Abstract
Video game balancing is a controversial and highly debated topic, especially between players of online games. Whether a game is sufficiently balanced greatly influences its reception, satisfaction, churn rates and success. In particular, different ideologies of balance can lead to worse player experiences than actual imbalances. This work succeeds a fine-grained investigation about the attitudes of the Guild Wars 2 community regarding balancing factors, and introduces a player-driven quantitative tool to approximate closer configurations of balance that could optimize player experience and satisfaction. After an initial evaluation, theoretical constellation outputs of this tool improved players’ perception of the balance between in-game build options – where aggregated opinions of (n = 64) players even showed benefits over individual opinions, indicating a potential “wisdom of the crowd” effect.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | CHI PLAY Companion '23 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Companion Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play |
| Editors | Jim Wallace, Jennifer R. Whitson, Beth Bonsignore, Julian Frommel, Erik Harpstead |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Pages | 187-195 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9798400700293 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 6 Oct 2023 |
Publication series
| Name | CHI PLAY 2023 - Companion Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play |
|---|
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 Owner/Author.
Keywords
- Video game balancing
- player-centric development