I absolutely agree that striving for greater "balance" has ruined, or at least made less fun, a lot of games. Knowing that the maps in, say Halo, are optimized by hotspot and killspot to spread out play, or knowing that map and player data is used to redesign levels in, say, Left 4 Dead, is kinda depressing.
With such finely-tuned games (and the Youtube strategy sharing mentioned in a sibling), it becomes frankly rather tedious to compete.
It's especially annoying in games that heavily favor micro management for units...it favors people who can quickly execute a dumb strategy over ones who can slowly execute a smart one. It favors people who can remember exact build timelines. Because all else is equal (because the sharp edges have been ground off during "balancing"), the winners are just the folks who can interface fastest.
And when you're game depends on basically "Here, who can deal with our clunky interface the fastest", it feels like bullshit artificial difficulty.
In Total Annihilation, for example, we always found that unit counts were large enough and AI decent enough that fights became about mid-long term planning and basically warring economies, not who could successfully dance a flock of zergs most effectively through a static defense.
With such finely-tuned games (and the Youtube strategy sharing mentioned in a sibling), it becomes frankly rather tedious to compete.
It's especially annoying in games that heavily favor micro management for units...it favors people who can quickly execute a dumb strategy over ones who can slowly execute a smart one. It favors people who can remember exact build timelines. Because all else is equal (because the sharp edges have been ground off during "balancing"), the winners are just the folks who can interface fastest.
And when you're game depends on basically "Here, who can deal with our clunky interface the fastest", it feels like bullshit artificial difficulty.
In Total Annihilation, for example, we always found that unit counts were large enough and AI decent enough that fights became about mid-long term planning and basically warring economies, not who could successfully dance a flock of zergs most effectively through a static defense.