If you’ve spent any time browsing around gaming forums, you’ve likely stumbled upon countless posts calling for nerfs. Players are often quick to point out what things they believe are overpowered and that need to be immediately addressed. A lot of this stems from the perception that the role of a game designer is to ensure their game is perfectly balanced, and that if the game isn’t balanced they must step in to fix their mistakes.
Here’s the thing though: game balance doesn’t really matter very much.
Woah, hey there, put the pitchforks down! Balance is obviously important (especially if your game is highly competitive), but it’s far from the most important thing. Rather, what matters most is the player experience.
Balance > Skill?
Let’s take a look at Chess and Go. Most people would call those games balanced, but in reality both feature a notable first-player advantage. In Chess the 1st player tends to win 52-55% of the time, while in Go the 1st player tends to score 5-7 more points than their opponent. Those are pretty notable advantages, and on its face it looks like both games need to be fixed immediately. But despite this imbalance, in typical play most players don’t care about this advantage. Why? Because player skill matters more.
See, the thing about first-player advantage is that it’s an aggregate statistical advantage detected from sampling thousands of games. So while it’s certainly useful for understanding the game as a whole, it doesn’t necessarily tell us much about two specific players playing against each other. Yes, based on the statistics going first means you’re favoured to win. But if you were to put a newbie against a Grandmaster, the Grandmaster is obviously way more favoured to win even if they go 2nd. This is because in games like Chess and Go, the more-experienced player can use their skills to overcome and eliminate the first-player advantage. That’s why you only really see handicaps being used in competitive play when both players are essentially at an equal skill level. When one player is much better at the game than the other, it doesn’t matter if the game is slightly unbalanced.
Balance > Luck?
What about in games which feature randomness? Surely you need to make sure random effects are balanced, right? Well, not necessarily.
Imagine you’re about to play a game with your friend, but at the beginning of the game you flip a coin. If you get heads, you instantly win the game. If you get tails, you instantly lose. This game would technically be perfectly balanced, since both players have an equal 50/50 chance of winning or losing. But despite this balance, most people won’t feel like the game is very fun. Why? Because player skill doesn’t matter.
Perfectly balanced randomness doesn’t allow for player skill. It strips players of their agency and doesn’t allow them to make meaningful choices. But if the randomness is slightly unbalanced, then players can be punished or rewarded for choosing to take risks. For example, let’s say you get to pick between two options:
Have a 100% chance to get a resource; or
Have a 50% chance to get 3 resources.
When you consider their expected outcomes, the 2nd Option is the better choice (since on average it pays out 1.5 resources). So if you’re going strictly off the odds, you should always choose Option 2. One could even say that Option 2 is overpowered. But in this situation, the certainty of Option 1 presents the player with an interesting question: should I take the better risk, or go for the weaker guarantee? While in most situations Option 2 is correct, a skillful player will be able to identify when choosing Option 1 is the correct choice (i.e. when you need exactly one resource and cannot afford the risk of getting none). This skill-testing situation is only possible because of imbalance.
Experience > Balance
So if game designers aren’t necessarily trying to make their games balanced, what are we trying to do? To put it simply, we’re trying to make our players have fun. As designers, we craft our games to provide specific experiences for our players. We might want our players to feel challenged, to feel frustrated, to feel rewarded, or to feel like their choices matter. Sometimes, perfect balance isn’t going to evoke the experience we want, in which case it’s totally fine to skew things a bit. If something is extremely unfun to lose to, it doesn’t matter if it’s statistically balanced. In that moment, for that player, the game doesn’t feel fun to play. In situations like that, it’s the right choice to nerf things that are balanced (or even underpowered) if it’s going to improve the player experience. Ultimately, game designers don’t fail when they make an unbalanced game. They fail when they make a game that people don’t want to play.