Different Types of Balance

In this post we will return to balancing games. Last time we touched on this subject we talked about why you would balance certain ways for thematic purposes. This time we will be discussing actual methods for balancing and their strengths and weaknesses. Specifically 4 types that can help to ball park the numbers for items.

Rational balance: Otherwise known as mathematical balancing is a philosophy that all items should be equal or their power should be numerically measurable. For example lets say two knights try and fight each other with different weapons, say an axe and a sword, say that the sword swings faster but the axe deals more damage. Rational balance would say something like the sword hits once a second for 1 damage and the axe swings once every five damage for 5 damage. That way their DPS (or damage per second) is exactly the same. Of course people take into account other things too, like weapon accuracy (as a percentage chance to hit and as such a fraction to the overall DPS) and weapon cost (determining how much more powerful the item should be in comparison to items of a lower cost). These balancing changes are exact and make the game easy to balance, but are not always correct as talked about later.

Excellent pixel art done by user Kirokaze on deviant art

Realistic Balance: Realistically, we do not live in a perfectly mathematical world. While the sword and the axe technically have the same chance to hit, the axe user is taking more of a risk, missing with his axe once deprives him of five seconds and five damage. Whereas a miss from the sword only loses one second and one damage if he misses. Additionally players can learn new ways of taking advantage of their weapons. If both players trained with their axe and sword for one yea, but the axe user found if he swings his axe at the moment the sword use swings he cancels his animation (and that is an inherent part of the game) then you need additional balancing. More realistically their environment or goals may be asymmetric. The sword bearing knight might be trying to simply get past instead of besting his foe in a duel. Or the knight carrying the axe might notice the frailty of the stones underneath his opponent and take advantage of it. Either way Realistic balance tries to take account of the possibilities outside of straight number comparisons when balancing items. It is a lot more difficult but can be more rewarding.

Tested Balance: otherwise known as QA or Quality Assurance is fairly simple. If you don't understand whether or not something is to weak or strong, have someone else decide. Players go through your game testing every aspect of it, with no developer bias. This allows you to see if an item is actually under or over preforming. This does have three major flaws though and that's time, cost, and relative testing. Having QA sessions is very expensive and takes up a large amount of development time. You have to hire 30-70 people to play the same level of the same game over and over again for several days. However, this amount of time is nothing compared the amount of time your combined player base will spend within the first week (given that you have a respectable fallowing). Players can and will find bugs, imbalances and exploits in days in what it took you a month to find. For our knight analogy you would have 30 people fight for 7 hours a day using the same weapons, every time they would win they would mark it, how they won and how much they won by.

Player Controlled Balance: PC balance or pacing balance is when the players are given tools to immediately change how powerful or weak they are. This is a common form of balancing but is pretty much only found in single player games such as The Elder Scrolls or Metal Gear. This is often done through difficulty settings or menu options the player can toggle. The advantage to this is that you don't need to balance the game much, players will do that for you. However the downside is best explained by this quote from Ralph Koster "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game". Basically if you provide players with the tools to win, they will use them. Bypassing an experience or challenge that you wanted to provide for them, so be careful. In this case we would only have one playable knight, and the other knight would be controlled by the computer. Every time the player failed 3 times he would change the difficulty down by one notch until he could win.

Wolfenstein's single player difficulty settings,

(when selecting easy you are greeted by your character as a baby)