Why are game balance design so bad?

[Don]

I was reading some articles on MTG from their official sites, and they talked about how back then they thought Ancestral Recall was balanced compared to a Healing Salve and so on. But the guys who made MTG started out as inexperienced guys so you can probably forgive for their earlier mistakes. But what excuse do modern, presumably highly-paid designers have? Now I know the common excuse is that games are complicated, but just because something is complicated doesn't mean you should have one character/team completely dominating everyone, or that you can put together an infinite combo by using your first two abilities. I'm pretty sure if me and a few random guys starting playing say, Street Fighter 2, or even Mortal Kombat, even with all the knowledge accumulated by now, it'd be far less broken in terms of balance compared to quite a few modern era games I can think of. Maybe that's because characters in Mortal Kombat had nearly the same moves, but it's still better to get something right that isn't exciting, versus something that's exciting but is just flat out wrong. I mean this scenario literally shows up in almost all significant competitive game I can think of:

Player: "Ability X is totally overpowered!"
Dev: "When we designed abilities we want players to feel powerful."
Player: "So pushing one button to instantly kill a guy is fair?"
Dev: "We said players are supposed to be powerful!"

Part of it I think is because of the so called rock-paper-scissor model. It can be Protoss beats Zerg beats Terran beats Protoss, or tank beats dps beats healer beats tank. Invariably though you end up with something that's more like some guy just beat everyone. The failure of such model, I think, is that people seem to design some kind of natural rock-paper-scissor model, even though this model does not make sure in nature. Animals at the top of the food chain usually do not lose to someone on the bottom of the food chain. Artillery is the most deadly weapon by kills in the history of war, and the tank is pretty much strong against everything except helicopters, which is why the tank is the main combat unit of modern warfare. A rock-paper-scissor model has to be contrived, something like 'class X magically deals 200% more damage on class Y', because there's nothing natural about a rock-paper-scissor model, and yet we continue to try to model games assuming there's some kind of natural way to do it. In any historically accurate game, if you could mass cavalry you should always mass them because there isn't a counter to cavalry until there are guns (cost prevented this from being possible in real life, but games usually don't respect such things), so either you accept that or you better come up with some really bogus mechanism to ensure this isn't possible.

[Eric]

I think you underestimate the difficulty of actually balancing a game, and still managing to maintain that fun aspect. Unless you want to argue games are intentionally unbalanced for that very reason.

I remember when Street Fighter IV 2012 came out, Ono, the game's director said he knew that Yun & Yang were going to be overpowered, and Yun was easily the best character in the game in that version. Not only did he know Yun was going to be overpowered, but he embraced it and said he thought it would be fun to give the community a villain or OP character to rally against. Sadly all that happened was everyone ended up picking up Yun.

[Don]

You can't say 'games are complicated' and then come up with stuff that'd be worse than throwing a dart at random. You can say that balance doesn't matter as much as people think which is probably true but it'd hardly be fun to play any Street Fighter game is there's a character like Shin Akuma strong. Street Fighter isn't super competitive for the vast majority of the players that play it, and as far as I can tell they never have a Street Fighter game where you start with guys as strong as Shin Akuma where all you have to do is air fireball to win. I certainly don't recall any competitive Street Fighter game where you can infinite an opponent, for example (that'd make a rather stupid competitive event if that was possible). There's still a large difference between a game where a character/race/whatever is overwhelmingly powerful, versus a game where you have essentially god mode. For example cavalry in a ROTK game is generally dominant, but bombers in Civ 5 is god mode. Whereas cavalry in ROTK is generally difficult to trade cost effectively with any unit but cavalry, bombers in Civ 5 simply cannot be killed when used by a halfway decent player.

Or take MMORPGs. There are many games where you can kill an opponent before they get control of their character, and even less balanced games you can potentially kill someone in a single GCD without even a significant gear disparity. In fact WoW is a pretty good example. It's something I'd hardly considered balanced, but they at least try to address anything that's egregiously out of whack. Any delay in addressing certain out of balance issues can usually be attributed to bureaucracy or lack of manpower, as opposed to unwillingness. On the other hand you can take say SWTOR where a Smash kills an entire team of players and devs for a very long time refused to address the issue and blame players for standing too close, never mind that the AE has to target at least one person and a move that kills a single person in one hit would be pretty stupidly overpowerful in any PvP environment, and most MMORPGs I can think of has similar issues at some point. And again, WoW can at least say they're the first MMORPG that's really successful on both PvP and PvE so they had all kinds of unexpected interaction of PvP and PvE, but what about the newer guys?