Lessons from other communties to improve BMP balance and player involvement

[distant kraken]

Because my message is long ill post it in parts below.

TlDR: establish good core values of what bmp should be, then involve players with surveys, let them earn voting or make a balancing council.

Overview of Community Governance Models for Balatro Multiplayer (BMP)

Last year I did my bachelor thesis on gaming communities and democracy. Because I’m really interested in using community knowledge to improve games or our actual lives. I learned about various methods to gather this wisdom. They have various upsides and downsides and are not all democratic but are certainly effective.

My thesis focused mainly on Smogon, the online gaming community that governs Pokémon Showdown. But I also played and watched Civ VI multiplayer. They have their own mod just like Balatro Multiplayer has. And I play a lot of Super Auto Pets, where the indie developers use public feedback from test servers to develop their game.

So with that being said, here are a couple ways BMP could incorporate player wisdom to improve the BMP mod. I would also like to preface that I have very little knowledge on how the BMP balancing currently works. So some elements may already be in use. And of course this is in no way an attack on the current admins, I just offer methods out of curiosity and because I’ve enjoyed my time in BMP. (It’s sad, but I feel like I need to establish that because internet culture can be hostile sometimes.)

Before implementing any model, the BMP community must establish a clear vision of its core values. Balancing decisions vary significantly depending on whether the primary goal is
Fun: Prioritizes enjoyment, potentially allowing for "broken" or over-centralizing mechanics.
Balanced: Focuses on mitigating over-centralizing elements to ensure a fair playing field.
Competitive: Ensure the better player wins the majority of the time, potentially allowing for "broken" or over-centralizing mechanics if these incentivise skill.

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Defined guidelines ensure that rulings remain consistent and provide the player base with transparent arguments for changes. It also helps guide discussions since people have the principles to refer to. For example, it is easier to make an argument for golden ticket being OP, but you believe that is fine when the core value is ‘competitive.’ But if there is no agreed-upon value, some people will say it’s OP, and others will say it’s fine the way it is. Without them understanding each other, halting productive discussion.

The methods I will discuss are, councils, direct democracy, suspect tests and surveys.

First direct democracy: While inclusive, this is generally ill-advised for binding decisions. High participation often introduces "uninformed" voters, trolls, or players voting solely for personal preference rather than game health.

Surveys: Recommended as a tool for overall insight. They allow developers to identify problematic jokers or mechanics while filtering out bad-faith actors. This method provides the benefits of community feedback without compromising the final decision-making authority.

Suspect testing, the model Smogon uses. This model requires players to "earn" their vote by meeting specific in-game criteria (for example, achieving a certain win rate). Because it is time-consuming for players, it ensures voters are informed and dedicated, effectively eliminates trolls, and increases community trust in the balancing process. However, it excludes casual voices and tends to favor the competitive/tournament scene.

Last balancing councils. A small group of dedicated players tasked with making informed decisions. There are various types of balancing councils. In both Civ VI and Smogon, they were present. The power of a council is that dedicated players make decisions relatively fast. Depending on the size of a council, they can vote quickly and discuss honestly. This facilitates fast decision-making and honest discussion among members. Since everyone in the council is there to improve the game, you also avoid trolls and uninformed opinions.

However, it is difficult to select "fair" representatives, and council members often face significant community criticism; it is a pretty thankless task. There are various options to select members: Members can be selected to represent different demographics (for example, casual players, serious ladder players, and tournament players) or via an internal appointment system based on community activity. You could also elect and vote people in, but this has a downside. Most people play games for fun and already have enough politics in their real lives, so Smogon council leaders don’t use this method.

Summary Comparison
To conclude, effective implementation of these methods in to BMP balancing requires navigating various trade-offs: while direct democracy can help define an overall vision, it is often hampered by trolls and uninformed voters, whereas surveys provide valuable insight into broad player opinions despite requiring a decent amount of work to implement. Suspect tests offer a more informed perspective by ensuring only dedicated players participate. Finally, councils enable fast decision-making but demand clear guidelines and high community trust to mitigate the difficulties of member selection and the inevitable criticism faced by those in this thankless position.

Final Recommendation
I would recommend an approach like Smogon. They use a hybrid of all methods except direct democracy. They use surveys for broad insight and to determine what suspect tests are needed, or sometimes councils make quick bans and they facilitate this proces. Whether you want to apply these methods or not, it greatly improves community trust and sense of involvement if you use at least one of these consistent methods. Establishing a system where players can "help improve their favorite game" fosters a healthier, more engaged community and makes the mod fit the community’s needs.

Overall I would be interested in seeing a suspect system for BMP, or at least a survey system. It would be complicated to figure out how people would get voting requirements, but it can be worth the effort. In my research all the casual players interviewed were very happy with the system even when they didn’t get to vote themselves. This improved community trust in balancing decisions and gave the people who participated a sense of involvement. They could help improve their favourite game.

Hopefully this was helpful or at least entertaining to read. If you have any questions, I’m happy to elaborate. I tried to keep it short, so I cut some nuances out. Always happy to start a productive discussion and help improve the games I play.

• Sincerely Mr. Fellows

the formatting is akward ill fix it

Its a big wall of text in discord, in my text editor it looked smaller😰

**TlDR: establish good core values of what bmp should be, then involve players with surveys, let them earn voting or make a balancing council. **

[teal lava]

I would like to note on suspect testing specifically. Recently(well not really but this season) bounties were added, which artificially lowers your win rate(this isn't for this system as a whole but only this version of it) my problem with it is that no matter how you split it, it is either easily exploitable or (specifically in bmp, and publicly known stats) would shave off most of the varsity in the community.
btw you can also just roll in random people for the decision if you really want an inclusive experience, in which non of the voters are uninformed.

[distant kraken]

You are right the BMP ranked envoirment is fairly small. So its hard to set requirments in such an envoirment. And indeed I forgot about random sampling! That has it's various problems too, but if you have a list of people willing to help and then pull a sample from those it could work. However I don't see how they would be informed players from your message. And informed voters is something I value a lot🤔

[teal lava]

The idea behind random sampling is that you take both the benefits of everyone voting and specialized people deciding with the caviat of potentially having longer wait-time between changes and sometimes minorities get really fucked up or vice versa. The way it usually works is you put like 10 people in a chat and let them talk for a week or so and ask them to come to an agreement somehow. The only reason I brought it up is because it is a good way to mishmash some of the other systems together to get different upsides and downsides, decpite being built around the same idea as them.