1 00:00:04,190 --> 00:00:08,430 If you’ve spent any amount of time in a multiplayer lobby, you’ve probably heard 2 00:00:08,430 --> 00:00:12,030 words like overpowered, cheap, and unfair. 3 00:00:12,030 --> 00:00:16,610 What these players are arguing about is the game’s balance. 4 00:00:16,610 --> 00:00:21,500 Balance is the art of making sure that all options in a multiplayer game are fair: so 5 00:00:21,500 --> 00:00:26,710 none are underpowered, and thus pointless to use. And none are overpowered, and thus 6 00:00:26,710 --> 00:00:28,550 dominate everything else. 7 00:00:28,550 --> 00:00:33,660 Here’s the thing though: most video games aren’t just striving for balance. But balance 8 00:00:33,660 --> 00:00:36,809 among a wide range of distinctly different options. 9 00:00:36,809 --> 00:00:41,870 You don’t have to work that hard to balance a symmetric game - which is one where all 10 00:00:41,870 --> 00:00:47,350 players have the exact same starting conditions. But most games are asymmetric - which means 11 00:00:47,350 --> 00:00:51,390 players are facing off against each other with completely different stuff. 12 00:00:51,390 --> 00:00:56,159 And in a game where players can pick from 74 different fighters or 140 13 00:00:56,159 --> 00:01:01,550 unique champions, the developers are counting on them all being equally viable among players 14 00:01:01,550 --> 00:01:03,659 of roughly the same skill level. 15 00:01:03,659 --> 00:01:04,790 So how do they do it? 16 00:01:04,790 --> 00:01:10,860 Now, I should say, balance is an incredibly difficult pursuit. It can be an entire department 17 00:01:10,860 --> 00:01:16,540 at certain companies, and Riot’s League of Legends has had more than 200 balance patches 18 00:01:16,540 --> 00:01:22,330 in the last decade. Plus it’s not just about numbers, but player psychology, with Overwatch’s 19 00:01:22,330 --> 00:01:26,800 Jeff Kaplan saying “the perception of balance is more powerful than balance itself”. 20 00:01:26,800 --> 00:01:33,240 So this is not going to be an intensive tutorial. Instead, Game Maker’s Toolkit presents 21 00:01:33,240 --> 00:01:40,060 a whirlwind tour through the ways games are balanced - and rebalanced - and rebalanced 22 00:01:40,060 --> 00:01:42,310 - and rebalanced. 23 00:01:42,310 --> 00:01:47,270 So how do developers go about balancing a game in the first place? Well, the first consideration 24 00:01:47,270 --> 00:01:53,300 is trade-offs. This is when you essentially cancel out a character’s competitive advantages, 25 00:01:53,300 --> 00:01:54,680 with drawbacks. 26 00:01:54,680 --> 00:02:00,310 Think of Mario Kart characters, where heavy racers like Donkey Kong have a high top speed, 27 00:02:00,310 --> 00:02:05,140 but low acceleration, while featherweight racers like Toad are the opposite. On the 28 00:02:05,140 --> 00:02:08,630 right track design, they’ll be almost evenly balanced. 29 00:02:08,630 --> 00:02:13,550 You can think of characters as having a “power budget” - at least that’s why Riot calls 30 00:02:13,550 --> 00:02:19,870 it. Advantages are a cost, but disadvantages are a discount. If all characters are just 31 00:02:19,870 --> 00:02:24,500 about hitting the limit of the same power budget, they’ll be closer to being balanced. 32 00:02:24,500 --> 00:02:29,530 It’s rarely that easy, of course. I mean, okay, sometimes you’ll get a card that does 33 00:02:29,530 --> 00:02:36,010 1 damage to all minions and another that does 4 damage to all minions. That’s an easy one: just make 34 00:02:36,010 --> 00:02:39,010 the second card cost a bit more energy. 35 00:02:39,010 --> 00:02:43,680 But how do you calculate the power budget for completely incomparable options like heroes 36 00:02:43,680 --> 00:02:48,950 in Overwatch? Or options with dozens of stats to tweak? Like, when Bungie was reigning in 37 00:02:48,950 --> 00:02:54,150 the initially overpowered sniper rifle in Halo 3, it had loads of stats it could tweak 38 00:02:54,150 --> 00:02:59,050 such as clip size, time to full zoom, reload time, and max ammo. 39 00:02:59,050 --> 00:03:03,480 (It ultimately decided the best knob to tweak was the time between shots, which it bumped 40 00:03:03,480 --> 00:03:06,370 from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds). 41 00:03:06,370 --> 00:03:11,500 What’s important, though, is to celebrate the big differences between choices. The sniper 42 00:03:11,500 --> 00:03:16,380 rifle and the shotgun offer a more exciting choice to players than two types of assault 43 00:03:16,380 --> 00:03:19,900 rifle - even though the latter is much easier to balance. 44 00:03:19,900 --> 00:03:25,420 So I agree with ex-Blizzard designer Rob Pardo when he warns designers against using the 45 00:03:25,420 --> 00:03:28,716 maths to balance games into mediocrity, saying 46 00:03:28,716 --> 00:03:31,510 ROB PARDO: "you’re gonna end up with a game where 47 00:03:31,510 --> 00:03:35,489 everything kinda feels the same. And you can high five each other and say it’s balanced, but 48 00:03:35,489 --> 00:03:38,240 is it fun? Probably not”. 49 00:03:38,240 --> 00:03:43,550 Another consideration is counters. This is when we give characters the ability to negate 50 00:03:43,550 --> 00:03:49,069 each other’s moves and strategies. For example: a quick Zerg rush in Starcraft is all well 51 00:03:49,069 --> 00:03:54,520 and good - unless your opponent is one step ahead and has already built defensive bunkers. 52 00:03:54,520 --> 00:03:59,900 And what we ideally want is for everything to have a counter. So a defensive Starcraft 53 00:03:59,900 --> 00:04:06,160 player can, in turn, be countered by a more economical strategy, where you save up resources 54 00:04:06,160 --> 00:04:10,480 to build units that can eventually crush those bunkers into dust. 55 00:04:10,480 --> 00:04:15,450 And we could make a counter to that counter, and so on - but then we’d be here for forever. 56 00:04:15,450 --> 00:04:19,780 There’s a more elegant solution though, because how do you deal with someone who’s 57 00:04:19,780 --> 00:04:23,360 sitting around saving up money? Well… a rush. 58 00:04:23,360 --> 00:04:29,520 And, wouldn’t you know it… it’s rock, paper, scissors. This goofy game you play 59 00:04:29,520 --> 00:04:34,440 to see who has to do the washing up might be incredibly simple and lacking any strategic 60 00:04:34,440 --> 00:04:40,680 depth, but it is perfectly balanced - because everything has a counter, and everything is a counter. 61 00:04:40,680 --> 00:04:43,880 EDDIE: Damn man, killed those scissors. 62 00:04:43,880 --> 00:04:48,940 And that’s why it forms the backbone of a lot of multiplayer games. Pretty much every 63 00:04:48,940 --> 00:04:54,160 fighting game has a system like this, such as Dead or Alive which boasts about its triangle 64 00:04:54,160 --> 00:04:59,160 system, where strikes beat throws, throws beat holds, and holds beat strikes. 65 00:04:59,160 --> 00:05:04,490 In strategy games, it’s not just the strategies that work like this, but the individual units. 66 00:05:04,490 --> 00:05:08,480 And the different Pokemon types all sit in a massive web of interlocking counters - but 67 00:05:08,480 --> 00:05:12,250 starting, of course, with fire, water, and grass. 68 00:05:12,250 --> 00:05:17,690 Rock, paper, scissors is a great balancing framework to start from, because you can ensure 69 00:05:17,690 --> 00:05:22,650 that no element is overpowered - it’s countered by something. And no choice is irrelevant 70 00:05:22,650 --> 00:05:26,310 - it at least works as a counter to something else. 71 00:05:26,310 --> 00:05:32,460 And also, in strategy games at least, it encourages mixed strategies, it makes you into a multi-disciplinary 72 00:05:32,460 --> 00:05:37,470 player, and it forces you to switch tactics on the fly in a really dynamic way. 73 00:05:37,470 --> 00:05:42,520 And in class-based games, it’s a great way of automatically making mixed teams. 74 00:05:42,520 --> 00:05:48,660 Take Team Fortress 2, where seven of its nine classes fit into a complex web of interlocking 75 00:05:48,660 --> 00:05:54,190 and interchangeable triangles of rock, paper, scissors. Here, teams must pick complementary 76 00:05:54,190 --> 00:05:59,870 classes to protect each other from weaknesses. If you’re an Engineer and Spies keep sapping 77 00:05:59,870 --> 00:06:03,490 your sentries, then you’re going to need to get one of your team mates to switch to 78 00:06:03,490 --> 00:06:05,000 Pyro. 79 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:09,410 These counters are often described as hard counters if they completely shut something 80 00:06:09,410 --> 00:06:14,680 down - like a punch is a hard counter to a throw in ARMS because it will nullify the 81 00:06:14,680 --> 00:06:20,690 effect every single time. But soft counters just mean one choice will have an advantage 82 00:06:20,690 --> 00:06:28,190 over the other. McCree will outperform Tracer, but his chance of winning is far from 100%. 83 00:06:28,190 --> 00:06:33,100 When it comes to counters, it’s really important to figure out what are the hands and what 84 00:06:33,100 --> 00:06:34,310 are the throws. 85 00:06:34,310 --> 00:06:39,270 The hands are the things that get locked in before the match even starts. You know, the 86 00:06:39,270 --> 00:06:45,740 characters and the races. The throws are the things you pick during the match. The moves, 87 00:06:45,740 --> 00:06:51,320 the units, and the strategies. And in a team-based game, like Overwatch, the entire team is the 88 00:06:51,320 --> 00:06:55,190 hand, while the individual players are the throws. 89 00:06:55,190 --> 00:07:00,100 The throws are specifically designed to be unbalanced against each other, to create that 90 00:07:00,100 --> 00:07:05,669 back-and-forth counter-play and teamwork. But the hands are supposed to be balanced, 91 00:07:05,669 --> 00:07:11,240 and so they should have access to all of the throws. If Zangief simply couldn’t block, 92 00:07:11,240 --> 00:07:14,410 for example, he would be unusable. 93 00:07:17,320 --> 00:07:22,040 So you’ve got a bunch of characters, with trade-offs and counters, and you think you’ve 94 00:07:22,050 --> 00:07:26,520 made them balanced. But how do you actually make sure that’s true? Well this is when 95 00:07:26,520 --> 00:07:31,560 we start collecting data - either from internal play-testers, or the millions of people playing 96 00:07:31,560 --> 00:07:32,720 your game online. 97 00:07:32,720 --> 00:07:36,940 Now you might think that all you need to do is track how often each character results 98 00:07:36,940 --> 00:07:42,440 in success - i.e it’s “win rate”. And if a character has a 50 percent win rate, 99 00:07:42,440 --> 00:07:43,500 it’s balanced. 100 00:07:43,500 --> 00:07:49,120 But, like all stats, this can be misleading. Imagine a fighting game with three characters 101 00:07:49,120 --> 00:07:54,660 - and if Ryu won every match against Chun-Li and lost every match against Cammy, his win-rate 102 00:07:54,660 --> 00:07:58,979 would be 50 percent. Perfectly balanced, though? I think not. 103 00:07:58,979 --> 00:08:02,979 That’s why match-up charts, where you where you can see the win rate of a character, when 104 00:08:02,979 --> 00:08:06,500 played against all other characters, are so important. 105 00:08:06,500 --> 00:08:10,729 But even that’s not going to tell you everything. Riot had a problem with the League of Legends 106 00:08:10,729 --> 00:08:15,939 character Akali. The numbers said she was pretty balanced, with a 44 percent win-rate 107 00:08:15,939 --> 00:08:21,789 - perhaps a tad underpowered. So how come she secured a 72 percent win rate at the 2018 108 00:08:21,789 --> 00:08:25,870 World Championship, and was banned more times than any other champion? 109 00:08:25,870 --> 00:08:31,361 It’s because while she was really powerful, she was difficult to play effectively. She 110 00:08:31,361 --> 00:08:36,080 had a super high skill floor, in other words. So while top-tier players could use her to 111 00:08:36,080 --> 00:08:41,340 wipe the floor with the competition, the low-ranking players using Akali were getting killed left, 112 00:08:41,340 --> 00:08:45,270 right, and center. Therefore, her win-rate was being dragged down. 113 00:08:45,270 --> 00:08:49,930 That’s why it’s important to look at a character’s win-rate and match-ups across 114 00:08:49,930 --> 00:08:51,370 all skill levels. 115 00:08:51,370 --> 00:08:56,360 And finally, win-rate doesn’t really tell you what’s actually going on in the game. 116 00:08:56,360 --> 00:09:00,540 We need to know what characters people are actually picking. People might be avoiding 117 00:09:00,540 --> 00:09:05,300 a character who is otherwise well balanced because that character is not much fun to 118 00:09:05,300 --> 00:09:08,670 play, or is only useful in certain situations. 119 00:09:08,670 --> 00:09:13,871 Blizzard found that Overwatch hero Symmetra was a largely balanced character, but she 120 00:09:13,871 --> 00:09:19,020 wasn’t being picked as much because her use was highly situational. So in her first 121 00:09:19,020 --> 00:09:23,370 complete redesign, they tried to make her more popular by giving her two ultimates to 122 00:09:23,370 --> 00:09:26,230 pick from: a teleporter or a shield generator. 123 00:09:26,230 --> 00:09:31,250 That’s why player feedback is so important - as well as pick-rate, which tells you how 124 00:09:31,250 --> 00:09:37,300 often a character is actually getting used. For Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft uses a matrix 125 00:09:37,300 --> 00:09:41,720 to cross reference both win rate and pick rate -with different considerations needed 126 00:09:41,720 --> 00:09:45,450 for operators who fall into these four buckets. 127 00:09:45,450 --> 00:09:50,480 And the pick-rates help tell you the state of the meta - which is essentially just the 128 00:09:50,480 --> 00:09:54,910 characters, cards, strategies, and so on that the community at large have found the most 129 00:09:54,910 --> 00:09:57,470 effective and are currently using. 130 00:09:57,470 --> 00:10:03,910 This is often shared through forum posts, fan-made tier lists, YouTube videos, and eSport 131 00:10:03,910 --> 00:10:08,740 victories. When a kid called Jason won the Clash Royale tournament in Helsinki, his chosen 132 00:10:08,740 --> 00:10:12,160 cards suddenly became massively popular. 133 00:10:12,160 --> 00:10:16,600 The meta can actually act as a self-balancing force. Let’s say everyone discovered that 134 00:10:16,600 --> 00:10:21,810 a certain character was overpowered, and everyone started using it. It’s now in everyone’s 135 00:10:21,810 --> 00:10:26,920 best interest to try and discover strategies that can counter or out perform that favourite. 136 00:10:26,920 --> 00:10:29,960 And if players find it, the meta might change. 137 00:10:29,960 --> 00:10:34,480 This rolling meta keeps the game fresh, and gives the players who found the counter a 138 00:10:34,480 --> 00:10:39,910 real sense of satisfaction. Overwatch’s Jeff Kaplan says “regarding the meta changing 139 00:10:39,910 --> 00:10:44,960 because players have innovated a new strategy – well – this is the best-case scenario. 140 00:10:44,960 --> 00:10:48,220 We’ve seen this happen time and time again.” 141 00:10:48,220 --> 00:10:52,910 Of course, that’s not always going to work. Sometimes the designers will have to go in 142 00:10:52,910 --> 00:10:58,380 and change things. If a strategy is overpowered, if a character is never getting played, or 143 00:10:58,380 --> 00:11:02,519 if a play-style is proving annoying then it’s time to swing the hammer. 144 00:11:02,519 --> 00:11:07,370 First, the devs need to figure out the exact reason why that character, or strategy, or 145 00:11:07,370 --> 00:11:11,820 whatever is unbalanced. It’s easy to see that a character is dominating the match-up 146 00:11:11,820 --> 00:11:14,850 charts, but can be harder to pin-point why. 147 00:11:14,850 --> 00:11:19,250 So for a character like Meta Knight in Super Smash Bros Brawl, it was mostly because of 148 00:11:19,250 --> 00:11:24,380 his extremely fast attack speed, and an ability to cancel his momentum in mid-air and avoid 149 00:11:24,380 --> 00:11:28,910 being KO’d. He had lots of advantages, and not enough trade-offs - and other characters 150 00:11:28,910 --> 00:11:31,580 don’t have the tools to counter him. 151 00:11:31,580 --> 00:11:36,269 Once the source has been found, you’ve got to figure out what to nerf and what to buff. 152 00:11:36,269 --> 00:11:40,680 Nerfing means making something less powerful, like reducing their speed, limiting their 153 00:11:40,680 --> 00:11:45,470 range, or cutting down their strength. Buffing is the opposite: making it more powerful. 154 00:11:45,470 --> 00:11:50,730 You don’t necessarily have to buff the weak characters and nerf the strong ones, though. You could 155 00:11:50,730 --> 00:11:55,000 leave an overpowered character alone, but buff the characters who counter them, and 156 00:11:55,000 --> 00:11:59,970 still solve the same problem. Make sure you watch this Core-A Gaming video on why buffs 157 00:11:59,970 --> 00:12:02,579 are, generally, better than nerfs. 158 00:12:02,579 --> 00:12:06,649 Balance changes can be anything from a tiny tweak to a character’s movement speed, to 159 00:12:06,649 --> 00:12:11,149 a complete overhaul of how a character works. It might be a fundamental change to the rules 160 00:12:11,149 --> 00:12:15,730 of the game - Rainbow Six Siege made attacking and defending more balanced by changing the 161 00:12:15,730 --> 00:12:19,839 match time to three minutes. And sometimes you’ve just to pull things from the game 162 00:12:19,839 --> 00:12:25,730 entirely, like when Epic scrapped the overpowered infinity blade in Fortnite. 163 00:12:25,730 --> 00:12:31,210 Any change is going to affect players - especially those who are very used to the way a specific 164 00:12:31,210 --> 00:12:35,279 character, or its counters, work. So when the game gets patched, it’s important to 165 00:12:35,279 --> 00:12:38,820 communicate the changes through patch notes, videos, and so on. 166 00:12:38,820 --> 00:12:43,740 In fact, patch notes are so important that Riot once put out of a note saying a champion 167 00:12:43,740 --> 00:12:49,060 was nerfed, but forgot to actually implement the nerf in the code. Even so, the character’s 168 00:12:49,060 --> 00:12:54,140 pick rate plummeted, and even his win rate decreased a bit. Didn’t I say that player 169 00:12:54,140 --> 00:12:57,260 psychology was an important factor? 170 00:12:57,260 --> 00:13:01,980 Now, at the beginning of this video, i said that balance was about trying to make characters 171 00:13:01,980 --> 00:13:07,120 equally viable among players of roughly the same skill level. But what happens when players 172 00:13:07,120 --> 00:13:09,160 aren’t at the same skill level? 173 00:13:09,160 --> 00:13:12,480 Well, a lot of highly competitive games use matchmaking 174 00:13:12,480 --> 00:13:15,340 systems to pair up similarly skilled players. 175 00:13:15,340 --> 00:13:20,080 But for more accessible, party-style games, we may want to build in negative feedback 176 00:13:20,090 --> 00:13:25,529 loops, or catch-up mechanics, where players who are doing poorly get a helping hand. Examples 177 00:13:25,529 --> 00:13:29,910 are the deathstreak mechanic in Modern Warfare 2 where you get a special bonus for dying 178 00:13:29,910 --> 00:13:35,000 a whole bunch. And the item system in Mario Kart where powerful items - including that 179 00:13:35,000 --> 00:13:39,950 pesky blue shell - are only given to players at the back of the pack. These are pretty 180 00:13:39,950 --> 00:13:42,980 contentious, and must be used sparingly. 181 00:13:42,980 --> 00:13:48,710 We can also reduce the value of skill by adding in more luck. We see this in most family board 182 00:13:48,710 --> 00:13:53,110 games like Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly which are heavily based on the luck of the 183 00:13:53,110 --> 00:13:58,320 die roll. But in video games, you see this in games like Apex Legends, where your chances 184 00:13:58,320 --> 00:14:03,209 of winning are shifted, based on what goodies you find when you drop into the map. 185 00:14:03,209 --> 00:14:09,230 Game can also offer handicapping modes. And in team-based games, we can give players alternate 186 00:14:09,230 --> 00:14:14,110 play styles that allow them to contribute to the team without needing to do highly-skilled, 187 00:14:14,110 --> 00:14:18,990 front-line action, like being a medic or an engineer. 188 00:14:18,990 --> 00:14:24,230 So balancing a game is a really challenging job. The more you make characters distinct, 189 00:14:24,230 --> 00:14:28,350 the harder it is to put them on an even playing field. And that’s not taking into account 190 00:14:28,350 --> 00:14:30,670 players of unequal skill level. 191 00:14:30,670 --> 00:14:35,170 We can try to design in trade-offs, to ensure characters don’t have too many advantages. 192 00:14:35,170 --> 00:14:39,089 And give characters counters, so they can keep each other in check. But even the best 193 00:14:39,089 --> 00:14:43,160 designs won’t stand up to scrutiny when put in front of millions of players. 194 00:14:43,160 --> 00:14:48,329 So we need to constantly determine the balance, by watching win-rates, match-ups, pick-rates, 195 00:14:48,329 --> 00:14:52,889 and player feedback. And while hopefully the meta will naturally shift in response to imbalance 196 00:14:52,889 --> 00:14:57,050 - sometimes devs have to go in and make the hard changes. 197 00:14:57,050 --> 00:15:01,550 And then you introduce a whole new character and everything breaks again. Sigh. I said 198 00:15:01,550 --> 00:15:06,230 this wasn’t an easy job. So let me know: what do you think is the most balanced game 199 00:15:06,230 --> 00:15:11,050 around, and have you ever played a game where the devs just got it oh so wrong? Let me know 200 00:15:11,050 --> 00:15:15,420 your experience with balance in the comments below. 201 00:15:15,420 --> 00:15:19,560 Thanks for watching! I had a lot of help on this one, from people who know multiplayer 202 00:15:19,560 --> 00:15:24,720 games really well to developers who have worked on games like League of Legends, Dirty Bomb, 203 00:15:24,720 --> 00:15:28,589 and Rainbow Six Siege. There’s definitely more to talk about - like balancing multiplayer 204 00:15:28,589 --> 00:15:34,100 maps in shooters. But we can get to that in the future.