Insane Difficulty: Get Over Your Game Balance Obsession

I get the feeling that you're specifically talking about competitive multi-player games, so I'll speak from that angle.

I've never been one to get really serious while playing competitive games, so I've never really worried about game balance. Even for games that I do play like Street Fighter, Smash Bros, TF2, etc. there are tier lists for characters and weapons, but I generally ignore them. I go with whatever I feel is the most fun to play, and if I'm using a low tier option and win, it feels even better.

That being said, I can understand why very serious players think this way. If you're constantly losing to a certain combo of characters/items because of the advantages they have, it feels like you're being punished for playing with the combos you like. It feels as if you need to use the top tier options in order to compete at the highest level.

But this really only affects people playing at the highest level of competence, and that's an entirely separate issue. Should developers design their games to appeal to the pro level players? With world competitions and eSports growing, and having a larger influence on our subculture, maybe the answer is yes. There will always be games for the casual market (By "casual market" I don't mean the people who bought a Wii for Wii Sports, I mean people like us ) and the unbalanced nature of these games is a large percentage of the fun that we derive from them. They are also mostly single-player experiences, with additional multi-player content, which means that a majority of the QA going on before launch will be focused on the campaign experience.

So my answer is a very non-committal "I understand that you feel that way, and respect your opinion."

Since Smash Bros was mentioned, could someone please tell me how Meta Knight was broken? I almost never used that character but whenever I did, I didn't win any matches easily.

I think the reason with what Stann said about not being able to kill a boss or wave or w/e the online game has you face is a way for the game (company) to make money. I went through a myriad of online games and didn't pay a cent for any of them even when I couldn't kill a near impossible boss because I didn't shell out 100 bucks for wings or w/e.

Games "balance" games in order to force players to spend real money to pass a part easier. Most players have no idea what strategy is but know "i need stronger weapon. Here real money. Make me stronger. I win. Everyone else noobs."

genobeam3, on 19 January 2014 - 10:49 PM, said:

Meta Knight has amazing air control, a powerful attack set, high speed and amazing recovery.

It shouldn't be a surprise that Hal Laboratories, creators of the Kirby series, are also the guys behind Smash Bros.

Think this applies more toward online mmo games such as WoW or ultra competitive intensive online games such as SC, the more intricate the game the more intense the outcries.

I recently got back into playing the aforementioned competitive blizzard games where the game balance shifts as quickly from patch to patch as it does expansion to expansion. I play both at reasonably high levels (diamond/masters sc and between 2.2-2.4 rated arenas) and while its frustrating not being able to simply play however you want, due to nerfs and buffs forcing you into the flavor of the month cookie cutter strategies, it's also a uniquely gratifying feeling doing well at the same time.

Long story short, in efforts to balance, you sometimes have to break certain game aspects to make others viable. I think true balance is almost impossible overall especially in the case of multiplayer games, you can't cater to everyone at the same time.

I remember this from WoW way back when, before the first expansion. I played a Paladin and they kept making changes to it so it became less and less of a paladin. All classes leaned toward being able to do pretty much anything instead of being good at some things and worse at other things. That sort of "balance" was, from my perspective, just a way to oblige the whiny portion of the gamer body. The fun for me was that each class was very different from each other and through constant tweaks that changes. I don't know -- and don't care -- how the game plays today, it's just my experience from many years ago. Since then I haven't played many games that make constant changes, except a few months worth of League of Legends playing. where I actually met with another disappointment when they changed Lulu a few times, which rendered my favorite character pretty useless with the way I played her.

Bateman, on 20 January 2014 - 12:49 AM, said:

Meanwhile, at Valve:

Bateman, on 20 January 2014 - 12:49 AM, said:

I haven't played World of Warcraft in about six months, but those patches never really forced me to switch it up. Hell, I was owning kids as a Fury Warrior when Arms is the de facto PvP spec. However, those patches do become a lot more important when it comes to 2200-2400 rated 3v3s, I'll give you that.

Bateman, on 20 January 2014 - 12:49 AM, said:

I think there's a way to find that middle ground, but what happens most of the time is that eventually you get to a point where everything needs an overhaul to be equally competitive/viable again. This is the place where Blizzard is (or was the last time I played) at with World of Warcraft.

Stann, on 20 January 2014 - 02:52 AM, said:

I was never really huge in the competitive scene with WoW. Never really did Arenas and in battlegrounds the focus was more on strategy and less on class balance. I do play a LOT of League of Legends though and balance is very important here (as much as it sucks to have a Champion you like get nerfed into the ground.) With over 100 Champions in the pool there needs to be constant checks and balances in order to keep the game being watered down to "Here's our 120 Champion pool. If you want to be viable in the competitive scene you're only going to be using maybe 20 of them." We still see that a lot in the LCS, especially in the end of Season 2 and middle of Season 3 where there were some Champions in each lane that were obviously stronger than others.

No game this large will ever be perfect because there's simply too many factors to look at but they do their best to make sure that there isn't one Champion that just CAN'T be countered when played well.

Balance is the most important thing (well, maybe aside from being able to actually play the game) if your want your PvP to have longevity.

XtraT, on 20 January 2014 - 10:55 AM, said:

I assume you mean MMOs or MOBAs, because TF2 still regularly gets the top third most played game on Steam, is 7 years old, and is completely unbalanced.

XtraT, on 20 January 2014 - 10:55 AM, said:

That's why I pointed out:

Quote

In the article I'm criticizing choke-hold styles of balance that kill emergent game play, not the preliminary balance that makes PvP systems enjoyable. The two are different. You can have something crop up in your PvP that is very dominant, and instead of erasing it, I believe the correct way is to address other, under-utilized things.

One style of balance kills creativity because it flattens everything into the same field of non-effectiveness, and the other promotes under-used mechanics by bringing them up to par.

Guess which one is easier?

Archael, on 20 January 2014 - 11:11 AM, said:

This is why I've said over and over again that I hate removing things from the game.

Archael, on 20 January 2014 - 11:11 AM, said:

Nerfing the 1 overpowered thing is much easier than buffing all the ''under-utilized things''. Also, buffing said things can unfavorably affect the meta and create even more broken settings on their own. Plus, said buffing is also exponentially harder the more abilities and heroes/classes/guns/etcs the game has.

For PvP, of course it's easier to nerf the guy on top instead of bringing everyone else at its level but it's also the better way. At least that's my opinion as a PvP lover.

For single player I agree that nerfing isn't the best thing, unless it's grossly broken and imbalanced (near invincibility, etc). Since there's really nothing to ''win'', it's usually better (but still harder) to buff all the crappy skills/weapons/etc no one uses.

XtraT, on 20 January 2014 - 12:16 PM, said:

Easier, sure. But it creates a more fun experience if you don't just look at the guy on top and knock him down. What does he have over the "inferior" classes, mechanically speaking? If it's that Mr. Imba is just lightyears beyond them, then nerf him. If it has something to do with the inviability of another class' abilities, then address that.

Proper identification of the source of the issue plays a huge part in this. All too often I see the symptoms being attacked instead of the source of the disease itself.

''More fun'' is very subjective, especially when you're on the overpowered side. So many times I read ''they nerfed my overpowered *insert anything*, stop nerfing fun!''. The problem is it's not ''fun'' on the other side when you're outplaying your opponent and still lose to imbalance.

Also, nerfing doesn't mean making the thing useless. Sometimes a 1-5% nerf or 1 ability tweak is all it takes. Take Hearthstone for example, they were some pretty strong cards that only got nerfed by 1 health/attack/mana. The cards are still worth using, but they're not as good as before.

Anyway, it's very game/genre dependent. LoL, Diablo, FPSs, I have a different opinions on all of them and I could talk about balance all day

XtraT, on 20 January 2014 - 01:54 PM, said:

That's very true. What I meant was more get a broad range of educated opinions. The guy pissing and moaning on the WoW Arena forums about how OP Warlocks or Death Knights are needs to be ignored.

XtraT, on 20 January 2014 - 01:54 PM, said:

In the MMOs I've played competitively, when something is nerfed, all too often it's nerfed to the ground.

XtraT, on 20 January 2014 - 01:54 PM, said:

This is also very true.

I wish I could have gotten in on the conversation earlier, but I don't think I really have much to add on what has already been said as I pretty much agree 100% with the stance of the article. I instead want to talk about balance as it pertains not the the MMO type games but in the classic RPG's such as the FInal Fantasy series.

There has been a general imbalance throughout the series that has stemmed from what I like to call disposable items, and also from fact that damage rushing your opponent is generally the most successful and easiest way to win most of the time. I think the series got a bit better in that regard starting with X, but not much.

Disposable items are mostly equipment that is useful for only a very short period of time. There is typically little variety in the equipment throughout most of the game besides the occasional elemental one, and then you get to the end game where there are the ultimate or clearly better no matter what items. The usefulness of the items are so low because all they do is provide a stat upgrade up in every category, rendering the previous item totally worthless.

I feel like this for the most part is a waste of item space and although I understand it would be very hard to come up with that many items that were that different, I feel like by better balancing out items so that they can have niche uses you are creating a good balance, but not one that makes every item basically the same.

With mods like 1.3 there is a good mixture of the disposables with ones that have niche use throughout the game in a way that in vanilla wasn't the case. Giving a mythril sword a magic boost makes it an item that can be appealing from time to time, but it doesn't make it so bland that it doesn't matter what you choose. I think this is a good direction to go in and I have tried alot in development of DM to try to apply the same philosophies.

It is an unfortunate fact that although many status items and spells exist, they serve little use when just applying as much damage as you can as fast as you can will do the job just fine. I often asked myself while playing why I would even try to use a status spell when I could just use an attack one. This is because of a fundamental unbalance where the developers didn't give those spells a general applied purpose.

They exist as a choice but they are never really a needed one unless you are playing a challenge run, which tell you that they could have made those spells more viable by creating situations where damaging the enemy wasn't as viable of a scenario, or the enemies defenses made it so that disabling them was a good option.

FFX did a good job of this by making different types of enemies that were most effectively fought by certain characters. This was the first time playing a FF game that I generally felt status ailments were actually viable and useful.

In both of these senses balance is very important because we want to create an environment that is diverse for the player and thereby challenges them to use what they have to try to win.

I wonder though when thinking about the developers of games like D3 and WoW that even though they take it overboard trying to balance, its possible that their intentions are not just for the players, but for themselves? What I mean is if you created all of these skills for the Wizard class, but most of the players were just running Archon, of course you don't want to ruin their fun but I know as someone who was trying to create something you want nothing more than for the player to experience everything you created. Of course the best option is one that gives players more freedom to play as they want, but I feel for the developers if this was the case on their end.

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

This is what we call a false choice.

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

I actually agree with this. Another game that does this well -- better than Final Fantasy X -- is Lost Odyssey.

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

Self-gratification is only valid if it's the dominant intent. That said, I don't think it's clear whether or not anyone but the devs can make that call here, at least for D3.

For WoW, the game balance isn't that bad to where you'd never want to touch X class because it's just so absolutely weak. As a matter of fact, there's kind of a different pull there. While it's true that classes have been standardized in the tools they carry (I saw some evidence of them trying to get away from that in the past two expansions), the ways that each class incorporates these tools are different. Each class plays somewhat differently, to the point that the small change in heavy melee playstyles (let's go with Death Knight and Warrior) can feel quite refreshing. It's similar, yet different at the same time.

To elaborate on this (while keeping it simple), Death Knight has a large emphasis on their diseases. The more diseases you have up, the more damage your bread and butter skill will do. These diseases are both DoTs and debuffs. With a Warrior, you have bleeds, which do damage over time, but refresh the cooldown of your bread and butter skill if I remember correctly. Similar, but different.

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.