Talk:Game Balance

This is a page for posting musings about game balance. What makes one character class more popular than another and/or easier to play? How to tell when an imbalance is temporary and will correct itself and when intervention by the developer or admin is required?

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At the moment the game has a majority of humans. But in theory it's harder to stay human than it is to stay a zombie... therefore this means that the human majority actually reflects a majority of players wanting to be human. So if you're human, what made you choose to be one?

Diversity of actions. Period. Shadowstar 19:39, 18 Oct 2005 (BST)

Hey, it's a lot harder to role play a bear fucking a zombie bird when you are undead. -- LABIA on the INTERNET ^{Dunell Hills Corpseman} #24 - |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ^TMG 06:48, 13 May 2011 (BST)

Yeah. You know us survivors. We're all just a bunch of bearfuckers.

~ _{07:04, 13 May 2011 (UTC)}

I still remember the first time I saw that Halloween costume. -- LABIA on the INTERNET ^{Dunell Hills Corpseman} #24 - |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ^TMG 07:19, 13 May 2011 (BST)

Defining balance

I think it's interesting to hear game balance spoken of in terms of a split of X/Y percent humans versus zombies. Would not a balanced game be one where the percentage stays more or less the same over time? In other words, if the split moves from 60/40 to 50/50 to 40/60, then something isn't balanced. If the split is 25/75 or 75/25, but stays that way almost all the time (despite the best efforts of the more numerous group to zombify or revivify the other group), wouldn't THAT indicate the game is in balance? I'm talking long-term here, as in the trend over a month or so, not the slight shifts back and forth based on who died or revivified recently, because right around the balance point there will be some "rocking" as player actions disturb the natural equilibrium.

In other words, couldn't one contend that if the percentages are shifting, regardless of what the percentages actually are, that the game is unbalanced... and conversely, if the percentages are oscillating slightly around a certain equilibrium point, that the game is balanced?

--Joe Seeback 02:01, 14 September 2006 (BST)

That actually generally means it's easier for one group to play over the other. The ideal is a constantly shifting dominant percent. In theory though an appropriate game situation would require zombies being the dominant percent persistently. Obviously that's no the case as zombies only aren't significantly behind when they have organized some massive meta-event. The standard gameplay for Urban Dead is shown to statistically favor survivors. --Karek^{maps 2.0?!} 15:46, 13 May 2011 (BST)