Fairness is over-rated in games?

Some of the most fun I had in games was finding unbalanced mechanisms that gave me more power than intended. Diablo 2 had a ton of that. Later versions were too balanced for their own good. Of course this is not a sustainable state so the move to seasons in v4 is a good compromise to let some of the imbalance come through, but with a predictable sunset window.

I think the article makes a good point.

Games have to be fun to play. That's it. Nothing else matters.

Making a game more fair might make it more fun. Or it might not. You might lose 90% of the time, but think about how awesome that 10% could be! Horde mode games (COD Zombies, etc.) are extremely popular despite being unwinnable. Everything is stacked against you, but they're still fun.

This is why I prefer single-player games. Multiplayer games necessarily focus on being fair. Single-player games can be deeply unfair and that's okay because it's against computer opponents who don't mind. Or put another way they are actors whose goal is to make you have fun, unlike real humans who prioritize their own fun.

I still think of the original Team Fortress (Quake Mod) as one of the most fun games I ever played. It was definitely not balanced per character type, you kind of needed at least a handful of players on each team, and a few different character types or you'd get slaughtered.

It was definitely fun to be sure...

I think this is missing something. I'd propose as an alternate - a game is fair if players of equal ability have the same chance of winning. This allows for fair but asymmetric games.

> In Magic Realm you can spend 20 seconds failing four search rolls in a roll trying to find a treasure, then wait an hour to try again. In my game last week I aced the search roll on the first try and pulled two treasures from a three treasure stack on the next two rolls. (The odds of this were under a quarter of a percent, not quite one in a thousand but nice). Did I win? No. Did I remember that? Yes.

I think I can pretty unambiguously state that I don't want to play a game that has a 1-in-1000 chance of being "memorable" and otherwise sucks to play, and that's kind of what Magic Realm sounds like in this description.

I suspect TFA has missed its own point. It sounds like they want games to have opportunities for absurdity. That is not a goal at at odds with having typical gameplay be roughly fair. A game designed around making "good stories" out of absurd power imbalances sounds not fun, so will people even play it? If they do, and you get a good story out of it, did all the other players go home and say, "That game sucks and that player is a jerk."?