Why Champions Will Never Be Balanced

Balance is a funny game. But it's not rocket science. Appropriately enough, it's game theory.

Eg: Rock > Scissors; Paper > Rock; Scissors > Paper. That's balance.

In the case of RPS, the best strategy is for each player to choose Rock, Scissors or Paper exactly 1/3 of the time each. That's the so-called 'Nash equilibrium' - which means if all players use this strategy, then none of them can do any better by changing their strategy.

You could also call the Nash equilibrium the Path of Least Resistance. Given enough time, you could expect players of the game to settle on the PoLR, for to do otherwise will put you at a disadvantage against other players following the PoLR.

This is not really a problem for the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, because the PoLR involves a mixed strategy employing all three moves in equal frequency. That's balanced, but crucially, it's also diverse.

However, Champions makes things harder for itself because players aren't forced to specialise. In most games, you're forced to choose Rock, Paper or Scissors, so you know there'll always be folk out there who can trounce you with ease. But you also know you can trounce others with equal ease. And it all comes out in the wash, with the population of players settling in to the three strategies in equal proportion.

But in Champions, you can effectively choose from any power in the game. You can choose Rock, Paper and Scissors - which means everyone else will effectively be forced to take all three as well in order to remain competitive. (Just call them Regeneration, Force Shield and Force Sheath, and you'll see what I'm saying.)

So instead of there being a Nash equilibrium involving multiple strategies in equal proportion, in Champions there'll likely always be just one optimised strategy that will give an edge over all others.

That's unbalanced and boring, because everyone gravitates towards the one strategy. Yawn.

The Tyranny of Balance

I don't know whether Champions can find a way out of this balancing trap. They can balance one power against another, but given the wide open nature of the game, players can simply choose a wide spectrum of powers that will give them the best odds against any other combination. They're already frantically scrabbling to find the Nash equilibrium, and once it's found, it won't take long for it to spread to other players.

One possible out would be for Cryptic to up the possible interactions - like this variation of RPS, which involves 25 different strategies. This might make it so it's impossible to choose a range of powers to cover every eventuality - so you must specialise to some degree.

But bugger me, it'd be a bastard to balance such a complex system. Might be possible, but given Cryptic's unsophisticated attempts at balancing to date, I don't have much confidence they'll navigate this game theory minefield.

Maybe the game industry can just call it a lesson learned: diversity and choice might look appealing on the surface, but get a few tens of thousands of gamers involved, and suddenly that diversity will evaporate to one FoTM PoLR, and you end up worse off than if you'd forced people to specialise in the first place.