General Balance Steps
So, balancing is a boring, tedious, and long task. Thus, I'll write here most stuff we need to be aware of. By the way, the longer we take to balance and fill things with placeholders, the more time we will spend just fixing and playtesting so things stop being a placeholder.
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Determine the basic effort (eg. 10 minutes farming crafties) -
Determine how much that will be worth in Esperins (eg. 100 E)
Now, regardless of how many riches players make, every pricing (prices and rewards) must be done in that rule.
Of course, as next releases take time, players may start getting lots... and lots... and lots... of Esperins. However, we cannot repeat the previous mistake of looking at how many Esperins players have to set prices for stuff, or we might end up with “this quest requires 1 year farming Esperins” just because old players got this sort of money (but new players obviously won't be able to get that amount of money.)
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Set buy price field based on that (location rarity may be changed on NPCs) -
Set sell price to 1/3 of the buy price
This requires discussion:
Well, I'll advise what I envisioned before but decision must still be collective. A "reasonable" procedure in my opinion if we take too much before releases, is setting a "premium currency" to be handled out > in events, boss raids, and any other event involving community, which can be swapped by rares. When we do a release and players have excessive money, we convert part of that money in this premium currency with only a warning that we will be doing so.
Not all money, of course... Just the amount which become balance breaking. And with a rule, like, 1000 E = 1 premium currency, so if you had 2540 Esperins and we decided that anything above 500 E is balance breaking, player would end up with 540 E and 2 premium currencies. (example)
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Determine maximum damage aborb for full equipment set (either with 60% damage absorb at level 99, or 5% damage absorb every 10 levels, for example) -
Convert that in defense points (eg. 900 equip. defense points) -
Create a formula of how these points will be distributed (eg. 50% shield, 25% armor, 25% headgear, 0% other stuff) -
Find out what should escape the rule (eg. mage equipment, archer equipment, tanker equipment, etc.) and tweak manually. -
Determine Monster Levels and allocate monster stats accordingly.
Then, we have to set weapons and monster stats at the same time.
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Player attack formula: It should have a reverse linearity. For example, if difference from level 10 to 20 is +100 attack, the difference from level 80 to 90 should not be above +60 attack, maybe even less. Monster HP should assume the attack raise is linear so we have a steady difficulty increase with less effort.
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Player HP table: It will affect monster ATK value, which is also affected by monster speed.
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Player EXP tables: It should affect monster EXP/JExp rewards
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Monster stats should then be tweaked based on monster speed, modes (specially the BOSS mode), size, etc.
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The worse problem is, of course, when we start tweaking monster stats based on their rarity, because that might change.
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Playtest to find errors on any base formula (these errors are propagated to ALL monsters), or on manual tweaks. - For example, on ML, the "agressive" mode from a monster was overstated. This meant a Cave Maggot gave more exp than a non-aggressive monster much stronger than it.
Also, we might also need to
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Make a table with all items sorted by rarity, so prices and quest difficulty can be set -
Note that for equipment, the following rule applies: Stronger equip = Higher rarity = Higher price/difficulty -
Remember to set equipment buy price first, based on how difficult it is 😉