by Lujo on Sat Apr 07, 2012 3:34 pm
What I ment by trolling is that "it's singleplayer" is not the answer to the questions we are asking. What avatar said basicaly is the background of the philosophy that leads to the question. I'm not even sure what would "perfect balance" be, but some sort of sense and sense of progression, or a logic behind a learning curve (or point of having one) would be it.
In other words, you can't have, or rather I feel you shouldn't have, people getting better at the game by "forgetting" learned lessons - I don't mind giving up some sort of newbie crutch, or outgrowing say "whoopaz" or a reliance on items, but outgrowing fighting monsters is a... well... a balance paradox. The balance is a balance between various levels of difficulty, and skill required to overcome them.
As long as there is a baseline for HP and damage gain per lvl up, as long as there is a baseline for monster stats, shop availability, powerup distribution, there will be a balance - some challenges will be easy, some medium, some hard. Getting to know this, getting the feel of it lets you decide how much resource expediture is optimal or even required for overcoming certain challenges.
But if it turns out that the proper way to play is to expend no resources at all, in a way that can be replicated almost anywhere - then there is really no balance, and since the balance (enviroment vs player) determines the difficulty of dungeons outside "trick dungeons", finding out that there is no balance (in favour of the player) kills a lot of the sense of acomplishment. In other words - you get the tools needed to make a laughting stock of the game from the get go, and most of the content is a red herring to prevent you from realizing this too fast.
That is, unless we, the testers, make sure the game IS balanced before it's done. And the dev's talk to us and respond and stuff. And crying "it's singleplayer" in this case would lead the discussion, if this even merits one, in the wrong direction.
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!