The Joy of Being Unbalanced
Perspectives
Abstract: Competitive multiplayer games have shaped my gaming identity from as
early as I can remember. The advent of downloadable updates created a new era
of multiplayer experiences, in which developers could continuously adjust for
balance and fairness. A zeitgeist has arisen around weakening elements in
multiplayer games that are deemed too powerful, making the dogma of balance center
around ‘nerfs.’ I argue this should not be the default approach, as you often
lose an intangible fun factor in the process. Some of my favorite competitive
multiplayer experiences of all time had huge imbalances that added to the
experience and my enjoyment. How do you think ‘balance’ should be handled in
competitive gaming?
It’s fun to be unfair. It’s
fun to be too powerful. If video games do one thing well, it’s making players
feel, act, and look like a force to be reckoned with. And where better to be a
headshot-targeting, full life bar KO-ing, make your enemy want to uninstall the
game and never return kind of person? Multiplayer.
Multiplayer games were a
tremendously important part of my video game upbringing. Some of my earliest
and most lucid gaming memories revolve around multiplayer experiences. Whether
it was playing Bandai’s Stadium Events
on the Nintendo power pad, or two-player Super
Mario Kart on the SNES, or the brutal vehicular destruction of Twisted Metal on the PS1, playing
competitively with friends (& strangers) shaped how I thought of games. Though
I was quick to move onto single player experiences, which now largely define my
current gaming identity, I never stopped being on the hunt for the next great
multiplayer game. Competing against friends and family made me
feel powerful. It was my mastery of the controls, my knowledge of the game,
which gave me all the advantage I could ever ask for. Perhaps even more
satisfying was defeating the stranger or two in my limited competitive arcade
play. It is hard to describe how elated I would feel when my team of Cable,
Captain Commando, and Sentinel would pulverize my unsuspecting opponent on the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 arcade cabinet.
 |
I was a pretty sick Thumper player in Twisted Metal 2.
For a 6 year old. I think. |
Online play revolutionized
competitive multiplayer gaming. For the first time you could play against
people from around the world whenever you felt like it. It created cultures,
and subcultures, of gamers obsessed with bettering themselves in the name of
digital competition. So much so that we’ve seen the emergence of eSports as a
major entertainment sports industry. You can know how you rank against a game’s
global playerbase. It’s a powerful thing, and one that continues to astound me.
 |
| Competitive multiplayer games are big business these days. |
The digital age also brought
with it a new era of designing multiplayer experiences: patches. Before we had
the infrastructure to facilitate online downloads, a game was what the game
shipped as. That is to say, once a game ‘went gold’ and released to the public,
development ceased. A feature doesn’t work correctly? An in-game system is too
powerful than you meant it to be? That’s just how it was going to be. But for
the past 10-15 years, developers have been able to tweak and edit their game, fixing mistakes
or adding new content, through downloadable updates known as patches. To say
that this dogmatic shift has been a boon for gaming would be an understatement.
It’s lead to a world in which games are living, breathing, experiences that can
learn from their missteps, and become more content rich and more
tightly designed over time. For multiplayer games specifically, however, it has led to
certain design sensibilities that I wish hadn’t become so ingrained. ‘Fixing’
multiplayer games has led to a certain collective mindset that I view as not a
sum good, and the reason why I’m writing this piece today.
For any game in which one of
your design foci is player versus player interactions, you want to create an
even playing field. You want your experience to be ‘fair’ to all players. Jane
Alabama and Joe Maine should have access to the same toolset to compete.
Ignoring for a second prior experience with previous similar titles, the two
should be able to achieve the same level of competency in a competitive
setting. What you don’t want, according to popular thought, are for certain
elements of a game to be unfair or ‘unbalanced.’ Especially following the
advent and rise of digital patches, players and developers alike have advocated
for maintaining a perfect balance within multiplayer games. No one character,
one move, one gun, one ability, should be strictly more powerful than another. Or,
at the very least, all options available from the player have balanced risk /
reward, strengths / weakness. The call has been to create an ecosystem of fair
play, in which players can essentially play with or as whatever or whoever
they want and still be able to compete.
 |
| Patch, patch away. |
The idea of creating and
maintaining ‘balance’ in multiplayer games has become a zeitgeist, especially
in the past few years or so. You can see it in any multiplayer game, be they
MOBAs or fighting games or shooters. Most of the discussion about balancing a
game, from my observations, generally centers around what is or isn’t too
powerful. And once something is identified as being too strong (to the point
that the community feels it is unfair), the typical outcry is for the thing
to be “nerfed”. Nerfing is the act of making something weaker or less
effective. Herein lies my biggest complaint with how fans
and subsequently developers approach balance solutions. Creating fairness by
lopping the tops off all trees that have grown too tall lessens the grandeur of
the forest. Does it make all trees more similar in height? Sure. Do you lose
something special in the process? I’d argue that you do. Let me talk more
concretely and less metaphorically, though.
As a quick point of
disclosure, I’m not attempting to argue that nerf-dependent balancing of
multiplayer experiences doesn’t work. It does. Games like Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty Black Ops have developers that chiefly focused their balancing efforts into making sure
nothing is overly powerful. When Diddy Kong was running rampant in the
competitive scene in Smash Wii U,
Bandai Namco and Sora Ltd. responded by making the character weaker. When the
M16A3 in Battlefield 3 or the FAMAS
in Call of Duty Black Ops were too
good at downing your foes, DICE and Treyarch respectively made the two weapons less
effective. Did these changes help the competitive ecosystem? It’s debatable,
but I (and many others) would say yes. Competitors felt less inclined to learn
Diddy Kong or to use the M16A3/FAMAS because they were no longer clearly more
powerful than other options. Cool.
 |
How many viewed Diddy Kong upon Smash for Wii U's release.
He's not as scary anymore. Is that a good thing? |
Street Fighter IV, and all its many iterations, is another title
that focused a lot of its balancing updates on reducing the effectiveness of
characters that were deemed too strong. Sagat in vanilla SFIV, Yun in SSFIV, Evil
Ryu and Poison in USFIV—all nerfed. To
Capcom’s credit, however, their balance updates also included character
‘buffs,’ i.e. making things more powerful. Though, for the most part, power
increases were generally very moderate
compared to the often heavy-hand of nerfing. The goal of this approach was to
eventually reach a state in which all characters are viable in competitive
play. Now 8 years later, I would say Capcom reached their goal (if Evo 2015 and
Capcom Cup were any indication). But even with Ultra Street Fighter IV, which I would say is one of the most
deftly balanced games I’ve ever played, something
was lost every single time a character was made weaker.
You lose that feeling, that
indescribable and joyous sensation, of using something that felt unfair. That
felt satisfyingly powerful. The same is true for Battlefield 3 and Black Ops
and any multiplayer game. Once nerfed, you can never get back the feeling of
power you felt in an un-nerfed world. Using the FAMAS in Black Ops was so deeply gratifying. It
fired fast and with remarkable accuracy. It could down players on the enemy
team in a split second. It led me to some of the best kill streaks I’ve ever had
in a competitive first-person shooter. Even when I was facing off against
players using the same over-powered gun, I felt powerful. But then it was
changed, weakened, and I never used it again. It felt off. It felt bad and
made me feel bad when I used it. The new FAMAS almost felt like an insult to my
cherished memories of its predecessor. While perhaps the game overall was more
balanced with more players using more kinds of guns, Black Ops lost some of its fun. I’ve had this feeling with
increasing frequency with modern multiplayer games. I loved Sagat in vanilla SFIV then hardly used him again. It felt
great to pull off Rogue’s infamous Gadgetzan Auctioneer “miracle” combo in Hearthstone, but then that was nerfed. And
the nerfs keep coming, especially as more and more players complain about how
powerful certain things are online. Well, I’m here to say that being unbalanced
(in the right way) can be fun too. In fact, in my experience, it’s often more.
 |
LEEEEROYYY JENKINSSS! Time's up let's do thi- Oh wait.
We can't do it anymore. Because it got nerfed. |
One of my favorite online
multiplayer games ever is Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) by Infinity Ward. MW2 is not a well-balanced game, far from it. Certain guns and certain
strategies quickly became recognzed as powerful, bordering on cheap or unfair. Underslung
grenade launchers on assault rifles could be paired with player-selected
abilities to refill ammo and increase your blast radius, giving players the
ability to be a one-man demolition crew (explosions, explosions everywhere).
Another potent combination allowed players to run around the map at extreme
speeds with enhanced melee speed & range, which turned players into warping
one-hit-kill knifing machines. Another still made it so just tapping on your
aim down sights button with a sniper rifle gave you pinpoint accuracy at the
intersection of the crosshairs, transforming players into ‘quick-scoping’
fiends who were effective at all ranges in battle. MW2 matches were a frantic flurry of explosions and snipers and
death. And they were so much fun. So many different strategies were rewarded in
MW2 because so many things were
blatantly overpowered. Even if you didn’t choose to specialize in the tactics I
just described, some of the game’s guns were so good you could easily annihilate
your competition (UMP-45, FAMAS). I ended up playing MW2’s multiplayer upwards of 350 hours, or 14+ full days. I think a
large part of that was because playing made me feel powerful. The developers never took away the fun tools they gave to me.
 |
| I came in like a wrecking ball! I never hit so hard (with my "noob tube.") |
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (MvC2), and even moreso Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and its update Ultimate MvC3 (UMvC3),
gave me that same powerful feeling. I suspect MvC2 will go down in history as one of the most imbalanced
competitive games of all time. Only roughly 8 of the cast of 56 characters are
good enough to be played competitively. Sentinel, Storm, Cable and Magneto were
head and shoulders better than the other members of the cast. Even UMvC3, released in the digital age, stayed true to its
roots and ended up as an unbalanced game. The top 5 characters in UMvC3 are head and shoulders better than
the rest of the cast, though more members of the roster can be made viable
competitively than its predecessor. That being said, MvC2 and UMvC3 are
exceptionally fun games and my favorite competitive fighters of all time. Powerful,
even unfair, strategies can be used by either player. You can dominate or be
dominated. Landing your cheap combo or frame trap or projectile spam is so
deeply satisfying. You feel good. You feel like you’re almost too good, or at
the very least better than that game intended you to be. Nothing about your
attacks or combos felt lackluster. UMvC3
revels in having an uneven roster and the game is better for it.
 |
You lost the second you chose Iceman, player 2. But MvC2 remains
incredibly fun, and interesting, to this day. |
Tentatively, feeling powerful
is one of many aspects I’m loving about Street
Fighter V. You can take my opinion with the asterisk that I’ve only been
playing for a week, but Street Fighter V
has a remarkable balance to it. Every single character feels unfair, feels a
little too good. It’s awesome. I’ve tried my hand at all 16 characters and each
one has some combos and moves and spacing that feel cheap. In my book, that’s
perfect. Let’s hope this can be maintained through the game’s lifetime.
As I touched on briefly in my
introduction, video games are unrivaled in giving people the feeling of power. Who
among us can shoot energy beams out of their hands or single-handedly stop an
army of insurgents in real life? A choice few, at best. So much of what
has historically worked about video games is giving the player this powerful
feeling. I find that too frequent or too heavy-handed nerfs lessens the impact
of playing on the player. It sucks to lose the joy you felt using something
powerful because it has been removed from the game. Sure, even unbalanced games
like MW2 and UMvC3 have their own kind of balance. It’s crucial that no singular element or strategy is too
powerful, rather, several exist in the same ecosystem that work synergistically
to build a dynamic competitive space. My point remains, however, that nerfing
what’s most powerful is not necessarily the best approach to creating a fun,
dynamic multiplayer ecosystem.
Whether broken or balanced,
each game has its own competitive metagame and there is no one right answer. What
works for balancing Heroes of the Storm
might not work when balancing Street
Fighter V. But be thoughtful about your balance decisions (developers) and be
thoughtful of what you post online (community). Nerfing the powerful should not
be the default solution. You might just lose a lot of fun in the process.
