Why are Games Balanced Around Top Level Play?

February 16, 2025 - Writing

With bated breath, you check your favorite online game's patch notes. Unfortunately, after reading through, the results are clear: your main was nerfed to the ground! You knew they were popular in tournaments, but why would they make changes that don't affect 99% of the playerbase?

As a game designer, there are many reasons which I understand from online discussions and direct notes from game developers working on these games. However, as always, these will come with the understanding that game balance is essentially an art, and these "solutions" will always be tradeoffs that do not appease everyone.

Why nerf in general?

A nerf usually refers to a change made to a video game that makes some aspect less powerful, most often an aspect of a playable character's moveset. Some years ago, there was this sentiment going around that game developers should "never nerf, only buff" characters, i.e. only change the game to make characters stronger rather than weaker.

This is completely bogus!

Think about the last time you've ever heard someone complain about a competitive multiplayer game. Are they more likely to say "I hate playing my character, they're too weak" or "I hate playing against this character, they're too strong"? I personally hear the latter about 5+ times for every time I hear the former. As I cover in another article, the general point of balancing a game is to make the game more fun, and there are many cases where making a character weaker will benefit the play experience.

In other words, do you want to play a fighting game where getting hit by a single attack means you're guaranteed to lose from a single combo? Do you want to play a shooter where a gun can one-shot you from a chest shot? Do you want to play a MOBA where someone can be a tank, mage, fighter, support, and marksman all at the same time? No! I didn't think so!

Most gamers can agree that there is a ceiling for a reasonable amount of power that can be placed in a single character's power budget before the game becomes incredibly unfun to play. Yes, it's fun to play as an overpowered character, but eventually you will also have to play against that same character.

Of course, this ignores a bit of the initial question, but it's an important concept we had to discuss first. After all, once we get to top level play, every single minor difference in character power gets magnified many times over since top players can exploit just about every single strength and weakness in the game, so nerfs and buffs matter a lot more.

We'll approach the initial question from multiple angles, starting with the top level players themselves.

#1: To preserve the top level player's experience

This is the most obvious reason to balance the game around top level play: to make top level players enjoy the game more. This comes with some very reasonable questions, too. Why should top level players' experience with the game matter more than the average player?

Well, to be frank, their opinions matter a lot more to people on the internet.

If a low level player complains about something being overpowered, then yeah, their experience with the game isn't great, but everyone will say, "No, it's fine, you just have to learn the counterplay, it's not the game's fault." But if a pro player complains about it, then all of a sudden the game is fundamentally broken. 

This... isn't a great mechanism, nor do I think it's the way a game should be balanced, but there is a possibility that a game would want to appease the opinions of top level players since their voices effectively act as free advertising for game balance. It doesn't matter if a tier list only applies to the top 0.001% of the playerbase -- everyone on the internet sees that tier list, and if they think it's not balanced enough, then they will think that the game won't be good enough for them, either.

As an example, there was some Tekken 8 drama a bit ago where Twitter filled with complaints about the game being too aggressive. I thought it was ridiculous -- this was the same things we've heard since the beta launched, but people loved the game. Then I saw the origin of the posts: a tweet from Arslan Ash, AKA "the undisputed best Tekken 7 player in the world".

Now all of a sudden, this random Twitter drama might be an actual serious issue, and any player of any skill level can say "yeah, I feel the same way!" and people can't argue with that because it's arguing with Arslan Ash.

It's a bit hard to fully explain this, so as a silly example: imagine if Miyazaki himself came down to Twitter to write a negative movie review for Encanto. Your opinion about Encanto doesn't really matter anymore. NOBODY is allowed to argue with Miyazaki. 

This functions the opposite way too -- if Tekken directly addresses Arslan Ash's complaints with the game, then that's GUARANTEED good press for your game. The company only addressed this top 0.0001% player, yes, but since almost every other Tekken fan will be aligned with his opinion, that will essentially be addressing the majority of the fanbase.

Is that kinda weird? Yeah. But this is a pattern I've often seen happen, whether or not this is the exact strategy that companies use. I would also mention that it's better for top players that their 1,000s of hours into the game not be rewarded with subpar top level gameplay, but it'd doubtful that would be a large factor in game balance decision-making.

#2: To make tournaments more exciting

This one's not really a secret.

Many esports have big international tournaments be massive events, which must rake in as much money as possible to break even, through viewership and other means like sponsors. If people do not like these events, then they will not make a good return. There's obviously a ton of factors when it comes to making a good tournament viewing experience, but the most relevant one here is balancing around tournament play, which would be the top level players.

There's a very common complaint I will hear about spectators for League tournaments, which are well-known to be the biggest esports tournaments. And that is: "I'm so tired of seeing the same character!" It's very common for League to have a powerful character on a tournament patch, causing them to either be picked often or banned by the other team. Even if it's not just a character, specific balancing choices can cause the game to be played too fast, or too slow, or too predictably, or too repetitively, all of which have to be considerations for the balancing team.

And yes, the number of people that actually play on the big stage with the majority of viewers is a tiny, tiny subset of the playerbase. However, these events are HUGE in bringing people in and getting interested in the game, for convincing people that the game is cool and worth investing time into. If you have hundreds of thousands of people watching your game on the big screen, and the top 0.0001% of players are an utter disappointment to watch, then all those people will probably be less convinced to play your video game, which could make the tournament a bust. Why play or watch the game if the best players in the world are a complete bore?

Those familiar with games like League that have a thriving esports scene might not think this matters, but it really does! Overwatch (the first one) was very infamous for being unable to get a grip on managing interesting tournament play, leading to a lot of slow and repetitive gameplay being streamed out to thousands of viewers. While there were many many reasons for its downfall, Overwatch League definitely fell at least partly due to lack of interest.

#3: Perceived strength

I touched on this subject with the other points, but it's worth emphasizing since it's massively underestimated.

My favorite example ever of the placebo effect in relation to game design is this one time that League included massive nerfs for the character Vladimir in the patch notes, causing a notable decline in his winrate. However, they completely failed to ship the actual changes! That meant the players all started losing more out of the pure feeling of being nerfed, rather than the nerfs actually affecting the character.

As mentioned before, buffs and nerfs are magnified for top level players since they're able to exploit mechanics to the fullest. That means that for other players, what usually matters more is just perceived strength, not actual strength. If you constantly worry about the characters you fight being overpowered, you will probably play worse against them since it tends to override your ability to focus on playing correctly. This tends to be less of an issue for top level players, who are the ones that usually need to be kept in check with nerfs.

Perceived strength in video games is almost always dictated by top level play. You never hear about which characters are best for mid-level play. You have the scrub killers (which are usually designed for that role and don't need to be nerfed), and you have the top tiers (which technically only apply to top level play). However, it's always the top tier characters that need to be nerfed -- any other characters that are nerfed will usually lead to considerable backlash.

Admittedly, this article had to veer off a lot more into conjecture than I usually prefer since I couldn't think of many good sources to pull from, but I'm keeping it as-is since I feel these ideas may be useful to some.

Of course, the ideal for games is to be balanced for all skill levels, but this goal can be very ambiguous. Do you want a high skill character to be balanced around low level play? If they were good at low level play and get better with high skill, then what would stop them from being overpowered in top level play? If a low skill character were good at high level play, then why wouldn't pros just play them? Game balance is a complicated thing, so I feel that balancing around top level play is actually a much more reasonable solution than some people may think.

There are many many methods to find ways around these issues and make a truly balanced game, but these are what I feel are the reasons that large competitive game companies tend to prioritize top level play.

• Vecderg