"Yo, this balance patch was pretty bad" "Well, the sun was in my eyes, and thunder hit my router, and it's a bad matchup, and I don't even play this game tbh"
Reminds me of an article I read a long time ago where the director of Zelda said he couldn't even beat the first boss in one of his own games. Obviously a little different than competitive balance, but still interesting nonetheless.
There was the retro director who couldn't beat a boss without dev tools in Metroid Prime 2. Said something like ' I know it can be done. People on staff can do it, I just couldn't'
@@joelsmemes4140 I can't remember if that was in regards to the boost guardian or the spider guardian and you know what, I don't blame them. Those two bosses are fucked up
@@GenericSoda interestingly this is not an issue that the Iga Castlevania games have because he forces the designer to be able to beat the boss damageless before it can be added to the game
@@joelsmemes4140 this story is less about dev skill (though they must be, some of those bosses are rock hard) and more about ensuring the bosses don’t have any unavoidable patterns
This is like expecting a teacher/ coach to be the top of their field. And this also goes both ways. Just because your the best at a game, doesn’t mean you’d make a good dev.
Exactly, designing and playing are two very different things, if these "pros" made a game, there's no doubt that they'll also receive the same amount of criticism.
Tha said I had a teacher who was well regarded in his field teach a class once and he was an excellent teacher. Also he included his own theories and dissertations as part of the curriculum.
Wouldn't community's complain the other way if every dev was top .1% in their own games anyway? Like oh they're obviously rigging the game toward their own playstyle. Devs should play their own games. But understanding mechanics and being able to recognize and execute at a high level is completely different.
But they still need to know how their games tick, and what makes it fun it isnt a separate skill they SHOULD be at least okay at their own game let alone actually play it, but this isnt for every developer just the leading ones.
@@notimeforcreativenamesjust3034 not even. Work is delegated precisely because people have their own expertise. This is akin to saying critics can't have a voice unless they can do it themselves
@@seokkyunhong8812 Thats why I said the DIRECTOR, and LEADING developers need to play their game and see what they are making. Not every game developer
@@notimeforcreativenamesjust3034 they should play it, but competence is still not required of their play. Lead in a project needs good management skills, not gameplay chops.
The most compelling reason a dev should have to have played a lot of ranked is not game balance, it's so they can understand what a crummy experience most ranked systems are.
Exactly, being a dev it's important to understand how your game feels like to play on a regular basis if you want the players to do so, and there is no better way to do that than to experience it first hand.
Yeah, I honestly was kind of taken aback when this dev started talking about playing ranked in his own game being like having a second part time job, as if _most people_ aren't also working 40 hour work weeks. Obviously he's making a different point, but makes you wonder if it should really take 400 games played to determine if you belong in the highest rank...
@@SuzakuX Most people are working 40 hour work weeks doing other jobs that don't involve playing TFT though. Like if your entire time at work is working on this game and then you have to spend time off working more on the game by playing it, that is incredibly mentally draining. Not a 1:1 example, but I work with a foreign language for my job, and anytime I see or hear that language outside of work it just feels like...MORE work. Idk man I just can't turn off work brain when it comes to that and I feel like it would be the same case for devs.
@@SuzakuX The question is not how many games, it's how many consecutive wins. The dev probably had a lot of losses in there, if a pro would use a fresh account they'd probably need much fewer games
I definitely agree that you need to account for the experience of players at all skill levels when balancing a game. One of the reasons Overwatch is such a weird game to balance is the huge range in player skill and ability to aim among the different ranks of players. One of the strongest characters in the game, Widowmaker, who can just 1 shot like 3/4 of the cast from across the map, is completely useless at lower ranks because people can't aim good. Meanwhile the characters that excel down there are characters where you don't have to aim as much, characters like Torbjorn and Symmetra who have turrets that auto-lock onto people, and those two were historically useless at high level because players knew how to deal with the turrets and it made the characters useless. It can take a lot of effort to take characters like that and improve on them. Sym went through like 3-4 reworks before she is the way she is now, and she's now actually a decent pick with a lot of interesting utility, as opposed to being just some shitty scrubkiller character.
If I worked at Riot Games I'd need to be fucked up on whatever I could get my hands on. Can't have my boss fart in my mouth and call me a bitch while I'm sober that shit's demoralizing.
If we go by that logic it would mean that every single trainer/coach needs to be better than the players they are coaching, which obviously isn't the case. I know that's sports and this a video game, but knowledge about a certain matter doesn't necessarily translate to performance and vice versa. Additionally, the ability to "teach" and see things from an outside perspective are also essential skills which aren't required to play a game well.
There are video game coaches and they indeed receive the same kind of shit as the devs. If memory serves, I believe one of the top League of Legends teams had a coach who was stuck at bronze (or something similar). Understanding a game is fundamentally different from being good at it.
Devs should have a grasp of what makes their game tick, and a high ranking/good match history is a good indicator of that. But they don't need to be in the top 5%, specially if they do a good job of communicating with the highest ranking players to get their feedback.
I agree completely. People who play the game usually have a better idea of what makes it fun. If you are a high level player you will understand the balance more. If you don’t that’s fine, but you need to go out of the way to understand what your working on.
@@PatrickRatman The DBD devs also have no idea what they actually want to make. They can't decide if they want to make a purely competitive game or a party game with a few competitive elements and it really suffers for that.
@@OriginalDad also too much RNG on the maps and spawns. an unlucky roll can make a match miserable and almost unwinnable but a lucky one can make it feel the easiest thing in the world
The amount of people in the chat and in these comments who have no idea how game development works but are still giving their stupid opinion, really makes my temples hurt. People really can just type anything online and have no consequences. For the few unfortunate years I played League of Legends, I very rarely saw the devs make a balancing mistake, which is an amazing achievement given the complexity of that game, but you wouldn't be able to tell they were doing a good job if you read comments from the community... Players are dumb, egotistical, heavily biased elements and cannot be trusted for the most part.
love this coverage 🙌 i can't stop thinking how overt Mortdog's points are--how strange 🤔 it is to think otherwise the idea 'higher rank always means better opinion' must value _something_ but not the wellbeing of the playerbase ❌ nor the developers ❌ nor even the game's production ❌
Good stuff. It's a hard question, and people tend to forget these are humans making the game. And the problems they're trying to address ultimately are extremely difficult...plus there's so many dimensions of a game devs have to address that are just invisible to most players, be it because they're not aware, it's a level of play outside their own, or a dimension of play they personally don't engage in like the "I dont play zoners" example. I like the KI Maya example a lot, it also made me think of Genjuro from SamSho2019 who was pretty heavily overtuned on release but his changes (while definitely making him weaker) just opened up way more interesting ways to engage the character and the game. It's something I wish was talked about more, when a change is or isn't successful and what and how that might be rather than the binary "buffed/nerfed".
This is the same reason Coaches, Comentators (some of them lol) and a lot of people can have great knowledge but not be high ranked because of time or lack of skill to perform what they actually know. Obviously as you better understand the game the better you can perform but not always happens because of the said reasons and I am good with it, also pro players are what? Less than 5% of player base, I always say to my friend when he complains about balance or stuff like that "What you are talking are stuff only the 10% of the player base on the top is able to do, we are not even at that level"
On the note of the zoning being a viable playstyle Yeah I agree that, if you're designing a game for a wider audience within the FGC, you need every playstyle to be at least somewhat viable, but I do believe there's somewhat of a limit to that. What I mean by this is simple: yeah, zoning and rushdown are a thing in every game, but Xrd focuses way more on rushdown and okizeme for most of it's cast, despite having some zoning in Dizzy, Axl and some others, while something like Touhou 12.3 is genuinely a zoner-fest, where zoning is incredibly oppressive even though you are invulnerable to projectiles while dashing. That is to say, I think a game that twists that around a bit can still be successful and attract a fanbase, just one not necessarily as wide as the more even spread games.
Players are basically telling game devs that they need to spend their minuscule free time playing the very product they might be sick of working on and become masters at the thing, competing with other players that put thousands of hours into the game from their own volition, so that players that form like 5% (being generous here) of the total player base can enjoy it to the fullest. Not being selfish at all, no sir.
It isn't mandatory for every game designer to be good at the game they're making. However, on the other hand, you *cannot* discredit the value of listening to the best players of your game. If your job is to fix bugs, or make costumes, or write netcode, then, yeah, you don't need to be good at the game, you just need to be good at making video games. But if you're a game balancer, and you get to decide what the startup of moves are, or how much damage supers do, or how fast a character walks, then you NEED to play the game, or at least listen to people that do, in all levels of play, including high level. Once again, people try to simplify a complex issue, and important details are overlooked. Both sides are completely wrong - not all devs need to be good, and it is very helpful for someone who is good to have input on specific parts of the game, namely balance.
The problem with taking feedback from top players is they don't really know how to balance a game because they don't play every character. They only know how to make their own character stronger. In the end, game devs still need to filter and test ideas from players.
@@kevl0rneswath I could not disagree more. It's completely false to assume that I have to play a character in order to know how to balance them. It's also completely false to assume that I can only play one character, ever. It's also also completely false to assume that I will never suggest a balance change that makes my character weaker. The truth is that, even if I only play one character, I'm playing AGAINST every character in the long run. Playing as a character especially gives insight into that character's execution and defense, and playing against a character especially gives insight into that character's offense. These are general ideas. For example, if a character has a move that's too strong offensively, i.e. if their overhead is too fast to react to when it's supposed to be reactable, then you're not going to learn that by playing as the character - you're only going to say "wow my opponents have bad reactions today." You're not going to learn any of that if you don't play the game at all. You could even say, the more a player plays the game, the more they know about the game, overall. And different levels of play *are different games* in that regard... unless you're playing Street Fighter V.
@@Moqlnkn Top players are highly motivated and incentivized to win. There is a just too much money and fame on the line for them to not act selfishly. When NRS got a bunch of top players to help test and balance one of their game, all of them made suggestions that would secretly make their characters strong. When Capcom implemented's Mago's suggestion to "fix" Fei Long in SF4, Fei Long became top tier. They simply cannot be trusted to be fair. If you only play one character, you would only know the matchups that involve your character no matter how much you play. Every suggestion you make is directly related to the matchup your character's matchup. Do you have any idea how your suggestions will affect the matchup between characters you don't play? It's not that opinions of the best players have no value, it's just that their ideas aren't always the best.
@@Moqlnkn I think he's wrong but does have one point. When you are extremely good, it can be difficult to properly weigh how fun it might be to deal with certain tools or situations that a better player might breeze through. for example, sometimes with Johnny, the best way to get out, or get in is with RC, and it technically breaks the rules of normal movement. If you're learning how to play, it just feels like the other guy gets to cheat, and you get to eat shit and die screaming. Dota is a different example. If you don't know what to do, some abilities just feel wrong. For example, tinker was very dominant for a long time, despite not being very viable at high level play, because he required a nominally expensive item for his power to really peak. At high level, people were either choosing picks that stomped him into the ground before he did, or getting items that made him useless. In solo que, where people do not change their builds to the situation, though, because everyone is on autopilot, he was very oppressive, but for all the wrong reasons. The fix was always to make his lazer do magic damage, instead of pure damage, because then you can counter him with pipe very effectively, but that would make him less useful in a bracket of play he wasn't even being used in, and they gave his auto-buy to him for free, as party of his R, so now he's purely a scrubkiller. This had the absolute WRONG effect. Tinker now see's LOTS of use by smurphs, because you can farm heros instead, and it still feels like you get the same level of power ramp, but almost never gets seen out of the most toxic games imaginable, because he is missing tools mid level plays used to make him function.
I don't think devs need to even be good players, but they need to understand what makes fun for the average player. If the devs aren't playing there game in any capcity beyond a playtest environment they aren't engaging with the game in a similar manner as the average player. If JP fighting game devs had to play online in a region of Europe or the Americas with no locals and only against wi-fi players we'd have rollback, crossplay, and wi-fi indicators decades ago. They would find out how lonely playing ranked by yourself is. There may be a chance we'd have more engaging singleplayer content as well. I'm not expecting devs to be gods of their game or even play it as their main game, but they should play the game enough and in a similar enough environment to understand the average player experience.
Only time ill blame the skill of a Game Dev. is when they admit to following the Meta, and then make changes, items, and abilities based on that. And then fail spectacularly. (Conan Exiles being a big culprit). Spear was the meta, they said they were watching the meta, and then they came out with 2 slow weapons that could not compete with spear. and were trash (Axe and Katana) where both move sets that left the opponent waay open, and got dunked on by spear. it was a pretty blatant fail on their part.
Goes without saying, I would have thought. As long as they make a good game I don't care if they even play it. I mean, it would make more sense if they don't really play it. They know the game inside and out, I would think that takes some of the thrill out of playing it. Also, they are busy and probably want to spend their free time trying games other people made if they have time to game.
The reason why FFXIV doesn't have those toxic mechanic and system from WoW is because the dev are playing it, and eventually they know what frustrating players and what's not. There are many things that sounds good on paper but when it's implemented, people hate it. I'm not asking them to be god of their game, but at least have a team that actively playing the games and giving their own feedback. Data alone isn't enough. Take Runeterra for example, they think the game is balanced because of the winrate, but they never thought that against certain deck/faction, people just outright quitting since it's not even fun to fight.
@@DuoMaxwellDS you do know that everything that's "wrong" with WoW are basically stuff that they asked for right? "Wow, Barrens is too big and quests are pain in the butt due to travel." *cuts it in half* "WTF, I was enjoying the drawn out tracking!" "Wow, it's so hard to prepare for raids now that I'm older" *make dungeons shorter and easier* "WTF, this is just a room and a boss, why is Blizzard so lazy" "Wow, I ran out of things to do, I wish there's more stuff than just raiding and pvp" *makes dailies* "WTF, is this a mobile game?"
@@DuoMaxwellDS i mean that would probably be a better argument if we didn´t knew that a good amount of wow devs are actievly playing like raiding etc. there was that one guy who got heat from the community for doing sell runs even so i dunno
@@seokkyunhong8812 also tbh, many of the current "problems" with wow is because blizzard gives too much attention to their players and their whining. Also i love the old guard talking about how much harder classic was when the main thing was that people had no idea how to play their characters, and how new raids are too easy etc. even though a single boss in shadowlands raids has enough mechanics for half of molten core .
The part that mentions that devs need to build a game for more people rather than just themselves could be a whole other video. There’s a balance of making a game you enjoy too but is accessible to many. I think Nick ASB could be a good example. It feels like Melee enthusiasts made Nickelodeon Melee - which seems to have missed the forest of Nick fans for the tree full of people that like a Melee type game.
Never thought of it that way regarding Nick-All Stars. Not to hate on them but yeah it feels like the only thing they know of is the Double Dare aesthetic yet they even did not took advantage of it or using a license they only took just to show off the fighting engine rather.
Also, maybe more significant amount of devs work week should be dedicated to playing the game to find out what makes it tick. Having to use your free time to play the game that is your job, so you can properly understand it, doesn't sound like free time.
Dead by Daylight is an awesome game that has a fan base who all for some reason think they are the top 1% of players, and the community ends up being really toxic in part because they have decided the game as it is isn't good and should fundamentally be different. This is always brought up whenever the devs make balance changes for the current state of the game, but if the game played the way, "the community," wanted then it would be completely inaccessible to new players. I think in general the toughest part of being a dev on a competitive multiplayer game is having to explain and justify your choices to a crowd of people who assume you don't know anything about the game you're making. I think the issue of player ego is often the toughest thing to design around.
dead by daylight is the worst example you could have picked, behavior has literally no clue what is even going on with their game as evidenced by the dev stream where apparently helping your team and dying in a team-based game is not "skillful" but doing nothing all game and escaping through hatch is. when the devs refuse to even see or understand how the game they are supposed to balance and develop for is even fucking played by most people thats a really big issue.
Fighting game devs do not need to be at the highest rank BUT combat designers and balance teams NEED to understand the game at the highest level and they should have high level play testers/watch high level play to see what may be too powerful, it’s also important to evaluate the game at lower levels because those are the le ve la most of the players will experience. Some devs have no understanding of mid to high level fighting games and it shows
It's also important to understand the *current* meta of the game so it can be adjusted properly. Taking _Hearthstone_ as an example I'm more familiar with, it seems that the developers generally do a poor job of predicting what cards and decks will be broken in each set, and then wait too long to address power imbalances, resulting in weeks if not months of the game feeling bad. And I think a lot of that comes from how much time they spend time playtesting the next set of cards, to the exclusion of the currently available cards.
9:21 that's how I pretty much view Strive Zato. I still think he's a general top tier in the game but in tournaments it's too volatile to pull guaranteed back to back wins
@@CIOTECHSFX I suppose what I'm getting at is the character has every tool to be top tier, but piloting him and making use out of everything perfectly is the volatile part that makes him non-consistent. But he's a great character
They don't have to be High Ranked but I think part of the dev team need to be directly in touch with current state of the game. Ideally every dev shoud be playing their game, however it's not possible, not nessecary for everyone(Artists for example) and this limits their horizons. Also having outside opinion, in this case someone not playing the game, is benificial cuz you can then based on their feedback design a tutorial. Devs that don't play their game at all can be seen as out of touch when they make controversial decisons or changes.
I feel like I disagree with this at least somewhat. A good example would be when Tekken 7 made hellsweeps track because you can “just block lol”. There was a fundamental lack of understanding as to why that wasn’t a particularly good idea and they eventually backtracked and made them step-able again. So while I would say you don’t have to be “pro”, having high level players amongst the dev teams number is certainly preferable and a fair amount of devs should probably be playing or interacting with their game in some capacity outside of work - Even if just to get a feel for things.
Yeah sorta the ironic thing here as it's sorta a big problem with Riot. Dunno the state of TFT as I only played a bit of it on initial release before they made comp. But for the base game of LoL it seemed like everything they said in this article on why you shouldn't cater to high level play is exactly the sort of problems that plagued the game. The same narrow champ pool being the strong meta picks for years on end and being problematic and in some cases like Irelia's rework being made even stronger despite them already being a menace with little counter in low elo as an example. Like if you look at the entire champion pool then compare it to the meta picks and most picked/win rate you'll quickly see that basically the top champs are ones that have been top for years on end and have over 30% pick rates and around 50% win rates. So it just generally feels like they patch/balance the game around their coveted "Esports" instead of as a game meant to be fun for the whole player base making the non-competitive end feel stagnant af.
A Dev's job is to design the game but they should be decent and knows how it works in not just in development but actual play. That's what makes a good Dev
I never expect devs to be pro level players. There is a specific problem with Riot though. I have played League of Legends on and off for over a decade. Riot’s balance team and the reason behind nerfs and buffs is incredibly out of touch. It got to the point where they were making fun of the community for criticizing the balance of the game. Champions consistently go from OP to completely useless regularly. I don’t think that devs need to play their game at a top level, but it definitely feels like Riot makes decisions as if they didn’t even play the game.
The dev teams are pretty different between the different riot teams though. I have recent experience with TFT (constant dev communication, quick b patches, even when things go bad they turn around quickly) and LOR (pretty mixed/poor dev communication, most of the community unhappy with current direction)
a big problem with the riot balance team is that they don't have a clear direction of how they want to balance things. the majority of their players are ranked low, myself included, but often they will nerf certain champs due to their performance in high levels of play, making them even more obsolete in low levels of play. there's also the case where they will balance things around competitive play, where some champs are only strong with a high level of teamwork, which in turn can make them unusable even in high levels of solo queue. furthermore, they have a strong tendency to balance for the sake of popularity and profit, which might be more of a problem w the higher ups, but there is an always growing pool of at least 20 champs that are technically playable but are practically unviable or unable to catch up w the current power standard.
Not all high level players make for good game designers They are able to find balance problems more easily but dont always have the best solutions for them
I totally agree with what Sajam and Mort are saying. However, from my perspective, this is a funny thing to read from a Riot dev. I know it's a different Riot game and way later, but League had absolutely abysmal balance early on, and a big part was that they didn't listen to their community and just assumed they knew best in all cases. They eventually started hiring good players and actually listening to them, and suddenly the game's design and balance heavily improved. So devs absolutely don't need to be good at their game to make a good game, but they DO need to consider what people who are better at their game than them are saying and doing.
I don't expect devs to be high ranks to make their games. I do however think it would really help their balance team if they consult some high level players about some changes. Starcraft 2 has done this for years (before they stopped supporting the game) and I think it's worked extremely well for the competitive scene. The devs either takes suggestions from those players, or ask them for opinions on proposed changes.
Ideally, they should consult players of all skill levels. There are weird cases where devs have listened to top tier players, and absolutely destroyed the low-and-mid level experience, because what works for top level doesn’t necessarily work for low level.
The issue is when devs will outright refuse to consult top players or give their opinions. Pro players/high elo players devote massive amounts of time to understanding how the game works, what's strong, what isn't and why. This is a huge resource that gets wasted so often for any number of reasons.
Add to that the immense amount of data from thousands of games in each patch and it should be enough to make informed decisions. While we know that was not the case in TFT.
Dev skill should have no bearing on design. The fact that betas, location tests exists show that internal dev experience is essentially meaningless when it comes to public reception.
As long as at least one person plays the game then I don't care if you get stomped in every auto chess game you play. I have no expectations for devs to even play the game after it's out or at all. If there's one bronze dev playing the game am happy
Devs don't have to be pros or high ranked but if they're spewing nonsense out like Michael Murray on Twitter, imma lose interest in the game case closed
TLDR: That's bullshit and Mortdog did it to himself. As both a Grandmaster in TFT's first season in multiple accounts and a professional game designer, I kinda disagree with this one. TFT went from the best competitive experience I've ever had in games in season 1 to League-like frustrating, life consuming garbage in seasons 3 and forward. Patch after patch I saw Mortdog remove skill expression from the game and add more and more uncertainty in outcome (a.k.a. RNG). I really doubt he would apply the same changes if he understood the game as deeply as we did back then. And playing isn't the only way to do it. It is known that TFT has a much lower ceiling in terms of mechanical prowess, so studying the game and analysing data provided by millions of games and guides from the player base comes really close to actually playing. And that IS part of the job, you HAVE to know exactly how EVERYTHING works and why it works, so it must be naturally easier for devs to be better at the game than the average player. I also find it hypocritical of him to say "oh, it took me like 300 hours to reach Challenger", like, yeah, that's what you've done to the game by introducing so much RNG into the Autochess model, it creates so much uncertainty that even someone at Challenger level needs 300 hours to reach their own rank on a new account. In season one, once I hit Grandmaster, it took me less than 50 games to reach the same rank on the second account. While having a job. And going to college. Lastly, I find it repulsive that he used to (probably still does) reveal patch notes on his stream first, and only then publishing it on official websites, just to farm some viewership. His reasoning for balance changes were completely unfounded to the point they seemed random. I barely can read this guy's nickname without getting furious, he's exactly what I strive NOT to be on my career. All the players I used to follow quit the game, also did I and everyone from the start of the competitive scene, which was killed by no other than the Dog himself. Couldn't fucking help myself after reading all that crap, wouldn't let that shit pass in a hundred years.
They obviously don’t need to be good at their own game but if they are is just plain better. Like you Sajam or any other caster. You guys don’t need to be the best of the best, just have the knowledge but if you guys can be good at the games you cast yall gonna reconize shit right and faster making the cast better. Well, there is a bunch of different skills envolved in any process.
Don't entirely agree. Developers don't have to be pro players but they should be able to simulate what the game will look like under certain professional conditions, that way they can at least catch errors that might show up down the line. You might not be able to do it perfectly but even something like running the game frame by frame can be very helpful for developers to see what is and isn't possible at a theoretical high level of gameplay.
Hm I dont agree completely. Yeah I agree I want weak and strange characters to get better for exemple I hope KoF devs are look at Ramon,Whip and Maxima and make some changes. At the same time there is other games that I love is directed by people that are at least good or hardcore players that know their game so well that feels like they know everything about the game without having to ask others devs about it and understand their community something I cant say about some other companies..
I'd love for the original Melee dev's (including Sakurai) to play against the current top players to see the monster they've created after all these years.
I’ll say here what I said in chat, Magic Devs rarely even play release Magic: the Gathering. Developers mostly play whatever shitty version of the new content they’re *not* going to release. Game balance is a data analysis job, not a play skill job.
I'll just say that I don't know if you wanna single out Magic the Gathering as a good example because that game had a rough like two years balance wise.
@@Thomazbr Oh no, the game with twenty five years of consistent releases had some overpowered cards that got banned recently. This obviously means that their expertise in making one of the most successful games in the world is useless trash.
@@Michael_Raymond "Some overpowered cards that got banned recently" is an incredibly disingenuous representation of what has happened. Eternal formats are now ruled by recent sets and we have had more standard bans in the past 2-3 years than all the other previous years combined. FIRE design is great for sales but not for the health of the eternal formats. Also no one said it was "useless trash." It's just not great right now.
this is riot being stupid, when Riot balance their games they use the foggy curtain of fun to justify decisions, i think they buzzword it to power fantasy, class fantasy or something. he has another line doing the same thing "junior devs try to make changes for themselves, what they'd enjoy" to act like there's no point in talking to singular people and he's not personally balancing it, he's only doing what a voice in his head, that is the community he doesnt talk to is saying. they have an infamous line, not TFT though for league but u know damn well they carry the same divine king mentality because another cali white boy picked another cali white boy for the job: "we have 120 yrs of balancing experience between us" it is nothing compared with the playerbase's experience inside the game, and they dont want to use it, ask them, theyre right there, it's their game too. you can't cater for the average player when it comes to balance, if you remove every knowledge, reaction, execution check, because theyre frustrating to deal with or to grind to get around, then what r u going to be satisfied on? you're just removing the depth from your game that gives you things to learn and think about and notice that make interactions varied, average players find their fun elsewhere in the game, mechanics, animations, or whether or not they won a matchmaking coin flip and got a win. i dont expect anyone good at making something to be good at using it, as long as they understand what makes it good. the balance team should be directly connected to top players, in pokemon there's a website called smogon, any time they want to change meta, they announce a poll, give the rating u have to reach, then run a poll through all the top players, and it's in their interest to make their own game fun, interesting, varied, because theyre the idiots playing it. pro players conflict with that and might want to preserve their characters and playstyle, for money interests, but they dont ask the questions and the majority of top players aren't pros. in golf, if you want to be a coach, club fitter, or whatever, something connected to it and advising players you need a license from being at least a 4 handicap player, pro players are considered 0 handicap, and an average one 10 to 18 handicap.
TFT might be applicable but when the person whose the lead for "Balance" in League plays 60 games a season/year and is unironically bronze so essentially so far below the average skill level it's kind of a problem.
"High level players and more junior designers will often make the mistake of designing games for themselves, which lead to very inaccessible games." No it doesn't. It becomes a game that is played and enjoyed by those who understand how it works and like the way it works. There is nothing wrong with that at all from a player perspective. It's only an "inaccessible" game in the sense that it won't make a lot of money through mass appeal, to which I say: If your goal is to make money, why not work for an industry where such a goal makes sense? Why make video games - art - if you're goal is monetary gain? Harada literally said in an recent interview "...we made a balanced game [Tekken Tag Tournament 2] and nobody played it...", when in reality people who loved the game played it (and still play it), but not enough people played it to where it could afford him a new yatch. Modern game design decisions start to make sense when you view game development less like working on a passion project, and more of just 100+ people's 9-5's.
Nickelodeon ASB says hi. You might want to listen to what Sajam is saying at that point. Also, it seems a little cynical to assume it's only about the money.
@@rachetmarvel931 "It's always been about the customers" lmfao.... arcsys/capcom chose to resell patches for their games as new fully-priced products back in the early 2010's. Harada is selling FRAME DATA for Tekken 7.
I don’t think devs should be TOP rank but if you can’t even make it out of pools in a tournament then I feel like you’re just as qualified to balance the game as Twitter finger kids.
"Yo, this balance patch was pretty bad"
"Well, the sun was in my eyes, and thunder hit my router, and it's a bad matchup, and I don't even play this game tbh"
"I was having an off day ngl"
"I don't even play this game"
Reminds me of an article I read a long time ago where the director of Zelda said he couldn't even beat the first boss in one of his own games. Obviously a little different than competitive balance, but still interesting nonetheless.
There was the retro director who couldn't beat a boss without dev tools in Metroid Prime 2. Said something like ' I know it can be done. People on staff can do it, I just couldn't'
Not a developer, but reminds me of how Mike Tyson couldn't beat Glass Joe in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out
@@joelsmemes4140 I can't remember if that was in regards to the boost guardian or the spider guardian and you know what, I don't blame them. Those two bosses are fucked up
@@GenericSoda interestingly this is not an issue that the Iga Castlevania games have because he forces the designer to be able to beat the boss damageless before it can be added to the game
@@joelsmemes4140 this story is less about dev skill (though they must be, some of those bosses are rock hard) and more about ensuring the bosses don’t have any unavoidable patterns
This is like expecting a teacher/ coach to be the top of their field. And this also goes both ways. Just because your the best at a game, doesn’t mean you’d make a good dev.
Exactly, designing and playing are two very different things, if these "pros" made a game, there's no doubt that they'll also receive the same amount of criticism.
Tha said I had a teacher who was well regarded in his field teach a class once and he was an excellent teacher. Also he included his own theories and dissertations as part of the curriculum.
@@GenericSoda I never, ever trust a teacher who includes their own stuff in their teaching.
After all, those who don’t do, teach (or in this case,develop).
Wouldn't community's complain the other way if every dev was top .1% in their own games anyway? Like oh they're obviously rigging the game toward their own playstyle. Devs should play their own games. But understanding mechanics and being able to recognize and execute at a high level is completely different.
Yeah that's definitely what would happen, a good point
devs job is to design the games mechanics and systems, a seperate skill set from competitive play
But they still need to know how their games tick, and what makes it fun it isnt a separate skill they SHOULD be at least okay at their own game let alone actually play it, but this isnt for every developer just the leading ones.
Those are the requirements, obviously a dev should be decent and knows how it works in not just in development but actual play.
@@notimeforcreativenamesjust3034 not even. Work is delegated precisely because people have their own expertise.
This is akin to saying critics can't have a voice unless they can do it themselves
@@seokkyunhong8812 Thats why I said the DIRECTOR, and LEADING developers need to play their game and see what they are making. Not every game developer
@@notimeforcreativenamesjust3034 they should play it, but competence is still not required of their play. Lead in a project needs good management skills, not gameplay chops.
The most compelling reason a dev should have to have played a lot of ranked is not game balance, it's so they can understand what a crummy experience most ranked systems are.
Exactly, being a dev it's important to understand how your game feels like to play on a regular basis if you want the players to do so, and there is no better way to do that than to experience it first hand.
Yeah, I honestly was kind of taken aback when this dev started talking about playing ranked in his own game being like having a second part time job, as if _most people_ aren't also working 40 hour work weeks. Obviously he's making a different point, but makes you wonder if it should really take 400 games played to determine if you belong in the highest rank...
@@SuzakuX yeah, now that you mention it, it is kind of telling.
@@SuzakuX Most people are working 40 hour work weeks doing other jobs that don't involve playing TFT though. Like if your entire time at work is working on this game and then you have to spend time off working more on the game by playing it, that is incredibly mentally draining. Not a 1:1 example, but I work with a foreign language for my job, and anytime I see or hear that language outside of work it just feels like...MORE work. Idk man I just can't turn off work brain when it comes to that and I feel like it would be the same case for devs.
@@SuzakuX The question is not how many games, it's how many consecutive wins. The dev probably had a lot of losses in there, if a pro would use a fresh account they'd probably need much fewer games
It's like saying, "You need to be a pro racer if you want to design a car."
I definitely agree that you need to account for the experience of players at all skill levels when balancing a game. One of the reasons Overwatch is such a weird game to balance is the huge range in player skill and ability to aim among the different ranks of players. One of the strongest characters in the game, Widowmaker, who can just 1 shot like 3/4 of the cast from across the map, is completely useless at lower ranks because people can't aim good. Meanwhile the characters that excel down there are characters where you don't have to aim as much, characters like Torbjorn and Symmetra who have turrets that auto-lock onto people, and those two were historically useless at high level because players knew how to deal with the turrets and it made the characters useless. It can take a lot of effort to take characters like that and improve on them. Sym went through like 3-4 reworks before she is the way she is now, and she's now actually a decent pick with a lot of interesting utility, as opposed to being just some shitty scrubkiller character.
In StarCraft, and for commentators, not devs necessarily, this has been a painful recurring talking point for EVER
Nerf Protoss pls
@@Lix0w buff toss please. They haven't won a single tourney. Nerf the damn lurkers and ghosts and we can talk about protoss
"Developers do not need to be high" hey man, it's a high-stress environment
If I worked at Riot Games I'd need to be fucked up on whatever I could get my hands on. Can't have my boss fart in my mouth and call me a bitch while I'm sober that shit's demoralizing.
If we go by that logic it would mean that every single trainer/coach needs to be better than the players they are coaching, which obviously isn't the case.
I know that's sports and this a video game, but knowledge about a certain matter doesn't necessarily translate to performance and vice versa. Additionally, the ability to "teach" and see things from an outside perspective are also essential skills which aren't required to play a game well.
There are video game coaches and they indeed receive the same kind of shit as the devs. If memory serves, I believe one of the top League of Legends teams had a coach who was stuck at bronze (or something similar). Understanding a game is fundamentally different from being good at it.
Devs should have a grasp of what makes their game tick, and a high ranking/good match history is a good indicator of that. But they don't need to be in the top 5%, specially if they do a good job of communicating with the highest ranking players to get their feedback.
I agree completely. People who play the game usually have a better idea of what makes it fun. If you are a high level player you will understand the balance more. If you don’t that’s fine, but you need to go out of the way to understand what your working on.
tell that to the Dead by Daylight developers lmao. they're worse than even somebody with an even rudimentary understanding of their game.
@@PatrickRatman The DBD devs also have no idea what they actually want to make. They can't decide if they want to make a purely competitive game or a party game with a few competitive elements and it really suffers for that.
@@OriginalDad also too much RNG on the maps and spawns. an unlucky roll can make a match miserable and almost unwinnable but a lucky one can make it feel the easiest thing in the world
top 5% isn't that high, at least on tft-lol
The amount of people in the chat and in these comments who have no idea how game development works but are still giving their stupid opinion, really makes my temples hurt. People really can just type anything online and have no consequences.
For the few unfortunate years I played League of Legends, I very rarely saw the devs make a balancing mistake, which is an amazing achievement given the complexity of that game, but you wouldn't be able to tell they were doing a good job if you read comments from the community...
Players are dumb, egotistical, heavily biased elements and cannot be trusted for the most part.
love this coverage 🙌
i can't stop thinking how overt Mortdog's points are--how strange 🤔 it is to think otherwise
the idea 'higher rank always means better opinion' must value _something_
but not the wellbeing of the playerbase ❌
nor the developers ❌
nor even the game's production ❌
Good stuff. It's a hard question, and people tend to forget these are humans making the game. And the problems they're trying to address ultimately are extremely difficult...plus there's so many dimensions of a game devs have to address that are just invisible to most players, be it because they're not aware, it's a level of play outside their own, or a dimension of play they personally don't engage in like the "I dont play zoners" example. I like the KI Maya example a lot, it also made me think of Genjuro from SamSho2019 who was pretty heavily overtuned on release but his changes (while definitely making him weaker) just opened up way more interesting ways to engage the character and the game. It's something I wish was talked about more, when a change is or isn't successful and what and how that might be rather than the binary "buffed/nerfed".
This is the same reason Coaches, Comentators (some of them lol) and a lot of people can have great knowledge but not be high ranked because of time or lack of skill to perform what they actually know.
Obviously as you better understand the game the better you can perform but not always happens because of the said reasons and I am good with it, also pro players are what? Less than 5% of player base, I always say to my friend when he complains about balance or stuff like that "What you are talking are stuff only the 10% of the player base on the top is able to do, we are not even at that level"
Something tells me we'll be having this exact same discussion again when Project L comes out 😒
This conversation has been going on and will be going on for a very long time.
if you wanna become a piano manufacturer you have to be finalist in the Chopin competition, simple as
On the note of the zoning being a viable playstyle
Yeah I agree that, if you're designing a game for a wider audience within the FGC, you need every playstyle to be at least somewhat viable, but I do believe there's somewhat of a limit to that. What I mean by this is simple: yeah, zoning and rushdown are a thing in every game, but Xrd focuses way more on rushdown and okizeme for most of it's cast, despite having some zoning in Dizzy, Axl and some others, while something like Touhou 12.3 is genuinely a zoner-fest, where zoning is incredibly oppressive even though you are invulnerable to projectiles while dashing. That is to say, I think a game that twists that around a bit can still be successful and attract a fanbase, just one not necessarily as wide as the more even spread games.
Players are basically telling game devs that they need to spend their minuscule free time playing the very product they might be sick of working on and become masters at the thing, competing with other players that put thousands of hours into the game from their own volition, so that players that form like 5% (being generous here) of the total player base can enjoy it to the fullest.
Not being selfish at all, no sir.
It isn't mandatory for every game designer to be good at the game they're making. However, on the other hand, you *cannot* discredit the value of listening to the best players of your game. If your job is to fix bugs, or make costumes, or write netcode, then, yeah, you don't need to be good at the game, you just need to be good at making video games. But if you're a game balancer, and you get to decide what the startup of moves are, or how much damage supers do, or how fast a character walks, then you NEED to play the game, or at least listen to people that do, in all levels of play, including high level. Once again, people try to simplify a complex issue, and important details are overlooked. Both sides are completely wrong - not all devs need to be good, and it is very helpful for someone who is good to have input on specific parts of the game, namely balance.
The problem with taking feedback from top players is they don't really know how to balance a game because they don't play every character. They only know how to make their own character stronger. In the end, game devs still need to filter and test ideas from players.
@@kevl0rneswath
I could not disagree more. It's completely false to assume that I have to play a character in order to know how to balance them. It's also completely false to assume that I can only play one character, ever. It's also also completely false to assume that I will never suggest a balance change that makes my character weaker.
The truth is that, even if I only play one character, I'm playing AGAINST every character in the long run. Playing as a character especially gives insight into that character's execution and defense, and playing against a character especially gives insight into that character's offense. These are general ideas.
For example, if a character has a move that's too strong offensively, i.e. if their overhead is too fast to react to when it's supposed to be reactable, then you're not going to learn that by playing as the character - you're only going to say "wow my opponents have bad reactions today."
You're not going to learn any of that if you don't play the game at all. You could even say, the more a player plays the game, the more they know about the game, overall. And different levels of play *are different games* in that regard... unless you're playing Street Fighter V.
@@Moqlnkn Top players are highly motivated and incentivized to win. There is a just too much money and fame on the line for them to not act selfishly. When NRS got a bunch of top players to help test and balance one of their game, all of them made suggestions that would secretly make their characters strong. When Capcom implemented's Mago's suggestion to "fix" Fei Long in SF4, Fei Long became top tier. They simply cannot be trusted to be fair.
If you only play one character, you would only know the matchups that involve your character no matter how much you play. Every suggestion you make is directly related to the matchup your character's matchup. Do you have any idea how your suggestions will affect the matchup between characters you don't play?
It's not that opinions of the best players have no value, it's just that their ideas aren't always the best.
@@kevl0rneswath I'm very sorry you think that way.
@@Moqlnkn I think he's wrong but does have one point. When you are extremely good, it can be difficult to properly weigh how fun it might be to deal with certain tools or situations that a better player might breeze through. for example, sometimes with Johnny, the best way to get out, or get in is with RC, and it technically breaks the rules of normal movement. If you're learning how to play, it just feels like the other guy gets to cheat, and you get to eat shit and die screaming. Dota is a different example. If you don't know what to do, some abilities just feel wrong. For example, tinker was very dominant for a long time, despite not being very viable at high level play, because he required a nominally expensive item for his power to really peak. At high level, people were either choosing picks that stomped him into the ground before he did, or getting items that made him useless. In solo que, where people do not change their builds to the situation, though, because everyone is on autopilot, he was very oppressive, but for all the wrong reasons. The fix was always to make his lazer do magic damage, instead of pure damage, because then you can counter him with pipe very effectively, but that would make him less useful in a bracket of play he wasn't even being used in, and they gave his auto-buy to him for free, as party of his R, so now he's purely a scrubkiller. This had the absolute WRONG effect. Tinker now see's LOTS of use by smurphs, because you can farm heros instead, and it still feels like you get the same level of power ramp, but almost never gets seen out of the most toxic games imaginable, because he is missing tools mid level plays used to make him function.
I don't think devs need to even be good players, but they need to understand what makes fun for the average player. If the devs aren't playing there game in any capcity beyond a playtest environment they aren't engaging with the game in a similar manner as the average player. If JP fighting game devs had to play online in a region of Europe or the Americas with no locals and only against wi-fi players we'd have rollback, crossplay, and wi-fi indicators decades ago. They would find out how lonely playing ranked by yourself is. There may be a chance we'd have more engaging singleplayer content as well. I'm not expecting devs to be gods of their game or even play it as their main game, but they should play the game enough and in a similar enough environment to understand the average player experience.
Only time ill blame the skill of a Game Dev. is when they admit to following the Meta, and then make changes, items, and abilities based on that. And then fail spectacularly. (Conan Exiles being a big culprit). Spear was the meta, they said they were watching the meta, and then they came out with 2 slow weapons that could not compete with spear. and were trash (Axe and Katana) where both move sets that left the opponent waay open, and got dunked on by spear. it was a pretty blatant fail on their part.
Loli thought this was going to be about the producer of p4u2 getting zoned out by yukiko va
Goes without saying, I would have thought. As long as they make a good game I don't care if they even play it. I mean, it would make more sense if they don't really play it. They know the game inside and out, I would think that takes some of the thrill out of playing it. Also, they are busy and probably want to spend their free time trying games other people made if they have time to game.
The reason why FFXIV doesn't have those toxic mechanic and system from WoW is because the dev are playing it, and eventually they know what frustrating players and what's not. There are many things that sounds good on paper but when it's implemented, people hate it.
I'm not asking them to be god of their game, but at least have a team that actively playing the games and giving their own feedback. Data alone isn't enough. Take Runeterra for example, they think the game is balanced because of the winrate, but they never thought that against certain deck/faction, people just outright quitting since it's not even fun to fight.
@@DuoMaxwellDS you do know that everything that's "wrong" with WoW are basically stuff that they asked for right?
"Wow, Barrens is too big and quests are pain in the butt due to travel."
*cuts it in half*
"WTF, I was enjoying the drawn out tracking!"
"Wow, it's so hard to prepare for raids now that I'm older"
*make dungeons shorter and easier*
"WTF, this is just a room and a boss, why is Blizzard so lazy"
"Wow, I ran out of things to do, I wish there's more stuff than just raiding and pvp"
*makes dailies*
"WTF, is this a mobile game?"
@@DuoMaxwellDS i mean that would probably be a better argument if we didn´t knew that a good amount of wow devs are actievly playing like raiding etc. there was that one guy who got heat from the community for doing sell runs even so i dunno
@@seokkyunhong8812 also tbh, many of the current "problems" with wow is because blizzard gives too much attention to their players and their whining. Also i love the old guard talking about how much harder classic was when the main thing was that people had no idea how to play their characters, and how new raids are too easy etc. even though a single boss in shadowlands raids has enough mechanics for half of molten core .
Lots of solid points in the article, video, and comment sections.
The part that mentions that devs need to build a game for more people rather than just themselves could be a whole other video. There’s a balance of making a game you enjoy too but is accessible to many. I think Nick ASB could be a good example. It feels like Melee enthusiasts made Nickelodeon Melee - which seems to have missed the forest of Nick fans for the tree full of people that like a Melee type game.
Never thought of it that way regarding Nick-All Stars. Not to hate on them but yeah it feels like the only thing they know of is the Double Dare aesthetic yet they even did not took advantage of it or using a license they only took just to show off the fighting engine rather.
Also, maybe more significant amount of devs work week should be dedicated to playing the game to find out what makes it tick. Having to use your free time to play the game that is your job, so you can properly understand it, doesn't sound like free time.
Sajam out here making real content talking about real issues in the FGC
Deep stuff
Dead by Daylight is an awesome game that has a fan base who all for some reason think they are the top 1% of players, and the community ends up being really toxic in part because they have decided the game as it is isn't good and should fundamentally be different. This is always brought up whenever the devs make balance changes for the current state of the game, but if the game played the way, "the community," wanted then it would be completely inaccessible to new players. I think in general the toughest part of being a dev on a competitive multiplayer game is having to explain and justify your choices to a crowd of people who assume you don't know anything about the game you're making. I think the issue of player ego is often the toughest thing to design around.
dead by daylight is the worst example you could have picked, behavior has literally no clue what is even going on with their game as evidenced by the dev stream where apparently helping your team and dying in a team-based game is not "skillful" but doing nothing all game and escaping through hatch is. when the devs refuse to even see or understand how the game they are supposed to balance and develop for is even fucking played by most people thats a really big issue.
Incredible thumbnail. The Architect from The Matrix.
"When's Tekken 8?"
Dammit, I want my Dead or Alive 7 with Rollback first!
SFV will be 42G just to only have 5 characters worth playing with a only 3 or 4 being played in ranked
Fighting game devs do not need to be at the highest rank BUT combat designers and balance teams NEED to understand the game at the highest level and they should have high level play testers/watch high level play to see what may be too powerful, it’s also important to evaluate the game at lower levels because those are the le ve la most of the players will experience. Some devs have no understanding of mid to high level fighting games and it shows
It's also important to understand the *current* meta of the game so it can be adjusted properly. Taking _Hearthstone_ as an example I'm more familiar with, it seems that the developers generally do a poor job of predicting what cards and decks will be broken in each set, and then wait too long to address power imbalances, resulting in weeks if not months of the game feeling bad. And I think a lot of that comes from how much time they spend time playtesting the next set of cards, to the exclusion of the currently available cards.
9:21 that's how I pretty much view Strive Zato. I still think he's a general top tier in the game but in tournaments it's too volatile to pull guaranteed back to back wins
consistency is something top tiers have, though
@@CIOTECHSFX I suppose what I'm getting at is the character has every tool to be top tier, but piloting him and making use out of everything perfectly is the volatile part that makes him non-consistent. But he's a great character
Being high rank in a game does not mean you know what's best for the game.
To wit: Landorous.
Maximilian uploads a video, spins to Sajam, "alright where is the next video huh?"
Devs need to have a life outside the game
I dont want developers using their free time to develop the game. They should be having fun with their free time and getting payed to develop.
They don't have to be High Ranked but I think part of the dev team need to be directly in touch with current state of the game. Ideally every dev shoud be playing their game, however it's not possible, not nessecary for everyone(Artists for example) and this limits their horizons. Also having outside opinion, in this case someone not playing the game, is benificial cuz you can then based on their feedback design a tutorial.
Devs that don't play their game at all can be seen as out of touch when they make controversial decisons or changes.
I feel like I disagree with this at least somewhat. A good example would be when Tekken 7 made hellsweeps track because you can “just block lol”.
There was a fundamental lack of understanding as to why that wasn’t a particularly good idea and they eventually backtracked and made them step-able again.
So while I would say you don’t have to be “pro”, having high level players amongst the dev teams number is certainly preferable and a fair amount of devs should probably be playing or interacting with their game in some capacity outside of work - Even if just to get a feel for things.
sajam's hair looks great
It’s funny how many armchair devs are in the comment section.
this reminds me of the endless debate in other games about if commentators and analysts need to be top players or not
A game developer doesn't need to be a master at their own game, but they do need to listen to their players. Many fail in that regard.
Yeah sorta the ironic thing here as it's sorta a big problem with Riot. Dunno the state of TFT as I only played a bit of it on initial release before they made comp. But for the base game of LoL it seemed like everything they said in this article on why you shouldn't cater to high level play is exactly the sort of problems that plagued the game. The same narrow champ pool being the strong meta picks for years on end and being problematic and in some cases like Irelia's rework being made even stronger despite them already being a menace with little counter in low elo as an example.
Like if you look at the entire champion pool then compare it to the meta picks and most picked/win rate you'll quickly see that basically the top champs are ones that have been top for years on end and have over 30% pick rates and around 50% win rates. So it just generally feels like they patch/balance the game around their coveted "Esports" instead of as a game meant to be fun for the whole player base making the non-competitive end feel stagnant af.
A Dev's job is to design the game but they should be decent and knows how it works in not just in development but actual play. That's what makes a good Dev
"Maybe you should develop some skills"
I never expect devs to be pro level players. There is a specific problem with Riot though. I have played League of Legends on and off for over a decade. Riot’s balance team and the reason behind nerfs and buffs is incredibly out of touch. It got to the point where they were making fun of the community for criticizing the balance of the game. Champions consistently go from OP to completely useless regularly.
I don’t think that devs need to play their game at a top level, but it definitely feels like Riot makes decisions as if they didn’t even play the game.
I think devs should at least play the damn game. One of the previous balance leads played less than 50 games the entire season they were the head.
The dev teams are pretty different between the different riot teams though. I have recent experience with TFT (constant dev communication, quick b patches, even when things go bad they turn around quickly) and LOR (pretty mixed/poor dev communication, most of the community unhappy with current direction)
a big problem with the riot balance team is that they don't have a clear direction of how they want to balance things. the majority of their players are ranked low, myself included, but often they will nerf certain champs due to their performance in high levels of play, making them even more obsolete in low levels of play. there's also the case where they will balance things around competitive play, where some champs are only strong with a high level of teamwork, which in turn can make them unusable even in high levels of solo queue. furthermore, they have a strong tendency to balance for the sake of popularity and profit, which might be more of a problem w the higher ups, but there is an always growing pool of at least 20 champs that are technically playable but are practically unviable or unable to catch up w the current power standard.
Riot doesn't want balance though. They want cyclical demands to get pay 2 win money
Glad that Kallista got that 3 armour, that was definitely her problem.
This is a good take
Devs should understand to just block mid and punish. 🤣
Not all high level players make for good game designers
They are able to find balance problems more easily but dont always have the best solutions for them
14:08 forget Tekken 8, where's SC6 season 3
love this content
Probably why even Nintendo, who hates its best smash players, immediately ran
a smash tournament when Ultimate was coming out
I'm still asking where's mahvel?!?
I love how sajam starts his videos an wastes no time getting to the point. Or he's at least funny while getting to it.
I totally agree with what Sajam and Mort are saying. However, from my perspective, this is a funny thing to read from a Riot dev. I know it's a different Riot game and way later, but League had absolutely abysmal balance early on, and a big part was that they didn't listen to their community and just assumed they knew best in all cases. They eventually started hiring good players and actually listening to them, and suddenly the game's design and balance heavily improved. So devs absolutely don't need to be good at their game to make a good game, but they DO need to consider what people who are better at their game than them are saying and doing.
I don't expect devs to be high ranks to make their games. I do however think it would really help their balance team if they consult some high level players about some changes. Starcraft 2 has done this for years (before they stopped supporting the game) and I think it's worked extremely well for the competitive scene. The devs either takes suggestions from those players, or ask them for opinions on proposed changes.
Ideally, they should consult players of all skill levels. There are weird cases where devs have listened to top tier players, and absolutely destroyed the low-and-mid level experience, because what works for top level doesn’t necessarily work for low level.
They don't need to be but I want them to be.
Yeah, if I was a dev, I would just play with an anonymous alt account so people wouldn't bother me about it.
Y’all ever heard of BHVR? Dead by daylight devs might be an exception to this lmao
The issue is when devs will outright refuse to consult top players or give their opinions. Pro players/high elo players devote massive amounts of time to understanding how the game works, what's strong, what isn't and why. This is a huge resource that gets wasted so often for any number of reasons.
Add to that the immense amount of data from thousands of games in each patch and it should be enough to make informed decisions. While we know that was not the case in TFT.
Dev skill should have no bearing on design. The fact that betas, location tests exists show that internal dev experience is essentially meaningless when it comes to public reception.
As long as at least one person plays the game then I don't care if you get stomped in every auto chess game you play. I have no expectations for devs to even play the game after it's out or at all. If there's one bronze dev playing the game am happy
Devs don't have to be pros or high ranked but if they're spewing nonsense out like Michael Murray on Twitter, imma lose interest in the game case closed
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TLDR: That's bullshit and Mortdog did it to himself.
As both a Grandmaster in TFT's first season in multiple accounts and a professional game designer, I kinda disagree with this one.
TFT went from the best competitive experience I've ever had in games in season 1 to League-like frustrating, life consuming garbage in seasons 3 and forward. Patch after patch I saw Mortdog remove skill expression from the game and add more and more uncertainty in outcome (a.k.a. RNG). I really doubt he would apply the same changes if he understood the game as deeply as we did back then. And playing isn't the only way to do it.
It is known that TFT has a much lower ceiling in terms of mechanical prowess, so studying the game and analysing data provided by millions of games and guides from the player base comes really close to actually playing. And that IS part of the job, you HAVE to know exactly how EVERYTHING works and why it works, so it must be naturally easier for devs to be better at the game than the average player.
I also find it hypocritical of him to say "oh, it took me like 300 hours to reach Challenger", like, yeah, that's what you've done to the game by introducing so much RNG into the Autochess model, it creates so much uncertainty that even someone at Challenger level needs 300 hours to reach their own rank on a new account. In season one, once I hit Grandmaster, it took me less than 50 games to reach the same rank on the second account. While having a job. And going to college.
Lastly, I find it repulsive that he used to (probably still does) reveal patch notes on his stream first, and only then publishing it on official websites, just to farm some viewership. His reasoning for balance changes were completely unfounded to the point they seemed random.
I barely can read this guy's nickname without getting furious, he's exactly what I strive NOT to be on my career. All the players I used to follow quit the game, also did I and everyone from the start of the competitive scene, which was killed by no other than the Dog himself.
Couldn't fucking help myself after reading all that crap, wouldn't let that shit pass in a hundred years.
They obviously don’t need to be good at their own game but if they are is just plain better.
Like you Sajam or any other caster. You guys don’t need to be the best of the best, just have the knowledge but if you guys can be good at the games you cast yall gonna reconize shit right and faster making the cast better.
Well, there is a bunch of different skills envolved in any process.
Don't entirely agree. Developers don't have to be pro players but they should be able to simulate what the game will look like under certain professional conditions, that way they can at least catch errors that might show up down the line. You might not be able to do it perfectly but even something like running the game frame by frame can be very helpful for developers to see what is and isn't possible at a theoretical high level of gameplay.
Hm I dont agree completely. Yeah I agree I want weak and strange characters to get better for exemple I hope KoF devs are look at Ramon,Whip and Maxima and make some changes. At the same time there is other games that I love is directed by people that are at least good or hardcore players that know their game so well that feels like they know everything about the game without having to ask others devs about it and understand their community something I cant say about some other companies..
I'd love for the original Melee dev's (including Sakurai) to play against the current top players to see the monster they've created after all these years.
I’ll say here what I said in chat, Magic Devs rarely even play release Magic: the Gathering. Developers mostly play whatever shitty version of the new content they’re *not* going to release.
Game balance is a data analysis job, not a play skill job.
I'll just say that I don't know if you wanna single out Magic the Gathering as a good example because that game had a rough like two years balance wise.
@@Thomazbr Oh no, the game with twenty five years of consistent releases had some overpowered cards that got banned recently. This obviously means that their expertise in making one of the most successful games in the world is useless trash.
@@Michael_Raymond "Some overpowered cards that got banned recently" is an incredibly disingenuous representation of what has happened. Eternal formats are now ruled by recent sets and we have had more standard bans in the past 2-3 years than all the other previous years combined. FIRE design is great for sales but not for the health of the eternal formats.
Also no one said it was "useless trash." It's just not great right now.
@@Michael_Raymond I mean, I don't think it's too much of a hot take to say that, from a competitive standpoint, it was a pretty disastrous 2 years.
this is riot being stupid, when Riot balance their games they use the foggy curtain of fun to justify decisions, i think they buzzword it to power fantasy, class fantasy or something. he has another line doing the same thing "junior devs try to make changes for themselves, what they'd enjoy" to act like there's no point in talking to singular people and he's not personally balancing it, he's only doing what a voice in his head, that is the community he doesnt talk to is saying. they have an infamous line, not TFT though for league but u know damn well they carry the same divine king mentality because another cali white boy picked another cali white boy for the job: "we have 120 yrs of balancing experience between us" it is nothing compared with the playerbase's experience inside the game, and they dont want to use it, ask them, theyre right there, it's their game too. you can't cater for the average player when it comes to balance, if you remove every knowledge, reaction, execution check, because theyre frustrating to deal with or to grind to get around, then what r u going to be satisfied on? you're just removing the depth from your game that gives you things to learn and think about and notice that make interactions varied, average players find their fun elsewhere in the game, mechanics, animations, or whether or not they won a matchmaking coin flip and got a win.
i dont expect anyone good at making something to be good at using it, as long as they understand what makes it good.
the balance team should be directly connected to top players, in pokemon there's a website called smogon, any time they want to change meta, they announce a poll, give the rating u have to reach, then run a poll through all the top players, and it's in their interest to make their own game fun, interesting, varied, because theyre the idiots playing it.
pro players conflict with that and might want to preserve their characters and playstyle, for money interests, but they dont ask the questions and the majority of top players aren't pros.
in golf, if you want to be a coach, club fitter, or whatever, something connected to it and advising players you need a license from being at least a 4 handicap player, pro players are considered 0 handicap, and an average one 10 to 18 handicap.
TFT might be applicable but when the person whose the lead for "Balance" in League plays 60 games a season/year and is unironically bronze so essentially so far below the average skill level it's kind of a problem.
Average skill level outside of TFT is silver... Which is one more rank, literally. Is the average for TFT different?
Dev: “this sucks, it takes 400 hours to reach top tier!”
Yeah whose fault do you think that is mr game developer!
"High level players and more junior designers will often make the mistake of designing games for themselves, which lead to very inaccessible games."
No it doesn't. It becomes a game that is played and enjoyed by those who understand how it works and like the way it works. There is nothing wrong with that at all from a player perspective. It's only an "inaccessible" game in the sense that it won't make a lot of money through mass appeal, to which I say: If your goal is to make money, why not work for an industry where such a goal makes sense? Why make video games - art - if you're goal is monetary gain?
Harada literally said in an recent interview "...we made a balanced game [Tekken Tag Tournament 2] and nobody played it...", when in reality people who loved the game played it (and still play it), but not enough people played it to where it could afford him a new yatch.
Modern game design decisions start to make sense when you view game development less like working on a passion project, and more of just 100+ people's 9-5's.
Nickelodeon ASB says hi. You might want to listen to what Sajam is saying at that point. Also, it seems a little cynical to assume it's only about the money.
You do realise your talking about a video gaming genre that started from the arcades, right?
It's always been about the customers, hence the money.
"Businesses shouldn't make money"
@@seokkyunhong8812 The gaming business has always made money, even now lol. I know you wanted to sound smart, but you gotta try harder like me bro.
@@rachetmarvel931 "It's always been about the customers" lmfao....
arcsys/capcom chose to resell patches for their games as new fully-priced products back in the early 2010's. Harada is selling FRAME DATA for Tekken 7.
no, but they should at least play their own game lol now & again =/
I don’t think devs should be TOP rank but if you can’t even make it out of pools in a tournament then I feel like you’re just as qualified to balance the game as Twitter finger kids.
Except designers have presumably made a study of game design where twitter finger kids have made a study of memology and salt