How Games Get Balanced

Summary

The video script discusses the intricacies of game balancing in multiplayer games, emphasizing the importance of ensuring fairness without sacrificing variety. It explores concepts like trade-offs, where characters' strengths are balanced by weaknesses, and counters, which allow characters to negate each other's strategies. The script also highlights the significance of data collection, player feedback, and the evolving meta in maintaining balance. Furthermore, it touches on the challenges of balancing for different skill levels and the role of matchmaking systems and catch-up mechanics. The video concludes by acknowledging the complexity of the task and the continuous effort required to achieve and maintain balance in games.

Takeaways

• 🎮 **Game Balance Importance**: Ensuring all options in a multiplayer game are fair, neither underpowered nor overpowered, is crucial for a good gaming experience.
• 🤔 **Challenge of Balance**: Achieving balance in asymmetric games, where players start with different conditions, is more complex than in symmetric games.
• 🔍 **Trade-offs**: Developers use trade-offs to balance characters by giving them competitive advantages balanced by drawbacks.
• 📊 **Power Budget**: Characters are thought to have a power budget, where advantages cost and disadvantages provide a discount, aiming for balance.
• 🚫 **Avoiding Mediocrity**: Over-reliance on math to balance games can lead to a lack of character diversity and reduced fun, as noted by Rob Pardo.
• ⛔ **Counters**: Giving characters the ability to counter each other's moves is a common strategy to maintain balance.
• ⚖️ **Rock, Paper, Scissors**: This simple game is a perfect example of balance through counters and serves as a model for many multiplayer games.
• 📈 **Data Collection**: Developers collect data from playtests and online play to analyze win rates, match-ups, and pick rates to assess balance.
• 📉 **Misleading Stats**: Win rates alone can be misleading; match-up charts and skill level analysis provide a more accurate picture of balance.
• 📚 **Player Feedback**: Gathering player feedback is essential to understand which characters or strategies are fun and effective in real gameplay.
• 🔄 **Meta Shifts**: The game's meta, influenced by community strategies and pro play, can act as a self-balancing force, encouraging innovation and counterplay.
• 🛠️ **Nerfing and Buffing**: Balancing often involves tweaking game elements, which can range from minor adjustments to complete overhauls.

Q & A

What is the primary goal of game balance in multiplayer games?

The primary goal of game balance is to ensure that all options in a multiplayer game are fair, so that none are underpowered and pointless to use, and none are overpowered, dominating everything else.

What is the difference between a symmetric and an asymmetric game?

A symmetric game is one where all players have the exact same starting conditions, whereas in an asymmetric game, players face off against each other with completely different stuff.

How does Riot's League of Legends approach game balance?

Riot's League of Legends has had more than 200 balance patches in the last decade, focusing not just on numbers but also on player psychology to ensure the perception of balance.

What is the concept of trade-offs in game balance?

Trade-offs involve canceling out a character’s competitive advantages with drawbacks, ensuring that advantages come at a cost and disadvantages provide a discount, helping to balance characters within the same power budget.

How does the rock, paper, scissors game relate to game balance?

Rock, paper, scissors is a perfectly balanced game because everything has a counter and is a counter itself, which forms the backbone of many multiplayer games to ensure no element is overpowered and no choice is irrelevant.

What are counters in the context of game balance?

Counters are abilities, characters, or strategies that can negate each other's moves, ensuring that everything has a counter and encouraging dynamic gameplay and team strategies.

Why is it important to track win rates and match-up charts in game balance?

Win rates and match-up charts help developers understand if a character is overpowered or underpowered when played against others, providing insights into how to adjust the balance.

What is the significance of player feedback in game balance?

Player feedback is crucial as it can reveal issues with game balance that may not be apparent from win rates or match-up charts, such as fun factor or situational usefulness of characters.

How can game balance be adjusted to accommodate different skill levels?

Game balance can be adjusted through matchmaking systems for competitive games or by introducing negative feedback loops and catch-up mechanics for more accessible, party-style games.

What is the role of the meta in game balance?

The meta, which consists of the most effective characters, cards, and strategies identified by the community, can act as a self-balancing force as players innovate new strategies to counter or outperform the current favorites.

How do developers communicate balance changes to players?

Developers communicate balance changes through patch notes, videos, and other updates to inform players about the reasons for changes and how they will affect gameplay.

What are some examples of balance changes that developers might make?

Balance changes can range from minor tweaks to a character's attributes to complete overhauls of gameplay mechanics, or even fundamental changes to the game rules.

Outlines

00:00

🎮 The Challenge of Game Balancing

This paragraph discusses the concept of balance in multiplayer games, emphasizing the importance of ensuring that no option is too weak or too powerful. It highlights the difference between symmetric and asymmetric games and the complexity of maintaining balance across a wide range of options. The paragraph also touches on the psychological aspect of balance, quoting Jeff Kaplan from Overwatch, and mentions the iterative process of balancing through patches, as exemplified by Riot's League of Legends.

05:04

🛠️ Balancing Through Trade-offs and Counters

The second paragraph delves into the mechanics of balancing games, starting with the idea of trade-offs where characters' strengths are balanced by weaknesses, using Mario Kart as an example. It then discusses the concept of 'power budget' and the challenge of applying this to games with complex characters and stats. The paragraph also introduces the idea of counters, where characters or strategies can negate each other, and uses examples from Starcraft and rock-paper-scissors to illustrate the point. It concludes with the importance of maintaining distinct choices to keep the game exciting, as advised by ex-Blizzard designer Rob Pardo.

10:09

🔄 Understanding and Adapting to the Meta

This paragraph explores the meta in gaming, which refers to the most effective strategies and character choices identified by the community. It explains how the meta can act as a self-balancing force, where the popularity of an overpowered character leads to the discovery of counters. The paragraph also discusses how developers intervene when necessary, using examples from Overwatch and Super Smash Bros Brawl, and the importance of matchmaking systems and catch-up mechanics to maintain balance across different skill levels.

15:11

📊 Analyzing Data and Player Psychology in Balancing

The final paragraph focuses on the analytical side of game balancing, discussing the collection of data from playtesters and player statistics to assess balance. It points out the limitations of win-rate as a sole metric and the importance of match-up charts and skill level analysis. The paragraph also discusses the significance of player feedback and pick-rates in understanding the game's state and making adjustments. It concludes with the acknowledgment of balancing as a challenging and ongoing process, especially with the introduction of new characters.

🤝 Collaboration and Future of Game Balancing

In the closing paragraph, the author expresses gratitude for the input from multiplayer game experts and developers who have worked on titles like League of Legends, Dirty Bomb, and Rainbow Six Siege. It hints at the complexity of balancing multiplayer maps in shooters and suggests that this topic could be explored in future discussions.

Keywords

💡Balance

Balance in the context of video games refers to the state where all options, characters, or strategies are fair and viable, ensuring that no single option is either too weak or too powerful. It is central to the video's theme as it discusses the challenges and methods of achieving balance in multiplayer games. The script mentions that balance is 'the art of making sure that all options in a multiplayer game are fair' and uses Riot’s League of Legends as an example of a game that has undergone numerous balance patches.

💡Overpowered

The term 'overpowered' describes a game element, such as a character or weapon, that is significantly stronger than others, leading to an unfair advantage. It is a common complaint among players in multiplayer lobbies, as highlighted in the script. The video discusses how game developers aim to prevent any option from being overpowered to maintain game balance.

💡Trade-offs

Trade-offs are a game design concept where advantages in one area are balanced by drawbacks in another. This concept is integral to the video's discussion on game balance, as it explains how developers can create a 'power budget' for characters, ensuring that advantages are offset by disadvantages. The script uses the example of Mario Kart characters to illustrate this concept.

💡Asymmetric Games

Asymmetric games are those where players have different starting conditions, abilities, or resources, leading to varied gameplay experiences. The script contrasts symmetric and asymmetric games, noting that the latter requires more complex balancing efforts due to the diversity of player options and strategies.

💡Counters

Counters in gaming are strategies, characters, or moves that can effectively neutralize or overcome another. The video emphasizes the importance of counters in achieving balance, as they ensure that no single option is unbeatable. The script uses the rock-paper-scissors game as a simple model of a counter system and discusses its application in games like Dead or Alive and Pokémon.

💡Win-rate

Win-rate is a statistic that measures the percentage of games won by a particular character, strategy, or player. The script discusses how win-rate can be misleading if taken in isolation, as it does not account for the context of matches or the skill levels of players. It is used as a metric to evaluate the balance of characters like Akali in League of Legends.

💡Match-up Charts

Match-up charts are tools used to display the win rates of characters or strategies when pitted against each other. They provide a more nuanced view of balance than overall win-rates. The script explains that match-up charts help developers understand the strengths and weaknesses of characters in different pairings.

💡Meta

The 'meta' in gaming refers to the most effective strategies, characters, or tactics that the majority of players adopt. The video discusses how the meta can shift as players innovate and find counters to overpowered strategies, contributing to the dynamic balance of a game.

💡Nerfing and Buffing

Nerfing is the process of reducing the power or effectiveness of a game element, while buffing is the opposite, enhancing its power. The script explains that these adjustments are part of the ongoing process of balancing a game. It gives an example of how Meta Knight in Super Smash Bros Brawl was nerfed by adjusting his attack speed and momentum.

💡Player Psychology

Player psychology refers to the perceptions and attitudes of players towards game balance. The script cites Overwatch’s Jeff Kaplan, emphasizing that the perception of balance can be as important as the actual balance, as it influences player satisfaction and engagement.

💡Handicapping Modes

Handicapping modes are game features designed to level the playing field for players of different skill levels. The script mentions these modes as a way to make games more accessible and enjoyable for all players, by providing alternate play styles or advantages to less skilled players.

Highlights

Multiplayer game balance is crucial to ensure fairness and viability of all options.

Balance is not just about equal power, but also about a range of distinctly different options.

Symmetric games are easier to balance than asymmetric ones with unique player setups.

Developers aim for all characters to be equally viable among players of similar skill.

Balancing is a complex task that can involve entire departments and numerous patches.

Player psychology plays a significant role in the perception of balance.

Trade-offs are used to balance characters by offsetting advantages with drawbacks.

Characters can be thought of as having a 'power budget' to achieve balance.

Incomparable options require complex calculations for power budgeting.

Celebrating big differences between choices enhances player excitement.

Counters are mechanisms that allow characters to negate each other's moves.

The rock-paper-scissors framework is a simple yet effective balancing tool.

Mixed strategies and dynamic tactics are encouraged by counters in strategy games.

Class-based games use counters to create interdependent team compositions.

Hard and soft counters differentiate the degree of advantage in character matchups.

Understanding the difference between 'hands' and 'throws' is key to team balance.

Data collection from playtesters and online players is essential for verifying balance.

Win rates can be misleading and should be analyzed with match-up charts.

Skill level differences affect character performance and balance.

Player feedback and pick rates provide insight into character popularity and meta.

The meta can act as a self-balancing force as players innovate strategies.

Developers must identify the root cause of imbalance before making adjustments.

Nerfing and buffing are tools used to adjust character balance.

Communication of balance changes is vital for player understanding and acceptance.

Matchmaking and handicapping modes address balance across different skill levels.

Balancing is an ongoing challenge that requires constant monitoring and adjustments.

Transcripts

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

words like overpowered, cheap, and unfair.

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

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

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

dominate everything else.

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

among a wide range of distinctly different options.

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

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

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

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

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

of roughly the same skill level.

So how do they do it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

- and rebalanced.

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

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

with drawbacks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the second card cost a bit more energy.

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

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

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

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

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

from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds).

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

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

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

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

maths to balance games into mediocrity, saying

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

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

is it fun? Probably not”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sitting around saving up money? Well… a rush.

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

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

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

EDDIE: Damn man, killed those scissors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pyro.

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

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

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

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

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

are the throws.

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

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

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

hand, while the individual players are the throws.

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

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

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

for example, he would be unusable.

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

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

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

your game online.

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

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

it’s balanced.

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

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

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

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

played against all other characters, are so important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all skill levels.

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

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

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

play, or is only useful in certain situations.

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

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

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

pick from: a teleporter or a shield generator.

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

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

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

for operators who fall into these four buckets.

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

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

effective and are currently using.

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

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

cards suddenly became massively popular.

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

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

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

And if players find it, the meta might change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

don’t have the tools to counter him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

are, generally, better than nerfs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

psychology was an important factor?

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

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

aren’t at the same skill level?

Well, a lot of highly competitive games use matchmaking

systems to pair up similarly skilled players.

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

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

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

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

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

contentious, and must be used sparingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

players of unequal skill level.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

your experience with balance in the comments below.

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

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

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

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