Game Balancing Design

The gaming industry is often seen as a hybrid of industries in the world, due to the fact it tries to cater to so many different elements in each game in produces. Games must tell a compelling story and narrative, they must have interesting and innovative game play and finally, something that is regarded by many as less important, but for others, it's seen as the most important feature of games today. Their competitive side, where the ambition of being ranked number one in the world can control someones life, or when defeat can cause complete disarray and astonishment. This is the world of competitive online gaming.

Online gaming is a world that is expanding rapidly. Originally confined too PC's, the accessibility to online features with the latest consoles means that more and more people have become involved in competitive gaming. Online gaming however, requires different presets than single player or co-op games. One of the toughest parts of creating and maintaining an online game, is making sure the game is balanced. Making sure that there is noway in the game to have an unfair or over powered edge against other people. This takes a delicate balance of many many factors and is something that must be watched continuously.

For my Design Document i'm going to talk about something that is crucial too balancing games and that is an issue for many Australian gamers, ping. Australian gamers are generally at a disadvantage due to the location of servers for most online games, this contributed with the low quality of ISP's in Australia can create less than ideal balancing and can in fact ruin some games. Our game will have a secondary service available for players outside of the optimal playing area, this service will have an in game client with the ability to create a secure shell connection which will streamline the packet handling by forcing it out straight away instead of bundling each packet with additional data packets. This will decrease ping significantly for users with high ping but lesser to people with stable connections in a good zone making it not a requirement therefore making it hog less resources.

Another thing wanting to implement into the game to make increase balancing is UI that takes into account all game play into player matching with other players. This means that instead of a first game determining your player matchmaking statistics, the game matches you with equal opponents easier and makes the game much more enjoyable for those whose abilities increase quicker than those and removes as such a grind feeling to a lot of the game.