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Wow, That’s a Real Job
February 2, 2007 10:10 pm
The “lead balance designer” of the next Command and Conquer game, Greg Black, has written a nice article about the RTS balance process. It involves manually timing combat with a stopwatch!
In other RTS balancing news, Blizzard’s looking for an RTS balance designer.
Until I saw these two things, I wasn’t actually aware that “balance designer” was a valid title anywhere outside of the credits for Shadowbane’s second expansion, wherein I was named as such. Heh.
The Blizzard job ad is also interesting in that it asks the applicant:
What games are you currently playing?
Which competitive online games have you played?
What is your win/loss record in your “Top 3″ favorite competitive games?
Whatever. You don’t need to be personally good at games to be good at balance. Balance is an art, not a science. It’s about feel and intuition. Play experience is vital, but I don’t see where personal kick assery has a role.
It’s entirely possible that I’m just saying this because I’m terrible at RTS games.
J. wrote:
It could be that they’re so certain that 90% of their applicants will be hardcore gamers with no applicable work experience that the dialogue would have to be about what games they’ve played. Given how rare it is to find such a gamer who’s actually halfway articulate about how they understand the game’s balance — not that they don’t truly understand it well enough to kick ass when actually playing it, they just can’t make thoughts into words — I wonder how successful they are at finding people this way.
Or, it could be that no one at Blizzard knows how to have a conversation about balance except in terms of well-established games already on the market. Which would be disturbing, if they can’t abstract it out any further than “like Starcraft, but not.”
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