The Balance Forge: A Blog

[RCIX]

You should check out the Torchlight forum.  Since it isn't a competitive game, people seem to think there is no need for balance at all.  Who cares if someone has a skill that one-shots every thing on the screen, destroy bosses, works best with only 5 skill points out of a possible 15, and is the skill you start the game with (Outlander Glaive Throw in this case).

Oh, i plan to talk about Torchlight sometime. It'll be tricky without hard numbers, but yeah.

One comment/complaint that hit me right away when I went to check this out was the background. Specifically those prism light/lasers that go behind the text, I don't mind background stuff along the side, but it's really distracting behind the text and makes it a little difficult to read.  I would suggest either making the background not scroll with the text (fixed background, scrolling text so I can move it around the background) or just change the background so the lights go up along the borders.

I was concerned about this a bit, so I'll look for a better background.

You should check out the Torchlight forum.  Since it isn't a competitive game, people seem to think there is no need for balance at all.  Who cares if someone has a skill that one-shots every thing on the screen, destroy bosses, works best with only 5 skill points out of a possible 15, and is the skill you start the game with (Outlander Glaive Throw in this case).

It is important to remember that the point of a game is not necessarily to be balanced.  Generally the main point of the game is to be fun, though the more e-sports-oriented ones understandably tradeoff some fun for competitive balance.  And some non-obvious choices go into making a game as fun as it can be (restrictions that are frustrating sometimes, but without them it's a house without walls, etc).

That said, it's also important to remember that "competitive balance for e-sports purposes" is not the only reason to balance a game.

If in some RPG you have N abilities available to you, and one of them is so underpowered and so uninteresting that there is never a reason to use it, then your game is literally worse off for having it (interface clutter and confusion, at least), and you should either rebalance it or go to N-1 abilities.

I'll definitely cover this. There's a bunch to be said for balance versus fun.

I'm still trying to figure out who doesn't know what a balance discussion is? Even small babies have a concept of fair. Granted it's different than older children, but human beings are always determining what's deserved and what isn't. Unless you are writing for eight-year-olds, I think we can dispense with the fluff and just get to the good part, which is discussing a game.

See any player on the Starcraft II forum. A lot on the LoL forums too. "OMG champion X is so OP!!11!!11!1" with no qualification or definition as to what they mean by that. Often? It's just an "I can't beat this champion at my skill level with the champions that I can play so it must be broken.". Very similar with starcraft, but at least with League enough people can carry a coherent discussion that it's sometimes worth talking about.

In any case, the next post will be about starcraft and illustrate a couple of points as well as do an overview of how starcraft's balance is structured.

But is all game balance about fairness and what's deserved?

In a lot of games you're in a totally unfair position, but you have more than choice open to you.  Balance there is a matter of the choices being close enough to one another that you actually have a decision to make, rather than just picking the obviously-best one (or ignoring the obviously-bad ones).  So when you weigh two options in the scales, no one just hammers the scale into the ground because it's so much heavier than the other choice: they're balanced.

Well, yes, a bit. There also needs to be some talk about whether one even wants perfect balance, since balance and choice and meaning are all tied closely together.

[keith.lamothe]

And good, discussing a game. I'm going to say that the player force is the most dangerous given the most time, and I like beam weapons generally. What is your balance question, exactly?

Were any of those weapon groups so good that there wasn't much point in investing time (game turns researching, or real time on the interface diversifying into) into the other ones?  Iirc a lot of players would load as many 2-shot missile launchers onto their hulls as possible, mount the special device that let you fire two missiles per salvo (at double reload time, iirc), fire everything on the first turn, and retreat everything they could without triggering fight-over, and the kill:loss ratio was fantastic.

On the other hand, the opening range was so close that there wasn't really a phase where you could use missiles and not use the larger beam weapons, which inclined things towards beam weapons if you weren't going to go missile-cheese.

These are all old recollections though.  Were things actually balanced in that there were good reasons to use all those weapon systems, depending on circumstances?

[Cyborg]

I actually never did that cheese. Sounds really good now! 

I'm trying to think of the technology trees, but I think I would say the doom star might be overpowered.

[RCIX]

Wish I could contribute, never was a fan of turn based 4x games though :<

Next post is up, though it's not the Starcraft one: http://balanceforge.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/balance-fun-and-choice/

[Cyborg]

Wish I could contribute, never was a fan of turn based 4x games though :<

Next post is up, though it's not the Starcraft one: http://balanceforge.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/balance-fun-and-choice/

This post has the same problems RCIX.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I feel like there is a lack of content with this post, there just isn't anything to comment on.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm trying to think of the technology trees, but I think I would say the doom star might be overpowered.

Yea, iirc it was pretty devastating if one empire got doom stars significantly before the others.

But another way in which things were "imbalanced" there was that by the time you had doom stars, why exactly would you build frigates?  Of course, partly this was a mercy: interacting with a frigate took largely the same amount of interface clicks as a doom star.  If there were balance reasons where it was to your distinct advantage to produce frigates instead of doomstars, such that you spent the same as your enemy and wound up with 200 frigates vs his 2 doomstars, you'd either just "gimp yourself" by not doing the optimal thing, or drive yourself batty clicking the mouse over and over.

So I guess sometimes obsolescence can be the lesser of the evils

But the "always build everything in your largest hull size" thing crops up in a lot of games in my experience, and it feels like a missed opportunity.  Why have all those other choices?

On the other hand, I never quite made peace with SotS system of "sure you could just field dreadnoughts, but the control limit only gives you like 2 of those, vs like 18 enemy small ships".  But perhaps it was a step in the right direction.  The finite number of ships on the field (regardless of how many was in your fleet) seemed like a good design decision considering the many vagaries of the alternative, but never felt right.

[chemical_art]

Gauss cannons OP! Wait...the wrong MoO...

I didn't like how in MoO 2 the dual problem of ship limits being based on the number of ships, and not their cost, was the limiter. In addition, you needed more clicks for those smaller ships. I think MoO handled ship classes best.

The tiniest ships are far cheaper, but  get the absolute basic of tools, while frigates were awesome missile / bomb craft, and the large craft had some of the bulkier tools, and HUGE ships were a good flagship.

Having a tradef-off of ability vs cost and the ship cap based off cost (in the form of cost for upkeep) is a great system.

As for ship control, I do think there should be a setting to also follow MoO's system. After a fleet gets so large, the number of units get "capped" but unit sprites can represent multiple units. As long as both sides follow a max number of unit stacks, there can be balance.

[RCIX]

I feel like there is a lack of content with this post, there just isn't anything to comment on.

I was afraid of this, not sure what to do about it though :<

[chemical_art]

I feel like there is a lack of content with this post, there just isn't anything to comment on.

I was afraid of this, not sure what to do about it though :<

If you want to talk broadly, pick a game and interweave your ideas with a specific game. Right now you have big picture fluff...it would be a lot more interesting to see an actual game being discussed.

[keith.lamothe]

More generally: say something people want to disagree with, and they'll disagree with it, and you'll have a conversation

[Cyborg]

I feel like there is a lack of content with this post, there just isn't anything to comment on.

I was afraid of this, not sure what to do about it though :<

How about picking a game, creating your balance argument, and watch the fur fly? I think we were trying to do that with Master of Orion 2, but it looks like we are all in agreement that it's not a shining example of balance. We seem to just be admiring its warts. 

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I feel like there is a lack of content with this post, there just isn't anything to comment on.

I was afraid of this, not sure what to do about it though :<

Thinking it over, you say a lot, but you really don't say anything at all. If you edit out all the unneeded sentences in your post, it would come out to something like this:

Balance is not the be-all and end-all of game discussion; it is a tool which affects several end results of a game and is in service to the ultimate goal of games: Fun.

At its core, games that balance applies to generally have some sort of discovery and/or expression built into them.

The key is to use balance as a tool to keep your game from becoming stale.

continually tweaking balance along with having a robust set of elements in the first place lets players have choices to respond to a currently optimal strategy.

Well, vaguely like that. You don't expand on your points in this post. WHY do games need to be fun? Why do games need to have some sort of discovery built into them? Why do perfectly balanced games become stale? Why does balance have to be fun? You move from one point to the next quickly and it required me to re-read the post about a half dozen times to get a sense of what you were talking about. And even now, I'm not entirely certain what you were talking about.

To put it simply, the post lacks substance. How you can put substance into the post is up to you. Just my two cents, take them or leave them .

[RCIX]

That helps My starcraft post will hopefully be better, and it's almost done. Just need to grab some info for it.

SOme of your questions aren't really that related to balance, but eh. If people are interested, I'd be fine talking about them.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I don't know of anyone who's done it to the extreme of only 1 worthwhile ability, but I've seen some suspiciously-like-padding stuff.

Not to start a big debate about it, but this is something I noticed in my few hours of Diablo 3. Many skill runes were barely variances on the regular skill, and often times, skill runes are so useless that they just aren't even worth trying when you're at the point of the game that you die in a couple of hits (Hell/Inferno). I don't know how well they've gone and fixed it, but there was a time when Demon Hunter literally had one viable build, and everything else was either suicide or suicidally inefficient (because enemies have time limits by the time you hit the level cap). I mean yeah, go for lots of skill variety, but the padding really got to me. In my own experience, it was actually a case of entire skills were useless because they didn't hit a bloody thing that I aimed them at, and did pathetic damage if they hit anything at all. And yes, I do mean multiple skills, which adds up to six attacks being unusable. If that's not padding, I don't know what is.