Join us at Noon CT for the premiere of our new game developer hosted podcast, Dev Heads! kzfaq.infoOs-gt-15XKM?si=rOLNoJk4RrHj3UwX Hosted by JM8, Tina Sanzhez and Michael "Mikee" Tsarouhas.

Perception of buffs and nerfs is so impactful, in every multiplayer game I've played people immediately gravitate towards things that were buffed in the most recent patch, even though in theory the buff simply means it was bad and now should be neutral. Same thing with nerfs, if something goes from overpowered to neutral, doesn't mean you should immediately stop playing it.

No way you got one of the biggest and most transparent developers to actually talk about game design. That's actually so awesome to see since I love both your discussions and Mortdogs design philosophies.

I actually had a balance experience with Guild Wars 2 just before Heart of Thorns was added. My friend played a Thief, and I had recently started playing with a theory-crafting tool for builds. So, naturally, being a good friend, I decided to make a horrible meme build for my friend to try. I started, of course, by replacing all of the attack and crit stats with HP and armor stats. I then replaced all of the damage moves with DoT moves, and then, I noticed something: in PvE, you could use food items to increase your DoT stats. Add to that a worthless trait that allowed you to share your “make weapon apply debuff on hit” abilities with nearby teammates, and I had made my friend a, “DoT-support thief”. So, laughing my ass off, I give this build to my friend. They think it’s absolutely hilarious, and add a weapon combo to it that gives them a super-long evade at the cost of being unable to act, and we jump into PvE. The build broke the game, and my friend proceeded to use it through all of HoT (we were actually one of the sub-squad leaders (we were co-leading based on the task) in the first clear of Mordremoth because my friend could keep eyes on the battle as a whole while in the invuln state). We also took it into PvP, and I must say it was some of the best trolling I’ve ever experienced. People would target the “squishy thief” only to find out the hard way that that wouldn’t work. And then the entire build got merged into the base kit for thief at the start of Path of Fire and we both kinda dropped the game, but it was extremely fun while it lasted.

Second wind has blossomed in to an amazing channel. Please don't stop making and creating such great videos.

One slight correction on the Vlad nerf story. He got two nerfs in patch V1.0.0.111 - a strict numbers nerf to his passive and removing movement speed buff during an ability. The movement speed nerf never happened, but the nerf to his passive did. So there was a real nerf explaining some of the winrate drop. People still complained like crazy on the forums about the movement speed nerf though.

"You take a card game like Hearthstone" Legends of Runeterra: T^T okay

My favorite balancing story comes from Iron Galaxy and their work on Killer Instinct 2013. Way back when Jago was a particularly strong character, all the players pointed towards only his healing being too strong. Every time someone pointed something out it was his ability to recover a good chunk of health. Instead of immediately tuning the healing, they played around with Jago, understood why he was a little too strong, and came to the conclusion that it had nothing to do with his healing, he just had too many good options at mid range. So they tuned down a few of his moves to make him more punishable. Of course, everyone noticed the healing was unchanged so they still complained, but slowly after people played more and more of the update, they stopped whining. Jago was more reasonable. The philosophy they use here is finding the "symptom" of everyone's complaints, not the issue itself.

I genuinely think part of the issue is that balance is so nebulous to define because I have seen people online imply that a game is only balanced if the more skilled player will win 100% of the time, which I think is a very limited and flawed view, even if you could come up with a quantifiable measure of skill.

Some credentials before I write this: I am a TTRPG developer. I’ve worked for Dreamscarred Press on Pathfinder 3P content, and more recently led the team that made the Liminal Space book for Lancer RPG. In these, players are on the same side… but balance is an issue. If one player is significantly stronger than their peers, the game becomes less fun for those who are losing the opportunity to play. This happens most often in tables of mixed skill levels, but in this format you cannot just let a bad or inexperienced player lose. That isn’t fun, and there is more to do beyond throwing dice that you need to make sure they stick around for. To this end, we like considering the skill FLOOR as much as the skill CAP. That is, if someone makes a build for their character by throwing darts at a board blindfolded, how well can they still do? Most DnD-like games have infamously low skill floors. What we did was do our best to nudge the power of “bad” options upward by a bit (so that they’re at least playing in a similar league of power level to their fellows), but that was only half of it. By far the more important thing was giving the players agency to swap out bad choices much more quickly than the base game. This let them experiment with something they think is “cool,” but also escape from a dead end build if they hit one. Not everything could get this treatment (due to needing to interface with the base game), so other tricks included making the options people get "stuck" with be more broadly applicable. that way, they could usually be used to support things that could be changed both during experimentation and after a swap. This process took a lot of time and iteration, but was very much worth it in the end.

Riot employee using Hearthstone as an example and not Riots own card game Legends of Runeterra

It's been said by many but having only watched ZP on Escapist I've really been enjoying the different things on Second Wind, I think this and Cold Take have been a genuine surprise and glad I started watching them. Keep up the good work 👍

I think some of the biggest problems with game balance is when games fail to help the player understand why a certain tactic/build/whatever didn't work. It makes it really easy to play a game and destroy people with one strategy, then find someone who knows how to counter it and decide that their race/hero/champion is just OP.

The hardest part about balance? It shifts with player knowledge. Things become good, then bad, then good again for no reason other than understanding use cases. You end up not knowing which part of the discovery journey any single feedback is on

I recall the original Puzzle Quest. A common conplaint is that the CPU cheats. Its a match 3 game, so you can sometimes trigger a cascade where one match leads to lots in a row with just one move. The player got about as many as the CPU did, with it being slightly weighted in the players favour. But not weighted enough. I remember reading an article where the devs said the player needs to get 70% of the cascades in a game to feel like they got an equal amount as the CPU. Perception is everything. The player will assume a cascade in their favour is something going to plan and a CPU cascade is unfair. By having them equal they made players feel like they were being bullied.

Im not super much into multiplayer games. But it is a constant battle to get a game balanced. There will always be a group of gamers in every multiplayer game that wants advantages. and if they find out a particular character is better they will abuse it. We will always be one step behind people that want to get advantages.

The impact of perception on gameplay makes a massive difference on whether something is viewed by the community as balanced, broken, or underpowered. With games with a ton of weapons in particular, it feels like people will see a video of a particular weapon getting super powerful in the right situation, and determine it's "overpowered" without considering how it functions outside of that very specific situation. The same happens in reverse where people will look at a weapon or skill meant for use in specific situations, and decide that because it's not useful at all because it isn't as useful in general gameplay. This is where the trickiest part of balance talk comes in, in my opinion, because if developers listen to the extremes on one end or another, without really having a look at things, they risk making an already balanced feature unbalanced because the community was too focused on using it in an unintended way. This can easily lead to something that was previously balanced becoming too good because now it's good everywhere on top of its niche, or becoming too useless because it was previously only performing well in its niche. I've seen this a lot in particular with fan made mods for games, where they attempt to balance a feature or skill from the base game that was previously overpowered in a specific setup that most players would only use if they watched a guide to make that setup. The mod creators focus so much on keeping that extreme from happening that they make the components of said extreme useless outside of it.

"Perception is reality" was essentially my experience with Dark Souls. When i first played it I was of the mindset that it was "so unfair" that a boss could just two or three shot me when I had to slog through 50-100 hits to kill them. My perception was that there was no way i could win because I was so much weaker than my enemy, but it wasn't the balance of damage and health, it was the balance of my own ability and the way I approached the encounter. That felt like a powerful realization.

The "perception" point reminds me of that game where they had two guns (the Thompson and MP40) that were team reskins of each other, but because one *sounded* more powerful, players thought that one was stronger. Feelings are so hard to account for in the balancing game!

Don't forget to join us at Noon CT for the premiere of our new game developer hosted podcast, Dev Heads! kzfaq.infoOs-gt-15XKM?si=rOLNoJk4RrHj3UwX Hosted by JM8, Tina Sanzhez and Michael "Mikee" Tsarouhas. A big thank you to @MortdogTFT for joining us in the Design Mines for this episode! It was a pleasure to peer behind the curtain on how TFT is balanced. Somehow even more chaotic than i thought!

I had a strangely introspective relationship with League of Legends, back in the day. Waaay back in the day, Udyr jungle was overpowered, but Trundle jungle was kinda mid-tier. On Udyr you could buy all the gold-per-minute items and still stomp until mid-game. And he synergized with everyything you would eventually built them into. Trundle was more item dependent, slower to launch, and basically worse in every way. Until late game. But, I won more games playing Trundle. Because I was actually consciously or unconsciously aware that I was not unstoppable, and so I took fewer risks, played more optimally, and would more routinely actually make it to late-game with more objectives. The perception of power made me a worse player, and my brother would beg me not to play Udyr, even when I could routinely three-buff any other jungler under the sun, and starve them out, I took too many risks. Essentially playing the weaker jungler required me to play in un-punishable ways. And when there's five pairs of eyes on the other team, they will spot punishable behavior eventually.

Game I've never heard of in my life has untold millions of players has become a daily thing

I wish more designers had Mort's consideration to the 1/10000 chance for someone to be having a mindboglingly misserable experience as something that should be prevented rather than sticking RNG on a pedestal and shrugging that most players will be fine. Even if it's never happened to me personally, it just feels almost criminal to willingly subject some players to that experience, intentionally.

Hell yeah you actually got Mortdog on. Stick figure and everything.

hell yeah, my favorite dev as a guest at my favorite videogame design video series!

I would love for robin walker to come on to second wind. I love his philosophy on balancing for pubs specifically. In an interview on a a now defunct gaming website. he said one of the reasons he added random crits was that people would blame the game and not their under performing teammates. (alongside the other reasons). People go "Fuck that bullshit crit" when they die instead of "fuck you medic" when they die

I would say that the statement "There are no balanced games" is less about balance being impossible, and more about managing your expectations as a player to avoid the "scrub" mentality. There's a lovely article excerpted from 'Playing to Win' describing the mentality, but a common refrain is "That's not fair, it's unbalanced" from players who are hung up on their own ideas of how a game should be played instead of playing the game as designed and trying to find counter-tactics.

I remember when both me and a dev team got humbled. I was playing Smite when the game was in Beta and they'd just put Loki in the game and he was dominating every game because he could go invisible and you couldn't detect him and at the time did 2x backstab damage+ extra damage coming out of stealth. I argued he was too powerful and part of the issue was the invisibility with no way to detect and either the game needed a way to detect invisible things (like Dota 2 has as the main Rikki counter) or Loki to be seriously nerfed. With some info the community had I worked out some beermat maths to work out how Loki was melting everyone even tanks and proved his burst damage was already above any other assassin. A dev stepped in to explain my calculations were wrong and due to how armour works and Loki's blades not getting armour piercing on special attacks or attacks from steal the damage stacking I was calculating was way off. I argued something seemed off even if my numbers were way off. 3 days later the same dev came back to the thread having looked at the Loki win / loss numbers and said there was huge evidence of Loki winning a high % and having looked into it we were both wrong. Turns out some-one had forgotten to code Loki's damage correctly so every attack was doing pure damage that no armour could mitigate and they'd have to try and fix this then go over all the data again.

I’m a musician and I normally use these videos to help me think in new ways. Art is art. Not sure how I can use this in another medium, but it was SUPER interesting. Loved it.

I'm not a game dev or even aspire to be one, but I absolutely love picking out trends and analyzing raw data points in pvp gaming spaces. In apex, they released Horizon and Valkyrie around the same time, both to relatively lukewarm reception. Both considered fun, but not overwhelmingly strong. I picked out immediately that both of them could simply leave a fight vertically, without the help of any structure to attach to and no vulnerability to shoot at them if done correctly. It was a whole year before the greater playerbase caught on to this and both characters rose to meta status before eventual nerfs despite there being almost no changes to either in the year leading up to it. In overwatch, I have for the last 2 years thought it absurd that almost every character's critical multiplier was 2x or greater as that meant that there is a huge disparity in the amount of damage you could be taking from the same number of shots making the single tank format feel awful becuase you could be doing just fine and then be dead almost instantly by taking a few headshots from the enemy in unison. Lo and behold, Overwatch has just announced a tank rework that decreases their headshot damage taken to level out time to death. There's a a few other examples, but mostly my point is that public perception of the power of something or public perception of what the problem is in the first place can really affect what is being played. Players who find effective strategies through personal data analysis rather than crowdsourcing the info from playrates and content creators can use said strategies for years being called "a specialist" becuase no one with a following has tried to replicate it out of a generally accepted feeling that it wouldn't be more broadly applicable.

There is also this perception that, because games are usually more fun if the player wins, and ranking is more fun if you are making gains, people just want to win more than they lose. And that is something that just doesn't happen - you either get to become the best and have nowhere else to overcome, or you aren't the best and will stay behind someone better than you. If a game ranking system is actually balanced, every player will rise up to a point where you will win exactly 50% of the matches. However, if every other game one loses it, the person will feel bad, stuck and miserable. And even then, if you try and make stuff like faking games to give a confidence shot and make everyone get 50%+ games won by getting bots to fail against the players, if they ever find out (and they WILL find out), players will feel outraged by it.

Even single-player balance is a TON of work in a complex system. I've developed comprehensive balance mods for FTL and Brotato which each took hundreds of hours, and that's only *after* the hundreds of hours the devs spent making the vanilla experiences strong to begin with.

After years of playing D&D, I eventually realized players don't want balance. They want controlled imbalance. And the perfect analogy is Jenga. The balance exists only to set up that thrill of seeing the tower fall over.

Perception is a wild thing. I remember a while back, Destiny 2 started to move away from Connection Based Matchmaking in casual PvP playlists to Skill Based Matchmaking, after being CBMM for like 2 or 3 years. A lot of higher-skill people were up in arms because they didn't want to play in sweatier lobbies, but nevertheless the update went through. And the socials were filled with people complaining that the new matchmaking was horrible, lobbies were awful now, and Crucible was ruined. But there's the kicker- we found out later that week that due to an oopsie, the change never went live- it was still the same CBMM it always was. Some PvP-focused content creators like Aztecross then went and tried to retroactively change the narrative to save face, which was equally hilarious and infuriating. Another time some Exotic boots got nerfed shortly after it was released and was found to be super powerful, and the community got super upset cuz they misunderstood a poorly worded dev communication about why they were nerfed. A month or two later they not only reverted the nerf, they buffed them stronger than they first were, and NOBODY used them because the public perception was still "They were nerfed into the ground."

Still don't know what "TFT" stands for, at first I thought it was Team Fortress Two.

Small nitpick: 3:35 What you're describing is called the Nocebo effect - It's the opposite of the Placebo effect.

Missed opportunity to tell another interesting balance story that partly involved player perception and partly game theory mishaps. In set 9, they introduced a mechanic called "Legends", which was a character you could pick before going into the game that would guarantee you to see a certain set of augments themed around a playstyle. The results were kind of mixed. It helped newer/more casual players get to narrow what they needed to learn to play and have fun, but it reduced variety for people who wanted that. Ultimately they removed it after the set. This story is about one of the legends: Draven. His augment set was all about being rewarded for playing aggressively, with the first augment he always offered being "Spoils of War." This game some % chance on kill to drop a loot orb. You play this, you spend your money aggressively in the early stages to win-streak and earn money back from the augment. This was viewed as underpowered for most of the set, so it saw little play. So one patch, they buffed it to drop the orb slightly more often. Basically right away, streamers and others were saying it was OP, so a lot of people started playing it. What made this worse was the fact that it turns out that the more people in the lobby who played Draven, the better it was for you to play Draven. That's because: a) If the lobby is aggressive and you're not, you'll lose too much HP and die. b) If people are playing stronger boards, that often means they're running more units. Since you have the chance to get loot orbs on unit kills, the more units the enemy has, the more potential money you get by winning. c) With all this money running around, a lot of the lobbies would end with people getting 3* 4 costs, which are ordinarily supposed to be super rare and give you an overwhelming likelihood of winning if hit. Because units get taken out of a pool of units of the same cost, the more people taking 4 costs out of the pool, the easier it becomes to hit other 4 costs. This particular problem is a more general problem TFT faces that Mort's talked about. So because of perception and game theory, within a few hours a lot of lobbies had 8 Draven players. People freaked the fuck out, because they always do, and the team fixed it literally the next day, like they usually do. But what's the funniest part of it? Just like with the Vlad story, the change didn't actually properly go through. Only the text was different. This entire catastrophe of a day was essentially entirely created by player perception, amplified by the mob mentality on streams and reddit.

Loving the interviews with actual devs. You get some good context and knowledge. Keep it up.

11:35 *ProtonJon laughs maniacally* Back when I was into Magic the Gathering, I remember reading an article claiming some imbalance is a good thing. If everything is perfectly balanced then the game is too homogenized and lacks flare. It's also nearly impossible to avoid- some players are just too dedicated, devoting thousands of hours to finding that perfect unbeatable combination. Not sure what's changed since I stopped playing DOTA 2 but I remember feeling like Rikimaru was far too OP in expert hands.

I think balance feels much better if the way it will affect the game is communicated well to the player. Let's say I'm fighting a character who could kill me in 6 hits before, but they got buffed. I've heard "They got a damage buff" and "They're A tier now", but I know I can win the fight before they can land 5 hits, so I take the fight, they kill me in 4 hits, and I lose the game. That's frustrating, because I made the correct decision with the best knowledge I had, but the knowledge I had was too vague. And the average person who feels like they should've won, will feel like it's the game's fault when they don't win, so they'll blame the balance If I had instead heard "They can kill you in 4 hits now, be careful", I would've known to not take the fight head-on, I shouldn't win that fight any more so it's my fault if I take it. If the opponent's character really needed that buff, then it's good balance, I just need to adapt to it This is an extremely basic example, just to get the point across, and I know it's not that simple to do irl, but surely we can do better than tierlists

My favourite example of balancing by perception is that in the early days of Splash Damage's Enemy Territory multiplayer only expansion for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the community was insistent that the Allies' Thompson machine gun was stronger than the Axis' MP40. Except the weapons were identical in numerical balance for damage, fire rate, reload time, recoil handling etc. The solution? They made the Thompson sound worse.

Been really enjoying the Design Delve series, thanks much for doing it.

One thing interesting about game balance is how the meta is not necessarily the best way to play, just the agreed best way to play. In Counter-Strike, there was a gun that was so incredibly powerful for several years. This gun, the SG 553, was completely ignored by the majority of the player base and the entirety of the professional scene because the meta was its alternative, the AK47. And everyone knows how to use the AK. It wasn't until the AK was nerfed for a week or so and people started using the SG that people found out it was really good. It was so good in fact that when the AK nerf was reverted, people would prefer using the SG. It was used so much that it ended up being nerfed. It's also funny how, if you used the SG before it became meta, people would mock you for using it. Imagine that, players mocking players for using one of the most powerful gun in the game just because no one knew it was good.

The Helldivers community has been very critical of the balancing happening in that game currently. Hopefully this sheds some light into what the some devs might be thinking.

Hi Mort! Pre-alpha tester for Riot here! You don't remember me! Really cool getting your input here. Second Wind is popping off.

The only kind of content that can make starting the weekend even better

Some terms I'm surprised never come came up in this video are symmetrical and asymmetrical gameplay, because those are kind of an important covariate hanging over this whole discussion. I feel like everything being discussed here is specifically applicable to a certain window within the Symmetrical-Asymmetrical window where you're mostly talking about character classes and is going to vary wildly as you move further to one side or the other. I think that multiplayer, gameplay symmetry could easily be an episode of Design Delve.

There is currently some drama in the Helldivers community about balance, regarding recent nerfs to popular weapons, new weapons being underpowered, and how much balancing is really needed in a cooperative PVE game like Helldivers.

Really great interview! It's interesting how a lot balance really just comes down to perception.

While talking during the end credits does mean hearing the calming music less, if the talking is as charming as this I am all for it😄💖😊

I used to help run a LARP that was also constantly under design as we tried to balance it and also broaden the kinds of fantasies it was possible to play. One of our biggest issues with game balance is that we were trying to balance two games: PvE was an entirely different game from PvP. The other issue with trying to balance the game is that instead of giving the designers unilateral control over the game, any changes had to be voted in by the players (an idea I had introduced very early on because I had just gotten out of three different larps where the people in charge just gave themselves arbitrarily large amounts of power). I eventually quit the game (there was a faction of players that were trying to take over and deliberately making things awful for me to drive me out and we for some reason couldn't ban them), and a few years after the other founding members quit the whole thing collapsed, which made me sad.

Cool addition to the format. You have made another great video.

That's why I never play multiplayer games anymore, every time I did it was a bad experience.

Give Ludo her own side-series and call it The Ludo Narrative

Ah, posted one minute ago. New JM8 and Ludo content on a Friday, yes please Edit: Guest appearance in this video is beautiful!

Crazy how Super Smash Bros Melee kind of works despite having no intention to balance and no patches.

I think an interesting other aspect to balance is unfun METAs and the difference between this is FUN and this is STRONG. I don't have any idea how to balance for video games, but I've been playing D&D for sixteen years and writing my own content for it. The 5e ranger is the quintessential example here IMO because if you play a very specific optimized build it is very strong, but its then one very specific course of action from there out. You summon animals and use a fully optimized set of hand crossbows. It's both unfun because you never make any other choices and the DM has to deal with 10 badgers eating up the turn order. Making ranger strong hasn't fixed many players problems with ranger because they want the class to be fun and engaging. Martials (classes with limited magic or no magic at all) in D&D overall have had this issue in 5e where there simply aren't many choices to be made and at its worst its really split the community even if they're "balanced" around certain numbers like damage dealt and how much damage they can take (which even then those numbers are very easy to skew). Of course all of this comes with that huge grain of salt called personal taste, but its still interesting simply because of how long its held on in 5e.

Thank you for this. It was actually insightful and lightly technical. Really appreciate the deeper content! Glad to support this kind of video!

My biggest frustration with perceived game design is when the devs don't communicate intent to the players. Here is a character and huge selection of equipment go have fun. Then I pick what looks fun and then find out that character was not intended to be used that way and now your stuck with a useless setup that is not fun. If you want players to perceive balance I feel you need to give at least a communicate a modicum of intent. I find when you communicate why things are designed in a way it gives players a foundation to work on. Some will go off that path if given the option and any success or fail is on the players. But not communicating makes the players perceive intent and then that focus goes on the developers and as failure is more likely when experimenting and this negativity impacts perception.

I've been playing the Roguelite _Astral Ascent_ a lot lately (2D platformer with a lot of Hades in its veins), and the randomness distribution thing is super well balanced there. In that game you get 4 spells (can be cast from mana which is replenished by landing hits with basic attacks), and can have up to 4 Auras (always active, may spawn helpful things on a timer and/or specific action, add passive buffs, etc). Both of these have an elemental type (or at least affinity): Fire, Electric, Ice, Poison, or Neutral and both can be upgraded or replaced through shops, random drops, or events. You always start off a run with no auras (until you unlock the ability to choose one at the start) and 3 cost 1 level 1 neutral spells + 1 spell you can choose from. Early in the run your choices are pretty randomly distributed (and low level) but as you get past the second area the game starts to look at what you've selected so far and nudges the RNG to give more synergies. One of the most important things is "Gambits" these are upgrades to your spells that may spawn additional damage causing objects, add debuffs, or even heal you. Selecting gambits that are of the same type as your spell improves the damage output of the spell directly. An example of a good synergy might be that your poison spell that hits 3-5 times has a gambit that has a 40% chance to spawn a poisonous slime on hit and an aura that increases the damage that a slime will do to enemies, or how easily it applies the poisoned debuff to them. This system came about because the early patches didn't do this and many runs died because you weren't able to synergize in any meaningful way except through sheer random chance. It's kinda the same way as the Shen augment discussed in the video, If I get lucky in the starting room and get a level 3 Aura that has a 15% chance of healing 1HP on missile hit, but can't find anything that spawns missiles I wasted an aura slot, but even finding one gambit somewhere in the run suddenly makes it a lot more viable.

I think Limbus Company had a pretty big surprise recently with it's latest update. So, they just released two new identities, whose gimmick is "I can inflict one of the five main status ailments, but it's randomly picked which one it is." This didn't seem very strong on release. However, it turned out that this meant that their skills counted as all status type inflictions, and their IDs counted as five of the seven status effects at the same time. So, all the mirror dungeon gifts that rely on skills or identities that inflict an ailment? Yeah, turns out those were triggering far more often than intended. If every attack counts as burn, bleed, tremor, rupture, and sinking all at once, then they could inflict way more of it intended with the right gifts, and also count for those super "Have 5 of an Ailment on your team for a big bonus" gift. They've been rebalanced to count as only Bleed IDs for fusion gifts, and their skills will only trigger gift effects if it specifically triggers the ailment by random choice, or would have counted anyway (For example, being an Orange attack for a gift that triggers on Orange or Burn attacks). I personally didn't see any problem with them until I read the patch notes to fix them up.

"Perception is reality Ludo" I find that fascinating too JM8 because that's something Dr. Maruki's therapy sessions in Persona 5 talk about

Something that's actually really interesting is competitive multiplayer games designed to be unbalanced. While such games are unsurprisingly rare to find, a game I myself personally enjoy quite a lot is called Blood Bowl, Imagine chess with dice and punching. In Blood Bowl there are many different factions, each essentially a different fantasy archetype, who you pick from in order to build your team. This team will generally play ~1 hour long games within the competition its participating in, out of which it can play anything from ten to hundreds of matches depending on the competition format and length, which while progressing, it can skill up its players, buy new ones, or even see them die. However where the balance hits an interesting snag is how many ludicrous ways the very different teams are built and interact with each other. Some teams are designed in such a way that they're solid in their early stages, but lack the potential to hold up at higher stages, some teams lack many basic skills early on, but develop into terrifying menaces within time. Some teams do pretty good at all stages, and a few teams are designed to be catastrophically deficient. However despite there being a clear meta orientation, there are so many factors, such as matchups and how a team develops over time, but most critical remains the dice factor. The top coaches (players) who will put dozens of hours per week into a completely open ladder system where you can easily get matched up against complete newbies, only have a win rate of ~70% - 75%. The whole balance aspect and team interactions are really worth a closer look than what I can fit in here, there are many eternal lengthy discussions about many of the balance factors of the game, if you look at different tournament rules you'll see extreme differences in what different factions get or don't get depending on their tier. Even the weakest factions have their own ways of fighting back, and there have been many cases where severely deficient factions managed to outperform the better ones. This is all exponentially increased by whatever the hell happens behind the developer's doors, since it exists in both table top and virtual format, in the latest big rule change the worst faction by far instantly became the best faction by far due a large amount of highly unconventional strategies, all mainly because the parent company changed its roster to better fit the factory miniature sprues.

Ludo is a great DAWG love her to bits!

In my own time, I'll tinker with ideas for card games which I'll sometimes test with friends. One thing I've found over time is that it's not just *how many* levers you have at your disposal for balancing cards, but the range you can move those levers in. A game like Magic where 1 power is small and 5 power is huge has less range on that lever than say Digimon, where 1000 is tiny and 15000 is massive. Thing is, after you've locked in the scale of those levers, it's really hard to change them because it will also alter the rest of the levers you have in the game. If Magic wanted to expand the power/toughness scale, not only would it invalidate older cards, but it would also mean the starting total of 20 life would be outdated as well.

I really enjoy these thought-provoking episodes! Keep up the great work!

A perfectly balanced game with no exploits is a rare thing indeed.

Tale as old as time. Even when a new Quake-style oldschool arena shooter comes out today (only to die in two weeks, because they're fucking brutal), you have people ingame flame others after dying the same way they did 25 years ago. "Rocket Launcher is a shit noob gun, splash damage", "Lightning Gun is a shit noob gun, too much DPS and knockback", "Railgun is a shit noob gun, you can snipe and hide". Like... Rocket Launcher's projectiles are slow, you need to predict enemy's movement more so than with any other gun to land direct hits, splash damage is too weak compared to what other guns can do consistently and, finally, there's self-damage! Lightning Gun is mid-range, the beam is short so it doesn't hit at long range at all, and at short range aiming it is impossible, avoid that range! Railgun has the lowest DPS because it takes so long to reload after every shot (as in, it reloads instantly after you fire it and you can't even switch to another gun), chip damage can be compensated for with good positioning, movement and item pickups, and players who are too cocky with the Railgun can get punished because they can't defend themselves while it reloads. Every option has strengths and weaknesses, there's so much depth to it that people are still playing decades later with minimal tweaks. The most important part is, there's no builds, there's no characters, no loadouts, there's so few variables to balance and they pretty much nailed it 25 years ago already. Since it's multiplayer, players can adapt and evolve. Everyone starts equal, everyone has access to the same 9 (nine!) guns, you have the freedom to *position yourself to render the enemy's preferred gun ineffective*, you just need to be better at exploiting the other guy's weaknesses than he is at exploiting yours. But new people don't want that, they'd rather resort to throwing out aforementioned absolutes or, better yet, calling players who are better at the game than them "the real noobs" because they not only don't see the whole picture, they've decided that they shouldn't have to

That was one heck of meaty episode 😊 Also I love this topic because it is combination of how you want your game to be played, players playing it and their perception aaaand actual balance, pseido random, rule set based or not

right now design delve is the best show on second wind, the production value man

It's fascinating to hear another POV on design and I hope you're able to bring in many more. Good luck on the new 'cast.

Possibly the biggest illusion of balance I've seen is in the game Heroes of Might and Magic 3, and it's extremely well executed. In that game, you control heroes that lead armies, gather resources and capture towns. There are 8 town types that produce different types of army - the Tower faction produces Magi, golems and other wizardly adjacent creatures, Necropolis summons the undead, Inferno summon demons and devils, etc. Some people claim the game is well balanced, that a good player with any of the 8 factions (or at least, a good subset thereof) will be equally capable of taking on any given challenge. They are wrong. This belief comes from the campaign, which expertly balances the difficulty of campaigns against the power of the factions such that you are presented with a suitable difficulty curve. Several factions are close to parity, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest: Necropolis. Their heroes have an ability called Necromancy that allows them to convert 10% of the entire enemy army to skeletons upon victory (or skeleton warriors, the upgraded version, if there is no slot in the army for the regular kind). As they develop, they can all push this to 30% and even beyond with certain powerups. Skeletons are one of the better bottom tier units in the game, and the game is structured such that a swarm of low tier units can easily defeat a more modest set of high tier units. What makes this game breaking is that every map has most of its resources guarded by unaffiliated armies. These are meant to be a weak but beatable challenge that slows the rate at which you gain power...but if you play Necropolis well, most of these fights will add more to your army than you lose. So while everyone else is slowly burning through their army, Necropolis players are enhancing it beyond what their production normally alllows. And this is only half of the game breaking - the other half is the Vampire Lords. Their 4th tier unit, Vampires and the upgraded Vampire Lords are powerful and generally become available around the start of what I'd call midgame. Vampire Lords are a particularly potent 4th tier unit with the ability to fly, excellent movement range, high attack power, and do not provoke retaliation attacks (most creatures, when they attack, get attacked back by the survivors on their turn; Vampire Lords don't trigger that, so they take about half as many attacks as they dish out in a one-on-one fight.) Then, this already high power unit gets this absolutely absurd ability where for every point of damage it deals, it heals. If a vampire lord from that stack has been killed, healing past full health for the surviving stack will resurrect those dead vampires. And these things deal a LOT of damage, so they get a LOT of healing. Once a person has over 40 Vampire Lords or so, they are going to tear through most battles with minimal effort. And for every other unit in the game, Resurrection, particularly the kind of Resurrection that persists after one battle and into the next, is a late game spell cast by heroes, which takes a good chunk of their spell points and can only be done once per cycle through all the army's units - thus making it an opportunity to do a great deal more than just bring back a few dead units. Between these two units, Necropolis is already extremely potent. Add in the fact that their tier 3, 5 and 6 units are all average or above average, and you've got a force that's as unstoppable as death itself. The way the campaign balances this is by making the Necropolis campaign absolutely brutal. Every level gives the enemy a major advantage in number of towns (and thus army production capacity, which is a fixed amount per town at the start of every week) and several levels put strong roadblocks in place to stop you from making an early rush - as rush tactics are an extremely good way to counter that sort of disadvantage as the army size discrepancy compounds every week of production. This results in memorable levels that pit you against extremely powerful enemy armies....and if you're a player who knows how to take advantage of Necropolis's advantages, you absolutely steamroll them. And if you're not...well, you might be able to pull off the Tom and Jerry strategy (bait them into attacking in a stupid way and use that to make them hurt). Great game, though! And super cheap, because it's some old 1999 game on GoG that the world has forgotten.

Thanks for the discussion.

Honestly one of the advantages of rogue-lite design is that it generally doesn't have to be finely balanced to be fun. If I discover a serious exploit, but can only take advantage of it because the combo isn't likely to happen in more than 10% of games... it's not that bad. 10% of the time I get this badass killer combo out, and the rest I don't - and in trying to build into my killer combo, I may be passing up other good-but-not-as-crazy options to try to get my broken combo out, and then I fail because the RNG tells me to go #%@# myself and I have to make do. Now, if I discover an exploit that lets me deterministically ACHIEVE a killer combo in a rogue-lite or similar RNG drive game, then you've got a real problem.

I think that what makes balancing so hard isn't so much the math associated with it, but how the "fun" aspect reacts to the balance. There was this one point in the speedrunning history of Goldeneye64 that a player accidentally discovered that you could shave a half second off your run by continuously looking down rather than forward and this nearly broke the community bc it was just not fun to play like that, but you'd never keep the first place spot without it. Fun is not just reliant on success, if winning is less fun than playing unbalanced then you have to reorganize whatever balance you imposed on the game.

I think one of the trickiest things with balance is that people use it to refer to different phenomenon. Some people use it to mean that all strategies or characters or weapons (depending on the game) are equally viable. Other people mean that they want all options to be equally enjoyable. Sometimes those are similar goals, but not always, especially since preference and skill level are going to affect both.

About the balance perception misconception I'm reminded of Killer Instinct and how the devs ended up balancing a character(I think it was Jago) in a different way the community was suggesting, and everyone got mad at then. But then it turned out the nerfs were really good and they understood what made the character bettter or worse more than the community did, so the devs sticking to their guns like Mortdog said is very true

As a fighting game player, one thing that is super clear is that the initial impressions of players are very likely to be wrong, so balance should probably just sit for a while. It has happened many times that a poorly rated character has turned out to just be the best or other way around. Also frequent balance changes reward players for jumping into the the thing that is hard to deal with right now, while less frequent changes reward players for investing more deeply into more complex parts of the game. You probably don't want to make changes too infrequent, but the latter way should be possible imo.

I still have no idea what this game was supposed to be.

This guy said in a better way something that, as a fighting game player, has been tugging at my mind. If your goal is balance for balancing sake, you might as well simply have one character. The point of balancing is to balance for fun, or the way he puts it, a desired experience. By balancing towards that goal, you can create an unbalance that many people actually love.

I would stand by the idea that no game is balanced, if by 'balanced' one means perfectly balanced. The trick is that you never really need perfect balance either, you just need enough balance. The first priority I think is making sure there are no dominant strategies, things that must be taken for winning to be possible (because your opponents will be taking them even if you don't). Make sure everything has a counter, make those counters reasonably accessible, and you don't need perfectly matching numbers, players will sort out the rest. From there it's worth looking at some second order goals, like making sure no option is too aggravating to play against or only has counters that are annoying to use, trying to make all (or at least as many as you can) of options a player can take become either one of the strong options or a useful counter against them, and how differing skill levels affect balance considerations (and what to do about them). Perception is also important to consider though, and I actually think it's the tougher nut to crack. Not only can it come from outside the mechanics, things like visual effects, sound design and UI elements can affect it, but it can come from outside the game entirely.

This reminds me of all the gamers on Reddit or whatever that are always saying that balancing things or making good games is so simple, devs should just listen to the fans, and them in particular.

Felt slightly like we where jumping between topics without linking. So having the podcast explains it.

as someone who has been thinking of making game (far more thinking then learning), this has kind of reinforced an idea I've had for a while, that being, the feel of a game is more important then parts of the game itself, it doesn't matter if "this item is absolutely broken" if it feels like absolutely nothing, or more importantly, "this enemy feels broken/annoying to fight" even if the enemy's abilities are on par, if not worse than yours, and I feel as though these have been ignored more often. I have played several games as of recent where the opposition feels, annoying. Yes, their hard to defeat. Yes, Its intended. Yes, what I do against them has counters their using. But none of these feel like "a hard challange to overcome" or "something that needs a new idea" It feels like a slog, a slog designed to wear you down, and wait, for every move you do, and to stop it in the least gratifying way possible, because its the best option.

This is a great video. Mort has excellent insights here and I felt this was a very fun topic. I wish you could go into much more detail a la talking about how to design systems that work well together to create effective levers for balancing.

I got to see Ludo live today and that was so wonderful 🥰

It's always interesting to me to find points where the meta is both un-fun and incorrect. Friend of mine used to be very into the great-weapon-master in Neverwinter. Because he could see that this "garbage" class was just specifically great at destroying adds in certain boss fights. So he was topping DPS charts, as rogues are single-target. Didn't even replace rogues as highly necessary boss-shankers. But it really made them mad because they were very used to measuring self-worth by pure damage numbers. MtG, when I had a program to help me play it on Arena (I need something to beep at me when it's my turn, because I can't both relax and pay attention, it's just where my ADHD is.) I loved building decks that were not optimal, but were fun and wrecked metas. Like the days of the cat-oven deck. Cheap little 2-card combo, just involved an etb trigger and a cat jumping in and out of the graveyard. And the main counter-play was a -2/-2 to all creatures instant that, at end-of-turn, deleted whatever it put in the graveyard if it was still there. And on Arena, you had to sit through every slow step of activating the cat, paying its price, activating the oven, selecting the cat, repeat... and it did *one* point of damage per full sequence. No fun to play, no fun to play against. So I built a deck with a lot of cards that people had dismissed from the then-recent sets. I wanted exile effects and things that capitalize on it. The idea was to remove a lot of threats and then ult a planeswalker about it. The big scary threat let you plop a couple of choice things you'd exiled onto the board under your control. But the secret powerhouse was a 3-mana planeswalker that could ult for the # of cards in exile, and +1 & lifegain off removing creatures from the opponent's graveyard... and -1 to exile a zero or one-cost non-land permanent. The cat was what kills you in the cat-oven deck, but the *oven* is the combo piece that can't change zones. Another fun time was in Brawl mode when the rage was, weirdly, Field of the Dead. You could spot the decks on sight because they'd always have this robot commander that let you put any land from your deck on the board when you played him. Which was silly, because his other ability was the game-winner. These guys weren't even building real landfall decks, and they badly wanted one to three 2/2 zombie tokens per turn. So I showed 'em Assassin's Trophy, a very cheap removal card with the unusual text "destroy target permanent", with the downside that the opponent gets to replace it with a basic land from their deck. Field of the dead requires 7 lands with different names. These decks tended to have allllll the 2-color lands and triomes and whatnot... and some forgot that basic lands still count, so they didn't have any. (Sometimes, the popular meta is just... bad.) And now? Helldivers 2 is the land of buffs and nerfs and... I'm weird, I remember stuff (not always). So I'll see a weapon that got nerfed and go "okay, 350 to 325, still up from the 250 it was before. Probably takes those guys I needed 5 shots to drop up to 6. No problem." And... that the railgun got armor penetration buffed again, and I think "great! people should be happy about that." but no, they were not, they'd already forgotten railguns ever existed. And... like... this isn't a game about balance. It's about running for your life across a warzone where you are extremely outnumbered except for your orbital strikes. (And satire of the 'murrican military/patriotism propaganda machines.) You've got 5 backup clones like it's Paranoia. Honestly, if they wanted to randomize the weapon stats every round, I think that'd be pretty fitting. Balance is so weird a concept.

I've never personally had a good sense of balance when it comes to games, but witnessing conversations about balance has spawned this observation: "Ubalanced" tends to mean "doesn't play the way I'm used to" or "...the way I want it to".

This is a good format. Every gamedesign channel eventually turn into soapboxing, the writer endlessly repeating their own biases. Getting people in from different parts of the field to talk about their experience would completely subvert that!

Yaaaaayyyy! A new design delve! Always look forward to Fridays because of this

Love the Ludo thinking Mortdog was gonna be a dog. I'm a sucker for that cute dog humor. Would love to see if a balancer for games like DOTA, OW2, LOL, and other team basedgames would chat. They must be much harder to balance and its be really interesting to see how well they can actually anticipate stuff. Also games like SC2 or the upcoming Frost Giant game (forgot the name) I think either of these games balance people would love to talk. Especially Frost Giant since they're trying to launch a new rts game. I love watching SC2 pro play and find the balance interesting, even if playing the game is easy beyond me.

I once busted the meta of an online card game (digitised version of a now defunct ccg) during a tournament. The group running the site had produced a new virtual expansion set of cards. I noticed that one of them had no intrinsic limit to the number of times the effect could be used, so long as I could pay the cost. So I built a deck around getting that card in play, keeping it in play until the halfway point in the game, then combining it with 4 other official cards - 1 of which was considered almost useless, and another only having niche utility - to win the game. The new card was nerfed immediately following the tournament, preventing the infinite loop I had discovered by limiting the number of times it could be activated.

hmmmm, I'm reminded many many many years ago when playing Akuma vs Ken. My friend was an expert fighting game fan, and had no idea that Ken Masters could dodge more so than Ryu, not as much damage, but enough to peck Akuma. Akuma was balanced to be a selectable character in Alpha 2, but interesting how much difficult the game is, yet better than being just being broken.

Another approach to balance is to make everything OP, that way players all get to do some game breaking thing. The end result can be quite chaotic. It's a technique used in modern boardgame design, I'm thinking particularly about a designer called Carl Chudyk, most famous for "Glory to Rome"

If you want to see a ongoing non-video game version of this: Yu-Gi-Oh. Lack of resource management and stupidly complex interaction mechanics means a trash card from a decade ago can suddenly become game-breaking because a new support card for a completely different archetype allows the older one to infinite loop into a FTK e.g. Frog Burn decks

Helldivers 2 comes to mind. Balancing wise the game is incredibly delicate as its attrition-style gameplay loop amplifies imbalance in a "Win/Lose-more" way, its like L4D on that. You are to have a fighting chance, not be a horde slaying god. Which means that the game is more likely to nerf something than buff and boy do players complain about that! Some in the community are still demanding their enemy trivializing Godgun is returned to the exact state it was before it got nerfed and that instead they should just "Buff everything else", oblivious to how much work that would be and what kind of problems it generates in the long run. So now they call everything in game "Mediocre" repeatedly while the odds are very much that if they never had a Railgun power-trip. They wouldn't have been spoiled and be able to enjoy the rest moreso..

Any semblance of balance goes out the window whenever I get involved.

If I recall correctly, back during the Halo Bungie days, there were a lot of players who flamed forums and raked Bungie over the coals for balance issues. And yeah, Reach especially had a lot of them (most of the Halo games did in spades). But talking about "perceived balance" and the placebo effect, it was on display there hard. One incident I recall was players demanding a change. Bungie released a patch saying they had. Players praised it, saying it was perfect. A week or two later, Bungie revealed that they'd actually done the *opposite* of what players had asked for, and made a comment to the effect of 'players know something is wrong, but actually *why* is generally completely wrong.' Stuck with me.

Anybody else constantly thinking them mentioning "TFT" means Team Fortress Two? No, just me?

This series is so criminally under viewed. I don't know how channels like GMTK and Razbuten pull in so many more views than design delve. Tell your friends about this show!