'Which difficulty is the game balanced for?'

[Tryble]

edit: this thread is causing a lot of arguments here & in chat, so imma take this post down

no real point in stirring up resentment

[Tryble]

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[dadito]

Game is probably balanced around nightmare

Most fun to play is insane imo

[Razakai]

I think this is accurate. But I don't think it's that classes are specifically balanced around Insane difficulty - it's more that the concept of what a 'strong' class is happens to line up exactly with what's required to play on Insane.

[grobblewobble]

Predicate logic, yay!

[tabs]

What your arguments seem to indicate is that it's balanced around player skill, not any particular difficulty. High skill players find Insane balanced; low skill Normal. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

PS: Please define 'balanced' in terms of, let's be generous, second-order logical statements.

[Davion Fuxa]

In general, the game is probably balanced around Adventurer Mode in Normal Difficulty/Nightmare Difficulty. Part of the reasoning can be based on the fact that stats like Defense and Saves can still matter on Normal and Nightmare, whereas on higher difficulties they must be forgone. Additionally, some talents do not scale as well for the higher difficulties and are merely placeholder talents in higher difficulties, whereas in lower difficulties they can still have some viability in use.

Winning the game doesn't really matter - what really matters is 'how' you can win the game. If certain stats are rendered unviable in higher difficulties, the game certainly isn't balanced around them.

[bpat]

It's pointless to balance for Madness because it's only been beaten by three classes after the hp inflation. It's pointless to balance for Nightmare or lower since it gets trivially easy for experienced players on all classes. Therefore by process of elimination the game ought to be balanced for Insane.

Also after playing a lot of Bulwark I've recently started to learn that saves and defense are actually okay on Insane, but you need a lot and you can't rely on them as much, which is reasonable. So they are weaker but not useless. The only thing I can think of that's completely useless on high difficulties but decent on low ones is Stealth.

[Davion Fuxa]

Experience shouldn't dictate what the game should be balanced too. Experience should only dictate that there should be a harder difficulty to challenge them.

Tales of Maj'Eyal is in many ways on of the 'entry' Rogue-likes to the genre. Balancing it for the lower difficulties is extremely important since newer players aren't going to know all the different tricks to employ to survive - and even intermediate players coming from other Rogue-likes may not necessarily have an easy time of it (specifically if they tick the 'Rogue-like' difficulty instead of Adventurer).

If an experienced player can win on Normal or Nightmare every time then personally I think that is fine - that honestly should be expected. However there are still some 'experienced players' who haven't even won the game on Normal yet or took quite a bit of time just win their first game, as they tend to post every now and then. Even the slightest change will get noticed by them - regardless of how easy the Normal and Nightmare difficulties might feel for people who have won the game a few times.

[bpat]

If the game was balanced for less than Insane, the entirety of balancing would literally be idiot-proofing the classes as much as possible. The best classes to win on low difficulties are the ones that don't punish you for making horrible misplays, which is why Solipsist and Oozemancer are so easy on Normal and Nightmare. Normal and Nightmare aren't about which class is strongest, but which one is the hardest to mess up. Balancing around idiot-proofing would be terrible design and it would quickly drive away non-casual players, which is seriously bad considering this is a roguelike after all.

I've said it many times before, but how strong a class is is nearly irrelevant on any difficulty lower than Insane. I have never seen a comment about a balance change based on Insane breaking Normal or Nightmare have any validity to it whatsoever.

[Davion Fuxa]

I'm sure you'd be hard pressed to find a comment saying that a veteran player was leaving either - for any reason. The same can't be said for players looking at and considering just starting the game.

The rogue-like genre by design is already not going to be for casual players - and compared to other rogue-likes, Tales of Maj'Eyal is complex enough to turn players away from even starting it, let alone mastering it. The game should be approachable first and foremost or players aren't going to be around long enough to even unlock Insane difficulty; which in turn is perhaps another reason Insane should be a secondary concern - Insane Difficulty needs to be 'unlocked' first via playing and winning the game in Nightmare Difficulty.

If many players aren't even going to start playing the game, let alone manage to get good enough to win the game to unlock Insane difficulty, it becomes rather irrelevant to really prioritize balancing the game for a difficulty they will never see.

[Tryble]

If many players aren't even going to start playing the game, let alone manage to get good enough to win the game to unlock Insane difficulty, it becomes rather irrelevant to really prioritize balancing the game for a difficulty they will never see.

That's...fine? If you renamed insane to normal (and normal to easy, and easier to free win) and sent it at new players there'd never be any new players. Makes sense, I agree.
Presenting the easier modes rather than the core to new players is not only okay, but probably advisable; learning the ropes to a roguelike is where a big portion of the challenge lies.

But for people to to go on and claim that Normal is the correct and intended mode of play is incorrect, given we see wins throughout both normal and nightmare of players who literally don't even have any class talents (see links in my second post) As I said above, to claim that those difficulties are balanced where that is possible is indefensible. This thread was made purely a response to claims like that.

[HousePet]

GAH! Connection dropped out and I lost my post.

Tryble:
Claim 2 talks about u. What u?

Various statements have poor evidence for them.
w makes no sense:
The existence of a win with a no class talent character does not imply anything about balance.

Claim 2 takes intent and then makes a statement about reality. Madness is not intended to be winnable, and yet it is. Intent does not imply reality.

(Claim 2 ^ r ^ ¬w) says nothing about difficulty, yet you draw different conclusions for different difficulties. And somehow imply v from it.

Your justification for r is terrible, but unlikely to cause an issue.

Bpat:
Experienced players don't need balance. They can use their own experience to tune their selection of build/difficulty to match their skill. Inexperienced players cannot, so they need balance more, and they play normal, therefore balance for normal (and stop making me giggle by using 'process of elimination' when discussing roguelike games ).

[Tryble]

Claim 2 talks about u. What u?

Crap, I lost a statement when rearranging the post. I'll edit it back in, thanks. I guess the rest of the posters either missed it, or maybe just didn't read the post.
u is "a character is any class or race".
Given that darkgod's statement made no qualifiers for class or race as a necessary component of winnability, I am just demonstrating that the statement is unrelated.

The existence of a win with a no class talent character does not imply anything about balance.

Like all statements, w is simply assumed to be true and the argument fails if any are falsified. I didn't want the OP to get too long, so I left it out. I honestly didn't expect this particular statement to come under contention.

A character winning without the largest and most influential resource pool they possess, means that a character with those resources is absolutely so much more powerful than required to win that they can be called overpowered. And given that those characters' limited abilities came from universally available options, then we can claim that all characters are thus. A difficulty isn't balanced when every character is overpowered.

Claim 2 takes intent and then makes a statement about reality. Madness is not intended to be winnable, and yet it is. Intent does not imply reality.

darkgod's post linked from the main post is "Clearly if madness is winnable it must be considered a bug !"
This is why q is worded the way it is → "not intended to be winnable", and I then draw conclusions based on that intention.
And more importantly, the game being balanced around a difficulty does not mean that it is balanced for a difficulty; I never make that claim. That linked thread itself if changed being implemented to try and curb madness wins.

(Claim 2 ^ r ^ ¬w) says nothing about difficulty, yet you draw different conclusions for different difficulties. And somehow imply v from it.

(Claim 2 ^ r ^ ¬w) is broken into cases, where one case difficulty = Insane (the text indicating that is missing, i'll edit that in too - my bad!), and where difficulty = Nightmare v Normal v Easier just below that.


By the way, in case anyone is wondering, I don't particularly have any personal stake in this debate or anything. I'm not going to be mad if you pull apart the argument (that's literally why it exists) or contradict a statement. If we can prove anything one way or the other, I'll add it to the OP.

[bpat]

I have never heard anyone who actually plays Insane ever complain about balancing for Insane. So the only people who do complain about it aren't actually aware of what they're talking about. This is a pointless debate because opponents of balancing for Insane fundamentally don't understand what balancing for Insane even means. Until I see a single example of something tuned for Insane that ends up breaking Normal, I won't bother taking "balancing for Normal" comments seriously, and considering how often this topic gets brought up, you'd think someone would have come up with a good example by now if there was any validity to it.

HousePet you're incorrect about tuning build/difficulty based on experience, since Nightmare is trivially easy on all classes for most Insane players while low tier classes on Insane are very difficult for them still. On Normal, playing a "good" or "bad" class just means there are more or less opportunities to get yourself killed by making a silly mistake.

I don't see the point of discussing this at all, since complaints about balancing for higher difficulties seem to come exclusively from people without a good understanding of ToME's balance in the first place.