It’s not just hard, it’s insanely hard. Hell, I’m starting to think it might be an intractable problem with all the self-imposed constraints that stem from trying to keep everyone happy. But I’ll get to that in a moment, there’s something else I want to clarify first.
I keep hearing this idea from the PVP players: PVP is a superset of PVE, so if you balance PVP, then PVE is going to be fine.
The problem with that is that it assumes that because both PVP and PVE players perform the same actions, they value them equally. PVE players and PVP players have different ways of having fun.
Yeah, sure, we both do the PVE content, but where that content might be a chore for a PVP player, it might be the main reason to play the game for a PVE player. You might only fight the Red Mother for the loot or slaughter everyone in New Asagarth in search of a particular thrall, but I do that stuff when I get tired of building and want to feel like I’m on an adventure.
Which brings me to why it’s insanely hard to balance PVP and PVE without making someone very unhappy. Let’s go for what people think is low hanging fruit: mob hitpoints and other stats like that.
How tanky should mobs be and how hard should they hit? This wouldn’t be such a hard question to answer if we didn’t have combat followers (e.g. fighters and archers). Unfortunately, followers exist and they serve two very different purposes. They are used as a base defense from raids, and they can also follow a player to help with the mobs.
If the mobs are too tanky and don’t hit very hard, people complain about how that’s not really a challenge, it’s just a drawn out, boring fight. If they’re not tanky enough, people complain about how it’s trivially easy to bring a thrall and kill them. If they’re tanky and hit too hard, people complain about how players are just sidekicks for their thralls, instead of being heroes.
The problem with all of those is that your thrall has way more health (and hits way harder) than you do. But they also can’t make the thralls too weak, because then they won’t be useful for PVP raid defense. Not to mention that people will rightly complain about the thralls being nerfed when there’s already a limit on how many you can have.
So we’re already seeing a problem because followers are used both for PVP and PVE, but we would still have a bucketload of other problems even without that. Take a look at this recent thread about the change that made damage cancel the healing from potions:
Yeah, I understand how the change was necessary to balance PVP, but it really saps the fun out of solo PVE. Does that mean they should revert the change? Not really, because they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. And the game is full of “little” conundrums like that one.
TL;DR: It’s already hard to balance PVP and PVE both, because PVP players and PVE players have fun in different ways. What makes it pretty much impossible is that followers can be used for both PVP and PVE.