GWENT'S DESIGN 02: BALANCING

+


Welcome to our article series on the Design of GWENT. Regularly, we’ll dive into the big concepts that make GWENT, design philosophies and other appropriate topics. We encourage you to reach out on topics you would like to see being dissected in this column!

From the beginning of GWENT, one of its key differences with the competition has been its willingness to do balance patches and evolve its mechanics. Today let’s delve into these monthly installments that rhythm the life of the game and of the community, why and how they’re made.

First of all, we need to go on a tangent and talk about “metagame”. You might have heard of “META” as an acronym for “Most Efficient Tactics Available”. While a sweet explanation, it’s actually a case of backronym. Instead, metagame is formed with the prefix “meta”, of the Greek “beyond”. “Metagame interactions” for instance are interactions with your opponent that take place outside of the explicit rules of the game, like thrash talking to disturb your opponent or in GWENT when you emote with only one card in hand in hope that your opponent will forfeit as that last card otherwise wouldn’t be enough.

But more often, metagame used alone refers to the way a game is played at a specific time and in a specific community. The first part is obvious enough, with time the way a game is played changes as people find new strategies, get better or adapt to previous strategies, even if the game itself doesn’t change.

For the second, imagine you’re playing a physical card game and you’re going every week to your local shop to play. There, there are 10 to 20 regular players. Out of these, more than half are casual players drawn to flashy strategies, a quarter are competitive players and the rest is made of experimenters and people that want to make a specific deck work at all cost. Now you could play an “optimal” deck derived from discussions on the internet over the last international tournaments, but you would only get the best results if you adapted to the specific environment you find yourself in. Like bringing a wide deck on purpose because Johnny has an unhealthy love for Geralt of Rivia and other tall removals. Playing a “suboptimal” strategy because it’s actually the one that brings the best results in the situation you find yourself in is what Frank Lantz calls the “Donkey Space” coincidently.

Thing is, while the scaling up and absence of boundaries that the Internet offers (especially when automatic matchmaking is available) does tend to smoothen the effect for digital games, this effect still exists. One of the best examples of it has been the first international tournaments for League of Legends. Due to playing on different servers, the European and American communities had developed very different metagames with different roles spread and different champions being favored. The results of these initial clashes resulted in the European way prevailing which eventually led to a harmonization of standards between the regions. Still what is greatly interesting is how two communities which shared languages (English) and even places of discussion (Reddit, the game’s forum, etc…) were able to diverge so much in the way they played the game in the first place.

Another example is the way the neural network artificial intelligence OpenAI plays DotA: far from the classic moba metagame of having different roles with different priority regarding income, it played in a fluid objective centric manner, spreading coins evenly between the different players so that everyone would be efficient in fights. While these results are mitigated by the amazing coordination of the AI and developmental bias that may prevent metagame like the one played by the players from appearing due to the huge evolutionary steps it would require, it still raises the question: since it’s winning, is the AI playing the game the proper way? After all, the tendency of Starcraft II’s neuronal network AI AlphaStar to overload its bases with workers (to make them more resilient to attacks at the cost of a decreasing efficiency) made its way into players' playbooks.

What I want to highlight here is a crucial element of metagames: they are up to players’ subjectivity. A metagame is made of players' perceptions, a mish mash of influences from what they’re playing against, the community they partake in, the players they are influenced by, what they love playing, etc… The objective state of the game has of course an influence on it, but a metagame will always be at most an interpretation of how to best play the game. Populations over the Internet are also more split than one would expect. Different ranks, different time zones and different habits heavily affect the population of players you might run into by queuing up. As for opinions on the game, language barriers but also even the streamers one might watch or the discussion places one might go to also have huge influences. Meta reports are a good example, decklists and opinions vary even though the players making them are of relatively similar communities.

This long introduction leads me to the “why”: the point of making balance patches is to make the game more enjoyable. To this, balance is a means, but not an end.

Typically the easiest way to bring balance is through symmetry: if all players have access to the same options at all time, there’s no concern for balance. However, the popularity of asymmetrical gameplay proves the interest there is in exploring different options and the replayability it provides, albeit to the cost of having to attempt balance on an ever so tilting ground.

Another point is that balance does not necessarily give information about the gameplay. Picture a meta with three decks in an absolute Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship. While the game would be balanced from the perspective of the average win chances, gameplay would be pretty unsatisfying if you knew with absolute certainty from the start of the match if you would win or lose. Instead, we have to try to reduce the polarity in all matchups so that every match feels “fair” to a reasonable degree, although covering all cases can be very hard. And even in a fair match, it’s not guaranteed for the gameplay to feel fulfilling. Winning can feel unsatisfying if you felt like you didn’t have a say in how the match went, just like losing can still feel good in a tense match. This is typically the kind of problem some players had with the old Viper Witcher Alchemist (or rather its accessibility in Gorthur Gvaed), as the card wasn’t necessarily strong on average but could feel quite frustrating for them.

As so, more often than not players' perception and how changes may affect it is actually what we’re really concerned about. For example, say there was a game with a deeply overpowered option apparent through data but which the community perceived as underpowered. Nerfing it would probably come at the surprise and disbelief of said community. In fact, we often see discrepancies between our data and what players might perceive as strong and weak, though the topic of the usage of data in balancing is complex and would deserve its own article.

The choice of doing balancing isn’t even obvious by itself. If developers step in every time a community isn’t happy about something it might lead to the community being less willing to adapt and find answers to the state the game finds itself in. Sometimes giving time to something is enough to see its impact and perception change as new strategies are found and a better understanding is reached (one of our most famous blunders in that regard was the buff to Viper Witcher Mentor in 8.2 which, due to the inherent delay between the patch being locked and delivered, arrived 10 days after the deck had finally been figured out).

The desire for less frequent balance patches isn’t a rare opinion among players, especially in the community of fighting games where balance patches are historically very spread apart and can have devastating consequences in the way a character feels or must be played. There are of course differences between fighting games and card games. In general, a good rule of thumb is that the more player agency the game offers (meaning the more the outcome of the game can vary depending on the player's decisions), the more players are able to adapt and as such the more time they should be left with to explore the game’s balance.

More generally, a game changing too fast can be overwhelming for players while a game changing too slowly can be boring. And of course, this perception of fast and slow is completely different from one player to another, making it a difficult balance to strike.

Which leads me to my next topic: communities are not single blocs. In the same community, wildly opposing opinions are usually expressed making it hard for developers to distinguish a unique “truth” (because it usually doesn’t exist and things are always more subtle). Even when there seems to be consensus in the community, it can be hard to measure how much of the community actually agrees with that opinion. It’s no secret that people tend to be more vocal when they are dissatisfied, so while complaints about a specific thing might represent the community’s views to a degree and even influence the perception of other members of the community, there usually exist people which believe that same thing to be fine but don’t feel the need to express it. Quite often, addressing a balance complaint tends to make the opposite opinion appear, with players being dissatisfied that what they were playing and enjoying was changed.

Which raises the question, if a deck or a faction is despised by a part of the community (hello Nilfgaard!) but loved by another part, should it be addressed? Sometimes the answer is obvious, an overpowered card might be fun to play but everyone can agree it makes the game overall worse. But it can be a pretty tough call to make in other situations, especially as the approach of maximizing happiness can just end up having everyone be mildly dissatisfied as it's sometimes discussed in philosophy.

When you’re annoyed at a specific deck or strategy, it’s important to remember there probably also are players that enjoy playing it. This is why our nerfing approach tries to be non-destructive: not only a nerf will always make some people unhappy, but if the deck ends up disappearing we’ve also hurt the game’s diversity.

We don’t always manage to achieve this however, especially as we tend to suffer from “nerf bias”. Changes are perceived more strongly than the actual state of things, so a card that received an important nerf can be abandoned even though it might still be quite good (League of Legends even had cases of announcing a nerf to a character, forgetting to include it and then observing the character’s play rate and win rate go down nonetheless). It can then take a while before players start experimenting again with it and “rediscovering” it, for instance, Viy disappeared after the 8.2 nerfs but ended resurfacing for a bit 2 months later.

The opposite can also happen interestingly. Nerf perceived as ineffective tends to be disregarded and not affect a card playrate even though the win rate does suffer. Provision changes are a good example of this: while a card becoming more expensive tends to be brushed off as “just needing to downgrade a bronze card”, it does mean the deck is weakened in some scenarios. In the long run, it amounts to a loss of a few percentage points, which in an environment where it only takes about 5 or 6 percentage points above 50 for a card to be considered very good can mean a lot. But these are just statistics and it doesn’t do much to the player’s perception.

At the same time, we’ve had a lot of past examples of singular provision changes having massive impacts: Maxii Van Dekkar’s buff in 8.2 had the card go from being considered as something that would never work to an icon of competitive decks, Eist Tuirseach’s nerf in 9.0 led to a disappearance of Warrior decks, etc…

Jackpot is also an interesting case. Following its rework in 9.0, it was at 16 provision and dominated the faction. A 1 provision nerf in 9.1 impacted it but still left it dominant, and it pretty much disappeared after a 2 provision nerf in 9.2… Only to resurface in 9.4 following the nerf to Tunnel Drill and eventually took over the faction again. Since Price of Power had a pretty quiet impact on Syndicate at the time, it goes to show how much the perception around this leader ability evolved. It also raises the question, if it had been released at 13 or even 12 provisions right away, would it have been tried?

Trying to predict the effect of changes in a massively interconnected system is already a hard task, but accounting for players’ perception makes the entire thing an even tighter fit.

If small nerfs can easily trigger massive perception shifts, we’ve learned that buffs tend to be the exact opposite. When nerfing a deck, players usually have an idea of how strong it is since it's played and as such it is possible to project oneself on the impact of the nerf. But since buffs usually happen on non or underplayed archetypes, the current state is way more unknown. Figuring if some cards are worth playing after a buff requires time and dedication so it’s understandable that most players won’t bother if the buffs don't feel impactful to them.

This is the reason behind our recent orientation toward delivering buffs as archetype focus. This way of working allows us to deliver more ambitious changes, but most importantly grouping these buffs and changes in this way makes them feel more exciting to try and experiment with, giving them a novelty factor. This leads to a decent portion of the player base trying the focused archetypes. And even if they end up feeling too weak in the long run, they still got on everyone's radar and provided us with great information to further improve their state in the future. This approach does however sometimes lead us to delay deserved buffs to instead deliver them at a time where we feel like they’ll be the most exciting and be the most impactful.

To finish this article on balancing and players’ perception, I find it important to remember that accounting for players’ perception doesn’t necessarily mean that the community is “right”. Over the course of the article I’ve shown multiple examples of how a community's perception of a game might be biased, but here I want to talk about a broader design principle: users are very good at identifying how they feel, but often misidentify why and give undesirable solutions. And it’s quite understandable, these kinds of analyses are complex and we also don’t always get them right, hence the importance of self-doubt in design.

Probably one of the most famous examples of that principle in video games was how the Thompson from the allied side in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was considered better than its equivalent from the axis and should be nerfed, even though the game was actually symmetrical. It even was backed by data, with players performing better with it. Developers ended up identifying the beefier sound effect of the Thompson as part of the problem. It made the weapon feel stronger which led to players playing more confidently in turn giving them better performances. Tuning the sound effects mostly resolved the issue.

Like so, in GWENT we often see suggestions that are inadequate at solving the issue at hand or create more issues by themselves. For instance, following Milva: Sharpshooter release in 9.6, a common suggestion was to lock her behind Devotion. This presented multiple problems as it only answered some of the decks in which the card was ran (and not necessarily the strongest), heavily restricted the diversity of decks in which the card could be played (which wasn’t what we desired for it) and wouldn’t address the perception when faced against it as the Devotion condition tends to be disregarded by players (a topic we’ll explore another day).

Another example is suggestions such as giving better control tools to Wild Hunt, Dwarfs or Congregate, or giving all factions a Purify, etc... While these might indeed help archetypes in the short term, we believe that it is very important to preserve factions/archetypes identity by giving different weaknesses and ways they’re played, balanced through proper strengths of course. Historically we haven’t been the greatest at it, older designs often used patterns across factions which gave them all access to similar tools, but it’s something we’ve been working on as we believe the game is more interesting with a wide range of deck identities, though it does mean the process of properly building an archetype gets more difficult and can require us to rethink its identity multiple times.

These, along with the design principles developed in this article explain why we don’t always take the direct route to balance a card. Surrounded by diverse and conflicting opinions, we have to identify when (and how) we should make changes, and when we should believe in our opinions, with the objective of having the game be the best it can be.
 
Last edited:
Are you going to post those articles in other languages? (like portuguese).

Also, the brazilian fórum have a bug that Everytime i change to brazilian i went to The Cyberpunk Page in inglish
 
Certainly a really interesting article. I agree that factions should stand out among each other, and not merely be different types of copies with a different color and art. I also understand that balancing different factions can be a real hassle, as balances will have to fit into the idea of the faction and future balances too.

That said, I think it would be nice for "sub factions" to have different strengths. This is done quite well with the dwarfs relying greatly on armor for instance. But it could also be done with other "sub factions" like the Wild Hunt. In the monster decks, it makes sense that Dominance is the name of the game. After all, in nature it usually pays of to the bigger and larger than your prey. But the Wild Hunt is not nature, and its Dominance focus is a bit questionable. Instead the Wild Hunt should revolve mostly around the White Frost, which some of the cards already do.
 
I like how you guys talk about don't want the game be like Rock-Paper-Scissors while doing the opposite.
Aerondight literally decide whether it is a 30 for 9 or 0 for 9 by a coin flip.

All the Nekker deck feel like the same and is very boring to play against, why focus on point slam neutral but not devotion?

Feel like the game is not getting better and seems like you guys want to do less balance change, good luck on that.
 
That article is far away from truth, and author is - in my opinion deliberately - writing about many minor, unimportant things while avoiding the real root of whole gwent balancing issues, what is way of gwent very bad monatization system that has tremendous impact on balancing.
With every new expansion the cards are deliberately much stronger, and therefore many existing cards became obsolete, so the archetypes that players got used to play with became incompetitive and they are forced to frequently buy new cards - even if they unnecessarely like that new cards for they design - just to have any reasonable chances against powercreep. The best prove of that are hundreds of usless cards in gwent, that could be easily revived by slight boosts of reworks instead of creating new cards (what is much easier and cheaper to do) but there is no interest in that from devs team at all.
What is even worse, players are force to change all decks and archetypes that they got used to every 3-4 months. For players that don't use netdecks but like to create decks on they own instead it is almost impossible to do it well so frequently and very flustrating, and therefore in the end of the day You or play meta/youtube decks, or don't have usually chances at all (especially if You want to play 4 factions or more simultaniously, what was main reason why I stopped playing gwent some time ago).
There is nothing wrong in taking care of company cashlow, but not in that way. New expansions and balance changes should introduce new interestings way of play, archetypes, cards and mechanics, without being stronger by deliberate design and without pushing by that into uslessness many other previously strong archetypes . But to do that the game monetization system must be changed at first, and the appropriate approach to balance will follow.
Moreover there are many succesfull card games, much more successfull than gwent, that shows possibilities to do that - just like for example clash royale, where you are paying for upgrading existing cards to make them strong, instead of neccessity of buying new stronger ones - and thanks to that You can play your favourite cards and decks for a long long time competitively If You wish to do that, and the devs earns they fair share - win win for both developers and players. And it is just one of many examples. So, it is doable. But unfortunatelly if there is no will, there is no way too - and elaborated PR articles about everything and nothing thrown into public from time to time like that one won't change it.
 
Last edited:
Excellent analysis. I appreciate the points made here. Love Gwent and the gwent team. I also agree people who are dissatisfied tend to say more.

But I absolutely love the game. I am just under 4000 hours. So excited to see what else the team has in store for us!
 
@Jan_Szybawski_KRK Why is Gwent 'bad monetization'? I've been playing Gwent for about 2yrs - about 1700hrs - I've never bought a keg, I've never bought any meteorite powder in all that time. I have crafted every card from what I've earned in the reward book, I have crafted every common and rare premium and I'm half way through the Epic cards - all without spending any money.

Gwent has changed a lot in two years - but I think it's still changing for the better.

One of my favourite decks is a Firesworn Devotion deck that I created 18 months ago - it has barely changed in that time - it's my most successful deck still.

I watch a lot of pro players - Lionhart, Shinmiri spring to mind - they're excellent at finding new synergies with older and newer cards. I don't have their analytical/strategic mind and I still struggle to advance beyond Rank 5, but I enjoy taking their decks and putting my own spin on them.

I'm already seeing a drop-off in Golden Nekkar decks that I'm playing against and a new normal seems to be being established.
 
@Jan_Szybawski_KRK Why is Gwent 'bad monetization'? I've been playing Gwent for about 2yrs - about 1700hrs - I've never bought a keg, I've never bought any meteorite powder in all that time. I have crafted every card from what I've earned in the reward book, I have crafted every common and rare premium and I'm half way through the Epic cards - all without spending any money.

Gwent has changed a lot in two years - but I think it's still changing for the better.

One of my favourite decks is a Firesworn Devotion deck that I created 18 months ago - it has barely changed in that time - it's my most successful deck still.

I watch a lot of pro players - Lionhart, Shinmiri spring to mind - they're excellent at finding new synergies with older and newer cards. I don't have their analytical/strategic mind and I still struggle to advance beyond Rank 5, but I enjoy taking their decks and putting my own spin on them.

I'm already seeing a drop-off in Golden Nekkar decks that I'm playing against and a new normal seems to be being established.
Well yourself answer your question in The beggening.

The problem of bad monatization is that, they cant sell so many cosmetic so they need to try to sell New kegs.

So since everyone has already a full set of cards, every New card should be a "must have card" so People will buy kegs to have it.

But, in fact, veteran players has so many scraps that we dont need to buy it, but problably New players will have to
 
Thank you for sharing these behind-the-scenes looks at the rationale and decisions you make about the course you take with developing Gwent. I may disagree with some of the contentions you make - vigorously in some cases - but now I know that you acting with purpose with a coherent philosophy rather than the idea that you are making things up out of thin air with no understanding of player desires at all.

Please continue writing and posting these missives. If for no other reason than now I can aim my complaint at the real things you are doing and thinking rather than the ones I might conjure up on my own. ;)
 
Are you going to post those articles in other languages? (like portuguese).

Also, the brazilian fórum have a bug that Everytime i change to brazilian i went to The Cyberpunk Page in inglish


Welcome to our article series on the Design of GWENT. Regularly, we’ll dive into the big concepts that make GWENT, design philosophies and other appropriate topics. We encourage you to reach out on topics you would like to see being dissected in this column!

From the beginning of GWENT, one of its key differences with the competition has been its willingness to do balance patches and evolve its mechanics. Today let’s delve into these monthly installments that rhythm the life of the game and of the community, why and how they’re made.

First of all, we need to go on a tangent and talk about “metagame”. You might have heard of “META” as an acronym for “Most Efficient Tactics Available”. While a sweet explanation, it’s actually a case of backronym. Instead, metagame is formed with the prefix “meta”, of the Greek “beyond”. “Metagame interactions” for instance are interactions with your opponent that take place outside of the explicit rules of the game, like thrash talking to disturb your opponent or in GWENT when you emote with only one card in hand in hope that your opponent will forfeit as that last card otherwise wouldn’t be enough.

But more often, metagame used alone refers to the way a game is played at a specific time and in a specific community. The first part is obvious enough, with time the way a game is played changes as people find new strategies, get better or adapt to previous strategies, even if the game itself doesn’t change.

For the second, imagine you’re playing a physical card game and you’re going every week to your local shop to play. There, there are 10 to 20 regular players. Out of these, more than half are casual players drawn to flashy strategies, a quarter are competitive players and the rest is made of experimenters and people that want to make a specific deck work at all cost. Now you could play an “optimal” deck derived from discussions on the internet over the last international tournaments, but you would only get the best results if you adapted to the specific environment you find yourself in. Like bringing a wide deck on purpose because Johnny has an unhealthy love for Geralt of Rivia and other tall removals. Playing a “suboptimal” strategy because it’s actually the one that brings the best results in the situation you find yourself in is what Frank Lantz calls the “Donkey Space” coincidently.

Thing is, while the scaling up and absence of boundaries that the Internet offers (especially when automatic matchmaking is available) does tend to smoothen the effect for digital games, this effect still exists. One of the best examples of it has been the first international tournaments for League of Legends. Due to playing on different servers, the European and American communities had developed very different metagames with different roles spread and different champions being favored. The results of these initial clashes resulted in the European way prevailing which eventually led to a harmonization of standards between the regions. Still what is greatly interesting is how two communities which shared languages (English) and even places of discussion (Reddit, the game’s forum, etc…) were able to diverge so much in the way they played the game in the first place.

Another example is the way the neural network artificial intelligence OpenAI plays DotA: far from the classic moba metagame of having different roles with different priority regarding income, it played in a fluid objective centric manner, spreading coins evenly between the different players so that everyone would be efficient in fights. While these results are mitigated by the amazing coordination of the AI and developmental bias that may prevent metagame like the one played by the players from appearing due to the huge evolutionary steps it would require, it still raises the question: since it’s winning, is the AI playing the game the proper way? After all, the tendency of Starcraft II’s neuronal network AI AlphaStar to overload its bases with workers (to make them more resilient to attacks at the cost of a decreasing efficiency) made its way into players' playbooks.

What I want to highlight here is a crucial element of metagames: they are up to players’ subjectivity. A metagame is made of players' perceptions, a mish mash of influences from what they’re playing against, the community they partake in, the players they are influenced by, what they love playing, etc… The objective state of the game has of course an influence on it, but a metagame will always be at most an interpretation of how to best play the game. Populations over the Internet are also more split than one would expect. Different ranks, different time zones and different habits heavily affect the population of players you might run into by queuing up. As for opinions on the game, language barriers but also even the streamers one might watch or the discussion places one might go to also have huge influences. Meta reports are a good example, decklists and opinions vary even though the players making them are of relatively similar communities.

This long introduction leads me to the “why”: the point of making balance patches is to make the game more enjoyable. To this, balance is a means, but not an end.

Typically the easiest way to bring balance is through symmetry: if all players have access to the same options at all time, there’s no concern for balance. However, the popularity of asymmetrical gameplay proves the interest there is in exploring different options and the replayability it provides, albeit to the cost of having to attempt balance on an ever so tilting ground.

Another point is that balance does not necessarily give information about the gameplay. Picture a meta with three decks in an absolute Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship. While the game would be balanced from the perspective of the average win chances, gameplay would be pretty unsatisfying if you knew with absolute certainty from the start of the match if you would win or lose. Instead, we have to try to reduce the polarity in all matchups so that every match feels “fair” to a reasonable degree, although covering all cases can be very hard. And even in a fair match, it’s not guaranteed for the gameplay to feel fulfilling. Winning can feel unsatisfying if you felt like you didn’t have a say in how the match went, just like losing can still feel good in a tense match. This is typically the kind of problem some players had with the old Viper Witcher Alchemist (or rather its accessibility in Gorthur Gvaed), as the card wasn’t necessarily strong on average but could feel quite frustrating for them.

As so, more often than not players' perception and how changes may affect it is actually what we’re really concerned about. For example, say there was a game with a deeply overpowered option apparent through data but which the community perceived as underpowered. Nerfing it would probably come at the surprise and disbelief of said community. In fact, we often see discrepancies between our data and what players might perceive as strong and weak, though the topic of the usage of data in balancing is complex and would deserve its own article.

The choice of doing balancing isn’t even obvious by itself. If developers step in every time a community isn’t happy about something it might lead to the community being less willing to adapt and find answers to the state the game finds itself in. Sometimes giving time to something is enough to see its impact and perception change as new strategies are found and a better understanding is reached (one of our most famous blunders in that regard was the buff to Viper Witcher Mentor in 8.2 which, due to the inherent delay between the patch being locked and delivered, arrived 10 days after the deck had finally been figured out).

The desire for less frequent balance patches isn’t a rare opinion among players, especially in the community of fighting games where balance patches are historically very spread apart and can have devastating consequences in the way a character feels or must be played. There are of course differences between fighting games and card games. In general, a good rule of thumb is that the more player agency the game offers (meaning the more the outcome of the game can vary depending on the player's decisions), the more players are able to adapt and as such the more time they should be left with to explore the game’s balance.

More generally, a game changing too fast can be overwhelming for players while a game changing too slowly can be boring. And of course, this perception of fast and slow is completely different from one player to another, making it a difficult balance to strike.

Which leads me to my next topic: communities are not single blocs. In the same community, wildly opposing opinions are usually expressed making it hard for developers to distinguish a unique “truth” (because it usually doesn’t exist and things are always more subtle). Even when there seems to be consensus in the community, it can be hard to measure how much of the community actually agrees with that opinion. It’s no secret that people tend to be more vocal when they are dissatisfied, so while complaints about a specific thing might represent the community’s views to a degree and even influence the perception of other members of the community, there usually exist people which believe that same thing to be fine but don’t feel the need to express it. Quite often, addressing a balance complaint tends to make the opposite opinion appear, with players being dissatisfied that what they were playing and enjoying was changed.

Which raises the question, if a deck or a faction is despised by a part of the community (hello Nilfgaard!) but loved by another part, should it be addressed? Sometimes the answer is obvious, an overpowered card might be fun to play but everyone can agree it makes the game overall worse. But it can be a pretty tough call to make in other situations, especially as the approach of maximizing happiness can just end up having everyone be mildly dissatisfied as it's sometimes discussed in philosophy.

When you’re annoyed at a specific deck or strategy, it’s important to remember there probably also are players that enjoy playing it. This is why our nerfing approach tries to be non-destructive: not only a nerf will always make some people unhappy, but if the deck ends up disappearing we’ve also hurt the game’s diversity.

We don’t always manage to achieve this however, especially as we tend to suffer from “nerf bias”. Changes are perceived more strongly than the actual state of things, so a card that received an important nerf can be abandoned even though it might still be quite good (League of Legends even had cases of announcing a nerf to a character, forgetting to include it and then observing the character’s play rate and win rate go down nonetheless). It can then take a while before players start experimenting again with it and “rediscovering” it, for instance, Viy disappeared after the 8.2 nerfs but ended resurfacing for a bit 2 months later.

The opposite can also happen interestingly. Nerf perceived as ineffective tends to be disregarded and not affect a card playrate even though the win rate does suffer. Provision changes are a good example of this: while a card becoming more expensive tends to be brushed off as “just needing to downgrade a bronze card”, it does mean the deck is weakened in some scenarios. In the long run, it amounts to a loss of a few percentage points, which in an environment where it only takes about 5 or 6 percentage points above 50 for a card to be considered very good can mean a lot. But these are just statistics and it doesn’t do much to the player’s perception.

At the same time, we’ve had a lot of past examples of singular provision changes having massive impacts: Maxii Van Dekkar’s buff in 8.2 had the card go from being considered as something that would never work to an icon of competitive decks, Eist Tuirseach’s nerf in 9.0 led to a disappearance of Warrior decks, etc…

Jackpot is also an interesting case. Following its rework in 9.0, it was at 16 provision and dominated the faction. A 1 provision nerf in 9.1 impacted it but still left it dominant, and it pretty much disappeared after a 2 provision nerf in 9.2… Only to resurface in 9.4 following the nerf to Tunnel Drill and eventually took over the faction again. Since Price of Power had a pretty quiet impact on Syndicate at the time, it goes to show how much the perception around this leader ability evolved. It also raises the question, if it had been released at 13 or even 12 provisions right away, would it have been tried?

Trying to predict the effect of changes in a massively interconnected system is already a hard task, but accounting for players’ perception makes the entire thing an even tighter fit.

If small nerfs can easily trigger massive perception shifts, we’ve learned that buffs tend to be the exact opposite. When nerfing a deck, players usually have an idea of how strong it is since it's played and as such it is possible to project oneself on the impact of the nerf. But since buffs usually happen on non or underplayed archetypes, the current state is way more unknown. Figuring if some cards are worth playing after a buff requires time and dedication so it’s understandable that most players won’t bother if the buffs don't feel impactful to them.

This is the reason behind our recent orientation toward delivering buffs as archetype focus. This way of working allows us to deliver more ambitious changes, but most importantly grouping these buffs and changes in this way makes them feel more exciting to try and experiment with, giving them a novelty factor. This leads to a decent portion of the player base trying the focused archetypes. And even if they end up feeling too weak in the long run, they still got on everyone's radar and provided us with great information to further improve their state in the future. This approach does however sometimes lead us to delay deserved buffs to instead deliver them at a time where we feel like they’ll be the most exciting and be the most impactful.

To finish this article on balancing and players’ perception, I find it important to remember that accounting for players’ perception doesn’t necessarily mean that the community is “right”. Over the course of the article I’ve shown multiple examples of how a community's perception of a game might be biased, but here I want to talk about a broader design principle: users are very good at identifying how they feel, but often misidentify why and give undesirable solutions. And it’s quite understandable, these kinds of analyses are complex and we also don’t always get them right, hence the importance of self-doubt in design.

Probably one of the most famous examples of that principle in video games was how the Thompson from the allied side in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was considered better than its equivalent from the axis and should be nerfed, even though the game was actually symmetrical. It even was backed by data, with players performing better with it. Developers ended up identifying the beefier sound effect of the Thompson as part of the problem. It made the weapon feel stronger which led to players playing more confidently in turn giving them better performances. Tuning the sound effects mostly resolved the issue.

Like so, in GWENT we often see suggestions that are inadequate at solving the issue at hand or create more issues by themselves. For instance, following Milva: Sharpshooter release in 9.6, a common suggestion was to lock her behind Devotion. This presented multiple problems as it only answered some of the decks in which the card was ran (and not necessarily the strongest), heavily restricted the diversity of decks in which the card could be played (which wasn’t what we desired for it) and wouldn’t address the perception when faced against it as the Devotion condition tends to be disregarded by players (a topic we’ll explore another day).

Another example is suggestions such as giving better control tools to Wild Hunt, Dwarfs or Congregate, or giving all factions a Purify, etc... While these might indeed help archetypes in the short term, we believe that it is very important to preserve factions/archetypes identity by giving different weaknesses and ways they’re played, balanced through proper strengths of course. Historically we haven’t been the greatest at it, older designs often used patterns across factions which gave them all access to similar tools, but it’s something we’ve been working on as we believe the game is more interesting with a wide range of deck identities, though it does mean the process of properly building an archetype gets more difficult and can require us to rethink its identity multiple times.

These, along with the design principles developed in this article explain why we don’t always take the direct route to balance a card. Surrounded by diverse and conflicting opinions, we have to identify when (and how) we should make changes, and when we should believe in our opinions, with the objective of having the game be the best it can be.
Awesome article. I'm a big fan of your design perspective and I trust you guys are top notch game designers
 
Are you going to post those articles in other languages? (like portuguese).

Also, the brazilian fórum have a bug that Everytime i change to brazilian i went to The Cyberpunk Page in inglish

As of now, I suggest you should select *English* in the language selection.
As far as I know, the problem of being sent to the cyberpunk page (even if you want to see the Wither page, for example) when *Brazilian* is selected in the language selection is also occurring on the Japanese board. To begin with, the Brazilian board is not divided into three categories as in the English, but integrated into this page as "Brazilian Comunity", so there is currently not much reason to choose Brazilian in the language selection.

And here is the Brazilian Portuguese version of this article:

Hope it will help. :D
 
As of now, I suggest you should select *English* in the language selection.
As far as I know, the problem of being sent to the cyberpunk page (even if you want to see the Wither page, for example) when *Brazilian* is selected in the language selection is also occurring on the Japanese board. To begin with, the Brazilian board is not divided into three categories as in the English, but integrated into this page as "Brazilian Comunity", so there is currently not much reason to choose Brazilian in the language selection.

And here is the Brazilian Portuguese version of this article:

Hope it will help. :D
Wow thank you, just read it and posted in that topic.

If its not ask too much, could you send me The first article too (dont worry i wont up the especifi topic, just read it). Since The first article i want to read it in portuguese but I forget to ask it
 
Thank you for writing this and sharing some insights, that I definitely wouldn't have considered before. I love these posts. Looking forward to more.

Regarding balance, it is always too easy to blame the devs, I have moments of frustration yelling "how is this allowed in the game?", then my friends joke "shit game", but I know it is most likely my fault not having discovered the correct counter. I still disagree with some combos, and their existence, but after a major tilt that left my hand and table hurting often, I asked myself "since when do you care about winning and rank? Play for fun, you enjoyed the game more when you didn't care" and created some fun decks, just to have fun. Well, not only I felt better and didn't dread the queue anymore, I actually gained a few ranks. Happy I steered clear of netdecking, what I do is replicate some nice plays that enemies destroyed me with and play around with cards (or characters) I love.

You're doing a great job and the cards are wonderful. I love Gwent and I am just starting.
 
I saw Burza's interview to Jean Auquier. The team doesn't consider aerondight polarizing and a coin-flip card, golden nekker is balanced thanks to rng, priestess is fine as it is now and ring of favour will probably stay untouched.

I don't understand why they are actively killing the game in its strategic aspect, feature that brought a vast pool of players here ( me included ).
Gwent is doomed.
 
I actually agree with this article 100%.

I have been playing GWENT since closed beta and to me the game has been very well balanced for the past 1 or 2 years compared to the beta even though many players express that the game is very unbalanced.

When mentioning perception in this article, I greatly agreed because there are some cards I think deserve a nerf but actually don't because I just want to easily prevent that card's ability from triggering by using the cards in my current main deck. For example, taking veil off Melusine. Doing so would make her an easy target for lock (which I really want) or to place doomed on her with Fortune Teller so my opponent can't bring her back from the graveyard.

As for the nerf/buff thing mentioned, I also agree, because I used to use Toruviel all the time in beta (when she was a trap card that boosted all units in the row she was in. Gosh how I miss that) and then I used her less so when her ability became damaging units instead of boosting them. Eventually I stopped using her completely. The moment she got that buff in the latest patch, I started using her again because her ability fits well with my deadeye deck and since people like row stacking, I find her a good solution of sorts. Similar thing with Schirru. In beta he was mega OP. I used him all the time and won so many matches because of his ability back then (trap: trigger when opponent plays a special, cancel ability of special card and scorch the highest units on the board) and I was really and truly upset at the giant nerf he got. It was a well deserved nerf, but I stopped using him because he isn't the kind of card I want to use anymore because I don't like his current abiliity and because he won't work in my deck.

As for feedback from players and changing the game based on what the players think is 'right' usually is a bad idea. I have experienced the result of such a thing with Dragon Age, Assassin's Creed and GWENT. With GWENT it was getting constant feedback from the community since it was in meta. However, it did cause the game to stray from it's intended path. I remember that being explained in the article released back when GWENT exited beta and Homecoming was going to be released.
Post automatically merged:

Thank you for writing this and sharing some insights, that I definitely wouldn't have considered before. I love these posts. Looking forward to more.

Regarding balance, it is always too easy to blame the devs, I have moments of frustration yelling "how is this allowed in the game?", then my friends joke "shit game", but I know it is most likely my fault not having discovered the correct counter. I still disagree with some combos, and their existence, but after a major tilt that left my hand and table hurting often, I asked myself "since when do you care about winning and rank? Play for fun, you enjoyed the game more when you didn't care" and created some fun decks, just to have fun. Well, not only I felt better and didn't dread the queue anymore, I actually gained a few ranks. Happy I steered clear of netdecking, what I do is replicate some nice plays that enemies destroyed me with and play around with cards (or characters) I love.

You're doing a great job and the cards are wonderful. I love Gwent and I am just starting.
I always play homebrew and casually play and could never get past rank 5 either however a part of me still wanted to reach pro rank. I had a bunch of people help me reach pro rank but it was with netdecks that I had to figure out or need help figuring out. I'm happy I reached pro rank with their help, but I prefer the feeling of playing my own decks that I don't need to figure out and I prefer playing at my own pace instead of spending everyday trying to win to reach pro rank. It's unnecessarily stressful.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom