Help me Understand "Balance"

[Brrokk]

Which reads a lot like equality of outcomes.

Which is complete and total bovine excrement. Simply because we are not all created EQUAL.

It's actually the opposite. If you want equal outcomes in any area, the last thing you can afford to do is give people equal opportunities.

 

[Werewolf13]

No. I clearly said equal opportunity to win. One winner. Not rigged. Unequal outcomes.

To Attack Chimp and Brrokk: I stand corrected.

 

[babelfisch]

Well technically, Horizons owners have a huge advantage over non-Horizon owners (and I encounter a surprising number of non-Horizon owners in the game)....

They probably don't care about balance.

I'll get my coat.

 

[V'larr]

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)

It's rather simple really.

Balance is what makes sports fun to watch. The outcome is determined by the players and how they use the tools made available to them. Not by what tools they got because they got one sponsor to overtweak their machine and bend the rules and another player didn't.

It's a fundamental flaw of most video gaming to date. I attribute a significant portion of it to Blizzard's success inspite of their extremely lax attitude towards balance in general and the seemingly endless flow of gaming companies willing to try and emulate that.

It's been a problem in just about any multiplayer game there is save for (obviously sports games, and) FPS shooters, where players tend to have equal access to the tools available which in turn aren't designed to be clearly inferior or superior to each other.

It's why I have lost interest in anything made by Wargaming or Blizzard. HotS and World of Tanks hold no interest to me, because I know the outcome isn't determined by the players, beyond the basics of movement and aiming and shooting. It's much more determined by RNG, "meta flavor of the month", power creep imbalances made to sell heroes/tanks, and gold ammo & other such gimmicks.

It's the underlying reason I've lost interest in other games as well: Mechwarrior Online? Ruined by The Quirkening (TM) and artillery/air strike spamming. Popular card games like Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering, Shadowverse, and so on? Ruined by obvious glaring imbalances in card design and thereby pay-to-win netdecking that simply shifts around on each new release without addressing the basic problem.

Some of it is due to a desire to grant players the "power fantasy", whereupon as they progress they can feel themselves growing more powerful, and certainly that's unavoidable in a game like Elite - but it can actually still be balanced properly if done in a thought-out, formulaic manner that strives to achieve parity and interesting alternatives to explore as opposed to straight up power inflation

Going on a slight tangent here, it's a problem shared by Warframe, whose developer has openly admitted to kicking that can down the road on occasion; their major mistake has been emulating the Mass Effect 1 modding system [which was infamously imbalanced] and then doing nothing about that since, while just adding more and more mods over time. It's created a domino effect of Warframe, weapon, damage type, and enemy balance problems that has resulted in continually negatively received boss encounters that revolve around long periods of full immunity, while any other kind of fight becomes a breezy horde killer in the vein of Dynasty Warriors.

 

[Kaocraft]

"Balance" is when every element in the game has a valid reason for being there, such that if you were to remove a given element from the game it would play substantially differently.

It's not an all or nothing state like being pregnant; it's a continuum along many dimensions.

If the game has a lot of aspects which could be individually removed without it making a big difference, that's usually a sign that the game is unbalanced. It doesn't mean the elements in question are causing the imbalance; there could be other factors which cause this; but the long and the short of it is the more superfluous or obsolete items, mechanics, systems, weapons, characters, ships, currencies, etc; that you have in the game, the more unbalanced the game is.

 

[Stealthie]

I define "balance" as everyone having access to the same assets and possible strategies. ED is balanced.

"Balance" is when every element in the game has a valid reason for being there, such that if you were to remove a given element from the game it would play substantially differently.

Y'see, these two opinions are a perfect example of the problem...

A game can be "balanced" according to the first description simply by providing everybody access to whatever happens to be the "best" thing.
If there are 40 ships in the game and 39 of them are utter garbage, as long as everybody can buy the 40th ship - which is superb at everything - then the game is "balanced" right?

Well, possibly - depending on your definition of "balance" - but the game is going to be incredibly limited if there's no possible reason to use 39 ships and so everybody is flying the same ship.

Which is where the 2nd, more thoughtful, definition of balance comes in.
Proper "balance" is only created when pretty-much everything has an up-side and a down-side and there's no obvious "best" way to do anything.