4 replies to this topic

[Thorqemada]

Hello folks,
a simple question - i wonder about why so many games or game Devs have this suicidal drive to demotivate their customers to play their games and to balance them out of the market?

I mean we all know enough games that startet great or not so great but at some point were very fun, entertaining or satisfactory to play only to find then some patch notes (or lack of) surprsing you with columns of text and math exlaining why the devs have rebalanced the game from its current height of fun, entertainement and satisfaction for some reason into another state of balancing akin more to make the game a job, forcing you to schedule your life arount, into giving up the things that were fun for you bcs it was not intended to paly that way etc. and losing slow or fast their playerbase.

The latest example, albeit it may surprise some bcs i was very positive about it and it still gets some good numbers in Steam is Helldivers 2.

Wtf are these guys thinking?
The game was so much fun at the beginning and did not force you to play a certain way.
Ofc the experimentation phase is most often the best time in a game but it can still settle on a high level of fun, entertainment and satisfaction.

Helldivers 2 to me fails to do so - i havent played in a long time bcs i feel forced away from the things i have fun with, i feel i been forced back into a schedule so i can meet with a premade group to have satisfaction (aka success), i feel the game becomes a job and i dont like the whole direction that thing takes.

I liked to play solo so i could with no time pressure learn the different weapons and stuff but i havent in a long time bcs its made for no reason a self penalizing experience to do so.

When i tried stealth i found out its a lie - the ******* NPCs know very well where i am and the only thing it does is they will wait some time longer to attack me so to pretend i am hidden in stealth while they ammass around my location with no chance to even know i am there.

i dont understand it!

Why do Devs balance the fun out of a game - for what kind of people if not their customer do they balance their work?

Its complete eceonomical suicide whats going on with ill motivated and ill informed balancing and the victims of it are all the abandoned games that could have been great in their own right but at some point failed their gamers!

I really think the industrie needs to rethink and relearn what balancing is about - i hope it is not to late!

Edited by Thorqemada, 12 May 2024 - 12:23 PM.

[LordNothing]

im not sure the problem is overbalancing. what they should be doing is killing metas and creating new ones in regular intervals to keep players from getting too complacent in any one particular dominant playstyle. when you try to flatten things out the hard to quantify elements start to take precedence and become the basis of new metas. even though your numbers look well rounded there are clear overperformers. so rather than going by the numbers, look at what players are doing, if they are doing something to excess, try and find a way to break that thing while simultaneously planting a new thing they can exploit elsewhere. better to keep the meta in flux.

also long dev cycles are part of the problem. players get bored with the game before its even done being developed. so many ship of theseus games out there. old games where once the rom was burned the game was done, and the remaining bugs and exploits take a life of their own as speed runners and pro players try to hit every one to do things previously undone. see whats been going on with nes tetris lately. not sure you could do that with an f2p but its something somewhat missing in gaming now. you cant even be sure your game will still be in a playable state in 10 years. they will be faded and people will still be speedrunning super mario brothers.

[Thorqemada]

Well, i guess Arrowhead is yet the still quite more successful than expected game while at the same time a prime example of a Studio not understanding how it came to be, why the players liked the game and why many dislike the direction.

I have stopped playing many "bad" nerfs ago bcs it was not fun to me anymore (especially the boring defensive mission that were so uniform in gameplay and not entertaining at all but a chore) and since i have a huge backlog of games i will probably not do it again ayntime soon.

I still following the development somewhat to see if i should give it a try again over other stuff but it seems the answer is no!


I guess a part of the reasons aside of Sonys PSN messup is the Studio Arrowhead never having a big hit before but a niche game that had a very deicated yet also very specialized fanbase that they catered too - never having developed a broader understanding of a more diverse playerbase with a multiple of different motivations.

Another thing could be a certain elitism that some devs fall victim to neglecting any other feedback but the elite ones.

The a lack in willingness to allow to let their players divert from the way the game is meant to be played according to the devs.

Spreadsheet balancing - the worst of all balancing bcs spreadsheets do not measure fun but popularity/unpopularity.


I guss the biggest challenge for dev studios in the future is to develop different methods of balancing and the tools and metrics for it that are able to make distinct differences between the different playergroups that play a game and their motivations.

Ideally you would like to find ways to have the different playerpools that your game attracts reinforce the experience for each other or at least not hamepering it instead of sacrificing one part of the pool and drinving them players away for the sake of pleasing another pool of players gradually narrowing down yourself into a very specific niche without ever having hope to recover again a broader appeal bcs the more niche a game becomes the more gatekeeing takes place!

Maybe the industrie intelligencia or some wise people can learn from it and make the future of gaming more ecxiting again instead of an unfunning statistic-technocracy.

I do not want to let my hope die b4 me!

Edited by Thorqemada, 07 August 2024 - 10:12 AM.

[Thorqemada]

Seems they made some good decisions and reversed the trend:
Helldivers 2's Revival Is Stunning - YouTube


Glad to see this happen!

[simon1812]

the developers of helldivers used to have a motto "a game for everyone is a game for no one" they held true to that until HDII launched...