An Interesting View on Game Balancing.

[CloroxTheKid]

Just posting a video of some guy's view on balance within games which may or may not change your view on balance within Project M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w

All credit for the video goes to Extra Credits.

 

[Mithost]

This is really interesting. I saw it a few months ago, and it really got me thinking.

Right now, we can't really consider 'waiting out' imbalances, because we don't have much time in-between updates to really get to stage 2 of the perfect imbalance. Once Project M v1 comes out, I can imagine waiting a year and see where balance is then.

 

[Kally Wally]

"You have to create a game where, no matter how skilled the player is, their character [...] can't be great at everything."

 

[Comeback Kid]

Asymmetrical games are always striving for perfect imbalance to keep characters unique and viable.

Except for the small advantage that white gets in chess, the game is balanced. But the game has never been "solved" either. The game endures because it is so deep and continues to have new possibilities.

What fighting game with something close to "perfect imbalance" has centuries of depth within it?

I think this guy is overstating his point.

 

[The_NZA]

*EDIT*

This video has been posted before and here were my comments.


That video was super silly. It tried to outline a philosophy of "perfect imbalance" when in reality, their observations about chess and starcraft had nothing to do with them being "too balanced" at all. Chess is "stale" and figured out largely because the metagame is hundreds of years old and the options both players have to explore are minimal (everyone is playing the same "character", whose moveset includes 2 bishops, rooks, knights, 1 king, 1 queen, and pawns). Starcraft gave every individual person three races with insane asymmetry, and the only reason there is a working framework of the optimum strategies of play is because it is also over a decade old with many players playing it on a competitive level.

It isn't about balance and imbalance. It is about maximizing the amount of options and scenarios for players, giving the metagame and number of strats available a greater dynamism. Really, EVERY GAME boils down to viable and unviable strategies, and the more BALANCED a game is while maximizing different gameplays means more strategies are available and more people can be involved in figuring out the metagame as it evolves. The reason League and MtG have a uniquely evolving metagame that everyone can contribute to has less to do with the inherent imbalances and more to do with the fact that the game constantly has new characters/cards being added in, contributing to the longevity of a fresh metagame.

tl:dr
asymmetry and options are important. Not imbalances.

 

[Spiffykins]

It was an interesting video, but it doesn't change my opinion on PM at all. There's huge variance in the types of characters in the game, so imbalance is sort of built in and inevitable. The difference is that 'perfect imbalance', as the video called it, is more or less the goal for the entire cast rather than a handful of characters, and if you ask me the game is still significantly more imba than it should be.

 

[traffic.]

Calls Starcraft wildly imbalanced.

Praises LoL for its constant patching.

...And I'm out.

 

[The_Guide]

Calls Starcraft wildly imbalanced.

Praises LoL for its constant patching.

...And I'm out.

You got his message wrong. He isn't saying that Starcraft is imbalanced; in fact, according to him, its too much in the opposite direction.

The main point that he's trying to get across isn't that games that are perfectly balanced have bad balance (that would be silly). Its that games that have a certain degree of imbalance are more fun for players of intermediate skill to learn.

 

[mYzeALot]

Well in Starcraft if there is a strategy or unit that is too strong then that thing will be picked most of the time if not all the time. In a game like that, you need to try and make sure that there is no one "perfect" strategy or unit composition to go for. The idea is to be able to branch out and try different things, not try and just pick the obviously best or safest option. Of course it isn't perfect because with the three races so diverse, there is a ton of difficulty in trying to make sure that the whole game is balanced "perfectly."

 

[Bakasama]

I feel that three comments above provide extremely good points in the conversation. The video of Fox supports the comment about Chess, in that the melee scene had been around for a long time, and got really big (not Starcraft big, but it made it to many tournaments). It had been analyzed to death, like chess, and the game mechanics had been basically 'figured out' by this point in time. However, the character selection made it more interesting than that of chess, where someone could 'counterpick' Fox, as many players did have inherent patterns that they followed, and even if they didn't, Fox had inherent strengths and weaknesses (barring the 'perfect' Fox player, which we'll assume isn't in your area). This allowed people to still provide their own creative input on strategy, and the lack of patching in melee prevented a literal 'power-creep', which can happen when new characters/mechanics/patches in general are introduced to the game. Since the game never was flipped on it's backside, there was a natural power-creep wherein players who mastered the mechanics were rewarded, and even new players could grind out mechanic practice on their own to try and enter the big-leagues. However, where the game fell flat on it's face is basically where it got big enough that it turned into Starcraft, where the amount of inputs per second was really what ended up mattering, and if the game were more like Project M, which is, in essence a large installation of 'perfect imbalance' (or an attempt at one), it would (should) have prevented something like 'Perfect Fox' from happening. While 'Perfect Fox' is barely possible to actually achieve, he exists as a character who holds the theoretical crown in the game. For awhile, it seemed that many players just band-wagoned him, seeing that tournament players made him shine moreso than any other character, and that's why the collaborative 'perfect Fox' was getting better and better, while the counter-picks were all just being 'learned' by Fox players, who then in turn just shut them all down one by one until there were none left. But, at this point I feel that most likely Fox stands as the god of melee's characters, which is an issue because that means that at some point, the game does end. If you're going up against the best chess player in the world, you better read the encyclopedia of chess and watch every video possible of it ever (which is impossible), and if you're going up against perfect Fox, you unfortunately only have one choice yourself, and that's to be the perfect Fox, and suddenly you've lost all your character options, and your movement options are suddenly limited to the fact that you can either tie, or lose. Because you can be perfect, or you can give up in that case.

But Project M decreased the movement options just slightly so that punishes became more popular and inputs per second mattered less than precise inputs themselves. So how to I feel about game-balance now? I feel that it's an irrelevant and helpless cause in games that introduce new-anything outside of glitch patching, and I feel that we've got a long way to go before we start analyzing it in Project M, a game that is not Melee or Brawl.

 

[Mithost]

"You have to create a game where, no matter how skilled the player is, their character [...] can't be great at everything."

This is another standing factor in perfect imbalance. In melee, we have gotten to the point where people would find character B, but truth be told there really ISN'T a character B in melee that truly does it's job of making fox not always the safest pick. Sure, some individual characters are better at dealing with fox than others, but it doesn't change that Fox has tools for everything.

In P:M, the same thing is apparent in a lesser stance. With more viable characters, there is more chance that the fox player will have poor experience with one of his opponent's characters, while it is common knowledge that everyone needs to know how to play as fox. Fox is still Fox. Outside of the recovery buffs other characters have received, Fox is still above average in every relevant mechanic in the game.

 

[TreK]

Thanks for the video, it's a Youtube channel I didn't know about and you just got them a new subscriber.

I'm also subbing to this thread because the answers are interesting so far.

 

[Vashimus]

Basically what NZA said. David Sirlin (the guy who balanced HD Remix) actually wrote four articles five years ago addressing the same issue, and they're good reads. The more asymmetrical your game is in the starting options, the more you need to take fairness into account and offer more viable strategies or safeguards for players.

Let's take Guilty Gear as an example, quite possibly the greatest 2D fighter ever made aside from Street Fighter, and one of the most balanced fighters I have ever played. GG is extremely asymmetrical, with an incredibly diverse set of characters that each play radically different and have traits that seem overpowered on paper. Zato fights using his shadow Eddie, and you're essentially controlling two characters at once, coordinating their attacks to work in tandem with each other; Venom can place multiple pool balls on screen in various formations and hit them off each other, creating various traps and set ups for approach or zoning; Zappa sucks on his own, but can summon 1 of 3 spirits at random, changing his playstyle and moves with each one, collecting souls so he can summon his ultimate spirit Raoh, transforming him to a borderline broken character; Baiken has guard cancels which work like alpha counters, allowing her to attack during blockstun without meter, etc. In order to keep all these crazy characters in check though, various system mechanics were implemented, though I'll just name only a few for examples. This is why Arc System Works is on a whole different level from everyone else.

- Burst: Simple. All characters have access to a burst that they can use at anytime. The burst meter keeps track of how often you're allowed to burst. You always start the match with a full burst. Once you use it, you can't use it again until the burst meter is filled, and it fills slowly the more you get hit, with some moves filling it faster than others. If you burst while being comboed, you knock the opponent back and break out the combo. If you burst when you're in a neutral state (not blocking or getting hit) and the opponent gets hit by it, they get knocked back and you're rewarded with a full super (tension) meter. This adds to the strategy of when you want to use it, as good opponents can easily bait a predictable burst. Do I want to use my burst now, or save it for later? OR should I take a risk and try a gold burst to get full meter, at the cost of probably eating a nasty combo I can't break out of later on? Decisions, options, players must be given these.

- Faultless Defense: You can perform faultless defense by blocking and holding two attack buttons. During FD, you take no chip damage and the opponent gets pushed back further after each hit you block. Doing this slowly drains your tension meter. So as long as you have meter, opponents can't simply chip you to death or lock you down for the win.

- Guard Meter: Another safeguard against infinites, as well as punishing overly-defensive players. The guard meter starts 50% full, and wanders back to 50% overtime if it gets raised or lowered. The more you block attacks, the higher the meter gets, and the less you benefit from damage scaling. So if the opponent does eventually penetrate your defense, their combo will do more damage than normal. This is why meter is so important, as FD is much more useful defensively than blocking normally, as it doesn't raise the guard meter. On the flip side, the more you get hit, the lower the guard meter gets, and the more you benefit from damage scaling and the less hitstun you receive. So even if an infinite combo did exist, it wouldn't kill you because eventually the combo fail and you would drop out.

- Negative Penalty: If a player is constantly running away (backdashing, airdashing away, walking backward) avoiding any type of contact and isn't performing any offensive moves for a prolonged period of time, a warning will appear on the tension gauge. If the player keeps running away, they are given a Negative Penalty. Their entire tension meter is depleted, and their meter gain is at 20% than normal for 10 seconds. If you're playing zoning or keep away, the game will not penalize you, as you're still performing offensive actions.

- Tension: Incredibly important, tension is needed for offensive and defensive purposes. The only way to get tension is by performing any type of offensive action, whether it be attacking or advancing towards your opponent. Heck, even just walking forward builds meter. This forces people to go on the offensive more than defensive, and helps make matches more interesting.

And that's just a few. With just a few of these system mechanics, it helps massively in keeping the cast in check and goes a long way towards making the game balanced. Since these mechanics are shared by all characters, EVERY character has multiple options for any situation. With all these safeguards, ArcSys has the freedom to go truly crazy with their character designs. Because they know that system is there to back the characters up and help them get out of trouble if things get too crazy. That's brilliant game design.

 

[TreK]

These systems are pretty much all debatable.
And the design philosophy that goes like 'add systems until the game is balanced' is debatable as well.

 

[UltiMario]

Don't we already do this

Fox/Falco **** over everyone in terms of raw ability

Everyone has some tech that completely ****s over Fox/Falco

Basically the same thing

 

[Vashimus]

These systems are pretty much all debatable.
And the design philosophy that goes like 'add systems until the game is balanced' is debatable as well.

It's not up for debate. The whole point of using GG as an example is that it's incredibly assymmetrical. It's not a factor of "adding mechanics till it's balanced", it's a matter of the fact that the more assymmetrical your game is, the more precautions you need to take to make the game more balanced, and either give the player multiple viable options to approach situations, or put fail safes in that stop things you don't want. You don't have to put multiple mechanics to make it balanced, so long as every character is given more options to deal with things, and since Arc was going to go crazy with character design anyway, they still added mechanics just to be on the safe side.

Look at a game like Marvel 2. 56 characters, each with their own assists. Now tell me. How many are actually viable to use in tournament? Like 10, and that's being generous. With that many characters, you have a lot of assymmetry, so clearly more care should be taken into balancing, but it isn't. Not every character is given viable options to deal with everything the top would have, so you have a whole bunch of garbage underneath a group of elites.

 

[traffic.]

But Project M decreased the movement options just slightly so that punishes became more popular and inputs per second mattered less than precise inputs themselves.

By adding additional movement options? I have no idea where you are getting this from when there are several new mechanics that force even more precision into your movement and decision making, in ways that have barely been touched on at this point because of a large portion of players who reject the notion of melee having any room/need/desire for change.

 

[The_NZA]

This whole topic and video make me sick. What a philosophical stupid mess. Perfect imbalance is such a damn fallacy.

 

[traffic.]

Ideals and concepts are always perfect, quit being a fart about it.

 

[Kink-Link5]

System Mechanics as balance is what allows fighting games to have such a diverse cast, as Vash illustrated greatly.

Extra Credits' take on game design and metagaming is not inherently wrong, but is is almost always wrong about something or another in its attempt to itself say "gamers are wrong about balance issues." Perfect imbalance is terrible from a metagame standpoint when it comes to decision making in application- ie., balance through checks and counters works for something like Pokemon, but not for something that requires precision and reaction as in a fighter. If every character was so perfectly imbalanced as to have characters great at certain aspects and bad at others, you have a cast of polarizing designs where the match outcome is almost determained before it even starts. Without universal strengths designs to handle certain dumb things, character strength, viability, and learning is on extremely shaky ground.

The same goes for that "Foo strategy" or whatever the hell it was: if something is working and then stops when high level players adapt to it, players using the initially strong strategy do not just "Give up when their plan stops working." All it means is that the initial strategy has to be reassessed and approached in a different way to counter the counter strategy. Adaptation goes further than any amount of "weening to a different 'better' strategy" could. If something like a "noob tube" is less useful at getting easy kills at higher levels, it does not mean "learn a different weapon or quit." It means "Learn to use your weapon in a smarter way." If something was good for X reason it isn't going to suddenly lose that good aspect just because something beats it 1on1.

Basically Extra Credits is made by fools that think they know more about game philosophy than they do.

Also I make no claims that I know more than they do, just that they're often wrong.

 

[JOE!]

The also talk about game design on the Dev end, for people making games to be enjoyed en masse. Not by odd cases of games being made on the user end to be enjoyed by a select group of users. In that respect they do a great job imo.

 

[ManicSanic]

The also talk about game design on the Dev end, for people making games to be enjoyed en masse. Not by odd cases of games being made on the user end to be enjoyed by a select group of users. In that respect

they do a great job imo.

Are you talking about that Beyond Fun video? Not a fan because it makes an argument based on multiple fallacies. It says games can be good without being made to be fun, then later on gives a perfect example of why the word fun(among others) isn't even being used correctly. It acts like games people consider fun, or games made to be fun, can only be fun and nothing else. Fun isn't an emotion , it's something that can cause someone to feel happiness, the emotion opposite to sadness. Look at the actual definition of some of the words used like fun, good, entertaining, engaging, etc. The only way a game could in no way be fun or relate to fun is if there was no enjoyment to be found in it at all, but you don't get to determine what other people enjoy for them, see how that doesn't work?

Where fun gets confusing is when we equate societal, or mainstream, conceptions of fun with the definition of fun. If the definition of fun is fundamentally subjective, there is no one way to have fun and there is no real or universal fun. It's making the appeal to popularity fallacy.

" A fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it. In other words, the basic idea of the argument is: "If many believe so, it is so."

and the appeal to tradition fallacy

" A common fallacy in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis that it correlates with some past or present tradition. The appeal takes the form of "this is right because we've always done it this way."

Combine this with the with the number of words that are being limited by a specific point of view and you'll see why I don't like it.

The video invalidates the very argument it tries to make when it mentions a specific game and tries to define it as fun or not fun in the traditional sense. The video shows Duke Nukem Forever when it provides examples of fun games, but a lot of people considered that game to be bad, so based on how the video uses some words you would not consider it a fun game. Just because a lot of people considered it to be bad doesn't mean it is fact and that it is bad for everybody, the minority of people aren't wrong if they think the game was fun. Older Silent Hill games are considered to be good by a lot of the fans, doesn't mean it is fact and they can only be perceived as good. Same thing with the newer games, they are considered bad or not as good as the older games by some fans because in their opinion it lost its pleasing, entertaining, engaging qualities in comparison to the older games, what allows it to be considered fun or good in the first place.

tl;dr
don't argue a point by trying to limit the meaning of subjective words, all it does is complicate things further. The premise of the argument could very well be correct, but the actual points used to prove that are not logically sound.

 

[Dantarion]

Fighting games HAVE to be extremely asymmetrical in order to work.

If every charcter in street fighter was a shoto with slightly different stats, the game wouldnt be fun. Everyone would have the same tools, with just slightly different effectiveness on specific ones, and eventually, someone would figure out which one was better 90% of the time. In SF4, each of the shoto's helps with a different kind of playstyle, even though they are similar.

Ryu has the more defensive spacing game.
Ken has the aggressive frame trap game.
Akuma has the vortex style lockdown options.

There basic moves may seem similar, and some share the same animations, but the way the characters actually are played is VERY different, even if they are made with the same template.

The reason why Guilty Gear and Blazblue are interesting games to me is that every character has a completely contained system within themselves, that can't be directly compared to another character.

Tager is a grab character, but he has magnetism, which exists to give him a tool to deal with being unable to keep opponents close.
Tager still has many of the blatent weaknesses that all grab characters have, but he is designed to be able to work around them with smart play and effort.

 

[Johnknight1]

Honestly, I don't think that video applies to fighting games, because in nearly every fighting game I can think of, there is at least one character (whether top tier or not) with no counter-picks. There are certainly counter-strategies that can work against said characters, but even those do not make the match ups for said characters worse than even. The only thing that does is technical skill, an understanding of the game, mind games/reads, and of course execution.

Those things apply more to strategy/RTS games, where you can choose multiple characters (units is more accurate) and strategies with them against other players.

In P:M, the same thing is apparent in a lesser stance. With more viable characters, there is more chance that the fox player will have poor experience with one of his opponent's characters, while it is common knowledge that everyone needs to know how to play as fox. Fox is still Fox. Outside of the recovery buffs other characters have received, Fox is still above average in every relevant mechanic in the game.

Well there are strategies where Fox has troubles with certain characters, but yes, Fox is too good in too many areas to really be countered unless he gets a solid counter character. The same goes with Sheik.

Until there is a counter for every character, we won't get a circle system similar to what Pokémon has (water beats fire, fire beast grass, grass beats water). Of course, who's to say such a system would work best=??? I mean, if every character had say even a 60-40 match up in and against them, that would make smash all about countering or dittos. That would be dumb as heck.

Actually, in fighting games, generally almost entirely even match ups is probably the way to go (if at all possible, of course). But even then, people would focus on the "countering" on stages; and since no stage is perfectly balanced, that would be the focus (although at least tournament legal stages don't normally have too big of an impact in Project M).

Of course, that is not to say a fighting game couldn't be "perfect" without a few counter-picks; it most certainly could be. But then again, the idea of a "perfect" fighting game is pretty much impossible to get to unless you are talking purely in dittos or cloned characters with "perfect" minor changes here and there.

 

[Mithost]

We don't need counter characters for fox, we need fox to have something to counter. Everything he has is above average in usefulness, and he also has two of the strongest moves in the game on top of it. He has recovery mix-ups, a ranged attack that forces approaches, multiple meteors (dair and shine), Great throws and kill moves, and shine, a frame 1 attack that combos into and out of itself, reflects projectiles, sets up kill moves, gimps, helps with recovery mixups, and much, much more.

Every character in the game besides Fox (and maybe falco) are missing one if not many of these elements. This is the design of most characters in smash. They have something good, so something else gets taken away. In wolf's case, he gained combo game and a rush-down style, but lost the polarizing aspect of shine and his projectile is not a camping tool.

 

[Paradoxium]

Um, foxes recovery is garbage. Easily one if the most gimpable recoveries in the game. Really the shines reflection is bad too because once you reflect a projectile you can't jump cancel the rest of the shine. And his fast falling speed makes him super easy to combo. What makes fox deadly is the fact that he doesn't have to give you any breathing room and that he has the speed to do it. Also his shine comes out on like frame 1 and hits you in the perfect position. So the point I'm trying to make is that fox is a complete glass cannon. Without his huge weaknesses he would be broken, and even melee's small cast of viable characters can beat him. And a lot of pm newcomers have crazy combos and off stage gimps, so I really don't see fox as that perfect character with no counters.

And just out of curiosity, why doesn't anyone use jigglypuff as a melee or top tier reference? Personally I think she is better than fox and falco.

 

[Johnknight1]

Um, foxes recovery is garbage. Easily one if the most gimpable recoveries in the game.

Try saying that to everyone who tried to stop Mango from getting back on the stage at Evo once he got hot. With DI and perfect spacing and using all of your recovery options, getting back on the stage isn't too hard with Fox.

Now Captain Falcon, there's a character with recovery issues.

We don't need counter characters for fox, we need fox to have something to counter. Everything he has is above average in usefulness, and he also has two of the strongest moves in the game on top of it. He has recovery mix-ups, a ranged attack that forces approaches, multiple meteors (dair and shine), Great throws and kill moves, and shine, a frame 1 attack that combos into and out of itself, reflects projectiles, sets up kill moves, gimps, helps with recovery mixups, and much, much more.

Every character in the game besides Fox (and maybe falco) are missing one if not many of these elements. This is the design of most characters in smash. They have something good, so something else gets taken away. In wolf's case, he gained combo game and a rush-down style, but lost the polarizing aspect of shine and his projectile is not a camping tool.

Fox has a few counter strategies and weakness (aka things you can combo him with), but nothing lasts for too long against him.

 

[Deleted member]

Um, foxes recovery is garbage.

No

Personally I think she is better than fox and falco.

No

so I really don't see fox as that perfect character with no counters.

Please make a list of characters who counter him.

 

[Paradoxium]

Please make a list of characters who counter him.[/quote]

Counters: pit, wolf, lucario, sonic, Lucas, Mario

Now I'm not saying that these characters completely **** fox up, but they really have everything they need to fight and exploit his weaknesses. Other characters who don't necessarily counter fox but still fight on his level are shiek, falco, and jiggs.

And don't try and use mango as an example of why characters are op. Whem he played jiggs everyone said that he was only winning because of his character, but then he showed he could also play as falco, jiggs, sometimes Mario, and sometimes Marth. Hes already proven that its not the characters that make him win but his skill.

 

[Vashimus]

The PMBR has already sent their best mercenary to slaughter the animals and put their heads above his fireplace in 2.6. He's just biding his time.

 

[Deleted member]

Now I'm not saying that these characters completely **** fox up, but they really have everything they need to fight and exploit his weaknesses.

I'm not sure if you understand what the term "counter" implies. It doesn't mean "they can win"; it means "one character has a definite advantage over the other." Just because a character can do something that messes up Fox doesn't necessarily mean they are a counter.

Do you truly believe that Pit, Wolf, Lucario, Sonic, Lucas, and Mario all have definite advantageous matchups against Fox?

 

[Paradoxium]

I'm not sure if you understand what the term "counter" implies. It doesn't mean "they can win"; it means "one character has a definite advantage over the other." Just because a character can do something that messes up Fox doesn't necessarily mean they are a counter.

Do you truly believe that Pit, Wolf, Lucario, Sonic, Lucas, and Mario all have definite advantageous matchups against Fox?

The only one u there who truly counters fox is sonic, but all these characters that can fight with fox means that fox isn't overpowered anymore. Kinda like brawl- how the characters are so good that their balance.

 

[Mithost]

Counters: pit, wolf, lucario, sonic, Lucas, Mario

AHAHAHAHAHAA... Sorry.....


AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

On a serious note, Characters can fight against Fox fine. Nobody doubts that. What we know is that Fox has every tool to deal with every character in the game in nearly every situation. There is never a situation where someone would say "I shouldn't have picked fox against this character". It is always smart to pick Fox (assuming you know how to play as him). He lacks things to counter that he cannot cover just by being "Fox".

 

[SpiderMad]

You guys are a bunch of noobs, including Eli: he owes me pesos as well for saying Diddy's up-b wouldn't get nerfed

 

[Bakasama]

By adding additional movement options? I have no idea where you are getting this from when there are several new mechanics that force even more precision into your movement and decision making, in ways that have barely been touched on at this point because of a large portion of players who reject the notion of melee having any room/need/desire for change.

I should've explained more properly by saying that the escape-options were altered, making it more difficult for a player to escape at the near 100% rate that Brawl had. I agree with what you said whole-heartedly.

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