another mud in which the only difference between two characters was their stat configuration (with each stat mathametically balanced against the others) - not even player tactics could result in inequality. Later still, I created another mud in which every character started with every skill maxed, so that any inequality could only occur as a result of each player's choices prior to and during each fight.

My views are therefore the result of over ten years mud development, and three completely separate muds.

That depends on your definition of balance.

I would define the process of balancing as minimizing the probability that class is a necessary precondition for victory and maximizing the probability that higher player skill is a sufficient precondition (with the caveat that you may want some randomness). Thus, optimal balance (factoring out randomness) would be achieved if a player with more skill would win regardless of class.

Obviously, this is a) impossible, and b) most muds do want some randomness. However, as an asymptotic optimal, it's basically fine.

In such a case, removing all classes does achieve balance - to an extent. However, you are still left to balance any game-relevant customization that players can perform. Equipment has to be balanced, for example. Unless no customization is possible, you've simply left yourself with a subset of the earlier problem.

Further, it also means a system with functionally different classes can be balanced.

Does that mean classless systems are stupid? Nah. Nor vice versa. Neither system is inherently superior from a technical balance standpoint, and thus the argument reduces to other issues and values and preference.

I think Spazmatic hit the nail on the head, neither way is more balanced than the other. I would say a class system is easier for the developers to balance than a classless system would be.

The mud we're developing is classless, we made the choice purely based on the decision that we wanted to allow our players to customize their characters as much as possible. The only time balance came into the discussion was me saying, this will be a bit harder to balance.

Do you think that Unreal Tournament would be better if characters levelled up and got more powerful the more they were played? Of course not. The game isn't designed around that. If I were to play against someone who had never played UT before, I would probably win, not because my character is better, but because I'm a better player than them from having more practice. Isn't that progression?

A classless system isn't supposed to be a single class system. The point of making a classless system is to increase flexibility, not decrease it. Reducing a game so that everyone's a fighter would probably be a bad thing. A classless system is saying 'we're not going to tell you what you can or cannot do, you have to decide that for yourself.' If you're going to make a classless system by reducing the player's choice to a single class, that's the fault of the designer.

Poor design aside, let's look at what (potentially) a good implementation of a classless system would be like:

New characters in the game are all identical, except for possibly racial modifiers. The player decides that they want to be a warrior kind of character. How do they do that? By grabbing a sword and shield and beating up some monsters. So, after a productive day of randomly attacking things in the forest, our protagonist gets injured, and wants to heal himself. A first level cleric could heal themselves no problem, so why shouldn't he? So he heads back, goes to the local church and after a bit of studying, learns how to cast some basic healing spells.

Now, he goes back out and meets his nemesis at the edge of town, who, incidently, had created a character at the same time as him. His opponant, however, has been focusing solely on fighting. They attack each other, but the hero is outmatched in swordplay - although he can still hold his own against most opponants, the time spent learning how to heal himself was time lost practicing melee combat. However, in his advantage, he can heal himself and the antagonist cannot.

So they fight. Who wins? If the hero doesn't use healing spells, more than likely his nemesis. If the hero plays his cards right though, and the system is well balanced, it should be a fairly even match.

---

That's really it. A classless system isn't classless at all - it lets the player define their character as they go, and ideally creates a character for them that matches their playing style exactly. Obviously, there are problems (such as, how do you keep a character from maxing out all of their skills?) but like all problems, solutions can be created.

It's not character progression, no (emphasis also added to my original quote).

I'm not arguing that UT should have character progression - I'm saying that my arguments are aimed at games which do, and thus it's an irrelevent comparison.

However that's pretty much the exact stance I've been defending for the last few posts, so I'm not quite sure I follow the purpose of your post.