Finding the right balance

As soon as we could test our project we started to balance the asymmetric game play. The main goal was clear from the start. Both sides of the game had to fun and fair. For fun we looked at the players reactions during play testing and focus testing. We also looked which side was preferred by the players.
Did they want to only play as one specific side? Did player preference matter? Was the fairness factor influencing which side they wanted to play?
These were the questions we were facing during the early stages of development.

The game started out with the thief only being visible to the guards when the thief was in line of sight of a guard. The guard player had four guards to start out with. So they would spread them out and then as soon as one of them found the thief, the chase would ensue. There were a multitude of problems with this. First one was that the guard player was overwhelmed with information. There was a lot of ground to cover, and they had to micromanage all four guards at once to effectively find the thief. So first we reduced the number of guards to three. This meant that the player had to micromanage less at once. To compensate for the lower amount of guards, we also provided the guard player with some information,