Game Balance Concepts Discussion

[a Chunk]

Game Balance Concepts is a 10-part series of 'lessons'.  The course is derived from the actual course teachings of Ian Schreiber, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  Like any college level course, it will require some effort on your part.  There's a fair amount of reading.  There's also Homework.  Feel free to take this as seriously or unseriously as you want.

The course will be released in weekly installments as follows:

• Week 1: Intro to Game Balance
• Week 2: Numeric Relationships
• Week 3: Transitive Mechanics and Cost Curves
• Week 4: Probability and Randomness
• Week 5: Probability and Randomness Gone Horribly Wrong
• Week 6: Situational Balance
• Week 7: Advancement, Progression, and Pacing
• Week 8: Metrics and Statistics
• Week 9: Intrasitive Mechanics
• Week 10: Final Boss

Game Balance Concepts by Ian Schreiber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit anything of the content in this course, and to adapt or change the content, provided that you attribute the work to Game Balance Concepts by Ian Schreiber.


Since the main thread for this course will be limited to only postings of course material, this thread should be used for any discussion on the course.

[purelyfat]

The luck vs. skill section is nice but it fails to address player talent. . A prime example as a sport or game for this is bowling. Someone that throws a really nice ball naturally but doesn't a great understanding of adjusting to the lane has a much larger variance in scores than a bowler who understands how to adjust and throws a nice ball but doesn't have a ton of revolutions or speed. Both these bowlers could have the same average but one gets there based on luck with the lanes because their talent will carry them to a high series when the lanes are good for them and when they are not good for them they struggle. The other bowler adjusts to what the lanes are giving them and always has consistent scores with not many outliers up or down to skew their score. If the talented player learns to adjust he will have a much better average but because of luck he has the same average or even a worse average based on the lanes. With this being said luck seems to scale with mechanical skill more than mechanical skill scales with game skill. This doesn't matter in tabletop games at all but is a major factor in anything that user input is involved with. Maps have a way of negating mechanical skill as well if the player has a great understanding of it. This is why in quake players with high game knowledge dominate on smaller maps(aerowalk/toxicity) because they make very good decisions and these good decisions have a higher probability of snowballing because the cat and mouse element of the map is less pronounced than on a map like lost world where luck and mechanical skill can pull a player with a lesser understanding of the game through because the map makes it easier for the player to runaway.

grammar errors will not be fixed.

[a Chunk]

Yes, that's a good point. I think a developer can achieve some sort of balance in that area by intentionally creating spaces that favor each of the different types of skill you're referring to. I guess a bigger question is whether or not that should be the goal, and the answer will vary from person to person, which is why we see a lot of variation in how games approach this type of issue.


I really liked these 3 questions that were posed:
Are the probabilities in our games something that we can frame as a question of professional ethics?
How do we balance the importance of giving the player enjoyment (especially when they are paying for it), versus giving them an accurate representation of reality?
What’s more important: how the game actually works, or how players perceive it as working?

It kind of ties into the Balance of Power article from Jaime Griesemer that was just posted. He poses similar questions regarding designing towards either perception or reality. I also recall that this subject is talked about in this video that buddy jumps posted on the site which talks about the networking of Halo: Reach.



One of the major topics is on how they designed the game to seem to run smoothly rather than approach it in a way that was technically superior but felt unnatural to players. It's definitely an interesting subject.