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My opinions: I think attempting to balance games where the number of character/choices are large enough is a futile process (especially if the design process aims at the "cream of the rop" players). The truth is that at the end of the day, competitions are still going to be populated with players would use the top ~20% something (depending on the game) of the character cast, with a very small minority actually bothering with the other characters due to the playing-to-win mentality. I see this pattern being very common with a lot of games, and attempts at balancing them only shuffle the casts around i.e. a new set of characters now dominate, replacing the old ones. Part of the reason is because the characters/game mechanics are so intricately tied to one another, a small change could flip the entire "metagame" around. This symptom is more apparent with MOBA games such as Dota 2. After each balance patch, the game becomes chaotic enough to raise interests among players, although the metagame will eventually converge to a singular point. Players will then complain and the process continues. Each patch hardly makes the game more balanced, they just make the game different. I think at stages like this, you simply have to adopt a new definition of "balance". Also I disagree with "Design Self-balancing Forces". While the mechanics proposed are good at creating depth for the game, I think it's misguided to add them with balance in mind. An example is the game Street Fighter 3 (specifically the third edition, Third Strike): the designer added a "parry" mechanic in which allows a player (with a good guess, timing and some memorization) to counter any attack. This could be perceived as an attempt to give any character a chance, but in practice players argue that this makes the strongest characters even stronger (of course it's hard to verify this because an identically copied game with no "parry" doesn't exist) because they can counter attack for much higher damage. Also, Sirlin (the author) spends a lot of his time with versus fighting games, and the article reflects that. I think if you're looking to balance a game of another genre, it's unlikely that his philosophies will be very useful. Just for reference, versus fighting games usually have these metrics: character pool is between 10-30 (usually don't go up much), there's a heavy emphasis on specialising on one character (could go up to 3), heavy emphasis on reaction and guessing, long intervals between balance patches (if there are going to be patches at all), at competitions there rarely are rules (i.e. usually no banning, save for a few games where balance is pretty bad). If you compare this to other genres (FPS, RTS, MOBA, ...) these metrics will be very, very different. |