Open Letters to MMORPG Players/Developers
There are a couple of pretty rockin’ posts over at LagORama that are basically rants about changing things in MMOs from both the player and developer perspective. Both resonated with me, because both apply to me at all times. Check out An Open Letter to MMORPG Developers and An Open Letter to MMORPG Players. I agree with both. Does that make me a paradox?
It doesn’t make you a paradox, it makes you an idiot
In all seriousness, both sides are right. Nerfs piss players off, and guess what? You shouldn’t nerf something unless you have to – unless it’s ruining the experience for other players. Especially when PvP is supported, that’s going to be true *a lot*.
In the end I do agree with both sides. My take is pretty simple – as developers we need to be aware that the players having fun is priority #1. It’s not a good game if they’re not having fun, no matter how clever your system is, how mathematically perfect balance is, how innovative something is (or conversely how well it meets expectations of established genre players)… if they’re not having fun it isn’t good, and those things are only tools for achieving that goal. It’s a delicate balancing act only because different groups of people like opposite things all too often and we’re responsible for prioritizing how we satisfy those groups.
I feel for developers, I really do. Make a perfectly balanced system and they will complain that it’s “just Rock/Paper/Scissors” or “all the classes feel the same, there’s no differentiation. Make them different enough and it’s “Nerf Shaman” or my favorite right now in AoC, since I’m a ranger; “Nerf Rangers.”
As a player you have to learn to roll with the changes. This is something I did long ago. It’s self-centered and idiotic to think that developers just like to screw with you. I have been in that environment and I can tell you players that there is nothing further from the truth.
It’s a sign of the overall level of emotional maturity present in a game or class (either in lack or surplus) when you observe how they react. It’s a stretch but it still applies to say; “Tough times don’t build character, they reveal it.” It’s one thing to whine and complain (something I like to think I excel at) but another entirely to cast aspersions about someone that is building a game that “must hate my class.”
One other thing, sorry for the extra post. Harping on developers is like crying “Wolf!” Over time, they hear you less and less because no one wants to listen to someone calling them an idiot over and over again. If they did like that they wouldn’t be right inside.
Eh, nerfs happen. What pisses me off is when people don’t bother to explain what rationale they had in nerfing something, they just do it and expect people to take it. If developers came out and said, “We had to tone down this, this and this because it was doing this, this and this and it was not intended that way, it was intended this way.” I can handle that.
I can’t name one developer who actively has tried to make the game less fun for anyone with the exception of:
1) gold farmers
2) exploiters
3) anyone else who is flagrantly violating the terms of service
And, in fact, I’d be happy to make the game less enjoyable for all of them as well, because it makes the game more enjoyable for everyone else.
Yes, you do nerf things sometimes in the knowledge that it WILL make it less enjoyable for some people, but it’s always with the intent to make the game more enjoyable for the most possible people. In the world of MMO development, majority rules.
And yeah, I have seen some pretty idiotic changes by people I’ve worked with or by people who worked on games I was playing. These are generally mistakes or something born of misunderstanding (which I’d generally translate as a mistake).
I don’t really hold it against developers when they change the game so that it’s less fun, I just move on to another game. Finding a new game is easy.
Does that make me a paradox?
For some reason I keep thinking of that scene in American Beauty where Annette Benning keeps slapping herself.
Wow…nice…that’s all I have to say is…nice. Now I have to write a post on my blog.
what bugs me is the players that arent happy unless their class is the absolute best (we already know which classes), and will whine and cry until other classes are nerfed to “their satisfaction”, instead of asking, calmly, for the devs to check into it, because they saw a few parses that were off
it also bugs me when the developers cave to that shit over and over, but sometimes it’s honestly warranted, even if i do hate parsetards.