Feedback loops and comebacks

updated 2023-11-05

A positive feedback loop is when being ahead makes it easier to get even farther ahead. It's present in most games where you control units and win by destroying enemy units (Chess, Starcraft), since losing units also makes it harder to protect the units you have left. The general argument against these mechanics is that they cause a small early mistake to snowball into an insurmountable disadvantage such that the player who makes it will lose *even if they play better than their opponent for the rest of the match*. This can be frustrating.

Lunarch Studios, the developers of Prismata, argue that this isn't a problem because players can just resign when they see they have no hope of winning.

Lunarch Studios blog: Luck in games

And that works, *if you see* that you have no hope of winning. But Prismata is a game where it's very hard to tell who's ahead. So I had some matches where I made an early mistake that put me hopelessly behind, but that wasn't clear until after 10 turns of watching my opponent make obviously bad plays, none of which mattered because they were already ahead. When I finally realized I was losing I still had no idea why, and that was super tilting.

Chess is a game where it's very easy to tell who's winning: almost always, it's whoever has more non-pawn pieces. But it's also very blunder-prone; (at least in amateur games) it's very common for someone with a huge advantage to mess up and lose, which makes players who are behind feel like they have to play on incase this happens. The time spent doing that is not very fun.

Positive feedback loops can also be somewhat boring to the winning player, since they often know they've won before the losing player knows they've lost, but this is a relatively small problem because it's much less upsetting to play knowing you've won than to play knowing you've lost.

Finally, making the game effectively over before it's technically over creates some trolling possibilities; some people will grief their opponents by going AFK or making moves to drag it out once they know they've lost. But this is also a small problem since few people do it and in most games there's a limit to how long it can go.

Negative feedback loops

Some people hate positive feedback loops so much that they advocate doing the opposite thing and making the game get harder on whoever's in the lead. And ominously, this philosophy seems to be much more popular - while fewer games implement it, I've never actually heard anyone criticize it. So I'm going to be the first to do so in a noble attempt to save the game industry.

Negative feedback loops make the early game feel like wasted effort in the same way positive feedback loops do the late game: you can outplay your opponent and get ahead early, but what's the point when the game will even itself out? And this time you can't escape the frustration by resigning because it happens *before* the outcome is known, so negative feedback loops are actually much worse.

Are comebacks even a good thing, anyway?

I'd even question the idea that comebacks are a thing we should design for. Sure, they feel great for the player who comes back. But does anyone ever talk about how it feels to have someone come back against you?

Having played some games designed to make that happen, it feels pretty shit.

In Dragon Ball FighterZ it feels just as disappointing as any other game to lose by a landslide. But this game has no feedback loop (at least not much); comebacks are always possible through outplaying the opponent. And despite how great it feels to be on your last character with low health and proceed to wipe the opponent's team, it feels significantly worse to be on the losing end of that than it does to just lose a match from the start.

And that's in a game where the comeback is entirely emergent and can only happen through the underdog legitimately outplaying you. When the game artificially rewards the underdog or creates its comebacks through randomness, it feels even worse.

Overall, I think comebacks are desirable, but only slightly; I discourage sacrificing other design goals to create them.