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Tristan Winter, on 14 October 2016 - 04:58 PM, said:
It all depends on the disparity. If the top mech is taking down ten mechs single-handedly, it's a problem. If it's only marginally better than the next mech, it's not such a big problem.
Basically, it's commonly regarded to be a good idea to balance the game from top down, rather than bottom-up or focusing on the guys in the middle. Needless to say, you should ideally make the game so that gameplay is enjoyable at all levels of play. That's why games like Street Fighter have simple combinations or special attacks that even beginners can grasp.
It's problematic when you don't balance the game around the elite level, for several reasons.
It's not really a good example, is it? The Tour de France isn't being held by the people who make bikes and the $500 bike isn't advertised as being as good as a $15,000 custom made bike. Nobody is trying to balance bikes and nerfing carbon frames or aluminum pedals.
It's a completely different dynamic for a game like MWO. It's more like someone making a tabletop game like Warhammer 40,000 or Battletech or Blood Bowl, and then just letting one particular faction or unit be horribly OP. And when the players complain that it's no fun playing against the Space Marines in 2nd edition and their OP 4th level Grand Master Librarians in Terminator armour with 200 points of force fields and warp grenades, imagine if Games Workshop responded with "git gud".
Real sports like cycling or football is kind of different, because each competitor is allowed to get any kind of equipment that money can buy, as long as it fits the regulations.
Basically, it's commonly regarded to be a good idea to balance the game from top down, rather than bottom-up or focusing on the guys in the middle. Needless to say, you should ideally make the game so that gameplay is enjoyable at all levels of play. That's why games like Street Fighter have simple combinations or special attacks that even beginners can grasp.
It's problematic when you don't balance the game around the elite level, for several reasons.
- It's a helpful tool to motivate players when elite level play is as good as possible. You want to motivate players to get better and reach higher strata. This ensures long term interest. Some games do this artificially (e.g. F2P games like Star Conflict where you unlock various abilities and game modes if you keep grinding to higher tier ships) and others do it naturally.
- It's harmful for the population if players want to avoid the elite level because the gameplay there isn't properly balanced. This leads to "sandbagging". People trying to artificially lower their results to avoid high ranks (e.g. Tier 1) or people creating alt accounts to club seals. If elite level MWO was all about the KDK-3 and all other mechs were useless by comparison, it wouldn't just hurt the top 1% of the players, it would trickle down to lower levels as elite players went on an exodus to escape their boring meta.
- To the degree you want to make an esport like Starcraft or Counterstrike, it's a bad thing if the elite metagame is horribly imbalanced and boring to watch.
It's not really a good example, is it? The Tour de France isn't being held by the people who make bikes and the $500 bike isn't advertised as being as good as a $15,000 custom made bike. Nobody is trying to balance bikes and nerfing carbon frames or aluminum pedals.
It's a completely different dynamic for a game like MWO. It's more like someone making a tabletop game like Warhammer 40,000 or Battletech or Blood Bowl, and then just letting one particular faction or unit be horribly OP. And when the players complain that it's no fun playing against the Space Marines in 2nd edition and their OP 4th level Grand Master Librarians in Terminator armour with 200 points of force fields and warp grenades, imagine if Games Workshop responded with "git gud".
Real sports like cycling or football is kind of different, because each competitor is allowed to get any kind of equipment that money can buy, as long as it fits the regulations.
The problem is that the Competitive side of this game is so completely different from the game play that most of us take part in that it generally holds no relevance to general game play. They keep balancing things based on meta builds that most of us don't even use or can't use effectively even if we do. This "balancing" then cascades down into the lower level game play like an avalanche destroying the fun everyone else is having. This is why we can't have nice things like JJs that actually work.
I will sort of agree with you however. The game should be balanced toward the higher end of skill but it when I say that, I mean the higher end of skill in non-competitive or Elite Tier game play. The Elite Tier or Competitive grade players should be considered outliers and thrown out of the equation.
