The Shrine

When I look at excessively complex games, which is pretty much any MMORPG out there and probably most MOBAs too, I wonder if the complexity is a method to monetize the game (LoL Avatars), a justification for having a devleopment stuff (WoW's constant shuffling numbers back and forth while appeasing apparently nobody), or some kind god complex by the original development team to think that they can actually design a complex game. If you played a fighting game even casually you know there's only a few characters that are competitive at the top level. Now maybe Super Smash Brothers or even Street Fighter 4 isn't designed to be a competitive game as a selling point, that is the game originally sure doesn't expect people to regularly compete so it's not designed with balance in mind. But you can't say the same about a MMORPG. Look at how many times the WoW talent trees have been completely revamped, not to mention the endless shuffling of numbers. Blizzard has a lot of money but sometimes I got the feeling they have a development stuff simply to make one kind of broken to another kind of broken. EverQuest, before it was dethroned by WoW, never had any significant kind of changes from expansion to expansion let alone patch to patch. If WoW never existed it doesn't look like the fact some classes are borderline useless in a raiding environment would have any meaningful impact to the long term game, at least with its original design where difficulty comes mostly from attrition. At any rate it's not like people don't swear their class is useless in WoW or any other MMORPG, so trying to balance anything is probably futile.

I think there's a rather ironic result that the more complex a game, the simpler it ends up being because if you have a game that's so complicated that nobody can possibly figure it out at a first glance, eventually the players will figure out what's the most overpowered combo that the devs may not even know about and after you figure it out, you don't really have to concern with anything else. Diablo 3 says it has a few gazillion combination of skills but people settled on 3 or 4 viable builds rather quickly because there's no point to use the other gazillion minus 5 builds that are never viable. This mistake has been repeated so often I really don't understand why people don't just look at any other MMORPG before them and tell themselves, "We're probably not going to figure out something nobody has ever figured out before." In the end I guess it can only be developer hubris, for a bunch of guys who are almost certainly far worse than the top players of their genre (if you're that good you wouldn't have time to take a job as a developer), and probably do not have any unusual insight to the game, just go ahead and make another 'endless customization' game without thinking if it's ever going to work. Or maybe the point is that it doesn't work so they'll always have a job by buffing a class by 5% and nerfing that class by 5%?

I plugged in the calculator and 100 choose 10 is around 17 trillion. That'd be a game with a total of 100 skills where you get to pick 10 of them as your skill set. That's significantly less than the complexity of the average MMORPG (these skills would include everything include cooldowns, utility, passive, and so on) and I'd bet if someone hand you $10K to come up with 100 skills anybody here could do it just fine, and you might even put in some reasonable effort into research and possibly come up with some original ideas. Yet the resulting game is almost impossible to be balanced because there's no way you can imagine how your 100 skills will interact with each other in the 17 trillion possible ways. Again we're talking about a game that is significantly less complicated than the average MMORPG that any armchair developer could develop and it's way beyond human comprehension to even imagine how all these skills could interact. Sure in a real game there might be more restrictions (each class usually won't have access to every skill in the game) but you also aren't limited to just 10 skills. At any rate the only way the complexity can be significantly reduced is if you know 85 of the skills involved totally sucks and no one would ever use them so it's really 15 choose 10 = 3003 and you can conceiveably know all the 3003 ways these skills interact, but then why waste your time coming up with the 85 skills that nobody will use? And even 3003 is a lot. I certainly don't think I'd actually be able to know how all 3003 ways to do 15 choose 10 works.