The Game Mechanic – All Things In Balance

In this age of online multiplayer, a topic that’s regularly brought up is balance. Good balance is absolutely essential for online games. It’s the difference between feeling violated and feeling outplayed. Players are far more likely to pick themselves back up and continue on when they feel like their own skills let them down rather than that the system is simply against them.

Yet good balance is notoriously troublesome to achieve. Some games developers even maintain that the idea of a balanced game is fool-hardly, and that the only realistic expectation is for a game to shift constantly between different forms of imbalance. In this model the shifts in imbalance themselves result in a kind of balance.

It can be really difficult to understand for those who’ve never gotten into a game far enough to be able to see imbalances in gameplay and why people get so irate over them. I was never truly aware of poor balance before I got right into StarCraft 2. Working my way up to Gold league I was always fairly well favoured as a Protoss player – Protoss being an extremely powerful race at the time. Suddenly Heart of the Swarm was released and we were no longer on top, and since then Zerg have consistently sat at the top of the food chain. If I’m honest I don’t really play StarCraft any more, and that imbalance is kind of the reason why.

Still having nightmares about these.

This feeling of inadequacy that imbalance can create in the player caused me to essentially give up the game. I stayed in Gold league and went on pulverising Terran and Protoss players but when I came up against Zerg (the majority of the SC2 population at the time) I simply could not beat them no matter how hard I tried. This was poor balance, and it may still be poor balance – as I said, I don’t play anymore.

I moved onto League of Legends, which has its own long list of imbalances that are far more forgiveable. Given the chance almost any character can become overpowered, but some have far greater potential than others. Some require very little skill for huge rewards and others demand skill and give even greater rewards.

Draven’s damage output is absolutely ridiculous even in the early game.

Take Draven for example, the character I play. Draven’s damage output is absolutely ridiculous even in the early game. If I hit an enemy champion with one of his trademark spinning blades they’ve lost a good quarter of their health right off the bat. The thing is that once you’ve thrown a spinning blade you need to catch it again to get the most use out of it and to catch it you need to make sure Draven is standing on a marker that shows you where it will land.

This makes fighting multiple enemies a nightmare if you’re not completely comfortable with the mechanics and you run around the fight clicking enemies, then quickly running to your marker before targeting and clicking that enemy again wherever they’ve moved to. It can even get you killed if your marker lands in a bad position (although the marker generally leads Draven’s movement), but if you get it right Draven can eliminate entire teams with sheer, unbridled damage output. He’s a monster in the right hands.

Your entire team is already dead.

Contrast this with Master Yi, though, and you’ve got the other side of the OP coin. Yi has very high damage output similar to Draven with an attack called Alpha Strike which makes him jump from enemy to enemy dealing huge damage and making him invulnerable while he’s doing it. Yi’s standard attacks then help to recharge the cooldown on Alpha Strike faster. When you mix that with his Highlander ability, it increases his attack speed exponentially and you essentially have a character who spends entire teamfights teleporting between enemies and dealing horrifying amounts of damage.

When it comes down to the difference between these two forms of imbalance it’s preference for gameplay that decides whether or not players will stick with your game. I can put up with League of Legends’ imbalance much easier than I can put up with StarCraft 2’s. It feels like I’ve got more opportunities to stop a character from becoming powerful – there are more possibilities. League of Legends has a lot more scope for creating new strategies whereas StarCraft and its ilk have become based around memorising the strategies of others and just doing them faster or more efficiently than your enemy can do theirs.

Or perhaps I’m just okay with it because my character is OP too.


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