Recently I've been playing MPQ a lot and I notice this recurring problem. In every competitive game I play I definitely know a lot more balance than the developers themselves, and this isn't necessarily because I have some kind of awesome insight on the game. There are a lot of game I play where the imbalance is so bad it's like a one button instant win. I can get that players might not recognize it because it benefits them and they may even think it's because of them being awesome at the game instead of being on the favorable end of any imbalance, but you'd think devs ought to recognize, but this rarely happens. I don't mean imbalanced like WoW where there is always this class that's like 10% better than anyone else and you might as well be the class that's 10% better. There are games where the best is more like 100% better than the closest competitor. And yet, a lot of these games seem to be surprisingly successful. Is it because most players are just so bad that they wouldn't even realize they're fighting an opponent that's 100% better? Or maybe because everyone can just play the overpowered guy so you don't care if everyone else is screwed?
Sometimes I wonder if imbalance is something like The Emperor's New Cloth, like even if you have a character that's equivalent of Shin Akuma no developer of the game want to admit that they totally screwed up so instead they'll give you some L2P argument. One of MPQ's latest character has a move that basically kills the entire opposing team and the drawback is that they gain 5 APs, since that totally makes up for the fact that one move kills the entire team. I can't even fathom how dumb you'd have to be to design such a character without realizing the character is broken, and yet apparently these guys are the ones that are supposed to be designing the games? And quite a lot of these games are obviously quite successful. I'm pretty sure WoW spent a significant time where some top class is 100% better than any comparable class, and that didn't really hurt the game. So does balancing a game even matter? Empirical evidence seems to suggest you might as well go all in on P2W schemes. Maybe that's why the random facebook/iphone games are successful, because who cares about balance when you can pay your way to win?
Sometimes I wonder if imbalance is something like The Emperor's New Cloth, like even if you have a character that's equivalent of Shin Akuma no developer of the game want to admit that they totally screwed up so instead they'll give you some L2P argument. One of MPQ's latest character has a move that basically kills the entire opposing team and the drawback is that they gain 5 APs, since that totally makes up for the fact that one move kills the entire team. I can't even fathom how dumb you'd have to be to design such a character without realizing the character is broken, and yet apparently these guys are the ones that are supposed to be designing the games? And quite a lot of these games are obviously quite successful. I'm pretty sure WoW spent a significant time where some top class is 100% better than any comparable class, and that didn't really hurt the game. So does balancing a game even matter? Empirical evidence seems to suggest you might as well go all in on P2W schemes. Maybe that's why the random facebook/iphone games are successful, because who cares about balance when you can pay your way to win?
