Ah yes, the classic "Players are GREAT at identifying problems, but horrible at designing solutions for them". This should be the first lesson for any game designer. Listen to your players, if they are complaining then something is most certainly wrong. But take their suggested solutions not with a grain, but with an entire shaker of salt.

I'm pretty sure there exists a competitive Rock Paper Scissors league. The metagame there is built entirely around being as unpredictable as possible and trying to detect and exploit any unnoticed patterns in your opponent's strategy.

I'm cancelling my patreon support because of this video. I can't believe all this time I was supporting a member of Big Chess.

There’s a phenomenon in board games called “point salad” games where instead of winning by completing a specific objective, players receive points for various things throughout the game. Naturally the designers would try to balance the amount of points any particular activity gives so no strategy is too dominant. However, if they do *too* good a job at it, then you can have a game where your decisions are mostly irrelevant because any strategy is equally as good as any other.

I am reminded of the recent Enter the Gungeon update, where after a long, long time of complaints about the scarce drop rates in the game, they changed the drop rates and rarity up to be more generous and less punishing. But they also made it a thing you could toggle, so that old players could still play the harsh beast they were used to as well. Which setting is more balanced? No way to tell. But one group of players will find one setting more fun, and another (perhaps smaller) group will find the other setting their cup of tea. But having the option there will always be in that game's favour. :)

the complexity of MtG's color pie is probably one of the biggest reasons the game has stayed alive for as long as it has it encompasses game mechanics (as roughly outlined in your video), morality and ideology and character traits for all the colors, and even after over 20 years the game's designers are still finding new elements to add to each that make sense within the pie, in all those areas

Blizzard is famous for their delicate touch on balancing. "This class/item/spell is a bit too good, let's nerf it with 95%!" Repeat forever.

*Everything affects everything.* This is exactly why I highly advocate for rock solid balance foundations, optimally mathematically expressed and calculated. I see so many games that just have wired fundamentally unbalanced systems at their core, which makes balancing them an impossible act of trying to build a straight house on a crooked foundation.

Larry Niven has an anecdote. During one of his many collaborations with Jerry Pournelle, the publisher came back to them with a list of edits they wanted made. The two authors double-teamed the publisher and argued him down on every single one of those points, defending their original choices. Then they sat down afterwards with the list and went through it themselves, and made a change (sometimes the suggested one) for each of the listed edits. The lesson is the same as the point in the video: people are good at spotting where there are problems, but bad at coming up with the right solutions.

"So no one deck can reliably access them all." Oh ho ho... My Superfriends and Sliver decks wholly disagree.

'Overpowered' and 'underpowered' are not terms that refer to static, permanent traits of a character. They refer to a given game element's viability _in the current meta,_ and are thus synonyms for god tier and trash tier.

*Saying Rock Paper Scissors* *Showing Overwatch* I think I love this channel

10:59 Sorry to pick hairs but this part triggered me Skaven have bad infantry on paper, but they have above normal unit sizes per cohort - this means that whatever they throw at themselves at, they will always have the advantage. Skaven don't have the worst artillery but calling it good isn't accurate either. it's "meh". Their power comes in overwhelming numbers and monstrous units which can provide a stronger backbone to the weaker clanrats. You build near half of your army as a mix of clanrats/stormvermin and then augment that army with specific counter large such as poison wind globes (anti-large armour piercing), death runners (high damage anti lord/anti hero units), rat ogres (fast anti armour), etc. That's how they are balanced, a weak but numerous core with specialist units that need to be protected due to their low unit sizes. /neckbeardrage

You just made me realize why i like playing black in chess. Because i like to disrupt the enemy and counter him

My suspicion is that Hearthstone's balance is so shit because Blizzard knows it will force players to buy more packs to get the few OP cards rather than if more cards were better balanced. A Hearthstone xpack usually has about 5% OP cards, 10% specific deck-defining cards, 10% playable cards, then 75% experimental or outright garbage cards. You'll have to buy a hell of a lot more packs to get those few OP or deck-defining cards, then if say, 40% of the cards were well-balanced.

Rule of thumb: If you're a layman wondering why a team of professionals working in their field don't do something simple that would solve the problem, you are probably ignorant about the flaws in that solution. If you're a professional wondering why a team of fellow pros working in their field don't do that, you are probably ignorant about the time that trying that solution caused bigger problems by clashing against parts of the project which are only clear if you spend significant time on that specific project.

There's a reason, most game developers use the term "Overperforming" when they comment on a complaint about an item/character/class/whatever players call "OP"

*raises hand* the total warhammer skaven work the same was as tabletop skaven, they've been pretty well designed for a swarm army from the start.

11:42 Though I was not a fan of Vaskii's changes to mana agglomeration and how they effected Botania as a whole, I'm content enough just to see that whole thing acknowledged in such a video.

Thanks for this video. : ) As a long time League of Legends player it's given me a much better perspective to view the balance changes through, and the tools to talk about it to other people.

Commenting my own thoughts before viewing. I think In a lot of games, especially single player games, it's always balanced in your favor. Even difficult stages that you won't beat on the first try like a Cuphead boss give you the advantage by simply letting you retry until you learn about it and finally beat it. Multiplayer is where it gets messy. RTS's (that genre on the brink of extinction) usually tackle balancing by taking the rock-paper-scissors approach. Basically everything is strong against something, and victory will depend on reacting to the enemy army composition. Although some older or smaller RTS's struggled with this and there was only one really OP unit that everyone would go for. Games like mobas have the 'meta' which shifts with updates. Basically just changing what is OP at different times, while also having(for the most part) characters that counter any given character which brings into play game knowledge and skill with specific characters. Lastly games like Fortnite don't really have a balance. It has a obvious hierarchy of what's better, and although skill is definitely involved in encounters, if two players on the same skill level face each other, the one with the better gun will always win. The randomness itself doesn't really allow for a balanced game. I only scratched the surface, and I just talked about common games. I'm sure you'll go much more in depth.

man honestly you have some of the best games i have seen talking about the interesting parts of game design. hopefully one day i can become a patron

I've compiled what is probably an incomplete list of things to consider and tips for multiplayer balancing: 1. Avoid samey gameplay, often through many strategies. Tic Tac Toe is the opposite of this. It's easy to find the optimal strategy and just do that. 2. Make sure the viable strategies are fun and interesting to use. I guess the opposite this is something like pirate warrior in HS. You just go face. 3. Make sure the viable strategies are fun and interesting to play against. Counterplay, as it is called. The opposite of this would be a combo deck from HS. "Fun and interactive", as they say. 4. Make sure the most powerful strategies require a great deal of skill(Type of skill dependent on your choices). Core players hate being defeated by someone less skilled. Zerg rush is obviously the opposite here. 5. Make sure the new players have a chance. If any new player is just instantly going to get obliterated by the best players, you will not have a playerbase larger than 30 guys. (Note this can also be achived by matchmaking, though good luck there) 6. Make sure there is a good difficulty curve. Sort of fits in with the former. Avoid huge difficulty spikes. The opposite of this is fighting games in many cases. They rarely give a good introduction. 7. Try to build in some catch up mechanics so most rounds feel really close. Getting completely stomped is frustrating, and stomping isn't really that engaging either. 8. Think about teamworking. How much does your game rely on it? What tools and guidelines should you lay in that regard? I played a game where there were sort of defense and attacker roles but also not really, and most new players had no idea what a hero was good at and what they should do with it. Contrast that to Overwatch, where each character fits in a class and you know what your role is in the team when you are playing that class. 9. Avoid one solution fits all problems mechanics. This fits in with point 1, and Fortnite indeed had this problem with people building in close and shotgunning. 10. Make sure the delta of RNG isn't too high. Extra Credits have some good episodes on this. 11. Make sure the game isn't too frustrating or punishing. Players will not have a good experience if they are constantly sitting in a respawn screen over minor mistakes. 12. Make sure to communicate and give feedback to players as to why they lost or died, so they know where to improve. 13. A lot of strategy viability can be dependent on the enviroment. Build strategy variation into your map design.

Don't worry. The entire strategy of Rocket League is to just fly around doing flips in the general direction of the ball until you score.

Kind of like how in D&D and Pathfinder, the wizard class is very versatile, in that they can learn every spell on their spell list, but they need to plan ahead and prepare their spells in advance. On the other hand the Sorcerer class can't learn nearly as many spells as a wizard, so they become much more specialized, but they can cast any spell they know at any time without preparing in advance and they can also cast more spells per day than a wizard can.

makes me think of TW:S2 when warrior monk armies were all over the place, people complained endlessly that you couldn't beat warrior monk armies, but eventually the player base realized that katana core rush armies are simply countered hard by warrior monks, and warrior monks are countered hard by balanced armies.

9:26 This triggers me soooo hard... I know you're trying to make a point but *just attack with the horseman to make magmaboii not die* You'd have lethal both ways but reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

This has explained a side of the game balance I've never thought of before, Thank you very much!

I've now watched several of your videos. I like what you do, and I have made the decision to subscribe. Please, continue kicking ass.

The Overwatch example is a great way to explain these complicated power struggles. Nice job. New subscriber ^_^

Really great video breaking down game balance. The thing about buffing/nerfing that I've seen some people talk about is that for competitive games, such as fighting games: - players typically want to buff their favorite/main characters - players typically want to nerf characters they struggle against Some of these buffs/nerfs may be valid complaints against the game's current real or perceived balance problems, but may just be certain players wanting to better without actually getting better.

You make alot of good points. Please make a part 2 soon. LETS TALK ABOUT CAPITALISM

Thanos wouldn't like this Video. Edit: Ok, I gotta be honest here. I mostly have KZfaq Videos on my second Monitor while I'm playing a game. I just heard the opportunity to make a Thanos Joke at around 02:35 and went for it. I scrolled up on the video and saw the Annotation. Congratulations, I played myself.

I really liked something you said, its vetter buff than nerf, also that makes people that likes to play some character or strategy a happier player because is more viable, and gives a better and more interesting challenge to the top tier users, so I guess its a win win

Great Video once again Adam!

I find your commentary on Hearthstone’s Magma Rager interesting. It reminds me of a child learning to play the recorder (a simple plastic musical instrument). Kids don’t learn to play the recorder to become a professional recorder player, but learning to play this simple instrument helps build the foundation for understanding how to read music and how a musical instrument functions. Once this understanding is achieved, it is far easier to transition to a more complex instrument. The Magma Ranger serves a similar purpose by giving the player a simple, easy to use card which then helps them learn the game mechanics and build their understanding of overall game strategy.

Damn you're good at this. Love your content.

I am taking a programming class to learn 'C'. For our second project, we had to have a user enter 2 numbers. One number counted to the next number using various math. I have spent the last 5 hours trying to figure out how to get the user to not break my program. For fucks sake I can't imagine how hard getting everything right in something as complex as a video game would be.

6:17 I've played OW for about 2 years. It is usually like that: Something that was perfectly fine a few seasons ago (without getting buffed) is suddenly meta (best example is after Triple Tank ended Tracer went from unpickable to completely meta (although to be fair, all characters except S76, Ana, Lucio, Hog, Rein, D.VA, and (maybe) zarya were unpickable in that...) And normally when something is OP, they don't directly nerf it (at least not majorly), they just "shift the meta" until something else comes in...

If you'd like an excellent example of how perfect balance can kill a game There's a Martial arts tournament game out there. I forget the name but it was actually perfectly balanced the only problem is everybody hated it because it wasn't fun. Another example of how imbalance makes games better is a rom hack for Street fighter 2 and Minecraft.

New fan here, pretty good video as always! Just a little feedback thing, I feel like you miss a bunch of opportunities to add context to statements (like explaining why the backstab was so abusable in BCB, which I assume is because there's a 50% chance you're behind an enemy since it's a platformer), and the argumentation can feel a bit brief/shallow as a result. We viewers want to know EVERYTHING :P

Wow I am a new game dev and idk about others but your videos help me figure out how to make my game better

The talk about Fort Night and shotgun made me think of X-Com and how it also pushed into curtain strategies. In the original I remember focusing a lot on long range sniping and high explosives to clear out buildings since the terrain was destructible. So there was always lots of wide open lines of fire. However in the remake the terrain was not really destructible as you couldn't simply blow a hole in a wall and enter from there. This forced a lot more close quarters fights and as the game progressed I find that long range sniping was less and less viable. Instead it tended to favor more mid range and close fights which made heavy hitting things really useful. This was only made more apparent by the enemies getting a free turn when revealed. In X-Com 2 the focus on nearly every mission having a time limit turned what use to be a plan carefully and approach cautiously into a charge in with max fire power and hope for the best. Where the first game had me occasionally fielding a sniper for cover on open field missions the sequel had me pretty much never field one because their inability to move and shoot on the same turn meant they couldn't keep pace with the team and would fall behind. And since there is a time limit to complete objective with endless waves of aliens in some missions, having one character who can't keep up is a problem.

When you watch every single Adam Millard video over the course of two days. 👌 Great writing man.

Another genre where "overpowered" and "underpowered" are demonstrable are free-to-play games on mobile platforms. Another platform was the various Facebook games. The specific games I am referring to were the ones where you paid cash to collect characters. I played (and paid) for a few "uncool" characters because they were impossible not to include on defense, but I also paid (but never played) some "wicked cool" characters that I wanted but knew they were absolutely useless in the game itself. In these games "overpowered" and "underpowered" were specific monetization choices.

...I highly agree with your idea to make everything in overwatch an identical clone of bastion... but! I would make all the maps into bastion as well. And I would change the name of the game to Bastion Watch. 😂

There's also another consideration when talking about modern day multiplayer games. Most MOBAs are built to have unbalanced characters, this is to encourage the player to buy the character. Release a character that's broken and overpowered so people get decimated without a chance, those people in turn want to decimate others the same way so they flock to spend money to unlock the character that decimated them, then the makers actually balance the character in preparation of the next character, and repeat till the game dies. Sure fire way to rake in the cash.

Interesting video. Still after playing so many hours of Diablo, Starcraft and Overwatch i think Blizz is bad at balancing lol.

I think one of the Overwatch devs said something like this, "If the majority of players are saying something is too powerful or too weak, then it's too powerful or too weak. Even if you've play-tested it a million times, and the numbers on paper say it should be perfectly balanced, what matters is how your player base FEELS. Because if they FEEL bad, like the game's unbalanced, they'll leave. So the player is always right, even when they're wrong." I've never stopped thinking about that when it comes to game balancing. This video opened my eyes up to the dev's point of view on balancing, but it's also important to remember that at the end of the day, what matters is that your players are happy, too. And even if it creates imbalance, if it makes the majority of your fans happy, then it's a good decision to make.

Just want one critique Skaven are balanced that way via the TT game as well, hordes of rats with big splodey machines

The thing about balance, is that you can play anything until you get to the highest tiers. I just grinded 300 sr, from mid diamond to masters with a group solely running dive, usually into meta Brigitte comps

Having seen that you play SupCom, would you agree that there are some balancing issues in their new additions in FA. Prime culprits being how the Percival and Brick respectively almost completely outperform the Titan and Loyalist both tactically and in down-right health and damage, but with other culprits as well like Aeon having a new amphibious vehicle when it was a key use for the low tier tank in the previous game (a point I previously thought to be an excellent way of keeping an early game unit relevant even in late game) as well as the new UEF point defence gun making any other form of ground defence obsolete in nearly every regard. A slightly annoying point given that they get a number of other additions so RIGHT: A new Aeon torpedo bomber to emphasise their naval powers without dominating aircraft's role in naval engagements. A weak and slow satellite for the UEF to improve their ability to fortify key positions without requiring a presence in all other parts of the map. The new Jester gunship for the Cybran rewarding players for sticking to their lore and utilising the Cybrans slight advantage in aerial combat and fluid battle movements. Perhaps its just me but I was half-hoping to see this somewhere in the video as a plentiful supply of examples for the points you made, but as you said: You're the one with the channel.

11:43 Wow I never expected to see this again.

Very neat video, but I missed the metion of "overloaded" kit. In games like LoL, with hundreds of characters created and reworked for years with clearly different mindsets behind those designs, balance becomes truely challenging, maybe impossible.

Magma rager is in one of my warlock decks where I also take shadowflame to make a ghetto 2 card flamestrike

as a normal playeri often take advantage of untouched potential to the max and basicly abuse the rarely used setups (status effects in most games can stack very very high until you just sweep the enemy with area burn+poison while spamming heals)

Great video. I stopped playing Overwatch because of the constant and unnecessary changes.

My brother once put a bunch of symmetra turrets over the enemy teams spawn exit.

Great video ! Just two quick remarks : 1. Your point about chess is very interesting but as far as I know, in most forms of competitive chess, adversaries play a pair number of games and end up having played white and black the same number of time. So even if the game itselft isn't perfectly balanced, the competition is supposed to be. 2. Regarding the tier-list, Innuendo Studios has made a very interesting point about the evolution of the meta game in his video about Smash Bros Melee. Everyone should watch his video but the short version is that if a character is at the bottom of the tier list it's not played anymore and people don't know how to counter this character. Making it more viable in the meta game.

Aw, was hoping you'd talk about Brawl Minus

Great video,one would hope all ppl screaming on forums would see this. Ppl just dont get balance.

This channel is a gem man

i always wanted to see a mechanic where (for an online game) all the characters/strategies have some "sliders" on them that boost/nerf them in a specific way (2 main alternatives: making them better/worse at what they do or making their aux parts better/worse, like a high dps sniper whatever character cares about damage, but could also be made more or less glasscannony via more or less hp) and those sliders get adjusted by pick/ban rates in real time. Gameplay stays the same, but specific number based balancing shifts, so people that are good with a character still have an advantage, but noone can just ride a characters inflated stats to victory

Balancing game mechanics and the effects of such is a science unto itself, and many game devs do not have the skills developed to be able to set up their game mechanics and design parameters so that they /can/ be balanced, at least by human skill, as opposed to superhuman skill. While it is true that the goal of every part of the game development process is to maximize enjoyment, game balance is often a big factor in not only the amount of fun to experience in the moment, but also the longevity of that experience. You also use the term "equilibrium" which is nothing more than a synonym of "balance". XD I get you're trying to make a nuanced distinction, but that's really the point of balancing a game in the first place. To achieve a happy equilibrium within the system of mechanics so the game is playable and enjoyable to as large a degree as possible for the system alone to provide. Your point is quite correct, though. The more and varied (read: complex) the mechanics, the more difficult it is to balance. Often, the problem is that game mechanics are composed of large monolithic pieces with little commonality in the aspects of those pieces, so balancing becomes a matter of just making said pieces larger or smaller. This is in contrast to defining all mechanics based on a lower level or "quantum" approach, where each piece is comprised of a number of smaller and simpler components, each with a well-defined impact on game play, and then adjusting the "shape" of the larger pieces by changing the proportions/presence of each of the various quantum components that make them. This can easily devolve into a discussion of "top-down" versus "bottom-up" design principles, which illustrates the very complexity and difficulty to which you refer. :)

Something to consider is that balance can vary greatly based on skill level. In low level Overwatch, Pharah can bomb your team with little resistance. At a Pro level, she gets torn apart by hitscans. My friends always blame me for losses when I play Bastion (Even when I have 3 Golds), but he can be effective at low level.

Apologies if it was already asked, but where did you get that amazing MTG breakdown... pentagram? Star-graph?

My guess is that there's a fuck ton of different settings that aren't balanced but only a few that are and just looking at numbers doesn't tell a developer what's balanced and what's not

actually when I played arkham city in new game plus it was hard but when I started to get use to it it really started to become fun and challenging and gives what the feeling to be batman

Someone should show this to the people over at Digital Extremes, the people who made Warframe. And tell them to actually start playing their own game while they're at it.

You could spend a whole balance episode talking about Enter the Gungeon. At the beginning of the game, it feels grindy, inaccessible and SO unfair, but as you slowly start to beat bosses more easily, and clear floors without taking damage, you start to unlock more and more items, until at last once you get to the endgame you start unlocking some objectively insanely OP guns and items. This is completely ok because it’s a single-player roguelite. You’re not unfairly demolishing another person, and because of RNG you can and will go many runs without getting any insane combos that make the game a walk in the park. Part of why is is so satisfying and is in fact necessary is because of how tough the game was to begin with. Dying on the first floor so many times makes it a genuine achievement to beat the game, and OP items don’t make it boring, they just make your revenge on the game all the sweeter. (Casey-Super Hot Watch-Bloodied Scarf anyone?)

Ok so I agree with what you said. With overwatch though I feel like a lot of problems with early game feel could've been solved with just getting rid of Mercy's Resurrection. It often felt like it invalidated the work you put in. The only times I hadn't heard of Mercy is when blatantly better options came like Ana when she could out heal everything, or Brig now.

In my opinion, the game balance is in it's core mechanics. For example, in "rock-paper-scissors" if Player 1 sees Player 2 using rock only, they can win by using scissors only. The questions are "what decisions do you make" and "how much decisions cost". If they go scissors, use rock. Kingdom rush: if spiders show up, use artillery. StarCraft 2: if zerg goes mutalisks, use phoenixes as protoss. A decision or action that anybody is capable of or can learn to do is the ultimate counter to another - that's easy. The second question is what it costs to make a decision. It's relatively hard to define exact strategy of opponent in "rock-paper-scissors", but one may win the next round or create a strategy thet probably has more chances to win. In Kingdom rush resources are limited so sometimes it's hard to switch strategy the moment one sees a specific enemy type and the foes may break through. And in games like StarCraft 2 one has time to respond if they get to know the opponent's strategy. But the players don't have equal opportunities due to different races or heros in games. So if one decision is countered, there must be a way to counter that counter. If it exists, the problem is solved. Also, I think it's very important to have some kind of material for studiyng that assures players there is always an acessible though maybe not very obvious way to win to stop all the "change the numbers, X is too _strong_ / _weak"_ whining forever.

Taking LOL as an example to show the butterfly effect of game balancing: In the game, there's a status effect called *grievous wounds* which hampers healing abilities. A select few methods are used to apply it (the ignite summoner spell, the mortal reminder item, etc). If they decide to buff grievous wounds, suddenly healing will become a less appealing ability. Champions like Vladimir, swain (tanky mages with self-healing mechanics), supports with heals (Taric, Soraka, Bard, Janna, etc), and Kayn's darkin form (tank-killer/disruptor with lots of healing) will become less viable, as do items with healing abilities (Bloodthirster, death's dance, ardent censer). The weakness of these champions and items means that the entire balance shifts. The champions normally countered by the above champions will become more viable, sometimes broken, because their usual counter has been nerfed. However, nerfing grievous wounds would cause the inverse. Champions with powerful healing sustain become unstoppable monsters because their main counter has been nerfed, allowing them to steamroll entire teams unchallenged. A single number can completely change the meta, and haphazardly fixing an issue will cause a weird wack-a-mole situation where each fix opens up a new issue. This isn't helped though by Riot's design philosophy, which is to "stir the pot" each year, spend the next 12 months fixing what they broke, and stir again when things settle.

There was a Halo video about balance being "longevity" == how long do players keep playing game, using the analogy of a tower of stones. The stones are uneven, yet together they stand for a long time

This should be a mandatory video for all players of competitive games!!

"No one deck can reliable have them all" Enter my sliver overlord edh deck (which 5 color)

I hadn't thought about the way that buffing a weak option in such a way as to counter a strong option might affect the metagame, but I've been saying the same thing about poor balance hiding content for years. The important thing to remember is that balance is a means, not an end.

something else about balancing you should consider is that something being god tier or trash tier also depends on what the player is doing. For example in Splatoon 3 the Wavebreaker is considered one of the best specials in salmon run, but not so much so in matches. This is because in salmon run, lesser salmonids can't jump, which puts them at the mercy of your wavebreaker and it revives your coworkers, so planting one down is a good way to ensure you aren't being swarmed by smallfry and that you dying doesn't end the shift. By contrast using the Hydra Splatling in salmon run is a good way to get a crew wipe within the first wave despite it being a monster in matches. This is because salmon run emphasizes faster weapons that don't take a while to use, which is the exact opposite of how the Hydra Splatling works and means you are going to get splatted a lot with it

The fact that the colors in the Color Pie segment aren't in WUBRG order unnerves me.

Good competitive games have a god tier fotm that changes every patch, while also having a selection of choices that are stable in the meta but rarely if ever fotm. Eg league of legends has annie, pantheon and garen be almost always stable good picks, where something like kassadin or zed is more fotm.

Thank you for the video. I can see where you're coming from in your thought process here. For years, i've gone on about the imbalance in TF2, and I feel like its entirely justified to be honest. I've never made a game before, but I know what TF2 is all about. And I can tell you right now, the Demo and Soldier class got 10 times more love than anyone else. Most of the classes experience some kind of stagnation in their side-weapons giving them more options of play. But the one Class that is suffocated the most is the Sniper. After they turned the Darwin Shield into yet ANOTHER anti-pyro item, and they still havnt changed the Huntsmans headshot mechanics.. I mean why would they even bother making more content or fixing stuff at this point.

4:33 I knew there was a reason I liked you Adam XD

Currently working on a game with multiple characters, I need to make sure they are all unique and fun to play.

The thing to remember is that balance isn't an inherent virtue of a game. More than a goal it itself, balance is a supporting structure for the depth of game, and the places where the game seems poorly balanced are sometimes hidden brilliance. Not only are there the cases Adam talked about where balance can be used to create an interesting and diverse metagame or guide players towards a better understanding of the game, they can also be a way to provide a relief mechanism for inexperienced players, provided you're careful not to let the easy noob option turn into the new god-tier. A great example of this is the ranged weapons in Dark Souls. With some clever use of ranged attacks you can bypass something like 50% of the game by picking off enemies before they can fight back or by separating enemies who would gang up on you otherwise, but because Dark Souls is so hard even so, and because the option takes more time and effort, it doesn't make a player feel inferior if they have to do it the way adjusting a difficulty setting would.

Epic shouldve looked into this before nerfing double shotgun to oblivion when they allready had buffed the smg's making double shotgun less favorable in a fight. By removing the double shotgun you are now left with less options when it comes to strategies in fortnite.

In terms of just multiplayerj Create a game that gives an equal kit that players can access on the fly within that rock paper scissors balance. Limit RNG moments(which seems like a thing that devs do when they dont know what else to do) boiling down gameplay to just skill instead of chance should be the easiest and obvious solution in a multiplayer setting. but In order to attract a broader casual audience, devs add handicaps and widen distinctions between playstyles that become convoluted in the balance between accessibility/aesthetic and competitive progression.

In chess white's advantage is negligible once you get passed the "moving pieces" stage and understand the game since black can equalise by the middle game. There is even an issue with top level play because there are too many draws. There may be some psychological advantage to playing white but there isn't positionally with decent play

Well I learnt nothing new, but you are correct, so guess youll get that updoot

What is the game at 13:24? It is not in your list.

What is the game around 13:25 with the guy shooting lightning?

In Titanfall 2 some players complained The Ronin Titan didn't have enough health. Later, players realized his sword block ability makes it one of the best defensive Titans, they just weren't using the ability enough

I mainly agree that in a "toolkit" (like a cardpool or in the case of a characters skills), some underpowered or overpowered options aren't necessarily bad. But In the case of a character pool it's not really true. Sure for the overall game state it might work, but from a lot of player perspective it'll feel awful. Someone that trained exclusively on sombra and end up with a low tier character might struggle to have fun simply because the dev thought it was ok that she was underpowered. When people are talking about something being underpowered they are saying "I'm not having fun because I'm being stomped with a strategy that I find enjoyable". And when they are talking about overpowered they are saying that a strategy is not fun to counter. That doesn't mean there is no counter, but if you have to play a character or strategy that isn't fun then there might as well be no counter because the game isn't enjoyable anymore. A good exemple would be toplane in LoL. For a long time (I'm not playing anymore so I don't know) people were complaining about riven, even when she was objectively bad. The thing is, riven power was never the problem, the problem was that to counter her you had to play super boring characters like malphite or garen. And honestly who cares about 2% win rate when they have to play garen?

I enjoy your video, it breaks down game balance in a nice way. In the case of Hearthstone I wonder about one thing. There are so many card games that came before which 'pushed' that certain stats/cost combinations are bad. At that moment it kind of becomes a given thing. Like Magic players just starting Hearthstone often said: oh this is a bad card due to it's stats, and they were right most of the times. My point is, can't the developer skip adding Magma Ragers into their game instead of proving a point that was already made by others? The message of: "Oh this is not ideal, look for other options." is also given via streamers, how-to-play KZfaqrs and whatnot. What do you think?

UM ACTUALLY, David Sirlin was the balance man of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix, not Street Fighter 2 Turbo

2:56 my rainbow sliver deck begs to differ....

This came at a great time for me in my recommended as I’m trying to make a tabletop game. After playing Warhammer 40k for about 2 years now, I’ve definitely noticed weird balancing choices. In my own game, it’s built around player interactivity, you can either attack or suppress wurh machine guns for example. Instead of making everything balanced, I’m mostly trying to give every army a variety of tools to overcome each other’s strengthe

I think balance for different types of games requires different mindsets... One made for multiplayer will always have a strong core (assuming it's successful) of elite players who will break the game in no time so you must stay ahead of the curve and keep them guessing and keep tinkering with the game to stop it becoming stale. The other is made for largely singleplayer/coop games that might still have a core of elite players who figure everything out but the balance changes you make are much easier to predict. Then you've got how linear the game is, the more linear the more planned the game can be and that much more refined in terms of balance...buuut it might have less replayability. The more open the game is the harder planning becomes and thus balance becomes but it will generally speaking have more replayability. Then there's the issue that...maybe you don't want a lot of replayability maybe you want a game that has a stronger focus on events and less on the playtime, something more akin to a movie/story. There's so many ways you can push the game that it's easy to forget the game designers aren't only balancing the game for what the current "meta" might be but also the future meta and still balancing things like how linear the game is and how much playtime they want players getting in it. As players we're the rats in the maze constantly being frustrated by the walls put in our place, as a dev you're designing the extra portions to the maze or removing old parts as needed to give just enough difficulty to keep players on their toes. Like you say Devs would be fools not to listen to player feedback but they do have to bear in mind the players are limited by the current version of the game they play, many dominos can fall from a few misplaced. That all said sometimes the devs just screw up and can't own up to it and hide behind "using statistics" or in general just behaving as if they know more about the game than the player. It's true but it's also false. The act of playing the game changes how you observe it, the act of making the game changes how you see the player and each change you make alters both player and developer. Nothing is certain.

i didnt play dota from the begining by i believe that is how they balanced it, there are characters with immortallity, instead of nerfing immortality they made axe ultimate kill through immortality, sniper boutyn hunter and zeus can reveal invisible characters and so on, eveything that is overpowered and up creating new game elements

"Players need a Sombra to counter a Reinhardt" or just extremely potent damage

13:24 what is that game? I hear him saying "All Art" or something but Google doesn't help. Thanks