Being responsible for game balance on any game can be one of the most difficult and frustrating experiences in game development. Everyone has strong opinions on it no matter how ill informed they may be. When you get it right, no one believes it, and when you get it wrong, you ruined the game.

Let’s take Inkborn Fables launch. A week ago, all the top players knew Bard was broken and ruining the game. Three days ago the top players knew Fated was broken and ruining the game. Today the top players know that Ghostly is broken and ruining the game. Yet these all can’t possibly be true.

On the TFT team, we took the stance of being very pro-active to adjust things as needed. If something was turbo broken, usually the worst you had to wait was for 1 patch, sometimes even sooner with a B patch if it was very bad. The side effect of this is now the expectation that simply the perception of imbalance creates a demand for action.

This is not just a TFT problem either. Observing various games across the ecosystem you see similar patterns. Usually the absolute pinnacle of players are pretty good about it, but the next tier down is very sure that the outcome of their last match would have been different if the balance team was competent, and it’s their fault they were unable to achieve victory.

Realistically I’m not sure how to solve this, short of accepting that it’s currently the nature of gamers and teaching everyone to accept it and not dwell on it. You still need to take action and patch your game, as that is important to keep the machine running as well as possible. But it can’t be up to balance designers to educate the entire gaming sphere. That’s never going to happen.

Anyway, I write all this as we lock 14.7 today for branch cut, knowing that the meta is still evolving and our changes may end up outdated by the weekend. I’m proud of the team continuing to do their best, and will continue coaching everyone to ignore the hyperbole and do what’s right. I believe the old adage is “It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it!”

Until tomorrow when randomly someone discovers Invoker is broken or something, take it easy 🙂

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