+7 Systems : The +7 Balance Engine™ : Keep the Fun

1000 players will outsmart a single game design expert. This is the guiding principle of the +7 Balance Engine™. Today's players communicate and share ideas via message boards, internet fan sites, and other fast, global communication channels. The global player base dissects every facet of a game. Every scenario, including many that the game designer never imagined, is quickly explored, documented, and shared. No designer can be expected to produce a game that will hold up to such scrutiny. It is not possible for a small team of design professionals to compete with the concurrent testing of thousands of active players.

That is why the +7 Balance Engine™ reverses this traditional alignment. It asks the game designer to only focus on content and vision, and uses the power of the global community to quickly identify balance problems. By relying only on objective, quantitative statistics of the player base behavior, the +7 Balance Engine™ quickly and accurately identifies balance problems, and reacts immediately with solutions. The +7 Balance Engine relies on an iterative control-system approach to ensure a game always remains in a balanced state.

Elaborate player behavior simulation

Without balancing, a player base learns the dominant strategies and adopts them, leading the selection of
components to polarize over time:

But with balance factors controlled by the +7 Balance Engine, dominant strategies are detected and adjusted before
they can become truly polarizing:

Increase strategic diversity

The +7 Balance Engine™ seeks to maintain a game state where there are no dominant strategies, significantly increasing the amount of viable content. Experienced players will likely abandon a game after playing all dominant strategies, since they have no interest in exploring strategies they know to be less effective. When more strategic diversity is available, players are retained longer. A skilled, creative player has opportunities for discovering new viable approaches, creating an advantage over those that simply copy existing designs.

At the same time, with the gap between the most effective and least effective strategies narrowed, the game becomes friendlier to the casual player. A game with select dominant strategies can be difficult for casual players to break into; they will become easily frustrated if they are outclassed by "unfair" dominant strategies.

Automated Balance Control Defined

Automatic balance control works on fundamental economic principles. In many ways, a running balance-controlled game is similar to a market economy. The +7 Balance Engine™ monitors player selection rates, analogous to demand, and modifies the component value, analogous to price, accordingly. To demonstrate the process, we'll look at a fictitious example of the "Fighter and Wizard RPG". A player can choose to create a character that is either a fighter or a wizard, where a wizard has access to a number of spells over the course of game play, and a fighter has access to a number of weapon specializations.

To set up automated balance control, the following steps are taken:

Identify balance-critical components
It is not necessary to control all aspects of the game in order to achieve game balance. In many cases, a subset of game components is chosen as a target for the balance engine. In our example, we'll choose the wizard's spells and the fighter's weapon specializations. Each spell is considered a game component, as is each specialization. In this example, we'll choose not to designate the weapons themselves as balance-critical components; the balance of specializations will take the relative strengths and weaknesses of the weapons themselves into account implicitly.
Select scalable attribute(s) of each component
For each component, select one or more scalable, numeric attributes of the component that will affect value. These components could be a cost, expressed in a game resource, to select or play the component. It could be an amount of damage a particular attack deals. Scaling these numbers will directly affect how valuable that component is in the game world. For our example, we'll say that wizards have "spell juice", and it costs a certain amount of spell juice to cast a spell. We choose this as the scalable attribute of the spell components. For weapon specializations, we'll say that each weapon specialization comes with a damage bonus to a particular weapon type. That damage bonus will be the scalable attribute for our weapon specialization components.
Dynamically adjust attributes based on actual game play
At this point, the +7 Balance Engine™ can be engaged. Over the lifetime of the game, the Engine monitors players' behavior selecting these key components, and dynamically addresses balance issues that the player base illustrates through its revealed preference towards certain components. In our example, the +7 Balance Engine™ will adjust the costs of spells and the damage bonuses of weapon specializations, based on player behavior, ensuring that there are no dominant strategies through particular spells, spell combos, weapons specializations, or weapon specialization combos.

For example, suppose the spell Ball of Fire deals 20 points of fire damage and requires 15 ounces of spell juice. With these statistics, Ball of Fire turns out to be significantly over-represented (either because Wizards in general are too strong or because Ball of Fire is too strong compared to other spells). The +7 Balance Engine may recommend changing the cost to 17 ounces. If on a future cycle it is still over-represented but nearing the acceptable range, it may then recommend changing it to 18.

Note that the design intent of the spell is preserved while bringing it into balance.

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