Exploding-Planet.com

One of the most important aspect of any multiplayer game is the balance between the various choices a player can make. Obviously if a player makes a mistake they shouldn't do aswell as someone who does not, but those mistakes are not the choices I refer to.

To keep a game interesting there needs to be a diversity amongst the players, rather than just giving everyone a Rock, we give them the choice of a Rock, some Paper or a pair of scisssors.

Now in this rather obvious example the paper should beat the rock, the scissors should beat the paper and the rock should beat the scissors. If the Rock can beat the paper, then everyone would pick the Rock and everyone would be the same. This balance is very hard to maintain and to even achieve in the first place.

Voidwars unlike paper, scissors and rock is much more involved. While the three races you can choose from aren't that diverse, they can be very hard to balance. One example are the Bakani's shields. Bakani ships have lower hull than the other races ships but they contain more powerful shields, and shields are quick to drop but also quick to regen. This causes the problem of those ships possibly never being damage since their shields might never be down. The question is are the shields on the ship more or less valuable than the hull the ship has lost? While initially it is a very simple problem, there comes into play another type of ship.

The EMP ships have extremely high damage versus shields, a fleet equipped with a few of these can take down Bakani ships much easier than without. This renders the shields of the Bakani ships much less useful, exposing the hull of their ships much quicker than with normal weaponry. This has to be factored into the "equation" of how much hull these ships should have.

There are also other factors to consider such as those ships build time, build cost, movement speed, weapon power and other such abilities. With all these combined it is never a simple matter to figure out if there is in fact a balance between the ships. While I do as much mathematical calculations as possible, often it comes down to user feedback as to whether something is balanced or not. In game situations often reveal more about their actual performance than number crunching, particularly with regard to "utility" abilities.

Blizzard Entertainment, one of the best game designers have shown how to get this right. They have often balanced very diverse abilities which can't always be determined through mathematical methods. Starcraft is one of the most balanced RTS games ever and the 3 races you can choose from have very differing powers, from Terran's ability to move their bases and call down nukes, to the Protoss' ability to mind control and have massive area effect damage spells. I would hope I have learnt a lot from playing their games and watching the changes made over the many years.

Of course one of the most important things about making all these changes is to inform the users of the system about such changes. This should't occur through player discovery usually, depending on whether it is merely a balance change or new feature meant to be investigated.

I haven't done a particularly good job of keeping players informed in Voidwars and with World of Warcraft devs often sneaking unannounced changes into patches they haven't always succeeded either, but I can appreciate why the devs can't always list every change that has happend. I would have thought they that a much more organised company like Blizzard would have some sort of system in place for that kind of stuff though =).