Last week, Kevin “Monk” Dong sat down with Back2Warcraft’s Jannes "Neo" Tjarks to talk about his balance philosophy – and about the specific changes the W3Champions team are making to the game. If you want to hear more about Monk’s thoughts about the specific Warcraft III balance changes, make sure to listen to the full interview - this article will only cover the portion of the interview relevant to how Monk expects the Frost Giant team to approach the balance of Stormgate.
What is Balance?
Before we can get into how Monk intends to approach balancing Stormgate, we need to talk about what that balance even means. Monk took the first bit of the interview (after Neo tried to get an updated beta date. Verdict: Nothing new) to explain the history of how game design developers have approached balancing a game over the years.
Most studios’ approach to balance games have undergone a significant evolution in the last 10-20 years. Game balance in the 2000s to early 2010s focused on the raw numbers – if a match up had a 50/50 win rate in the desired skill bracket, that match up was balanced. Of course, that philosophy ran face first into the glory of late Wings of Liberty PvZ and Immortal Sentry vs Broodlord Infestor. The match up was nearly 50/50, but it was a 50/50 that had Protoss dominant first 10 minutes and rarely winning after that point. Even worse, the games weren’t fun.
The modern balance approach, and the one that Monk expects Stormgate to follow, balances around ensuring that as many games as possible are fun. While a strict 50% win rate for every match up at the highest level might be nice, it is far more important to balance in such a way that the game feels fun, even if that fun is slightly imbalanced from the perspective of pure win rate.
The interesting part of balancing for feel is that it will prioritize some stages of the game over others. Monk thinks that late game balance disproportionately effects balance perception, which tracks with my thoughts on how the Starcraft II balance discourse has developed – old school TvP was rather even, but the impending wall of late game Protoss power led many to feel like the match up was tremendously Protoss favored, even in times when Terran was the leading race.
The other concept that bears mention is how pro level play effects balance discussions. In Starcraft II, Serral and Reynor have dominated the European and international scenes in recent years, which leads to a perspective that Zerg is overpowered despite the lack of low-and-mid level Zerg professional players. In contrast, Protoss players making up 50% of any European tournament (and the Grandmaster ladder) is not seen as nearly as much of a problem because Protoss players are not winning tournaments. While it would be tempting to try to enforce equal win rates at the professional level, the small sample of players means that match ups can statistically be imbalanced due to professional outliers dominating (e.g. Happy in WC3, Flash in Brood War, Serral in Starcraft 2).
Who To Balance For?
In many modern games, the goal is to make the game as balanced as possible at the highest level – especially for titles that have esports as an aspiration. Blizzard games are famous for this, sometimes to their detriment – Heroes of the Storm became a much better game once the competitive scene lost official support and the designers started balancing with a mind to the average player.
Frost Giant doesn’t appear to have a significant stance on the casual v competitive balancing perspective at the moment, although we do know that Monk in his time on the balance team at Blizzard pushed for more changes that benefit the casual audience (such as the decision to extend the vision of the Zerg hatchery in 5.0.11) in both SC2 and Warcraft 3. The other key philosophy Monk points out is that he tries to make execution cost fair – things that are harder to defend than execute actively diminish fun and lead to a perception of imbalance (e.g. shift-queued widow mine drops ending the game immediately).
Important Voices
If there is going to be a greater focus on balance at more than the highest level, does that mean that the balance team is willing to listen to voices that aren’t at those highest echelons? Yes, but with a reasonable caveat. Many game communities are terrible at communicating their ideas properly, and instead fill communication channels with arguments about how certain things are broken without substantive suggestions on how to tweak those things. Monk goes out of the way to mention that well-reasoned ideas from anyone, regardless of their skill, will be considered so long as they are communicated well and make sense.
Balance Process
While we don’t know exactly where Frost Giant will swing on the casual/pro balance discussion, Monk does go into the framework of how the balance process will work. Most balance developments will come out of the game designers actively following the game and developing theories about why things are over-or-under powered.
From there, they will reach out to professional players to try to get feedback on the proposed changes. According to Monk, pros are often rather bad at judging balance changes or suggesting good ones, although years of communication with Starcraft II pros has apparently improved that drastically – to the point where some pros would requests nerfs to their race to gain credibility when they asked for buffs later! The proposed changes will then likely go through several rounds of pro and game designer feedback before the changes are released to the public for discussion and multiple iterations on a Patch Test Realm.
Monk also admitted to intentionally over buffing underutilized units to encourage their use, as happened with Void Rays during the 2021 season. However, he does acknowledge that this works best with larger teams and a faster patch cycle – smaller teams can’t put a patch together as fast and over tuned units can rapidly spoil a meta or even the entire game (Broodlord Infestor, anyone?).
Final Thoughts
The final thing that we should touch on is the incredible transparency Frost Giant has been providing about their processes. Blizzard was (until recently) notoriously opaque and insular about their balance process and decision making – to the point where WC3 players would ignore developer balance questions as they felt their input was habitually disregarded. For all Frost Giant is comprised of many old Blizzard developers and Stormgate will be a Blizzard-style RTS, these heightened communication channels should lead to a more transparent and productive balance process than Blizzard was able to do, as that baggage has been left behind.
How to Get Involved
As always, if you want to engage with the Frost Giant developers and get information from them as they post it, you should sign up for their newsletter, head on over to /r/Stormgate on reddit, and sign up for the beta and wishlist the game on steam!
Frost Giant is also asking for names for our favorite little infernal worker - you can email them at pr@frostgiantstudios.com