The other modes of MGO, in my opinion, have little use for melee combat when the power of run-and-gun headshots(basically being reckless) will curb stomp even the most skilled knife or CQC users. And traps, nonlethal grenades, nonlethal guns, and such are also nearly useless. You typically left with two options when it comes to modes like Team Deathmatch or other popular modes: pick the stronger Assault Rifle or pick the the stronger Sniper Rifle(and grenades for both). Not the case with Team Sneak though.

Team sneak is verrrrrry team based(especially on stealth when one sloppy player can get 2 or more other players killed, and i forgot to mention this: it works on a 1-life per round system). More so than other modes and most other shooters I’ve played. I didn’t realize you weren’t looking for that, my mistake.

When I mentioned balance in Team Sneak, I didn’t really mean the symmetric parts(which are there of course), but rather how viable the playstyles are. You have your skill selection and you have your actual actions. There are many ways to actually win and many ways to build you character(assuming you pick what you will use). And they are all viable.

I know I am getting into details here, but I’d just like to throw out MGO’s TSNE. I think the people behind captured stealth vs brute perfectly.

It is a shame though. They are hosting a MGO world tournament and the only mode being showcased is Team Deathmatch… They don’t even realized they stumbled on a gold mine. I guess TDM appeals to the FPS crowd more making it more popular, but TSNE is much more enjoyable to watch!

In Metal Gear Online(packaged with Metal Gear Solid 4), there is a mode called Team Sneak. The rest of MGO isn’t terrifically balanced(not terribly unbalanced either, just most options suffer)… but in this mode, the game is extremely balanced. And the appeal of this mode is that it doesn’t play at all like the others. Actually I haven’t played any other game/mode like it.

A very EXTREMELY brief description:
-One team is heavily armed and must defend a target or wipe out the other team.
-The other team is lightly armed(only lethal weapon is a knife, rest can only stun or sleep) and must retrieve an object and return it to goal or wipe out the other team. Can also steal the other team’s weapons.
-The other team(stealth) is invisible except for their weapons(bigger weapons = more visibility). If one teammate is shot, they are exposed, and the entire team becomes visible for 3 seconds since the last shot/grab.
-The teams switch between these two play style every round and the the spawn is always based on the play style. This makes all map-based balance inherently symmetrical…but the real balance doesn’t stop there.
-In MGO you have 4 slots for skills, 1 skill per slot and one additional level for that skill costing another slot(in most cases). This changes up trap-users, meleers, snipers, etc from each other. And the real beauty of it, you can’t change skills in between rounds, forcing you to have to balance between skills focused on Offense or Defense.
-And finally, the true nature of balance comes from just how many choices you have as either side(well stealth being the more interesting of the two) and how many of them work. You can win only using a knife… or a knife+magazines+a box. Think about that for a moment…

I didn’t go into details, but what I’ve said basically is MGO’s Team Sneak is awesome. I didn’t delve into the metagame, but it is all there and very strong and very balanced. The problem is it is attached to a game with poor balance… so it can it or can’t it count?

The character’s themselves are pretty well balanced, and it’s easy to see the difference between a strong player and a weaker one, no matter which character’s are picked. The characters are also very diverse, and one person can play the characters with a very different style and be successful. Sakura, for example, is someone I like to play as an up close fighter, while others may use her as a ranged “hit-and-run” type character. The way the deck system works, you can win using a deck with a single strong character, or 4 weaker ones.

Now, even though I said the characters themselves are balanced, I think the support Character’s are VERY unbalanced. Besides the “Big 3″ (3-koma Seya, Trunks, and Sena) that are usually banned in friendly play, there are also some supports that are almost completely useless.

Then there are Help koma which provide small buffs to characters (Extra Jump, Health Boost, etc.) But there is one thing that’s really bothered me and I’ve wanted to say to a designer to a very long time, why would you make a way to counter every other status (Using Help Koma that make you Freeze-proof, paralyze-Proof, poison-proof), and yet not have a single character or help koma that makes you immune to movement stop, the most imbalanced status in the game? A Movement stop support attack followed by a high-knock back guard breaking attack guarantees a kill if it knocks you off the edge.

I still love the game, though, although I wish the supports and status effects were as well designed as the characters.

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No, this is strictly false. The computer doesn’t have to care what you do, it can just choose the right move in a given situation. There is a “best” move such that it can counter any possible followup you might choose. You can’t work arond it by being unpredictable, because the move was calculated taking every possible option you have within the rules into account.

The problem with your example is that in Street Fighter, is probably with the tools the two opponent’s have to interact with each other. You have a relatively short list of moves, and you can only perform one move at any given time. So, you have to commit to a single option, and remain committed to it long enough that your opponent can counterattack for free if you guessed wrong. In warhammer, you have lots and lots of units, and each of them has multiple choices for movement and actions and whatnot on any given turn. I’ll still bet it turns out more like chess, where if you setup a crazy feint like you described, there’s actually an optimal move such that your opponent can stay reasonably well defended against both of your possible options to attack from that point.

Blah. I nominate Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. I leave it up to Mr. Sirlin to decide whether the game meets his criteria, Yomi or no.

(Incidentally, when arguing Yomi presence in Warhammer in my previous post, refer to the end of the paragraph that you quoted me on, Claytus; “In Street Fighter you might cancel a move to create an opening in your opponent’s defense. In Warhammer, you might distract your opponent with a dangerous unit or vehicle, drawing his units away to allow more time for your teleporting units to arrive and capture an objective. You might fail a morale check on purpose to force his unit to follow after yours, isolating them for the rest of your army. And so on. A clever opponent will anticipate these tricks. If you’re even more clever, you’ll plan for that. That’s pretty much the definition of Yomi as I understand it..” The sentence you quoted verbatim was meant to set up my argument. My fault for not being clearer.)

In a fighting game that’s simply not true, you can create situations from which there is no “best” move, it’s just an RPS-style guess against your opponent. A fighting game computer, that we assume still has a slower than ~15 frame reaction speed (I say this because fighting games are degenerate and easily solved at 0 frame reaction speed, and they’re designed around human reaction times, not because we should arbitrarily limit one type of computer and not another… if you don’t like this limitation, you can replace this example with a computer that plays rock-paper-scissors), will still have to some way to perform guesses, and it’s not possible to just pull out a freeze frame of a game state and prove one specific solution is best.

Realistically, actual human players have lots more interaction than the computers would in both games, but the fact that the mathematical perspectives completely removes guessing games from one, and can’t remove them from the other seems to imply the games are fundamentally different.