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General: Inside the Nerf
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
In this week's column, MMORPG.com's Victor Wachter takes a look at the thought process and fallout that occurs when developers pull out the old nerf bat.
If you play a multi-player game for any length of time, you'll inevitably run into the nerf. In my career working in games, I've helped nerf spells, guns, robots and super powers.
As people play together, they are always taking account of how they compare to their fellow players and begin to note which play styles are the most efficient. As a result, they generally do one of two things: They either adjust their own style to include the optimal mechanics or they decide that certain mechanics are too powerful to be allowed and seek to make their feedback known.
Sometimes, developers act on that feedback and swing the nerfbat. The magnitude of a nerf varies. Sometimes, it's a simple adjustment of damage tables, changing the effectiveness of certain mechanics, which pretty much every game does on a regular basis. Sometimes, it's a complete overhaul of certain classes, such as the EverQuest Monk or EVE’s medium spaceship changes. Sometimes, it will be a complete gameplay overhaul, such as Ultima Online's Trammel.
;)
Read Inside the Nerf.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
If developers did their job in development they would not need to nerf, but later they compensate their own failure on the back of the player. Imagine you buy a car and 5 months later after you drive and enjoy your big horsepowers the creators of your car come to you are take out some of the tech and some of the power with the argument "it is unfair to be faster and more secure with your tech gadgets than other drivers". I mean, wouldn't you be fucked up too?
When a company nerfs it means only one thing: they totally borked it and now the gamers have to pay the price. How about: we gamer have patience with your tinkering with our characters when you have patience with us not paying while the game is under "paid beta"?
Often nerfs are just a sudden paradigm change. For instance, EQ2 Paladins were nerfed about 2 years after EQ2 launch. And I thought WTF? And they changed a good tank with some heals to a half-baked healer who also might tank. It was changed ALL THE DAMN way around and for why? Just because after TWO YEARS SOE had the idea to make Paladin a healer instead of a tank. Great.
Or some Companies who recently launch games (*cough cough*) and ONE DAY after Beta realize they have too little content and swing a nerf over ALL POWERS to compensate the lack of content. Man, I can quote so many examples of messed up nerfing, it isn't even funny to be right. Nerfs are made often after games run for years and years? How can it be after a game runs and people played that over and over SUDDENLY some Dev thinks "oh wow, thats OP"?
(For someone who is aligned with Cryptic and the nerfs of the powers... man you have some guts to defend nerfs. I really have bite my MF tongue not to just YELL something REALLY BAD. *fumes*)
EDIT: And in comment to the poster below me: yes indeed, does it occur to the Devs ONE TIME, that gamers invest into their char and their powers? We build those chars over months and years and suddenly some dev finds no other way to justify is prolongued employment by juggling with powers? Can you honestly tell me many companies just not give in to whining? I have seen it too many times that gamers whine and whine about OP class X and when they whine enough companies swing the nerf to calm their gamers. No man... starting the nerf bat is ALWAYS a loose-loose cycle for all involved parties.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I understand the need to tweak certain game elements, especially class balance in PvP, but some developers realy take it to the extreme, having streams of nerfs and buffs every couple months. It's like the developers are bored or scared to lose their jobs, so they just make stuff up to change. I mean, isn't this what the beta testing stage is for? Just as I'm getting comfortable with the old changes, here comes the latest patch, making the game completely different for me. And maybe I don't like the new game, you know? It actually kind of pisses me off.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
PVP in CoX ... what the heck were they thinking? I have my theroies but there is no effort to fix that hole. Not yet anyway.
I think one of the biggest mistakes that many dev teams does is that they don't explain WHY they do what they do. Most players are reasonable people and if they feel they are respected and told infomation in an adult, balanced and reasonable way they are inclined to look at the case from a broader perspective and can accept that yes maybe their fireball of doom was a bit over the side.
It comes down to that dev teams need to be utterly open about what their goals is and what their method is to reach that gold. Then most of the bad feelings will be absorbed by reason and open frank discussion.
But most teams don't do this, they hide behind CS and bring press statements and patch notes and then hope for the best and the result of course is that the changes seems unreasonable and that will decrease the customers trust in the dev team so that when they adjust again people will have very little trust in the team doing the right thing and they will certainly feel angry because they feel treated badly.
What developers should understand is simply that people are ready to accept bad things if they understand why the bad thing was necessary.
"You are the hero our legends have foretold will save our tribe, therefore please go kill 10 pigs."
They DO explain. It's just 80% of what they say is BS.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
When I see a nerf in a MMO that am playing, I tend to cancel my account and give reason of you nerfed the game making it unplayable.
If more players did this then the trend of nerfing will be be reduced in such a way that it would be a wakeup call to the devs. Without a subscriber base devs have to go look for work elsewhere. Also devs with a reputation as nerfing devs are usually not hired at all. No big name company wants a dev on the team that has a rep of being a nerfing dev.
I personally wish companies weren't so eager to make LARGE nerfs. I would be happier to see them go, "okay, we're going to lessen this by 10% and see how the numbers stack up." Instead, skills take 50-80% hits that completely demolish a skill and make it useless, and then maybe they'll come back later and make it not suck so much.
In other words, when you're trying to ram something big into a tiny hole, ease it in so you don't tear anything.
I personally wish companies weren't so eager to make LARGE nerfs. I would be happier to see them go, "okay, we're going to lessen this by 10% and see how the numbers stack up." Instead, skills take 50-80% hits that completely demolish a skill and make it useless, and then maybe they'll come back later and make it not suck so much.
In other words, when you're trying to ram something big into a tiny hole, ease it in so you don't tear anything.
Completly agree, if you make a wide range change then you fucked up. Really plain and simple. Oh and the last example wasn't a change in beta. CO Nerfed all powers across the board, and buffed minnion dammage across the board on Launch Day, so all the 3 day head starters wenr from hero to zero litterly over night.
head starts are not Betas.
Some other examples of global nerfs that are just dumb
Enhancement Diversification (City of Heroes): Sure they made up with it with Inventions but it took us a year with powers litterly cut in half to get IOS.
Regen (city of heroes):
When you spend 13 issues nerfing the same power you have to just man up and admit "ok we don't know what the frak we're doing"
My biggest problem with nerfs, they almost always over do it.
I always thought of Mythic as the nerf a lot kids. They over nerfed so many things it is impossible to relate them all. Yet when the Atlantis expansion came out in DAoC and they really needed to nerf the new skills they did an about take and did little. it cost them their playerbase.
You can never fathom the thought process of developers.
Major changes though are a very high risk. UO got away with one when they introduced trammel as they opened the game to players that did not want to pvp, but SWG and DAoC imploded when introducing theirs.
You would think looking at the current history of MMO's that developers would realize that stepping stones are a far better way to change than the do it all at once approach. Seems a common human failure to repeat history time and time again.
I think what turns off a lot of players is the constant up and down adjustment. One day a certain class can easily handle specific content. Post nerf, they can't kill a limping, bleeding fly and get stomped on by that exact same content.
We're supposed to be playing a persistent world with rules that should be constant, but are in fact at the whim of the developers. As developers come and go, that whim also changes. Changing the rules midstream breaks any sense of immersion and destroys the credibility of the gaming company and any sense of respect for the developers. If there's a mechanic that makes certain classes seem overpowered, fix the problem in beta/QC or don't fix it. Playing the nerf card on a live game just shows the player base that the developers don't know anything about playing or testing their own game.
No Developer can possibly emulate the million and one weird things players do in a game. If they could we would still be waiting for Ultima Online to be released. So nerfs are sometimes needed. Period, paragraph. Its all a matter of HOW they release them.
Well,... I do think nerfing can can be a good thing(if done right).
Devs can think of variouse nerfs coming into effect on an automatically timed in-gaming out-gaming cycle that could last anywhere from an hour/day/ week/month, or more if they so choose. I know this sounds like just like a buff but look a bit closer for me here.
This could play out as being a bit more realistic as we understand our own lives from a subconciouse point of view.
In other words, we all have our good days and bad days, some of us are night howls vs. others who are day walkers.
How does this compare with character creation? How can this be done on a universal scale?
Businesses (particulalry textile companies) tend to have their stong seasons and week seasons.
And this creates factors which shape both cause and effect as well as supply and demand. Now, what makes cyclic nerfing different from buffs is that no one player has control over their enhancements or apparent weaknesses. And they occur cyclicaly just like winter and summer. But the timing of the enhancements or weaknesses can be predicated and thus compensations can be made by the characters themselves, (rather than a chalky request from an upset player.) i,e, if you know its going to be cold outside, you dont put on swimmng trunks befrore stepping off to work.---you put on a jacket and/or a scarf.. But then again,its not always cold outside, and its never cold outside during August...where i live..... here on earth...( the expeptions are endless)
Such a way of cyclically creating strenghts and weaknesses that automatically wax and wane over periods of time could technically create an extra dimension to role playing individual classes. This new/extra dimension is the dimension of balance, vs the infamously well know ( and over emphasized ) dimension of playing merely for Power's sake.
I find an interesting perspective missing from your article. Your assumption is that nerfs are done in reaction to either "improving the game balance" or "responding to payer complaint". You forget the more OBVIOUS one that is at the foundation of almost all nerfs in the f2p mmos arena. I would agree that if you are talking P2P games you are correct as they do not have that directive in mind, however, taking a game like Atlantica Online for instance, 95% of all the huge and extreme nerfing that has been to that game in the last 7 months has been SOLEY to force use of the item mall. Extreme nerfing of gold drops rates, gear box droprate, materials droprate. The nerfing of every way players had found to make in-game gold...from crafting to grinding has been made irrelevant by the nerfs. Why?...simple, to force plyayers to make money by buying items from the item mall and reselling them. With very little changes made to actual player characters.
Next "nerf"? To then overpower to an extreme level all lvl 100+ content to make the purchase of blessing potions/licences, Atlas stones (to try to make upgraded gear) and various other power enhancing item mall items. While at the same time reducing all ways to do these things with in-game tactics and again, with very few actual changes to the characters themselves (meaning no real "character balance" issues were involved in any of Atlantica's nerfing.)
I have played alot of games, and I have never seen such ramapant and extreme nerfing for this purpose before. To some extent yes, but never to such an extreme as Atlantica has done it. So perhaps you should amend your ideas regarding Nerfing to include the fact that sometimes and where some companies are concerned, the nerfing has NOTHING to do with game play balancing or player capitulation, but is soley to make the game more dependant on item mall purchases with NO care or concern for the player base. The long time/hardcore AO players have watched 75% of the playerbase quit in thelast 7 months during this nerfing campaign. So ATO certainly has no concern for player reaction...lol
Well I have been around for quite some time. I have been in many games and seen many nerfs.
My main question is always why cant you fix the gameplay instead of nerfing skills.
I quit EQ2 for 2 years due to the nerfs that were handed out to most of the casting class. Over half the casting class is still nerfed down.
Swg had the huge nerf, completly changed the game.
Lotro, Turbine has had so many nerfs to their game its not even funny. You had Mini's had half their dammage they could do changed over night with moria. Gaurdians still have problems holding agro with the rebalance they did to add the new and improved warden tank. LM's had inductions added with moria. Hunters and Champs 2 nerfs in a row to skills. Upcomming nerfs with som to both those classes. Captains had an in harms way a skill that had not changed in 2 years cut completly in half. All this using the word balance. The game was balanced until moria, and with the introduction of 2 new classes and LI's the went from balance to never having it right in the first place. Most of the nerfs in that game were handed out due to the PVMP something that only about 20% if that of the entire play base is.
I could go on and on and give examples after example.
The problem is how to fix the game without taking away player skills. There has to be a way of fixing problems without turning on your customer base. I agree the nerf needs to be explaned and be reasonable. However most of the nerfs Ihave seen are not reasonable, and go to far in a lot of cases.
If you're quitting everytime there's a nerf you must be quitting more games than your playing becasue they all do it.
I did the same for CO. The launch day nerf was not the game I bought a 6 month sub for so cancelled my 6 mo sub.
The BIG issue as one other poster said it is that these develpoment houses and their publishers ( mostly their publishers... Im looking at you Atari) force the developers to launch within a very short time frame. Too little time for proper play testing. Hence the post launch nerfing... paid beta testing whatever you want to call it.
Im not sure how this could be changed other than lawsuits against the publishers for selling a product not as advertised and incomplete, but who among us has the resources to begin that assault? beside who can spend that much time away from their MMO without falling totally out fo the loop? LOL
It's really not the developer's fault. It's the publisher with the wallet. They only speak money, so hit em' in the wallet, but you need to be prepared that each time you cancel a sub and leave a publisher with a bad taste in their mouth for you as a customer that, they may not welcome you back for the next big launch if you terminate a contract in a negative way, or too frequently.
If only some ultra rich gamer would sue a few companies and set some precidents so this stopped happening we would see the nerf bat out alot less.
To paraphrase Yoda; "Once you start down the NerfSide, forever shall it dominate your destiny, consume you it will hmmm".
Grabbing the nerf bat and swinging it around wildly(like some demented version of wack a mole) is almost always a Bad Thing(tm). It usually results in even more "imbalance" than you started out with. Thats how FOTM classes get going(and end). Simply because some vocal members of the forum are howling like hysterical banshees, doesn't automatically translate to a real need to nerf a given class. It takes time/thought and above all lots of DATA before one should even consider setting foot on the path that leads to the NerfSide. Much of this can be avoided by Dev's actually understanding how the various play dynamics work on the players side. Thats best achieved by them playing the game themselves. Second best is to have teams of dedicated(and well vetted) players that feed them play information(which is then compared to the data logs).
After all of that, THEN they should decide IF a change(or changes) is warranted. If not, a simple "Working As Intended" is certain to make the forums lively for weeks on end.
(Warn your CM's before hand, so they can get out their Ban Hammers of Doom, *when* things get out of hand).
If it is required, then change ONLY ONE VARIABLE AT A TIME! After each change, check the results in *actual play*. In all of this make certain that you document the decision process, so that if something gets messed up, you can back track it and hopefully prevent it from happening the next time...And there WILL be a next time...and a next time...
Good point and holy crap!
I haven't played Atlantica so I had no idea.
This free to play concept is very misleading. Nothing is ever free.
Again my point is that these Publishers are only concerned about money, no customer satisfaction.
My theory is satisfy the customer's desires and the money will come.
The game that shows up at launch is the game you pay for. Pay for it the day before it comes out and that's your fault. To say you canceled your sub because they changed something for launch reminds me of all the posts about people being silly and buying into hype of a game before it ever comes out. If the devs need a beta test to find out that thousands of people playing a certain way cause an unintended effect, then right after beta they have to nerf.
The funny thing is, after a life of nerfs in gaming, I don't think I ever cared one way or the other. I generally level my entire account with toons and have never really been put off by a nerf. Its something that every single game I've played has done and to act as if the toon you play now will forever be the same is naive. Its even more naive to think that anyone who has played any MMO for more than 6 months would believe that you somehow had no idea these things happen. Even worse than those things is usually, things get nerfed for a reason and people act like their toon only being able to solo 10 grape mobs instead of 25 is somehow lamentable....
I can actually accept nerfing if developers give players to recover lost time or reset their build after the change.
I recall in Lineage 1 they nerfed my bugbear wizard but didn't let me respec his talent points so i could compensate for the change. It drove me to quit the class and ultimately the game.
CCP annoyed me in EVE when they decided to put in the speed nerf and not restore the SP's that I spent training for a Vagabond and put them into another ship tree. Fortunately, most training for the Vaga applies in some other areas so it isn't a total loss, but I would have appreciated some sort of opportunity to put my SP's in a different area.
Speaking of EVE, they are about to do a major "rebalancing" of 0.0 soveriegnty in their next expansion and I sure hope it doesn't turn out to be another NGE or TOA that destroys a great game.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
That last paragraph reminds me of the Shaman class in WoW. It's the least played class, so they don't do anything worthwhile for it. They'd rather "fix" the more played classes and say F off to Shaman. I guess they see it as it has one "spec" that does well in PvP... a healing spec... the least they could do is mark the other two spec trees as PvE only, and save people the trouble of bothering with the two non-PvP specs.
I am pro nerfing, even when they nerf my own character. A lot of people think that all the balance should have been sorted out in the beta, or that nerfing classes is a sign of an incomplete game. The reality is that as an MMO progresses it adds to the game and as a result the developers find tha tthe added content leans more towards one class over another. The problem with a nerf is that once you do it then you have to make sure it is balanced again and so forth. I think people are often so against nerfing is because they are so hardcore that they have a system for their character and dont want to change it. To me this is just lazy and unimaginative, in fact I often find such people are not very good at playing their classes because they are unadaptive and can not adjust to varying conditions in battle.
A fantastic example of the hugely negative response from a nerf was the swith in WoW from original to Burning Crusade. Before the release of the expansion Warlocks got a huge bonus across the board, they were incredibly over powered, the developers realised their mistake very quickly and nerfed the Warlock which recieved huge amounts of hate. What most of these people failed to realise is that the warlock was still mroe over powered than before they got the bonus, they stayed over powered, but to a lesser extent. In fact ti was not until 2 years later when Wrath of the Lich king came out that they were given a nerf at all.
Nerf haters simply see that they get hurt and ignore that the nerf is actually usually made logically and effectively. The developers are not out to hurt you. They are trying to make the game more playable for everyone.
Finally: in the real world not everyone has an equal oppurtunity, MMOs are often trying to replicate life and if they wanted to be real then a wizard would clean the floor with a soldier.
Nerfs should NEVER happen. Ever. At all.
Why? Simply put: It pisses people off.
What should devs do if a class is overpowered? Buff the other classes to match.
Sure, some people will get upset at that, but the backlash will be far less severe.
While I agree in theory... In practice buffing all of the other classes takes a lot more time and resources than nerfing one class does. Not only that, but there are then multiple potential points of failure, with each class that was buffed. Then there is the required buffing of the mobs and bosses(to maintain the same balance). Thats why the vast majority of Dev's nerf, rather than buff.
I think you will find that in the future the companies that do really well will be the ones that learned from the mistakes of the past and:
1) never release a game before it has be tested and passes the fun factor target score of awesome and usually this includes balance. If I play a class and try to work at developing it to optimize my fun along with my tastes and then the devs nerf the class so I no longer can use this character the way I developed it I might stay but it is likely I will start to search out other games to see what's up because of my distress over how the devs rendered my time and effort worthless.
2) When a nerf is necessary they will use the test server wisely, that is what it is there for.
Hire guys to play the game and get to know these people to see how you should gauge their input and contrast it with your own in game experience and discuss it and adjust and retest and maybe even focus test over and over till you think you got it if there is a tough decision to make. Never should a nerf show your player base that you obviously did not test your nerf because of glaring imbalances you missed or never even tried to find and make us players wounder why you even have a test server. If you don't have a test server then start your search for another job.
That makes sense. Part of the fun in an MMO is learning to adapt when you get more powerful, or when you get a new skill or spell. The only thing though, is occasionally the nerfs make a playstyle that you enjoy, less balanced. So, even though you can still play that way, you are alot more limited. It doesn't have anything to do with being lazy or not wanting things to change from time to time. It has more to do with being shut out of a particular style of play, where options are actually being taken away.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.