StarCraft 2 Beta...what balance means

Normally, gaming forums require that one wade through hundreds of uneducated posts before coming across useful information.  I do it anyways because every once in awhile, I find little gems of wisdom and insight that are truly remarkable.

Today's little tid-bit comes from a poster called Bibdy.bobdyboo:

Pretty much all of the balance changes have been made to encourage unit diversity. People always look at patch note changes and assume that changes were made to find that perfect balance point. They're really not. Roaches were nerfed because they were too prominent in ZvZ. Hydras were nerfed again because people simply used them too much (and still do) to counter almost everything. Marauders had Conc Shell put on an upgrade, because it screwed up the early-game PvT dynamic, where super-fast Marauders were hammering on Protoss bases at the start of matches and Protoss couldn't counter them for like 2 minutes. Marines and Reactors had their build times increased in response to very commonly used quick Marine/SCV charges in PvT strats (in Korea mostly). SCVs had their health reduced to combat the same problem. The Dark Shrine had its cost and build time increased in reaction to that, since DTs could now 1-shot SCVs and be much stronger against Terrans (this was one of those rare, pre-emptive nerfs). Blizzard are only going to be happy when they land balance at the exact point you're talking about. When there's massive unit diversity, tons of crazy strats, tons of crazy counter-strats AND a 50% win rate for everybody. That is never going to happen so long as people keep sitting on the boards screaming that X or Y is overpowered. It'll happen when you play a *%@*load of games, give them lots of data to work with and they make gradual tweaks here and there to encourage different unit usage and just see what people come up with. For instance, now that Immortals come out later, are Roach-rushes going to be overpowered against Protoss? The only one's who know for sure, are Blizzard. If its a problem, they'll fix it in some manner. Another Roach nerf isn't going to be because they thing Roaches are "10% too powerful!". It'll be because there's some strat that's very common, strong and barely counterable.

Did you see that.  I like this definition of balance much better than my previous one (I had said Balanced Enough  is when the game is decided by player skill rather than choice of faction), and this is the model I believe has lead Blizzard to success with the first StarCraft.  Variety of strategy is key.  Most forum posters complain about individual units being overpowered.  Sure we could analyze why that unit is too strong for it's cost and tech level, but there are more dynamics to strategy than just mass producing a single unit (even zerg will fail if they attempt to mass only one thing).  "See the forest not the trees" is an analogy that my mom liked to say.  There's a bigger picture out there, and the multitude of dynamics involved in strategy games is what makes looking at individual unit stats less than useful.
Trends and following the Emergence of new strategies is what needs to happen.  With such a large beta tester base, we can view these things and observe and tweak until things are "balanced enough".  After all, the game would be awfully boring if counters were written in stone for you, or if the units were all equal.

If we can observe that all factions have a variety of strategy that involves a multitude of units being used at high levels of gameplay then we can infer that the game is balanced.  If a unit is over-utilized, then we can infer that said unit could be overpowered.  Certain units are meant to be more versatile than others.  For example Marines, Stalkers, and Hydralisks.  As units that can strike both air and ground, you can be certain that most mid and late game strategies will involve them or be prepared to deal with them.  Does this make them overpowered?  No probably not.  It makes them useful.  These units are designed to be "all around" units, so that they easily fit themselves into various strategies is not surprising.  There is a limit though.  If the strategy is such that these "backbone" units become the only unit used in the strategy, then there's obviously an imbalance if they're defeating units that are meant to destroy them.

But if we see a specialized unit...say the Dark Templar being utilized with great frequency, then we start worrying.  A clear harassment and tricky unit, a DT should not be something that a player relies exclusively on.  A few to harass workers or pick off buildings, or mix a few in with your ground army to make your army more offensive than it seems at first glance.  Either strategy still requires other things to compose the bulk of your army with specialized units as "assistance".

Units have roles, if they exceed their roles, then perhaps they're imbalanced, but noting if something exceeded is dependent on strategies as a whole...not specific unit stats.  Ultimately the change in balance will be derived at the unit level, but it will be made in response to strategic situations and variety.

Three Kingdoms Online

So back in high school, I got pulled into the world of Browser Based Strategy games.

The first of which I played was Utopia which is now hosted by Jolt.  What got me interested in these games initially was the idea of "Wait...so it's like Warcraft, but with tens of thousands of players simultaneously?  Awesome."  Also the games were free to play.  They usually made money off of donations, advertisements, or providing benefits to paying players.

The reality is slightly different, but the analogy is as fitting as you can get.  Needless to say that with a browser interface and the sheer volume of player limits the game play significantly.  Despite that, I was addicted.  I went on to play Dominion, Astronest, Archmage (now known as The-Reincarnation), and a host of other RT-BBS games.  And my high school friends all played with me...which is what made it great.  During lunch hours, we would check our accounts at the library and coordinate attacks and intelligence gathering on our latest victims.  But enough nostalgia.

The topic at hand is Thee Kingdoms Online, a BBS based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  It functions like many of the older BBS games except that they bothered to place down a full scale grid map of China and they labeled the 30+ states which impressed me greatly.  TKO also contains a ton of bells and whistles that makes the game much more complex than anything else I've ever played previously.

The other games followed the same basic formula:

You start with some Land

Land -> Buildings get built on Land -> Buildings enhance production -> Having production allows you to train troops and maintain upkeep -> Troops can go get you more land (attack or explore)

And thus the cycle of growth is formed.

Better players know how to balance their resources and troops for optimal growth while providing defense for their territory.  In a nutshell, that is what all of these games are about.  TKO is no different, excepting its bells and whistles.

Most notably is the Heroes and Factions.  In TKO you play the role of a warlord in control of a city during the Three Kingdoms period of China.  Heroes are noteworthy characters who serve you, you start with one and can recruit more provided you meet the requirements.  Heroes can military or support.  Generally, you place political heroes as the Governor of a city to boost the resource output, while you send your more militaristic heroes to lead your armies.

Heroes function much like RPG characters.  They have stats, and can equip arms and armor, also they can learn techniques and carry ability scrolls to enhance your city, troops, or themselves.  They also gain experience and level up, so don't slack on leveling up your hero or else they won't grant a sufficient leadership bonus to your army.

Factions are the historical factions.  You can send your heroes on Faction Quests to gain bonus XP or send your hero and army to aid in historical battles and earn resources.  Either way, you will gain and lose reputation with your actions and based on who you decide to help.  Reputation allows you to purchase some trade goods that can be used to boost your "nobility" status, thus elevating oneself from a small time warlord to a rival for the throne.

Not only can armies be used to attack others, but there are also server events like a weekly "King of the Hill" event, in which an NPC run city is declared a strategic stronghold and leagues of players can struggle to capture and hold the city.  Similar things can be done with provincial capitals to provide a benefit.  Needless to say, there are rewards to participating.  All of this works to break the basic cycle of  Land, Buildings, Troops, Attack that the older games had.  Nothing is wrong with such a game scheme, but TKO does a good job of providing alternative goals beyond personal growth.

For instance, you could decide that you want to have the most powerful hero and spend all of your time and resources building up your hero and dominating the dueling arena.  Or you want to be the Provincial Governor so you go after the provincial capital.  Or maybe you do want to just grow big and conquer cities.

There are several frustrations I had with the game.  The game has a steep learning curve.  Troop death comes really easily.  Just earlier this week, I had  4000 man army come in and wipe out my army of 1500 which was sitting at home behind a high level wall and with archers entrenched.  Recovering said troops would take weeks.  This game model generates a "rich getting richer" scheme in of itself.  To exacerbate things further, there is an "Overwhelming numbers" bonus in where a side with 3+ times the troops will suffer fewer losses.  While this has a degree of gritty realism, it doesn't necessarily make for a competitive mass multiplayer game.  I mean, after a month of build up, suddenly my army is wiped out with little effort by someone who decided to spend money for in game benefits (totally legal, but still categorized under the heading of "un-fun" experiences).  Not to mention that this isn't conducive to getting new players in on the game once someone else has a head start.

As a result, I see little point in continuing to play the game to watch my cities be ransacked and what few troops I train to get killed by overwhelming numbers until my attacker gets bored.

All in all, the game was fun until I realized the tremendous advantage gained by people willing to spend money for in game bonuses.  Other games granted meta-game bonuses for paid players.  A good use of "paid account" schemes was the way Dominion did theirs.  Paid accounts in Dominion removed pop-up advertisements in game, and now grant you access to some tools to make your gaming easier (such as attack/defense calculators).  These benefits do not translate into direct in game bonuses, but rather can help in a metagame fashion.  Though for me, I was patient enough to just ignore the advertisements, and skilled enough to create my own calculator using excel.

I don't be-grudge paying TKO players their game, but I don't think it to be good gaming when I have to throw real life money at a game in order to progress.  So the people willing to spend money can continue throwing their cash at each other.  I'll retire...and update my list of current games/projects.

Current Games and Projects:

Computer: Team Fortress 2

Computer: StarCraft 2 (beta)

Computer: Warstorm

Tabletop: D&D 4th Edition

Tabletop: D&D 3.5 Edition

Forum Play-by-Post: L5r RPG 3rd Edition Revised

LARP: Live Effects (Wyrd, Veil, Lanaque, Messina, & others)
Book: Half-Real by Jesper Juuls

Book: Luck, Logic, and White Lies: The Mathematics of Games by Jorg Bewersdorff

Level Scaling

I got into a conversation regarding "level scaling" in computer games.  Poster child games that suffer from level scaling problems are The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and recent Bioware games.  What's so bad about level scaling?  It destroys progression.

Does it matter if I do 10 damage against a 100 HP enemy or 100 damage against a 1000 HP enemy?  No not really, the ratio is the same, and if my opponents simply scale up when my character increases in power, then what's the point of increasing in power?  The game's mechanical progression become moot and turns into effectively wasted effort on the programming side.

It's a different thing if the game's progression is designed such that you should reach a certain power level by the time you face more difficult challenges.  That is game progression.  But to artificially adjust challenges directly based off of player power level defeats the purpose of game progression.

On the illusion level, I suppose it does have the merit of allowing players to see larger numbers show up for damage (even if the effort remains the same).  Similar to the differentiation between a true random number generator and a pseudo random number generator.  However, the strength of the illusion with a RNG serves a purpose in providing a level of unpredictability, whereas level scaling merely makes the game static.

In short, don't level scale.  It's the lazy (boring) way to design "challenging" encounters.

StarCraft 2 Beta

So, I received a beta key for StarCraft 2 from a friend about a week ago and the game instantly brought me back to high school years playing the first version of the game.  Mutabomb is still highly functional, 6-pool rush also is great.  Carriers are still the best all around air support, but Battlecruisers are now a functional substitute on the Terran side as well.

While I love the RTS genre, I would hesitate to call myself 'good' by any stretch of the imagination.  'Good' and 'Bad' are relative, but I do watch how it functions.  My RTS gaming got started way back with WarCraft 2, so I have a long history with Blizzard's style of RTS (though I skipped WC 3 due to various factors).

In WC 2, Horde and Alliance had the same units.  The only difference was in the late game where Paladins and Ogre Mages had different spells.  (I think the dedicated spellcasting units had different effects as well, but I forget).  Bloodlust or Healing?  Take your pick.

StarCraft was a leap forward with 3 factions and different basic units.  That must have been a horrible pain to balance.  Between Zerglings and Zealots, it was probably an easy thing, but toss Marines into the mix and you'll have some serious headache as you consider the power of ranged attacks.  Is 1 Zealot equal to 4 zerglings equal to 2 marines?  In the end, the balance cannot be perfect, but it can be "close enough".  What is "close enough"?  The point at which the player skill, tactical situation, and luck determines the outcome between equally resourced armies rather than some unfair advantage.  That is what we call "balanced enough", and StarCraft 1 certainly achieved that for me.

In StarCraft 2 (yes it's still a beta, but nothing is outright broken from what I can tell), new concepts have been added.  So before, you had your 'basic' units.  Marines, Zerglings, and Zealots.  Don't worry, they're still there.  From there you had your 2nd teir, Firebats, Hydralisks and Dragoons (alternating the melee with the ranged).  While the second tier is similar (Stalkers are effectively Dragoons, and Hydras are still around.  Terran get Mauraders instead of Firebats), they added "skirmisher" tier between.  Skirmishers are units that excel at getting behind enemy lines.  The concept of a "semi-flyer" was introduced with Reapers and Stalkers w/ Blink upgrades.  Lurkers are gone and instead Zerg get Roaches (can move while burrowed).  Rather than performing air drops, now you infiltrate by way of these "skirmisher" units.

Skirmishers add an entirely new dynamic into the game.  Perimeter defense strategies fall victim to skirmishers very easily as the Skirmishes excel at getting around to the back of the base and harassing the workers until it's too late.  Before, just adding a healthy amount of anti-air to your perimeter defense would suffice to defend against drops, but now you must add defense internally to your workers, or merely station some anti-skirmisher units near-by or else suffer a humiliating defeat as your workers die and your economy grinds to a halt.

That's all I have for now about SC2.

Welcome to Infinity

So this weekend was a LARP weekend.  These are always exhausting, but filled with fun.

Ultimately, LARP in of itself is not a game.  Juuls states that LARP is in a gray area where it could or could not be a game.  However, I'm going to put my foot on this side: LARP is not a game inherently.  It is a medium.  LARP can be used to create a game.  Similarly, Tabletop is not a game...though the medium of Tabletop or Cards, can be used to create a game.

Ironically, LARP is actually where I became heavily invested into Game Balance.  Here is where it really mattered.
Sure, back in the day, balance in Diablo 2 mattered to me in the sense that I mocked those who played the powerful classes as playing on easy mode, but in the end it did not matter.  While paladins were weak solo, when you get some auras stacking, they became pretty awesome.

But in LARP, the delineation between the haves and have-nots became very clear and to the point where the game was no longer fun.  People who steal loot, horde information, hog the game instances, overpower the encounters leaving nothing for the others to do, and otherwise alienate the other players.  Fortunately, the majority of said players no longer show up at this game.  Unfortunately, I now staff this game rather than play in it.

It has been a point of argumentation between myself and others as to who's responsibility it is to curb 'unfun' behavior. There are many things to consider.

Is it the Player's responsibility to regulate themselves?
Those overpowered and loot thieving players need to stop.
Or perhaps, those lazy bums need to get up and loot for themselves rather than just complaining that they get none.  People find time to loot during battle, why can't they?

Is it the plot team/GM responsibility?
Game masters need to create mods that appeal to all players.  Mods that all players can participate in and have a good time.

Is it the game designer's responsibility?
It's the game designer's fault for leaving loopholes and room for abuse in their rules.  Game designers need to be more careful when writing rules.

The reality, as you might expect, is that it is a combination of all three, but the most important part starts with the game designer.  Even if the players play nice, there is the chance that they will accidentally hop onto an overpowered character build.  Everything starts with the game design.  If your rules suck, then your game master will have a tough time making good encounters, and your players will have a hard time feeling useful.  So, step 1: have a good rules set.  Other stuff comes later.

On that note, for those of you who LARP.  I'm working on a new rules set based off of Live Effects.  I've spoken to many of you about it, but here are the core principles that I am functioning off of.

Gritty realism - Death is cheap.  Survival is costly.
Gradients of Consequence - Absolute defenses are rare.  Partial defenses will be plentiful.
Removal of no-win scenarios - Anyone can pick up a weapon and win.  Chance of success may be slim, bt it is possible.
Consistency of ability use - You no longer "run out" of usages.  Energy is no longer a concern.  Rather, time is your only concern.

I will have a design notes document.  I feel the design notes document is very important.  It tells you why changes were made.  One of the most frustrating things these past years of arguing rules was that it was very difficult to understand why Ira made the changes he did, what he wanted, and what he had already tried.  The only reason I was able to get so many things passed was because I asked him what he was looking for.  The importance of design notes is so that you don't have to ask the designer what they intended.  You can just read it.  Sure, some things are lost in translation, but the general gist of what the designer wants is there.  Specific questions can then be answered.

Anyone who wants to read the alpha version or get in on the beta test, please shoot me an email and I'll add you to the list.