Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

So why are skill-based games so hard to develop? Are they harder to develop, or is that just a myth perpetuated by the lack of developers willing to undertake skill point systems? Due to my inexperience as a game developer, I won't even gesticulate on this topic, and let the developers answer the questions for themselves:

EVE Online's Matt Woodward:

I don’t think that skill versus level is an issue here – the difference comes when trying to balance skills versus trying to balance classes. My gut feeling here is that, for a given total number of available skills/abilities, classes will always be easier to balance simply because tying specific skills/abilities to specific classes mathematically reduces the number of possible combinations. That said, even within classes with at least some degree of flexibility you’re still going to see optimized builds in most cases. I’m honestly not sure it’s possible to achieve “perfect balance” without making the variations effectively meaningless and/or soullessly, boringly mathematical. Maybe if you had some incredibly cool tool which could calculate the damage/tank/other combinations for every possible build and flag up the ones which were potentially problematic you might be half-way to solving it, but you might also just be giving your balance developers a nervous breakdown – finding problems and solving problems aren’t the same thing!

I have a sneaking suspicion that the best way to resolve this sort of issue is to design a series of optimal builds and then build the system around those builds. If you have some choices which are meaningful and tweak specific builds towards different playstyles without having a large impact on power, and other choices where there’s a subtle but compelling optimal choice, then you’ll end up with a system that has “bad abilities” designed in that no sane person would use, but you also end up with a system that gives the appearance of choice while also (hopefully) giving you a stable, balanced set of “flavor of the decade” builds that you can take as given and design around. It’s kind of a class system masquerading as a level system, and it’s pretty underhanded, but it might at least get away from constant power swings. Until you try to create new loot sets, of course…

Fallen Earth's Lee Hammock:

I think they are always harder since so many more possible combinations of abilities exist and the current role structure favored in MMOs (tank/healer/DPS) begins to break down under the myriad possibilities.  At that point you have to re-teach people how to play MMOs to some extent and depending on how well you do that, you may get a ton of bugs that aren’t bugs but communication failures.

As for “build of the month” issues, that‘s going to happen no matter what you do—regardless of if you have a class-, level-, or skill-based system.  People are going to develop a build they think is the best no matter what you do. You will have thousands of players and many fewer QA people, and your players will think up combos of items, skills, and abilities that never occurred to you or your QA.  It is impossible to think of all the abuses your player base will find, so you have to concentrate on finding the most egregious problems.  This leaves lots of smaller issues unfound that your players may use to create their ideal builds.  When these arise you have to consider whether they are playing as intended. If not, what parts of the game allow such builds to dominate.  I’m not a big fan of reducing the power of a build because it’s effective, but instead trying to find other weaknesses that make that build effective.  This may not always be possible though and sometimes things need to change.  

Earthrise's Atanas Atanasov:

Skill-based systems are hard to balance because they place a massive amount of options in the hands of the players with very little or no limitations at all. To ensure balance, such systems require an incredible investment in time and testing, and even then the final result never reaches perfection. Yet, the key to the success of MMOs is not balance itself, but the feedback from the designers that respond to the evolution of the game and provide fast and proper changes that cater to the expectations of the players. Instead of allowing players to take advantage of unbalanced character builds, changes should be made to ensure that the design team responds before such issues could reflect on the whole game.