Balance is a delicate thing – it can be a finely tuned system that gives all players a fair opportunity at success, or a gigantic mess of exploits, loopholes, and overpowered items. No matter what kind of game you are playing, from first person shooters to real time strategy to traditional pen and paper, gameplay systems exist that must be carefully considered and balanced. But, no matter how much time a developer puts into balance, we the players always seem to find a way around it.
How Developers Create Balance
Balance can come in many shapes and sizes, but designers always have it in mind from the very start. Designers can create a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) type of environment, one where powerful things are ‘rare’, or make the system so large and complex that no single strategy is ‘unbeatable’.
A common solution is that of the rock-paper-scissors style of balance. In Valve’s Team Fortress 2 (TF2), for example, spies beat heavies, heavies beat pyros, and pyros beat spies. While this is boiling it down to very simple terms, it’s how TF2 was fundamentally balanced at launch. RPS style balancing need not include only three things, but, in general, it works best where there are a fixed number of items to deal with.
Other times, designers will employ scarcity of resources to create balance. They will limit or otherwise make rare some items to keep a game balanced. For example, in a real time strategy game, “heroic” units might be limited to one per side, or a particular power-up like Quad Damage will have a timer on it and spawn in a difficult-to-access area. Since the player has to go to great lengths to get something, they are rewarded (if temporarily) with something powerful. While that particular player may now have some advantage, there is a risk associated with it to weigh against less risky alternatives.
Other times, designers can make a system that is sufficiently complex such that no one strategy that a player can put together is a ‘win-all’ strategy. This is most evident in TCGs like Magic, or in games like Pokemon. The sheer staggering numbers of possible combinations and strategies mean that even a seemingly unbeatable strategy will eventually run into its’ antithesis. This is sort of a ‘security through obscurity’ approach to balance, and it can lead to a lot of abuse if developers aren’t careful.
How the Player(s) Invariably Break it
Glitches & Exploits
No matter how good of a coding team work on a game, or how many hours of playtesting a game gets, it will inevitably have glitches and exploits. If it comes down to thousands of players versus a staff of dedicated game testers, my money is on the players. The glitches that do make it through can be anything from harmless fun to game-breaking. Occasionally though, a glitch can actually add to the complexity of gameplay. In the case of several early FPS games, physics glitches that caused oddities like bunny hopping (a process where a player continually jumps and turns) using the strafe keys instead of forward and backward, were left in the game and became a staple part of game mechanics.
Creative Use
When developers add in some kind weapon or ability for players to utilize, they generally have a very specific intent or purpose in mind. Play testers do try to break the abilities and use them in ways the developers did not intend for them, but as with finding glitches, several thousand players will be better at finding interesting gaps than any team of play testers.
In a rock-paper-scissors type game, this most often takes the form of using a particular weapon against something it was not intended to be used against. A weapon designed to be useful against a certain enemy might also be useful against an enemy it was not designed to fight given certain circumstances. For example, a sniper rifle might be used to no-scope someone point blank for full damage, or an anti-tank rifle would be equally effective against infantry or aircraft despite being specifically for vehicles.
Outlier Strategies
In very complex games, players can come up with certain combinations that can radically alter the meta-game in ways that the original creators had not intended. While the ‘security through obscurity method’ makes games very complex so that in theory, no matter what strategy someone uses, they can not make one that is ‘unbeatable.’
The problem with this method is that the sheer volumes of players will always be able to test and create more strategies than any number of test players will ever be able to do. The critical key here with the killer strategies that players come up with are how many of them are ‘soft’ countered and how many of them are ‘hard countered’. A strategy is considered soft countered if there are many methods to diffuse it, and hard countered if only one way can stop it.
The effect this has is, as more strategies are developed that only have hard counters, other players are forced to play in a certain way in order to remain competitive. This could mean that everyone in MtG has to have a specific card to be competitive, or that everyone in Pokemon has to play with a certain set lineup just to survive. This shrinks the number of viable strategies and arguably makes the multiplayer experience a more boring one.
The Solutions
Depending on the type of balance problem, both players and developers can address and correct issues. Some solutions may take a good degree of time to implement, but others can be done almost overnight.
Exploits, glitches, and creative use of existing items typically requires intervention by a game’s coders. Fixes could take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on the severity of the problem and how easy it was to fix. Generally they are fixed in rather short order, except in a few rare cases where bugs have been left in the code due to the feeling they enhanced gameplay, such as bunny-hopping.
For very complex systems, a patch won’t necessarily fix things. If new things are added, players just adopt a new and possibly even slimmer set of usable strategies, further shrinking the multiplayer scene. Or, if thing are patched, developers may end up playing whack-a-mole, continually patching things every time a new “killer” combo is created. It also has the potential to lead to a slippery slope that discourages players from innovating.
However, there are things that both developers and players can do to regulate the strategies used. For example, in Pokemon players organize pokemon (and the strategies some of them represent) into tiers (most notable, via Smogon). While this doesn’t always explicitly ban something, it does give more organization and guidance. It fleshes out and ranks the strategies, so that the lower level that one plays on, the greater the number of strategies are available. In fact, Nintendo itself does some bannings for its own tournaments in order to encourage that a wider pool of monsters ends up seeing action. In a similar vein, bannings can also take the form of restricted sets in competitive use, for example, an official magic the gathering tournament may only allow cards from the latest set be used. While this would seem to limit play, the continual rotation of new sets in and other forms of play that allow for a wider set of cards to be used keep players on their toes and encourage them to always be innovating and creating new strategies.
Conclusion
When players invariably break the balance of a game, some things the developers should always fix, and fix immediately. However, developers need not jump straight in and fix everything a community seemly demands immediately. Especially when dealing with weapon imbalance it’s more prudent to take a step back and let things play themselves out, see if players develop their own countermeasures or if the balance issue in question actually adds to game play.
Players too, just as creatively as they can break things, can also creatively adapt to them or form their own systems to adapt to the change. Certain elements of a player base will even persist in finding ways to break things, and in a very white vs black hat fashion, some will report the bugs, and others will keep their exploits secret. Either way, a persistent team of unpaid players testing the boundaries can only serve to expand how the game is played and fix errors that the developers did not uncover before releasing the game.
