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How do you balance a variable?
jesad
Member UncommonPosts: 882
I could have put these down in the ESO forums but I believe that the topic speaks to the genre overall and so I am putting it up here for you all to discuss freely.
The question here is, "How do you balance a variable?"
And what I mean by that is how are developers expected to create a competition based game when the variables that they have to balance for live somewhere inside the realms of intellect and reflex.
My example - Elder Scrolls Online
The pvp in that game is based HIGHLY on reflex and intellect, and by that I mean that your ability to win or lose a fight relies heavily on your ability to build a good character and your ability to play that build effectively.
So there are a ton of people in that that just want the same old same old (and yeah, that's after years of pretending that they didn't need balance and asking for all this innovation, but I'll get to that later), they want to be able to go to the forums, find out the best build to own with and go into the game and own.
Only isn't that pretty weak?
In no other competition are you so limited in your ability to win as is being asked for in the MMORPG genre. Athletes have to train, race car drivers still need to be able to drive the car, hangman requires that you know how to spell and even tic tac toe requires some rudimentary logic skills.
What other game then is it where you can expect to compete with someone who, the moment one person manifests themselves as superior in one of the skills required to win, the creator of the game is expected to come in and hit that person over the head with a nerf bat so that YOU can have a chance to win even though you aren't nearly as smart or have nearly the reflexes?
Ok, discuss.
Comments
The balance people speak of is in the skills and abilities.
ie: If the same person would be playing against each other, they would win 50-50. That is not possible nor desirable, but people don't understand good game design so you cant blame them for whining. The thing to avoid is having one class able to dismantle another with 1 move. Early shamans in WoW with the 5hit bug for example could one-shot a level 60 starting from level 50. That was something to cry about because it wasn't balanced for a class to be that high above another. Or frost mages being able to kite warriors while spamming 1 button at one point was also imbalanced.
The main issue with most balance complaints though is this: I didn't win 100% of the time.
Boycotting EA. Why? They suck, even moreso since 2008.
A thinking PvP game. Real skill is involved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4265wxgS7Jg
Like neobahamut20 said, it is very difficult to talk about balance when majority of the people don't really understand balance.
In a perfectly balanced game, the best player wins most (if not all) of the time. If someone beats you because they are smarter, faster and better hand-eye coordination, everything is working as intended.
If someone clearly weaker than you beats you, then there's something wrong, but people tend to be dishonest and very poor at identifying exactly what was the cause of their loss (or their win). For example, a stereotypical MMO player would attribute most of his/her wins on skill and most of his/her losses on poor balance.
That is why you get these people raving on the forums about balance. Bear in mind though that not all of the comments about balance are nonsense.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Comparing video game competition to real life competition is not a fair comparison to begin with.
The core reason people play video games is because games are more fair then real life. You can work your entire existence in the real world and see nothing but pain and suffering for your efforts. Real life offers absolutely no guarantee of reward.
Even the athlete can have their entire life map torn to shreds by a single unfortunate injury. Just like the realm it is based in. Real life competition is rarely fair.
But, in the virtual realm we have the ability to control most of the factors. We can offer Guarantees. If you grind long enough... you will get that great piece of gear. If you play enough PvP matches. your W/L ratio will balance out. If you earn enough experience you will level. And if you stick with it long enough, you will reach the end game and stand amongst the elite, while being viewed as near god-like to any one day newb, as your power literately emanates from you in a brilliant visual display.
Good virtual competition is so balanced because that is what people are there for (the best virtual competition is overtly well balanced). A level playing field. To be treated with absolute fairness where life does not do this. The top earner for online F2P's at the moment is World of tanks. A competition based game. One where there is constant 're-balancing' and where the difference between being a good or bad player is measured mostly in 4-6% increments (if your 48%wins, with 10k games, your not very good. If your 52%wins at 2k games...you have the same standing. But, 50%wins at 15k games...your considered a fairly average player. 54%+ at 15k+ games...your pretty good).
Such small margins that separate the good from the bad. Such balanced play and continuous 'fair-making' And it's the highest grossing F2P MMO at the moment.
This is further supported by the treatment of how matches go. I have seen hundreds of matches where one side simply has the clear advantage, in the tanks they have, the field advantage, and the statistics of their players. These matches always end in that team completely dominating the other team... and there is rage in the chat on both side when this happens. But the matches people praise. the ones where you hear even the guys that got taken out of it first say "best match all day". It's the matches where it comes down to exactly two tanks that have an equal chance at wining and one just barely wins it for their team.
In the top grossing F2P Competition Game... the photo finish gets far more adulation then a flat out pownage.
A soccer goal keeper can use his hands, he's OP.
Discuss
This is a very simple answer from a programming and game design standpoint. You limit the variable. Just like AD&D dice.
Quick example:
X = 1d20
The possible outcomes of X are 1 to 20.
That's a very simple way to balance a variable by limiting the possible outcomes. What your talking about is balancing multiple variables with undefined limits (player skill, intellect) and the opening question is irrelevant to the rest of the post. From my personal experience I would say most devs would balance for lowest common denominator to encourage accessibility.
2 cents
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/In my experience, it is a rare PvPer that wants balance. What they usually want is an edge. An upper hand. An advantage.
To answer your question, though, there is no way to balance "Player Intellect" (is that the best word?) or "Player Twitch Skill." The devs can do nothing to these skills because they are outside of the programming.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Flipping a coin?
Oh, no, that would be really bad for any game if that was the common case.
This should only happen if the best player is vastly superior to everybody else. Which sometimes can indeed occur, but then everybody else get frustrated and everyone gets bored. Games arent supposed to be boring, thus thats not a good situation at all.
But if, as it is common, the best player is just a little bit better than the second best player, the result of 100 matches should be something like 51:49. Or maybe the second best player has a bit more luck and then he actually wins.
Balance is you stand a fair chance. It doesnt rule out a component of random.
Nope. Get your nerf bats out because ole honest Abe apparently ain't so honest after all.
Coin Flips are not 50/50
No, balance is right when the best player wins most of the time even with variance (random elements). This does not rule out "fair chance".
If an amateur plays poker, head-to-head, against a pro, starting with the same bankroll, they both have a "fair chance" at winning, but the pro has a much greater chance of winning than the amateur. Played repeatedly, the pro will win a greater percentage of the games.
A good game rewards players who get good at it. You absolutely should not balance out player skill. If you don't need skill, then whats the point?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
(Note. I half thought this out as I was typing it but I left my thought processes in so that you could see where I came up with what I ultimately said. And because I was too lazy to go and retype it all mid-thought :P)
Man, I don't know dude. I think I disagree with almost everything you said.
Initially it is my belief that people play games, MMORPG's anyway because different games are played for different reasons, besides the escapism and all that other stuff, is to see how well they can meet a challenge but ultimately to win.
I say this because historically, when a game has offered a challenge that a player could not overcome no matter how many bodies they have thrown at it or how many different tricks they have tried, the word that usually gets tossed around is "bugged" as though the game must be broken or something because it didn't let them win.
That being said then, in a situation where both protagonist and antagonist are being controlled by the player, it is impossible to please both sides all the time because both sides come into the situation with the same expectation, to win. It is also impossible then to please either side without the same word getting tossed around by the other side and so it is impossible to please either side ever, no matter how close you make the odds.
Understand, I am not saying this from a point of no reference. My best friend plays World of Tanks sitting beside me regularly and I can not count how many times I have had him tell me to look over my shoulder at his potential win percentage only to hear him ask of his team moments later "so how did we lose that?" And each time it's pretty much the same thing, "not my fault'. But if its not his fault or the fault of his team then who's fault is it? Is that possible win percentage taking into account that the guy on the other side in the weaker tank might be smarter or more twichy? Can it?
You seem to be making the case that it can within a degree of 4-6% probability but that just seems amazing to me to think possible.
As a side note, and by your own admission also, this all takes place in a top earning "Free to Play" game also. Which in and of itself is an oxymoron because I know that my buddy throws all kinds of money into that game in order to have the win/loss ratio that he has, which is not-so-coincidentally pretty good.
So then couldn't it be just as likely that, in a game like World of Tanks, the balance is actually skewed unfairly towards those customers with potentially less skill but who pay than towards those customers with a high degree of skill who do not?
Whatever the case I think I was referring more to a 1v1 situation over a team vs team situation anyway as it is clearly going to be easier to match up a team in a single match where the teams are chosen by the computer based on statistics that are being gathered constantly as the players play than it would be to match up two random players who meet on a field of battle such as what occurs in an MMORPG on a regular basis.
So in that case we both digress but at the same time we do come to, in a round about way, your answer to my question. That answer being, "The only way to balance out the variables is to collect constant data on the variables and then to formulate matches based on that data" something that is completely contrary to the idea of choice that most MMORPG's are trying to promote.
In your example then, lets say in Cryodill. The server would have to constantly keep track of every players W/L ratio and then either eject of not allow entrance to anyone who would throw the balance off for any of the three realms.
Can you imagine? Although SWTOR probably doesn't do bad doing things this way, it is obviously not a solve all for all types of games. Still, I get what you are saying.
Regarding working all of your life and never being rewarded though, well sure, if you do not live in a free society and all. But again, I really don't think that, per the rules of a society that supports fair pay for fair work, a person could not possibly work for their entire life and not have anything to show for it but pain and suffering. That is, again, unless they were just too dumb to know how to manage the fair pay that they were given for their fair work. And even if that was the case, would the world then be expected to take things away from the guy who worked the same job for the same amount of time but managed to live within his means and scrimp and save until he could get some of the things that he wanted?
Would that even be a level playing field? Or would it be a playing field slanted towards making the weak feel stronger and the strong feel weaker? And if you are promoting a system where the weak get to feel as strong as the strong, are you really creating what could be considered "good competition?" Or are you simply catering to the .........well, you know.
I am of this mind also. Skill rewarded is, I believe, the fun in most games.
Thinking about this some more, MMOs used to "equalize" player skill with random number generators, skill/global cooldowns, and character advancement. Even that did not equalize 100%. Some players can hit their keys better than others. Me, I "fat-finger" my keyboard a lot
Player intellect is still tough to do, though. How fast a player "learns" their character's abilities can not really be influenced, that I can think of.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
To be entertained?
Games can be just interactive story books. You can get through games like Bioshock Infintie with zero skills .. and it does not make it less entertaining.
@OP
I really don't feel up to building a pyramid today...
"Initially it is my belief that people play games, MMORPG's anyway because different games are played for different reasons, besides the escapism and all that other stuff, is to see how well they can meet a challenge but ultimately to win."
Doesn't this first bit alone align you with what I said? Escapism for instance. That is getting away from what is the norm. Real life is the Norm. Real Life is un-fair. The universe tends towards chaos (heavily empirically evident in any field of science). And, if they are seeing how well they can meet a challenge but ultimately win...Then they have the warranted expectation that if they work at it hard enough, they will win. As in...Guarantee of reward. Where as in real life. You do not have that guarantee.
You can argue that my exemplification is a bad one. And, maybe it is. Maybe I am just not good at making the point well...So, here are some alternative arguments that may make it better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5jDspIC4hY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL35FE5C4B157509C9&v=MyUC_28HIvA
But, I think the assertion is correct. That being: The core reason we play games is to be treated fairly, where we have no guarantee of that other wise. To assure fulfillment .
Now as for world of tanks being P2W (which is what i think you were driving at). No...Because it is a team based game. you can have the most beast tank and be an excellent player. But, if you get with a team in PUG that simply doesn't communicate well, and has a few players making some really questionable moves...You can still get absolutely owned regardless.
If your friend is really good, and also spends a lot of money on that. It doesn't mean the two things are necessarily related. Likely he plays in a platoon or is part of a clan. He has a mic and actually talks to his team mates. He knows the people he is playing with and communicates well. Few people have the ability to consistently carry games. But, a really good platoon consisting of the right combination of tanks platoon mates that understand the mechanics of the game and communicate well. Those are the players who tend to do really well, regardless of how much money they spend.
Either that or players who jump out of a tank as soon as they start to loose in it. But, their just stat padding.
Man dude, that was 26 mintues of video LOL.
I watched it all though and although I don't necessarily disagree with a lot that was said, I do feel as though neither video really went as deep as it could have in the ultimate reasons why people play games.
Talking to you though I can see that my theory is also not singular. Figuring that you actually believe that the universe tends towards chaos and that the world is actually unfair I can understand why you would want a game to ......I don't know....coddle you? Is that too harsh? Into feeling like you actually had a chance among people who were both smarter and more physically adept at monkey spanking the keys than you were.
I believe though that advanced math is going to seem like chaos to a person not trained to understand it and likewise the world, life, and the universe. In my understanding all of those things are completely fair and dealing with any of them, including my games, is dependent on the building up of certain skills. Knowing the exact right thing to do then, not autonomy, is more important to me than doing whatever I want and still being able to win. I will admit that I do get a certain thrill out of being able to beat a tried and true method with an alternative method of my own devising, but I am much less likely, should that method prove unsuccessful, to expect the developer to come in and "adjust" my method or the other guys method in order to make my method more viable nor would I see doing such a thing as fair.
Sure, that means that I might end up on the middle or even lower tier of the food chain because of my inability to adapt in all the ways that other folks may adapt, but I'd rather be there, knowing that this is what I am capable of, than to be put into some faux reality where no matter how good I am at a game I would never be able to take pride in that either.
Again, I just wouldn't see that as fair.
In world of tanks, and remember, you mentioned it first. What it seems like they do is they allow those people who pay to play to be winners "within their match" but pair them with people who will not win overall in order to give the "teams" balance but also to provide the spender with a reward for the money they've spent. I guess if they have their numbers right then, this would make most people feel equal within that 4-6% spread and promote the "win" effect throughout the playerbase while still promoting to those who do not spend that spending would be the thing to do and promoting to those that did spend that they did the right thing in spending.
That's fucking genius by the way. (Just had to throw that in there.)
It begs the question though "how many people who don't pay to play actually stick with it in comparison to those that do pay to play and for how long?"
And is this really fair? Or is this just a means of exploiting those who play games to be treated fairly?
I played WOT for a minute and honestly, the moment that my boy felt the need to break out his wallet I bailed faster than guy in a leaky dingy in the middle of the ocean on a Tuesday.
I mean, the whole thing here being, if the game was actually fair, why would anyone feel the need to spend money on it in the way that the game allows you to spend money on it?
League of Legends is a LOT more fair and NOBODY is happy LOL. As a matter of fact you can pop over there right now and you won't see anything but the din of cries for the nerf bat to be swung in all directions. But yet......it has just as big a playerbase, if not bigger.
Good talk man. Fleshing out a lot of stuff here in my head.
Regarding escapism, I put that aside because it, to me, is an entirely different subject but one that I am not afraid to address.
The escapism that I get from playing these games then is simply a moment to refocus something that will not stop running just because I tell it to, meaning my brain, from the topics that I would rather it not dwell on during my every waking hour.
Fairness doesn't even come into play for me when it comes to this. All I care about is that the thing that I am doing is causing me to actually think about it hard enough to keep me from having to think about things that are genuinely distasteful to think about and the more challenging/engrossing that thing is the better it is at getting that job done.
There is also (since I'm saying this) a desire to keep whatever that thing is from being something detrimental to me or others as well, and that has everything to do with why I don't play these things nearly as much or for as long or even in the same way as I used to. Live and learn.
Fairness though? Relative term to me. Something can only be unfair if you allow it to be. Someone cheats at a game you look at that as a hurdle that they just placed in their psyche that is going to keep them from ever being able to accept an actual loss because they will never be able to convince their self that the person that beat them wasn't cheating. And because they will never be able to accept that truth, they will never be able to draw the full resources needed to overcome that battle without cheating, which will eventually lead them into getting caught and shamed. (see professional sports)
No reason for you to get involved in all that though. Your job is to convince yourself that people who do not cheat exist. And the only way to get that done is by you, yourself, not cheating.
Faith is a lot easier to have in yourself than in others. And having that kind of faith will lend to a much happier life overall, trust me.
But now I am preaching so I'm done. Everything that I am saying here will come back to you later in life though
Now back on topic.