The Shrine

I was reading this conversation which came from a MMORPG (FF14 in particular), but you can see this kind of stuff that's very common for any game that's remotely considered hardcore, which goes something like this:

Dev: I tuned this encounter only for the best players. It will require the pinnacle of playing and cooperation to defeat! By the way I can totally beat this encounter, because I designed it. I even beta tested it under God mode and it was easy.
Player: My guild just beat this encounter. It indeed requires pinnacle of playing perfection. Thanks dev for a well tuned encounter! By the way our guild is the pinnacle of playing perfection, in case you didn't figure this out.

Of course this lasts only until someone more perfect than you that beats something you cannot, and then the encounter is obviously broken and that dev should be fired.

There's an extreme hubris with dev actually thinking they know anything about balance. How can they possibly play their own game enough to know more than a player while still having a job? Would you expect Miyamoto to be the best platforming guy?

The next hubris is assuming that players know anything about balance as a function of beating the encounter. If encounters really are that tightly tuned, what's going to happen is if anybody you regularly play with is away even for a short period your playing group is likely going to implode. If a game requires 10 guys playing better than 99% of the population, then let's take a server with 50K people, you've a pool of 500 players total to work with and good luck finding the guy who matches your time zone and actually want to join you. I've been in the said guilds and I see the massive turnover and that's hardly uncommon. If you go to any uber guild of any MMORPG they're almost always recruiting. How can a game possibly require everyone playing at a high level if the said guild can also take chances on any random guy that claims to be super awesome (and is almost always not)?

In reality it's more like your mousebreathers remembered to breath correctly this time while your better players shouldered the load. You might even be one of those mouthbreathers without knowing it.

In general I don't presume I necessarily know everything there is to know about the game in terms of balance, and certainly won't attempt to balance the game around me. However I do assume I still know the game more than a developer just because logistically it's a virtual impossibility that a developer would actually have time to know his own game in depth. If I can beat something it doesn't mean it's too hard or too easy, and likewise if I cannot beat something. In fact, if I am to judge if something is too hard or not, I'd almost certainly do it from a purely statistical point of view. E.g. X% of the people who attempted the encounter can beat it, and if X is a relatively large number then it's clearly not that hard even if I think otherwise.

Most developers of fighting games understand this. They are not the best players and they know they are not the best players. And balance is EVERYTHING in a fighting game. So, they listen to their players, especially the top ranked ones, since they know how to break the game. They keep track of tourneys.

Well fighting game is easier since they obviously don't really care what an average guy like me because it's pretty unlkely the average guy will have any opinion on whether to buy Street Fighter 5 just because Ryu is or is not overpowered. That said I think even here balance is some kind of accident. Street Fighter 2 is still played as a tournament game if I recall and I hardly doubt it was ever intended to be played at that kind of level. Also since there isn't exactly a huge commitment to these games so if you find out that Ryu is indeed totally useless you can always switch to someone else who doens't suck.

That said I totally do not agree with the idea that you should listen to your top players because they're often the guys who least have any clue as to how the game is supposed to work for everyone else, in particularly in a MMORPG. "Stop sucking" is not how you'd expect to keep your customer. Top players often get into the exact scenario I talked about, which is you say the game is awesome when it seems like you're the only one good enough to beat it and then quickly bash the game when it turns out someone else is better than you after all.

I guess it might make sense if your game is more like a professional sports. For example it probably doesn't matter if the masses think the rim ought to be lowered in basketball so everyone can dunk because we know it's the NBA that makes the bulk of the money for the sports of basketball. But that'd only apply to a handful of games that tend to be dominated by Koreans. Even a MMORPG is nowhere near e-sports. You most definitely don't get a MMORPG because some uber guys are doing some super hard boss so whatever they may think about the game is actually pretty irrelevent to your gaming experience. I'd argue even fighting games I certainly don't think anyone is getting the next Street Fighter because soandso the gaming legend is endorsing them at this tournament. I'd argue in fighting games it simply doesn't matter as much because if XYZ is weak you can always just play someone else. If you look at one of those 50+ character VS games, there's obviously no way these characters are remotely balanced but it's not like the average guy cares about that. If your favorite character sucks you either live with it or you just play someone else.