What is "balance" anyway

[Timo Pietilä]

Again I like to start thread about philosophic behind balance.

This was something I tried to do for missile-weapons but my main point was missed by majority of people and entire thread went to different track pretty soon after start.

So: what is balance?

To me game is well balanced when:

1) it is fun
2) it is replayable

Point two is something that has been diminishing lately because game no longer has "extreme" moments. Every change I have seen here is made game more "smooth". If item has power it is being weakened, if it doesn't have power it is made more powerful. If some class is easier than other class then that class is weakened and vice versa.

Game is fun, but not very long. You need to "invent" your own restrictions and challenges to make it replayable. Playing without artifacts is actually more fun than with them.

If items are added they are never removed. Enough such changes and everything looks the same. There is no more "Wow!" moments into game.

More vaults were added in the game. Sounds good, but because the way game engine works vaults did not become any more common. In old days there was 1/4 chance to get GCV which always was a "Wow!" moment. Now there is 3/30, maybe 4/30, chance to get about same effect, so interesting moments were lessened, not increased. Also more lesser vaults were intorduced, which basically caused same effect, maybe even worsening overall effect for GV:s.

We *need* extreme things. Single things that can change your current game in one strike. Occasional monster that are way more dangerous than ordinary monsters. Situations that are more unpredictable and bigger variation to gameplay.

Remove hard limits for OoD monsters. Create things that can give you surprises. Maybe even very rare cases of unavoidable instant deaths (that really are unavoidable, no matter what you do or what you have). Crazy unbeatable monsters way too soon.

Also chars should be different each. Make items that are very very powerful, but also extremely rare. Give possibility for different tactics. Holes in monster defenses. Weapons to strike to those holes. Holy handgrenades. Potions of invulnerability with extremely severe drawbacks. Something other than "paur* gauntlets are too weak, lets give them some additional boost".

Mage spells are weak: So what? Make mage more interesting, not stronger. Make mage spell variation higher. Make him better at devices. Do *NOT* make mage stronger. How about Ranger? Ranger is an warrior-archer with mage spells. It can be played as anything you want which is bad. Reduce his spell choices, weaken his melee. Paladin? Paladin is boring. I really don't know what to do with it. Rogue? Rogue has excellent stealth. But nothing more. That counts as boring. So I play Priest and Warrior. Priest has versatility in spells, but can't handle everything until very late in game, which makes it interesting. Warrior doesn't have spells so he has trouble dealing with inventory and surprise monsters early. Difficulties make it more fun.

How about races? Does people really like kobold? How about elf? My favorites are Hobbit, Dwarf and High-Elves, because those differ from rest of the mass enough to be interesting. I would like to add some more extremities to rest of the races.

[d_m]

So I totally agree with the general idea, although I think I disagree with you about a lot of the specifics. I'm gonna quote your message and respond, please bear with my mega-response.

So: what is balance?

To me game is well balanced when:

1) it is fun
2) it is replayable

I would probably call that "good" rather than "balanced". I think balance has to do with the perception that the classes all have reasonable trade. Most people probably say balanced when they mean that no class is better than another across the board (e.g. rangers and mages currently, maybe) and that no class is useless.

That said, being good is probably better than being balanced (assuming there really is a direct trade-off between the two, which there might not be).

Point two is something that has been diminishing lately because game no longer has "extreme" moments. Every change I have seen here is made game more "smooth". If item has power it is being weakened, if it doesn't have power it is made more powerful. If some class is easier than other class then that class is weakened and vice versa.

You might be right about this. The reverse problem might be that the game is totally flat *until* you hit an extreme moment... there is no smooth improvement. Maybe we have too much smooth steady improvement during play, and need to make sure there are some big jumps in there. Does this seem right? I think a lot of newer players do appreciate some of the smoothness, so I don't think it's entirely bad, except to the degree that it softens out the "extremes" you speak of.

If items are added they are never removed. Enough such changes and everything looks the same. There is no more "Wow!" moments into game.

More vaults were added in the game. Sounds good, but because the way game engine works vaults did not become any more common. In old days there was 1/4 chance to get GCV which always was a "Wow!" moment. Now there is 3/30, maybe 4/30, chance to get about same effect, so interesting moments were lessened, not increased. Also more lesser vaults were intorduced, which basically caused same effect, maybe even worsening overall effect for GV:s.

I think this probably happened awhile ago (i.e. before I started reading Angband's code)--I didn't think any new lesser vaults were added recently.

I agree that dungeon generation is pretty boring right now--I was actually working on a patch to change the way it's done and try to make levels more interesting (possibly incorporating work from S). I don't think any boringness with the dungeon is tied to the recent "smoothings" you are complaining about.

We *need* extreme things. Single things that can change your current game in one strike. Occasional monster that are way more dangerous than ordinary monsters. Situations that are more unpredictable and bigger variation to gameplay.

I think this is true but defining "occasionally" correctly is really hard. Does occasionally mean once per 100,000 turns? Per 50,000 turns? Per game? Per 5 games? Per 5 dungeon levels? Per 5 character levels?

I think for many of your suggestions the correct definition of "occasionally" is the real challenge. Anytime the frequencies of anything change it's a cause for much commotion and (as you probably know well) any such change has a better chance of being wrong than right.

Maybe 1-in-N games should end when an amazingly OoD monster (e.g. a great wyrm on dungeon level 20 or something) kill you... but I think very few people will appreciate that change.

Remove hard limits for OoD monsters. Create things that can give you surprises. Maybe even very rare cases of unavoidable instant deaths (that really are unavoidable, no matter what you do or what you have). Crazy unbeatable monsters way too soon.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but the number of added levels to OoD (and double OoD) monsters was raised recently... after dungeon level 20 they start to go way up. Possibly this could be raised higher, although again, there is a risk of getting crazy unbeatable monsters too often.

I would be open to trying to create an unbounded function to generate out-of-depth monsters with no cap, but getting that right will be tricky, and it will cause a lot of pain if it's wrong (hell, even if it's right it will).

Also chars should be different each. Make items that are very very powerful, but also extremely rare. Give possibility for different tactics. Holes in monster defenses. Weapons to strike to those holes. Holy handgrenades. Potions of invulnerability with extremely severe drawbacks. Something other than "paur* gauntlets are too weak, lets give them some additional boost".

Do you think that the rarest items aren't powerful enough? I almost never see Ringil (or at least, not until incredibly late in the game when most artifacts start showing up), I've still never gotten PDSM in a real game, etc, etc. That said, I'm not opposed to huge, rare and powerful artifacts.

I don't get how that's at odds with making terrible artifacts not terrible. I guess there's an argument that there are too many artifacts... but you don't seem to be advocating for their removal either. My feeling is that if an artifact is basically never good it should be removed or improved; I could imagine an argument that not enough have been removed, but it seems crazy to me that improving some of them makes the game worse, or removes extreme moments.

As far as hobbling good artifacts, I can see the argument better. Maybe making them rarer rather than weaker would please you more?

Mage spells are weak: So what? Make mage more interesting, not stronger. Make mage spell variation higher. Make him better at devices. Do *NOT* make mage stronger. How about Ranger? Ranger is an warrior-archer with mage spells. It can be played as anything you want which is bad. Reduce his spell choices, weaken his melee. Paladin? Paladin is boring. I really don't know what to do with it. Rogue? Rogue has excellent stealth. But nothing more. That counts as boring. So I play Priest and Warrior. Priest has versatility in spells, but can't handle everything until very late in game, which makes it interesting. Warrior doesn't have spells so he has trouble dealing with inventory and surprise monsters early. Difficulties make it more fun.

Again, I think your argument is weird. Weakening ranger is fine but strengthening mage is bad? Carrying around a book of spells which mostly suck doesn't make the game more interesting or challenging. I stand by my argument vis a vis artifacts--we should either remove mage spells/books if they are basically useless, or make them better.

I have never found rogue or paladin interesting to play, so I think I agree with you there. I think giving them more of their own unique spells could help fix this.

How about races? Does people really like kobold? How about elf? My favorites are Hobbit, Dwarf and High-Elves, because those differ from rest of the mass enough to be interesting. I would like to add some more extremities to rest of the races.

A lot of people find kobolds really challening--I'm surprised you'd want to remove them given that they fit your argument about being different and challenging.

Differentiating the other races is a good idea (and something a lot of people have been clamoring for).

[Marble Dice]

Every change I have seen here is made game more "smooth". If item has power it is being weakened, if it doesn't have power it is made more powerful. If some class is easier than other class then that class is weakened and vice versa.

Make mage more interesting, not stronger. Make mage spell variation higher. Make him better at devices. Do *NOT* make mage stronger. How about Ranger? Ranger is an warrior-archer with mage spells. It can be played as anything you want which is bad. Reduce his spell choices, weaken his melee.

Here you seem to be arguing simultaneously that we should not "balance" the game and that we should. I think the game should be balanced. As such, I think the classes need some changes, specifically mages are (or possibly were) too weak, and rangers too strong. Weak and strong don't necessarily mean damage output, but in this case I think the difference is too big. I'm fine if mage is a "tricky, low damage" character, but currently their branded missile damage is way too high, and their everything else is too low. Balance does not mean the same, it means comparable with hopefully interesting trade-offs.

I like highly OoD monsters as long as they don't crowd out a level and give you too few options. I like rare and powerful egos/artifacts so long as they aren't the only viable equipment. I like rare "wow" moments but not when they define the game to the point that I feel like I live or die only by the RNG, and my actions don't affect the outcome.

I think vaults are probably the most interesting part of the game. If you think the vault generation algorithm could be improved, then I'd be interested in that. I haven't looked at the process lately, but I assume from your post, when the game decides to place a vault, it just picks a random one from the file, without regard to lesser/greater (but there are many more lesser in the file than greater)?

[Derakon]

IIRC the vault placement system basically works by saying "I should place a lesser vault here" or "I should place a greater vault here" and then finding one that fits. Some of the greater vaults are so big that they often fail the fitting test and so almost never show up; back when I was making vaults (I'm responsible for a bunch of them, like Bubbles, Miniature Cell (though I note that one's been toned down a bit, and deservedly so), the Roundabouts, Mirrored Quartet...) I occasionally got told "Look, this is just too big; tone it down."

Some variants greatly up the rate of vault placement; I remember playing ZAngband back in the day and it would be pretty unusual to not find a vault once I got below 3500' or so. Whereas I think my latest Vanilla character, who got abandoned at 4200', saw precisely two vaults all game. I don't think we necessarily want to make vaults commonplace, but they could stand to be more frequent. It might be worth tweaking the vault placement algorithm so that vaults could be assigned rarities, too.

Edit: Quick statistic: we used to have 4 greater vaults ("huge", "large", "butterfly", and "chambers"). Now we have 30. I think we used to have 7 lesser vaults, though I don't remember them so well; we now have 18. Given that lesser vaults show up more often than greater vaults, it seems kinda weird that we have more kinds of greater vaults than lesser vaults.

[konijn_]

Again I like to start thread about philosophic behind balance.

This was something I tried to do for missile-weapons but my main point was missed by majority of people and entire thread went to different track pretty soon after start.

So: what is balance?

To me game is well balanced when:

1) it is fun
2) it is replayable

Point two is something that has been diminishing lately because game no longer has "extreme" moments. Every change I have seen here is made game more "smooth". If item has power it is being weakened, if it doesn't have power it is made more powerful. If some class is easier than other class then that class is weakened and vice versa.

Game is fun, but not very long. You need to "invent" your own restrictions and challenges to make it replayable. Playing without artifacts is actually more fun than with them.

If items are added they are never removed. Enough such changes and everything looks the same. There is no more "Wow!" moments into game.

More vaults were added in the game. Sounds good, but because the way game engine works vaults did not become any more common. In old days there was 1/4 chance to get GCV which always was a "Wow!" moment. Now there is 3/30, maybe 4/30, chance to get about same effect, so interesting moments were lessened, not increased. Also more lesser vaults were intorduced, which basically caused same effect, maybe even worsening overall effect for GV:s.

We *need* extreme things. Single things that can change your current game in one strike. Occasional monster that are way more dangerous than ordinary monsters. Situations that are more unpredictable and bigger variation to gameplay.

Remove hard limits for OoD monsters. Create things that can give you surprises. Maybe even very rare cases of unavoidable instant deaths (that really are unavoidable, no matter what you do or what you have). Crazy unbeatable monsters way too soon.

Also chars should be different each. Make items that are very very powerful, but also extremely rare. Give possibility for different tactics. Holes in monster defenses. Weapons to strike to those holes. Holy handgrenades. Potions of invulnerability with extremely severe drawbacks. Something other than "paur* gauntlets are too weak, lets give them some additional boost".

Mage spells are weak: So what? Make mage more interesting, not stronger. Make mage spell variation higher. Make him better at devices. Do *NOT* make mage stronger. How about Ranger? Ranger is an warrior-archer with mage spells. It can be played as anything you want which is bad. Reduce his spell choices, weaken his melee. Paladin? Paladin is boring. I really don't know what to do with it. Rogue? Rogue has excellent stealth. But nothing more. That counts as boring. So I play Priest and Warrior. Priest has versatility in spells, but can't handle everything until very late in game, which makes it interesting. Warrior doesn't have spells so he has trouble dealing with inventory and surprise monsters early. Difficulties make it more fun.

How about races? Does people really like kobold? How about elf? My favorites are Hobbit, Dwarf and High-Elves, because those differ from rest of the mass enough to be interesting. I would like to add some more extremities to rest of the races.

I will try to not to troll and share my view

First off "what is balance ?", in my mind balance is the absence of broken features. Broken features are features that present no-think-no-lose scenarios. Last time I played V, whips were broken, I always bought a whip to start out because I got more hits and bigger damage dice than dagger, there was just no competing option.

Balanced games can be fun, but really I think the variants that generated the most hype were unbalanced ( Z and Tome ). You might disagree if you haven't been on rgra when Z and Tome were very successful.

Replayability has more to do with balance, if there's too many no-choices, then the player will do the same song and dance all over again.

With regards to Wow moments, I would agree with you. I've not been wowed in Vanilla since a while. However, in all honesty, you've been saying there are not enough wow moments since the last three maintainers ;]

I did not know that the large fun vaults have been reduced so dramatically, that sounds like a side-effect of trying to make things better, I am sure that can be fixed.

With regards to OoD, I think the bottom limit should be much harsher, no monsters from below level 50 on dlevel 60 in my mind, definitely no Icky things on dlevel 90..

With regards to extreme things, I agree totally. My solution for this is that I added a ton of extreme artifacts with the rarity of bladeturner. This way it wont take years to find one, it wont be the same rare thing you find every time, and its still special, because you still might finish the game without every finding one of these. Also post-Dis the monster difficulty becomes just rude to compensate that.

I'll reply to the rest at some later point.

T.

[Derakon]

Way back in the day when I was still learning C, I made a patch to Angband to prevent weak monsters from being generated in the deeps. From what I can recall, without all those "filler" monsters, the levels become much more dangerous, since practically every monster you meet is capable of posing at least some threat to you. On the flipside, this also means that each combat is interesting; no more mowing through 95 orcs without paying attention. I think it's worth moving in this direction, but it'll require some major tweaks to make certain that the game doesn't get too hard.

[fizzix]

I agree that races and classes should *not* be balanced. I'm perfectly fine with Mage being the hard class and Ranger being the easy class. Just the same, High elf can be the easy race while Human is the hard race.

I disagree that smoothness is boring. It is only boring if you follow the guidelines that say, "don't go past depth x without y resist." But that's self-imposed smoothness, not game smoothness. Every game I've played recently has had different challenges, and I've gotten different resists and abilities at different points. I've found it to be both fun and replayable.

Lastly, aren't unique monsters precisely the very dangerous OoD monsters that you mention. I'm *never* able to handle a unique when I first approach its native depth (except for smeagol, fang, grip, sauron and morgoth) Putting lots of OoD monsters is not very fun, because if I was ready for it, I'd just go to that depth. Putting one powerful OoD monster isn't fun either, because I either die or successfully avoid it.

[miyazaki]

How about races? Does people really like kobold? How about elf? My favorites are Hobbit, Dwarf and High-Elves, because those differ from rest of the mass enough to be interesting. I would like to add some more extremities to rest of the races.

Have you seen the bonuses that gnomes get? Inherent free action and instant ID of staves and wands! This is a total game changer.

Crazy unbeatable monsters way too soon.

Difficulties make it more fun.

I'd also say that a randart, ironman game answers about 80% of your complaints: extremely powerful, rare weapons/items; the danger level of monster increases 10-fold (giant salamanders become terror-inducing); attribute sustains take on a whole new importance; even ammo with negative damage values becomes useful; !CLW become gold; starvation becomes a real possibility; as does losing your light source; you can't hoard artifacts or ego items in your house to cover all resists, just in case; inventory management becomes trickier; stealth is king (a new reason to try a rogue); curses actually enter the game because ID magic is so rare; you start every level without an escape back up the staircase.

[chem]

Timo,

Your original post is spot-on, and I think that's why ToME is more widely played/reported on ladder than [V], and why Heng/Entro (variants based on other variants, with almost no fanfare, a steep learning curve, and no releases in 5 years) have a combined popularity of similar order as [V] in ladder, and higher than any other variants created.

Large fun, massive replayability, lots of interesting and game-changing items, vaults, uniques, etc.

[Timo Pietilä]

Do you think that the rarest items aren't powerful enough? I almost never see Ringil (or at least, not until incredibly late in the game when most artifacts start showing up), I've still never gotten PDSM in a real game, etc, etc. That said, I'm not opposed to huge, rare and powerful artifacts.

I have seen everything. Those items are not very interesting, even that they are powerful. Because almost everything has been given power boost we now have much flatter artifact selection.

I don't get how that's at odds with making terrible artifacts not terrible. I guess there's an argument that there are too many artifacts... but you don't seem to be advocating for their removal either.

I am, but that is not the topic here. Lets not go to specifics how to achieve what I'm proposing, lets focus onto point I'm trying to make.

As far as hobbling good artifacts, I can see the argument better. Maybe making them rarer rather than weaker would please you more?

Definitely. Rare and powerful artifacts, not strolling knee-deep in mediocore ones.

Again, I think your argument is weird. Weakening ranger is fine but strengthening mage is bad?

There is a difference between strong and versatile. Mage is IMO class that needs skilled player to be able to win. Mage should _not_ be strong until very late in game, but it should be able to "trick" its way thru early stages in game.

Of course it is bad that mage is just extremely weak archer, and that should change, but change should not be that mage is able to kill everything and anything with magic in every stage of the game.

Make sleep, confuse, stun, etc. more useful and use them. and so on.

A lot of people find kobolds really challening--I'm surprised you'd want to remove them given that they fit your argument about being different and challenging.

Really? I consider them as stronger version of Hobbit with poison resistance. Kobold is a race that has been added quite recently, and it doesn't even fit in Tolkienish theme of the game. Actually Half-Troll doesn't either, but that is traditional.

[Timo Pietilä]

Here you seem to be arguing simultaneously that we should not "balance" the game and that we should. I think the game should be balanced. As such, I think the classes need some changes, specifically mages are (or possibly were) too weak, and rangers too strong. Weak and strong don't necessarily mean damage output, but in this case I think the difference is too big. I'm fine if mage is a "tricky, low damage" character, but currently their branded missile damage is way too high, and their everything else is too low. Balance does not mean the same, it means comparable with hopefully interesting trade-offs.

You are mixing here game balance with class balance. Classes should not be equally easy (or hard), so mage should stay difficult class.

I agree that branded missile damage is too high. So make branded missiles more rare. Remove unnecessarily added branding spell (which I opposed when it was introduced).

I think vaults are probably the most interesting part of the game. If you think the vault generation algorithm could be improved, then I'd be interested in that. I haven't looked at the process lately, but I assume from your post, when the game decides to place a vault, it just picks a random one from the file, without regard to lesser/greater (but there are many more lesser in the file than greater)?

I think vault generation is similar to artifact generation: if you can get lesser vault you can get greater one too, but only if you can get that lesser one.

I'm not complaining so much about vault generation algorithm, I'm complaining about rarity of interesting vaults. Many of those are weaker than lesser ones or at best as good as those are with exception that they just are bigger. For some reason in latest versions getting even one of those is rare case, and when you get one then it is that 3/30 chance that it is a interesting one.

[Timo Pietilä]

I disagree that smoothness is boring. It is only boring if you follow the guidelines that say, "don't go past depth x without y resist." But that's self-imposed smoothness, not game smoothness. Every game I've played recently has had different challenges, and I've gotten different resists and abilities at different points. I've found it to be both fun and replayable.

Well, I have played thousands of games. Differences between "resists" and "abilities" are not really differences to me anymore. I know what to use and when to use it. What I require for my interest to stay is events that differ from game to game.

I have played all kinds of challenge-games and for some time I also dived quite fast, but even that turns pretty boring after a while. Every dive was the same, just with different gear. There are exciting events missing. When you have seen Azriel 10000 times it stops being interesting even when he appears at the place where you can get killed. Even situations that lead to dying isn't interesting when you have died who know how many times.

Game is replayable (othervise I wouldn't play it anymore) but it could be *more* replayable.

Lastly, aren't unique monsters precisely the very dangerous OoD monsters that you mention.

No. They are same in every game, and appear approx same time every time.

I'm *never* able to handle a unique when I first approach its native depth (except for smeagol, fang, grip, sauron and morgoth) Putting lots of OoD monsters is not very fun, because if I was ready for it, I'd just go to that depth. Putting one powerful OoD monster isn't fun either, because I either die or successfully avoid it.

Lots of them isn't what I want. But occassional Ancient Red Dragon where others are baby dragons is...interesting.

[buzzkill]

Lots of them isn't what I want. But occasional Ancient Red Dragon where others are baby dragons is...interesting.

Yeah, interesting the first time it happens, but if such things happen more than once in a great while it would get really frustrating, really fast. At least with uniques, you may have a shot at killing them. An ancient dragon appearing at DL's native to baby dragons is an unfair (ugh!) death sentence. Survival would be a matter of luck (flip a coin type luck). You might a well have rare and undetectable traps that occasionally insta-kills a player. Interesting?

[konijn_]

Yeah, interesting the first time it happens, but if such things happen more than once in a great while it would get really frustrating, really fast. At least with uniques, you may have a shot at killing them. An ancient dragon appearing at DL's native to baby dragons is an unfair (ugh!) death sentence. Survival would be a matter of luck (flip a coin type luck). You might a well have rare and undetectable traps that occasionally insta-kills a player. Interesting?

I was thinking about that, what if the game places the Ancient Dragon with enough damage to give the @ a fighting chance ? It would definitely be quite a sight.. Drop generation would have to take the reduced hp into consideration, monsters with healing spells should never be placed that way. I dont know about you, but that could be quite exciting I think.

T.

[fizzix]

I was thinking about that, what if the game places the Ancient Dragon with enough damage to give the @ a fighting chance ? It would definitely be quite a sight.. Drop generation would have to take the reduced hp into consideration, monsters with healing spells should never be placed that way. I dont know about you, but that could be quite exciting I think.

T.

If you're going to randomize stats of the monsters in order to place them earlier, why not go the whole way and make randomized unique monsters.