The majority of characters in **** near every fighting game ever are not viable. Balance is only to be viewed in the scope of the top tier. If there is a healthy balance between 5+ top tier characters then the game is balanced enough to be successful over long term play. You can have 10 non-viable characters or 100 non-viable characters but the game is going to be just as balanced when you look at what actually matters in a competitive environment.
Absolutely not, this is a huge misnomer.
This is because balance exists to foster diversity of play and support emotional investment in the game and its ideas, concepts, and identities.
If we ignore this, then only viable options matter and balance is totally meaningless as long as at least some very small core set of viable options exists; additional non-viable options do not matter in this view. If the game was being played only by AI, this would be correct.
However, that is not how people play games, nor how games are designed.
The vast majority of players do not play MK in Brawl, just as the majority of players do not play the top character in any fighting game (or multiplayer game period). This is because the experience of playing games is more than the lump sum of evaluative processes to optimize victory. There are very strong, very hard aesthetic, emotional, and psychological reasons that people gain satisfaction and enjoyment from playing the characters they do. The diversity and design of the roster is built around this.
Lets say brawl had been released without Ganon in the game. Would it be more balanced than our current version of brawl with Ganon in it? No, because Ganon does not affect the game at a competitive level.
Statistically in terms of fairness, yes. The average matchup ratio standard deviation drops from 0.589 to 0.518 if Ganon is removed. This is almost 7 times the improvement that would result from removing Meta Knight.
Obviously, removing Ganon could only hurt the game. Ganon has a very unique read-centric playstyle that is a great benefit to the game. However, realizing that helps one understand why balance is meaningful.
Ganon matters--people play Ganon. Ganon, and all his unique good design (from Flame Choke to SH dairs), is part of the Brawl experience. Brawl is better off having Ganon's contribution to its design than not.
At the same time, Ganon's incompleteness as a competitive option hurts the game. Ganon isn't even *that* terrible by most fighting game (or any multiplayer game) standards, and yet he still seriously disadvantages those that play as him. For anyone who has ever enjoyed playing Ganon in Brawl, this makes their Brawl experience strictly worse than it could have been had Ganon been viable. Merely viable is still strictly worse than fully competitive.
To use a classic phrase to summarize, it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all--but it's even better if we can just love without the loss part.
Sonic Hurricane said:
Derisive words like “unbalanced,” “overpowered,” and “broken” get thrown around so much these days, you’d think every fighting game was expected to have a 90% competitive roster ratio. It’s true that modern game developers can benefit from studying a long history of tournament-tested titles, but the fundamental problem remains the same: character diversity naturally fosters imbalance. There’s no escaping it.
A really important distinction has to be made here: "balance" refers to the unity of fairness and diversity. What this is highlighting is the struggle between the two--this is correct. The reason balance is "hard" is that its components are at odds with one another.
Saying diversity is going against balance in some way is foolish, as without diversity there is no balance.
His next few paragraphs are preaching to the Pope, so to speak.
Sonic Hurricane said:
Clearly, demanding 20+ evenly matched characters is an unrealistic expectation. What would be considered a reasonable number? Looking through the Classics, i’d say any “good” fighting game with a legitimate top tier of four or more characters is perfectly acceptable.
This I take issue with though. Several fighting games have impressively well balanced rosters. (Guilty Gear is the classic example; SF4 and Brawl are also very well balanced.)
With the most recent matchup numbers, GG XX:AC has 515 (97%) matchup-sides between a 4:6 and 6:4 ratio. (Pre-Super SF4 has 534 (92%), Brawl has
1276 (86%).) All these characters span a pretty diverse design space, even if they aren't going to extremes like Starcraft. That's a
lot of well-balanced gameplay!
Sonic Hurricane said:
To be clear, it doesn’t matter how many squares there are on the character select screen.
This is where it breaks down:
It matters to the people who play those characters. Their emotional enjoyment from the game and their self-identity when playing it is being sabotaged by this inferiority, the design effort and resources spent on them is being wasted.
Balance matters, or more simply put,
design matters.
You can't look at games, even competitive games, in a fully rational vacuum. That's just not how humanity operates or behaves.
