When to start balancing a competitive game?

so I've just got my collectable card in to a playable state (enough cards to create at least a few interesting combinations) with all the art and effects in place, i wonder when's a good time to start testing online balancing, is there any point testing when I haven't gotten close to finishing all the cards.

When's a good time to start balancing your game on "the public" or just anyone who's not in the core development team? Has anyone else come across this issue and can assist me.

 

Make paper versions of your cards, print your rules, & take them to a local game night & ask the tabletop gamers to test them out. Without all the distractions that 'juice' can provide online they will focus purely on gameplay, mechanics, & balance & give you really good feedback. It's also easier to balance by adding/removing cards, altering effects on the fly etc without the need for coding I.e. They will be able to test rebalanced decks & cards immediately.

 

A friend of mine just finished balancing their CCG game, coming out very soon. In addition to what Ted says, which is spot on, the balance process took basically 1 year and 3 months of open beta testing during the last half of development. Just to put it into perspective how massively difficult it is to balance these monsters

 

I've been kicking this around in my head for the past few days- is playtesting the only way to get a feel for the way a ccg balances? Is there no way to get an estimate?

I'm just spitballing here, but I figured if you were to establish an "equal play" or how powerful a card is when played against itself, or a reasonable facsimile, You could then get a feel for what a "good play" is- a play where the card has larger than normal effect/influence/power, and "poor play"- where the card has less than average effectiveness. Then you could tweak the card so that it's performance across the board is "on curve" with the cost of playing that card/card rarity/ whatever other factor.

Because I figure each card has a purpose it's made for- a specific way it is meant to change the way the match goes. So as long as you can quantify that somehow, you could maybe control how powerful a card is relative to all the others.

I've never tackled a CCG before, feel free to tell me if I'm way off base.

 

Well, I am not a CCG pro or anything but the problem, LMan, is cards tend to interact with eachother and can end up in a positive feedback loop unexpectedly. Further, most cards that really impact balance are not direct cards. So a 3/3 creature that does nothing is easy to balance. But how do you balance the cost of a spell that makes nobody able to attack for a turn? The value of that card is entirely dependent on how much 'power curve' is gained from one round of stalling. Lets say you can craft a 'top tier' deck with an incredibly steep curve, this card is very valuable. However, if that same deck is NOT top tier (meaning even though it has a high curve the deck isn't effective in ranked play) then the card is basically worthless, despite doing exactly what it is meant to do.

The problem with graphing out such a curve is you're going to be extremely prone to human error. Having people test these things and then tracking/plotting them into a graph will produce a much better result simply because you reduce the risk of missing a possible card combination that changes the "top value" of a card.

Something like that anyway is why player driven testing is vital to CCGs, especially when you don't have Blizzard's budget for paid for testers.

 

There's some good articles floating around, & Extra Credits have done 1 or 2 episodes, about hearthstone & the power curve of cards, talking about the cost/power ratio & how quick players are to find & exploit overpowered cards & the difficulty designers have with finding ways to rebalance it.

 

I would watch out for overtly overpowered cards - if you can logically deduce which cards may fall under this category.

But you may need to wait for some meta to evolve in your game before it is apparent which cards or strategies are overpowered. I think i would lean in the direction of less-balancing... remembering that playing with awesome cards and finding broken combinations are part of the appeal of playing such a game.

 

You can normally spreadsheet this stuff out pretty well. I'd suggest making up a spreadsheet with every card early in the balance process.

Spreadsheets can get broken when players use the card in a totally unintended way. This requires play testing to find. My favourite example is the chapel in Dominion. It's one of the cheapest cards. Thematically it was designed to remove curses. But you can use it to replace your entire deck with gold, making it a massively OP card.

 

I'm not be a big fan of fantasy card games, but I do find them interesting though.
Especially the amazing artwork, of a card game called Legend of Cryptids.

But I agree with Caseys comment. Especially the part about less balancing.
Why? Because that will make each individual card, especially the powerful ones
look special, and amazingly cool to the players.
Also, balancing a game or card game, does not mean the game will be
automatically fun. And doing that, can sometimes bore alot of players.

If you have overpowered cards, like for example, a super magician card
and he is super powerful. Then make opposing magical card powerups
and rare cards, that can help weaker character cards, semi easily fend
against him.
Or make it where those magical power up cards, can only be used by weak
character cards, and not by super powerful cards.

 

To go a bit more in-depth about the statement 'a perfectly balanced game isn't necessarily fun', you might be interested in checking out this video done by Core-A gaming

(about fighting games, not CCG's, though hopefully still valuable)

 

I would worry less about balancing and more about how you're going to evolve the content. Players play these types of games to figure out what are the most powerful combos, and then a meta evolves. Once that meta stabilizes the game starts to get boring, so you need to stir the pot to reset the process.

Magic the Gathering does this by continually phasing out old releases in favor of new ones, but rereleasing some old cards in the new releases, so even if you're familiar with the old cards you'll need to come up with new combos with them. A similar process happens with most any games that are based on first building out some type of deck, squad, or fleet to match against an opponent.

Even table top miniature games work similarly, such as X-Wing, where they don't cycle things out but they continually release new content that disrupts the existing meta. You then get a few months of everyone figuring out the new meta, then everyone figuring out new squads to tech against this new meta, and just as it starts to get stale some new content hits and resets everything.

But if everything is truly 100% balanced then that actually makes the player's decision making when they build out their deck pretty irrelevant, since they won't be able to come up with a more powerful deck no matter how hard they try to find good combos. That takes half the fun out of these games.