Shade4x, on 07 February 2013 - 03:34 PM, said:
I wouldn't say liars and gomless idiots, however if one side cry's warlocks are underpowered, and the average warlock user pays out $500 chances are that reguardless of the balance of the game, they will buff warlocks. Further more on subscription based games there was a very interesting article by PCGamer on how World of Warcraft intentionally invited flavor of the month (every month a new class was over powered while a differnt class sucked) to keep players around longer by starting new characters and purchasing extended subscriptions. I would agree with you if the dev's only cared about the game, and the game balance. They don't. They cannot litterly afford to. Thats why you see the raven 3L, Atlas DDC and 9M costing as much as a hero mech in MC. Thats why you see pretty baby going for 30 bucks cash. People complain and dev's change policy based on it. Otherwise the playerbase cry's that they are not listening to them.
/sigh
What you're saying here is that, in order to keep a minority of players happy (Warlocks, for example,) a development team will buff something simply because people loudly demand that it be buffed. And tick off
everyone else in the process. So now we're back to claiming the devs are gormless idiots. They really have to be in order for this idea to be right. There's no other way to characterize people who would (on the assumption that dissatisfied players mean lost money) make changes to satisfy a
minority of players at the expense of ticking off
everyone else. The devs would have to be too dang dumb to do basic math. If complaints from the one group threaten the profit margins, so does complaints from the other group - the
larger one. You have to use your logic consistently to defend the idea - and if you do it falls apart.
Following the WoW illustration: Warlocks are an excellent example - when the game first came out, Warlocks were complaining a lot. And So they got buffed pretty heavily after the first several months of the game being released. Why? Well, because they
complained, right? "It was all the complaints, and Blizzard caved! Warlocks cried and now I can't kill them any more!!!!!1one!" That nonsense was repeated ad nauseum by the credulous and chronically upset. But really, if you actually look at the devs' explanations and listen to what serious players who observed the game would tell you - the fact was that Warlocks were underpowered. Really underpowered - no, worse than that. So Blizzard looked at player demographics - who was playing Warlocks; what damage numbers were they putting up in raids; what was their prevalence on the winning team in Battlegrounds? They also did internal testing to see just what the problem was, and I'm sure they did look into player feedback. But in the end they made their decisions based on hard data, not some foolish assessment of a small corner of their player-base. No one but Warlocks were complaining, but the reaction to the buff was extreme - and yet Blizzard let Warlocks go for a long time without many changes. They simply attempted to tune other classes' interactions with Warlock abilities.
Also, the above decision-making process is one that devs from companies like Blizzard have themselves outlined on multiple occasions. It's pretty much the only sane way to do things, if you think about it, but regardless, it's also what the devs of games I've played tell players they do. So if they're buffing and nerfing based on some ill-considered fantasy about pandering to minority player populations for money - they have to be lying. So the claim really does require you believe the devs are liars as well as fools.
As for WoW deliberately rotating "overpowered" classes - I played that game for years, and I just don't see it. I couldn't find the PCGamer article that alleged it, so I suppose anything's possible, but even if they did that, it's STILL not making changes just because players complain. Mind you, one of my characters was a Shaman, so I saw a lot of controversy from the inside (don't get me started on the myth of Shaman invincibility in Vanilla WoW.) But when Blizzard made changes, it was due to demographic data and hard numbers rather than theorycrafting and complaints - which were often based on anecdotes that simply did not reflect the current state of the game.
Edited by Void Angel, 07 February 2013 - 06:42 PM.
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