Game Imbalance

As those of you who play World of Warcraft know, every Tuesday the servers go down for maintenance. Sometimes, these downtimes are accompanied by a software patch for the game. Ahh, patch day; the day of bug fixes, and most importantly, game play tweaks. The developers diligently monitor the damage per second of every character class, making sure that none of them exceed their alloted amount of influence in the game.

It isn't just World of Warcraft, but pretty much every game in the market right now. Game Balance, over the lifecycle of a game, becomes the most important and most tweaked aspect of any game. Visit any forum and you'll see hordes of players crying out about the injustices visited upon them. "Nerf Warlocks!", "Don't Nerf Pallies!" etc. etc... So, in an effort to minimize complaints, to make sure everyone is playing fairly, and most of all to ensure everyone has a good time, the developers listen to the arguments of these players and appease them on patch day.

I can understand the outcry to a certain extent. Games like this need to be balanced so that all players can have an equal influence on their surroundings and other players. If there is something in the game that is unbalanced, a player will exploit it and then they will have a disproportionate amount of influence.

I can't help but think that a game that requires this amount of tweaking is imposing an unnatural order into a system.

What if there were a game that thrived on the natural tendency for players to exploit the game for power and use it at other players expense? What if there were a game that rewarded players keeping these secrets to themselves? What if there were ways, in game, for you to steal other players knowledge and use their own tricks against them.

That sounds like a game I would love to play.

I had a small taste of game play like this in the game Shogun Wars. This game definitley had large game balance issues, but I don't think the game suffered for it, in fact, I think the game was improved by them. The best tactic was to save all your gold, improve your financial position, and stay in the bottom of the rankings avoiding notice until you can't upgrade your gold production anymore. Then, when you are producing a large amount of gold, you shoot up through the rankings by purchasing weapons and warriors.

Another exploit we used in the game was a vast database of our enemies statistics. Whenever you sent ninjas into an enemies base, you could retreive information about thier attack and defensive power. Our group made a database of this information, giving us a distinct advantage in the game. I don't think the level of our coordination was expected by the creators of the game because we ended up with about 80 of the top 100 spots in the game.

I am sure we made the game all but unbearable for others to play, especially newcomers, but our clan was big, and with so many players it was impossible to know who the spies were. many players infiltrated our clan and had access to this database. It was a very immersive experience, and one that should be more common in games.

These immersive elements came out of giant unbalanced holes in the gameplay where the players decided to make their own fun. Maybe the fun was a little tilted in our favor, but by no means should that discourage a game designer from trying to make a game where exploitation and a complete disregard of game balance can be fun for everyone...