I remember reading an article a while ago where one of the designers of the Magic: The Gathering card game was talking about balance. He said that printing bad cards is a necessary aspect of the game. After all, if everything was very good (by the current standards), then the least-good of the cards would again become the bad ones. There will always be bad cards, since 'bad' is relative. The question to consider becomes: how varied in balance should the cards be? Should they all be relatively equal in power? Are completely terrible cards even worth printing? I'm thinking about this in terms of FPS weapons, as applied to multiplayer. My opinion is that the balance curve should be slightly skewed towards bad weapons, and have the good weapons relatively equal in power. Personally, I enjoy using bad weapons if they are interesting enough. It adds an additional challenge, and in the context of a social multiplayer game, it can really stand out. People will notice if you use an especially terrible gun but are still doing alright with it. I think what makes this work is that bad weapons need to have some sort of uniqueness, not just different stats. Insignificant changes can lead to some interesting (and fun!) emergent techniques. For example, in Counter Strike: Source, one of the worst guns is a submachine gun called the UMP. It costs more, does less damage per second, fires slower, has less ammo, is less accurate, and takes longer to reload than many other weapons. However, it has the unique (although 1 other gun as this) property of being 100% accurate on the very first shot (which resets when you switch back to it). This applies to even when you are jumping in the air. If you've played CS, you know that making accurate shots is largely about standing relatively still. Jumping shots are unheard of (except from shotguns). This means that with the UMP, you can try the foreign tactic of making jumping shots from unexpected places. Granted, it's still not very effective, but it's very unexpected and entirely humorous. Some of the most fun I've had in online FPS games is watching people (or being the person) do interesting things with bad weapons or items. The weapon doesn't have to always be bad; as long as it's used unintentionally in a terrible way, it can be hilarious. Whether it be fighting with just your melee weapon, or having your whole team charge in with just grenades unpinned in hand, intentional bad strategies and intentional usage of bad weapons can be unexpected sources of fun for everyone. Usually everyone is laughing and cheering at the end. Game design and balance should acknowledge the subtler social behaviors that arise in multiplayer games; not everyone is always focused on winning 100% of the time, but sometimes people are bored and want to do something creative and dumb. If more games focused on making interesting bad weapons, I think more lasting experiences could be made than if the low end weapons remained an afterthought. Even just changing the appearance, like the different melee weapon models in Team Fortress 2, can have a significant impact.

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Original post by Swarmer I remember reading an article a while ago where one of the designers of the Magic: The Gathering card game was talking about balance. He said that printing bad cards is a necessary aspect of the game.

I may just be cynical, but I would place the printing of 'bad' cards as a matter of economics, rather than balance. Since there are only a few good cards in each deck you buy, they keep you buying many more decks.

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The question to consider becomes: how varied in balance should the cards be? Should they all be relatively equal in power? Are completely terrible cards even worth printing? I'm thinking about this in terms of FPS weapons, as applied to multiplayer. My opinion is that the balance curve should be slightly skewed towards bad weapons, and have the good weapons relatively equal in power.

I don't think that good/bad have a place in a discussion about balance. One weapon should not be better than another - it may be better in one or two respects, but it should never be better across the board.

Take the needler in Halo: it is completely useless face-to-face, as it is slow and has limited ammo. It does however have a very high fire rate, the needles actively seek the enemy, and they explode lethally after a short delay - there is nothing more satisfying than blowing an opponent up from beyond the grave [wink]

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Original post by swiftcoder I may just be cynical, but I would place the printing of 'bad' cards as a matter of economics, rather than balance. Since there are only a few good cards in each deck you buy, they keep you buying many more decks.

But if they only printed good cards, then the scale of goodness/badness would shift up again, making all of the slightly less good cards the bad ones.

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Original post by swiftcoder I don't think that good/bad have a place in a discussion about balance. One weapon should not be better than another - it may be better in one or two respects, but it should never be better across the board.

I think I was arguing the opposite question: you say that a weapon should never be better across the board than the other weapons. I agree with this; however, I think some weapons should be worse across the board than the rest.

My argument is that having bad weapons adds an unintended type of fun: the I-just-beat-you-with-a-bad-weapon type of fun. Gameplay isn't for the sake of the game, but the player. If they have more fun using a bad gun, then let him. Of course, the opposite is not true; there should not be a clear-cut "best" weapon. I'm just saying that having a clear-cut "worst" weapon is worth having. Although it's not enough to just lower all of it's stats; adding some interesting attributes to it makes it fun to use.

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Original post by Swarmer Quote: Original post by swiftcoder I may just be cynical, but I would place the printing of 'bad' cards as a matter of economics, rather than balance. Since there are only a few good cards in each deck you buy, they keep you buying many more decks. But if they only printed good cards, then the scale of goodness/badness would shift up again, making all of the slightly less good cards the bad ones.

But the whole point is that you have a bunch of worthless commons, a few decent uncommons, and a couple good rares in each pack. If they tried to make all cards roughly the same quality, you'd have to buy fewer packs to get a suitable number of "good" cards to build a good deck.

I don't do a lot of online FPS stuff, but I really don't like games that force you to memorize the locations of powerups and good weapons to be competitive. If you try to balance all the weapons, you can still have quirky effects and strategy. The Unreal Tournament series has done a pretty good job of this.

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Original post by Swarmer If more games focused on making interesting bad weapons, I think more lasting experiences could be made than if the low end weapons remained an afterthought. Even just changing the appearance, like the different melee weapon models in Team Fortress 2, can have a significant impact.

I missed this the first time through, but again, I think you are mistaking alternate needs for 'bad'. The melee weapons in TF2 aren't worse than the ranged weapons, they merely have a different use-case. Melee weapons are of course useless at range, but at close quarters, they are often more effective than ranged weapons, particularly as regards to the sniper rifle or minigun, which are too slow and hard to aim up close.

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Original post by drakostar But the whole point is that you have a bunch of worthless commons, a few decent uncommons, and a couple good rares in each pack. If they tried to make all cards roughly the same quality, you'd have to buy fewer packs to get a suitable number of "good" cards to build a good deck. I don't do a lot of online FPS stuff, but I really don't like games that force you to memorize the locations of powerups and good weapons to be competitive. If you try to balance all the weapons, you can still have quirky effects and strategy. The Unreal Tournament series has done a pretty good job of this.

You only need 60 cards for a deck; in that deck you would have only probably 10-15 unique cards. The rest would be multiples. When you have a card pool of, lets say, 3000 unique cards, you only need the 10-15 best ones (granted that they fit together in your theme/strategy). Let's say all 3000 cards were approximately equal in power. You could still order them from best to worst, since they wouldn't all be exactly the same. That means the bottom 500 or so will never be used. Why would you use one of those cards when there are dozens more that are similar but slightly better?

In fact, that method is a type of game variant among some players. You gather the 400 best cards in the game, and draft a game from that pool of cards. You always end up with cards that no one uses, because it's the worst of the best, even though they are still very good cards.

The thousands of "bad" cards in Magic add tons of diversity to the game. By not worrying if a card is good enough, the designers can focus on adding interesting and unique elements to the "lesser" cards. Eventually, complex strategies emerge, and cards previously thought bad become key elements in powerful decks, just because they were diverse enough that a peculiar strategy involving it was discovered.

My point is that balance should be twofold: balance for the upper-tier weapons should be focused on balancing fairness, while the focus for the lower quality ones should be on adding diversity and uniqueness.

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Original post by swiftcoder Quote: Original post by Swarmer If more games focused on making interesting bad weapons, I think more lasting experiences could be made than if the low end weapons remained an afterthought. Even just changing the appearance, like the different melee weapon models in Team Fortress 2, can have a significant impact. I missed this the first time through, but again, I think you are mistaking alternate needs for 'bad'. The melee weapons in TF2 aren't worse than the ranged weapons, they merely have a different use-case. Melee weapons are of course useless at range, but at close quarters, they are often more effective than ranged weapons, particularly as regards to the sniper rifle or minigun, which are too slow and hard to aim up close.

I guess that was a bad example. I didn't mean to imply that the melee weapons were bad, but rather that diversity in the lesser-used weapons was a good idea. In the context of that example, I talked about how using good weapons with an intentionally poor strategy (attacking using broken beer bottle as the primary weapon) could be fun and overlooked. Giving these weapons (the ones with limited use) some variety and uniqueness makes silly strategies all the more fun.

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Original post by SwarmerThe thousands of "bad" cards in Magic add tons of diversity to the game. By not worrying if a card is good enough, the designers can focus on adding interesting and unique elements to the "lesser" cards. Eventually, complex strategies emerge, and cards previously thought bad become key elements in powerful decks, just because they were diverse enough that a peculiar strategy involving it was discovered.

Humorous anecdote: my friend had many copies of this one specific terrible card. It was the worst. No one knew why it was even printed. He stapled all of his copies together into a makeshift wallet. He probably used about 10 copies to make it. About 3 months later, some people created a deck based around that card, and it was a very competitive Tier 1 deck. It revolved around using that "terrible" card as a finisher. It did well in tournaments, and the value of the card rose from around 20 cents to 12 dollars. In a way, my friend's wallet was almost worth $120, but then again, the staples and creases canceled that out.

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Original post by Swarmer My argument is that having bad weapons adds an unintended type of fun: the I-just-beat-you-with-a-bad-weapon type of fun. Gameplay isn't for the sake of the game, but the player. If they have more fun using a bad gun, then let him. Of course, the opposite is not true; there should not be a clear-cut "best" weapon. I'm just saying that having a clear-cut "worst" weapon is worth having. Although it's not enough to just lower all of it's stats; adding some interesting attributes to it makes it fun to use.

You don't always need a weapon that is bad all across the board to achieve the same result - in Counterstrike I used to try and make sniper kills only without using the scope (I used the Scout if you're wondering, since it had better accuracy for that purpose) for the same reason as you're describing here. Or using the automatic sniper as though I was wielding an automatic (again without using the scope). But these two guns, of course, excel at long-range kills, if you use the scope.

But I agree with what you are saying, that cards or weapons that have no purpose other than to be bad could cause a bit of fun, you just have to keep it a minimum (or else they wouldn't be so bad anymore, eh? Too many of them would make the whole game bad).

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Original post by swiftcoder Quote: Original post by Swarmer I remember reading an article a while ago where one of the designers of the Magic: The Gathering card game was talking about balance. He said that printing bad cards is a necessary aspect of the game. I may just be cynical, but I would place the printing of 'bad' cards as a matter of economics, rather than balance. Since there are only a few good cards in each deck you buy, they keep you buying many more decks.

I think that is the cynic in you. Having been an avid player of a certain popular TCG, In my experience, there are two kinds of "bad" card, the weak, cheap, fodder type cards, these are shunned by some, but experienced players know that these are the meat and potatoes onto which you put the heavy hitting card gravy, or the seemingly detrimental bad cards, which in combination with other cards actually do something that few people will notice at first, but is actually very cool.

there's a reason wizards spend so much time on balance... people like me, and yes, bad is relative.

less desirable, easy to come by, throwaway weapons in a game is a reasonable mechanic. you got your super gun, which kills everything, but runs out of bullets fast, so you gotta have a "bad" gun to use as an alternative, this balances things out, and also makes players consider when to use the supergun-5000 when the cheapy-bullethose is a (less desirable) alternative.