This doesn’t directly answer your question, but I wanted to say how much we’ve appreciated these polls and the analysis in the threads. Super useful feedback as we decide how to prioritize future balancing work.
So I’m going to say something very controversial, but true, so I’m putting on my flame-retardant pants for a diversion into game-design-philosophy-land: Dividing changes into buffs and nerfs doesn’t really make sense when you’re evaluating whether and how much a game has improved or not.
For one thing, the terms aren’t necessarily clear or useful. A buff for one character/ability/mechanic/strategy is a nerf for everything else in the game, and vice versa. Any change can be interpreted as a buff or a nerf. Team healing not lasting between missions? Clearly a nerf, right? To Black Widow (Original), Spider-Man (Classic), and those poor long-suffering hot-dog vendors, you bet. But it’s also a buff to health packs, Protect tile generation abilities, strategic play (vs. volume play), stun, users that play in typical mobile patterns (vs. those that play all at once), characters with self-heal, and so on. And it’s a nerf to a bunch of other tangentially related things as well.
Players, particularly expert players that are well-represented on the forums, gravitate toward optimal strategies, even if they make the game less fun for others (usually even if they make the game less fun for them). If you make a balance change and do it exactly perfectly (which I certainly don’t claim to do all the time - assuming the idea of “balancing perfectly” even makes sense), there are two possibilities:
- You take something overpowered and make it perfectly balanced. This is most likely going to change the way the expert players are playing, and make the way they were playing before less effective. And there’s some adjustment involved in that, and expert players notice big time.
- You take something underpowered and make it perfectly balanced. Expert players are not likely to care or notice, or they’ll think of the change as minor, since the optimal, overpowered strategies haven’t changed.
So even if we were doing everything perfectly (which we’re not, of course - we’re human), an expert group of players is always going to feel like changes are biased towards nerfs, even if there were the same number of both. But even then, there shouldn’t be the same number of both: if you take another look at those two possibilities and weigh them against each other, you’ll usually find that fixing something overpowered is more urgent, since it’s having a bigger impact on the experience. Most often, a very underpowered thing makes the game smaller, with fewer possibilities than it might otherwise have, while a very overpowered thing makes the game broken.
I’m not saying this to defend the design decisions we’ve made, but to criticize listing a game’s nerfs as telling us anything about the quality of a game or how it’s changing. I’m always interested in y’all’s “things I love about MPQ” and “things I hate about MPQ” lists, and I care very much about putting lots more eggs in the first basket, but I try not to pay too much attention to balancing out what particular players think of as a nerf vs. what particular players think of as a buff. Also, while I am interested in both, I think it makes sense to give more weight to the experience afterthe change than the experience ofthe change: temporary pain can be vital to the long-term health of the game.
(The lists you’ve linked to are also missing some things that I think most forumites would classify as substantial buffs (like the PvP rewards rework) and the nerf list includes some things that are pretty questionable as nerfs (writing patch notes in fiction? we might do that again when it makes sense and can be clear, but we got a lot of complaints that the fictional language made them unnecessarily hard to understand, and I don’t think you’d usually call something like that a nerf) but for the reasons above, I’m not going to spend time hashing the details of those lists.)
Now returning from game-design-philosophy-land; hope the diversion has been interesting.
