This isn’t an angry quitting post. This isn’t a “how dare you” post. This is a post where I explain why these changes make me want to stop playing this game. I’ll try to keep it short.
So I play a lot. I’m in a pretty big alliance, I’m involved with the community, I love the overall feel of the game. But the recent character changes strike me as amateurish, short sighted and clumsy.
1 - Posting Xavier’s abilities before they were final, immediately nerfing him.
We’re led to think that the characters are developed with a few things in mind. Interaction with characters, flavor (meaning how the character “feels”), and overall power among them. We’ve been talking about the mystique+mnmags interaction for a while now, and I think most of us were under the impression that you guys kept the combo in mind. When Professor X’s abilities were revealed, it took seconds for people to think of how he would interact with said combo. Then people thought of other combos. Well clearly the people (though judging by how this is going, person) in charge of design decided to browse the forum for the first time in his life, read the thread, went into a panic, and designed to nerf it immediately.
2 - Nerfing Winfinite
Clearly soon after that guy the thread again, noticed people still were pointing out how broken the interaction with winfinite would be, and went through a few threads from the last month to find out what the combo entailed. That person then slapped his forehead, and decided he needed to bone up on how those characters worked, since he’d forgotten about them seconds after their release.
3 - Goddess
He then probably decided it might be a good idea to browse the general forums after random complaints, isolating the daily “xForce and Goddess needs to be nerfed” threads. Goddess would be easy to nerf, since she’s a relatively new character, but the person nervously looked at the tab where he was putting the finishing touches on the IW rework, pondered about what it would look like if he was forced to nerf a character he had very recently reworked, thought about how much he liked his job, and decided to postpone the xf nerf for a while.
Now, to me, this (plus the Iron Fist nerf before the vast majority of people had enough covers to play him) point to a direction I’ve seen before. In Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, blizzard put entirely too much weight on community feedback when those games were new, and made major, incredibly clumsy changes to the games as response. The result is that many people felt like sinking any significant amount of time into learning those games was a waste of time, since nothing could be relied on. This was particularly disastrous in Diablo 3, where there was a real money auction house, so changes would often ruin items people had paid real money for, sometimes a lot of money. It basically killed the hardcore community, who moved on to games where they felt the developers had an actual plan for the future of the game that wasn’t “listen to the panic”. The Diablo 3 team was later fired, and a new team was built, one that stuck to their guns substantially more, and made the game playable, but the game never had the same amount of players again.
I don’t have a viable x-force. I do have a viable goddess, which I use with Loki, and that team allows me to play high level pvp. I fought hard for those GT covers. Hell, in the case of the first 5, they cost me sleepless nights grinding at that awful pve event.
These changes lock me out of high level pvp, and make me uncertain that any covers I commit for will be worth anything after a few days.
So this isn’t goodbye. I’m still around. This isn’t “F you”. This is just “Stop and think about it, because in the past companies that did this destroyed their games and the good will of the community”.
Thanks for your attention.
