Bottom line is, as I said, the
computability of finding game balance. It doesn't exist for a deep and well designed game, and in fact should
not exist.
This is due to the
solvability of a game. One of the goals of good game design is to make your game
unsolvable.
This is a good thing. That's because a solved game is predictable and boring. Tic Tac Toe is solved, and a very shallow and uninteresting game.
A game designer shall intentionally
reduce the solvability of their game, which creates
greater depth and keeps players coming back over and over again, constantly pushing the boundaries as they explore the game's decision-space. A game with a very large decision-space is one in which even the game's designer cannot fully explore on their own, and if done well, even with millions of players, the decision-space will
not be exhausted. It is because the players will use techniques that even the designers did not think of, that expecting anyone to design an algorithm to determine game balance is futile.
Players will think of techniques and methods that not even the designers originally envisioned, and these
may force the game designers to re-think the game's balance. More likely is that, given some time, other players will devise a way to counter that innovative new technique with yet another new technique of their own. Game designers should give players some time to see if they can come up with counter-play options, rather than knee-jerk nerfing things that rise to the top of the "meta" (the way PGI used to smash things with the nerf bat is
not how you do game balance!). A game whose decision-space can be quickly exhausted is a shallow game and one that is
not worth playing.
Thus, in a well-designed game with complexity and depth, you
cannot exhaust the decision-space, hence you cannot determine game balance by computation alone.
If hundreds of millions of dollars and countless watts of electricity and computational power invested into research into Go has not exhausted its decision-space, then nevermind MWO with the much smaller amount of money we could expect to be invested into it.
Nah, the litmus test for game balance is much simpler:
If an opponent uses X, can I counter it by doing something
other than X? If the answer is yes, then there's no problem in game balance, because a counter-play option Y is available. If the answer is no, then the question should become: how long have players had to try to come up with a counter to X? If, after months of fruitless experimentation, players still haven't found a way to defeat X besides using X themselves,
then an adjustment is warranted.
Otherwise, any whining about X is just that: whining. And anybody whining about it just needs to L2P.
Edited by YueFei, 20 January 2022 - 11:11 PM.
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feeWAIVER, on 19 January 2022 - 06:41 PM, said:
