Basically community feedback combined with stats to see what cahracters/builds are mostly winning.

Varies from case to case, usually it’s a multi step process. Initially a bit of logic from the designers/coders (I.e an SMG should have lower long range accuracy and less damage per round than a sniper rifle), some of the balancing refinement is then done via play tests (sometimes in the form of Alpha or Beta test releases). Even then there are typically still things not considered, so final adjustments are made once the game is released by looking at player statistics. Unfortunately it’s a very difficult process without a lot of player data so usually comes down to balance patches after release.

I guess I was wondering if there were just algorithm testing or simulations that get ran 1000x or something to that affect.

Simulations might be used, but they're of little help because the devs need to balance based off of how players actually play the game.

So for that, they track all sorts of statistics about what characters are used, howe they're used, how effective they are against other characters in general, and specific other characters, and much more.

They take that data and then see if something is too strong, too weak, etc, and try to adjust for fairness.

Or in the case of Riot, they release new characters that are strong so people buy them, then lower the power after.

Well the thing about balance on a competitive videogame is that, even if something is unbalanced that doesn't make it unfair. As long as people have access to the same options, or like in asymmetric maps you alternate sides and play multiple rounds it's fair for competitive use.

What balance is about is making competitive play -interesting-. If competitors see that some character or weapon or strategy leads to an advantage some will gravitate to that strategy. And when too many people do it things get tweaked to make that less advantageous.

The developers do their best of course with play testing before a release, but after they get a ton of data to look at from people actually playing the game. Though generally they try not to make sweeping changes as that can lead to even more things going out of whack. A higher playerbase tends to find things the developers missed/couldn't predict just from the sheer quantity of people trying stuff out.

A side note, ELO systems. ELO or MMR systems use some variation of th ELO algorithm created for ranking chess players. It works by assigning players a number which denotes their skill.

When two players play eachother, the probability of either person winning is calculated based on the difference in their scores. The general formula, is that two people with equal scores have a 50/50 shot at winning. For every point by which one player iss below the other, that players assumed odds of winning g are reduced by some percentage for every point. So 1 point below you might reduce his odds by 1% so he has a 49.5% chance of winning. Then another point so a other 1% now they have a 49.05% chance of winning and so on and so on.

When the game is over, the players scores are adjusted according to how much of an upset the results of the game were. So, if a player won a game they were likely to lose, they'd get more points than if they were likely to win it. Eventually, you're so likely to win that you would gain less than some threshold of points. At this threshold you usually just gain 0 rather than a fraction of a point. Both to keep the math easy in the future, as we as to represent that you played someone so much worse than you that it basically doesn't count.

The amount of points you can win at once are also bounded. So the harder the odds are against you, the less pay off you get the more unlikely it is. In other words, you have to win increasingly more unlikely games to get the next additional point.

Because the way the odds work, the game is considered to be too wide in skill gap before the odds get so extreme that you get 80 points in one game. This solves the problem of outlier games where sometimes an unskilled player will get lucky against a far more skilled opponent, and has to play many more games to even things out.

Finally, all the points one player gains, the other loses. Meaning that if you lose a bunch, your rati g goes downdown, then you win all your rematches, you should end up in a similar place, though technically be a use of rounding error you might not.

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Alot of updates and a good communication between the developers and the pros/casuals. There are games which are less balanced - could be a budget problem or a lack of communication with the community. I play tekken and csgo. In both games there are alot of updates based on the feedbacks from the community and the results of the pro scene.

If you are interested there is a podcast episode with the lead game designer for league. Im mobile so here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwlBy253qCY

Depends totally on game, sometimes on statistics, sometimes on feedback, sometimes on both, or in apex legends case - not at all