Most games are fundamentally unbalanced. Even chess went through many iterations, or “balance patches” if you want to be on the nose about it. Even still there’s an inherent advantage in white’s favor because they go first. Despite that it’s not as if black will always lose. Chess players have come up with solutions to overcome this disadvantage, even if it can never be fully nullified. Video games highlight this lack of balance at an even bigger scale. Game breaking bugs, overpowered characters, one sided maps, the list goes on. In the small corner of esports, these problems are often big deals due to the monetary incentives and overall desire for a fair game. But when a weapon or character is overpowered and will be for the next 3 months, you can’t just hide your head in the sand and pretend things are fine, you have to adjust.
For better or for worse, powerful aspects of gameplay are what define games. For competitive folk especially, doing anything other than the best possible course of action is suboptimal and lowers your chances of winning. As a result, the strong or overpowered characters get abused by almost everyone and those powerful aspects define the meta. Refusing to use an overpowered weapon can cost you titles, especially if that weapon suits your skillset. (Looking at you and the Krieg, NiKo)
Finka LMG really powerful? Choosing not to take Finka LMG on your Attack actively lowers your chance of winning. For this season of Siege your play is defined by Finka’s presence. When you’re on Attack it’s about how well you abuse this overtuned operator. When on Defense it’s about playing around her as best you can. Even when something isn’t outright broken, but simply powerful, gamers have to find ways to play around such mechanics. When trying to play around something powerful, meta defining even, gaming has shown 2 different paths to overcoming these hurdles.
The modern solution is to ask for developer intervention. This is a direct result of the Games as a Service model that perpetuates the market. Games like Siege, Valorant, League, and Street Fighter all receive regular updates to add more content, fix bugs, and possibly rebalance the game. Because of this, players have learned that if they make enough noise these overpowered or overbearing gameplay aspects will get addressed…eventually. Mileage varies on this depending on the developer. Riot is very hands on and communicative when it comes to Valorant. You constantly see developers responding on social media regarding balancing, acknowledging community problems, and being very forthright about patch note decisions.
Looking at Ubisoft’s management of Siege and you see a very different story. There is little to no communication beyond official posts and patch notes. Even then, the rationale behind major balance decisions is often patchy at best, not giving the player base the full picture to understand why certain seemingly incomprehensible decisions are being made. If those balancing decisions play out poorly it often takes a season or two for things to get relatively balanced again.
The best example of this is an operator like Lion. While he may be in a good place now, he used to be the terror of Siege. Lion had a 100% pick or ban rate in pro play. Meaning that you either banned him out or played him every single round. I remember a particularly noteworthy game of Bank between Rogue and SSG where the game was decided by who won a single defensive round because Attack was so dominant. Every basement hold was blown wide open by the Attack no matter the team.
With how little counterplay there was due to the nature of how his gadget was designed, the community had very little wiggle room in addressing Lion themselves. For around a year Lion remained basically untouched. There was a half-hearted attempt at balancing a few months after his release, but it took another year to actually do something about the EE1D. Despite how long waiting for developer interference can take, most gamer’s first instinct is still to bitch about broken shit until the developers change up the meta.
While the R6 community didn’t choose it, there was another way to handle Lion’s overtuned nature. When the developers are asleep at the wheel (or even if they aren’t) a tactic many console competitors use is the GA; the Gentleman’s Agreement. Teams agree either before a match or as a collective to not use certain gameplay mechanics. If a team uses it anyways, the other team will also use it and the agreement falls apart. This is most common in Call of Duty and Halo.
A current example of a GA would be the use of the Mangler and drop weapon macro in Halo Infinite. The Mangler is seen as too powerful due to it’s near guaranteed one hit kill combo and the macro is seen as a faster version of a pre-existing button, thus being unneeded and not the “skill-based mechanic” that some claimed it was. GA’ing mechanics and weapons is good, but ultimately raises questions regarding the validity of the competition. For many it becomes a matter of “if it’s in the game, it should be allowed.” Think competitive Smash Bros. having limited maps and no items. This also doesn’t solve the clear balancing issue for the general player base, it only helps the competitive players.
However, there is another way to deal with meta defining mechanics. You just give it time.
This is a common approach in the FGC, especially with older, unsupported games. Modern titles are treated as live service games and often have frequent updates, but old titles are still played in competition. You can’t beg Capcom to balance Akuma in Street Fighter 2 when you’re playing on an arcade cabinet at Evo.
Broken bullshit is embraced rather than addressed. Because who can fix it anyways? The developer who dissolved back in the 1990s? As a result, the FGC has taken a very unique stance in regards to powerful characters and mechanics. Either use it yourself or shut the hell up. In doing so, players unwilling to swap characters for the meta have to find counterplay to remain competitive. While a slow process, oftentimes these players find workarounds that somewhat or completely address the powerful tools that defined gameplay interactions.
BlazBlue is a great example of this. A week ago there was a unique interaction found for a low tier character in the franchise’s latest iteration (released in 2015) and a day or two later it was already applied to other characters to devastating effect. Given enough time and effort, gamers can and will find ways to address powerful mechanics, characters, maps, whatever. It’s been proven to be in their nature to find ways to overturn their state of disadvantage as much as possible just to give the opponent a big “FUCK YOU.”
However this way of handling overtuned mechanics has a few fallbacks. For one, it relies on the game being stable and unchanged. With Games as a Service this isn’t realistic, giving players a short window of time to look into workarounds before the game gets changed once again. If a balance patch completely destroys a character, there’s no amount of unique interactions that will help if those buttons don’t work like they used to.
The other issue with this response is simply that it takes time.
Like a lot of time.
As mentioned with the BlazBlue example, this cool new tech was found last week. The game’s been out for 7 years and isn’t supported by the developers any more. As an esport BlazBlue isn’t pushing the FGC forward like a Guilty Gear Strive is. That isn’t a bad thing, but save for some miraculous influx of players, this discovery isn’t all that impactful in the grand scheme of things, it’s much too late for that to be the case.