Ok, so that’s the best picture I could come up with.

In the previous power post, I went over the various paths to acquire power, as a player.  This post will go over the developer’s mandate to control that path in order to provide game and player balance.

In a traditional start/end game, like Mass Effect, distributing the power is usually limited by two factors – time (experience) and content.  The longer you play, the more items you acquire, the better they are and the better your skill set becomes.  Some games give a carrot-on-a-stick effect to start the game, like God of War, where you have extraordinary power then lose it shortly after.  Still, as the game goes on, your experience and time played provides more power.  A developer can incrementally increase the power of enemies and map it along with your increases.  A game like Final Fantasy where you can “grind” levels to make content easier also provides a hardcore mode for players that want to complete the game at level 1.

The second part is tiered content.  Using Final Fantasy 13 as a great example of tiered content, the developers limit your power acquisition to chunks of gameplay.  No matter how much you grind in section 2, the developers have given you a minimum level of power to start and a maximum amount to end with.  The variance is also usually pretty small too. Any game that locks out zone X until you complete Y is artificially limiting your power.  That’s why games like Fallout and Skyrim can make some sections really easy and others impossible as an open game does not assume your power level – it gradually increases difficulty based on your power.  This requires more coding by the developer but less planning since they never have to guess at your power level.

In games with no end content, such as MMOs, balance is difficult.  A straight boost to a power stat (power, critical chance, critical multiplier, speed) means that an item from the lower levels can and will compete with a higher level one, unless you inflate it to higher levels.  WoW had trinkets that provided 2% critical chance in the lower levels.  For a higher level trinket to provide a better stat boost, it had to be 4% at the minimum.  Push this across 10 item slots and you have players with incredibly boosted stats.  Add in an expansion and now the items need to be 6% or more.  Power growth is uncontrolled.

Developers learned fairly quickly that you need to convert something into that base stat – hence ratings.  Ratings work under a formula that is based on your character’s level so that an item with 10 rating would give 2% crit at level 20 but only 0.1% at level 50.  As you increase levels, you also decrease the conversion ratio so that at any given level, a character should only have X amount of a base power stat.

Moving on a bit to more complicated matters – theorycrafting.  In games with multiple playstyles – ranged, melee, casting, tanking – certain stats are more interesting than others.  Some classes will prefer to stack critical rating, others speed boosts and to that end, will stack a single stat that provides a linear gain.  If I know that 100 crit rating gives me 1% crit, then I will stack 10,000 rating as it’s my most attractive stat.  From a balancing perspective, this means that the items that you design will have weights based on classes and some items will simply never be used.

Diminishing returns help with this issue somewhat as the more of a stat you stack, the less valuable it becomes.  If you’re familiar with a logarithmic scale, you can see that at a given point, a stat rating becomes less attractive than another.  Let’s say critical chance is your best stat, 2:1 compared to speed.  Once your critical rating stat gives half the rating it did at 0, then you can start putting points into speed rating.  This way, you still have the increased power from critical but the loss of power from the diminished returns is off-set by the increase in power from speed with has yet to have diminishing returns.

From a balance perspective, it’s also easier to balance diminishing returns as you’re effectively capping the possible value for a stat source. If critical rating is the only way to get critical chance, you could make it diminish completely at 30%.  If you have 1 or 2 more sources, diminish those as well so that the total possible in-game is 50%.  You know that the majority of people will be in the 35% range while the ultra players will be higher, 40-45%.  That’s much easier to balance than 10% vs. 80%.

Diablo 2’s magic find stat worked like this.  For basic items, it provided a linear return and for the best unique gear, it was a diminishing return.  So while you might always be gaining a better chance to find magic items, once you reached about 400 Magic Find, there was little benefit on stacking more of it if you were hunting uniques.

On the flipside, if you have hard caps on some stats, where once you reach a given point there is no more benefit, you’re essentially limiting your gear selection for players.  SWTOR for example had an original issue where Accuracy and Speed were completely worthless stats since you only needed a small amount to cap, yet 75% of all the high end gear had these two stats present.  With the game’s ability to swap stat packages around, high end players farmed a small set of gear (IA gloves mostly) for the Crit/Surge boosts, which were 3-8 times more valuable for every class.  This is poor design.  Changes were made in a patch to reduce the return on some stats and the next big patch, 1.2, should change the way stats are distributed across equipment.  Still, the stat system is flawed at its core in that game.

Developers have an intricate balance to play if they have multiple paths to power.  The more you have, the more you have to make sure that all of them provide benefit to the player in a balanced fashion.  If one stat simply shines for everyone, expect game breaking situations (armor penetration in WoW is a good example).  Ratings and diminishing returns provide the mechanics that devs can use to balance stats between each other, between classes and across all levels of content.

Back to gaming!  The next few posts will go over the mechanics of RPGs, specifically the increase in power and the multiple paths that it can take.

Since the Pen and Paper (P&P) days, characters have faced adversity and through it, gotten stronger for the next challenge.  This is true in life, for the most part.  When computers came out, essentially large calculators, this process was shadowed somewhat by the adventure.  In today’s world, you can easily play any RPG game and ignore the behind-the-scenes calculations for power.  The game usually does a pretty good job of showing you what is an upgrade – in a linear fashion as well.  Only if you want to play at an elite level do you need to worry about min-maxing (a term that means minimizing your weakness while maximizing your power).

In this first post, I’ll look at the particular mechanics of that path and the various ways games get you to the top.

Power is gained through 3 main methods.  Acquiring new skills, more damage or more speed.  Certainly there is a mental aspect in performance but that’s for another post.  In RPGs would get new skills with new levels.  Batman doesn’t get his grapple gun for a while in his games, for example.  You get more damage either through numerical input from new equipment (better stats) or from leveling and improving the baseline of the skill you are using  (a level 60 backstab is stronger than a level 10).  More speed is really split into two sections: getting more efficient (the mental aspect) and accruing more numerical speed – usually through some haste metric.

The leveling aspect of power increase is linear, easily controlled and available to everyone.  At maximum level, every character should have access to their most powerful skills.  Some games in the past (Vanilla WoW, Everquest, etc…) made you hunt for these skills, giving players who had them a huge advantage over others.  In today’s game, that is gone.  EvE (and Glitch) is a little different in that the skills are available but time limits your ability to get them – you need to train for months.  From a developer’s standpoint, this is a fairly easy way to measure and control player power.  It also gives them points to balance classes.

Next is the increase in numerical power.  There are many variables here: level, attack power, critical chance, critical multiplier, base statistics, equipment.  Take a typical MMO.  Your fireball damage is based on the level of the skill, your intelligence modifier, your spell power boost, your chance of it hitting critically and the amount of damage that critical hit deals.  At lower ends of the numerical scale (say 100 damage) an increase of 10% overall damage is significant but not overly powerful.  At the higher end of the scale (say 100,000 damage) an increase of 10% damage is massive.  In WoW, characters can hit for that much or more and 99% of all characters in the game have less than 10% of that amount in hit points.  If you continue to add a linear amount of power, this soon gets out of control through compounding.

Compounding is where you continually add in percentages – just like a bank.  If I put in 100$ and it gains 5% every year then: year 1 = 105$ (100+5%), year 2=110.25$ (105+5%), year 3=115.76 (110.25+5%), etc…

If I say that each item adds 1% damage, people who have 60 items have an extraordinarily large advantage(81%) over those with 30 (35%), let alone 10 (10%).  Where someone should be 6 times more powerful, they are actually 8 times because your baseline increases continuously.

On top of that, since you have 5 or more variables that affect your power increase, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage and keep balanced.  If you were to make one method unattractive, people will go for another.  TOR has this problem where Critical Chance and Critical Multiplier are excessively powerful when compared to other methods.

The final increase is from speed.  The basic damage formula is called Damage Per Second (DPS).  If you’re able to get more attacks in per second, your overall damage will go up.  In shooting games, a fully automatic weapon will shoot more often than a sniper rifle but do less damage per hit.  Most of the time, the sniper rifle will have a higher DPS rating but the mechanics of the item make it hard to use consistently.  So let’s say the automatic hits for 20 damage every 0.5 seconds (40DPS) and the sniper rifle hits for 150 damage every 3 seconds (50 DPS).  If I were to increase the rate of fire by 10%, then the auto goes to 44DPS and the sniper to 55DPS.  It’s a linear gain for each but the sniper rifle gained more power overall.  Some games give a 50% boost to speed and in that instance, the sniper rifle gains 20DPS over the automatic.

You can see again how a compound gain of speed will benefit damage.  In many RPGs you reach a point where speed “caps” at a point where the game system can no longer handle the input (global cooldowns, energy, mana resources, etc…) but on the whole, more speed is good.

In the next post, I’ll go over how games balance these various power stats to ensure that people who have gone through a lot of hoops are more powerful than others but in a balanced fashion.  I’ll also go over how a complete lack of balance in some games puts an artificial barrier on gameplay.