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 want to argue we live in a universe where an infinite amount of time can be spent on making something perfect be my guest, but until we actually do, balance
does imply sacrifices will be made, because major deadlines are normally fixed.
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."
Yes, I did mean the number of quality game states would be reduced and I meant that because time is a finite resource, so unless you dedicate additional time to making sure that balance is maintained between states, quality will suffer. Obviously, its possible to construct arbitrary cases where this is not true, for example you could add 1 more object to rock, paper, scissors and make it a square rather than a triangle, but the more initial complexity a system has before you try to modify it, the harder doing something like this is and 5e is not rock, paper, scissors. Sure, you could also do something like give every single class a new, specific action which has identical functionality on all of them, but even that is not guaranteed to be balanced due to inter class interactions, where some classes are better able to take advantage of that action than others. Point being, if you want to make changes with the intention of adding depth, its going to come at the cost of either time or balance and probably a bit of both.
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 never said balance was bad, I just drew distinctions between different kinds of balance and said that I care more about one than another. System balance is in my opinion important, where the system as a whole is seen as balanced, while individual class vs class balance is not something I am particularly interested in. So long as classes have their niches and there isn't 1 class which is ideal for every single situation, I see it as more or less ok outcome. Actually, it makes for a far more interesting game when classes have different strengths and weaknesses, even if it means in some cases, certain classes feel useless because at that moment in time their specific niche isn't available to them, provided there are other cases where being that role is useful.
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.
You were the one who brought up that you could just replace the AI with a human doing the same thing, so I just followed your line of reasoning and showed why it was an unfair comparison. Whilst you could make an AI which is designed to be more vindictive than a human, that same AI would not also be able to do more considerate decisions, because of the way AI works. Until AGI is a thing, you aren't going to have a computer making as naunced decisions as a human is. Whilst it is nice to make arguments in an idealized world where time doesn't exist and we have super intelligent AIs, its not the world we live in so we might as well stick to the real world constraints.
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.
That would be nice, yes.
