An effect of Competitive Balance, this phenomenon arises in a game with what might be called "multiple axes of conflict" — primarily, a game which contains both Player Versus Environment and Player Versus Player content, though other conflicts (such as balancing solo player versus player AND group player versus player) can fall into the similar traps. PVP Balanced describes the state where the needs of two different environments — usually PvP and PvE — conflict, resulting in a major headache for the developer as they attempt to balance the game.
In order to create greater diversity, characters have different strengths and weaknesses — a rogue might be very good at dealing damage but not so good at taking it, a wizard might be excellent at debuffing enemies but have difficulty dealing damage, a healer may be excellent at healing and buffing their allies but terrible at dealing damage, and a warrior might be good at drawing aggression from enemies and taking punishment, but mediocre at anything else. So what happens when these characters, often designed for group PvE experiences, get thrust into solo PvP combat? How does the healer fight back against the rogue? Can anyone kill the warrior, or is he just too tough to bring down before his damage overwhelms the opposition? Is the wizard utterly useless, or can he perpetually stunlock his enemy and prevent them from ever acting at all?
All of these are possible issues which arise when powers intended to be used against massed groups of enemies and AI controlled bosses instead are brought into PvP combat — what is fair against an AI may not be fair against a player character. Oftentimes PCs have utterly different stat arrays than NPCs — NPCs often have vastly more hit points than player characters do, and deal very different amounts of damage. A NPC doesn't get bored if it gets stunned repeatedly or otherwise severely impaired by debuffs, nor does it mind if it gets shredded in a few seconds by a high-damage character. An NPC often attacks in a scripted manner, meaning that a tank can draw "aggro" that forces NPCs to attack it, but which doesn't necessarily work on human-controlled characters. And NPCs don't necessarily go for the healer first, whereas humans are very likely to do so every single time. Ranged PCs may be able to run away from melee characters all day, preventing them from ever engaging, or alternatively start out so close to the melee characters that they gain no benefits from their ranged attacks, or might even endanger themselves with their own abilities when fighting an enemy up close.
As such, what works for PvE often does not translate well into PvP — stunlocks are severely unfun, healers may go down in mere moments due to the sky-high damage of characters relative to PC hit point total or have such good healing as to be unkillable, or the tank might have counterattacks that instantly kill or otherwise severely cripple anyone who attacks them. It's even worse when the PvP environment is different from the PvE environment in scale — solo PvE characters have very different needs from group PvE characters (needing to be much more well rounded), which may translate poorly into group PvP combat where everyone having a role makes for a stronger team, while the opposite — the standard PvE group of 4-5 people of three to five roles doesn't tend to translate well into one on one dueling.
The unfortunate end result of this is that if a power is weak in one environment, but strong in the other environment, correcting its balance may be impossible — making it stronger for the weak environment may result in it becoming broken in the environment it is strong in, while weakening an overpowered power in one environment may render it worthless in the other. Any buff or nerf affects both PvP and PvE, resulting in players from the environment where the power is negatively affected complaining about how it is too weak or too strong now. If powers are separated by environment, a different issue may result where a character might funnel all of their power into PvE or PvP, rendering them very bad at the other environment but potentially overpowered in their own — neither of which are desirable outcomes. And if powers don't behave identically in PvE and PvP, it often leads to a steeper learning curve while transitioning from one to the other, causing player frustration at the inconsistency of the effects of their powers. Woe betide the world where PvP is global, thus further adding to the confusion of which powers to use where, or what they do in what situation.
This problem is most prevalent in MMOs, where PvE and PvP both tend to be major concerns, but can arise in any other form of multiplayer game where both environments exist — games from Mass Effect 3 to Tabletop Games are affected by such issues. Note that these issues are not restricted to class-based games, either — in any game where player characters are not identical, and both PvE and PvP exist, this can be a potential issue. This isn't even necessarily have to be restricted to games with combat content — any game wherein there is both competition against the computer and competition against other players, where those two types of competition are not nearly identical, can be affected.
Caused by the need for Competitive Balance. See An Adventurer Is You. Compare Lensman Arms Race. Usually an issue for characters who are newly Promoted to Playable.
Examples:
- Anarchy Online consistently has problems in this area, since while PvP was intended to be a major part of the game, PvE was also a big part, and considering the vast level differences between any two given characters (at launch, 200 levels were implemented, and as of this writing, about 320) as well as the vast differences between the theory and practice of how various professions engage in PvP, as well as the very open-ended skill system where anyone can in theory equip anything, just not as well as a profession that the item/weapon falls under, and you wind up with a PvP system where it's not only hard to figure out what, if any, balance exists (some professions were purely dog meat in PvP for a while, Meta-Physicists being bottom of the heap here), but also figuring out where your profession stands after the massive game changes implemented by the devs. (Fixers used to be top of the heap in PvP, now they're middle of the road at best.)
- World of Warcraft:
- It unsurprisingly has problems with this as well, for the simple reason that there are at least four different setups that need to be considered when balancing classes: Solo/small group PvE, raids (large group PvE), Arenas (small group Player Versus Player), and Battlegrounds (big scale Player Versus Player). For starters, PvE and PvP have vastly different priorities and rules, in particular "crowd control" skills are decisive against players while being unusable against most bosses. Another problem is that some abilities like group healing scale more strongly in large groups. So how do you balance something that is overpowered in a duel but mediocre in a battleground?
- In the early game, the developers simply didn't bother balancing 1-on-1 and 2-on-2 PvP, focusing on large group content. Duels were very unbalanced; it was possible for a rogue with no gear other than a low-level dagger to kill a well-geared player. There was also the matter of gear, of which the best came from raids. PvP gear existed but most was considered not worth the effort.
- The Burning Crusade expansion did a lot to rectify the gear situation, by introducing the PvP-exclusive stat of resilience. This made PvP gear good at defending yourself from other players, while raid gear made you into a glass cannon who died quickly.
- From the Legion expansion onwards, two new design knobs were introduced: PvP Talents and separate tuning.
- Pvp talents are special passive or active abilities that only work in PvP and only if you pick that talent, of which you can only have 3 of a rather wide selection. So if you need to be great in large scale battlegrounds, you can pick a PvP talent that enhances you in that direction, whereas in small scale arena you'd give it up for a more small-scale talent and the developers don't have to worry about you having both toolkits. And since those talents don't work in dungeons or raids, they don't affect the balance of PvE.
- Separate tuning is simply the developers growing ability to have different tuning in place for PvP and PvE. For example, in recent years, healing is reduced by 10% when an arena match starts, and grows weaker over time, ensuring players are killable despite healer presence and that even if both teams' healers are incredible, eventually someone will die due to healing becoming too weak. Likewise, powerful spells such as Chaos Bolt can be tuned to have truly threatening damage in Pv P where they're hard to cast against players with interrupts, whereas their damage value in PvE is more modest where interrupts are rare.
- Guild Wars decided to handle the balancing of PvE and PvP separately, by making some skills function differently in the two modes, an approach that later MMOs would adopt to varying extents. Some powerful skill are only functional in PvE. And while players have a lot of skills available, they can only have 8 active at a time.
- Perfect World International has an interesting way of working with and around the inherent problems of PvP vs. PvE. First, they have two kinds of servers: 4 servers that are PvE intensive and 2 that are PvP. In each, the way one goes about committing PvP acts is different. On the PvP servers, once a character reaches level 30 they are open for the slaughter, but can in turn attack anyone they wish. This adds an element of chaos and paranoia that some people grow to love and others tend to shy away from. On the PvE servers, one has to activate PvP mode, and it shows on their name, so everyone recognizes when someone is in "killing mode." This makes people who enjoy the madness caused by PvP to think of PvE players as "Carebears." Additionally, there is a large difference in damage inflicted on mobs and player characters. In fact, the amount of damage done to player characters is only 1/4 of the damage done to monsters. This keeps Nukers from raining fiery doom down and one shotting everyone with area of effect spells. It also keeps every other character type from one-shotting every other character type. However, a wide spread problem occurred with the Petmaster class. A certain pet that must be bought with real money (or ridiculous amounts of in game coins)can learn a certain damage over time attack. The problem is that the attack does PvE damage in PvP. And the monster that uses is so strong that one can get "bled" for 4-9 thousand damage a second. (The toughest class in the game usually doesn't have more than 12 thousand hit points. And that's near level 90.)
- Air Rivals is a primarily PvP game. So much so that some job classes are much more PvP friendly than PvE friendly, and vice versa. The Healer of the game constantly find themselves in center point of any conflicts, but levels the slowest due to their quirk (amongst others, the innate disability of having a really low offensive power). The literal Tank of the game, similarly, needs to find specific maps that has a lot of ground for them to land and unleash mayhem. Same case with the Nuker bombers, who needs decent ground enemies (or large, slow, flying ones) to cash in exp. The only one least affected by these is the equivalent to the Fighter class, which, unfortunately, is the least PvP balanced of all four and dies very, very often (unless you tune it to a specific build).
- Final Fantasy XI relegates PvP to the "sports" of Ballista and Brenner (which are vaguely similar to Basketball, and Capture the Flag, if killing opposing players were required to score), and is generally agreed to be ludicrously unbalanced, favoring the two fighter-mages, then pure mages, then damage-dealers, then tanks, and lastly the pet jobs. A sufficiently-prepared Red Mage or Blue Mage (the aforementioned fighter-mages) can easily lay waste to 4 or 5 melee attackers at once, and Red Mages/Blue Mages on opposing sides tend to employ the Foe-Tossing Charge to get at one another, each being the other's only real threat.
- The disparity in power is so great that in a widely-read Red Mage forum, the advice for defeating each class will be given in great detail for defeating another Red Mage or Blue Mage, then moderate details on dealing with mages, a general strategy for obliterating melee attackers, and then a disclaimer for pet jobs (this comment in regards to Puppetmaster): "It should be a universal understanding amongst all PvP participants to let PUPs run around and humor themselves in peace. Don't enfeeble them, don't engage them. It's just a courtesy thing; I don't think I need to elaborate much. Maybe toss them a "Blind" or something so they have an exciting story to tell after the match."
- That said, PvP is a very small part of Final Fantasy XI, which many players do not ever take part in, with almost all of the game's focus on Player Versus Environment gameplay.
- Final Fantasy XIV tries to offset this issue by having certain weaponskills and abilities function differently in PvP areas. For example, Summoner's Deathflare has only 300 potency (normally 400), Ninja's Shadow Fang reduces the healing received by the target. Additionally, most stuns, binds, and movement slowing effects are half or less effective in PvP than in PvE.
- Additionally, each job has access to certain PvP Skills that aren't available in PvE. Some of these are global (Purify to remove all debuffs), some are role-specific (healers get Divine Breath to instantly raise a player without a respawn debuff), and some are job-specific (Machinist has Between The Eyes to deal heavy burst damage to disabled targets). These undergo balance changes in their own right from time to time.
- Eventually the dev team realized that balancing PvE skills into a PvP environment was probably never going to work, so instead now whenever you enter an area that allows PvP (which most of the game areas don't as the game is mostly PvE focused) you get a completely new set of skills which act in a similar fashion to your PvE ones but generally have a much faster cooldown and/or don't use any resource to activate. You also have your HP set to an amount depending on on your class which is not effected in any way by your gear, meaning anyone can participate regardless of what type of progression they do. Finally, damage in PvP has no random element to it: There are no crits, and if a skill has a potency of 8000 then it will deal exactly 8000 damage every time.
- EVE Online's developer, CCP, in general takes a conservative approach, releasing new ships in a pre-nerfed state to avoid wild fluctuations in strategies. When they conclude that certain ships are too rarely used, they'll carefully bring them up to par with the rest. Ships which went through this process include Black Ops Battleships, Stealth Bombers, the Falcon's cousin Rook and the Caldari & Minmatar Dreadnaughts.
- No matter where the nerfbat swings, this will always be true in EVE: Caldari. PVP. Solo. Pick two.
- Atlantica Online has issues in this department as well. Because of its unique system of hiring up to 8 comrades of wildly different classes, in any combination a player wants, there are a huge variety of possible tactics and builds; it's almost impossible to fully balance them. Like WoW, there are multiple "basic" setups: Hunting PvE, Raiding PvE, Free League PvP, and King's Judgement PvP.
- For Hunting PvE (typical questing/grinding), using lower level gear is fine if it has higher grades on it (+1 through +10). A typical setup uses 3 tanks, 3 damage dealers, and 3 support units.
- Raid PvE tends to be more compact than Hunting PvE, and therefore cuts some of each type of mercenary. Most people tend to use either multiple healers or NO healers, and more melee power combining tank with DPS. Again, lower level armor is fine with high grade.
- Free League PvP tends to have builds centered around single strategies, for example, a bow-rich formation for quickly dispatching critical opponents' mercenaries one at a time, or multiple wide-shot mercenaries (artilleryman, gunner) to build stun counters. Higher level armor of low grade is preferred in Free League than lower level high grade gear because of the unique nerf of weapons/armor in that mode of PvP.
- King's Judgement is a tool that high-ranking players can use to essentially force PvP on other players; losing a King's Judgement (Or KJ for short) causes the player to lose a random piece of equipment. None of the Free League nerfs are in place for a KJ so virtually any build will work, so long as a player's gear is superior in every way. High level, high grade gear is preferred for KJ. (A side-note: For those wondering how anything gets done in Atlantica with the possibility of KJ — Doing so repeatedly or with malicious intent can be reported to GMs for review.)
- Inverted in Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE as it wasn't created with PvP in mind, and it was only implemented later due to the player-base asking for it. Most of these people now complain how unbalanced it is. Later on, a patch that tried to remove some features from being used in PvP to make it more balanced ended up breaking half the game, and having half the devs fired. Granted, in a game where players hit Over Nine Thousand damage while having around 400 HP, PvP was doomed to fail. Sure, everyone has increased HP in PvP, but it doesn't help much to have 3000 HP when it's possible to hit 30 thousand damage in one hit. It's basically a matter of who hits who first.
- Dragon Nest tries to avert this, with almost every skill behaving somewhat differently in PvE and PvP (generally, the difference is in how much damage they do and/or how long the cooldown is, although some skills, usually buffs/debuffs and/or ones with buffing/debuffing secondary effects, have other changes). Player consensus is that despite this, the game is still unbalanced in PvP, with certain classes stronger than others (engineers and acrobats stand out in this regard; the former is able to summon a small army of computer-controlled allies against their foes, but both her and her summons have relatively low HP, while the latter is capable of incredibly long combos and has a large number of invincibility frames, but is very weak to electrocution knocking them out of the air and breaking all their combos). Certain Game-Breaking PvP Bugs contribute to this as well, although those are usually fixed within a month or two of discovery.
- The Matrix Online blundered its way into a very instructive example of this. They had a purely PvE problem — players got around by super-jumping everywhere, just like the movie, and the single playable city had high level and low level "neighborhoods" distributed across it basically randomly, rather than enemy levels increasing as you went north or something. Which led to a problem where low level players just trying to travel around the city or get to their next mission could jump from somewhere safe and land somewhere way above their level and get immediately dogpiled by instant-death enemies. As to why they couldn't just jump away again immediately, MxO had a system where enemies would pull you into a 1v1 combat state where all your actions became contested rolls (to allow all the cool martial arts and gun fu stuff). Players would lose their rolls to break away, be stuck in combat, and get punched to death. So Monolith fixed the problem; breaking away now succeeded automatically and prevented anyone from pulling you into combat for 15 seconds, to prevent an endless chain of breakaway/next enemy grabs you. Players could now shake enemies off and jump away to safety. Easy, simple, and broke PvP irreparably. Hackers who focused on debuffs and stuns were countered in PvP by pulling them into direct combat, where they had bad rolls and you could interrupt their tricks with a kick in the face. Except now whenever you tried, they'd break away automatically, and 15 seconds of immunity were more than enough to lay on enough debuffs and stuns to incapacitate an opponent. Oops.
- The iOS/Android MMO Book of Heroes has had to carefully refine its class balances ever since a PvP option was introduced. A PvE game at its core, class balance quickly became an issue once PvP came along. The three classes available (Justicars (fighters/paladins), Shadow Walkers (Rogues) and War Mages (ice/fire wizards)) had unique abilities that hadn't needed to balance with regards to each other while the game remained a PvE affair. To get around the problems of extensive playtesting, the developers released the PvP arena as a 'beta' version, allowing them to gather real data on the performance of each class vs the others (and against others of the same class). Problems such as the extremely powerful debuffs that Mages could inflict, or the health stacking tactic (meaning some players faced chewing through an opponents' 50,000 health while their own could be half that number), were eliminated once PvP was released as a finished article. Though Nerf Cries still ring out on the game forums and chats, these are virtually always class hate rather than legitimate concerns as of September 2014. The game's primary issue now is the effect PvP has had on PvE raiding. The Justicar class performs poorest in raids overall and is not capable of disposing of enemies with the speed Shadow Walker and Mage players are. This means Justicars have to work harder even to achieve parity. While the problem existed before PvP was introduced, the tweaks to the Justicar skill set aimed at bringing balance to PvP exacerbated the issue.
- The StarCraft series continually wrestles with this issue due to the prominence of competitive play. The original game and its expansion pack are widely considered to be as balanced as they are purely by accident and each race is only on even ground with the others by virtue of having its own Game-Breaker strategies. With the sequel Blizzard has decided on a method of constant refinement based on the feedback of dedicated and high profile players but certain issues like the Terrans' raw versatility, the supremacy of Protoss micromanagement and the Zerg tendency for runaway economy are persistent thorns in their side. Unlike the original, this game also has explicit differences in gameplay tools between multiplayer and the single player campaign, allowing for for more difficult and varied objectives than "build an army and smash the enemy bases". This varies between races though, in Wings of Liberty your Terran troops have access to units and upgrades beyond the multiplayer standard (and on higher difficulty levels computer Terrans have some of these too), in Legacy of the Void your Protoss troops get support from your flagship in orbit (in both subtle and not so subtle ways) and in Heart of the Swarm your Zerg get, well, Kerrigan.
- The 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons's focus on PvE balance means that certain roles are now weaker in PVP environments, particularly the Leader, Defender, and Controller classes. Controllers, who are designed around crowd control, still fall behind other roles in PVP settings and are rarely used outside of stunlock builds. Defenders and healers fall behind in PVP due to having nobody around to defend or to heal. This basically means that 75% of the classes are automatically subpar in PVP.
- The Old World of Darkness had problems with this, as each gameline was designed on its own, so when different supernatural beings were brought together (and most had plenty of reasons to fight each other), there was no balance between them. You had vampires versus werewolves... where one werewolf could likely wipe the floor with a handful of average vampires. And then there were the Tremere vampires versus the Forces-happy Order of Hermes mages. It helped that the game put at least as much emphasis on stealth and spying as on direct combat.
- Chronicles of Darkness is tooled so that while the supernaturals usually stay in their own domain, if they do fight they have a one-on-one fighting chance or at least the means to escape. Hunter: The Vigil is focused on normal humans fighting all the supernaturals from the other gamelines, and it gives them the means to just about survive.
- Exalted plays this remarkably straight. Every player character is basically expected to be a competent combatant Plus competent something. In a world where Aggressive Negotiations are almost the default method of discussing matters (with actual diplomacy ensuing in the event of some kind of stand-off in the initial effort at fast and pragmatic solution) this is naturally to be expected. This led to the unusual effect of "dedicated combatant" subtypes (Dawn/Dusk/Slayer for Solar-tier) being widely criticized as getting the bad deal, because there's very little they do more efficient then other subtypes and usually much in the "other something" area they do worse.
