Overbalanced

I have long asked myself, “Malstrom, why have you continued this blog for so long? You get no money from it. And all you get is get grief from people.”

One of the reasons why is that the issues of gaming are extremely complex problems that are tricky to analyze, trickier to solve, and trickiest to communicate. Here is an example…

What is the issue with WoW? Why is it losing subscribers? People will give their opinions. The habit of gaming is that the issue is often never that easy to identify. This is why message forums and general industry people are consistently wrong. Some people say the issue is about the increased difficulty, but I’ve talked about that earlier.

But is the issue about WoW? Or is the issue about Blizzard?

“What do you mean by this?” asks the reader.

Before we approach the issue, it would be best to isolate where the disease is at. Just because the symptom is in WoW doesn’t necessarily mean the disease is in WoW. The problem could be in Blizzard itself.

“If that were to be true, then the symptoms would be present in other recent Blizzard games.”

That would be Starcraft 2 (and Diablo 3 which isn’t out yet). Did Starcraft 2 have issues? Does it still have issues?

Starcraft 2 is bleeding players as well. You can tell when ladder entered Season 2. People who were Gold Level became Silver. “Or maybe there were a ton of new players added that got into Diamond!” Now reader, that is highly unlikely. The people who were to stop playing would be from the bottom end of the player skillbase.

“Get the point, Malstrom. I tire of your diatribes.” Very well.

Balance in gaming is a new concept because of the recent rise of mass multiplayer. Previous multiplayer games were ‘balanced’, but not on a scale like a RTS game or a MMORPG. Multiplayer used to be confined to a local space. When someone found an exploit or an imbalance, it was not well known and, if it was, the local multiplayer inoculated the game experience. But with the Internet and its rise of worldwide multiplayer, game balance has become a very important thing. A game can be destroyed if the balance is off.

Blizzard is a game company whose rise is almost entirely due to the rise of multiplayer PC gaming. And the boat Blizzard used to ride this rising tide was balance in multiplayer. Why do we play Warcraft and Starcraft? Why is World of Warcraft the top MMORPG? Balance played a huge part.

Can there be too much balance? Let me ask this question again so you can hear it. Can there be too much balance?

“Absurd! How can anything be overbalanced?”

Human beings are not balanced.

“I cannot argue with that.”

So when a game is overbalanced, it begins to balance out things Humans naturally desire and expect. An example of this is Starcraft 2’s chat rooms. Warcraft 3’s chat rooms were exploited by spammers and other ilk. Blizzard’s solution was to remove chat rooms entirely and allow chatting in Starcraft 2 to be in temporary chat windows. The problem with that is that you could not meet people and it gave the game a sterile feeling. You were playing this online game yet felt… all alone.

Human beings are unbalanced, and it is natural behavior for them to act unbalanced. If this were not to occur, society would be a dreary ordeal. The definition of personality is, in itself, something not in balance with other people. Some people are funnier than others, some are meaner, some are kookier, some stupider, some smarter, and so on.

You can ‘overbalance’ a game by intruding on this natural behavior. For example, Nintendo’s online does not allow easy communication with the other player. The reason why we play multiplayer games is, in large part, for the social experience. Nintendo might say, “But people could swear and say bad stuff.” While this is true, you’ve so much overbalanced it that it interferes with the purpose of playing a game in the first place.

There is a problem with WoW. But it isn’t because it is ‘harder’ than Wrath. Vanilla and BC were ‘harder’ than Wrath. I honestly believe Blizzard is ‘overbalancing’ WoW to the point it is harming the purpose of why people play games.

Back in Vanilla (and BC I suppose), it took work to get a team together to go do a dungeon.And you had to actually travel to the instance. Blizzard began to notice this issue and began to balance it. Blizzard first added the meeting stone (added in Vanilla). This cut down on the travel time. But during Wrath, Blizzard added the Dungeon Finder. For those who don’t know, the Dungeon Finder is where you select a role (Tank, Healer, DPS) and a dungeon. After a certain amount of time, the Dungeon Finder will instantly transport all the people who queued into the instance. Note that these players are often on different servers. These people will never see one another ever again.

The Dungeon Finder, constantly a hot topic on the WoW forums, did fix many problems. Best thing is that it made it easier to do low level dungeons. But before the Dungeon Finder was implemented, people made friends in order to do dungeons. People would always be friendly to a solid healer (so they could ask the healer to go on more runs). Has Blizzard balanced this issue to such an extent that it ‘overbalanced’ it? People do not make friends like they used to through dungeons.

Above: Has the game become TOO balanced to the point where Human elements cannot thrive?

Here is another example. One of the complaints I remember from Vanilla was that people said you do not feel like a hero (as you would in a single player game). Due to the nature of the MMORPG, the world could not respond to your actions. So Blizzard decided to heavily incorporate ‘phasing’ which gave appearances to the player that changes were occurring. But they so ‘overbalanced’ this that the reason for playing the game was put in jeopardy. People like playing the game in co-op. Also, when people are phased, it removes many of the surprise events in the world. The world appears empty.

“How do you know something is ‘overbalanced’?” That is a good question, reader.

Overbalance is removing spontaneity. Let me repeat it again so those in the back can hear it. Overbalance is removing spontaneity. The foundation of entertainment is spontaneity.

Why do people watch sports? Spontaneity. You never know if the next minute has a surprise play that results in a touch down or a home run.

Why do people watch television and movies? Spontaneity. The plot twists and suspense keeps viewers interested.

Why do people listen to talk shows? Spontaneity. You never know if someone will say something absurd or brilliant.

The reason why many people do not engage in the above entertainment anymore is because it no longer feels spontaneous. Reality TV became a hit because people thought there were spontaneous things going on. And the reason why Reality TV fell is because it was all scripted. TV producers couldn’t risk the chance of nothing happening.

And a big reason why we play video games is because of spontaneity. Since video games are largely repetitious in nature, it is why, and it always has been, we are drawn to multiplayer games. Since Human beings are not balanced, they provide a spontaneous element in what is otherwise a repetitious and balanced game. Think of Super Mario Brothers 5 where you would be playing cooperatively until the person beside you picked you up and threw you! Well, you retaliated. And they retaliated back resulting in that person’s death (and you both laugh). This type of spontaneity is why we play games. It is where the surprise of games comes from.

The secret with many single player games is to create a somewhat spontaneous illusion. Animal Crossing and Minecraft seem filled with spontaneous events. But once you understand how the system works underneath the hood of the game, both games become boring fast. Multiplayer orientated games, on average, hold up their spontaneity longer due to the Human element introduced by the variety of players.

Overbalance does not allow spontaneous events. I actually suspect this is a great part for WoW’s rise in the first place. In Vanilla WoW, what was so ridiculously delicious was creating your own events. “Let’s go attack Tarren Mill.” Why do you think the video Leroy Jenkins became so popular? It showcased spontaneity (even though the video, itself, was scripted).

In Starcraft 2, you will lose 50/50 of your games unless you are at the top 2% (where you will win most games) or are at the bottom 2% (where you lose most games). The game is so overbalanced that you do not really have a long winning or losing streak unless a huge change occurred in your skill. The game is so overbalanced that you do not get ‘facerolled’ by someone vastly better than you. And, likewise, you do not get to ‘faceroll’ someone vastly inferior in skill than you.

Blizzard thinks that is wonderful. “It is balanced!” But it is also boring. Having players make new IDs like in Warcraft 3 or Starcraft didn’t hurt those games..

In the case of WoW, it was exciting when a spontaneous event would occur in the world. It could be people raiding a town. Blizzard has been hard at work ‘balancing’ the game so these spontaneous events would not occur. Why? It might interrupt someone’s experience. (In Vanilla, sides would take over small towns and some players complained they couldn’t quest because of that.) While it is unfortunate some people did not have a good experience, it was exciting and it was spontaneous. Thus, it was entertaining.

Today, World of Warcraft consists of sitting around a capital city all day queuing for dungeons or battlegrounds. The game is so overbalanced, there is no spontaneity. Everything is structured. Everything is orderly.

This trend of ‘overbalance’ I noticed very early in Blizzard’s rise. It is only recently that it has come to the point where it is ruining the consumer experience. I first began to notice it in Starcraft (the original Starcraft, not Brood War, not 2, the very first one).

Here is how I played Warcraft 2. Since I had a T1 connection at the time, I would host games over Kali. And we would have eight players (including myself) on. There was only one rule: there were no rules. There was nothing set up before we started.

As the game went on, people would be whispering back and forth and making secret alliances and secret backstabbing. The game was a wonder of surprises with turnarounds all the time. The victor at the end was more than a master of the computer game. The victor at the end was also a master of the human game. He knew how to manipulate, how to deflect. These different skills are a big reason why people play games such as poker. With Starcraft 1, multiplayer became ‘structured’ where such a spontaneous type game could not exist. If you selected ‘free for all’, you could not do alliances and all.

One of the great joys of World of Warcraft was the human game. It was people making friends, getting people to help them, and so on and so forth. It was also grieving the enemy. But as Blizzard kept balancing and balancing and balancing, much of that ‘human game’ was wiped from existence. It used to be that in order to succeed at a game like WoW, one had to utilize some strong social skills (or, at least, not be socially repelling).

Why do we play games? Dani Bunton, the creator of M.U.L.E., answered this by saying the game is to vanish and the dueling personalities and social interactions of the players are to prevail. In other words, the game is not about the game. The game is merely a stage for the players to unleash their personalities, wit, and other social forms.

A multiplayer game is actually two games. There is the game, itself, and there is the Human game on top of that (the social interaction). Overbalance is when a game focuses on balancing itself at the expense of the social interaction, at the expense of spontaneity.

I consider Overbalance to be the cancer ravaging Blizzard and showing symptoms in all their later games. If this is true, the symptoms will appear in Diablo III in some form. Unless Overbalance is tackled directly, Blizzard games are going to end up becoming extremely balanced but extremely sterile due to the lack of Human spontaneity.