A Course About Game Balance

Comments (24) on “A Course About Game Balance”

1. I love his point about "good" and "bad" at math being cultural. Along with so many other things in our society

2. Wow, an overview of their college course, very helpful xD

3. This class is masterfully crafted. I look forward to seeing what Ian creates in the future. So happy he is making a textbook so more students can benefit. Brilliant!

4. 27:27 literally tell them something like "Think like a scientist, question everything" or "You have to be kinda OCD about this"

5. Brilliant course, I find this very important and wish we had had more of it in our class. As a kid I would play managing a farm with wood blocks and use beads to keep track of my beads, optimizing the costs of me doing things until it was most fun to play all day, funny how easy and intuitive that seemed back then and how much of a hard time I am having now to do the same thing as an adult sitting before a spreadsheet.

6. If it's a multiplayer game the rules is if players can break something they WILL break it.

7. This is the course that blizzard forgot to take.

8. some people are definitely better at math than others, just cause you have to learn it doesn't mean there isn't innate ability involved

9. This reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Lisa proves bully's beat up nerds because of nerd pheromones and someone in the crowd is always like: "Let's not listen to her!" lol
   Not that i'm talking about the crowd here, I've just played a lot of UNbalanced games.

10. I got this same look going with the glasses and long hair. I guess I fit in with the game dev crowd.

11. The Q&A part confirms me to never allow Questions after a speech

12. Is this course still available if so where and how can I take it? I hope theres an online version of it

13. I am not a developer or game designer but i have been only playing games and have been using all those methods you have mentioned not to balance but to exploit lol

14. Single player save scumming is fine, unless you want to explicitly challenge yourself. Change my mind.

15. here after genshin backlash a.k.a yoimiya and ei

16. How do I sign up?

17. I still don't understand why a game need to adjust itself to the incorrect perception that players have on probabilities. This will never help them learn the correct way probability works, it just makes everyone more entrenched in their wrong beliefs.

    I see it very often in TCGs, where players complain about things that are not only relatively likely to happen, but are actually the MOST PROBABLE outcome.

18. Playing at 0.75 speed gives the lecture a more normal speed…and the lecturer a more human sound, vs chipmunk.

19. Clicker games were what finally broke the code for me. The only difference between Cookie Clicker and wow is people, scale, and illusion.

20. My opinion: Games are not balanced on purpose, if game is balanced everyone would be successful in game, cuz if game is fair there is only so much you can learn and you will eventually get to the end. Unbalanced or unfair game is endless game. System is made to keep you at 50% , not low enough to make you quit and not high enough to make game boring.

21. Send this to the rainbow six siege developpers, please.

22. oh we just throw it all into a spreadsheet and let the algorythm decide if a card is balanced or not ….
    no wonder most tcg's are currently flaming hot messes, especially MTG banning cards before sets are even released now XD

23. 4:35ade me think of how mtg starts with 20 lives and ygo starts with 8000 so in ygo you have phrases like "pay 1000 LP" that sound so jarring in mtg lol

24. we understand so much about how to make the games that have already been made.

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