

Balancing Multiplayer Competitive Games (2009) [pdf] - mirceasoaica
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50f14d35e4b0d70ab5fc4f24/t/53ef1dbae4b0a6d424125a6f/1408179642248/GDC+2009+sirlin+handout6.pdf

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highCs
Good article.

 _Definition: What is Depth? A multiplayer game is deep if it is still
strategically interesting to play after expert players have studied and
practiced it for years, decades, or centuries._

We often talk about _skillcaps_. The more _skillcaps_ a game has the better it
is. Ideally, you want a game to have an infinite number of skillcaps. A
skillcap is a level of expertise which allows the players in it to
dramatically beat the players which belong to the lower level of expertise.
The idea behind skillcaps is that, if you, as a player, are in a lower
skillcap, it means you're not entirely exploiting all the possibilities of the
game. Many skillcaps means that increasing things like reflex is not enough.
The player needs to increase its _understanding of the game_. Incidentally,
that game is very deep.

Also, there is a measure for player expertise called the Elo rating system:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system)

 _Definition: What Is Balance? A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably
large number of options available to the player are viable--especially, but
not limited to, during highlevel play by expert players_

Well, not really in my opinion. A game is balanced if you cannot find a single
way-of-playing to beat an equally-expert opponent more than 50% of the time
when the opponent is not allowed to use that same way-of-playing. (Note we are
talking here about robots which automatically play each game with the exact
same level of expertise.)

EDIT: oh the author calls that _fairness_. Fair enough then.

~~~
Hasu
>A skillcap is a level of expertise which allows the players in it to
dramatically beat the players which belong to the lower level of expertise.

Where are you getting that definition? I've always seen "skill cap" defined as
the highest possible level of skill, beyond which no increased skill can
increase performance. "Skill cap" is also not a measure of players, but of
game mechanics and games themselves. We might say that checkers has a lower
skill cap than chess, or that the bishop has a lower skill cap than the queen,
but we wouldn't say that Magnus Carlsen is at a higher skill cap than I am.
He's just more skilled.

We want unreachable skill caps, so that there's always room for improvement.
I'm not sure any game has an infinitely high skill cap.

~~~
derefr
I think it's by analogy to the chess piece version you mentioned. A _strategy_
has a skill cap. Therefore, a player who only knows some subset of strategies,
where the max skill cap within that set is X, will always eventually be beaten
by some other player who knows a strategy outside that set, with a higher
skill cap. That player can be said to "have" the skill cap of the highest-
skill-cap strategy they're currently aware of.

To put it another way: a "perfect" player with mastery of every strategy they
are aware of, but with imperfect knowledge of the space of possible
strategies, will have a skill level at the game equal to the highest-skill-cap
strategy they're aware of.

Or, if you only practice the strategies you already have, you'll only ever get
as good at the game as your best strategy is powerful. It can be _much_
higher-ROI to explore the game's strategy-space to find higher-skill-cap
strategies.

Imagine a game where a player who has 80% mastery of a large number of
strategies, beats a player with 90% mastery of fewer strategies. The 80%
player probably won because one of the strategies they were competent at had a
high-enough skill-cap to dominate the other player who didn't know that
strategy.

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jamesdelaneyie
Another great talk on the same issue:

Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from
0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3

PDF: [http://twvideo01.ubm-
us.net/o1/vault/gdc10/slides/Griesemer_...](http://twvideo01.ubm-
us.net/o1/vault/gdc10/slides/Griesemer_Jaime_DesignInDetail_Sniper_Halo3.pdf)

Talk & SlideDeck: [http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012211/Design-in-Detail-
Changi...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012211/Design-in-Detail-Changing-the)

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sbov
I've casually worked on MUDs for a while and whenever I help a friend, the
first thing I do is put their game in a spreadsheet. It usually reveals
several things they didn't realize about their game.

They tend to tweak their games over and over based upon feedback until they
eventually don't know what their own game is doing.

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dkersten
I've toyed with MUDs a bit as well. I'm actually thinking about doing it again
because I want to play around with a component-entity-system idea I had.
Anyway, I've always figured that keeping everything as a zero-sum-rule is the
only way to really balance things. A spreadsheet makes this much more visible
(because you can list all your assumptions (weights etc) in a sheet and
calculate if everything balances or not. Then if you learn the assumptions are
wrong, modify them and rebalance). So yeah, definitely good advice!

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ionwake
Thank you for this.

I need help balancing my RTS for this weeks indiecade submission if anyone is
interested in helping ?

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z3t4
One method that has proven to work good is to keep statistics and then nerf
overused tactics and bump the ones that are rarely used. It will make some
interesting game play!

Also try to have as much diversity as possible. This is one of my favorite
quotes: "This game is so imbalanced so that it get balanced".

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fdej
Chess 1.1 changelog

    
    
      * nerfed movement for white pieces to balance out first-move advantage
      * added "undo" and "knight blast radius damage" DLC

~~~
qznc
The author of the article actually has come up with "Chess 2".
[http://www.sirlingames.com/products/chess-2-print-and-
play](http://www.sirlingames.com/products/chess-2-print-and-play)

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nocman
_Definition: What Is Balance? A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably
large number of options available to the player are viable--especially, but
not limited to, during high-level play by expert players._

Interesting. I think of 'balance' in multiplayer games as a different thing
altogether. I am usually thinking of the match itself, rather than the design
of the game. In that sense, a game is "balanced" if the overall skill level on
each side is reasonably close to the overall skill level on the opposing side.
Games where one team is just too much better than the other are boring.
"Balanced" games -- where you really don't know who will win until the game is
over -- are usually the most fun.

~~~
infogulch
I think you're confusing "game" and "match", where "game" means the rules
defining how players interact, and "match" means one instance of a game being
played by a specific group of players.

"game" and "match" can sometimes be used interchangeably (e.g. "that was a
good game" can mean a single match), but a discussion on "game balance"
typically refers to the rules themselves being fair.

What you described, grouping players into opposing teams of roughly equal
skill, is called matchmaking, and it's a different problem from game balance.
In fact, in a competitive match where game balance is arguably the most
important, matchmaking is not a big problem since it's solved by a bracket of
some sort.

~~~
nocman
I think you didn't read my post very carefully.

I'm not confusing those terms at all. I said:

"I am usually thinking of the match itself, rather than the design of the
game".

By which I mean pretty much exactly what you said. "Game" can mean either a
single match, or the actual thing that you are playing.

My point was that the term "balance" isn't limited to the dynamics of the game
(those that exist regardless of the players skills in using them), but that it
is often used to refer to the equality of the teams -- and that when I hear
the term "balance" in regard to gaming I am more likely to think of the team
equality than the other possibility.

~~~
derefr
Where do you go, that you hear so many complaints about unbalanced
matchmaking?

Tournaments and ladder systems almost automatically cause match "balance" in
the way you're speaking of. Some games go further and introduce handicaps, so
weaker players can play stronger players with the result not being
predictable. In either case, nobody is really thinking about balance; it's
just built into the social systems _around_ the game.

The only time one might hear complaints about match "balance" is in non-
competitive "casual" play. (This is actually a large part of what Nintendo's
game design is about. The Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Mario Party, etc. series are
all about letting people with unbalanced skill—family members, say—play
casually against one-another while still having fun.)

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mkcarlos
My opinions:

I think attempting to balance games where the number of character/choices are
large enough is a futile process (especially if the design process aims at the
"cream of the rop" players). The truth is that at the end of the day,
competitions are still going to be populated with players would use the top
~20% something (depending on the game) of the character cast, with a very
small minority actually bothering with the other characters due to the
playing-to-win mentality. I see this pattern being very common with a lot of
games, and attempts at balancing them only _shuffle_ the casts around i.e. a
new set of characters now dominate, replacing the old ones. Part of the reason
is because the characters/game mechanics are so intricately tied to one
another, a small change could flip the entire "metagame" around.

This symptom is more apparent with MOBA games such as Dota 2. After each
balance patch, the game becomes chaotic enough to raise interests among
players, although the metagame will eventually converge to a singular point.
Players will then complain and the process continues. Each patch hardly makes
the game more balanced, they just make the game different. I think at stages
like this, you simply have to adopt a new definition of "balance".

Also I disagree with "Design Self-balancing Forces". While the mechanics
proposed are good at creating depth for the game, I think it's misguided to
add them with balance in mind. An example is the game Street Fighter 3
(specifically the third edition, Third Strike): the designer added a "parry"
mechanic in which allows a player (with a good guess, timing and some
memorization) to counter any attack. This could be perceived as an attempt to
give any character a chance, but in practice players argue that this makes the
strongest characters even stronger (of course it's hard to verify this because
an identically copied game with no "parry" doesn't exist) because they can
counter attack for much higher damage.

Also, Sirlin (the author) spends a lot of his time with versus fighting games,
and the article reflects that. I think if you're looking to balance a game of
another genre, it's unlikely that his philosophies will be very useful. Just
for reference, versus fighting games usually have these metrics: character
pool is between 10-30 (usually don't go up much), there's a heavy emphasis on
specialising on one character (could go up to 3), heavy emphasis on reaction
and guessing, long intervals between balance patches (if there are going to be
patches at all), at competitions there rarely are rules (i.e. usually no
banning, save for a few games where balance is pretty bad). If you compare
this to other genres (FPS, RTS, MOBA, ...) these metrics will be very, very
different.

