Should PvP Games Be Balanced For The 1% Of Top Players? - Games

After all, it only makes sense; top players push the limits of the tools they're given, and represent peak performance within the boundaries of what the game allows. Seeing as to how video games are closed systems with set variables, balance should be implemented based upon the raw potential of each component, which is best exemplified by top players. Once you start balancing around the enjoyment of the casual audience (players with less experience and a lower motivation to improve themselves) you start diluting the competitive quality of your game. Mechanics or components that function well in low-skill environments--but aren't viable in high-skill environments--should never be tuned, or at least, shouldn't receive flat nerfs, because they simply aren't technically overpowered; think of it as "trickle-down balancing." If you implement systems in your game to mitigate the dominance of superior players, then you are actively discouraging players from putting effort into the game in the first place. That creates quite a mess of contradictory design, doesn't it?

hehe contradictory

Balance your game around the 99%, let people enjoy your game, if they like the game enough a pro scene will form, and the pros will create their own meta out of what you've made. If you balance your game for only what the top players are doing, you end up with either a game like Dota 2 (circa 4 years ago, haven't played since), where the devs and their painfully slow dev cycle resulted in only the most top picked characters in the game getting tweaks and such, and they just ignored like 80% of the characters in the game and they were outright weaker and disadvantageous to play as a result. Worse yet you could end up with something painfully stale like nearly every MP game from the last half decade that think they'll be the next Starcraft or CS, but instead just end up being a boring game that only rewards players who spend 6 hours a day playing and frequently look up the meta and keep up with the patch notes. Balancing your game so that its fun but nothing is quite game breaking is how ancient stuff like Quake and Age of Empires 2 are still going almost 20 years later. Not balancing your game at all so that theres 256 grenades on a full server is how we ended up with Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and its competitive scene that lasted like 3 days. Balancing your game for the super dudes is how we end up with the imo more boring and stale games like Dota, R6 Siege, and like every RTS made since 2008

Is this thread a low-key 10 year old gripe about the random crits in TF2 ?

Balancing a game primarily around comp which usually has the best players isn't a bad idea though looking at feedback from all players is probably a good idea.

I just want casual games (can have a comp scene with weapon/characters/map bans) to be casual games and comp games to be comp games, without trying to be both at the same time. Overwatch

Balance for both. Different factors in a game will come to dominate a new player's experience compared to a veteren player's experience, for a veteren some tiny 10% differences in the exact numerical values will make a big difference, but a casual player will just see the more general immediate options, controls, routes and such. Just make sure to tune the factors that are mostly isolated and you can get the experience you want in both situations.

Dota has recieved a lot of updates in the past 4 years, if you haven't played it recently your impressions may not be accurate.

The answer is yes if you're looking to make a competitive/e-sport game but expect the public playerbase to be dead within weeks if that one guy who plays every waking hour is able to curb stomp an entire team of people who just want to have fun in the weekend

ideally you look at both sides of the coin; comp players would obviously be the ones to utilize any aspect of the game to its full potential and is helpful in discovering unintended effects, positive or negative. meanwhile you also need to look at your average player and their comfort with said aspect.