DOMINATION!

Ok, so the other night I went into a bit of a rant saying that unbalance can make games incredibly fun. More specifically, that games that have some degree of unbalance sell extremely well and become very popular. Perhaps I went too far in the direction of saying unbalance is always going to be fun, cause clearly, it's not always. The area that can imped the experience is the dominant strategy idea.

Take any Star Wars game for example. In any game where you are given force powers, the powers belonging to the dark side are always ridiculously more powerful than the light side powers. In Jedi Academy, a game where you control a Jedi Apprentice, you are given a few light and dark side options to put your force powers into, as well as some neutral ones. The idea of this was to give you some "different play styles" that you could use. You could select the light side powers so you could be noble and walk the ways of the Jedi, like Force Absorb, which would let you absorb some attacks. You could do that... or you could get Force Lightning, which allows you to pick up all enemies in front of you and launch them in every direction. Because of this, online play would always result in a lightning-fest, with very few people using light-side powers. While this didn't necessarily remove the fun aspect, it caused the play styles to be illusionary as the aggressive style was always superior.

Dawn of War was honoured for its highly balanced factions... until the expansion, Dark Crusade was released. This expansion introduced the Necrons, a zombie-like race of machines. They played fairly balanced to begin with, until you upgraded your main unit known as the Necron Lord. This unit could be used to resurrect all fallen units in its radius. What players would do is build an army up to their population limit, delete them all, build up to their population limit again, and then resurrect their entire fallen army. This effectively doubled the size of the Necron army above the balanced, defeatable population cap level. No wonder people online only use the Necrons. To be fair, some of the later patches of the game introduced greater levels of balance to the other teams because of this ability of the Necrons, but players using this race still had the edge online.

Mario Kart DS was a fantastic racing game. One of its biggest selling points was that you could play it online via Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection. Upon starting one of these matches, you will instantly see the dominant strategy come into play: snaking. In MKDS, you are able to powerslide to help you get around tighter corners. If you jiggle the direction pad left and right during this, you will receive a turbo boost. Online players exploit this to no end, by going through all the levels constantly using this boost. If you don't do the same, you stand little to no chance of winning a race.

So far I've found that there are different levels to balance that should be considered. Being fair to the player is usually admirable, but a lot of players can stand a lot of "torment" in terms of difficulty before they stop playing, and in fact may find it more enjoyable this way. At the same time, different strategies that are presented to players should be equal in effectiveness, otherwise you severely limit the multiplayer experience.