Handicaps Handicaps may create a competitive situation between players of different skill level, but they might also go too far and render skill irrelevant. Handicaps are disadvantages that sometimes are deliberately self-inflicted. Intuition Games can be complex systems. Since development resources are limited, relying on intuition can sometimes be useful or even necessary. The designer should always keep in mind how changes affect other parts of the game and guesses should always rely on evidence or proof. Matchmaking and ranking An approach to avoid some balancing problems all together is ranking players depending on their skill. Ideally, the ranking system predicts the outcome almost perfectly and every player (in a PvP game) has roughly the same win rate, even considering factors that lie outside the game, like the gaming device. In any case, good match making benefits a game greatly, since, for example, newbies are not matched against experienced players who leave them with no chance of winning and the challenge of stronger opponents rises together with each player's skills. Observation Some obvious problems become clear through sheer observation of the game and player behavior. This includes mathematical superiority of game elements or strategies but also extremely high or low usage of those. In any case, statistics do not necessarily represent causalities and that there are typically multiple factors. Orthogonal unit differences Orthogonal unit differences describes properties of game elements that cannot be compared by inherent numbers. Ideally, every game element has at least one unique trait. This also helps creating intransitivity and counters. Pacing Player versus environment games are usually balanced to tread the fine line of regularly challenging players' abilities without ever producing insurmountable or unfair obstacles. This turns balancing into the management of dramatic structure, generally referred to by game designers as "pacing". Pacing is also a consideration in competitive games, but the autonomy of players makes it harder to control. Power curve A power curve (also: cost curve) is a relation that reflects the ratio between power and costs. It is especially useful when dealing with multiple game elements that provide varying benefits depending on different values of the same cost, e.g. when using a central resource. While a power curve always shows an order, it does not necessarily represent exact relations, depending on the level of measurement. Randomization Randomization of starting conditions is a technique common in board games, card games, and also experimental research,