Game Balance And Yomi

To celebrate the release of Yomi on iPad, I'll tell you some stories about balancing Yomi. First I'll give you two myths about game balance, then tell you about tier lists and matchup charts, and then a bunch of specific balance problems we had to solve.

Game Balance Myth 1: If it's too well balanced, it's boring.

I understand where this one comes from. Game balance is really hard, so if you had a cast of characters (or RTS races, or card decks, or whatever) and some of them were too good vs other ones, what should you do? The easiest thing is to smooth out anything one that has that's too different. Make things more and more homogeneous until it's fair. Yeah that's one approach, but it makes things boring. The harder way is to try to preserve as much asymmetry as possible AND to make it fair. When we do things the hard way, the good way, it doesn't make things boring. Furthermore, balanced just means the matchup is fair. It doesn't say anything about the dynamics of how interesting it is. A balanced game could be boring or interesting.

Game Balance Myth 2: Sirlin only cares about balance.

From the outside, I can see why someone would think that because I work on games that require a lot of balance work. But the testers who work with me would laugh at this. I'm the one always pushing back on balance changes because other things are more important: good flavor (mechanics expressing the right personality), good dynamics, and elegance. I want fewer words, fewer elements, things to be as simple as we can get away with, and for characters to feel right. If you allow balance to rank higher than those things, you get a terrible feeling game. If you make only balance changes that respect all those constraints, it's hard work, but you can still have a balanced game.

Measuring Balance

At first, I think it's best to get tier lists from testers. That where they put all the characters in a few tiers (groups) to say which characters are all pretty much tied for strongest, which are tied for next strongest, etc. The goal isn't to eliminate tiers, because even you had a 100.00% perfectly magically balanced game, testers would still say there are tiers because of their imperfect perceptions, and that's fine. Tiers help you get a sense of what's going on with balance though.

A helpful format is:

God Tier (S rank). Any character here is brokenly good, above the maximum level that should be allowed, and obsoletes the other characters.
Top Tier (A rank). The group of strongest characters. Being here doesn't mean there's any problem.
Mid Tier (B rank). These characters are noticeably weaker than the top tier, but still very useable.
Bottom Tier (C rank). These characters are noticeably weaker than the mid tier. They are still useable.
Garbage Tier (F rank). Any character here is too weak to bother with. Something really went wrong and they need a boost to become a real part of the game again.

Players are going to disagree and argue, but there will also be some low-hanging fruit here. Even if everyone is arguing about whether CharacterX is high or mid, they might pretty much all agree that CharacterY is garbage or CharacterZ is God tier. The first thing to fix here is to nerf anything in God tier (since even a single thing there ruins the game). The next thing is to buff anything in garbage tier. After that, try to compress the tiers so that being a tier below only means you're barely worse, not like hugely worse.

Matchup Charts

The next level of zooming in on balance is a matchup chart. That's where you create a grid of every character vs every character and then give a rating to how difficult the matchup is. The notation is stuff like 6-4 or 7-3 which means if two experts played 10 games, we expect the expert using CharacterA to win 6 (and opponent using CharacterX wins 4), for example.

It's actually best not to use numerical data to determine these numbers. Yes, really. It's faster and more accurate to get to the bottom of things by relying on expert opinions, and then having those experts argue, and then play each other to sort out disagreements. Think of matchup chart numbers as a kind of shorthand for this:

10-0. Not possible to lose when you play how you should, which you can always do.
9-1. Horrifically bad matchup. Impossible to lose unless something very unlucky happens.
8-2. Really hard for the other player. Multiple "miracles" required each game for the disadvantaged player to win.
7-3. Very hard for the other player. Clear disadvantage for them, but they can still win.
6-4. Somewhat advantage for you. Pretty close overall.
5.5-4.5. Very close match, but you can slightly detect an advantage.
5-5. No advantage to either character.

I want to emphasize just how important it is to get expert opinions on this, rather than adding up numbers from matches. Experts can get a good sense of what's going on in a match much, much sooner than data will reflect. I mean like months or years sooner, even. Imagine two experts played a certain matchup 20 times and the more they played, the more unfair it got. In our example, there is a certain way of playing that the other character just can't deal with and both players are coming to realize that truth more and more. It's entirely possible that they (correctly!) declare it an 8-2 matchup even though their results are no where near that bad. Lots of their games were before they fully understood what's going on. And if we lump in the data from anyone other than experts, it's likely to be worse than ignoring it because they probably aren't playing the match well enough.

With 20 characters, that's 210 matchups (190 non-mirror matchups) so if every non-mirror matchup was played 20 times, that's 3,800 games. Wow is that a lot to even do a first pass with the numerical method. And you get extremely bad data if you do. Let's say a matchup is really 5-5 and you're lucky enough to have found two expert players of equal skill. The chance that result will be 10 games to 10 is just 18%. Finding catastrophically wrong results (the chance of a player winning 14 games or more, indicating a 7-3 MU or worse) is 12%. You're really better off just asking the experts, letting them argue, and letting them sort it out by playtesting, and that's what we do.

Here's Yomi's matchup chart as of today. Of course it slightly changes as players gain more and more understanding, but it's fairly stable:

To put it into perspective,

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A Discussion of Balance

Here's an episode of Extra Credits about "Perfect Imbalance" on Penny Arcade. While I appreciate that the topic of game balance is getting covered, I don't think the arguments hold up.

First it makes these two points, which I agree with:

1) The two sides in Chess are similar enough that we can call the game symmetric. ALSO, Chess requires a huge amount of memorization to play, and he wishes that you could play in a more adaptive way and have memorization be less important.

2) Starcraft requires a huge amount of APM click speed to play at a high level, and only players who are super great at that really get to innovate in the strategy space (also bad players playing against bad players can get away with more strats). He wishes that thinking about new strategies had more relative importance to the common player than high APM does.

I have posted and spoken many times about those exact two issues, so I agree. But there is then some strange leap lof logic happens. The problem of how "solved" parts of those games can feel at times is claimed to be BECAUSE they are well-balanced. The problems involved are actually 0% because the games are well-balanced. Well-balanceness is a wonderful property and should not be blamed for these problems.

Chess

Chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer also agreed that Chess had become too rigid and that memorization played too large of a role. He wanted Chess to be a game that reward moment-to-moment decisions more, strokes of genius more, adaptability more, even general grasp of fundamentals more, and memorization less. To achieve this, he created Chess960. The starting position of the pieces are randomized (according to a few rules) and then mirrored on the other side, so the game is still symmetric. He strived to keep the "perfect balance" of Chess while addressing the problem. I think it's a great idea.

The same problem that bothered Fischer and Extra Credits bothered me too. In addition that problem, the problem of too many draws bothered me, as did the slippery slope nature of the game causes it to end with conceding which is kind of anti-climactic. And in addition to that, I think asymmetric games are just more interesting than symmetric ones. So to address all of those issues, I developed Chess 2.

Chess 2 has 6 different armies (for asymmetry, creates lots of matchups) and a "midline rule" that

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The Anti-Progress Attitude

Maybe read Archon Shiva's summary of this post first:

The way I read I, the original article had nothing against this release of Third Strike - he agreed with all design decisions that went into it, and I'm pretty sure David's not actually opposed to unlockable artwork. What he did attack was the attitude of some players that tweaking an unbalanced game into a balanced one was a net loss. At no point was it hinted that the original balance shouldn't be part of the release, or even that a rebalanced mode should have been in: he just said he feels the proper reaction is "too bad they didn't have time/budget to add it, but that's life!", rather than "thank god we didn't get a rebalanced mode selectable at the title screen, that would have ruined everything!"

This review of SF3:3rd Strike Online at 1up.com should be considered shameful. It casually embraces an attitude that's damaging to the quality of games we get to play. What's so wrong with what's said there? This (emphasis added):

Do the developers make adjustments to characters like Chun-Li and Yun -- who are leaps and bounds more powerful than the rest of the cast -- rebalancing them as to give characters like Q, Sean, and Hugo a fighting chance? Some argue this would allow newer players to ease into the game and even provide a fresh take on the series, possibly revitalizing the competitive scene.

At the same time, if they make changes to the game, even the slightest rebalance, players such as myself who have literally been playing the game for 10 years now, might feel it's an inferior port and not play it at all -- opting to continue to fight it out at the arcades or even on the PlayStation 2.

It's great that Capcom made such an effort to translate the game to a modern console. It's great they used the only reasonable kind of networking for a fighting game (GGPO). Well, strike that. It would be shameful and embarrassing for any fighting game to not use it, so it's more of a "phew, they did an obvious thing right there." It's great they did an obvious thing right with the way the button configuration screen works. There's really a whole lot of positive stuff to say here, and I agree with those saying those positive things. BUT...

There's a problem: 3s is one of the worst balanced fighting games around. I mean that literally. It's hard to even come up with worse balanced fighting game than it, yet if you throw a stick at a pile of fighting games, you'll hit a better balanced game. James Chen had this to say in 2008 about the Evolution tournament results:

Street Fighter III: Third Strike - This year [2008], in the Top 8, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, and Yun. In 2007, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2006, we had Yun, Yun, Yun, Yun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2005, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Yun, and Yun. I don't think there's anything left to say about this game.

Yeah it's pretty appalling. It's

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Football Helmet Clown Shoes Guy

I was doing some consulting on a small game that I can't really talk about, but there's a lot of customization in the game. I was discussing with a friend (the mysterious Mr. G. Phantome) how we were going to balance this thing. He imagined a future player who works really hard to make his guy into a samurai. He has the samurai helmet and armor pieces, and a decent plasma sword and everything. And then he meets...

Football Helmet Clown Shoes Robot. The terror of the metagame, this guy destroys the samurai guy. Why? Because even though the samurai looks cool, he basically sucks. The mishmash, discordant eyesore of Football Helmet Clown Shoes guy is just way more powerful. We imagined that the forums are full of outraged players, complaining about this, but they don't really grasp the game system. They keep calling for the football helmet to be nerfed, but they don't understand that the clown shoes are what really powers the build, in fact, it's really just the left shoe.

A new player starts playing and asks what pieces he should be looking for. The experienced players tell him "Dude, you want Football Helmet and Clown Shoes, for sure." The sad new guy asks if he has any other choice. "Caveman is barely viable," says the expert. "Flower hands can win too, but loses to everything else so good luck with that."

The point of all this is just that a customizeable system can have aesthetics at odds with balance or power. You have to look out that for the problem that actual experience the player will have with the game is encountering absurdly bad-looking characters. Imagine a fighting game, for example, where one guy is wearing some ugly safari outfit and the other has a huge hat that covers half his character and some enormous robe that covers the rest, so you can hardly tell who anyone even is. Yeah it's fun to customize, but some careful art direction is in order.

Magic: the Gathering

Later, for reasons unrelated to the above, I was scrolling through some images of Magic: the Gathering cards. By chance, I happend to come across the card Donate. I asked Mr. G. Phantome if he knew about how Donate (a seemingly terrible card that gives the opponent one of your cards) was actually part of one of the most powerful and dominant decks ever. He said he was not aware. So then I showed him Illusions of Grandeur, the other part of the combo. I told him to just LOOK at the cards, not even really read what they do, but

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World of Warcraft Arena Balance and Sirlin

Here's an amusing post on gameriotby Vir that mentions me. The comments are entertaining too. It's about the balance in World of Warcraft arenas, and making the game into an e-sport.

For the record, I'm available but I don't think Blizzard will call. ;) For one, they might say that fighting game balance doesn't apply to their game, and that I don't know their game. Shrug. The same concepts seem to apply to Puzzle Fighter, Street Fighter, Kongai, Yomi card game, and the other projects I can't tell you about. Balance is balance and the same issues show over and over.

And second, I don't think my article two years ago won me any points there. Even though much of what I complained about has indeed been acknowledged and addressed, I don't think my tone went over well.

Anyway, thanks Vir.

--Sirlin