/game-balance-pass

/game-balance-pass

The Warden (QA/balance) and The Playtester (synthetic players) run a balance sweep: persona-driven synthetic playtests, a balance Monte-Carlo simulation, and telemetry-informed tuning, producing concrete tuning recommendations that route back to the owning design heads — and a check that no change drops the game below its accessibility floor. Uses the game-qa-and-balance skill. This command tunes existing design; it does not create new features.

Steps

1. Frame — The Warden defines the balance question, the fun-proxy metrics, and the win/clear-rate targets for the named system/encounter.
2. Synthetic playtest — The Playtester runs persona simulations (casual/core/speedrunner/exploiter), emitting friction reports and fun-proxy deltas.
3. Monte-Carlo — The Warden runs the balance Monte-Carlo over --iterations to find dominant strategies, dead options, and difficulty cliffs.
4. Telemetry tuning — if --telemetry, fold in live clear-rate/drop-off/build-popularity data to ground the sim against reality.
5. Recommendations — synthesize tuning recommendations and route each to its owner: combat/systems numbers → The Systemsmith; encounter/boss/AI tuning → The Duelist; economy/drop/progression curves → The Economist.
6. Accessibility floor — fire game-accessibility-guidelines (owner: The Warden) to confirm no tuning change raises the skill floor past the accessibility baseline (e.g. assist-mode targets still clearable).
7. Close — The Warden writes the balance DECISION_RECORD with the recommendation table and verdicts; eights.memory.add(domain="gaming").

Example

/game-balance-pass "ranged-vs-melee weapon parity" --telemetry --iterations 5000

The Playtester finds melee unviable above tier 3, the Monte-Carlo confirms a ranged-dominant meta, telemetry agrees, and The Warden routes per-weapon tuning to The Systemsmith plus a difficulty-floor note to The Duelist — all while passing the accessibility-floor check.

Delegation

This is largely an in-crown evaluation; tuning recommendations are design artifacts handed to design heads. If a recommendation requires a code/tuning-table change, the owning head emits a DEV_TASK to engineering (game-bug-fix-team or game-feature-team). No assets are commissioned.