Along very similar lines, back in the early days of wow, before battlegrounds, the Horde were generally vastly outnumbered against the alliance on every server. I remember taking screen shots of open PvP where you'd see a flood of Alliance (easily 30+ people) and only have about 5 or 6 on the Horde side. This was common, this was the typical night of open world PvP. This lead to some very interesting things happen. The Horde really started to work together. Priests would actually heal the warriors, warriors would actually protect the priests, people would create distractions to allow the mage in get into the middle of the Alliance group to blast off AoE spells. Eventually, we were holding our own against the vastly overwhelming force.

Then, things really became interesting once battlegrounds were introduced. The Horde no longer had to deal with fighting a force two to three times it size. Now the sides were even, and I bet you can guess what happened. The Horde would absolutely demolish the Alliance. It was just pathetic. We didn't have people trying to be heroes, fighting as one man armies. We had a bunch of people who worked together to win the fight. Our days in open PvP had taught us how to work together, something the Alliance had yet to learn.

Those were some fun times.

I remember the exact same transition, Tkyl. A quick addendum, the Alliance always out-geared the Horde since their numbers let them run more stuff. Didn't help.

Makes you wonder if the gamers' and game dev's ideal of 1-to-1 balance is really necessary. Sure, it might be for the sake of, "We want it to be fair!" and no one wants to actually have a learning curve or be required to have much skill to play, which is probably key to good sales.

But how often in TF2 do you see teams improperly balanced, and one side totally trouncing the other because they have their sh*t together? And is it any less fun? Maybe for the losing team... But the fact is that imbalance can, indeed, be fun, and force new strategies and tactics that otherwise probably would never have been used.

I want left4dead soo bad

As far as Imbalances, playing a private Beta of Planetside when we had an iGames (lan center group) Uber battle, I was the general for the Terran Republic. The trick to the game was to capture the most land after 24 hours, but for some reason 1/3 of my LAN Centers did not play at all! So we where constantly out numbered like 2to1.

I ended up giving LAN Centers bases that they had to hang on to, and if they lost it then they had to take it back, while my LAN Center was like a quick reaction squad that would fly out to whichever front was crumbling and help them get back. We totally had a blast, at the begining of the game the Terran Alliance owned some 75% of the land mass, By the end we shrank just 11%, but because it was all about gains the New Conglomerate won. I totally bitched at the Admins of the contest because they where suppose to reset the server so everyone had 0 territory. Then they finially caved and we got a consolation prize of keychains and other nick nacks and I got a signed copy of the game.

I loved that game it was so fun, too bad it turned into a boring suckfest so fast because it was blast while it lasted.

I think it's mostly necessary to silence the message board haters. Any perceived imbalance results in thousands of posts across the internet. Which is to say it's completely unnecessary, but makes managing and maintaining a community and vibrant player base a lot more difficult.

<- Agrees.

If you happen to participate in alphas/early betas of MMOGs, those are always the most fun times, because after every new update there's some new powerhouse class/skill combo, and it's so entertaining to figure out what it is and go exploit the hell out of it. Sometimes the situation even persists through the early months of an open beta or the retail release, at which time it's doubly entertaining because the world is packed with new folks who are amazed at how hard you're dominating with some build that they never thought of using. Eventually, mud wimping sets in, and I leave.

It's been awhile since I had the connections to get in on stuff early, but I always think fondly of those times. Anyone who was in on WoW back when mages had "Chains of Ice" will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Mechcommander 2 has some imbalances that are fun. Its the kind of imbalances that are not godly but do give an edge.

If you load up every mech with LRMs or Clan LRMs once you get them, your lances will devastate everything at long range, with indirect fire and good damage.

In most of the Mechwarrior games you can load up a mech with 10-16 machine guns and blow off any size mechs' legs in a mere second.

Frozen orb is godly and can power level whole groups from 35-65 in Diablo 2. Its an insanely fun spell to spam.

Isn't this what Haze is doing?

Don't forget the choppers in the Desert Combat mod for 1942. They were angels of death that were nearly impossible to fly. I spent a whole weekend in unpopulated servers just trying to get decent with them. Thus my inner chopper whore became manifest and there was much rejoicing.

Best example of this is the rocket launcher in Quake 1 multiplayer.

The choppers in DC. Now there was a sight. Damn those things were hard to fly. Took me 2 hours just to keep one in the air for longer than 1 minute. After hours of practice I finally became good with the things. I did it all by keyboard, and flying it was a dance of a few keypresses a minute the entire time. I even got the thing to hover with the keyboard by tapping the 'up' key continually.

I remember a Lan party playing DC and obliterating everybody on the server. Good, good times.

I get the feeling most developers only think of balancing out their game with the use of statistics. But like the DC chopper, there was a balance there. It was super powerful, but also insanely hard to fly. I think that balanced it out really well. After I think 0.7 they totally reduced the effect of the missiles and hitpoints of the chopper, and it became some flying deathtrap which was still very hard to fly well.

Also, I loved the fact that DC had almost no plane campers because of this.