I just hopped over from a different thread... And I'm compelled to ask this of all of you just because I'm curious.

In real life, things are never balanced, one side has more power than another, one power has some capablity another doesn't, sometimes they balance, other times they don't... Sometimes one side overpowers the other, sometimes the other side pulls out something to fight back with... I'm curious why we all think that semi-permanent unmoving balance in game is the way to go... It seems like it'll be more apt to promote stagnation in the game than anything else...

Discuss please.

I think it has to do with the context our own lives stem from; mostly a democracy. We expect everything to be fairly well balanced, for us to, theoretically, have as much chance as the next person. We are born into these ideals and are taught their immense worth for as long as we live. I'd imagine it would be very hard to shrug that off.

It's for the game experience. Of course, being a member of a small, dying community which is constantly being crushed/enslaved by some stronger guys might be fun from the RP point of view - in theory. But it's not. A player should not have an easier/harder life automatically just because s/he has chosen an unbalanced side to play.

Quoted for truth.

I agree with Cuber. Why play a game where you constantly get the crap beaten out of you because of some imbalances? Not very fun in my opinion. Life isn't balanced, but you don't have much of a choice in whether to participate in existance or not.

I would have to agree, in the interest of gaming dynamics, then your best solution to continued and 'even' player enjoyment, would be to make the different sides even, and give them a chance, which would be totally dependant on player application to the game.

However, in a a currently imbalanced (Read: Umbalanced due to previous player contributions), then if the continued circumstances mean much much more than the balance, ie, Celest, for the nature of game-balance, could have, and quite really, from an impartial view, should be given, an imbalance, in the course of future, continued game balance.

(PM me if this is retarded, consumption of alcohol generally makes my points more expansive, but less pointed.)

EDIT: My own counterpoint to this argument given here, which, was being used as a point to demonstrate the negative impact, not from a point of continual game balance.
EDIT2: Bolded change.

I think they're right, in the fact that you don't want to play the loser, because you'll tire of it eventually. And if you've got overpowered skills, more people than the other guys, etc, then you have it too easy, and it makes it not challenging for you, and it makes it lame for everyone else.

Unfortunately, things in Lusternia have too many opposites. A guild has lich? The opposing guild wants lich! Almost everything here has its counterpart.

Ideally, it would end up something like starcraft, which is a wonderfully balanced game, where everything does not have an opposite, but more of a rock/paper/scissors thing going on. There is no clear winner of the three starcraft races, each are equally effective in the hands of a good player, and every unit can be effectively taken down by another.

Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to pull something like this off, and some of my friends have marveled at Blizzard's ability to do that. So, since we don't have something like that, we're left with Lusternia's good/evil, black/white, skill vs skill, in an effort to not completely shut down the opposition.

I believe our definition of "balance" is probably different - there is balance in real life, at least to a degree. And where there isn't balance (Say, environment (greenpeace, Julia Butterfly Hill, etc) vs Industrialism (Loggers, strip-miners, whalers, Bush), we are seeing the cost of it. Slowly the environment is dieing - I can't say many of us are too pleased with it.

Although Lusternia seems to pride itself on balance, and the maintaining of it. Night vs Sun, Light vs Darkness. Iunno. It's too early for me to think.

And, Richter, Protoss were superior. Dark Archons > all.

Pff, he means the original starcraft, before they added the zerg lurker, (buildable) protoss dark templars & archons, and the like (though I love broodwar personally)

Edit: Go Zerg

Was I the only other person who totally loved to mass dark and light templar?

No, I did it too.

More on the subject of balance though.

When you get right down to it, Lusternia's not all that centered on storytelling. Role immersion, yes, but not storytelling. If we were, you could reasonably have, say, a repressed lower class, like you have in a number of medievel MUSHes. It's fun in that context. Here, though, we focus on the interplay of the character relationships and the objective, coded part of the world. The stereotypical Glom doesn't like the stereotypical Seren, and the feeling is mutual. The Gloms and the Serens proceed to make life a little harder for each other. The game arbitrates the conflict and decide which side wins that particular skirmish, be it power production, economic development, village influence, or just plain morale. "Losing" in any of those senses is undesirable, and thus, avoided by balance of quests/skills/sanity of patrons.

So does that kind of answer your question? Balance = good, because it keeps players here, and is nessecary for the game to function in a way that is still fun.

Stop trying to close threads, it's mean!

Because it's a competitive game.

I wasn't trying to close it, I was trying to see if she got the answer she needed, so that we could... answer it.

Think about how it would be if every zergling was played by an individual though. You'd never pull off a rush cause everyone would be wanting to do their own crap. It only works out to be balanced as well as it is because the nature of the interactions between each player can be tweaked far more readily. There are an extremely small number of variables to consider as compared to a game like Lusternia, and OOC factors like different clients or coding knowledge rarely come into effect in any fair game.

I think what was meant in evoking SC is that the players had different styles of fighting, and yet it was all reasonably balanced*. Picture the zerg player as a Wiccan, the Terran player as a Druid, and the Protoss as a Warrior.

I think the key Blizzard used was to find 'counters'. Take Zerg vs Terran in Broodwar, around v1.08. *

Terran charged in with marines.
Zerg counters and attacks with lurkers.
Terran slows lurkers with micro and defends them with tanks/turrets.
Zerg uses free time to expand madly
Terran techs to Sci vessels and counters lurkers.

From there it's a battle of exps. Zerg has more territory but NEEDS 3x the bases to truly compete. Terran can easily decimate a Zerg army fully teched but has to get out of 'defensive' mode to win. True, if either missed a step (i.e. If Zerg was slow in lurker making, or Terran can't micro with with marines) it's an easy win, but the counter was there, and it WAS possible, and it WILL help you win.

Do we have the same back and forth motion here? Assuming a tri-transed pair with great systems: When a Warrior tries to kill a Druid with damage, how does a Druid counter it? What can the Warrior do to counter that Druid move? Can all of that be reasonably done and will one side win if and only if, they do a move that the enemy forgets to counter?

*SC DID have it's imbalances, like Corsair abuse and how annoying Carrier/corsair was, but they didn't dominate the game completely, unlike how bothersome Bloodlust rocked everything but the very expert level of WC2.*

Another driving force no one's touched on is the sheer volume of work that would be involved in pulling off any major social change in the game.

Celest conquers Magnagora once and for all? Huzzah!! Now quick, we need to rewrite several hundred room descriptions just to tear down the things Celest would never put up with; totally trash three guilds and the other institutions of Magnagora; and come up with a new threat for the Celestians to face, pronto. "Three new guilds, quick! You, get to work on the new Gorgog city that's about to rise from the depths! Two-hundred and fifty rooms. Stat!"

It doesn't happen. It's not going to happen. It can't and won't ever happen on any human-moderated MUD. Until we have storytelling AI so sophisticated that it can generate whole worlds on the fly, complete with conflict and drama, we will never see a MUD that will truly allow us to alter it the way a lack of game balance would force it to be altered.

Find 75 builders.

Each one makes 3 rooms.

Bam, city COMPLETE.