Game Balance - Retard alert

I assume he's saying that if you let everything be broken, people will have fun figuring things out and doing whatever they want. The game wasn't about perfectly balanced 1v1s or the ultra fair no exploit epic quest to defeat baal.

> Balance is literally all that matters.
then how is activating every cheat and completely breaking the game fun, you much more likely retarded idiot?

The idea that everything must be balanced is why all modern blizzard games are so insanely boring. Everything that gives any character some sort of unique identity is sanded away until everything is the same boring sludge.
And the balance _still_ sucks ass despite it.

No idea. And in a single-player or coop game, having perfect balance is pointless and unfun.
Had a friend watch me play XCOM 2 and asked why I used Reapers to scout the map since it made the level far easier. Also was critical of me using overwatch every turn. Seemed surprised when I told him because it was more fun.

You should see the talk about balancing Diablo 3.
youtube.com/watch?v=urijgWXLYck

Honestly I agree as far as single player games go. I like being able to become broken as shit towards the end of the game, like in FFX with the damage cap removal.

Balance only matters in multiplayer games like MMOs

D3 was balanced around the real money action house. 99.99% of the drops were shit so ppl had to buy their equipment.

Not just that, in the talk they specifically mention how they thought people wouldn't like higher rates and then instantly were confused when people said they want higher rates and liked higher rates in their testing. I can't remember the whole talk but needless to say it's a mix of ridiculousness like "You should be happy you have to grind for that 0.00001% drop because it gives you a story!" to plain old insanity like "We know better than the players".

Nah. It's best to ensure the game is balanced so the player never becomes a god mindlessly killing things and there is always challenge.

I guess it's a difficult balance to strike, making it so that one thing can't make you steamroll through the whole game, but still being powerful enough to be useful or just fun.
Binding of isaac is the perfect example of both being in the same game.

In multiplayer games, yes balance is good
In singleplayer? Balance is cancer

then why is wow multiplayer so shit right now, it's probably the most balanced it's ever been.

>hey let's completely ruin your class because this other class is shit!

Games do need to be balanced enough that certain options aren't so good they invalidate other ones and that other options aren't so bad they're frustrating to play. IE don't make certain play-styles objectively better or worse then others.

No it isn't.
t. dota

Balance is a meme in single-player games. Look at Pillars of Eternity 2.
>the swordmage hits too hard, nerf his sword magic
>the wizard casts too well, nerf their magic

Not every game has to be a gay ass esport you homo.

>We know better than the players".
This is blizzard in a nutshell really.

Balancing sp games is a bit different then mp. While in mp games you want character that each have certain strenghts and weaknesses so everyone can have the upper hand under certain conditions, in sp it's more about how hard your progress can be trough the game. You can have a character that can do everything reasonably well, another one that has shit early, but amazon late game, and one that is good early one, but gets harder the farther you play unless you play it perfectly well.

It's because of the idea that someone else could be inherently better than they are. You'll see these people playing modern mmorpgs a lot. They'll complain about things like other people having better gear than themselves and that it is unfair, which is why level and gear scaling is so rampant in mmorpgs now. I find it especially heinous in games like Destiny, where every gun has the same normalized DPS. Doesn't matter if you use a level 400 revolver or a level 400 assault rifle, they all have the same dps and the only thing that matters is which you like more of them. There's no right or wrong decision and if there were, they'd quickly patch it out to """"balance"""" the game.

Blizzard cannot balance ANYTHING.

Balance is absolutely overrated in a game that has no pvp elements.
Even then, there's a space for broken as shit vs games. Bloody Roar 2 has 0 balance while being very fun

>singleplayer/co-op game
>balance matters
underage go

PvP games, balance very important.

PvE games, fuck balance. Let me make builds that just nuke shit left and right. One of the reasons I replayed F:NV so much. Sure you can make fun builds for roleplaying and going down specific story routes which is fun. But some times you just want to min-max like fuck and become a god.

because they're attracted to the most efficient way of doing something.
If you have 8 classes in your rpg, and one of them is better than the other 7, then autsits will always pick that class otherwise they can't enjoy the game knowing there's an inherently better class

How was Diablo successful then?
I try to get into PoE every geek months and I feel like the only non-drug addict every time. Shit is too boring to play for more than a day or two.

Balance is nice, but nerfs are an atrocious invention. Improve the bad shit instead of taking people's fun away

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>auction house
Ah, what a time that was.

The broken act 2 inferno difficulty and regularly having to buy items off AH to progress through the game because of how utterly shit the drops were back then.

Strange that I kind of miss that in a way.

PoE is so fucking mindnumbing. It's like the devs made every design choice wrong on purpose.

>How was Diablo successful then?
Unique classes, art style and atmosphere really made it stand out.

This is very true.

>game dev doesn't focus on balance
>everything is viable and completely dependent on how you want to play
>game dev focuses on balance
>YOU BETTER HAVE OPTIMAL LOADOUT OR ELSE WE CANT DO SHIT

Destiny 2 is a prime example of over balance. If something is out of line, it's to the point that it becomes a necessity to even play since its overpowered, and when it eventually falls back in line it becomes absolute garbage.

Remnant devs seem to be having a good grasp on balance so far.

The enteral conflict between power fantasy autists and balancefags rages on.

This. You try your best to make as many options as fun as possible, but beyond that you don't need to constantly fiddle with numbers because one thing happens to be the best. Perfect balance and variety of meaningful choices is pretty much impossible to achieve. If two things are equally strong and one is easier to use, it's going to get used more and will be perceived as "better." Metafags will always flock to whatever is "best," so if you focus solely on pick rate of certain things you'll constantly be nerfing shit because it's what's fotm.

Nah that is super emotional response as they come
Especially if you take this stance, you cannot start backpedaling when the game turns to shit with everyone buffed to 11
Or well, you would just be another hypocrite in the world of crites

Every few months*

It’s weird, I read about it anywhere and it’s the best f2pgame and an amazing Diablo replacement. I’ve never beaten it (for the same exact fucking reasons) but I legitimately have more fun playing Diablo 2.

balanced towards most boring queueing maybe

>balance is all that matters
Yeah nah piss off you're not man enough to save the world from any alien attack

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The problem is that most nerfs are an overreaction. Some option goes from best to unplayable in one patch because devs are so fucking spooked by the pick rate.

Thanks doc

How would "everyone buffed to 11" make a game shit? It's balanced and fun as fuck at once

OP, you don't even fucking know what balance means. You just picked a random tweet by the first game designer you saw on Twitter and posted a contrarian opinion about it to get som (you)s. Fuck off.

>Balance is literally all that matters.
that statement is 10x as retarded as the statement "balance is overrated". idk who the faggot in your faggy Twitter screenshot is though

We got an old example that proves that wrong
Nobody likes to play UT instagib shock rifle mode over anything else

Perfect balance is anathema to good gameplay because it means nothing unique (since unique will be unbalanced) and everything is the same. It also means there are no optimal builds or strategies since you can do whatever you want and get the same result.

No it’s not. Literally it’s in the name, up to 11 implies out of balance.

>Play a Dragon Quest 8
>40 hours pass and you are like level 20-30 and get wrecked by shitty mobs and random battles take ages
>ecounter a metal slime farming spot
>farm them for a few hours
>now you are like level 70 and a fucking God and you steamroll the whole rest of the game and take revenge on all those random ecounter mobs
This is a fucking amazing feeling and if the game was "Balanced" it wouldn't exist.

>chaotic clusterfuck of 0.25 seconds ttk
>fun

literally who

>who cares about fun! balance is all that matters!

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until the later expansions, yes. adding dumb bosses with damage caps is not fun.

It depends on the type of game. In fightan, when everyone is too powerful games feel like playing Rock Paper Scissors; you make a wrong guess and you're dead. Marvel is loved and hated for this type of gameplay.

When was the last time you played a truly balanced game? If you say anything remotely asymmetrical, you're an idiot.

When everyone is unbalanced, nobody will be.

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>asymmetrical balance isn't balance
Imagine being this retarded.

I love this. Mother 3 had the Black Sootling.

Warcraft 3. Oddly enough it was the last good thing ever released by Blizzard.

Aside from fighting games and MMO's this is pretty spot on. There is a reason that people try to do the most OP tactics in a game, the reason is that its fun.

When everything is turned to 11 then no matter how bad your build is or how hard you kneecap yourself everything is still trivialized.

>new bosses have damage resistances
>new enemies all have too much health
Isaac has truly become a masochistic experience.

>Mark Kern
He is still living in his 5 million dollar west coast customs made bus?

It's not. There will always, always, always be something better or more efficient if your game is asymmetric.

Imagine being so retarded that you don't realize that. Pick a game, any game, that's asymmetrical and someone can name an instance where something is OP as fuck.

Balance in a single player game isn't that important. But if every single build you do in the game makes the game laughably easy, then it just needs proper tweaking so that even higher difficulties is not just inflated hp pools and damage. Basically, fun >>> balance but the game needs proper challenge and not just mindless button mashing, spamming 1 button, bullet sponge or you can endlessly stunlock and the enemy/monster doesn't have a proper counter and a chance to respond. But every single player game always has its own broken build that breaks the game, so balance really doesn't matter at the end of the day.

In multiplayer games balancing is very hard, because if you nerf everything it just makes for stale gameplay, and the hero/character loses its identity from said nerf (unless the thing has just insane values that should not be in the game). If you have something that is overpowered, you must make said thing have a weakness. Nerfing something isn't necessarily wrong but I prefer if every build/character has their has their set conditions to make their build overpowered, thus the game is balanced that way. For example, in dota hero A becomes strong at 35 minutes, while hero B spikes at 20 minutes, so while hero B is strong for the moment, hero A's team can make space for hero A while building appropriate items to mitigate anything that hero B can do.

Yeah, people hated it so much that an equivalent mode was present in almost all FPS games for a long-ass time
Buffing defensive options is possible too, you know
Off the scale. The previous scale that is now irrelevant

Rock paper scissors.

That's not asymmetrical, dumbass.

>fun
>balance
Games can be 'too balanced' or strict to be fun, and other games can be too imbalanced and retarded to be fun. Finding out you picked the horribly shitty class/weapon/etc. when it's too late isn't too fun either.
All depends.

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>Singleplayer Game
Balance should only loosely revolve around the intended progression.
There's nothing wrong with the possibility of overpoweredness as long as attaining it requires a conscious effort on the player's part and they can't accidentally hamstring the challenge of their playthrough.

>Multiplayer Game
Same as above, but balance needs to be found between all players so that no one feels as though they're just useless compared to their friends for picking X character or Y ability.
As soon as someone can tell they're objectively doing less work towards progressing through the game than the other players, most people will start focusing on this and it can dampen their enjoyment of the game.

>Competitive Multiplayer Game
Perfect balance is your unattainable pipe dream that you should always be striving for.
You want as many characters and/or playstyles to be viable as possible so that as wide a variety of them get used as possible.
There will always be favorites or metas, but they can be useful for finding out what the playerbase values out of their characters and help you figure out 'how' to balance your shit.

Diablo 2 didn't need amazing balance, but if he thinks balance as a general game designer is overrated then he's an idiot.

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Fun is what matters. And balance is not always fun.

as a gimmick mode that was never taken seriously
honestly, you have no backing behind your claims
you are a lonely idiot who thinks he is right but cannot find a single person who would agree with you

Okay, retard, the point is to strive for perfect balance not to actually achieve it. The ideal is for every gameplay choice to have a situation in which it is the best option.

>Balance in a single player game isn't that important.

Fucking brainlet.

Insults aren't arguments you cock-devouring retard nigger

Just came to say this. Balance is important, but not the first thing to think about.

>Fucking brainlet.
Explain, nigger. If you actually read my post I just said balance isn't important as long as the challenge in the game is properly tweaked.

What it comes down to is having meaningful choices. When it doesn't matter what you pick, you don't really care. And if one option is so obviously better, you'd be crippling yourself to pick anything else.

>each one has a unique strength and weakness
Literally the goal of every asymmetrically balanced game.

5:5 ryu mirrors is not the perfect fighting game

Balance is stupid, it's better when your accomplishments feel like accomplishments and not just a stepping stone
I've played 4x and only ES2 got the cool hang of it, nobody is overpowered if everyone is overpowered, Stellaris flattened the game so much that you have to get by by stacking minuscule bonuses, federations and alliances are overpowered because the average empire is the strength of another empire, and two empires overwhelm one empire, Civilization turned most outputs into minuscule bonuses except for the research bonuses like Great Library or Oxford University, but then they killed that too with Civilization 6
Getting your hands on that one powerful thing or getting the hang of the game and you being able to stick to a strategy or two that are very good compared to any other feels better than playing rock paper scissors

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Balance is always more fun than an absence of balance, unless you're a literal child who hasn't outgrown the novelty of cheat codes yet. The reason balance has bad PR is shitty devs like Riot games cutting mechanics out of their games in the name of "balance" when really they're just lazy and stupid.

Balance makes things boring

>the point is to strive for perfect balance not to actually achieve it.
Every game that strives for "Balance" over "Fun" is going to make a boiled down experience where it's incredibly easy to balance but has no remarkable features about them. No one wants to play this game; there have been dozens of games that have done that and you don't play any of them.
> The ideal is for every gameplay choice to have a situation in which it is the best option.
If they're the best option in every gameplay choice, then it's not fucking balanced. You don't even know what the word means.

Bad balance does

this
Imagine a fighting game where everybody fights the same and has the same functions
It's fucking boring

only americlaps care about balance in non pvp games
>unless you're a literal child
It's fucking video games you retard

>>each one has a unique strength and weakness
They have one strength and weakness. They're exactly the same. There is no asymmetry involved. They don't have any special abilities or powers over the other.

I can't believe balancefags don't even realize what asymmetry means.

>If you actually read my post I just said balance isn't important as long as the challenge in the game is properly tweaked.

It's something stupid that stupid people always say, so forgive me for assuming that you are stupid. Balance is very important in single-player games because otherwise you are presenting players with choices when they don't actually have a choice, meaning that you are wasting their time and misrepresenting your gameplay as more varied than it actually is.

DUH BUT THAT'S HOW ADULTS ENJOY VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I PLAY GAMES TO BE COMPETITIVE

Unbalanced shit is perfectly fine in single player as long as it's not rampant or obvious. Leave bits and pieces for people to exploit, who cares. Like in SMT Nocturne, Daisoujou was imba as fuck as early as lv37 or something, but most people never used him long enough to notice.

They want to feel validated in the fact that they exploit what the devs want them to use which is the meta that the devs set up ( and yes the devs make propabilitys on how the meta will progress they make these changes on that purpose).
The only problem is that this pretty much kills the fun of creating a unique meta that is formed by the fans, because many AAA devs are afraid to let them do something beyond the bounds of what was planned (overwatch being the best example here and Jeffs fear of making things exciting) stuff like "fun" bugs get squashed and removed because they are not seen as creative but disruptive something like bunny hopping would have been removed nowadays and the devs would have refused to bring it back because it's an "unfair advantage".
Balance nowadays is just an excuse to put a leash around the pvp player base neck ( and in some coop and singleplayer games too which is dumb)
to keep them in line with what the devs are planning and god help you if you find some anomality during gamelay and you use it to your advantage because you will get banned for it.
I would go even further and say that this is the most lazy shit any pvp designer could do and that is to create an eternal stalemate which is boring.
The total opposite with everything being OP is just bullshit though (noob tubing in MW2 being a good example) and makes people angry and that is also understandable.
Another problem is that many AAA devs think they are creating a good meta and that via collected data but in reality are they just creating another meta stalemate which only ends when the next patch arrives, which is never a good thing.
AAA needs to stop being a bunch of cowards and think a bit outside the boxnif they want to engage the players and make the game fun by maybe looking at some of the bugs and exploits that got found and maybe try to experiment with them because stuff like that creates more fun than worthless data collected from matches.

Balance and optimal fags like you are a cancer to this hobby. I'm so sick of seeing retards calling for changes in games day one

You seems to have a different definition of asymmetry balance than most people. StarCraft is an example of it. You also seem to be a literal autist that thinks if perfect balance is not reached then balance is irrelevant.

>Okay, retard, the point is to strive for perfect balance not to actually achieve it. The ideal is for every gameplay choice to have a situation in which it is the best option.
You are fucking retarded. So the point is to try to perfectly balance the game but not actually do it?

If the game isn't a mirror match every time, then there's no perfect balance involved. This is why he said "balance is overrated".

It's also a crazy broad term: Adjusting boss/enemy health values, or the time it takes to progress through certain areas are 'balancing' the game.
I also hate anyone who thinks balance doesn't 'matter' in a single player game, as if some exploit that can potentially undermine the experience is 'okay'.

>I need to play the most efficient way
I hate you niggers so much

Autists obsessing over balance has ruined so many games. People nitpick over balance way, WAY beyond the point where there is any meaningful or noticeable difference, simply because they are totally fixated on the idea of perfect optimization and efficiency. The obsession with always making the "best" choice no matter how insignificant. And they cry so loudly about it that the game ends up getting neutered so that any differences can be scrubbed out, along with all the variety and fun.

I honestly wish these people would die or at least find a hobby better suited to them. Solving equations or something.

TF2 is well balanced an asymmetric across the classes

>You seems to have a different definition of asymmetry balance than most people
You seem to not be able to use a dictionary, let me help you:

sym·me·try
/ˈsimətrē/
Learn to pronounce
noun
noun: symmetry
the quality of being made up of exactly similar parts facing each other or around an axis.

If you have three options, and they all do the same thing, then it's a fucking symmetrical game.

>StarCraft is an example of it.
StarCraft also iosn't even remotely balanced. You must haven ever played Starcraft in your life if you think it is.
People stuck with Starcraft because everyone has their own broken cheese strats that are fun to use and require skill to manage. Not because it's anything even remotely "balanced".

I'm glad I got one of you idiots to hold up Starcraft as an example because it's proof that none of you actually play the games you think you're experts on. If you were remotely familiar with Starcraft; you wouldn't have said that.

>Across the classes.
No it is not. If this were the case picking Spy or Sniper wouldn't be a wasted slot in a good chunk of the maps.

He's right. In a PvE environment, the ability to become overpowered is much better than unnecessarily restricting a player for the sake of "balance"

Exploits are literally a tertiary concern in single player.

>Balance is literally all that matters.
>game has bazillion continuous updates and call it "content" because no one can agree if it's balance or not

stay mad moba/fgc cuck.

>Every game that strives for "Balance" over "Fun" is going to make a boiled down experience where it's incredibly easy to balance but has no remarkable features about them.

They aren't mutually exclusive. I certainly never said that balance is more important than fun. For people that actually play video games, balance is an essential component of fun. Little kids and non-gamers might get a giggle out of picking the most OP broken garbage and just roflstomping the game, experienced gamers need balance to have fun.

Dota 2 and Slay the Spire would be examples of games that maybe prioritize fun a bit higher than balance but are still balanced very well, which in my book is the best way to be. Slay the Spire is a good case to point to because you can still achieve an OP broken build but only with careful planning or insane luck, i.e. you actually earn that roflstomp when you get it. Tbh the relics are probably not balanced all that well but the cards aren't bad and the 3 completely asymmetrical characters are balanced insanely well compared to each other. Would it be as fun if the Ironclad was the designated easy character who is deliberately overpowered and the Defect was the designated hard character who is deliberately underpowered? Absolutely fucking not.

Not an RTSfag, but how can it not be balanced if you mentioned that everybody has plenty of completely viable options?

>Balance is very important in single-player games because otherwise you are presenting players with choices when they don't actually have a choice, meaning that you are wasting their time and misrepresenting your gameplay as more varied than it actually is.

What the flying fuck? Just because a build literally has 5 less dps it means that the build is a "false choice" and the devs wasted the player's time for using the build? What do fuck kind of game do you even play nigger. I bet you even google the best build for a game even before you play it. Pro-tip: the most OP builds are not discovered when the game is released, so most builds you do is essentially inefficient. I guess the devs wasted your time for using "the best build" huh.

as good as diablo 2 is, runewords - particularly enigma - were a fucking awful idea and ruined the game

Name one map where a good spy/sniper isn't effective in a 12v12 pub

I hate you retarded niggers too.

Yeah pretty much this, stuff being a little too strong or too weak is fine. I don't understand the people who get butthurt about things like nerfing skills in Pillars of Eternity that were one shotting the final boss when used by a single character in a 5 man party game on the highest difficulty, that level of imbalance isn't fun.

>everyone has cheese
>not balanced

>balance is overrated.
I like the way this guy thinks.

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I like Mark, he's a smart guy and very talented, but sometimes it feels like he takes more credit than deserved

>tertiary concern
That's up to the dev, and depends on the 'exploit' in question.

If all you do is constantly "balance" everything and micromanage then everything becomes monotonous, stale and boring. You need fun things that shake up the game in a big way.

inb4 muh 6v6

>that pic
My god I can still hear that guy from decades ago.
>I'm going to r-r-r-rub you out see!

>Just because a build literally has 5 less dps it means that the build is a "false choice" and the devs wasted the player's time for using the build? What do fuck kind of game do you even play nigger.

What a childish interpretation of that post. I'm talking about shit like Fallout where there are skills for Science and Medicine but if you actually make a character who invests in those skills you will not have fun because they barely do anything. That's misrepresenting your gameplay and pretending to give players a choice.

Cheese strats only work when the opponent is not prepared for it. The fact you would use this as an example of it not being balanced only shows you are an idiot.

>sniper
Fucking retard

... I don't play the most efficient way in any game. That's literally the reason I think balance is important. Because I want to make choices that are fun and flavorful and have the game be designed to accommodate those choices, not fuck me over because I didn't do 5 hours of research to math out the optimum choice because autistic grognard thinks "balance is overrated".

Your way of thinking is so backwards and idiotic I don't even know what to say.

Balanced games are never the ones being played a decade+ later

>Daisoujou was imba as fuck as early as lv37 or something, but most people never used him long enough to notice.
That dude never left my fucking party desu. Even gave him that "give 10mp to someone else" skill so he stayed as an infinite magic battery battery for the rest of my party, even before I slapped Salvation on him.

Have you ever heard of Starcraft or Dota?

Balance klls fun
Unbalanced and cool tactics are mandatory for an online game to be relevant.
If all people do is play the groundhog day they're going to burnout, meme tactics and shitty builds that work are the essence of having fun and keeping the game fresh.
Balancing and fine tuning single player is cancer and should be banished

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The reason you think balance is important is because you think you can only use the most efficient way to play which is the unbalanced OP way, you don't need to be an autist and do research you just need to play the fucking video game

>The reason you think balance is important is because you think you can only use the most efficient way to play which is the unbalanced OP way, you don't need to be an autist and do research you just need to play the fucking video game

I think the reason you think balance isn't a big deal is because you're a fucking zoomer and have never played a game where balance is completely discarded. There is no "play the fucking video game" when a game is truly imbalanced and you pick the wrong choice. You have to start over again.

>I am going to do 5 hours of number crunching per potential viable build to determine the best
>IT'S YOUR FAULT

literally git gud

>Those
>Balanced
Oh lol

If the game is designed to force that behavior then it literally is the game designer's fault.

I never played fallout, but do those skills unlock anything or have unique things that are only available if they chose the skills? If there's nothing to the skills then I agree with you, but even then you can hardly say that balance is important if only those 2 are useless out of like 50 skills. That's just cherrypicking the devs' oversight and you purposely ignore all the good skills that are available in the game.

Weapons you're given in DMC3 are all over the place balance-wise, yet it's still often quoted as the best action game of all time.

It's only designed to enforce that behavior if you compulsively need to figure that shit out
Everyone else can put two and two together and realize a dumb wizard isn't going to work

Well if you're just going to be a retard troll who thinks asymmetry automatically disqualifies balance then you're not really having the same conversation as the rest of us and should probably stop posting in the thread.

its not a pvp game
kill yourself

offline game perhaps you can do overpowered shit but in multiplayer games everything better be fair and square. You NEED to balance game properly.

Nerfs don't happen in a vacuum. Even if you're not an autistic min maxer, you still get hit by it.

diablo 3 is homogenized trash

>do those skills unlock anything or have unique things that are only available if they chose the skills?

They probably unlock maybe a dozen unique text interactions that give you a mediocre item or something. I haven't played the game in like 15 years and I'm not looking it up for an internet debate.

>even then you can hardly say that balance is important if only those 2 are useless out of like 50 skills. That's just cherrypicking the devs' oversight and you purposely ignore all the good skills that are available in the game.

Of course I can. They are in the game. If something useless and annoying is in a finished game then the designer didn't do their job properly.

Hmm... I think it's more complicated though. I literally am unable to play pokeman if my mons don't have the correct nature and skill.

But I love imbalance in its own way, like Dota2.

Notice how people only like imbalances when it works in their favor?

Are you locked into weapons in DMC3, or can you freely switch them?

>He's never played a modern TCG

People adapt their strategy to counter unbalanced decks.

Adapt and git gud competitive Cuck. Not like you're ever going anywhere with your time invested in video games

>blocks your balance path

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diablo 3 is best played on consoles while listening to podcasts or watching something

He's literally right.

Take Grim Dawn for instance : fun game, but trying to take a build you made to endgame content is hell because it takes very long to take the very specific set items you need, and since the devs love having 200+ lines of balancing changes in each changelog, you have a good chance of your build getting dumpstered for no good reason before you were even able to finish it.

The worst thing about all this is that if their way of """balancing""" (which seems to be making as many changes as possible and balancing via spreadsheets without testing) were any good they'd have had a balanced game ages ago, because the process would have converged. Instead they are stuck doing more balance changes than everything else. It took them three years to implement simple QoL, and then it was only because they were forced to for console releases.

Obsessing over perfect balance in singleplayer games, especially ARPGs is retarded.

>But I love imbalance in its own way, like Dota2.

Dota 2 is not imbalanced.

balance doesn't matter in all games as much as others. in some games is fun to discover the "broken strat" or to play the underdog one and win anyway, or just play the strat that is more fun to you regardless of efficacy.

D&D however is fucking ruined by shitty balance and design decision and i felt this problem with multiple playgroup and made me want to play a fixed version of it or a different RPG. it does have some resilence to unbalance because it's a coop game and also a human moderated game, but it's not enough to stop its problems.

Not him but Dota 2 is totally, completely, utterly imbalanced.

>you have a good chance of your build getting dumpstered for no good reason before you were even able to finish it.

I love how anti-balancefags call me autistic or whatever for wanting games to be fun but this is their only argument against balance. "I don't get to be overpowered". Such stupid children.

It is. Every different moment makes the situation imbalanced. Early game, encounters, items, etc...

To add to this put someone up against an enemy that can only be beat with a few specific builds. Wonder how much they will care about balance then.

you're playing video games nigger

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The more "balanced" a game is the less fun it is. This is universally true across game dev. Imagine if every character in street fighter had the exact same move set.

Devs that put out frequent balance patches are trolling you. This week character X is strongest. Next week it's character Y. It's a ploy to get you to feel emotions (anger, joy) when your favorite character gets nerfed / buffed, and thus making you play more (because you feel emotionally attached to the game.)

it's balanced enough that you can have a 30M dollar tournament and have people play different heroes and try different strat.
if it takes a 30 M dollar tournament and 20 teams to find the heroes that are a bit better than other it just means it's not unbalanced at all.

Last I checked like 90% of the cast was picked or banned in the highest level of competition. Sounds pretty fucking good to me. Name one game of similar complexity that is better balanced than Dota 2.

>The more "balanced" a game is the less fun it is

i disagree.
i think your statement become true only after a certain point past which the only way to make each choice ( character) equivalently strong is to make them homogenous.for most game there is a large fun space before you reach that point and balance can improve a game there.

his right and you're wrong

begone zoomer

That's the end result of strat-team performance. Not the gameplay.

We are talking about gameplay.

Everything should be viable, not the same. This applies to sp and mp. Some things can be better but everything should be usable

The fun of these games is drawing up builds on paper and then seeing how they perform in real conditions. Farming for tens of hours to get the items needed and then waking up one morning to see that the build got dumpstered because some other build that used common items or skills managed to do the big endgame challenge in 5:50 minutes instead of the god-sanctioned minimum 6:00 minutes just makes you want to drop the game

No shit. Video games that should be fun. If they aren't balanced then they aren't fun.

>The more "balanced" a game is the less fun it is. This is universally true across game dev. Imagine if every character in street fighter had the exact same move set.

Is this conversation too mature for Yea Forums to handle? This is a youtube-tier argument, and those are the only kind of arguments anti-balancefags are making. Literally no one here is advocating removing variety to make the game easier to balance. Not a soul. If you need to make shit up to make your position seem less retarded, then maybe your position is retarded and you are a retard and you should just stop holding that position?

The issue is that if a game is too balanced people just boil characters down to their role because everyone will be as good as everyone else. Fuck that.

> but do those skills unlock anything or have unique things that are only available if they chose the skills?

If hes talking about 3/NV, then medicine boosts the effects of your healing items, meaning every stimpack becomes more efficient and powerful. Science allows access to hacking (same as lockpicking, but different minigame and gives more options), unique crafting recipes in NV.

Fallout 3/NV skills all have effects as there are some skill check dialogue for each skill in the game, especially NV. But they certainly arent useless.

Doctor/First Aid in the top down games certainly arent useless either, Doctor allows you to heal your broken limbs effectively without having the backtrack to the nearest doctor, while first aid allows you to heal yourself without wasting heal items.

Science in 2 allows you to have more dialogue options and better interactions when science is relevant, still not useless, that user is retarded.

I hope you have fun in whatever games you play user. Sometimes try out other builds even if they're not efficient, you'll probably have more fun playing a game while doing that.

>The fun of these games is drawing up builds on paper and then seeing how they perform in real conditions.

Isn't this literally the kind of shit you anti-balancefags were just accusing me of doing, which I don't, and telling me that I'm a faggot or whatever on that basis, and now your desire to do that is your primary argument against balance?

Sometimes having a "correct" choice is good. It's part of learning the game.

>thing is somewhat OP in a multiplayer game
>all devs have to do is give it a -5 stat and see if it's fixed or not
>"Whoops haha we gave it -30 and it's useless now"
>"It's staying this way btw, it's what you guys wanted right?"

>is this the only argument you can come up with?

Says the guy spewing ad homs and deflecting.

Removing variety is exactly what balancing is.

If there is a correct choice then there really isn't a choice.

I do. All the time. Tell that to your fellow anti-balance retard here You fucking idiots. Can't even keep your moronic talking points straight.

What in god's name the fuck do you think you're saying? You think it's possible to have an asymmetrical cast of over a hundred characters with 95% of them being viable in million dollar tournaments without the game being well-balanced?

Yes there is. People make incorrect choices all their lives. You eat red meat, don't you?

>Removing variety is exactly what balancing is.

Hmm, that's weird, because all of the games that are being praised for their balance in this thread have a lot of variety.

Thankfully you will never get in to game development.

Is it possible that they don't know the difference, or that there are games that handle balance much differently?

Always hilarious when a non-dev says this. You really believe this gives you a high ground.

"Into" is one word, skipper.

D&D is only the mac daddy of TTRPGs because it's the first and the biggest, thus getting all the media attention, TTRPGs are such a niche that new people literally call them "Dungeons and Dragons" and have next to no idea that other systems exist. It's not even a very good system, but any system can be fun when you play it with friends.

Yeah but the balancing I’m talking about was “wipe encounters with zero effort and no particularly focused build decision making” not stuff getting nerfed to only work in a single build.

note how everyone defending imbalance talks about overpowered stuff and not underpowered stuff

Nigga if you wanna be overpowered just play on easy.

>Literally no one here is advocating removing variety to make the game easier to balance
Sure, but it's still what happens. Balancing changes are in 97% of cases just making options be more in line with others.

Alright, then let me be the first. The correct way to balance a game is to buff weaker fighters/jobs/classes/whatever. If you nerf a so-called overpowered class then whoever enjoys that class has their toys taken away, and is more likely to stop playing the game.

Balance is overrated as long as bots exist to teleport to the throne room and kill for you....

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For multiplayer games balance is needed, you need to feel empowered to overcome your opponents without it being cheesy.

For single player games, in the late game being unbalanced is fun. FFVII and SotN have completely unbalanced endgames and I love them for it. Once you're hours and hours in, it's nice just being able to breeze through everything - and because of the time sink it feels earned.

>If you nerf a so-called overpowered class then whoever enjoys that class has their toys taken away

Sometimes it needs to happen. Also, this entire thread the anti-balancefags have taken the position that optimum choices don't matter and anyone who thinks that they should is a "tryhard" who needs to "git gud" and yet the only ONLY actual argument I've seen against balance has been whining about nerfs because anti-balancefags evidently need to be overpowered to have fun, because they are stupid children.

>FFVII and SotN have completely unbalanced endgames and I love them for it. Once you're hours and hours in, it's nice just being able to breeze through everything - and because of the time sink it feels earned.

Why not play a walking simulator if you don't enjoy gameplay?

Muh balance is like muh grafix, you only actually need a minimal level.
In the case of muh balance, that level is enough to prevent either of the following cases:
>a single option is so fucking strong that everything else is trash in comparison (melee fox)
>a number of options are so fucking weak that they are actual fucking trash (trap options in /tg/)
If you avoid both of these, you have successfully balanced your game

D&D is in fact one of the less fun systems with friends. It's too heavy on math that slows the game down when you don't have a machine to do it for you. Just one spell can be 18d8 with separate saving throws for everyone in the area. There's so much busywork each turn that most groups actively look for ways to skip some of it.

In a competitive environment yes, finding which characters / fighters / whatever are best is a part of the game that competitive players find fun.

In a non-competitive environment you're going to get blasted if you pick characters that have strong, basic and cool looking moves. Thus leading to the reputation of being OP even though it may not even be that good in a competitive environment.

The whole debate is very silly.

have you tried 5th edition? there are many good and bad things about it but definitely they cut out a lot of math and numbers.

game designers make shit games because they are no longer game players. The entirety of their ambition is to do little shitty tricks to show off to other designers

> don't enjoy gameplay

I literally said "after hours and hours in".

because options that are too good are way more harmful than options that are too bad.especially in multiplayer.and you can just del with them by ignoring their existence.

the opposite is only true for single player games where you lock in a choice for a very long time without being able to chjange it and it's so bad that it makes the game very hard and slow to play.

>balance solely for high level play
>if everything is OP, nothing is OP
there, done and fun

based radical centrist

FFT being one of the best games in the franchise proves you wrong.

Does it?

Look at LoL vs Dota vs HOTS.

HOTS was perfectly balanced.

LoL is also perfectly balanced.

None of them are fun.

Meanwhile Dota 2 is wildly unbalanced and you explained the flavor of the patch until it gets nerfed and then repeat.

So now the game that I invested hours and hours into, presumably because I enjoyed the gameplay, randomly turns into "press button for awesome" with effectively no gameplay. How is that good? Why is that a virtue to be praised?

When did Yea Forums get so fucking casual?

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he's right, balance obsession and patch culture ruined online games. The best CS? 1.6, where the maps are massively unbalanced and there's only three viable guns. The best smash bros? Melee, where the top tiers literally can't lose to the bottom. The best starcraft? brood war, where you have defilers, arbiters, and 3 supply siege tanks. The only good multiplayer game that ever got balance right was Q3A (almost all the guns have some purpose). Games were better when the developers would put something out there and the players had to just deal with it instead of whining constantly on the PTR feedback forums

The twitter screencap is correct in this case. It's more fun when the game lets you break it, see daggerfall etc

>LoL is also perfectly balanced.
>Meanwhile Dota 2 is wildly unbalanced

Imagine being this retarded and insane. Shut the fuck up and go away.

I made a few thou from rmah. Good times.

Ah yes, Daggerfall. A game that is truly remembered for its fun and satisfying gameplay. Hmm, yes indeed.

>strawman comic that doesn't even make a clear point
>criticizing the entire board for having an opinion that differs from yours (not gonna state it though)
shut the fuck up and get the fuck out faggot

Balance is important to a degree. Obviously if you try TOO hard to balance things you wind up with a boring game where everything is effectively the same, but it's very possible to achieve a state where everything -feels- balanced which is the important part. If you're playing and thinking "wow, i shouldn't even be bothering with this option because this other option i could pick is so much better it invalidates it" or even worse, "i shouldn't be bothering with this option because it feels worthless even in a void with no comparisons" you have encountered a major failure in game design.

Now, I will say that something feeling or even being powerful, but not extraordinarily so, is good, especially when earned. If you overcome a difficult optional challenge in a singleplayer game you should be rewarded with something fun that is above the current progression curve because you went out of your way for it, it's balanced that you got something worthwhile because you spent the time on it. Or in a multiplayer game, a weapon or powerup that's risky to pick up on the map may be stronger than most other options due to its limited nature, but you also took a risk to get it, which is part of the balance itself. Now, in a game where you can simply pick characters/weapons and one is way better than everyone else? That's awful design and centralizes the game, which is no fun. You didn't earn that option and all it does is make everyone who isn't playing with said option feel like they're wasting their time. But a high skill ceiling character being available to everyone and performing above the curve compared to easier to play characters when mastered? That's good, part of balance is in expected average performance. One playing an autoaim character who does decent damage is not going to feel invalidated if they get killed by a high risk high reward character who either does a high amount of or absolutely no damage depending on their technical skill in movement and aiming.

You want balance to be a focus but not the main focus, under and over balancing are both equally as unfun
>hur dur just make everything broken
enjoy piss easy single player games and multiplayer games where you never stop dying, casual

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>HOTS was perfectly balanced.
>LoL is also perfectly balanced.

Where the fuck did you get this idea?

>Meanwhile Dota 2 is wildly unbalanced

Where the fuck did you get this idea?

Balance (or at least the policy of nerfing things that are good) is utter faggotry. Why reduce how fun something is when you could buff everything else to catch up with it? This philosophy is why MW2 was so much more successful than, say, Overwatch, despite the latter being much more mechanically complex.

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>"press button for awesome" with effectively no gameplay.

This is an oversimplification. "Press button for awesome" is the reward for the hard work and gameplay up to that point, with the gameplay style changing from fighting for survival to pushing as far as you can go. In FFVII this manifests as seeing how you can max out each character, and having absolute freedom to explore the world. In SotN, the gameplay changes to map completion and puzzle solving through movement.

Cry more faggot.

it's a good option but it's not always the correct one as it causes power creep.

also some types of gameplay are ruined by options that are too strong. i'll do the easy example using card games: a card has just been banned from Modern in MtG because it led to very consistent turn 3 wins and there weren't enough good counters to it.
following your arguments the "correct" way to deal with it would be to create more cards that enable just as good turn 3 wins or to create more powerful hard counter cards that in that case would have to come in to play turn 1 ( and yet one fitting the description already exist and it wasn't enough...also doesn't that count as nerfing?).
it turns out the mtg community wouldn't like the format to become a format where you have to win by turn 3 because that leaves out many fun archetypes and gameplay and neither they want to to stack up on "silver bullets" cards that they have to include in the deck and randomly draw, leading to many matches that are just " mulligan into the hard counter".the entire community welcomed the ban even if it actually means that everyone who owned that deck lost 150$ as all the card prices crashed.

dilate

FFXI at level 75 cap had pretty damn good balance, except for dark knight which was just garbage. Every class had a very specific role and purpose and excelled in various scenarios, even so much as as various phases within individual bosses. Item level is absolute cancer and I would rather have an unbalanced game that generic cookie cutter gear

This. Balance should be a high priority but only after designing satisfying game mechanics. Otherwise you end up with garbage like LoL, which isn't even balanced but uses balance as an excuse to make the game shitty and boring.

>t. espurts fag

It cuts both ways. It's not fun to make the wrong choices and then get utterly destroyed either by the game or by other players.

enigma enables non sorcs to be viable

if you take out enigma, nerf sorc teleport

Ironic considering CvS2, Third Strike, and Marvel 2 are three of the best games ever made and the balance is beyond fucked in those games. Fuck off, faggot OP.

He was right and did nothing wrong.

>But a high skill ceiling character being available to everyone and performing above the curve compared to easier to play characters when mastered? That's good, part of balance is in expected average performance.

I actually disagree with this, easy characters should be able to compete with hard ones on a level playing field. Hard ones should just fill more unique niches.

The only reason people like OP things is because lowering the difficulty would hurt their ego. Prove me wrong. You can't.

you couldn't remember it at all since you're 14
just don't be a brainlet

balancetards would completely destroy everything that makes a game good just so they had the illusion of fairness
its hilarious how stupid they are

>balance in PVP and ranked games
the most important aspect
>balance in PVE games, single-player or co-op
who actually fucking cares

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This thread definitely proves you correct, because that is the only argument I've seen here against balance. I'm not counting the "balance means no variety" argument because it's profoundly insane and easily disproved by glancing at Dota and Slay the Spire.

>Balance is literally all that matters.
Something tells me you're not an above average chess player.

this

Balance is such a shitty concept. There will always be better and worse options in any game that offers them. Attempting to make every option equally useful is just asking to make the most boring game possible.

Balance is overrated. It's something you want in a competitive game, sure, as competition is best when player skill is the deciding factor, but excess cares taken towards MUH BALANCE is arguably a bad thing for single player games.
Take, for example, how much effort Sawyer has plugged in trying to homogenize the experience in Pillars of Eternity and the end result was nobody saw much point in replay because mechanically nothing much would be different. (well that and because PoE's writing sucked dick)

I would say that trickiness of execution is part of being niche, since even if you're skilled, a kit that calls for more skill and precision is going to have a higher failure rate than one that's much more guaranteed to work. It's easy and nigh guaranteed to cause damage if you pepper people with explosives from a distance but even the best of players can get fucked over if their character requires them to get in close and earn their damage with precision.

Rarely are underpowered choices explicitly labeled.

Autists are also attracted to whatever wins them the game even if it's completely boring to play. You can't win sith them so just enjoy the game for what it's for.
A completely streamlined game is a boring one.

It's simple

>I beat someone in a game: It's balanced
>I lose to someone in a game: It's unbalanced. Fix your shit game.

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>even if it actually means that everyone who owned that deck lost 150$ as all the card prices crashed
Wouldn't those players have seen the writing on the wall? A strategy that dominant is bound to get banned, after WotC got all those delicious shekels from people buying the required booster packs.

Wrath PvP was pretty well balanced till ICC, when gear creep made stuff like cast times and mindless cleaves ridiculous.

>playing multiplayer games

>How was Diablo successful then?
Everyone really likes to downplay the atmosphere and story in diablo for some reason. Yeah, eventually you'd get to the point where you where everything was solved and you're chasing loot drops, but I always felt that making your build come together was what made the game fun.

Not in single player games. If I know a character or skill set that is broken, I usually avoid playing it and try the underdog just for the sake of it. If I am not burned out from it, I usually take the strong character after I finished the game with said underdog.

Balancing a character or a class in a multiplayer game is one thing, being a retarded dev and using it to break the viability of a character or a class you've personally been using for quite some time is another. While you could say that it's easy to switch characters especially in a MOBA or an ASSFAGGOT, doing so in an MMO is another.

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Depends on what he means exactly. Look at Starcraft. Some units are fucking trash while others you want to be using literally every game. The game is stupidly imba in certain areas, but is balanced where it counts. Some areas of balance don’t matter while others are vital.

Mark is a fucking idiot but he's right on this one. Balance is somewhat important, but not as much as people think it is. At least you shouldn't have useless shit, if anything because otherwise you've wasted precious time and resources into adding something that nobody will use, but OP mechanics are not necessarily a bad thing. Designers often unbalance their own games on purpose to make them more fun to play.
Even in long term games like MMOs or PVP, meta shifts are usually a deliberate design decision to add variety with little effort and keep players engaged with content that feels different by just tweaking some mechanics.

D2 is a strange case because it all depends on your items. Some classes become powerful very easily. Some are completely useless unless you have the perfect build. Every class has at least one OP build, it just takes different levels of work to get there. D2 is a beautifully balanced, unbalanced game.

He's absolutely right
youtu.be/bsC8io4w1sY

thanks doc

Diablo 2 is a shitty game.

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well, balance is the reason why we cant have reality-shattering wizardry, so fuck that. In sp games at least.

That image doesn't mean what you think it means newfriend

>How the fuck can a designer be this retarded?
Easy, he's a bad designer, and he's already retarded if you've ever seen his account.

>the game turns to shit with everyone buffed to 11
this was what WoW was in mists of pandaria and that was the best that game's classes had ever been and ever will be

Balance is for autists and tryhards.
For the vast majority of players they will never get to the point where balance is a bottleneck. I can go play a "D-tier" character in smash with my friends and still trade wins because none of us are weirdo obsessed with the game to the point that it matters. As someone with a life I would take content over balance any time as long as it's not broken enough that that it ruins casual play

how many games went to shit because of an obsession with balance, read: (NERF EVERYONE ELSE BECAUSE THEY SUCK, NOT BECAUSE I REFUSE TO CHANGE BUILDS)

Balance is a contemporary thing you fucking zoomer

People used to be able to break games with broken shit and it was just noobish to use them.

This, people used to call out anyone using overpowered junk as noobs. Now people encourage it by calling them "chads"

So many people don’t understand balancing or what makes a game enjoyable.

I sentence this retard to a half drowning, half burning.

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based