[azureel]

I think the previous comment refers to player (human) balance. Not in game unit balance.

You know Elo rating, as in chess? Something like that is needed in order to match players against each other.

An online multi-player game that fails the matchmaker system, will lose players eventually. Because if you match the newcomers with seasoned pros, everyone will be unhappy and churn rates will be high.

[IgorPartola]

No I think we are talking about balancing units. It’s not super satisfying to play a game with hundreds of units if only one or a handful of them are worth building.

[yoz-y]

Yeah it’s about units. It is also however important to balance the game at most skill points.

For example if a strategy that is easy to implement and relatively strong emerges, then you will have very boring games at low level and the only way to get out of the low rank would be to learn to counter one specific strategy. (This is for example what happened in the beginning of SC1 with Zerg rush and SC2 and M&Ms)