The Impact Factor

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.