I've seen this video, and many others like it, and there are three examples I'd like to highlight (given I had a lot of playtime at medium-low levels of them): StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and...
I've seen this video, and many others like it, and there are three examples I'd like to highlight (given I had a lot of playtime at medium-low levels of them): StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends.
League of Legends and World of Warcraft tended towards this endless fiddling of nerfs and buffs, always trying to make things perfectly 'fair and balanced (tm).' They never succeeded, and it made things exponentially harder to learn as things were ever shifting.
To contrast, StarCraft Broodwar was, by and large, left alone. The metagame for StarCraft is still shifting to this day, despite not having any gameplay-tuning since 1999, other than bugfixes and closing of exploits.
Completely uncounterable things should be fixed. But the endless fiddling to try to make everything counterable and fair is (as the video said), completely missing the whole point of making a fun game to play.
If at all possible, a thing recieving a nerf to balance gameplay should be given a buff in some other way as well, to compensate and make the nerf feel less crappy.
I can't speak for WoW, but League's goal with balancing is not to try and reach "perfect balance" and the balancing team has never claimed such. Riots core philosophy is to keep the game...
I can't speak for WoW, but League's goal with balancing is not to try and reach "perfect balance" and the balancing team has never claimed such. Riots core philosophy is to keep the game entertaining and fresh so players keep coming back and trying new characters and builds. They intentionally push certain champions, items, and objectives and nerf others to stop things from stagnating.
Now you may not agree with their design philosophy, but saying it's a failed design is just like, your opinion man.
Uhh...it's not exactly a secret that BW balance is HEAVILY influenced by map design, which last I checked they still add/remove maps from competitive viability (macro is too strong right now? I...
To contrast, StarCraft Broodwar was, by and large, left alone. The metagame for StarCraft is still shifting to this day, despite not having any gameplay-tuning since 1999, other than bugfixes and closing of exploits.
Uhh...it's not exactly a secret that BW balance is HEAVILY influenced by map design, which last I checked they still add/remove maps from competitive viability (macro is too strong right now? I get all this 3rd hand).
Point being you're looking at a very rare case through a very rose colored tint. Brood War also didn't launch in the modern environment where almost everyone knows how to look for strong strategies, and more importantly, will share that information globally immediately. It's a totally different world, and if BW dropped today some of its blemishes would've been discover VERY quickly (granted when "can you micro a unit up this hill" is a skill check, you're already in odd territory).
This discussion reminded me of a very old article looking at Super Smash Bros Melee's power rankings through time, since that game also didn't get any balance updates and the character tiers...
Melee is a particularly interesting case, because I think it's one of the best examples for making the argument that "balance" or power rankings is dictated less by game code and more by players....
Melee is a particularly interesting case, because I think it's one of the best examples for making the argument that "balance" or power rankings is dictated less by game code and more by players. Jigglypuff's rise in the rankings can be largely attributed to HungryBox's dominance as a player, and more recently Yoshi is rising now that aMSa finally won a supermajor with the character. A lot of discussion about the topic has shifted away from objective definitive character rankings and more towards tournament viability. Does a character have the tools needed for a good player to take them to victory?
It's weird because anyone who cares kinda already knows/knew this. The problem was Smash being new to the FGC spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel. To this day there's a lot of odd shit in...
It's weird because anyone who cares kinda already knows/knew this.
The problem was
Smash being new to the FGC spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel. To this day there's a lot of odd shit in how smash talks about tier lists.
The FGC itself has moved away from more logical matchup charts because "yeah the worst matchup in the game is 7-3 and only at the highest level, so the spread is so narrow that you should probably just pick who you enjoy, even if you plan to go to tournaments" doesn't get as many clicks as "THIS CHARACTER IS BROKEN SSS+ tier".
It's odd because there's this middle ground of players like myself who discovered everything after forums became popular and there was a TON of documentation and reasoning but before the explosion of youtube click bait, and it just feels like everyone gets lied to and then has to figure out for themselves that "yeah its' really just about viability, and holy shit turns out most characters are viable enough".
It also lets players who really don't want to learn use excuses. "i lost because I'm bad at something and need to get better" is just not the attitude. Lots of DSP(notorious fighting game player) style "everyone else is cheating or using broken characters" nonsense.
Yep. Melee is a very interesting case because again it's riiiiight before the explosion of information that the modern age is, but also hides a TON of intentional mechanics, and then on top of...
Yep. Melee is a very interesting case because again it's riiiiight before the explosion of information that the modern age is, but also hides a TON of intentional mechanics, and then on top of that has even more unintentional ones, which leads to a lot to be messed with. It also helped that it was basically the second game in its genre, and was basically what really kicked off the whole thing.
Even then the legal stage list has however changed over its lifetime, and I believe I recall hearing that ice climbers infinite was banned recently? And they were discussing if Jigglypufff should be hit.
I think the video is just flat out wrong and associating this with loss aversion downplays what's actually a VERY difficult needle to thread in competitive environments. I do believe that...
I think the video is just flat out wrong and associating this with loss aversion downplays what's actually a VERY difficult needle to thread in competitive environments.
I do believe that generally buffing the low tiers is better than nerfing the high tiers, but that depends on a TON of external factors. Hell the tier lists you'll often see these days are almost always overblown junk that doesn't show the most important factor, the actual distance between a top tier and bottom.
Everyone drops SSS+w/fries as their top tiers, but I doubt many have even played a game with something that overwhelming. Sure MvC2 has some absurdly good characters at the top of the list, with some outright awful ones at the bottom, but there's enough characters at the top to have more viable cast members than many competitors. There's plenty of room for strategy and expression (...iron man/war machine being another discussion).
To get to the heart of why I think he's wrong, it's about content.
You make a game with 20 characters (fighting game, fps, rpg, whatever). Each one cost time and money to design and model. Then your game launches and 19 of the 20 are utter trash and only 1 can be played in any serious setting.
This CAN actually turn out playable/ok, but obviously, there's a whole pile of assets and effort just sitting there rotting on the vine. You want to get those other 19 playable, not just because you put in time, but almost certainly because it'll add more variety and more customers. Many people attach to a certain character/playstyle, and feel punished for it when it turns out it just sucks.
Now should you buff the bottom or nerf the top depends on a whole slew of factors on how fun the current gameplay actually is. If the top 1 works because their whole game boils down to hitting one button faster than your opponent, then yeah you're going to need to nerf that. You can buff everyone else up to that level, but you're probably obsoleting entire systems that you built the game around (not that you can't do that and do well, but this is the extreme) and more importantly, it's probably not any fun.
Conversely, if they're the only character who has a real set of options, while everyone else has only one working button, then yeah, you should buff.
The reality for most games lies more in the middle, but many will skew hard to one side depending on the problem. Truth is these days you don't see the catastrophic fuckups you used to see in competitive games where patches were just new releases, so often yeah, the problem is that some of the cast do things waaaaaay better than others, so you should buff.
Personally MK1 is a pretty easy example of "please buff more", but i'll spare the speech on that. Suffice it to say that just like MK11 it feels like some cast members are playing a completely different game.
On the other hand, Riot should probably (been years since i've played) do both. It's not really a secret that they have a meta in mind that they're shooting for, and if you fall outside of that they'll cut your legs off. Their champion design has a lot of overlap, so it can be hard to find a reason to pick A or B character if C just does everything they do better.
It's hard for me to think of an obvious "this must be nerfed" example from modern games. There are characters who needed to be nerfed, but it's not like ST akuma/Ivan Ooze nonsense that just literally obsoleted 90% of the cast. Dota has had it's rough patches but hasn't had a tremendous balance issue in some time (Naga being probably the best argument for and against needing to nerf things, but dota is special anyways).
And I say all this without even getting into the more awkward problems of characters or strategies that are exceedingly good against beginners but weak vs any decent. These are probably the most commonly nerfed thing these days, because at that point the goal is to nerf the strategy that's breaking the beginners in half, while hopefully pivoting the character/whatever to have something that's more viable at the top levels (see, just about every single grappler in a fighting game. Shoutouts to OG BB Iron Tager for crushing beginners and being one of the most recent 0-10 matchups I can think of).
So in short, yeah. It's not some mystical "reptile brain doesn't like losing things" nonsense. It's a lot more complicated than that.
I've not watched the video, but this brings to mind an interesting moment Warframe had back in the beta days. They originally intended the game to just be a third person shooter with some cool...
I've not watched the video, but this brings to mind an interesting moment Warframe had back in the beta days.
They originally intended the game to just be a third person shooter with some cool character powers but there was a bug/exploit where you could crouch and sprint at the same time to power slide and do all kinds of dumb movement tricks.
Instead of patching it out, they made it a feature because people liked it so much and rebalanced a lot of the game around the movement stuff later.
Wish more games did this to be honest, noone likes a nerf if its a thing they like to use.
Its honestly a sign of good design in my eyes. Dota is arguably one of the all time best at this. Denying, Backdooring, Creep skipping, Creep pulling, and arguably the entire concept of jungling...
Its honestly a sign of good design in my eyes. Dota is arguably one of the all time best at this. Denying, Backdooring, Creep skipping, Creep pulling, and arguably the entire concept of jungling as people know it were all things that started as possible exploits that I think a less talented developer/team(?) would've just axed from the game. Instead they've all been adopted and tweaked over many years to keep the game interesting.
Interesting you say this, since League of Legends has none of them Dota is boss, for sure. I've said for years, "when everyone is overpowered, no one is overpowered"
Denying, Backdooring, Creep skipping, Creep pulling, and arguably the entire concept of jungling as people know it were all things [...] a less talented developer/team(?) would've just axed from the game.
Interesting you say this, since League of Legends has none of them
Dota is boss, for sure. I've said for years, "when everyone is overpowered, no one is overpowered"
League literally has all of those except denying? Am I missing something? Backdooring isn't common, but its not exactly rare, creep skipping is viable on several champions like Singed, creep...
since League of Legends has none of them
League literally has all of those except denying? Am I missing something?
Backdooring isn't common, but its not exactly rare, creep skipping is viable on several champions like Singed, creep pulling happens all the time to keep waves from crashing on the tower, and jungling... is jungling. Its in every single game
Hell, DotA removed the item that made jungling a bespoke role at the beginning - and it sounds like a net positive for that particular game. Some mechanics just get too fiddly to tweak and keep fun.
Hell, DotA removed the item that made jungling a bespoke role at the beginning - and it sounds like a net positive for that particular game. Some mechanics just get too fiddly to tweak and keep fun.
Yeah that wasn’t actually a shot at league, although I do think that they had similar moments and just killed whatever new star was found rather than embrace it. They did knowingly try to pivot...
Yeah that wasn’t actually a shot at league, although I do think that they had similar moments and just killed whatever new star was found rather than embrace it.
They did knowingly try to pivot the focus of the game, which is fine.
I think the better idea to focus on here - which is danced around in the video but not quite summarized as such - might be overcentralization, no? It's OK for the meta to have inherently...
I think the better idea to focus on here - which is danced around in the video but not quite summarized as such - might be overcentralization, no? It's OK for the meta to have inherently overpowered and underpowered things, because we don't want to just play Rock Paper Scissors or a coin flip. But those things should create options, not restrict novel gameplay. Magic the Gathering is a great place to look at it; a certain card won't necessarily be drawn, and you can't have most cards more than 4 times in a deck, or once in Commander/Brawl/etc. So a particular card won't always spell a win for someone - but obviously, if the top 16 in a tournament is all the same deck with a 60%+ win rate, or all decks have a particular card regardless of the archetype, then it needs some key card banned. Less obviously, if the winrate of a deck hovers around 55% only because every other successful deck is heavily modifying their deck's other 56 cards specifically around the single most dominant deck in the meta, that also tends to be a toxic metagame - even if that deck isn't itself the highest win rate deck. Kinda like in 2004, where an Astral Slide deck won because the wild abundance of the ultimately 2nd place Affinity deck led to a meta where running a specifically targeted Anti-Affinity deck would do well.
I say this because, funny enough, Core-A mentions Melee's Wobbling being accepted as OK - that ended up banned like two years later, and Ice Climbers didn't need a nerf. But likewise, it made ICs players find more options and ultimately made them more fun to watch. And it turned out the good ones do just fine without it. Sometimes toxic mechanics just need to get excised.
I do love Core-A's videos, though. Amazing resources for starters and I adore the editing.
A lot of this topic has been about competitive games, but one of the most pertinent examples that comes to my mind is from Dragalia Lost. For those unfamiliar, it was a Nintendo/Cygames mobile...
A lot of this topic has been about competitive games, but one of the most pertinent examples that comes to my mind is from Dragalia Lost. For those unfamiliar, it was a Nintendo/Cygames mobile gacha that was co-op only and very player friendly. It emphasized lateral progression, i.e. you needed multiple teams of multiple characters, each with their own gearset. The different teams corresponded to different elements, the right element gave a buff, the wrong element gave a debuff, and the others neutral. You weren't strictly restricted to taking the characters of correct element, but virtually were due to the differences in effectiveness. It also encouraged using characters with different types of weapons within a team since each gave a party buff but they didn't stack.
Somewhat early in the game's lifespan, they were working on difficult boss content. And these were legitimately no joke, you needed a team of well geared folks with weapon types that complemented each other and they needed knowledge of the fight. The boss would enrage at 10min, but a solid run would take about 5min. Defeating the bosses would grant drops for the current best weapons, and given lateral progression, you'd be grinding out the boss to fill out your team. Basically mini MMO raid bosses.
Enter Gala Cleo. She broke the meta with her ability to buff party damage substantially on top of her strong kit. These buffs stacked with multiples of these characters in play (an unusual party comp). Folks found a cheese strat for the most current boss where the whole party was Gala Cleo and they could clear the boss in 40sec, trivializing the encounter and speeding up the gear grind.
This was surely unintentional and came with consequences. A significant number of lobby hosts would exclusively run this strat, which made matchmaking rather frustrating for folks without her or wanting to properly do the fight. Further, she was so powerful, she was being used in fights where she wasn't the preferred element since she still out damaged many characters even after the element buff.
Folks called for a nerf, which seemed appropriate in this case, even if the game wasn't competitive and players with her weren't crushing players without. However, this was a gacha, folks paid money to gamble on pulling her with the goal of doing this strat. Nerfing her would not go over well with that crowd, and the whales are the ones keeping your gacha afloat. So what did they do?
Most immediately was quick and severe power creep. This ended up meaning that characters before her were left behind -- no matter the element. This didn't eliminate the cheese strat or take care of the lobby issue though. Maybe 6 months later they did introduce upgraded skill trees for under-performing characters, some better than others, but they were quite the substantial boost.
I'm not sure what lesson to take away from this at the end of the day. Lobbies for that boss never improved and we were left with the power creep. Power creep would've happened naturally with the addition of new content, but she accelerated it quite a bit. I think the gacha and paid-character aspect exasperated an issue that would've most simply been resolved with a nerf, and the nerf could have simply been "her buff doesn't stack/significant diminishing returns" or "a party can only have 1 of each character," but I also didn't think the cheese strat was fun. I did pull the character with the generous free pulls, but I didn't opt for the strat and stopped doing the hard bosses until the situation levelled out months later.
Looks like you may have been watching the new Idyll video, which is also a recommendation on a similar topic, Power Creep. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SUF5Yx5H9iA Honestly love this guy. I'm an...
Looks like you may have been watching the new Idyll video, which is also a recommendation on a similar topic, Power Creep.
Honestly love this guy. I'm an MMO lover who hasn't had a home in one for a decade now and it's fun to listen to Idyll talk about the genre, bonus is that he cracks me up.
I initially watched the Idyll video but last time I posted a video of him people got angry due to the comedic nature of the content. So I posted this one instead, which is just as good if not better.
I initially watched the Idyll video but last time I posted a video of him people got angry due to the comedic nature of the content. So I posted this one instead, which is just as good if not better.
I wouldn't even say they were necessarily wrong, I just don't see the point in engaging with content that you detest. That happens a lot with videos. Someone that dislike videos posts will come in...
I wouldn't even say they were necessarily wrong, I just don't see the point in engaging with content that you detest. That happens a lot with videos. Someone that dislike videos posts will come in and essentially complain that the video is a video. Well, that's fine I guess, but it would probably be best to filter out the kind of content that annoys you.
Next time I will probably put a "satire" tag, maybe even a comment saying "this is really silly and juvenile, please avoid if you dislike that kind of comedy".
I think it's a thing that needs to be cultivated. I often have a negative attitude and want to comment on things (not just on Tildes), that "such and such is dumb and lame." But I do my best to...
I think it's a thing that needs to be cultivated. I often have a negative attitude and want to comment on things (not just on Tildes), that "such and such is dumb and lame." But I do my best to stop myself, because I don't want to be that guy and I don't want to put that out into the world.
Speaking for myself, I often feel an impulse to comment on things and often the easiest way to satisfy that would be to be snippy about stuff; I wouldn't be surprised if other people have similar impulses.
At any rate, I have a friend who also doesn't like this style of humor. I think he's wrong, but I just don't send him stuff like this, even if it has a salient point. Also, I still need to watch this video you've posted, I haven't had a chance yet.
But I do currently have Idylls Patron song stuck in my head.
Buffing over nerfing has been the main direction of the fighting game I played the most (Tekken 7, kinda tekken 8) and it has created really unfun patterns of play with every patch shuffling...
Buffing over nerfing has been the main direction of the fighting game I played the most (Tekken 7, kinda tekken 8) and it has created really unfun patterns of play with every patch shuffling around top tiers while consistently removing the things that make the game interesting - their weaknesses and specialist tools. It often feels like the developers don't know what to do so they just look at a character, see what gap they have in their toolset, and buff the hell out of it with no regard for consequences.
The more games I play the more I think just letting the meta develop is the right thing to do. SF6 is doing something similar by only having 1 major balance patch a year, and it seems to be going ok. "balance" shouldn't be a goal in itself, the game has to be fun too
I used to think the best philosophy was to buff everything/everyone so that eveything/everyone is OP, so you get something like Street Fighter 2 Rainbow like he talking about in the video....
I used to think the best philosophy was to buff everything/everyone so that eveything/everyone is OP, so you get something like Street Fighter 2 Rainbow like he talking about in the video. However, the problem is unless the characters all do the exact same thing (street fighter 1 in his example), there will always be a character or characters that stand out because of something about their design that is different than the others. Even in Street Fighter 2 rainbow, there was still probably a character or two that stood above the rest.
There always has to be a best and worst character, depending on the type of game and what the gameplay entails. Chess, for example, doesn't need to buff or nerf either side, because each player gets the same pieces to play with. The difference comes in how you position your pieces and your plans for the pieces. It's not about the pieces themselves, it's about the strategy of using them.
So since there has to be a best and worst character inherently, unless you plan on making every character do the same thing and act the same way (uninteresting to players), the only other option is to change the meta every once in awhile. Let the meta characters be meta, then when people start getting tired/bored of it, nerf them and buff others if necessary to let new characters be meta.
I think thats the path you see a lot of game devs taking -- or trying to take -- when they make buffs and nerfs, but it's a hard balance to try to strike. Sometimes buffing or nerfing one thing, unintentionally really buffs or really nerfs some other unrelated thing. Its not uncommon to see a big patch come out with buffs and/or nerfs, then people figure out how figuratively broken (or even sometimes literally) the changes made things, and an updated patch comes as fast as a week after the big patch.
So in summary, it's not as easy as choosing to buff vs nerf. It's definitely contextual and depends on what the buffs/nerfs do unintentionally to other characters or mechanics in the game.
I've seen this video, and many others like it, and there are three examples I'd like to highlight (given I had a lot of playtime at medium-low levels of them): StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends.
League of Legends and World of Warcraft tended towards this endless fiddling of nerfs and buffs, always trying to make things perfectly 'fair and balanced (tm).' They never succeeded, and it made things exponentially harder to learn as things were ever shifting.
To contrast, StarCraft Broodwar was, by and large, left alone. The metagame for StarCraft is still shifting to this day, despite not having any gameplay-tuning since 1999, other than bugfixes and closing of exploits.
Completely uncounterable things should be fixed. But the endless fiddling to try to make everything counterable and fair is (as the video said), completely missing the whole point of making a fun game to play.
If at all possible, a thing recieving a nerf to balance gameplay should be given a buff in some other way as well, to compensate and make the nerf feel less crappy.
I can't speak for WoW, but League's goal with balancing is not to try and reach "perfect balance" and the balancing team has never claimed such. Riots core philosophy is to keep the game entertaining and fresh so players keep coming back and trying new characters and builds. They intentionally push certain champions, items, and objectives and nerf others to stop things from stagnating.
Now you may not agree with their design philosophy, but saying it's a failed design is just like, your opinion man.
Uhh...it's not exactly a secret that BW balance is HEAVILY influenced by map design, which last I checked they still add/remove maps from competitive viability (macro is too strong right now? I get all this 3rd hand).
Point being you're looking at a very rare case through a very rose colored tint. Brood War also didn't launch in the modern environment where almost everyone knows how to look for strong strategies, and more importantly, will share that information globally immediately. It's a totally different world, and if BW dropped today some of its blemishes would've been discover VERY quickly (granted when "can you micro a unit up this hill" is a skill check, you're already in odd territory).
This discussion reminded me of a very old article looking at Super Smash Bros Melee's power rankings through time, since that game also didn't get any balance updates and the character tiers shifted: https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/unbalanced_design_of_super_smash_brothers/
Melee is a particularly interesting case, because I think it's one of the best examples for making the argument that "balance" or power rankings is dictated less by game code and more by players. Jigglypuff's rise in the rankings can be largely attributed to HungryBox's dominance as a player, and more recently Yoshi is rising now that aMSa finally won a supermajor with the character. A lot of discussion about the topic has shifted away from objective definitive character rankings and more towards tournament viability. Does a character have the tools needed for a good player to take them to victory?
It's weird because anyone who cares kinda already knows/knew this.
The problem was
It's odd because there's this middle ground of players like myself who discovered everything after forums became popular and there was a TON of documentation and reasoning but before the explosion of youtube click bait, and it just feels like everyone gets lied to and then has to figure out for themselves that "yeah its' really just about viability, and holy shit turns out most characters are viable enough".
It also lets players who really don't want to learn use excuses. "i lost because I'm bad at something and need to get better" is just not the attitude. Lots of DSP(notorious fighting game player) style "everyone else is cheating or using broken characters" nonsense.
Yep. Melee is a very interesting case because again it's riiiiight before the explosion of information that the modern age is, but also hides a TON of intentional mechanics, and then on top of that has even more unintentional ones, which leads to a lot to be messed with. It also helped that it was basically the second game in its genre, and was basically what really kicked off the whole thing.
Even then the legal stage list has however changed over its lifetime, and I believe I recall hearing that ice climbers infinite was banned recently? And they were discussing if Jigglypufff should be hit.
I think the video is just flat out wrong and associating this with loss aversion downplays what's actually a VERY difficult needle to thread in competitive environments.
I do believe that generally buffing the low tiers is better than nerfing the high tiers, but that depends on a TON of external factors. Hell the tier lists you'll often see these days are almost always overblown junk that doesn't show the most important factor, the actual distance between a top tier and bottom.
Everyone drops SSS+w/fries as their top tiers, but I doubt many have even played a game with something that overwhelming. Sure MvC2 has some absurdly good characters at the top of the list, with some outright awful ones at the bottom, but there's enough characters at the top to have more viable cast members than many competitors. There's plenty of room for strategy and expression (...iron man/war machine being another discussion).
To get to the heart of why I think he's wrong, it's about content.
You make a game with 20 characters (fighting game, fps, rpg, whatever). Each one cost time and money to design and model. Then your game launches and 19 of the 20 are utter trash and only 1 can be played in any serious setting.
This CAN actually turn out playable/ok, but obviously, there's a whole pile of assets and effort just sitting there rotting on the vine. You want to get those other 19 playable, not just because you put in time, but almost certainly because it'll add more variety and more customers. Many people attach to a certain character/playstyle, and feel punished for it when it turns out it just sucks.
Now should you buff the bottom or nerf the top depends on a whole slew of factors on how fun the current gameplay actually is. If the top 1 works because their whole game boils down to hitting one button faster than your opponent, then yeah you're going to need to nerf that. You can buff everyone else up to that level, but you're probably obsoleting entire systems that you built the game around (not that you can't do that and do well, but this is the extreme) and more importantly, it's probably not any fun.
Conversely, if they're the only character who has a real set of options, while everyone else has only one working button, then yeah, you should buff.
The reality for most games lies more in the middle, but many will skew hard to one side depending on the problem. Truth is these days you don't see the catastrophic fuckups you used to see in competitive games where patches were just new releases, so often yeah, the problem is that some of the cast do things waaaaaay better than others, so you should buff.
Personally MK1 is a pretty easy example of "please buff more", but i'll spare the speech on that. Suffice it to say that just like MK11 it feels like some cast members are playing a completely different game.
On the other hand, Riot should probably (been years since i've played) do both. It's not really a secret that they have a meta in mind that they're shooting for, and if you fall outside of that they'll cut your legs off. Their champion design has a lot of overlap, so it can be hard to find a reason to pick A or B character if C just does everything they do better.
It's hard for me to think of an obvious "this must be nerfed" example from modern games. There are characters who needed to be nerfed, but it's not like ST akuma/Ivan Ooze nonsense that just literally obsoleted 90% of the cast. Dota has had it's rough patches but hasn't had a tremendous balance issue in some time (Naga being probably the best argument for and against needing to nerf things, but dota is special anyways).
And I say all this without even getting into the more awkward problems of characters or strategies that are exceedingly good against beginners but weak vs any decent. These are probably the most commonly nerfed thing these days, because at that point the goal is to nerf the strategy that's breaking the beginners in half, while hopefully pivoting the character/whatever to have something that's more viable at the top levels (see, just about every single grappler in a fighting game. Shoutouts to OG BB Iron Tager for crushing beginners and being one of the most recent 0-10 matchups I can think of).
So in short, yeah. It's not some mystical "reptile brain doesn't like losing things" nonsense. It's a lot more complicated than that.
I've not watched the video, but this brings to mind an interesting moment Warframe had back in the beta days.
They originally intended the game to just be a third person shooter with some cool character powers but there was a bug/exploit where you could crouch and sprint at the same time to power slide and do all kinds of dumb movement tricks.
Instead of patching it out, they made it a feature because people liked it so much and rebalanced a lot of the game around the movement stuff later.
Wish more games did this to be honest, noone likes a nerf if its a thing they like to use.
Its honestly a sign of good design in my eyes. Dota is arguably one of the all time best at this. Denying, Backdooring, Creep skipping, Creep pulling, and arguably the entire concept of jungling as people know it were all things that started as possible exploits that I think a less talented developer/team(?) would've just axed from the game. Instead they've all been adopted and tweaked over many years to keep the game interesting.
Interesting you say this, since League of Legends has none of them
Dota is boss, for sure. I've said for years, "when everyone is overpowered, no one is overpowered"
League literally has all of those except denying? Am I missing something?
Backdooring isn't common, but its not exactly rare, creep skipping is viable on several champions like Singed, creep pulling happens all the time to keep waves from crashing on the tower, and jungling... is jungling. Its in every single game
I mean, they're both decendents of the Warcraft 3 custom map after all.
Even then, league used to have denying with the original skills that Gangplank was released with, and that stuck for a few years if memory serves
I've played League of Legends maybe a handful of times over ten years ago and even I know that League has jungling.
Hell, DotA removed the item that made jungling a bespoke role at the beginning - and it sounds like a net positive for that particular game. Some mechanics just get too fiddly to tweak and keep fun.
Yeah that wasn’t actually a shot at league, although I do think that they had similar moments and just killed whatever new star was found rather than embrace it.
They did knowingly try to pivot the focus of the game, which is fine.
Reminds me of how Starseige: Tribes got its skiing mechanic.
I think the better idea to focus on here - which is danced around in the video but not quite summarized as such - might be overcentralization, no? It's OK for the meta to have inherently overpowered and underpowered things, because we don't want to just play Rock Paper Scissors or a coin flip. But those things should create options, not restrict novel gameplay. Magic the Gathering is a great place to look at it; a certain card won't necessarily be drawn, and you can't have most cards more than 4 times in a deck, or once in Commander/Brawl/etc. So a particular card won't always spell a win for someone - but obviously, if the top 16 in a tournament is all the same deck with a 60%+ win rate, or all decks have a particular card regardless of the archetype, then it needs some key card banned. Less obviously, if the winrate of a deck hovers around 55% only because every other successful deck is heavily modifying their deck's other 56 cards specifically around the single most dominant deck in the meta, that also tends to be a toxic metagame - even if that deck isn't itself the highest win rate deck. Kinda like in 2004, where an Astral Slide deck won because the wild abundance of the ultimately 2nd place Affinity deck led to a meta where running a specifically targeted Anti-Affinity deck would do well.
I say this because, funny enough, Core-A mentions Melee's Wobbling being accepted as OK - that ended up banned like two years later, and Ice Climbers didn't need a nerf. But likewise, it made ICs players find more options and ultimately made them more fun to watch. And it turned out the good ones do just fine without it. Sometimes toxic mechanics just need to get excised.
I do love Core-A's videos, though. Amazing resources for starters and I adore the editing.
A lot of this topic has been about competitive games, but one of the most pertinent examples that comes to my mind is from Dragalia Lost. For those unfamiliar, it was a Nintendo/Cygames mobile gacha that was co-op only and very player friendly. It emphasized lateral progression, i.e. you needed multiple teams of multiple characters, each with their own gearset. The different teams corresponded to different elements, the right element gave a buff, the wrong element gave a debuff, and the others neutral. You weren't strictly restricted to taking the characters of correct element, but virtually were due to the differences in effectiveness. It also encouraged using characters with different types of weapons within a team since each gave a party buff but they didn't stack.
Somewhat early in the game's lifespan, they were working on difficult boss content. And these were legitimately no joke, you needed a team of well geared folks with weapon types that complemented each other and they needed knowledge of the fight. The boss would enrage at 10min, but a solid run would take about 5min. Defeating the bosses would grant drops for the current best weapons, and given lateral progression, you'd be grinding out the boss to fill out your team. Basically mini MMO raid bosses.
Enter Gala Cleo. She broke the meta with her ability to buff party damage substantially on top of her strong kit. These buffs stacked with multiples of these characters in play (an unusual party comp). Folks found a cheese strat for the most current boss where the whole party was Gala Cleo and they could clear the boss in 40sec, trivializing the encounter and speeding up the gear grind.
This was surely unintentional and came with consequences. A significant number of lobby hosts would exclusively run this strat, which made matchmaking rather frustrating for folks without her or wanting to properly do the fight. Further, she was so powerful, she was being used in fights where she wasn't the preferred element since she still out damaged many characters even after the element buff.
Folks called for a nerf, which seemed appropriate in this case, even if the game wasn't competitive and players with her weren't crushing players without. However, this was a gacha, folks paid money to gamble on pulling her with the goal of doing this strat. Nerfing her would not go over well with that crowd, and the whales are the ones keeping your gacha afloat. So what did they do?
Most immediately was quick and severe power creep. This ended up meaning that characters before her were left behind -- no matter the element. This didn't eliminate the cheese strat or take care of the lobby issue though. Maybe 6 months later they did introduce upgraded skill trees for under-performing characters, some better than others, but they were quite the substantial boost.
I'm not sure what lesson to take away from this at the end of the day. Lobbies for that boss never improved and we were left with the power creep. Power creep would've happened naturally with the addition of new content, but she accelerated it quite a bit. I think the gacha and paid-character aspect exasperated an issue that would've most simply been resolved with a nerf, and the nerf could have simply been "her buff doesn't stack/significant diminishing returns" or "a party can only have 1 of each character," but I also didn't think the cheese strat was fun. I did pull the character with the generous free pulls, but I didn't opt for the strat and stopped doing the hard bosses until the situation levelled out months later.
Looks like you may have been watching the new Idyll video, which is also a recommendation on a similar topic, Power Creep.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SUF5Yx5H9iA
Honestly love this guy. I'm an MMO lover who hasn't had a home in one for a decade now and it's fun to listen to Idyll talk about the genre, bonus is that he cracks me up.
I initially watched the Idyll video but last time I posted a video of him people got angry due to the comedic nature of the content. So I posted this one instead, which is just as good if not better.
Yeah, I saw the hate from the last one you posted. But that's ok, people are entitled to their wrong opinions.
I wouldn't even say they were necessarily wrong, I just don't see the point in engaging with content that you detest. That happens a lot with videos. Someone that dislike videos posts will come in and essentially complain that the video is a video. Well, that's fine I guess, but it would probably be best to filter out the kind of content that annoys you.
Next time I will probably put a "satire" tag, maybe even a comment saying "this is really silly and juvenile, please avoid if you dislike that kind of comedy".
I think it's a thing that needs to be cultivated. I often have a negative attitude and want to comment on things (not just on Tildes), that "such and such is dumb and lame." But I do my best to stop myself, because I don't want to be that guy and I don't want to put that out into the world.
Speaking for myself, I often feel an impulse to comment on things and often the easiest way to satisfy that would be to be snippy about stuff; I wouldn't be surprised if other people have similar impulses.
At any rate, I have a friend who also doesn't like this style of humor. I think he's wrong, but I just don't send him stuff like this, even if it has a salient point. Also, I still need to watch this video you've posted, I haven't had a chance yet.
But I do currently have Idylls Patron song stuck in my head.
Buffing over nerfing has been the main direction of the fighting game I played the most (Tekken 7, kinda tekken 8) and it has created really unfun patterns of play with every patch shuffling around top tiers while consistently removing the things that make the game interesting - their weaknesses and specialist tools. It often feels like the developers don't know what to do so they just look at a character, see what gap they have in their toolset, and buff the hell out of it with no regard for consequences.
The more games I play the more I think just letting the meta develop is the right thing to do. SF6 is doing something similar by only having 1 major balance patch a year, and it seems to be going ok. "balance" shouldn't be a goal in itself, the game has to be fun too
I used to think the best philosophy was to buff everything/everyone so that eveything/everyone is OP, so you get something like Street Fighter 2 Rainbow like he talking about in the video. However, the problem is unless the characters all do the exact same thing (street fighter 1 in his example), there will always be a character or characters that stand out because of something about their design that is different than the others. Even in Street Fighter 2 rainbow, there was still probably a character or two that stood above the rest.
There always has to be a best and worst character, depending on the type of game and what the gameplay entails. Chess, for example, doesn't need to buff or nerf either side, because each player gets the same pieces to play with. The difference comes in how you position your pieces and your plans for the pieces. It's not about the pieces themselves, it's about the strategy of using them.
So since there has to be a best and worst character inherently, unless you plan on making every character do the same thing and act the same way (uninteresting to players), the only other option is to change the meta every once in awhile. Let the meta characters be meta, then when people start getting tired/bored of it, nerf them and buff others if necessary to let new characters be meta.
I think thats the path you see a lot of game devs taking -- or trying to take -- when they make buffs and nerfs, but it's a hard balance to try to strike. Sometimes buffing or nerfing one thing, unintentionally really buffs or really nerfs some other unrelated thing. Its not uncommon to see a big patch come out with buffs and/or nerfs, then people figure out how figuratively broken (or even sometimes literally) the changes made things, and an updated patch comes as fast as a week after the big patch.
So in summary, it's not as easy as choosing to buff vs nerf. It's definitely contextual and depends on what the buffs/nerfs do unintentionally to other characters or mechanics in the game.