FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Balance Issues for Persistent Worlds
Persistent worlds are multiplayer online games that run continuously, offering a game world that persists even if a player is not logged in. Chapter 21, "Online Games," discusses persistent worlds but this section addresses a couple of issues in the context of balancing.
Persistent worlds are never symmetric and are always intrinsically unbalanced because long-time players accumulate significant resources and experience that put newcomers at a disadvantage. As a result, online games must provide protection and encouragement for beginning players. Most now allow players to avoid PvP combat unless they specifically want to engage in it (Chapter 21 addresses this at further length), but online games must also give new players a chance to earn resources,
explore areas without finding them already crowded by others, take up interesting occupations, and so on. A persistent world cannot be a zero-sum game: New resources must constantly flow into it from outside for new players to find.
The designers of persistent worlds, unlike designers of standalone games, can rebalance on the fly, changing the rules after their customers begin play. Such rule changes, while sometimes necessary, tend to cause howls of outrage from players who have optimized their play according to the existing rules and enjoy the game as it stands. Most persistent world games have had to implement rule changes this way to rectify design errors and to correct imbalances.
In spite of such changes, the persistent world Asheron's Call remains fundamentally unbalanced in favor of magic users. Apparently that's what the magic users want, and obviously the publishers want to hold their audience. In this case, designers balance the game in such a way that the majority of players enjoy the game in the way they like to play it rather than in such a way as to make the game objectively fair. The aim of this balance involves ongoing sales and politics more than it involves equal distribution of resources or opportunities—but as a designer, you may be required to consider how market forces call for a different kind of balance.
