Patch notes
Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was proving too big of a distraction. More recently, a second game has reached that same ignoble height — except it's not even a full game. It's a demo. It is Guildrun.
Guildrun is a single-player auto-battler in the spirit of Teamfight Tactics. If you're unfamiliar with the genre: it revolves around setting up a roster of heroes, equipping them with skills and items, and then having them fight against increasingly difficult enemies while you watch. I have never been a huge fan of the genre, and yet Guildrun has completely ensorcelled me — in no small part because I think they have nailed the balance between mastery and chaos. There's enough randomness in a given run that each one feels different, but I as a player have enough agency and optionality to feel that my choices not only meaningfully impact the run but that I'm getting better at making the right choices over time.
This post isn't really about Guildrun, though. It's about their patch notes.
Remember: this is a demo. The game is not yet out, and it is a single-player game — there is no ladder, no economy, no opponent whose feelings about a nerf you have to manage. And yet the notes are uncommonly detailed and well-reasoned. It is very hip to talk about the lessons application designers can learn from game design, largely around progressive disclosure and activation/habit-building. But the thing that caught my eye here was how the balance dev talks about archetypes of players, and how they weigh priorities when making changes.
Since it just isn’t possible for every player to be happy with every decision I make, I try to think about each decision in terms of the “net fun” it will add to the game for each kind of player. I read through my list of changes from the perspective of each major player group, then add up the total amount of positive and negative “fun units” I expect these players to derive from each change. This way, even though certain changes add to the net fun of one group while subtracting from another, I can always aim for each player group to end up with a positive net fun score, which hopefully translates to a positive view on the patch. However, if even one player group ends up in the net fun negative then I haven't done my job well enough.
For Guildrun, the 3 major groups of players are the Climbers, the Endless Mode players, and the Red Rift players. The Climbers are players who are in the process of climbing through the difficulties to unlock and complete all of Guildrun's content, and are currently our largest group of players by a decent margin. Everyone starts out as a Climber, and for many of these players the quest to discover everything the game has to offer is the game. The experience that players have during their climb through the difficulties is incredibly important to us, and the feedback from Climbers helps make the game better for all Climbers, present and future. Since the primary goal for most Climbers is to progress up the game's difficulties, it's easy to understand why nerfs can feel like an obstacle standing between them and their goals, and why buffs feel like a helping hand.
It does not require a lot of rhetorical justification to understand how this might apply to traditional software. Software tends to grow more complex and featureful over time, which rewards edge case users who have already onboarded at the expense of new users; conversely, redesigns or radical simplifications of an interface might be a net positive for new users without any muscle memory whatsoever, but are often experienced as a net negative to experienced users who log in to find that all of their cheese has been moved.
Even more than that, I find, as a player who now aspirationally describes themselves as in absentia from any sort of impact of these notes, I can't help but admire the thought that went into these changes, minute as they are. And the explanations themselves, even if I might disagree with them, generates goodwill towards the organization, because at least now I can understand that there was a thought process and not just whimsy