PAX South 2018 -- Balance in Game Design
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ม.ค. 2018
- Balancing games is deceptively difficult. Even worse, there are subtle reasons why even if a game is perfectly, mathematically, demonstrably balanced, players will likely have even LESS fun. From systems like Microsoft TrueSkill or ELO rankings to everyone complaining about how overpowered Hanzo is (he’s not), join GeekNights for an exploration of how and why (and sometimes why NOT) to balance games.
Presented by Rym and Scott of GeekNights at PAX South 2018:
south.paxsite.com/schedule/pan... - เกม
You guys got better at not interrupting each other :) Some would say that you found... a balance.
"You're game's not balanced until you eliminate poverty"
LOVE it
your
i love well coordinated duo talkers you guys are the sklar brothers of this game conference
I'm not a game dev, but I do spend most of my time giving balance suggestions for Team Fortress 2. I recently made "What is balance" video, where I did my own research. And I came to pretty much the same conclusion as you guys have.
There is HiGPS excellent "WHAT IS BALANCE ?" video !
th-cam.com/video/qujA5SHvii8/w-d-xo.html
I like their point on the 50 50 balance match making. its sometimes fun to get stomped. Even taking one round or point from a far superior team is more fun than being the one doing the blow out
Oh Scott, I love that the background for the "TODO: For Devs" slide is AstroScript Pilot Program :)
Unbalanced games are not always strictly more fun. According to this we should never balance SC2, Dota, LoL or whatever competitive game is out there. Some people want to compete and win/lose based on their play, others just dont wanna think and find luck-based games simply more entertaining.
The tricky thing to me is balance contrasted against meaningful choices. If choices are to be meaningful, they carry sacrifices, compromises, pros and cons, some decisions could be superior in a context to others. There's always going to be a certain crowd of players who don't like the harsh consequences (cons) of their choices, and listening too much to them could take out all the interest and variety associated with making choices in the game.
LoL will never be balanced. The meta changes with every patch due to minor tweaks, not in an effort to truly balance the game, but for the purpose of keeping it fresh. I have been playing that game for like 7 years now. I can't think of any other game I've played for so long that is anywhere near as unbalanced as League. League is intentionally unbalanced to preserve meta-gaming, which in turn preserves the playerbase.
What if there are multiple kinds of balance(more than just boring and non boring ones)?
You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for this. Some perspective that also keeps us as interested as we would want a game to be.
When making the "fun is the enemy" and "spectators are the enemy" points, the presenters talked about 'balance' as if it were equivalent to 'the game not being random'.
James Hutchings Thats because their definition of balance was based on each player having an equal probability of winning at the start of the game
@@jphanson Right but there's hundreds of games that are balanced by that definition that ALSO aren't in conflict with their definition of fun or what makes a great spectator sport. It was just a sloppy attempted attention grab that fell flat.
@@jphanson so by their definition a balanced game is one that takes no skill and outcome is decided at random eg. rock paper scissors. This is such an idiotic and reductionist view on balance it hurts, very sad people are taking these clowns seriously.
I can't thank you guys enough for being the nerds you are! I love your lectures! This earned the subscribe!
Thank you! That was just what I needed. =)
Love your presentations !
My LGS holds tournaments in a format called cheapo supremo. You submit a deck which must cost less $25, sideboard and all. It's a very dynamic format, and a lot of fun.
To be honest, in Pokémon specifically kids and more broke players are actually give or traded with at local leagues, or you have “ team or group binders “ which a few people use or trade in or from. Pokémon as a whole is a significantly different tcg community vs magic or Others. Children, broke, and new players all have a kind of “ goodwill “ at the leagues they attend regularly. Having said that. I wish we had more and larger leagues. As with any tcg it tends to have territorial issues with other tcgs for space and time.
3:41 I disagree with this point, because I don't like an easy win, and I play star realms with friends and I know there are certain card combinations that feel unbalanced to me, and sometimes I feel like my win was unearned as a result. Now If I'm picking the pack combo to play with I will often either try to find a new combination that will balance it out, or I just won't play with those sets.
True, but are there ever forum posts where people complain about a playstyle they enjoy being too easy?
@@TheRealToaster2 why would anyone complain about something they enjoy? The point is that a lot of people dont enjoy bad balance even if they are capable of exploiting the imbalance for easy wins. To a significant chunk of people a victory feels hollow if they dont perceive it as something they earned.
Amazing talk!!!!
Just started watching your videos today! You talked about a someone figuring out the 'secret' to Dr.Mario and winning all the time being unlikely, which it is, but I believe this literally happened in one of the Smash Bros games, Yoshi was bottom of all the tier lists for like 9 years after release, then someone discovered a tech trick, which Yoshi way more viable, making it to the top of some people's tier lists. Just though it was interesting :)
Great talk!
This remains one of your best talks, you guys nailed it.
Unfortunately pay to win continues to ruin games. I know the weight classes thing for games was a joke but as someone who has always had less money I would 100% prefer not to play against rich kids who buy cheap shit.
Yes it feels good to beat them and there are some potential ethical issues, but most of the time it just ruins the experience to say “oh I lost because they spent thousands of dollars”
I really like your videos! You help me become a better game designer :)
GOPS is a great game! I used to play this constantly with my siblings growing up.
excellent talk as usual :)
Should be balanced but strategy depending on oponents chioce, like chess.
Going last in 'connect 4' is like going first in 'tic, tac, toe.'
My problem with balancing a game though happens to be obvious unbalanced issues like a oversight that kind of thing think of it like DND and your doing a campaign and the bard somehow messes with the progression by seducing a powerful foe.
I've played GOPS quite a few times.
Funny that with the MTG solution, now there's an EDH format that assigns cards point values and you play with X point decks like building an army for a miniatures game. Kind of a Wage Cap for MTG, since the powerful cards are gonna cost more.
There is another idea. For their magic the gathering example, just value the cards by points and allow a maximum amount of points for the deck like miniature tournaments do.
I dont think thats a good way to balance MtG. . .
3:40 Not true. When I was playing Corrin in Smash bros 4 or Bayonetta. The characters felt unbalanced and instead one of my friends banning me from another character, I banned myself from the two because the game was lacking fun when I was just curve stomping people.
The expression is curb stomping.
Right? I dont think these guys have much of any idea why games are played and developed let alone how.
In team games, like rocket league, the rng factor comes into play with the teams. When playing with random people, you never know how the chemistry works. Sometimes it feels like your team mate is an absolute idiot who can't do anything and sometimes you feel like this is like the 100th agme you play together as everything is so smooth from the start.
In rocket league I feel this hard, as I have a good understanding of the game, but my mechanics are absolute shit. I mean I am literally at about gold/platinum level in mechanics, but my rankings are from high diamond to low champion. Sometimes there may be a mechanical master in my team, who think they are masters in the game because of that, but they lack any awareness in the game as they only focus in mechanics, instead of understanding the game.
Tai Chi is also about balance
53:10 "a magic tournament with a spending limit" Penny dreadful has entered the chat (a format where you cant play with cards worth more than 2 cents)
53:35 Also pauper was in a gp (before the whole quarentine shebang) and is considered a competitive sanctioned format by wotc.
Thumb for Super Dodge Ball slide.
right . . . ?
I recently tried to balance my set of elements. These are things like fire, water, electric etc. It is very hard to do. It is is like PRS but way more complicated. I have a new sympathy for game developers. Balancing is a lot harder than it looks. I like the jab at pay to win games and trading card games. The money imbalance can really ruin the fun. I am a big fan of MTG. However I hate being forced to play against other players. I would rather play against a bot or play two decks by myself. The competition is brutal. Maybe polo players are precursors to video game whales. There are so many factors I never considered. I got to wonder. What if a player has epilepsy? That will really mess them up. Disibilities aren't always obvious things like blindness or anbroken limb. Some are invisible. It would be unfair and wrong to discriminate a person with epilepsy. Maybe there is a way to make it more fair for them. Maybe all players with epilepsy can play against one another. Then they can play a modified version of the game. It is one where the graphics changed to eliminate flashing lights. In official fights, it may help to have medical staff on standby just in case. I thought about the epilepsy thing halfway through the video. Then one of the guys mention simulation sickness in VR. That is another good example of an invisible disability, that would negatively affect gameplay.
I'm pretty sure people unknowingly mean they want Pareto Efficiency when they say they want balance. Theyre not asking for a perfectly balanced game, they just don't want something that falls way out of the Pareto Horizon.
I feel like you guys know this and instead decided to attack a strawman for an hour.
I do disagree with so many points though.
1. Balanced games are not fun.
A lot of balanced games are considered to be fun by many players. Chess is a good example, why else it would be popular? The bigger issue with games like chess and go are the deterministic nature of the games, better player usually always wins and there is nothing else to blame, but yourself. For most part, people are quite egoistic and this plays a huge part why losing in these type of games is so excruciating. But on the other hand, they delve very deep into fundamentals of the game and practice that rewards whenever you make a progress with learning the intricacies. I would argue that both of those games have a lot more players than majority of modern board games.
Luck factor caters to anyone being able to win, no matter how good you are at game. I suppose it is more natural for common denominator to like this sort of aspect.
In videogames, Dota2 is very much not luck dependent and extremely balanced. Explain to me again how that game isn't fun or is not swingy like luck based unbalanced games are.
2. Balance doesn't matter for singleplayer games.
I can't figure out how this makes any sense. A good balanced progression of the game with no broken abilities is pretty much the crux of any singleplayer game ever. It can be highly unfun to play a game that isn't balanced properly throughout the entire game. Diablo3 is extremely good example of that. Imagine that game as unbalanced mess and tell me it would be a fun game. But of course it isn't as necessary them to be as fine tuned as multiplayer games, majority are not going to see subtle differences until very high level of gameplay, but I'm talking about major unbalance issues.
I mean, maybe there was some good points here, but the correlation with balance == not fun doesn't resonate with me at all. Especially when saying munchkin is fun game I stopped really getting into the video. A lot of luck based unbalanced games can be unfun and some of those luck based things are completely game ruining. For example, in MtG you have about 10% of chance to be drawing only into lands and getting "manaflooded" which ends up some matches being complete nongames. That's not fun.
Played a game of Twilight Imperium 4 the other game. One player controls all wormholes, is just a turn away to win the game, justifiably so. Agenda phase we draw a card that says that every ship in wormholes is destroyed and effectively ruining one player for 95% of all ships he owns. Do you honestly think that kind of swing is somehow fun for most players as it technically just ruined the game?
Fun is completely subjective. There is probably at least one person on earth who things that literally enjoys watching paint dry and will say it's not boring.
When it comes to games, there are obviously people like you and I that enjoy competitive, strategic, and balanced games with little to no luck. Yet, there is no denying that the vast majority of people do not agree. The most popular games incorporate lots of chance, drama, secrets, and are far away from meritocracies. The most pouplar sports all have subjective referees and loose rules, soccer being chief among them.
Your second point about single player games is merely semantic. There is no such thing as "balance" in a single player game. Yes, single player games can be poorly designed, or well designed, and it will change how enjoyable they are. But since there is no human to compete against, there is simply no such thing as balance to even discuss. Balance, as we define it and use it here, applies only to the fairness of competition between humans.
Reading my first comment, sorry for the munchkin part, that was rude of me.
I'm not sure what to say about soccer. On vacuum, excluding referee bias, it's very balanced game with pretty concrete rules. Add in referee bias and player injuries, it's completely different game that viewers love to tune in for a weekend. It's a bit of a different discussion really on what's interesting for people to view as there is a huge difference between being fun to watch and being fun to play.
If you agree balanced games can be fun, why then say balanced games are unfun in the video? I guess you as a professional designer are looking for the biggest market and is giving your advice on that respect? There is also huge implication you are giving that balanced games don't have a huge market as well, which is kind of untrue.
My second point, if you want to define balance that way, so be it. I think I got different implication from the video.
@29:17
Back in the day I told a homie Phoenix will be the best character in the game. He laughed and said no way, look at how fast she dies. #UMVC3
Balance as if a TAS bot were playing. Aka ground thing in math/psychology
The salary cap is just a point-buy system for sports
“He’s got the Hanzo gene”
**Abortion Rates Spike as Scientists Develop New Detection Method for Hanzo Gene**
Very interesting!
Totally disagree with one thing though.
Although fighting games DO begin at character select, and picking powerful characters is part of the strategy of the game. I don't think that gives a pass to devs to call their game balanced.
If Ryu was the only character that could 1-hit kill in SF, and there were 30 total characters, everyone would play Ryu. So in practice each match could seem balanced because everyone just plays the same character. But the GAME isn't. There are 29 other characters that are strictly worse than Ryu. 29 attempts to make a character that would be competitively viable, and 29 failures. 29 CHOICES the devs intended for you to have with the expectation of an equal chance of victory. That is the core conceit of Fighting Games. Why even put a character in if it's strictly worse? Or strictly better? (like your Starcraft insert.) They wasted money creating characters that no one will play, so their intent MUST have been for those characters to be balanced, otherwise why spend the money?
Those characters are still part of the game. The option to select those characters is still part of the game. And you're making a suboptimal choice any time you select someone other than Ryu. The developers failed to balance their game, and to play it optimally, the players "balance" it themselves in the way they play.
The developers didn't want to make just 1 character good, they wanted to make the whole cast see some amount of play.
I guess it comes down to developer intent. And in almost all competitive games that intent is to create an environment in which the character you bring in to the fight is preference only. This is what people WANT from competition, right?
Balance gets whacky when you start getting into team games like recent hero shooters, or MOBAs. I honestly don't even know how you begin to balance one of those. But Fighting games, while still difficult to balance large rosters, is the vacuum case for balance. 1v1.
If there are 29 choices the devs intended to have equal chance of victory but they don't it doesn't mean that the game is unbalanced, it means that it's degenerate. That is to say, it has options that you would never pick if you were to play 100% optimally.
When discussing whether a game is balanced or not from a purely analytical standpoint, it's not valid to bring up developer intent since it doesn't factor in the process of play.
dark souls does it and everybody praises them for it. there are characters in dark souls that make completing the game far easier than others, a built in easy mode so to speak without adressing it as such. the "overpowerd ryu" could be the equivalent for that. there IS a single player mode in street fighter.
Same with Garen in league. He’s cheap because he’s supposed to be easier.
And still, that's not a balanced game. I strongly disagree that it is okey to have literally weaker characters. Or easier to play characters for that matter. If a character is weaker, you better make damn sure it is agile and harder to hit to balance things out! Think glass canon style characters. The reason is can be done in a balanced way is you get the firepower, but have to sacrifice hit points. Anyone saying weaker characters can't be balanced is quite honestly a moron. :-)
"Balance gets whacky when you start getting into team games like recent hero shooters, or MOBAs. I honestly don't even know how you begin to balance one of those. But Fighting games, while still difficult to balance large rosters, is the vacuum case for balance. 1v1."
This is actually surprisingly easy to do, but developers often CHOOSE NOT TO. They prefer seeing a certain meta game going on, instead of proper balance. A game can have hard counters and soft counters or a mix thereof. It is possible to balance things out. To be honest, a game like Overwatch is deliberately unbalanced. Picking the wrong class might lose you the game.
Did everyone forget starwars battlefront 2? The original one not the EA one
The game spaned the old saga and the new saga(at the time) and if you were playing in the new saga some battlefilds were un balanced because the CIS are robots and a couple of worlds had field hazards that only affected living things. And nobody for the most part said anything about it because it felt right. You adjusted your game play to fit it. When playing dom on thies maps you couldn't set a defense in the toxic parts next to the base but you could set a heavyer defence there intisapating that thats where the attak would come from.
Ya it gave a huge advantage to the CIS and the fact that the CIS Infantry had wrist rockets insted of the grenades the clones had just two examples make a huge difference and theres more.
But i almost never played CIS if i had the choice because i didnt like the character models. But id still win because knowing how the other team has an advantage leads to learning how to overcome it.
Oh and might i add that battlfront 2 is still heralded as the best one over any of the battlefront series.
40:57 Just described what Gears 5 ranked balance feels like, reason why we Gears players will ever stop complaining about the terrible game balance it has for ranked games... although the bigger argument it's that the unbalance it's possibly build on their possibly terrible netcode (or just server service), they used to have ELO based ranking BTW and dropped it for something weird that just seems to make up people's actual ranking general disappointment by making everyone rank up more often, although it means that the matchmaking feels completely pointless from the point of view of... ah, yeah, lack of actual balance when making matches. Here's the question I have, why I used to hate being stuck on a rank I thought it didn't mach my experience and skill while in ELO based ranking system and why now that my rank seems to show what I felt my skill is like (obviously much higher than it was), I hate the way the game is match-making as it feels nearly random, maximum 2 out of 10 games end up being balanced, the rest are all clearly unbalanced and it can be spotted quiet early on after just a couple of minutes played or less, which makes the game highly frustrating and their only way of balance it out is by "giving away" one or few unbalance games on your favor later on with pourpously poor match-making.
Ah good old Jade Druid. Definitely in my top tier of most hated decks ever.
I miss scotts beard
i need be provided with the best magic cards :)
Goofspiel? The definition actually sounds like Spades.
So lottery is more fun to watch for spectators than NBA? Also balance is not when everyone has the same chance of winning at the beginning of the game but when everyone a the same skill level has the same chance. In fact if someone has low skill compared to another player his chances should be pretty much 0 to win at the beginning of the game.
They aren't saying the lottery is more fun to watch and your second point is just repeating what they said.
I dont get what the "luck factor" in football could be. I understand it with american football, as their ball is shaped in a way that make him bounce inpredictable f.e.
But soccer? Okay, the referee is a human only supported by tech, but I cant see this making 1/4 of the game... 🤔
Most games are won by a penalty kick due to the scores being low and often tied. Getting a penalty kick is one of the most impactful things you can do in the game.
I do care if single player game is balanced. Bad balance can kill enjoyment out of any single player game.
True... although the computer isn't actually a player, just a convincing enough illusion of one. Like, the AI in Starcraft is psychic, it can see everything at once and control all its characters simultaneously. You can't balance that, you just patch it til it seems legit.
Also, imbalance can be a lot of fun. Boss fights would be boring if they had the same stats as the player.
By balance in single player games I mean keeping player in the flow, when game isn't too hard/frustrating or too easy. Even simple things like movement needs to be balanced. Just imagine if Skyrim didn't have fast travel/horses and player movement was two times slower. That would make Skyrim unbearable.
None of that has anything to do with balance. That's just good versus bad game design.
@@DanielDavissynthman I mean that is just an incorrect statement. Stuff like 'how long does it take to do x' is exactly what balancing is in a singleplayer game. Besides you could make that exact same redundant "its just bad game design" statement at any poorly balanced multiplayer game.
Cards against humanity: person who bought the game goes 1st.
I thought it was person who pooped last? Or was that Joking Hazard?
Pro strat: buy it from them.
Remember when competitive hearthstone was split by genders? Totally arbitrary stratification
I'm sorry, but a game of tennis doesn't really have rules for balance other than the turns they take at serving. The progression of skill level in tennis has little to do with balancing tennis, it has everything to do with a more objective way of determining who is the absolute best on a global leaderboard. Leaderboards are not about balance, but rather focus on purely the objective outcome. It doesn't take into account when a theoretically higher ranked player has an off day and loses against a lower ranked player, for example.
And a 100% win rate is not balanced. 50% of winning, where player input tips the scale, is actual balance. And actually, for true fundamental game balance player skill actually does NOT matter nearly as much as you think. It is not a balance problem when people are less skilled at playing a 'glass canon' character, a character objectively stronger in attack but simultaneously weaker in terms of hitpoints.
By ranking the players you can ignore any game imbalances?!?! Are you kidding me? That's just not at all true. Balancing the players is not what makes a game balanced at all. It's actually why we see so many games fail right there. Worse yet, it is why people on forums tend to be RIGHT when they complain about a game's poor balance. They're right because developers with 'your' mindset don't even attempt to balance their games. You say 'never separate rich and poor people to balance out a game', but that's precisely what microtransaction based and something like traditional collectible card games do these days. Poor here means 'unwilling or unable to spend money'. Most card games are extremely pay to win. The idea that games should balance players to have some kind of equality of outcome is ridiculous. A game should never penalise higher player skill. Equality of opportunity to win all comes down to have good rules for a game and making a game easy to learn, yet hard to master. Most games fail at that point way before even trying to balance character classes, individual weapons or abilities. Many developers don't even try to spreadsheet-balance anything, they just use focus groups, use stats of what becomes a popular method of 'winning' and then nerf the f out of whatever they don't want the metagame to be like. It's ridiculous. And it results in games where the meta game decides what is 'strong', instead of some kind of actual game balance and player skill. In Hearthstone you can literally buy one of the best decks and have a superior win rate because of it.
I'm surprised we did not see a spreadsheet in this talk that mentions rock-paper-scissors style fundamental mathematical balance. Explain how those types of hard counters may be too harsh for videogames and explain how (yes, mathematically) balanced soft counters solves this issue. There's a lot of math that can balance the game properly, without any need for 'player balancing'. Player balancing in most cases is it's entirely own and different thing. Talking about tennis again, it may not be much fun for a novice to play against Roger Federer, but it is false to suggest tennis rules are unbalanced. Fun doesn't determine balance. Nor does player skill.
They said 100% win rate for the better player. If a player is better than their opponent and the game is perfectly balanced, they will win 100% of the time. That's just a fact.The only way they can lose is if they play a poor game and hence weren't the better player in that game or if some other factor like luck interferes.
this... is genuinely bad analysis. Close to a subtle and insightful point, but missed.