What pisses me off even more is when it's a PvE game. Like Bordelands, what do you mean you nerfed your best gun? Who the fuck cared if it was doing "too much damage" to the goddamn pixels!? Let people have fun!
That was more of slag being a hard set requirement in op levels and even then you didn't need those 2 at all unless you want to meta whore because you need that 2 seconds faster clear time
Wasn’t just salvador although yes he’s hust absurdly broken in general you would shoot then swap to grog to get free healing, I would talk about pimpernell but that’s just bug abuse, the bee was also massively broken, especially with certain guns like the hawk (I think that was the name of the smg, it’s been a while)
Yeah it was broken then nerfed to just top tier, it used to proc on each individual pellet on a shotgun so stuff like the Conference call could wipe raid bosses in a second
I thought that it ended up being changed to be divided among all listed pellets but since guns like the conference call had additional unlisted projectiles they would get the full buff? At least that's what I recall. Conference call is still my beloved tho
I despise the sentiment that game balance isn't important for PvE games. Having a balanced arsenal of reasonably powerful tools creates interesting and varied gameplay, and when one of those tools is too strong it both reduces gameplay variety and makes the game less challenging/engaging.
I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a meme but I think seeking a balanced engaging challenge is just slightly on the more intellectual side that doesn’t apply to most people if you know what I mean
While I agree with this sentiment, nerfing a build or weapon in a PvE game feels really shitty, I’d rather them buff other builds or weapons playstyles to keep up with the stronger build in question, then have a difficulty modifier to allow you to still have a challenge. Much like the Mayhem modifiers in Borderlands 3 or the Tiered (forget what it’s called) dungeons in Diablo 3.
Only agree with nerfing if the weapon or build in question is not working as intended. If it’s just a clever use of game mechanics leave it in the game.
As in it the build or gun is broken with glitch. Hence, the reason I put a follow up sentence. “If it’s just a clever use of game mechanics, leave it in.
“Is it a clever use of game mechanics? Leave it alone.”
Example:
Glitch: This gun hits hard but only shoots a single projectile, if I save the game and load back in as I’m switching to a gun that shoots multiple projectiles. My hard hitting gun will now shoot multiple projectiles. Fix this as this is a glitch.
Clever use of game mechanics: This one gun in the game shoots knives that are classified as melee damage so it takes advantage of melee damage increasing skills while still having the advantage of a gun. And if you get this in a certain element it deals even more melee damage to affected enemies. Don’t nerf this as it’s just a clever use of game mechanics.
Unintended behavior can be things outside of “glitches”. Literally no glitch occurs but the devs just didn’t think about the interaction that much or it didn’t get discovered in play testing. When a game releases, you get more hours of “testing” in the first hour of day 1 players than you get the entire development time.
BF3 USAS with frag rounds is a great example of this
I dont love this approach because if you only ever buff numbers then the numbers get so big they no longer matter. That kind of power creep is easily observed in games like Diablo and Warframe
It’s a stance that always leaves me scratching my head because the flaws are usually so apparent that it legitimately feels like they’re shitposting sometimes
Like the last time I saw someone say this, they unironically thought that the player using different weapons instead of the same one every time was bad game design
God and people defended it, no bro you're supposed to just not fight anything and keep running away. Bro guns are only there to TK not fight back bro it's skill expression to tickle your enemies with your rifle
Have you ever played the first game? Sticking together, running away and killing as many patrols as possible before they can spawn more enemies was how you played it on higher difficulties, and that was the intended experience for Helldivers 2 as well
That's not how it worked in the second one, if you didn't play in the early months you don't know what we're talking about. Patrols don't stop spawning for starters, the game spammed heavies when only 2 weapons could kill them reliably. The game spawned hordes on you for approaching objectives, didn't even have to shoot any for it.
It's okay to just say you don't know what you're talking about and want to fit in the conversation, there's only 10 difficulties. The conversation wasn't about them in the first place.
Doom: The Dark Ages had its Super Shot Gun nerfed…that game only has a single player campaign. You had no idea how good it felt to one shot Hellknights and other heavy demons.
game balance matters in singleplayer games. its hilarious to me when people are astonished to see singleplayer experieces get balance tweaks, like obviously difficulty is an extremely important factor of game design and things can be changed in updates lmfao what
havent played DA so i cant speak to the justifiability of the nerf but i dont recall the super shotty oneshotting hellknights in previous games on any real difficulty
I disagree entirely. Balancing single-player games doesn't make sense to remove the advantage for players to use. Just like speed runners getting out of bounds to save time. Can people do that? Yes. Is it a substandard way to play the game according to the devs? Yes. Who are you impacting by running overpowered weapons in your single player player game? Nobody but yourself. If you want to run through the game with the no skill gun, why not? You're making that choice as the person who bought the game. You're just as able to not use those weapons and play the game "correctly" if you like as well.
Take Halo Infinite for example. The devs left a glitched version of an unlimited ammo tank gun you could carry like a rifle in the launch version. It was patched out and then shortly after added back into the game because fuck it. If you want to play that way, go nuts. Not a fantastic example as far as good games go but it seriously doesn't matter.
"Balancing single player games doesn't make sense" Unbalanced single player games are still less fun, you have to intentionally disadvantage yourself to use the full set of options you have in the game means you are less likely to use the full kit, which makes it less enjoyable.
this is of course a niche example. not all balance issues stem from abusing bugged behaviour, and sometimes if theyre out of reach and enough and fun enough they should absolutely be kept in, like hoiking in terraria
but im talking people itt shit themselves when devs literally just slightly nerf the most overtuned shit in a dlc or something, in a way that retains its fun entirely, like with brimstone in isaac repentance. its damage was nerfed like 15%, people went apeshit lmfao
Game balance matters yes, but buffs are preferable to nerfs; if an item is overtuned, bring the others up to its level, and if needed, buff the enemies too. The net result is the same, but it feels so much better for end users.
this is only warrented in major systematic issues, like launch helldivers 2, this is insane to expect all the time as its obviously 100x more work and usually utterly unnecessary
It’s a bit less powerful but the nerf added a ton of utility. The SSG no longer one-shots Hellknights but it does put them into a glory kill state so you can get ammo and melee charges back. See Under the Mayo’s video here about it.
I mean if the gun wasn't intended to one shot heavy enemies then it is trivializing some of the game's difficulty. I played through post-nerf completely unaware of the nerf and never once thought "wow the super shotgun is weak", it was always my go-to for close range and felt plenty strong.
That's the point of nerfing those guns. If one gun is substantially more powerful then everything else then every single playthrough done by everyone that isn't playing for the first time is just going to be nothing but the bee shield and the conference call.
Having more options is fun, using the same setup every single time makes the game really stale.
I'm not sure what's so hard about this. "Using the same build every time gets really stale" then...don't do that? It's not like there weren't a thousand other great guns/combos in that game or any game like it.
You, personally, are making that choice. "I'm tired of eatting baked potatoes every meal" then fuckin, make something else.
Some of you people would optimize the fun out of jackin off.
"there are two routes to my job, one takes ten minutes and the other takes an hour. Today I think I'll take the hour long drive just to change things up!" You right now
It's almost like people value their own time or something, wtf. Yes, people will optimize the fun of stuff when given the chance. When people have a goal they want to reach they tend to avoid the options that will consume more time.
"But why the fuck are you playing a video game if you care about your time that much" sometimes people like chasing goals even if it isn't fun. Ever heard of shiny hunters? People in people that spam legendary fights for hours and hours hoping to get some different colored pixels?
Do you think gaming is a job? If you've played it so many times that you're bored of it, play something else dawg.
Regardless, if you want to optimize your free time, why is it the job of the game companies to stop you from doing that? How does that make any sense? In your metaphor, this is saying "well, they blocked off the 10 minute shortcut, so now I gotta take the hour long route everyday. Thank god they did, they sure know better than me what I should be doing. That old shorter route was gettimg boring anyway"
Tl:Dr you won't agree with anything I say anyway so just don't bother reading.
Do you think gaming is a job?
No, my analogy was an example. You can substitute whatever you like. The point is that when people have a goal they'll aim to achieve it as quickly as possible, regardless of how tedious the process is. If you make one gun the strongest in the game by far and you get a person who wants to level every character in the game to max then they will use that same gun for every character and burn themselves out due to tedious gameplay.
Using my analogy you are incorrect about blocking off the shorter path, that would be akin to removing the gun entirely. What they should be doing is ensuring all routes to your destination are similar in length but varied. One might pass by a gas station, one might pass by a park, one might be a country road, but if they're all similar in length then you get to pick and choose which one you like best instead of only driving one road for the rest of your life.
Analogies asside, no I don't see games as work, but I do know people will do tedious or painful tasks if it means achieving what they want. People don't always play for fun. Some people play really difficult games because they like overcoming a challenge, dark souls. Some people play toxic hostile games just because they enjoy feeling superior to others, League of legends. And some people will play games that extort actual money from you just to so you can get fast passes to achieve your goals, mobile games. Yes it is stupid that people will play games that don't enjoy but it is generally a good idea for developers to do their best at ensuring players will walk away from their game with a positive outlook rather then a negative one.
For PvE they should balance powering the weakest weapons, not nerfing the favorite ones.
(When the power balance broke because the game became easier just buff the enemies or add new ones more op)
The amount of fun they added by deciding to buff everything up instead of nerfing and reworking play to be a glass cannon instead of a slightly tanky wet sponge was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Night and day compared to the initial release. I can't wait to see what they do next with it.
Shit used to drive me nuts back when I played WoW. I don't give a FUCK if my cooldown makes Alterac Valley miserable, I'm tryna push Icecrown progression! Should just make them have different numbers in a PvP zone.
I think the crucible was much more active for D1 so I at least understand that one more. D2 crucible has been underpopulated for ages and they still do nerfs for it that make PvE worse
I cant really get behind this having witnessed the downfall of Helldivers 2. The game was supposed to be difficult and you were meant to work together with your team in order tp cover all tactical requirements, dedicated machinegunners, rocketeers, flamers, so on, all useful in specific circumstances, all vulnerable in others. The fun of the game was the cohesion of different tactics each player would bring to the squad dynamic. Then people started whining because you couldnt one man army the entire process and the devs caved. Everything has been buffed to where you are no longer dependent on your team at all. Might as well be a single player experience because everybody consistently just runs off on their own anyway.
It really depends if something is so good there’s no reason to not use it, it makes the game unfun and stale. If you make a game with 200 options but players only chose 3 options you’d rather them explore those other 197 options both so they can appreciate what you’ve made and to not keep them bored
I am not going to comment on specific scenarios, but sometimes it makes sense nerfing stuff for single player games. Sometimes some setups/strats are too strong and trivialize the game's difficulty or make other setups/strats useless in comparison. It's something that's hard to deal with and you don't always have the possibility to please everyone.
With borderlands 2 I will defend at least some of the nerfs. Like I think it's understandable to not want the endgame completely broken by easy to obtain guns. Makes playing multiplayer feel sorta pointless.
Now the issue with that game is that they almost never buffed stuff, so way too few weapons are good on the highest difficulty. (Thank you community patch for fixing that)
Encourages players to use a variety of weapons if they are all balanced. Like one of the massive things in Borderlands is that there's a fuck ton of variety.
Cause if a gun is too overpowered it ends up being the bases for the end game
Shout-out to the absolute hell that The Bee turned Borderlands 2s endgame into because they couldn't properly nerf it so instead balanced the end game around it
I hear what you're saying, but I have never, not even once, found that to be the case. It's always "this one is too strong" but it's not like other strong options don't exist. You, the player, are choosing if you want to use the super powerful thing. You always had the option to use less powerful weapons, and that doesn't make this one "the only viable option".
If players want to go on a power trip, let them. If it trivializes your end game, who cares? That's a choice that they can make.
Because it feels like shit to know that your favorite playstyle is trash and you could be doing better using something else.
Why should one thing be really good for a small number of players that like that, instead of making things all around decent so everyone can have fun with that? Even people that like trivializing the game might find the one option that enables it unfun because they're stuck with that one option.
who cares? That's a choice that they can make.
This makes no sense. The devs care, they have a vision on how the game should be played. Maybe it's a choice they don't think you should be able to have.
If the game has no player opponents anyways, edge on the side of giving the player the powertrip. Give them a challenge, but also give them MULTIPLE fun toys to tackle it with. Don't give them the challenge and then take away the already few toys that could deal with it easier
Buffing is not a straight forward answer, because then what was once a bad item, becomes the new absolute best, from unforeseen consequences of willy nilly buffing, now everything needs to be buffed to match that, and the cycle repeats until everything is all over the board
Balance the game with a tendency to buff existing weapons over nerf.
I'm not saying "stronger is better. Buff everything" I'm saying, if things aren't balanced, avoid balancing them at a less fun playing field. Bring it all UP to a balance, instead of depressing it all DOWN to a balance.
Buffs feel good until everything is so overpowered that the game becomes boring. Not every game or player wants to be invincible walking through mobs of endgame enemies and trivial bosses.
Buff everythin but in its unique ways. Let sniper one shot enemies, but its 1 bullet every 3s, meanwhile let flamethrowers burn everyone but theres no burst damage. Every playstyle should be fun, strong and unique. The issue is when theres a flamethrower that can kill 20 enemies faster than a minigun. Also, introduce enemies with resistances so that you force certain weapons agaisnt them, but keep enemies varied so that a team of 4 all must carry different tools for the job. Thats how you make a PvE game fun.
If its single player PvE game, then give the player ability to hold few guns, that way they can swap and still have fun.
The issue is when theres a flamethrower that can kill 20 enemies faster than a minigun
And what are the devs supposed to do if that happens? Buff the minigun to kill them even faster? Then every enemy is being vaporized by both weapons and you'll need to buff every other weapon to be equally as strong. You have now made your game trivial.
Also, introduce enemies with resistances so that you force certain weapons agaisnt them, but keep enemies varied so that a team of 4 all must carry different tools for the job.
This would technically be considered a nerf to your guns (they do less damage), so it's not allowed by this logic. This is also how borderlands does things, and it still required nerfs and buffs to keep weapons and equipment in check.
Blanket statement of "only buffs and no nerfs" isn't reasonable as you've just proved.
No, its a matter of design. Sniper is designed to be long range weapon, and IRL its usually low fire rate. Youre talking like its black and white. You missread my comment, i said to buff everything IN ITS UNIQUE WAY, meaning have a strong design.
If a weapon is overused, you need to analyze why its used so much, and buff/nerf accordingly. Just nerfing things will always make next thing buffed by default.
Strenght is A B C, you nerf A, now B is too strong. What im proposing is ask why is C not used as much and buff it accordingly. Just nerfing things would leave the game unfun to play. You need things to feel strong, and unless you start by making everything broken, nerfs wont get you there.
I don't disagree with this. This thread started as people saying that "only buffs" is a viable balancing strategy and I'm arguing that it's not. Just nerfing things is arguably worse than just buffing things. You need a balance of both, like you're saying.
Very notably, you don't have to do that. You can do that, and make your life easier, but no one is making you. That's why nerfing it is stupid. You always have the the choice you use whatever less overpowered resources you can, that was never in question.
I would argue that buffing everything to match the power of one item, would be balancing around 5%, nerfing the item that 5% of the player base uses would not impact the rest of the player
No, you're again ruining something fun for the majority of the playerbase so that it's not "too strong" for a very small handful. When the average player happens to find it, it is this really cool toy, that they can enjoy whenever. You're breaking that toy cause some other kid was playing with it too much? That sucks. You're punishing the majority for essentially no reason.
You know that they could nerf the item in a way that the low level player can enjoy it, while the high level player dont right?
You also know that, the low level player changes gear way more often than the high level one, and that the bee has like a 10% drop chance? So we are talking more like nerfing a item for 10% of the player base, because of 5% of long term players
Destiny 2 had a similar issue, arguably still has. Well of radiance is an Ult (called super in game) for the Warlock class that plants a sword in the ground which heals and boosts your damage and it just trivialises most parts of thegame, including PvP.
The big issue is that every single boss and endgame encounter now has you attack from a stationary position while you wait for the boss to become invulnerable and then you repeat a small puzzle mechanic and damage again. This has made warlocks mandatory in all endgame content and left the other two classes to the mercy of various buffs and nerfs.
It's bad, you can get kicked for not playing it and if you are a warlock you have less build freedom than the other two.
That's the fucking "and". Ill balanced PvE leads to a toxic LFG environment.
Tbf the other person did say to buff the content you're playing as well to match the buffed gear, but that leaves a toxic loophole open if the game ever introduces new powercreeping content (which as we know is extremely common, hey power fantasy sells especially if it's a DLC item). You just end up with an infinite loop of New Gear Added > Old Gear Buffed > Content Buffed > Repeat. At some point entropy takes effect and you end up with degenerated gameplay loops that reward screen wiping as quickly as possible while not getting 1-shot by giga-buffed enemies or wiped by mechanics that punish you for not meeting new standards set to challenge the current most powerful meta gear/playstyle.
I pretty frequently play a game called Darktide and that games endgame has already gotten to the point that players HP/Toughness(Shields) have to be reduced to around half or less of their original values, all ammo pickups are reduced by 60%, all enemies are given like 150%-200% bonus HP, enemies with guns fire extremely fast and often, enemy spawn rates are doubled, maps are flooded with bosses that normally only get spawned once per mission, maps are also flooded with special end-of-mission bosses and a story mode boss fight as a random encounter that will just show up unannounced, and on top of all this it still rolls you additional random difficulty modifiers like making elite enemies immune to CC and do bonus damage while under half HP or have certain enemies full heal all nearby enemies constantly until they die. It barely plays like the base game at all. We're still clearing this semi-consistently thanks to power creep and it usually takes bad luck for a run to fail. We just had a new DLC class drop that makes this content look like a stroll in the park and people are already talking about buffing up the old classes to meet "the new standard".
That just leads to infinitely scaling difficulty which inevitably ends up in games devolving into "1 shot or be 1 shot" fiestas ala Warframe where enemy types may as well be an amorphous grey blob that you shoot for funny damage numbers while you try not to accidentally get 1-shot by a toxin eximus smiting you for 3x your total ehp cause you turned a corner at the wrong time or didn't see them clipping into the 15 other enemies and vfx in the corridor. That game doesn't care about the intricacies of its actual combat too much so it's fine, but any game where the actual combat loop is really important suffer hard from power creep.
There's no point in engaging with enemy mechanics for example if your weapons and durability exceed anything those enemies could punish you with right? Why would you care about an enemy that's meant to make you use a rocket launcher for example when your pistol can delete it. So they have to buff the enemies to keep the gameplay interesting, then they have to do all this again whenever new power crept content gets added ad infinitum. At a certain point you just lose any sense of what the original gameplay design was.
We had the exact same problem with warlocks in D1 with the super that allowed them to resurrect themselves. So of course warlocks were expected to run that super because it allowed the team to avoid being wiped out.
Somehow Bungie didn't learn from that and created another "run this super or be considered a troll" class for them
I guess they have a certain balancing in mind making it, a certain playstyle, a certain challenge. It's not necessarily more fun just because a gun is stronger. They got a vision for how the game should be enjoyed, I can respect that.
Helldivers 2 does this as well, despite being purely PvE. They release a new weapon (that you have to pay for), and it's absolute ass at the start. They buff it and it becomes overpowered, then when the next weapon comes out, they nerf it again.
Yeah Rivals is slowly dying as a result. And honestly what's the point of an "Anti-cheat" if a game has more cheaters than I have seen in every other game I've played combined
I"m convinced the rivals devs simply don't care about balance. If they're trying to balance around high-level play, I can't imagine how the things they design could be considered skillful. All the metas have been "character does thing that the enemy literally can't do anything about."
Every patch introduces some insane dogshit that isn't fun to play against. It's healer ults, or insane damage nukes, or whatever. Game seems designed to be won exclusively by the people playing the most soul-crushing uninteractive bullshit ever.
Even casually the game is frustrating, because half the cast is only playable when you have certain allies or enemies, so if you wanna learn them and the other team has your counter, you're simply SOL.
If I didn't have friends who played it, I would have uninstalled in January. Alas lol.
This killed ow for me for sure. I got really sick of them nerfing characters because the top 0.01% of players could exploit some power. If they just gave professional players hero bans and kept the game the same for the 99.99%, things could have been different.
Why even give hero bans? If you're so damn good, you're going to be playing with the absolute cream of the crop and for them, this sort of thing would be a challenge. If someone is so good they can't be opposed, they've earned it frankly.
Remember when they changed it so you had to play with one less friend? The vast majority of players found it confusing, and only the top players went 'yeah' for 5 minutes before finding something else to complain about.
This. OW was for FPS what Smash Bros was for fighting games or Mario Kart for racing games, just fun, stupid and wacky gameplay.
But then, they started to optimized everything for the try hards, and if you play the game only a few times per week or month with your friends, even just having an idea of what is the current patch feels like a chore homework.
This eventually lead to people playing less, including your friends, so you play even less, and each time that you come back the game, it feels so different that it's not worth it just to get used to the new season meta.
It did. I will never forget the day they demanded "competitive". Then next thing you know you were only allowed on of each character. After that... you couldn't spam voice emotes because it was "toxic".
I still remember when me and the boys did a full Torb team and just kept spamming "let's not buy the pig while it's still in the bag" as the enemy team kept suiciding into our turrets instead of counter picking... good times...
I recall being text chatted on 2fort about committing crimes against the Soviet state and was subsequently executed by a firing squad of pow emote heavies in the sewer. God I love tf2
I was really big into competitive OW in the early seasons and capped out around mid grandmaster, before they added role queue. Me and the guys I rolled with loved the theory crafting of team comps and using them in high tier games to try and figure out new metas or counters to current metas. That was genuinely the most fun I had with overwatch, roll in with some weird ass team comp and crush the other team running the meta comp.
Hero bans, map voting, an open ended official tournament circuit, a general decrease in sustain etc.
Overwatch has shifted to catering to the higher end of the playerbase significantly more in the last year or so and the game has seen a massive surge in popularity, and is the most popular it has been in many years.
The balancing was never the problem for either the casual or competitive playerbase. The issues that put Overwatch in the dirt for a couple of years went significantly deeper than that, people just like to say things ”oh x hero killed the game” etc. as a way to over-dramatise a thing they don’t like, as if the game hasn’t had shit like Widowmaker and Roadhog for a decade at this point.
Higher end? It is objectively casualized version of ow1 with specifically bigger hitboxes and less variety. New heroes are do-alls instead of smth focused. Ow lost its style and lore to boot.
As an OW player, no it didn't. What led to OW becoming hated was the dev team pouring all their resourses into PvE, which lead to pvp going without any content updates and barely even any balance patches for nearly 3 years
And then before that several heroes throughout OW1 were broken to the point where if you didn't pick them at any level of play, you were throwing. Pro play too saw the same meta repeated over and over
So OW fell not because the devs were listening to one particular group, but because they weren't listening to anyone at all
Now that’s just not true, it wasn’t that long. And if it was, people found a way to deal with her. I’m not riding for the devs, I just don’t remember it being that long and I played the game religiously for years.
Take this with a grain of salt cause I don't have a source but as far as I remember, at peak broken, brig had something like a 93% win rate against teams without brig
Thank you Jeff Kaplan for tanking a franchise because he desperately wanted to make a PvE game and could only sell it to shareholders if it was called Overwatch 2.
Ngl for me brigittes existance single handedly killed the game for me, orisa was already pushing it since i hated playing against characters with barriers but with brigittes existance it wasnt too rare to run into team comps with 3 different projectile barriers simultaenously
They should have solved this by making new characters that could deal with Barriers instead of just making the barriers suck. Option A adds a new dimension and just the existence of that character will reduce the pick rate of shield characters, option B just ruins shield characters and makes them not fun anymore.
Sigma came out in August 2019, more than 3 years after OW released. He's good, yes, but he didn't exist for 50% of OW1 and calling him the defacto OW1 tank is a stretch.
adc is attack damage carry, or the dps in other games.
that was an era where all the other roles were insanely inflated in terms of damage and tankiness to the point where adc players needed insane babysitting in order to be able to pull their own late game. and even then, a full build fighter/assassin/mage could melt the adc in 2 seconds.
i mean, that's still kinda true, but at least adcs deal some damage now.
It was absolutely hilarious to play a normal full tank build on someone like Sejuani and having enough damage with your full combo to 100 to 0 an adc in 3-5 seconds while they're literally permastunned the whole duration, very balanced gameplay yes.
League has the best pvp balancing of any game and its not particularly close.
Excluding iron and challenger, there's like a \~10% winrate gap between the worst champ and the best champ at every rank. That's pretty narrow. And then you compare that to every other pvp game out there.
People love to shit on League, but it's pretty good on most ends, otherwise it wouldn't be one of the most popular games in the world for years like it has.
People love to shit on heroin but it's pretty good on most ends. Otherwise it won't be one of the most popular drugs in the world for years like it has.
League of legends: Engage with an infinitely deep system of mechanics and try to solve complex puzzles through split second decisions across hundreds of games, honing your skills.
It's very tilting, possibly the most tilting online game out there, but you just have to be learn to let it go and relax.
I usually didn't even play ranked cuz I was way too overcompetitive (if that even is a word) but recently I've been learning to just enjoy for what it is and put less importance on games where all 4 other players are 0/10, sometimes that just happens, you don't need to be 100% calm and fine with it, just don't completely go insane and crash out, and specially don't queue another game if you're feeling that way.
I swear people make an effort to have a bad time in league
DISABLE THE FUCKING CHAT.
And if people spam ping u just mute them.
You gotta realise this game is filled with 14yo idiots. Stop steping down to their level, be a fucking adult and ignore the crying baby, you're not gonna make them play better
Yeah league is fucking awesome. People act like it’s addictive but it’s because they have been lied to by easier games and can’t accept the reality of a true ranked ladder.
I can’t imagine getting “addicted” to casual league. Like there are people in this thread talking about raging at their friends for not tryharding? Like bro you need to win in Normal games that bad?? Do you play Mario kart and rage at your friends for throwing blue shells, or do you have a good laugh and play again?
People have a bad relationship with the game and blame the game
Yeah, I play a lot of normals with friends and all that, but I can't possibly imagine crashing out at my friends over going 0/10 on lux or something. Maybe tease them a little, but no way I'll rage at them for it, even if I'm not having that great of a time dying to a fed enemy player, just play out like calmly or surrender
That's becuase it is, very intentionally, competitive games are designed like crack, you have a good match and you're soaring, having fun, enjoying the time commitment, and then you start losing, and at a pace that's too slow for you to grasp, your mind is turning every bit of actual enjoyment into seething rage, and the game and your brain are essentially working in tandem, keeping your full attention on the stimulus that is causing an extreme reaction
Oddly enough, towards the end I stopped playing solo entirely, pretty much giving up on the game but friends kept pulling me back in for 5 man. Had fun for a very short amount of time before I started tryharding again and hating them for not putting in as much effort so I decided to just give up the game rather than get frustrated with them
played only arams after the people were so toxic and unfun on the rift. after a 3weeks vacation i came back and had to get used to the game again and said to myself now or never and it worked so far for the lastyear.played since S3
I actually love league, but I don't enjoy playing it much anymore. One day I realized grinding ranked just wasn't fun. I really like watching professional games though and trolling in a 5 stack.
yeah, at least league actually has a big proplay/esports scene, unlike overwatch that ruined the game in a fruitless effort to force a comp scene lmfao
It's a tough balance, if those guys feel slighted they screech as loudly as possible how bad changes are until they fucking kill the game ala Battlefield V.
Don't forget the tarkov route. balance the game around streamers. Because then conning people and lying is the only way to get new players for you dogshit cheater infested game.
Yeah they removed the quest for a the start of the wipe, made it so you can only start on 3 maps and then have to travel to the other maps from their, increased the price of the traders by a massive amount and reduced the sell price on every item, and made insurance cost more than just buying a brand new kit
nah as someone who gamed for the better part of 15 years the cycle of:
call out a problem->dev ignores it->turns out its a problem->dev implements the fix you said at the beggining
happens way too often. most devs just do knee jerk changes or ignore feedback. plenty of devs have 0 creativity when it comes to adjusting a problematic ability and either gut it completely or change it in such a way that the problem is not adressed. most devs dont identify core underlying issues and do bandaid fixes after bandaid fixes until you get a frankensteins monster of a patched up mess. most devs dont understand that the casual playerbase is the lifeblood of games and listen to the whispers of the 1%.
look at world of warcraft (bad example), when the fucking game director looks at the "game is too hard and complicated for new players" problem and his 500 iq solution is to add an auto play button you can press so you dont have to actually learn the bloated character, you know they went off the deep end.
look at elden ring (good example), incrementally doing slight buffs to underused weapons to make them as viable as the rest, and at the same time slightly nerfing the 2-3 most dominating and overused options to make space for the rest to shine. small tasteful changes, not sledgehammers or bandaids.
The culture around lower level players is completely different in FGs as well, when a low elo player can’t beat a certain tactic, we don’t say “wow spamming rekka on elphelt is OP!” we say “don’t let her do that next time you have to 6P her”.
Devs balance the game around the top 5% of players
Be Starcraft
Everyone complains
Devs balance the game equally around the entire playerbase
Be League of Legends
Everyone complains
Devs balance the game based on variety of player feedback
Be TF2
Everyone complains
Devs balance the game based on the complaints of everyone
Be Marvel Rivals
Everyone complains
Devs balance the game based on their own intuition
Be Helldivers 2
Everyone complains
Devs neglect to balance game and allow for the playerbase to naturally ebb and flow based on the perception of the state of the game
Be Call of Duty BO 3
Everyone complains
I think y'all are just assholes, ngl. Genuinely bad balance can be annoying sure, but I've so so many fucking picky playerbases who are the equivalent of the head butler hovering over the gentleman in training as he wonders what utensil to reach for. Inevitably reaching for the "wrong" one and getting shot in the palm for doing so.
It's impossible to please absolutely everyone when it comes to a competitive game... that you must know. Yes balancing the game around your top players is not a good practice, but where does it end? Do they choose to balance the game around the ranks just below that and possibly alienate/punish the ones in the top ranks just because they found a niche that got them ahead? Taking away their fun? Do they balance the game around the middle ranks and cause the game to have a repetitive, samey meta? Do they balance the game around the lower ranks and cause absolutely everything to become OP? Like genuinely think about it for a second, it ain't easy to do.
I'm not saying you should just take your slop and like it, like a good little bitch. I'm just saying... all this excessive hatred needs to be...
Is it really fun combat if you're 1 shotting everything? I'm playing a CRPG currently, there exists a build which with an early game pair of boots and an early game chainsaw has more movement than god and deals up to 10 million dmg (the strongest enemy of the game caps at 20k). The only real solution if you want to have an interesting and engaging combat experience is to not play that build.
If the fun part is the learning part of finding the OP combo, then it is a major win for you if the weapon gets nerfed.
When a weapon is nerfed, you can go find and learn a new combo to be OP again with. Because if that weapon doesn't get nerfed, then there is no point in learning anything else than the tried and true method.
There's no point in learning anything else than the tried and true method.
You're thinking as a utilitarian. Once again, the fun is learning and finding ways to be OP in the game, not being OP just for the sake of being optimal. That's how you end up being a meta slave and having a miserable experience.
That's how roguelikes became so popular, btw. They give you a lotta options so you can learn different ways to be strong in the game.
Great! Except, you didn't refute my argument that you can find new ways to be OP again with a nerf and balance patch. After all, it is the "learning" part that is fun for you, not the being OP part as you keep repeatedly stating.
Every balance patch comes with new discoveries on the best builds. The part where you "learn" to find new ways to be OP.
Like, I don't see why you hate this unless you really hate learning ways to be OP and just want to be OP for the sake of being OP.
But I never said nerfs are bad, motherfucker. Nerfs are good to constantly shake the meta and is a good way to make the game fresh every season. Destiny 2 is a good example of this. However, that is not the point Anon is trying to make.
Balancing the game around the top players is not a fun way to balance anything. Making everything balanced just makes everything weak. Compare Overwatch at launch and Overwatch now. TTK is at an all time low because they wanted to focus on eSports championships, like the cucks that they are.
Whoops, my bad. I thought you were another person. So many people replied to me and I don't keep track of the messages.
Balancing the game around the top players is not a fun way to balance anything.
Compare Overwatch at launch and Overwatch now.
Seeing, my original message is about playing easy mode to feel powerful and the top message is about Single player games. The top 5%, Overwatch, and Anon is irrelevant. I don't really care about those games anyways. I care about singleplayer/PvE games.
If you still insist on arguing with single player and PvE games in mind, feel free to continue to argue. Otherwise, there is no point in you arguing, but I will argue believing you are talking about PvE games in general.
Since you can't grasp the concept of it, the fun is to learn the game and then getting as OP as possible to make even hard mode be turned easy.
Making everything balanced just makes everything weak.
On Hard mode? Yes, all your tools should feel weak so that achievements means something. If you want easy mode, play easy mode.
If you argue that nothing should be nerfed you should also believe underpowered things shouldnt be buffed which I know you dont even though the end goal of these 2 actions is the same - equalizing power level across the game
Who cares what you find fun and interesting, if a wants to make a oneshot build, and the game provides the tools to do so, then let them make a oneshot build.
Because in a perfectly balanced game you should be able to build for any playstyle you want and not feel like you're missing out because there's a build that invalidates everything in the game. I'm not even against one shot builds if they're hard to assemble so you feel like some effort you put in was rewarded but if its easy as it is in this example it just feels cheap.
why should devs not be allowed to make balance updates in their game? really annoys me when games get perfectly reasonable updates that even slightly affect difficulty and then endlessly whine about it, as if it being a singleplayer experience magically invalidates any and all care of balance and difficulty design, see the flood of "un-nerfing" mods for the binding of isaac after repentance came out
As a game dev, it's not usually smart or well received to you let people do a thing and then tell them they can't do that thing anymore. People usually care not just about the difficulty, but that either their playstyle is no longer viable because of a small change or a specific thing they liked just isn't possible anymore. Helldivers 2 is my favorite example without outing what I've worked on, so I'll go with that even though they've totally fixed it and made the game incredible again by now. They nerfed guns like the Railgun and HMG into the ground, removed emoting midair to prevent fall damage (which players loved, saving yourself by saluting goes with the game very well), nerfed all the explosives to the point of them not even hurting the enemies you brought them for, and many more unneeded nerfs that noticably made it worse. If you can't do a thing you like anymore, that sucks for you as a player. A good game developer makes changes for the player, not just their artistic vision. 15% less mag capacity on a big gun means you can't kill that thing you brought it specifically to kill. 10% slower movement speed as a fast character means you can't use what you picked them for like you could. 20% damage on that shotgun you loved because it obliterates everything in front of you no longer obliterates everything in front of you.
Obviously there's cases where you should make balancing changes and it isn't a universally negative thing, devs just need to learn when and how to do it without fucking things up on the player end.
Gamers really get mad when their perceived ability to do stuff drops. Sometimes as a dev you just gotta plug your ears and wait for people to realize that having a build that invalidates all of the other builds can feel really bad.
Sometimes it's totally appropriate to nerf something though. I think to Paradox games, where they might add a mechanic that is so powerful it trivializes other styles of play, effectively punishing you for wanting to play the game differently.
I still remember when the operator who puts a mini ballistic shield on top of his rifle was released and it got nerfed very quickly because the pro players who went to tournaments who were used to always aim for the head, couldnt deal with him and the simple tactic of aim to the chest/legs, which was the entire point of the operator
Fr reading these threads reminds me that most people don't actually care about balance or good game design, they enjoy a game almost exclusively because of vibes.
And that's fine, but then they say crazy shit like "launch Blackbeard was fine" and their logic is basically "I liked him". Which, again, is fine, you can like whatever you want to like, but don't confuse things you like with things that are (necessarily) well made.
Brother, were you there for even the first year of Siege??? This was always a thing. The worst case of this is Ela, a year 2 op, and even then, most of the gooner brained people complain operators are too ugly these days lmao.
Some of them do, yeah, but if he's referring to the Iana elite thats like one of the few cross-over skins that isn't poorly done imo. And I'm fucking gay saying that lmao.
People always argue about this shit in the Darktide sub. "Just buff every weapon to be as OP as the dueling sword and balance every class around soloing Havock level 40.
They buffed a lot of shit to such an absurd degree, while also neutering most enemies, making skill expression redundant, the challenge left in the game the competence of your teammates, even then its not like you can just commando your through everything even at the highest difficulty with relative ease
I knew it would go the route, but the early days of Hearthstone before it went full meta builds for competitive were a blast. 'Storymode' was rad, gave decent rewards, and didn't feel like any goofy deck was too punishing.
Lots of RNG made for some wacky builds early-on that got complained about by streamers before the big fixes came next.
what do you even mean, ever since \~2017 hearthstone has declined into a literal casino with 0 skill. good thing they removed the rng of damage ranges to then add insane rng to everything else. id rather have 2-5 damage than 5 random spells.
The problem with the esports pivot isn't even just balancing with the top players in mind... they start balancing with stream viewers in mind and making objectively unfun changes so that it can look cooler
Yeah and it sucks ass. Most of my experience with this phenomenon is in league, where some champions are nerfed into being troll picks for anybody who's not in the top 0.01% of players because otherwise they'd be too strong in pro play.
proplay seriously needs its own version. its practically a different game already anyway, why keep doing goofy patches to change things just for proplay to just change it back after lmao
actual facts. Most champions have pretty reasonable winrates at all levels. It's fine for Azir to be 47% winrate in Silver so that he isn't 75% winrate in Master+.
Well the issue is you kind of have to. The really good players will find the best tactics possible with high skill, if there's stuff unbalanced for them it will centralise their meta around it. The average player will see that all the good players are doing that specific thing and do it too, very quickly making it repetitive and stale, also ruining the game. Bit of a catch22
Honestly devs shouldn't have to cater to any player group
balances around top 5%, new players stop coming
balances around noobs, long time players get bored and quit because even if the surface level mechanics are equal-ish, any semblance of skill annihilates the game balance completely
balances around the average joe, top players call it catering to no skill, noobs call it catering to skill
but honestly the most evil way to balance is Gaijin: balance to polarize your community and make them get mad at each other instead of you because you're literally applying the divide and conquer principle on your playerbase
I'll eat down votes but the second an exploit is found by a pro in any of the games mentioned in these comments, everyone and their mom is abusing that shit in casual queues. I see it happen all the time to this day in games like MTG where everyone net decks what the pros play, and exploits in MOBAs and whatnot are quickly used in casual to pub stomp.
That's not what I'm saying. I literally play the game. I'm just making a joke about a character from a game I'm familiar with being a good example of why not every character can be equally viable at all levels of gameplay.
Only person with a brain in this thread. ":((( please buff Ryze to have a stable 50% wr in bronze!! I don't care if he's 100% pick/ban and 95% winrate in diamond+, those guys are the minority!!!"
Funniest thing about this is that lowers elos could absolutely hate if a champ that is already heavily low elo skewed like mordekaiser was gigabiffed to be viable in higher elos
Whales spread all elos, but my guess is that the average Chally player has spent significantly more money on the game than the average never-touched-rank silver mmr.
World of warcraft raiding. They pushed a stupidly hard difficulty completly locking the cutting edge behind terrible boss design, went on wars with the addons necessary to survive to the bullshit boss design they kept creating just for 40 streamer to show off for twoo weeks once every six months.
That shit never impacted the numbers of players, but the experience went miserable for all the other 1500 guilds behind them.
IMO WOW lost its appeal when they started making everything accessible to every player (kinda the opposite of what this topic is complaining about). It was around WotLK. By the time the pandas came out it was more like playing a mobile game and just grinding pointless matchmaking trainwrecks than a real a MMO where you know the people you are playing with.
This is 100% true. To the point where today you are timegated so heavily on how much you can progress your character every week, so that wagies can still play the game and not feel behind.
i mean no matter who it's balanced towards the other group will hate it
if you're playing a game where something's balanced towards the 95% but you're in the 5% you're gonna feel like the devs are stupid for catering to stupid people
and if you're in the 95% you'll think that you're the one that matters because population bigger
and neither is wrong its just you'll never get 100% thats just how it is
I think for PvP games, this is totally fine, because buffs/nerfs generally don't impact low elo very much, as they have gameplay issues that impact whether they win or lose more than any buff or nerf ever could (unless the buff/nerf is something insanely egregious, which is rare); it doesn't matter that your character is "weak" or theirs are "strong," because both parties are playing so ineffectively that those buffs/nerfs are basically irrelevant.
When PvE games start buffing/nerfing things? That's where it gets stupid, in my opinion. Not that things need to just be broken OP, because that's also boring, but a lot of the time they do nerf things for no real reason at all, and then fun weapons are no longer fun, and the unfun weapons are STILL unfun.
That's what pissed me off when I played WoW. Let's nerf this ability that hurts too much in arena. Nevermind that we just fucked everyone else, most of whom have literally never even been to the arena.
How can you “balance” something when 80% of the players don’t understand the actual game mechanics. Generally it’s the top 10% of the players that absolutely break the game because it’s “balanced” around people who don’t even know what they’re doing.
Balance isn't a simple "this thing deals too much damage." Sometimes a lot of specific game functions have a very high skill ceiling and are unbalanced only in the hands of someone really good, or sometimes things just dominate at lower skill levels while getting dunked on in higher ranks. There's no magic number where you can stop.
true. Like if the devs admitted that your character was a horrible design and acted accordingly insstead of succing you dry of your money by not nerfing them and giving them skins constantly I'd show you your placd
Its actually worse than that. They cater to the top .1% of players who are pros and complain when off meta stuff gets buffed/meta stuff gets nerfed because it means homework for them and they dont want to relearn the game.
Galve is still yet to change annad balance a Dota hero Witch Doctor, because he is an awful hero at pro level. But he dominates us pubscrubs
Of course pros who can communicate, strategize, think like a team, know when to use spells efficiently to stop WD from doing his things, can easily counter him. But try to communicate with a Bulgarian, Russian, Turk in your team (none speak English) that one should save his stun for WD, that one should buy ghost so he can get close, AND ALL SHOULD MOVE AWAY WHEN HE CASTS CASK.
WD is so infursting to play against solo, or even duo. He cannot be countered if everyone in the team is not ready to coutner him, and he annihilates us pubs scrubs. I will not pretend I am higheer mmr than I am (3.3k) but for the love of God, WD is making the game worse in our bracked and there is nothing that I, individually, can do about it..
It's comparable to old techies for me in terms of pub ruining (tho not wuite as bad because there are some really bad WDs out there)
Especially because good players always exploit difficult things that lower skill players wouldn’t attempt, resulting in weird and random nerfs that just lower the overall quality of the game. Leave the op quirks in, let those who are good at using them do their thing. Who cares.
I hate when ppl say "man they only balance around the pros this shit sucks" like wdym bro your dogwater ass aint gonna feel buffs or nerfs because you not good enough for that too really make a difference - its *usually* just that they read stats in a balance update and are psychologically tricked into feeling a fake difference or they just follow whatever the meta is in the upper echelon
Counterpoint: if a game is well-balanced for competition, that can also have appreciable benefits for more casual players. If a game is NOT competitively balanced, casual players might not notice or care, but the competitive scene will suffer for it.
Helldivers 2 started that way, the extreme "games too easy, make it harder" made me quit for awhile. Once they got their act together and reverted alot, it's much better now.
Dota 2 for me - back in the day people used to have some range on what they want their champion to be in the match. Building a support into a carry was much more feasible (and FUN), but now the meta is so systemic that I hate it.
They build the game in a way the pro players play it, but normal people want something less punishing and strict.
Gamers when devs want to appeal to the people who spend the most money on their games.
If a game has an Esport, you really shouldn't expect anything else. At that point, it's about the money and the money comes from tournaments which need to be watched by people so the top gameplay needs to be good. It's that simple.
Rainbow Six Siege. All it takes is a couple pro players complaining on Twitter (X) for the devs to change something that isn’t even relevant or useful for the average player.
But in a competitive game, you will always have someone who loses more often than he's winning. Even with MMR, you have someone in the bottom tier who is bad even for that bottom tier. Those people will leave the game.
When they leave the game, you have someone else who is losing more often than he's winning. Those people will also leave the game.
Years and years of this, and the only regular players you have is the top few percent. Those are either so competitive they don't mind losing, or they like dunking on the new palyers who occasionally come and go.
A game needs more pople joining in compared to the people leaving. As a game grows and builds hype, this is very possible. As the game gets older, it becomes impossible. And the game eventually dies.
What would be the downsides to having two balance systems? One you work with up until you are in the top 5% rankings, then another until you are World First or whatever.
The finals nerfing a sledge hammer on the least mobile unit in the game bcs a few sweats playing the fastest, squishy glas cannon type, unit couldnt comprehend pressing w
The Finals is pretty reasonably balanced but the heavy's lack of mobility is a real question mark. In Cashgrab and TDM, nobody seems to play it because the lights can simply plink and dodge while the heavy just stands there, and the mediums have a broad array of tools for getting around shields and barriers.
I only see effective heavy play in Platform bc the defending heavies can hunker down and the attacking ones can use the chaos and angles to leap on the platform with a spear or hammer. But even so, they seem so out of place in a game where speed and guile are two of the most important things a player needs to have.
Worst i ever experienced was Destiny 2. Destiny 1 was a multiplayer pve game with some side pvp stuff. They built Destiny 2 to cater to the .01% of players who streamed pvp content. It flopped massively, as was easy to predict, and they had to change everything to get the players back.
"Yeah we gonna nerf this character to death because someone in Overwatch league found one very rare instance where they are slightly overpowered if used with 4 otjer specific characters"
The devs of ow1 were incompetent they never listened to pros and the average community,why do you think goats was in the game for 2 years?they never listened to anyway,the devs themselves and Jeff kaplan was the downfall of overwatch
Well, right now the only complaint I have is how the new hero does too much damage. Counter-picking still exists but is much harder now because of hero bans. Anyway, that's pretty much it balance wise. I don't really have much of an issue with the balancing or think that they're especially catering to the top pros.
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
What pisses me off even more is when it's a PvE game. Like Bordelands, what do you mean you nerfed your best gun? Who the fuck cared if it was doing "too much damage" to the goddamn pixels!? Let people have fun!
JBlazzy@reddit
Yeah, fuck game balance ans build diversity, let everyone just run the same 4 guns on every character on every build!
COUGH COUGH BL2 Unkempt Harold & Grog Nozzle COUGH COUGH
Churro1912@reddit
That was more of slag being a hard set requirement in op levels and even then you didn't need those 2 at all unless you want to meta whore because you need that 2 seconds faster clear time
Boudac123@reddit
Lifesteal slag on one and harold was just plain obscene
Churro1912@reddit
That's just Salvador being himself, I hated the Norfleet spammers more
Boudac123@reddit
Wasn’t just salvador although yes he’s hust absurdly broken in general you would shoot then swap to grog to get free healing, I would talk about pimpernell but that’s just bug abuse, the bee was also massively broken, especially with certain guns like the hawk (I think that was the name of the smg, it’s been a while)
Dont_Touch_My_Nachos@reddit
Sand hawk from pirate's booty?
Boudac123@reddit
Yep that’s the one
Churro1912@reddit
Yeah it was broken then nerfed to just top tier, it used to proc on each individual pellet on a shotgun so stuff like the Conference call could wipe raid bosses in a second
Dont_Touch_My_Nachos@reddit
I thought that it ended up being changed to be divided among all listed pellets but since guns like the conference call had additional unlisted projectiles they would get the full buff? At least that's what I recall. Conference call is still my beloved tho
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
If devs can’t change balance, they should just remove the useless weapons
Wasted dev time amirite? /s
a-bottle-of-vokda@reddit
I despise the sentiment that game balance isn't important for PvE games. Having a balanced arsenal of reasonably powerful tools creates interesting and varied gameplay, and when one of those tools is too strong it both reduces gameplay variety and makes the game less challenging/engaging.
Boudac123@reddit
Agreed however borderlands is kinda in the category where the devs really shouldn’t care
IIlIIlIIIIlllIlIlII@reddit
I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a meme but I think seeking a balanced engaging challenge is just slightly on the more intellectual side that doesn’t apply to most people if you know what I mean
UnNecessary_XP@reddit
While I agree with this sentiment, nerfing a build or weapon in a PvE game feels really shitty, I’d rather them buff other builds or weapons playstyles to keep up with the stronger build in question, then have a difficulty modifier to allow you to still have a challenge. Much like the Mayhem modifiers in Borderlands 3 or the Tiered (forget what it’s called) dungeons in Diablo 3.
Only agree with nerfing if the weapon or build in question is not working as intended. If it’s just a clever use of game mechanics leave it in the game.
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
Right so if the devs nerf something that is, and I quote, “not working as intended”… you’re fine with it.
So what’s your complaint lol
Devs want you to play a certain way and you abusing something that they didn’t intend… then it’s a warranted nerf, per your own words
UnNecessary_XP@reddit
As in it the build or gun is broken with glitch. Hence, the reason I put a follow up sentence. “If it’s just a clever use of game mechanics, leave it in.
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
Unintended game mechanics would be not working as intended…
You’re arguing against yourself lol
UnNecessary_XP@reddit
I’m really not lol. 🤦
“Is it a glitch? Fix it.”
“Is it a clever use of game mechanics? Leave it alone.”
Example:
Glitch: This gun hits hard but only shoots a single projectile, if I save the game and load back in as I’m switching to a gun that shoots multiple projectiles. My hard hitting gun will now shoot multiple projectiles. Fix this as this is a glitch.
Clever use of game mechanics: This one gun in the game shoots knives that are classified as melee damage so it takes advantage of melee damage increasing skills while still having the advantage of a gun. And if you get this in a certain element it deals even more melee damage to affected enemies. Don’t nerf this as it’s just a clever use of game mechanics.
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
You’d defend the BFG “slowdown” tech lol
Unintended behavior can be things outside of “glitches”. Literally no glitch occurs but the devs just didn’t think about the interaction that much or it didn’t get discovered in play testing. When a game releases, you get more hours of “testing” in the first hour of day 1 players than you get the entire development time.
BF3 USAS with frag rounds is a great example of this
UnNecessary_XP@reddit
https://i.redd.it/4ujjvkxrx1cf1.gif
😂👍
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
No you
Type of shit
UnNecessary_XP@reddit
https://i.redd.it/gz5m6kkzx1cf1.gif
M0rgr0m@reddit
I dont love this approach because if you only ever buff numbers then the numbers get so big they no longer matter. That kind of power creep is easily observed in games like Diablo and Warframe
goldninjaI@reddit
counter point: big gun go boom do damage explode
RodjaJP@reddit
Counter counter point: all guns go boom, but player only sees big number
goldninjaI@reddit
number big damage guts flying kaboom
igorpc1@reddit
Counter counter point: play on easiest difficulty or change enemy hp to lowest if allowed.
goldninjaI@reddit
gun go boom explosion blood pow
684beach@reddit
Yeah, fromsoftware games like armored core have guns thats trivilize most bosses and others thats are beyond clunky and weak
Deadlymonkey@reddit
It’s a stance that always leaves me scratching my head because the flaws are usually so apparent that it legitimately feels like they’re shitposting sometimes
Like the last time I saw someone say this, they unironically thought that the player using different weapons instead of the same one every time was bad game design
demon-storm@reddit
Noob detected
MeBustYourKneecaps@reddit
This I can understand. Honestly I even agree with it.
I never understood "balancing" a PvE game, like who tf was complaining? And where are they, so I can order a direct carpet bombing on their house.
DennisDEX@reddit
Helldivers lmao
Churro1912@reddit
God and people defended it, no bro you're supposed to just not fight anything and keep running away. Bro guns are only there to TK not fight back bro it's skill expression to tickle your enemies with your rifle
Successful-Claim-473@reddit
Have you ever played the first game? Sticking together, running away and killing as many patrols as possible before they can spawn more enemies was how you played it on higher difficulties, and that was the intended experience for Helldivers 2 as well
Churro1912@reddit
That's not how it worked in the second one, if you didn't play in the early months you don't know what we're talking about. Patrols don't stop spawning for starters, the game spammed heavies when only 2 weapons could kill them reliably. The game spawned hordes on you for approaching objectives, didn't even have to shoot any for it.
Ecstatic-Compote-595@reddit
play a lower difficulty, there are like 12
Churro1912@reddit
If you're talking about 12 difficulties than you don't even know what we're talking about, at least Google your shit first lol
Ecstatic-Compote-595@reddit
I count bugs and the arcade machine as different difficulties
Churro1912@reddit
It's okay to just say you don't know what you're talking about and want to fit in the conversation, there's only 10 difficulties. The conversation wasn't about them in the first place.
TheInsanernator@reddit
Thankfully they rolled them back. Wonder if other game devs will take notice.
Campsters2803@reddit
Doom: The Dark Ages had its Super Shot Gun nerfed…that game only has a single player campaign. You had no idea how good it felt to one shot Hellknights and other heavy demons.
FrazzleFlib@reddit
game balance matters in singleplayer games. its hilarious to me when people are astonished to see singleplayer experieces get balance tweaks, like obviously difficulty is an extremely important factor of game design and things can be changed in updates lmfao what
havent played DA so i cant speak to the justifiability of the nerf but i dont recall the super shotty oneshotting hellknights in previous games on any real difficulty
DoubleInfinity@reddit
I disagree entirely. Balancing single-player games doesn't make sense to remove the advantage for players to use. Just like speed runners getting out of bounds to save time. Can people do that? Yes. Is it a substandard way to play the game according to the devs? Yes. Who are you impacting by running overpowered weapons in your single player player game? Nobody but yourself. If you want to run through the game with the no skill gun, why not? You're making that choice as the person who bought the game. You're just as able to not use those weapons and play the game "correctly" if you like as well.
Take Halo Infinite for example. The devs left a glitched version of an unlimited ammo tank gun you could carry like a rifle in the launch version. It was patched out and then shortly after added back into the game because fuck it. If you want to play that way, go nuts. Not a fantastic example as far as good games go but it seriously doesn't matter.
BadgerMolester@reddit
"Balancing single player games doesn't make sense" Unbalanced single player games are still less fun, you have to intentionally disadvantage yourself to use the full set of options you have in the game means you are less likely to use the full kit, which makes it less enjoyable.
FrazzleFlib@reddit
this is of course a niche example. not all balance issues stem from abusing bugged behaviour, and sometimes if theyre out of reach and enough and fun enough they should absolutely be kept in, like hoiking in terraria
but im talking people itt shit themselves when devs literally just slightly nerf the most overtuned shit in a dlc or something, in a way that retains its fun entirely, like with brimstone in isaac repentance. its damage was nerfed like 15%, people went apeshit lmfao
SaintCambria@reddit
Game balance matters yes, but buffs are preferable to nerfs; if an item is overtuned, bring the others up to its level, and if needed, buff the enemies too. The net result is the same, but it feels so much better for end users.
FrazzleFlib@reddit
this is only warrented in major systematic issues, like launch helldivers 2, this is insane to expect all the time as its obviously 100x more work and usually utterly unnecessary
SaintCambria@reddit
So then leave shit alone and let people have fun.
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
Obviously you’ve never run 2016 with a mastered SSG from level 4 through the entire game without touching another weapon…
THAT is the strongest SSG by far, penetrating rounds and 2x double barrel blasts per reload. Makes all other SSGs a joke honestly
Hurk_Burlap@reddit
You mean its not supposed to one shot a hellnight when you shove the barrel down their throat?
AnnoyingRingtone@reddit
It’s a bit less powerful but the nerf added a ton of utility. The SSG no longer one-shots Hellknights but it does put them into a glory kill state so you can get ammo and melee charges back. See Under the Mayo’s video here about it.
Hurk_Burlap@reddit
:<
0rphu@reddit
I mean if the gun wasn't intended to one shot heavy enemies then it is trivializing some of the game's difficulty. I played through post-nerf completely unaware of the nerf and never once thought "wow the super shotgun is weak", it was always my go-to for close range and felt plenty strong.
SurprisedCabbage@reddit
That's the point of nerfing those guns. If one gun is substantially more powerful then everything else then every single playthrough done by everyone that isn't playing for the first time is just going to be nothing but the bee shield and the conference call.
Having more options is fun, using the same setup every single time makes the game really stale.
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
I'm not sure what's so hard about this. "Using the same build every time gets really stale" then...don't do that? It's not like there weren't a thousand other great guns/combos in that game or any game like it.
You, personally, are making that choice. "I'm tired of eatting baked potatoes every meal" then fuckin, make something else.
Some of you people would optimize the fun out of jackin off.
SurprisedCabbage@reddit
"there are two routes to my job, one takes ten minutes and the other takes an hour. Today I think I'll take the hour long drive just to change things up!" You right now
It's almost like people value their own time or something, wtf. Yes, people will optimize the fun of stuff when given the chance. When people have a goal they want to reach they tend to avoid the options that will consume more time.
"But why the fuck are you playing a video game if you care about your time that much" sometimes people like chasing goals even if it isn't fun. Ever heard of shiny hunters? People in people that spam legendary fights for hours and hours hoping to get some different colored pixels?
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
Do you think gaming is a job? If you've played it so many times that you're bored of it, play something else dawg.
Regardless, if you want to optimize your free time, why is it the job of the game companies to stop you from doing that? How does that make any sense? In your metaphor, this is saying "well, they blocked off the 10 minute shortcut, so now I gotta take the hour long route everyday. Thank god they did, they sure know better than me what I should be doing. That old shorter route was gettimg boring anyway"
SurprisedCabbage@reddit
Tl:Dr you won't agree with anything I say anyway so just don't bother reading.
No, my analogy was an example. You can substitute whatever you like. The point is that when people have a goal they'll aim to achieve it as quickly as possible, regardless of how tedious the process is. If you make one gun the strongest in the game by far and you get a person who wants to level every character in the game to max then they will use that same gun for every character and burn themselves out due to tedious gameplay.
Using my analogy you are incorrect about blocking off the shorter path, that would be akin to removing the gun entirely. What they should be doing is ensuring all routes to your destination are similar in length but varied. One might pass by a gas station, one might pass by a park, one might be a country road, but if they're all similar in length then you get to pick and choose which one you like best instead of only driving one road for the rest of your life.
Analogies asside, no I don't see games as work, but I do know people will do tedious or painful tasks if it means achieving what they want. People don't always play for fun. Some people play really difficult games because they like overcoming a challenge, dark souls. Some people play toxic hostile games just because they enjoy feeling superior to others, League of legends. And some people will play games that extort actual money from you just to so you can get fast passes to achieve your goals, mobile games. Yes it is stupid that people will play games that don't enjoy but it is generally a good idea for developers to do their best at ensuring players will walk away from their game with a positive outlook rather then a negative one.
alexmp00@reddit
For PvE they should balance powering the weakest weapons, not nerfing the favorite ones. (When the power balance broke because the game became easier just buff the enemies or add new ones more op)
fateofmorality@reddit
Helldivers 2 had this problem as well, balancing guns to make them more 'realistic' in a future setting than making the guns fun.
Fortunately, the devs actually listened for once and went back to just letting players enjoy the game.
VagueRaconteur@reddit
The amount of fun they added by deciding to buff everything up instead of nerfing and reworking play to be a glass cannon instead of a slightly tanky wet sponge was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Night and day compared to the initial release. I can't wait to see what they do next with it.
sanesociopath@reddit
The real offense is when games have strong pve and pvp elements and they have to nerf an item for both because it's strong in one
SaintCambria@reddit
Shit used to drive me nuts back when I played WoW. I don't give a FUCK if my cooldown makes Alterac Valley miserable, I'm tryna push Icecrown progression! Should just make them have different numbers in a PvP zone.
Pulmaozinho@reddit
A good example on what to do would be the split for PvP and PvE damage like they did in Elden Ring
UglyInThMorning@reddit
The Destiny 2 problem. So much stuff gets nerfed for the crucible.
sanesociopath@reddit
Lol it's funny that im mainly imagining the original destiny.
UglyInThMorning@reddit
I think the crucible was much more active for D1 so I at least understand that one more. D2 crucible has been underpopulated for ages and they still do nerfs for it that make PvE worse
PartyPresentation249@reddit
Live balance patches in a PvE game is such a strange concept. Just let the game be the game.
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
But that would require devs to ship completed games!?!?!?!
We CAN’T do that in the year 2025 of our lord and savior. Isn’t that why y’all have 1gig down speeds and multi TB storage¿ /s
Jozsefirst@reddit
I cant really get behind this having witnessed the downfall of Helldivers 2. The game was supposed to be difficult and you were meant to work together with your team in order tp cover all tactical requirements, dedicated machinegunners, rocketeers, flamers, so on, all useful in specific circumstances, all vulnerable in others. The fun of the game was the cohesion of different tactics each player would bring to the squad dynamic. Then people started whining because you couldnt one man army the entire process and the devs caved. Everything has been buffed to where you are no longer dependent on your team at all. Might as well be a single player experience because everybody consistently just runs off on their own anyway.
GruntBlender@reddit
Fucking Warframe
barthalamurl@reddit
It really depends if something is so good there’s no reason to not use it, it makes the game unfun and stale. If you make a game with 200 options but players only chose 3 options you’d rather them explore those other 197 options both so they can appreciate what you’ve made and to not keep them bored
Shoddy-Warning4838@reddit
I am not going to comment on specific scenarios, but sometimes it makes sense nerfing stuff for single player games. Sometimes some setups/strats are too strong and trivialize the game's difficulty or make other setups/strats useless in comparison. It's something that's hard to deal with and you don't always have the possibility to please everyone.
CancerNormieNews@reddit
With borderlands 2 I will defend at least some of the nerfs. Like I think it's understandable to not want the endgame completely broken by easy to obtain guns. Makes playing multiplayer feel sorta pointless.
Now the issue with that game is that they almost never buffed stuff, so way too few weapons are good on the highest difficulty. (Thank you community patch for fixing that)
BaconatorBros@reddit
Encourages players to use a variety of weapons if they are all balanced. Like one of the massive things in Borderlands is that there's a fuck ton of variety.
Peepus_Christ@reddit
Cause if a gun is too overpowered it ends up being the bases for the end game
Shout-out to the absolute hell that The Bee turned Borderlands 2s endgame into because they couldn't properly nerf it so instead balanced the end game around it
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
Fuckin, and!?
KymbboSlice@reddit
Fuckin, and then that creates a more boring game where the most optimal strategy is the least varied and interesting?
This seems so obvious to me that I’m really surprised there are so many mouth breathers in this thread that don’t seem to value game balance at all.
lipehd1@reddit
Okay, i agree with him on this take. It kinda kills the replayability of a game if there's only 1 viable weapon in the end game
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
I hear what you're saying, but I have never, not even once, found that to be the case. It's always "this one is too strong" but it's not like other strong options don't exist. You, the player, are choosing if you want to use the super powerful thing. You always had the option to use less powerful weapons, and that doesn't make this one "the only viable option".
If players want to go on a power trip, let them. If it trivializes your end game, who cares? That's a choice that they can make.
kdhd4_@reddit
Because it feels like shit to know that your favorite playstyle is trash and you could be doing better using something else.
Why should one thing be really good for a small number of players that like that, instead of making things all around decent so everyone can have fun with that? Even people that like trivializing the game might find the one option that enables it unfun because they're stuck with that one option.
This makes no sense. The devs care, they have a vision on how the game should be played. Maybe it's a choice they don't think you should be able to have.
Mister_Bossmen@reddit
The answer should then be to buff the rest.
Buffs feel good. Nerfs feel bad.
If the game has no player opponents anyways, edge on the side of giving the player the powertrip. Give them a challenge, but also give them MULTIPLE fun toys to tackle it with. Don't give them the challenge and then take away the already few toys that could deal with it easier
Peepus_Christ@reddit
Buffing is not a straight forward answer, because then what was once a bad item, becomes the new absolute best, from unforeseen consequences of willy nilly buffing, now everything needs to be buffed to match that, and the cycle repeats until everything is all over the board
Mister_Bossmen@reddit
Let me rephrase, slightly.
Balance the game with a tendency to buff existing weapons over nerf.
I'm not saying "stronger is better. Buff everything" I'm saying, if things aren't balanced, avoid balancing them at a less fun playing field. Bring it all UP to a balance, instead of depressing it all DOWN to a balance.
Peepus_Christ@reddit
Oh yea absolutely
I agree 100% it's just I see a lot of people only praise buffing when that can potentially be even more harmful than nerfs
NotVainest@reddit
Buffs feel good until everything is so overpowered that the game becomes boring. Not every game or player wants to be invincible walking through mobs of endgame enemies and trivial bosses.
2Rome4Carthage@reddit
Buff everythin but in its unique ways. Let sniper one shot enemies, but its 1 bullet every 3s, meanwhile let flamethrowers burn everyone but theres no burst damage. Every playstyle should be fun, strong and unique. The issue is when theres a flamethrower that can kill 20 enemies faster than a minigun. Also, introduce enemies with resistances so that you force certain weapons agaisnt them, but keep enemies varied so that a team of 4 all must carry different tools for the job. Thats how you make a PvE game fun.
If its single player PvE game, then give the player ability to hold few guns, that way they can swap and still have fun.
NotVainest@reddit
And what are the devs supposed to do if that happens? Buff the minigun to kill them even faster? Then every enemy is being vaporized by both weapons and you'll need to buff every other weapon to be equally as strong. You have now made your game trivial.
This would technically be considered a nerf to your guns (they do less damage), so it's not allowed by this logic. This is also how borderlands does things, and it still required nerfs and buffs to keep weapons and equipment in check.
Blanket statement of "only buffs and no nerfs" isn't reasonable as you've just proved.
2Rome4Carthage@reddit
No, its a matter of design. Sniper is designed to be long range weapon, and IRL its usually low fire rate. Youre talking like its black and white. You missread my comment, i said to buff everything IN ITS UNIQUE WAY, meaning have a strong design.
If a weapon is overused, you need to analyze why its used so much, and buff/nerf accordingly. Just nerfing things will always make next thing buffed by default.
Strenght is A B C, you nerf A, now B is too strong. What im proposing is ask why is C not used as much and buff it accordingly. Just nerfing things would leave the game unfun to play. You need things to feel strong, and unless you start by making everything broken, nerfs wont get you there.
NotVainest@reddit
I don't disagree with this. This thread started as people saying that "only buffs" is a viable balancing strategy and I'm arguing that it's not. Just nerfing things is arguably worse than just buffing things. You need a balance of both, like you're saying.
Peepus_Christ@reddit
Its not particularly fun to have to constantly equip 1 specific shield to actually have good damage in the end game
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
Very notably, you don't have to do that. You can do that, and make your life easier, but no one is making you. That's why nerfing it is stupid. You always have the the choice you use whatever less overpowered resources you can, that was never in question.
Peepus_Christ@reddit
As a hardcore bl2 player
Yea no, raid bosses aren't receptive of this mindset, nor is the OP levels
AngryGublin@reddit
I just used whatever and beat that shit when i was a literal child idk what this gear you guys are talking about even is
Peepus_Christ@reddit
And I'm referring to and have consistently referred to the end game
If you haven't played the end game content that's on you for not knowing the segments I'm referring to
AngryGublin@reddit
I beat it bro I just dont remember having to min max in any way to do it I was like 11
Mafagafinhu@reddit
Yeah you probably didn't do the OP levels just the base game or maybe the new game plus
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
So again, changing stuff for the like >5% of players. Not even. Ridiculous to balance around that.
Mafagafinhu@reddit
I would argue that buffing everything to match the power of one item, would be balancing around 5%, nerfing the item that 5% of the player base uses would not impact the rest of the player
MrBones-Necromancer@reddit
No, you're again ruining something fun for the majority of the playerbase so that it's not "too strong" for a very small handful. When the average player happens to find it, it is this really cool toy, that they can enjoy whenever. You're breaking that toy cause some other kid was playing with it too much? That sucks. You're punishing the majority for essentially no reason.
Mafagafinhu@reddit
You know that they could nerf the item in a way that the low level player can enjoy it, while the high level player dont right?
You also know that, the low level player changes gear way more often than the high level one, and that the bee has like a 10% drop chance? So we are talking more like nerfing a item for 10% of the player base, because of 5% of long term players
AngryGublin@reddit
Yeah I thought he was referring to the end of the game as endgame and that people were just bad at borderlands lol
Peepus_Christ@reddit
Overpowered 8 Difficulty included?
AngryGublin@reddit
I just looked up what this is and realized 6 the exact kind of thing op is talking about
Kiwi_Doodle@reddit
Destiny 2 had a similar issue, arguably still has. Well of radiance is an Ult (called super in game) for the Warlock class that plants a sword in the ground which heals and boosts your damage and it just trivialises most parts of thegame, including PvP.
The big issue is that every single boss and endgame encounter now has you attack from a stationary position while you wait for the boss to become invulnerable and then you repeat a small puzzle mechanic and damage again. This has made warlocks mandatory in all endgame content and left the other two classes to the mercy of various buffs and nerfs.
It's bad, you can get kicked for not playing it and if you are a warlock you have less build freedom than the other two.
That's the fucking "and". Ill balanced PvE leads to a toxic LFG environment.
NAFEA_GAMER@reddit
Then they should buff the rest and buff the content as needed
Kiwi_Doodle@reddit
Infinite buffs don't work. If all your tool become better every time then everyone gets too easy.
Waxburg@reddit
Tbf the other person did say to buff the content you're playing as well to match the buffed gear, but that leaves a toxic loophole open if the game ever introduces new powercreeping content (which as we know is extremely common, hey power fantasy sells especially if it's a DLC item). You just end up with an infinite loop of New Gear Added > Old Gear Buffed > Content Buffed > Repeat. At some point entropy takes effect and you end up with degenerated gameplay loops that reward screen wiping as quickly as possible while not getting 1-shot by giga-buffed enemies or wiped by mechanics that punish you for not meeting new standards set to challenge the current most powerful meta gear/playstyle.
I pretty frequently play a game called Darktide and that games endgame has already gotten to the point that players HP/Toughness(Shields) have to be reduced to around half or less of their original values, all ammo pickups are reduced by 60%, all enemies are given like 150%-200% bonus HP, enemies with guns fire extremely fast and often, enemy spawn rates are doubled, maps are flooded with bosses that normally only get spawned once per mission, maps are also flooded with special end-of-mission bosses and a story mode boss fight as a random encounter that will just show up unannounced, and on top of all this it still rolls you additional random difficulty modifiers like making elite enemies immune to CC and do bonus damage while under half HP or have certain enemies full heal all nearby enemies constantly until they die. It barely plays like the base game at all. We're still clearing this semi-consistently thanks to power creep and it usually takes bad luck for a run to fail. We just had a new DLC class drop that makes this content look like a stroll in the park and people are already talking about buffing up the old classes to meet "the new standard".
Waxburg@reddit
That just leads to infinitely scaling difficulty which inevitably ends up in games devolving into "1 shot or be 1 shot" fiestas ala Warframe where enemy types may as well be an amorphous grey blob that you shoot for funny damage numbers while you try not to accidentally get 1-shot by a toxin eximus smiting you for 3x your total ehp cause you turned a corner at the wrong time or didn't see them clipping into the 15 other enemies and vfx in the corridor. That game doesn't care about the intricacies of its actual combat too much so it's fine, but any game where the actual combat loop is really important suffer hard from power creep.
There's no point in engaging with enemy mechanics for example if your weapons and durability exceed anything those enemies could punish you with right? Why would you care about an enemy that's meant to make you use a rocket launcher for example when your pistol can delete it. So they have to buff the enemies to keep the gameplay interesting, then they have to do all this again whenever new power crept content gets added ad infinitum. At a certain point you just lose any sense of what the original gameplay design was.
kentaxas@reddit
We had the exact same problem with warlocks in D1 with the super that allowed them to resurrect themselves. So of course warlocks were expected to run that super because it allowed the team to avoid being wiped out.
Somehow Bungie didn't learn from that and created another "run this super or be considered a troll" class for them
moragdong@reddit
Holy shit just stfu already. What are these answers even..
If its surpasses the rest by a huge margin, nerfing it is way better solution than buffing the rest.
rokomotto@reddit
Buff other things instead? Nooo thats too much effort get fucked
Fun1k@reddit
Balancing is important even for a PvE game.
Adventurous_Turnip89@reddit
Can't let the Speedruns be too speedy...
gbuub@reddit
Gonzales
DamnGoodCheeze@reddit
NotA56YearOldPervert@reddit
I guess they have a certain balancing in mind making it, a certain playstyle, a certain challenge. It's not necessarily more fun just because a gun is stronger. They got a vision for how the game should be enjoyed, I can respect that.
LarryCrabCake@reddit
Helldivers 2 does this as well, despite being purely PvE. They release a new weapon (that you have to pay for), and it's absolute ass at the start. They buff it and it becomes overpowered, then when the next weapon comes out, they nerf it again.
PartyClock@reddit
Yeah Rivals is slowly dying as a result. And honestly what's the point of an "Anti-cheat" if a game has more cheaters than I have seen in every other game I've played combined
Sinfere@reddit
I"m convinced the rivals devs simply don't care about balance. If they're trying to balance around high-level play, I can't imagine how the things they design could be considered skillful. All the metas have been "character does thing that the enemy literally can't do anything about."
Every patch introduces some insane dogshit that isn't fun to play against. It's healer ults, or insane damage nukes, or whatever. Game seems designed to be won exclusively by the people playing the most soul-crushing uninteractive bullshit ever.
Even casually the game is frustrating, because half the cast is only playable when you have certain allies or enemies, so if you wanna learn them and the other team has your counter, you're simply SOL.
If I didn't have friends who played it, I would have uninstalled in January. Alas lol.
Parzaival69@reddit
Skill issue honestly
Sinfere@reddit
Zermist@reddit
Idk I got up to top 3% solo queuing and one tricking black widow and she’s the worst hero in the game by far. Probably a skill issue
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
Game4kids.png
Almost like it’s in the filename
Consistent_Ant_8903@reddit
Pretty sure that started overwatch’s death spiral
Prestigious-Fig1172@reddit
I wish real Ovewatch was still around, but Blizzard murdered it and gave us an inferior imposter.
Parzaival69@reddit
Did you even play overwatch recently bro?
vickera@reddit
This killed ow for me for sure. I got really sick of them nerfing characters because the top 0.01% of players could exploit some power. If they just gave professional players hero bans and kept the game the same for the 99.99%, things could have been different.
Parzaival69@reddit
There were hero bans in overwatch 1 tho, and it was only for masters and grandmaster so what exactly is your point
And they added back hero bans in for everyone 4 months ago
Do you even play the game or even look at news surrounding it?
mischievous_shota@reddit
Why even give hero bans? If you're so damn good, you're going to be playing with the absolute cream of the crop and for them, this sort of thing would be a challenge. If someone is so good they can't be opposed, they've earned it frankly.
Dasnap@reddit
Remember when they changed it so you had to play with one less friend? The vast majority of players found it confusing, and only the top players went 'yeah' for 5 minutes before finding something else to complain about.
FeelAndCoffee@reddit
This. OW was for FPS what Smash Bros was for fighting games or Mario Kart for racing games, just fun, stupid and wacky gameplay.
But then, they started to optimized everything for the try hards, and if you play the game only a few times per week or month with your friends, even just having an idea of what is the current patch feels like a chore homework.
This eventually lead to people playing less, including your friends, so you play even less, and each time that you come back the game, it feels so different that it's not worth it just to get used to the new season meta.
It's a death spiral.
CthulhuMadness@reddit
It did. I will never forget the day they demanded "competitive". Then next thing you know you were only allowed on of each character. After that... you couldn't spam voice emotes because it was "toxic".
I still remember when me and the boys did a full Torb team and just kept spamming "let's not buy the pig while it's still in the bag" as the enemy team kept suiciding into our turrets instead of counter picking... good times...
cat_sword@reddit
That second part is 90% of 2fort games in tf2
Dont_Touch_My_Nachos@reddit
I recall being text chatted on 2fort about committing crimes against the Soviet state and was subsequently executed by a firing squad of pow emote heavies in the sewer. God I love tf2
rudolfs001@reddit
Fav overwatch memory is a team full of Winstons divebombing them
Supershadow30@reddit
"Hi there."
CptNeon@reddit
This is what Overwatch was all about until the enshittification
Frostychica@reddit
Take me back :(
SerTheodies@reddit
I remember piecing apart a full team of Reinharts as Roadhog while getting a Damage boost from Mercy. Straigh dopamine. Can't have it anymore.
UnNecessary_XP@reddit
I was really big into competitive OW in the early seasons and capped out around mid grandmaster, before they added role queue. Me and the guys I rolled with loved the theory crafting of team comps and using them in high tier games to try and figure out new metas or counters to current metas. That was genuinely the most fun I had with overwatch, roll in with some weird ass team comp and crush the other team running the meta comp.
RyukoT72@reddit
I remember doing a full torb team and laughing my ass off. They tried to counter pick us so we switched to bastion and wiped them
greystar07@reddit
You’re skipping so much shit lol but still right.
Unworthy_Saint@reddit
Man that moment is just peak Overwatch. We'll never again experience a monkey madness 6v6 Winston only.
Pulmaozinho@reddit
Dude I remember having so much fun in a 6 DVa comp in season 1 of competitive lmao
A shame the game really went headfirst into the competitive e-sports scene
Heathcliff511@reddit
You can still play no limits bro. Nobody forced you to play comp.
ZenPyx@reddit
You can play the gamemode with far fewer players, and no ranking system?
Like, you can also just play another game too? You do understand why people would not want the entire game to be balanced around comp, right?
MrEuphonium@reddit
People with that argument don’t think that far, they’re reactionary barbarians
Prestigious-Fig1172@reddit
Epic
DaRealKovi@reddit
It is a certified Torbjörn moment
breadmaker8@reddit
banned for teabagging
Puddler_@reddit
Literally the opposite. Pro players were absolutely shitting on the balancing constantly for years upon years. Replies are casuals
Maelorian@reddit
nah, brighetete killed overwatch the second she got release
TheRedditK9@reddit
Hero bans, map voting, an open ended official tournament circuit, a general decrease in sustain etc.
Overwatch has shifted to catering to the higher end of the playerbase significantly more in the last year or so and the game has seen a massive surge in popularity, and is the most popular it has been in many years.
The balancing was never the problem for either the casual or competitive playerbase. The issues that put Overwatch in the dirt for a couple of years went significantly deeper than that, people just like to say things ”oh x hero killed the game” etc. as a way to over-dramatise a thing they don’t like, as if the game hasn’t had shit like Widowmaker and Roadhog for a decade at this point.
Femboy_hater@reddit
Higher end? It is objectively casualized version of ow1 with specifically bigger hitboxes and less variety. New heroes are do-alls instead of smth focused. Ow lost its style and lore to boot.
Don’t confuse QOL changes with actual improvement
MrInfinity-42@reddit
As an OW player, no it didn't. What led to OW becoming hated was the dev team pouring all their resourses into PvE, which lead to pvp going without any content updates and barely even any balance patches for nearly 3 years
And then before that several heroes throughout OW1 were broken to the point where if you didn't pick them at any level of play, you were throwing. Pro play too saw the same meta repeated over and over
So OW fell not because the devs were listening to one particular group, but because they weren't listening to anyone at all
MrEuphonium@reddit
Idk, brig wasn’t as bad as people think, and Orisa never deserved the hate she got.
The stuff about the PVE is true though.
UnfashionableRash@reddit
You’re super wrong, brig at her peak was the most busted thing ever. Could 1v1 anyone, infinite heals, tanks as hell, could 1 shot tracer no counter.
MrEuphonium@reddit
Okay yeah, launch brig was worse than I remember, but they tuned her back quick.
UnfashionableRash@reddit
It took them 2 years and like 10 nerfs just for her to still be better than most
greystar07@reddit
Now that’s just not true, it wasn’t that long. And if it was, people found a way to deal with her. I’m not riding for the devs, I just don’t remember it being that long and I played the game religiously for years.
bl0ndie5@reddit
Don’t forget stunning through shields
MrInfinity-42@reddit
Take this with a grain of salt cause I don't have a source but as far as I remember, at peak broken, brig had something like a 93% win rate against teams without brig
greystar07@reddit
Stop lying to yourself lol balancing was dog shit before the ow2 and pve stuff.
busiergravy@reddit
Agreed, I'd argue the balance is better in ow2 than previous years
VanBland@reddit
Thank you Jeff Kaplan for tanking a franchise because he desperately wanted to make a PvE game and could only sell it to shareholders if it was called Overwatch 2.
the_fresh_cucumber@reddit
Why not balance the game differently in each league?
NCAA and NFL have different rules for that reason
Finkenn@reddit
It‘s so disgusting how much effort it takes to counter these low-skill cheese picks — when you play solo trynna “coordinate” with randoms
-Danksouls-@reddit
Overwatch is super balanced though. The heck?
This is literally apex legends
Justsomeone666@reddit
Ngl for me brigittes existance single handedly killed the game for me, orisa was already pushing it since i hated playing against characters with barriers but with brigittes existance it wasnt too rare to run into team comps with 3 different projectile barriers simultaenously
Agreeable-Buffalo-54@reddit
They should have solved this by making new characters that could deal with Barriers instead of just making the barriers suck. Option A adds a new dimension and just the existence of that character will reduce the pick rate of shield characters, option B just ruins shield characters and makes them not fun anymore.
FlyingScott_@reddit
As a counter point, Sigma has never been bad. He was the defacto OW1 tank, more than Rein ever was.
TheSquirrelWar@reddit
Sigma came out in August 2019, more than 3 years after OW released. He's good, yes, but he didn't exist for 50% of OW1 and calling him the defacto OW1 tank is a stretch.
Shotgun_Difference@reddit
Team Fortress 2 :(
Raziphaz@reddit
What was even nerfed for comp players? The base jumper?
TheCorruptedBit@reddit
delusional
Level-Economy4615@reddit
Go back to Uncletopia
LittleManBigHat@reddit
Lol the devs have not balanced the game around the top 5% of players, infact they havent balanced the game around the bottom 95% either
FlyingScott_@reddit
In fact, the devs just haven't.
AbortionBulld0zer@reddit
what, there never was a pro scene or rating mm to begin with
ReverieDrifter@reddit
True. And then they just keep the weapon banned in 6s anyways lol
The_Meemeli@reddit
"The weapon"?
B_Hopsky@reddit
Probably the Wrangler if I had to guess.
13ricity@reddit
2 words: scorch shot
FoxCQC@reddit
Pro gaming ruined gaming
Gwynnbeidd@reddit
League of Legends mentioned, I see
Thank god I escaped that shithole during the "adcIn2k18 lmao" era
DominateMePiper@reddit
incomprehensible
Quakezy@reddit
goated pfp
DominateMePiper@reddit
ty <3
CalmOptimal@reddit
This is a good thing for us, I think.
The_King_7067@reddit
I don't understand it either
It's probably the difference between me being slightly overweight and me being hella obese
FreljordsWrath@reddit
"adc in 2018 lmao"
adc is attack damage carry, or the dps in other games.
that was an era where all the other roles were insanely inflated in terms of damage and tankiness to the point where adc players needed insane babysitting in order to be able to pull their own late game. and even then, a full build fighter/assassin/mage could melt the adc in 2 seconds.
i mean, that's still kinda true, but at least adcs deal some damage now.
Kohtupora609@reddit
It was absolutely hilarious to play a normal full tank build on someone like Sejuani and having enough damage with your full combo to 100 to 0 an adc in 3-5 seconds while they're literally permastunned the whole duration, very balanced gameplay yes.
The_Meemeli@reddit
Thanks for the explanation. The other person capitalized the "i" in "in", for some reason, so I thought it said "ADC LN 2018 LMAO"
GoatRocketeer@reddit
League has the best pvp balancing of any game and its not particularly close.
Excluding iron and challenger, there's like a \~10% winrate gap between the worst champ and the best champ at every rank. That's pretty narrow. And then you compare that to every other pvp game out there.
sendnukes_@reddit
People love to shit on League, but it's pretty good on most ends, otherwise it wouldn't be one of the most popular games in the world for years like it has.
textposts_only@reddit
People love to shit on heroin but it's pretty good on most ends. Otherwise it won't be one of the most popular drugs in the world for years like it has.
sick_frag@reddit
League of legends: Engage with an infinitely deep system of mechanics and try to solve complex puzzles through split second decisions across hundreds of games, honing your skills.
Heroin: I smoke da crack
textposts_only@reddit
Gotta tell you, I've had legit anger issues while playing LoL. Never had that before or after. OW, CoD, WoW. Comp or free play.
I don't know why LoL brought out the worst in me. I legit fear it
sendnukes_@reddit
It's very tilting, possibly the most tilting online game out there, but you just have to be learn to let it go and relax.
I usually didn't even play ranked cuz I was way too overcompetitive (if that even is a word) but recently I've been learning to just enjoy for what it is and put less importance on games where all 4 other players are 0/10, sometimes that just happens, you don't need to be 100% calm and fine with it, just don't completely go insane and crash out, and specially don't queue another game if you're feeling that way.
XaosDrakonoid18@reddit
I swear people make an effort to have a bad time in league
DISABLE THE FUCKING CHAT.
And if people spam ping u just mute them.
You gotta realise this game is filled with 14yo idiots. Stop steping down to their level, be a fucking adult and ignore the crying baby, you're not gonna make them play better
sick_frag@reddit
Yeah league is fucking awesome. People act like it’s addictive but it’s because they have been lied to by easier games and can’t accept the reality of a true ranked ladder.
I can’t imagine getting “addicted” to casual league. Like there are people in this thread talking about raging at their friends for not tryharding? Like bro you need to win in Normal games that bad?? Do you play Mario kart and rage at your friends for throwing blue shells, or do you have a good laugh and play again?
People have a bad relationship with the game and blame the game
sendnukes_@reddit
Yeah, I play a lot of normals with friends and all that, but I can't possibly imagine crashing out at my friends over going 0/10 on lux or something. Maybe tease them a little, but no way I'll rage at them for it, even if I'm not having that great of a time dying to a fed enemy player, just play out like calmly or surrender
WasteOfTimeAndEffort@reddit
You know you wanna play league again deep down just redownload it
Japan-is-a-good-band@reddit
After he's been clean for so long? You're disgusting.
WasteOfTimeAndEffort@reddit
I am, I’m just petty someone escaped and I’m still addicted after genuinely hating this game for a decade. I thought it was impossible
Fiercepaws@reddit
Life genuinely hits different after giving up the game and competitive shit in general. It feels like it's made to be rage inducing and addictive
ReikaTheGlaceon@reddit
That's becuase it is, very intentionally, competitive games are designed like crack, you have a good match and you're soaring, having fun, enjoying the time commitment, and then you start losing, and at a pace that's too slow for you to grasp, your mind is turning every bit of actual enjoyment into seething rage, and the game and your brain are essentially working in tandem, keeping your full attention on the stimulus that is causing an extreme reaction
Kirito619@reddit
League is like Drugs, it's fine to do unless you are mentally ill. If you are, you will get addicted while also hating the game.
Fiercepaws@reddit
Oddly enough, towards the end I stopped playing solo entirely, pretty much giving up on the game but friends kept pulling me back in for 5 man. Had fun for a very short amount of time before I started tryharding again and hating them for not putting in as much effort so I decided to just give up the game rather than get frustrated with them
DaEccentric@reddit
I feel that, man. Good on you for choosing to walk away. Shit's addictive and rage-inducing.
academicgopnik@reddit
played only arams after the people were so toxic and unfun on the rift. after a 3weeks vacation i came back and had to get used to the game again and said to myself now or never and it worked so far for the lastyear.played since S3
KingAsi4n@reddit
I actually love league, but I don't enjoy playing it much anymore. One day I realized grinding ranked just wasn't fun. I really like watching professional games though and trolling in a 5 stack.
Gwynnbeidd@reddit
Only reason I ever redownloaded it was because my ex-girlfriend (now fiancée) wanted to play together. :D
Quit since again though, as did she, so I yoinked another player out of that hole :DD
DelightfulHugs@reddit
People writing 20 as 2k need to be studied.
MrInfinity-42@reddit
It's so strange, I'd understand 2000 = 2k but without the round year that's not even faster
Imrtltrtl@reddit
Someone wasn't around when Y2K was a thing.
jerk_chicken_warrior@reddit
its quicker to say, and thus probably slightly quicker to think/read and it sounds snappier
Gwynnbeidd@reddit
I agree. That was a quote of a meme though.
Kornik-kun@reddit
Nerf ryze
RussianEggplant@reddit
Nerf Azir
TheRockLobsta1@reddit
Definitely but it's more like League is balanced around the 0.001% of top players
kubin22@reddit
R6 Siege
dindowaff@reddit
I actually really like league and think it's very well balanced. Not joking
MyFatherIsNotHere@reddit
i mean, league is catering to bad players more and more, high elo is boring as fuck nowadays
NotVainest@reddit
I mean, if league was balanced around low elo, pro play and high elo would heavily suffer which is pretty much the only marketing league has.
FrazzleFlib@reddit
yeah, at least league actually has a big proplay/esports scene, unlike overwatch that ruined the game in a fruitless effort to force a comp scene lmfao
Jugaimo@reddit
The beauty of balance patches in League is that they don’t affect my shit bronze ELO lobbies.
The_Freshmaker@reddit
It's a tough balance, if those guys feel slighted they screech as loudly as possible how bad changes are until they fucking kill the game ala Battlefield V.
Specialist-Text5236@reddit
Fucking Rainbow fucking six fucking siege. I want old graphics, and night maps back
Deathfeather1321@reddit
The finals
LEONARD-YYM@reddit
oylesine2019@reddit
Definetely
GuyNamedWhatever@reddit
WoW dropping a new season so the top 5% of players can grind for 2,788 hours again
Zermist@reddit
You don’t need to say “top 5%” just say “the 5 players” that’s all that’s left
Foreverwise427@reddit
Why would you balance bottom to top, that’s stupid. If something is good in low elo and not in high elo then it’s a skill issue.
Zermist@reddit
You’re clearly just saying that because you figured out how to get in the upper percentiles of a game.
People who have never done this are completely blind to what you just explained
wolphak@reddit
Don't forget the tarkov route. balance the game around streamers. Because then conning people and lying is the only way to get new players for you dogshit cheater infested game.
busiergravy@reddit
The update they just released today is the Pinnacle of this
Djassie18698@reddit
Is it the hardcore raid update I was seeing? Like they super limited the game this wipe
busiergravy@reddit
Yeah they removed the quest for a the start of the wipe, made it so you can only start on 3 maps and then have to travel to the other maps from their, increased the price of the traders by a massive amount and reduced the sell price on every item, and made insurance cost more than just buying a brand new kit
wolphak@reddit
I stopped paying attention when it came out that the audio doesn't work tbh lol
granyiyght@reddit
Yep this shit ass game. The dev is watching pestily and lvndmark thinking everyone else is a sweat like those two.
General-Biscuits@reddit
Well, it’s better than balancing around the bottom 20%. That’s for sure.
cocofan4life@reddit
ITT: people that overestimate their game design skills
Kotoy77@reddit
nah as someone who gamed for the better part of 15 years the cycle of:
call out a problem->dev ignores it->turns out its a problem->dev implements the fix you said at the beggining
happens way too often. most devs just do knee jerk changes or ignore feedback. plenty of devs have 0 creativity when it comes to adjusting a problematic ability and either gut it completely or change it in such a way that the problem is not adressed. most devs dont identify core underlying issues and do bandaid fixes after bandaid fixes until you get a frankensteins monster of a patched up mess. most devs dont understand that the casual playerbase is the lifeblood of games and listen to the whispers of the 1%.
look at world of warcraft (bad example), when the fucking game director looks at the "game is too hard and complicated for new players" problem and his 500 iq solution is to add an auto play button you can press so you dont have to actually learn the bloated character, you know they went off the deep end.
look at elden ring (good example), incrementally doing slight buffs to underused weapons to make them as viable as the rest, and at the same time slightly nerfing the 2-3 most dominating and overused options to make space for the rest to shine. small tasteful changes, not sledgehammers or bandaids.
cocofan4life@reddit
I mean Im mainly referring to people that say 'any nerfs bad and just give buffs' ppl on this thread etc
SocSmallfry@reddit
Literally describing the economy.
CoronelPanic@reddit
Ah yes Warhammer 40,000
noah9942@reddit
Anytime games balance around the competitive scene, it gets worse.
Jozef_Baca@reddit
Tbf, I'd say fighting games are the only exception to this.
Games not balancing around competitive scene is how you get shit like Injustice 1.
AtomicNewt7976@reddit
The culture around lower level players is completely different in FGs as well, when a low elo player can’t beat a certain tactic, we don’t say “wow spamming rekka on elphelt is OP!” we say “don’t let her do that next time you have to 6P her”.
noah9942@reddit
You know what fair, I don't play any fighting games but those generally seem much more in line with the comp scene.
Jozef_Baca@reddit
Injustixe 1 batman when trash can is within his vicinity
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
FIXING THIS WOULD MAKE THE GAME WORSE
MeBustYourKneecaps@reddit
I think y'all are just assholes, ngl. Genuinely bad balance can be annoying sure, but I've so so many fucking picky playerbases who are the equivalent of the head butler hovering over the gentleman in training as he wonders what utensil to reach for. Inevitably reaching for the "wrong" one and getting shot in the palm for doing so.
It's impossible to please absolutely everyone when it comes to a competitive game... that you must know. Yes balancing the game around your top players is not a good practice, but where does it end? Do they choose to balance the game around the ranks just below that and possibly alienate/punish the ones in the top ranks just because they found a niche that got them ahead? Taking away their fun? Do they balance the game around the middle ranks and cause the game to have a repetitive, samey meta? Do they balance the game around the lower ranks and cause absolutely everything to become OP? Like genuinely think about it for a second, it ain't easy to do.
I'm not saying you should just take your slop and like it, like a good little bitch. I'm just saying... all this excessive hatred needs to be...
Balanced
Tom_Browning@reddit
Trickle down economics doesn’t work in real life, so why do game devs believe it will work in-game?
Brutal_Illusion@reddit
I'll never forgive the R6 seige Devs for absolutely ruining a really fun tactical shooter. Such a shame
beardyMcfatfuck@reddit
Tarkov
Pola2020@reddit
Single player game
Devs nerf player's weapons/abilities
CailHancer@reddit
Is it really fun combat if you're 1 shotting everything? I'm playing a CRPG currently, there exists a build which with an early game pair of boots and an early game chainsaw has more movement than god and deals up to 10 million dmg (the strongest enemy of the game caps at 20k). The only real solution if you want to have an interesting and engaging combat experience is to not play that build.
Jozef_Baca@reddit
Yes
Next question
MangaIsekaiWeeb@reddit
Then play on easy difficulty.
Hard difficulty should remain hard.
MoffDracen@reddit
Since you can't grasp the concept of it, the fun is getting as OP as possible to make even hard mode be turned easy.
MangaIsekaiWeeb@reddit
If the fun part is the learning part of finding the OP combo, then it is a major win for you if the weapon gets nerfed.
When a weapon is nerfed, you can go find and learn a new combo to be OP again with. Because if that weapon doesn't get nerfed, then there is no point in learning anything else than the tried and true method.
MoffDracen@reddit
You're thinking as a utilitarian. Once again, the fun is learning and finding ways to be OP in the game, not being OP just for the sake of being optimal. That's how you end up being a meta slave and having a miserable experience.
That's how roguelikes became so popular, btw. They give you a lotta options so you can learn different ways to be strong in the game.
MangaIsekaiWeeb@reddit
Great! Except, you didn't refute my argument that you can find new ways to be OP again with a nerf and balance patch. After all, it is the "learning" part that is fun for you, not the being OP part as you keep repeatedly stating.
Every balance patch comes with new discoveries on the best builds. The part where you "learn" to find new ways to be OP.
Like, I don't see why you hate this unless you really hate learning ways to be OP and just want to be OP for the sake of being OP.
MoffDracen@reddit
But I never said nerfs are bad, motherfucker. Nerfs are good to constantly shake the meta and is a good way to make the game fresh every season. Destiny 2 is a good example of this. However, that is not the point Anon is trying to make.
Balancing the game around the top players is not a fun way to balance anything. Making everything balanced just makes everything weak. Compare Overwatch at launch and Overwatch now. TTK is at an all time low because they wanted to focus on eSports championships, like the cucks that they are.
MangaIsekaiWeeb@reddit
Whoops, my bad. I thought you were another person. So many people replied to me and I don't keep track of the messages.
Seeing, my original message is about playing easy mode to feel powerful and the top message is about Single player games. The top 5%, Overwatch, and Anon is irrelevant. I don't really care about those games anyways. I care about singleplayer/PvE games.
If you still insist on arguing with single player and PvE games in mind, feel free to continue to argue. Otherwise, there is no point in you arguing, but I will argue believing you are talking about PvE games in general.
On Hard mode? Yes, all your tools should feel weak so that achievements means something. If you want easy mode, play easy mode.
kdhd4_@reddit
You mean looking up a YouTube guide and refuse to actually interact with every other mechanic in the game?
Jozef_Baca@reddit
Difference between easy and hard in it is that on easy you can oneshot the enemy with almost no skill
On hard you need to be really skilled at the game to know the right combos to oneshot someone
MangaIsekaiWeeb@reddit
If an ability/item/weapon gets to the point where it needs a nerf, that specific combo usually takes no skill to get there.
All you need to do is just look up a guide.
Jozef_Baca@reddit
When the game caters to the top 5% of players it assumes that you have the skill to pull the thing off and nerfs it anyways
You can always just not use that specific strat if you want a harder playthrough, noone is forcing you to play meta.
CailHancer@reddit
If you argue that nothing should be nerfed you should also believe underpowered things shouldnt be buffed which I know you dont even though the end goal of these 2 actions is the same - equalizing power level across the game
Jozef_Baca@reddit
How do you even come to that conclusion?
Buffs are good, they make more things viable and usable
Nerfs make less things viable and usable
CailHancer@reddit
Endless buffs with no nerfs is how we get powercreep and how a game's difficulty gets ruined.
Jozef_Baca@reddit
Nah, power creep is usually caused by not enough buffs to the old content while new stronger content gets released.
MangaIsekaiWeeb@reddit
Indeed, I could just not use that strat. But the existence of that strat destroys the prestige of beating a game at hard difficulty without it.
Getting an achievement for beating a game at the hardest difficulty needs to mean something.
Pola2020@reddit
Difficulties shouldn't exist for most games and most of the time harder difficulty is just "ok now enemies have 10x more health and deal 10x damage"
Lerekdujwr@reddit
Who cares what you find fun and interesting, if a wants to make a oneshot build, and the game provides the tools to do so, then let them make a oneshot build.
kdhd4_@reddit
Isn't the point that the game doesn't want to provide said tools? If they nerf it, it wasn't intended to be exploited.
moragdong@reddit
Why the fuck devs need to design gameplay elements then? Let everything just one shot from the start.
Even for a single player game build variety and balance is very important if the game is gameplay focused.
CailHancer@reddit
Because in a perfectly balanced game you should be able to build for any playstyle you want and not feel like you're missing out because there's a build that invalidates everything in the game. I'm not even against one shot builds if they're hard to assemble so you feel like some effort you put in was rewarded but if its easy as it is in this example it just feels cheap.
FrazzleFlib@reddit
why should devs not be allowed to make balance updates in their game? really annoys me when games get perfectly reasonable updates that even slightly affect difficulty and then endlessly whine about it, as if it being a singleplayer experience magically invalidates any and all care of balance and difficulty design, see the flood of "un-nerfing" mods for the binding of isaac after repentance came out
Parksrox@reddit
As a game dev, it's not usually smart or well received to you let people do a thing and then tell them they can't do that thing anymore. People usually care not just about the difficulty, but that either their playstyle is no longer viable because of a small change or a specific thing they liked just isn't possible anymore. Helldivers 2 is my favorite example without outing what I've worked on, so I'll go with that even though they've totally fixed it and made the game incredible again by now. They nerfed guns like the Railgun and HMG into the ground, removed emoting midair to prevent fall damage (which players loved, saving yourself by saluting goes with the game very well), nerfed all the explosives to the point of them not even hurting the enemies you brought them for, and many more unneeded nerfs that noticably made it worse. If you can't do a thing you like anymore, that sucks for you as a player. A good game developer makes changes for the player, not just their artistic vision. 15% less mag capacity on a big gun means you can't kill that thing you brought it specifically to kill. 10% slower movement speed as a fast character means you can't use what you picked them for like you could. 20% damage on that shotgun you loved because it obliterates everything in front of you no longer obliterates everything in front of you.
Obviously there's cases where you should make balancing changes and it isn't a universally negative thing, devs just need to learn when and how to do it without fucking things up on the player end.
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
Gamers really get mad when their perceived ability to do stuff drops. Sometimes as a dev you just gotta plug your ears and wait for people to realize that having a build that invalidates all of the other builds can feel really bad.
CrosshairInferno@reddit
Doom The Dark Ages. They nerfed the SSG from being the biblically accurate hole puncher it’s known to be.
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
Sometimes it's totally appropriate to nerf something though. I think to Paradox games, where they might add a mechanic that is so powerful it trivializes other styles of play, effectively punishing you for wanting to play the game differently.
austin101123@reddit
Bloons tower defense
ReikaTheGlaceon@reddit
Bloons is fine imo bc its a tower defense, you should be encouraged to try new strategies and towers, variety and balance are important
Immortal_Merlin@reddit
R6 was fine for a first 2-3 years, but i must note that blitz buff and operation health were major improvements
somechileandouche@reddit
I still remember when the operator who puts a mini ballistic shield on top of his rifle was released and it got nerfed very quickly because the pro players who went to tournaments who were used to always aim for the head, couldnt deal with him and the simple tactic of aim to the chest/legs, which was the entire point of the operator
Duke_KD@reddit
Did you play y1 cause Blackbeard was unbelievably op
Puxple@reddit
No bro, blackboard was nerfed because his shield could take 3 full clips of ammo
Sinfere@reddit
That's not the reason Blackbeard got nerfed lol. He would just hang out on windows where you COULDNT shoot his chest/body.
He was dumb and deserved a nerf.
VacaRexOMG777@reddit
Bro about to tell Blackbeard was balanced 😭
Sinfere@reddit
Fr reading these threads reminds me that most people don't actually care about balance or good game design, they enjoy a game almost exclusively because of vibes.
And that's fine, but then they say crazy shit like "launch Blackbeard was fine" and their logic is basically "I liked him". Which, again, is fine, you can like whatever you want to like, but don't confuse things you like with things that are (necessarily) well made.
Jay_T_Demi@reddit
Siege was ruined when they started changing the maps away from realistic architecture to favor TDM game mechanics. Change my mind.
(Hint: you can't.)
sanesociopath@reddit
Yep, and it wasn't just top down balancing but was "balancing" the game so it was fun to watch for pro league
bosnanic@reddit
it was jarring going from operators based on real life special forces units to gooner slop k-pop idol who can deploy kuwai holograms.
Dtron81@reddit
Brother, were you there for even the first year of Siege??? This was always a thing. The worst case of this is Ela, a year 2 op, and even then, most of the gooner brained people complain operators are too ugly these days lmao.
cocofan4life@reddit
Wahhh wahhhhh wahhh women in my vidya games for men!!!!!
Povstnk@reddit
I think they are talking about elite skins that look extremely out of place
Default Ela at least looks tacticool
Dtron81@reddit
Some of them do, yeah, but if he's referring to the Iana elite thats like one of the few cross-over skins that isn't poorly done imo. And I'm fucking gay saying that lmao.
Immortal_Merlin@reddit
Nah, Alibi is cool since r6 is implied to work with tech that is slightly advanced and we already had few holograms on music concerts.
JUST LET HER DECOYS LOOK LIKE PLAYER SKIN AND GUN, AND FIX BACK AA-12
ZenPyx@reddit
Alibi is at the edge of believability surely, but Iana? I think making the holograms run around and pretend to be a player is a bit odd
ReikaTheGlaceon@reddit
How about Skopos, where they decided to not even put the operator in the game and instead added Mechamaru from JJK
w3bst3rstudio@reddit
You've never played R6 have you?
kubin22@reddit
I'm still salty about operation health. Not because of any changes to the game bjt because it robbed us from polish map. Never forget
not_nsfw_throwaway@reddit
they kept butchering my boy recruit until he's just another named operator
Sponhi@reddit
Apex Legends, thank you master and predator players for b*tching about everything and exploiting everything, very cool.
Wickedlurlofthewest@reddit
Overwatch really did be like that. 6v6 with duplicate pics was the best
Squidboi2679@reddit
Riot nerfing the worst league character again because she moves too fast or some dumb shit and pro players got a kill with her
the_marxman@reddit
People always argue about this shit in the Darktide sub. "Just buff every weapon to be as OP as the dueling sword and balance every class around soloing Havock level 40.
Solaire_of_Sunlight@reddit
Thats the way helldivers 2 went, now its a complete snoozefest
Limekilnlake@reddit
whaaat I love the buffs, the game for me is cinematic dopamine!
Solaire_of_Sunlight@reddit
Meh, I like buffs too but imo they went too far, i find the game to now be all spectacle no substance
Limekilnlake@reddit
Fair enough! I'm there for the spectacle, so it makes sense I wouldn't care
the_marxman@reddit
I remember most of the guns being shit at higher difficulties just due to enemy armor and density. Did they buff a bunch of shit?
Solaire_of_Sunlight@reddit
They buffed a lot of shit to such an absurd degree, while also neutering most enemies, making skill expression redundant, the challenge left in the game the competence of your teammates, even then its not like you can just commando your through everything even at the highest difficulty with relative ease
Syseru@reddit
Limekilnlake@reddit
if only there was a population of players outside of the bottom 30% and top 5%
Limekilnlake@reddit
Deadlock rn.
Avatarboi@reddit
Most competitive game do this btw
hagamablabla@reddit
The problem is a lot of non-competitive games tried to pivot into esports, so they started doing it as well.
Jedimaster996@reddit
I knew it would go the route, but the early days of Hearthstone before it went full meta builds for competitive were a blast. 'Storymode' was rad, gave decent rewards, and didn't feel like any goofy deck was too punishing.
Lots of RNG made for some wacky builds early-on that got complained about by streamers before the big fixes came next.
Kotoy77@reddit
what do you even mean, ever since \~2017 hearthstone has declined into a literal casino with 0 skill. good thing they removed the rng of damage ranges to then add insane rng to everything else. id rather have 2-5 damage than 5 random spells.
sanesociopath@reddit
The problem with the esports pivot isn't even just balancing with the top players in mind... they start balancing with stream viewers in mind and making objectively unfun changes so that it can look cooler
0rphu@reddit
Yeah and it sucks ass. Most of my experience with this phenomenon is in league, where some champions are nerfed into being troll picks for anybody who's not in the top 0.01% of players because otherwise they'd be too strong in pro play.
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
vincent2751@reddit
didnt know League failed
tocaproPelaites@reddit
I quit league after they destroyed my boy Azir because like 20 people in the entire game were steamrolling games with him
OnetwenT7@reddit
Play the bigboy version and download dota
FrazzleFlib@reddit
proplay seriously needs its own version. its practically a different game already anyway, why keep doing goofy patches to change things just for proplay to just change it back after lmao
Thisdsntwork@reddit
League does a pretty good job at balancing around skill levels.
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
actual facts. Most champions have pretty reasonable winrates at all levels. It's fine for Azir to be 47% winrate in Silver so that he isn't 75% winrate in Master+.
Dragonacher@reddit
Well the issue is you kind of have to. The really good players will find the best tactics possible with high skill, if there's stuff unbalanced for them it will centralise their meta around it. The average player will see that all the good players are doing that specific thing and do it too, very quickly making it repetitive and stale, also ruining the game. Bit of a catch22
TaserDonut@reddit
Honestly devs shouldn't have to cater to any player group
but honestly the most evil way to balance is Gaijin: balance to polarize your community and make them get mad at each other instead of you because you're literally applying the divide and conquer principle on your playerbase
o0THESHADE0o@reddit
I'll eat down votes but the second an exploit is found by a pro in any of the games mentioned in these comments, everyone and their mom is abusing that shit in casual queues. I see it happen all the time to this day in games like MTG where everyone net decks what the pros play, and exploits in MOBAs and whatnot are quickly used in casual to pub stomp.
This is a bad take for those reasons imo.
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
decide to take this post's advice
top 10% of the ladder completely and utterly miserable/unplayable
hardcore players (big spenders) all quit, no point in mastering game
mediumcore players all quit because there's no point
casual players were mostly tourists and the one's who weren't see there's no point in upping their engagement
game dies
awesomedude4100@reddit
you aren’t seriously that league is dead are you? that shit is still massive
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
That's not what I'm saying. I literally play the game. I'm just making a joke about a character from a game I'm familiar with being a good example of why not every character can be equally viable at all levels of gameplay.
BaconPai@reddit
Only person with a brain in this thread. ":((( please buff Ryze to have a stable 50% wr in bronze!! I don't care if he's 100% pick/ban and 95% winrate in diamond+, those guys are the minority!!!"
Totoques22@reddit
Funniest thing about this is that lowers elos could absolutely hate if a champ that is already heavily low elo skewed like mordekaiser was gigabiffed to be viable in higher elos
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
A game rotten at the top is rotten all the way through.
m50d@reddit
The people at the top of the ladder are not the big spenders.
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
Whales spread all elos, but my guess is that the average Chally player has spent significantly more money on the game than the average never-touched-rank silver mmr.
cocofan4life@reddit
Complaining about netdeckers in 2025, lul
FlashAttack@reddit
Starcraft
Antoni-_-oTon1@reddit
This sounds awfully similar to whats Tarkov been doing.
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
When are you starting “been”
It’s BEEN since the “end” of COVID lol
Antoni-_-oTon1@reddit
Touche.
ConCadMH@reddit
dat_GEM_lyf@reddit
Many such cases
NightOwl3031@reddit
The rich get richer and all that
aluminiumpigeon@reddit
Overwatch, Apex, many such cases.
newbreed69@reddit
just like irl
kluukje@reddit
Dune awakening rn, with the crying pvp kids
Bilbo_Boceteiro@reddit
They don't even cater to the 5% it's about the 1%, or even less when you consider games that take pro play into account. It's a real shame.
DonBenvenuto@reddit
World of warcraft raiding. They pushed a stupidly hard difficulty completly locking the cutting edge behind terrible boss design, went on wars with the addons necessary to survive to the bullshit boss design they kept creating just for 40 streamer to show off for twoo weeks once every six months.
That shit never impacted the numbers of players, but the experience went miserable for all the other 1500 guilds behind them.
All of that for like 2 weeks of streaming.
DonPepe181@reddit
IMO WOW lost its appeal when they started making everything accessible to every player (kinda the opposite of what this topic is complaining about). It was around WotLK. By the time the pandas came out it was more like playing a mobile game and just grinding pointless matchmaking trainwrecks than a real a MMO where you know the people you are playing with.
TechiesOp@reddit
This is 100% true. To the point where today you are timegated so heavily on how much you can progress your character every week, so that wagies can still play the game and not feel behind.
Tetragig@reddit
Dungeon queue kinda made the rest of the game irrelevant.
SPZ_Ireland@reddit
Any competitive fighter
I don't care about your frame rate bs. I just wanna have fun.
TopMountainGoat@reddit
Tekken 8 is balancing around it’s more casual audience and look at how it’s fairing, so to me at least fighting games are the worst example for this
SPZ_Ireland@reddit
Tekken 8 is great to play because of that.
It's the exception to the rule
It's everyone else should take note from them imo
Hunriette@reddit
Delusional
DerrBenja@reddit
Just Valorant
Hunriette@reddit
This rarely actually happens
-NotQuiteLoaded-@reddit
i mean no matter who it's balanced towards the other group will hate it
if you're playing a game where something's balanced towards the 95% but you're in the 5% you're gonna feel like the devs are stupid for catering to stupid people
and if you're in the 95% you'll think that you're the one that matters because population bigger
and neither is wrong its just you'll never get 100% thats just how it is
isnortmiloforsex@reddit
Dota2 devs are the only ones who do it correctly
theDefa1t@reddit
Destiny 2 for the part few years
ganzgpp1@reddit
I think for PvP games, this is totally fine, because buffs/nerfs generally don't impact low elo very much, as they have gameplay issues that impact whether they win or lose more than any buff or nerf ever could (unless the buff/nerf is something insanely egregious, which is rare); it doesn't matter that your character is "weak" or theirs are "strong," because both parties are playing so ineffectively that those buffs/nerfs are basically irrelevant.
When PvE games start buffing/nerfing things? That's where it gets stupid, in my opinion. Not that things need to just be broken OP, because that's also boring, but a lot of the time they do nerf things for no real reason at all, and then fun weapons are no longer fun, and the unfun weapons are STILL unfun.
TerminalDoggie@reddit
Dead by daylight my beloved
pizzabox53@reddit
war thunder
fibericon@reddit
That's what pissed me off when I played WoW. Let's nerf this ability that hurts too much in arena. Nevermind that we just fucked everyone else, most of whom have literally never even been to the arena.
AsherTheDasher@reddit
the finals
Slip_Snake@reddit
Watching the game I like get worse, knowing there's nothing I can do about it.
Magical-Hummus@reddit
They ruined my boy Aurelion Sol. They ruined my boy Jeff the land shark.
_tastymomo@reddit
When Devs start tweaking the game mechanics not to balance but to favor a portion of player that really pisses me off
KamikazeSexPilot@reddit
How can you “balance” something when 80% of the players don’t understand the actual game mechanics. Generally it’s the top 10% of the players that absolutely break the game because it’s “balanced” around people who don’t even know what they’re doing.
DaEccentric@reddit
Balance isn't a simple "this thing deals too much damage." Sometimes a lot of specific game functions have a very high skill ceiling and are unbalanced only in the hands of someone really good, or sometimes things just dominate at lower skill levels while getting dunked on in higher ranks. There's no magic number where you can stop.
ShadowWithHoodie@reddit
true. Like if the devs admitted that your character was a horrible design and acted accordingly insstead of succing you dry of your money by not nerfing them and giving them skins constantly I'd show you your placd
KamikazeSexPilot@reddit
Apex legends was the opposite for me. Balanced around the bottom 30%.
Killed it.
Acharyn@reddit
The players keep using the meta build that the top 5% make.
greystar07@reddit
Overwatch :3
Darthmalak135@reddit
Just started to watch Frieren the other day lolz
show-me-dat-butthole@reddit
Tarkov
Phil_Da_Thrill@reddit
Destiny 2 addicts throwing money at Bungie right now
PartyPresentation249@reddit
Its actually worse than that. They cater to the top .1% of players who are pros and complain when off meta stuff gets buffed/meta stuff gets nerfed because it means homework for them and they dont want to relearn the game.
Weird_Angry_Kid@reddit
Certified Halo moment
Legiyon54@reddit
Galve is still yet to change annad balance a Dota hero Witch Doctor, because he is an awful hero at pro level. But he dominates us pubscrubs
Of course pros who can communicate, strategize, think like a team, know when to use spells efficiently to stop WD from doing his things, can easily counter him. But try to communicate with a Bulgarian, Russian, Turk in your team (none speak English) that one should save his stun for WD, that one should buy ghost so he can get close, AND ALL SHOULD MOVE AWAY WHEN HE CASTS CASK.
WD is so infursting to play against solo, or even duo. He cannot be countered if everyone in the team is not ready to coutner him, and he annihilates us pubs scrubs. I will not pretend I am higheer mmr than I am (3.3k) but for the love of God, WD is making the game worse in our bracked and there is nothing that I, individually, can do about it..
It's comparable to old techies for me in terms of pub ruining (tho not wuite as bad because there are some really bad WDs out there)
Sensitive-Fun-9124@reddit
How has nobody mentioned World of Tanks yet
banyakmisi@reddit
Oh yes, memeing and crying about game balance with litterally no idea about game balance. Thats reddit for you.
biglious@reddit
Especially because good players always exploit difficult things that lower skill players wouldn’t attempt, resulting in weird and random nerfs that just lower the overall quality of the game. Leave the op quirks in, let those who are good at using them do their thing. Who cares.
iR3vives@reddit
Is this a commentary on our current society?
Thanag0r@reddit
I bet anon is one of those 10k hours but same skill group as someone who started 3 months ago.
r-Cobra229@reddit
I hate when ppl say "man they only balance around the pros this shit sucks" like wdym bro your dogwater ass aint gonna feel buffs or nerfs because you not good enough for that too really make a difference - its *usually* just that they read stats in a balance update and are psychologically tricked into feeling a fake difference or they just follow whatever the meta is in the upper echelon
TeMPv@reddit
Counterpoint, lower the difficulty if it's too hard for you. The highest difficulty should not be accessible to everyone.
bdrwr@reddit
Counterpoint: if a game is well-balanced for competition, that can also have appreciable benefits for more casual players. If a game is NOT competitively balanced, casual players might not notice or care, but the competitive scene will suffer for it.
Guyyyyy123@reddit
Marvel rivals has lost half its player base after release of season 2. Congratulations Spider-Man and Emma frost mains 👏
PanJanJanusz@reddit
I thought anon was talking about politics for a sec 😭😭😭
Komikaze06@reddit
Helldivers 2 started that way, the extreme "games too easy, make it harder" made me quit for awhile. Once they got their act together and reverted alot, it's much better now.
guitarmstrwlane@reddit
runescape
bayygel@reddit
Phasmophobia my old friend
balloonatic_@reddit
and smash players hate that their game doesn’t do it
_Lelouch420_@reddit
Apex Legends does this and predatory micro transactions
somgooboi@reddit
Sounds like real life...
nsa3679@reddit
Dota 2 for me - back in the day people used to have some range on what they want their champion to be in the match. Building a support into a carry was much more feasible (and FUN), but now the meta is so systemic that I hate it. They build the game in a way the pro players play it, but normal people want something less punishing and strict.
Deldris@reddit
Gamers when devs want to appeal to the people who spend the most money on their games.
If a game has an Esport, you really shouldn't expect anything else. At that point, it's about the money and the money comes from tournaments which need to be watched by people so the top gameplay needs to be good. It's that simple.
Celynymerch@reddit
Rainbow Six Siege. All it takes is a couple pro players complaining on Twitter (X) for the devs to change something that isn’t even relevant or useful for the average player.
Miles_Reptiles@reddit
Halo Infinite fucking up weapons because pro players would get mad at them
RetentiveCloud@reddit
Hey, that's League of Legends!
MalekithofAngmar@reddit
A game that is dogshit to master and is built around hardcore engagement doesn't work.
Broccoli_dicks@reddit
The Finals is going this way unfortunately. Love the game, but some of the balance choices don't make sense.
nothing_in_my_mind@reddit
I think no competitive game could go on forever.
So, most people don't like losing, that's a fact.
But in a competitive game, you will always have someone who loses more often than he's winning. Even with MMR, you have someone in the bottom tier who is bad even for that bottom tier. Those people will leave the game.
When they leave the game, you have someone else who is losing more often than he's winning. Those people will also leave the game.
Years and years of this, and the only regular players you have is the top few percent. Those are either so competitive they don't mind losing, or they like dunking on the new palyers who occasionally come and go.
A game needs more pople joining in compared to the people leaving. As a game grows and builds hype, this is very possible. As the game gets older, it becomes impossible. And the game eventually dies.
Leander17@reddit
r/csgo
Thornn05@reddit
mordhau
Brutios@reddit
Deadlock is dead even before arrival, and it started when valve introduced ranking system and MMR. It's so sad to see it.
VacaRexOMG777@reddit
People here just learning PvE games (specially live service ones) also need balance 💔🥀
SonTyp_OhneNamen@reddit
Same shit as irl, except that our top 5% balance the game by themselves.
Fleedjitsu@reddit
What would be the downsides to having two balance systems? One you work with up until you are in the top 5% rankings, then another until you are World First or whatever.
ZeDuke@reddit
many such cases
Aramanta2510@reddit
Escape from tarkov mentioned
JackSwieper@reddit
The finals nerfing a sledge hammer on the least mobile unit in the game bcs a few sweats playing the fastest, squishy glas cannon type, unit couldnt comprehend pressing w
bencciarati@reddit
The Finals is pretty reasonably balanced but the heavy's lack of mobility is a real question mark. In Cashgrab and TDM, nobody seems to play it because the lights can simply plink and dodge while the heavy just stands there, and the mediums have a broad array of tools for getting around shields and barriers.
I only see effective heavy play in Platform bc the defending heavies can hunker down and the attacking ones can use the chaos and angles to leap on the platform with a spear or hammer. But even so, they seem so out of place in a game where speed and guile are two of the most important things a player needs to have.
Povstnk@reddit
Look how they massacred my boy R6 Siege...
Key-Soil-5707@reddit
Hunt Showdown
Aluminium_Fail@reddit
Apex :(
SigaVa@reddit
Worst i ever experienced was Destiny 2. Destiny 1 was a multiplayer pve game with some side pvp stuff. They built Destiny 2 to cater to the .01% of players who streamed pvp content. It flopped massively, as was easy to predict, and they had to change everything to get the players back.
dankspankwanker@reddit
Overwatch
"Yeah we gonna nerf this character to death because someone in Overwatch league found one very rare instance where they are slightly overpowered if used with 4 otjer specific characters"
yariimi@reddit
The devs of ow1 were incompetent they never listened to pros and the average community,why do you think goats was in the game for 2 years?they never listened to anyway,the devs themselves and Jeff kaplan was the downfall of overwatch
Inner_Impress8741@reddit
Well, right now the only complaint I have is how the new hero does too much damage. Counter-picking still exists but is much harder now because of hero bans. Anyway, that's pretty much it balance wise. I don't really have much of an issue with the balancing or think that they're especially catering to the top pros.
The_Guy_From_Drive@reddit
Rainbow Six Siege fr.
RiguezCR@reddit
siege.
plastic_addict_no420@reddit
Fortnite