作者：Leigh Alexander

这周末在纽约大学，我有幸聆听了《Magic：The Gathering》创作者兼资深设计师Richard Garfield关于游戏平衡策略的演讲。

Garfield可能是目前最具创造性与影响力的设计师之一，他负责制作了无数款已深远影响设计与行业模式的实体游戏。然而即使是在他看来，游戏的平衡性仍是个宏大话题。

richard-garfield(from thenoisecast.com)

鉴于游戏类型的多样化，我们难以对它们进行笼统分析。Garfield指出：“假如，你是一位正在探讨生命的生物学家，那么你是无法分析如此繁多的生命。你应该选取其中某个部分，然后‘着重探讨这一方面’。”

正交游戏的平衡

为了能够探讨游戏的平衡性，Garfield选取正交游戏作为论述重点，他将其定义为有限的多人游戏（游戏邦注：包括两位或两位以上玩家的游戏），游戏最终会对玩家分数进行排名——比如桥牌与棋盘这些经典游戏便属于这一类型，而《FarmVile》不属于该范畴。

Garfield解释道：“我们用策略性失败来定义平衡性。这意味着，玩家可以在游戏中采取一系列策略，如果有些策略在游戏中不可行，而玩家认为它们本该具有可行性时，这时，人们就会认为这种现象为失衡状况。”

当玩家总是选择某个更具可取性的战略时，策略失败现象便会发生。在《Magic》的竞赛环境中，寻找各种平台类型是检验竞赛安全性的优良渠道。更多的平台类型可以确保游戏平衡，而游戏中只存在一个可行平台则会降低游戏的趣味性。另一方面，过多的平台类型则会给大部分玩家造成更多困扰。

Garfield表示：“毫无疑问，这样会引申出更多策略。”

有时，策略失败与策略本身毫不相关。比如，首个开始井字游戏的玩家，他的获胜率更高，因此，对手可能会仅仅因为自己并非领头羊而失去对游戏的兴趣。

同时，Garfield强调了平衡性玩法失败的概念——所有玩家都会采取不同的方法开始游戏进程，而你的方法如果在游戏中并不是很占优势，那么你可能就会认为游戏不具有平衡性。

看待平衡的两种方式

Garfield认为游戏平衡可分为两类：整体性与部分性。当某款游戏中包含的单独组件需要保持平衡时，这就归为部分性平衡——《Magic》中的闪电球只消耗一个红色魔法吗？在《暗黑破坏神》中，一件装备能够为你增添152个智力值吗？相反，整体平衡注重将游戏当作一个整体——在《Magic》中，你是以20点生命值还是7张卡片启动模式的？在《暗黑破坏神》中，你可以兜售装备，换取真实货币吗？

他解释道，有时这种区别界限十分模糊，但区分性地讨论游戏平衡仍具有一定作用。

Garfield表示：“通常，设计师会设计出符合骨灰级玩家平衡定义的游戏。当然，我们在早期制作《Magic》时便有这种想法，而且，我经过了一段时间才逐渐摆脱这种固定思维。”

其实，迎合骨灰级玩家，忽略其他类型玩家的平衡模式实则是个失衡体验，在大部分玩家发展技能水平，达到完美平衡的体验之前，他们会纷纷离开游戏进程。同时，骨灰级玩家也会失去合作对象。

而且，针对骨灰级玩家的平衡模式常常忽略了一点，即某些玩家的精通水平已超越游戏本身。设计师不一定是顶级玩家，其实，大部分时候，他们并不属于出色玩家。

所有游戏都会附上规则，帮助玩家理解游戏进程。其实，大多数时候，平衡性有助于玩家快速提高技能，这对表现不佳者极其有益。

重要的是，游戏应提供更多选项，方便所有类型的玩家做出自己的正确选择，这与按照玩家使用技能或职业方式是否正确来进行分组完全不同。即使玩家并非机械性地集中精力，他们也能对抗，如同角色扮演玩家或故事粉丝一样。

其中有些玩家会根据角色外貌或叙事背景为它们选择装备，而如果其他玩家更为成功，他们就会感觉自己需要被迫放弃这种游戏风格，这也会让他们的游戏体验产生失衡感。

magic the gathering(from giantbomb.com)

平衡策略

Garfield指出：“平衡是一门艺术，不是技术。”数学确实在Garfield的游戏设计中发挥了作用，但它却无法取代扑克玩家打算了解的游戏复杂程度。

他表示：“我认为游戏中不存在公式。如果你还未解决游戏，那么，要想出平衡游戏的公式似乎是个难题……而且不同用户所需的平衡性又各不相同。如果你解决了游戏，保持了平衡，那么这种平衡性只符合骨灰级玩家，我们已经阐明这是你不能采用的做法。”

而且用户也在发生变化：新手转变为一般玩家，再到骨灰级玩家，年轻玩家转变为年长玩家。Garfield指出：“这是一个移动目标。因为这主要涉及心理状态，与数学无关，因此你不该期待游戏中存在某个精确公式。”

包含大量测试与灵活创建游戏原型的迭代设计方式是找到游戏自然平衡的关键——《Magic》经历了两年测试。“我已经多次尝试将游戏设计为文档形式……但我们确实难以从内在定位游戏的大致方向，除非，它确实极为接近地模仿了一款你十分熟悉的游戏。”

迭代设计的一大优势是，起初，每个玩家都是初学者，而该范围会随着游戏开发进程的继续逐渐扩大。但其中的风险是，随着游戏经过多次测试与迭代，你会逐渐失去新手与休闲玩家。因此，定期主动地引进新玩家，确保自己可以完美让骨灰级玩家与菜鸟玩家融合在一起。

近来，不少发行商可能会在游戏发行后采取迭代手段，这是一个不错的做法，因为它在发行时制作的平衡性符合新手玩家的要求，而且它可以进行快速调整，吻合不断增长的用户群，以防将新用户拒之门外。

石头-剪子-布

Garfield指出，石头-剪子-布结构是指游戏中的所有元素抵抗某个完全不同的元素，这有助于设计师设计游戏平衡。从部分水平上看，该结构体现在大量游戏中，比如《Stratego》与《军团要塞2》。从整体水平上也是如此，比如《星际争霸》中采取的快速、防御以及单一游戏模式，即每个策略相对于另一个策略具有一定劣势。

Garfield指道：“如果暴雪能够认识到这是一种健全的石头-剪子-布关系，它便会根据这一模式设计。如果他们为失衡游戏创建单位或基础状态，并且制作出可以统治他人的策略，那么他们需要做出一些调整。”

虽然石头-剪子-布本身是一种小型游戏，但它也做出了一些设置：比如，石头并不需要100%地战胜剪刀。只要获胜概率超过50%，该结构便具合理性，其实，许多情况下，我们最好制定这种结构，那样整款游戏就不会局限在单个选项中。在一定范围内选择某个策略只会提高偏爱该策略的玩家的胜算，无法保证完全取胜。

Rock-paper-scissors(from uncyclopedia.wikia.com)

增加成本

另一方面，我们可以通过为需要平衡的组件生成和定义“成本”，从而保持游戏平衡，成本可以源自多种渠道。比如玩家在游戏过程中付费，而且他们最初都处于同一水平。如果游戏设置回合内与回合间成本，那么它们通常属于不同来源，有时，我们难以定义这种成本。

Garfield表示：“重要的是，你应拥有一个，或者一些可以调整组件平衡的数据……开发者掌握成本和得分概念后需要用一个数字来作为主要按钮。随着你深入理解系统，你将会成为这个按钮的调整专家。在《Magic》，一旦我们擅长调整魔力消耗按钮，我们便会熟练操作其它按钮。”

非独霸策略

Garfield提议，我们通过设置一系列成本标准为起点。之后开始发展系统——包括添加新组件，保证它无法凌驾于旧组件之上。由于独霸元素更易凸显其价值，从而导致游戏逐渐丧失维度；通常情况下，未包含独霸元素的游戏可以提供更多的可行选项。

如果某个组件过于强大，你可以采用策略或“管控”组件，或是减少它的功效。《Magic》频繁地采用这类做法；比如，飓风卡可以伤害所有玩家，尤其是飞行物；“如果我碰到对手使用飞行物，那我可以采用这种方案解决。现在如果他们过分依赖飞行物，我就会打败他们。”《星际争霸》中的观察者可以控制隐身术。添加hoser则是让玩家对抗采用特定策略或强大组件对手的可行方式。

通常，hoser会造就石头-剪子-布情境，即策略A是对抗策略B的理想选项，但可能极易受到策略C的制约。

同时，还可以让玩家使用相关游戏元素与功能控制自己的发展曲线，保持平衡的完整性。有时，不一致性也有助于保持平衡——比如，某个在大多数时候不具可行性的策略有时候可能会转变为可行战略。这通常出现在卡牌游戏中。为了调和一个具备强大功能的方法，我们应让它只在某些罕见情况下具有可行性。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Richard Garfield’s strategies for game balancing

by Leigh Alexander

This weekend at New York University, an intimate audience had the opportunity to hear game balancing strategies from a master — veteran designer and Magic the Gathering creator Richard Garfield.

PRACTICE at New York University’s Game Center is a now-annual observance of game design as art and practice — a conference focused on the moment-to-moment experience of game design, and on building a community that supports game design as a process in culture.

Garfield may be one of the most prolific and influential living designers, responsible for countless physical games that have influenced design and business models. Yet balance is an ambitious topic, even for him.

Given the breadth of variety in games, it’s challenging to talk generally about them. “An analogy you might draw is that if you’re a biologist and you’re talking about life, there’s a crazy amount of life,” he says. “It helps to take a subset of that and say, ‘I’m going to talk about that.’”

Balance in orthogames

For the purposes of his discussion Garfield chooses to focus on orthogames, which he defines as finite multiplayer games (two or more players) that result in players being ranked — classic games like bridge and chess fall under this umbrella, while FarmVille doesn’t.

“We define balance as strategic collapse,” Garfield explains. “What this means is that games can be approached with a set of strategies and if there’s a strategy that is regarded as not being viable that people think should be viable, then people will talk about this as not being balanced.”

Strategic collapse occurs when one strategy is so preferable that all players essentially choose it all the time. In the Magic tournament environment, looking for a variety of deck types is a good way to check the health of the tournament. A wider variety of types keeps the game balanced, and it’s less enjoyable when there’s perceived to be just one viable deck type. On the other hand, too many deck types is too confusing for most players.

“There definitely can be too many strategies,” Garfield says.

Sometimes strategic collapse has nothing to do with strategy at all. For example, the player that goes first in Tic-Tac-Toe will win much more frequently, such that an opponent might lose interest in playing the game simply by virtue of not going first.

Garfield also highlighted the concept of play style collapse, relevant to balance — players all approach a game in different ways, and a game that has weaker support for your approach than for other approaches will feel unbalanced to you.

Two ways of viewing balance

He views two types of balance: Holistic and componential. When a game has separate components that need to be balanced, it’s componential — in Magic, should a lightning bolt cost just one red mana? In Diablo, should a piece of equipment give you 152 intelligence? Holistic balance issues concern the game as a whole — in Magic should you start with 20 life or seven cards? In Diablo, should you be able to sell equipment for real money?

Sometimes the distinction is muddy, he notes, but it’s still useful in talking about balance to differentiate.

“Often designers will design the game to be balanced for the expert,” Garfield says. “This is certainly the way we thought about it in the early days of Magic, and it took me a while to outgrow this mode of thought.”

A game balanced to favor experts risks other types of gamers having an unbalanced experience — and the game may lose most of its players before they ever develop the skill level to attain the well-balanced experience. Meanwhile the experts run out of people to play with.

Also, balancing for experts often fails to consider that there might be levels of proficiency even above what the game is desgned to contain. Designers aren’t necessarily the best players — most of the time, they’re not, actually.

All kinds of games are patched with rules to accommodate players that outgrow their bounds. Balancing is helped by the fact that most of the time skill goes up logarithmically, and the benefit for performance tapers.

The important thing is to provide options so that every type of player has a good choice, versus grouping players into correct and incorrect ways to use skills or classes. This lets players compete even if they’re not mechanically-focused — like roleplayers or fans of storytelling.

Some of these players will choose gear for their character based on appearance or narrative suitability, and feel forced out of their play style by the fact that other players are more successful. That unbalances their experience.

Strategies for balancing

“Balance is an art, not a science,” Garfield says. Math helps in his game design, but never supersedes the level of complexity that a poker player would need to know.

“I came to the conclusion there is just no formula,” he says. “If you haven’t solved the game, it seems a tall order to actually come up with a formula to balance the game in the sense that people usually mean… and balance is different for different audiences. If you solve the game and then balance it, then you’re only balancing for the expert, which we’ve established you don’t always want to do.”

And audiences are always changing: Beginners become intermediates become experts, younger players become older players. “It’s a moving target,”" he says. “Because of all this it’s really a matter of psychology, rather than math, so you shouldn’t expect there to be an exact formula.”

An iterative design approach with a lot of testing and flexible prototypes is one essential technique to find a game’s natural balance — Magic was playtested for two years. “I have tried many, many times to design games as a document… but it is really hard to internalize what the game is going to be like unless it’s really closely modeled on a game you already understand.”

One benefit of iterative design is that everyone is a beginner at first, and the scope broadens as development goes on. But a risk is that the more you test and iterate, you can lose track of your beginners and casual players — so intentionally bring in new people regularly and ensure you have a good mix of players familiar with the game and people who know little about it.

These days, publishers are likely to iterate after a game launches — which is fine provided it launches with enough balance for beginners and can rebalance fast enough to keep up with the growing player base and not lock out new players either.

Rock-paper-scissors

Rock-paper-scissors’ structure — where every element of a game is strong against a different element — is incredibly helpful to keep in mind while balancing, Garfield says. On the component level it appears in a broad range of games, from Stratego to Team Fortress 2. On the holistic level it works too — take rush, defense and economic-oriented gameplay patterns for Starcraft, where each strategy is weak to one other strategy.

“Once that was recognized by Blizzard as being a healthy rock-paper-scissors relationship, it’s designed with that in mind,” Garfield points out. “If they make units or base states for the game which imbalances that and makes one of those strategies dominate the other, then they will tweak those back.”

While rock-paper-scissors in itself can be regarded as a trivial game, there’re options: Rock doesn’t need to beat scissors 100 percent of the time, for example. As long as the odds are better than 50 percent, then the structure is sound, and in fact in many cases it’s best to make it so that the entire game doesn’t rest on a single choice. Choosing a strategy within a cycle simply improves the success chances of a player that prefers that strategy, rather than guarantees a victory.

Add cost

Another useful idea for balancing is to generate and define a “cost” for components that need balances, where that cost can be multiple resources. The cost can be paid during the course of the game, and all players begin at the same base. If the game has in-session costs and between-session costs, they usually will be a different resource and sometimes the cost will be difficult to define or subtle.

“The important thing is that you have one, or perhaps a few numbers to tweak to balance your components,” Garfield says. “With cost and score [you need] one number that your developers recognize as being the principal knob. And as you become better at understanding your system… you’ll become experts at tweaking that knob. In Magic, once we got good at tweaking the mana cost knob, we got better at tweaking other knobs.”

Non-domination

Start by setting a series of benchmarks for cost. After that, grow the system — add new components in such a way that new ones don’t dominate the old ones by being strictly better, he advises. With domination things are easy to value and thus games have less dimension; non-domination generally offers a wider array of viable choices.

If a component is too powerful, you can use a strategy or component that “hoses” it, or reduces its efficacy. Magic uses this a lot; for example, the hurricane card damages all players and specifically flyers; “if I’m running into problems with my opponents playing a lot of flyers, here’s an answer. Now if they rely too much on flyers, I will beat them.” Starcraft’s observers hose invisibility. Adding a hoser creates a viable response for players to use against specific strategies or powerful components.

Often, hosers can create a rock-paper-scissors situation, where Strategy A is the ideal choice against Strategy B but is vulnerable to being hosed by Strategy C.

Players can also bid for access to elements and features as a method of controlling their growth arc and keeping balance intact. Sometimes variance also assists in balance — a strategy that isn’t viable most of the time may randomly become viable. This is often present in card games. To mitigate a very powerful approach, make that approach useful under rare circumstances.(source:gamasutra)