Posted 22 May 2023 - 10:27 PM
I hear what you're saying about balance issues and not being able to play with them prior to release but it's still extremely frustrating to spend a not insignificant amount of real money on a mech, kit it out to play the way I want it and then to come back and find that the loadout's invalid because someone forgot to put in a set of actuators (that several other mechs in the same family, the Deathstrike, the -1, and -2 variants, don't have) or that the loadout I liked and was comfortable playing a particular way had been deemed too powerful and had been nerfed. I have been playing this game for a very long time and have spent a lot of money on it, buying nearly every pack or mech that has been released, because I enjoy it and want to support it but with the QA issues and nerfs that have been hammering the better ones and the lackluster one not getting any changes to make it enough better that I don't feel like I completely wasted my money on it. I'm finding it very hard to be willing to put more real money into the game by buying new mechs when I've been burned by 75% of the most recent ones (MWK - Nerfed, J -extremely difficult to find a build that I find to be playable with the current high alpha state of meta, S - nerfed pretty significantly, DN - pretty good out of the box) within a month or so of purchasing them. I had actually been actively considering buying a second Scattershot so I could have one running each kind of weapon before these patch notes came out. Now? I probably won't buy another one, and this pattern of being jerked around immediately post purchase has me strongly considering just passing on the new ones all together.
I totally understand the need to address the balance issues around the quirks on these mechs but I feel like more gradual changes over the course of a few months might be a better way to address it rather than trying to do all of it at once. Say in the patch notes that the scattershot was performing too well and reduce the performance by a significantly smaller percentage and say that further tweaks may be needed down the line if it continues to overperform and then continue to tune its performance over say the next 3-6 months so that it's not slapping paying customers in the face with big changes to their new toy all at once. It's a bit like cooking a frog. If you toss it into boiling water it'll jump right out but if you put it in cool water and heat it up gradually it won't notice. Folks will continue to play the new mechs and will gradually adapt to your changes much easier than they will to the abrupt changes you are making with this patch and they're far more likely not to hold those changes against you and PGI and will continue to buy the new legendaries as they come out instead of just saying that you're messing up their experience of the game and they don't want to buy any more because of your repeated nerfs of new products and blatantly hostile and defensive attitude toward their very valid complaints. I want this game to be successful and last as long as possible and the only way to do that is to keep the players buying new mechs and other content. If you're driving players with money away from paying for the new shinies (and thereby keeping the lights on) you're actively depriving the game of the very thing that's keeping it afloat. What does it really hurt if your nerfs happen overnight or over the course of a few months. You still get to a point where the new toys are balanced, the buyers stay relatively happy, and PGI keeps getting people to pay for our game. Everybody wins that way.
5
Steel Shanks, on 21 May 2023 - 08:08 PM, said:
