It's a myth of game design that everything can be completely balanced in games where players have radically different abilities. A lot of people don't understand this and instead blame game developers for creating "unbalanced" games. One of the key boardgames that helped define CCGs was Cosmic Encounter (if you haven't played it, I highly recommend it). There is no concept of balance in the game, players have random powers and certain combinations of powers result in clear advantages. If you don't like it, don't worry, it's going to be over soon and you can play a new game with all new powers. Collectible games actually tend to have less randomness in player powers than a board game like Cosmic Encounter. Players tend to build and replay specific decks instead of relying on random choice for each game. So collectible games had to define the metagame concept. At any specific time, based on the released cards, certain decks will be best. They can't all be equal, much like in chess when players have to learn that just the ability to move first provides a substantial advantage regardless of having the same playing pieces. Specific to Cardhunters that means certain classes, and specific builds, will be stronger. For the metagame you want the dominant decks or classes to change with new releases, so at least the game doesn't become stagnant. This is something that all the current online CCG games in development are struggling with. By the time they actually release the game, the meta will likely already be solved by their beta community (the best decks will be known). That information will already be there, in the online forums, on the day of release. You can see this happening with Mojang Scrolls right now. It's in limited beta, months from any release, and there forums are full of discussions of the most powerful decks. While it will likely change by the time the game is released, the forum discussions will naturally move on as well. It greatly limits the discovery phase for new players, and in some ways it's much more difficult to be a purely casual player under these conditions. I personally think this is why the single player aspects of Cardhunters has been received so energetically. Rather than getting thrown head-first into a defined competitive environment, players will be able to approach the game on their own terms through the single player modules. The most powerful multiplayer deck doesn't matter when you're trying to beat a Dragon at the end of an adventure. Much like Magic had to redefine and better cultivate their casual players through game design and product support (shifting money from pro tours to Friday night magic events), online freemium/collectible games must change their focus to appeal to the casual players they need to be successful.
I like you Oberon this is true! Many games even capitalize on imbalance because players crave it ! They WANT to be stronger ! Games like Archlord really played into this, making players work hard to become a super powerful being in an mmo, and TESO is planning on doing something similar. But as for cards, if you think about it, a dwarf warrior is overpowered compared to an elf warrior, he has more HP so hes going to win a fight most of the time, but hes slower... But that doesnt ALWAYS matter, when it does its 'unbalanced' for the loser, when it DOESNT matter its a big bonus ! So lets say your dwarves HP is his advantage, maybe you'll push that by having cards in your decks to teleport/move/snare, a combination brings out a balance. But can also bring out the imbalances, im sure certain cards will mix together VERY well, but that alone wont make it overpowered unless its also EASY to do, and difficult to stop. Thats how i view balance anyways Kind of true for RTS's and MMORPG's. I brought this thread up because of the importance of clerics in most games, the 3 man team is so common its basically made to compliment eachother and deviating from the holy trinity is inefficient. Glad its not sounding like that though !
I think that any competitive games should aim to be as balanced as possible. Although it may not actually be possible to make some games truly mathematically balanced, it should be the goal of the developers to make it as balanced as possible so that players have no way of knowing or even guessing that it's not balanced for many months, years or even decades. This entire issue has been discussed in detail elsewhere, and better than I could impart myself so I will recommend David Sirlin's article on balancing multiplayer games. http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-1-definitions.html My understanding is that all successful competitive games are very balanced, so much so that their flaws did not show up for years, decades or even centuries. Sure in deckbuilding games some decks are stronger than others, but then there are other decks that trump those. There is no best deck, but rather a group of viable decks that have their own advantages and disadvantages, their good matchups and their bad matchups. No one deck wins 100% of the time against all decks, in fact (for balance and fun's sake) you probably want viable decks in bad matchups to still win some of the time. I think stagnation is largely due to imbalance or a lack of depth rather than there not being enough cards. Adding cards can be used to solve balance and game design issues (by providing counters for powerful decks, or always keeping the players on the back foot), but if the core game is designed well and improved through rules updates and card patches, it should not be necessary for a long time. That being said adding new cards is probably a good idea, for longevity among other things. As an aside, in a well balanced game the meta will shift naturally from one strategy to the next (often its counter) and so on. There is no need for developers to step in, unless something truly is imbalanced. Although this game sounds like it might be fun to play socially, I doubt it would be last a week as a competitive game, let alone the years that Card hunter no doubt aspires too. If any player gets a deck that is unusually weak they should probably just forfeit rather than go through the motions with no hope of success. For a competitive game this would be disastrous, players would look at their starting cards and then decide whether or not to forfeit before playing on. One way of resolving this inherent imbalance would be to play multiple rounds in the hopes of smoothing out the randomness, but occasionally people will get stings of luck or unluck rending much of the fun from the game. (Tip: you want to encourage people to play your game, not encourage them to not play due to forcing them to forfeit). The fun of competitive games often comes from two players with equal or close to equal chances of winning trying their hardest to best one another relying purely on their own wits and skill. Even when losing a good competitive game can be fun, engaging and exhilarating. Also, I think first turn advantage is an interesting problem, that I hope Card hunter can solve through deckbuilding rather than having to play multiple matches as both first and second player.
I think people need to be very careful in distinguishing between games that are imbalanced from the outset, and advantages and disadvantages that players make for themselves through deck building and over the course of the game. Yes some items (or decks or classes) are going to be "imbalanced" in some situations, that is to say that they have an advantage or disadvantage in that situation. However, before the match starts that item is no stronger or weaker than others, because you do not yet know whether it will ever be in a situation to captialise on it's advantage or whether it will be stuck dealing with its disadvantages. Good players will even direct to flow of the battle to situations where their deck has the advantage, while avoiding the situations where their opponents would have the edge. Allowing them to eek out an advantage even in a bad matchup.
