When is it acceptable and fair for a multiplayer game to be unbalanced?

Does anyone have the "door stuck" Counter Strike webm? I thought I had it but I can't find it.

Another problem with the first L4D was that there was no real way to prevent the survivors from huddling constantly. The sequel introduced new special infected specifically to deal with them (Charger ran down groups of people, Spitter put a denial AOE down, Jockey literally rode one party member away from the others). It was a bit shit.

IMO the only games that need to be absolutely tuned to find perfect balance are esports titles, and those are pure cancer and they need to be destroyed, so it's a catch 22.
Back in the day, house rules were the best. You could simply outright ban certain characters or, if someone committed the faux pa of playing an OP character or whatever, there was the unspoken rule that said faggot was to be teamed up and eliminated first.
I miss local multiplayer. :(

Arenashooters are like this sorta. Basically in quake, obviously not all the weapons were balanced. The rocketlauncher and lightning gun were fucking ridiculous compared to the other weapons but they had to be picked up from the map. This is due to quake being made as a singleplayer shooter first. Controlling the powerful weapons and armors was/is one of the most important parts of arena shooters.

Counterstrike is sorta similar I guess. The guns are not equal at all and the ak is basically the best gun in the game excluding the awp since they're hard to compare. But the two teams are balanced by numerous factors and the games economy.

lmgtfy.com/?t=v&q=door stuck

That's true, L4D2 overall was an improvement. The biggest flaw is that fucking nobody made vanilla servers last I played, there was always some gay mod like the ability to crawl when you're downed, the ability to cycle between undead in ghost mode, and retarded shit like buying equipment using server points.

"Balance", like nearly every other thing people talk about being "good" or "bad" in games, is incredibly broad and has several nuances to it. On the surface, there's two extremes of design in balance that games lie between: symmetrical balance, where players all have the same choices with the same outcomes (like in traditional games and sports), or aysmmetrical balance, where players' choices are not equal but their overall outcomes are balanced among the other choices (fighting game matchups, etc). While the latter form of balance has more variety and thus be more enjoyable, the former is easier to design and assures player skill is the prime deciding factor in these games.

Of course, even in games with asymmetrical design, one could argue players still have the same choices. For example, think about a fighting game with gross imbalance in the cast, where certain characters have almost unwinnable matchups against most of the cast. However, one could reason that since both players have the options available to them, it's up to them to know what choices would allow them to win and what choices would make them fail, and thus it's still balanced. At this point though, it would seem foreknowledge of the game is more important than other player skills, which isn't really good design-wise as it makes it so that player input is less important in determining victory than the design of the game. Let's take the stage in the OP as an example as well: if you pick a slow character like Ganondorf or Bowser, you're going to be severely disadvantaged on that stage compared to the faster characters in the cast that can more easily position themselves on the stage and take advantage of it. While this trait comes up in other stages, the especially large ones amplify this to extremes to the point where it's almost a joke. On the flip side, if a stage existed in the game that was extremely cramped (moreso than Yoshi's Story), those slow characters would lose that disadvantage, and faster characters would lose their positioning advantage.

This is where the notion of balance comes into play. How asymmetrical can you design a game before you start filling the game with useless choices, where player skill becomes less relevant to determining victory than foreknowledge? How much more balanced can you make a game before you start removing options and it becomes more samey? This is where answers becomes uncertain and dependent on the design one wants out of their game.

But no, everything has to be (((balanced))) nowadays.

SC1 and SC2 did that but those games are dead as fuck now

In an asymmetrical game you will probably never get perfect balance, but you can try and approach it.
For instance, Melee's biggest problem is that most of its characters are completely useless in high level play. It's still the best Smash game, but the lack of variety in tournaments is a shame.

why even include the wizard then?

If the game is about co-op then ballance doesn't really matter. If you are using unoptimized builds/characters the "community" looks down on you but really doesn't care.

Those "best guns" are balanced by being harder to use to their full potential.

If you want a really good case study on good balance see the DOTA2 TI6 patch.

Just because warriors have no counters doesn't mean they cannot be defeated. It's just that head-on encounters is where they should dominate. Wizards on the other hand should excel at long range area denial. Nothing says "fuck you" like a wizard dropping the fantasy version of a tactical nuke on your objective from half the map away.

Brood War is "dead" because League of Legends is the new big thing in Korea. Battle.net is a poor place to indicate Starcraft 1 popularity anyways because everyone uses different places separate from Battle.net I mean shit the hardcore veterans that didn't retire and still play haven't used Battle.net since 2008.

Fuck you asshole.

I fucking miss melee's hyrule temple so much.

It's a party game.

Do you expect balanced mechanics in games like Mario Party, too?

When it's new.
And when it's already all datamined and the meta dictates 90% of your keypresses, no amount of balance will make it fun.

I would argue that FG need to be a little bit unbalanced in order to be fun. Plus every FG need a joke character or two along side with an overpowered god character or two and maybe an experimental character thrown in as well.

When you're a Capcom fan.

...

When it prevents damage sponge combat models. MMOs are the worst with this. Basic enemies should not have to take a dozen hits from a lightsaber to go down.

Then everyone plays Warrior and kills any idiot dumb enough to play wizard.

When it's co-op multiplayer, not competitive.

Heathen detected.

Balance is impossible to achieve because you have to assume the people behind the characters have the same amount of skill and apply it in the exact same way. Any variable in any form destroys the illusion of balance. Balance is a stupid shitty concept invented by crybabies who lose. "B-But I am perfect, surely the character is unfair!"

Balancefags are that kid you knew growing up that blamed his controller.

You can't just completely dismiss the concept of balance because you don't like it. A multiplayer game where the meta only encompasses one character or weapon is bound to suffer and early death due to lack of variety.

Nice dubs, but things like that are generally self-balancing, at least in fighting games. A single godly character gets picked often but as a result people are extremely familiar with their tricks and know how to take them apart, while low tier heroes can get picked and steamroll people who don't know how to deal with them because they've been playing against SSS-tier the entire time.

While that is true, fighting games are very complex and have a lot of depth that is capable of compensating for a stale meta. This isn't the case with most modern multiplayer games in which the fundamental strengths of a character or weapon mean a lot more.

Sorry but this is horseshit. A "meta" is called that because its a creation of an environment outside of the game's design. Its a concept created by compcucks so they can have a safe space where they always win under arbitrary, artificial "rules." Selfish queers that don't give half a damn about their game or anyone playing but themselves.

Whatever you say, pal.

Just because warriors deal decent damage and are tough to kill doesn't mean they're good at chasing people who aren't interested in a fight.

It's easier to say when a game shouldn't be unbalanced, and that's when it's so unbalanced all the fun gets sapped out the game.
Make a game first, and just see what happens with it. If one particular thing is so OP that it breaks the rest of the game, fix that. Otherwise don't listen to the retards who complain about a character or weapon because they lost once.
Unbalanced is good. Unfair is bad.

Balance comes down to two things: who bitchest the loudest and how well do the devs discern between bitching and actual issues. If a game is good enough, the vast majority of the people playing it are ignoring all the drama on the forums and are unaware of any stupid changes being made because some group of autists got pissed.

I've always been a G

balance is nice but it often comes at the price of fun. the best kind of balance is when all the characters are good at what they do. youll still run in to things that are blatantly more useful given the game mechanics though.

i want to 1v1 her butthole

While a younger meta certainly has the potential for those shifts, the game is never truly balanced because of this. At this point, you're banking on the lack foreknowledge of game elements for determining success to make up for other fundamental weaknesses in choice. As the general playerbase becomes smarter and the game becomes more "solved", the stark deficiencies in balances becomes much more bare.

/thread
Fuck competitive autists.

A lot of people fail to understand the importance of balance and think it's a buzzword

Balance comes in a lot of forms. Many games have balance in there games. Doom, Goldeneye, Duke nukem, unreal, Super Mario bros., etc. all have balance with there weapons and the game play. If there was no balance, What you would have is worthless aspects that no one will use or rarely. Balance is why classic games are still played.

This. Not to mention you have to take into consideration the game mechanics, and difficulty, especially with asymetrical gameplay. Classic Fps games like Doom, Duke nukem, quake, etc. are based on that.

So why do people still play classic games? There is more to it than just tournyfags.