[zhrance]

To be precise, balancing games the way it is presented in the article is futile because, if played competitively, the game will change drastically. To put it more bluntly: thinking that the game will still have its out-of-the-box game play and be played the way the developers and testers play it at the office for more than six months is downright stupid.

No game will be played the way it was meant to be played. And the grave mistake that is often repeated is trying to balance the game on a superficial level -- that is making it fun and making sure that all the items work the way they were intended to work. That's a good thing to do if you do not expect your game to be played on a competitive level.

You cannot balance a game so it plays the way you wanted it to play after a year. At least not unless you continuously keep watch and patch it. How do you expect a game to stay the same if it takes gamers a year of playing intensely to start playing on a high level? It will not be the same. The game will change and keep on changing until it stops resembling what you've initially designed.

Players will always have crazy ideas on how to use game play items with a purpose they were not intended for. They will find new purposes and exploit all the bug they find, turning them into standard game play elements.

Did id Software imagine that people would want to shoot themselves with a rocket to travel across the map faster? No, and they admit it. Neither did they think that people would start climbing up walls using fresh plasma traces in "Quake 3." It does not look like Blizzard predicted that "Warcraft 3's" Ancient of War would be used as a very powerful offensive unit either, nor that it would be used to tank creep damage. In fact, if you read the original online strategy guide that came out with "Warcraft 3" has got lots of comedy value to it.

Hello??? Your "desired game play of the project" will not be there after people really start playing the game! There is no "perfectly balanced state" over a longer period of time. "Target game play" my ass. The above examples more than prove it and I am sure you can find examples from the games you play of how they changed.

Poland!Game play always evolves and natural selection applies to it the same way as in the real world. Some weapons, pickups or units may become useless because their intended purpose has been replaced by something better or for any other reason. From the point of view of the essay which assumes that there is an "target game play" this is bad.

Of course, that is not stated explicitly in the article but it's against the desired effect thing. Is that bad? No. Have you seen anyone that complained that all but two weapons in QuakeWorld duel are almost useless? WC3 and other games have weapons and units which are not used. Did that destroy the games? No.

Those things are not important. The important thing is that the elements that do stay eventually are elements that create good and interesting game play.

It doesn't really matter if units and weapons are not used the way they were intended to be. As long as it's fun. What does matter is that the underlying principles of the game are designed properly. The game can be imbalanced and many great games are imbalanced! As long as the element that creates the lack of balance is an element that is fun and takes skill to use.

Finding those elements and making sure they will stay predominant is the key. It's the lack of balance leaning towards the "good" elements on the underlying level, not the superficial one, that's important.

Sod the balance that's not there to stay anyway... Sod the "target game play" -- there's no possible way to predict where the game's going.