Game Balancing - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 338

explore areas without finding them already crowded by others, take up interesting
occupations, and so on. A persistent world cannot be a zero-sum game: New
resources must constantly flow into it from outside for new players to find.
The designers of persistent worlds, unlike designers of standalone games, can rebal-
ance on the fly, changing the rules after their customers begin play. Such rule
changes, while sometimes necessary, tend to cause howls of outrage from players
who have optimized their play according to the existing rules and enjoy the game
as it stands. Most persistent world games have had to implement rule changes this
way to rectify design errors and to correct imbalances.
In spite of such changes, the persistent world Asheron's Call remains fundamentally
unbalanced in favor of magic users. Apparently that's what the magic users want,
and obviously the publishers want to hold their audience. In this case, designers
balance the game in such a way that the majority of players enjoy the game in the
way they like to play it rather than in such a way as to make the game objectively
fair. The aim of this balance involves ongoing sales and politics more than it
involves equal distribution of resources or opportunities—but as a designer, you
may be required to consider how market forces call for a different kind of balance.
Making PvE Games Fair
Because the challenges in PvE games come from the environment rather than from
other players, making a fair game involves more than giving all players equal
opportunities to succeed. In general, players expect a fair PvE game to exhibit qual-
ities enumerated in the following list. Some may not appear to have much to do
with balance, but we'll look at them here because they constitute part of a player's
notion of fairness.
The game should offer the player challenges at a consistent maximum level
of difficulty, with no sudden spikes. Players regard sudden spikes in difficulty as
unfair. The next section, “Managing Difficulty,” is devoted to this important issue.
The player should not suddenly lose the game without warning and through
no fault of his own. So-called learn-by-dying designs, once commonplace, are now
considered unfair. The Immortal , an old Electronic Arts game, notoriously requires
the player to learn by dying. Fortunately, it allows players to restart the game indef-
initely without having to start over at the beginning, but repeated character death
still isn't much fun. You can easily avoid this by providing the player with adequate
warnings of dangers ahead.
A stalemate should not occur. Stalemates can result from deadlock (see Chapter
10, “Core Mechanics”) or from other combinations of circumstances that prevent
the player from winning or losing. If a player fails to pick up a critical item in an
adventure game and then passes through a one-way door that prevents him from
retrieving the item, he's in a stalemate. He hasn't lost the game, but he can't win it