A game is composed of game mechanics. Each game mechanic is delegated a portion of potential power for it's human user. If this potential power is the right amount, we say that the game mechanic is balanced. If all of the game mechanics are balanced, then the whole game is balanced.

A game mechanic that provides too much power is overpowered. A game mechanic that provides too little power is underpowered.

Calculating the power of a game mechanic depends on the type of mechanic it is, thus we have sub-categories for game balancing; these sub-categories include: weapon balancing, health balancing, armor balancing, powerup balancing, and movement balancing.

Let us focus on weapon balancing for now.

The power of each player depends on their skill and their will to victory, it also depends on their mental and physical state which varies over time. A highly skilled player who is exhausted may lose to a low skilled player if the low skilled player happens to be well rested, focused, and not hungry or thirsty. The highest skilled player may also lose if his will to victory is hindered by emotional trouble or drugs.

These occasional situations where the higher skilled player may lose are out of our control and prediction. It makes more sense to balance the weapons assuming that the mental and physical states of all the players are equal, with the inherent skills of all the players being the only set of variance.

For the rest of this article, I will only compare the weapon damages per second (DPS) between vanilla quake 3 (VQ3) and Quake Live. The base grounding for actual weapon balance may be discussed in a later article.

VQ3 vs QL weapon DPS

Let's look at the weapon balancing for Quake 3 Arena. Here are the VQ3 weapons and their respective damage output per second:

Railgun (66.6 DPS)
Machinegun (70 DPS)
Shotgun (110 DPS)
Grenade Launcher (125 DPS, 125 Splash DPS)
Rocket Launcher (125 DPS, 125 Splash DPS)
Lightning Gun (160 DPS)
Plasma Gun (200 DPS, 150 Splash DPS)

Compare this with the DPS's of Quake Live:

Machinegun (50 DPS)
Railgun (53.3 DPS)
Shotgun (100 DPS)
Heavy Machinegun (106.6 DPS)
Lightning Gun (120 DPS)
Rocket Launcher (125 DPS, 105 Splash DPS)
Grenade Launcher (125 DPS. 125 Splash DPS)
Plasma Gun (200 DPS, 150 Splash DPS)

Note that in VQ3 the Lightning Gun used to have more DPS than Rockets and Grenades, Grenades also used to have equal DPS with the Rockets. Machinegun also had more DPS than Railgun.

Quake Live has altered the original rank of the weapons by making Lightning Gun have less DPS than Rockets and Grenades, and making Grenades have more DPS than Rockets, and making Machinegun have less DPS than Railgun.

It has not been proven that either VQ3 or QL is more balanced. But we definitely know that their weapon balancing is different.

Shotgun balance

DPS is not the only determinant of the weapon's power. A weapon may have spread, a limited range, or be projectile based.

VQ3's shotgun fired 11 pellets and had a spread constant of 700. QL's shotgun fires 20 pellets with a spread constant of 1000. So even though VQ3's shotgun does 10 more damage than QL's shotgun, the QL shotgun has a higher chance of hitting the target at all ranges; not to mention the QL shotgun (a close range weapon) has a longer range than the mid-range Lightning Gun.

The high probability of a hit with the QL shotgun sometimes enables you to kill a weak, Railgun-armed enemy at distances as far as 1500 units.

With that being said, it appears that QL has buffed SG while nerfing the LG, RL, RG, and MG.

Lightning Gun balance

LG used to have 160 DPS (8 damage), pre-Steam QL nerfed it to 140 DPS (7 damage), post-Steam QL nerfed it again to 120 DPS (6 damage).

After that last nerf, the LG is now weaker than RL. Now RL is supposed to be that type of weapon that beats LG at close range and loses to LG at mid-range; the last nerf to LG now makes RL and LG be equally matched at mid-range.

Consider the difficulty of using the LG vs the RL at mid-range. It is much easier to hit 50% rockets than to hit 50% LG. Two equally matched players, may roughly hit 40% LG against each other and 50% rockets against each other. Consider the scenario where these players are fighting at mid-range, one with RL, the other with LG. The RL has 125 DPS with direct rockets and 105 DPS with splash rockets. Even if the RL player was not hitting direct rockets, his DPS with 50% accuracy could go up to 52.5 DPS. The LG player on the other hand, hitting 40% accuracy with the LG would have an effective DPS of 48. To do more DPS than 84 damage splash rockets at 50% accuracy would require an LG accuracy of 44%.

In summary, the LG is underpowered since it takes more skill to do less damage than the rockets.

Plasma balance

The Plasma Gun (PG) is highest DPS weapon that has not been altered since VQ3. In QL, the PG does 75 more DPS than the weapon ranking right below it. The nerfing of all the other weapons below it has practically made the plasma gun into a flamethrower. Compared to the 6 damage LG, and 84 splash damage RL, the PG penetrates better than any other weapon at close to mid-range with 20 damage per cell.

While it is true that PG is the hardest weapon to use, it does 60% more DPS than LG and RL and 100% more DPS than SG. So weapons that are specialized to a particular range (SG for close-range, LG for mid-range) get raped by the multi-ranged, multi-purpose plasma gun.

Heavy Machinegun balance

The HMG does 13.4 less DPS than the LG. It makes up for this by having more range than the LG and a spread constant of 400 which makes it easier to aim with.

The HMG was introduced in the post-Steam version of QL, most likely as an LG alternative to make it easier for new players to get frags. This weapon has no purposeful existence other than to increase affirmative action for lower skilled players.

Is DPS power?

It is too simplistic to measure a weapon's power by it's DPS, but I believe it is a significant factor. Perhaps a math formula can be constructed to take into account spread, projectile velocity, and maximum range. But this may still not get to the root of the problem.

If we want to really know how to calculate the power of a weapon or game mechanic. We have to know, conceptually, what power is. Maybe power is a product of our will, and this power is what alters our position between victory and defeat. This concept may be discussed later.

Critique of reflex

Reflex is the type of game that was created by no-skill rocket spammers. Everything about this game is designed for the rocket launcher player. The type of player who is incapable of tracking targets with his crosshair. That is why they made the movement too fast, so hitscan can only track for 2 seconds before the target goes behind a wall. That is why every weapon is weaker than the rocket launcher. That is why all the maps are designed with short and narrow corridors and lots of teleporters: to encourage rocket spam, there are no wide open maps where sniping has an advantage. So if you're the type of player with a 24-inch mouse pad and 400 DPI, just don't even bother: you're type of skill is not welcome in Reflex. Most of the servers are 1v1 password-protected servers anyways, it's a closed community.

Critique of Toxikk

Toxikk is the type of game created by plebians who grew up playing a mixture of halo and unreal tournament. All the weapons are too powerful. The graphics have so much bloom and detail it screws over the competitive players who are looking to get a frag, the game cannot run on a stable 144 hz, not to mention the pickup items are indistinguishable between each other and from a distance: shotgun ammo, sniper ammo, and 25 hp look identical. Then you have the retarded item respawn times: it takes 15 seconds to respawn a weapon and mega health and heavy armor take 1 minute to respawn, so most of the time you are running around with a measly 100 hp and a pistol. The lack of strafe jumping and lack of rocket jumping is replaced with an awkard and clumsy movement mechanic that involves hitting dodge jump + normal jump to pick up speed. The movement looks stupid and feels stupid. It also doesn't help that they put in these pointless additives like 2 second stealth and an ability to spawn a hoverbike, for what purpose? To add "uniqueness" and "depth" to the game? With this type of thinking in game design, these guys are ready to work at Bethesda with Tim Willits. Even if I wanted to enjoy this game with other players, it is virtually impossible. The ranking system prevents players of different skill to join the same server. At this early stage of Toxikk's development, the ranking segregation will serve to further dissolve the already insignificant player population. This decision was probably done to cater to the weak will of new players who cannot handle being fragged by veterans. But frankly, if you cannot handle losing a few times in order to get better, you are probably too weak for e-sports in general. In other words, you are not a man.

Critique of Quake Live

Quake Live was and has always been the half-baked Quake III replacement for the current gaming generation. It's everything you love about Quake III without the modding, without cross-platform support, and with the requirement that you sign your soul away to Steam: all for $10! I find it insulting that the latest update has removed official servers, instead they expect us to run dedicated servers on Linux when there is no Linux client! The game should be free if Zenimax is too cheap to host servers. Where is all this money going if all the servers are ran by the community? I sure hope it's going towards the development of cross-platform support and better netcode. A 64-bit version would be nice too. Instead, the latest major update brought us pointless additives like loadouts, item timers, bunny hopping, and the creation of the most noob-friendly weapon: the HMG. The gun that makes me question the existence of the 6-damage lightning gun.

Critique of moba shooters

"successful" shooters: overwatch, dirty bomb, team fortress, what do they have in common? They have this fetish for equalizing everything, and not in the good way. These games have a lack of deathmatch, it's all team-based and objective-based. There is a move of fps games and all games towards more cartoon-looking graphics and a desire to sugar-coat the violence, it has the added effect of saving money for game devs who are too lazy to add real artistic detail to their games. It is a side-effect of our politically correct age to make everything look like sparkles and ponies as to not offend anyone. Overwatch has the added political background plot of being about this globalist, benevolent, one-world government task force that fights against all the evil criminals and terrorists, all the antagonist characters are relatively tough-looking, all the protagonist characters are these metrosexual weaklings: especially Tracer. It is typical of our age to look down on the tough and independent ones and put the weak and superficial ones on a pedestal. These games force everyone to play as a team so that victory is spread to as many players as possible. The mediocre players on the winning team can feel good about themselves despite being a massive weight to the 1 player who carried the whole team. The mediocre players, who are the majority of players, feel entitled to that participation trophy and the video game companies must design their games to cater to these casual spoiled brats or else nobody will purchase it. The desire to be "inclusive" means not singling out a minority of winners and not singling out a minority of losers, thus the new games make it so that exactly 50% of players win and 50% of players lose, not just in every match but on average. Ever notice how you win 50% of the time in every video game made by Blizzard? That's by design. The desire to equalize everyone means to eliminate the distinctions between winners and losers, in other words the death of true diversity. Thus the death of true merit, the death of being exceptional and great spreads from society and into our video games. This is why deathmatch is being replaced by team deathmatch and cart pushing.

Is Quake Champions, the coming messiah that will save the FPS genre? Can we pin all our hopes and dreams on Tim Willits? Will he deliver us from the apocolypse of class-based moba shooters? I wouldn't hold my breath. Maybe it's better for us to stop looking for authenticity inside video games, grow up, and start living our lives. Video games are for kids. And the struggle for finding a real e-sport with fair and balance gameplay is our struggle to find an outlet for our natural urge to manly competition. This outlet will most certainly not be built if it does not reflect the values of the lowest common denominator of mankind, the masses of emasculated men, women and children that make up the dominant target for marketing, the dominant source for money which is the primary goal of all video game companies. Bethesda is no exception. It is not Bethesda's fault if they do not deliver a good game that does not make money, it is our fault for confining our hopes and our great potential about ourselves to a digital world that grows smaller every day.

Edit 1: Critique of DOOM Multiplayer

It is universally accepted that DOOM mp was a failure. For one, the game can barely sustain 90 hz on a good gaming system, playing at 120 hz requires an Nvidia Titan X and not even the Titan X can reach 144 hz unless you cut your resolution in half. A significant portion of people can't even play at 60 hz. Then you have a growing cartel of aimbotters and wallhackers, wrecking havoc and going unpunished due to a lack of any anti-cheat system. What's worse is that these hackers cannot even be spectated or vote kicked. The most obvious screw-ups come from the game design itself: the loadouts, the "hack modules", the DLC weapons, 3 powerups/power weapons on a single map, armor that seems to absorb 100 percent damage, and a voice announcer that sounds like pajama boy working at starbucks. And after all this Tim Willits has the balls to say "The success of DOOM has made Quake Champions a lot easier for us", what is he smoking? Get a load of these other quotes from Tim Willits talking about Quake Champions:

Edit 1: Tim Willits on Quake Champions

Tim Willits says: We don't have classes, we have champions.

How condescending! Tell me exactly what's the difference between classes and "champions". If players starting with different abilities is not classes, what is? Maybe adding loadouts? Then again, I heard that Sponge said that QC will indeed have loadouts. Also the leaked QC footage shows that the champions start with different health. So Tim Willits, tell me again that QC doesn't have classes, I dare you, I double dare you!

Tim Willits says: We feel that the champions are a natural evolution of not only Quake, but the genre

Our great prophet has declared the death of the arena fps. You heard it yourself, classes are here to stay. It's 2016, get with the times!

Tim Willits says: Our philosophy for Quake champions is a rock paper scissors mentality.

This is starting to sound like a Blizzard game. Does "rock paper scissors" sound like a skill-based game to you? Or does it sound like more cancerous rpg luck-based elements creeping into the Quake scene?

Tim Willits says: We want counters to a number of the different champions.

Here we go again with more affirmative action for classes. This is just a perfect complimentary quote to the previous two quotes. The champion that you choose will have a built-in disadvantage to another particular champion, more evidence of leveling the playing field for the sake of mediocre players.

Tim Willits says: We want to add more champions as long as we can.

Welcome to Overwatch.