On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 46

Balance (Again)
There are various mathematical equations that can help you figure out
balance, depending on the various factors in your game. Continuing
with the Street Fighter example, though, here's the way to do it. Let's
say your game has ten characters in it. Using a math operation called a
combination (you can find it by typing choose function into Google), we
can try 3 choose 2 , which will tell us how many combinations there are
(minus mirror matches). This number comes out to 3. For a two-player
game like Street Fighter , we can simply add the number of characters in
the mirror matches, bringing the total to 6. Note that you can't use that
snazzy trick for a game that has to choose combinations larger than 2
(look up combinations on the Internet for more extensive information
on these equations).
So for a game with three characters, we essentially have to balance
six different games. Again, this is an interesting property that we have to
remember about an asymmetrical game—it's essentially several games
you're developing at once. When players agree to play the Ryu vs. E.
Honda game, it's a different game from the Ryu vs. Ken or the Ryu vs.
Ryu game. Each combination is going to require its own balancing job.
For a game with ten characters, you have to balance 55 games. How
about a game with thirty characters (which, I might add, is kind of the
standard these days)? That game actually consists of 465 different games
that have to get balanced! That's insane—do you think you'll ever make
465 completed games in your entire lifetime? And we wonder why fight-
ing games are always imbalanced, with tier lists (rankings) of characters
that lay out which are the “good� (most powerful) characters regularly
being created.
Now some of those 465 games may be easier than others, if they
are very similar to each other. However, making a game with nothing
but very similar asymmetrical forces is almost always a very bad idea: a
lose-lose situation. You're making your job harder, and providing very
little of what people like about asymmetrical forces. Further, you're
blurring the choices (making them closer to false choices) by making
them similar.
In the end, the solution may be as simple as this: asymmetry can be
fantastic, but keep the number of races and characters low. And video
gamers: by low, I don't mean a dozen—I mean preferably less than half
a dozen. This is one of the ways that the computer has spoiled us digital
gamers—we have to really reset our expectations now in a dramatic way
if we're ever going to make something that stands the test of time.