EPTI'm not necessarily trying to voice an opinion on what I think is right or wrong but rather attempting to understand the philosophy behind how a game is balanced as well as how game developers deviate their approach on the matter which is fascinating to me to say the least. Please take my subjectivity with a grain of salt, I'm not pretending at all.
To clarify, almost every modern game either has a balance team or the thought of balance always comes into play even including single player focused games in regards to difficulty and so on. While my topic mainly concerns multiplayer games, I'm putting this out there to show how integral the word balance is to each and every game.
II. A few questions
•Does balancing a game ever get in the way of fun?
Now my immediate reply to the question was a resounding yes. Such as when player bias in terms of having whatever their preferred character, race or weapon being nerfed isn't the reason why the question is interesting to me. Now what happens when a game patch is almost universally accepted as being more balanced and fair but comes at the price of being less interesting to actually play? Now when a major balance revision changes, the game itself is played differently in correlation to that. We're in an age where the forefront of competitive games places a huge emphasis on an even playing field. I'm not sure whether Blizzard is still sticking to their philosophy but they once stated numerous times that players should feel overpowered but balanced and honestly I can see why Blizzard attempted to tackle it because feeling empowered is gratifying for some.
•Is the goal of balance always in mind?
Sometimes games become stale, we lose interest and move on to whatever else catches our attention (you know, trends). We've seen enough cases where developers in an attempt to rejuvenate player base adds a major patch out of the reason of refreshing the meta game.
III. My perspective
As a player, my favorite multiplayer games are the ones where you feel as if you could make good use on any tool given you have the skills to do so while at the same time allowing you to express a certain amount of creativity on how you're able to use said skills instead of feeling restricted by limitations on some tools over others. Skill based games that are governed purely on mechanical superiority are personally uninteresting to me because players are rewarded purely on how well their execution is.
IV. end.
That's all I can muster for now although I still have much more to say on the topic
