I agree with those who have quite rightly pointed out that "Fair" is merely the illusion of having the same chance of winning as everyone else.
When we consider a game to be "fair" it really is our assessment of the situation based upon our ability and others to influence it enough for a positive outcome. Did that make sense? We all want to win but we tend to forget we need to loose to recognise when we win and to maintain the same sense of reward when we do. That is the art of balance for designers. The balance of sense of achievement for the player at all levels of the game. There is a huge element of psychology involved in how you go about achieving that balance. Players will always accept a "nerf" easier if it is combined with a "buff" in another area. Blizzard's failing if we are to raise WoW as an example is they tend to take the god complex and implement changes showing complete disregard to their communities. I have seen several exceptional ideas discussed in forums for classes which propose changes to classes that achieve the same result blizzard are trying to obtain in a less obtusive manner. These proposals are to my knowledge always disregarded because it didn't come from their own development house.
A common topic for balance especially in world of warcraft is damage. There seems to be a cry constantly for all classes to be able to do equal amounts of damage. This is merely an example of perception of balance within a game. It is strange to me to think that a game designed around unique classes could ever be class balanced across a common theme. A Healer will never, should never be able to balance mathematically with a warrior and vice versa. If you wanted a game where all things were equal everyone should be playing the same characters and in that case it would be single player.
Players need to realise when it is reasonable within a game to request balance and not.
Certain common themes exist -
Healing in any form always comes at the cost of damage dealing. A character who can sustain themselves via healing and equal a none healing character in damage would be the best character to play in any MMORPG. If it existed everyone would be playing that class.
Range damage tends to come at the cost of survivability.
I am sure people could come up with many more but if your requesting balance in violation of these foundation principles your clearly not thinking straight.
Bottom line if a game has classes don't expect them to be equal in all things. There wouldn't be much point in having different classes otherwise would there. They would be different only in name and appearance.
Lets also not forget that most MMO's are about banding together to defeat the common goal. If we are thus working as a team to the benefit of the team. Does it matter if you balance with your team mates? Think less about yourself and more about the team. As long as you actively contribute to the team most people will be happy to have you along and you will get the rewards with the team.
For that reason - Solo PvP tends not to work well because it forces a direct comparrison between classes who shouldn't be compared in such a way in the first place. This is why you find most people start complaining about balance when they have experienced a direct one on one situation.
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!...
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
COH team does the same. They systematically piss off their enitre playerbase one after the other.
What amuses me is how when Build 1 gets nerfed, the players of build 2 all say "thank God" they nerfed you. You deserved it. The dev's only nerf because nerfs are needed.
And then it happens to them.
Nerfs are really lame ways to balance games. In PvE, balance can be adjusted by addition of new monsters or adjusting the AI's attack priority. In PvP, everyone knows that even in America's Army, where all builds are identical that one player can totally out perform 99% of all other players all the time. The difference individual player skills skews any datasets. Better to make PvP gametypes that favour specific types of class so that each one can have his day.
Nerfing is a very uninspired form of balancing. I think people who have spent a lot of time and money to develop their characters to be powerful are essentially being robbed. (In the criminal sense of the word).
It is not lost on me that in a subsciption based game, Nerfs may not only be used to balance players, but also too stop people from finishing the game content to fast. To "balance" timesinks.
Nerfing you just to get more money out of you is pretty low.
I quit COH over nerfs. Never seen the like of it in any other game. I heard SOE was pretty bad at about the same time. Any whiff of nerfing and I avoid the title now.
I think the "buck" stops with the game producer/director ..... directing the devs. He sets the rules...make the final decisions..provides direction to the team. Thats where the nerf out crys belong.
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
COH team does the same. They systematically piss off their enitre playerbase one after the other.
The critical difference between the companies (NCSoft/Arenanet & Cryptic) is that Arenanet doesn't charge a monthly sub. City of Heroes does. And as you correctly pointed out, Baff (BTW, good to see you again), when you pay to play, you should expect a modicum of respect as a customer. When you spend - as I did - literally hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars building a character, only to see the devs piss on YOUR time and YOUR money, well it feels like being cheated. And then when they have the balls to lie to people, pull threads that affect the way people might feel about the game or - god forbid - make them cancel their subs and treat the customers as idiots (or worse), it simply adds insult to injury.
Nerfs are bad enough. Lies and a "people come and go" attitude, expressed by Emmert himself once, really let you know the level of contempt companies - like Cryptic - have for their customers! It amazes me that people accept that kind of treatment and continue to reward it rather than cancelling their sub(s) and walking away. In many ways, players/customers of companies like this find themselves in an abusive relationship but don't leave because they "don't have anywhere else to go" to play a superhero game. Kinda sad and sickening, really.
I have never felt cheated with Guild Wars, on the other hand, because I don't pay a penny to play. When you sell a subscription-based game, though, the developers had better make damn sure they've gotten the game as close to perfect to their vision of balance as they're going to get it before they release it!
As I often wrote about CoH back in the day: it felt like the game was in a perpetual state of beta with all the "rebalancing" (a.k.a. "nerfing") the devs were doing and, as a former beta tester for really big companies, I can assure you I never once paid to beta test any product other than CoH. On top of that, the devs actually had the temerity to ask their paying customers to "test" the changes on the test servers and comment on them!!! Whoa, bucko: isn't that what we pay the devs to do with our subs??? Make sure the game works before they send it live???
Cryptic is a P.O.S. company with a nerf record equal only to that of SoE with SWG. The only reason that CoH didn't get the kind of bad press SWG did was because so very few people play(ed) it by comparison. It's only a pity that Marvel chose to go with Cryptic to develope their superhero game. Based on Cryptic's track record with CoH, I don't have a lot of hope for Marvel's game.
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.
i agree with what you say. except that MMOs make money by retaining paying customers. not so much by selling boxes (except vanguard, i think that's the only way they've made money), but normally, it's retaining customers. retaining, because a customer you keep is good (and free) PR you gain.
the problem is, that people (and when i say people, i mean people that play games) are STUPID. right up in your face S T U P I D.
look at the total and complete moronic dolts who sit there and idolize games (and it's devs) no matter what idiotic thing those devs do. without these idiots praising stupidity on the part of devs, said devs/staff wouldn't be able to do ANY of the crap that we normally see.
why not? because there wouldn't be a bunch of posts (of praise) to which they could point their superiors. "oh, sure, some dummies say it's a bad move, but look at THESE posts, they say how wonderful we're doing, and look at those guys' post counts, they've been around a loooong time and know what they're talking about".
so in the end, every fanboi in any game you see -- he is responsible for a LOT of the crappiness of that game, and all other games in which that idiot has played the role of "mindless sychophantic sheep aka fanboi".
those idiots DESERVE games like vanguard, or games with cheating douchebag staff (like eve), or games with insanely retarded (and boring as hell) timesinks (wow, eq, etc).
non fanbois DON'T deserve that garbage.
so every time you read a fanboi-esque post, keep in mind, pretty much anything wrong in that game, you can thank those idiot fanbois for supporting it whilst thinking people post articulate arguments against stupidity (ofttimes backed with factual numbers and playtest notes), while fanbois just go "yayayayay you did something devs you're great yayayay nerf everything we just need a stick and bubble gum and you can nerf down to that and it'll still be great".
so this one's for all the mindless idiots who seem to be determined to reduce all games to the "pong" level of fun. may you all get to play the games you so richly deserve and may those of us opposed to your outright stupidity get the games that aren't plagued with said genius talent. amen.
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?
"...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.
ya know, if it's going to be fair, then the players have to be equal. otherwise, there's no way for it to be fair, and anyone saying that they're "balancing" anything are either lying, incompetent, or i guess outright stupid.
if i have a housewife, 30, who occasionally plays a game and pvps cuz her hubbie likes it and she wants to do stuff ingame with him.
then, i have a 14 year old, who all she does is pvp, and get the best build/equipment FOR pvp.
then i have a 58 year old grandpa, who plays because he's always been interested in fantasy, and in his mind, his superiour age/wisdom logically means he'll be the best player on the pvp field.
and finally we'll say a 20something who just hates pvp, but the game has areas he REALLY wants to farm for the "uber" items, but they're in pvp zones.
all of these people play the same game. each one has complaints about "balance", because of one reason or another. all but the 14year old complain because they get their asses handed to them on a routine basis. the 14year old complains because a certain skill is actually broken (if we're using COx as a random example, then let's say stalker's placate, which is VERY broken and total garbage since it's creation but ass clowns can't be arsed TO fix it).
odds are, there WILL be nerfs, and the placate will remain broken. why? must be because devs know what's best. because that's EXACTLY the sort of supposed "balance" changes which routinely happen. idiotic knee jerk reactions to whiners, while people who have actual problems which NEED fixing, are ignored.
look at swg, eve, wow, cox, probably any mmo you can randomly choose. you'll see the same problems over and over again.
if devs would spend more time on 1 fixing bugs and 2 making meaningful and F U N content, and worry a whole lot less about an imaginary balance which will never exist; then you'd see a hell of a lot of improvement in a lot of games very quickly.
i dare any team to prove me wrong. stop doing stupid things, fix what's wrong with your game (bug-wise) and make MEANINGFUL content and see if the quality and fun level of your game doesn't go thru the roof. that means, you quit having your favorite players (eve), you quit having your favorite realms (daoc), you quit being lazy asses (wow), you quit ignoring bugs/content issues (cox, swg), and everyone else i'm missing---and you forget that the word "balance" (or whatever word would/could/will be substituted for it) and you work on making the games bug-free and FUN. balance doesn't exist any more than the tooth fairy, easter bunny and grinch.
balance... think of the old riddle/joke --- if batman, santa claus, a police man, and super man all showed up to a 4way stop at the same time, who would have the right-of-way? answer-the policeman. why? he's the only one that is real. balance, in this riddle, is everyone BUT the police man.
in summary -- listen to numbers. listen to players who give actual logical thinking. fix bugs. block/ignore/whatever fanbois. fix bugs. make content that is FUN, not just more boring assed timesinks. fix bugs. stop having favorites (players/classes/whatever). and, probably at least as importantly, get lives. if all you do is sit at a desk and never have an actual social life; then, you're NOT going to have a clue about what the players REALLY want, because you live in a box.
thank you.
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?
"...make content that is FUN, not just more boring assed timesinks."
Agreed. It seems far more often than not, the whole discussion of fun gets lost in the hand-wringing over balance. CoH started to go hell real quick when the devs there began planning to add PvP. Before PvP, people - like myself - didn't care that my electric/energy blaster didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell against a fire tank because that's not what the game was about! The fire tank and I were both having fun in our own way, and no one cared that tanks could take on 50 mobs at once or that a Blaster's Thunderous Blast could wipe out a whole mob with one shot. The point was CoH was a game about SUPERHEROES and before the travel power nerf and arenas went in, we all had fun playing that way!
It was fun and no one gave a damn about balance except the pocket-protector-wearing pencil-necked geeks in some dimly-lit back room at Cryptic! And despite the howls of outrage from paying customers that a game was becoming less and less fun with every release (what's the freaking point of a game if not to have fun???), the devs - led by Jack Emmert - focused on nerf after nerf in some vain attempt to fix what most people feel wasn't broken, while real issues - like mobs getting stuck in cave walls after knockback, who were able to hit the players but we couldn't hit back - remained broken long after I left!
When you create a game about superheroes, you create certain expectations about what that game should be, because anyone who knows anything about comic books at all knows what superheroes are capable of. Then, when you actually create avatars that meet your expectations, only to see them stripped of their powers time after time after freaking time again because a year after the game's release, the devs aren't happy with "balance", ought to show you how really little such people care about the customers! Ask people at SWG if they think the devs there really gave a s*** about them when they released the CU and NGE!
As noted in an earlier post: Cryptic is a horrible company not necessarily because the way they kept nerfing the players, but because of the way they treated us with such contempt, like we were idiots who didn't know what "real fun" was!
That, more than anything, is why I left. I refuse to pay anyone money who's going to treat me the way they did. F'em!
Comments
I agree with those who have quite rightly pointed out that "Fair" is merely the illusion of having the same chance of winning as everyone else.
When we consider a game to be "fair" it really is our assessment of the situation based upon our ability and others to influence it enough for a positive outcome. Did that make sense? We all want to win but we tend to forget we need to loose to recognise when we win and to maintain the same sense of reward when we do. That is the art of balance for designers. The balance of sense of achievement for the player at all levels of the game. There is a huge element of psychology involved in how you go about achieving that balance. Players will always accept a "nerf" easier if it is combined with a "buff" in another area. Blizzard's failing if we are to raise WoW as an example is they tend to take the god complex and implement changes showing complete disregard to their communities. I have seen several exceptional ideas discussed in forums for classes which propose changes to classes that achieve the same result blizzard are trying to obtain in a less obtusive manner. These proposals are to my knowledge always disregarded because it didn't come from their own development house.
A common topic for balance especially in world of warcraft is damage. There seems to be a cry constantly for all classes to be able to do equal amounts of damage. This is merely an example of perception of balance within a game. It is strange to me to think that a game designed around unique classes could ever be class balanced across a common theme. A Healer will never, should never be able to balance mathematically with a warrior and vice versa. If you wanted a game where all things were equal everyone should be playing the same characters and in that case it would be single player.
Players need to realise when it is reasonable within a game to request balance and not.
Certain common themes exist -
Healing in any form always comes at the cost of damage dealing. A character who can sustain themselves via healing and equal a none healing character in damage would be the best character to play in any MMORPG. If it existed everyone would be playing that class.
Range damage tends to come at the cost of survivability.
I am sure people could come up with many more but if your requesting balance in violation of these foundation principles your clearly not thinking straight.
Bottom line if a game has classes don't expect them to be equal in all things. There wouldn't be much point in having different classes otherwise would there. They would be different only in name and appearance.
Lets also not forget that most MMO's are about banding together to defeat the common goal. If we are thus working as a team to the benefit of the team. Does it matter if you balance with your team mates? Think less about yourself and more about the team. As long as you actively contribute to the team most people will be happy to have you along and you will get the rewards with the team.
For that reason - Solo PvP tends not to work well because it forces a direct comparrison between classes who shouldn't be compared in such a way in the first place. This is why you find most people start complaining about balance when they have experienced a direct one on one situation.
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
COH team does the same. They systematically piss off their enitre playerbase one after the other.
What amuses me is how when Build 1 gets nerfed, the players of build 2 all say "thank God" they nerfed you. You deserved it. The dev's only nerf because nerfs are needed.
And then it happens to them.
Nerfs are really lame ways to balance games. In PvE, balance can be adjusted by addition of new monsters or adjusting the AI's attack priority. In PvP, everyone knows that even in America's Army, where all builds are identical that one player can totally out perform 99% of all other players all the time. The difference individual player skills skews any datasets. Better to make PvP gametypes that favour specific types of class so that each one can have his day.
Nerfing is a very uninspired form of balancing. I think people who have spent a lot of time and money to develop their characters to be powerful are essentially being robbed. (In the criminal sense of the word).
It is not lost on me that in a subsciption based game, Nerfs may not only be used to balance players, but also too stop people from finishing the game content to fast. To "balance" timesinks.
Nerfing you just to get more money out of you is pretty low.
I quit COH over nerfs. Never seen the like of it in any other game. I heard SOE was pretty bad at about the same time. Any whiff of nerfing and I avoid the title now.
The critical difference between the companies (NCSoft/Arenanet & Cryptic) is that Arenanet doesn't charge a monthly sub. City of Heroes does. And as you correctly pointed out, Baff (BTW, good to see you again), when you pay to play, you should expect a modicum of respect as a customer. When you spend - as I did - literally hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars building a character, only to see the devs piss on YOUR time and YOUR money, well it feels like being cheated. And then when they have the balls to lie to people, pull threads that affect the way people might feel about the game or - god forbid - make them cancel their subs and treat the customers as idiots (or worse), it simply adds insult to injury.
Nerfs are bad enough. Lies and a "people come and go" attitude, expressed by Emmert himself once, really let you know the level of contempt companies - like Cryptic - have for their customers! It amazes me that people accept that kind of treatment and continue to reward it rather than cancelling their sub(s) and walking away. In many ways, players/customers of companies like this find themselves in an abusive relationship but don't leave because they "don't have anywhere else to go" to play a superhero game. Kinda sad and sickening, really.
I have never felt cheated with Guild Wars, on the other hand, because I don't pay a penny to play. When you sell a subscription-based game, though, the developers had better make damn sure they've gotten the game as close to perfect to their vision of balance as they're going to get it before they release it!
As I often wrote about CoH back in the day: it felt like the game was in a perpetual state of beta with all the "rebalancing" (a.k.a. "nerfing") the devs were doing and, as a former beta tester for really big companies, I can assure you I never once paid to beta test any product other than CoH. On top of that, the devs actually had the temerity to ask their paying customers to "test" the changes on the test servers and comment on them!!! Whoa, bucko: isn't that what we pay the devs to do with our subs??? Make sure the game works before they send it live???
Cryptic is a P.O.S. company with a nerf record equal only to that of SoE with SWG. The only reason that CoH didn't get the kind of bad press SWG did was because so very few people play(ed) it by comparison. It's only a pity that Marvel chose to go with Cryptic to develope their superhero game. Based on Cryptic's track record with CoH, I don't have a lot of hope for Marvel's game.
/rant
the problem is, that people (and when i say people, i mean people that play games) are STUPID. right up in your face S T U P I D.
look at the total and complete moronic dolts who sit there and idolize games (and it's devs) no matter what idiotic thing those devs do. without these idiots praising stupidity on the part of devs, said devs/staff wouldn't be able to do ANY of the crap that we normally see.
why not? because there wouldn't be a bunch of posts (of praise) to which they could point their superiors. "oh, sure, some dummies say it's a bad move, but look at THESE posts, they say how wonderful we're doing, and look at those guys' post counts, they've been around a loooong time and know what they're talking about".
so in the end, every fanboi in any game you see -- he is responsible for a LOT of the crappiness of that game, and all other games in which that idiot has played the role of "mindless sychophantic sheep aka fanboi".
those idiots DESERVE games like vanguard, or games with cheating douchebag staff (like eve), or games with insanely retarded (and boring as hell) timesinks (wow, eq, etc).
non fanbois DON'T deserve that garbage.
so every time you read a fanboi-esque post, keep in mind, pretty much anything wrong in that game, you can thank those idiot fanbois for supporting it whilst thinking people post articulate arguments against stupidity (ofttimes backed with factual numbers and playtest notes), while fanbois just go "yayayayay you did something devs you're great yayayay nerf everything we just need a stick and bubble gum and you can nerf down to that and it'll still be great".
so this one's for all the mindless idiots who seem to be determined to reduce all games to the "pong" level of fun. may you all get to play the games you so richly deserve and may those of us opposed to your outright stupidity get the games that aren't plagued with said genius talent. amen.
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?
ya know, if it's going to be fair, then the players have to be equal. otherwise, there's no way for it to be fair, and anyone saying that they're "balancing" anything are either lying, incompetent, or i guess outright stupid.
if i have a housewife, 30, who occasionally plays a game and pvps cuz her hubbie likes it and she wants to do stuff ingame with him.
then, i have a 14 year old, who all she does is pvp, and get the best build/equipment FOR pvp.
then i have a 58 year old grandpa, who plays because he's always been interested in fantasy, and in his mind, his superiour age/wisdom logically means he'll be the best player on the pvp field.
and finally we'll say a 20something who just hates pvp, but the game has areas he REALLY wants to farm for the "uber" items, but they're in pvp zones.
all of these people play the same game. each one has complaints about "balance", because of one reason or another. all but the 14year old complain because they get their asses handed to them on a routine basis. the 14year old complains because a certain skill is actually broken (if we're using COx as a random example, then let's say stalker's placate, which is VERY broken and total garbage since it's creation but ass clowns can't be arsed TO fix it).
odds are, there WILL be nerfs, and the placate will remain broken. why? must be because devs know what's best. because that's EXACTLY the sort of supposed "balance" changes which routinely happen. idiotic knee jerk reactions to whiners, while people who have actual problems which NEED fixing, are ignored.
look at swg, eve, wow, cox, probably any mmo you can randomly choose. you'll see the same problems over and over again.
if devs would spend more time on 1 fixing bugs and 2 making meaningful and F U N content, and worry a whole lot less about an imaginary balance which will never exist; then you'd see a hell of a lot of improvement in a lot of games very quickly.
i dare any team to prove me wrong. stop doing stupid things, fix what's wrong with your game (bug-wise) and make MEANINGFUL content and see if the quality and fun level of your game doesn't go thru the roof. that means, you quit having your favorite players (eve), you quit having your favorite realms (daoc), you quit being lazy asses (wow), you quit ignoring bugs/content issues (cox, swg), and everyone else i'm missing---and you forget that the word "balance" (or whatever word would/could/will be substituted for it) and you work on making the games bug-free and FUN. balance doesn't exist any more than the tooth fairy, easter bunny and grinch.
balance... think of the old riddle/joke --- if batman, santa claus, a police man, and super man all showed up to a 4way stop at the same time, who would have the right-of-way? answer-the policeman. why? he's the only one that is real. balance, in this riddle, is everyone BUT the police man.
in summary -- listen to numbers. listen to players who give actual logical thinking. fix bugs. block/ignore/whatever fanbois. fix bugs. make content that is FUN, not just more boring assed timesinks. fix bugs. stop having favorites (players/classes/whatever). and, probably at least as importantly, get lives. if all you do is sit at a desk and never have an actual social life; then, you're NOT going to have a clue about what the players REALLY want, because you live in a box.
thank you.
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?
"...make content that is FUN, not just more boring assed timesinks."
Agreed. It seems far more often than not, the whole discussion of fun gets lost in the hand-wringing over balance. CoH started to go hell real quick when the devs there began planning to add PvP. Before PvP, people - like myself - didn't care that my electric/energy blaster didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell against a fire tank because that's not what the game was about! The fire tank and I were both having fun in our own way, and no one cared that tanks could take on 50 mobs at once or that a Blaster's Thunderous Blast could wipe out a whole mob with one shot. The point was CoH was a game about SUPERHEROES and before the travel power nerf and arenas went in, we all had fun playing that way!
It was fun and no one gave a damn about balance except the pocket-protector-wearing pencil-necked geeks in some dimly-lit back room at Cryptic! And despite the howls of outrage from paying customers that a game was becoming less and less fun with every release (what's the freaking point of a game if not to have fun???), the devs - led by Jack Emmert - focused on nerf after nerf in some vain attempt to fix what most people feel wasn't broken, while real issues - like mobs getting stuck in cave walls after knockback, who were able to hit the players but we couldn't hit back - remained broken long after I left!
When you create a game about superheroes, you create certain expectations about what that game should be, because anyone who knows anything about comic books at all knows what superheroes are capable of. Then, when you actually create avatars that meet your expectations, only to see them stripped of their powers time after time after freaking time again because a year after the game's release, the devs aren't happy with "balance", ought to show you how really little such people care about the customers! Ask people at SWG if they think the devs there really gave a s*** about them when they released the CU and NGE!
As noted in an earlier post: Cryptic is a horrible company not necessarily because the way they kept nerfing the players, but because of the way they treated us with such contempt, like we were idiots who didn't know what "real fun" was!
That, more than anything, is why I left. I refuse to pay anyone money who's going to treat me the way they did. F'em!
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
And because I like beating dead horses, too.....
H.P. Lovecraft was the author, and Alhazred was of course his fictional character who authored the Necronomicon.
Current MMOs: Rift, GW2, Defiance
Blog: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com (old school tabletop gaming and more)