I’ve been around the FGC for a long time and have seen lots of different types of game balance across a multitude of different fighting games, many of which will target different styles (rushdown vs defense heavy, air vs ground heavy, etc). I was heavily invested in fighting games back when I knew patches would never happen, and I played and studied intensely many of the games that brought the FGC into the internet era, where patches are not only necessary, but expected. I’ve been around people who think you should only buff the low tier and never nerf the top tier, as well as players who think nerfs for any strong strategy should have happened yesterday.
I want to bring all these ideas together into an analogy, which I will call the Smooth Ball analogy. Maybe it will give you some perspective on why fighting games can be fun even though they aren’t balanced, and why balance in games can be thought of in many different ways.
Imagine the summation of all tools for all characters in a fighting game can be mapped to the contours of a ball. These are the tools you will be using to damage your opponent’s character, to resist damage being thrown at you, and generally to add spice and flavor to your game so that players want to pick it up and play it. Are you picturing this ball in your mind? Okay, good.
What does this ball look like for your theoretically perfect fighting game? Before reading the rest of this post, give it 20 seconds of thought, and come to a conclusion.
Lots of people will say that the ball should be perfectly smooth and shiny, like a marble. I think this is probably most people’s first thought about what a “perfect” ball looks like. This is very aesthetically pleasing and “pure” in a mathematical sense, so you might think that a designer’s goal is to create a game that is close to a perfect sphere as possible. No sharp edges anywhere (wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt). We can roll it on a table in a straight line and it will reach its destination super predictably. A paragon of design that will have players playing this fighting game for years to come, knowing all their decisions were projected against a perfect sphere.
That is… until you realize that this ball is incapable of damaging someone. Remember, your goal is to do damage to someone (or prevent against damage) by using this ball, and unless you throw it really hard at someone’s forehead, nobody’s going to be getting hurt from a perfectly round metal ball being rubbed up against their skin. You might look at the ball and say “that sure is pretty”, but nobody will play this fighting game. No moments of unpredictability can happen as you roll the ball down the table. Every match feels and looks the same, no matter what angle you hold it.
So, okay, the designer decides to weaponize this ball a bit. We’re playing a fighting game, let’s add the capability to hurt someone. They add a small imperfection to one side of the ball so that if you rub someone’s skin against it, they might become mildly irritated. The clear strategy is to now use this one added tool, since it is the only thing that can hurt someone, but you don’t get too much mileage out of this.
Fair enough, let’s add a few more imperfections. Heck, let’s take one side of the ball and add a spike to it, that’s gonna hurt someone. But like before, we can’t just add one spike, or else it becomes the best strategy. Let’s add one spike to each area (ie, each character) of the ball. Let’s make it the same height, though, so that no matter which side you pick the ball up, you can stab someone the same way. Again… we haven’t really improved our situation, but at least one thing is for sure; our ball is becoming farther and farther away from the perfect sphere we started with.
Let’s cut to the chase here. After playing around with this for a while, you start to realize; let’s just add tons and tons of spikes all over the ball, of varying heights and angles. Now, no matter how you pick up the ball, you will be able to find a small area of the ball that can really hurt your opponent, often in unpredictable ways. They will have to creatively use different sides of their ball to shield themselves from this damage. This can clearly go too far, though. If you add the spikes “randomly”, you run into the risk of introducing one particularly dangerous area that has such a sharp spike that no other contour of the ball can defend against it.
So again, I ask the question… what would the ball for your theoretically perfect fighting game look like?
To me, this answer lies at the crux of both fighting game balance, and fighting game character design (ie, creativity you allow within the game engine). Think of fighting game balance as the distribution of spikes around the ball, and fighting game creativity as the length and number of the spikes you give the players.
A perfectly smooth ball has no spikes at all; this game might be perfectly balanced (equal distribution), but has virtually no creativity (height of spikes is 0). To be blunt, this is a crappy game. It might seem philosophically pleasing, but there is nothing worth exploring here. The ball’s function has been decided by the designers and there is nothing to discover.
Let’s talk about a game like SFV; I think it is kind of golf-ball esque (if the dimples on a golf ball were protrusions instead of indents). Decently balanced, but very little creativity allowed. And here is an important part; when the ball is still close to smooth, design imperfections are all the more obvious. If a character like Balrog has overwhelming mixup spikes, or Guile has overwhelming space control spikes, other characters are immediately frustrated because it is so blatantly clear that there are no imperfections on their side of the ball that they can use.
Important Statement #1: Games that aim for smooth balance often tend to provide the opposite, because as soon as the smallest unintended or undesigned imperfection is found, there is nothing left to counteract it; the rest of the sphere has been polished to a shine. One or two small mistakes can throw the balance of the ball so wildly off and no amount of trying to roll the ball in a straight line will fix this. It’s why, I feel, so many people are frustrated at SFV’s balance of the top tiers. It’s actually not really that badly balanced of a game (ie, many characters contain a somewhat powerful spike), but the length of these spikes is disproportionate, and most importantly, the number of spikes is so low that you don’t have to look too long at your own spike to see that it’s not going to win in a measurement contest.
Let’s take a look at a game like… KI Season 2. This is a game that, I think most will agree, had hundreds of spikes sticking out all over the place. And when you have a spiky ball, doing damage to your opponent is often extremely easy (and fun!). If one spike starts to fail, no problem, you have 50 other spikes of various lengths and sizes to check out. So is the solution just make your ball super spiky? I think to some extent, yes, but it’s not the full solution, since powerful spikes can still emerge from this ball and become degenerate, both on offense and defense.
Important Statement #2: Just buffing the low tier while keeping the top tier identical is not a viable strategy for game balance; the goal needs to be to limit the effectiveness of the powerful spikes. And often it’s not much, it can be just shaving a little bit off the tip while keeping the spike in its same place and orientation.
Important Statement #3: Fighting game balance is harder to decide the spikier your ball is. To put it another way, when you give characters many tools to overcome other character’s many tools, sometimes it takes years to decide which area of the ball is the spikiest. But most importantly, it can actually cover for some bad design decisions. Marvel 2 is a broken game, but because its ball was so spiky, we ended up with all sorts of glitches, strategies, and flavors of the eventual top tier characters that people played it for 10 years. Marvel 3’s most dominant current player uses point Chun-Li, a character deemed incredibly outmatched by better characters at the game’s launch, but RyanLV found an underexplored topology of the ball, because it was possible to do that. Vergil is probably too good of a character (that is, it was a bad design decision), but there are enough spikes on the ball for other characters to mitigate that bad design decision in the long term.
Now, let’s compare this to KI Season 3, a game which I believe is moving closer to what I would call good fighting game balance; a well-distributed but very spiky ball. Some of the sharpest edges from S2 were shaved, but because KI’s design philosophy was to fill the ball with spikes, there are still plenty of spikes to go check out. Some players are mad that their favorite spikes were shaved down, while their most disliked spikes for their opponents were untouched; one approach is to get mad at the designers, but the real answer here is to look for new areas on the ball with spikes people haven’t checked out yet. And I will confidently say that KI is the most underexplored fighting game I have ever seen that saw at least 3 years of tournament play. There is LOTS we haven’t checked out yet.
But the most important thing is that we CAN check it out, because the KI ball is spiky. Using a spiky weapon that might hurt you just as much as the opponent is a skill that the best fighting game players should love to be measured by. And I worry that as people incorrectly measure the distribution and length of the spikes (because, say, they are only concerned with a local maximum rather than a global maximum), and demand that the ball be polished and buffed to a shine to eliminate its imperfections, we will end up with not only a game not worth playing, but worse… a game whose slightly overlooked imperfections become glaringly obvious, like a fingerprint on the back of your new iPhone. A game so carefully designed to be pure that its one area of impurity can only be the sole focus of your attention.
I would encourage you to think about this the next time you hear someone throw the word “yolo” or “cheap” around, or when someone says they want to nerf all the top tier or buff all the low tier, or that something “shouldn’t be in a game.” Are they saying this because the spike is egregiously long and disproportionate to the rest of the ball? Are they zoomed in too close to a local maximum? Are they trying to polish the ball into something that will only show its imperfections faster and leave you with less creativity to overcome the designer’s mistake?