By Jason_cross (Jason_cross) on Tuesday, January 30, 2001 - 11:31 pm:
This doesn't really equate to nerfing in a game like Diablo 2 or Everquest at all.
In RA2, players have, what 30 minutes invested in their army tops? The game ends, they start over...and everyone has access to any unit when they start playing, because they can play whatever side they want. Better balancing does nothing but make the game better.
In Diablo 2 or Everquest, players have hundreds of hours invested in their characters. Change the characteristics, and you alter what they've worked for all this time. It's great that the game is more balanced, but you reach a situation where players say "I wouldn't have spent 100 hours improving this skill, which was good at the time, if I knew you were going to make it suck in the name of balance." And who wants to start over with a new class/race/whatever that is now more powerful (relatively), tossing out all that play time on your current character and investing it all over again to get to the same place?
What I can't understand is why people bitch about changing weapon characteristics in a game like Counter-Strike. I mean, so buy a different weapon then. It's not a new round wasn't starting in 4 minutes anyway.
By wumpus on Wednesday, January 31, 2001 - 02:24 am:
"I wouldn't have spent 100 hours improving this skill, which was good at the time, if I knew you were going to make it suck in the name of balance."
More like "I spent 100 hours exploiting this error in the game logic, and if you take it away from me, I will kill you and your entire family!"
But I hear what you're saying. Definitely a kernel of truth there, and it's all a question of how severe the balance issues were.
The original Diablo II balance issues were fairly extreme; as I recall, the necro's corpse explosion was doing something like exponential damage, destroying everything on the screen.
wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com
By Mark Asher on Wednesday, January 31, 2001 - 01:30 pm:
"The original Diablo II balance issues were fairly extreme; as I recall, the necro's corpse explosion was doing something like exponential damage, destroying everything on the screen."
The most telling thing was that necros and barbarians were the characters all at the top of the D2 ladder. Blizzard had to do something or soon enough only those two classes would be played.
EQ just nerfed some Cleric's armor that was way overpowered. It let Clerics do a full heal every 30 seconds without expending any mana. You have to wonder how that one ever slipped by testing?