Insane Difficulty: Get Over Your Game Balance Obsession - Insane Difficulty

The hard part is finding out where exactly is that point when balance overcomes gamer's satisfaction. Who's to say what and when that point is reached?

For me, balance is lost when one 'side' dominates regardless of whether it's legal or not. I take a look at MtG for example. Those that played back in 2004 will remember this bad boy:



For those that played in the standard format, every deck was either a)playing affinity or b)playing to stop affinity. There was no in-between; if you didn't do a or b, you had no chance to be competitive.

The same should hold true to other games. I haven't played an MMORPG since Everquest so I won't comment on that aspect, but for RtS, it is relatively the same. Most RtS follows a paper-rock-scissor concept: i.e. Grunts > Archers > Dragons > Grunts.... I understand that that's a simple example but the general scheme overall is the same.

However, when one strategy effectively dominates the scene then it becomes necessary. When WC3 first came out burrow rushing was a dominate game play strategy among orc players which went to the highest level. The same with undeads summoning multiple graveyards and using necromancers to send, literally, an endless army of skeletons to attack the enemy.

On a large or major game no one player can ever be in a position to make a decision to say that a certain skill, ability, strategy, etc is a dominate strategy. You can play 10 or 50 games a day and it won't matter when there are hundreds of thousands of games played everyday. The developer or whoever has access to see the results of all these games are the ones that are in a position to make the educated decision of whether something needs to be changed or not.

Good players I know don't really care about changes, it simply means it's time for them to find a new way to be the best. Players that overly rely on a fixed planned are the real gripers about because they can't adopt the change.

The only thing that would give me pause is that any changes inevitability leads to unintended results. Changing ability X might put an immediate stop to a issue at hand but who knows what other consequences it might face down the line? No amount of playtesting can ever detect any and all bugs in a given system especially given how large the scale of today's games are.

kc724, on 21 January 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

Nailed it.

It's a nice idea but there's a measure of practicality missing from that statement -- it only works if there is neither practice nor unlocking involved. And almost any game with have at least one, if not both.

Spend several hours unlocking that OP item, only to revel in it for a day and then the dev was like "nah, it's OP. Let's nerf it to the ground". Good thing I just spent my $D3 shinies$ getting that item. Now that Item Y instead of Item X is the hot thing, guess it's back to the grindstone.

It sucks to have to level a new class, grind out a different item set, lose the infinite combo you perfected, or similar -- even if it's for the greater good.

auraplatonic, on 21 January 2014 - 12:05 AM, said:

That's one of the things that FFT did right, imo. You may try to inflict a status in other FFs, but you'll feel it will almost always miss. How's that? The player doesn't even have a clue of what were the chances of getting it right. In FFT on the other hand, you have a clear idea of what the odds are all of the time.

Of course, your point still applies, because damage is still the best strategy 95% of the cases in vanilla. But I really like that pov. There's different types of strategy in FFs: You may fully support a damage dealer, you may inflict status to cripple the enemy, you may cripple / buff stats, you may have a full team of damage dealers, you may even have a leeching type of builds with Blood Swords, and everything in-between. And each status cripples the target in a very different way. How can you have a FF game that involves you thinking about using every type of strategy, with every status, (having the possibility to swap your team with unique teammates) while not letting one strategy be clearly superior to the rest?

Don't have lots of time to keep typing, but I'll be stopping by in a few days when I get back.

philsov, on 22 January 2014 - 06:44 AM, said:

Oh God, you just reminded me of a time many many years ago. Some kid was showing off his infinite 100% combo in an X-men vs Street Fighter match against another guy. The other guy gave him a beatdown irl after the match.

So much truth about "balance" here, and about the way people get so obsessed with it that games get ruined.

For example, I've mentioned in the past (as in, like 3-4 months ago the past, probably) in Chat that one of the non-FFT things I work on with some friends is building up a private server for the long-defunct MMO Universal Century Gundam Online, and one of the first things we had defined and well-implemented were PVP aspects. So of course, while we're working to develop other parts of the server, we're having people play on the server and give us feedback on the game balance, etc., since there's no reason not to have that part going through the testing gauntlet while developing other parts of the game. And of course, we've gotten plenty of "X is too weak", "Y is OP", etc.

And honestly? A lot of what's said in the original post is fairly spot-on - sometimes, people are just using things in ways you never originally envisioned, or something is "OP" for reasons other than it strictly being overpowered. And while it's talking about the reverse situation, I find the example in this episode of Extra Credits more or less summarizes the approach you need to take in general when a change needs to be made to a game's "balance". (For those who don't feel like watching, the episode is about the importance of proper playtesting from a consumer perspective, and I'm specifically referring to a segment where they refer to getting feedback such as "I feel like this part of the game needs more power ups" and digging for the root problem, which may actually be "my weapon isn't strong enough" and require a completely different solution than offerred by your playtester.) When people say something is too good or not good enough, or trends that seem 'wrong' pop up or whatever, it's really important to dig into the meat of your game and see what's actually going on. To bring it back to my original example of working on that MMO server - we got a lot of feedback on one kind of weapon being overpowered and one being underpowered. Since the feedback on these two kinds of weapons was fairly consistent compared to most other feedback, it was clearly worth looking into, despite the surface-math saying that the two weapons should be more or less balanced against both each other and the rest of the field. It turned out the surface math was correct - the actual problem was mechanical and related to how the weapons were handled by a specific server routine, and they weren't even the only weapons to be skewed by it. While my players were saying "Buff this" and/or "Nerf that", what was actually needed was a far more intricate solution.

A lot of designers / companies often take the easy way out though, which results in lots of buffing or nerfing in situations where they're not the real solution, and "you WILL play MY way" fixes to unforeseen ways players figure out to play the game, which, honestly, is the exact opposite of the reason people play games. I find that's the absolute worst way to go about designing games. In any game I've played (Trading Card Games, FFT, etc.) I find I have the most fun utilizing whatever exists in the game to personalize the way I go about playing and, hopefully, winning against the AI or other players or whatever the game's objective happens to be, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this regard. While a competitive player can (and should) use any means necessary within the rules of the game to win, that is ultimately not what's fun or engaging to your average player. The personalization and discovery process of a game is important to getting players invested, especially if you want a long-term committal. Being too "hands on", especially in this modern age of constant patches and fixes to basically every game ever, can be incredibly detrimental. This is because you can quickly stifle and kill the discovery process and in turn player interest in general simply because they're not discovering what you want them to discover, or are no longer able to use the thing they like because you made a knee-jerk decision to nerf something instead of digging into the why about why it's causing a (perceived) problem.

Honestly, I could go on quite a while about the topic of "balance", how people get obsessed with it as some kind of inane idol to worship, how it factors into other areas of game design, etc. but it's getting on 3am and I'm already worried this is getting less coherent the more I type. I suppose the short version is that, if a change needs to be made to your game (either during playtesting or after launch), you really need to dig in to find the meat of that problem and the solution your game needs instead of the one it looks like it needs, and you need to be willing to let go of a game after it's finished and let people have fun (or whatever emotion your game elicits, games can be for more than fun!) in the way they want to, discover, and find interesting. Yes, that means sometimes players don't have the experience you want them to - but it can often turn out the one they ended up having is even better or at least more interesting, so there's no harm in that!

Back when i was in the uni, me and a group of people i knew through warcraft 3 were designing a MOBA custom map.

In this map, it so happened that "Strength" heroes were dominant, due to their high hp and often ability to stun. There was a whole bunch of different strength heroes with various stuns, but they still occupied less than 10% of the entire roster, and there were plenty of other heroes too, which - while not necessarily able to stand up in straight combat with "Strength" heroes - could still do all sorts of other damage.

This created some interesting dynamics where some people picked "Strength" heroes of their choice to own stuff, while other people picked other types of heroes to be clever and show those strength dudes what for.

Obsessed with balance as we were, though, we decided to seriously nerf stuns across the board. Which killed the core dynamic we had and the map started gradually bleeding players.

I'm showing up a bit late to the party here, but i've spent a lot of time playing League since i've left, and have a pretty good understanding of everything that happens in that game. Keep in mind, this is a multiplayer game and every type of play has to be counterable in some way to make sure the game stays fun and doesn't become frustrating. The Mid-lane Master Yi gameplay type was incredibly frustrating and unfair because it had very little counterplay. His abilities consisted of a skill that would (automatically, it couldn't miss) hit multiple targets for large portions of health instantly while he himself remained untargetable. This, paired with the ability he had giving him cooldown resets passively on champion kills meant he remained untargetable while entire teams died to him. This type of gameplay is incredibly unfair to whomever doesn't have this champion on their team and so it is reasonable to change.

Many people complain about the simple pattern of nerfing Riot has for balancing things, largely because it's very easy for people to complain whenever their favorite champion is nerfed, and it drowns out any buffs anything else gets, especially on the Forum/Reddit environments. For example, pretty recently, two mid-lane mages have been picked up for the support role (Annie and Morgana), a support has become strong in the mid-lane (Lulu), and two relatively unplayed champs played mid or top (Pantheon and Wukong) have been picked up in the jungle, all because someone, somewhere, innovated. All of these picks barring maybe lulu are healthy to the game - with obvious strengths and weaknesses, it feels good to succeed and feels fair when you've lost.

League of Legends is a living breathing game, and metagame never turns stale as Riot constantly introduces new champions and items - it's a beautiful thing, really, despite how much people complain.

Dude, welcome back. How have you been?

Just wanted to throw in my 2 cents:

Developers probably need to make sure they are looking at 2 separate sets of "general balance" in most games: PVE and PVP. In single player games, obviously this is not an issue.

I'll use WoW as an example: When WotLK first came out, due to story reasons in the PVE side of things, they wanted to make Paladins and Deathknights powerful in PVE thinking that player strategies and balance they established in BC would continue. The problem was that the talent system rework caused more powerful characters in PVP than they initially intended. So the nerf bat gets thrown around.

Really what probably should have been done was to just rework the gear for PVP and leave the rest of it alone. WoW has the concept of "resilience" as a PVP stat that allows tweaks to this without affecting the rest of the game (for the most part).

Any time you have a rock paper scissors mentality that exists in a lot of MMOs and MOBAs, a lot of that balance gets thrown out the window when you introduce any type of combinations of these or unique character styles. So trying to just nerf bat all playstyles into balancing each other, considering the exact nature of the problem, while more time intensive, will probably result in more happy players.

elchupateta, on 19 June 2014 - 09:02 AM, said:

As someone who's played WoW fairly consistently for several years, this is pretty accurate. I still remember the infamous Frost Mage patch during Cata when the PvP balance of power was turned on its head.

elchupateta, on 19 June 2014 - 09:02 AM, said:

Resilience is pretty much a non-stat in Mists, as every class gets a baseline amount of it depending on their level. From what little of Mists PvP I've experienced, I'm not sure I like the direction they took resilience in, though I can see the rationale behind it.

elchupateta, on 19 June 2014 - 09:02 AM, said:

Yeah, it's a very precarious house of cards that collapses in on itself when you carelessly introduce new elements into the game. Though, rebuilding that house of cards is what patches are for, I guess.

Advent, on 19 June 2014 - 10:58 AM, said:

I played a little Cata then quit out so never played Mists, mostly due to the game seeming to be dumbed down a lot to attract new crowds (Blizzard needs more cash for their money pile).

So I'm operating from a WotLK perspective which had its problems, but many things about it were great to me. For example, while Paladins and Deathknights were still very powerhouse PVP chars, Mages and Locks could pretty easily lock them down, with Rogues, Shamans and Druids outclassing them, and Warriors and Hunters outclassing them. There was a lot more interplay and variability due to talents and gear but most balance issues could be counteracted with playstyle which is the entire point: you want to get the game balanced enough that the major deciding factor in equivalently geared players is skill and knowledge of class.

elchupateta, on 19 June 2014 - 12:20 PM, said:

You just pretty much described high-end PvP in every expansion past BC (which is not to say that it wasn't like that in BC, but rather my first max level toon came in Wrath, so I can't speak for it).