Ladder Resets

[Kevin]

I can't see why we can't have PvP arbitrary balance. That is, some balance changes only effect PvP.

How to accomplish that? That's easy, make abilities have modified effects on human players! Certain skills could just have a penalty against human players only, etc.

That way they can almost be separate issues.

Not really. The skills that tend to be the most problematic aren't ones that have effects on other players, it's cooldown stuff, which means you aren't just changing what it does to people you have to limit what it can do based on location, which is whole new layer to the coding because there is no mechanic in place for that now. The could likely kludge something in with the difficulty system, but my guess is for code efficiency that is only a way to do multiplicative changes across the board. You need a finer tool than that for skills.

I don't know the classes and skills well enough to come up with a pertinent example, but I would imagine that something like serenity for the monk would be a problem. 4 seconds of invulnerability to everything. How do you fix it? Do you start tacking things into the code base so that it doesn't work vs this player skill or isn't full invulnerability?

The real issue is that balanced PvP is akin to security, you have to build from the ground up for it. It's actually easier to add on PvE to a PvP game than the other way around. Sure you can also tack security onto an existing system but it's much more vulnerable (think windows or the old IPX/SPX protocols if we are staying in the code base world ) as opposed to something that has security at it's core (think *nix/MacOS or TCP/IP protocol). It doesn't eliminate the issues, but it makes them simpler to deal with, and can eliminate a large swath of problems that trying to add on after the fact can't.