There’s a lot of ways for games to be “unbalanced,” but in this post I’m going to examine, in particular, competitive team-based games with various playable “classes/champions.” Prominent examples include all MOBAs, Overwatch, Smite, TF2, and the upcoming Valorant release.
For anyone who’s never played a champion-based game, hopefully the concept is nonetheless intuitive- depending on the goal of the game, there are different skillsets suited to helping in different ways. In most games, there is a “glass cannon” or ranged damage dealing character, who offers high DPS but with high vulnerability, a “tank” class with high health and relatively lower damage, and an “assassin” type character whose sole purpose is to eliminate enemy DPS. Generally, there also exist utility-heavy characters who heal or boost allied characters, or alternately debuff or inhibit enemies (stuns, snares, barriers, and other crowd control included). Depending on the goal of the game- in TF2, where the goal can be to transport an item, there is a class with high mobility ideal for parkouring across a map. In League of Legends, where structures need to destroyed, there is a role for dealing sustained damage against them.
Games with a rolling roster face a unique challenge- how do you convince players to change from a character they’re comfortable with to try something new? A commonly accepted answer is to make the new release particularly fun- but that comes with a slew of its own issues.
Most players like a skillset that offers a lot of options, but isn’t impossible to understand- established players don’t want to stand still and shoot or heal, but they also don’t want to have to learn to play DDR on a keyboard. Players like mobility- no one wants to be trapped, and an escape offers forgiveness for bad play. Utility is rewarding to play with because it offers the potential for moves that pay off in a big way, but sacrificing damage for utility can also make the game feel unbalanced.
League of Legends in particular suffers from this “power creep”, where newly released champions have increasingly more mobility and utility without sacrificing damage or defence. In an effort to keep older champions relevant, they constantly rework underplayed champion kits, but it still results in champions that are not just unbalanced, but almost impossible to balance because their kit simply has too much utility.
Now, overloaded kits present a twofold problem- first, as previously discussed, they’re hard to balance in terms of damage and tankiness- but also, utility tends to lower the skill floor and raise the skill cap of playing a character. As a very simple example, take Mei from Overwatch- she can erect a temporary wall in-game. Used well, this wall can isolate a single enemy for an easy kill, but used badly, can trap your team to die. Extrapolating the metaphor, a professional player will use their utility much more optimally than your average, casual player, and if your game relies on publicity from professional streamers or revenue from an e-sports league, how can you balance an overloaded kit for both?
The recent League release, Aphelios, is probably the worst offender and best example of an overloaded kit. It’s standard for a champion in his role to have perhaps one escape/mobility mechanic and perhaps some crowd control with a caveat (time delay, easy to dodge, etc.), but Aphelios has the utility of five separate champions, granted by essentially switching weapons. Playing an game with Aphelios at a professional level is no longer skill-reliant, because the champion is simply better in every way- the team with Aphelios almost always wins- but his winrate for most players is 48%- in a game with an ideally 50% chance of winning, it’s quite balanced.
