www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_GameBalancePart1.htm
The first lesson is that "variety" and "balance" are inversely proportional; Both sides in chess have identical pieces, and the only difference between the black side and white side is that white goes first. Street Fighter would be much more balanced if we just removed all the characters except Ryu. Quake is fairly "balanced" since each player has the same "moves" (or ability to acquire weapons and armor) as any other player. The different spawn points do introduce some "imbalance" though. The trick is to introduce variety, yet keep a reasonable level of balance. A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably large number of options available to the player are viable--especially, but not limited to, during high-level play by expert players. It basically means that game doesn't degenerate down to a very small number of real options. This is a pretty broad definition since it encompasses the concept of "brokenness" as well. If, in chess, only pawns were used in tournament play (if pawns were so good as to be "broken"), I would say the game lacks balance, even though both players start with the same pieces. Another point of contention might be my use of the phrase "large number" rather than "large percentage" of viable options. Whether MvC2 is anything close to balanced is an incredibly complicated question that we'll have to come back to. For now, let's say that most players agree that there are about 10 "top tier" characters in the game. Others might care more about the percentage, but it's a minor point. Single Player Balancing a competitive multiplayer game is orders of magnitude harder than balancing a single player game. When we try to balance a single player game, we are basically striving to match the "skill" of the computer to the skill of the player. There are many techniques for doing this, and there is a large margin of acceptable error. For example, consider what happens if Joe Hardcore figures out a super sneaky way of beating almost every enemy in a single player game for free. Further suppose that this method is very obscure and discovered by less than 1% of all players. Factoring in strategy guides and the internet, sure, others will figure out this method, but the overall impact will be small. Joe Hardcore feels full of himself, the computer doesn't mind being beaten, and most players will never know about this method at all. If the same trick/bug existed in a competitive multiplayer game, the game would be totally ruined. The knowledge would spread like wildfire, as the 1% proceeded to crush the masses. The masses would learn the trick, and soon, there would be no gameplay. The game would degenerate to the exploitation of a single bug, and possibly the exploitation of another even more obscure bug as a countermeasure to the first. In short, the multiplayer world doesn't forgive imbalance: it abuses it 100 times more than even many game developers realize. So how can we make sure that a competitive multiplayer game will be balanced when we release it? If your game has the complexity needed to be interesting and successful, then it's pretty much guaranteed to be beyond the level of complexity that can be fairly balanced right out of the gate. Anyone who thinks otherwise just hasn't been in the trenches of real competitive gameplay. And it certainly doesn't mean the problem isn't worthy of analysis. There are things we can do to minimize the chances of insane imbalance, and there are methods to correct balance problems when they are discovered. Before we get to those, let's think about why the problem is so difficult in the first place. Finding Bugs in Code and Design Developers often think they are the best players of their own games. They designed and programmed their games, after all, so they have many advantages. They know the actual equations and formulas the game uses. They know the nuances, and the little tricks they put in there. But in reality, the gamers outside the company have many, many more advantages than that. The developers are busy making games, but hardcore gamers have seemingly infinite time. Just imagine how much the people at the other end of the curve are playing! A particular move or strategy might be considered weak, but end up strong. The development team might have a bias against this move or strategy, since they remember it being too weak to bother trying. It's very possible for entirely new strategies to become viable after new features are added at the last minute or old values are tweaked. Yet the developers often have little or no chance to test these newly-emerged strategies against other strategies they've deemed to be good. If you discover a strategy in Starcraft or a deck in Magic the Gathering that truly breaks the game wide open, you have lots of rewards waiting for you. Fame, glory, tournament victories, even fabulous cash and prizes. If you're a tester at a game company and you discover the exact same thing before the game is released, then you get to type up another bug report and get you toys taken away from you. Design Balance In, Then Get Good Testers Ok, so balancing a game is damned hard. The first step is designing checks and balances into a game from the start. Attacking early (at the expense of a strong economy) beats expanding early, but loses to defending early (if the defender can maintain a good economy and survive the attack). Another great example of designing (at least some) balance into a game is Magic the Gathering. There are five colors in Magic, and each one has unique strengths. Blue can counter spells, draw cards, and fly, for example. The more colors you want in a deck, the less consistent the deck will be. If your whole deck is blue, you'll pretty much always have blue mana whenever you need it (very consistent), but you will also have the built-in weaknesses of blue: you can't deal with threats once they are in play. You might play blue and white or blue and black to better remove threats (more versatile deck), but now, because of the way mana works in Magic, you are less likely to have the correct colored mana at the right time (less consistent). In a fighting game, you could make sure that whenever someone sits there you can throw them, whenever they attack you can block or parry or do a reversal, and so on. But it's a whole new ballgame when you throw all those options together, in combination. Perhaps a pattern of attack (rather than a single move) is too powerful. Testers are usually employed to find software bugs, but in competitive games, they really need to be playing the game constantly in order to break it design-wise as well. That's the only hope of getting anywhere near balanced for launch. I'm a pretty academic guy, but even I would never pretend that someone could take a design document I wrote and turn that into a perfectly balanced game without testing. One company acutely aware of this is Wizards of the Coast, makers of the collectible card game Magic the Gathering. Many of them even made a living as Magic players before joining the dev team. He has lots of incentive to discover and exploit balance problems. Career earnings of Magic the Gathering Players as of October 24th, 2001 Jon Finkel $249,227 Kai Budde $144,425 Ben Rubin $119,470 Zvi Mowshowitz $108,320 Kyle Rose $104,225 Mike Long $96,202 Chris Benafel $93,850 Tommi Hovi $93,780 Darwin Kastle $90,627 Bob Maher, Jr. Starcraft is one of the best balanced games ever to be played on the internet, and that's no accident. Blizzard knows that the release date of a game is not the end; Thanks to Blizzard's expert team of tester and balancers, including lead balancer Rob Pardo, Starcraft was patched several times for bugs as well as balance issues. They know the percentage of people who play Zerg on the Hunters map, the average win ratio for those players, the average length of a game, and zillion other stats. It's sure nice to back up anecdotal statements like "Zerg are too good. For the most part, units in Starcraft are designed to each have a specific purpose that doesn't obsolete any other unit. The more functionally independent each unit is, the better. They have a designated size of "sm...
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