Balancing Video Games: A Player-Driven Instrument

Abstract

Video game balancing is a controversial and highly debated topic, especially between players of online games. Whether a game is sufficiently balanced greatly influences its reception, satisfaction, churn rates and success. In particular, different ideologies of balance can lead to worse player experiences than actual imbalances. This work succeeds a fine-grained investigation about the attitudes of the Guild Wars 2 community regarding balancing factors, and introduces a player-driven quantitative tool to approximate closer configurations of balance that could optimize player experience and satisfaction. After an initial evaluation, theoretical constellation outputs of this tool improved players’ perception of the balance between in-game build options – where aggregated opinions of (n = 64) players even showed benefits over individual opinions, indicating a potential “wisdom of the crowd” effect.