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Games like League of Legends, DotA, and Marvel Rivals all need regular patches. Usually these patches are to add fresh content to the game to keep people interested. But they always include buffs or nerfs to heroes and mechanics that are intended to "balance" the play experience.
But what if you could let the balance of a game be entirely determined by its player based? Such an idea is novel, but comes with plenty of caveats that would require careful manuevering.
Game Balance Is Hard
As a developer, writing a good balance patch for your game requires careful planning and foresight. For top dog MOBA developers, there are many people who's full time job is balancing the game. But for smaller indie studios, balancing the game falls mostly on personal taste and ad-hoc statistics.
I know a multiplayer indie game that writes its balance patches based on winrate. If an item has a 50% winrate, it is considered balanced. Too high? Nerfed. Too low? Buffed. Unfortunately, this logic does not make for very satisfying patch notes and it communicates to the readers that the game design is running by the seat of its pants.
Democratic Patch Notes For Multiplayer Games
Aren't the people who are best qualified to balance a game the people who spend hours on hours playing it? It has been observed that even groups without specific expertise can make remarkably accurate predictions. That is, when those decisions are made from a big enough sample size.
An incredibly fresh idea would be some kind of monthly "patch notes election" where players vote on specific nerfs and buffs. Want an ability to have a lower cooldown? Make a proposal and get people to vote on it. Want a hero to have less hp? Get people to vote for it. It would be at the game designer's discretion to decide how the results of an election would make its way into the next balance patch.
Such A System Has Obvious Flaws
This idea is not perfect and has potentially ruinous downsides (much like our own government).
Bad Players May Nerf Mechanics For The Wrong Reasons
A good example of this is Riki from DotA. Riki is a hero that has permanent invisibility which is a perennial noob killer. Once you reach a certain level of skill in DotA, you build the habit of buying stealth detection items and killing Riki.
Bad players will of course want to nerf Riki into the ground because he's so tilting. Is this really something that should make Riki even more unplayable in higher ranks than he already is?
You could possibly accomodate for this by changing the balance of a hero or item based on the skill bracket of the game – but that sounds very messy and is possibly bad business for your game's content creators.1
There's No Guarantee The Balance Will Be Good For Any One Patch
Ideally, your game is balanced at all times to maximize its enjoyability, and thus your sales and revenue. Democratic patch notes would not guarantee this.
Given the expensive development cost of most MOBAs, your investors would need a lot of assurance that you know what you're doing. Imagine going to a publisher and saying something along the lines of "we're putting the game design in the hands of the players."
It's novel, and a well designed pitch could work – but you're fighting uphill. It is far safer bet to say "we have industry leaders designing and maintaining our game." Whoever approached this challenge would have to be incredibly convincing to get others on board.
It's Easy To Vote To Tweak Numbers, But What About New Features?
You can tweak HP, cooldown, damage fairly easily. But sometimes, game balance comes in the form of ability reworks or changing core game mechanics. And those features could take months to implement.
If you could get clear and effects requirements directly from your user-base, who wouldn't want that? But I can barely get clear requirements from industry professionals, much less average people. Software engineering is notorious for getting thousands of little things wrong in planning. So I wouldn't hold my breath about my users have excellent game-balance sense for anything other than tweaking power. But hey, I could be wrong.
How Do You Prevent Voting Abuse?
What stops someone from making new bot accounts then using those accounts to swing the vote one way or another? What if people organize around your game professionally, and voting to buff the favorite hero of a certain player could change the outcome of the tournament?
You could restrict the voting to maybe the top 1,000 or 2,000 players, much like political power held by the equites of Ancient Rome. The let the bronze and silver players vote like the plebs they are.
But that wouldn't stop top players from creating boosting smurfs to swing their voting power. Maybe if you added a certain "played X amount of hours" requirement to the voting power, it would have more merit.
I think this is the most compelling reason to not to implement democratic patch notes in an expensive project.
A Small Indie Experiment Is Best Suited For This Idea
Crowd sourced game balance sounds like a very good case study for a game. If someone were to implement this idea, it is best down with a low-budget multiplayer game with universal appeal. I am deeply curious to know how such an experiment would perform when it hit the market.
Footnotes:
Then again, a game with dynamic patch notes would already be very hard to make content for. It'd be like the stock market. Are stonks up or down this month? Oh shit! Buy Pudge! Sell Riki! Fuck! My 401k evaporated! :(