The video is really well made. This is just slightly related but percived balance is usually way more important than actual balance. for example in team fortress 2 people complain way more about sniper than medic when medic is the most important and powerful class in the game to the point where you basically can't win if the enemy has one and you don't. but people complain way more about sniper because he's annoying to "fight" because the counterplay is usually to just not be where he's lookning. sorry for the tangent loved the vid
Yeah I actually tried to have a section on it but I was super behind schedule and it wasn't fitting into the script how I wanted. I probably won't for a while but I plan to make a video on how supports are so powerful and necessary but so overlooked.
Because, when a team is bad Medic is better but when a team is good Sniper is better. A good sniper watches their flanks, forces a Medic to pop Uber early, and is positioned so you can't use the Uber to kill him without ignoring his team which lets his team kill your non-Uber and then kick in your teeth when Uber ends. You are able to force the Uber into a lose-lose choice as a Sniper. A good sniper can completely invalidate a Medic's contribution as they will out damage Overheal and get a kill. There is a reason why that 1 good sniper can dominate the entire lobby. There is a reason why bots, cheaters, and hackers use Sniper.
To me, the ideal balance philosophy is to try to make it so every character has a fair shot in both a beginner casual setting & a pro setting but letting it slide that some characters are noticeably better as long they're not ruining the match for other players unless you can come up with a way to make it even without messing up what makes that character fun in the first place. For example, I don't mind Lucina being really good in Smash Ultimate but I do mind Hero being luck-based, counters being designed in a way that encourages randomly throwing them out, Yoshi getting hyper armor by air jumping, & Incineroar's Revenge. Incineroar's not even good & yet he's one of the most infuriating characters to me just because that move is so stupid. So a lot of the time, it's not about how imbalanced they are but *how* they're imbalanced. There are cases where just pure degree of imbalance ruins a character too though. Meta Knight in Brawl is neither fun to fight nor to use because he's the best at nearly every possible thing. Same goes for Vergil in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. Same goes for Ultra Instinct Goku, Labcoat Android 21, & the original Broli in Dragon Ball FighterZ. Some degree of imbalance is actually needed in a class-based team vs team game because that's where strategy comes from. Even if you always use the same character, strategy still comes from a degree of imbalance because you have to plan around the pros & cons of your character based on the map you're in & the current situation.
Sorry for the late reply been busy but yeah 100% how a character is imbalanced is the most important part if a character is stronger but not oppressive/annoying to play against it is so much better.
I believe a truly balanced game is a game where all the characters are of the same power level but still have different play styles. Evreyone can deal with evreyone, its just up to the skill of the player to understand how to deal with it, not by switching to a different character, but by using a part of the character that can deal with the one they are fighting against. Ye, i know it's pretty impossible to make something like that, but one can imagine.
Really nice video! Thanks for the closed captions! I can tell you put a lot of work into this video. Can't wait to see where your channel goes from here!
I really god damn like this video! An enjoyable rant with actually funny jokes, with a dash of Scott the Woz. This channel is surprisingly underrated, and I - and from what I can see, many others - sense a lot of potential afoot. Great work!
As a Splatoon 3 player, the title alone is what makes me think is a reason people have dropped the game so much. The game has great balance, but I feel like many feel the game is bland in part due to it being so balanced (and the weapon sets being underwhelming for expectations)
Yeah also a lot of the upgrades (admittedly I only played Splatoon one) felt really really similar to each other which meant I couldn't even tell the difference between one roller and another most of the time.
its also because the general map design massively prefers certain types of weapons that makes the game steamroll simulator, and its so mechanically driven that any notion of "positioning yourself properly" is thrown out the window once you're forced to fight your way out of hallways using mechanics with skin-deep depth
Feels like I just stumbled onto a gem of a channel that's bound to explode in popularity!! Glad the algorithm brought me here. Good stuff man, great video, keep it up!!
On the single player game end you also have the other side of the spectrum where the game just hates you and anything short of the strongest playstyle is a fool's errand, I haven't seen many of those but when it happens it pisses me off.
Very well put together video, and definitely deserves more view. If I could offer a suggestion though, I'd say there's so many references to other games and some of them just went over my head. I think it's fine to have these, but it'd be nice if they were a bit more concise so I could understand the point better. Other than that this is a great video, and if you keep at it I could see you getting big :)
Thanks its a good point and I'll try to keep it more consistent. I mostly did that out of fear of it being a to Overwatch dominant video so any other games I could think of got thrown in I'll probably continue to do it but with games that are more closely related or better explained.
Quick summary of the entire video: Your game cannot be balanced solely around strength or low-dimensional metrics. A balanced game can only be achieved if every aspect of your game is balanced, not independently. You must balance general champions' skill floors and skill ceilings. Balancing frustration is crucial too. You need to balance the impact of most mechanics in your game, such as the draft for example. While achieving perfection is likely impossible, use this information to inform your decisions. If you are already interested in game balancing, these concepts should be turbo obvious and even instinctive.
Yeah your right. The problem is I play very little games that actually put it into practice and very few people on the outside understand it and just say "Balance bad, devs fix". I'm trying to make more in depth videos as time goes on :)
You have great potential omgjlfkskfsdjf (I can tell you're very inspired by Scott the Woz) I love your argument of unbalanced games being good, it makes Melee matches more fun to see a low tier specialist beat a meta character (and rewarding if you're the player himself).
@@Mikey_2626 hee hee yes. In the future though, make sure you make your voice seem more "expressive" and not like you're obviously reading a script. It does tend to get a bit distracting. Not hating though, very solid.
That's fair part of it is because most of the recording is recorded at like 1 am or later after a long day so I can't actually remember what I'm try to say. Like the outro took over 30 tries because my brain was fried. But yeah I definitely want to try to do better with that as well as taking more pauses as sometimes I just keep going in the voiceover.
balance is more a matter of rock paper scissors rather than "blue vs red is matter of color vs color, nothing more" to a point where you CAN overcome the disadvantage, but it takes true skill to do so
True, depending on the game and characters. That is how counters should be and in some games they are, in others its actually unfair. I do think in general overwatch does a good job at it (except for supports vs tank match ups specifically ana)
I really enjoyed this video and really agree with what you said. its not really all that fun when certain characters absolutely curbstomp others and it basically comes down to picking the right guy on the character select screen. I could also really feel the scott the woz influnce in the joke delivery and im loving it! i subscribed.
One example of balance being somewhat psycological is with Vladimir from League of Legends. To make a long story short, after the character received a nerf, his win rate, ban rate, and pick rate went down, and players complained he felt worse to play. One small issue: Riot forgot to put those changes live. Literally nothing changed, but because they said there was a nerf the community placebo'd it into making an impact.
Really good video! I disagree with some of the conclusions that you come to and some of the examples that you bring up, but I enjoy your style of humor! One thing that I think is really important to keep in mind when it comes to balance is System Mechanics VS Character Mechanics. I can't speak on Overwatch 2's balance because I don't play that game competitively, but I think an "absolute balance" state would be bad like what you say. This is because the game has very weak System Mechanics. System Mechanics being the tools that everyone has. For OW2, that would be moving, crouching, and jumping. Everything else, from the properties of shooting to Health to abilities vary from character to character. Of course, these system mechanics are essential to play, but they don't have a lot of influence in character to character interactions. You can kind of dodge hitscan, but that's about it. Compare that to having a Zarya bubble or Tracer recall, or heck, even just a normal dash, and you'll see what I'm talking about. Because so much of a player's power is determined by the heroes that they play, you get this RPS situation you're describing. ...But, there are games with stronger system mechanics that help make the game MUCH more balanced. Under Night In Birth is a master class at that, but if you're not already familiar with how traditional fighting games work, you'll probably have a hard time understanding it. But even in Smash, basic movement means so much more than it does in OW, and that's not even mentioning mechanics like shielding, rolling, spotdodging, and more! The more of your player's power is determined by system mechanics, the closer the game becomes to something like chess. This COULD be bad, if you forget that chess is actually a really good game. But yeah, homogeneous design can be boring. But with strong enough system mechanics, as long as you don't get too crazy with the characters, it's actually very easy to keep those characters feeling unique. And if you do this, it's perfectly possible to get a nearly perfectly balanced game while keeping the game very fun! The hard part at that point is making those strong, impactful, and balanced system mechanics.
I've never heard of that before (probably because I don't play fighting games) but that makes perfect sense and is a really good point and not something I had considered I'll keep this in mind for the future to make my takes better suited to more than just a single game as I had seen the problem in Overwatch and spoke to a friend of mine about it who played fighting games and they mentioned that its a problem in other games as well so when I did some research into the nature of game balance I never encountered it in my research (somehow). That's kind of why I was careful around fighting games as a topic as I'm not knowledgeable enough to draw conclusions on them as I am with Overwatch but I viewed them as the closest analog. But yeah you are 100% correct I try to do better research in the future.
YESS!!! Imagine being able to select your magic element or race at the start of a game, but it's been "balanced" so heavily, that it barely has impact on your gameplay...
Spot on my dude. The biggest culprit for me has been MMO', which began as varied, making each class unique and relevant in its own way, and over time, the endless pursuit of "balance" brought forth aberrations like current Wow/FF14 in which classes are basically just aesthetics, tuned to practically the exact same gameplay and style with zero things that make them stand out in any way.
I haven't played any MMO's but it does seem like they do suffer the same issues. It feels good to know my points are accurate to more than a few genres!
Hello there! Lovely video, friend. That's a lot of belabouring a single point, though I appreciate you considered it quite a good deal. Also thank you very much for the subtitles, I love to see those every time! As for your rock-paper-scissors argument, I feel you're missing a perspective. Coming from League of Legends, I understand that some games are won in champ select (although - especially in lower ranks - more often than not, they're *lost* in champ select.) In a well-balanced game, I don't think it should be expected of players to constantly counter-pick the opposing team. In fact, that sounds like pretty terrible balance to me: It says that characters' strengths and weaknesses are overtuned and they should be more balanced to par. In team games, I understand a balanced character to mean that they perform their role satisfactorily. *How* they perform that role is where player skill is expressed and how the game ultimately plays out. To use Overwatch as an example, when I decide to play Support, I expect to be a team force multiplier. If I play Mercy, I expect that effect by keeping my tanks in the fight longer and by having them soak up much more damage than usual, making the enemy team expend more effort for the same result. If I play Lucio, I expect that effect by allowing my team to manoeuver much more aggressively and by attacking from unexpected angles and disrupting enemy positions. Mercy and Lucio should play dissimilar and be better or worse picks for different team compositions, but to consider them balanced, I don't feel like I should constantly swap between the two depending on the enemy's team. I feel like they should be valuable picks for certain team compositions to play in some situations - for instance, I feel I should consider Mercy more valuable on defence and Lucio on offence, just by virtue of their skillsets. But most importantly, I feel they should both allow me to meaningfully play the majority of a match and statistically, across the entire playerbase, have comparable win rates. To get back to my home turf of League of Legends, there's the Attack Damage Carry (or ADC for short) - an archetype of character who mainly contributes by dealing massive amounts of sustained damage via basic attacks. They're called Carries because they need to be carried through the early game and will carry their team in the late game. Due to their almost exclusive focus on damage output, they're quintessential glass cannons - any good assassin will simply hop in, pop their health bar from 100% to 0 in two attacks and hop out before there's any chance of retribution. That's the general play around ADCs. Of course, there's many different ADCs and they all fulfill different sub-roles. Kog'maw is the poster child of the carry: Pitiably fragile at every stage of the game, completely useless early on, but a literal living artillery of death and destruction 40 minutes into any given match. A team with a Kog'maw usually wants to build around it and stack a whole lot of champions who can keep it safe. They truly don't need any other sources of damage once a Kog'maw is sufficiently fed; it just needs to stay alive, run down a lane towards the enemy nexus, and obliterate anything and everything in its path without dying and its team wins. A completely different type of ADC is Lucian. He boasts excellent damage in the early and mid game, but falls off hard in the end game. A good Lucian player who gets one or two kills in the first five minutes of a match will, most likely, win his lane even with poor support from his team. This means he can act fairly independently from everyone else, make risky plays thanks to his good mobility and create immense pressure on the enemy team for the first 15-20 minutes, but if they manage to hold on, stall the game and draw it out, they all but guarantee their own ADC will be considerably stronger than Lucian. He just needs to ensure that the game ends before that point, or that his team gets strong enough to compensate for his late game weakness. It's impossible to switch champions in the middle of a game of LoL, but if it were, people would obviously constantly swap to characters that are strong for whatever part of the game they're at. But LoL is balanced around the fact that this is impossible. Like I mentioned, this leads to situations where teams lose in champ select (for instance, if the ADC picks Kog'maw and the rest of the team *also* goes for high damage, low utility champions; or in high-to-pro level play where champ select sometimes *is* a figurative game of rock-paper-scissors.) But both with the dizzying number of champions in the game and the wide array of strategies available, balance comes pretty naturally. If one strategy is dominant, it'll be played with increasing frequency until inevitably a counter-strategy is found. This very rarely necessitates an entirely new team composition; much more often it's just a certain counter pick or even just an item or two that can be purchased in a match. The point I'm getting at is that balance is situational. In Overwatch, long, unobstructed sightlines across bottlenecks are a dream for Widowmaker or Bastion and a nightmare for Tracer or Reaper. In a balanced game state, I'd expect my choice to be much more influenced by my team's needs and where the action is happening than by what enemy characters I'm up against. To a certain extent, rock-paper-scissors dynamics should be at play, or perhaps it's unavoidable that in a game with diverse skill sets, some abilities are naturally going to counter others. But I'd expect those rock-paper-scissors dynamics to affect the win rate only up to a certain degree. If in the example of a sightline across a bottleneck, the situation arose that my Widowmaker were constantly killed by Tracer until I switched to Bastion to tear her to shreds, but then she switched to Reaper and kept fragging me until I switched back to Widowmaker, I'd (probably bicker at my team for not covering my back, but also) consider this an example of terrible balancing. Modern multiplayer games have endless numbers of adjustment dials to balance every part of the game. If one balancing system completely overwhelms another or even all others, it's not doing its job properly. * Apologies if my analogies and comparisons are out of date. I've admittedly not played any competitive multiplayer game in several years, but I feel you're more than clever enough to substitute names until you understand what I'm getting at.
Sorry for the late reply I've been busy and that's a lot to break down. So I have never played league I was just a little to young to get into it. However not being able to change mid match solves the issue of counter swapping but would still mean that if they had equal strength/power. That one side will just win by nature. Because I'll stick to Overwatch as I know next to nothing about league. If I am playing Rein into Orisa my teammates could be running Lucio and Baptise and fully synergize however as Orisa strength is being able to push back against brawl characters as that's her strength as I am a Reinhardt main if I am against a half decent Orisa even with that support combo I can't break past the Orisa to create value unless we are able to get away with a crazy flank which would be more their mistake then our skill. If I couldn't swap this would just be a loss. While I can swap I am a Reinhardt main he is who I'm best at but the counter shuts me down I can't produce *as much* value so if my team was built around me or my team is just plain bad now me and the tank are creating equal value. So now my team is the deciding factor of who wins not me. You can actually see this in the video theres team fight where I'm in this situation and I'm just getting pushed around with little ability to escape the enemy Orisa ability to shut down Rein luckily my team was good and able to keep me up and get picks. However in Overwatch of course you can swap so in that situation once their team does successfully kill me I now have to swap to say D.va to continue gaining value and not just removing myself from the deciding who wins the situation and now I can just ignore the Orisa and continue to win. However had I been just Rein one trick Orisas ability to shut down a brawl tank is strong so even if they are worse on Orisa then I am on Rein they are successfully make up for what can sometimes be a massive gap by just playing the character with the advantage. While D.va can just ignore the Orisa and win. So they can swap Zarya and unless the team understands to focus down the Zarya the D.va alone will again lose just by the nature of how each character works. In a vacuum all of the tanks*(theirs a few really weak ones) are strong and can win a game and make up a massive team gap just by being good however almost every tank has a way to shut them down. Which is why I describe it as balanced and not fun. My main point is that when a game becomes to tightly balanced where all characters are of equal effectiveness not only is the strengths over one another become more clear and massive but it also leads for players like me who prefer to only play 5 out of the 40ish overwatch characters to not have a chance at winning because someone who is more flexible can have this massive gap just by that characters unique strength. That had it been less balance powerful that gap would be smaller as a character like Orisa where you actually just need to learn when and where to use your abilities and as described by one top 500 player "sit in a corner until they push you" would be one of the weakest characters in the nature where she can still dampen a Rein but it would require more intelligent use of the abilities other than just use the abilities. While a character like Rein would stand a chance at making up that innate advantage by being stronger. Then a character like Winston or D.va to a lesser degree would be able to better stand up to Rein in a fight despite his innate advantage over their lower damage output as they are even more skill based then Reinhardt. My point was that the inbalance in characters is what makes a games balance more fun and if there is a massively dominant strategy thats not really balanced but as a said if it is fun and enjoyable to play against is it really a problem? If it is unfun like say double shield in Overwatch original then yeah it should be dealt with but was Winston or Rein metas really that oppressive at any points same with when they made Junker Queen meta for a small update. So while I agree balance should be situational what I was advocating for was Balance based on the skill required for a character as it currently stands theres no reason to play a higher skilled character if there is a less mentally intensive character who is just a strong in 90% of circumstances which is what the issue is with perfect balance. I would had preferred to call the video Why equal balancing feels bad or something like that where all characters feel equal in strength but the letter limit on youtubes titles became a problem at that point so I didn't have the chance to. Either way hope this made sense and cleared up what I meant.
Card jitsu was goated was one of my favorite club penguin games though it is literally rock paper scissors from a game design perspective. Still a really good game tho
Great video with a lot of interesting points, I have a question for anyone reading this though: If all the characters in a game have a similar reward for your skill, and a very high skill ceiling, then would that be the best of both worlds? Players are rewarded for their skill, and they're not forced to learn every character, since even in a bad matchup they can win through the skill they got one-tricking the character. Obviously this is easier said than done, and still isn't perfect, but I reckon it might be the best approach if you really want a balanced game. I'm open to opinions on it though.
It is technically the best solution, its just very difficult for each character to have that scaling nature without also having a low skill floor making them too difficult for a first time player. Though I would be interested in playing a game with a more limited roaster that takes that approach.
If you don't want to force players to learn every character then you must make all the characters hitboxes same and only change the animations. And I don't think it will be fun. Sometimes the fun is trying to find some tactics to beat overpowered characters while using weak characters. So game developers should make the game however they want but balance the game according to players feedbacks.
I'd like to counter your Mario Kart example. Sometimes if you're just way better than the opposition, it's fun to play with a handicap. Playing with the worst vehicle loadout while they play with the best means you're actually more engaged in the multiplayer rather than just doing a time trial with occasional blue shells.
That's fair. The problem is 2 things my first Mario kart was Wii so even though I have played the earlier games I am much more used to bikes and when I play with my friends most of them run meta while being around the same skill as me but because I am not good at karts and not running meta I get giga gapped even when in any other game (not deluxe) or when they are off the meta karts I win most of the time. So I think its more based on how your friends play the game but its a good point.
Overwatch has a lot of problems, inside the company and out. You talked about the game in a way that both commends their creativity but talks about their mistakes and explains really well why it's so important that they need to make the game fun before anything else. The video was well made.
Thanks! Managing that balance was really difficult as I had to rewrite a good bit of the script because I felt it was too unfair to the game. I am happy with how it ended up though.
This is an interesting subject and I do concur that balance is a lower priority that comes much later in game development. That being said, you do mistake imbalance with flavor. There's plenty of different subjective reasons why people stick to a character/build loads for fun (such as just liking the character's design, lore, feel of how they play, etc). Aiming for more inherently skillful and imbalanced design doesn't equal global fun for your whole playerbase. Yes, Melee is acclaimed because of its skillful tech and Spacie duo, but it's also dismissed because of it's lack of variety, imbalance being one of the big reasons. Despite arguably 13 characters (half of it's roster) being viable at high level, you only see like 5 of the best commonly being played by multiple people. Many of which aren't the easier/beginner-friendly characters many people started off the game with like Mario or Kirby. A big concern considering Melee's more casual roots. There's plenty more battles of factors such as lower levels vs. higher levels, simplicity vs. complexity, streamlining vs. abnormally, healthy vs. toxicity, etc for a meta. So I wouldn't advocate for 'This is harder to use, so it should be way better by default' as a flat answer.
In short, it's too much of a case-by-case situation with so many broad, vague, changing and open-to-interpretation components to give a definitive answer that your skill and imbalance suggestion don't solve on their own.
I agree, I realize it might of come off as saying this is harder so it should be better. What I was more so advocating was for higher skilled characters to have slightly higher power. However I think there is a limit Doomfist (of overwatch) for example is character that if he became meta might just make the game to difficult for new players so I think he should be around the same level as other high skill characters but never the best. I also personally don't view "good aim" as that much of a skill as its pretty easy to make up for or just be on console where that skill is removed because aim assist I think a lot of games over value aiming. If a game has movement based characters and aim based characters and positioning/tactical characters they should all be viable to allow for different play styles. I do realize its not a definitive answer but I do believe what I purposed was a much better alternative than what many games do handle it as. I have some game dev experience (about 6 years) but I by no means am an expert I just think a lot of games handle balance poorly making it less fun as a result. Though I can see how it wasn't all that clear. I'm still trying to learn how to better handle scripts and script writing to handle counterpoints and potential downsides.
One thing you forgot to mention is; some characters are fun not because they're balanced but because they're FUN! Back when I played Yager in R6 even with him being nerfed he was so FUN! I love playing fun characters, I don't care about the balance! Weak, strong, etc. Have the character be fun to master/ understand.
great vid, completely agree. Blizzard in particular obsessed wayyy too much with making their games esports-viable, probably to recreate the success they had with StarCraft 2, and ended up killing Heroes of the Storm, WoW and Overwatch by catering to hardcore players and balancing the fun out of everything. OW on release was stupidly fun back when Bastion for example was broken and even though, yes, they should've made changes - the changes they made and continued to make up till this point have, as you say, made the game into a disappointingly milquetoast rock-paper-scissors snoozefest and its sad to see them squander the potential that I know the game could have
Thanks! And yeah Overwatch as a franchise had some of the most potential of any game series just to see it get squandered by miss management and unfun balance is one of the saddest franchise deaths I've ever seen a game have.
I agree with you fully, I believe a good way to balance a game is to actually create an imbalance. An example I'd like to bring up is the balancing in csgo (or cs2 now). counter terrorists compared to terrorists have a huge advantage as their objective is to play passively (holding angles, defending sites, watching the middle of the map if applicable) while terrorists have to act in order to challenge those angles, attack sites, and be capable of going through the center angle on a map without getting obliterated. how is this balanced? the guns! the counter terrorists specifically have weaker guns due to their innate advantage, along the fact that their equipment can be more expensive than terrorists, while terrorists have arguably the strongest options in the game, and some are cheaper as well. This is why I have an issue with the game Valorant, as it seems to not understand this and creates an imbalance that's not fun compared to CS's; I'll agree that Valorants agents are more intriguing than the standard character models of CS2 not having anything special for them, but the fact that guns on both defense and offense are exactly the same actually creates an extremely large advantage for defenders than offenders, while the options are "balanced" the feeling of the game altogether is not, as defenders can 1-tap you just as easily as you can them, without any form of difference whether it be cost, damage, etc. as both sides have the exact same options, leading to the only advantage that offenders have being peaker's advantage and potential agent options which again, both sides are capable of having. This is IMO, take this with a grain of salt. (another good example is R6, seeing that both sides have specified agents depending on the role, attack or defense, so it creates an imbalance of options but is balanced with this in mind creating a fun and engaging experience; however some of that has slowly been lost over the years.)
Also unbalanced heroes (in Overwatch) have different usefulness depending on the player's rank. In an average match, a low rank player may heal about 8k as Mercy and 5k as Ana (making Mercy a preferable pick), but a high rank player may heal 11k as Mercy and 15k as Ana (rendering Ana the preferable one in high ranks). So the metrics for usefulness of heroes are different between ranks. Low ranks rewards ease to heal, high ranks reward raw healing output. Sure I left all other skills of them aside.
High skill expression heroes should be stronger in higher elos, and lower skill expression heroes should be stronger in lower elos. That way those who invest the time to really get good at the game and play at a high level are rewarded for it, and don't just get the same value they would for playing something that doesn't have as much skill expression. If we look back to the meta in overwatch 1, near the end of its life, excluding the soloq sigma hog + hitscan stuff, the ball dva. tracer brig zen meta was pretty amazing. Pretty much all of those heroes were in the top 10 highest skill expression heroes in the game, and gameplay was really intense, with tons of macro decisions and high apm stuff going on. What isn't fun is having the high elo meta be dominated by mercies, hitscans, and roadhogs, all of which require little to no macro decision-making or complicated mechanics.
Yeah 100% top level meta is most fun when its dive dominated kind of a shame they refuse to let Genji breath for more than an update. This next update is probably going to have one of hell of a time for backline though.
You seem to be ignoring that humans are playing the game. No one is going to run a super difficult character if they could get just as much or more likely more value out of a character who is easier to play as on that easier character they can focus on other aspects of the game. Humans aren't machines and balance isn't as simple as just numbers equal each other psychology is the other half.
For Widowmaker and other one shots I don't think that there fun to play against because of their one shots. I don't think one shots belong in the game. I think they have to rework her and Hanzo to make them more fun to play against as theirs no way to remove widows one shot and have her still be viable to play. Hanzo would probably be fine though without his one shot
I think part of the issue with the concept of "Balance" in multiplayer games these days is that... well it might just not be the right word to describe the issues going on. You can lump a lot of issues into the general concept of a games "Balance" and not necessarily be incorrect. In reality, maybe the issue is more specifically to do with the concept of "Windows of Opportunity." You mentioned things like punishing people for mistakes and that sort of feeds into what I mean here. At the same time a lot of development teams on games have quite possibly taken the idea of "You should buff more than you nerf" a bit too much to heart. Let's say players are generally dissatisfied with how a particular character plays, this example character is a damage-oriented character who is balanced around a lack of mobility. Perhaps the issue in this hypothetical game is: Mobility has gotten too strong with the general roster of characters, or, more than likely, the issue is maybe the character should just not have mobility be a weakness anymore. Between these two ideas, it seems at least to me that more and more devteams are favoring the latter, taking away weaknesses that make the character reasonable or even fun to fight against, specifically because it's an easy way to bump up things like winrate numbers or general satisfaction. It's a quick and dirty fix but it doesn't address the broad issue the game might be having. Alternatively maybe this character gets a different kind of buff as another way to circumvent their lack of mobility, crowd control in some form, debuffing the enemy, which can objectively make playing the character feel better, but comes at the direct cost of, again, making them a lot less fun to play against. Imo, character identity is something that should be preserved over game balance in instances like this, as it seems too easy to just say "screw what the players actually want with their character, they just like winning more than losing anyway" and then make big changes that outright remove identity from how a character functions. I'm not saying that there can't be fundamentally broken kits, or ones that were poorly conceived of in the first place, but taking immediately to doing things that outright detract from the identity of a character for balance reasons is also a good way of exacerbating issues rather than solving other systemic problems. As a final note, I personally think simple characters should be relatively viable in the top level, and not necessarily because of extrinsic things like game sense. Imo simple characters should survive off of consistency over raw output. Complex and skillful characters should reward the player with an output they can't get elsewhere, while simple characters should be rewarding through less ability to screw up, at the direct cost of not necessarily being the biggest most flashy things to exist. I haven't played Overwatch in a number of years (I dropped off way before OW2) so idk how applicable this opinion is now, but when I played I gravitated towards Soldier 76, I found him very simple and while I won't necessarily be ripping entire teams apart if I'm against people with brains, having the ability to just dish out consistent single-target damage was very fun for me. He's definitely more about aim than ability usage and I felt decent at making it work. To work this opinion into my point about simple characters in these games, he's not exactly very multi-target unless he's doing something like cleaning up low hp targets, but he can usually fight one person extremely well if your aim and spread control are on-point. At least in my opinion, having an option like that be relatively reasonable as a pick at the highest level is valuable.
Look at London Spitfire, them playing their own meta that required such a high level of coordination and game sense. It's why I will argue they were the best team in the league but the meta wasn't in their favour (thanks Orisa).
100% I wasn't around esports until this last season but it was just so fun to watch Spitfire compared to any other team I was really sad they got knocked out so early.
i will give my take as a moba player, becuse the league is constantly flamed becuse how bad the balancing is. i do agree that there should be characters that are stronger the harder they are to play and thats where some games fail, currently in league the strongest characters arent the ones with easiest moveset or the most unbalanced stats, but the ones that got less counter play. it dosent matter if i got the most broken one shot character, if one character can both tank my damage and then switch to do same damage i do, thats how things are unbalanced and thats currently wats happening in league meta, having characters that dont do especificly wat they are meant to do or having characters that do everything any other can is wat breaks games balances, not even counting how they create characters to counter the ones that are new and leave the old ones to be forgothen leaving the game to be "unbalanced". Now a good exemple of balancing characters is dota 2, in dota balancing characters does almost nothing, changing a few couldowns or some % dosent really stop them from building 2 completly diferent playstyles being tank or dps, any character can be either of them but obviosly some kits will help one style more than other, either way nothing stoping a skilled player from playing around with stuff like that and still win matches unlike league were you do this same items or your worthless
Yeah the power creep of new characters being more or less them just lacking counters is definitely something that a lot of games suffer from when they keep adding new characters it entirely inverts how the game handles power. I think thats why valves games always seem so balanced because they arn't adding anything new and just focus on balancing what they have.
THIS THIS is why I am starting to get bored of overwatch 2 and HATE the direction. Zen the glass canon with the BEST debuffing being unkillable because characters cant have downsides undermines the whole tank role, where the best advice is to stop peeking, all I feel like I'm doing is playing sig, or ram to sponge damage for some dps to flank and kill their supports. sure I am going to win, but when my fun is derived from playing the game, not winning, I enjoy more of the games in where I am not forced to play sig or ram and end up losing anyways
Yeah 100% the loss of identity from there just being no downsides when a character receives "balance" changes is infuriating especially characters with fuck that one guy in particular abilities like Zen as a tank main (specifically Rein) its just not fun to not play the game because of discord orb. I have a 60% win rate and a 90 something win rate (on Rein) in comp and yet its just not fun just because your fun is derived by whether the enemy team lets you have it or not.
you are getting balance and counters mixed up dude, counters are more relevant the closer player skill gets, but it's not influenced by balance at all, if the game is unbalanced you get the beginnings of OW, where the team without bastion loses and you CAN'T swap it away. Honestly you sound like an OTP riven
Yes, you are correct but the reason im advocating for imbalance is because low skilled counters like bastion should never be above a 'C' teir character he doesn't need as much skill to create value while countering 90% of the tank roaster. Same can be said for any other low skill high reward characters like Orisa they should have strengths but they should never be near the meta in power if they are going to have such a low skill ceiling.
@@Mikey_2626 Didn't mean to come out rude, I was making a joke! I think it's a good video but maybe a bit too much on overwatch, there is so many more examples you could of talked about. I don't play overwatch so it wasn't the right example for me to watch for minutes and minutes. Keep it up, will watch your next videos.
Sorry I'm a little bad at understanding comments sometimes my bad. I tried to use other games but that's a fair critique I also thought it was to much on overwatch
Sorry, but if you think that having better and worst characters is fun is because you never had your character be in the F tier of a tier list. For some reason every game I play my favorite character ends up being the worst one. It's not fun Like, let's imagine a professional tournament of a game. Tell me, why would anyone not use the "much stronger than others but needs a lot of skill to use" characters? Everyone there is a pro, everyone participating in the tournament is a professional, making the skill barrier be non existent because everyone there is (almost) equally good at the game!
@@Mikey_2626 my jaw dropped at the subscriber and view count! This is a great quality video. Reminded me of Scott the Woz but not about exclusively Nintendo or consoles (That's a compliment, sorry if you don't like comparisons, idk UA-cam etiquette)
The video is really well made. This is just slightly related but percived balance is usually way more important than actual balance. for example in team fortress 2 people complain way more about sniper than medic when medic is the most important and powerful class in the game to the point where you basically can't win if the enemy has one and you don't. but people complain way more about sniper because he's annoying to "fight" because the counterplay is usually to just not be where he's lookning. sorry for the tangent loved the vid
Yeah I actually tried to have a section on it but I was super behind schedule and it wasn't fitting into the script how I wanted. I probably won't for a while but I plan to make a video on how supports are so powerful and necessary but so overlooked.
Because, when a team is bad Medic is better but when a team is good Sniper is better.
A good sniper watches their flanks, forces a Medic to pop Uber early, and is positioned so you can't use the Uber to kill him without ignoring his team which lets his team kill your non-Uber and then kick in your teeth when Uber ends. You are able to force the Uber into a lose-lose choice as a Sniper. A good sniper can completely invalidate a Medic's contribution as they will out damage Overheal and get a kill.
There is a reason why that 1 good sniper can dominate the entire lobby.
There is a reason why bots, cheaters, and hackers use Sniper.
To me, the ideal balance philosophy is to try to make it so every character has a fair shot in both a beginner casual setting & a pro setting but letting it slide that some characters are noticeably better as long they're not ruining the match for other players unless you can come up with a way to make it even without messing up what makes that character fun in the first place.
For example, I don't mind Lucina being really good in Smash Ultimate but I do mind Hero being luck-based, counters being designed in a way that encourages randomly throwing them out, Yoshi getting hyper armor by air jumping, & Incineroar's Revenge. Incineroar's not even good & yet he's one of the most infuriating characters to me just because that move is so stupid.
So a lot of the time, it's not about how imbalanced they are but *how* they're imbalanced. There are cases where just pure degree of imbalance ruins a character too though. Meta Knight in Brawl is neither fun to fight nor to use because he's the best at nearly every possible thing. Same goes for Vergil in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. Same goes for Ultra Instinct Goku, Labcoat Android 21, & the original Broli in Dragon Ball FighterZ.
Some degree of imbalance is actually needed in a class-based team vs team game because that's where strategy comes from. Even if you always use the same character, strategy still comes from a degree of imbalance because you have to plan around the pros & cons of your character based on the map you're in & the current situation.
Sorry for the late reply been busy but yeah 100% how a character is imbalanced is the most important part if a character is stronger but not oppressive/annoying to play against it is so much better.
I believe a truly balanced game is a game where all the characters are of the same power level but still have different play styles. Evreyone can deal with evreyone, its just up to the skill of the player to understand how to deal with it, not by switching to a different character, but by using a part of the character that can deal with the one they are fighting against. Ye, i know it's pretty impossible to make something like that, but one can imagine.
Every* if you didnt know
@@meticakolli1237 thanks
closest game i've played to that is YOMI Hustle
This is a great video. I hope you do well!
Thank you!
Really nice video! Thanks for the closed captions! I can tell you put a lot of work into this video. Can't wait to see where your channel goes from here!
Thanks!
I really god damn like this video! An enjoyable rant with actually funny jokes, with a dash of Scott the Woz. This channel is surprisingly underrated, and I - and from what I can see, many others - sense a lot of potential afoot. Great work!
Thanks you! I try my best to make good stuff!
I love this video and your mirror match in rock papers scissors. I couldn't take my eyes off such a match where its difficult to find the true winner
I'm really enjoying your humor and style 👏
Thanks! I really try :)
Man, this is such a good-ass video, can't wait to see what else you put out!
Thanks, I try to do my best!
As a Splatoon 3 player, the title alone is what makes me think is a reason people have dropped the game so much. The game has great balance, but I feel like many feel the game is bland in part due to it being so balanced (and the weapon sets being underwhelming for expectations)
Yeah also a lot of the upgrades (admittedly I only played Splatoon one) felt really really similar to each other which meant I couldn't even tell the difference between one roller and another most of the time.
its also because the general map design massively prefers certain types of weapons that makes the game steamroll simulator, and its so mechanically driven that any notion of "positioning yourself properly" is thrown out the window once you're forced to fight your way out of hallways using mechanics with skin-deep depth
Fantastic video Mikey, you have the X-factor for sure. Looking forward to seeing your progress and future videos.
Thanks! I hope to continue doing better
Feels like I just stumbled onto a gem of a channel that's bound to explode in popularity!! Glad the algorithm brought me here. Good stuff man, great video, keep it up!!
Thanks! I hope to continue making entertaining stuff!
Well made vid, I honestly thought you were a way bigger channel until I looked at the sub count xD Keep it up, you got some potential
Thanks! I try to be professional lol
@@Mikey_2626 just try not to burn out and im sure you'll get a lot of subs
I'll try!
Damn you even got the subtitles? Good shit
Thanks!
I hate it when they punish for my monogamy 😫
Yeah isn't it just the worst
On the single player game end you also have the other side of the spectrum where the game just hates you and anything short of the strongest playstyle is a fool's errand, I haven't seen many of those but when it happens it pisses me off.
Its a good point though I feel like games like that could be made into its own video
This vid is gonna blow up. I can feel it already. It deserves blowing up.
Thanks I hope so!
Very well put together video, and definitely deserves more view. If I could offer a suggestion though, I'd say there's so many references to other games and some of them just went over my head. I think it's fine to have these, but it'd be nice if they were a bit more concise so I could understand the point better. Other than that this is a great video, and if you keep at it I could see you getting big :)
Thanks its a good point and I'll try to keep it more consistent. I mostly did that out of fear of it being a to Overwatch dominant video so any other games I could think of got thrown in I'll probably continue to do it but with games that are more closely related or better explained.
@@Mikey_2626 I do like that you did that though because I'm not an overwatch player but I was still engaged by the video anyway
Quick summary of the entire video: Your game cannot be balanced solely around strength or low-dimensional metrics. A balanced game can only be achieved if every aspect of your game is balanced, not independently.
You must balance general champions' skill floors and skill ceilings.
Balancing frustration is crucial too.
You need to balance the impact of most mechanics in your game, such as the draft for example.
While achieving perfection is likely impossible, use this information to inform your decisions. If you are already interested in game balancing, these concepts should be turbo obvious and even instinctive.
Yeah your right. The problem is I play very little games that actually put it into practice and very few people on the outside understand it and just say "Balance bad, devs fix". I'm trying to make more in depth videos as time goes on :)
You have great potential omgjlfkskfsdjf (I can tell you're very inspired by Scott the Woz)
I love your argument of unbalanced games being good, it makes Melee matches more fun to see a low tier specialist beat a meta character (and rewarding if you're the player himself).
Thanks! Yeah Scott the Woz was a big inspiration. Happy to hear that my arguments make sense for more games then just Overwatch lol.
@@Mikey_2626 hee hee yes. In the future though, make sure you make your voice seem more "expressive" and not like you're obviously reading a script. It does tend to get a bit distracting. Not hating though, very solid.
That's fair part of it is because most of the recording is recorded at like 1 am or later after a long day so I can't actually remember what I'm try to say. Like the outro took over 30 tries because my brain was fried. But yeah I definitely want to try to do better with that as well as taking more pauses as sometimes I just keep going in the voiceover.
Your video is such high quality, good freaking video man
Thanks!
This is, of course, unless the characters have different stats, but are all equally good against each other, which is absurdly hard.
balance is more a matter of rock paper scissors rather than "blue vs red is matter of color vs color, nothing more" to a point where you CAN overcome the disadvantage, but it takes true skill to do so
True, depending on the game and characters. That is how counters should be and in some games they are, in others its actually unfair. I do think in general overwatch does a good job at it (except for supports vs tank match ups specifically ana)
That's a really well made video you'll probably get more popular in no time, keep up the good humour and quality :D
Thanks! I try my best
I really enjoyed this video and really agree with what you said. its not really all that fun when certain characters absolutely curbstomp others and it basically comes down to picking the right guy on the character select screen. I could also really feel the scott the woz influnce in the joke delivery and im loving it! i subscribed.
Thanks! I always loved Scott the Woz videos and wanted to use that style with different topics
@@Mikey_2626 Thats cool! Its nice to see something simular to his brand of humor with something thats out of his very small neiche.
It's here finally!
Only took an ungodly amount of time to edit and script
One example of balance being somewhat psycological is with Vladimir from League of Legends. To make a long story short, after the character received a nerf, his win rate, ban rate, and pick rate went down, and players complained he felt worse to play. One small issue: Riot forgot to put those changes live. Literally nothing changed, but because they said there was a nerf the community placebo'd it into making an impact.
Nice video keep up the good work
Thanks, I'll try my best!
Really good video! I disagree with some of the conclusions that you come to and some of the examples that you bring up, but I enjoy your style of humor!
One thing that I think is really important to keep in mind when it comes to balance is System Mechanics VS Character Mechanics. I can't speak on Overwatch 2's balance because I don't play that game competitively, but I think an "absolute balance" state would be bad like what you say. This is because the game has very weak System Mechanics. System Mechanics being the tools that everyone has. For OW2, that would be moving, crouching, and jumping. Everything else, from the properties of shooting to Health to abilities vary from character to character. Of course, these system mechanics are essential to play, but they don't have a lot of influence in character to character interactions. You can kind of dodge hitscan, but that's about it. Compare that to having a Zarya bubble or Tracer recall, or heck, even just a normal dash, and you'll see what I'm talking about. Because so much of a player's power is determined by the heroes that they play, you get this RPS situation you're describing.
...But, there are games with stronger system mechanics that help make the game MUCH more balanced. Under Night In Birth is a master class at that, but if you're not already familiar with how traditional fighting games work, you'll probably have a hard time understanding it. But even in Smash, basic movement means so much more than it does in OW, and that's not even mentioning mechanics like shielding, rolling, spotdodging, and more! The more of your player's power is determined by system mechanics, the closer the game becomes to something like chess. This COULD be bad, if you forget that chess is actually a really good game. But yeah, homogeneous design can be boring. But with strong enough system mechanics, as long as you don't get too crazy with the characters, it's actually very easy to keep those characters feeling unique. And if you do this, it's perfectly possible to get a nearly perfectly balanced game while keeping the game very fun! The hard part at that point is making those strong, impactful, and balanced system mechanics.
I've never heard of that before (probably because I don't play fighting games) but that makes perfect sense and is a really good point and not something I had considered I'll keep this in mind for the future to make my takes better suited to more than just a single game as I had seen the problem in Overwatch and spoke to a friend of mine about it who played fighting games and they mentioned that its a problem in other games as well so when I did some research into the nature of game balance I never encountered it in my research (somehow). That's kind of why I was careful around fighting games as a topic as I'm not knowledgeable enough to draw conclusions on them as I am with Overwatch but I viewed them as the closest analog. But yeah you are 100% correct I try to do better research in the future.
very funny and well put together video, good job man
Thanks!
YESS!!!
Imagine being able to select your magic element or race at the start of a game, but it's been "balanced" so heavily, that it barely has impact on your gameplay...
That sounds like a lot of games oh wait...
Spot on my dude. The biggest culprit for me has been MMO', which began as varied, making each class unique and relevant in its own way, and over time, the endless pursuit of "balance" brought forth aberrations like current Wow/FF14 in which classes are basically just aesthetics, tuned to practically the exact same gameplay and style with zero things that make them stand out in any way.
I haven't played any MMO's but it does seem like they do suffer the same issues. It feels good to know my points are accurate to more than a few genres!
WOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW i cant belive how underated you are
Hello there! Lovely video, friend.
That's a lot of belabouring a single point, though I appreciate you considered it quite a good deal. Also thank you very much for the subtitles, I love to see those every time!
As for your rock-paper-scissors argument, I feel you're missing a perspective. Coming from League of Legends, I understand that some games are won in champ select (although - especially in lower ranks - more often than not, they're *lost* in champ select.) In a well-balanced game, I don't think it should be expected of players to constantly counter-pick the opposing team. In fact, that sounds like pretty terrible balance to me: It says that characters' strengths and weaknesses are overtuned and they should be more balanced to par.
In team games, I understand a balanced character to mean that they perform their role satisfactorily. *How* they perform that role is where player skill is expressed and how the game ultimately plays out. To use Overwatch as an example, when I decide to play Support, I expect to be a team force multiplier. If I play Mercy, I expect that effect by keeping my tanks in the fight longer and by having them soak up much more damage than usual, making the enemy team expend more effort for the same result. If I play Lucio, I expect that effect by allowing my team to manoeuver much more aggressively and by attacking from unexpected angles and disrupting enemy positions.
Mercy and Lucio should play dissimilar and be better or worse picks for different team compositions, but to consider them balanced, I don't feel like I should constantly swap between the two depending on the enemy's team. I feel like they should be valuable picks for certain team compositions to play in some situations - for instance, I feel I should consider Mercy more valuable on defence and Lucio on offence, just by virtue of their skillsets. But most importantly, I feel they should both allow me to meaningfully play the majority of a match and statistically, across the entire playerbase, have comparable win rates.
To get back to my home turf of League of Legends, there's the Attack Damage Carry (or ADC for short) - an archetype of character who mainly contributes by dealing massive amounts of sustained damage via basic attacks. They're called Carries because they need to be carried through the early game and will carry their team in the late game. Due to their almost exclusive focus on damage output, they're quintessential glass cannons - any good assassin will simply hop in, pop their health bar from 100% to 0 in two attacks and hop out before there's any chance of retribution. That's the general play around ADCs.
Of course, there's many different ADCs and they all fulfill different sub-roles. Kog'maw is the poster child of the carry: Pitiably fragile at every stage of the game, completely useless early on, but a literal living artillery of death and destruction 40 minutes into any given match. A team with a Kog'maw usually wants to build around it and stack a whole lot of champions who can keep it safe. They truly don't need any other sources of damage once a Kog'maw is sufficiently fed; it just needs to stay alive, run down a lane towards the enemy nexus, and obliterate anything and everything in its path without dying and its team wins.
A completely different type of ADC is Lucian. He boasts excellent damage in the early and mid game, but falls off hard in the end game. A good Lucian player who gets one or two kills in the first five minutes of a match will, most likely, win his lane even with poor support from his team. This means he can act fairly independently from everyone else, make risky plays thanks to his good mobility and create immense pressure on the enemy team for the first 15-20 minutes, but if they manage to hold on, stall the game and draw it out, they all but guarantee their own ADC will be considerably stronger than Lucian. He just needs to ensure that the game ends before that point, or that his team gets strong enough to compensate for his late game weakness.
It's impossible to switch champions in the middle of a game of LoL, but if it were, people would obviously constantly swap to characters that are strong for whatever part of the game they're at. But LoL is balanced around the fact that this is impossible. Like I mentioned, this leads to situations where teams lose in champ select (for instance, if the ADC picks Kog'maw and the rest of the team *also* goes for high damage, low utility champions; or in high-to-pro level play where champ select sometimes *is* a figurative game of rock-paper-scissors.) But both with the dizzying number of champions in the game and the wide array of strategies available, balance comes pretty naturally. If one strategy is dominant, it'll be played with increasing frequency until inevitably a counter-strategy is found. This very rarely necessitates an entirely new team composition; much more often it's just a certain counter pick or even just an item or two that can be purchased in a match.
The point I'm getting at is that balance is situational. In Overwatch, long, unobstructed sightlines across bottlenecks are a dream for Widowmaker or Bastion and a nightmare for Tracer or Reaper. In a balanced game state, I'd expect my choice to be much more influenced by my team's needs and where the action is happening than by what enemy characters I'm up against. To a certain extent, rock-paper-scissors dynamics should be at play, or perhaps it's unavoidable that in a game with diverse skill sets, some abilities are naturally going to counter others. But I'd expect those rock-paper-scissors dynamics to affect the win rate only up to a certain degree.
If in the example of a sightline across a bottleneck, the situation arose that my Widowmaker were constantly killed by Tracer until I switched to Bastion to tear her to shreds, but then she switched to Reaper and kept fragging me until I switched back to Widowmaker, I'd (probably bicker at my team for not covering my back, but also) consider this an example of terrible balancing. Modern multiplayer games have endless numbers of adjustment dials to balance every part of the game. If one balancing system completely overwhelms another or even all others, it's not doing its job properly.
* Apologies if my analogies and comparisons are out of date. I've admittedly not played any competitive multiplayer game in several years, but I feel you're more than clever enough to substitute names until you understand what I'm getting at.
Sorry for the late reply I've been busy and that's a lot to break down. So I have never played league I was just a little to young to get into it. However not being able to change mid match solves the issue of counter swapping but would still mean that if they had equal strength/power. That one side will just win by nature. Because I'll stick to Overwatch as I know next to nothing about league. If I am playing Rein into Orisa my teammates could be running Lucio and Baptise and fully synergize however as Orisa strength is being able to push back against brawl characters as that's her strength as I am a Reinhardt main if I am against a half decent Orisa even with that support combo I can't break past the Orisa to create value unless we are able to get away with a crazy flank which would be more their mistake then our skill. If I couldn't swap this would just be a loss. While I can swap I am a Reinhardt main he is who I'm best at but the counter shuts me down I can't produce *as much* value so if my team was built around me or my team is just plain bad now me and the tank are creating equal value. So now my team is the deciding factor of who wins not me. You can actually see this in the video theres team fight where I'm in this situation and I'm just getting pushed around with little ability to escape the enemy Orisa ability to shut down Rein luckily my team was good and able to keep me up and get picks.
However in Overwatch of course you can swap so in that situation once their team does successfully kill me I now have to swap to say D.va to continue gaining value and not just removing myself from the deciding who wins the situation and now I can just ignore the Orisa and continue to win. However had I been just Rein one trick Orisas ability to shut down a brawl tank is strong so even if they are worse on Orisa then I am on Rein they are successfully make up for what can sometimes be a massive gap by just playing the character with the advantage. While D.va can just ignore the Orisa and win. So they can swap Zarya and unless the team understands to focus down the Zarya the D.va alone will again lose just by the nature of how each character works. In a vacuum all of the tanks*(theirs a few really weak ones) are strong and can win a game and make up a massive team gap just by being good however almost every tank has a way to shut them down. Which is why I describe it as balanced and not fun.
My main point is that when a game becomes to tightly balanced where all characters are of equal effectiveness not only is the strengths over one another become more clear and massive but it also leads for players like me who prefer to only play 5 out of the 40ish overwatch characters to not have a chance at winning because someone who is more flexible can have this massive gap just by that characters unique strength. That had it been less balance powerful that gap would be smaller as a character like Orisa where you actually just need to learn when and where to use your abilities and as described by one top 500 player "sit in a corner until they push you" would be one of the weakest characters in the nature where she can still dampen a Rein but it would require more intelligent use of the abilities other than just use the abilities. While a character like Rein would stand a chance at making up that innate advantage by being stronger. Then a character like Winston or D.va to a lesser degree would be able to better stand up to Rein in a fight despite his innate advantage over their lower damage output as they are even more skill based then Reinhardt.
My point was that the inbalance in characters is what makes a games balance more fun and if there is a massively dominant strategy thats not really balanced but as a said if it is fun and enjoyable to play against is it really a problem? If it is unfun like say double shield in Overwatch original then yeah it should be dealt with but was Winston or Rein metas really that oppressive at any points same with when they made Junker Queen meta for a small update.
So while I agree balance should be situational what I was advocating for was Balance based on the skill required for a character as it currently stands theres no reason to play a higher skilled character if there is a less mentally intensive character who is just a strong in 90% of circumstances which is what the issue is with perfect balance. I would had preferred to call the video Why equal balancing feels bad or something like that where all characters feel equal in strength but the letter limit on youtubes titles became a problem at that point so I didn't have the chance to. Either way hope this made sense and cleared up what I meant.
only a bit more time until this channel gains more popularity
We can hope!
Hey dont diss card jitsu like that at the beginning it's a good fun game
Card jitsu was goated was one of my favorite club penguin games though it is literally rock paper scissors from a game design perspective. Still a really good game tho
good video. thats it its just perfect in every aspect i can think of
Thanks!
Great video with a lot of interesting points, I have a question for anyone reading this though:
If all the characters in a game have a similar reward for your skill, and a very high skill ceiling, then would that be the best of both worlds? Players are rewarded for their skill, and they're not forced to learn every character, since even in a bad matchup they can win through the skill they got one-tricking the character.
Obviously this is easier said than done, and still isn't perfect, but I reckon it might be the best approach if you really want a balanced game. I'm open to opinions on it though.
It is technically the best solution, its just very difficult for each character to have that scaling nature without also having a low skill floor making them too difficult for a first time player. Though I would be interested in playing a game with a more limited roaster that takes that approach.
If you don't want to force players to learn every character then you must make all the characters hitboxes same and only change the animations. And I don't think it will be fun.
Sometimes the fun is trying to find some tactics to beat overpowered characters while using weak characters. So game developers should make the game however they want but balance the game according to players feedbacks.
0:00
everyone has a FAIR chance at winning
even if not an equal chance.
I'd like to counter your Mario Kart example. Sometimes if you're just way better than the opposition, it's fun to play with a handicap. Playing with the worst vehicle loadout while they play with the best means you're actually more engaged in the multiplayer rather than just doing a time trial with occasional blue shells.
That's fair. The problem is 2 things my first Mario kart was Wii so even though I have played the earlier games I am much more used to bikes and when I play with my friends most of them run meta while being around the same skill as me but because I am not good at karts and not running meta I get giga gapped even when in any other game (not deluxe) or when they are off the meta karts I win most of the time. So I think its more based on how your friends play the game but its a good point.
damn, didn't know rock paper scissors was very a recent game
Almost as many releases as Call of Duty
Overwatch has a lot of problems, inside the company and out. You talked about the game in a way that both commends their creativity but talks about their mistakes and explains really well why it's so important that they need to make the game fun before anything else. The video was well made.
Thanks! Managing that balance was really difficult as I had to rewrite a good bit of the script because I felt it was too unfair to the game. I am happy with how it ended up though.
@@Mikey_2626 It's hard not to sound unfair when talking about the mistakes companies have made, you've done perfectly.
This is an interesting subject and I do concur that balance is a lower priority that comes much later in game development.
That being said, you do mistake imbalance with flavor.
There's plenty of different subjective reasons why people stick to a character/build loads for fun (such as just liking the character's design, lore, feel of how they play, etc).
Aiming for more inherently skillful and imbalanced design doesn't equal global fun for your whole playerbase.
Yes, Melee is acclaimed because of its skillful tech and Spacie duo, but it's also dismissed because of it's lack of variety, imbalance being one of the big reasons. Despite arguably 13 characters (half of it's roster) being viable at high level, you only see like 5 of the best commonly being played by multiple people. Many of which aren't the easier/beginner-friendly characters many people started off the game with like Mario or Kirby. A big concern considering Melee's more casual roots.
There's plenty more battles of factors such as lower levels vs. higher levels, simplicity vs. complexity, streamlining vs. abnormally, healthy vs. toxicity, etc for a meta.
So I wouldn't advocate for 'This is harder to use, so it should be way better by default' as a flat answer.
In short, it's too much of a case-by-case situation with so many broad, vague, changing and open-to-interpretation components to give a definitive answer that your skill and imbalance suggestion don't solve on their own.
I agree, I realize it might of come off as saying this is harder so it should be better. What I was more so advocating was for higher skilled characters to have slightly higher power. However I think there is a limit Doomfist (of overwatch) for example is character that if he became meta might just make the game to difficult for new players so I think he should be around the same level as other high skill characters but never the best. I also personally don't view "good aim" as that much of a skill as its pretty easy to make up for or just be on console where that skill is removed because aim assist I think a lot of games over value aiming. If a game has movement based characters and aim based characters and positioning/tactical characters they should all be viable to allow for different play styles. I do realize its not a definitive answer but I do believe what I purposed was a much better alternative than what many games do handle it as. I have some game dev experience (about 6 years) but I by no means am an expert I just think a lot of games handle balance poorly making it less fun as a result. Though I can see how it wasn't all that clear. I'm still trying to learn how to better handle scripts and script writing to handle counterpoints and potential downsides.
Very good video!! 🥰
Thanks!
Words of Gold.
One thing you forgot to mention is; some characters are fun not because they're balanced but because they're FUN! Back when I played Yager in R6 even with him being nerfed he was so FUN! I love playing fun characters, I don't care about the balance! Weak, strong, etc. Have the character be fun to master/ understand.
great vid, completely agree. Blizzard in particular obsessed wayyy too much with making their games esports-viable, probably to recreate the success they had with StarCraft 2, and ended up killing Heroes of the Storm, WoW and Overwatch by catering to hardcore players and balancing the fun out of everything. OW on release was stupidly fun back when Bastion for example was broken and even though, yes, they should've made changes - the changes they made and continued to make up till this point have, as you say, made the game into a disappointingly milquetoast rock-paper-scissors snoozefest and its sad to see them squander the potential that I know the game could have
Thanks! And yeah Overwatch as a franchise had some of the most potential of any game series just to see it get squandered by miss management and unfun balance is one of the saddest franchise deaths I've ever seen a game have.
great vid :D
Thanks! :D
"Rock Paper Scissors is not a balanced game"
Uhm acshsually 🤓👆0:00
I agree with you fully, I believe a good way to balance a game is to actually create an imbalance. An example I'd like to bring up is the balancing in csgo (or cs2 now). counter terrorists compared to terrorists have a huge advantage as their objective is to play passively (holding angles, defending sites, watching the middle of the map if applicable) while terrorists have to act in order to challenge those angles, attack sites, and be capable of going through the center angle on a map without getting obliterated. how is this balanced? the guns! the counter terrorists specifically have weaker guns due to their innate advantage, along the fact that their equipment can be more expensive than terrorists, while terrorists have arguably the strongest options in the game, and some are cheaper as well. This is why I have an issue with the game Valorant, as it seems to not understand this and creates an imbalance that's not fun compared to CS's; I'll agree that Valorants agents are more intriguing than the standard character models of CS2 not having anything special for them, but the fact that guns on both defense and offense are exactly the same actually creates an extremely large advantage for defenders than offenders, while the options are "balanced" the feeling of the game altogether is not, as defenders can 1-tap you just as easily as you can them, without any form of difference whether it be cost, damage, etc. as both sides have the exact same options, leading to the only advantage that offenders have being peaker's advantage and potential agent options which again, both sides are capable of having. This is IMO, take this with a grain of salt. (another good example is R6, seeing that both sides have specified agents depending on the role, attack or defense, so it creates an imbalance of options but is balanced with this in mind creating a fun and engaging experience; however some of that has slowly been lost over the years.)
Yeah 100% imbalance is an art and games that use it well are much better for it.
Also unbalanced heroes (in Overwatch) have different usefulness depending on the player's rank. In an average match, a low rank player may heal about 8k as Mercy and 5k as Ana (making Mercy a preferable pick), but a high rank player may heal 11k as Mercy and 15k as Ana (rendering Ana the preferable one in high ranks).
So the metrics for usefulness of heroes are different between ranks. Low ranks rewards ease to heal, high ranks reward raw healing output.
Sure I left all other skills of them aside.
Scott the Woz at home :
fr good video bro
Fair enough lol
RPS needs an update though or at least a sequel
Yeah though at least we have Club Penguins Card Jitsu as a spiritual successor.
High skill expression heroes should be stronger in higher elos, and lower skill expression heroes should be stronger in lower elos. That way those who invest the time to really get good at the game and play at a high level are rewarded for it, and don't just get the same value they would for playing something that doesn't have as much skill expression. If we look back to the meta in overwatch 1, near the end of its life, excluding the soloq sigma hog + hitscan stuff, the ball dva. tracer brig zen meta was pretty amazing. Pretty much all of those heroes were in the top 10 highest skill expression heroes in the game, and gameplay was really intense, with tons of macro decisions and high apm stuff going on. What isn't fun is having the high elo meta be dominated by mercies, hitscans, and roadhogs, all of which require little to no macro decision-making or complicated mechanics.
Yeah 100% top level meta is most fun when its dive dominated kind of a shame they refuse to let Genji breath for more than an update. This next update is probably going to have one of hell of a time for backline though.
your take make 0 sense. in a balanced game, you can play both easy characters and hard characters.
You seem to be ignoring that humans are playing the game. No one is going to run a super difficult character if they could get just as much or more likely more value out of a character who is easier to play as on that easier character they can focus on other aspects of the game. Humans aren't machines and balance isn't as simple as just numbers equal each other psychology is the other half.
hello scott the woz
Scott the Woz??
Nice video btw
Thanks!
Really impressive 👍
Thanks!
Lore of Why Good Balance Feels Bad & What Makes a Game Feel Good momentum 100
what are your thoughts on widows??
For Widowmaker and other one shots I don't think that there fun to play against because of their one shots. I don't think one shots belong in the game. I think they have to rework her and Hanzo to make them more fun to play against as theirs no way to remove widows one shot and have her still be viable to play. Hanzo would probably be fine though without his one shot
I think part of the issue with the concept of "Balance" in multiplayer games these days is that... well it might just not be the right word to describe the issues going on. You can lump a lot of issues into the general concept of a games "Balance" and not necessarily be incorrect.
In reality, maybe the issue is more specifically to do with the concept of "Windows of Opportunity." You mentioned things like punishing people for mistakes and that sort of feeds into what I mean here. At the same time a lot of development teams on games have quite possibly taken the idea of "You should buff more than you nerf" a bit too much to heart.
Let's say players are generally dissatisfied with how a particular character plays, this example character is a damage-oriented character who is balanced around a lack of mobility. Perhaps the issue in this hypothetical game is: Mobility has gotten too strong with the general roster of characters, or, more than likely, the issue is maybe the character should just not have mobility be a weakness anymore. Between these two ideas, it seems at least to me that more and more devteams are favoring the latter, taking away weaknesses that make the character reasonable or even fun to fight against, specifically because it's an easy way to bump up things like winrate numbers or general satisfaction. It's a quick and dirty fix but it doesn't address the broad issue the game might be having. Alternatively maybe this character gets a different kind of buff as another way to circumvent their lack of mobility, crowd control in some form, debuffing the enemy, which can objectively make playing the character feel better, but comes at the direct cost of, again, making them a lot less fun to play against.
Imo, character identity is something that should be preserved over game balance in instances like this, as it seems too easy to just say "screw what the players actually want with their character, they just like winning more than losing anyway" and then make big changes that outright remove identity from how a character functions. I'm not saying that there can't be fundamentally broken kits, or ones that were poorly conceived of in the first place, but taking immediately to doing things that outright detract from the identity of a character for balance reasons is also a good way of exacerbating issues rather than solving other systemic problems.
As a final note, I personally think simple characters should be relatively viable in the top level, and not necessarily because of extrinsic things like game sense. Imo simple characters should survive off of consistency over raw output. Complex and skillful characters should reward the player with an output they can't get elsewhere, while simple characters should be rewarding through less ability to screw up, at the direct cost of not necessarily being the biggest most flashy things to exist.
I haven't played Overwatch in a number of years (I dropped off way before OW2) so idk how applicable this opinion is now, but when I played I gravitated towards Soldier 76, I found him very simple and while I won't necessarily be ripping entire teams apart if I'm against people with brains, having the ability to just dish out consistent single-target damage was very fun for me. He's definitely more about aim than ability usage and I felt decent at making it work. To work this opinion into my point about simple characters in these games, he's not exactly very multi-target unless he's doing something like cleaning up low hp targets, but he can usually fight one person extremely well if your aim and spread control are on-point. At least in my opinion, having an option like that be relatively reasonable as a pick at the highest level is valuable.
Look at London Spitfire, them playing their own meta that required such a high level of coordination and game sense. It's why I will argue they were the best team in the league but the meta wasn't in their favour (thanks Orisa).
100% I wasn't around esports until this last season but it was just so fun to watch Spitfire compared to any other team I was really sad they got knocked out so early.
based
i will give my take as a moba player, becuse the league is constantly flamed becuse how bad the balancing is.
i do agree that there should be characters that are stronger the harder they are to play and thats where some games fail, currently in league the strongest characters arent the ones with easiest moveset or the most unbalanced stats, but the ones that got less counter play. it dosent matter if i got the most broken one shot character, if one character can both tank my damage and then switch to do same damage i do, thats how things are unbalanced and thats currently wats happening in league meta, having characters that dont do especificly wat they are meant to do or having characters that do everything any other can is wat breaks games balances, not even counting how they create characters to counter the ones that are new and leave the old ones to be forgothen leaving the game to be "unbalanced".
Now a good exemple of balancing characters is dota 2, in dota balancing characters does almost nothing, changing a few couldowns or some % dosent really stop them from building 2 completly diferent playstyles being tank or dps, any character can be either of them but obviosly some kits will help one style more than other, either way nothing stoping a skilled player from playing around with stuff like that and still win matches unlike league were you do this same items or your worthless
Yeah the power creep of new characters being more or less them just lacking counters is definitely something that a lot of games suffer from when they keep adding new characters it entirely inverts how the game handles power. I think thats why valves games always seem so balanced because they arn't adding anything new and just focus on balancing what they have.
Risk of Rain 2 is a funny game
THIS THIS is why I am starting to get bored of overwatch 2 and HATE the direction. Zen the glass canon with the BEST debuffing being unkillable because characters cant have downsides undermines the whole tank role, where the best advice is to stop peeking, all I feel like I'm doing is playing sig, or ram to sponge damage for some dps to flank and kill their supports. sure I am going to win, but when my fun is derived from playing the game, not winning, I enjoy more of the games in where I am not forced to play sig or ram and end up losing anyways
Yeah 100% the loss of identity from there just being no downsides when a character receives "balance" changes is infuriating especially characters with fuck that one guy in particular abilities like Zen as a tank main (specifically Rein) its just not fun to not play the game because of discord orb. I have a 60% win rate and a 90 something win rate (on Rein) in comp and yet its just not fun just because your fun is derived by whether the enemy team lets you have it or not.
this video is true they should nerf all the characters i dont play :3
Exactly lol
this is so real we should buff doomfist :3
I think doomfist is included in my scared of fighting game players lol
@@Mikey_2626 we need doomfist in smash!!
He would fit well though I feel like they'd pick Tracer sadly
@@Mikey_2626 for real 😔
you are getting balance and counters mixed up dude, counters are more relevant the closer player skill gets, but it's not influenced by balance at all, if the game is unbalanced you get the beginnings of OW, where the team without bastion loses and you CAN'T swap it away. Honestly you sound like an OTP riven
Yes, you are correct but the reason im advocating for imbalance is because low skilled counters like bastion should never be above a 'C' teir character he doesn't need as much skill to create value while countering 90% of the tank roaster. Same can be said for any other low skill high reward characters like Orisa they should have strengths but they should never be near the meta in power if they are going to have such a low skill ceiling.
underrrated
I don't play overwatch but all I got from this video is "Orisa is braindead"
I feel like I said more than that but, ok! At least you got something out of this video :)
@@Mikey_2626 Didn't mean to come out rude, I was making a joke!
I think it's a good video but maybe a bit too much on overwatch, there is so many more examples you could of talked about.
I don't play overwatch so it wasn't the right example for me to watch for minutes and minutes.
Keep it up, will watch your next videos.
Sorry I'm a little bad at understanding comments sometimes my bad. I tried to use other games but that's a fair critique I also thought it was to much on overwatch
@@Mikey_2626 No worries
neat video
Sorry, but if you think that having better and worst characters is fun is because you never had your character be in the F tier of a tier list. For some reason every game I play my favorite character ends up being the worst one. It's not fun
Like, let's imagine a professional tournament of a game. Tell me, why would anyone not use the "much stronger than others but needs a lot of skill to use" characters? Everyone there is a pro, everyone participating in the tournament is a professional, making the skill barrier be non existent because everyone there is (almost) equally good at the game!
Splitgate footage.
Sigh, I miss that game...
Splitgate was great
where are all your subs!! slap three or four 0s to the end of that!!
Thanks! Hopefully lol!
@@Mikey_2626 my jaw dropped at the subscriber and view count! This is a great quality video. Reminded me of Scott the Woz but not about exclusively Nintendo or consoles (That's a compliment, sorry if you don't like comparisons, idk UA-cam etiquette)
I was massively inspired by Scott the Woz and Ceave Gaming so its fine lol
but rock paper scissors is fun
i think you just are confusing things and i dont even have a term to what are you talking about
Bad take. Bye.
Is there a way to DM or chat privately with you somewhere? I wanna show you something I created regarding this. Socials or discord?
I have a twitter twitter.com/Mikey_2626