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So an interesting thing you could do as a game company with an "unbeatable" bot is to use it to balance a metagame. Let the bots all play each other and tweak character stats etc until they win a proportional amount of the time. (This presupposes that the bot learns the game the way OpenAI claims it is, without needing to learn from player replays or from playing in a very different way than human players do with tree search etc)

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I think balance is a bigger problem than people realize. It's much harder than you'd think, and the most common way of balancing things is to simply make them more "samey".

I was part of the Warcraft 3 beta. When it started all the races felt so unique. It's a bit foggy now but I think, for example, all the elves buildings - which appeared tree like - would automatically regenerate. Once they started balancing the game, all these special traits fell away. All the races were homogenized and despite still being different, all played much more similarly. Honestly, it ruined the game for me. I feel if I had just picked it up upon release I would have enjoyed it, but watching all these unique traits and play styles fade away made me realize what could have been.

Homogenization is a huge problem with nearly every major online game I've played (WoW, LoL, Hearthstone, etc.)

Your looking at the blizzard school of balance.

Think going to a theme park. It's very pretty and attractive but underneath it all, the experience is always on rails without any deviation.

That's one way to deal with complexity. I hate those games, because the moment you become human, and try to do something intuitive but undefined and unwanted by the programmers, you get penalized.

Dota doesnt do that, although the recent patch feels like a shadow of such design: but nothing like league or blizzard

> I hate those games, because the moment you become human, and try to do something intuitive but undefined and unwanted by the programmers, you get penalized.

That's what I loved about Ultima Online. Characters were basically "Here are 100 possible skills to learn and 5 base stats. You get 700 points to distribute among your skills. Good luck"

My fav part was that doing things that require strength made you stronger, doing dexterous tasks increased dexterity etc.

While fun, the game was also an absolute nightmare for beginners. You really needed to find friends that knew what they were doing to help you out. This of course created a wonderful community.

Have you tried Path of Exile? You might enjoy it.

+1 for PoE. The only reason I don't play is because I can't stop when I do.

Haha of course - and absolutely right. I loved it.

The recently released Albion Online feels a lot like UO (and also has some of the sandbox territory control of EVE)

> I think balance is a bigger problem than people realize. It's much harder than you'd think, and the most common way of balancing things is to simply make them more "samey".

I completely agree, but Dota is the very rare exception to that rule.

If one heroes ability is "too strong", most games would turn it down 20%, but dota instead perhaps lowers the hero's armor by 1, or lowers their sight range, or base strength, or something even less intuitive and tangentially related.

What you get is 100+ very unique heroes, that somehow manages to stay fairly balanced. It's quite an amazing game, if you can handle the timesink.

A big hero pool you can only pick one of each from is probably easier to balance than something like an RTS where there are a fixed set of units for just a few alternate races and the players typically choose between them once at the start of their career.

You have to consider how every single one of them interacts with all of the others and even less serious imbalances will be present in the games all the times for players that are unable to switch to playing anything else.

I don't think that's true at all, since you have to consider how each team of 5 heroes combines and synergises. That's a far larger part of balance than individual heroes. Players also play roles, but typically play more than a handful of heroes and so those combinations are in reality also very numerous.

On top of that, you then have items which change how heroes can play and, more recently, talent trees which can significantly alter how they play also. Dota's balance is such that a hero can play both a carry role and a support role depending on how the player builds and plays them, and there's a number of examples like that which do get done at the pro level.

That's an incredibly diverse scope to balance.

On the other hand limiting it to one hero of a kind per game helps quite a bit. Overwatch had the problem of very static team compositions early on because they didn't copy that particular feature of MOBAs. I haven't been following that closely but I assume changing that helped quite a bit. Of course they might still have some issues because of the small number of heroes available in the game.

Each composition doesn't have to be perfectly balanced against every other either and the system of picks and bans helps.

This is luckily a problem Dota2 doesn't suffer from, we've been incredibly lucky to have Icefrog be the main force behind it for over a decade. It's an incredibly well balanced game, at this International (World Championships for Dota2) 112 of 113 heroes has been picked and/or banned. The amount of diversity you have in strategy is amazing, there is a meta obviously, but teams have very individual styles and heroes they prioritize.

As far as I'm concerned Dota2 is probably the most well balanced competitive video game out there.

It's also interesting to note that icefrogs balance strategy revolves around strengthening strengths, and making initial weaknesses more pronounced. I think this helps a lot with diversity.

> It's much harder than you'd think, and the most common way of balancing things is to simply make them more "samey".

which is the wrong way to balance a competitive game

Balance for humans and robots is different. Different play skills are easy or hard and those skills matter different amounts on different heroes . Effectively instead of balancing for fair heroes, you'd be balancing for maximizing the performance of heroes with the small human-robot gaps. It would be very easy to make the game boring because in some sense you're making the easy to play heroes the best ones and I think many games aim to be biased slightly in the opposite direction.

Humans are not machines.

Games are mostly based on the skills of the players, so should games be balanced by assuming a human can do what a machine can? Of course not!

A bot can usually make computations way faster and more presice than humans.

Let's say a bot plays against another bot, both with different characters. One character might seem really overpowered compared to the other, but that might only be because the bots can react to certain events thousands of times faster than a human. Without that reaction time the tables might turn and the other character might be clearly stronger.

So how fast should we assume a human can do a given action? How precise should we assume the player is at fast calculations?

I do see a lot of things it can balance, but letting bots learn by themselves with no limitations will definitely not work out well.

You can restrain the bot by emulating human limitations if the goal is to use bots to figure out the game balance.

Add latency. Limit its actions per minute including camera movements and maybe even inertial limitations of input methods.

And even if the bot is not a perfect imitation of a human it still might figure out surprising things that would take human players years of real time to figure out by chance since they can only spend so much time on playing and experimenting.

This approach seems like it would be more useful for bug discovery than game balancing. Actively collecting a slew of performance metrics, similar to how companies like Blizzard already do, would give you a better idea of how to proceed with balance changes because you can review the data as it applies to your actual playerbase and even organize it based on ranking categories to get an idea of how your decisions would affect players at different skill levels.

This was generally my interpretation as well. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft already struggle to balance classes with high skill ceilings for use by both the casual players and the hardcore players while keeping those classes enjoyable for both groups. In some ways you could call that the dev-meta, making a competitively balanced meta game while still offering an appealing level of fun for the various subgroups of the player-base.

> but that might only be because the bots can react to certain events thousands of times faster

AI bots such as this one are usually limited to emit actions every N frames, so they can't possibly react faster even if they can solve the perception problem. There is nothing interesting for AI advancement in competing for the best reflex speed - it's all about strategy.

Aside from human vs machine style comments, the issue this would also have to avoid is what's referred to as "over tuned". ie when content is balanced to a point where variation has to be maximally efficient. See also http://nethack4.org/blog/strategy-headroom.html

Icefrog also balances the game for fun, not just for the theoretical limit of what's equally fair.

Except Dota is not balanced so that heroes have the same win rate (LOL does that and it's a boring uneventful game for large stretches of time). Dota is balanced also taking into account the map, hero synergies, item builds, match progression etc, and it takes a genius like Icefrog to make everything fun and interesting at the same time.

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