What does “balance” mean to you?

[LawAbidingCitizen]

So right now, I would consider Sonya unbalanced, because she has such strong zoning and such strong rushdown, while other characters that are dedicated to 1 specific playstyle don’t do their playstyle better than Sonya.

My definition is different.

For me it's fine that Characters are well rounded like Sonya, Erron Black, Geras, Sub and Scorpion. There are characters that lack certain things but Excell in others which levels out thier flaws.
A good example of this is Cetrion who isn't great up close but very strong far away and mid range.
I don't personally think it's bad that there are characters like kabal who have decent everything but have weaknesses.
Sonya is very strong but all mix starts high and the launching string is punishable on block making her have legit counters.
Erron is good almost everywhere but slide is unsafe and mix can be fuzzy blocked and his F4 is reactible at footsie range and baitable.

To me broke tools are so strong they force the opponent into constant opression or at a huge disadvantage. An example if this is Scorpions teleport, along with being great everywhere he can use TP out of turn on reaction if spaced correctly and punish you on your turn. Completely dismissing neutral. In short tools that destroy the main focus of the game in this case neutral/footsie.

If a character had a reset that deleted your life that's a perfect example of broken. Infinits Unblockables that steal turns and so on. The exception is when you have counters to said tools removing the capability of forcing that situation.
I'm not asking for Nerfs. I'll leave all that to NRS. I mostly feel many characters are lacking and feel incomplete so I'd rather buff the bottom end and slightly bring up the middle only toning down what is truly broke.
Maybe more depth will be added by comboability, frame data adjustments, buffs, custom variations or additional Krushing Blows? Who knows but I hope something is added instead of removing tools and destroying characters like has been done in so many games.

 

[STB Shujinkydink]

Balance. Let me pick the character I WANT to play, not the character I HAVE to in order to compete

 

[RoboCop]

Balance. Let me pick the character I WANT to play, not the character I HAVE to in order to compete

Wow, I like that a lot.

 

[LawAbidingCitizen]

Balance. Let me pick the character I WANT to play, not the character I HAVE to in order to compete

Are you using Kotal too?

 

[Crusty]

Balance to means everyone should be able to play their character against any character they fight against, as feasible as it can be.

 

[Gaxkang]

Equal or no cheese. Either everybody has major cheese, or let there be no cheese.

Another sort of imbalance is strong/real strong zoning but strong up close too for a character...but then another character don't got that going.

I like the idea of being able to use any character and having as good a chance to win...without being some sorta super pro player heh.

And Marvel games...its gameplay I consider to be garbage, so. Majorly unbalanced yeah, and the massive combos while making nice spectacle...makes for a lousy two player game.

In MK11 I don't even like the 10-15 hit combos...wouldn't bother me if they weren't in the game.

 

[exflyingbooty]

I actually think right around the end of mkx's life it became an extremely balanced and fun game because every character had their bullshit but was still good and viable for the most part.

This game suffers from the tops tiers having easy abusable bullshit and the lower tiers not really and it becomes very obvious. If you look at kitana/sub for example kitana has basically an ok projectile, gimmicks with float and her b+2 and b+1 strings. Sub-zero basically wins almost every aspect in neutral, has really difficult to see mixups, has a vortex and it's just so unfun for kitana at that moment.

Or scorpion for example how just having the threat of teleport shuts down so many aspects of neutral for 80% of the cast. It's just not fun and literally forces the game to be stale.

 

[Xelz]

Perfect balance is Pong.

Great balance is when every character is competitively viable.

Good enough balance is when Sonic Fox could place in the top 8 with any character.

 

[Jynks]

"Balance" is one of the most miss understood things in gaming. People say they want balance but as so many fundamentally do not understand what balance even is they are usually talking about something else.

Real Life isn't balanced.. nothing is perfectly balanced. Your favourite Football Team is not balanced with other teams. One MMA fighter is not in balance with another MMA fighter. In fact the very fact these things are out of ballence is what makes the games fun and exciting. For something to be balanced it needs to be identical. Chess is balanced. GO is balanced.

The very differences and "unfairness" of things is what makes things fun, from a human perspective... which is because that is how reality works and how it works for majority of every game on earth.

Everytime someone talks about balance they are usually just talking about how they are a scrub. If a FGC game was truly balanced, people would hate it.

 

[Scheme Kahn't]

What does “balance” mean to you?

To me:

• Balance IS the fine line between a roster comprised of characters which are competitive (against one another) at an intermediate-advanced player skill level, while still respecting the uniqueness and individuality of each character archetype / fighting style.
• Balance is NOT a homogenised roster that essentially, in effective gameplay terms, all boil down to the same tactics either working for a given char., or not -- thereby defining their strength / "tier".
• An example of IMBALANCE would be what Mortal Kombat bosses were in the 1990's/MK9, when compared to the rest of the roster (presuming playability / human player control).

People can, indeed, legitimately argue that MK11 is balanced. After all, there currently exist no "infinites" (IIRC, there might have been one--prior to patching) and of what characters feel weak, it's still not like they would require a SonicFox using them, to have a chance of beating a "my first fighting game" casual who was controlling a char. at the opposite end of the tier spectrum.

Having said that, to claim that whatever balance may exist in the current build of MK11, has not come at the expense of the individuality of many of its characters, is simply a myopic focus on winning and losing, and ignores the nuances of what true fighting game balance should represent.

 

[trufenix]

Stop using mvc3 as a barometer for anything regarding balance or longevity. It was broken from day one, filled with glitches, homogonized bullshit, and other horrible balance decisions that people only tolerated because it was "marvel" and "marvel" is supposed to be fucking busted, I guess.

MvC3 only survived as long as it did because it was two games and the marvel community had previously played an even more broken game for 10 years and Capcom was promising DLC. The second the DLC and patch promises dried up, it went poof just like all competitive games that aren't called Melee or Street Fighter.

 

[Matix218]

Idc that much about balance. MK9 was the most fun of the new trilogy, & it wasn’t balanced lol.

The funny thing is mk9 had the weirdest choices of things they made bad/good, like scorpions pokes being negative on hit, noobs shadows being negative on hit, jade having no mixups, johnny cage f4 having randomly higher plus frames on block, kabal having the best zoning AND the best rushdown (assuming you had the execution), etc. Those kind of odd choices combined with the meter drain, input bug, p1 advantage and stage counterpicking for kenshi and kabal are why the game was cobsidered so poorly balanced. I still feel that a remaster/rebalance of mk9 with current netcode would be my dream mk game, too bad it will never happen...

 

[GLoRToR]

I was going to just tack this onto my Kustom Variation thread, but it’s a complicated issue and I’m stuck at an airport, so might as well go in-depth.

Balance. This site has an obsession with it, but I bet if you ask 100 members what balance is, you’ll get 100 different answers. Does it mean no bad matchups? Does it mean everyone is the same tier? Does it just mean no character has unfair bullshit. And really, does “balance” even matter? Why are we obsessed with it?

So first I just want to cover why “balance” is a deceptive, nebulous term that doesn’t actually mean anything. I think of “balance” like I think of money: it’s just a tool to get what you really want. People get confused and decide money is what they want, when really it’s just the things you can get with money that matter. So how does that describe balance?

Well, it seems to me that the end goal of balance is to achieve a fun-to-play, entertaining-to-watch, and fair fighting game experience. Is there anything else I’m missing? As long as a game meets those criteria, it seems to me that it will be popular and have a long tournament life. It doesn’t matter if it’s actually considered “balanced” as long as people like to play it, like to watch it, and can compete at it. Right? So in a sense, those features are the $100,000 Tesla you want and “balance” is the currency you use to get it. But do you really need “balance” to achieve those goals? I say no, and that the question doesn’t even make sense because no one can define “balance”.

Looking again at UMvC3, that game was full of busted shit. There were overpowered team compositions (Morri-Doom), infinites, glitches, and every other dirty word in the fighting game community. Yet, that game outlasted every NRS title as a popular competitive title by a factor of 2 or 3! It spent 9 years on the Evo main stage. What NRS title has remained relevant for longer than 3 or 4 years?

So, I propose that balance doesn’t matter one bit. I argue that the end goal is the criteria I mentioned above: fun-to-play, fun-to-watch, long tournament life. It doesn’t matter if the game has ban-worthy characters, glitches, infinites, or anything else, as long as it meets those criteria.

Other than that, the only fighting game I can think of that has ever achieved true balance is Divekick, a game where every character only had the same single move: a divekick. So sure, if you want perfect balance then just delete every character except 1, or only allow mirror matches. Otherwise, this concept of balance is something that simply doesn’t exist.

One last thing: if you respond to this post, please include your definition of balance. I won’t be debating or attacking any such definitions; I’m genuinely just curious what everyone thinks they’re talking about when they bring up the concept of balance.

Thanks for reading!

While I agree with the premise of your logic, I need to remind you of the other side.
Most characters are loved.
Most people want their loved characters to stand a fair chance.

I think that's what balance is.

 

[Kroaken]

Another great post, @karaokelove .

 

[Wicked]

Balance. Let me pick the character I WANT to play, not the character I HAVE to in order to compete

Oh, you mean Virtua Fighter? /Kappa

 

[Evil Canadian]

Balance to me is I want the characters I like to be at least mid tier or better and FUCK EVERY OTHER CHARACTER TO HELL

 

[OutworldKeith]

The funny thing is mk9 had the weirdest choices of things they made bad/good, like scorpions pokes being negative on hit, noobs shadows being negative on hit, jade having no mixups, johnny cage f4 having randomly higher plus frames on block, kabal having the best zoning AND the best rushdown (assuming you had the execution), etc. Those kind of odd choices combined with the meter drain, input bug, p1 advantage and stage counterpicking for kenshi and kabal are why the game was cobsidered so poorly balanced. I still feel that a remaster/rebalance of mk9 with current netcode would be my dream mk game, too bad it will never happen...

Another reason it was so well received is because it had everyone’s favorite characters.

 

[Matix218]

Another reason it was so well received is because it had everyone’s favorite characters.

Yeah, it had the cast everyone wanted for sure

 

[Johnny Based Cage]

Balance doesn’t mean shit with patches, is what balance means to me. Every cycle of every game is going to have shit that’s better than other shit, and if any of that shit is too good (or conversely, the other shit is too bad), a patch can fix that.

The bigger goal of the developer should be allowing its players creative control to find what shit is better for them and test it against the shit other people think is the best. This is why Marvel games lasted so long, because shit was broken all along but other people were able to find other shit that worked and we ended up with one of the last Evo champs using fucking Hulk, Haggar and Sentinel of all teams.

Tournament variations stifle our potential for enjoyment in a game where half the fucking moves you were so hype to show us pre-release don’t even get seen by the most hardcore fans of the game. Why the fuck would you even show us these spirit of the Great Kung Lao moves if they don’t even make it to one of King Lao’s tournament variation?

So what if there’s the potential for people to find some broken dirt with custom variations, half the hype is going to be watching people find it and then watching people either find even more broken dirt to compete with it or watching everyone adapt come balance patch time anyway. Y’know, as opposed to watching people all jump on the same pre-determined train of oh this Geras variation that they make me use is great vs oh this Sonya variation I’m stuck with has more shit than most other variations. Let US find that shit on our own with the game you wanted us to play, the WHOLE fucking game and not this locked off fraction of it.

/rant

 

[Nickolaidas]

Balance means that every character has the same chance to beat another character at the hands of competent players.

FighterZ isn't balanced, because Krillin is a fundamentally flawed character (and to add insult to injury, this was purposefully done by the devs) and the best Krillin player will not have the same chances to beat the best Gotenks character. Which is bullshit, because the only thing it achieves is to discourage players from using Krillin, and encourages them to use Gotenks.

 

[Edmund]

Balance to me is Having all playstyle options readily available to play and viable (NOT on the same character of course)

Ie: upclose mixups, zoners, mid range, all rounders, etc

If you can play every type of style, then you have a game where fundamentally everyone has a chance to win their game

 

[Methysan]

To me, a game is more balanced if more of the cast has a chance at winning a tournament and less balanced if tournaments are dominated by only a handful of characters. If you have 25 characters and there is NO reason to play anyone under the top 5 because the top 5 slaughters the bottom 20 for free in 7-3 or worse match ups, that's not good. Granted, having 100% of the cast be tournament viable is probably a pipe dream, but if at least 2/3 are, that's pretty good to me. A compressed tier list like UNIST or Tekken is ideal. But you can also have games like Marvel 3 where the meta is an arms race to discover and abuse the most broken tactics possible which can lead to a cool end game where you have drastically different but equally powerful teams trying to keep each other from playing. This type of meta still shuts out most of the cast though.


Varied and interesting characters that lead to varied play styles in different match ups can help with balance and fun. For example, character X has to keep out character Y but rush down character Z.


Check out Seth Killian's article on this issue:

http://shoryuken.com/2013/09/03/domination-101-prelude-to-a-diss-some-preliminary-remarks-on-balance/

"[wish for] varied characters, none of whom is so weak so as to necessarily lose in boring ways. You don't need to focus on avoiding powerful characters- you just want to keep everyone interesting."


Sirlin also has a good series on balancing Guilty Gear. Whether you agree that this philosophy succeeded is one thing, but I think the idea is sound. A game can allow for incredible variety in characters if it has a robust system of universal mechanics that everyone can use. The biggest example of this in MK 11 is probably flawless block.

 

[Matador Fiend]

No characters are blatantly unfair (mk9 kenshi and Kabal) and no characters are junk (mk9 kano or mk11 dvorah).

 

[grandabx]

Balance

When players can fully invest in characters they like and don't ever need to play the counter-picking game. This is achieved by every character having a definite strength and weakness. Even though a character has bad match-ups, they still have exclusive tools or universal options that keeps their opponent honest.

A good example of this would be a grappler-type character that isn't very threatening from far away, but their game plan is working on all cylinders up-close. Their weakness being long-range attacks and projectiles. Their tools to keep the opponent honest in this case could be a parry-type move for a knockdown, a projectile-negating attack that also helps to get them closer to the opponent at some point. Look at General Raam from Killer Instinct. He's slow, but has all the tools to allow the player to fully invest in him without counter-picking. If you play the game, you know that his combos are very limited and easily combo-broken. He was given as a tool with his instinct a way to cover up his attacks and terrorify the opponent with their normal health bar gradually going into recoverable health status. Jumping over him is a challenge because of his very good anti-air attacks, so an opponent in the corner has to be very creative about getting away once caught.

In a game like MK, a character like this would also need a way to make teleporting against them honest.