Slashdot Mirror
Dealing With Fairness and Balance In Video Games
MarkN writes "Video games are subject to a number of balance issues from which traditional games have largely stayed free. It can be hard finding players of comparable skill-level to create even match-ups, diverse gameplay options can quickly become irrelevant if someone finds a broken feature that beats everything else, and some online games make your ability to play competitively a question of how much time and money you've invested in a game, rather than the skill you possess. In this article, I talk about some of the issues relating to fairness and balance in games, in terms of the factors and strategies under the player's control, the game's role in potentially handicapping players, and the role a community of gamers plays in setting standards for how games are to be played. What are your thoughts on managing a 'fair and balanced' gaming experience?"
I don't agree with the article about the expectation of fairness in games vs real life. I think in both cases what we really want is to know the rules, so we have a chance of following them and making it through.
In games I simply want things to be moderately predictable - so that with experience I can become better. And then I want variation; it gets pretty tedious if it is always just the same few things you do, like just killing monsters.
Quake Live does a great thing by having you go up against a bot, and then determines your level of skill from that and then emphasizes those servers which are taylored to your skill level when you look through the server browser.
Of course you see people who play outside their skill level, but for the most part you are surrounded by people who play on your level.
Making it 'fair and balanced' can be fun (handicapping in golf or go), but in most cases it just makes a video game crappy.
Back in the days of Rainbow Six (yes, and now you can get off my lawn) I created an online ranking system based off of chess' scoring system. This worked great for the players and teams, as you didn't really have to find people on your own skill level to have something to gain.
If I (a mediocre chess player) were to play the reigning world champion of chess, he'd stand to gain maybe 1 point in his ranking by winning (I'd lose 1 I think), but if I were to win, I'd gain upwards of 24 or 32 points (and he'd lose a lot of points). This scoring system makes it worthwile for the best player to avoid drawing or losing to a less skilled player.
We did get a few complaints about the scoring, because the "best" players were used to them being unable to lose their top spot without losing to #2, where as with this system, someone could overtake them simply by winning lots and lots of games against less skilled players/teams. This has the upside of enticing people to play more, and not just by cherry picking from the top 10. Any adversary is okay, as it gives you a chance to win more points.
See more on the Wiki page
Many games offer a seemingly large freedom when creating your character, playset or play style, but eventually you find out that only a very narrowly defined path leads to success. Take WoW. You can, in theory, create almost limitless variants of skill point distribution, yet only a handful "work". For some classes, it's basically set in stone that you have this or that distribution, depending on whether you want to go against other players or some large raid encounter.
In other games, too, you are limited to a narrow set of viable choices. TFA uses beat 'em ups as an example where you can only pick a handful, or even only one, character to succeed, the others being basically fluff.
It's also not really "balanced" when you're basically forced to play by a certain strategy because all the others simply do not work. If you play an MMO and your class excels in mezzing, it ruins your class if mezzing is simply unnecessary, no matter how much you excel in it. Instead, you have to rely on your other spells which are maybe (in the end, when the devs heard enough whining and don't want to "break" the game for the others and make mezzing important) even as strong as the ones of another class, yet an important part of your character, maybe the reason why you chose it in the first place, becomes completely obsolete.
This can actually break a game. For a player, or for all.
Imagine an MMO where healing becomes obsolete because items became so powerful that nothing (short of a player wielded weapon) can harm a tank. Dedicated healer classes would certainly feel unbalanced and "useless". Now, instead of making healers important again, they're giving a boost to their damage spell lines and are told to behave like offensive casters. That's not what I made. I made a healer. If I wanted a damage caster, I would have made one.
Thus "balancing" a game may actually ruin it, when it is done without first considering what the player actually wants...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.