One of the major issues whenever a shooter with a heavy multiplayer comes out is how to balance the game properly. Even with a game that gets a yearly release like Call of Duty, it's never easy.
In an interview with Destructoid, Black Ops 2 game director David Vonderhaar reveals how they keep everything in check with a new system called "Black Box" that analyzes player data to see how everyone is doing. This is a good contrast to changing something up on a whim or if someone complains that a weapons is OP (overpowered).
What we said was we need to balance the emotion of using something, like your personal visceral reaction to it, with math…here's a lot of instrumentation in this game, there's a lot of data logging, so I know exactly what the power band of a weapon is at all times. So I can combine how something feels with how it's actually behaving. I know, I know this is going to happen: A million people are going to Tweet me and tell me that the [for example] 'PDW 57 is overpowered, Vonderhaar what are you doing?
What's more, Vonderhaar reveals that this Black Box is a series of databases that allow Treyarch to run various data against it in lots of unique ways. They can a weapon with the long barrel attachment and compare how many shots it's going to take to kill someone on average against another set of data.
Once you have the data you just need to figure out how you want to use it. You can create new queries and modify queries and that allows you to run all sorts of reports. I have this chart on my wall that we run all the time to just be sure how things are trending. What's really cool about it is you make a little tiny tweak [and] you get a sense of what that does to the tuning, what would happen if you did that. It lets you do some really lightweight modeling, it's pretty neat.
When it comes to things that are overpowered, claims that he can use the data form the Black Box to prove things aren't what people initially think they are and adds, "'m just going to kill people with facts [with] this game when they come over and go 'This thing is OP.' I'm going to go 'Actually it's not OP, you're wrong.' I'm not going to yell at them or anything, I'm just going to tell them the truth. I don't have to hide this stuff from people, just drop knowledge bombs on guys. It's gotta be done!"
You can read the whole interview along with how Vonderhaar gets feedback from Twitter, here.
From the past few days Black Ops 2 has been available, have you noticed anything overpowered in the game? Be it guns, a set of perks or loadout? Which loadout do you think is the "god" tier one that everyone uses now?
