… as if millions of players suddenly cried out for a nerf and then were silenced.
The topic of Balance has been quite popular this last little while. My version of the discussion so far:
Count Dooku: It’s silly.
Wat Tambor: It’s very silly.
Darth Vader: It’s impossible!
Obi-Wan: Is not!
Han Solo: Fight Fight! (P.S. Is not!)
Darth Vader: Uh huh! Is too!
Princess Leia: Look, this is how you do it.
Jek Porkins: But what about … [explosion]
Darth Vader: I’ll agree that it at least exists.
… and the discussion continues …
Whether or not it’s possible, balance is necessary. Every player I know has complained about it at some point or another.
For some, balance is about equality of players, characters and classes. Every class should have equal damage in combat. Every class should have equal access to heals. I certainly think that, in some games (chess, checkers) absolute equality can still result in a fun game. In stat based games (like MMORPG’s), I agree with other bloggers that it is inequality that often leads to enjoyable game play.
But balance is still needed. One just has to look at the topic a little differently. What needs to be balanced is the tradeoff between rules that create enjoyable inequality and the degree to which said rules shrink the playable game-space.
When faced with imbalance, players flock to a single play style and focus on only a subset of what it is possible. The game suffers as a result. When game rules are badly balanced, the playable game-space can collapse to a near singularity.
This definition can be applied to the traditional view of balance. Examine the case of Star Wars Galaxies’ and the Carbineer and Pikeman classes. These classes had no characteristic that made them interesting and as general combatants, they were sub-optimal. As a result, very few people played them and the playable game-space shrank.
This could have been fixed. They could have been given specialized skills for crowd control (as I think was originally intended). A crowd control class (see City of Heroes) can be an important member of a group and fun to play.
In classic SWG*, the ‘mind pool’** was king in PvP. This led to a division of character templates: PvE and PvP. For any given character (and you only had one character per account), the playable game space was effectively cut in half. In my opinion, the benefit of an interesting irregularity in the topology of SWG game-space was outweighed by negative impact it has on the size of the playable game-space for any given account.
Or look at balance between individual abilities in classic SWG. Execute any action and you waited for the single cool down timer to perform your next action. The rules encouraged players to focus on spamming their single best combat action (perhaps occasionally throwing in a heal). Playable game-space (the choice of action) was essentially reduced to a one option.
Again, this could have been fixed. In CoH, each action generally runs on its own cool-down timer. While waiting for one action to become available, you can use all your others. Players are encouraged to explore the full game-space.
The list of balance questions is endless. For example, the power-growth curve of a character impacts the range of viable targets for PvP (ideally, you want an opponent you’ve got at least some chance of beating). Is the benefit of a steep power-curve worth the cost of reducing potential targets (playable game-space)?
While it might not be possible to satisfy all players, it is nonetheless the designer’s job to ensure that the chosen rule set doesn’t imply a single path to success. This is the act of balancing.
Some games show great balance. Other’s do not. I therefore must conclude that balance is in fact possible. Perhaps, though, it’s more art than science.
Notes
* Pre Combat Upgrade, Pre New Game Experience.
** For those who didn’t play Star Wars Galaxies, each mob had 3 point pools: health, action, and mind. Each pool could be targeted for direct damage, healing or buffing. The rules of the game made it such that health and action could be buffed and healed easily. Mind could not, making it typically the weakest point. To be optimal in PvP, you were encouraged to choose a character template that targeted the mind pool. In PvE groups, the health pool was more likely to be the optimal choice (since most group members had attacks that could target health). The net effect: PvE and PvP optimal builds were different and separate.
8 Comments
Wooohooo, I get to be Princess Leia! Now the question is which version?
While I can understand what you have said and how it works, I am going to have to respectfully disagree. I think every game can be balanced, games only become imbalanced when the designers and developers listen to the demands of their playerbase without first questioning how it will actually impact the rest of the game. Even if it might not impact the game until several expansions later, the designer or developer should look closely at it.
Unfortunately we’re in a very now centric society and it’s usually easier to say yes as opposed to no.
I think balance of a sort is certainly possible; what worries me the most are the Great Traps of Balance.
Trap #1: Everything is balanced numerically. This produces a bland, uninteresting sort of homogenized gruel where we were kind of hoping for gameplay. Now, I believe there is some sort of “underlying derived number” that could probably be balanced; it’s just nothing as straightforward as damage per second + healing per second. Still, if the only difference between Class A and Class B is that Class A hits for 300 with a 3-second cooldown, while Class B hits with a DoT for 100 points per second dealt for 3 seconds — well, that’s totally balanced but not interesting. Now, on the up side, this sort of balance seems to have largely become unpopular, so that’s good.
Trap #2: Complexity breeds sameness traps. Early Diablo 2 suffered enormously from this: in creating widely varied skill trees, some (*cough* strafazon *cough*) allowed players to highly focus their skill points and gain massive strength. SWG’s HAM system, as discussed above, is an even better example — in attempting to add dimensions of freedom, what would have otherwise been small balance traps forced all players to respect massive restrictions. This is the issue that seems to be the largest today, and I have no easy solution to propose. Rock-Scissors-Paper style combat systems are a step towards this (WoW in the expansion: Paladin’s invulnerability bubble can be dispelled by a Priest. Priest shield can be dispelled or beaten down. Balanced! if the numbers are properly examined), but this will require massive amounts of testing during development, and monitoring during live status.
True balance arrives when any given build has an opportunity to shine, in the right tactical circumstances. This is easy to say, and difficult — but not impossible — to execute. It’s OK if one build tends to lose to another, so long as it can tend to defeat a third, and all three have strengths that make them desirable.
Amongst the numbers, combat effectiveness, and the like, though, come the intangibles. WoW Warlocks get one of the cooler-looking mounts. (Firey-footed horses, no relation to Firemares from Krull!) Jedi in SWG (again, talking about the old game, not the new… version) got their glowie sticks. This is an area that gets important, I would postulate. Even in cases where raw effectiveness is unchanged, being able to look unique, or at least cool, is a very real portion of “balance.”
Ahhhh, but let’s not look at the damage per second, because that will only be balanced if the characters are initially balanced.
As opposed to taking one aspect and balancing that, instead take the very base of the game, the character creation and balance that. If the NPC’s follow the same build models, a set of skills given a weight value used in conjunction with a set of abilities or traits that are given a similar weight value, you will be able to balance the game.
But there is a caveat. Not all characters will have the exact same result with each encounter. I happen to believe that this should be the case. I might not like that the shmo next to me is doing twice as much damage, but I do like the fact that when things get bad, I can just run around the corner and fade while they are beaten to a sad little pulp.
The playing field will never be equal, because everyone will approach the playing field differently. There are those who min-max, and then there are others who like to create something of a challenge. While you can take those things into consideration and approach them with a cap, you won’t be able to make everyone happy. And when you try, you end up making everything worse.
I get the feeling that we’re not actually disagreeing; I’m just not communicating myself well. I could write a whole article about this, but if I had to summarize, here’s what I’d think of as a balanced system:
A system is balanced when no one build is always clearly better than another.
Again, I could write a whole article about this, but here’s the approach I hope to use to “balance” a system. I’d envision running battles in simulation. Mass simulation. 1 v 1, same level. 2 v 2, same level. 1 v 5, max vs min level. Etc. (I’m way oversimplifying, of course.) Balance is measured when win percentages reach target rates. (1v1 should be about 50%. 2v1 should be about 67%. Or whatever.) As a component of doing this, what I would hope to actually be doing is computing an “energy score” for each particular “move.” Perhaps, over thousands of simulations, I determine that a 3-second stun is worth 10 energy, while doing 20-30 DPS is worth about 15. (Again, this is oversimplified — nothing really makes sense until I start evaluating combinations.) But obviously, if we’re talking about statistical equivalence, there’s always going to be some variation.
Again, I feel like I’m vigorously arguing “Yes, I agree with you,” because I certainly THINK we’re saying similar things. I guess I went into more detail than I needed; the only things I was trying to say were that balance is more than straight numerical DPS balance, and that the caveat of a complex game system is that, if there are a small number of completely unbalanced options, all other options become unviable (Is that a word?) — so it’s an extremely critical point.
I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. We’re arguing the same point from different sides. Of course I personally think that everyone who is actually discussing balance, should probably try to define balance first. I think, after reading a lot of different posts, that most of us are talking about the same thing, we’re just talking about different facets of it.
But then again, disagreeing can be so much more fun than agreeing. =)
Hey TGB … great to see you’re posting and touring again.
TGB wrote: “Wooohooo, I get to be Princess Leia! Now the question is which version?”
I think it would be more interesting to hear your opinion on that.
TGB wrote: “Unfortunately we’re in a very now centric society and it’s usually easier to say yes as opposed to no.”
This very much seems to be the case. It seems many games stray from their roots at some point … some disastrously. New faces arrive on the team, the players start moaning about this and that … and all of a sudden the game is heading down a road it’s not equipped to travel.
SWG, of course, must be mentioned here. Sure, there were quirks and oddities. But little changes could have made to solve the big problems. All that effort they poured into CU / NGE could then have been focused on more content for the activities they already had … or heaven forbid … making something out of the Galactic Civil War.
I think it sounds like a Princess Leia – A New Hope, kind of quote. You know, before she kissed her brother and got all sentimental about Han.
I think the “now / new faces” effect is even more insidious than that. The initial dev teams for all of these games have talented, motivated folks. The games launch (mayhaps a bit early and bug-ridden). Over time, a significant percentage of the top talent is culled and sent to new projects, while incoming newbies start to swell the team because it’s “just support.”
Of course, I have no data to base this on.
One Trackback
[...] conclusions that were made seem unsettling. A hilarious, and informative, summary can be found at WorldIV. The first part of the discussion I stumbled upon was at Psychochild’s site (link), where he [...]