Game Balance

To an extent. Basically it's fine to have "overpowered" shit that breaks the game, because it's fun when you discover it and learn how to fully utilize it. What's not cool is when you have underpowered shit. Using the Diablo 2 example, summonmancers fucking blow compared to say a cold/lightning sorceress. Two completely different plains of power. And it's cool and all that the sorc has teleport and raw dps, but the summonmancer simply isn't even viable past normal mode. That shit sucks and he should get buffed up to at least be usable.

In single player games I love finding hilariously broken shit. Or imagine if borderlands 2 just deleted the bee shield instead of nerfing the shotgun interaction, game would be way less fun

Works in PVE not PVP

He is right.
While there obviously should be balance, absolutely locking down everything so all playstyles perform about the same makes shit boring. Metas form anyway no matter what you do. Might as well let people have fun with it.

you know it doesnt have modern res support and they removed the ability to get modern res support as a third party fix

PVE (Or PVM for you shitty ass runescapers) should never be balancing individual characters against each other.

In fact older games listed classes by difficulty. As it should be.

>enter hell
>your melee character is now irrelevant until you get baalfarm armour with 99999999999 attack rating

d2 is decent for asymmetrical balance but it has too many flaws to use as a model.

Hell was a badly designed difficulty and the game peaked in nightmare.

On the other hand Borderlands 2 balance is a mess not because something is broken but because everything else is trash
Good thing the community patch exist

If every class has its own level of overpowered skills, it absolutely works. In the case of Diablo 2, you had Assassins with stun, Sorcs with aoe spells like Blizzard, Barbs with 1 hit ko aoe melee attacks (whirlwind), Druids with minion stacking and insane damage that cannot be reduced more than half, Necromancers with similar, however long range like a sniper with homing missiles, Amazons had shit cast rate but great run speed and dodge, also playing the homing missile sniper route, Paladins with uninteruptable movement skills like charge and insane damage (but shit hitbox). All of these have their strengths and weaknesses, and it was up to the player how they utilized their own respective skills and movement whether they would win or lose.

Then again, D2 was an action based RPG. You could beat people with gear much better than yours if you could outmaneuver them. Most online games, especially MMOs tend to lack this factor where skill trumps gear. Of course, gear was super important, but it wasn't so important that any shitter can buy the best items and faceroll a good player with welfare gear.

I would agree
I just remembered that I had to abandon my level 78 poison necro because you can't break poison immunities and I was brickwalled in the Lut Gholein sewers.

As long as you wait until endgame for the player to break it

It isn't about acheiving perfect balance, but it's worth making things at least roughly balanced for the first part. If a certain move/power/ability/tactic is overpowered then it can easily sap all of the fun out of a game. It doesn't matter if you crunch the numbers and playing an Axe based character deals 10% more damage than a sword based character, with everything else being equal. It does matter if your throw button does 10x the damage or a regular attack and is safer to use.

if its competitive it should be balanced
if its single player who fucking cares

for example grim dawn, it's a single player focused ARPG per the devs own statement, yet every single time the community comes up with something cool outside of how they imagined it working, they immediately nerf it into the fucking ground. its so dumb, its a single player game, who cares if some builds are broken, don't nerf that one buff the others and add another difficulty in an expac or something. it makes no sense to have some classes blitzing through endgame and some nerfed into uselessness when they have all been good at some point, just keep them good and fix the shitty ones fuck. goddamnit crate

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if you want your game to be labelled "competitive", you have to be balanced
otherwise just don't label your game "competitive"

there is no competition in asymmetry anyway

In single player games? Not really, as long as the one broken thing isn't easy to do and heavily better than all other alternatives

>it's worth making things roughly balanced
no, its not. unless you are fixing something that completely broken due to a bug or unintended feature, it 100% is not worth balancing things. Your playerbase will mob you with bitching and complaints from baddies about how "x and x are broken you need to NERF it" and the ride will never fucking end until every single thing is the equivalent of bapping each other with a pool noodle.

He's right. Games will never be balanced thanks to min-maxers and tryhards. Once something is found in game that is .1% better than everything else, everyone will use it, leading to boring gameplay.

Weird, I thought that the 1.14 patch had added that. Thanks for the heads up.

Just because something is overrated it doesn’t make it worthless

Breaking the balance scale in a game or overcoming an “unbalanced” challenge can be immensely rewarding and fun. Balance might be the hardest thing for a game to achieve, so it makes sense that developers will find other things to excel in to make a game worth playing

When it comes to fighting games though balance is KING (but still somehow overrated, plenty of “unbalanced” fighters like MvC2 are still a blast to learn and play)

If making your character broken is the only way to stay in the game, doesn't that mean the game and your broken character are actually balanced?

As long as PvP isn't disrupted by it, Balance is indeed overrated.
People with OCDs and such are just bitching about it.

For PVP you should shoot for a semblence of balance. For PVE it matters a hell of a lot less and is situational.

Balance is more important in some games than others. I'd say for a diablo style game, fuck balance.

All you need in diablo is the appearance of balance. But players want to feel really smart and capable of "breaking" that balance with some kind of crazy build, so that needs to be the goal to create.

But for other games, like a competitive multiplayer game, balance is the blood of the game. Imbalance spreads like a plague and just leads to the game getting too stale too quickly.

Fucker introduced runewords and everything went downhill from there.

Grim dawn is weird, they put way too many damage types in and get unhappy when players managed to optimize the two that show up in abundance. They really need to tighten up the numbers instead of just throwing dozens of damage types in.

Then again Torchlight 2 did the same thing and the result was awful tedium. God damn it still makes me mad how badly Torchlight 2 fucked it up why does the berserker class even exist when the game is balanced around fucking over extremely tanky engineers

Not necessarily true, in most games players find their own balance, though this usually means omitting the part of the cast that can’t keep up

Where did I say you needed to patch things for balance's sake, user?

He's right fuck the autismos that can't stop themselves from abusing blatantly overpowered shit then complain.

I tried out card games like magic or shadowverse where op shit is the normal. No thanks man. Games like fps games or fighting games are perfectly fine getting balanced

>the different strengths and weaknesses, and overpowered skills that each class possesses are what made the combat special
But then there isn't an issue of balance.
You'd have a balance issue if one specific class had an overpowered strategy that invalidated everything else.

Games should be rewarding you for figuring out their systems. They, however, shouldn't have one singular dominant strategy that overshadows everything else entirely.

I had friends get my poison necro to the end of the game in hell difficulty.
Spoilers: 80% of all enemies are poison immune. It is actual garbage.

>add level up system to fighting game
>everybody specs into glass cannons
>whoever lands a combo first wins
Is there a worse game design choice than this?

>PVE (Or PVM for you shitty ass runescapers) should never be balancing individual characters against each other.
Why not?
Why should you only be able to get a decent experience with one character/class/whatever?

I think balance is important in multiplayer games.
Balance also has a place in Single Player. You should probably make it so you don't have to break the game's mechanics just to win, but maybe have higher difficulties that are designed to reward that.

the problem is most devs have no fucking clue about ballance, so it's either overpowered as fuck or underpowered and useless

Because you cannot possibly design something perfectly balanced if its a multiplayer game. You simply do not have enough of a test audience to do so until the playerbase sinks their teeth into it and acquaints themselves with it. And by then it is too late unless you bow to every balance change they bitch about.

Because a well designed game offers challenges at all levels? I sure would hate to be stuck with one build for every playthrough.

Does blizzard EVER makes any sales?

No, he's right. The most balanced game ever is checkers, even that is unbalanced because red moves first.

Balance just means "I should be better or at least comparable to everyone else." Except this is subjective anyway, because if you have unique classes/playstyles/weapons/skills/etc, then they're always going to excel at one thing and not excel at another.

A jack of all trades system g ets boring quick.

So why should I only be able to have a decent challenge with the deliberately weakest character?
Instead of actually making the characters balanced against one another and having a separate difficulty selection, thus satisfying everyone?

Yes. Hence why Western developers obsessed with balance tend to make such boring games. Games such as GoW and Uncharted and Pillars of Eternity and Diablo 3 are "balanced" but certainly not fucking fun.

its so frustrating, like they put a million options out there and just nerf the fuck out of all of them whenever one gets too good, it just makes no sense. i could buy the "it would make the game too short" excuse if it weren't for the fact that because of the way drops are handled it takes hundreds of hours to finish even a single set, i mean the grind is fucking real and there regardless of how fast you kill, like even if you could clear top tier crucible in a minute or less, you'd STILL have a long fucking time before finishing a set organically.

they seem to buy into the vermintide 2 concept of durrrrrrr slowerrr equall hardurrrrr equal beturrrrr

>because if you have unique classes/playstyles/weapons/skills/etc, then they're always going to excel at one thing and not excel at another
But that is balance.
Imbalance would be if one class simply excelled at everything another class does, and more, therefore rendering that other class functionally pointless.

I mean, Warlord was incredibly strong, was nerfed twice, and is still one of the stronger builds in the game, so they don't always nerf things into the ground.

He's right for PvE games like Diablo. "Balancing" characters means watering them down which is stupid if the opponent is a computer. If the game is PvP, however, balance is crucial for making it feel fun.

The problem with Blizzard is that they try to make games balanced, competitive, AND casual, which is impossible to achieve. A balanced competitive game can never appeal to casuals and a casual balanced game can never be competitive. This is why they always shoot themselves in the foot with shitty characters like Brigitte.

Seeing how fun morrowind and oblivion was compared to skyrim, yeah. If you "balance" a game too much, it just feels sterile and soulless

>therefore rendering that other class functionally pointless
But it isn't pointless, because it doing less than the other class creates a unique gameplay experience in itself.
There's no reason why every class or playstyle has to be equally strong.

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>D&D
>mac daddy of fun
>D&D
LM@O

>D&D just dumps on balance yet the system is the mac daddy of fun RPG gaming
I defy you to
A) Find a D&D player that isn't pissed off about how dead in a water a class is without a spellcasting feature
B) Find a D&D player that actually finds the game fun and isn't just using it because it's the only system everyone in the group already knows

>perfectly balanced
>It isn't about acheiving perfect balance
Fuck off retard.

Well Guild Wars 1 is the greatest game of all time and it was horribly unbalanced so yeah I'd say he's right.

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>D&D
>mac daddy of fun RPGs

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games need imbalance to make the player able to "outsmart" the game and feel amazing because of it

>diablo boomers trying to talk about balance
yeah of course you don't need any balancing for the pioneer of the genre of mind numbingly uninteresting and boring click-spam gameplay devoid of any challenge

but if you actually want any kind of engaging gameplay you will need some balancing, both for singleplayer and multiplayer

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players rarely complain when the odds are in their favour

It depends on the game.
I don't think every PvE game should be about utterly breaking its systems, that's dumb. I also think that, for the games that are, breaking them should take plenty of knowledge and effort, and that there should be a good variety of ways to "break" the game with various playstyles, and that these ways to "break" the game should be fun and rewarding in themselves, rather than feeling dull and exploitative.

The issue is that the typical approach to "balance" that shitty devs tend to go for is to just neuter everything, and that's given the very notion of balancing a bad name, when it's a core component of game design for any kind of game.

Yea. Balance only matters in competitive, esports style games.

Listen shrimpdick, anything less than perfectly balanced will get shit on by any community. One thing that some retard calls overpowered starts a chain reaction torrential shitwave that ruins any discussion of balance in the first place. How do you not understand this?

"Engaging gameplay" is overrated, too.

Hot Take: Wizardry wasn't balanced either and isn't it funny how almost every party has a priest?

Yes. Anyone with a brain knows that.

In a game like Diablo, you work your way for hundreds of hours to make an unbalanced piece of shit build that rips the game a new asshole. Of course "balance" is overrated, because the "balance" in a game like Diablo is exactly that imbalance. If it were a perfectly scaled experience where killing enemies in hour 500 was exactly like killing enemies in minute 5, it never would have become a classic. "Balance" depends on the game. Like literally everything else.

>make characters specialized in finding non-combat solutions
>games always put a combat focused roadblock 3/4 of the way into the game

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Damn, never knew Starcraft wasnt competitive.

i think he doesnt understand what balance means
"balanced" or "fair", especially in games, doesnt mean "perfect equivalency"
games generally need an arbitrarily determined baseline of where average "power" is, and then you balance offensive and defensive output around that base
balancing things deliberately over or under that baseline is a part of "balance", because the situations that these things are applicable in and the ease with which they are used vary wildly
every small thing has its own variable attached, and then on top of that the combination of all different balance points combine to create a very delicate ecosystem in which changing ANYTHING affects the efficacy of all other potential balance variables
basically "balance" is not a destination, its the act of properly understanding and managing your games inter-workings on a very detailed and personal level and being able to control those things in a way where you can properly predict the outcomes of changes you might make

granted this is not something that any blizzard employee has ever been capable of
easy to see how someone like that could adopt ignorance as an affirmative opinion, seems to match their company m/o, maybe they can rehire him to make firefall 2 lmao

Just go into a Goodwill, find a copy, and write down the CD key. It'll take a few tried but you'll eventually find an unclaimed one.

So an RPG where there's a class that outdamages all the damage dealers, outheals the dedicated healers and outsupports the dedicated supports, making the ideal party composition always as many of this one class as possible, is totally fine because it's singleplayer?

Wait this guy makes video games? I thought he just made suicidal doodles lamenting he's an unlovable loser.

Id, I just don't care. This isn't about how a community reacts to something, it's about what the developer should attempt to do. So unless you want to actually respond to something I've said rather than bitch at anyone even vaguely for the concept of balance in games, stop responding to me.

Do we really need every single one of this pathetic faggot's tweets to be a thread?

Yes, especially maddening when they patch out fun in single player games

But Diablo 2 was reasonably balanced? Only hammerdins were OP. In fact I'm gonna go reinstall it now

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Being fun is more important than being balanced
An overpowered mechanic can still be fun if it adds a lot of depth and takes skill to exploit effectively
Likewise an underpowered mechanic can still be bad for the game if nobody likes using it or dying to it
Community perception is important to keep in mind as a developer

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D&D being unbalanced is fine because the game is run by a person (DM).
Video-games should try to be as balanced as possible, and the only argument against it is developer laziness and incompetence.

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When the point of your game is build diversity, you have to force it once things get out of hand. It might not have been the case in a previous era, but in today's gaming world filled with metagaming, streaming, copying from the internet, you should understand why it's an issue. People don't play for fun, they play to minmax and be the best.
"Why should I play x when y is stronger" may be a dumb statement, but unfortunately it's a very prevalent mindset.

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This is only true for RPGs, sandbox games, or games without a clear winstate. For any other game, balance is the only way to keep it engaging. Games, at the most basic level, are just a series of decisions leading to a win or lose state. If one option has a clear advantage over every other, then there's no reason to make any other decision, at which point you're not playing a game anymore so much as just pushing the win button. A lack of balance directly leads to fewer viable options, which leads to a simpler, more boring game.

That only happened in 1.10.

They wanted to have more endgame content by including more uniques and super rune words. They scaled the difficulty up to match, but it meant that melee characters were shit without top end gear.

You can use Steeldriver to cruise through Nightmare as a werewolf, paladin, or barb, and then on Hell you can't hit shit and when you do, you do no damage.

But at least most caster builds have a hard time... except necromancer's.

A necromancer can still clear hell naked if they are patient and can just watch TV and hardly pay attention with even basic gear on. The most elite weapon combo might have you doing 11,000 damage a hit with a weapon. A naked necro spams amp damage and CE and does 80,000 damage across the entire screen in two frames.

>newfangled do-everything weapon outstuns the weapon meant to specialize in stuns
>even the other burst weapon that was never meant to be able to stun can now outperform it in stuns because of a newly buffed skill
>designated 4 player support weapon is too weak to be worthwhile even in 4 player parties
>light bowgun can solo lockdown every monster in the game almost indefinitely, making 1 LBG and 3 HBGs the best team composition by far for every single monster in the game, all other weapons can only fulfill a niche in solo play
>new jack of all trades weapons has the highest DPS, best craftable weapons, top tier status application, can spam the new CC ability far better than anyone else, and gets free defensive tools out the ass
>essentially, 9 out of 14 weapon types in the game are rendered completely pointless by another weapon doing every single it thing they do, better

"lmao fuck balance"

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>Imbalance would be if one class simply excelled at everything another class does, and more, therefore rendering that other class functionally pointless.
Yet this often happens in games. Things may seem balanced because every class or character has a niche and you're playing at the level of a beginner. In actuality with time in a lot of cases some of the specialties different characters have will be nothing special and completely sub-optimal. You might have the best DPS in the game, but single target and melee only, and then someone else shows you they have 90% of your DPS but with range, AoE, and greater toughness than you. You do have a niche, but it's so minor. They do what you can for the most part, but are far safer than you and do most content much faster and easier than you.

>DnD
lmao

an unbalanced game can still be a ton of fun as long as it is singleplayer only.

or search for it on ebay and try the keys in the pictures.

Well yeah, most devs either suck at, or simply do not care about balance. Nothing new.

How about that Blizzard balancing?

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If it's a competitive multiplayer game then it should be balanced. It wouldn't be fun playing chess if your opponent had twice as many pieces as you would it.
In single player games or games with multiplayer that aren't competitive having unbalanced stuff is fun. Crippling every class to be "you have one damage ability that's a different color, some cc and some survival" is boring as shit.

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I think Path of Exile does it right
Every single character can become strong enough to one shot every single encounter, you have basically infinite build options, devs just buff and rework weaker and old skills, VERY rarely nerf things
Some builds are just not as good as others but everything should be able to clear all the content

The only concern is obviously the race to 100 at the start of a new league and the fact that shitty builds don't generate nearly as much currency as good ones but the devs basically just said they balanced the game around going as fast and hard as possible so if you decide to play a slower/weaker build you're on your own

>Boring games
Only if you balance like Blizzard does and nerf everything into the ground.

isn't the skill tree the same for every class though, you just start at different points

Poorly balanced action games are the worst shit.

fucking this

CE was always OP, but it couldn't be used on bosses. Then teleport charges came out in and you could teleport 25 revives and 10 skeletons directly on to a boss and begin hitting them for insane damage. That plus clay golem slowing, decrepify, and a bunch of new "hit slows target" items for mercy and ice damage basically let you slow Hell Baal down so much your infinitely stacked summon army would kill him before he did an attack.

5:5 chun mirrors because no other character can win tournaments isn't either

That's the passive tree, skills are handled differently. Even though every character has access to every skill over time, ascendancy customization is dependent on your starting class.

Summonmancer is fucking great, what are you talking about?

WWII was the first COD game I played in a while where everyone didn't run the same gun every time. There were two good ARs, really the PPSH was the best SMG, and then the LMGs actually were worth using in objective games.

I skipped a bunch but COD4 was the last time I remember using an LMG not gimping you

The biggest factor for choosing your character is one of the the 3 available ascendancies available for each one
The starting point at the skill tree is obviously important for min maxing but you can get everywhere with every character
It's like said, the tree is just passives with some big ones that affect your character dramatically and lesser ones like health%, I like it a lot, you just get a ton of incremental increases during your leveling up phase and sometimes incredibly huge jumps

But that happens every time, in every game. Really, balance is pretty much a meme in multiplayer games too, because a meta will always exist, and 90% of choices in a game will always be worthless next to the best shit.

Firefall taught me, as a game designer, that budgeting is overrated.

He is right
BFA is just as poorly balanced as Classic despite the heavy pruning, Warrior tanks are by far the best tanks in both BFA & Classic

The difference is, Classic classes are unique & more fun

CB wasn't better at stunning than hammer though, it was just way easier so it came off as better at stunning to bad players.
HH wasn't so much a bad weapon as much as it was that the monster design was absolutely horrible for it. So yes, the HH was a bad weapon, but it was more because the monsters weren't designed for it, not the weapon itself.

Old Diablo 2 PVP had this for its balance:
An amazon would shoot out a super fast homing arrow that pierced you 4 times, hitlocking, and then killing you from multiple screens away.

A sorceress would teleport giving her ultimate mobility and evasion while spamming frozen orbs with frost shards filling up half the screen. If two or three shards touched you, you'd die unless you pumped resists or were on normal.

Paladins would try to one or two shot charge you, but it was meh. Amazons could shoot paladins down from extreme range very fast and sorcs could do it from lesser range and avoid charges with their teleportation.

Necromancers were like Amazons, they had a homing spirit attack, only worse and way way slower.

Barbarians could jump at a necro or paladin and spin to win, or against anyone else spin and die.

Balance only matters in competitive games.

>fun rpg gaming
>mages always trying to break the game and yelling when martials want OP shit too
>user generated content
Looks like someone never olayed D&D

Balance is just another tool to restrict or free players. Its a question of how you want to direct the player's focus.
Flatly balancing 'W thing is X strong in Y situations that is occuring Z amount of time/total time" to have a similar result across things will be bland and predictable.

>HH wasn't so much a bad weapon as much as it was that the monster design was absolutely horrible for it.
Its numbers were absolute garbage too. Even with the 20% AuL buff, you're still better off bringing a status LBG (which basically turns every hunt into a joke) or a status DB/IG (which contributes more to the team via paralysis/sleep and does significantly more damage) if you want to support people.

Just look at the lengths Iceborne had to go to to finally make HH playable.

There's different kinds of balance.
Perfect like for like balance where every player has access to all the same resources/gear and has to win from skill and strategy alone, and situational balance where one class or equipment set provides advantages in different situations, and the player has to try and lead the fight into a situation that benefits them - or play against the odds.

Both are good in different situations and games

>9 out of 14 weapon types in the game are rendered completely pointless
I get you're saying that CB, IG, HBG, and LBG are great, but what's the fifth one? Greatsword?

Even then, I'd argue that LBG and HBG weren't necessarily OP. Their main use is in specific team compositions for specific quests, and the margin for error was paper thin. In solo play they were pretty balanced.

It is overrated, at least in some games.
But it's not meaningless.

In versus games, like a 1v1 or 5v5, then balance matters so that it can remain competitive.
In other games like diablo 2 it's still not completely irrelevant. Every class, every build, and every ability doesn't need to be perfectly balanced, but it becomes less enjoyable if the gap in balance becomes too great, so when you're in a party and only 1 player contributes because what he's doing is broken.

I'm definitely not going to say it was a good weapon, much less say it could compete with the horribly overpowered LBG or IG, but it's at least "Usable" in some hunts. AuL would make it better that stuff like Switch Axe or Gunlance at least in a party.
HH is the absolute worst because the monsters make it far too dangerous to use a lot of HH's moves, especially recitals. The number of monsters with counter attacks, random explosions or are just too fast is way too high for HH to be properly played (Have you tried playing HH vs G rank or GQ Shaggy? It's basically a coin flip every time you press R). You could jack up its damage numbers to Insect Glaive levels and it would still be a bad weapon simply because you can't play it properly.
I'm not really arguing with you, because I do think HH is the worst weapon in 4U, but I just want to bring up that it's because of the monster's design moreso than the weapon's. It helps understand that balance isn't just about the weapon's numbers or abilities, but also what you have to fight against.

>Their main use is in specific team compositions for specific quests
More like every single quest worth farming, period.
>and the margin for error was paper thin
Not like you didn't get plenty of time to learn considering you were probably going to grind GQs for fucking months with the awful RNG. Can't blame people for wanting every advantage they can get.

>Diablo 2 taught me, as a game designer, that balance is overrated
Actually when I think about it some more Diablo 2 in compared to Diablo 1 was insanely more balanced, and much more popular so I don't think that line alone is really much of an argument.
The difference between the power level of different classes in diablo 2 is much smaller, than the vast gap between a Sorceror and the other two classes almost no one played.

Oh, yeah, definitely, 4U's combat design as a whole is pretty much atrocious. The monsters and weapons aren't designed around one another properly at all, most weapons barely advanced since P3rd and here you are expected to take on shit too fast for the camera to follow most of the time.
I will never understand how this abortion of a video game came to be the community darling.

Its an odd statement to me, if they didnt care about balance why did they release balance patches for years?

>PvE
Balance isn't that important as long as no class/character/build is objectively useless and they're all FUN. The objective is to make all the different playstyles engaging.

>PvP
Balance is paramount, especially because if something is overpowered as shit, everyone will pick that even if it's awfully boring, or if something is fun but shit, the fans of that character/class/etc will be upset.

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Which is why Diablo 2 and PoE are total shit and Diablo 1 was based

The true successor to Diablo 1 as far as I'm concerned is Demon's Souls and later Dark Souls.

If Fromsoft ever decide to make one of these top down ARPG's it'll be fucking over for GGG and anyone else making those gay ass games

>More like every single quest worth farming, period.
I only saw people using it for guild quests.
>Not like you didn't get plenty of time to learn considering you were probably going to grind GQs for fucking months with the awful RNG. Can't blame people for wanting every advantage they can get.
True. Even though it was easy to fail, considering how shitty most people normally are at level 140 GQs, it was absolutely worth doing in terms of both time and difficulty.

>especially because if something is overpowered as shit, everyone will pick that even if it's awfully boring, or if something is fun but shit, the fans of that character/class/etc will be upset.
But both of these happen all the time in PvE.

Balance is very important, it's not just balancing the player, it's balancing the enemies. A game will be more engaging when you aren't just steamrolling everything since then you have to actually make use of the mechanics rather than just turning your brain off and still succeeding.

If a game is too easy to break then it's boring.

>A game will be more engaging when you aren't just steamrolling everything since then you have to actually make use of the mechanics rather than just turning your brain off and still succeeding.
Nah. Brainless steamrolling should always be the end goal. The work lies in how you get there.

Singleplayer games have an easy solution to any and all balance issues.
Just don't use it.

I prefer it that way. All the balance humping in WoW turned the game into a character-less mess.

It's one thing to make a spec viable, it's another to just turn it into an Arms warrior but holy magic

Balance isn't achievable in a good manner in those kinds of games because the entire making of the game from the outset is flawed. Hitboxes? Don't exist, it's just a big cone. Greatswords, Greathammers, maces, axes, swords all just swing the same have the same animations, no combos or patterns or fighting styles, those games essentially are actually Wizard games where your sword and axe etc are actually wands.

The day someone decides to make a top down ARPG with something more closer to Neir combat with it's shmup leanings, is the day the genre reaches it's true potential.

Needs to stop being about LE NUMBERS BIGGA and farming gear and about dealing thoughtfully with tough challenging foes ganging up on you.

Playing Diablo 2/PoE is basically point for point identical to someone playing cookie clicker or shopping on amazon. It's almost a one button game.

Not even close, the greatest challenges of a game should be at the end, the final boss and levels should be the hardest thing to overcome in the game outside of superbosses and things like that

hh song activation times should make the buffs about 5x more effective. or slightly reduce them and turn them into regular swings. every time i hh i end up fighting the air to play songs safetly then use wide rage heals and buffs the rest.... wtg capcom!

>it should be the player's job to cut out all of the bad parts of the game until they're only left with a tiny bit that's actually decent
Or the dev could do their fucking job and leave you with way more choices to use

No they don't. You see people pick shit options in PvE all the time just because they're more fun. A good example is Civilization VI. Some of the most fun civilizations in the game are shit (Khmer, Kongo, Maori, either version of Eleanor of Aquitaine), and they see why higher play rate in singleplayer than in multiplayer. Meanwhile boring, strong ass civs like Sumeria, Persia, or Germany see tons of competitive play. There's a very small intersect of fun-to-play and competitively-viable that you find Mali and the Incans in.

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On games with so much freedom where you can mess with gear, enchantment, and stuff like runes, yes.
I still remember Ragnarok Online was considered one of the games with the worst balance ever but had some of the most memorable mechanics, and every job had their uses.

1.14 broke PlugY and the resolution mod. Downgrad that shit back to 1.13d

a game that isn't well balanced yet is more fun for it is dragons dogma

>You see people pick shit options in PvE all the time just because they're more fun.
Often because those people simply don't know any better. But once they learn the game more, their choices will naturally start to gravitate towards what is most effective.

Yes. Or what do you think a sorcerer is in any d&d or similar game?

In PvE let the players break the game if they want
in PvP you should attempt to achieve balance.

>I can oneshot every boss in the game with a blast arrow
>Warrior has no useful attacks whatsoever
>hard mode actually makes the game easier
>that's what makes the game fun
???

But in PvP you hit that point much more bluntly, even if you hit that point later.

A source of endless shitflinging and debate

Why should everyone else suffer and have to play a boring, homogenized game with little to no freedom offered to the player because autistic mental midgets like yourself demand everything to be perfectly equal and balanced?

Balance is realy only important for MP games.
In SP/PVE balance is not that important.
No one cares if one method is more effective the the other what matters is whats most fun.
Even if lets say magic is more OP in a game you might enjoy melee combat or ranged combat more the next play-thru.
Like for instance if a game has a busted mechanic that lets you abuse it.
Althou at lest some semblance of balance should be upheld in SP.

>and have to play a boring, homogenized game with little to no freedom offered to the player
Where did I ever suggest any of this?

Depends entirely on the genre. RTS demands perfect balance, other genres not so much

Because no amount of "balance" is ever achievable without sucking fun and variety out of the game, and those should always come first.
I'd say make the game as imbalanced as possible.

>New guy plays PvE game
>Gravitates towards what's most fun instead of most effective until he gets a better understanding of the game and can choose between fun/effectiveness

>New guy plays PvP game
>Gets completely dominated by a top tier 3 games in and starts gravitating to using that character/weapon/skill build/etc because they're tired of losing

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not that user, but how does the hard mode make the game easier? Is it some goofy shit or just some dumb code bug?

>Warrior has no useful attacks whatsoever
actually the warrior doesn't need them since the jump attack is good enough
>I can oneshot every boss in the game with a blast arrow
but that requires that you grind out 100s of blast arrows
>hard mode actually makes the game easier
you get more money but its not easier

It depends on the game. If it is multiplayer, then balance is very important. For singleplayer, who gives a shit?

Wouldn't it be revolutionary if you didn't have to choose between fun or effectiveness and could just have both?

Just play a mage.

>actually the warrior doesn't need them since the jump attack is good enough
>a vocation relying entirely on only one attack because everything else sucks that much dick is totally fine

Yeah, and it'd be cool if you didn't have to work or die, but that's just not the way the world works.

>Balance is overra-
I get what he's trying to say but it still have to be playable and not to easy

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That's just the sort of quirks that any good game has. It gives the game character. Any modern game would have just ironed out all of these things and turned the game into just another soulless husk in the pursuit of "balance" and "polish".

Warrior is a goofy ass vocation that spams jump attacks because everything else sucks, and that's fine.

Balance is more than just what the players can do, everything about the game requires balance, like the enemies

kek, the absolute state of westaboos. who needs gameplay when you have click-to-win movies?

Nah. Imbalanced enemies are better because they require more ingenuity on the player's part to overcome.

>Works for Dota 2
>Works for Brood War
>Works for CoD/Battlefield
>Works for Red Orchestra

>But it doesn't work for??

You do realize that imbalance also leads to a homogenized game, right? It's just as boring to have everyone pick the only viable option.

So you're saying that it's impossible to create options that are both strong and fun in a video game? Are you retarded?

Imbalanced enemies can mean easy ones too you know, and as you said balance doesn't matter, so they can just fill the game with pushovers and since balance doesn't matter that's okay

balance is important for multiplayer games, especially online multiplayer games that try to take themselves seriously as some e-sport.

but in cases like shit like diablo, who gives a fuck.

In singleplayer PvE balance has much looser tolerances than any kind of cooperative or competitive thing. Nobody likes being forced to play a certain class to contribute in a PvE game

Yup! Most fun WRPGs have completely broken shit that makes logical sense in the context of the story. Speech is objectively the best route in FoNV, for example but you'll use other shit because it's fun.

Every option is viable as long as you're good enough, shitter. Imbalance creates variety in gameplay. Balance makes everything the same with a slightly different flavor.

Well, if the game is a RPG, for roleplaying purposes. As long as the game can be completed, you can't expect a speech guy or a stealth guy to slay so much shit as the 18str int2 orc with a giant axe and a fuckhueg armor.

>variety in gameplay
Yeah, a choice between being better or worse. Being imbalanced doesn't fucking mean every class can perform similarly with different difficulties you fucking retard.

But it doesn't work for BW. There's a reason why Terran has dominated its history and why they had to implement super anti-terran maps so Protoss could win the ASL lol

>All the people ITT saying competitive games need to be balanced
Dumb cucks. Some of the best competitive games of all time have been broken as shit, just look at Super Turbo.

>As long as the game can be completed, you can't expect a speech guy or a stealth guy to slay so much shit as the 18str int2 orc with a giant axe and a fuckhueg armor.
No, but they shouldn't arbitrarily have a much harder time because the game is 90% combat focused with maybe 2 relevant speech checks. In that case a speech focused character shouldn't even be presented as a viable option.

Balance is subjective, some games are only good because they don't give a fuck about balance, it's fun to 1 hit gods in Morrowind, it's fun to solo super bosses in Xenoblade. but some games inarguably demand balance or else it's a gold rush towards a singular strategy/build, Dota is probably one of the best balanced games to exist, and that's entirely due to it's stance on it, it doesn't nerf like crazy it makes things more powerful, there's a wide array of builds that shouldn't work but do, and a wide arrange of characters that are worth running in multiple positions, I've seen tactics that shouldn't work in a competition win, and I've played fun builds in serious matches that were competitive. Now I don't really know, it looks like shit, but it used to be really well done.

Mark Kern is a huge faggot who ran Firefall into the ground, and he takes way too much credit for games he's worked on in the past.

>what do you think a sorcerer is in any d&d or similar game?
A worse wizard.

I agree with him, in a single player game, unless it gets to the point of being utterly degenerate to gameplay.

Maps are part of the game doofus. They aren't removed from the equation. You're absolutely right about how map makers have to build around the games balance but it's not a problem. It makes exciting games.

Perfectly balanced games are boring.

Balance inevitably leads to homogenization.

>Yeah, a choice between being better or worse.
Which is a completely valid choice.
And why the fuck should classes have to perform similarly?

Why not? vtmb did it and everyone was able to get through the sewers unless they put literally 0 points on 1 (one) combat skill.

Why should one class require twice the effort to do less beneficial things than another? Why is that "Fun" to you?

Especially character balance tends to get overrated a lot. A fighting game isn't somehow magically improved by having to learn 40 different matchups. I'd rather have a small top tier dominating the game.

>a more intelligent wizard able to separate the crap spells from the good spells
ftfy mate

This. Every game should be balanced on the surface, but reward creative players for being industrious and bringing the system to its knees.

Because in that case all you're doing is creating entire character archetypes as noob traps.

The problem with balance is that it often comes at the expense of fun mechanics. When you start sacrificing fun for the sake of balance, that's when you've gone wrong.

Which has been a staple of games for decades. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Games are fundamentally about analyzing the choices in front of you and separating the good from the bad.

Balance is only important when PvP is the primary (PRIMARY) focus, and even then its possible to get good balance in a game where character abilities are all over the place

In PvE like Diablo balance can go out the window

Balance in an SP game: shit
Balance in an MP game: good

Balance is for competitive games, and only competitive games.

Why is the only example given for PvE games always shit like fucking Diablo?
What about highly skill based action games? Should balance not even be a factor for those as well?

Yes it is fun. That is why some people choose to make videogames instead of simply becoming a dentist.

So basically people find it fun to have lots of well designed viable options. Even if they're not exactly balanced they can be fun because they all have different crazy stuff that is fun. Even a low tier character should be really fun with lots of crazy fun things to do and a means of winning.

This gives players fun options to choose, but also means they can face a variety of opponents and not just the same two characters constantly.

It's bad when every option is so balanced that they become so similar with no variety to playstyle. It's also bad when everything is so imbalanced that just a couple options are the only viable picks so again there's no real variety.

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So "Doing less with more" is "Fun" to you?

In games with lots of options and techs (like SF2 to use that example again) even trash tier characters can revolt and get results against top tiers. Maybe not outright win tourneys but I've seen ST Cammy players take out top tiers in competitive play and she is one of the worst fighting game characters in history. I think it also goes without saying that matchup expectation is a type of balance itself, people underestimate lower tier characters and don't learn the matchup while higher tier characters are more widely played and thus "solved". It doesn't diminish their inherently powerful tools but it's still something to consider. Additionally, fans of low tier characters just need to accept the risks that come from playing their character. If they don't like the risks they could always learn one of the dominant characters, it's a non-issue except for the most stubborn

Because that's what role playing is about you joyless fucking robot.
Sometimes you want to be a god amongst men.
Sometimes you want to be the underdog going up against impossible odds.

>select few players play creatively and achieve that one broken build that trivializes the game
>one retard posts a guide online telling everyone how to do it
>everyone uses that build and takes a fat stinky dump on your game
That's every ARPG ever

>why understanding the underlying logic of the game should benefit me? I should be able to do as much damage as a guy who knows what the fuck he is doing instead of being a retard like me!
It is fun for non retarded people, believe me.

Yeah fuck balance. Just keep changing the op shit to keep things fresh. That's what ends up happening with balance patches anyway.

>I like games being shittily balanced so I can larp within them
You could place any number of arbitrary limitations on yourself, why do you need the developers to be so shit at balance that one class is nonviable?

Not being a whinning faggot is fun to me, yes.

PvE balance is retarded. The whole fun of PvE combat is too slowly become so unbelievably god like that suddenly YOU'RE the asshole. Take Risk of Rain 1/2 for example. If you remained perfectly balanced the whole game there'd be no fun at the end. However when you reach the point that you attack so fast your animation is glitching out, every time you shoot an enemy you fill the sky with heat seeking missiles and you can kill most small enemies by just walking in the general direction of them because your frost relic/barbed wire/unstable tesla coil/what have you procs and instantly vaporises them. Yeah making it so you can overpower yourself to the point that bosses explode on contact might sound unfun to some but for some it's the ultimate, you've made it so far that the big monsters that made you shit your britches a few levels ago are now just more chaff for you to destroy.

Because arbitrary self-imposed limitations are never the same as inherent limitations.

So now you've moved from "It's more fun that way" to "I don't WHINE about it like you". That's fine, but recognize your status as a shiteater.

Make shit viable
not balanced

Which is fun for about 5 minutes and then you go play something else.
Or you could play a game where improvement comes from YOU becoming better at the game, not just your character becoming more and more overpowered.

I think devs should worry about making the game fun first. Then with about balance after making sure not to ruin the things that make it fun.

And you could git gud and stop complaining about you gay ass deaf blind unoptimized halfling not being able to dish out as much damage as a minotaur, and learning to find alternate ways to complete the game. You can replay later again as something that doesn't suck.

>Additionally, fans of low tier characters just need to accept the risks that come from playing their character. If they don't like the risks they could always learn one of the dominant characters, it's a non-issue except for the most stubborn
This.
To be honest, I can't respect any fighting game with diverse top 8s. It just shows to me that people aren't taking the game seriously enough.

No he's a retard. Look at Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition where Yun and Yang were made overpowered on purpose. Virtually everyone fucking hated Arcade Edition, AE 2012 was probably the most balanced SFIV ever was and it was incredible on a competitive level.

If you have fun being a crying little bitch it is fine by me. I don't though.

That's what you play PvP games for, you brainlet.
PvE games should be about becoming OP as fuck, not about skill.

Single player and co-op multiplayer: absolutely right. Fuck balance, have fun.
PvP multiplayer: don't play this.

Shiteater.
There's a difference between "You built a character poorly despite the guidelines you were given" and "The character class you chose is actually just worthless, sorry". One is a failing on the part of the player to play within the system, the other is developer incompetence.

FFXIV doesn't give a fuck about Balance and its one of the most fun MMORPG out there right now

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He's right, balance isn't always necessary to make a fun game. Games like Symphony of the Night are hugely unbalanced but incredibly fun to mess around with.

I think you don't understand that he does understand and you just wasted you life over-analyzing. Well done.

Keep crying man, won't change the game mechanics.

Is your game built as a power fantasy? Is it based upon grinding with a satisfying game-play loop to make the grinding you need to do (not the spreadsheet part, the actual dirty work) to gain that power?
If so, yes. Fuck balance.

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No, but it will continue to denigrate the shitty games you like and make you mad.

Most RPG games are unbalanced as fuck. Only game that tried to balance shit (and it didn't accomplish anything) was PoE and it was boring as fuck, so much that tanked PoE2.
So keep playing about the 99% of games that are unbalanced, retard.

Woops, *keep crying
If you actually kept playing them you might git gud tho :^)

Not really. An action game needs challenge otherwise it is just a chore

Because balance doesn't matter in single player games, it's very important in multiplayer though
Also this guy is a huge fag

Screw balancing. Some shit should be OP and others not. The key is viability. It should be possible to fully complete a game with any build and set of choices.

Flash just proved BW was unbalanced and it's not fun to watch. When you have to implement garbage anti-terran maps just to get protoss or zerg to win it's not exciting

Sorry, all your favorite games are easy and worthless.
It's not hard to beat these unbalanced abortions, if anything it's far too easy because of the lack of understanding on the part of the developer.

Balance should mean "everything is equally viable" rather than "everything has the same maximum potential"

>balance in single player games
>devs actually nerf strong builds nowadys in single player games

OH NO NO NO NO

>FFXIV doesn't give a fuck about Balance
AST players this patch are already aware

I've always busted my head on how things could be made balanced in a video game until pic related taught me about how imbalance is actually the perfect balance. There is nothing more fun for a player as much for a spectator to make everything stupid.

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FFXIV is literally the most balance focused MMO out there right now.

He's 100% right when it comes to singleplayer or coop. In PVP though make everything broken in its own way.

Your favorite single player game is unbalanced too and you are too stupid to even realize.

For raiding sure, but Monk out dpses every meele and is broken as fuck, Astro was destroyed, nuked to death. Paladin and Gunbreaker are literally the best tanks in the game

Works for Melee

People undervalue balance because they never actually notice good balance, only bad balance.

Take Resident Evil 1 for example, would it still be as fun without the limited inventory? The specific item placement? The exact among of RNG put into landing a critical hit? Somebody had to decide all that stuff. It was not just magically there.

People take good balance for granted.

Yes, I agree it isn't perfectly balanced, but it's not an incompetent clusterfuck with a win button strategy and a fuck yourself strategy.

People liked RE4s comparatively huge inventory too. I don't want to argue against your point because I agree people do inherently enjoy well balanced games without realizing it. But classic vs nu Resident Evil is a trap to argue about in this discussion.

Monk has been either the top or second top melee DPS since its inception, but they still fucking ruined the class in Shadowbringers. TK rotation WAS MNK. They ruined all my goddamn classes, so I haven't even bothered with the expansion.

What game is it? C'mon, humor me.

>D&D
>fun
D&D is only the bog standard RPG because of marketing. From a system perspective, D&D is a fucking mess, it wouldn't even be fitting to call it the call of duty of rpgs, because at least call of duty can be simple, mindless fun.

It's fucking hilarious how this recluse has been absolutely dabbing on game balances for the past decade. Blizzard and Riot hire hundreds of people to FAIL at the job this one man succeeds at. It's honestly fucking embarrassing.

is right.

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I think it's Rainworld, but it's a tough call.

Absolutely. Finding that combination that absolutely shatters the difficulty feels fucking great.

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Perfect balance ultimately means complete homogenization. Absolutely boring shit.

That's not even true, you can have a game with absolutely identical endgame performance and radically different ways to get there, theoretically.

>People liked RE4s comparatively huge inventory too. I don't want to argue against your point because I agree people do inherently enjoy well balanced games without realizing it. But classic vs nu Resident Evil is a trap to argue about in this discussion.

Shinji Mikami has specifically said that Resident Evil 4 was originally played way more like an older RE just with a different camera, what they noticed however was that the different perspective completely changed the flow of the game and the old formula had to be rebalanced and tweaked. They added more ammo and a bigger inventory to fit the enhanced field of view and combat abilities.

He even said that he never intended for RE4 to end up as an Action game, but the camera change caused it to "pull that way".

Here's the real scoop on balance:

What balance really means, is decision weight. If a decision is obviously always optimal on one side, then that leads to repetitive playstyles and less variety, a key to replay value being lost.

Don't knock on balance; it is actually very important.

Depends on multiple things. I think it's very important in PvP types of games. In competitive MP games that aren't PvP directly it still matters a lot. It's important even in co-op MP games because one player being vastly OP will likely ruin the fun of the people playing with him, even if it's co-op. It wouldn't be fun to play a game if you can even get into a fight because the strong dude annihilates everything before you even have a chance to engage properly. In pure SP games it doesn't matter as much as long as it's not so horrid that some classes become unviable for the hardest content the game has to offer.

That being said, balance can easily kill fun too. It can very easily lead to poor design decisions which make characters more and more similar to each other until everything feels like the same bland and boring dreck like everything else. I think it's important to keep that in mind and to try to balance on more of a macro scale - as in the things you're trying to balance should overall have similar effectiveness, but you shouldn't try to balance in the sense that every action class A can perform should not be more effective than any action of class B or something like that.

>D&D dumping on balance
>Good
Ah yes! Because Psionics in AD&D were not reviled on it's heyday! Because 3.X was NOT criticized left and right for it's retarded trap options!
There is a point where over balancing things only makes things boring, but to argue it is over rated when the most successful D&D edition of all time (5e. Yes. Look it up.) is also the most balanced speaks volume to the idea that D&D is unbalanced and that is fine.

youve clearly never played uo because the pvp in that game is so next level to anything thats ever come out its untouchable in its scale

>sp/coop games
as long as you don't have the game more rigged than carnival shit or give the player actual fucking garbage for options against whatever you're throwing at them (i.e. Enter the Gungeon, borederlands 2)
>competitive shit
the only big thing you want to avoid here is having something be the single ultimate answer to literally every possible game state (i.e. fox in melee/brawl meta knight)

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Yep. MW2 is the best CoD in the series for that reason.

Well it is actually a pretty fucking neat game but it is the epitome of unfair and unbalanced in the traditional sense of the word. I guess the part of "unbalanced" that irks you is not being able to get out of a bad situation due to poor choices early on and eventually git gud without getting bogged down by those early mistakes. I can respect that, but if you think it in terms of time sink in the game, making a new char after learning what stuff doesn't work it probably takes less time than what it takes to master advances maneuvers in rainworld. In any case you don't seem to be the "every build should work!" kinda guy I took you for, so disregard all the previous namecalling.

>theoretically
there's the rub, mr. devil's advocate

The appearance of balance is, often, more important than balance itself.
It also varies on the type of game it is. If the concept of the game is play against other players...it should attempt to be balanced.

It also depends on how this imbalance comes about. If the imbalance is because of bugs then they should be removed if they trivalize content.
Players, given the opportunity, will ruin a game for themselves. So you must always protect the player from themselves in terms of trivializing content.

Game design is literally all about tricking the player into thinking they are smarter than the game they are playing.

You do not actually love broken game design, you love the feeling of thinking you "cheated" the system and got an advantage; when in reality the game designers are just playing 4D Chess with you.

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maplestory 2?

Intentional weakness on the part of the player character is a design choice not a balance oversight. If you make X basic character choice early on and are fucked to unfun gameplay versus Y basic character choice that makes you an unstoppable god, the game has fucked up. I'm fine with imbalance as a result of informed player choice.

To a degree, then again going too far into not giving a fuck about it can also backfire.

>X means Y
>but it doesn't in theory
>THEORYCRAFTER

Level scaling/balancing is one of the biggest tumors in the gaming industry.

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I loved playing around in FFT with dual wielding, guns with break skills or just the good old Mathematicians. Messing with characters that made enemies useless or straight up deleted them was pretty fun and I can imagine it being similar for other games. I think that multiplayer PvP games should work towards balance but in single player who cares? You have the option to break the game or play it as intended. Only shitty devs who want to milk their customers go and balance single player/PVE games.

>Is he right, does balance and the endless spergs who bitch about it ultimately result in boring games?
when they balance by nerfing, yes

game devs should instead balance by buffing weaker weapons/abilities/etc

CORRECT:
>dev, Weapon X is too strong compared to the other weapons
>alright then, let's buff the other weapons so they can compete

INCORRECT:
>dev, Weapon X is too strong compared to the other weapons
>alright then, im a fucking retard so let's nerf Weapon X to be weak and unsatisfying like the other guns

Cancer.

If something is weak there's no reason you can't make it stronger.

Balance is only relevant in PVP.

Buff only game design is fucking terrible.

Broken shit is fun.

Remember the golden gun on 007?

Or the fucking wall hacking sniper in Perfect Dark?

Man that shit was so much fun.

Stupid post, PM has more busted shit than Melee does while also being much more balanced and everyone loves it because you don't have to play one of the 6 top tiers to be able to compete.

Developers saying "balanced games aren't fun!" is a fucking ploy to get their stupid fanbases to be okay with them not putting in serious effort to make their game better and can just half ass it. They've genuinely tricked people into thinking that balanced means no one can have busted shit when in actually a game where everyone, or mostly everyone, has broken shit would also be considered balanced.

Actual balance is when there is a defined meta and only certain things work in it and all the things that work in it are fair but everything else is trash tier.

>your favorite game is imbalanced and shit unless all the options and choices are exactly the same
>your favorite game is boring and shit if all the options and choices are exactly the same
>you only like your favorite game because it completely caters and panders to your playstyle

>my favorite game is based as fuck, either all the options are balanced or they offer real and interesting choices
>my favorite game doesn't pander to anything except the most patrician gamer tastes

If it leads to power creep levels, sure. You can have both buffing and nerfing without nerf focused or buff only balancing.

>are you talking about this game?
I wasn't thinking about that game in particular, but I've been burned before by similar games. I played the first maple story as well as a few MMOs.

Sure it does, it keeps casuslizing classes each expansion and further homogenized them all within their specific role. The only differences between most Jobs now is the cosmetic visuals associated to their abilities.

Alright, if you are fine with mixed nerfs and buffs you're alright. Games should be designed around a golden level of satisfying effectiveness and everything should be brought up or down to that level.

level scaling is just the lazy solution to abundant side content.
Why its so popular in RPGs is the open-ended nature of how quests are done mean that someone could be doing X story quest at either level 15 or level 20. The former being extremely hard and the latter being a walk in the park.

So it's a lazy solution to the varying ways players play games; some rush and some are completionist.
But this is more of an issue of how bad open world games are, than anything else.

Netflixmancers clear Hell with ease, have you ever played the game?

What maps are anti-terran
How can a map even be anti terran

I don't want balance in singleplayer games, go fuck yourself - I put in effort to be overpowered.
I do want balance in multiplayer games, because if there isn't - everyone will just use the most overpowered getup they can.
youtube.com/watch?v=h5hTG2bb27Y

rock paper scissors is balanced

but autists dont want rock paper scissors because they only win 1/3 of the time

In singleplayer games you want to feel OP, but you shouldn't actually be it.

>make a class absolutely useless except for ONE single mechanic
>"just quirks any good game has"
that's the most retarded shit I've read all day

I beat all the difficulties on Diablo 2 with a skeleton summoner necromancer. Were you not using any curses at all bro?

Just retire scaling in RPGs and we're good.

>Because Psionics in AD&D were not reviled on it's heyday! Because 3.X was NOT criticized left and right for it's retarded trap options!
Very, very true. Even in psionics there was no balance. One person could have the psionic abilities to turn intangible, disintegrate enemies, and mind control others. Another psychic could have the ability to tickle you with a little damage, sense your emotions, and grow plants a little faster or some shit.

People may have loved 3.X but they also loved optimized as fuck power builds with prestige classes and spells that can fuck over encounters. Some skills were crazy useful like bluff. Some skills were almost downright necessary like concentration for casters. Knowledge of (thing that won't show up in game) or profession (farmer) or whatever was generally pointless. You can put a bunch of points in climb and be incredibly lame compared to someone with boots of spiderclimb.

>ugly faggot draws himself with :3 face

>How can a map even be anti terran
Pretty simple, really. Think about what happens if Terran players couldn't turtle up and lings could just run in and destroy everything. Basically the normal meta always favors Terran because Terran has the best units. Terran have won ASL 5 times and they would probably would have won 6 times if they didn't use anti-terran maps in season 5

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They get boring when the devs are so damn bad at their jobs that entire avenues become useless. For example: All pure energy damage weapons in Fo4 and 76 are useless due to just how poorly Bethesda coded energy damage in regards to armor pierce (literally does not reduce energy resist at all) and DR calculations (% taken off is based on the base energy damage before perks, not the final damage after perks and crits against the enemy's energy resist).

Invalidating an entire class of weapons does not make for a nice game in replay value and general balance.

Based on the replies user might be an idiot, I dont know I don't play Diablo but his overall point is right. It sucks when content of the game is clearly on a lower level on the rest and its even worse when when the game is competitive making low stuff just lag to far behind the meta to become viable.

>How can a map even be anti terran
by not having only one entrance to any given mineral deposit, and if there is only one entrance to any given mineral deposit, not having that entrance be 2 fucking tiles wide.
So basically, by not being designed like a fucking Tower Defense map

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They know it's the last good one. Thankfully there's no reason to buy D2 ever again with how many good private servers are up.

I like him but he's wrong. Anything unbalanced pulls me right out of a videogame

Yeah 2 guns you only get after dozen of hours of great balanced gameplay.
If you had the Farsight from the first level you wouldn't even play through the game at all, you'd be bored after level 2.

Shitty balance can absolutely destroy a game, so no, Mr. "I designed a shitty MMO" can go fuck himself.

>mp game is incredibly fun despite janky balance
>the sequels are more balanced but nowhere near as fun
What was her name?

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>If you had the Farsight from the first level you wouldn't even play through the game at all, you'd be bored after level 2.

Then the game was balanced?

Lots of unbuildable space everywhere.

Balance means different things to different games. Competitive game balance should be obvious, but you have to be careful not to strip out individuality or whatever from your characters/classes. For non-competitive games, you're more balancing around the challenge of your game and the difficulty of getting something fun but broken. A super gun that stomps everything can be fun, but if its too easy to get the game will likely get boring. You could balance some of the game around the gun, but then the gun feels like less of a fun reward and becomes something you just have to get to get past something. So you have to balance the reward of broken things between the ease of getting them, and depending on the game, you'll wanna balance things so you don't just have one broken thing at the end that makes everything else feel useless.

Of course these days people just think 'balance' means everything has to be boiled down to bland samey-ness, which is shit.

not really, I prefer consistent challenge and not having to police myself out of potential broken tactics every 5 minutes so I can play the game normally and not steamroll everything

I solo every MH game with the HH exclusively, you two are just weenies.

MP games needs balance
SP does not

Bullshit. SotN is so much worse off for having zero balance and difficulty it's not even funny. Even OoE, the closest the series ever got to being balanced, is worse off because Nitesco overwhelms every other option in the game hands down.

3 of my favorite games are Alpha Centauri, Morrowind, and HOMM3. 55,000 Power Liches>Balance in terms of fun

SP games at least need some balance, especially between builds to keep from going stale. Fo4 gets hurt pretty bad due to how Heavy weapons and Automatics get outclassed hard as the game goes on due to Beth's idiot armor scaling.

It depends on the type of game, and what is and is not balanced. Also how it's balanced. For instance a fighting game that's balanced because everyone is too similar to each other, like the early Mortal Kombat games is quite boring after a while. A game that's balanced because every character has something broken to them like Guilty Gear is actually pretty fun.

A game that's unbalanced and ultimately relies on repetitive and boring strategies is quite bad, like Smash Bros Brawl. A game that's unbalanced, but said unbalance creates a new, fun way to play the game with it's own depth is great, like Marvel vs Capcom 2

Destiny 1.

>everyone will just use the most overpowered getup they can
WRONG. Look at something like TF2. If Heavy was much stronger than everyone else, sniperfaggots would still play sniper, spyfaggots would still play spy and women would still play support characters. People don't pick characters based on how strong they are, people just want to enjoy the game. Now if you're talking e-sports, then you do need balance. But e-sports is cancer

If its a single player game sure for the most part. Although if the game is a skill ceiling heavy game where using one weapon/item trivializes it and defeats the purpose of getting good it should be patched.

For multiplayer its another bag entirely. Its important to have smart options that are also strong. Sure some degeneracy might arise but if everything is bland bad metas usually arise either way. So good tools that are also satisfying to beat with a few gray spots here and there of faggotry beats over balanced drivel.

MVC2 could've been a even better game with some balancing though. A lot of the mid tiers are insanely cool and have good setups even a few select low tiers do. But if you run anything outside of the top 5 besides some super specific teams you're gimmicking yourself badly because the top 5 have crazy good neutral for how fast MVC2 is.

Same with UMVC3 which was good in different ways. If they could've patched it one or two more times it might be the best vs game and still super alive instead of on life support from ITS MAHVEL BABY drones like Kaneblue who cannot be competitive in other games.

Depends on the game, if a game is "Competitive" you should have some rough "Balance" for obvious reasons, if it is single player it is okay to have broken things if they aren't immediately obvious and are more in it to reward a player for having figured something out or having gone out of their way to get said thing, FFVIII is a good example i think, since it is insanely easy to break with multiple ways to do so, from just buying tents at the start of the game to Spam Limits to Refining Cards or just junctioning the Magic right, a shame some people just see it as "Draw Magic 100 times every battle and then never cast it" because they failed to see how broken shit is.

With MMOs it should also be some ballance so everything is viable or has prupose unless specifially for "Flavour", but in practice actually matter too much because people will be Full Retard about things anyway even a slight difference gets blown up to be insurmountable and sometimes people get in in their head something shitty is the Bees Knees, the "Protect vs Cleric Stance in sub-20 dungeons" problem Scholars had in FFXIV comes to mind, where players something sub-optimal just because it was expected and they got bitched out on by other players if they didn't because Protect basically gave a Placebo even though it reduced damage by such low amounts that it did not matter since Eos overhealed passively at those levels regardless.

even if it's broke it should be fine for a single player game

fuck faggot devs who patch shit out of single player games for being "too good" or "not intended"

balance has never been terribly important in games, even competitive games. What matters is depth and the decision making tree. You can only have 2-3 options but if those options lend themselves to intense and intricate interactions then it's better than 100 options that are tic-tac-toe tier. The only reason balance has become a huge issue now is because of never ending patching makes people think that devs should be able to get everything perfect eventually just through sheer trial and error. The ideal is having a bunch of different options all on the same level, but it's extremely hard to do that without homogenizing a bunch of stuff

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>d&d 5e's bounded accuracy system removes number inflation from core stats but also guts class gameplay variety, has vague non existent rules that bopil down to "eye ball it lol", and a janky non functioning skill/background system
>even after all the changes spell casters are still top tier

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Yeah the finding part is, but then once you realize how OP and broken it is the game becomes boring, balancing fixes that and allows you to find another way to break the game reseting the system so people who like to find ways to break the game can still have fun.

Manipulation of reality in creative ways will always be the most powerful route unless you nerf it to literal uselessness

valve was is unironically the best way

>summonmancer
>underpowered
You can beat the ubers with nothing but a staff containing teleport charges. If you are going to talk about underpowered, mention the druid who is mostly just a shittier version of other characters.

remember when Krampus' head only had a three room charge? or when the stopwatch activated the slowdown effect as soon as you got it?
good times

I don't have an issue with spellcasters being the most powerful, it makes sense in a fantasy game.

My issue is that the actual bounded accuracy system is really good, but everything on top does little to add variety.
My players roll for stats just because every point buy ends with a +5 basic attack lame as squad that feels the same.

Hell, whats even the point of EXP in 5e? Using their own rules as given has levelups happening slow as fuck, yet strong low CR enemies don't give much EXP even for 4 man parties.

This same issue with quality is found in the art of the game, the art work for the red dragon is amazing, and holds up with any piece of classic fantasy art, meanwhile shit like the lamia looks like an intern scribbled it for deviant art.

Ah, I misread the point of your post.

Anyway, my group tried 5e and PF2 for a couple of sessions and now we're back to PF1 since it's way more versatile, despite its flaws.

I suppose balance doesnt matter if you can manipulate a bunch of bird brains into being click zombies chasing the next gameplay unlock and they only realize the game is an unbalanced shitfest after several months. Like diablo 2 or star wars galaxies

Pathfinder gets a lot of flak from people for being an overwritten mess but most people online use an SRD and don't bother to read the books.

When I first started playing my DM let us use whatever the fuck we managed to find as long as it was paizo, if you just go witht eh core books, advanced combat, and then use erratas and only a few splat books, it's the better system out there.

PF2 has me worried, they are imitating 5e (which to be fair sold gangbustesrs), but rather then try to make a more fleshed out game they are moving side ways with janky action economy rules.

You found me

>Kongdoo, Mind (T)
>KSL2, Effort (Z)
>ASL 1, Shuttle (P)
>ASL 2, Flash (T)
>ASL 3, Flash (T)
>ASL 4, Flash (T)
>ASL 5, Rain (P)
>ASL 6, Effort (Z)
>ASL 7, Last (T)
Of the 9 tournaments on Afreeca, 2/9 were terran victories, 2/9 protoss, 2/9 zerg and 3/9 flash. If anything, it is pretty obvious it is flash that is overpowered.