Keeping Live Games Good | Design Club

[Music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that comes to you on this particular day at this particular time in this particular local to talk about this thing that we're going to talk about today. Haha. That was as general and vague as to be unhelpful, but all technically true. Uh, I am your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff. Hi to the people, Jeff. Hello everybody and welcome. It is Thursday morning. It is 11:00 Pacific, 2:00 Eastern. Just cuz you're Eastern, 3 hours in the future does not mean well you get to shake your head at me because it is still morning for me. That's true. But this is the only show we do that cares about Pacific time. No other show we do cares about Pacific time. Anyway,

can you be specific about the Pacific? Or we could take the time to rhyme. Don't Yeah. Don't Don't start with me. So So we go to the show. We shall go to the show. Sorry. I'm teach Did you know rhyming is a teachable skill? I've been having to teach my 5-year-old well since he was three how to rhyme and he's now actually he's a badass at rhyming by the age of five. But it is an actual thing you have to learn how to do. Yeah. So Jeff, yes, we we were on break last week. We were. And while we were on break, uh a a thing near and dear to my heart experienced an overhaul, which is the cause of our our discussion. So, as you may be able to guess by the thumbnail, we're going to talk about the Magic Bands. So, I am a lover, a player of Magic the Gathering. Um, and have been since I was four. Uh, it's because many of us are here have been actually I can't think of anybody in the studio who has not been a Magic player. Yeah, I think that's fair. Um, and

maybe not all active at this point, but at least in some point it is that ubiquitous of a game. Correct. That we have an entire studio of people all of whom have played Magic. Yes. So um recently uh Wizards made a choice about one of their live formats. Uh they decided that it was going to be three years long. standard the main uh I guess entry format into Magic was going to be three years long for actually for very good reasons but yes for ve for very good reasons instead of two years long which for all of the good reasons has caused a problem which is that there are roughly now 50% more cards that can interact in ways that the designers didn't intend when they made the cards and then there are some cards that are just on their face maybe a little too much. Did not quite get through the tuning and QA process in the way they should have. Correct. So, this led us to a big conversation that we wanted to have

about why banning stuff is actually good and why it's important. Right. Well, it sucks for all of the people who bought Cory Steel Cutter when it was at its peak at oh, I don't know, entirely too many dollars. Uh, what was the rarity of Cory Steel Cutter? I don't remember. Cory Steel Cutter was a rare. Uh, okay. First printed in uh or printed in Tier Dragon Storm. Um, and it peaked at uh $23 $22. Okay. Highest price. High but not egregious. Yeah. Like having seen the history of Magic cards. High but not egregious. Correct. So, while it absolutely stinks for the people who spent $100 on a play set of Cory Steel Cutter and it's now banned, it did retain some value. It's still like 15 bucks a copy. Um, the bans in general, the concept of banning, the concept of taking action to keep a live game healthy is good. And we

wanted to talk a little bit more about that because I think that that's a um I think that's a big discussion, right? That this happens all of the time, right? This happens in every PvP game of note, I think. Even some PvE, though that's a lot rarer. Yeah, absolutely. So, let's let's let's start at the very basics. Why do balance passes? It's work, right? It's it's work that's not generating new content, right? That's not fixing bugs. It's not doing a bunch of things, but balance passes are important. So, why do we do them? Uh, and I think the the first one uh is something that Mark Rosewater talked about and uh that um Carmen talked about uh and that was the game needs to be fun for people to play it, right? That is that is fundamentally like one of the first and biggest things

is that the game needs to be fun. And Jeff, would you believe would you believe that having all of the matchups be deck A versus deck A, Cory Steel Cutter verse Corey Steel Cutter is not fun. And that's actually a point I'd love to get to later, but yes, 100%. Like if you lower the if you lower the quantity of things getting play actually I have a great old EverQuest story for this one. Sure. So years ago, actually decades ago at this point, um, as I was moving on from EverQuest, I was training up a replacement to be in charge of the magic system. Mhm. And so they made a couple spells for the I made some spells to the expansion, they made some, and I was doing some review, and that they had this cool highle spell. Um, trying to remember who it was for, one of the classes, it doesn't matter. That

basically is a highle buff. Like, it was a perfectly good buff. It like made you move a little faster. It gave you some attack speed, but it also transformed you into a werewolf. Sure. Which on on its face sounded cool. Like I had another travel spell that transformed people into wolves. Sure. So, you'd get like this pack of wolves running around. Sure. Like over long distance. The problem was or was or that one was okay because honestly a lot of people kind of tuned out when doing long distance travel. Sure. Combat at its heart is one of the things the game was most known for, right? So imagine for a moment every single as a highle buff that's really good. You would expect this to be cast a lot, which would mean a lot of your players would always be seen as werewolves, which would mean all character customization at that point was completely unseen because you'd be swapping their model out. And so this great amount of

customization and other things would all get reduced down to you'd see a couple of werewolves on screen. And so I had to gently talk to this young designer about what would actually happen if we put that spell in. Like thinking through this, this, and this, and here's the state it will end up being. Yes. And telling them basically it wouldn't be fun if everybody looked the exact same, right? And in a lot of cases, like that happens with other kinds of balance, too. if every single deck is the exact same, you take all of this customization and possibility space and you shrink it all down into what the optimal thing is, right? And in some cases, it's um uh the term that often gets used for it is warping, right? So, for instance, um the only other uh the the other deck of note in the format that wasn't the is it prowess deck that was running around with Cory Steel Cutter began main

decking their um their answer to Cory Steel Cutter decks. And main decking means not putting it in the sideboard to substitute in in case you need it. Correct. They were just running it straight. They were assuming that more often than not they were going to run into a deck running this card and that it would deeply advantage them to be prepared in game one of a three-game match to face that card and that becomes a problem. Right? It's okay for stuff to be strong. It's okay for stuff to need specialized answers. But when it specialized targeted is cool, especially if it's specialized. Correct. Mhm. But when it's ubiquitous, when it's so ubiquitous that everyone assumes that you're going to play against it, now the format is tending towards solved. And that's not good, especially in a in a place that thrives in customization. Right. Magic is probably

one of the most um customizable PvP type environments, right? Like think about how many customization choices you get to make in Magic, right? In a in a tournament deck, you get to make 75 distinct choices of what cards to run in your deck. And you in a pool of thousands of people can choose a completely unique 75 cards. And the fewer and fewer people that are choosing to do those 75 unique cards because the format has an answer that's one deck, the worse it becomes, right? Because the more boring and sta the more stale it becomes. Let's say I would say that that's worse because it's tending further away from like the the point of the game is I was trying to define why worse. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Worse. Yes. But worse because stale. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Um and so those things also mean and and we've talked about this briefly in other

places. It means that design time is being wasted and art time and like all sorts of time because for every card that doesn't see play ever anywhere you spent time designing, balancing, getting art, doing all of this stuff and it isn't useful, right? It languishes, right? there are cards that just simply aren't being played because they don't work well against that thing, right? And so that is in um sort of inefficient at best and kind of sad at worst, right? If you think about it, right? If if 40% of all decks are playing the same deck, that's a huge amount of potential for people to be brewing new things, that's just wasted, right? Well, you just gave me a really interesting idea. Mhm. I don't think it would work in physical, but imagine a online magic or a

Hearthstone style game that say it launched with a 100 cards. I'm just picking and every month they just added 10 new cards. Every month like not big sets like Yeah. That literally there's an ongoing So they're committing to roughly 120 cards a year. Yep. And I'd be curious to see like I don't think I've ever seen that. But I've always seen like big batch format releases as opposed to a consistent ongoing let's shift the meta a little bit every month with introductions of things. Uh Fantasy Flight has done that with their living card game model. Oh, okay. So that was the model that was used in Netrunner in um Android Netrunner and in um their version of Legend of the Five Rings. Uh and it's a very and I will tell you for freezes your idea is a good one. The problem is that it's competing with magic in a physical space. I do think it would work better in digital because you get to slowly shift things rather than

Hey, we got That's why I say digital because physical actually the biggest downside is almost the collectibility aspect. Mhm. If you're releasing a set of like 300 cards at a time, sorry, as the group making it and you want to earn money for what you did, releasing 300 as people buying a lot of stuff, hoping to get the rares, etc. If you're selling releases of like 10 at a time, yep, it's kind of a lot harder to justify getting people to go buy a box, right, or something. And one of the problems with um Fantasy Flights model is that they released playsets of every card that released that month as like a booster pack. Mhm. But that means that the total development plus production cost needed to be met by number of players times the cost of booster pack, right? And that math wasn't necessarily the most favorable with magic in the room taking up a bunch of money and a bunch of space. Um yeah. No, sorry. It was it's a little bit of a

tangent, but it's fun to like look at what games like Magic have done to how people expect an ecosystem to operate. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, okay, so carrying on. So, will Yes, a big announcement came out. Well, you mentioned Cory Steel Cutter, but what is the thing that Watsi just did that they have not done for a very very very very long time? They banned seven cards in one shot, which is a lot. Uh so, and this is seven that are in the current live format. That is correct. They are all they were all in the threeear cycle. Yes. Okay. They were all in they were all in the format standard which is the past three years of most but not all releases. There are non-standard legal sets that get released that release for older formats. So they're higher powered but most sets release for standard now. So um and seven is actually I'm just going to quote that seven seven is a lot of cards. Yes. Now, here's the very interesting thing.

Here's the very, very interesting thing that I loved about this. The two most straightforward bands were Cory Steel Cutter, which showed up in most decks, like literally most, like literally the majority, and another card called Monstrous Rage, which was warping the format in horrible ways. Okay. And the other five cards were all preemptive bands that for the things that Wizards had pretty good data was going to be the next problem. So, that's interesting. Correct. That is a very interesting concept, right? because uh Wizards tries to only do um bands uh at specific intervals, right? It helps a lot to keep format stability if you only ban things at specific time windows and indeed only balance things in specific time windows so that players know and that applies to pretty much every game, right? You don't want

players like practicing with a champion and then right before a big tournament the champ gets nerfed in a way that affects all of their practice. That's not really ideal, right? Or um you know, oh hey, it's tournament weekend for the biggest tournament of the year in this esport. Guess it's time to release a balance patch on Saturday night. Oh, maybe don't think about don't consider you could, but also no. So, um the five cards that got uh banned, we're not going to dwell too much on what they are. Um, but the five cards were Up the Beantock, This Town Ain't Big Enough, Hopeless Nightmare, um, Abuo's Awakening, and Heartfire Hero, which were all weirdly The other very interesting weird thing about this is that two of the seven cards were rare, four of the cards were uncommon, and one of the cards was a common, which is fascinating. That's a whole

different conversation about like rarity versus power and the way that it impacts card games. But it was it I don't think I've ever seen that many com I don't think I've ever seen that many not rare bands in a format that wasn't popper. So um so and actually one of the things for those of you a little unfamiliar with it is Magic has had a philosopher for a while that's not always true but usually true that commons are good for almost every deck. Uncommons are a little more situational and rares usually have a very specific use. Correct. They're built. They don't always follow this, but and that's why you tend to see more bands on rares is that specific use tends to ends up being a little strong because they tend to up the power because they're narrowing the way in which it can be useful. Correct. Um and and yeah, they tend to be what we would call like buildaround, right? And of course, rarity only kind of matters in a

constructed sense. It's mostly for limited a format where you build your deck out of cards in packs. And the rarity really matters there, but it is peculiar that the breakdown was like this. So, so they banned these cards and much like the wolves returning to Yellowstone, standard is a um re is in a really good place right now. The format went from being mostly one um mostly like one or two decks to having a wide variety of decks. There are now there is still an is it deck. It's just run by Vivv instead of run by other stuff and it's not quite as good. There's there's a weird stompy fourcolor dinosaur deck. There's all kinds of variety. There's all kinds of competition. People are brewing again. Standard is playable again, right? And it's it's very cool to see the impact that this balance change directly had on a format, right? On a player base, right? And one of the

reasons that Magic is such a good example for this is we can see the data very quickly and very granularly, right? Can I also mention, I just realized this is one of the few styles of games where if they do it right, nobody's unhappy about the bands. Yeah. Like if you went into an MMO or and like, hey, this class is banned. you would have, you know, because people have invested hundreds if not thousands of hours in upping their character that characters and the character class or if you go into League and you're like this champion is they don't ban champions, but they will occasionally nerf them to the ground just to get people to stop playing them as much and then rebuild them. Yeah. But, you know, if you've put 50 hours into making yourself good at that champion and you've bought some cosmetic skins and other things, like people get angry about that. But generally in Magic, people are looking to have fun matches. And if all they're having to if the only thing they

feel they can play is the ultra power, the single ultra powerful deck or it's one counter, that actually sucks a lot of the joy out of it. Correct. Correct. And I would wager even the people who spent money picking up those cards a couple days in are like, "Oh, I am so glad I don't have to be correct playing this way." Yeah. I I I think that that is a that is a reasonable um uh that that is a reasonable analysis. Um worth noting and I can I can actually speak to this. Um Zora asks, "If Magic is a pure digital game, will those cards be banned or changed?" Uh interesting note, uh in the digital only formats, two of those exist in Arena, Timeless, and Alchemy. Um oh, and I guess historic, three of them. Um one of the banned cards has already been digitally nerfed. Um and one of them is banned. The other ones, because it's a digital only format, have other cards that are running around in the format, so they're not quite as big a problem. Right? bands

and cards are only problems in context, right? Like if you if you have a card that relies on a particular enabler to work and the enabler isn't present, card's not as big a deal, right? If you have um there context is what really matters. So some of them were some of them some of them have already been nerfed. some of my and it's worth also noting alchemy historic and timeless bands are sort of alongside in parallel with standard bands but do not align directly. So um yeah uh yeah so um let's talk about so we've been talking a lot about bands and we've sort of been shorthanding bands as a standin for why you do balance changes in a in an environment. Let's talk about the other levers you can use to

affect things. Right. Right. And one of the interesting things about Magic and the reason we're starting with bands is for a physical card game, they pretty much only have one tool once the game has been released. Once the cards are out is they have to say bam. They've tried rewarding once or twice a long time ago and it causes such confusion because they can't actually go and change the card, right? And it's I mean maybe they could send out hundreds of thousands of sticker packs to local gaming stores that you could take a sticker and put it across the thing, but like from a logistic standpoint of trying to get people or people showing up to a tournament and being like what? this is what the card reads that um they just realized they can't do that in a meaningful way as a for a physically released game and so their option is banning

limiting was one of the initial ones they did allowed one of these per deck right but that only sees use in vintage now and as we discussed on Monday vintage is not a real format uh back when I was playing limiting was one of their early it's not quite so bad we have ban it, but we really don't want four of these. The other problem is that the buyin for vintage is being able it it is a very specific playground where you can play with all the cards. That's sort of the intent of the format, right? So, if they ban the Power Nine, then you're not really able to play with all the cards now, are you? So, they instead crank it down to one copy. And that's one of the reasons why I say vintage isn't a real format, cuz it is just a wild pile of money. Um, Well, I'm sure there are some people that that's their gym. Yeah. Anyway, but Yeah. But anyway, so like banning limiting and banning for a physical game are literally the only levers they have for the scale they operate at.

Correct. Now, other games have other tools they can use. Yeah. There are games that have done cards, right? Um, but they are generally uh games that are set up with that in mind to do something like a print ondemand system. Um, and that's uh the that's sort of their one of their first principles, right? They're already set up with it because they're on board with that idea from the get-go and magic never has been. And the amount of work it would take now to get into that would be entirely too much for them. So there is actually something I just added will on Arata that there is one more thing that some games including Magic have done which is they put Arata out as clarifications like D and D does this Warhammer 40k does this where they're like hey we obviously didn't make the wording clear enough some people are having disagreements on how this should

operate. Therefore, we are going to put out a rata with a clarifying statement to say this is the way that we expect it to work with the rulings and the interactions. Correct. And and that's good. Like the downside is people have to go look it up. The upside is at least the designer said a thing so somebody, you know, the rules lawyer or the reader at the table could be like, "Hey, Watsy's addressed this here." Right. Like, and then everybody can stop arguing. Yeah. Uh, Magic has done a different kind of era um as well which is they have changed the core rules that tends to be less frequently used and tends not to be a direct not an attempt to um balance the game's power level but instead to fix an oversight in the rules. So for instance, sagas, a kind of enchantment, have had an interaction with losing their abilities, which was not really

intuitive. Um, and so that has been changed in the core rules by a new core rule being added. It did buff sagas. I don't think that was the point. I think the the intention of the rule change was to uh reduce the sort of does it work like that in the same way that a clarification would, right? Except in this case they're changing it to to be a different um rule to to solve. And one of the downsides to historic arata and of clarifications like this is not all companies have had a good way of consistently pushing these out to a place that is easily seen and recognized. Yeah. And again, this is one of the advantages of a digital format is they can literally just go into the code of the game and being like, "Oh, let's fix this." Or in a digital game, because everything's programmed, you can be like, "I'm unclear how this works." You can play it once or twice and see how it

works and be like, "Ah, I now understand." Yeah. Because in a digital environment, everything everything operates the way it was in it was programmed in. That may not have quite been the intended effect, but like the computer isn't going to randomly guess a thing. The computer is going to operate based on its set of instructions. Yep. And so, and I'm not trying to say physical or digital is better. I'm just I'm calling out the clarifications. Yeah. That digital is a lot easier to patch fix, etc. Agreed. Um, okay. So, next up on the list of um uh levers. Levers. Yeah. Big big old big old buttons and levers is buffing stuff. Buffing stuff is is one of the the I guess more fun ways to do this, right? Take a thing that is not doing as well as people think it should be, as designers think it should be, as players think it should be. Those are two very different evaluations. By the way,

one normally leads to enough outcry that the other occurs. Players get upset that something isn't performing well. So designers have to go in and pull the buff lever. You can make something better. You can increase a number. You can decrease a cost. You can add a keyword. You can There are all kinds of ways to make something better, right? You can add a synergy. You can I I could think of like doz even releasing a new card in a future set often is a buff. Correct. Well, yeah. Let's let's talk let's hold on to that. Let's talk about the opposite of buffs and then we'll talk about indirect because I think indirect is actually Yeah, that's right. We do have an indirect but buffs are definitely and as well and buffs really depend like as a designer longtime designer buffs are just dependent upon your ecosystem. Yep. League balances things differently than Magic, than Dungeons and Dragons, than Warhammer 40k, than Overwatch, then

Final Fantasy 14. Like, every group has to look at what are the things that actually make something more or less powerful, right? And decide if it's worth addressing. Like, in a roglike game, you can look at stuff and be like, "Yeah, that's weaker. Doesn't need buffing." It is part of the choice. or even in CCGs like Magic, it is okay to have weaker cards and that you know maybe some people find uses for. But part of the joy in building things is often being able to with your experience discern what is a little more powerful and what is a little less powerful. Not everything has to be exactly equal. Is it okay in D and D to have some spells that aren't as good as other spells, right? Like that's just that's an okay thing. If you're trying to do like Fireball has and always will be um overpowered for its level, right? Because it's so at least in fifth edition. Yeah. In uh in fifth and I believe they said they did it in fourth, but I don't know fourth well enough to say. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, like D and D for

example, when they were making fifth edition, we'll just say for this latest one/2 editions, um the nom is getting a little weird. They basically said certain iconic spells are just going to be a little better. Mhm. And that's okay. Like that's their choice. That's what they're doing. It it does create uh the potential for a feedback loop where some the the spell is stronger because it's iconic. So it's iconic because it is stronger, etc. But I think the speed of development on D and D is slow enough that they can keep a lid on that. Yeah. But for other ones, like if you're balancing an MMO class-wise, you want the classes to be roughly equally as strong in each class in some way. Yeah. But again, in an MMO, it's it's not like all weapons have to be equal, but you know, there are certain things in a game that you just you want classes in League of Legends, excuse me, characters. um in League of Legends to all roughly be balanced on win loss

rate. Like that's how they balance there. So anyway, yeah, you can make them stronger. You can also make them weaker. Nerfing. Yep. Which is buffing's other side the other side of the coin. And in some cases, it's almost the same thing. Making anything stronger or making anything weaker, right? Or is just turning knobs in different directions. Correct. And some of those knobs are really weird. Recently, I don't know if we've talked about this, Jeff, they buffed Bastion in Overwatch. Okay. By making him smaller. Oh, less hitbox. He's 10% smaller next season. Fascinating. What? Like, I don't even follow Overwatch. I have to give props. Fascinating way to approach balancing a character. Just make them smaller. Same damage output. None of his stats changed except he's 10% smaller. Overwatch and League, like reading their patch notes is fascinating because their dev teams get really creative on ways,

subtle ways to make things stronger or weaker. Like I've read ones where they're like, "This character is in a good place. We like him, but in pro play, they seem to be winning a little bit much. We're therefore making this one change that we think will only affect like the top 2% of players by like lowering his armor by two points so that during the laning phase he takes slightly more like and they'll explain like the reason they did this and you're like hm two points of armor doesn't seem like a lot but you know they've done their math out and they think with the you know certain things that's enough or they'll be like this one ability that gets really abused by pro players that you know almost nobody else can use We're upping the cool down on it by 2 seconds. No, no normal player is going to notice this. Pro players will, right? Like it's interesting to look or they'll be ones where they're like not seen enough in pro play too good like or just general things. It it is fun to watch how they do or they're like this item

had this extra component that doesn't really add a lot of power. We're just removing that component to balance the item. Like it's like, "Oh, that was a fun little interaction." They removed like um they did one recently. Well, do you remember the League of Legends? What was it called? It was an item that if you hit somebody further than 600 pixels away, it did extra damage on subsequent shots. Yeah, I think I remember that. They removed that. They just upped its AP a little bit. So, now does more damage on every hit. And they remove the if it's further away Yeah. compo component of that as a streamlining measure. Yeah, like cool. Like balance changes are interesting if you like the nitty-gritty kind of stuff, but buffing and nerfing better and worse are the tools you can do pretty much digital is the easiest. Um, we do see it sometimes on physical like we've seen mostly in board games,

board games, some role playing games. Yep. We'll we'll talk about both of those in a little bit in a little more detail. But I also want to address that the buffing and nerfing can be much more granular than banning, right? Oh, I think is always more granular than banning. Yeah, but banning is banning is binary. It's there or it isn't, right? But when you nerf something so hard that it is that its use rate falls to practically 0%. Mhm. You functionally banned it right there. There there is yes there is a difference though actually there is an important difference will you can play it it's just worse and what that means though is for people who have spent money in a digital environment you are not removing the thing and therefore you don't have to do refunds so like from a legal standpoint and I'll even say an ethical standpoint if league removed a champion they would probably

have to refund people who had bought it and had bought skins y if they nerf it into oblivion in they don't have to do that. Yes. Sorry, just this from my my developer mindset always hits that because um especially as you get more senior, you get brought into the are we making enough money on our game to pay for all the people working on it meetings. Uh yeah, and male over on uh YouTube mentions that um Destiny's balance patches are like a great example of that. uh because uh exotics and subasses are generally what they're hitting and they're incredibly complicated uh and have like all kinds of nuance to them and from what I recall of Destiny 2, yes, I can absolutely see that. Especially because the point of exotics is to be weird, right? So like the further away from fightman you get, the more interesting pads to buff and nerf something you generally have. Um,

yeah. Okay. So, let's talk about the the the other one, which is something that Jeff brought up, which is indirect uh balance decisions and why I I think that those are some of my favorite super weird choices. Like, they are so bizarre. Um, so what do I mean by indirect? I mean that uh warriors are um too powerful right now in game X. Therefore, we have given rogues a dagger of slay of plus five to slaying warriors specifically. He didn't touch warriors, but man is it harder to play a warrior now because every rogue who's frustrated with warriors is going to be running around with a dagger of plus five just slaying

warriors. The ecosystem, the context of the balance matters quite a lot. Um, and I think that that is like Let me give you an interesting Yeah. Here's a rules change one. Sure. We think this was in D and D going into fifth edition. There used to be actually depending upon the edition, but a rogue used to have to get behind somebody to do a backstab. Yes. Nowadays in fifth edition, as long as there is a friendly there is a friend in combat with your target. Yes. It's considered flanked. It doesn't have to be behind the target. So you can be standing next to your buddy. Your rogue can now do his sneak attack. Yes. So by just by broadening the rule of the positioning, rogue suddenly became much more viable because they could do their sneak attack much more frequently. Yes. So they weren't necessarily they didn't do go do anything to the rogue class,

but by expanding the rules for a certain kind of positioning, they made it more powerful because they could do a class ability more often. Mhm. Yep. Um, that that is a great example of an indirect buff. Nothing touched no no line of code or text was changed on the actual rogue itself. Yeah. Yeah. And and um Magic's doing all kinds of stuff like that for long-term eb and flow balance, right? Uh for instance, um they're printing a bunch of artifacts in the next set, which is a sci-fi set, which is cool. I'm looking forward to it. And to keep that all in check, they're reprinting a null, which is a one mana blue. It's one blue blue for a counter spell. It says counter target artifact or enchantment spell. Great. So that that helps keep right. They can print super powerful artifacts because if the super powerful artifacts get to be too out of whack. No. Now, it

is also worth noting that I acknowledge it for anyone who wants to to bring it up in the comments or anywhere else. Yes, Cavern of Souls is in standard, but that doesn't apply to spacecraft. It's fine. Fine. Cavern of Souls is in standard again, which is wild. Anyway, um but those uh decisions like that really help, right? Both in the buff and the nerf department, right? You um you were talking about uh League, right? There was that change where they made mages better by increasing the value proposition of all mage items during that period of time. They they did a rebalancing of mage items, just the items. They didn't touch any of the mages, just their items, right? Which is a great way to do it. There was actually very commonly when they do a large rebalance of a certain brand of items, they will actually then have associated buffs or nerfs with champions because they'll say based on this new set of items, we now think the Gangplank

is performing a little too well, so we're doing a preemptive nerf as these things go live. Yeah. Like I have seen things with that or one patch after an update it's like so and so is now under you know had a core item you know that changed around and is no longer fitting their balance synergy as much and therefore we are you know needing to buff them up to compensate for the lost power or even some things like map changes. I think when they redid the map like eight, seven or eight years ago or whatever, I can't remember how long ago they did it, they they made some little things that um like they just cleaned it up some. There were some champions that interacted with terrain that were slightly impacted either positively or negatively because of the small changes to the map. like they added a tiny bit more brush that made certain characters that like to hide in the brush like Rengar who pounces out when he hits brush slightly

more powerful because there is now more of it on the map. There's some really interesting interactions that happen based on all sorts of criteria. Yeah, which is cool. Again, yeah, I I I think that this is you can think larger about ways to influence balance, right? I that that's the thing I really wanted to highlight with with this particular um idea is that in a game, particularly a digital game, you have so much room to control both the element and the environment that the element operates in, right? Like we were talking about terrain, items, counterplay, whatever, right? Rather than just pulling the giant heavy-handed levers, the first three, right? band nerf buff big levers but you can you can do small ones you can do like sort of balance surgery with like a scalpel rather than a sledge um

actually well you know it's a really interesting one in Dn D for a while healing has been considered other than healing word a thing you don't do in combat that you're equivalently wasting your action you could have been doing damage and so in the new fifth edition they actually upped the potency of standard healing spells to make them more viable in combat. I believe it used to be for like cure light wounds, you'd roll a d8 and you'd add your if you're a cleric, your wisdom modifier, it's now 2d8 plus your wisdom modifier for a first level spell. And part of what that means is because it's actually stronger now, characters that had less of a hit point pool are slightly more viable in melee combat because the cleric actually or another character actually bothering to use a healing spell in combat tops them up more percentage-wise than they'd had.

Yeah, I feel like the real and again part of this was I think this was addressing that there are players who like doing combat healing. Yeah. They were being underserved in the 5.0 ed or in fifth edition where in 5.24 that's now a more viable option and people don't look at you and say why are you healing in combat? Right. Part of that is also the broader context of the way that fifth edition handles uh zero hit points, death, and dying. Yeah. Right. And that's that's a whole different that's a whole bigger thing. But again, 100% like Yeah, it goes to context. That would also be a change that would make people But it was just interesting that just by making the healing spells more powerful, certain other non-healing classes felt like they're a little safer to dive head first into Yeah. into the thick of things. Like these are fun indirect changes that we and that's part of actually the joy of doing game

design is trying to put all of the possibility space in your head and look at what every single thing you do like I will I am in the middle still of designing what I hope two or three years from now I'll put out as a either solo game or maybe a small team game. Sure. and designing some of the interactions both in my head and then writing them down about how I want it to operate to me is some of the most fun parts of it because hell I was thinking about how to do equivalently shields and blocking for the style of game. I can literally think of 50 different ways I could implement what would to most people look to be almost an identical system, right? But the feel of how it operates with just these tiny tweaks and tunes will be part of the player experience or how it ends up coming out. The the my favorite example whenever we talk about why games uh complicated games that rely on players understanding

inter uh interactions between like different mathematical elements, the thing I always bring up is armor. What does the word armor mean in your system? Because there are as many answers as there are games. Yep. And that is the it could be even on basic concepts. Does armor make you harder to hit? Yep. Does armor absorb dam absorb damage? Does armor mitigate damage? Correct. Is armor a static thing or does it lose potency as it like right? How does it mitigate damage? Is it a percentage reduction or a flat reduction? Because those are incredibly different. If it's a flat reduction, is it min zero or min some amount also a huge difference? There's like you can go on and on and on about that. So yeah, um and even little changes like that like or the degradation. It's like if you um slay the spire has an interesting armor mechanic where called plated I think

it's plated armor where like it's basically applative if you you get five points of armor. If nothing gets through the armor based on that and other things you do, it stays. But if something goes through, it reduces. So your five becomes four for the fight, then becomes three, then becomes two. So ba as if you're fighting an opponent, you can slowly chip away at their armor to do more damage per hit each turn. Yes. Or break through in a large burst. As a defender, sometimes you spend extra time doing defense just to keep your thing high so that armor doesn't go down. It changes the gameplay where if it was just a you get a refresh of five armor every turn, right? If it was just metaliciz, it's not metalized. Yeah. Yeah. But like just those little changes affect the game play once people understand it and it enters in a tiny little strategy element in their space. Mh. And that is part of the I said part of the fun of design and part of the fun of playing new games is getting to see how different designers thought of different things and put the package together.

Yep. because there isn't a better or a worse one. It's how do these all interact with each other and in their aggregate make the game that you're playing. Agreed. Agreed. So, we talked about a bunch of levers. Let's talk about the the the big button. Let's talk about the big red button of balance. The the one So, the or the slightly less big one. This isn't banned. That's the biggest reddest button. I would say that this is almost in many ways from a from a balance perspective the same right as banning because you're erasing an element that used to exist and now it's something different right so it's it's sort of like a ban and replace immediately with something that looks the same we're calling it a redo or a reimagine and I've seen games use both actually and sometimes it's small and excuse me sometimes it's not small but sometimes it's expected. Yes. So, giving a good example, moving from second to third edition Dn D or third to fourth or fourth to fifth, you expect

all of the classes to be reimagined. Mhm. You don't expect the your fourth edition fighter to be identical in fifth edition Dn D. Yeah. You expecting it to be different. You're But what you're expecting is the core fantasy of the fighter or the wizard or the ranger or the monk or whatever it is to survive. Rangers being kind of the most interesting where they've been literally for the past couple editions they've had a hard time trying to fulfill the fantasy in a meaningful way of outdoor warrior with survival skills and possibly animal friends. Yeah, that's kind of the core fantasy and maybe a bow thrown in, right? Possibly two weapons, but that's kind of the core ranger fantasy, right? And part of that's the context, right? that that there has been a not a huge but there have been city campaigns in Vogue which doesn't fit with a lot of people's stuff and the other more social ones with more social elements.

Yeah. And that's and honestly less outdoorsy exploration. Mhm. Also, Ranger gets significantly less good when you're not tracking rations, right? Or like other parts of the game that people don't necessarily enjoy. Play with things that involve wilderness survival. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually playing in a campaign right now where we've been traveling across uninhabited lands in the winter and our ranger with his survival skill has been pretty key to a lot of things. Yes. Because man, not finding good shelter and getting um endurance penalties for not sleeping well is not a fun thing. Yeah. They suck. So um and so re reworking just means or redoing or reimagining is literally that and it's as expansive as you any of the others uh any of the other non-ban options can be right you can as long as it fulfills the core fantasy you can totally rework what it means for that champion to be right scarner got one for

not not long yeah actually and so there's also the hey this isn't a new addition but this is an existing game. Yeah. So, for example, League of Legends, Scarnner, Evelyn, Yoro, there have been actually a number of champions that they've redone their entire kit of abilities trying to kind of keep what they call the core fantasy around the character. You know, Yoro is basically a gravedigger who raises ghouls to come fight with him. That's the fantasy that they were or characterization they were trying to keep. and his initial one wasn't super strong, but it was also just not fun to play against. Yeah. And so they redid him. The same with Yeah. Scarnner, Evelyn, who's a stealth assassin, that they've gone in and basically said the current way we have implemented this, we we do not think that we can make this character fun enough just with buffs and nerfs. We actually need to go through and sometimes it's just redoing one ability, but often by the time they get to that

point, they're like, "Screw it. We're going to reimagine the character, new passive, new three main abilities, new ultimate, like redoing a look at the stats. Like, we are going to the art will probably stay the same and all of the skins and everything you've bought, but we're going to redo how the character works, but in such a way that people playing it will hopefully still be very engaged with the concept of what they're doing. And one of the huge advantages of reworks over um Oh, yeah. old Teemo, right? Over banning something or nerfing something or buffing something is that hopefully it gives players a uh who have an emotional attachment to that gameplay element more sticking power, right? So, MMOs are like we talked about, MMOs are the thorniest ground for balancing, right? Because people really hate getting nerfed in MMOs because they because of the time invested in getting a character to or a class to the point

where it's ready to raid only to have that thing nerfed. People really hate that. So, I would say MMOs and actually tabletop war games involving large amounts of miniatures that you paint up like Warhammer 40k or fantasy are the two single hardest ones around that because the time and the time/d dollar investment and I'll even lump those roughly together with the time is money kind of thing. Like you have put a significant investment into the thing and having it change on you is painful. Yeah. Like Warhammer players used to live in joy/fear of every new addition that came out, wondering how will it affect the army that I have spent hundreds or thousands of hours assembling, painting, priming, scraping mold lines off, all of all of this. How dare you make me remember mold lines? Um,

yeah. No, absolutely. Uh and um and having having worked at workshop, I can tell you that that experience is wild for for people um that their that their hope is that when a new edition comes out is just as much that it benefits their army as it as like what it does for the general state of the game, right? Because again, there's hopefully it's makes the game even more fun and b at least leaves my army in a neutral state. Yeah. Um, this is a really good question that I want to I I think we should we should slide in here because I think this is great. Um, what are the thoughts on the use of a published watch list? Like, hey, these are things we might take action on in the future. I like that a lot. Um, League does that fairly actively. Mhm. They will, and again, I use League as a go-to because to me, League's patch notes and public communication are still S tier. Like, they are as good as we see in the industry. and I play enough League that I'm I interact with it.

But um yeah, watch list is a really neat thing because it does let players know this may or may not be too too much or not enough. We're keeping an eye on it. But the big thing is the communication. It lets players know that they're heard. Yeah. It's like we're not ignoring this issue. We just don't think we have enough information to act on it yet. But don't worry, we're paying attention. I think there are some cases where um it is a great tool. It can be behavior warping. Yes. So for instance, magic. If if I say pick a card, grizzly bears. Grizzly bears are it. It's grizzly bears today, y'all. Grizzly bears are too powerful. Two two for two. Too good a rate. Mhm. We are closely watching grizzly bears. that does cause some amount of um shift in grizzly bears must be really powerful if

they're thinking about nerfing it. I need to make more grizzly bear decks and simultaneously I don't want to make a grizzly bear deck because I don't want to get invested in the idea of building a grizzly bear deck only to have it banned out from under me. So both of those things are true. That doesn't mean that the communication is bad, but understanding the way that those communications will impact player behavior and then as a result of that impact the metag game, right, in any situation where there is a metag game is also important, right? Because you can say grizzly bears are really good and all of a sudden everyone starts main decking shock, one mana, do two damage to anything. And now the grizzly bears are all getting their lunch eaten and now they're not a problem because you said they might be a problem. Right. But what'll really twist your knickers is would you have bumped into the table if I hadn't told you about it in the first place? Exactly. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Um I saw that again recently. Matrix still holds up. It it does. It does. It absolutely does.

Um, so and actually I've also seen it uses communication for we're not sure if we've done enough or too much. Like we have buffed York's Q on here a little bit to get him back into viable gameplay. We're not sure if we've done enough. So we're going to keep a tabs on the win rate and see if we need to do it further. Yes. And that's communicating, hey, we didn't want to overdo it. So we're doing an incremental step and we're going to look at that and decide if we need more. Yeah. Yeah. And and again, those are much more possible in places where finer controls are uh are on the table, right? Big big heavy-handed stuff uh you know, not always uh physical is a hard medium to work in. It really is. So, let's let's let's get into this. So, so we we've got a couple of examples and I've got sort of we've talked a bunch about magic, but the other the other place that's really weird that has a bunch of the same problems as magic, but a bunch of the same advantages as

digital is war games. War games. If you ever want to look at human comprehensible, complex RTS like stats, war games, fascinating. I have played a lot of them. I've played uh and Jeff has too. I've played Fantasy 40k, Malifox, Infinity, Warmahords, uh, Mordeheim, Bloodb. I'm trying to think. You didn't even mention regular Warhammer instead of Fantas. Oh, you said never mind. You said, sorry. Um, Lord of the Rings. That's at least seven off. Yeah. Right. Like, so, so those are another really interesting example and they're probably one of the most interesting cases where you get to look at balance done in weird ways. So, um, they have, as Jeff talked about, they have this emotional investment thing going on, right? Not really a problem, not really an advantage, right? But people are invested in the time they

spend on their stuff, right? Especially because it's a physical army, right? Painting and whatnot. Um, and the the ways that those things get balanced are because the thing that you care about is separate from the rules text that goes with it, right? There's a card, an app, a something that does it, right? So, you have all of the emotional investment to uh to an identity in the game space that Magic has with I'm a control player, I'm an aggro player, I'm a Celestnia player, I'm a whatever, I'm an orc player, right? But the rules are separate from that which is really interesting, right? because you get a bunch of those um those advant advantages uh from from getting to issue a RA like Malifox does all of its stats on cards and has partnered up for a really long time with a print ondemand card service and they when they release an Arata they say here's the text of the AA you can just print it out and copy and paste it onto your card if you want or we have this

bundle of cards that you can order for essentially print at cost to you to replace all of cards. But that works because that's part of what Malifox designed itself to be from the get-go rather than the cards being Malifox has miniatures too, right? Yes. Malifox is um So their advantage on this one is what you're really paying for is the miniature. The card that comes with it with its stats is incidental. Correct. And so they are happy to say print these out, buy them cheap, buy them at cost, etc. Because they've already made their money off the miniature. They're still supporting their studio, right, in the way they thought and they've designed a way to do Arata updates in a way that is friendly. Yeah, correct. And similarly um with uh Warhammer, right, new codecs, new army book, new edition, the the physical miniatures stay the same unless as as a heard a rumor that like a decade ago, Space Marines got bigger.

Yeah. Yeah. They moved. They moved space marines onto bigger bases. They were and then like there was some new thing like Mars hatched a whole new batch of them and Oh yeah Marines. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, they made super marines because the Marines weren't marini enough because I look Don't ask me to explain. I don't I don't know. I don't I don't get it. But yes, there are bigger beefier ones and there's like only three of them to a squad. Anyway, um so all of these have the these additional advantages of being sort of the most h I would say the most human comprehensible middle ground if you want to look at these things yourself, right? Because I love Jeff's league examples, the problem is that when we look at the actual change, it's like adjusted this queue by.3% only on Tuesdays. And you're like, how did that do anything? and they're like, "Well, if you look at this big complicated backend stat spreadsheet, it

makes perfect sense." And it does, but it's not necessarily the most comprehensible if you're looking to talk about balance. League has the advantage where they have millions of people playing every single day and they can make a tiny change and watch it ripple through and say, "Oh, cool. The win rate on I'll just keep saying Yoro went from 49.2 to 49.6. That's close to the 50% we want. A tiny bit more and we're done." Yeah. or excuse me, done until the stats change again, right? But they can make micro tunes because all they have to do is have it do micro adjustments across millions of games per day, right? Something like Warhammer doesn't have millions of games reported every day where they can look at their stats and tune off of that and or the ability to easily distribute Yeah. that information out to players. Yeah, Magic's in a really weird spot because MTG online is used largely for older formats. Not entirely, but it it lets you play with any format. So,

that's a thing. And that client is not the most intuitive, straightforward, or approachable to use compared to the arena client. The problem with the arena client is that statistically the format that most players are playing on arena is not good data for balancing magic because most players on arena only play best of one and the way that magic is balanced is around best of three or at least tournament play magic best of three. Yes, correct. Which is where things which is one of the reasons why we see most major um magic bands happen after tournament series. M um uh and that is specifically because magic in best of three lets you do sideboarding, i.e. bring in cards to deal with the deck you just fought. Correct. And so building your sideboard is not quite as important as building your deck, but is close. Right. It it also decreases the number of um decks that want to do a silly trick and

win off of it, right? um because the odds that they're going to do it three times successfully with sideboard um interaction uh for those silly tricks is significantly lower. Graveyard decks are the prime example. Graveyard decks do really well in game one if you don't have any graveyard interaction. And after game one, they tend to do significantly worse because now I have all now I know you're playing a graveyard deck. So I have all my graveyard interaction. So, my lay line of the void's in play and you're having a bad time, right? Hi. Um Oh, don't do this to me, brain. Brain hit a penny on the tracks. No, no, no, no. It's all gone. Magic interactions. Magic interactions. We're talk Oh, we're talking about data, right? So the it is also really important to note that the threshold for

having enough data to make an informed balance change is also a piece of the environment that we're talking about when we're considering balance changes and the frequency of balance changes. Right? D and D goes six months, a year with some classes remaining completely as they were. But that's because D and D functions on a campaign length time scale. Right. League won't survive. D once they put out their core book. Yes. Tries to make as few changes as possible. Correct. Just straight up. Like they would they want to do clarifications every once in a while, but right they are not looking to update printed material if they can help it. Correct. Can you imagine the state of everything if League went six months without balance changes? Mhm. Actually, depends. If they did no heroes, if they did no other pushes correct, around that, maybe. Maybe. But the odds of them not doing

that for 6 months are virtually zero. Yeah. It's a complex and evolving environment that demands constant and on purpose because every once in a while they're like, "Oh, we're doing a jungle update to keep things fresh." Yeah. like they do or we're doing a mage item refresh to keep things like them doing a thing like that means the game is suddenly a it fascinates me. We could do a whole episode on this though I don't think we should anytime soon on the things you do to keep a game meant to be played over years fresh and interesting of keeping the game feeling the same while making changes enough to make it feel different. Yeah. Like one of the beauties of League is you could do what I did. take five or six years off and come back in and feel like you can still play the game. Yes. Without having like if you did that with say Destiny like hey six years in you'd be like wait why is nobody where I'm going? What are we wearing? What are these new If you've done that I've done that and can't get back into Destiny. I tried I

tried with help from people and Destiny 2 is opaque to someone who's trying to return right because of the amount that they've changed in the name of streamlining the install base and keeping things fresh and on and on and on and so it's a really interesting thing on choosing if you do that or not. Like I feel like League is close enough that you can hop in and you may be unfamiliar with the new champions and the new items, but they're still recommending you items. The goal is still destroy enemy nexus. there are still dragons to claim and you know you're still last hitting in lane like right all of the changes they do are things that somehow interact with that but are still comprehensible even if you h have been away for a while and which is interesting that's a real interesting choice yeah games that rotate sort of suffer for that right rotation is a way to do balance right we didn't even put that in there having rotations happen right having some gameplay elements move out of a format into other bigger formats

into other um uh into other uh play areas, right? Is a um is a way that you can keep the play environment from getting too big, which is part of the problem that Wizards has encountered with making standard a three-year format. The format's too big now. Uh and that's part of the problem. Um, but it does cause the problem that Jeff's talking about, right? What do you mean I took three years off and now none of my cards are good? What do you mean I took three years off and none of this looks anything like the way it was? Right? That's particularly true of Magic now because in the past, uh, Magic is almost impossible for that because of their two/3year rotation, right? Like even if the rules are the same, part of playing Magic is knowing the cards that exist in the environment so that you can play make make strategic and tactical choices. Yes. Yeah. It's just also hard to recognize it when in the past couple of

years we've had Cowboys, wacky races, Final Fantasy, uh, uh, Legally Not Red Wall, and now we're going to outer space. So, if you've been away and you come back, you're like, "What do you mean that mouse got in the spaceship and punched me in the face?" Right? Like it's there is some amount of uh lossiness in the experience there, right? Yeah. Um Yeah. Like the easiest way to get back into Magic would literally be to sit down with friends and have one of them hand you a deck and say, "Here, play this." Yeah. Like if you had to go in trying to construct a deck into a group where you didn't know the cards and you didn't know what you're playing against. Yeah, it's a high it's a lot of ramp up time. Now, magic also has the advantage that the most common format in Magic cares not a wit for legality. The most common way that Magic is played is at the kitchen table. Kitchen table Magic is u table magic and kitchen table commander far outstrip um competitive formats, but

that's fine because the people playing those formats don't playing in their kitchen table don't care about competitive formats. Yeah. Which is good, right? Um, yeah, that mouse with a katana jumped in a spaceship. Exactly. Exactly. Will, did we get through our topic? I think we did. I think this is a this is a good sort of summation. Um, YouTube comments. So, I'm going to throw out an interesting thing. Yeah. If you happen to be watching on YouTube, will do we have is 45 minutes enough? Uh, I wasn't going to. I mean, we can you since we have Matt on, Matt's coming on in 45 47 minutes. Yeah. Oh, we could do it over on Twitch. I just didn't want to leave it. That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. If you happen to be watching on YouTube, we've been doing puzzles over on Twitch to support our upcoming Extra History Calendar Kickstarter, which is going to be going live in I'd just say a week or two. We'll be releasing more information soon. A bit.

A bit. And if you would care to join us, we're going to be doing a puzzle with an interactive an interactive puzzle that we'll found a way to do. Y um it doesn't make sense to leave it up on you this on YouTube because YouTube is a VOD after this and we don't have an easy way to clip it out. Yep. And YouTube will react poorly to us having 45 minutes of low-key puzzle time. Yeah, absolutely. But if you want to join us for some low-key puzzle time and hang out in coffee and drinks, we will be doing so on Twitch. Yep. Uh but and otherwise on YouTube, we'll be back on Monday with our uh next episode of Games for Breakfast. We'll have a whole new list of topics and stuff to talk about, and we look forward uh to seeing you all then. Uh until then, if you have comments, thoughts, concerns, feelings about balancing in live games, put them in the comments below. I do love reading all of your comments. So, Will reads a lot of comments. I do read a lot of comments. Uh, until next time, everybody, take care of

yourselves, take care of each other. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. [Music]