Help me Understand "Balance"

[Werewolf13]

Balance...

I see this all the time in the ED forums and elsewhere; usually because someone is complaining about it being out of whack in ED. I really don't understand that. The only truly balanced game Of the hundreds and hundreds I've played in the 58 years I've been playing games (I'm 67) is CHESS (and even that's not perfectly balanced because the player that moves 1st - white - definitely has the advantage, all things being equal).

How can a game like ED be balanced. To me that means that a sidewinder should be able to take on a 'vette and win all things being equal but player skill.

Then I think. No way - that can't be what those concerned with balance means. Can't be.

Which leads me to the conclusion that when I think balance in ED it has to be something very different from what the typical player all ate up with it thinks it means.

So...

Define balance and what it means in Elite Dangerous.

ASIDE and FWIW: in my opinion true balance would make any game that achieved it boring as h.ell (which is a big reason that I stopped playing chess years ago; though I've recently taken it up again as it is a good way to teach my youngest how to think into the future, to look before he leaps and evaluate all potential consequences of his decision making process - still bores me to tears though)

 

[Krash]

Boring is everyone flying around in FDL murderboats with the same weapons and engineering. If you deviate from that "meta" your considered a scrub.

 

[Backelaer]

Then I think. No way - that can't be what those concerned with balance means. Can't be.

You're right, that's by no means what people tend to mean when talking about balance.

It all comes down to engineering and hitpoint/damage-inflation. Before the engineers, if you encountered the same ship type, or even the same ship class, you knew you where roughly equal. Okay, if your opponent chose to sacrifice some optional internals for cargo, you would have a big advantage. But it they were a good pilot, it'd still be a heated battle.
WIth engineering, both the maximum damage a certain ship can deal, and the maximum shields they can carry shot up by a crazy amount. While the minimum for both is still the same. If you're not engineered in any way, you don't stand a chance against a ship that is. A fight also became a much more rock-paper-scissors type of thing with engineering.

There's a lot of people better versed in this that can explain this to you a hell of a lot better than me (@Morbad or @Crimson Kaim come to mind) but these are my intitial thoughts.

 

[GJ51]

Help me Understand "Balance"

Try standing with one foot raised off the ground ...

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Balance?

That's the weird thing almost every single professional MMO game and every single Multiplayer title on the Planet took great care of.
The best ones continually evaluated and finetuned it, even after years.

Games which designers could tell you - without looking at any sheet of paper or a screen - which Weapon or Equipment types were most used since inception and what considerations that was being given.
Games that ran full balancing telemetry all the time and where customer feedback was very carefully evaluated throughout the balancing and re-balancing processes.
Any re-balancing commonly didn't exceed 10-20% stats moves, most being far smaller than that.

Now meet the oddball : ELITE Dangerous
A Game which is "special" since it ignored even fundamental MMO/Multiplayer balancing basics since inception xD
Re-balancing (if done at all) has reached upto nearly 2 full orders of magnitude (!) in the past, indicating a previous "total and catastrophic miss".
Other areas either aren't balanced at all or massively unbalanced conditions left untouched for upto a full year.
There's always a primary income source that easily outdoes every single other, instead of balancing one activity eventually just leapfrogs others at some point after a change.
A Game that ran no less than 3 incarnations of C&P - all of which failed miserably and got everything turned upside down. Since 4+ years now.

Yep, this one is truly unique and by now it's an integral part of ELITE : Dangerous

But be honest : you wouldn't want it any other way.
Arcade FFA Gankfest, Gold rushes, racing to the next-best available phenomenon (Ranks, Credits, Rep, Mats etc.) before the nerf-hammer hits it
Yep, that's ELITE. That's how it works around here.

PS.
The cool thing though : you as a Player can opt out of alot of that imbalance. Which is really neat, gotta say that.

 

[Speedcuffs]

Boring is everyone flying around in FDL murderboats with the same weapons and engineering. If you deviate from that "meta" your considered a scrub.

You missed FA off.
Just saying.

 

[AlaricVonDrago]

Not balanced like chess, or in other words, a sidewinder taking on a corvette. No no.

Balance is subjective. Someone might think that's good balance, others would think that's insane.

I believe "balance" is just everyone's opinion on how the game ought to be. If it differs from Frontier's opinion, then they are wrong, I am wrong, you are wrong, everyone else is wrong, and no one knows what they are doing and the game is dead in maintainence mode and everyone should just delete it from their hard drive because Jurassic World is the new baby woe to the world doom gloom, etc.

 

[Old Duck]

When I think of balance in a PvP game, I think of games like Overwatch where each team is balanced (assuming a good team comp), and ideally player skill is also relatively balanced by the matchmaking algorithm. Does this mean one character can easily 1v1 any and all other characters? No. But each character has strengths and weaknesses that the other team has the ability to counter. A Bastion in a corner will chew through most tanks trying to melee him, but a Widowmaker can safely take him out from a distance. That Widowmaker may find herself in a pickle if a cloaked Sombra shoots her in the back at point-blank range. And the list goes on. Ultimately, however, who wins and loses is solely based on skill and teamwork.

Now in a game like ED, who wins and loses often depends on who has the best meta-builds, and some of these builds are insane, thanks to shield booster stacking, HRP stacking, OP engineering, etc. And forget about any sort of fair matchmaking - it's both easy and common for an E-rated Sidewinder with a new pilot to be facing a wing of 4 experienced, engineered FDLs / Corvettes / Cutters / etc. It's anything but balanced, but I'm not sure it can ever be truly balanced. Frontier could bring some of the "god ships" back to more realistic stats, which I would like to see, but even then there's nothing stopping an E-rated Corvette from going after new players in their Sidewinders / Haulers.

This is why I personally don't do much PvP in ED. I prefer a game like Overwatch (which ironically is much closer to Chess that the OP mentions) for my PvP. That's not to say I don't like poking the god ships with my stick (aka - my "killer" Sidewinder), and I'll happily engage other players that I determine are on similar footing, outfitting-wise. Still, PvP is the exception for me, not the rule.

ps - the one way to balance a game like ED is numbers. "The solution to pollution is dilution." I can survive a long time in a game like Fortnite 50-50 mode or Battlefront not because I'm the best player, but because there are SO MANY PLAYERS on both sides that the weak and the strong tend to average out. Of course, this implies "sides", something else ED lacks (I tend to do worse in battle royal modes than I do team games / modes).

TL;DR - play Overwatch!

 

[Morbad]

Elite: Dangerous is ultimately attempting to be a Pilots Federation CMDR life-simulator with an emphasis on small craft piloting. With it's huge spectrum of options and potential motivations, balance is a complex topic.

In my view, balance isn't about making everything equal, it's about making sure everything has a reasonable niche within the context of the setting that Frontier is trying to depict.

Anyway, the topic is too broad to define further without focusing on a particular subset. Suffice to say balance has been harmed by niches that once existed becoming redundancies, too few viable options in other niches (leading to a narrow near-optimal 'meta' dominating), and a virtually complete unwillingness to adjust balance without resorting to inflationary means.

 

[VR CMDR Novindus]

I can only tell you how I view it.

In terms of items, abilities, and services purchasable with in-game currency, balance is a proportionality between units of currency spent and degree of advantage gained, which is maintained across all items, abilities, and services, or as close as reasonably possible. This would require a usable metric for advantage gained, which can often be subjective, and therefore give the impression of imbalance. Depending on the game, it can be useful to have a different metric for advantage gained in different aspects of the game, i.e. advantage in combat would have one metric, and advantage in trading would have another.

In terms of earning currency in-game, balance is a proportionality between effort and currency gained. Effort would account for time, difficulty, risk, and costs. Difficulty ratings and risk ratings would need their own usable metrics, and these can also be subjective at times, again creating the possibility of perceived imbalance. If costs, i.e. the proportionality between units of currency and advantage gained, are not carefully balanced, then it becomes more difficult to balance earning currency, because items, abilities, and services play a part in facilitating the earning of currency. This type of balancing is purely gameplay focused, whereas there may be lore, logic, and game world considerations that could override gameplay mechanics at times for the sake of immersion. For example, mining, which typically requires less effort (as defined above) than bounty hunting, has a much higher potential rate of earning, and this makes logical sense in a real world and game world perspective.

That brings us to the next point about balancing gameplay and immersion, for which there's no hard and fast rule. I would say however that, in general, where a harmony between the two cannot be managed, gameplay should more often trump immersion, as players can often suspend their disbelief, but they can't pretend for long to enjoy a game that is lacking gameplay, or that feels too imbalanced to offer fair chances.

With regard to engineering in Elite, where there is a requirement of material and data collection, as well as a notable amount of time and travel in the process, the materials and data themselves become a form of currency for purchasing the services of an engineer, and have their own effort requirement to be balanced against, so will be balanced differently to the standard game currency.

Lastly, regarding the effects of items, abilities, and services, irrespective of the cost balancing, there should be the possibility of reducing the effectiveness of any offensive or defensive action to varying degrees, in order to ensure there is no sustained invulnerability or omnipotence. Ideally, there should be finite and carefully limited categories of offensive and defensive actions, so that the methods of reducing the effectiveness of either do not have to be multitudinous, as that would create an unrealistic requirement on character configuration (or in the case of Elite, outfitting), with players having too many categories of offensive and defensive actions to account for even a reasonable number of them in their builds.

That's really just a high level summary, as there would be far more details to consider when actually diving in, but it gives a general idea of how I consider the subject of balance in games.

 

[Old Duck]

Elite: Dangerous is ultimately attempting to be a Pilots Federation CMDR life-simulator with an emphasis on small craft piloting. With it's huge spectrum of options and potential motivations, balance is a complex topic.

In my view, balance isn't about making everything equal, it's about making sure everything has a reasonable niche within the context of the setting that Frontier is trying to depict.

Anyway, the topic is too broad to define further without focusing on a particular subset. Suffice to say balance has been harmed by niches that once existed becoming redundancies, too few viable options in other niches (leading to a narrow near-optimal 'meta' dominating), and a virtually complete unwillingness to adjust balance without resorting to inflationary means.

Forgive me, I'm actually not replying TO you, but rather your post inspired the following thought, which may or may not have anything to do with what you are trying to say.

On the issue of balance, one area I feel ED fails at is the appropriate offset of pros and cons. The example that comes to mind is that big, heavy-hitting ships should be slow and cumbersome. I should easily be able to fly circles around even a Corvette when I'm in a Viper, for example. However, thanks to engineering, this is not the case. I was recently in a fight with a player in a Dropship who was matching my Courier in speed and maneuvering... My jaw hit the floor. To go back to Overwatch, this is like Reinhardt being able to blink around like Tracer but keep his DPS and shield! It's insane!

So back to the OP's example of Sidewinder taking on a Corvette - the Sidewinder should definitely not be able to destroy a Corvette, but it should be able to easily stay out of the line-of-fire of a large ship's fixed and even gimbaled weapons IMO, assuming equally-skilled pilots. Unfortunately the Corvette flies just like a fighter itself. FWIW, I purposefully undersize thrusters on my larger ships because it seriously breaks my 'mersion to fling around a battleship like it's an F-18 jet. I can get away with this against NPCs, but it puts me at a disadvantage against fighter-vette PvPers, so I never engage in large-v-large PvP for this reason.

 

[DNA-Decay]

Just to look at combat rank progression.

At one level, you could just grind to Elite in a Sidey. And it’s been done.
But ‘normally’ your combat rank is a fairly accurate representation of you skill.

I will grant there is a difference between an Elite PvP player and the rest.

But as a general rule - I have always been able to take out CMDRs of a lower rank than me.

Two ranks above me and I am very happy if I escape. Three ranks above me and I expect a rebuy - I won’t get a chance to get out.

So that’s one aspect of balance that ED has got right.


Also I made DEADLY yesterday so I expect to survive encounters with single CMDRs.

 

[RamirezKurita]

Where performance of a given tool is proportional to both its degree of specialisation and investment required.

Just like how in an average RPG, nobody would expect a level 30 character with middling gear to match up to another level 30 of the same class/build with top-end rare drops, or to fare particularly well against a similar character with identical gear but being level 40. However, a dedicated healer might be able to match up to the geared or higher level characters if the stronger characters had chosen to diversify rather than specialise (they would, however, perform better overall, just not at healing).

Obviously, you also have player skills involved too, a skilled player can help compensate for inappropriate or lackluster tools, or tiebreak against a similarly tooled opponent.

So, in the end we are left with a trinity of levers for balance - investment, specialisation and skill. Any one of these should be able to compensate for the others, while those seeking optimum performance (such as those wishing to engage in competitive PvP) would instead seek a combination of all 3.

 

[Crimson Kaim]

Balance...

I see this all the time in the ED forums and elsewhere; usually because someone is complaining about it being out of whack in ED. I really don't understand that. The only truly balanced game Of the hundreds and hundreds I've played in the 58 years I've been playing games (I'm 67) is CHESS (and even that's not perfectly balanced because the player that moves 1st - white - definitely has the advantage, all things being equal).

How can a game like ED be balanced. To me that means that a sidewinder should be able to take on a 'vette and win all things being equal but player skill.

Then I think. No way - that can't be what those concerned with balance means. Can't be.

Which leads me to the conclusion that when I think balance in ED it has to be something very different from what the typical player all ate up with it thinks it means.

So...

Define balance and what it means in Elite Dangerous.

ASIDE and FWIW: in my opinion true balance would make any game that achieved it boring as h.ell (which is a big reason that I stopped playing chess years ago; though I've recently taken it up again as it is a good way to teach my youngest how to think into the future, to look before he leaps and evaluate all potential consequences of his decision making process - still bores me to tears though)

I can tell you what balance is not. Alligning in a line, triangle or sqaure with healing jesus beams and tanking both sides of a combat zone plus the capital ship without engineered shields.

Or when you go silent running, sacrifice your shields and build up 10 times more heat that you can't get rid off without heat sinks only to realize that a single shot of an emissive laser completely negates your advantage in silent running despite your high sacrifices.

Balance is when for every advantage, there is a disadvantage. Balance is when for every debuff, there is a buff of equal strength.
Balance is when for every + there is a -.

Ofcourse, you'll never achieve absolute balance, for that to happen we must not have so many factors that come into consideration.
But do we really need to be able to tank both sides of a combat zone with the capital ship by just a single jesus beam per ship?
No we don't, at all. But here we are. Being invincible to anything that isn't phasing or a bomber. Just go to YouTube and search for the terms healies4feelies or spicy bois and so on.

Yes there are people misusing the word balance in a wrong way, especially common in the never ending PvE vs PvP debate but the actual ship and module balance is what really is wrong.

 

[Aashenfox]

Simplest example is the unbalance between shielded and non-shielded, imo.

When you are shielded, your modules cannot be directly attacked and you are invulnerable to the majority of (useful) special effects. This gives high shield value ships like the Ferdie a big advantage against hybrid or hull tanks which are designed to fight shields down for half an engagement if not more. Throw packhounds in and the hybrid user has not a single chance. I fly hybrids almost exclusively, I love the tankiness, but if I see a packhound in flight, I'm waking straight away, that just ain't cricket.

 

[babelfisch]

It probably helps by identifiying what's unbalanced.
This Sidewinder has a hull value of 1435:

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

This Sidewinder has a hull value of 108:

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

coriolis.io

PS
How about this Corvette with a hull value of 10288?

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

 

[Aashenfox]

P.S. As regards the final comment in the OP, that a balanced game would be boring...no. If we all had the same weapons, that would be boring, and that's what UNbalance does. PAs and rails, used properly, are the meta, that's why we're all using them, and its boring. They are better than anything else in the hands of a skilled user. If the weapons were properly balanced, all weapons would be viable and you'd see more variation in loadouts. People also say that rock paper scissors style balancing (as found in elite), is always doomed to failure, as it is wrong to give one loadout supreme domination over another, but here I disagree...I like it in Elite that I can either outfit for extreme effectiveness against shield tanks, or extreme effectiveness against hybrids, or compromise and use a universal loadout that will not be quite as effective in either case, but makes sure I'm not rocked when I'm scissors.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Generally there are three entirely separate bits of game balance being complained about.

1) Combat balance making certain weapons considerably more effective than others, and certain designs of combat-focused ship considerably more effective than others. This generally only affects high-end PvP combat because pretty much any weapon or defence can be effective enough versus NPCs.

2) Income balance between activities. There are a whole bunch of issues here, some of which are not actually real, but ultimately the nature of the rest of the game design means that this is not "fixable" in the "all activities should be equal" way people want without starting over. [1]

3) Combat balance in that the gap between a combat-specialised ship and a generalist ship is massive - ten times the defences, twice the firepower, etc. - and perhaps more importantly, considerably higher than it was at the 1.0 release. This makes organically-occurring hostile encounters generally unsatisfying, because:
- a non-combat defender should be able to survive (if they haven't deliberately under-protected their ship, if they know some basic survival tips, if they don't panic too much) and escape, but has no incentive at all to try fighting back
- to allow the non-combat defender the possibility of survival, escape is easy enough that a combat-equipped ship basically cannot die regardless of what attacks it

The two combat issues probably are fixable in theory, but in practice they affect relatively few players at a time, and the scope of changes needed for them would have a bunch of potentially unpopular consequences for everyone else.


[1] The main problem is that activities have very different skill curves, and very different outfitting curves.

Outfitting curve example
- exploration can be done with a couple of minor tweaks to the starter Sidewinder, with basically the same profit as a fully-engineered Anaconda
- conversely, trading is much more profitable in a T-9 than a Sidewinder, because you can carry hundreds of times more cargo per run

Skill curve example
- laser mining is the most profitable activity in the game by an extremely large margin if done in a fully-optimised high skill way - laser mining is one of the least profitable activities in the game if you just show up and shoot some rocks. The skill gap is high enough that the majority of players don't even believe that laser mining is the most profitable activity - they'll say core mining, or some mission "exploit", or whatever.
- trading theoretically has a significant element of skill in looking at market behaviours, BGS state changes, Powerplay effects, etc. to identify the best trade routes. Or you can outsource all the thinking to a website like EDDB and get almost the same profits.
- the most profitable way to make money "exploring" is to download a list of systems with ELWs, Water Worlds, etc., hop around them scanning and mapping them, then cash in. Actual exploration pays worse than that

So Frontier have basically an unanswerable question - what do they balance the activities around? If they balance them so that they all make about the same amount of money in a "cheap medium" (Asp, FAS, T-7, etc.) then for big-ship pilots, trading will be by far the best way to make serious money. Conversely, if they balance for Anaconda/Cutter/T-9 levels, trading will be useless for beginners - but exploration will make a ridiculous amount of cash early on.

Similarly if they balance activities so that the min-maxed fully-optimised incomes are the same, no-one except the very best will make more than a million per hour from laser mining. But if they balance them so that the earnings for someone just showing up and having a go without much clue are similar, the earnings for min-maxers will vary immensely from profession to profession.

Combined with that is that the amount of money you actually need to progress varies by several orders of magnitude. My average earning rate is about 500,000 credits per hour because I spend a lot of my in-game time doing things which don't earn money at all. But I don't fly big ships, and I don't fly medium ships that much, so I still have more money than I could possibly ever use. Conversely, my entire total assets wouldn't be sufficient to buy, A-rate and combat-fit two large ships. If that's the sort of game you want to play, you need to be earning tens of millions per hour at least to have the same sort of relative financial comfort that I have.

As I said, this is basically unfixable. Frontier seem to have balanced things around "smaller medium ships" and "average pilots" - which is probably a good choice for the majority of their players, but causes frustration for some veterans and players who prefer the really large ships.

 

[Old Duck]

Or when you go silent running, sacrifice your shields and build up 10 times more heat that you can't get rid off without heat sinks only to realize that a single shot of an emissive laser completely negates your advantage in silent running despite your high sacrifices.

Amen! Make SR great again!! Seriously, SR is one of my favorite tools. Thankfully I haven't encountered too many players (SR is useless against cheating NPCs) that have used emissive weapons against me, but this new night vision aimbot is a real PITA that also greatly negates my ability to run "cloaked".

 

[Morbad]

Yes there are people misusing the word balance in a wrong way, especially common in the never ending PvE vs PvP debate but the actual ship and module balance is what really is wrong.

There are many things I perceive as wrong with the game's balance. Ships and modules are just one aspect...surely one of the most readily apparent in a direct engagement, but a lot more than that has been neglected.

Amen! Make SR great again!! Seriously, SR is one of my favorite tools. Thankfully I haven't encountered too many players (SR is useless against cheating NPCs) that have used emissive weapons against me, but this new night vision aimbot is a real PITA that also greatly negates my ability to run "cloaked".

SR is probably more effective against NPCs than it is against CMDRs that have experience fighting stealthy opponents and was even before night vision. I'm sure not going to forget you were there if you happen to get 8km away, nor am I going to ignore mysterious unresolved contacts until they pass in front of my CMDR's window.

That said, I do agree that stealth was an interesting facet of gameplay that has been significantly undermined by dramatic reductions in the duration it could be maintained, the introduction of night vision, and shield effectiveness outpacing that of hull.