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Nerfs, how many REALLY care.
gannonreid
Member Posts: 172
My question is, with every MMO featuring nerfs, buffs, and stat-changes to a number of things (like classes/spells/items). I want to know who actually cares about them. Either thinking they are positive or negative.
I have played so many MMOs and always people are in uproar when the slightest nerfs happen, and frankly, I have never actually cared. I still play and continue to play. Nerfs are not a deterrant IMO, and by nerfs I mean normal non-world-changing nerfs (by this I mean take spell A, decrease duration X time, or spell B, increase damage to Y).
Maybe it's because I am not a PvPer, but I think I wouldn't care still even if I was, and I am a casual player.
So again, who cares?
Comments
Historically, nerfs whines occupy entirely to much bandwith. Many times they are needed because of imbalance, sometimes they arent.
When I play a game, I choose my class based on what I think will be fun to play. 99% of the people who whine about nerfs are the people who choose thier toon/class based on what is the "flavor of the month" or is currently the most powerful class in game.
On the other hand, the fact that the term "nerf" is even as prevalent as it is tells me 1 thing about mmorpgs. They are often released far too soon. Many games have implemented classes that are entirely incomplete. Even the historically popular MMorpgs like WoW and EQ had enormous imbalances. Anyone who played EQ can surely remember how broken enchanters were at the release of the game. The WoW counterparts would be Locks and Hunters who had thier skillsets or talents added after beta testing or at the very end snd were therefor very incomplete at release. You can sell a class as part of a game but dont expect it to be fun for anyone if it is too incomplete. In the past with little other gaming options out there people were willing to wait, now with more and more games appearing daily imbalances will not suffice for a lot of gamers who will just take thier monthly fees elsewhere.
Knowing nerfs will always be part of mmos , I still expect them to slow down because my expectations of the completeness of games is rising. I know I will have little tolerance for games that release while still very incomplete.
I do not pick my class or build because it excels for a short while and I can go pow pow pwn! with it.
What I do complain about is the poor balancing most MMOGs go live with. As Consequence pointed out I do fully agree with.
Nevertheless the prime issue stays.
So you pick up a game. Decide on your role and place initially. Think about a pure healer who is having a blast. Had invested time and focused on role progression. Had a place in group and guild. Had a set place in raids and emphasised to be just that, a healer all along.
Well next patch day the healer got 'nerfed' and from that time on is a arrow wielding archer like type.
A quite extreme example but I had it happen, with a different class, in a MMO already.
Point is, that the developer had how much time, money and (we hope at least) knowledge on how to implement a well balanced system.
Constantly desperately trying to even things out isn't acceptable in my book anymore nowadays. That is what at least the beta phase was intended for. Among other things, yes of course.
Once I pay to play I expect a well rounded product with the occasional nerf, yes, in regards to the FotM but not complete overhauls, incomplete classes or skills.
Just how am I supposed to build my fun and decide on my goals in game? Role a dice? Pray I do not getting hit by the nerf bat tomorrow?
To sum it up, it is given that nerfs will occur and are very much needed. As the term of nerfing is also used in a bigger scope, it also applies to the examples I gave above in my opinion.
The one thing needed is stability. Nerfs do not really cater to that. Quite the opposite.
Also well said
Not much to add other than to echo what the others here have responded with. When I decide to play a game, I usually look over the class descriptions and decide what to try first depending on what role I want to play, what playstyle I "think" I may want, etc.
I think there is always the FOTM type set-ups that developers can't forsee, but I think the biggest problem with some people regarding nerfs is when there is ALOT of them and they are very heavy handed.
I would imagine there is also people who may be slightly discouraged by nerfs or adjustments made in the name of PvP balance when they themselves DON'T PvP. Note that I do not share that mentality (as if I am to enjoy PvP in a game there simply MUST be some sort of balance and attention paid to it), but I've seen more than one post in more than one forum about that.
I guess I would summarize and say nerfs only really bother me when they are numerous, confusing, or show a huge lack of development focus on balance in the first place. In addition changes that have huge and drastic effects can annoy in a "class" system, because it is basically a forceful change of the role you had initially decided to play in the first place, like Nevarion described with the healer example.
Skill balances will always be present, because for many people it is natural to find the most efficient, or easiest, or most probable path for success. In MMORPG's, where the mechanics are mostly dependent on numbers, people look for the best stats/skillsets/etc.
if lets say one of my abtilities makes less damages or stuns hold 2 sec less no problem
sometimes i get angry when i read some heavy nerf is coming for my class
but i dont stay so for long and its not worth a post in the forums for me
-if it gets too bad i simply stop playing until its fixed
did that already several times
Pi*1337/100 = 42
One of the worst was in my first game, Lineage 1. I had worked very hard to obtain a spell called "summon bugbears" and at the time it gave mages 4 pets that they could use to hunt with. I had to save up about 1 million adena to buy that spell, a kings ransom back in those days when you were just starting out.
I guess NC decided they were overpowered, so they decided to tie the number of pets you got to a your charisma value. (we could chose attribute values in that game). Since previously Charisma was a pretty useless skill, most mages had a value so low they got 2 pets from the new summoning spell. Worse, they did not give us a chance to respec our characters (like most games permit today) so it meant a complete reroll to get the 4 bugbears back, which was too time consuming (and majorly nerfed your spell casting damage)
So I suddenly found my hunting effectiveness dropped by 50% only 2 weeks after I had purchased this spell. Within another month the cost of that spell dropped so fast that what was once 1million could be obtained for 30K.
I was extremely disillusioned, and although I rerolled a few other classes and stuck around for 2 more months, I decided to leave and go play DAOC in the end.
So yes, sometimes I really do care about nerfs.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
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
indeed, who cares.
the devs make inumerable mistakes without testing in the mmo environ and use "test boxes" , instances of the mmo world in which any mob can be called up in any configuration. devs fighting each other in various classes and gear/skill really does nothing for us. as many ptr testers know the vanilla, antiseptic test bays do not translate well to the real mmo environment.
so, who care that devs over the years continually make the same mistakes over and over and over in the name of quest and player balance?
devs know folks are hypnotized by pretty, shiny objects, play comes second, indeed, who cares.
can you smell that?!!...............there is nothing quite like it.....................the smell of troll in the morning............i love that smell.
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
nerfing loses customers, you'll be surprised in posts here where I've seen the reason for leaving is because of a nerf. Noticably WoW has possibly learnt from this and when they nerf they always include some sort of improvement to make up for it and people lap it up.
I am able to comment like this because I have played several classes in games that have been severly nerfed at one point or another.
1. EQ Monk - Migration change that stopped me from being able to solo grind.
2. WoW Rogue - Poisons persisted through zoning (BGs, Instances) and then they stopped. It added a lot of cost to my rogue. Imagine playing a days worth of WSG and having to reapply poisons every time.
3. WoW Shadow Priest - As a casual Priest the amount of dmg reduction that came as a result of the current nerfs has hurt big time.
4. WoW Paladin - Go read the Test Realm patch notes.
Now, have I quit? No. I enjoy the time I play, and I don't bitch about my classes shortcoming. I know that things change and abilities need to be retuned.
What is the solution when your class hits a nerf you don't think you can survive? Reroll.
There are plenty of Hunters and Rogues out there who are consistantly buffed in order to appease the voice of ten thousand idiots who can't play a class that has a challenging grind.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
Quoting people doesn't make you clever, in fact, it makes you all the more stupid for not bothering to read the quotes you post in the first place.
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I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
No one likes to waste there time leveling,outfitting,studying ,and practicing to play well,forming relationships with your character and have someone make drastic changes to your character with seemingly little or no concern about the subscription paying public that puts food on the devs table).
Would you like it if you went into an ice cream store ordered chocolate ice cream that was advertised and the owner said you are getting strawberry to balance his inventory(make things "right")......you ordered an black new car and you got a green one because the company felt they wanted to ship some green ones..or the bank decided to give you 2% less interest on your savings because they felt someone else needed the money(to"to balance things out").Of course not.When a company says this is what the rules are..this is what you character is..you assume they have great knowlege of the implications of what they promised your character would be...AND THEY RESPECT YOU AS A PAYING CUSTOMER AND WANT TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO CONTINUE PURCHASING THEIR SERVICE.MANY COMPANYS SEEM TO DISPLAY AN ARROGANCE AND DISTAIN FOR THEIR CUSTOMER......and need to be promptly "rewarded" for this with a cancellation.
Do devs always get it right when they spec out a class....of course not.No one is expected to be perfect.Devs just need to understand the impact of their decision to make changes.... the negative impact on their player base...and minimize the occasions where a nerf/change needs to be made.
Blizzard has learned from other companies mistakes, no doubt about it. When your character in a game has a 1%-5% change to it (whatever the change is) that's no big deal. People will generally just classify it as balancing and go on. When a company makes a 25%-50% change to your character, then people get tee'd off, seriously and good reason.
Blizzard will not make major drastic changes to their game. Why? Because they believe in their core ruleset and core game. They just add fluff or make minor changes. Mythic is an example of a company that makes major changes to take games, at least they did with DAOC. They killed a couple of their character classes and a bunch of people quit the game. Then they changed their core game with releasing TOA and they ended their game as they knew it. Drastic changes are bad. People don't like big big changes.
From what I hear SOE drastically changed SWG and they lost a great deal of their subscribers. I know the people I play WoW with all left SWG about the same time not long after drastic changes. They were happy with SWG prior to that.
Anyone calling for drastic changes in an MMO has no business playing that MMO. The MMO should be shutdown if the game is not viable as is.
Personally, I don't really care about nerfs. They usually need to happen when a game implements them. Players will get upset no matter how someone changes the game. Players get upset when classes get improvements, or when something is made easier. There is no way to make a change to the game where people don't complain, and when a company doesn't make any changes they complain about how messed up everything is. It's always a lose/lose situation with customers. A company just has to hope that after everyone stops complaining that people are satisfied with the changes they've made.
The only nerf in any game I truly cared about was the missle nerf in Eve Online. It was really harsh as I recall and implemented badly. I was a Caldari pilot choose the class because i like support roles.
I recall on gate camp once. Where I flew a tackling Kestral and not my Scorp just for a role change for a bit. I hit a webbed shuttle with 3 flippen heavy missles and it only knocked it to 75% structure before it zoned thru the gate to saftey.....
Teamspeak exploded with laghter. The majority of the players Flew turret class races. Killmore and Rota were flying fully Tech 2 mega's. Just one of their bloody ships could pop just about anything that came thru the gate in about 5 seconds flat. Frigs, ceptors, Battleships, it didn't matter. If they had a good enough scan res to get a lock before they warped. People's ships were popped before they knew what hit them.
I think had like 3 points in the new skills for the missles types I was useing if I remember right. And because I had zero turret skills and so much time and planning put into my character. It sucked pretty bad for me as im sure it did for alot of Caldari pilots at the time. I left probably a week after that happened, and never looked back even tho the game was fun as hell. I do miss playing it from time to time. .
I'm not argueing the nerf wasn't needed for some reasons. But how the nerf was implemented.
Editing because i don't think it was heavy missles I was useing. Either lights or mediums. Its been so long i can't remember the exact details. Anyways...
It's a statistical fact. Nerfs causes people to leave games.
Good nerf: A nerf that is needed to fix an exploit in a game or to make a class more balanced with the others.
Bad nerfs: 99.9999% of everything that happened in SWG
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
So the only nerf I ever cared about was one I really liked.
Most of the time, I find that nerfs have very little effect on me, as I am not the sort of player who exploits obviously unintended loopholes, especially when the exploit is tedious or detrimental to immersion. I usually find overpowered classes boring to play, so there's another way nerfs don't bother me.
I'm sorry, but this thread reminds me of a bunch of dishwashers arguing over brain surgery. It's a little rediculous.
While combat changes may or may not be needed, and complete reworkings of the system is completely up to the customer if he/she wants to stick around to see how it all pans out. Nerfs, I think, would be something completely different. Testing anywhere from 10-24 different classes, with or without racial adjustments, would be completely different on a field of a couple hundred testers on a test server, and hundreds of thousands to millions of players on a real server. Obviously some people of the millions is more likely to figure something out, or find that one thing that makes his character superior to everyone else, or easier to play, than someone in the hundreds. Once word gets out, then everyone is doing it, as it is human nature to take the easy road.
Devs get a time limit on implementation and testing. Then it is out, ready or not, whether or not someone on the test server has figured out the "secret". Also, as others have mentioned, no matter how much the test server is like the real servers, there's always something that gets through the cracks. As games get more and more complicated, with more and more code, and bigger and bigger worlds, with the same amount of coding time and test time, it gets a LOT harder to pinpoint idiosyncrisies.
"Granted thinking for yourself could be considered a timesink of shorter or longer duration depending on how smart..or how dumb you are."
Brain surgery? Hardly. Brain surgeons have a lot more training and experience than your average game designer. In many ways, MMOG designers are learning as they go.
(The dishwasher part of your analogy is entirely apt, however.)
I'd say it's more like a gaggle of armchair quarterbacks arguing over a questionable call by a referee.