1) Beat people with it a *lot* 2) Find some really good players, give them a chance to think about it and adapt, and then beat them some more. 3) Come tell us that you think you found something that's too strong. In tangential support for this position, here's a fascinating series of articles on balancing a multi-player games, written by a games designer and aimed at other game designers, but still very interesting for a gamer: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-1-definitions.html A couple of relevant quotes for our purposes, both from the part 2: and If you can beat the best players, even after they understand what you're doing and try to figure out ways around it, you might have found something OP. Or maybe you've just found a really strong early strategy, that will look weak compared to the things that people develop a few months later. The important thing to realize is that you cannot credibly claim something is OP by being beaten by it, because you just don't have enough information about it from that perspective. You can only credibly claim something is OP by winning with it.
Love those articles, great quotes and summary as well! Now to get back to beating people so I can get some card nerfed.
From our point of view, stats are everything. If we see you guys winning consistently with the same cards/items/classes, we'll know there's a problem. Of course, you need time to let that settle down. I haven't done any serious MP balancing yet, but I expect to spend a LOT of time on it in the future.
Good to hear. I think a lot of it is still emerging. Will be interesting to see what happens. Time is certainly the key.
I just want to chime in and say David Sirlin is the nuts when it comes to theory and design of competitive games. Read his articles and his book 'Playing to Win', now free of charge. And yes, it takes a) experts and b) time to determine whether something is OP or not.
I'm a bit of a Sirlin fan-boy too, and BM will be looking for experts, but this advice is definitely intended for the rest of us too. Trying to emulate a play-style that's beating you is a great way to learn more about it. You get to learn more about how it works, and you remove a lot of ego from your evaluation. Sometimes it's really easy to do what they're doing, but more often it's really hard, and you lost because they were playing better. Balancing a game is a much harder problem than people give it credit for. If Amy beats Melvin 3 times in a row, is that because: Elves are better than dwarves 3 mages beats warrior,warrior,priest Amy's cards are better Melvin's just having a bad night Amy's a better player than Melvin Melvin is generally a better player, but has a tendency to blow his move cards too early in the turn, and Amy's elven mages just happen to be the perfect setup to exploit that foible I'm pretty sure that Melvin's dwarves would obliterate Amy's elves. I've got no idea Every single data point you get has dozens of potential causes, so you can only get anything useful by looking at lots of data.
