I read that often, but I have often many max characters in MMOs I play a longer time. I had 5 max chars in EQ2 and 6 in GW2 now, and trust me, the classes of MMOs are usually VERY imbalanced. They are usually not even remotely even powered. ONE reason being is, that nowadays MMOs have both PVP and PVE in the same game, and that is close to impossible to balance.
Well, I'm a strange person - as I tend to trust my own experiences over that of another person. Expecting balance in a game with as many factors and human elements as the average MMO is not realistic.
But there's a big difference between an impossible balance and then claiming imbalance is the root of everything that goes wrong for you.
Trust ME - most players simply suck and refuse to think out of the box.
I have only briefly played ESO, so I dont know about that, but anyone who played a lot of MMOs will tell you classes usually ARE quite imbalanced. For instance GW2 Warrior just outclasses all other having almost the DMG of a Rogue and among the top most defense too. I could say the same about a lot of classes.
Let's just say my experience with MMOs is not insignificant. I know about Warrior and "Zerker" builds in GW2. But, again, there's a difference between the hivemind calling the shots for the general population and truth.
Usually, it's somewhere in-between, and most players actually prefer to believe the popular saying rather than work and think out-of-the-box. That's been my experience.
I dont even blame developers; balancing and still keeping distinct and interesting classes is among the most difficult things to do. LOTRO had among the best class balancing, partially because it didn't have any (real) PVP to take into account, and WoW used to have the worst balancing, because Blizzard had clear flavour of the months classes they loved much more than others.
That's a misconception if I ever saw one
Trying to pin it on developer bias is ludicrous. Blizzard's problem was and is that they iterate based on player feedback too much, and trust in their own vision too little.
But WoW was quite balanced for a long time - considering the amount of factors involved. The problem is that they eventually relented and decided that all classes should perform well at most tasks, and that's when everything interesting about it went down the shitter.
That's one of the biggest problems with MMOs today. Well, not the genre itself - but how developers approach it. They spoil players by changing everything based on the initial perception - and they don't give them time or motivation to adapt. So, imbalance will be an endless cyclical problem as one class is tweaked until it's "desirable" which makes other classes less desirable.
The best approach is to strive for balance - but then ACCEPT a certain measure of imbalance - and wait for a LONG time until players have adapted. THEN you can see what's real and what's not. We're talking 6-12 months, instead of every other month.
