Metaphor for Skill vs. Imbalance.

Introduction

Do you ever find yourself arguing over balance on forums?

Damn right you do - or at least I do occasionally.

One thing I find in every single gaming community is that many people (new to the game and experienced alike) don't understand that when discussing balance, you must eliminate skill as a variable.

Hence, most discussions are like so:

"X is too powerful"

"Just use [unreliable attack] to kill him!"
"But that assumes he just stands there and lets you use it!"

In this situation, someone defends a unit by assuming a player of low skill is playing it.

Or
"X is too powerful"
"I find it to be balanced as when I'm playing, other people kill me with [unreliable attack] all the time!"

"That attack is easy to counter if you are aware of your surroundings, though."

In this situation, people often degrade their own skills, or give examples of extremely strong opponents to defend the unit.

Obviously, all of this argument is invalid, because, your test subjects should be at an equal skill level, or, as I posted in a previous article ( http://zandagamedesign.blogspot.com/2010/02/skill-ceilings-and-floors.html ) - they should be at the skill ceiling of their respective units to accurately judge absolute potential.

Anyway, I'm not going to dive into all that and restate everything - this article is made so that, if you ever do need to explain to a person how skill relates to a unit's potential, you can just refer them to this article.

On with the Metaphor!

To balance two units, you MUST measure their potential at their skill ceiling (or peak human skill if the skill ceiling is higher than the limits of human qualities).

To demonstrate this, I will be discussing the fine art of carpentry.

Firstly, imagine that instead of complex characters, the units in your game are simple tools, that you as a player, utilise to win the game.

This is exactly what they are. You unit in a game is a tool. Nothing more.

So, let's say we have two Hammers, the "Craptacular Nailpusher 101" and the "Super-Gold-Hammer Deluxe 5000". We'll assume that, as their names suggest, the 5000 model is far superior to the 101.

Let's say that "Balanced Hammer Co." wants to measure up the hammers against each other - as they are unsure of whether the Deluxe model really is any better.

So, they pick two carpenters from the local area, Tom and Dave to test out the hammers.

The thing is, Tom has been hammering for an odd 20 years now, and specialises with his Nailpusher 101, while Dave is completely new to the trade, and was frankly dropped a few too many times on his head while he was a baby.

The test begins, and Tom immediately takes the lead. He finishes the task deftly and with prowess, while Dave manages to hit himself in the face more than the nails he's supposed to be hammering.

The company records these findings, but obviously note that Dave was a really bad test subject, and so they discard the reports.

To relate this back to balance briefly, this shows that just because a unit is overpowered, it does not necessarily mean that new and unskilled players will immediately dominate skilled players with it. Even in unbalanced scenarios, a wide skill gap will still favour the more skilled player.

If it doesn't, then the balance issue should be so plainly obvious, it would have to be intentional.

So, back to the hammers.

Balanced Hammer Co. goes back to the drawing board.

What could they possibly use to test the hammers?

They search around, and find another carpenter - Adam, who has the same degree in hammery as Tom, and has been hammering for exactly the same number of days as Tom.

As far we can tell, Tom and Adam are both skilled at carpentry, and they are both about equal in terms of skill.

So, the competition starts off again, and, Tom, who now gets to try out the 5000 model, wins by a mere nail.

The company takes the results, and concludes that their new hammer isn't worth the 200% markup over the 101 model, and agrees that they must add more and more features to the 5000 model.

Seeing as Tom has been a willing participant in two tests, the company give him a free 5000 model as thanks - and guarantee him a discount on the model when they finish superpowering it.

So, Tom goes home, and, decides to use the hammer full time. It did win the competition, so why not?

Anyway, 3 weeks later, he's hammering some nails when he realises that on this particular model, the handle has a flat base that, on every 3rd swing, can be used to strike nails harder than usual.

Conducting his own test, he decides that this feature should be raised with the Hammer Co. company, to help them with their designs.

What does this show us?

Just because players aren't currently bunnyhopping with the Sniper class, headshotting every player they encounter with quickscoping, doesn't mean that the unit cannot do it. Players will often gain more and more skill until a large portion of a unit's potential is realised.

When judging balance, you cannot just use "good" players, you must go further, you must evaluate the unit's absolute potential.

Back to hammers.

So, Balanced Hammer Co. take this last lesson in their stride, but unfortunately they're still unsure of how they can measure up the two hammers.

But, one of their engineers has been doing some searching, and he finds the contact details of a couple of Romanian Hammer Brothers who are said to have such amazing skill in carpentry that they can immediately take one look at a hammer, work out every single trick with it, and utilise the hammer and all its features to a near perfect degree. The degree at which they can utilise these hammers is at the absolute limit of human hammering ability.

So, the company flies them in, and hands them each hammer.

The brothers take a quick moment to analyse the hammers, and the competition begins.

The result is that the brother with the Deluxe Super-Gold-Hammer 5000 wins by a land slide. He found many more tricks to this new hammer, than the other brother could find with the older one due to the new design's slick form, useful handle, and other features.

The brothers were completely equal in skill - and both were at the peak of human skill in hammering terms - so what happened?

As we started at the beginning, the Deluxe Hammer was simply better.

If we liken this to games, you can have a player at the skill ceiling of a Machine Gun class - but, if the machine gun class only deals 2 damage per second, while the others deal 100 damage per second, all that skill does not matter. The class is inferior to the others.

Conclusion

So, Balanced Hammer Co. choose these results over all others - why?

• We are not comparing a bad player to a good player.
• We are not comparing two equal players, that cannot utilise their units properly yet.

We are comparing two players, who use the units to their full (human) potential - and they demonstrate how powerful the units really are in comparison to each other.

This is how you evaluate balance.

I hope everyone enjoyed this post, and I want to try to follow this up with more skill vs. balance articles really soon.