Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26149284-20160209140823

Now, I know im not too caught on since I've had my hiatus, including suggesting ideas and such for Strobe 2. However, I've learned more about game mechanics in general, so i think this will still be valid going into the future.

1) Keep in mind about the Power Curve and Power Creep when suggesting stuff

Now, you may be thinking, "what is this power curve" or  "what is this power creep"? I'll be using this a lot later when talking about balance. For starters, the Power Curve is basically a graph for balance. Although it will have variations, most of time a balanced game will have items and weapons along the curve, including RNG-based weapons (delta of rng as it will be called). If something is way below curve, it will most likely never see play. If something is way above curve, then it will become Power Creep, which all future items or weapons will have to be either on par or stronger than said card. Then, the rest of the underpowered weapons won't see play.

2) We need perfect imbalance to create a metagame

Now you might be thinking (lol same starter sentence) "why wouldnt we want a perfectly balanced game?" Well, you know Chess? It's considered a balanced game. However, there are so many fixed strategies involved it can take a long time to learn all of it before creating your own strategies. Perfect Imbalance isn't simply imbalance, no we don't want drastic imbalance. Perfect Imbalance is carefully crafted, and creates a Metagame, an evolving state of play which no real strategy is definitively correct. This allows all play levels to change and come up with newer and better strategies.

One way to do this is to create a "game around the game", where players must figure out the system in trying to get an edge. Another way of doing this is having a certain weapon or item be slightly better than average, but not too overpowered for it to be above curve; alose have it specialize so its not good in every single aspect. Next, players will have to find a better zombie to counter that, and so on and so forth. Yes, it will eventually create a brick wall of memorization if we don't tweak the game properly, but it's still worth talking about.

So, thank you folks for reading this quick little ramblings about game balance! Also, stop being lazy trying to always do TL;DR stuff, its incrediebly annoying in every possible way when you create a viable post people need to look at. 