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Weekly MMORPG.com columnist Dan Fortier uses this week's edition of MMOWTF to talk about Nerfing in MMORPGs.
"That which is not an exploit may eternal lie and with strange eons, even buffs may die!"
There are aspects of gaming life that are completely transparent until something goes wrong. Server outages and the like remind us that there are tons of processes going on behind the scenes that ensure that we are having fun. Things like game balance are usually hot topics, but the huge pile of clockwork code and databases that are behind all of the perceived and real imbalances we experience are often overlooked. The forces at work in keeping the cosmic balance are often as mysterious as the seemingly uncaring Gods who watch with unblinking morbidity. This work will hopefully illuminate you to the horrors called Nerfs that lurk at the edges of perception and steal our sanity!
Read the rest of MMOWTF here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
I agree.
Players tend to think that they seem to know so much more about their class/the game then the devs to. Calling all nerfs unneccessary and all buffs too overpowered, unless of course it's their class getting buffed.
I highly doubt a single forum troll knows even 10% as much about the game as the devs do.
All systems are connected. Each ability or item effected by an extremely high multitude of other factors which we, the humble gamer, will never fully realize (perhaps unless said gamer is a dev for another project/former dev)
So, in that regard, chill out people. Put some faith in the devs. They really do know what they are doing (in most cases)
We won't talk about SWG.
*edit* First! haha I've never been first or called "first" before
Nice article
My response .....well......the above poster actualy already said it (you lucky first one )
True game-balance isn't mathematical balance where everyone has the same change of winning with equal skill and time played and where skill and time played are themselves balanced.
True game-balance is the feeling that you could have won. Provided that YOU, and not the game, was better.
A balanced game is one where players blame themselves and not the game for losing.
A game in wich a mage always loses to a warrior but the mage always has the feeling, if I just used ice blast a bit earlier I would have won, then that game is balanced.
This is why you shouldn't let the devs do their jobs. On the contrary, you should note every single flaw you see. You should suggest every little thing that in your opinion would make the game better. Provided ofcourse that you do so in a polite and friendly way.
Devs usually strive for mathemetical game balance. Players strife for the feeling of balance for their own class in a specific situation.
These two combined give true game-balance. The global view of the devs combined with the feeling of the players.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\
( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o)
(")("),,(")("),(")(")
Please don't butcher Metallica. Thank you.
It's also worth noting that some types of changes cannot be tested properly in the development/testing environment, simply because the possible combinations of gear, skills, combat modifiers, etc. is nearly infinite. Changes to mob AI or aggro systems, for example, can't be fully evaluated internally because of the sheer number of possible combinations of gear, skills, modifiers, and playstyles.
Even when the dev team makes a point of telling the player base that the effects of a change will be monitored and adjustments will be made if needed, the playerbase screams in outrage about lack of QA testing - nevermind the fact that they are taking part in the QA testing!
Of course, it's easier to write a three-page rant about dev stupidity than it is to turn in a two-paragraph problem report detailing the effect, when it occurs, and what actions, if any, trigger it...
Guildleader, Mithril Council, Chaos
it's the way Anet does with Guild Wars.
they nerf(err.. balance) something, then monitor the forums...
funniest thing is that they do not un-nerf skills that ruined build 1,
but simply nerf another skills used for build 2 that took place of build 1.
so all cookie-cutter builds are in constant change and rotation
Please don't butcher Metallica. Thank you.
Not from Metallica, quote from Abdul the prophet in the Necronomicon :P
Anyways, that aside, my hat is off to all the developers we love to hate on patch day, no matter which game we're playing at that particular time. Personally, I never really look at whatever class I'm playing in that game as being hit with a nerf bat, but learn to adapt my play to the tweaks the devs gave my class. It's a learning curve on boths sides of the monitor. Admittedly, there are a few times when one can notice a true nerf, like a skill breaking due to a tweak on a different skill, but not known until the patch is actually implemented. Usually for something like that it's quickly fixed in hotfix patch within a few days. But these guys and gals put thousands of hours into their developments usually thanklessly and more likely than not to be flamed all over the forums as the great Nerf King of "X" game.
With the exception of SOE, uh, yeah, not gonna open that can of worms. (puts down cattle prod and walks away from sleeping dog)
Please don't butcher Metallica. Thank you.
Not from Metallica, quote from Abdul the prophet in the Necronomicon :P
Pwnd.
-Currently looking forward to FFXIV
-Currently playing EvE and Global Agenda
I found myself reading it wondering "ok when is Dan gonna bring pvp into this" and he didn't let me down. I'm sure if Dan wrote on article on basket weaving, he'd find a way to bring pvp into it.
On topic now....
I think gobla said it best that it is a bit more complex than Dan's oversimplification. Many times devs do what they "Think" is best, contrary to what their playerbase wants or suggests. This attitude of "it's balanced cuz we say so" is not a way to endear yourself to your paying customers. SOE was notorious for this in the earlier days of EQ1, took them all the way to the LDoN expansion to begin doing what players had been asking for.
On the other hand caving in too quickly to player demands isn't good either. It is a simple fact that most of a MMOG's subs do not read the forums. Those that do, not all of them post. So only a small percentage of a game's subs are actually posting which is not going to be the "general opinion" of the subs as a whole. So if devs react to several angry postings and make a change, they end up making that small percentage happy while ticking off the silent majority.
My biggest beef with "nerfs" is the stealth nerf. If you are making a change let me know about it? Don't sneak it in buried on page 5 of the patch notes. So that I find out about it ingame and bug report it only to have a GM tell me "oh that's working as intended now, didn't read the notes?" later on.
Playing a fun game is what's important to me.
Please don't butcher Metallica. Thank you.
Not from Metallica, quote from Abdul the prophet in the Necronomicon :P
Pwnd.
Ah, but at least Lumindeas had the knowledge to be able to accomplish that pwn against me. You, as yet, have not.
you should check out COx then. look at the amount of playtesting players do, numbers, many many god knows MANY numbers included. and the devs simply ignore it out of hand.
there's been many issues where the players did point out numerous problems on the test server and the devs would just blow it off, then a month to several months later, there's a patch to fix the problem because too many people are complaining that it's broken. funnily enough, it really doesn't seem to be the factual numbers as much as the numbers of people complaining, which gets grease for that squeaky wheel.
the op has an interesting point of view, in a perfect world. but we live in a world where ass clowns like mcquaid fake update reports on how far along his game is, then points fingers nonstop at why the game was a failure (but it wasn't his faking stuff that caused issues). so um, a perfect world analogy really isn't a good thing to use.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
Nerfs are just bad business for everyone. Sometimes they are necessay, many times not. I won't touch upon SOE and NGE, that was a gross aberation.
Problem with MMO's today there is always someone finding a hole in the code so they can exploit something. Fixes for those things are appropriate. Balancing on the other hand generally tends to be onesided. Instead of being cautious they generally have the tendency to over do it.
One of the reasons I won't play any Mythic games any more. When they nerfed a class they made sure it was beyond redemption. Archers and stealth classes in DAoC have been like a yo-yo, varying between great and horrible. They also always took the easy way out even though the change would prove a hardship on the class. Take for example the necromancer, some people were abusing the class by using certain items, instead of fixing the items they just removed the ability of the class to use any item in shade form. Since the class was completely defenseless out of shade form they made many of the items everyone else used in the game unusable by the class.
So it behooves a game company to be very careful with nerfs, the negativity associated with such can be a general detriment to maintaining a playerbase. It is far better if you can improve other classes than nerf one.
i believe that "balance" is a misnomer and should be renamed "perceived balance" because if people are playing (as opposed to some sort of simulator), balance can not exist.
why?
no two people are alike. you have to have someone who has the same skills at the same skill level of the other player playing a different class (player skill here, not character skill levels). if someone gets their butt handed to them by a little kid, oh well, learn to play better, it's NOT a reason to whine nerf. yet, that's what happens.
then, you have fanbois blindly supporting everything the devs do, because the fanbois are idiots and can't think of their own. that's why the Bible refers to people as sheep and cattle - lots of people don't bother to even pretend to think on their own (if they did, we wouldn't have hitlers, jim jones', david kureshes, etc). devs that listen to fanbois are doomed to have shyte games that just keep getting worse.
balance doesn't exist. perceived balance isn't going to happen because people have different play styles/levels.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
Please don't butcher Metallica. Thank you.
Not from Metallica, quote from Abdul the prophet in the Necronomicon :P
Pwnd.
Ah, but at least Lumindeas had the knowledge to be able to accomplish that pwn against me. You, as yet, have not.
Heh, wasn't trying to "pwn" anybody, just offering some enlightenment
For the record, and last I'll mention it,
"That is not dead which can eternally lie, And with strange eons even death may die.
-Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon"
comes from
"That is not dead which can eternally lie,
And with strange eons even death may die.
Wize Old tends to step aside from a path of fiery Young,
But only to get behind because the Old holds the Knowledge and declare it with the Tongue.
Still has even the Old a need for long lay and sleep,
So there has to be a Guardian for the Land to keep.
While the Old has a strength of Wisdom and Memory,
The Young in his fury forgets and makes in horror the Rediscovery.
The Guardian is meant to sit and the Land for the Old to keep,
But during the weird times even the Guardian may be drown into sleep.
Under closed Eyes of the Guardian the Young passes forgetting what has been told,
And is terrified by horrors brought by the Wrath of the Waking Old.
At the time when the Old awakes rises also the Guardian who slept,
And the Land belongs again to Old who wipes out the Young whom had it kept.
The Guardian stands by side the Old who never again has to sleep,
And the Young is buried into the Shadow eternally unpossibly deep.
For Yog-Sothoth - the Praised! He opens the Gate enabling the Old to become again the King,
And on the Land now eternally walks the royal Shub-Niggurath; the one that seeds the Offspring.
That is not dead which can eternally lie,
And with strange eons even death may die."
Thread hijack completed, released back to the topic on hand
Dev's don't know shit. Look at Vanguard. Look at EQ. 2 good game premises completely ruined by devs. Yeah i'm smarter than 99% of the world but you'd think dev's would know why people play their game. Nerf's and mudflation are admissions of failure.
Any nerf is a mistake, period.
If I didn't care about PROGRESSION, I would just go play a shooter, a strategy game or whatever.
But no, I play a RPG. What does a RPG offers that other doesn't? Progression.
If you nerf me, no matter how "justified" this nerf was, you just remove my very motivation to even play your game. Even if I would accept it (which is not the case ever, I never accept any nerf, no matter how justified they were), even if I would smile nicely, you would have kill, in the process, my kiddie motivation to "play just another minute" before going to bed.
Is Game Balancing more important than my motivation to play your game? I think not. You made a game, you create a world, you put rules. If you break these rules, you ain't worth my time. If I am overpowered, then UP and boost other players all you want and then add new challenges. But never, under any circumstance, nerf me.
A nerf is by definition a mistake. I play a RPG, not a shooter, not a wargame, not a simulation. I play a game that is centered around the developpment and the progression of MY character (Last sentence might help you understand why I can't bear raiding making peoples better at grouping then me). Any move backward that is unfair (aka a nerf, a boost on the mobs, anything that I didn't deserve). My character has 75 hps. You can't take any away. Similarly, you can't take anything else I have hoarded, acquired or developp, that I may use as a referrence for my character progression.
Failing to obey this rule would automatically and invariably lead to unhappiness. And if I am unhappy, you want me to go out ASAP and cancel my subscribtion, you don't want me to spread my unhappiness. Communities are living bodies...a diseased part is always bad.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
Honestly, the plead to balance in a game is silly. There's really no such thing as balance in this regard because the point of any game is to have a player or set of players unbalance the current situation. If single player games were balanced, then everyone would win, or more properly no one would win but no one would lose. Consider how the game Go operates. It follows a set of simple rules for which both players can exploit specific strategies that can be very complex, but each step in the execution of the strategy when it is recognized can be unbalanced, producing a new unique game pattern. That is the beauty of simple games like Go, they show that balance is an illusion.
What so-called gameplay balance is about is the assumption of the person's locus of control. When the person succeeds, the person assumes it was entirely their effort that made it possible rather than blind chance. When the person fails, they assume it was other forces involved. Then conversely, when a person observes another person succeeding, they assume it's blind chance. And when a person observes another person failing, they assume it was the other person's fault. This odd conceptualization of individuals is what is at the core of nerfs/buffs, and so-called class rebalancing.
The reality is this, a game plays as its designer intends. If it doesn't, then it's unbalanced. If it does, then it's balanced according to what the designer intended. That is what game balance is. So, if a game designer in some hypothetical MMO decided to make mages like those of legend, where they had to use rituals based on cycles and concentration, then it would be plain stupid of such hermetical mages to scream, "FIRE BALL" and charge at a rabid bear. If a player assumed this is unbalanced, did they actually study what the game designer said about how his/her mages work in the MMO? Did they assume that mages had to work the same in that game as they do in others? If so, then the issue is the player and not the designer. The mage class in the hypothetical MMO operated perfectly as designed, it's a ritual caster, where these rituals aide its fellows and itself, subtly instead of directly as traditional fantasy games suppose. In this case, the same follows for PVP, the game is balanced toward the intended design of the designer and not what the player assumes what the designer intended.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
-- Brede
"Players tend to think that they seem to know so much more about their class/the game then the devs to."
Yeah, right. Let me walk you through what happened in City of Heroes a couple of years ago with Scrappers. Apparently, some dev read a data sheet that Scrappers were killing dozens of +8 con level mobs without suffering any injury at all.
So the devs at Cryptic announced that they were testing nerfs for the so-called "uber scrappers" (*/Regen) and that these nerfs would be going live. But when they made the data public to quell the howls of protest, dozens of customers (if you pay to play, you're a "customer") pointed out to them that - in fact - their data were wrong, and the devs - after much red-faced embarassment - admitted so!
So given the fact that they knew their data were wrong, do you think that kept them from nerfing the hell out of regen scrappers (not just in issue 2, but in issue 3, 4, and even 5!)??? Nope. The nerfs went live anyway!!! And this doesn't even begin to touch on some of the outright lies the devs at Cryptic told over the years to keep people from leaving that nerf-ridden pile of crap in droves!
Which leads me to believe that in a best-case scenario, devs are people too, fully capable of screwing up just like everyone else. But at their worst, they can be as unscrupolous as the slimiest snake-oil salesman completely willing to tell anyone anything they want to hear just so they can keep subs up.
You'll forgive me if I tend to lean more to the latter than the former, based on a whole lot of experience with the slimy developers at Cryptic.
P.S. Don't even get me started on the huge whopper of a lie they told about the global enhancement nerf just before it went live! At the same time they were testing changes to enhancements that would make six-slotting them counter-productive, they were telling players to go ahead and six-slot their powers to help make up for the nerfs to travel powers (the infamous 4-second travel power delay nerf)!
In fact, when some beta testers broke their NDAs to let the players know what was coming down the pike, the devs' idea of "damage control" wasn't fessing up: it was to pull threads wherever the information appeared in a vain and ultimately stupid PR fiasco that was tantamount to trying to get toothpaste back in the tube!
Oh yeah, those devs are a smart bunch!
Look people, the bottom line is really always only the bottom line here. MMOs are in business to make money for their stockholders. The devs work for the corporations that publish and host these games. They do not work for the players, which is why - if as it seems so often - player complaints fall on deaf ears: they do.
The real balance issue has nothing to do with skills or powers or classes. The real balance issue is how far the devs can go in breaking the game before paying customers take their money elsewhere. Unfortunately, most people are tied slavishly to their "fun" (even when it isn't) to understand how badly they're being hosed by people who - in reality - don't care what they think as long as the monthly checks keep coming in.
If you want better MMOs, start demanding it. Be a smart consumer and don't pay to play a game where the company is not delivering the kind of experience they originally promised or the kind of experience you want!
Vote with your wallet, not your heart.
"...but should a game be as fair as possible?"
"Fair" is an overly broad, extremely subjective term. Fair by whose standards? It's obvious that devs have one view of what's fair while players may have an entirely differnt view. Again, the real "balance" issue lies in trying to find the middle ground between what the devs view as fair and what the players view as fair. Swing the pendulum too far in one direction, and while you may appease 10% of the player-base, the other 90% is packing up and leaving.
Balance is really about what keeps the most people from a wide range of personalities and playstyles paying every month to play. It's about finding the broadest appeal possible in what is - essentially - a very niche market.