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Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Essay about game design and game balance, or why "fun to play" heroes usually suck for everyone else

Part one: design and balance are not the same thing

What's a good design? A hero that's fun to play as while not being frustrating to play against. Because while some heroes are entertaining for one person playing them, they're a headache for opposing five. You can have a well designed hero that's imbalanced and you can have badly designed hero with a perfect 50% winrate. Vice versa and anything in between.

First example: mirror matches, especially in Starcraft. They are perfectly balanced (everyone has same tools) but generally disliked because they're frustrating. ZvZ is a knife fight in a closet, TvT is a stalemate and PvP is a rock-paper-scissors lottery.

Second example: imagine a ranged AA hero with no abilities nor talents. To compensate, their DPS and health are higher than other heroes. Oh, and they cannot stutterstep due to rapid attack speed. Is such hero the most boring thing ever? Yes. But it can be balanced! In fact, it would be even easier to balance than others because there's only three knobs to tweak: health, DPS and range.

Last example: take the same hero but make it so that they can 1-shot any hero while themselves having only 1 HP too. Now you have only one knob left – attack range. Such stupidly designed hero would be even easier to balance than the previous one, yet it would be frustrating for everyone despite having a pristine 50.00000000% winrate.

Part two: not all exciting ideas are good

Short detour. Despite being a good game, Dota has a trove of frustrating abilities:

  • Instantly deal damage to and reveal all enemy heroes no matter where they are
  • Silence and poison a hero for a very long time. Sixteen seconds, to be precise.
  • Low chance to deal a huge AA crit
  • Ranged, instant point-and-click stun that has random duration and damage
  • Permabash (Skullcracker on steroids)
  • Silence, slow, and attack while invisible. Oh, and crits btw.
  • Infinite clones
  • Just general possibility of being able to 1-shot someone with an auto attack.

Are such things fun to do to others? Fuck yeah! But it will it make you rage when tables turn. That's just Dota's way of balancing things: make everyone OP so that no one's OP. HotS, however, was fundamentally different from the start and if you added such things it would be a gross power creep. Unfortunately, that's precisely what started happening after Chogall's patch, which also brought scaling changes and new talent tree style. After that, Blizzard started releasing heroes with increasingly annoying mechanics:

  • Hyper mobility
  • Attack on the move
  • Resets on kills
  • Protected
  • Deflection
  • Unrevealable stealth
  • Surprise burst damage

Imagine if there was a hero that had most of these mechanics. What a nightmare it would be... Anyway, back to the point. In the olden days, there were only few annoying heroes, namely Illidan, Zeratul, Nova, Murky and late-game Hammer. Maybe also Sylvanas, Zagara and Gawloze. Post-Chogall that number is about 50%. Check heroespatchnotes by release date.

This is concerning not only because of power creep (which coincided with a marathon of reworks) but also because these heroes can (and sometimes do) drive people away from the game. In today's games people complain about having to play against Garrosh. Before that it was DVa, Genji, Probe, Valeera, Samuro, Zarya, Medivh, Chromie, Tracer, Li-Ming. It wouldn't happen as often a year and a half before.

Part Three: how better design looks like

What all these aforementioned mechanics have in common? It's the lack of counterplay. You don't outplay annoying heroes, they play against themselves. If they don't make a mistake they succeed, if they fail, they fail. You don't come into the equation.

Why Garrosh is not fun to play against? Because his pull/throw combo is basically an ultimate from level 1, on a 16 second cooldown. Stitches can only pull and hook can be blocked by minions. Artanis puts himself in danger by swapping. Meanwhile Garrosh combo is neither hard nor risky to execute. Some say Garrosh "punishes bad positioning". It's Diablo that punishes bad positioning if you stand between him and a wall or if a ranged hero hugs him. Counteract by not doing that. Garrosh can punish anyone, anywhere. If his Q missed it's not because you "dodged it", it's because Garrosh missed it. You can dodge Chromie's Q, you can dodge Malthael's E. You don't "dodge" something that's almost instant. Even then – Artanis or Stitches abilities are easier to dodge anyway.

Ok, let's take everyone's favorite weeb – Genji. His dash is a movement ability on a scale that HotS never saw before. Currently neither his nor yours positioning matters, Genji can noclip anywhere he wants. Now imagine if dash did not go through walls (like it doesn't in Overwatch) and to compensate it had lower cooldown or D had longer range. Suddenly positioning matters. Suddenly there no longer can be cheap ping-pong kills through walls and buildings. Suddenly abilities have different niches. Suddenly you can predict Genji's movements and counteract.

Lastly, I want to address Tracer. In order to make a faithful transition to Hots, she had to have attack on the move. With such high attack speed she couldn't stutterstep. Nor it would feel like Tracer if she attacked slowly. Devs had no choice and they said so themselves in Q&A. In Overwatch, Tracer's pistols have big spread so in order to be effective you need to get close to enemies. In HotS, she has the default 5.5 range. Because most of her abilities are for mobility, to compensate Tracer has one of the highest AA DPS in the game. The combination of range, DPS and mobility means that Tracer has to have one of the lowest health pools in the game. The result is that Tracer punishes melee heroes and high-skill heroes that rely on skillshots or combos. Meanwhile Tracer herself gets countered by low-skill ranged right-clickers.

Consider the following change. AA range is reduced but to compensate Tracer gets more health and DPS. Blink range is increased but so is the cooldown. Now melee heroes have a chance because Tracer is closer to them while Tracer herself has a chance against ranged auto attackers. Due to closer range and Blink's longer cooldown skillshots are more of a threat yet at the same time Tracer has more health to put up a fight.

Good design is not good balance. Good design is counterplay.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 1 month ago (Source)

    I think you can boil it down to a single statement:

    A hero should feel overpowered without actually being overpowered.

    That's a really tricky target to hit, but a great goal.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 1 month ago (Source)

    I do not think that is what he said at all. He said it had little to do with balance or overpoweredness.

    Rather, it is that you should be able to feel that you can punish a hero (which you rarely can with Genji) while when you die to him or her, it should feel like you made a mistake or had poor positioning. If you want to boil it down to one statement. A hero should be as easy to punish as it can punish others.

    Several of my friends stopped playing Hots after you released Tracer. It may be partly due to her being overtuned by mainly because they felt there was few ways to punish her due to her multiple escapes and mobility. While she could very easily punish you. It felt cheap, she ran in circles while other heroes had no way to catch up.

    The counterplay and skill requirements are part of the balance and what can keep what would otherwise be overpowered from actually being so.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 1 month ago (Source)

    A hero can be frustrating to play against even if it isn't overpowered. Chromie is a good example, dodge to the left and you instantly die. Dodge to the right and Chromie is useless and did absolutely no damage. There's nothing telegraphed, you just more or less randomly die sometimes and Chromie does nothing most of the time.

    Can you understand that it may be frustrating to play against? That it may fell less fair to die to a Chromie than to for example Kael'thas?

    Definitely, though Chromie wouldn't be top of my list for frustrating ones to play against. I'm not saying we hit the goal of every hero feeling great to play with and against. I'm saying its a good goal.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 1 month ago (Source)

    Sorry, but have you even tried to read the post? Really frustruating to see such a sloppy comment from a lead game designer. And it is even more sad to read your "goal" regardless hero design.

    Yep. As a hero, you want to feel powerful and have your skill rewarded with moments that feel awesome. It's easy to make a boring hero balanced, but it won't feel great to play. As the opponent, you want to feel powerful and have your skill rewarded as well. The relevant point here is the counterplay which can mitigate or negate, though skill, the things that are making the hero feel awesome to play. When those things are in balance, you've got a solid skill matchup with both sides feeling good and what could otherwise be an overpowered ability isn't. The examples given are ones where the author feels there isn't enough counterplay and the abilities end up being overpowered and frustrating to play against. It's a legit concern and what it feels like to play against a hero is an important consideration for us as well. We don't always hit the mark, but our goal is that every hero is both entertaining to play and to play against.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 1 month ago (Source)

    I agree on most things you are saying here but I honestly don't understand why are you so focused on the word "overpowered". In my understanding being rewarded in some moments and feeling awesome when you are taking advantage of your hero's strenghts is absolutely not the same as feeling overpowered. I would say that feeling overpowered is the opposite -- it is when you are getting rewarded for nothing and can easily get away from being punished even if you are making bad plays.

    And hero who is frustuating to play against is not nessesary overpowered in any aspect. Let me use Zagara as an example: she is far from being overpowered in general, her winrate is not stupidly high or something. But when she picks Nydus worm and your team is not very well coordinated it might be super frustruating to feel forced to go across all the map and clear her creep and Nydus exits to prevent her split push during the next objective. Note that it is very clear what you should do to counter play her: don't let her to spread the creep freely on all lanes, forse 5vs5 teamfigths where she is not a big threat, gank and kill her if she pushes to agressively, etc. But in solo q games you are unlikely to be able to reliably force smart 5vs5 figths outside of objectives and because of that the main counterplay to Nydus often turns into playing a game of cat and mouse with Zag which is not fun at all.

    You talk about hero being "both entertaining to play and to play against" in the end but I think it is significantly different from your original statement "A hero should feel overpowered without actually being overpowered" which caused my negative reaction to your first comment.

    It's probably just different ways of looking at the word overpowered and what it means to "feel" overpowered. To use your Zagara example, she's one of my favorite heroes and when I'm in the zone and everything is clicking, I feel invincible and OP even though I'm clearly not.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 1 month ago (Source)

    It must be personal, because she is on the top of my list of "annoying to play against", and even the universally hated Genji doesn't come close.

    I'd rather deal with hyper-mobility than "you got deleted without even having a chance to see it coming".

    Everyone has their own boogeyman. I'm pretty good about anticipating Chromie so she doesn't bug me much. I'm awful at picking out stealth, though, so curse up a storm when there's a Valeera around.

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