A complaint about balance is a prediction#
SLOP2875 · Week 1
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“The boss is too hard.”#
That is not an opinion#
It is a prediction.
Nobody has written it down yet.
Every balance argument hides a number#
“Too hard” means fewer players get past this point than the designer meant.
How many? Out of how many?
An argument nobody can lose is not worth having#
One game, twelve weeks#
Close Quarters. A run lasts 120 s.
The first boss arrives at 40 s. Kill it within 26 s or the run ends.
You will not play it until week ten.
An opinion#
“You can skip the upgrades and still get past the first boss.”
The same thing, as a prediction#
A player who takes no upgrades is still alive after 66 s
in at least 1 run out of 15.
0 out of 15#
What it cost to find out#
15 runs
63 ms
Less time than it took to read this slide.
The semester#
- The measuring instrument
- Players and distributions
- Options and gates
- The edges of measurement
- Different players
Thursday#
Three predictions about Close Quarters.
Each with a number, a unit and a run count.
The one most likely to be wrong is tested in week three.
No playing.
Written down, it can be wrong#
That is the whole point of writing it down.
Week 1, in full#
The page for this week has the numbers and where they came from.