'Member balance?

[Nox]

Something I noticed in the post-Overwatch world is that nobody really bothers with proper balance in PvP games anymore. It's now all "asymmetrical" which translates to "not balanced". There's this odd rock<paper<scissors approach to it where as long as a thing has a counter it's considered balanced. So you've got rocks that are countered by paper and scissors and a few other rocks, but you also have a rock that's only countered by another rock. And that's, apparently, balanced.

I don't find that fun. It doesn't feel like I did anything but be along for the ride.

As an example, and to continue with the OW thing, I can play as Reaper and do the murder on a Hog and it doesn't feel like I got that kill but rather Reaper did because, due to the R/P/S balance, he's nearly always going to win.

Meanwhile, I played a bit of Rogue Company a while back and it was terrible, because it's a HiRez game, but not because of balance. Balance is fine and I was mostly last, yet I found myself having a tonne more fun than I ever did in OW simply because I was last. Me. I sucked. I didn't pick a character that sucked, either overall or in a specific instance, but I got to suck by my own lack of skill.

I had not considered just how much player agency affected my enjoyment in PvP games.

At the end of the day I had more fun losing than I ever did winning because I picked a certain character(OW) or bought a p2w card (Marvel Snap).

What I'm trying to say is...I miss Unreal Tournament 2004.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

There's plenty of PvP FPS games out there that don't go the "hero shooter" route, though I suppose you'll be hard-pressed to find anything that still does team-based deathmatch.

 

[Gordon_4]

Something I noticed in the post-Overwatch world is that nobody really bothers with proper balance in PvP games anymore. It's now all "asymmetrical" which translates to "not balanced". There's this odd rock<paper<scissors approach to it where as long as a thing has a counter it's considered balanced. So you've got rocks that are countered by paper and scissors and a few other rocks, but you also have a rock that's only countered by another rock. And that's, apparently, balanced.

I don't find that fun. It doesn't feel like I did anything but be along for the ride.

As an example, and to continue with the OW thing, I can play as Reaper and do the murder on a Hog and it doesn't feel like I got that kill but rather Reaper did because, due to the R/P/S balance, he's nearly always going to win.

Meanwhile, I played a bit of Rogue Company a while back and it was terrible, because it's a HiRez game, but not because of balance. Balance is fine and I was mostly last, yet I found myself having a tonne more fun than I ever did in OW simply because I was last. Me. I sucked. I didn't pick a character that sucked, either overall or in a specific instance, but I got to suck by my own lack of skill.

I had not considered just how much player agency affected my enjoyment in PvP games.

At the end of the day I had more fun losing than I ever did winning because I picked a certain character(OW) or bought a p2w card (Marvel Snap).

What I'm trying to say is...I miss Unreal Tournament 2004.

You know Counter Strike is still a thing, right?

 

[Bedinsis]

Perfect balance is not always the best choice. Which of the following games is more interesting:

Rock-Paper-Scissors

or

Rock-Paper-Scissors where you get an extra point if winning with a rock?

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Perfect balance is not always the best choice. Which of the following games is more interesting:

Rock-Paper-Scissors

or

Rock-Paper-Scissors where you get an extra point if winning with a rock?

Context: He is offering to his opponent that he will lose if he throws anything other than paper. Naturally, his opponent goes for scissors, while he plays rock. He then argues that he lost by playing rock, but she lost because rock beats scissors, and therefore it's a draw - and the terms he set down for a draw secretly favored him.

 

[sXeth]

Eh, theres still a reasonable population of games where the playables are perfectly uniform copies (Fortnite and CoD, for obvious popular ones).

Any game with various classes/heroes/roles/whatever they call it are invariably going to have a non-uniform balance, unless the perks or abilities they give them are ludicrously low impact and dull. Whether that be fighting games or hero shooters or whatnot (you could even go into like, SNES Mario Kart and arguably win by picking the better racer for the track)

 

[Nox]

There's plenty of PvP FPS games out there that don't go the "hero shooter" route, though I suppose you'll be hard-pressed to find anything that still does team-based deathmatch.

It's not just hero shooters. Gear, as an example, in BR games ensures luck messes with balance.

You know Counter Strike is still a thing, right?

Yeah, but I'm weird and like to play games rather than wait/spectate 25 out of 30 minutes.

Perfect balance is not always the best choice. Which of the following games is more interesting:

Rock-Paper-Scissors

or

Rock-Paper-Scissors where you get an extra point if winning with a rock?

In single player? Second. In pvp? First. "Ooh! isn't it interesting how the game won/lost for me?" My answer is no, hence the thread.

Eh, theres still a reasonable population of games where the playables are perfectly uniform copies (Fortnite and CoD, for obvious popular ones).

Any game with various classes/heroes/roles/whatever they call it are invariably going to have a non-uniform balance, unless the perks or abilities they give them are ludicrously low impact and dull. Whether that be fighting games or hero shooters or whatnot (you could even go into like, SNES Mario Kart and arguably win by picking the better racer for the track)

I don't want to nitpick. Which is why I brought up Rogue Company, where heroes do have different abilities, however, most of your kills are still got the standard way. I'm not advocating for chess. Just less "press Q to win" type of stuff.

I love when skills are low impact utility. It adds flavour without really breaking the balance. But, I guess that's considered "dull" now that you can have a character wipe a whole enemy team with a single button.

 

[Terminal Blue]

It's now all "asymmetrical" which translates to "not balanced".

Here's the thing, I don't think balance was ever particularly desirable. If a game is perfectly balanced, then the only thing that determines winning or losing is skill, which means new players who aren't yet highly skilled don't have fun, they just spend their entire time getting seal clubbed. You can fix this to a degree using things like intelligent matchmaking, but that limits you to games with a lot of players, and those games tend to be very focused on making money, which means it's more likely their matchmaking system is designed to psychologically manipulate you into spending money than to give you a 'balanced' experience.

Before asymmetrical gameplay became mainstream, the solution was to deliberately add a bunch of low-skill-floor/low-skill-ceiling strategies. Like, maybe add weapons like grenades that don't require precision aiming, so new players can occasionally get kills just by lobbing grenades around. The skilled players don't like being killed by less skilled players and will thus complain about these strategies being unbalanced or illegitimate, but it gives new players a reason to keep going and actually develop the skills to transition into strategies with a higher skill ceiling.

I don't play FPS games because I'm too autistic, but I do play the SS13 colonial marines server when my brain isn't working and I only have a limbic system, and that server is both highly, highly asmmetrical (by necessity, it turns out most people on a colonial marines server want to play marines) and has a bit of FPS culture of instrumental play. What I've noticed though is that when an asymmetrical game like that is actually well balanced, everyone feels like it's balanced against them. I think the human brain is just set up to learn more from failure than from success, so we focus on the times when we are in disadvantageous situations more than the times when we have an advantage.

But yeah, the other thing I've learned is that everyone hates warriors.


But here's the thing, people don't really hate warriors. They hate a tiny number of highly skilled warrior mains who play warrior specifically because it has a high skill ceiling. Noone remembers when I try to play warrior, grab some dude and get stunlocked to death by five other dudes with shotguns. Asymmetry doesn't generally do away with the need for player skill, it interacts with skill in interesting ways. Playing warrior is the equivalent of picking the sniper rifle instead of the grenade launcher in an old school FPS, it's a high skill floor, high skill ceiling option which caters specifically to higher skilled players. Coming up against those players, it feels like they're cheating somehow and have all these advantages, but the real advantage is having the skill to use an inherently difficult playstyle with very high built in rewards.

It's fine not to like asymmetry. I'm not saying its objectively good and yeah, asymmetrical games are a lot harder to balance in a way that feels fair to everyone. This is more just a comment on why I think asymmetrical games have become so common, because in some ways asymmetry is a very userful tool in creating the kind of balance that is engaging.

 

[BrawlMan]

At what cost @Nox? At what cost?

​

 

[sXeth]

I don't want to nitpick. Which is why I brought up Rogue Company, where heroes do have different abilities, however, most of your kills are still got the standard way. I'm not advocating for chess. Just less "press Q to win" type of stuff.

I love when skills are low impact utility. It adds flavour without really breaking the balance. But, I guess that's considered "dull" now that you can have a character wipe a whole enemy team with a single button.

Eh, while I don't play Overwatch (or the other 3-5 identical games) and probably my closest actual experience would be Destiny. I think "Press Q to win" is probably a hyperbolic exaggeration. (pulling secondhand names out of a hat) Roadhog doesn't have a "delete any Tracer iin sight" button. There is some application of skill there and the other one has to presumably put themselves into a position where they can be grappled or whatever else it is Roadhog does.


You could absolutely floor a team with a Destiny super (or even a grenade), but you also needed to work your way up to that super. And the enemy team had to actively ignore an activation audio cue, a warning prompt, remain mostly grouped up, fail to focus fire you, and there were also some here and there heavy guns or abilities that would just suppress a super.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Something I noticed in the post-Overwatch world is that nobody really bothers with proper balance in PvP games anymore. It's now all "asymmetrical" which translates to "not balanced". There's this odd rock<paper<scissors approach to it where as long as a thing has a counter it's considered balanced. So you've got rocks that are countered by paper and scissors and a few other rocks, but you also have a rock that's only countered by another rock. And that's, apparently, balanced.

I don't find that fun. It doesn't feel like I did anything but be along for the ride.

As an example, and to continue with the OW thing, I can play as Reaper and do the murder on a Hog and it doesn't feel like I got that kill but rather Reaper did because, due to the R/P/S balance, he's nearly always going to win.

Meanwhile, I played a bit of Rogue Company a while back and it was terrible, because it's a HiRez game, but not because of balance. Balance is fine and I was mostly last, yet I found myself having a tonne more fun than I ever did in OW simply because I was last. Me. I sucked. I didn't pick a character that sucked, either overall or in a specific instance, but I got to suck by my own lack of skill.

I had not considered just how much player agency affected my enjoyment in PvP games.

At the end of the day I had more fun losing than I ever did winning because I picked a certain character(OW) or bought a p2w card (Marvel Snap).

What I'm trying to say is...I miss Unreal Tournament 2004.

I don't see what Overwatch has to do with this. League of Legends and Dota were doing this LONG before Overwatch was a twinkle in Blizzard's eye.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Here's the thing, I don't think balance was ever particularly desirable. If a game is perfectly balanced, then the only thing that determines winning or losing is skill, which means new players who aren't yet highly skilled don't have fun, they just spend their entire time getting seal clubbed. You can fix this to a degree using things like intelligent matchmaking, but that limits you to games with a lot of players, and those games tend to be very focused on making money, which means it's more likely their matchmaking system is designed to psychologically manipulate you into spending money than to give you a 'balanced' experience.

I won't pretend to have much of a dog in this fight as almost any PvP disinterests me anymore, but I'm reminded of my days with Halos 2 and 3 where intelligent matchmaking was the fun. There was something to be said, some meta-fun to had, for leveling up and being classed with better and better players as you immersed yourself in the gameplay loop and got better at the game. I'd no idea we'd gotten away from that in any substantive way.

That said, I think asymmetrical PvP is fine if classified as a thing unto its own and not disguising itself as standard PvP where each player is handed equal odds from the start, and skill proves out the victors. I think games like Evolve and Friday The 13th had potential, but were simply mishandled (some more than others) not for the concept, but for the execution. If the current problem is PvP games being fundamentally and unintentionally unbalanced, I hope those of you interested in this day and age let developers know it's not okay with your wallets (the lack thereof, of course.)

 

[Bedinsis]

Context: He is offering to his opponent that he will lose if he throws anything other than paper. Naturally, his opponent goes for scissors, while he plays rock. He then argues that he lost by playing rock, but she lost because rock beats scissors, and therefore it's a draw - and the terms he set down for a draw secretly favored him.

Trying to making a matrix of moves here, curious if there's a way to go about it:

Spoiler: rock paper scissors strategies

Regular grid; She want to maximize the result, he wants to minimize:

	She Rock	She Paper	She Scissors
He Rock	0	1	-1
He Paper	-1	0	1
He Scissors	1	-1	0

Here there is no dominant strategy. Now let's add one when he picks something other than Paper.

	She Rock	She Paper	She Scissors
He Rock	1	2	0
He Paper	-1	0	1
He Scissors	2	0	1

Winning twice presumably only counts as one win, which means that 1=2.
I see no dominant strategy, in particular since these rules are a novelty for her so she probably could not draw a grid in the allotted time. If winning takes priority the scissors seems the best strategy since worst case scenario leaves no winner and best case, which happens 2 out of 3 times, leaves her the winner.
However, if she thinks that he thinks that she thinks that way, he'll pick rock, and thus something other than scissors is most desirable. However if she thinks that he thinks all of these steps, the best option is the one that goes against rock and paper for him, which always is paper, which means scissors is best for her, and we're back at square one with no dominant strategy.

In single player? Second. In pvp? First. "Ooh! isn't it interesting how the game won/lost for me?" My answer is no, hence the thread.

Well I don't really play multiplayer so I cannot say anything further of meaning, other than saying that that example was something of eye-opener for me. I got it from David Sirlin, professional game designer.

I don't play FPS games because I'm too autistic [---]

What's the issue?

 

[Nox]

snip

So what you're saying is lack of balance is good for new/low skill players because it allows them to even the playing field by picking the objectively better thing? That's a great point. But, here's a small problem...what if one of the veteran high skill players picks the objectively better thing too?

Eh, while I don't play Overwatch (or the other 3-5 identical games) and probably my closest actual experience would be Destiny. I think "Press Q to win" is probably a hyperbolic exaggeration. (pulling secondhand names out of a hat) Roadhog doesn't have a "delete any Tracer iin sight" button. There is some application of skill there and the other one has to presumably put themselves into a position where they can be grappled or whatever else it is Roadhog does.


You could absolutely floor a team with a Destiny super (or even a grenade), but you also needed to work your way up to that super. And the enemy team had to actively ignore an activation audio cue, a warning prompt, remain mostly grouped up, fail to focus fire you, and there were also some here and there heavy guns or abilities that would just suppress a super.

Yes, of course it was hyperbole. I'm not advocating for perfect balance, but the problem, I think, is still that you COULD wipe the whole team. And Destiny is a perfect example of that because the Crucible used to be fairly fair and balanced...and then that Titan thing happened and it just went downhill. It sunset-ed, one could say.

I don't see what Overwatch has to do with this. League of Legends and Dota were doing this LONG before Overwatch was a twinkle in Blizzard's eye.

Uptick. Mobas were fairly niche. Still are, largely. And quite hostile to the casual playerbase, which is large. Overwatch brought the asymmetrical "balance" to the masses and was, imo, the final nail in the coffin.

I won't pretend to have much of a dog in this fight as almost any PvP disinterests me anymore, but I'm reminded of my days with Halos 2 and 3 where intelligent matchmaking was the fun. There was something to be said, some meta-fun to had, for leveling up and being classed with better and better players as you immersed yourself in the gameplay loop and got better at the game. I'd no idea we'd gotten away from that in any substantive way.

That said, I think asymmetrical PvP is fine if classified as a thing unto its own and not disguising itself as standard PvP where each player is handed equal odds from the start, and skill proves out the victors. I think games like Evolve and Friday The 13th had potential, but were simply mishandled (some more than others) not for the concept, but for the execution. If the current problem is PvP games being fundamentally and unintentionally unbalanced, I hope those of you interested in this day and age let developers know it's not okay with your wallets (the lack thereof, of course.)

Agreed. People also keep saying "there's plenty others" yet the only ones that come to mind are CSGO and Velorant, which are jobs.

Again, not advocating for perfectly balanced sweat feasts, but I think there could be some middle ground between CSGO/Velorant and Overwatch/p2w games.

 

[Terminal Blue]

So what you're saying is lack of balance is good for new/low skill players because it allows them to even the playing field by picking the objectively better thing? That's a great point. But, here's a small problem...what if one of the veteran high skill players picks the objectively better thing too?

A skill floor is the minimum amount of skill required to be successful with a given strategy. Again, that new player can jump into a match and blast away with the grenade launcher and maybe get on the scoreboard even if they don't have skills like precision aiming. That strategy has a low skill floor. A player can jump in and immediately see reward without needing to develop more advanced skills. The more advanced player who is quickscoping with a sniper rifle probably thinks this is very unfair and not a legitimate strategy. After all they spent a long time learning their true MLG quickscoping skills and they feel they should be rewarded, but it is necessary to have some rewarding strategies with a low skill floor otherwise lower skilled players aren't getting anything, and they will quit before they can become higher skilled.

A skill ceiling is how much player skill can influence the effectiveness of a strategy overall. So let's say our new player does stick around and decides they absolutely love the grenade launcher. They practice constantly using the grenade launcher. They gain an exhaustive knowledge of its capabilities and master every aspect of its use, to the point they aren't improving all that much because there's nothing more to learn. If we send them up against MLG sniper man, they might still lose most games simply because the sniper rifle rewards skill more than the grenade launcher does. The two strategies have different skill ceilings. Which one is better is going to depend on how skilled you as a player are, just because an "unbalanced" strategy lets unskilled players score the odd win doesn't mean it's objectively better.

I'm describing this in the context of an old school, symmetrical FPS game, but the problem with this completely imaginary game I'm describing is that it has a very simple and boring metagame. A new player might use the grenade launcher for a while, but eventually in order to remain competitive they are forced to switch to the sniper rifle. The meta revolves around the sniper rifle. High level gameplay is going to be boring because it's just a bunch of people with increasingly cringey gamertags quickscoping each other in compilations full of annoying dubstep. Regardless of how they get there, everyone ends up using the same strategies because the community has collectively agreed that those strategies are what "high level play" looks like.

That, I think, is why asymmetry won. It's why you're always going to need rock paper scissors mechanics in some form, because otherwise there is only whichever rock the community agrees is the best rock, and nothing else.

Uptick. Mobas were fairly niche. Still are, largely. And quite hostile to the casual playerbase, which is large. Overwatch brought the asymmetrical "balance" to the masses and was, imo, the final nail in the coffin.

The first FPS game which I can remember using very distinctively asymmetrical design was Battlefield 1942 Team Fortress Classic the original Team Fortress mod for 1996 Quake. It's been with us a long time.

 

[Asita]

Ok, let me correct a misconception. Balance is not typically measured on a 1:1 scale. It's measured on a grand scale. Asymmetrical matchups aren't unbalanced by being 4 v 1, they're balanced around being a 4 v 1 match.

Using Dead By Daylight as a personally familiar example, the game is balanced around there being 4 survivors who are - at any given time - doing some mixture of repairing generators, distracting the killer, and supporting the other survivors. The less active survivors there are, the more the balance shifts to the killer's favor. The survivors are at their strongest at the start of the match, and the killers are at their strongest towards the end, as survivors are picked off and their area of operation narrows. The ideal is not to the effect of "the Trapper kills Nea 50% of the time", but rather that "across all matches, the Trapper will average a 50% kill rate".

Balance for a character is disrupted when a particular playstyle turns out to be so comparatively powerful that not using it is considered a disadvantage and consequentially dominates the meta...or alternatively, so weak that it is necessarily considered a handicap. Balance in this respect is based around tradeoffs. Some characters excel at hunting and chasing (eg. Legion, Twins), others are better at map control (Knight, Trapper), others still at ambushing (Dredge, Hag), others at disrupting the other team (Cenobite, Plague), and then of course there's the slow but deadly ones (Shape, Cannibal). These playstyles are balanced against each other, with a similar intention that none have too much of an edge over the others.

This is a long way of saying that when we talk about game balance, we mean that well-informed players feel that they have viable options, both in what they use and in their counterplay.

 

[Hawki]

Snip

Look, people can like/dislike whatever they want, but on the subject of balance, it's silly to compare something like Overwatch (a hero shooter) to Unreal (an arena shooter). I don't think it's a question of balance, it seems more like a question of taste.

There's plenty of PvP FPS games out there that don't go the "hero shooter" route, though I suppose you'll be hard-pressed to find anything that still does team-based deathmatch.

Cough*Halo*Cough

 

[Nox]

That, I think, is why asymmetry won. It's why you're always going to need rock paper scissors mechanics in some form, because otherwise there is only whichever rock the community agrees is the best rock, and nothing else.



The first FPS game which I can remember using very distinctively asymmetrical design was Battlefield 1942 Team Fortress Classic the original Team Fortress mod for 1996 Quake. It's been with us a long time.

I'm not quite sure how "community agrees what the best rock is" is worse than "this is objectively the best rock". At least the first example is often screwed by factors outside balance, such as popularity.

I don't want to ruffle any feathers, but there's no way to propose this theory without doing so, is that asymmetry won because most people are absolutely fine with the game winning itself for them. They pick the best thing and they deserve the win, end of. And I just don't have fun in that scenario. I don't see the point in playing the game at all when presented with the notion that it plays itself. I don't need to be there anymore. Might as well be watching a bunch of AI controlled characters duke it out.

I didn't actually know TF was originally a mod for Quake, thought it started with HL. Cheers for new info!

Ok, let me correct a misconception. Balance is not typically measured on a 1:1 scale. It's measured on a grand scale. Asymmetrical matchups aren't unbalanced by being 4 v 1, they're balanced around being a 4 v 1 match.

Using Dead By Daylight as a personally familiar example, the game is balanced around there being 4 survivors who are - at any given time - doing some mixture of repairing generators, distracting the killer, and supporting the other survivors. The less active survivors there are, the more the balance shifts to the killer's favor. The survivors are at their strongest at the start of the match, and the killers are at their strongest towards the end, as survivors are picked off and their area of operation narrows. The ideal is not to the effect of "the Trapper kills Nea 50% of the time", but rather that "across all matches, the Trapper will average a 50% kill rate".

Balance for a character is disrupted when a particular playstyle turns out to be so comparatively powerful that not using it is considered a disadvantage and consequentially dominates the meta...or alternatively, so weak that it is necessarily considered a handicap. Balance in this respect is based around tradeoffs. Some characters excel at hunting and chasing (eg. Legion, Twins), others are better at map control (Knight, Trapper), others still at ambushing (Dredge, Hag), others at disrupting the other team (Cenobite, Plague), and then of course there's the slow but deadly ones (Shape, Cannibal). These playstyles are balanced against each other, with a similar intention that none have too much of an edge over the others.

This is a long way of saying that when we talk about game balance, we mean that well-informed players feel that they have viable options, both in what they use and in their counterplay.

Not to pull you by your example but aren't killers notoriously unbalanced in DBD? Especially the ones that come in shiny new DLC each time? Marvel Snap does the same with cards, new cards--mostly only accessible to those who pay--are wildly unbalanced until the f2p lot can get them, then they miraculously get enough info to nerf them.

I'm not pulling that example out of my bum without reason but to point out asymmetrical balance is, frankly, a load of rubbish whose only purpose is for devs to make the game p2w without anyone being able to objectively prove they did so because that "balance" is viewed as you describe, obscured by convoluted "big picture" and subjectivity.

That's really my whole problem with it.

Look, people can like/dislike whatever they want, but on the subject of balance, it's silly to compare something like Overwatch (a hero shooter) to Unreal (an arena shooter). I don't think it's a question of balance, it seems more like a question of taste.


Cough*Halo*Cough

It's not that silly if you equate weapons with heroes.

P.S. To expand on the whole thread a little...why is there meta? That is to say, why is meta a thing that's even allowed in the first place? Why are balance patches not more frequent and why do devs allow for meta to develop in the first place?

 

[sXeth]

P.S. To expand on the whole thread a little...why is there meta? That is to say, why is meta a thing that's even allowed in the first place? Why are balance patches not more frequent and why do devs allow for meta to develop in the first place?

Prettymuch the second there's two options, one is going to better (at least in X scenario). Unless its just a reskin of the same option.

Travelling genres here, but your original Command Conquer (I want to say 1992?). Nod were best at rapid early rushes, GDI were best at turling up a bit until they got their mega tanks and then they were almost guaranteed to win in the endgame. (Obviously either could make poor decisions)

The two were essentially relatively equal to win and in balance. But the particular scenario might give an edge to one or the other. All things being equal a good NOD player would usuallly beat the GDI faster then the other way around though. The few RTS's prior to that (or roughly around the same time) tended to be mirror matches with reskinned units (even the first Warcraft had a pretty 1:1 ratio between humans and orcs, if you ignored the names and models).

The 4v1 games (which started with EVOLVE to my recollection) all require the 1 to basically be overpowered to stand a chance. Even then I'd bet the money on a 4-person *Commmunicating* squad will beat the 1 every single time (which is exactly what derailed EVOLVE from a gameplay standpoint, their monetization (and lack of familiar IP) just sealed the deal)

Most "Hero" games tend to start with a few basic heroes, who will continue to shine because simplicity is often the best/easiest solution (Rhino coves this niche in Warframe) then as they keep feeding out newer ones they can't use simple ideas and things get more and more complex. Quite often this results in more powerful ones, but they're more complicated to use as an offset (the skill floor/ceiling as earlier mentioned). More broad audience/casual games, this usually makes the basic-good one the "META" and if you get into more niche and dedicated audiences (like fighting game tournaments) the more complicated one usually gets the favorable rating from the community (since they're all the proverbial "no lifers" who have time to learn all that)

 

[Dreiko]

I dunno if you count fighting games as pvp or as a different thing entirely, but they're entirely balanced. Even when a char is a little bit better, even the weaker ones typically stance a chance in all the more recent games.