There is always a trade-off in order to achieve something [...] Time was lost while doing this and time is a resource.
Oh mercy. This is exceptionally trite, even for a forum argument. Of course real-world resources like time are consumed in the course of any behavior. If the only idea you wanted to express was that space-time exists, you didn't need to post anything at all. The manner in which the statement supported your argument implied you believed balance entails distinct sacrifice, and you gave the example of fun. To reply that it's an action subject to the laws of physics is bad faith argumentation in its purest form.
If you assume time is not sacrificed, that means something else is, unless you assume the developers have perfect knowledge and create a flawless system on the first try without messing anything up
Non-sequitur in the original domain of discourse, but since we're now talking about whether or not actions exist in dimensional reality, I have to "concede" that this is technically true. In the domain of the original discussion to a reasonable observer, however, this is untrue. Again, I don't want to get bogged down in more slippery argumentation, but additive balance is a thing. You can expand a game space to produce a larger number of win-viable game states for all parties - though if you wanted to be slippery, you could argue a degree of parsimony is sacrificed in that case, but that's really just more bad faith argumentation. You clearly meant the number or quality of game states would be reduced, and if not, your argument becomes nothing more than the tautology "things change when they are changed."
At any rate, I'm glad we've finally come to agree that balance is a critical component of designing a cooperative game, as no development team makes a perfect product on first go and are likely to make a mistake that requires balancing (kind of like if you, say, made a game of Solitaire where you win every time you place a card down, eh?) Now you just need to recognize that classes and class options are a set of player choices and that player choice is a significant and common, if not the most significant and common, avenue for game balance.
I was making comparisons between this game and a PVP game (where balance is absolutely the core of the game) to draw attention to the key differences. And sure, whilst any number of monster interactions could be managed to another player, they aren't and they likely never will be, so that is a non analogous comparison because one of the limitations we are imposing on the system by having it within a computer game is that it is controlled by a computer and there are massive differences between a computer and a real person. For one, the computer can only react to situations it has been programmed to deal with, its a very narrow "intelligence" (if you can even call it that) with a whole lot of limitations and a creative player can easily bypass those limitations. This is incidentally why a player can get away with killing that entire goblin camp in the first place, because if it was a vindictive player controlling those goblins, the players would be very, very dead.
Again man, this just has nothing to do with what we were talking about and I don't understand why you want to drag me into it. Besides, look at all the caveats: "they likely never will be" (exactly, which is why this line of discussion is weird and pointless, and does not constitute a meaningful or useful delineation for creating categories of balance) "a vindictive player", "an intelligent player," you can just as easily design an AI to make vindictive or intelligent choices. In fact an unconstrained AI would probably be better at making those choices than an average player, it's not 1980 anymore. Even if this were meaningful or relevant, it's a bad line of argument.
I think it depends on a few factors. If there was a surface that did 200d10 damage for example every round, even if it took you 3 rounds to remove it, you would probably make removing it a high priority. They could also scale fire surfaces at a high level by increasing the damage of surfaces as the player level increased. We don't really know what they are planning to do beyond spell level 2 right now and there are lots of ways which surfaces could become far more broken, or far more underwhelming. I mentioned above why I like surfaces, its possible to include them, without completely skewing balance. Although I acknowledge that even if they are made inefficient action wise to apply, by virtue of being there they make casters stronger by giving them more options.
An example I saw mentioned somewhere which I personally liked is if targeting the ground created a surface but targeting an enemy did not. This creates a situation where a player needs to decide whether they want the surface, or the direct damage and keeps the surface dynamics in the game. They could up the cantrip surface damage to say 1d6 if a player throws it on the ground and have it deal 1d10 fire damage directly. If the AI walks through the fire, it has a potential to maybe do more than 1d10 (I have seen some enemies do weird stuff on flaming ground which resulted in them taking 3+ ticks for example) and so it has a potential to do more but also a potential to do nothing.
Yeah, more information from Larian on their intentions for further modifications to 5E would be extremely welcome. I hope we get a series of blog posts that explain the divergence, planned divergences to come, and give us some insight into the playtesting and design philosophies that led to so many changes. I think the Steam/Larian forums would be far less divided and far more civil if they provided some first-hand information.
