The Unbalanced Design of Super Smash Bros

http://forrestthewoods.com/unbalanced-design-of-super-smash-brothers/

by wgx • 12 years ago

203 79 12 years ago

valarauca15• 12 years ago

If I could comment to the author directly. Look into the Tier lists for Street Fighter, and Namely Street Fighter Turbo II. Which is also completely unpatched, but still has an actively changing tier list despite being over 20 years old.

CocaKoala10• 12 years ago

Even regional tier lists for Turbo can be really interesting. In the states, everybody thought T Hawk was a trash character, completely low tier. In Japan, he was one of the top tier grapplers; eventually, somebody from Japan came out to the US for a tournament, picked T Hawk, and started doing stuff that folks in the US had just straight up never seen before.

Chevalier• 12 years ago

As a 1v1 fighting game with a comparable roster of character genres, Street Fighter seems like a better analogue to Smash Brothers than League of Legends is. And like you said, Street Fighter II remains unpatched... versus the regular patching of the Street Fighter IV series. The comparison seems perfect.

Street Fighter IV started the series with a ridiculously overpowered Sagat, who was then arguably overnerfed in Super Street Fighter IV. New characters introduced in Super Street Fighter IV AE, Yun and Yang, were overpowered to the point of breaking the game.

I'm pretty glad that Capcom has, however reluctantly and at whatever expense, continued to balance the characters with each release. The series would have been pretty damn bland if anyone could win by spamming Sagat's fireballs since 2008. It's given me the opportunity to experiment with relatively underpowered characters, which is WAY more fun -- and since they're not (completely) helpless against more powerful characters, I've been able to come up with game-winning tactics that baffle friends who rely on the usual shotos like Ryu/Ken/etc/etc.

I've never gotten into Smash Brothers, but I'd love to hear about the Ice Climbers. I've tried playing them at parties and got absolutely destroyed. Why are they such a powerful character?

- - - - -

Edit - To answer my own question about the Ice Climbers:

"The Ice Climbers aren't very good at using their standard arsenal of attacks for continuous hits, normally speaking. With weak throws, small hammers, and slow movement in general (slow falling, air, and dash speed), the Ice Climbers can usually only manage one or two good hits in close before they need to resort to Ice Shots or Blizzard again. With both Climbers present, KOing generally isn't too much of a problem, although their Smashes are generally better at racking up the damage than at KOing. With all this in mind, they wouldn't seem like the best character choice, if it weren't for the following...

Chaingrabbing and Desynching

Many would consider the Ice Climbers to be "the King and Queen of all Chain Grabs" due to the fact that their two-in-one property allows a variety of chain-grab options. For example, the lead Ice Climber can grab onto one opponent and use the forward throw. In the middle of the throw animation, the player can gain control of the CPU Climber, commanding him/her into performing a forward-air spike, or grabbing again with the CPU Climber while once again bringing the original, player-controlled Climber in for a new grab. Such strings create long and extremely damaging chain grabs capable of being performed at nearly any percent, on nearly any stage. A down side is that the ice climbers don't have a very good grab range and because of how much they slide it's almost impossible to grab an opponent when they hit your shield unless you powershield his or her attack.

For further two-in-one hi jinks, it is even possible to "desync" the CPU partner by confusing it with erratic movement (such as dash-dancing), putting the player in control of both Climbers for as long as they are capable of maintaining it. Once the partner is desynced, the player can have it perform any move while the main Climber is in the middle of one, providing for all sorts of possible attack strategies that can be exceedingly difficult for opponents to escape from (alternating Blizzard, alternating Ice Shot). While desynced, the partner Climber has restrained movement within an invisible box around the main Climber; should he/she be separated or removed from this box, the CPU will take over again. This invisible box makes it so that if you desync yourself from the AI so that it charges a smash attack and you start walking or running away, the AI will slide in your direction while charging the smash. A unique thing that you can do when desynced is that if you desync the AI to charge a smash attack, your belay will cancel the AI's charging sequence and teleport it into the belaying sequence.

It should be obvious that such techniques are almost impossible to perform in combat, regardless of the player's skill, due to the constant string of precise commands required for the Climbers to move/attack as intended. This level of obscene difficulty is what has prevented any seemingly-unfair IC techniques (outside of wobbling in Melee) from seeing competitive bans, especially given that very few professional players maintain or even use them at tournaments. This lack of appearance has made their tier ranking, and whether or not it should be higher, questionable for the time being. Nevertheless, these techniques are the backbone of playing a good pair of Ice Climber; without them, they aren't particularly great, so it's essential for players who plan on using the Ice Climbers to master them as they are not worthy of their tier placement without these."

http://supersmashbros.wikia.com/wiki/Ice_Climbers_(SSBB)

CocaKoala10• 12 years ago

The past couple EVO tournaments for Street Fighter (which is, for people who don't follow the FGC, the largest tournament in the US for fighting games) have been won by some pretty unexpected characters, which I like; nobody really considered Gen to be a powerhouse until Xian pulled it out, and I'm pretty sure Rose was thought to be solidly low tier until Louffy demonstrated that she could make really effective use of her normals (and also lucked into some people who didn't understand the Rose matchup and e.g. kept on spamming Sagat's fireballs when that's a pretty terrible thing to do against Rose).

I feel like there are a lot of characters in SF who are pretty viable, and some of them just require a lot more work than others. It's pretty well understood how to play a shoto like Ryu or Ken, but the downside is that when you pick them, everybody knows what to expect from you. If you can put some solid work into a low tier character, you can often pull off some really unexpected stuff and occasionally shift the tier lists.

Another good example of this was Canada Cup 2013, 5v5; NE Asia's Dakou picked Dee Jay (a decidedly low tier version of Guile) and ended up destroying a bunch of people who really expected to win. The commentary on this set is a lot of fun just because you can tell the announcers are so surprised: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcMwzw6EbMg

CocaKoala10• 12 years ago

After a bit of thought, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (and 2, honestly) would also be interesting to look at. 2 is essentially a booked game, I don't think anybody feels like new stuff is going to be discovered there, but it was actively played for years and years, so examining changing tier lists would be pretty interesting. 3 is still played and the metagame has gone through some pretty significant shifts (from phoenix teams to morridoom to zero may cry), but I can basically guarantee that it's not going to be patched any time soon because of the way rights to the characters are tangled up, so any metagame shifts that happen are entirely due to the players discovering new tech. And there's definitely still a lot of new tech to be discovered in MvC3.

forrestthewoods2• 12 years ago

Author here! Can you point me to a set of tier lists for Street Fighter? I actually looked very briefly but couldn't find anything. It's possible to find a single tier list but what makes the Smash Bros post work so well is that it's 12 lists from the same source over 10 years.

I've found a few good tier lists for SF2 and SF4, but nothing consistent enough to really show their evolution over time.

valarauca15• 12 years ago

The evolution over time will require a little bit of data mining. I'm only slightly attached to the fighting community and haven't actively been playing for 20 years.

I don't know a good resource where this information will be readily available from seeing at the early 90's were kinda ancient history for the web.

agrona• 12 years ago

Dave Sirlin had a recent(ish) post about balance in fighting games here: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/game-balance-and-yomi

He mentions a few different Street Fighters.

ZenoArrow• 12 years ago

Here are some tier lists for SF3 (Second Impact and Third Strike)...

http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Street_Fighter_3:_2nd_Impact#Tier_...

http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Street_Fighter_3:_3rd_Strike#Tiers

Shoryuken doesn't seem to have a tier list for New Generation...

http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Street_Fighter_3:_New_Generation

... but found these...

http://cyberfanatix.com/forums/index.php?topic=100.0

http://www.killermovies.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-48991...

debacle3• 12 years ago

One thing that this graph doesn't capture is that, especially for Peach, Ice Climbers, and Mewtwo, a single player has brought each of those characters into the limelight.

These kinds of graphs don't translate well into MOBAs because the team size (5), character count (100+) and drafting mode (ban/pick/ban/pick) tend to create very stale metagames if the game is not rebalanced from time to time. That said, both Riot and Valve have made some pretty crazy balance decisions in the last 12 months.

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

Mewtwo has always been low on the tier list and never has been an actual threat in high level play. Peach and Ice Climbers are spot on however.

debacle3• 12 years ago

He's always been low tier, but his jump in popularity was caused by m2k

valarauca15• 12 years ago

I strongly disagree.

We haven't seen a MOBA go without patches long enough to test if your theory is correct. Defense of the Ancients ended up at version 6.85 before develop ceased. League gets biweekly patches. DotA2 get monthly patches.

The time scale we are talking about is 5-10 years of fixed metagame development. Which in nearly all games where this happened (primarily fighters and board games) we do continue to see metagame development as long as the game is played competitively.

To assume one subgenre is excluded form this ignores the present data, and makes an assumption that the game is incredibly shallow.

oblio3• 12 years ago

Dota 2 monthly patches are generally not actual game play changes. They're mostly additions of cosmetic items and fixes for the Dota 2 platform.

The thing with Dota 2 and other Dota clones is that the depth (problem space) is way too big. There's no way competitive teams would have the time to explore all the combinations and still be successful in a reasonable time frame, with the same roster.

That's why every 3-6 months Icefrog (the main developer behind Dota/the game design lead for Dota 2) makes game balance changes: slight nerfs on the most popular heroes and generally slightly higher buffs on the least popular heroes. The main intent is to break this natural tendency of humans to "cluster".

cheepin• 12 years ago

Back when LoL was new[er], you could see a player bring out a 'pocket pick' in a tournament, something that no one really played and bring it to prominence. I think a contributing factor for why this doesn't seem to happen much now is that the competitive playerbase is much larger than SSB (and exponentially larger than it's own first seasons) which means there are enough really good players/analysts that everything good gets discovered pretty quickly.

forrestthewoods2• 12 years ago

Author here! A lot of folks have said exactly that. I'm gonna work on a 2nd post that talks about the 'why' a bit more. There does seem to be a strong correlation between a characters rise and specific players who played them.

That post will hopefully come soon. Thanksgiving makes it a little difficult to get out quickly as I'd like.

pyrocat• 12 years ago

I'm hoping to see Yoshi come up in the ranks because of aMSa.

debacle3• 12 years ago

Make sure you include an excellent shot of Mango.

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

One of the big issues that sets Smash Bros. apart from other fighting games like Street Fighter or Tekken is the attitude of the developers. Sakurai and team don't really consider their game a fighting game and cater to the casual crowd with smash bros. This is in stark contrast to Capcom who tries to make Street Fighter the competitive fighting game. This is changing somewhat with the Wii U invitational and actually issuing balance patches this time around for smash 4 but it will be a long time before another Smash is a competitive hit like Melee was, Sakurai has even said that melee was too technical and was a mistake.

minimaxir• 12 years ago

It's worth noting that the casual focus in Brawl was responsible for the "tripping" mechanic: during battle, your character would trip completely at random. There was no way to disable it.

Ironically, casual players hated it.

lmm• 12 years ago

Random bonuses (items) are fun. Random penalties (tripping) are not.

NanoWar• 12 years ago

Make sure to watch this awesome documentary about SSBM: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoUHkRwnRH-KTCH3tJ9Wv... (Beware, it's 4 hours long in total, hehe)

Mithaldu4• 12 years ago

I wanted to like this, but it's 99% fluff and very weak to watch, even outright boring.

Maybe it's because i simply don't know the game, but right from the bat they expect the watcher to know the best players, and how the game works. Just throwing out names and techniques without explaining anything, while describing the completely typical 90s/00s mobile gaming nerd scene, which is identical to lan parties, demoscene parties, CCC clubs and what have you.

Secondly they show plenty of game footage, but it's like they made sure that it's a meaningless jumble by doing jumpcuts in amounts, frequency and rapidity that would make modern hollywood movies envious; and also exclusively using footage that's visually flawed in being either: out-of-focus, thumbnail resolution, sub-10 fps, shaky-cam, composed of fist-sized compression artifacts, overexposed or (something common to almost ALL the clips) presented entirely without comment or explanation.

Mind, so far i've seen 1 and a half videos of theirs and peeked into the third to see if it gets any better, but it really looks like this documentary doesn't say anything about the game, and is entirely a documentary about the social and competitive scene and the people in it.

CocaKoala10• 12 years ago

Three minutes in to the first video: "This is about the seven greatest players who, in their time, ruled the world".

So yeah, it seems like it's about the players and the community.

edit: The first video has so far gone over wave dashing and l-canceling, so it seems like it actually goes over some mechanical details of the game as well. I'm not really sure what you were expecting?

unclesaamm• 12 years ago

In contrast to the other response to this, I loved this documentary, and watched it in two sittings straight. I grew up playing this game, though, and watching it was a fond reminder of a culture that I always felt surrounded by. It's more nostalgic than hard-hitting, so you might not get as much out of it if you don't have any ties to melee or people who love it.

Agustus• 12 years ago

What we are seeing here is a demonstration of real world fog of war and the evolution of combat, bear with me on a real world application.

In the beginning of a fight / battle / war where both competitors have never seen one another there will be tendencies to favor an approach (character) based on visual appeal or familiarity. This is the selection of a character familiar to the player, look at Mario, Zelda, Luigi and their degradation over time; new users select their favorites but realize as they get better that these are not the best.

Over time, the players / strategists come up with new strategies to handle the predominantly selected players. As new characters are chosen, because the losing character demonstrates a propensity for losing, new strategies are adopted by the new loser.

The rise of certain characters within the game demonstrate users experimenting with them and their adopted strategies working against entrenched strategies.

Things also to consider, as less new players discover the game, the residual data becomes more experienced player-centric as they are the remaining still playing the game.

Ness is a character that may have some secret ability that no one knows about and may be helpful in the future.

Lavery• 12 years ago

To be nit-picky for a moment, it's profoundly irritating when footnotes in an article are not presented as links.

Thursday-• 12 years ago

I agree with the conclusion of the article, going for a fun game rather than trying to balance it perfectly is the best way to go. When games set out from the start to be competitive, balanced, and cater to the professional's feedback it takes away that element of discovery and letting the game grow organically. If something is obviously broken then A game in recent history that did this was StarCraft 2. StarCraft 1 became a huge competitive game well after the last balance patch came for it. This allowed the players and the community to grow through strategy and map making. In StarCraft 2 once something powerful (and fun) was discovered, players went the route of complaining online so the developers would change it. For myself and many others, this took away a lot of the fun and hurt the longevity of the game. Strategies/races/units falling out of favor did not happen naturally, a patch directly caused it. In StarCraft 1 you could not complain and expect a patch to save you, and you had to come up with something to deal with it.

hsk• 12 years ago

To be fair, in SC1, maps played a HUGE role in balance. On Blue Storm, for example, Zergs used to have a multiple percentage point advantage over Terrans, but the map makers fixed that by adding a little space behind the minerals on the natural, making it a little bit easier to defend against Muta harass and thereby curbing the advantage.

CocaKoala10• 12 years ago

By the way, if anybody is interested in this article and wants to read more about competitive game design and competitive game balance, they should check out Dave Sirlin[1], a former competitive fighting game player and game designer who's written a lot on the subject. He has an article on how he rebalanced Puzzle Fighter, and an article for each character that he wrote for rebalancing Street Fighter II Super Turbo HD Remix, with some really interesting insights about what makes a character powerful or balanced or unbalanced.

[1] http://www.sirlin.net/article-archive/

apetresc• 12 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with his interpretation of his own results. By my reckoning, 4 of the top 5 characters have been continuously in the top 5 for the entire 12-year duration (with Jigglypuff the sole exception and by FAR the most interesting data point in the whole thing).

Sure, some of the bottom places shuffled around a bit in the intervening time, but if SSBM is anything like the other competitive games I play, that's probably only because the people making the list don't really have strong opinions about them. Every competitive player is going to pay attention to who's #1-5 in the metagame, but do you really think they devote as much attention to whether Bowser should be #25 or #26? They probably pick those on a whim based on whatever recent experience they had.

That explains the volatility at the bottom rankings. I don't think it's because the pros are plumbing the depths of the game to find new strategies to move a character from second-worst to third-worst.

agibsonccc• 12 years ago

You would be surprised. I was apart of the smash community for a long time. I can attribute part of this to people being very attached to characters and like what's been mentioned with the way the game was created (catering to "casuals") much of the tier listings would change over time due to new bugs or people just trying to push the limit for certain characters.

We can see artifacts of this with the combo videos competitive players would put out.

While I agree competition and the metagame was the real objective (like in CCGs for example) people did like looking in the crevices for that next thing that could give their character that extra wave dash or what have you. I dare say that's what made smash so much fun.

sopooneo• 12 years ago

Could you explain what is meant by the "meta-game"? The author explained a little, but I'm still not clear and have never played myself. Was there an actual game-within-a-game? Or was there just a style of play where everyone agreed to eliminate all outside assets and play with only each character's native powers?

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

This is completely true, the top 4 characters in the original melee tier list are the same 4(in a different order) in the current day tier list. If you want to be competitive at melee your best bet is to get good with the spacies (fox or falco).

barbs• 12 years ago

"I'd love to play League of Legends low tier only. Can you imagine a tournament where the 40 most used champions are all off limits? It'd be so fun!"

Dota 2 has a similar mode[1] where you can't choose from your 40 most played heroes, although this is based on what heroes you've played previously, not the heroes that are most played globally.

[1] http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Game_modes#Least_Played

swagasaurus-rex2• 12 years ago

Dota does it correctly, if you cut off the top 40, tou would see a new meta game develop around the available champions. The tier list would not have the same ordering as the bottom remaining champions, as some of them are better suited to combat the removed 'meta' champs, and visa-versa.

I've been wondering if a MOBA could use a balancing algorithm, and tweak a pre-configured variable character stat if a champion becomes too popular, too high win ratio, or too weak.

Even more interesting IMO would be a stock market, where players can spend in game (or real) currency to manipulate the power level of their favorite champion. Over time, people will bid against overpowered champions and their numbers will get tweaked downwards. You might see certain champions that people consistently choose to invest in (to buff), but it will be an honest measure of the popularity of the champion and can be combated if enough of the player base hates it.

the_french• 12 years ago

Your stock market idea is interesting, however it wouldn't work well at all and would destroy the entire pro scene. If you check http://dotabuff.com/heroes/played you'll see the list of most played heroes and their win rates. The heroes who most likely need buffs will be at the bottom of that list. In a stock market simulation you would have people bidding on their favorite (popular) hero or against their most hated (popular) hero. Heroes like Invoker who have a 40% pub win rate are actually balanced for pro players with a 50% win rate. Given the popularity of invoker and the low win rate, we could expect a good amount of buffs causing the pro-metagame to shift to invoker being #1 pick.

Basically, balancing is hard.

kajecounterhack2• 12 years ago

For anyone who's into low-tier heroes, here's an inspirational game & watch: http://youtu.be/-IsVX-3ZsFU

Maybe G&W will never be high tier but it's so fun to watch people push the limits of known-to-be-bad characters out of love

tuxidomasx• 12 years ago

I remember playing SSBM in a college environment before Youtube. It was interesting to see how the discovery and exploitation of certain moves and abilities on campus over time shifted who people would use.

One day somebody discovers the "Falcon Knee" and destroys everyone. Suddenly people are picking C.Falcon a little more often. Or the sweet spots with Marth. Suddenly Marth is picked a lot more. Same with Luigi's neutral A drop kick/foot. Or Peach's down-smash on a slope.

I think the relative lack of shared video footage of other people playing contributed to a lot of tier-changing within isolated groups. Moves are kinda discovered on accident, get refined, and ultimately change the dynamics of the game a little.

organsnyder2• 12 years ago

I remember the same thing happening. While SSM was out by the time I was in college, my friends and I played a lot of the N64 version. When one of us really discovered Jiggly Puff—and learned how to pull off her "sleeper" move—it began to spread around. Interesting to see a parallel dynamic happening in Melee.

stonemetal• 12 years ago

Isn't shuffling in the ranks a sign of balance? Lets say the game is unbalanced such that Mario wins 100% of the time, and Luigi wins against everyone except Mario. Then I would expect the ranking to list Mario as #1 and Luigi as #2. They would never change positions because there is no question about if Luigi should rank higher than Mario or lower than some other character.

georgeecollins• 12 years ago

Yes - exactly. It's also a sign that the game has enough depth that not all strategies are known immediately. An unbalanced game where everyone knew A was better than B and that never changed would be a dull PvP game.

This is an interesting article, and I agree that balance isn't always as important as people think, but I don't think is well thought through in terms of game design.

jjaredsimpson• 12 years ago

That's assumes perfect information and perfect play. As new strats and counters are discovered the relative power of characters shifts over time.

Balance doesn't have to do with changes in perceptions of character strength. A game is usually said to be balanced if there is a large selection of characters that are considered viable for tournament play.

swagasaurus-rex2• 12 years ago

I think this distinction is important. Balance is about the diversity of choices players can make.

In nature, there are balancing mechanisms, but there is no balance. If one organism learns how to overwhelm another, it often spells the extinction of the weaker organism.

In games, however, if one character is unviable, then the game is said to be unbalanced, which naturally leads to discontent with the portion of the player base that likes that character. Balance is a battle against the natural entropy that generates tier lists or food chains, because it is a human preference, not a trend or a law of nature.

jpdus• 12 years ago

Normally one would expect the rankings to be more or less constant without any balancing, this is exactly the point of the article.

The shuffling indicates that new tactics/play styles are found and widely adopted (as well as preferences are shifting) over time. With rebalancing, the shuffling should be more or less random (or at least you would see a higher "volatility"). Without rebalancing most characters which were judged as strong stay strong but players perception for some characters changes with tactics etc.. It would be interesting to not just see the overall standings but some kind of "consensus" rating (which characters are rated similar and for which characters ratings are mixed).

By the way, your point also shows that SSBM has an extensive gameplay and is (if intended or not) well designed for competitive play - otherwise ratings should be more stable.

1123581321• 12 years ago

Because game staff have limited time and ability, more balanced games reduce and standardize options to make them easier to manage.

Smash is balanced in that win rates are similar enough to allow some mobility but not enough that the developers eliminated many of the later-discovered capabilities.

ixtli2• 12 years ago

This is a fantastic article that I'll link to the next time people complain about "balance" as a general construct to express that their discontent at losing in some context. There have been other well thought out observations similar to this about other classics, including Final Fantasy Tactics: http://kotaku.com/5973196/why-everybody-loves-final-fantasy-...

In the case of Tactics, the game continues to be fun even after 100 hours of play in part because player is _rewarded_ for their effort by their units becoming out of balance in the late end game.

saraid216• 12 years ago

While I agree with his point, I don't think he successfully demonstrates it, let alone proves it. There's very probably an Extra Credits video that does it better; I'd have to look, though, and I can't do that at work.

rubyn00bie• 12 years ago

A bit surprised to see the analysis was of Super Smash Bros Melee and not Brawl. Not quite as much data on it (7 years vs 12)...

For what it's worth, I actually wore out 3 Wiis playing smash bros for probably thousands of hours.

Also, great marketing effort releasing this the day before the new one releases.

ixtli2• 12 years ago

Unsure what you mean: There is power ranking of brawl at the bottom from which you can extrapolate some of the same conclusions he talks about wrt melee.

theseoafs• 12 years ago

? You've got that backwards, Melee came out 5 years before Brawl.

broodbucket• 12 years ago

Brawl has much less of a storied competitive scene, and thus there's inherently less metagame development. Fox is considered the best character in Melee, but the margin that Meta Knight dominates Brawl by is far, far larger. Nowadays, competitive Brawl is pretty much dead, Melee still has large tournaments.

I think the Melee tier story is far more interesting than the Brawl one since there's far less motivation to develop the lower tiers in Brawl. In Melee there's still some development in lower tiers like Game & Watch and Yoshi that could see them climb the ranks.

tiglionabbit• 12 years ago

Does the game track which characters tend to win and lose the most? I wonder if Nintendo could aggregate this and generate their own rankings.

organsnyder2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure that all Smash Bros versions going back to N64 keep track of a fairly comprehensive array of stats. I doubt that the games phone home with that info, though.

myko• 12 years ago

The 3DS version keeps track of those statistics for online play at least. Nintendo ostensibly uses this information to balance the game further in patches:

http://kotaku.com/little-mac-is-smash-bros-biggest-loser-165...

_Being on the developer's side, Sakurai is able to view online player statistics for the game, and one particular statistic was brought up. "For Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the individual character win ratios lined up nicely in a staircase format, but [for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS] one fighter has a significantly low ratio." Sakurai wrote. "It's Little Mac."_

ChuckMcM3• 12 years ago

It would be wonderful if more game designers took the basic premise to heart, which is that the "balance" is antithetic to "interesting". Much of what made early World of Warcraft worlds compelling was the lack of balance on character capabilities. And while minmaxers would find a combo that was hard to beat, often alternatives could be found without large scale nerfs and buffs. Smash brothers is a lot of fun in this regard, since my daughter regularly trounces me I can try different strategies over time and discover things about the character I'm playing that improve it against massive failure. That journey is much more interesting than whether or not Zelda is more powerful than Sheik.

CocaKoala10• 12 years ago

"balance" is antithetic to "interesting"

That's an unusual opinion, would you mind explaining more? Unbalanced games tend to, in my view, be less interesting, because imbalance removes choices from the game.

For example, if you changed the rules to Rock-Paper-Scissors so that paper no longer beats rock, that's not an interesting game anymore. Paper is now clearly the worst choice, since it has no chance of winning, and Rock is now clearly the best choice, since it will draw in the worst case.

Put another way: There's nothing about a balanced game that keeps you from going on the journey that you feel is interesting. But with an balanced game, that journey is mandatory; with an imbalanced game, it's superfluous. You're playing strictly sub-optimally, which is a fine choice, but it's hard for me to see how it's more interesting.

ChuckMcM3• 12 years ago

   >  would you mind explaining more?

Sure, we're using a slightly different meaning of balance I suspect. In the case of Smash Brothers, and World of Warcraft, the 'actors' each have different capabilities, some are offensive, some are defensive. In both of these cases the abilities can be "enhanced" by in game power ups.

Thus if you are playing actor 'A', and I am playing actor 'B', we state the game 'balanced' if every offensive action that 'A' has, has an equivalent defensive action on 'B's part, and vice versa. If an actor A has offensive capabilities that can overpower every other actors's defensive capability, then that actor is referred to as being 'over powered'.

What the original article discusses, and I certainly resonate with, is that there is a third balancing factor which is the environment and sometimes more subtle properties of an actor which are not specifically 'offense' or 'defense' related.

So to re contextualize that in terms of the argument you put forward, rock-paper-scissors is balanced at the actor level and the environment is irrelvant, so it plays the same way in all environments and is boring. If you add the environment, say underwater paper becomes mushy and can't be cut by scissors, or in volcanic environments paper catches on fire and can't wrap rocks, Etc, you create a more interesting game. One in which a strategy that works well in one environment, fails in another environment.

I realize that is a bit contrived, I was trying to stay with your use of r-p-s as the analogy which is imperfect to the task.

The short version is that widening the problem space from which you have to create a winning strategy makes it more interesting to me. That is done by spreading the notion of 'balance' beyond just matching actor skills to include effects from the environment as well.

TulliusCicero• 12 years ago

He's neglecting that SSBM is an offline-only game, so imbalances take MUCH longer to manifest. When people can easily play games against serious competitors across the globe at any time of day, new strategies spread extremely quickly.

Sniffnoy• 12 years ago

This is an argument against regular balance patches, not against trying to balance things in the first place. I don't think it's a good idea to conflate the two.

ryanpardieck• 12 years ago

I think maybe the takeaway here is that you can't always tell the difference between a slightly unbalanced and a perfectly balanced game right away. You can probably spot extreme imbalances immediately, I'd guess.

But if this game had been patched monthly, Jigglypuff or Ice Climbers might have been buffed drastically or had their mechanics changed early on, which would have been a shame.

A proposal: when a game has been thoroughly played, tested, and thought through, and the designers are nearly certain that a desirable state of balance has been reached, then restrain yourself to no more than one (maybe two) balance tune-ups in a year. Only patch imbalances so glaring that they are on the scale of bugs or exploits. Let things play out a bit.

The Unbalanced Design of Super Smash Bros

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