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If you’ve spent any amount of time in a
multiplayer lobby, you’ve probably heard
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words like overpowered, cheap, and unfair.
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What these players are arguing about is the
game’s balance.
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Balance is the art of making sure that all
options in a multiplayer game are fair: so
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none are underpowered, and thus pointless
to use. And none are overpowered, and thus
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dominate everything else.
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Here’s the thing though: most video games
aren’t just striving for balance. But balance
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among a wide range of distinctly different
options.
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You don’t have to work that hard to balance
a symmetric game - which is one where all
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players have the exact same starting conditions.
But most games are asymmetric - which means
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players are facing off against each other
with completely different stuff.
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And in a game where players can pick from
74 different fighters or 140
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unique champions, the developers are counting
on them all being equally viable among players
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of roughly the same skill level.
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So how do they do it?
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Now, I should say, balance is an incredibly
difficult pursuit. It can be an entire department
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at certain companies, and Riot’s League
of Legends has had more than 200 balance patches
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in the last decade. Plus it’s not just about
numbers, but player psychology, with Overwatch’s
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Jeff Kaplan saying “the perception of balance
is more powerful than balance itself”.
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So this is not going to be an intensive tutorial. Instead, Game Maker’s Toolkit presents
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a whirlwind tour through the ways games are
balanced - and rebalanced - and rebalanced
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- and rebalanced.
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So how do developers go about balancing a
game in the first place? Well, the first consideration
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is trade-offs. This is when you essentially
cancel out a character’s competitive advantages,
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with drawbacks.
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Think of Mario Kart characters, where heavy
racers like Donkey Kong have a high top speed,
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but low acceleration, while featherweight
racers like Toad are the opposite. On the
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right track design, they’ll be almost evenly
balanced.
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You can think of characters as having a “power
budget” - at least that’s why Riot calls
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it. Advantages are a cost, but disadvantages
are a discount. If all characters are just
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about hitting the limit of the same power
budget, they’ll be closer to being balanced.
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It’s rarely that easy, of course. I mean,
okay, sometimes you’ll get a card that does
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1 damage to all minions and another that does
4 damage to all minions. That’s an easy one: just make
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the second card cost a bit more energy.
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But how do you calculate the power budget
for completely incomparable options like heroes
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in Overwatch? Or options with dozens of stats
to tweak? Like, when Bungie was reigning in
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the initially overpowered sniper rifle in
Halo 3, it had loads of stats it could tweak
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such as clip size, time to full zoom, reload
time, and max ammo.
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(It ultimately decided the best knob to tweak
was the time between shots, which it bumped
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from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds).
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What’s important, though, is to celebrate
the big differences between choices. The sniper
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rifle and the shotgun offer a more exciting
choice to players than two types of assault
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rifle - even though the latter is much easier
to balance.
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So I agree with ex-Blizzard designer Rob Pardo
when he warns designers against using the
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maths to balance games into mediocrity, saying
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ROB PARDO: "you’re gonna end up with a game where
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everything kinda feels the same. And you can high
five each other and say it’s balanced, but
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is it fun? Probably not”.
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Another consideration is counters. This is
when we give characters the ability to negate
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each other’s moves and strategies. For example:
a quick Zerg rush in Starcraft is all well
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and good - unless your opponent is one step
ahead and has already built defensive bunkers.
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And what we ideally want is for everything
to have a counter. So a defensive Starcraft
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player can, in turn, be countered by a more
economical strategy, where you save up resources
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to build units that can eventually crush those
bunkers into dust.
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And we could make a counter to that counter,
and so on - but then we’d be here for forever.
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There’s a more elegant solution though,
because how do you deal with someone who’s
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sitting around saving up money? Well… a
rush.
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And, wouldn’t you know it… it’s rock,
paper, scissors. This goofy game you play
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to see who has to do the washing up might
be incredibly simple and lacking any strategic
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depth, but it is perfectly balanced - because
everything has a counter, and everything is a counter.
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EDDIE: Damn man, killed those scissors.
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And that’s why it forms the backbone of
a lot of multiplayer games. Pretty much every
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fighting game has a system like this, such
as Dead or Alive which boasts about its triangle
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system, where strikes beat throws, throws
beat holds, and holds beat strikes.
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In strategy games, it’s not just the strategies
that work like this, but the individual units.
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And the different Pokemon types all sit in
a massive web of interlocking counters - but
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starting, of course, with fire, water, and
grass.
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Rock, paper, scissors is a great balancing
framework to start from, because you can ensure
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that no element is overpowered - it’s countered
by something. And no choice is irrelevant
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- it at least works as a counter to something
else.
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And also, in strategy games at least, it encourages
mixed strategies, it makes you into a multi-disciplinary
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player, and it forces you to switch tactics on
the fly in a really dynamic way.
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And in class-based games, it’s a great way
of automatically making mixed teams.
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Take Team Fortress 2, where seven of its nine
classes fit into a complex web of interlocking
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and interchangeable triangles of rock, paper,
scissors. Here, teams must pick complementary
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classes to protect each other from weaknesses.
If you’re an Engineer and Spies keep sapping
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your sentries, then you’re going to need
to get one of your team mates to switch to
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Pyro.
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These counters are often described as hard
counters if they completely shut something
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down - like a punch is a hard counter to a
throw in ARMS because it will nullify the
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effect every single time. But soft counters
just mean one choice will have an advantage
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over the other. McCree will outperform Tracer,
but his chance of winning is far from 100%.
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When it comes to counters, it’s really important
to figure out what are the hands and what
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are the throws.
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The hands are the things that get locked in
before the match even starts. You know, the
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characters and the races. The throws are the
things you pick during the match. The moves,
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the units, and the strategies. And in a team-based
game, like Overwatch, the entire team is the
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hand, while the individual players are the
throws.
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The throws are specifically designed to be
unbalanced against each other, to create that
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back-and-forth counter-play and teamwork.
But the hands are supposed to be balanced,
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and so they should have access to all of the
throws. If Zangief simply couldn’t block,
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for example, he would be unusable.
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So you’ve got a bunch of characters, with
trade-offs and counters, and you think you’ve
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made them balanced. But how do you actually
make sure that’s true? Well this is when
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we start collecting data - either from internal
play-testers, or the millions of people playing
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your game online.
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Now you might think that all you need to do
is track how often each character results
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in success - i.e it’s “win rate”. And
if a character has a 50 percent win rate,
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it’s balanced.
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But, like all stats, this can be misleading.
Imagine a fighting game with three characters
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- and if Ryu won every match against Chun-Li
and lost every match against Cammy, his win-rate
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would be 50 percent. Perfectly balanced, though?
I think not.
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That’s why match-up charts, where you where
you can see the win rate of a character, when
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played against all other characters, are so
important.
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But even that’s not going to tell you everything.
Riot had a problem with the League of Legends
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character Akali. The numbers said she was
pretty balanced, with a 44 percent win-rate
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- perhaps a tad underpowered. So how come
she secured a 72 percent win rate at the 2018
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World Championship, and was banned more times
than any other champion?
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It’s because while she was really powerful,
she was difficult to play effectively. She
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had a super high skill floor, in other words.
So while top-tier players could use her to
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wipe the floor with the competition, the low-ranking
players using Akali were getting killed left,
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right, and center. Therefore, her win-rate
was being dragged down.
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That’s why it’s important to look at a
character’s win-rate and match-ups across
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all skill levels.
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And finally, win-rate doesn’t really tell
you what’s actually going on in the game.
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We need to know what characters people are
actually picking. People might be avoiding
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a character who is otherwise well balanced
because that character is not much fun to
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play, or is only useful in certain situations.
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Blizzard found that Overwatch hero Symmetra
was a largely balanced character, but she
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wasn’t being picked as much because her
use was highly situational. So in her first
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complete redesign, they tried to make her
more popular by giving her two ultimates to
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pick from: a teleporter or a shield generator.
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That’s why player feedback is so important
- as well as pick-rate, which tells you how
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often a character is actually getting used.
For Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft uses a matrix
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to cross reference both win rate and pick
rate -with different considerations needed
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for operators who fall into these four buckets.
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And the pick-rates help tell you the state
of the meta - which is essentially just the
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characters, cards, strategies, and so on that
the community at large have found the most
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effective and are currently using.
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This is often shared through forum posts,
fan-made tier lists, YouTube videos, and eSport
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victories. When a kid called Jason won the
Clash Royale tournament in Helsinki, his chosen
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cards suddenly became massively popular.
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The meta can actually act as a self-balancing
force. Let’s say everyone discovered that
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a certain character was overpowered, and everyone
started using it. It’s now in everyone’s
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best interest to try and discover strategies
that can counter or out perform that favourite.
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And if players find it, the meta might change.
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This rolling meta keeps the game fresh, and
gives the players who found the counter a
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real sense of satisfaction. Overwatch’s
Jeff Kaplan says “regarding the meta changing
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because players have innovated a new strategy
– well – this is the best-case scenario.
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We’ve seen this happen time and time again.”
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Of course, that’s not always going to work.
Sometimes the designers will have to go in
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and change things. If a strategy is overpowered,
if a character is never getting played, or
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if a play-style is proving annoying then it’s
time to swing the hammer.
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First, the devs need to figure out the exact
reason why that character, or strategy, or
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whatever is unbalanced. It’s easy to see
that a character is dominating the match-up
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charts, but can be harder to pin-point why.
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So for a character like Meta Knight in Super
Smash Bros Brawl, it was mostly because of
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his extremely fast attack speed, and an ability
to cancel his momentum in mid-air and avoid
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being KO’d. He had lots of advantages, and
not enough trade-offs - and other characters
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don’t have the tools to counter him.
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Once the source has been found, you’ve got
to figure out what to nerf and what to buff.
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Nerfing means making something less powerful,
like reducing their speed, limiting their
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range, or cutting down their strength. Buffing
is the opposite: making it more powerful.
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You don’t necessarily have to buff the weak
characters and nerf the strong ones, though. You could
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leave an overpowered character alone, but
buff the characters who counter them, and
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still solve the same problem. Make sure you
watch this Core-A Gaming video on why buffs
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are, generally, better than nerfs.
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Balance changes can be anything from a tiny
tweak to a character’s movement speed, to
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a complete overhaul of how a character works.
It might be a fundamental change to the rules
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of the game - Rainbow Six Siege made attacking
and defending more balanced by changing the
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match time to three minutes. And sometimes
you’ve just to pull things from the game
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entirely, like when Epic scrapped the overpowered
infinity blade in Fortnite.
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Any change is going to affect players - especially
those who are very used to the way a specific
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character, or its counters, work. So when
the game gets patched, it’s important to
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communicate the changes through patch notes,
videos, and so on.
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In fact, patch notes are so important that
Riot once put out of a note saying a champion
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was nerfed, but forgot to actually implement
the nerf in the code. Even so, the character’s
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pick rate plummeted, and even his win rate
decreased a bit. Didn’t I say that player
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psychology was an important factor?
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Now, at the beginning of this video, i said
that balance was about trying to make characters
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equally viable among players of roughly the
same skill level. But what happens when players
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aren’t at the same skill level?
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Well, a lot of highly competitive games use
matchmaking
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systems to pair up similarly skilled players.
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But for more accessible, party-style games,
we may want to build in negative feedback
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loops, or catch-up mechanics, where players
who are doing poorly get a helping hand. Examples
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are the deathstreak mechanic in Modern Warfare
2 where you get a special bonus for dying
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a whole bunch. And the item system in Mario
Kart where powerful items - including that
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pesky blue shell - are only given to players
at the back of the pack. These are pretty
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contentious, and must be used sparingly.
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We can also reduce the value of skill by adding
in more luck. We see this in most family board
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games like Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly
which are heavily based on the luck of the
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die roll. But in video games, you see this
in games like Apex Legends, where your chances
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of winning are shifted, based on what goodies
you find when you drop into the map.
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Game can also offer handicapping modes. And
in team-based games, we can give players alternate
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play styles that allow them to contribute
to the team without needing to do highly-skilled,
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front-line action, like being a medic or an
engineer.
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So balancing a game is a really challenging
job. The more you make characters distinct,
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the harder it is to put them on an even playing
field. And that’s not taking into account
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players of unequal skill level.
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We can try to design in trade-offs, to ensure
characters don’t have too many advantages.
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And give characters counters, so they can
keep each other in check. But even the best
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designs won’t stand up to scrutiny when
put in front of millions of players.
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So we need to constantly determine the balance,
by watching win-rates, match-ups, pick-rates,
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and player feedback. And while hopefully the
meta will naturally shift in response to imbalance
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- sometimes devs have to go in and make the
hard changes.
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And then you introduce a whole new character
and everything breaks again. Sigh. I said
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this wasn’t an easy job. So let me know:
what do you think is the most balanced game
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around, and have you ever played a game where
the devs just got it oh so wrong? Let me know
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your experience with balance in the comments
below.
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Thanks for watching! I had a lot of help on
this one, from people who know multiplayer
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games really well to developers who have worked
on games like League of Legends, Dirty Bomb,
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and Rainbow Six Siege. There’s definitely
more to talk about - like balancing multiplayer
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maps in shooters. But we can get to that in
the future.