Quote Originally Posted by Bartmanhomer View Post
Wow. That's a lot of information. How do you know all this stuff anyway?
It's not all that much info, but it is a lot of thought. The big takeaway is still "what do you mean by balance, and why does it matter?"

I doubt if it's possible to have two competitive sides be perfectly matched, unless you make them identical. And even then one side will probably have some advantage, like white in chess. In practice, I can't think of any game or sport that expects its sides should always be perfectly matched. The whole point of playing is to determine which is better.

The thing about computer games is, they allow people to recreate exactly the same matches over and over - there's no human athlete who is getting tired, or injured, no changing weather or team spirit, no crowd to get hostile or bored. And in those conditions - quite unlike any real sport - people have the chance to observe and optimise their tactics in a way that hasn't been possible before. If you think about it in those terms, it's not surprising that repeating the same match, over and over until both sides have run out of ideas, eventually settles down to give the same result each time.