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>if you are playing actor 'A', and I am playing actor 'B', we state the game 'balanced' if every offensive action that 'A' has, has an equivalent defensive acti

>if you are playing actor 'A', and I am playing actor 'B', we state the game 'balanced' if every offensive action that 'A' has, has an equivalent defensive action on 'B's part, and vice versa But that's not what balance is at all. I'm going to go to some fighting games here, because I really like them and it's an easy way for me to contextualize balance. I apologize if I'm referencing a game you're not familiar with, but I'll try to be clear. Guilty Gear (and its various sequels; right now I'm thinking of Guilty Gear XX Reload ^ Core, but that's super long to type) is generally considered to be a fairly balanced game, but the cast of characters is incredibly diverse. Venom can place pool balls on the screen in various formations, and if he hits them with any attack, then they bounce around and hit the opponent. Zappa can summon random creatures to give him access to new attacks (seeded by the clock, which skilled players can use to their advantage). Eddie has a secondary effect where he does one attack when you press a button, and a second attack when you let go of the button. Chipp has teleports and a triple jump that lets him move around the stage quickly. You can't say that each character in Guilty Gear has an equivalent defensive action for every tool that every other character has, because there are just so many characters and so many different tools. Instead, each character has a generalized set of defensive options: a double jump and air dash for mobility, an attack that has upper body invincibility (and so can be used as a defensive move against air attacks), an attack from blockstun that has brief invincibility but costs a small amount of meter, and a rechargeable 'burst' that can break out of an opponent's combo. So now, even though every character has a myriad array of ways to attack you and there's no way to say "My burst is equal to Venom's pool balls, my dead-angle attack is equal to Zappa's dog, my anti-air is equal to Chipp's triple jump", the game is still overall balanced. I would say that your example of R-P-S with stages is still unbalanced; in underwater environments, there's no situation where you don't want to choose rock. In volcanic environments, there's no situation where you don't want to choose rock. The addition of the stage has removed all the strategy from the game. > The short version is that widening the problem space from which you have to create a winning strategy makes it more interesting to me. This part, I absolutely agree with; I feel like you just took it in sort of a weird direction. You don't want to give everybody an equivilent set of tools, because that doesn't widen the problem space at all (because the characters are all equal, so the choice doesn't matter). And adding in effects from the environment is a way to widen the problem space, but certainly not the only one; you can go the Guilty Gear route and make sure that the system itself gives characters some good ways to get out of trouble, and then give each character an incredibly diverse set of offensive options and the problem space is sufficiently widened that way.

ChuckMcM 12y ago
> This part, I absolutely agree with; I feel like you > just took it in sort of a weird direction. Fair enough. We all read the article that is posted at the top right? A long discussion about Super Smash Brothers and how all of its characters were ranked by players, and how the rank of the characters changed over a long period of time as players figured out how to play them and interact with the environment? The author of that piece used that definition of unbalanced. I just happened to like it, or resonate with it as I wrote, because in my experience playing World of Warcraft for years and years. Changes that the developers made in the character abilities, primarily it seemed to address player vs player perceptions of "balance" (which was the term the WoW developers used), made all of the characters nearly uniform in their effective capabilities. So when the WoW developers said "the character classes/races/roles are more balanced in this patch" the experience was that the game was "less interesting" to me. There was an interesting metric for that which was a characters "rotation" which was code for the sequence of commands the character would use in battle, which the more "balanced" the game became, the more uniform/boring that sequence became[1]. That said, it sounds like Guilty Gear is a lot of fun. And yes, that sort of global diversification is something I really like in a game and it keeps it interesting to me. And to your point having diverse capabilities that do not map 1:1 on the characters is part of the charm. And that is part of the charm of Super Smash Brothers which started this conversation. So after all this wonderful discussion I think we just figured out we agree with each other :-) [1] Jokes about Paladin's having a single 'i win' key they just pounded again and again, or simplifying the user interface to three buttons, 'fight', 'farm', and 'cyberz'
- CocaKoala 12y ago
  Right; I think part of the confusion is that the author talks a lot about 'balance' in Smash but never actually defines what he means by it. I got the impression from the article that when he talks about "balance", he means "constant and ongoing change to reduce options which players feel are overpowered, and enhance options which players feel are underpowered". He talks about Smash being "unbalanced", and then immediately explains that it's a console game which has never been patched. He then follows up by contrasting it with LoL, and the constant state of patching that LoL exists in. Treating "balance" as a verb, rather than an adjective. That's a very different interpretation of the concept than what I'm used to thinking, and so I think you're right that we ended up talking past each other a bit and ended up at the same place anyways. Guilty Gear is a lot of fun, and if you're interested in checking it out, you're in luck! A brand new game in the series is coming out in just a few weeks (Guilty Gear Xrd, pronounced "Ecksard"), for ps3/ps4. A bunch of people are really looking forward to it and it seems like it'll be a lot of fun. It's a very different style of game from Smash, but if you like one, you may well like the other.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

> This part, I absolutely agree with; I feel like you > just took it in sort of a weird direction. Fair enough. We all read the article that is posted at the top right? A long discussion about Super Smash Brothers and how all of its characters were ranked by players, and how the rank of the characters changed over a long period of time as players figured out how to play them and interact with the environment? The author of that piece used that definition of unbalanced. I just happened to like it, or resonate with it as I wrote, because in my experience playing World of Warcraft for years and years. Changes that the developers made in the character abilities, primarily it seemed to address player vs player perceptions of "balance" (which was the term the WoW developers used), made all of the characters nearly uniform in their effective capabilities. So when the WoW developers said "the character classes/races/roles are more balanced in this patch" the experience was that the game was "less interesting" to me. There was an interesting metric for that which was a characters "rotation" which was code for the sequence of commands the character would use in battle, which the more "balanced" the game became, the more uniform/boring that sequence became[1]. That said, it sounds like Guilty Gear is a lot of fun. And yes, that sort of global diversification is something I really like in a game and it keeps it interesting to me. And to your point having diverse capabilities that do not map 1:1 on the characters is part of the charm. And that is part of the charm of Super Smash Brothers which started this conversation. So after all this wonderful discussion I think we just figured out we agree with each other :-) [1] Jokes about Paladin's having a single 'i win' key they just pounded again and again, or simplifying the user interface to three buttons, 'fight', 'farm', and 'cyberz'

CocaKoala 12y ago
Right; I think part of the confusion is that the author talks a lot about 'balance' in Smash but never actually defines what he means by it. I got the impression from the article that when he talks about "balance", he means "constant and ongoing change to reduce options which players feel are overpowered, and enhance options which players feel are underpowered". He talks about Smash being "unbalanced", and then immediately explains that it's a console game which has never been patched. He then follows up by contrasting it with LoL, and the constant state of patching that LoL exists in. Treating "balance" as a verb, rather than an adjective. That's a very different interpretation of the concept than what I'm used to thinking, and so I think you're right that we ended up talking past each other a bit and ended up at the same place anyways. Guilty Gear is a lot of fun, and if you're interested in checking it out, you're in luck! A brand new game in the series is coming out in just a few weeks (Guilty Gear Xrd, pronounced "Ecksard"), for ps3/ps4. A bunch of people are really looking forward to it and it seems like it'll be a lot of fun. It's a very different style of game from Smash, but if you like one, you may well like the other.