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Richard Garfield (Magic, Robo Rally) wrote a very interesting article on BGG on game balance. As this is an issue that has come up in 40k, WHFB, etc since forever, I found his insights very thoughtful and imagined you all might as well:
https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/169896/the-balancing-act

Summary: Perfect game balance is a myth. Game balance is about improving play for a wide range of potential players and often involves costs and benefits.

The term "balance" is somewhat unfortunate because it implies there is a single correct place for the final game.

There is a school of thought that preaches balancing games for the top-level player.…There are two problems with this approach. First, players won't hang around to become experts if they aren't enjoying the game. Second, and I think more importantly, many players didn't evolve to an expert level of play despite playing for a long time.

…overreliance on adjusting game balance means that when players have challenges, they won't try as hard to overcome them — and monumental game achievements will be removed from the table.

He gives several detailed examples from his long career and even discusses komi in Go for the second player. Worth a read in my opinion.

One thing I notice with video games - eps in rts games - is when people lose there are a portion who refuse to learn the new game and instead

1) Expect the game balance to change to accommodate the tactics/gameplay they use.

2) Complain that the AI/opponent is cheating and that is the reason for their loss.


I've even seen people arguing it after 1 or 2 matches in a brand new game (by their own admission).

For me this is one reason why "high level play" is often defaulted too as the bar which is used to measure and adjust balance; because at the very least players that stick around, learn the game and advance to higher levels are typically playing the game correctly (or if not "correctly" at least within the boundaries that the rules permit).
They are more likely to adapt their choices to the situation; adapt to the games mechanics and find ways to win.


Now yes many people won't advance that high, but at the very least it gives slightly less biased information.


Of course you've got to keep an eye on the entry level too. It's very easy to end up with very tight very complicated rules if you only focus on the top tier players. I know Warmachine could end up like this in 2nd edition - things like "never use run always declare a charge that will fail to get the extra move distance" were common higher level tactics that newer people often wouldn't grasp.
Similar to how experienced players could eye-ball move distances or head-trigonometry them. Meanwhile beginners wouldn't be able to eyeball distances; which could make it much harder for them when the game was restrictive on measuring distances.

 Overread wrote:

Of course you've got to keep an eye on the entry level too. It's very easy to end up with very tight very complicated rules if you only focus on the top tier players. I know Warmachine could end up like this in 2nd edition - things like "never use run always declare a charge that will fail to get the extra move distance" were common higher level tactics that newer people often wouldn't grasp.

Just to nitpick because its a good example: running was farther than charging, but you couldn't have your caster cast spells then run so the trick was to cast spells and fail a charge, which wouldn't get you as far a run, but would get you farther than the more natural cast spells and walk while still getting your spells out.

I mostly agree with Richard here, but out of the games he made (early Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner, Artifact), none of them were really close to balanced.

Even inside of GW there were games with high levels of balance despite the huge variety in factions (example: Epic Armageddon). The secret? good designers and extensive playtesting.

In fact when you mix the opposite, awful designers and NO playtesting at all, you get bad and unbalanced games (example: Legions Imperialis).

Open beta playtesting is such a great idea.

SU-152 wrote:
Open beta playtesting is such a great idea.

It's really, really not.

The problem with open betas is they create an extreme version of a community over reliant on adjustments. Essentially, people stop playing the game and start spending all their time on a potential future game that never really exists. Essentially the game just becomes discussing the game; politicking for "fixes" and arguing on the internet about what's wrong and how to fix it. No one plays the game that they have because they're focused on the game that will be. You can never play tomorrow even when it becomes today if you remain focused on the new tomorrow.

SU-152 wrote:
Even inside of GW there were games with high levels of balance despite the huge variety in factions (example: Epic Armageddon). The secret? good designers and extensive playtesting.

In fact when you mix the opposite, awful designers and NO playtesting at all, you get bad and unbalanced games (example: Legions Imperialis).

Open beta playtesting is such a great idea.

These days short timeframes also comes into play - major GW games get a whole new rules edition every 3 years. That's not like something such as Magic the Gathering where the core rules are basically unchanged for decades and change comes from additions and tweaks. GW are more than happy to change major fundamentals - eg some editions everything has the same movement; some its unique per model;

Calbear wrote:
I mostly agree with Richard here, but out of the games he made (early Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner, Artifact), none of them were really closed to balanced.

At least for MtG they were surprised by how popular it was. They figured rarity was going to be a factor. If there was only one or two copies of a rare in a play group, you were not going to get degenerative combo decks. There would just not be the cardstock to build them.

Of course, after the first few printings, that excuse went away..

Balance as a concept has evolved a lot over the last 30 years as competitive gaming has become more and more common and in particular, the internet has accelerated the rate at which games are consumed and knowledge is shared. Each era of balance has learned something. I do think the highlights from the OP reflect the current views on games.

What currently seems to work best is a lighter touch than what a lot of players think they wanted in the era of immediacy. The constant churn of regular updates didn't really make games more balanced and mostly left players disengaged and reliant on the future.

Lately, the trend has been more of a less is more approach. No more than 2-3 updates a year seems to be about right, but the catch with that is those updates have to get it right. A good patch cycle acts essentially as course correction, but a bad patch will make it really hard to see how to fix the problems you've created. Nerf something too hard and you'll have no data to see how it really performs. Make something too good and you have no idea how good the rest of the game is.

I've been really interested in watching this play out over the years. Games need updates to keep their interest, but change for change's sake is really destructive. You need players to feel like they're feedback is being heard, but you need to take the time to make sure that the changes you make don't immediately require more changes. Quality and timely patching is an art onto itself these days, and one that requires developers with faith in what their doing and faith in their playerbase at the same time.

I put my RPG into a limited playtest. And I learned players will innately spend their time trying to actively break your game.

I think designers spend more time trying to close loopholes in the system than trying to fix balance issues.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I put my RPG into a limited playtest. And I learned players will innately spend their time trying to actively break your game.

.... and there is no system that can not be broken.

A lesson many aspiring game designers learn pretty early on.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I put my RPG into a limited playtest. And I learned players will innately spend their time trying to actively break your game.

And??
I'm sorry, but if you hand me a game to playtest my assumption is that it's my job to see how I can break it. And I can & will break it. What you do with the analysis I provide you with from that exercise is on you....

ccs wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I put my RPG into a limited playtest. And I learned players will innately spend their time trying to actively break your game.

And??
I'm sorry, but if you hand me a game to playtest my assumption is that it's my job to see how I can break it. And I can & will break it. What you do with the analysis I provide you with from that exercise is on you....

I'm not feeling very well right now, so I'm going to keep it short.

If you want a detailed response I will give you one later. But nothing was filled out on any of the playtest forms, except that they one section I had told them to ignore (Concealing Equipment - which Ive been rewriting), was too easy to abuse.

And the guy who was trying to run the game said they spent the entire time trying to manipulate how many weapons and and how much equipment they could conceal into their clothing.

Just very aggravated. Sorry for venting.

 LunarSol wrote:

SU-152 wrote:
Open beta playtesting is such a great idea.

It's really, really not.

The problem with open betas is they create an extreme version of a community over reliant on adjustments. Essentially, people stop playing the game and start spending all their time on a potential future game that never really exists. Essentially the game just becomes discussing the game; politicking for "fixes" and arguing on the internet about what's wrong and how to fix it. No one plays the game that they have because they're focused on the game that will be. You can never play tomorrow even when it becomes today if you remain focused on the new tomorrow.

That's a very long shot with lots of assumptions. Make it closed then


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:

SU-152 wrote:
Even inside of GW there were games with high levels of balance despite the huge variety in factions (example: Epic Armageddon). The secret? good designers and extensive playtesting.

In fact when you mix the opposite, awful designers and NO playtesting at all, you get bad and unbalanced games (example: Legions Imperialis).

Open beta playtesting is such a great idea.

These days short timeframes also comes into play - major GW games get a whole new rules edition every 3 years. That's not like something such as Magic the Gathering where the core rules are basically unchanged for decades and change comes from additions and tweaks. GW are more than happy to change major fundamentals - eg some editions everything has the same movement; some its unique per model;

Took me a weekend to check how OP infantry is in LI for example.

A week to check how week infantry is in WH:TOW. And how powerful riden monster+save stacking.

Oathmark has super nice mechanics. Zero balance (author confessed on FB they did zero playtesting).

Playtesting is key. And it is not slow.

Lathe Biosas wrote:

ccs wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I put my RPG into a limited playtest. And I learned players will innately spend their time trying to actively break your game.

And??
I'm sorry, but if you hand me a game to playtest my assumption is that it's my job to see how I can break it. And I can & will break it. What you do with the analysis I provide you with from that exercise is on you....

I'm not feeling very well right now, so I'm going to keep it short.
If you want a detailed response I will give you one later. But nothing was filled out on any of the playtest forms, except that they one section I had told them to ignore (Concealing Equipment - which Ive been rewriting), was too easy to abuse.
And the guy who was trying to run the game said they spent the entire time trying to manipulate how many weapons and and how much equipment they could conceal into their clothing.
Just very aggravated. Sorry for venting.

If you give a monkey two things, expect them to fixate on the one you don't want them to fixate on. This is sometimes why its easier if there's something you don't want tested; to just leave it out entirely. Don't show them the thing you don't want working. At the same time you've also identified that public playtesting also comes with risks - one of which is that thye are not employees and you can't control them. There's also the issue that they can play it wrong; not follow the rules; make stuff up; be bad quality players and the lot.

Firms get around this by identifying skilled players and focusing on them for review information. By having internal testing teams and by doing mass-tests and relying on volume of information (often processed through surveys and the like) to spot very common patterns.

Testing stuff is 100% about breaking it; looking for areas to abuse; looking for things that don't interact right; spotting problems and also finding out if the whole system is overall fun to play

SU-152 wrote:

Took me a weekend to check how OP infantry is in LI for example.

A week to check how week infantry is in WH:TOW. And how powerful riden monster+save stacking.

Oathmark has super nice mechanics. Zero balance (author confessed on FB they did zero playtesting).

Playtesting is key. And it is not slow.

But it is slow because all you've done is identify 2 problems in 1 weekend. Now go spot the other problems, then provide solutions for them, then playtest those solutions and find the new problems
Each step is short and simple, but you have to add them up multiple times over.

Another big thing with playtesting is playing it "wrong". You can't just play with one tactic/approach because otherwise you might well be missing a trick or two that leads to something being confusing/broken (too strong or too weak) etc... You also might well miss out on loads of inter-codex interactions. So when two abilities clash which one is superior to the other; what's the proper order of resolution etc....

Proper playtesting takes time, which is why things like "open betas" are a thing for playtesting systems because they can let you speed up certain elements. Bigger populations playing means you get loads of natural variety in styles and approaches and can test WAY more interactions in a smaller span of time. Of course they come with their own risks. Lunarsol raises the issue of the game never "settling" and that 'can' happen; though in truth it sounds a little like they've spent too much time online chatting rather than playing themselves.

What can happen with very long term playtesting is that the community decouples from the updates as people have old books, old printouts and keep missing all the updates and then get sick of the rapid updates. This is very easily resolved by simply having an initial beta period and then shifting to slower updates when the product goes live. In theory GW could do this too, except they never really leave the initial release phase of changing cause - again - that darn 3 year cycle!

Balance is a sod. And particularly for a game like 40K, AoS or HH, there are just so many moving parts and variables (including the terrain being used and time constraints) the mythical Perfect Balance just can’t be achieved. No amount of play testing or theory hammer can realistically account for every possible situation and permutation.

And that’s before we consider some armies are deficient in a given area by design, to offset a strength.

Example. Tau are notoriously useless in HTH. But, they’re noticably powerful at range.

This can lead to some games where they dominate, and others where they’re on the receiving end.

How that’s interpreted can depend on the player. One might cry foul, complaining bitterly and demanding Tau be given solid close combat as well. One might chalk it up to experience, accepting some games are going to be an uphill struggle. And that can be influenced by the opponent’s attitude. If their army is simply well placed to exploit your baked in weaknesses, and they present as a Tactical Genius, it can be irritating to infuriating.

Different attitudes to the game (I’m not saying any are wrong, to nip that in the bud) can also skew things. For someone whose preference is to win by the largest margin possible, close run games might be seen as bad game design. For someone whose preference is to take a more challenging army and find a way to win, close run games might be more desirable and so on and so forth.

But. The sort of but of such proportion Sir-Mix-A-Lot is asking its father’s permission? That Is Not To Say Balance Doesn’t Matter.

Of course it matters. Example?

I’ve been playing Path of Exile 2. Boy does that game have balance issues. My first character specced into melee. And I struggled. Some bosses I just couldn’t tickle, as my DPS was too low, and I’d just get flattened. Armour seemingly does nothing, so ranged or melee you’re best off speccing into Evasion or Energy Shield. This got on my tits enough to uninstall it.

But last night, needing to put my Ming in the Guild Chest, I reinstalled it. I also gave it a shot as a Sorceress from the top. The different is night and day. I can move and attack! I can chain attacks! My abilities compliment each other! I’m absolutely wrecking stuff my Melee character seriously struggled with. The game is fun again.

All because the Devs slipped up on melee, with every boss being better suited to being kept at arms length and plinked away.

Does GW have anything so egregiously wonky? I don’t think so. But it still needs to work on balance. Same with MTG, where Blue is always a chore to fight, as when I’ve powered up a high mana spell which should put me in the lead? Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve paid 2 Mana and now that spell is countered and you’ve lost all that mana so, so, so sorry, but you can’t handle my tactical genius and don’t bother trying to block my monsters, they’re well cheap, have decent defence, and a shocking number of them can fly too, because No Blue Deck Should Ever Be Taxing…

Bitter? Moi?

MTG's issue is less with balance and rules and more with the fact that the performance difference between a good deck and a great deck is bonkers huge. So basically if you don't bring the A game list there's a good chance you'll be shot off the table

Also Blue has always been what I'd consider the "unfun colour". Not because it lacks technical depth, indeed many of its tricks are awesome; but its the denial colour. Certainly back in the Ravnica days it was the colour that could stop you doing anything. And when you were allowed ot do something they'd just ping it back next turn or steal it

 LunarSol wrote:

SU-152 wrote:
Open beta playtesting is such a great idea.

It's really, really not.

It really really is. Sort of.

Games where it works well have a lot of control over variables. Two games where this worked best? Blood Bowl. Actually was testing a very limited set of variables within the game, and importantly was happy to accept low performing variables. Epic. Very limited army selection (3), one scenario, fairly restrictive terrain rules compared to say 40k.

The more variables, the more the 'art' of games design comes in to speed up the process. Saying that for gods sake GW get at least a weekend of unconnected gamers playtesting the thing as many of the biggest problems leap off the page. And they can do this - witness Adeptus Titanicus.

You’d also need some way to manage the risk of unfaithful reporting. Otherwise, you risk the old “Rock Fine, Scissors OP, yours, Paper” type stuff.

And that includes deliberate misreporting, and parsing out “this guy just sucks at the game and made numerous, glaring errors” whining.

There’s also the risk of people wanting a game to be something it’s not intended to be.

The flip side is under reporting issues. Let’s say you and I are play testing. And across a couple of games, I prove singularly unable to roll a six for damage. The obvious take away from that is “I was just grossly unlucky”. But, that could still be highlighting an issue if, by not being able to roll them sixes, I lost the game, as stuff that should reasonably be dead or destroyed kept on going and pummelling me.

There will of course be ways to factor all that in no doubt. But if you’ve not got that in place? Your play testing phase may be of inherently limited use.

40k and PoE2 are 2 intresting points

PoE2 is currently in open Beta to get the balance right and that it is way off is the point that you can only reach a certain point without playtesting it

While the problem of 40k with too many moving parts, that problem is there because someone wanted to add all those parts to the game without testing it
the system there is more about 3 years of public playtesting, 3 years of a better balanced game, and than starting again with a new game

that a computer game is easier to handle because you have the results of the played games in digital form and know that they are real, a beta test for a wargame cannot be done by having random people report games back

there is a reason why companies doing that either have only accepted full battle reports (to easier spot fake results) and ignored any comments that just say X bad, Y good.
Or having people come in for gaming days playing the new game and report directly to the designers


and GW could very easily get 500 people in a room, each one given a pre-made army list and let them play against each other over a weekend and fill out reports to get the necessary data, and people would pay for that

Hopefully a competent game designer is alive to 'I couldn't a six, got smashed'. GW interestingly deliberately uses multiple dice rolls (buckets of dice) for system resolution to ensure results go towards the average. Systems that have multiple pivotal single dice rolls tend to need the design to take account of the likely probabilities. (Also makes pointing units inordinately hard.)

 Overread wrote:

Lathe Biosas wrote:

ccs wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I put my RPG into a limited playtest. And I learned players will innately spend their time trying to actively break your game.

And??
I'm sorry, but if you hand me a game to playtest my assumption is that it's my job to see how I can break it. And I can & will break it. What you do with the analysis I provide you with from that exercise is on you....

I'm not feeling very well right now, so I'm going to keep it short.
If you want a detailed response I will give you one later. But nothing was filled out on any of the playtest forms, except that they one section I had told them to ignore (Concealing Equipment - which Ive been rewriting), was too easy to abuse.
And the guy who was trying to run the game said they spent the entire time trying to manipulate how many weapons and and how much equipment they could conceal into their clothing.
Just very aggravated. Sorry for venting.

If you give a monkey two things, expect them to fixate on the one you don't want them to fixate on. This is sometimes why its easier if there's something you don't want tested; to just leave it out entirely. Don't show them the thing you don't want working. At the same time you've also identified that public playtesting also comes with risks - one of which is that thye are not employees and you can't control them. There's also the issue that they can play it wrong; not follow the rules; make stuff up; be bad quality players and the lot.

Firms get around this by identifying skilled players and focusing on them for review information. By having internal testing teams and by doing mass-tests and relying on volume of information (often processed through surveys and the like) to spot very common patterns.

Testing stuff is 100% about breaking it; looking for areas to abuse; looking for things that don't interact right; spotting problems and also finding out if the whole system is overall fun to play

SU-152 wrote:

Took me a weekend to check how OP infantry is in LI for example.

A week to check how week infantry is in WH:TOW. And how powerful riden monster+save stacking.

Oathmark has super nice mechanics. Zero balance (author confessed on FB they did zero playtesting).

Playtesting is key. And it is not slow.

But it is slow because all you've done is identify 2 problems in 1 weekend. Now go spot the other problems, then provide solutions for them, then playtest those solutions and find the new problems
Each step is short and simple, but you have to add them up multiple times over.

It is not all I've done. It was way more. But it is not a fair example because I am a very veteran player of those systems (WH:FB and Epics). I couldn't have done the same in for instance Infinity or WH40k, etc....

It was just an example. I could have writen a better more balanced LI in a week ffs.

Also I am not talking about perfect balance (it is impossible), but high acceptable levels of it....

SU-152 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

SU-152 wrote:
Open beta playtesting is such a great idea.

It's really, really not.

The problem with open betas is they create an extreme version of a community over reliant on adjustments. Essentially, people stop playing the game and start spending all their time on a potential future game that never really exists. Essentially the game just becomes discussing the game; politicking for "fixes" and arguing on the internet about what's wrong and how to fix it. No one plays the game that they have because they're focused on the game that will be. You can never play tomorrow even when it becomes today if you remain focused on the new tomorrow.

That's a very long shot with lots of assumptions. Make it closed then

It's.... not? We had a whole era of open beta game design and this was very much the result of it. It's been tried and a lot of companies learned a lot of harsh lessons. One of those lessons is making betas closed, which are not even remotely the same thing. A closed beta is just a playtest group. Almost every game has them, they just don't make a lot of noise about it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
Of course they come with their own risks. Lunarsol raises the issue of the game never "settling" and that 'can' happen; though in truth it sounds a little like they've spent too much time online chatting rather than playing themselves.

What can happen with very long term playtesting is that the community decouples from the updates as people have old books, old printouts and keep missing all the updates and then get sick of the rapid updates. This is very easily resolved by simply having an initial beta period and then shifting to slower updates when the product goes live. In theory GW could do this too, except they never really leave the initial release phase of changing cause - again - that darn 3 year cycle!

Funny enough, it's kind of the opposite. It's a result of trying to convince people to stop arguing online and just play the game

I think this depends on what you mean by an open beta. If you just mean the kind of stress test before launch, that can definitely work, but has its own problems. One of the common problems with a new edition is that it kills the old by design. As soon as players can play the new edition, the existing one will not see play. That means that any sort of stress test beta you do has very little time to meaningfully change things. A long 6 month beta to really work out issues means your game is dead for 6 months and many just can't survive that.

That's part of the reason we're seeing more of the "live beta" in things like 10th. They gave us the "final" game and then responded with regular updates to fix all the issues over a 6 month period. It's effectively the same thing, they just didn't pretend that 9th edition was still a thing after the beta started. They said 9th is dead, here's what we have for 10th and while that doesn't result in the most polished product we'd like it does keep existing players engaged while still acting as a jumping on point for new players. It's a result of designers learning how to manage their communities as much as they've learned how to design games.

It's an interesting problem he's touching on with beginner/intermediate/expert having different balance needs. The game I'm spending most of my time on atm (Dystopian Wars) has had several aspects of this. Carriers can dominate at the beginner and intermediate level, but are pretty much a joke for expert play.
The let the meta fix it argument is also pretty flawed when applied to miniature games. Sure, you can probably build a list to beat whatever obscene thing someone comes up with, but people aren't going to want to abandon their main faction. Not to mention mirror matchups.

Irdiumstern wrote:

The let the meta fix it argument is also pretty flawed when applied to miniature games. Sure, you can probably build a list to beat whatever obscene thing someone comes up with, but people aren't going to want to abandon their main faction. Not to mention mirror matchups.

This assumes that the only way to improve a matchup is to change the list and removes the agency and responsibility of players. Very, very few people play enough games to really learn a matchup and develop new approaches to dealing with it. When you respond with fixes to every player complaint, players depend on fixes instead of trying to find solutions.

That's not to say fixes aren't necessary, just that even in the age of the internet it can take some time for a meta to settle if the game is at all competent. SF6 went a whole year without a patch with the "broken" character changing monthly before settling on a top 3. Minis games tend to have less execution potential that makes them settle quicker, but can still go a good 4-6 months without getting stale if they're built well.

The trick is realizing that for that to work, you need to launch in a well tested state. The previous era has used the ability to update as an excuse to skimp on in house testing, but that just creates problems so big you need to make drastic changes without the time to think them through. Games need to launch in a relatively polished state, with updates largely serving to shake things up and provide minor course corrections.

Players also tend to VASTLY overrate faction dispartities in general, but that's an issue for a different TLDR ramble

I think one of the big problems with balance in miniature games is when someone gets it wrong it's a lot of effort for players to correct for it. If your mtg deck is bad you swap out cards or build a new deck. Cards you buy can be used immediately. You can trade cards with other players at the same value you got them for. In a miniatures game, players have often put hours and hours into building and painting units or entire armies that are bad, so of course it's going to be a way more frustrating experience when the balance is off.

 Overread wrote:
One thing I notice with video games - eps in rts games - is when people lose there are a portion who refuse to learn the new game and instead

1) Expect the game balance to change to accommodate the tactics/gameplay they use.

2) Complain that the AI/opponent is cheating and that is the reason for their loss.

A funny example of that is how video games need to make random elements less random by introducing some algorithms that make them look random.

Because actual randomness will, over time, randomly produce patterns or just results that look like patterns for our pattern-sensitive brains. And players who don't understand randomness will assume the game is rigged (against them ofc ).

This was exactly the case when I used to play MTG:Arena and checked comment sections of related videos on YT. Rigged!