Where it packs up, 2018. How about that? You're talking about game balance, I'm sure. I guess people care about this because the room is full, kinda. Alright, sure, anyway. Game balance. I'm sure that everyone has seen threads like this around the internet. These threads go back to the dawn of time. Alright, this one I got a screenshot of is from 2014, but I've been seeing these from counter-strike.net from like 2000 and oh. If you've wanted to ban that AWP and guess what, it's 2018, still got an AWP, right? Here's some more threads, this is a more recent one. I like how that's the official one. Well, I mean, there were just so many that they had to combine it and be like, this is the one. Get it all out. Stop making it because it was literally the whole forum, just like 100 threads, right? But I mean, everyone here has seen threads like this, right? For whatever game it is that you're playing, right? Here's some more. This one is a really interesting one. This is from the subreddit call-up from For Honor. I don't know if anyone knows what that game is. I think the screen is actually high enough resolution you can read it. In MacFest you couldn't read this. Sorry, the text is small. But basically what they're saying is all the complaining about balance, please remember, this is a new genre entirely. I never played For Honor, I just assume. Alright, sure, it's a new genre, whatever. Street Fighter is still getting balanced. Street Fighter that's 25 or 30 years old or whatever, still getting balanced. And I guess that's true. Yeah, Street Fighter is really old and still unbalanced. Okay, so I've got to get rid of these threads. Every time I see these threads on every different game, everywhere, I feel the same thing. I just got to write and reply, but I want to put the same reply in all these different forums. And because I got the same things to say to all these different people, even though they're specifics of the different games are different, right? The general idea of what the deal is with how come these games are at balance is the same. So, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a YouTube video today, right? We're going to put this on YouTube like next week. And what everyone else to do is whenever you see the thread for whatever game it is that you're playing, some game I never heard of, post the link to this video as their reply, and we're going to get rid of these threads at least 10%. Now, unless they may disagree with us at the end of this hour. They may, in which case, alright. Well, in which case they're going to be posting their reply in our comments thread. Go ahead, I don't care, I don't read those. Alright, so yeah, this is going to be on YouTube. Put this link to this video as their reply. And people watching on YouTube, you're out there right now. This is my camera, right? You see, you're watching this now. Post this in your threads. Okay, here we go. Talk about balance. What are we balancing exactly? And this is not an easy question. We wouldn't put a slide up about it if this was like, oh, we're balancing the game, obviously. Yeah, what about the game are we balancing? Games are big. They have a lot of things going on. We're balancing the audio levels here, you know, stuff like that. So, you could try to balance for player satisfaction, right? That seems like a good idea. You want your players to be satisfied with their game, right? You don't have to be upset. You're like, grumbly, grumbly, making threads. If they're satisfied, they won't make threads, right? So should we be balancing for that? And while it's true that the people making those threads are unsatisfied, they're unsatisfied about something very specific. Alright, are we balancing? No, we're balancing for competition. Meaning we're talking about competitive games. Right. Well, games where someone is going to win. There are players playing against other human beings, and someone's coming out on top. That is the balance. Oh, my microphone is good. That is the balance we're trying to achieve, right? So that the competition is fair. Nobody feels like they lost because the game was unbalanced or something was unfair. They lost because the best player won.  That's true. Anyway, alright. First thing you gotta know, fun is the enemy. Now this isn't always true, right? Balance is an objective thing. We can, if we had enough math, determine this game is definitely balanced. But fun is subjective. Some people like a balanced game. Some people don't. But for the most part, people actually do not like balanced games. Balanced games are typically very unfun and very boring, right? Exciting games have lots of unbalanced things in them. Think about the board games you play where crazy stuff happens and someone loses in some weird moment at the end. Or at Munchkin. Games like that. People have a lot of fun playing those games. Not balanced, but very fun. So usually for the most part, fun is the opposite of balance. Also, spectators are the enemy. Any game that is really good to watch, really exciting, like you're watching it and you're having so much fun are games with lots of swings, ups and downs, taking the lead, losing the lead, right? Big blowouts occasionally. Yeah, that's exciting. Games that are balanced and fair are really kind of boring, usually for most people. Some people can watch say the New England Patriots just march down the field slowly and find that exciting and other people can't. Most people can't.  You're going to balance the game to make sure you make the most money by getting other people to watch the game. Those are two very different things. So if you are balancing a game or playing a game and complaining that it's not balanced, right? Think about these things because you might have to sacrifice fun and spectator enjoyment to achieve competitive balance and there's really no way around that. Yup. Unless people decide that they like boring things for a certain reason. Okay, I mean take the example of a modern gladiatorial arena. Right? Yeah. I'm just going to let that go. All right. So there's a recent study that like measured all the different sports in the world and I know people here probably aren't caring about sports. Like why? There have been so many sports references already. Get ready for more. Sports are games and they're great examples because sports are very old games and are very popular and have evolved over a long period of time. So games in general, video games, board games, everything else can learn a lot of lessons from pro sports and non-pro sports. But here's, this is like, this doesn't look like a real thing, but this is actually a study that showed, you know, luck on the left, skill on the right. Hockey has the most luck. Basketball has the least luck of the pro sports in the United States, right? And that's how much skill goes into it, right? But the idea is that games that are either less balanced or have less skill input because this is looking mostly at how much your skill input into the game affects your probability of winning the game. Games that have less skill input play, expectators often still think the games are high skill even though they're objectively and measurably not, and their enjoyment tends to lean more toward games that have more luck and randomness. Now this isn't to say that luck makes things imbalanced, right? But it is to show you that things that are more crazy and farther away from a balanced game where there's lots of swinginess are more exciting than, you know, tests. Okay, so we also got to discuss, we're only talking about multiplayer here, right? We're not talking about single player games, right? Who cares if you balance a single player game or not, right? It's only care about balancing multiplayer games because if a multiplayer game is imbalanced then there's an actual human being who feels that they have been wronged somehow. Like, oh, that wasn't fair to me, right? So I think Tycho, the person who sort of runs this convention or owns it in some way, right? Put this best when talking about cheating in Diablo. It basically said, by their own admission, Diablo is not really focused around a PvP experience. If you're playing with someone who has duped items or whatever, all it means is that you'll be more likely to defeat Satan. Without a means to gain advantage over another, cheating as a concept becomes substantially more opaque. Who is the cheated party precisely? Satan the devil?  I mean, this applies to fun and all these other things as well.  The AI does what it does to make the players have fun. Right, if Super Meat Boy is just too hard, it's impossible to beat. Who cares? It's not a big deal. It's if it's unbalanced, right? Mario Kart 64, if the cards you're racing against that the AI is controlling are going too fast, who cares? That's not a problem, right? It only matters to balance things for competition when it's between human beings so that all the human beings get a fair shake. We don't care if the computer gets a fair shake or not. And if you're against a computer, we don't care if you get a fair shake or not either. You can just play a different game that gets an easier computer upon it. All right, what is balance, right? So, not everyone's going to agree with this definition 100%. And that presents some alternate definitions later on as well. Right, but this isn't mathematically rigorous definition. But it's a definition that we're going to go with for the purposes of this panel because it lets us illustrate the points we want to make. And because you think about it, it's pretty solid, right? I mean, at the start of a game, whenever it starts, everyone has equal chance of winning. Ever all the players, right? It might be over the course of the game, someone's odds of winning increase and decrease until the end where someone's chances of victory hit 100% and everyone else is at zero. But at the start, as long as everyone's chances are equal, then the game's balanced. It's like, oh, you did end up losing the game, but it was because of something that happened during the game.  All right, so that seems fair, right? If everyone starts with equal chance, it's a balance game. All right, can you balance a game? Is it even possible? Street Fighter's still not balanced, right? Does anyone think it is impossible to balance games? No. Some people, maybe. I don't know. Not many people. All right, well. All right, here's a balance game. Rock isn't faster. I know it feels like rock is stronger. It feels like rock is better, but it's not. All of these options have an exact 33.3333% chance of winning and both all players involved have equal access to all the options, right? The options all require the same amount of skill to use. It's not.  But then we use a proxy hand, right? Obviously, right? I mean, assuming everyone can play rock paper scissors, it is a fair and perfectly balanced game, right? Also, might have pointed out, boring game, right? Balance game is boring. Yep. Okay, here's another balanced game. I can't really illustrate it for you. Does anyone know this game? Does anyone play Goochfield? Yeah. Okay, one guy. Wow. And even he is like eh. Yeah, so it's also known as GOPS, which stands for Game of Pure Strategy. It is the Game of Pure Strategy. If anyone wants to learn this game, go to Wikipedia and read the rules or come to me with a deck of cards and I'll teach you in five minutes, it's really boring. But basically, you use a deck of cards and everyone has the same options to bid on cards that are worth points and everyone has the same options, the same strategies. You start with a hand of one through 13 and you play all the cards one at a time. It's just which order do you play them in. Yep. But this is a game that is perfectly 100% balanced and only strategy and nothing else is involved and it's boring, right? But it does exist. And it's good. If you want to learn about game design, you should play this game at least a few times. There are other games that are more fun that incorporate Goosh feel is a recent two player board game called Raptor, where like one person controls Raptors and the other player controls, I guess archeologists or not archeologists. Paleontologists. Yep. Show us how smart I am. It's basically clever girl the game. Pretty much. There's another game called El Grande. It's like an older German board game with a lot of wooden cubes and that game also incorporates Goosh feel for it's turn order mechanic. Yep. So play those instead. Okay. Not football, coin toss. Coin toss. Even though it involves luck and even though one player in the game calls heads or tails and the other player just deals with the results, is still a balanced game. Assuming the coin is fair and the flip is fair, everyone has a 50% chance of winning at the start and it's a fair game. Okay. Even those luck involved. Okay. We don't care about those games. They're boring. We care about this. I mean, if you're already getting a little excited just thinking about what the answer to this fight is. Who votes for Superman? Anybody? Yeah. This is the same. Magfest had the same results. Everyone else is for Saitama. I feel like everyone raised their hand for Superman. Doesn't really know Saitama's deal. Oh, I guess maybe that could be it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Magfest all the hands were for Saitama so I did Superman this time. But yeah. This is what we want to see in games. We want to see like crazy asymmetric nonsense. You don't even know what the game is. How do you know they're not playing chess against each other? But just thinking about this is fun. You're having fun already just thinking about this which shows you asymmetric games that are not balanced are way more fun than balanced games. But just because it's asymmetric. Meaning that not everyone has the exact same thing at the start doesn't mean that it's unbalanced. You can balance this asymmetric game where not everyone has the exact same stuff at the beginning. Because all the other games you looked at so far Goofspiel, you know, Klointas no one has different stuff. This is different. Can we balance this? Most of the games you play are asymmetric. We want to balance those. So the first thing that makes games asymmetric is turn order. Here we have a game that's almost symmetric. Almost except someone goes first. Yup. And they remove an option from the second player so the second player actually has a different starting state from the first player. Everyone here understands that going first in Tic-Tac-Toe is way better. I don't need to explain that. Okay, good. Just not along even if you're not sure and just go Google it later. But the point is, how do we balance a game like Tic-Tac-Toe where going first gives a huge advantage in this case but there are other games where it gives even if a very small advantage some sort of advantage, right? One way to balance that out is have yourself a tournament. Have everyone play as the first player, the second player, the third player, the fourth player to make sure that everyone tries every potential iteration of the game.  You switch back and forth between white and black and you add the games together. And if you win some games going first and second, you're going to add up and do better than the person who only won when they had the advantage. Now that's not going to help you if you're just at packs and you want to play a game once with your friend. That's also not going to help you at Tic-Tac-Toe. Tic-Tac-Toe tournament does not sound like a good time. So another way to balance out turn order would be to compensate. So this is Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico board game, and what they do here to balance out going first and second is that whoever goes first starts the game with a little indigo here, right? And then the second player also has indigo, but based on how many players there are, eventually players start getting corn, right? And corn is way better, at least at the start of the game, because you don't need some kind of building to go with it. You can just start spitting out corn right away. It's also way better at the end of the game for reasons that I don't want to get into. Right, but the point is they tried to balance this game by giving players who didn't go first in the first round this corn as in, you know, sort of balance things out a little bit. It wasn't a perfect balance, but it is one way in which you could try to balance out this turn order deal. And you'll see this in a lot of board games, like the first player gets two money and the second player gets three money and third player gets four money. You'll also see a lot of these games will specify who the starting player is. And if you look at old German-style games especially, they'll often say the oldest player goes first. The youngest player goes first. They don't actually mean the oldest or the youngest. They effectively mean the most experienced or the least experienced.  They want the more skilled player to go first. So if you want to win games, read that sentence in the rulebook and act accordingly. The trend lately is to say things in the rulebook like whoever was most recently at C goes first. Something to do with the theme of the game in which case, lie and say you were at C recently. Or go jump in the sea and come back. Okay, another great way to balance out turn order is to change the turn order as the game goes on. This is Kalis and this is a little blurry part here. But as the game goes on, every turn, you switch up the turn order, right? Power Grid also does this. Agricola and a lot of other games will let you do an action to become the first player. You want to be the first player at the right time. Stuff like that. So you can see where this gets really complicated because most games go clockwise or counterclockwise if it's Steve Jackson, but usually clockwise. But they do that as a convenience so it's easy to track around the table. But if you're sitting to the left of a particular player who's playing a particular way, that will actually affect you and make the game possibly less balanced. So games that are more worried about having a balanced game will have the turn order be entirely independent of where you are physically sitting.  All right, so we just spent like four or five slides just balancing turn order and not balancing any of the other stuff involved in games, right?  Right? We just go first and we'll take turns. 20 minutes, no rush. Right, four or five slides on turn order. How many slides are going to take to balance this? And we've only got three races or classes here. And we only got 42 more minutes. Oh, my God. But yeah, this is the thing that most people are trying to balance, right? We want to have fun. We want to see who's, you know, mix and match. You don't always want to have it be Terran and Terran.  We want to mix it up. Everyone's got different stuff and we see who comes out on top, right? How do you balance this? Well, one way to not necessarily balance it, but make sure that all the options are good is this thing called the Pareto frontier. Yes, Pareto efficiency. Now we're not going to get into the math. We don't want to put you to sleep. Yeah, I'd like to say it. I don't want to, you know, we don't have time, but really we don't know it that well. But the idea is that you can map attributes of things like actions you could take in a game or characters you could take. And you can see, like, strength and speed. The example we've got right there. The idea is that if you map them all over the place, you can make this line of viability. What is viable versus what is non-viable? A viable thing is something where if you choose it over something else, you have to give some attribute up and you get some other attribute. There's a meaningful difference. All right, so this is, originally the Pareto was a guy studying economics and like whether it's, you know, these are prices you would set something at for efficiency and these are prices you would never set things at. Stuff like that. But anyway, you can see here, the Protoss are strong and slow. The Terrans are sort of in between. The Zerg are fast and kind of weak, right? Everyone knows this. I hope you know this. Right? So obviously all of these three are good choices, right? I mean, you know, you might, it might be that speed is better than strength in which case the Zerg might be more powerful overall in terms of which one you would choose. It's not balanced, but they're all worthwhile choices, right? But that is a very important point. Pareto efficiency does not mean that the game is balanced. It just means that every option in the game has a viable reason for it to be chosen. Right. So obviously in order for the game to be balanced, all the options first need to be viable, right? So let's try to add another race to Starcraft. We're going to add the Spathe. I don't know if anyone knows who the Spathe are. Right? The Spathe down here, the thing is the Spathe are below the frontier. Now, if you only consider the Terrans and the Protoss, yeah, the Spathe might be a worthwhile choice. They're faster than the Terrans even though they're weaker. But look, the Zerg are faster and stronger than the Spathe. As long as Zerg exists, there is no reason to ever choose Spathe. Why are they even in the game? If you pick them, you're probably just going to lose, especially if someone chooses Zerg. They're just worse. If you pick Dan Hibiki in Street Fighter, you can just pick someone else and be better, and there's nothing. Right. Now, what if we added another race to Starcraft? They got some Murfolk up here, right? The Murfolk are stronger and faster than everybody. And now there's no reason to choose anyone but Murfolk. Murfolk's forever. All these other three existing classes are completely useless. So forget about imbalance, whether speed is more important than strength.  We're going to talk about a lot of different game genres. This applies to decks and CCGs, characters and fighting games, races and RTSs, heroes and MOBAs. Going first, going second, going third. Any difference in the starting position in any game applies the same way. Right. Only here, Murfolk beat everybody. That's only with two dimensions, strength and speed. Imagine some MOBA. How many dimensions are there to a character in a MOBA? I don't even want to think about it. So already this visual representation, which was already pretty unscientific and highly subjective, is now literally impossible for a human mind to grasp. Yeah. We're not talking about balance yet. We're still talking about just making all the options viable and two dimensions, once we get those three, four dimensions, becomes absolutely impossible. And you want to balance how many heroes do they have with League of Legends now? Oh my God. And they all have hero powers that have different abilities, stunning people. Oh my God. It's really not sort of possible until computers can do it, which they can't right now. But even if we wanted computers to do it and we had the processing power, we have to be able to turn strength and speed into quantifiable numbers, and that itself is a challenge. So sometimes it's easy to balance something. I don't know if you've ever, if you haven't played Hearthstone, you can just see up here, it's obvious. This is a three-mono, one-four taunt. This is a three-mono, two-four taunt. They're both in the game. Why does this exist? It's just worse. Yeah, it's a beast, but this one's an elemental and that one's even way better. All of these are just obviously better than this one. Pretty much anyone. There's no reason for this to exist in the game. That's below the frontier. All of these are arguably maybe on the frontier, even though this one is probably the best. This could use that one, but not this really. In essence, there are a lot of reasons why there might be non-viable options in games. Partly because people might do fun things. They might not be playing to win. The game might not be that competitive. They might be used for other meta things like got pointed out, the random hero, a random card inserted into your deck by a power might be one of those suboptimal cards. It also gives unskilled, unexperienced players an ability to learn, grow, and optimize in the course of the game when they start to figure out why a card is better than another card. It also makes good cards feel like they're good. If everything in a game is perfectly viable on the frontier, then things can feel pretty samey. You'll never feel like a card is powerful. You'll never feel like it's different. So that's easy mode. It's hard mode. Right? Is this even within the realm of human capabilities ever to balance a game like this? If you have 10-zillion characters. Has someone even made a tier chart for this game? I'm pretty sure someone has.  I haven't played this since year 2003 or whatever it came out. But yeah, is this even possible? All right, let's see if it's possible. Okay, we're going to go back to our definition here. A balanced game is one in which all players begin with an exactly equal chance of victory. We want those fighting game characters that be equal chance of victory. Right? When does the game start? I'm going to make an argument here. I'm not going to say which side of this I believe in. I just want you to consider this. When does the game start? Most people would say the game starts when you say round one fight. So that no matter which character you chose, you should have an equal chance of victory. Most people would feel that that's right. But what if I told you the game starts here? Those are choices you made in the context of the game if Johnny Cage was just better than everyone else and you didn't click on Johnny Cage, that's your fault. You could argue that the game is balanced even if Scorpion is just way better than everyone else. You get annoyed that it's the first time you ever played this game and your friend who played it two times more just went get over here. Get over here. It's like you're so annoyed pick Scorpion and do the same thing. You're so annoyed. No one's stopping you. If you believe the game starts here, then Marvel's first Capcom 2 is already balanced. It doesn't matter if you don't have to tweak the characters or anything. Now you see games addressing this today and look at how a lot of MOBA tournaments work in terms of the character denial, the eliminations. The choice of character is part of the game now and game designers are recognizing that. And that sort of lets game designers off the hook because they don't have to balance the characters. If a character sucks, it's up to players to choose the right character.  We'll make weak guys, strong guys.  Yeah, Danny Vicky is just a trap now. So some people believe A and some people believe B. It's up to you. So because of this, the unbalance of characters, these tier lists have come about. And now the thing is there is a tier list that is true somewhere out in the universe. Some characters are just better than others and the tier list you'll find on the internet telling you which sieve to play in Civilization or which fighter to pick in Smash Brothers are kind of true because they're based on some amount of empirical data and reasoning and real world results at tournaments and things like that. But they're not 100% true. They're highly subjective. There's no real rigor in them. They're usually heavily biased by what the person who wrote them likes about a game. They're balanced based on which characters, people who are good and like. There might be someone out there who can take it down to Mario there. He's not a real doctor, don't trust him. And totally win all the Smash Brothers tournaments because they just figured out the secret of Dr. Mario and no one's figured that out. Yeah, it's possible. It's not likely, but it could be. But until then, Dr. Mario, you're staying out there and it's the E tier. Yeah, but we do have a good example around this. Yeah, so there was a recent article on Kotaku and I've read it. Someone complaining about tier lists and how they used Blanca. And Blanca was low on the tier list, but they just liked Blanca. And they actually ended up winning a lot with Blanca because A, opponents weren't used to Blanca. So it was hard to judge. Was Blanca actually winning because he was better? Or was it because other people weren't used to his spacing and things like that so he could mess up opponents? Was that person just better with Blanca? There weren't a lot of guides online about how to play Blanca. This person practiced with Blanca a whole bunch. He was able to extract more power from Blanca than other people just hadn't tried because he was too weird and annoying to mess with. So think of it this way. The tier lists that exist, even if they seem accurate or they're based on win rates in actual play, they're a feedback loop of the existing meta and the existing play. So if there is a bias in that initial loop, it's just going to keep reinforcing itself and everybody's playing Fox in the end. So I highly recommend reading this article. But yeah, if you believe that the game starts when you choose your character, you're going to want to figure out somehow for whatever game it is, which option is the best and pick that option every time if you want to win.  Okay, so here's another thing we got to worry about. Not just balancing the overall power and strength of the different characters and choices, but also how hard they are to play. Yeah, if you choose Ryu, he's pretty straightforward. Yeah, people these days know how to do a Hadouken. I can't do a Shoryuken still. It doesn't always work out. Yeah, I get like a 60% rate of getting the Shoryuken off. Yeah, anyway. But some people like to play Valdo. Well, no one chooses Valdo. You did choose Valdo. No, Valdo chose me. I just ended up being frequently good at Valdo, even though I'm not good at any other fighting game, because Valdo's hard to use and weird and you don't see him that often. I don't know what the current meta is. I think you like being the guy who plays Valdo. That may be true. Don't do that. But because Valdo is so much harder to use, Valdo had a lot of powers that if you pulled them off and you used him correctly, he was actually in a way kind of cheap, especially as people weren't used to him. So in essence, by leveling up my own skill and playing a more difficult character, I ended up having something that was unfair only in that context.  I made a little chart here. Oh, it was a great chart. The characters that are more powerful, the ones that have more strength, more speed, more whatever it is in your game should be harder to play. If you've got a character that's really, really hard to play, like the controls are all weird or the strategy for playing this magic deck is really complicated, right? Then that deck should be really strong and should win a lot of games. And if you've got one that's really easy, like, oh, I put one button and Fireball comes out, that should be a weak Fireball. It should do like two damage, right? So down here, we've got the useless land, right? This is where the characters that are too hard to use live. It's like, oh, this guy's so hard to use, but he's not strong enough, right? Why would you ever pick that character? You could pick someone who is just as hard and stronger. And over here, we've got the cheap land, right?  This is what they mean. They mean it's something really easy to do, like, get over here, get over here. Well, immoral comment, but it was more the duck in the corner, like, sweeping and never doing anything else. That's also a good one. I just sweep the leg of the other at Magfest a few times. It was great, because people don't know what to do. Yeah? But yeah, it's something really easy to do and it might not be the most powerful, but it's way too powerful considering how easy it is. You literally hold the stick and push one button over and over again. It should not be that strong, right?  It feels right. Harder things should be stronger and weaker things should be weaker. But if you have a competition with pro players, difficulty doesn't matter anymore. There is a skill ceiling to all games. It is the maximum skill input you can use. So if you really want to balance a game, like fully balance it, you have to look at what a test bot would do. What is a tool assistant? What is the best possible conceivable player in the universe would do with a character if they had perfect frame, perfect input at all points from start to finish of a game and assume that everyone is that skilled? Right. If you have pro players, people who are doing nothing with their time except playing video games, practicing and trying to win in this game because it's worth it for them to do this, they don't care how easy or hard the character is to use. They're going to find the most powerful character regardless of difficulty. If it's a really hard character, fine, they'll master it, right? If it's a really easy character, even all the better, it takes less time to master it, right? They will not care. So you cannot have it both ways.  You either need to have easy characters that are useless and not strong enough to be competitively viable so that new players can play your game easily or you can have all the characters be equally strong up at the top and certainly equally difficult, right? You can't have it both ways. So if your game is completely balanced and you're not balancing for difficulty, okay, sure, the pros are going to love this game. And if you make the game balanced where there's entry-level new players can have these easy characters, those easy characters will not be competitively viable and there won't be any reason to choose them. There'll be like five characters that are on tier one and that's it. And to see how crazy this gets, you know in Overwatch, Torbjorn, the turret guy, turds work differently in the console version of Overwatch compared to the PC version. PC version with mouse and keyboard has more opportunities for player skill input and it turns out that that turret, which is generally not competitively viable among skilled players, was way too powerful with the lower skill cap of the inputs on the console. So they actually had to change the way this character worked because of the skill ceiling. So most game developers out there when they're trying to figure out, you know, we already saw how impossible it is to balance things beforehand, right? There's just too many factors. You get a hyper cube going on, right? Most game developers try to look at statistics after they make the game to see if it's balanced. Do all these characters have 50% win rates? Ah, that means they're balanced. Ah, 50% win rate, this is great. Right? All these characters, no matter who they choose, they always win half the time. Therefore, none of them are too strong or too weak. Oh, 55% win rate? That's only a little bit. That's okay, that's fine, right? Yeah. You know, this is okay, right? Because obviously if something was in balance, you would be seeing characters or races or whatever with like 100% win rates or 90% win rates, at least when it wasn't a mirror match, right? But it's not perfect, right? 50-50 is not balance. This is balance. Balance is when the best player wins all the time. 100% win rate, right? Regardless of who they're playing against. Tennis works this way too. Notice how the same small set of people win year after year after year. As long as they're not injured. Yup. Oh, people actually got a sports show for once. Whoa. That packs. But yeah, a balanced game is where the things that happen during the game are what determine who wins and loses. Not the things that happen before the game, right? Which means the best player will win no matter what race they choose. No matter what character they play. No matter what deck of cards they have, right? The best player should win 100% of the time against weaker opponents. That's a balanced game. And that's not what game developers are looking for. First of all, how do you even know who's the Michael Jordan of whatever your Esport is or your board game is? You have to figure that out first before you can see if they have 100% win rate. So that's the first thing. So now here's the second thing. Is this balanced? If everyone in this room, if we decided to go out and have a foot race, and I don't think many of you would be into this, but we could do it, we all have the same chance of winning, right? We're following the same rules. Unless I cheat. So I gotta ask you the same question I asked before, right? Which is when does the game start? Does the game start when the gun goes off? Or does the game start here? And this doesn't just apply to sports.  So I'm just a lot better at video games than someone who didn't have that experience growing up. I start at a higher skill level and that's that. All right. So there's this imbalance of DNA. So we talked about when the game started. Did the game start even before you were born when the DNA came into your body, right? There's certain things like DNA as one example. We're going to get to more examples that you can't unbalance just within your context of your game. You can't put stuff into Overwatch to help people who, say, have worse hand-eye coordination because they're old like me. Oh, he's got the homzo gene. Right? There's nothing you can do about that, right? So there are some ways, though, that you can try to balance for DNA. One way is weight classes or the equivalent thereof in whatever your game is. Take an intrinsic property of the players and use that to match players against players who share that intrinsic quality. Right.  Muhammad Ali versus Mayweather. It's not even a discussion because Muhammad Ali made 100 more pounds than Floyd Mayweather. It's like, who would win in a fight? This laptop or an orange? Right. There isn't even a point in discussing that, right? Yet, in all board games and video games, we're not separating players at all. We're not separating them by anything, right? And they're all playing against each other. And sometimes it's fine for people to play against each other, regardless of any differences of DNA or anything like that. But sometimes it's not. Is it really okay for me to be playing Counter-Strike against someone 20 years younger than me whose arm is a lot faster than mine? Is that really fair? Should there maybe be some separation there? I saw recently those old people playing Counter-Strike. Yeah. Which is way awesome, by the way. When I should be playing against them, it would be fair. Right? But it's like, is it right that they have to go into the same exact Counter-Strike league? Even the PG has, like, a senior's tone. Now it's extra important. This can't just be an intrinsic property of the player. It has to be an intrinsic property that directly affects the outcome of the game. Weight classes in board games is just cruel. It is. It is. Yeah, anyway. So, remember I said intrinsic property? Well, the problem with video games is that there are very few intrinsic properties that we can measure. You can't, like, require players to submit a blood sample before they play Counter-Strike online. Right. And you say measure this by hours played, right? You know, say, oh, the people who played Counter-Strike more play together and the people who are just brand new at playing play together. Which works two ways, because more skilled people play together and old people play together. Yeah. So, me, who's been playing since 2000 on and off, ends up putting together with these kids who only played five years ago but have put in 24 hours a day and that's not so good. It almost works. Another thing happens is that this is something that you can change. You can change. You can make a new account and have zero hours played. Yup. All right. Zero hours played. Oh, what's going on here? Now, you see this with intrinsic weight classes as well. If you look at any boxing and an A, you'll notice that everyone in a weight class is one nanogram under the maximum for that weight class. Well, before the fight, they all decrease their weight as much as possible to get right under the weight class and then the next day before the fight happens, they drink a bunch of water and get back up to where they normally are, right? Because this is the weigh-in and whatnot. But players like Sperfig is a real problem in games because a lot of people, they don't want a fair or balanced game. They just want to win. And the easiest way to win is to play against those wood-tier kids at the bottom of the competitive ladder. You cannot fault the player for cheating this kind of system to try to win. That's what they're going to expect that they're going to do that and you have to work around that if you're going to use weight classes. And because it's not an intrinsic property, they're going to self-select into whatever avenue, whatever weight class they have the best chance to win. Now, some games, like Pokemon, both the video game and the card game, are doing some amount of weight-classing, right? And this is also for other reasons, not just for fairness, but also because you don't want like 40-year-old people playing Pokemon with 5-year-olds, it's not really this kind of creepy, right? But yeah, some games are doing it, but not a lot. The vast majority of video games, board games, nerdy games are not separating players and stratifying them in any way. In fact, a lot of the developers, publishers are afraid to do this because they think it'll split up their player base into different categories and they don't want to do that. They always want to have, this is the way, right? This is the category that counts. All the other categories are just side shows and everyone plays in this one category at the end. So, there should be more of this is what I'm trying to tell you. Okay, instead, what they like to do is matchmaking. This is where you're going to see in most of the games industry, this is what everyone's doing. There's algorithms you can just use. There's elo ranking, there's Microsoft True Skill. You can literally go and get libraries and do some work and just have your game keep track of player skill and balance matches. And it'll work okay. Yeah, it's not bad, right?  It has some problems we'll talk about in a second. Right, but for the most part, if you have a game with good matchmaking like we got Rocket League here, kind of strike, all the games of modern matchmaking systems, right?  Let me tell you, back in the day when you played games online and there was no matchmaking whatsoever, you just picked a server. I mean, it was a horror show. It was really bad.   Everyone's lumped in together. It's just like, does this game even count? What is even happening here? It was not good. Matchmaking is a big improvement. Do not take for granted the greatness that is modern matchmaking. Hopefully it will get even better.  There are problems, however, with matchmaking. There are very interesting things that occur when you perfectly balance player skills such that every game is a 50-50 chance. In that situation, you'll never feel like you're getting better as a player. Every game feels like the exact same challenge. Every game, you win or lose basically randomly, and even though you are probably objectively getting better and better and better, every time you get better, it just puts you against a harder opponent and you feel the same way. Think about the backs of my Michael Jordan example. Michael Jordan plays pickup ball. He'd go around town probably back when he was a kid, and he'd win, and he'd win. Every court he went to, he would just dominate, and he felt and he could recognize, whoa, I'm good at basketball, I guess. Yeah, maybe he went to play in college and people really wanted him to play. He could tell that he was good because he kept on winning. If you keep getting better and better and better at Rocket League, you're gonna see your rank go up, I guess into different bronze, silver, whatever. But you don't feel that you're getting better because you're always winning about half your games all the time and the matchmaking is always putting you in. Even worse, it reduces player stories and it reduces drama because even if a game is balanced, people like to see the occasional blowout because if you lose in a blowout, it reminds you of what's out there. This is what we talked about at the beginning of the panel, right? Enemy of fun, enemy of expectation, right? If you always have these match-made games with the 50-50 win rates, when's the blowout game gonna happen? That's super exciting, right? When's the game, even sometimes you get crushed. It's like when you're Roller One in your, you know, D&D game. That's a really great time sometimes. Player narrative is important. People tend to tell the stories of when they lost in an epic way more often than the stories where they won in an epic way. And if you remove that entirely from a game, a huge portion of why people enjoy playing games disappears with it. You need the epic things to happen and if everyone's always perfectly even-matched, it's boring and non-epic. My advice, if any of you are game developers, is to shoot for the 50-50 rate, but occasionally build in some cheating or some randomness into your match-making to just occasionally take a bunch of wood-tears and put them up against the Golden God and let him hanzo them all to death just so everyone gets to see what that looks like. Hey, the wood-tears might win, and then... If the wood-tears win, then all bets are off. Thank you for letting you can adjust your match-making accordingly. That hanzo's going down to the bottom of the place. Another minor flaw in a lot of modern match-making systems is that they only take into account winning and losing. They don't take into account anything else. So if I play Rocket League and I have the bad luck to be on teams with people who really suck... Which happens 100% of the time. All the time. And I score 10 goals a game, but my team keeps losing because someone on the other team scores 11 goals a game. Those two players on the other team who didn't do anything except watch 11 goals get scored, their rank is going to go up. Meanwhile, me, who's the second-best player in the game overall, I like to... You know, I lost by one goal, basically. My rank is going to go down. It doesn't recognize how good I am because they're not looking at goals scored or any sort of other individual metrics. They're only looking at win and lose. So if there's ever a team game where people don't come as a team together, you're going to get match-made slightly improperly which can add up over time with bad luck if you're on a team that wins when you don't deserve a win or loses when you didn't deserve a loss. There's a lot... You can see this in pro sports also. Lots of really, really great players on teams that just don't win. In fact, you see it pretty commonly in the way drafts work, the best prospects tend to go to the worst teams. Those worst teams don't suddenly start winning usually. And there's a lot of players out there who have championships like Tons and Tons of Rings because they happen to be on Michael Jordan's team worn at the bench. Yeah. That's that. Okay, so back to our little what is balance definition here just to remind you all. Equal chance of victory when the game starts. But really, what we're really doing here is that thing we also mentioned. The real goal of balance is to ensure and this is a definition from one way to rank players, one matchmaking system, Elo rankings. Elo was used originally in chess. It really only works for single player games. Two player games. Yeah, two player games or games where you can rank an individual person or a team as a unit. It doesn't work with ad hoc teams. But the idea is that every player gets ranks. Every player has a ranking and if you look at two players who are about to play a game you can look at their two ranks the percentage chance that either player will win. And it is shockingly accurate. So if your Elo ranking is higher than someone else's after enough games that the ranking becomes accurate. And we say, well, the person with the higher ranking should win and they do all the time that means the game is balanced. The better players keep winning. Ratings between the two players predict the outcome. We've measured who's the best and whoever's the best always wins. There's no weird chances for the weak players to somehow come behind. That means the game is nice and competitively balanced. There isn't some crazy luck factor unbalancing the game. There isn't some choosing of characters that makes one person win or lose. The better players win, the worse players lose. Your skill is what determines victory. It's a balanced competitive. Two nice things about this is that by ranking the players you can ignore game imbalances themselves. Whatever's wrong with the game the skilled players have figured that out and are playing accordingly. So you sort of wash that out and just focus on balancing the players. But the other piece of it is that generally skilled distributions tend to follow normal distributions. You know that bell curve that you see everywhere? So as a result the 50-50 thing happens everywhere meaning every match will be a 50-50 chance and then the extremes will be 100% chances. Alright. So handicaps these are one way of handling those ratings to make sure everything's nice and balanced. Handicaps are not used in... Like does anyone know a video game where a competitive board game has like handicaps in it? Like I don't... There's not too many. Someone knows one out there, right? I don't know a lot of them. But you know they're best used in games where you're not directly competing against someone else, right? Golf. Bowling. Right. These are games you're competing against yourself. You're trying to get better at golf, get better at bowling, right? It's not like, okay I play golf next to him or I bowl next to him but it's not like I'm bowling directly against him, right? But what handicaps do, they change what the competition is. So I'm competing against myself and Scott's competing against himself. Say I'm really bad at golf, which I am. I'm terrible at golf. So I have a huge handicap and Scott has no handicap because he's apparently talking about words. No, I'm not. But it means that if I do better than I expected based on my own experience and Scott does worse than he normally does, I win the match. We've changed the match to be who performed better than their baseline as opposed to who was better at golf. Right. If I play basketball against Michael Jordan and one-on-one, it's kind of pointless, right? But that's a directly competitive game. We're seeing who is better at basketball, right? If I play golf against Tiger Woods, it's not about who's better at golf. We know who's better at golf, right? It's about he's gotten worse at golf because he's old and got injured and I got better because I actually practiced and played golf for the first time in my whole life, right? Somehow I've improved. Therefore, I beat my handicap. He gave me 100 strokes or whatever. That's what I'm going to do, right? I was able to come back, right? The nuance here with these handicaps is that it allows two players a very disparate skill to play a game together and have a meaningful experience and a meaningful competition even though in reality they are so vastly different in skill but that couldn't otherwise occur, right? You can get rid of matchmaking if you've got these handicaps involved, right? Because it's a game where you play against yourself.  They can play together and have a good time without anyone getting upset. It'll be balanced and everyone will have fun. All right? So yeah, the problem with handicaps is when they go too far they get a little Harrison Bergeron situation. Does anyone know what Harrison Bergeron is? Like somebody. You should go read that science fiction story. It's a very short science fiction story. You should read Harrison Bergeron so you know what's up. But basically it's a sci-fi world where they try to balance all people. And so like Harrison Bergeron, like if your vision is too good they'll attach something to your eye that keeps like blasting a light into it so you can't see as well, right? Basically puts everyone to the lowest common denominator. Now, that's balanced but it makes for a really horrible and awful world. Well, what it ends up doing if you look at it mechanically from a game perspective, it removes skill input as a determiner of victory. So the game is literally a 50-50 shot. It literally turns every game you play into a coin flip because no matter how much better you get at a game there is no possible way for you being better to affect the outcome of the game. So the lesson of Harrison Bergeron is that if you're going to balance people somehow, right, with handicaps, you don't want to balance people down. You don't want to play against Tiger Woods at golf by giving him a ball and chain on his leg or his arm or something like that, right? I would watch that. That would be a good spectator sport. Sure, you could do that. But what you want to do is you want to lift the weak players up just numerically, give them extra score, extra points in bowling, something like that so that it becomes an even game, right? You don't want to give them like a turbo rocket arm either, right? So throw the ball faster. But just think then, handicaps really only work in games that are effectively you against yourself as opposed to you directly interacting with another player. And nerdy games don't use them and they shouldn't. Okay. It's another imbalance. Let's get to something that's probably pretty uncomfortable. This one doesn't feel great. Yeah. So a lot of games these days give advantages to people who pay more money. This is, I guess, Hellgate London that Penny Arcade made a comic about. I use a lot of Penny Arcade games at a PAX panel. Does anybody read Penny Arcade? Like you guys? Yeah, maybe. But anyway, right? So in a pay-to-win game, Bill Gates is the champion of all pay-to-win games. You can't beat Bill Gates. He could just buy everything and then you're going to lose, right? Same thing, I guess, in this game, right? If you bought more stuff. When we were in school, there was a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament where, basically, we took all the expensive cards at the game store, made the God Deck, Vanilla Coke, and it was played by a small 20-ounce bottle of Vanilla Coke that followed simple rules to play the deck. And, of course, it almost won the tournament. I think it came in second place, the Vanilla Coke second place Yu-Gi-Oh tournament. So that's a money-to-win game that Vanilla Coke was really rich. It had whole game stores worth of Yu-Gi-Oh cards to work with. To be fair, though, it was Vanilla Coke. Like, yeah. Right, the point is, right, how do you balance this, right? You can't, like, within your game of Monopoly, sure, everyone starts with $1,100 of Monopoly money. It's $1,100, right? I don't remember. Don't play Monopoly. Everyone starts with the same amount of Monopoly money, but people don't start other games, right? They start with the amount of real-world money that they have. It's just the reality of the world. We can't somehow shield our game from that, right? So, his one way to do it is his nice salary caps, right? Pro sports do a salary cap, right? Your team can only spend this amount of money on players, and have the same rules for every team. That way, no team just stocks up on all the best players by giving them a zillion dollars. How are you going to do that for a Magic the Gathering tournament? Because the money those players have is their real-life money from their regular day jobs or whatever. Well, their day jobs are not magic. Well, their parents' allowances. Right. Right? So, the thing is, this makes sense for pro sports, the salary cap thing, for competitive balance, but it really doesn't make sense for labor, right? Owners and team fans love salary caps. It makes the games more exciting, and the reason owners love it, because it means they have to pay players less.  Players hate a salary cap, right? Players, imagine if you went to your job, and you said, man, I really need a raise. It's like, sorry, the total amount of money we're paying everyone in the office is already at the maximum. We can't give out any more money. Why? Oh, because we wrote on a piece of paper. We got more money, but, you know, that's for us billionaire owners, not you billionaire players. Well, we agreed with our competitor that this is what we'd pay our employees. Right. So, the baseball is one of the only pro-sports still left that doesn't have a salary cap, because the baseball union is very, very, very strong, and the other unions are not as strong.  Can you tell we're from Queens? Yeah. Okay. So, here's another problem with money. How many of you grew up with a horse? Well, it's just Texas, maybe this horse people, yeah. Still not that many. There weren't any horse people in Max's. Do you think you have a horse that's capable of playing polo? Okay, nobody. Good, right? So, sometimes you just don't have enough money. You can't even play the game. It's impossible for anyone in this room probably to play polo, or most people. So, a VR game tournament at a PAX? How many people can even come to the table? Yeah, there are people who just can't play VR because they'll get sick, and as a tournament involves, like, well, they can't play that game, sorry. Yup. Right? And that's a big problem. Here's another big problem. A problem you might understand, right? Some people just got more money than other people.  The worst. Alright? It's BS. Alright? So, here's one solution that we're never going to use. Ever. Oh, and the poor kids play magic over there. Everyone who's got kids with top hats play magic over there. Everyone with at least 500 bucks in their wallet follow me. We're going to go play some Counter Strike. Alright? This is BS of these reasons. Do I even have to explain why this is wrong? It'll work. You'll balance the game somehow. No, this is wrong. We're never doing this, right? We're not going to say separate the rich people and the poor people to play a game separately. Everyone, regardless of how much money they have in life, should be competing together, right?  Scholarships? Yeah. I know words today. Right? Things like that to help out people, right? So we're not doing this, right? We could do this, but someone's not going to be happy about this. Now, you already can imagine the difficulties of doing something like this. If Magic the Gathering wanted to have a spending limit in tournaments, the value of cards change on an hourly basis. Even forgetting that. It's like, oh, everyone's magic deck must cost less than $100 total. Okay, even if the card's at stable values, Watsy is going to be pissed. No, at the same time. Oh, I've got my $100 worth of magic cards. I'm done buying magic cards. That would be really fun. I would play an imagine tournament. I would be so into that. Imagine there was like 20 bucks. That's what you get. You get to make four decks and we're going to play a tournament.  Right? Notice how Popper Mode is not and never will be the magic meant mode that counts. Right? The mode that counts is always going to be the one that's super expensive and you need all the awesome cards. Right? And that's on purpose. So, while we would like to do this, they're not going to let it happen. It's not realistic. Right? Sadly. Okay? What we can do, and there's not like a perfect solution to this, right, is we got to do something to help out the people who don't have a lot of money who are into games. I mean, like Ice Hockey is a great example. Not a lot of people in the U.S. I mean, down here, we're like south of the Messei line. It's teamer than polo. Right? True. It's teamer than polo.  You got to have this long pipeline of players and you want to have that pipeline come in from as diverse and broad an audience as possible. Right. So Ice Hockey as a whole, right, the whole sport of Ice Hockey, all the different organizations around the world from the NHL on down, recognize that if they can't get kids playing Ice Hockey, they won't have new players when the current players get old. They need to constantly be creating new hockey players that Ice Hockey carries on. And if people don't have enough money, well, they need to provide them with skates, with sticks, with pucks, with nets, with all this expensive armor, gaming PCs, a hockey rink, a giant sheet of ice that's really expensive and hard to get, especially in a place like Texas, I imagine. You don't have one of these around here? I mean, I want us to e-sports companies literally going to poor schools and giving kids gaming PCs so that's a thing that could be a hobby that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. I looked. Where's the charity that gives magic cards and Pokemon cards to kids who can't afford them so that they can win a Pokemon? It doesn't exist, but it totally should. It's super wrong, right?  It's all people from countries that have a lot of money. People who have a lot of money can afford gaming PCs on their own, right? People who have a lot of money and thus can afford the time it takes to be a competitive gamer in the first place. They got time as well as money, right? So we have to do more as a whole gaming community. It can't be me, sorry, but I got the idea. Someone else has to do this. If you do this, I will support you with my money because I just don't have the time. Give things that are expensive, things that are needed to enter into competitive gaming to people who cannot afford them so that they have a chance to. That becomes more fair, right? That's just money. Geography, race, gender, all of these other things, et cetera, et cetera, also in balanced games just as much as money does, right?  Well, there goes your eSports career.   All of these things could keep you out of gaming, whatever kind of gaming it is, and it's totally unfair.  We got to balance that. That's going to be my new thing. If I lose a game, it wasn't me. It was a defect of the womb. It's a defect of your DNA. That is why I'm at a counter strike. You can knee down again. Stay with my new cat. All right. Okay. We got two minutes left. We're awesome at timing, sweet. Yes. All right. Wheel of morality. What did we learn today? All right. Balance is hella hard. When you're complaining about this in a forum, at least take a second to remember this panel and think about how hard it actually is to balance even a simple game. Right. If you look back, it's like we spent the five slides on turn order and then we showed you the Marvelverse Capcom 2. Right. If it is your job to balance Marvelverse Capcom 2, guess what? Some of the players are going to suck. Your game is not balanced until you eliminate poverty. Right. It's hard. It's pretty hard. All right. So just keep this in mind when you're complaining to devs who haven't perfectly balanced a game and your favorite whatever option is not strong enough. Right. Okay. Who is the balance for? Not all games need to be a perfectly balanced competitive e-sport. Some games can just be fun. Yeah. Not you. We talked about enemy and expectation being the enemies of balance. Not every game is an e-sport. Right. Most games in fact aren't. We don't need to balance Marvel. Table top is a great example. Table top games tend to break down for all these reasons we've talked about. But the reality is most table top games get six to ten plays ever and you never touch it again. So it doesn't need to be that balance. You'll move on before you get that balance. Mr. Richmond over here has so many board games he only has to play them six to ten times. Most people only play games four times I want to say. Whatever. Yeah. The point is right you only want to competitively balance a competitive game. Most games out there if you're a developer especially you're trying to just sell the game concentrate on the fun and maybe the expectation don't have to worry about competitively balancing it so much. Right. As long as you get your options out there as being viable or fun it's OK. Don't go nuts if people are complaining just tell them yo it's not a competitive game. All right. OK. Developers although we recognize it is so hard to balance a game Microsoft true skill exists just use it right. There are things you can do to better balance your game right. If it is a competitive game you can do better than this right. How come players can recognize something is wrong with the game and then it takes you five months to put out a nerf patch right. Not only get on top of it but also be more open with the players right. The players can see something is wrong and they just hear silence from you right. There's no reason if you're only talking about balance and not like future releases or something like that this has to be secret you can just be public with your balance discussions right. And even if your balance discussions you know players might disagree with the things that you're saying like oh we chose this because of that they might not be happy right. At least they'll see that are going on right. They won't be able to complain as much if you're telling them yeah we decided to do this or we didn't put the patch after that. If you don't make a change show them the data saying yeah actually Diva is way overpowered not underpowered and here's the data and you're just wrong we're sorry right. And keep it all the other things you mentioned in mind right. Are you going to balance for the difficulty or are you going to balance for competition right. Are you going to make your game more fun recognizing that it's going to make it less balance and just accept that fact that it's going to be the easy week ones. It's like you got to let people know you're like yeah you're complaining that character is weak we made them weak on purpose right. Players keep your sour grapes out of here right. You know recognize all the things we just said if your character is not winning a lot because they're the weak easy one not every character can win. Yeah does the ALP suck or do you suck that's a question that you have to answer answer honestly which is hard you put this in here the last piece and we're done here if you are if you feel like a game is unbalanced and you're mad about it you the reality is your feelings are legitimate there is something wrong with the game that's making you unhappy you're also not a game design expert and you're probably wrong about why so say you're unhappy but don't try to tell game devs what to do because you probably don't know all right so I think we're done life isn't fair of course right we already went over that all right games game is a separate world from the real world we can do more to insulate it from the imbalances of the real world and the imbalances of its own world so that we can experience fairness when the world is full of unfairness and we're out of time almost one minute over we suck we usually don't go a minute over we should have handicapped ourselves a little bit we should have handicapped ourselves minus one minute anyway have no fear of perfection you'll never reach it enjoy the rest of your past we're done if you have questions about one of these email us we will really respond and answer your questions


Okay, so I just read The Gathering Dead, and it was pretty good. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. I wish I could say more, because this is my second review in a row where I just don't have a lot to say about a story, because both Skyward and this are pretty formulaic. Though I will say I like this one a little bit more than I like Skyward, even though it's slightly more outside my wheelhouse. So basically the plot of this one is zombies are attacking, you know, they're all over the world, and then at the beginning there's this group of special forces soldiers who are helping to try and evacuate New York City, you know, to try and get as many civilians and resources and all that as they can out of the city before the zombies completely take over.  Like I said, very simple. This is kind of like a military sci-fi-esque thing, like I don't know if that's the exact terminology I would want to use, but it's like that, or maybe something Tom Clancy would write, maybe, like I just don't know where exactly this would fit, but it's mostly focused on, you know, military types doing military things and being stuck in difficult situations, having to think slash fight their way out.  I don't think they necessarily need to in order to be good, and like I said, this one is, it is pretty good. The majority of the story is just things slowly getting worse for the soldiers, you know.  And this book does do a pretty good job of nailing down the dread of knowing that death is coming for you, and that you really can't fight your way out, you just have to find a way to leave. And that's helped somewhat by making the zombies a little bit more dangerous than normal.  And in fact, in The Walking Dead, at least in the show, a lot of the drama and danger is just caused by characters being dumbasses, so, you know, World War Z has kind of this problem too, but that book is clearly trying to talk about like societal issues that the zombie virus exploits. But then on the other side, you have zombies that are like, you know, fast or smart or something, and those are usually like so dangerous that it's kind of amazing that they didn't take over the entire world immediately. And there's stuff like 28 Days Later and The Gathering Dead, which manages to go on that line, which manages to walk the line between the two pretty nicely, where they're just smart enough and just fast enough to really be dangerous, and you can see how the government and people would get overwhelmed, and even if you're prepared, it's still dangerous.  And I know that might seem like a spoiler, but it really isn't, like at the beginning you do get indications that the zombies are smarter than they usually are portrayed in fiction. They know how to like climb over stuff and hang back from danger a little bit. So I thought that was interesting, and it did help make the story feel... Well, it helped with a sense of dread with the story. There we go. Words are hard. As for characters, I literally only remember one of them. His name was McDaniels, he was the main character, and there's very little to him, unfortunately. Like, he's mostly just a tough soldier dude. There's a little bit more than that. Don't get me wrong, like he clearly regrets some stuff that's happened in his past, and it talks a little bit about how he's a black guy in United States Army Special Forces, and that's pretty rare. There aren't a whole lot of other black people that work with him in his field. That doesn't inform that much about his character, but you know, it is there. And yeah, that's about it. As for the other characters, there's like this dude, the scientist, who is studying the zombie virus and how it works, and this is one of the other tough soldier dudes who doesn't really get along with McDaniels, and this is a tough soldier dude who does get along with McDaniels and likes him, and you know, they're mostly just archetypes. They never really break out of those archetypes, and they never even really develop those archetypes, if I'm being honest. So yeah, there's not a lot to them, but nonetheless, nonetheless, it is... They serve their purpose, you know, they're there to fight zombies and then either get killed by them in order to show how dangerous the situation is getting, or help out and not get killed by them.   But most of them ignore the fact that modern weaponry will still shred the human body to pieces, even if it doesn't damage the brain. Like, for example, in World War Z, the Battle of Yonkers talks about that a lot, how there's a lot of shrapnel and stuff going around that's hitting zombies in the torso and the limbs, but it's not getting them in the head, so they're still coming. And again, I love World War Z, I love what it's trying to say, but in that case, it's very wrong, because modern explosives and artillery and stuff, they can still shatter the bones in your arms and legs or shred your muscles. And if you do that to a zombie, then it's not going to be able to move properly. Like, it's not going to be able to walk, and in many cases, it won't even be able to crawl.  So I did like that the gathering dead doesn't ignore that.  And I liked that. I liked that it had that little bit of information. It shows that the author did some research and thought about things a little bit before he wrote this. He wasn't just writing another zombie story, because this, I believe these came out, because this is part of a series, and I believe these came out during the height of the zombie craze or maybe near the tail end of it. I don't remember. I would need to check what year. But, yes, he clearly put some thought into it and wanted to differentiate himself from it a little bit. Because in this case, the zombie apocalypse is not just beginning. Like, it's been going on for a little while, but it also hasn't completely destroyed government and civilization and everything. Like, it's in the midst of everything, which, when you think about it, is pretty rare to see. So I liked that as well. And overall, The Gathering Dead, if you are someone who's just into, like, pure action stuff or you really like zombies, then I would say go ahead and check it out. But I think you can tell from my description of it, and if you look at the book Summary, I think you'll be able to tell whether you'll like this or not. For my part, like I said, pretty good. But I don't begrudge anyone for not liking it because this probably won't change your mind on any level. Special thanks to all of my patrons whose names you see here, including my $10 up guys, Appo Savilainen, Andrew Dixon, Ashley Watson, Ava Tumor, B Quinn, Brother Santotes, Christopher Quinton, Emily Miller, Joel, Johnny St. Clair, Madison Lewis Bennett, Ronnie, Taylor Briggs, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, Tofer Wheeler, and Vaivictus. Man, that list is getting long. And this review was a Patreon request, so thanks to them. And you might notice the sound is a little different this time, and there's also no static in the background. That's because I got a new microphone, but I'm still tweaking it a little, still trying to figure out how it works. So please just bear with me in the meantime. And thank you for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye.


Hello YouTube family, thank you so much for joining me today. We are going to be talking about dupes. One of my very favorites, Cheaper and Better, Little Miss Everyday Heidi. She came up with this and I just think it is just a great idea to name a duped video because there are sometimes when we like what the drugstore gives us better than we like what Tyane gives us and sometimes it's the formula, sometimes it's just the price. It's even better and that's what I'm bringing you today. So if you like these kind of duped videos don't forget to give me a thumbs up and if you're not subscribed I would love to have you here if you wouldn't mind taking a minute and doing that.  But you can tell by looking at my face that it doesn't look like I have two different sets of makeup on. This side we're going in with Milani and this is not a normal size. This is one that I got in a little package that they were giving away when I ordered off of their website. This is the Romantic Rose and these are just the rose blushes. So this side we went in with that and on this side I went in with the Benefit Dandelion. These two are really really similar in formula. The formula is so close that honestly dipping into it I think that it's really close to the same. I will say though that I feel like the Benefit one had to be built up a little bit more. So over here we have the Milani and over here is the Benefit one. And I do feel like as I was working with it the Milani one went on just a little bit better. There is just a tiny tiny hue difference here. But when you get it on the cheeks like now there is no difference whatsoever on them. But if you buy a single of the dandelion I'm going to throw those up on the screen what the price difference is. It's quite a bit. So for me that's a no-brainer. I like the way that the Milani performs it just looks a little bit better on my skin. The next one I actually already threw in a video and I did it last week. So I'm not going to take a lot of time on this but and I will throw up a card so you guys can see what that video was. But this is the new Alter Ego Palette and the Sultry Palette from Anastasia Beverly Hills. I'm going to just hold these up so you can see these are identical palettes you guys. They perform exactly the same. They are outrageously gorgeous on the eyes. I think that I even liked the Temptress Palette a little bit more because it just seemed to blend a little bit better and it had a little bit less fallout as I was working with it. But honestly I couldn't tell the difference. If you just gave me two down here and I didn't know what packaging they were in I would not be able to tell the difference in working with these. So as far as that one goes it's an absolute. This is 45 and this one is 16. So just wanted to throw that in here. The next one is one that I feel really strongly about. This one is so close. I cannot tell the difference one bit when I try both of these on my skin. And there is a little bit of a difference in color. You can see that this one right here from it by the way this is the It Bye Bye Pores and this is the Elf Translucent Press Powder. Okay so there is a little bit of a color difference. You can see that the Bye Bye Pores the It One has got a little bit of a creamy look to it and then this one just has a more white look to it. But boy on the skin there is no difference. There's no difference in the way they feel when I put them in between my fingers.  So for me even though I like the It One and I've used it for years the Elf One almost surpasses it because it just feels a little bit creamier and a little bit softer to me. Okay way back when the highlighting craze started Laura Geller did her Gilded Honey Baked Gelato Swirl highlighter and it was a metallic and it was a super metallic. You guys it's just one of those that's like hooey baby. It's so bright and so pretty and on the cheeks it's just gorgeous. She has a lot of other colors too but then Maybelline came out with their Molten Gold. They basically duped this a hundred percent. So there they are right there. You couldn't tell the difference if I didn't tell you which one it was but this is the Laura Geller and that is the Molten Gold from Maybelline excuse me. There they are. They are so close you guys but look at the huge pan you get compared to the Laura Geller and the price point is so much better. I personally do like the Maybelline formula a little bit better because again it is a little bit softer. The Gilded Honey I like the formula on it too but again because it's a baked product it is a little bit stiffer. But you guys when you get these on your cheeks you really can't tell any difference. I do have several different colors of hers that the Maybelline ones match those. So if you're very interested in knowing about those I could maybe do a little comparison thing that I did maybe on Instagram or something for you guys. I think I've talked about this one in other videos but I know I haven't thrown it in a dupe video before. Cover FX has their illuminating drops. They're so pretty. I just talked about this in being something that you might want to try if you don't like the texture that you get from powder highlighters. You might want to try a cream. This one is from Makeup Revolution. Now keep in mind these aren't the same color but if you walk in and you get a color that you like I think these are something like 44 and I can't remember how much those are. They're like 10 maybe. But I want to show you how the same thing that they do. Look at the beam on that. They're the same exact one. Now if I didn't tell you right now which one was the high end one and which one was the drugstore would you be able to tell? So that one on the top right there that's the Cover FX and then this one down here is the Makeup Revolution. You can share these out as much as you want to so they're not as bright and as high beam and they're so good for people that struggle with texture. If you have been wanting to try the Cover FX but you don't want to spend that kind of money I don't blame you because that's really expensive but the Makeup Revolution is just as good. Okay one more highlighter that I want to talk about is from Becca. Her Prismatic Amethyst is one of my very favorite highlighters that she has ever done and it's because when you get it on your cheeks you get this little flip of pink with a tiny bit of that iridescence of the amethyst in it but the amethyst isn't overwhelming. This one right here from ColourPop that is one of their Super Shock formulas and this is called Hippo. These two they look identical in the pan and they are identical when you get them on the hand too. So there they are right there they're so close. So on the top we have the Super Shock formula and then on the bottom right here we have the Becca. This is to me the most dead on dupe I have ever seen and even though I absolutely love the amethyst one I like the formula of the Super Shock better because it is the cream formula that just seems to work a little bit better on my aging skin and my dry skin. This one to me is a definite cheaper but better one. And then these last couple are lipsticks. I really like MAC Lipstick formula but I really don't like the price tag of it but right here I have two. What do you guys think? Pretty darn close. This one right here is the Snob from MAC and then this one on the other side is Primrose from Revlon and they are so close. Again, blue pink. I love blue pink. I think I just think it is such a pretty color. So close on the formula as well. The formula on both of these are really creamy. It's not a matte formula. I love both of those. I didn't even know that was there. I'm glad that I found it and I won't have to repurchase the MAC.  It just really shows the same color. This is MAC's Plum Dandy and it is right there and then on the other side is Warm Me Up. These are two of my favorite colors. The difference that I think you're seeing more than anything is that the MAC one has kind of like a pearly sheen to it and then this one is more along the lines of just a cream. So even though as I'm moving them like that they look a little bit different. When I'm looking at them right here they're really just exactly the same except for one is a little bit of a sheen and the other one is a little bit of a cream. So really have liked using that one as well. And then my last dupe is right here. This one is from Clinique. This is called Plum Spice and then this one from Revlon is called Plum Baby. And they are formula the same, color the same. They're so close to each other. This one is the old packaging from Clinique. I don't even know if they even have Plum Spice anymore. I hope that they do because that is one that I really like a lot. But now that I've found the dupe for it with Revlon, I'm pretty sure that I'll be okay if I don't find it again. I am absolutely in love with Revlon and Maybelline's lipsticks. I think that they're lush, they're high end and they perform just like Mac, Urban Decay, Clinique, all of those do. And I just really love them. So I hope that you did enjoy the video. Please give it a thumbs up if you did. Guys, do you have dupes that you know about that I should be trying and testing and then showing everybody here? I'd love to hear that from you in the comment section below. Thank you so much for taking a part of your day out and spending it with me. You all have a wonderful day and I'll see you guys all in my next video. Love you, bye-bye.