How Games Get Balanced | Game Maker's Toolkit

If you’ve spent any amount of time in a
multiplayer lobby, you’ve probably heard

words like overpowered, cheap, and unfair.

What these players are arguing about is the
game’s balance.

Balance is the art of making sure that all
options in a multiplayer game are fair: so

none are underpowered, and thus pointless
to use. And none are overpowered, and thus

dominate everything else.

Here’s the thing though: most video games
aren’t just striving for balance. But balance

among a wide range of distinctly different
options.

You don’t have to work that hard to balance
a symmetric game - which is one where all

players have the exact same starting conditions.
But most games are asymmetric - which means

players are facing off against each other
with completely different stuff.

And in a game where players can pick from
74 different fighters or 140

unique champions, the developers are counting
on them all being equally viable among players

of roughly the same skill level.

So how do they do it?

Now, I should say, balance is an incredibly
difficult pursuit. It can be an entire department

at certain companies, and Riot’s League
of Legends has had more than 200 balance patches

in the last decade. Plus it’s not just about
numbers, but player psychology, with Overwatch’s

Jeff Kaplan saying “the perception of balance
is more powerful than balance itself”.

So this is not going to be an intensive tutorial. Instead, Game Maker’s Toolkit presents

a whirlwind tour through the ways games are
balanced - and rebalanced - and rebalanced

- and rebalanced.

So how do developers go about balancing a
game in the first place? Well, the first consideration

is trade-offs. This is when you essentially
cancel out a character’s competitive advantages,

with drawbacks.

Think of Mario Kart characters, where heavy
racers like Donkey Kong have a high top speed,

but low acceleration, while featherweight
racers like Toad are the opposite. On the

right track design, they’ll be almost evenly
balanced.

You can think of characters as having a “power
budget” - at least that’s why Riot calls

it. Advantages are a cost, but disadvantages
are a discount. If all characters are just

about hitting the limit of the same power
budget, they’ll be closer to being balanced.

It’s rarely that easy, of course. I mean,
okay, sometimes you’ll get a card that does

1 damage to all minions and another that does
4 damage to all minions. That’s an easy one: just make

the second card cost a bit more energy.

But how do you calculate the power budget
for completely incomparable options like heroes

in Overwatch? Or options with dozens of stats
to tweak? Like, when Bungie was reigning in

the initially overpowered sniper rifle in
Halo 3, it had loads of stats it could tweak

such as clip size, time to full zoom, reload
time, and max ammo.

(It ultimately decided the best knob to tweak
was the time between shots, which it bumped

from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds).

What’s important, though, is to celebrate
the big differences between choices. The sniper

rifle and the shotgun offer a more exciting
choice to players than two types of assault

rifle - even though the latter is much easier
to balance.

So I agree with ex-Blizzard designer Rob Pardo
when he warns designers against using the

maths to balance games into mediocrity, saying

ROB PARDO: "you’re gonna end up with a game where

everything kinda feels the same. And you can high
five each other and say it’s balanced, but

is it fun? Probably not”.

Another consideration is counters. This is
when we give characters the ability to negate

each other’s moves and strategies. For example:
a quick Zerg rush in Starcraft is all well

and good - unless your opponent is one step
ahead and has already built defensive bunkers.

And what we ideally want is for everything
to have a counter. So a defensive Starcraft

player can, in turn, be countered by a more
economical strategy, where you save up resources

to build units that can eventually crush those
bunkers into dust.

And we could make a counter to that counter,
and so on - but then we’d be here for forever.

There’s a more elegant solution though,
because how do you deal with someone who’s

sitting around saving up money? Well… a
rush.

And, wouldn’t you know it… it’s rock,
paper, scissors. This goofy game you play

to see who has to do the washing up might
be incredibly simple and lacking any strategic

depth, but it is perfectly balanced - because
everything has a counter, and everything is a counter.

EDDIE: Damn man, killed those scissors.

And that’s why it forms the backbone of
a lot of multiplayer games. Pretty much every

fighting game has a system like this, such
as Dead or Alive which boasts about its triangle

system, where strikes beat throws, throws
beat holds, and holds beat strikes.

In strategy games, it’s not just the strategies
that work like this, but the individual units.

And the different Pokemon types all sit in
a massive web of interlocking counters - but

starting, of course, with fire, water, and
grass.

Rock, paper, scissors is a great balancing
framework to start from, because you can ensure

that no element is overpowered - it’s countered
by something. And no choice is irrelevant

- it at least works as a counter to something
else.

And also, in strategy games at least, it encourages
mixed strategies, it makes you into a multi-disciplinary

player, and it forces you to switch tactics on
the fly in a really dynamic way.

And in class-based games, it’s a great way
of automatically making mixed teams.

Take Team Fortress 2, where seven of its nine
classes fit into a complex web of interlocking

and interchangeable triangles of rock, paper,
scissors. Here, teams must pick complementary

classes to protect each other from weaknesses.
If you’re an Engineer and Spies keep sapping

your sentries, then you’re going to need
to get one of your team mates to switch to

Pyro.

These counters are often described as hard
counters if they completely shut something

down - like a punch is a hard counter to a
throw in ARMS because it will nullify the

effect every single time. But soft counters
just mean one choice will have an advantage

over the other. McCree will outperform Tracer,
but his chance of winning is far from 100%.

When it comes to counters, it’s really important
to figure out what are the hands and what

are the throws.

The hands are the things that get locked in
before the match even starts. You know, the

characters and the races. The throws are the
things you pick during the match. The moves,

the units, and the strategies. And in a team-based
game, like Overwatch, the entire team is the

hand, while the individual players are the
throws.

The throws are specifically designed to be
unbalanced against each other, to create that

back-and-forth counter-play and teamwork.
But the hands are supposed to be balanced,

and so they should have access to all of the
throws. If Zangief simply couldn’t block,

for example, he would be unusable.

So you’ve got a bunch of characters, with
trade-offs and counters, and you think you’ve

made them balanced. But how do you actually
make sure that’s true? Well this is when

we start collecting data - either from internal
play-testers, or the millions of people playing

your game online.

Now you might think that all you need to do
is track how often each character results

in success - i.e it’s “win rate”. And
if a character has a 50 percent win rate,

it’s balanced.

But, like all stats, this can be misleading.
Imagine a fighting game with three characters

- and if Ryu won every match against Chun-Li
and lost every match against Cammy, his win-rate

would be 50 percent. Perfectly balanced, though?
I think not.

That’s why match-up charts, where you where
you can see the win rate of a character, when

played against all other characters, are so
important.

But even that’s not going to tell you everything.
Riot had a problem with the League of Legends

character Akali. The numbers said she was
pretty balanced, with a 44 percent win-rate

- perhaps a tad underpowered. So how come
she secured a 72 percent win rate at the 2018

World Championship, and was banned more times
than any other champion?

It’s because while she was really powerful,
she was difficult to play effectively. She

had a super high skill floor, in other words.
So while top-tier players could use her to

wipe the floor with the competition, the low-ranking
players using Akali were getting killed left,

right, and center. Therefore, her win-rate
was being dragged down.

That’s why it’s important to look at a
character’s win-rate and match-ups across

all skill levels.

And finally, win-rate doesn’t really tell
you what’s actually going on in the game.

We need to know what characters people are
actually picking. People might be avoiding

a character who is otherwise well balanced
because that character is not much fun to

play, or is only useful in certain situations.

Blizzard found that Overwatch hero Symmetra
was a largely balanced character, but she

wasn’t being picked as much because her
use was highly situational. So in her first

complete redesign, they tried to make her
more popular by giving her two ultimates to

pick from: a teleporter or a shield generator.

That’s why player feedback is so important
- as well as pick-rate, which tells you how

often a character is actually getting used.
For Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft uses a matrix

to cross reference both win rate and pick
rate -with different considerations needed

for operators who fall into these four buckets.

And the pick-rates help tell you the state
of the meta - which is essentially just the

characters, cards, strategies, and so on that
the community at large have found the most

effective and are currently using.

This is often shared through forum posts,
fan-made tier lists, YouTube videos, and eSport

victories. When a kid called Jason won the
Clash Royale tournament in Helsinki, his chosen

cards suddenly became massively popular.

The meta can actually act as a self-balancing
force. Let’s say everyone discovered that

a certain character was overpowered, and everyone
started using it. It’s now in everyone’s

best interest to try and discover strategies
that can counter or out perform that favourite.

And if players find it, the meta might change.

This rolling meta keeps the game fresh, and
gives the players who found the counter a

real sense of satisfaction. Overwatch’s
Jeff Kaplan says “regarding the meta changing

because players have innovated a new strategy
– well – this is the best-case scenario.

We’ve seen this happen time and time again.”

Of course, that’s not always going to work.
Sometimes the designers will have to go in

and change things. If a strategy is overpowered,
if a character is never getting played, or

if a play-style is proving annoying then it’s
time to swing the hammer.

First, the devs need to figure out the exact
reason why that character, or strategy, or

whatever is unbalanced. It’s easy to see
that a character is dominating the match-up

charts, but can be harder to pin-point why.

So for a character like Meta Knight in Super
Smash Bros Brawl, it was mostly because of

his extremely fast attack speed, and an ability
to cancel his momentum in mid-air and avoid

being KO’d. He had lots of advantages, and
not enough trade-offs - and other characters

don’t have the tools to counter him.

Once the source has been found, you’ve got
to figure out what to nerf and what to buff.

Nerfing means making something less powerful,
like reducing their speed, limiting their

range, or cutting down their strength. Buffing
is the opposite: making it more powerful.

You don’t necessarily have to buff the weak
characters and nerf the strong ones, though. You could

leave an overpowered character alone, but
buff the characters who counter them, and

still solve the same problem. Make sure you
watch this Core-A Gaming video on why buffs

are, generally, better than nerfs.

Balance changes can be anything from a tiny
tweak to a character’s movement speed, to

a complete overhaul of how a character works.
It might be a fundamental change to the rules

of the game - Rainbow Six Siege made attacking
and defending more balanced by changing the

match time to three minutes. And sometimes
you’ve just to pull things from the game

entirely, like when Epic scrapped the overpowered
infinity blade in Fortnite.

Any change is going to affect players - especially
those who are very used to the way a specific

character, or its counters, work. So when
the game gets patched, it’s important to

communicate the changes through patch notes,
videos, and so on.

In fact, patch notes are so important that
Riot once put out of a note saying a champion

was nerfed, but forgot to actually implement
the nerf in the code. Even so, the character’s

pick rate plummeted, and even his win rate
decreased a bit. Didn’t I say that player

psychology was an important factor?

Now, at the beginning of this video, i said
that balance was about trying to make characters

equally viable among players of roughly the
same skill level. But what happens when players

aren’t at the same skill level?

Well, a lot of highly competitive games use
matchmaking

systems to pair up similarly skilled players.

But for more accessible, party-style games,
we may want to build in negative feedback

loops, or catch-up mechanics, where players
who are doing poorly get a helping hand. Examples

are the deathstreak mechanic in Modern Warfare
2 where you get a special bonus for dying

a whole bunch. And the item system in Mario
Kart where powerful items - including that

pesky blue shell - are only given to players
at the back of the pack. These are pretty

contentious, and must be used sparingly.

We can also reduce the value of skill by adding
in more luck. We see this in most family board

games like Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly
which are heavily based on the luck of the

die roll. But in video games, you see this
in games like Apex Legends, where your chances

of winning are shifted, based on what goodies
you find when you drop into the map.

Game can also offer handicapping modes. And
in team-based games, we can give players alternate

play styles that allow them to contribute
to the team without needing to do highly-skilled,

front-line action, like being a medic or an
engineer.

So balancing a game is a really challenging
job. The more you make characters distinct,

the harder it is to put them on an even playing
field. And that’s not taking into account

players of unequal skill level.

We can try to design in trade-offs, to ensure
characters don’t have too many advantages.

And give characters counters, so they can
keep each other in check. But even the best

designs won’t stand up to scrutiny when
put in front of millions of players.

So we need to constantly determine the balance,
by watching win-rates, match-ups, pick-rates,

and player feedback. And while hopefully the
meta will naturally shift in response to imbalance

- sometimes devs have to go in and make the
hard changes.

And then you introduce a whole new character
and everything breaks again. Sigh. I said

this wasn’t an easy job. So let me know:
what do you think is the most balanced game

around, and have you ever played a game where
the devs just got it oh so wrong? Let me know

your experience with balance in the comments
below.

Thanks for watching! I had a lot of help on
this one, from people who know multiplayer

games really well to developers who have worked
on games like League of Legends, Dirty Bomb,

and Rainbow Six Siege. There’s definitely
more to talk about - like balancing multiplayer

maps in shooters. But we can get to that in
the future.