Proposition: Zen vs. Norfleet

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Zen:
the MMO mentality of everything is a "Nerf" and nothing is an upgrade

Having played the E&B and SWG MMOs, I can assure you that the majority of the nerfs those games suffered through, during and post-beta, did not improve the game, nor were they felt as "upgrades" by 99% of the players. I can only recall a handful of nerfs that actually worked well to improve game balance. The rest simply lessened (drastically) the enjoyment of the game for those players with characters directly affected by them.

So far, IW does not appear to have gone hog-wild with the same sort of nerfing as I experienced in those games (which is the reason I quit SWG), but the trend that I'm seeing is disturbing. I'm a firm believer in the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" philosophy, and several of the nerfs from 2.08 onwards fall into the "we jacked with it because we felt like it" Category, rather than because there was any pressing need to fix some problem being reported by a majority of players. There are real, serious, longstanding bugs in Dom2 that have yet to be fixed while IW devotes its attention to silencing the whining of a very vocal and tiny percentage of its customers, many of which are grossly challenged in the strategic-thinking department and should go back to playing the mindless twitch games that they're suited for.

If a game is less fun after a patch than before, then that patch's nerfs are counterproductive. E&B and SWG (especially SWG) failed that test miserably. After all, people play games to have fun, and not to just fatten the bank accounts of the companies running the games. So far, I cannot say that about Dom 2, but as I said, the trend is disturbing.