http://boardgames.about.com/od/freeboardcardgames/a/design_winners.htm

The contest in 2002 was to design an asymmetric game, what they called “unequal forces”

Here are the unequal forces game entries (finalists?):

http://boardgames.about.com/od/freeunequal/Free_Games_Unequal_Forces.htm

Made me think of this thread.

Chess has the same pieces on each side. If you want to know how on-purpose local imbalances add up to a global balance, Chess is not going to help. We already know without even looking that Chess has global balance (the two sides are the same!) and that it has local imbalances when you have X,Y,Z pieces left and I have A,B,C pieces left. Do those local imbalances add up to global balance at the start? Yes. Why? Because both sides are the same!

Zealots and Zerglings have local imbalance too. Same resource cost yet one beats the other. How does this lead to global balance overall between the two races? Good question! You have to actually play the game to find out because it’s not automatically answered by “both races have exactly the same pieces,” as it is in Chess.

There are several openings available for both sides in chess that get used at high level play, so why can’t the balance between them be analyzed like a character choice? Each has it’s strengths and weaknesses. They don’t need to be balanced the same way as characters do, but some of the ways they are balanced could work for both. It’s analyzing the balance between the choices that give depth to the gameplay in hopes to find something that applies to pre-gameplay.

If that happened in a fighting game, that would be terrible. The character choice happens before any actual gameplay (this characteristic pretty much defines what Sirlin refers to as an asymmetric game), so if one player is counterpicked, he has a significant disadvantage for the entire game. The most balanced asymmetric games don’t have many of these situations, and are great, fun tests of skill despite the wide variety of abilities to choose from before the gameplay. Unbalanced asymmetric games aren’t good skill tests because of all the counter-picking outside of the gameplay, or they’re boring because they have few viable options to choose from.

Even if Quake’s weapon matchups are all fair, the fact remains that it’s not an asymmetric game and as such it makes little sense to study it to find out how to balance an asymmetric game.

To your other points. Chess is clearly symmetric for these purposes. The two sides are the same so there is nothing to study for “balance” only depth, which is a separate topic. And an FPS where you can pick up different weapons doesn’t help either. The weapons do not need to be “balanced” in that game. It would be perfectly fine to have 4 dominant weapons that everyone uses, one that only counters 2 of those an otherwise sucks, one that only counters one and otherwise sucks, etc. You’re not locked into those weapons anyway, so they don’t need to be a the same level of fairness versus each other that characters need to be in a fighting game.

Anyway, I think the terms were defined over and over and over again in that other thread. Only TF2 took a few posts to work out where it fits. Not one single other game was confusing to classify (to me or to Claytus or to PoisonDagger). Just use common sense in what would make these terms useful. Calling chess asymmetric wouldn’t be useful. What happens when I meet up with other people who use different terms? I don’t care–at all. The terms aren’t the point. The GAMES that are balanced and asymmetric are the point.

Once you get past the 90% of all this where people can’t seem to read the definitions that are repeatedly stated in the other thread, it looks like there just aren’t many games that fit this. Any given game is either not diverse enough to really help much (Nintendo’s Ice Hockey) or diverse but not tested with real competitive play so who knows if it’s fair at all (Nintendo’s Mario Tennis), or finally it is truly asymmetric and it has been tested but people in the thread disagree on whether it’s fair/balanced or not (perhaps Dota is an example of that). These games are mysteriously hard to find.

Just skimming through the other article I came to a post where you said looking at an fps game for balance doesn’t work since even though you can pick up different weapons you start the same. This is what I’m trying to say is wrong since you can look at how those weapons are balanced. You aren’t looking at the whole game, just a particular aspect of it that you might learn from. Now as you said you are only interested in balance that has been proven through high level play, all you would need to do to make sure the weapons are balanced is see if high level players are doing well with different weapons or if they try to get the same one every time. Now it isn’t likely worth it to do this if you’ve never played an fps before, but if you’re familiar with them and someone points you to a game with good gun balance then you might be able to find something.

The (a)symmetrical part was about language, not about your clearness at this point. My point is that there needs to be a clear definition or it isn’t working as a word. These problems start when you have multiple people making up their own meanings of unclear definitions. Calling chess an asymmetric game because of the different openings is no different then saying that it is symmetric just because it doesn’t start out differently and the decisions are made later. It’s lawerly either way, and this only happens because the definition was unclear to begin with. Considering none of us are judges in this matter it won’t get resolved without an agreement from everyone as to what meaning to use or to use different words altogether, which is already happening. Now we might be fine with the definition of asymmetric being those games that you were looking for, but what happens when you meet some other groups that came up with their own definitions that are different? You get fierces(ones with frame disadvantage!) linking into hadokens.

How can I make good blueberry ice cream? Oh you can’t go asking that without looking at chocolate ice cream. You can’t even ask that without looking at poorly made ice cream. You can’t expect people to know what you mean by blueberry ice cream. Please.

What i mean is pretty simple and people like Claytus and PoisonDagger understand it readily. You start with different sets of moves/units/cards/whatever (for example Ryu vs. Zangief) and somehow the different sets of moves/units/cards/whatever end up at a close power-level to each other. I really can expect people to understand that.

Knowing to put bombs and spies in your Stratego example would make the game deeper yes, and not more “balanced” in the way we mean it here, as you surely understand. So my question would not lead to understanding how to make that match deeper? Correct. It also doesn’t lead to understanding how to make it accessible or have good graphics, or a million other things. It’s as if you expect my one question must hold up the weight of all the world and answer all things. It must only answer what we are looking at right now, this one concept. Other questions can get at other concepts. And yet again I’ll say how sad it is that so much discussion is spent on things like this–the nature of question-asking–rather than actually finding some good example games. Thanks to those who did. I still should check out StarControl maybe.

Back to symmetric vs asymmetric for a second. Firstly, you can’t just go and issue a new definition for a term and expect everyone to understand what you mean. Saying you want an asymmetric game, but what you really want is a game to learn how to balance two different things isn’t going to get you what you’re looking for. It just happens that every game you want is asymmetric.

There is still a lot you can learn about balance from unbalanced games. First of all, how will you learn about balanced from a balanced game? You would have to know why the game is balanced to learn anything about it. Likewise, if you see how unbalanced games are unbalanced, you can learn from mistakes. Also you can just as well learn from asymmetric parts of symmetric games. If you know why(/why isn’t) 1 knight vs 1 biship + 2 pawns is balanced then you can learn from it. Even if you are unable to learn from unbalanced games, if it happens to be balanced then you should still be able to learn from it. Granted it might not be as good use of time as studying something else, but disregarding it completely is ignorant.

Ignoring symmetric games altogether is also a bad idea if mirror matches are available. If you were making a board game rts with the races of stratego, risk, and catan, you would need to have made bombs and spies or stratego vs stratego would be boring. Granted, having one or two boring mirror matches in a game with over 10 selections isn’t going to cause a huge fuss.

All in all, while you are still likely to learn more from a balanced asymmetric game than one that isn’t, you shouldn’t completely discount games that don’t fit that description.

Think of something like MvC2… Magneto can pull off an infinite on any other character. You can’t easily solve his infinite by changing a single move, because he actually has multiple move sequences that cause the infinite. You can’t raise his opponent’s damage to one-hit him in exchange for his infinite being sort of a “kill you if I manage to hit with a particular move” since that’s even more degenerate. Magneto has to pull off a lengthy and rather difficult infinite combo, but he dies to a single easy-to-use attack isn’t fair, and it would be completely broken for new players who don’t know the infinite combo in the first place. There’s just a huge number of things that makes the “good” character better than the “bad” characters (multi-directional air dashes, infinite combos, Sent’s unblockable, AHVB recovery speed). Fixing one of Cable’s “broken” moves takes him from 10 different ways to rape half the cast, down to 9 different ways to rape half the cast… but he’s still gonna win.