I believe balancing issues are done in beta. I say this because u will always fine someone that is using something how U would of never thought to, thus making it to powerful, but yes having a stable build is a must. Thank you for the nice reply criminal
Balance is started in Beta, Finalized in Release.
Remember, beta is a smaller, isolated section of the whole.
Once a game is released and it's in the hands of thousands of people imbalances that may not have been noticed come to light. Just like any piece of art, it's never finished, even when finished.
I know I have been on the beta testing groups for both NBT and MEKTEK as well as about 15 other games in the past ALIENS ONLINE WHAT WHAT LOL. Balancing is what I did, I feel they all came out well.
Yeah. It's also a matter of trying to get it decently balanced as well as possible, even for the beta. Because like it or not, people tend to judge beta's as the final product. If there are glaring balance issues, then it's not fun and we don't get as good beta results as hoped for. Beta's are really useful for stress testing, and fixing small problems/inconsistances, and/or any oversights and tweaks. If we just threw something out there, even assuming it was stable, and didn't bother to balance it, then we'd get a whole bunch of people:
1. Say it sucks
or
2. Would critquie about obvious balanceing problems that we could have avoided earlier, instead of critiquing the finer more delicate balance issues. In turn, keeping the game more unbalanced by the time full release happens, and having the game just not being as fun as it could be when release happens
It's pretty similar to the 5, 50, 500 rule in printing:
"Find and fix a mistake early on, costs you $5 to fix"
"Find and fix the same mistake while in prepress, costs you $50 to fix"
"Find and fix the same mistake during press/production/release, costs you $500 to fix"
