great video, never thought about balance this way.
I'm not exactly great at fighting games. But almost any game that lets you tweak the modifiers of things tends to be more fun and interesting to watch when you crank it up to absurd levels, rather than slowing it down and making everything too levelled out.
You start to lose the distinction between hard counters and weaknesses as everything can become viable against nearly anything. People who aren't great can actually have a chance to do some damage, and people who know what they are doing can experiment and find new ways to push their character of choice (as the video points out).
While he focuses on fighting games alot, there is alot of merit to what he says for other genres.
For example, Symmetra in OW was up until a month/2 ago relatively niche use. However instead of directly buffing her or nerfing the other supports, they gave her another Ultimate to add more utility to her character.
This honestly makes her more viable in competitive instead of "lol you're just wasting a healer slot".
I love that a bootleg was a major influence towards fighting games. I'd love to see a new game that's balanced by making everyone Rainbow-level broken
Title doesn't really line up with the contents of the video. The real title should be "don't remove gameplay when balancing".
Nerfing and buffing through changing values ( as opposed to adding or removing mechanics) should be done just as much as eachother if you want to balance a game well. Removing mechanics and making the game boring to make it balanced obviously isn't a good idea, but you should always add just as many mechanics on the opposite end to maintain balance, sure.
It does remind me of countless internet arguments i've seen where people demand mechanics be removed for the sake of balance (star citizen gimbals cough cough) so the video definitely has a place just whats up with that title and terminology.
Personally I couldn't give less of a fuck about the competitive level of video games if I tried. I play games for fun, not for competition.
So with that in mind, I don't think of these things in terms of overpowered and underpowered, I think of them in terms of fun. Fun to play as, fun to play against, and in team-based games, fun to play alongside of.
With that said, nerfs are absolutely necessary. If you have one or a few characters in your roster that are a lot more powerful than the rest, that's a problem. It's not fun to play against. Nerfing them might annoy the people who play those characters, but you have to weigh that against the annoyance of everyone else who plays against them.
If you're in the opposite situation, with a few characters being weaker than most of the roster, of course buffing them would be best. But if you're sitting on one character who is really strong, you'd have to give out massive buffs to the entire rest of the roster. That'd be a completely different game, at that point.
It's weird how he failed to mention at all the reason why you can't actually buff all the time, [I]power creep[/I]. In a fighting game, you can't have all of the characters have good numbers, tiers will surge naturally simply out of what is in vogue or what is more trendy. If what you do instead is constantly give more power to those character that are underplayed or underpowered, you risk simply flipping the tiers around, making what was strong before weak now, which results in a vicious cycle. If there isn't really a target to balance around, numbers will just continue to go up and up until the point where your original design is simply not compatible.
Additionally, if a game has a competitive meta, and a casual meta, like League of Legends, ANY buff, no matter how minor, can severely alter balance. This is because their interests are different, the casual player values fun and rewarding gameplay over simply winning, the pro player is the exact opposite. Making things fun while still letting them feel balanced is a very, very difficult task that companies nowadays still heavily struggle with.
Balance it's not a thing of absolutes, hell, sometimes it's not even necessary, look at Melee, people still play that game competitively and it's never ever received a balance patch in it's history, granted, the only reason why it's played at a high level is due to the discovery of several bugs that lead to emergent gameplay and the game is not played at all like it is designed, but I think that speaks volumes about its design. Balance should be for the players and for the audiences, not because some number appears to be too high.
[QUOTE=Mattk50;51746533]Title doesn't really line up with the contents of the video. The real title should be "don't remove gameplay when balancing".
Nerfing and buffing through changing values ( as opposed to adding or removing mechanics) should be done just as much as eachother if you want to balance a game well. Removing mechanics and making the game boring to make it balanced obviously isn't a good idea, but you should always add just as many mechanics on the opposite end to maintain balance, sure.
It does remind me of countless internet arguments i've seen where people demand mechanics be removed for the sake of balance (star citizen gimbals cough cough) so the video definitely has a place just whats up with that title and terminology.[/QUOTE]
Not a fighting game per se, but in Overwatch there are a number of heroes which, to be quite honest, I think the game would be much more fun without. They're just built around mechanics which, in the context of the game Overwatch is, cannot be made fun to play against. At least, not as far as I can see. Biggest examples for me are Roadhog, Mei, Widowmaker and Bastion, these characters are simply not fun to play against, but the only one that's really considered powerful in the meta is Roadhog, as far as I'm aware. In fact Bastion is considered extremely weak competitively, and yet he's a complete pain in the ass to play against nevertheless.
[QUOTE=General J;51746439]great video, never thought about balance this way.[/QUOTE]
I've been arguing this way for ten years, and it's only in the last three years that people are finally figuring what the fuck I'm talking about without making a stupid OMG face at my implementations until they see them in actual action.
If something is [I]logistically broken[/I], a nerf is PROBABLY what you need. If something is mechanically powerful in a vaccum, then you can examine ways to bring it in line with the greater spirit of design you've established. If something is mechanically superior, instead of automatically removing a tool from the toolbox, why don't you instead buff a counter tool or technique that makes it riskier, instead of closing down the option entirely, resulting in rote counters being the only method of (no) choice.
The biggest hurdles to this is, especially in action and fighting games, is frankly developer snowflake fetish masturbation syndrome and refusal to even the field cleanly.
You take one look a Street Fighter and there is very very clear tier skewing and favoritism right out of the gate. Tekken also has this, though it isn't as pronounced, though it's pretty much impossible to miss with the Williams sisters and the Mishimas.
As an example, Nina and the Mishimas on tekken 3 are hilariously OP in most set ups, countered only by Ogre's batshit damage and Law's ability to chain launchers off of any parry, not just a reversal.
The devs deliberately gave these character insane logistical throughput versus the complexity of the commands. The only balancing mechanic they added was an artificial speeding up of the windows to execute them, which meant only players with batshit reflexes could pull them off consistently, which further alienated a good chunk of the player base from day one.
As the game progresses, instead of bringing the rest of the cast up to this same level and giving them their own tools to work with, they furthered the gap even more in balance updates so that by the time the home version hit, character tiers were essentially hard locked thing.
Small wonder interest in T4 was an all time low for the series, because it continued this trend hard core.
When T5 was launched, the field was far more even, but everyone had their own flavor and surprise surprise people came back to the game.
This has been the philosophy of Icefrog in Dota.
There's a reason why he's praised so much even though some of his changes are dumb.
Maybe he didn't mention it because it was so obvious, but whether you decide to nerf or buff should IMO also be governed by how many gameplay elements it affects.
For example, if a new character comes out that's stronger than the rest of the roster, it would make little sense to go through the effort of buffing the entire roster and possibly messing up somewhere and creating new imbalances.
[QUOTE=patq911;51746654]This has been the philosophy of Icefrog in Dota.
There's a reason why he's praised so much even though some of his changes are dumb.[/QUOTE]
I think what's important about Icefrog's way of balancing is "placement". When he buffs a hero, he usually buffs what they're already good at, and when he nerfs a hero, he nerfs what they're already bad at. This way characters don't end up being a samey, bland soup, in fact they get fleshed out more through this method.
His big patches do usually contain more buffs than nerfs, but that's because there's usually only a handful of overpicked characters to worry about at a time.
Sounds a lot like he's supporting power creep. Not sure how I feel about that.
Judging by your avatar, it makes you rock hard :v:
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