I'm not sure if I agree with your basic assumptions about competitive balance and am not totally sure where you got those assumptions from
I can't speak about the case of FPS, fighting games or card games, but the vast majority of RTS and grand strategy games fail when competitive play takes precedence over casual play (I.e. narrative). Even SC2's success as an e-sport plays second-fiddle to its campaign mode.
Everyone likes winning. But it is generally not the sole focus. For example, some players of AoS might care about creating cinematic moments (e.g. glorious last stands, a duel between heroes etc.) even when it's reduces their chances of winning. Essentially they'll purposefully make mistakes on account of it being cool or fun. Competitive minded players will, generally speaking, not do those kinda things if it means winning is in the balance. Which was the point I'm trying to make. People are generally fine with losing. They're generally not fine with losing due to things they percieve as completly outside their control or due to something they percieve to be an unreasonable punishment for a minor mistakes. Things like Nagash dominating magic to the point of invalidating an opposing mage will be percieved as unreasonable because that mage has no meaningfull option to fight back. The situations with the eels will be percieved as unreasonable because it's a 1/2" mistake and the average player cannot reasonably be expected to not make such small mistakes. What's very important to realize here is that what matters is perception. It's all ultimatly subjective, and of course debate can be had about where exactly the cut-off point lies but generaly most people can agree on at least some of it. For example if 1/2" is a reasonable mistake you can argue about, maybe you think being accurate to 1/4" is still a reasonable expectation. But we can all agree there's a limit to how accurate people can place their models, and punishing say a 1/10" mistake would be absurd. This is also why being dominated in say chess is considerably less frustrating. You don't get punished for something silly like placing your piece 1/2" out of position and the rules are extremely clear as to what can and can't be done. Which makes it very easy to know what kinda moves are possible at any given moment. Since that is relativly easy it's also relativly easy to accept your loss as it's much easier to see what you did wrong, as well as how big of a mistake it was (or wasn't). It also helps that all pieces are always relevant. A pawn can still checkmate a king. This means that even after you've lost a considerable chunk of your pieces you can still win. Which again, helps people feel like they're in control and not just being toyed with by an opponent with a superiour force. Also important to note; fair would be a misnomer here. Keeping a game (almost) fair is surprisingly easy, as the rules are clearly defined and generally at least some measure of balance is attempted. It's not like games allow cheating or say allow one army in AoS to bring triple the points (or include a unit that should cost three times as much). What's more accurate would be to use the term unreasonable I guess. Rock-paper-scissors mechanics are literally defined by the massive local inbalances to the point hard-counters have 100% winrates but average out to 50% overall in the meta-game... And that's kind of the basis of like 99% of all competitive balance focused approaches. So no, I'm not putting words in your mouth, that's literally just the most common used basis of competitive balance and something these games tend to activly advertise with... Toxic/degenerate/disruptive/<however you wanne call em> playstyles are often quite fun for the user if they can succesfully pull them off. They tend to be infuriating for whomever is on the recieving end, both if they lose as well as when they do manage to win against this nonsense. The reason for this is quite simple. These type of playstyles generally don't follow "regular" play and force you to react in a very specific way. Thus taking away control from the player on the recieving end (which again, is bad... people don't like to lose control). Also, depending on how big the disruption is, it can even turn the game into something completly different the "victim" may not be interested in playing. As an example of that you have things like Singed proxy-farming in LoL, it disrupts the normal flow of the game & requires very specific counter-actions, which may or may not be possible depending on what the victim is playing. Either way, as the victim you're most likely just going to be annoyed you have to deal with this nonsense. Anyway, the issue is that competitive focused balance tends to ignore the victim's frustration, and only cares about the user's fun. (again, for a prime example see LoL, they've literally come out and said as much at one point.) Use literally anything else. The most obvious being comparisons of various stats and ensuring things stay within a certain bandwith as well as associating some form of cost with stats/abilities. Winrate has so many confounders it isn't even funny, relying on that as a measuring stick for balance is just pointless. Especially as noone ever corrects for the confounders. If at least they'd do that it might have some vague semblance of usefullness. GW generally does a decent job at fixing bugs/unintended effects, or well, they try to... Unfortunatly their solutions aren't always better than the bug, but that's a detail I guess . Competitive balance in general, however, does not care. It's why things like animation cancelling are a thing in most videogames... That sorta thing is pretty much never intended, but it's difficult to completely avoid and from a competitive point of view it adds "skill-expression" so it usually is accepted as a "feature". Like 99% of games that explicitly set out to be e-sports. Especially things that advertise with "hardcore" and "old-school". They also tend to immeadiatly fail cuz the niche they serve is so ridiculously tiny. Also a lot of them simply are really bad, even without the issues that competitive focused balance can bring, so that doesn't help. The few that do succeed often have other things going on on the side, drawing in "players" that don't really play the game all that much (e.g. LoL has a massive community of cosplayers) or rely on non-competitive players for the bulk of their players (e.g. a large chunk of AoE II or SC players refuse to go anywhere near ranked and just play the campaign or the occasional game against a friend...) or are relativly "simple" games that are easy to pick up and provide a nice easy shot of dopamine to "players" who again, don't really care what they're playing, preferably with lootboxes for some extra dopamine, and profits of course... (e.g. FiFa, CoD, Rainbow Siege). Also, if at all possible, the succesfull ones utilize all of these aspects to be succesfull.... Defining fun is difficult (especially as a broad term, it's easier if you restrict yourself to say a specific genre of game or limit yourself to a specific target audience), defining anti-fun is considerably easier though. Like I said earlier, people don't like it when they feel they can't control the situation, or mistakes are punished to an unreasonable degree. Again, this is still subjective and depended on genre and target audience, but it's the type of thing you should be on the look out for. Avoiding those kind of frustrations for the majority of your playerbase is generally is a good idea if you want to create a fun game. A lot of nintendo games tend to succeed in this regard. Though the competitive scene then often does it best to ruin things by randomly declaring bits to be "unfair", and occasionally by wildly missing the point of the game (pokemon's competitive scene is kind of ironic given the consistent messaging you should play with your favorites in those games) Other than that: Most sports. Most children games that have evolved a stable rule-set (so stuff like variants of tag, not the incoherent games a 2 year old toddler comes up with) A good chunk of board games that've stuck around A considerable chunk of older videogames that couldn't rely on patches to fix frustrating OP things. Cooperative games (in general PvE type games do this well as they only need to focus on making it fun for 1 side) Have you tried playing AoE II ranked after not playing for a while? It's awefull. It's filled with people trying waaaaaaaaaay too hard to be optimal, and if you don't join in this ratrace you lose after about 5 minutes of gameplay when you get invaded by 3 scouts that will be nicely micro-ed to ruin your day. Same with pokemon. Have you played that competitivly after playing it like a normal person who just played their favorites and maybe had a basic understanding of EV's and natures? Only to get swiped by some meme-team you can't even touch? Same with 99% of fighting games. Playing against friends is fine. Playing competitivly results in you getting juggled until you die by what is considerate a bottom tier player. The basic games are fun enough, assuming you like the genre, but the competitive scene is fairly consistently awefull to get into. And more often than not plays completly different from the campaign/skirmish/games with friends to the point it might as well be a completly different game. Lastly what's rather important. A good chunk of those didn't set out to be competitive and aimed to be a fun game first and foremost. Pokemon very explicitly ignores the competitive scene, to the point the competitive scene regularly complains about this. AoE II created its core 20-25 years ago and hasn't significantly changed since (at least in terms of its core-gameplay). TF2 is at it's core just a ridiculous game aimed at fun and hats. SC2 is build with the campaign at its core. Also, what's rather important to, none of these are exactly stable games. Imho, to count as "having stood the test of time", a game shouldn't be recieving frequent updates anymore.... Difficult to claim it's still the same game after 200 patches (or a 100 sequels in the case of pokemon) Also, genuine question, how many of these have a competitive scene that's actually stable, with a nice influx of new blood, and fairly large playerbase (outside of Korea at least, before you point out SC is super duper populair over there), and isn't just a niche within a niche? I can't remember the last time I saw yu-gi-oh cards in a regular store. The last time I saw kids playing pokemon in the park I was still a teenager. The only time I see anyone talk about AoE II is when I end up in strange corners of the internet. And a good chunk players tend to prefer the campaign or skirmishers against the AI cuz it's more fun and less stressfull. How much of their competitive playerbases is just the people that happened to grow up with those games and stuck around? Resulting in a playerbase that is going to die out as there's little to no fresh blood. As an aside, how is dishonoured a competitive game, isn't that a solo-game? Eh, why would it matter if the game is assymetrical or not? The point is that most actually long-living stable games don't change rules simply because something is "OP" but are primarly focused on changing things that are frustrating, boring or just generally unsportsmanlike. Assymetrical game or not.
Top-down game design doesn't account for the fact that narrative campaign, cooperative, and competitive multiplayer modes are fundamentally different games altogether, and that, for all the spectacle of e-sports and tournament play, competitive gaming accounts for less than 20% of a given game's active player base. This holds true for both videogames like Starcraft 2 and tabletop games like AoS or 40k.
uuuh no we do it to. stop making clames about us you keep getting them wrong. you thinking something is unfair does not make it unfair. i have had people "perceive" soooo many things in the game to be wrong and broken that aren't. i've had people perceive the old ark of sotek is broken. i've had people perceive that glade guard are broken, i've had people perceive that carnasuars and RAZORDONS are broken. which is why it's a terrible terrible metric. sure i do think it's absurd i also think that that doesn't happen very often(if at all i've never had a game disided by being 1" let alone .1") and that the above example was not .5" but 2" out of place(thats a lot considering it's half os some units movement) and bassed on as you said a lot of very good charge rolls. you have never played a very good chess master then. unlike AoS there is 0% chance of you beating one. no you get punnished for making a bad move 6 turns ago(no really) this isn't a argument againsed balancing around competitive it's a argument againsed complicated games and fair enough they actually need computers and doctorate lvl math to determine how effective moves are. noooo no it can't.(ok it caaaan but it's unbelievably hard to do so) in fact any board state that has a pawn checkmating a king would have been easier if the pawn has just ranked up or not been in the picture at all. yeeees but only if you traded well and your opponent is in close to the same position as you. other wise naw your @#$%ed if your oponent is good enough at chees you can literally loose by making the wrong move in the first 5 turns. if you are going to complain about top level plays like the eels then we are going to compare it to top level chess. again no fire emblem is well known for it's rock paper sisors game play but it doesn't give you a 100% win rate but average out to 50% overall in the meta-game... And that's kind of the basis of like 99% of all competitive balance focused approaches. So no, I'm not putting words in your mouth, that's literally just the most common used basis of competitive balance and something these games tend to activly advertise with...[/QUOTE]that wasn't the argument you attributed to use. you said we don't care about it and we do. i play cities bud i don't need to be using "Toxic/degenerate/disruptive"(poisoning tthe well a bit there) playstyles to think they make the game fun. i actively sought out nagash fights in the last tournament i played(team based draft system). i was running a magic dependent army even and i had a blast.(there is fun being a bad measurement again). not just nagash but dragons and DoK as well and i was playing a decidedly non meta list. then they can forfeit at any time. i'm not going to force you to play a game you are not having fun in. but most people try to keep playing to see how well they do and to practice. if they din't want to play my list in the first place they should have said so i have easier lists for casual games there is no hard counter to singed proxy farming it's just a style of game play. and is limited to one hero hence why it's named after him. sure it requires you to play againsed that but so does doing anything in lol yes becouse you can't balance around a subjective feeling and to try is foolhardy i thought you said it doesn't care about fun? just win rates. so you don't have an alternative... i asked you for something to use and you said "not that" thats not helpful. the fact that it has variables is why it's not the only thing we use. yes we do. no it definitely is intended. the craters make it possible so that some moves are less punishing to mess up with but are usualy less powerful as a result. you don't say.... wow you rebut yourself in the same paragraph as you make the argument. the game being bad is why those games fail not due to it being balanced competitivly. that doesn't make mean the game isn't balanced around competitive. they are they just also have champains, and yes those are important but we don't balance the game the game around champain in fact as soon as you know what you are doing the champain becomes painfully easy. this shows that the games need stuff to do that isn't just match play and they do(i don't know like painting or narative) but all of them are balanced around competitive. wow did you just blame loot boxes for competitively balanced games being successful? no absolutely not. these games are popular inspite of those things not because of them. ok awsome a actual example to work with lets do this. there are 5 major multiplayer games put out by Nintendo. Mario party a game that has a startling reputation for bad player experience to the point that it's said to never play with friends. mario cart a game that is completely balanced around competitive gameplay spatoon a game that is completely balanced around competitive game play. smash brothers a game with notoriously bad balancing between characters and pokemon a game series that has a wonderful competitive seen but terrible balancing(we get around this by having weight classes) and a non competitive seen that is constantly derided for being far far to easy. the 2 teams play under the exact rules there is no balancing is not balanced it's entirely dependent physical ability, the fat kid has a distinct disadvantage to expansive a list to judge try something more specific again be spacific i can't adreas such a large category without are generally unbalanced in the players favor well i asked for and gave specifics and i got broud genres not really the same i have, no it's not. this is why AoE 2 has the elo system. 3 scouts is actually a really bad tactic that only works on low elo players who have no idea what they are doing. in fact it's countered by a single button press and build order matters a lot less at low elo almost like player skill is the most important thing. i have played competitive pokemon and being good at the game trumps team composition. we can see this in a bunch of youtube videos where a person is running a UU team and sweaps full legendary lists because he knows what he is doing. pokemon also has weight classes for the people who aren't that good. you want to use your favorites? cool you absolutely can try out OU UU or PU wow almost like playing with friends is a bunch of new players playing againsed each other and the other is a new person that hasn't played enough to get ranked playing some one who is much much better then they are. nothing unfair there just the best player winning. no it's consistently difficult to get into because it requires the practice and skill to play well. yeah spamming fire balls and button mashing doesn't work in competitive you need to actualy know what you are doing and this takes time and effort if you don't want to put the time in that is fine but that doesn't make the game unbalanced. so does the main game. those game are the most cheesable exploitable games out there. i mean heck it's posable to win the main game without leveling up at all. the balance is way way worce in the main game completely untrue the last balance patch for AoE2 was in august 2021 wow no it's not. the updates have stopped steam has moved on to other things but for it's intire development valve did it's best to make it a well rounded balanced game no it's not. again the minute you know what you are doing the champain falls apart. SC2 has continually been balanced around competitive game play because the AI isn't good enough and they have to make it cheat in order to play againsed a player. what so lack of balancing makes something balanced? you are also ignoring that those game are receiving constant new content so yeah of course the balancing kept happening they had to adjust for new stuff. all of the above most of witch have player concurrent player counts in the tens to hundreds of thousands you aren't looking very hard. they are normaly behind the front counter. also the online versions have very health player basses what? no one playes in the park any more. what a weird argument average 15.000 players daily with spikes up to 30,000 thats good for modern games let alone a game nearing it's third decade and they are welcome to do so. i like winning againsed a dumb AI that cheats to be challenging to. but we don't balance the game around it. in fact you don't have your entire roster of tools untill the last 2 level of each champain quite a bit . most of those are constantly getting new players it's why they have lasted so long. sorry my bad i ment for honor because something can't be OP if both the sides are exactly the same. you don't balance cheekers you don't balance baseball you don't balance foot races. the sides have the same rules. the only difference is player skill and abiliy. the armies in AoS are not the same they need to be balanced becouse they are diferent.
you are right RTS game do need healthy campaigns . but thats not a argument againsed competitive balancing it's a argument againsed a lack of variety and lack of content. it's true that most people don't play competitive i am a part of a rare breed. but the game is still balanced around competitive because that's the best place to get metrics. RTS can't balance around the Champaign the AI isn't as smart or as skilled as a player. this is why the AI cheets so hard in starcraft. getting constant free units having infanite resorses starting with 2+ full basses while you have to build every thing from scratch and having full tech trees when you are limited in your options. you can't balance the game around this so they make a fun engaging unbalanced Champaign based on unit balancing from competitive.
As much as you are on point about the AI being an artificial idiot that needs boosting to present a challenge at times*, this is still a pretty disingenuous assertion at best. *In all fairness though, a lot of recent competitive-only games, as a result of treating single-player modes as a desperate afterthought, often feature AIs and pathfinding that make those of SC1 look like Deep Blue by comparison. One of the big draws for a lot of players in strategy games is spectacle, which - especially in the case of Command & Conquer, Starcraft, or Warcraft - is often presented in spades in their campaigns in ways that competitive-only games cannot balance without cutting out the very units and abilities that would make them so appealing. Case in point, Starcraft 2 features several units and abilities per faction that, while really awesome and cool to play with in single- and cooperative multi-player, do not appear in its competitive multi-player mode for any of the following reasons and more: Mechanics and/or roles that step on those of other units or abilities within the same faction; Mechanics that players have little to no control over when using them; Mechanics that outright prevent opponents from controlling their own units... Arguments about SC2 not being AoS or 40k aside, I would be hard-pressed not to see design parallels between tabletop and digital strategy games, especially where these kinds of pitfalls rear their ugly heads, and, insofar as I can tell, AoS and 40k suffer immensely from a lack of focus as to who to cater to - the wacky content that casual fans want in their games is next to impossible to balance for the ones who want to play competitively - all while giving the middle finger to player-generated content.
Fire emblem is also: 1) Not competitivly balanced, which is why you have people beat it with no-growth runs and other nonsense 2) The rock-paper-scissors mechanic is relativly minor, especially once you're past the first few levels, to the point it can be ignored in most fights and you'll probably be fine. This reduces the risk of running into a hard-counter you can't beat. 3) The game allows you to switch your weapon, as well as your characters on a regular basis, as well as just bringing multiple characters so if a certain level has 1 powerfull sword and 1 powerfull axe user you can bring the appropriate counters yourself, thus further minimizing the risk of getting stuck with a full-blown hard-counter throughout a level. Especially 2 & 3 are important to make rock-paper-scissors mechanics feel good. As long as you have the flexibility to switch on the fly, it can work perfectly fine. However, if you can't adapt on the fly, and get countered when you pick your champion/deck/army/whatever, it generally results in a rather frustrating game. Do you seriously not understand why proxy farming is viewed as utterly horrible to deal with by like 99% of the victims to the point some people view it as little more than trolling? I mean sure, LoL is filled with borderline trolling strategies that are deemed legit for some inexplicable reason. But that's kind of the point. If you balance competitivly you get LoL; a game that constantly breaks its own rules, refuses to put limitations on things to prevent obvious problems cuz god-forbid we limit skill-expression, is obsessed with winrates resulting in random buffs & nerfs that don't really fix any issues, & has outright stated that the frustration of the loser doesn't matter as long as the victor felt he was skill-full... Yeah, I give up. The fact that you're replying with this just shows that I've not even managed to get across what I mean by competitive balance. Spending more time talking in circles to ultimatly be misunderstood doesn't seem like a whole lot of fun, so I'm going to do something else now. Also, stop demanding pokemon be made difficult. It's a series aimed at small children & a generally casual audience, and it's balanced perfectly fine for the target audience cuz it focusses on providing them with a fun experience first and foremost, and even allows them to be competitive within the framework of a relativly casual and easy game. It's not intended to be even remotely difficult or taken seriously, never has been and probably never will be. No matter how hard the competitive scene insists it should be. Which is kind of precisely the point. Pokemon does exactly what it's supposed to do. Balancing it competitivly would kill a large part of what makes the current game fun.
The new Skaven warband's AoS rules are out. Unlike the majority of warbands, these actually look ok: https://i.redd.it/6clcj9c3h5v81.jpg
fishing for MW with these guys as well as run and shoot fight first AND retreat out of combat? that's more then just ok
It's pretty glaringly obvious that they designed these guys as actual units of their own rather than just less-good versions of an existing unit *cough*Starblood Stalkers*cough* They look like pretty effective assassins that will be able to kill unprotected heroes or take objectives. But meanwhile, I'm hearing people say that the Nighthaunt warband is just ok and the new DoK one is bad.
They may be a glass cannon (especially if you have some shooting), but that "deep strike" at 6" should assure they hit what they want.
They finally release a foot-hero that's actually halfway capable of dealing damage and it's a freaking underworlds warband? What the hell? Yeah, these should be good at deleting a support hero, stealing an objective out of nowhere, or just to be a general nuisance on a flank that an opponent will have to deal with, as you can't just let them run rampant with their damage output. Plus that strike-first then retreat rule in combination with its damage output should be quite usefull as well, especially if the opponent lacks shooting. This seems to be the first underworlds warband that might be more than just a silly fluffy gimmick unit.
https://www.warhammer-community.com...-with-four-full-days-of-mind-blowing-reveals/ Do you have any speculations what the AOS reveals will be on Thursday?