Most Imbalanced Multiplayer You Have Played

[Blatherscythe]

While most recent AAA games have betas and hours of play testing done to them to try and balance a mode of play with 100's of variables, there is always that one that seems to have been pushed out without an attempt to balance or play test it.

Take for example Age of Mythology, the four factions have radically different play styles with various strategies formed around them, with some working better than others. The one added in the expansion just makes this more apparent. The two factions that dominate the multi-player matches my friends and I play at school are the Atlanteans and the Norse.

The Atlanteans are the most broken, to the point where we eventually agreed no one can play them without everyone agreeing with it. Not only are all their units able to be upgraded to heros (really tough units that exceed at killing pretty much everything), their villagers are able to do the work of 5 villagers and don't have to keep returning to a stockpile to deposit their resources. They can use these resources to advance in ages quickly and with the right gods chosen can cripple anyone still in the third age with a Tartarian Gate. They can then simply spam Fanatic Hero units, who despite being weak against archers can easily dispatch Gastrophetes, one of the best ranged units in the game, with a few destroyers and destroy anyone else.

The Norse are broken just because of the way they build their bases. Their workers simply gather resources and their infantry build the buildings. They also have a cheap, tough, and neigh infinite supply of heros they can spawn called hesirs, who can also build buildings. Because their scout can also build town-centres a Norse player can easily grab up all the free population without sacrificing resource collection. Then all the player needs to do is build fortresses around the enemy base (since I believe there is no limit to how close your buildings are to theirs) and simply spam hesirs.

The fact that you could win the game with very little unit variation and unit spamming as well as the laughably weak defences one could produce to try and avert this is what turned me off the game and drove me to playing games like AOE3 (because we may be able to get it on the school computers) and Dawn of War 1-2, because you actually need proper tactics to win.

So what game in your opinion has the most imbalanced multiplayer experience?

Bahaha, don't judge balance based on experience with friends. The Norse and The Atlanteans are simply better for entry level players, though that's not to say they are bad at high levels of play, they just have a significantly easier learning curve.

Egyptians were the most dominate back in the ESO days. They had the best scouting, their myth units were top tier, by far the best economy, not to mention the added benefit of being protected by their statues. That being said they were probably the weakest at releasing a Titan, but that didn't matter much since it was easy to stop others from raising theirs.

This would be like calling the Zerg OP because the ling rush is so easy to do and so powerful... until you meet someone that knows what they are doing.

Actually many of the Egyptian units are less powerful than the other races, but cheaper as well (at least that is what the guy who played them claimed), and on top of this they are the most gold heavy faction in the game. If an Egyptian player has no access to gold he will lose the match. Though their Rocs and myth units are a pain in the ass, I'll give you that.

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

Modern Warfare 2 because of the fucking dual Model 1887's and Commando. You see a guy running down some steps 30ft ahead of you "Aha!" You think, as start to shoot him thinking you're going to get an easy kill, but then all of a sudden this guy has teleported 30ft and 1 hit killed you with his knife, the fuck?

Also, All Points Bulletin, before it became APB: Reloaded I haven't played the new F2P version so I cannot comment on that. But when it was first released, it was fun I'll give it that, but it was one of the most hideously unbalanced games I have ever played. Not only were the weapons hideously unbalanced with starting weapons taking ages to kill people and higher level weapons killing people with a few hits. But, if you were on the Criminal faction, you got royally fucked over by the fuckers on the Police faction with the stun guns. A weapon that immobilised you for like a minute so if you got hit by it all you could do was sit and watch yourself die.

 

[Blatherscythe]

I recently had a go at the multiplayer for Space Marine. Holy Skull throne is that mode broken. The only saving grace is the fact you can copy the class of the last person to kill you, gives you a minor chance.

The way you unlock perks is screwed up as well. For the Assault Marines you just need to get 50 kills for each weapon and then you get some health back for every kill or simply kill in one shot. For Devastators and Tacticals you need to get kills and kill-streaks, which Assault Marines always ruin. They should have had the jump-pack have a longer recharge time in my opinion.

 

[Caliostro]

Imbalanced overall, or unique cases?

Overall, Street Fighter III. SF3 was never a bastion for balance, and balance did get better as they went, but yeah... Second Impact was hilariously broken to a whole new degree. Ibuki and Sean were the top, top, top, tiers in that game, especially Ibuki. Ibuki was so hilariously broken it wasn't even funny. Touch of death combos, pokes that beat everyone, crazy safe and powerful... You name it, she had it.

Third Strike was a bit better, but mostly it was a power coup. Instead of Ibuki and Sean it was all about Chun Li and Yun (with honorary mentions to Ken and Makoto). Chun had the best pokes in the game by far (half the cast can't do anything but whiff punish), everything she did was safe, her super had two bars, wasn't too big, and was insanely damaging WITH possibility of follow up. Yun was the other beast: A divekick, great pokes, fast, and the best super in the game by far: Genei Jin. "Steroid" kind of super that made Yun faster and allowed him nearly endless juggling ("hup, hup, hup, hup, hup..."). Best part? He built meter crazy fast and had the shortest super bar in the game! Basically more than half the match you were fighting Genei Jin. Any hit usually resulted in half your health going away.

In a "unique" case: Street Fighter II: Super Turbo. SFII wasn't a very balanced game either, but Akuma, who first became playable in ST, was broken beyond reason of belief. He was never meant to be played competitively, and you can see it when you use him. His air fireballs simply destroy everyone. On top of that he had insanely high damage, inescapable and unblockable "resets" and setups, and he was the only character that could not be stunned. He was hard banned from tournament play for a very good reason. Even "old" Sagat looked wimpy next to him.

Then again, Third Strike had Gill...

 

[F'Angus]

Starhawk has pretty imbalanced multiplayer...although they are constantly updating it it balance it out.

Really if you get the enemy trapped in their base with hawks then there's nothing they can do, every time the drop you just stomp on them. Autoturrets do nothing either, I've ran up to 4 autoturrets in a row and destroyed them before they could kill me before. Plus they've got a perk where you can knife buildings down, which is just way overpowered.

 

[saintdane05]

Soulstorm. Widely to be one of the worst expansions of all time, it sets the new level for "broken". Still, even on release, the game was very well-received - and then, it happened. 19 hours after the game's initial launch, an infinite resource exploit was uncovered for the Sisters of Battle. By queuing up an upgrade for their listening post and then cancelling it, it was possible to get double the normal resource amount - ergo allowing you to do it rapid-fire for colossal amount of resources very, very quickly along with having infinite faith resource by simply auto-casting a faith ability so in-theory, a simple Celestian squad with a missionary attached could very well turn their durability like those of an Assault Terminator Squad with a Chaplain attached. After initially dismissing this as "not a real bug" and prattling on that players "should be happy with what they've got," a "hotfix" was promised within "one, maybe two weeks."

That one to two weeks turned into a nearly 9-month wait, whilst the game suffered horrendously. The "merit" system which was designed to award players with little collections of in-game multiplayer achievements was completely non-functional not only during this time, but after it. The lobby at launch read: "This is stand-in-news. Replace this with real news," and kept this for 6 our of the 8.65 months it took for the patch to hit. During this time, Automatch was broken and the use of a trainer allowing players to play multiple races and delete enemy buildings ran rampant, destroying anything that remotely remained of the game's competitive multiplayer environment. Smaller bugs and problems kept popping up during the wait: using dance of death would set Eldar players' resources to Zero (The fuckers entirely deserved it, though). Charming an Ethereal with a Deceiver would give the Necron Army billions of hit points per unit. Observers could activate a Dark Eldar player's Soul Powers.

After 8.65 months, there was nothing left. The game was deader than a Hooker at Patrick Bateman's place. But again, after 8 months of waiting and leaving the game to die, a small shard of hope appeared: the hotfix finally DID arrive which addressed most of the early problems present in the game, including the ability to use trainers in a multiplayer game and most of the SoB/DE bugs, which made the game relatively playable. However, much like how Zelda to the Nintendo Gamecube, it came too late and Soulstorm basically died out as many players just gave up on the game.

 

[INF1NIT3 D00M]

I recently had a go at the multiplayer for Space Marine. Holy Skull throne is that mode broken. The only saving grace is the fact you can copy the class of the last person to kill you, gives you a minor chance.

Aww damn, you ninja'd me. I bought it the other day because of the sale on Steam, and I got on this thread just to post about it.

To clarify for everyone who hasn't played Space Marine, you have 2 online modes. Co-op and Versus. Co-op is fine, because killing things as huge over-the-top space marines is fun. Versus is not fun.

Based on the game's health bar, I'd say that the space marines are glass cannons, believe it or not. I think the damage values and health values remain unchanged from single player to multiplayer, it's just that the AI enemies in single player and co-op have lots more health than you and do way less damage, in order to compensate for your ridiculous damage output and really low damage resistance.

Regardless, you'll die really fast in Versus. In addition to your extremely fast deaths is the extreme limitation of your weapons/perks early on. You get 3 classes at the start. No customization, neither visual nor loadouts is allowed until level 4. At level 4, you are given one class slot. You only get one perk slot (even though there's a second perk slot available at higher levels), and your selection of perks is 3. All the rest of the perks get unlocked at higher levels, or through getting kills with a particular weapon (usually something like 30 kills or 500 headshots). The only weapons available to you from levels 1-10 are the default ones, a slightly stronger melee weapon, a laser gun, and the lascannon (best gun in the game by far). By level 10, you're 1/4 of the way through the ranks and you've only got maybe 1/3 of the available weapons and 4 available perks for each class instead of the starting 3. You can play the Co-op to level up, but your XP gain is drastically reduced, and there is no way to unlock the weapon-specific perks. Copying the class of a high-level Lascannon player can turn the tide of an otherwise losing battle, for about half a second. You'll be able to score instant kill headshots from across the map (assuming the game isn't lagging horribly due to the P2P networking) for as long as you stay alive. However, one person kills you and you either have to copy them or go back to your horribly underpowered space marine.

It's not fun to get hopelessly murdered over and over again by a team with high-level players. The limits on what tactics and weapons you can use bottlenecks your skill and sets the barrier to entry so high that it's very nearly killed the multiplayer entirely. However, there's potential in there for an awesome multiplayer game, once you unlock things and customize your guy a bit. And like I said, pitting your horribly overpowered space marines against waves of hapless enemies in Co-Op is great fun. If you guys buy it on Steam today, it's 7.50 and you'll get your money's worth out of Co-Op and Single Player, with Versus just being something to fool around with once in a while.

 

[MetalDooley]

Another vote for MW2

Glitches such as Infinite Care Packages
Dual wield Shotguns
Commando perk allowed you to knife people from 10 ft away
Knifers
Shotguns as secondary weapons
Certain perk combos gave you infinite noob tubes
Quickscoping
Ridiculously overpowered killstreak rewards
Too many killstreak rewards on screen at the same time
Kills from kilstreak rewards counting towards your next killstreak reward
The fucking Tactical Nuke

MP in that game was a fucking mess

Also Gears of War 2 though that was down to the ridiculous host advantage rather than game design.Seriously if you were the host in Gears 2 you could absolutely destroy the other team

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

To me, Modern Warfare 2 was and still is one-of if not the-most unbalanced multiplayer game on the planet at the moment. Some people like it, some people hate it - but a lot of people would agree that the game is only a few steps away from being completely unplayable because it's that unbalanced.

I love Modern Warfare 2 for this reason.

It's like a giant chaotic shitstorm. Almost every gun is overpowered, there's no recoil, killstreaks are absurd, Commando + noob tube (the only BADLY imbalanced things in the game) run rampant everywhere. It's a ton of fun if you can get over the frustration that it can cause once in a while.

To me Black Ops and MW3 are just so sterile and boring in comparison. (I won't get into why I think MW3 and especially Black Ops are AWFUL games.) Even CoD4 is boring by comparison, though it's often more enjoyable just because there's a lot less frustration involved.

 

[lRookiel]

Gears of war host advantage, nuff said.

Erm... Quick scoping?

LoL has some OP champs when they are released (I'm looking at you Darius!)

Despite people saying that space marine MP is broken I'll be getting it all the same, I hear it's fantastic in all the other areas ^^

 

[Rack]

I've been playing the PS3 version of Space Marine and I found the co-op to be hilariously broken but the versus to be fairly level headed as these things go. The upgraded chainsword makes you about 5 times as effective as the standard one, but you can only unlock it via multiplayer kills. I gave it a go with little hope of success, but it was actually very easy, I was able to get about 5 kills a game with a pretty even k/d ratio even with zero unlocks. Admittedly there were other newbies there only a few levels above me, but in a similar situation on pretty much any other unlock based multiplayer game I tend to go 50 deaths per kill.

That said the Lascannon is going to be vastly more effective on the PC version than the PS3.

 

[Cavan]

Greece is laughably powerful in Civ 5, and I love them for it.

This is interesting, everybody seems to have their own idea of which faction is OP in civ. I wouldn't say greece stands out for it. Try some of the Gods and Kings one like Austria buying city states for 335 gold with no negative diplomacy or anything to anyone beyond getting a new city. Or Ethiopia where you automatically get more faith than almost any other civ early game thanks to their monument giving +2 and you get +20% combat strength as long as you have one less city than whomever you want to fight.

Or having half your units swallowed up by Ottoman Janissary because they get +25% attacking strength and heal a huge amount after they kill anything.

Or rome for maxing out your production thanks to their bonus, and getting a great early game advantage thanks to road building and trade routes.

Crysis 2. It was a mess. Invisible pricks. Invisible pricks everywhere.

How is something everybody can do unbalanced again?

 

[Kahunaburger]

Re: MW2, I think you can safely call it imbalanced, but not in a way where any strategy or weapon dominates, if that makes any sense. Like a commando lunge insta-kills people who are about 10 feet away, but so does basically everything else in the game. I don't think it's a particularly good multiplayer game, but it's sort of like a (significantly less fun) shooter version of Smash Bros where, as MetallicaRulez0 said, everything is so chaotic that it's hard to find a way to consistently exploit the system.

 

[Furioso]

Gears of War, I think the second one. Played the multiplayer at a friends house for a long time, and by the end was a mess of rage. Why the fuck, in a cover based shooter, would you constantly switch the spawn points. Could you think of no other protection for spawn campers? Every one of my deaths was caused by someone spawning behind me and blasting my super exposed body that was supposedly in the safety of cover, fuck that nonsense

Edit: I'm also 90% certain that the shotgun is far more powerful when you aren't aiming down the sights, I could shoot someone point blank in the back with it (aimed) and they would just turn around and gib me in one shot from the hip

 

[mrdude2010]

Demigod. It was this incredibly shitty dota style game shat out by GPG to contrast with their excellent supcom: FA. There were a couple stupid, but unbeatable strategies.

Also, I mean, a few weapons in CoD were pretty bad. And the odd champ in any fighting game is going to be OP.

 

[Sky Captanio]

Modern Warfare 3. Whoever thought that "Free-kill" predator missiles was a good idea is an idiot. And also the I.M.S, which you place on the ground and it gets you four kills.

 

[Thepistolman1234]

For me it has to be Quantum of Solace or Call of Duty World at War, quantum of solace wasn't particularly good in single player, but the multiplayer was completely unbalanced in favour of anyone that had the auto-shotgun, which was a one hit kill anywhere on the body, had a stupidly long range and fire very fast. In world at war, anyone using the mp40 just killed everyone, it was one hit kill to the chest and available very early on, so everyone ends up using them.

 

[Alssadar]

LoL has some OP champs when they are released (I'm looking at you Darius!)

Better nerf Irelia...

OT: Having only a few multiplayer games, I have to say the only one I have an issue with: Call of Duty, World at War (It's the only CoD I own, and I've only played MW3 for twice). Freaking MP40 bullets have magnets that detect your helmet. I guess the developers were all "hey, smg's are inaccurate, so let's make them be nigh 1-shot kills!" Little did they remember that smg's fire a lot of bullets fast, making people who play with my precious semi-automatic rifles (Freaking Gewehr) to hit thrice in order to take a guy down.
And rifle grenades--the pre-noob tube.

And there a peeps bad-talking Space Marine multiplayer... I just bought it fifteen minutes before entering this thread. -.-

 

[Naeras]

Imbalanced overall, or unique cases?

Overall, Street Fighter III. SF3 was never a bastion for balance, and balance did get better as they went, but yeah... Second Impact was hilariously broken to a whole new degree. Ibuki and Sean were the top, top, top, tiers in that game, especially Ibuki. Ibuki was so hilariously broken it wasn't even funny. Touch of death combos, pokes that beat everyone, crazy safe and powerful... You name it, she had it.

Third Strike was a bit better, but mostly it was a power coup. Instead of Ibuki and Sean it was all about Chun Li and Yun (with honorary mentions to Ken and Makoto). Chun had the best pokes in the game by far (half the cast can't do anything but whiff punish), everything she did was safe, her super had two bars, wasn't too big, and was insanely damaging WITH possibility of follow up. Yun was the other beast: A divekick, great pokes, fast, and the best super in the game by far: Genei Jin. "Steroid" kind of super that made Yun faster and allowed him nearly endless juggling ("hup, hup, hup, hup, hup..."). Best part? He built meter crazy fast and had the shortest super bar in the game! Basically more than half the match you were fighting Genei Jin. Any hit usually resulted in half your health going away.

In a "unique" case: Street Fighter II: Super Turbo. SFII wasn't a very balanced game either, but Akuma, who first became playable in ST, was broken beyond reason of belief. He was never meant to be played competitively, and you can see it when you use him. His air fireballs simply destroy everyone. On top of that he had insanely high damage, inescapable and unblockable "resets" and setups, and he was the only character that could not be stunned. He was hard banned from tournament play for a very good reason. Even "old" Sagat looked wimpy next to him.

Then again, Third Strike had Gill...

While I'm usually the first in line to criticize 3rd Strike for it's balance(seriously, Chun-Li can go fuck herself), I wouldn't hold it as an example of a hugely imbalanced game. None of the characters there are really broken, although part of that can be attributed to the fact that parries effectively make every single move in the game unsafe, if you can predict them.
(And Gill doesn't really count tbh D: )

SSF2:T, on the other hand. Holy balls. Akuma is probably the second most overpowered character in a fighting game ever. The only one I can think of who's worse was from some samurai fighting game who one-hit-killed everyone with any move he used, which pretty much says it all here.

The worst examples of balance I've seen, though, have got to be in some of the old versions of Company of Heroes. Dear god, Panzer Elite and British Commonwealth were bullshit at release, and a lot of the problems didn't get fixed before a year ago. And even disregarding those dumb factions, you had delicious stuff like strafing runs, pioneer spam, crocodile tanks(aka NAPALM NASCARS), zeal+IA+panzershrecks, rangers and T17s. Thankfully, almost all of the issues the game had with balance has been fixed now, but its history is horrible and bloody.

 

[Souleks]

snippy

My god the Mp40, just stopping power + Mp40 w/ extended magazines lol gg thanks for playing also dogs.. I hated those dogs.