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What complaining has done for classes


Sangrar

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Every day I hear some kind of complaint about a class or their abilities. Commandos spam grav round too much. Smash specs are ruining pvp. Mercs are useless in pvp. Sorcerer is the worst clas to play right now. You know how it got that way: complaining. I remember a time where everything was good, the beginning of the game, people weren't complaining as much as they do now, you could see Troopers and Inquisitors eveywhere you looked, and most importantly each class had something that made them more powerful and special. Then people complained. Watchman Sentinels have too much healing. Consulars can interrupt from 30 meters away and warriors can't. The smash spec is too powerful. I could list a bunch of other examples but the point is that because of us complaining about eachother and ourselves, we have caused nerfs to every class. Now you have to be within 10 meters to use short term stuns. The Pyrotech tree for powertechs gives their abilites a 10 meter range making it harder to be a ranged DPS. The Watchman healing bonus was reduced so now its not as useful anymore. consulars project ability animation doesn't look good anymore. Commandos and Sorcerers, once two of the most powerful and well known classes at the start of the game, are now ridiculed and put down and people often complain about them. Bioware wanted to please the people and hear their concerns which they have. The problem is that fullfilling them has caused something important to be lost. Each class had a significant advantage over another class, this made people want to play them because they seemed powerful or because they seemed to have an advantage they can use. Don't get me wrong I love the classes and still think that some have great skills, and bioware has made some great improvements to the game, auch as giving troopers and bounty hunters an interupt ability, but I remember a time where people didn't hate commandos or sorcerers, a time where There was no real squishy class, where people played characters over what advantage they had or the powers they used. I want a return to some of what we had at the beginning of the game, I want all classes to be useful in pvp and pve to the point where there is no "bad class" or no "waste of time". I hear every day how someone wants another class nerfed or this ability chould be reduced, and I am tired of it. Aren't you? Edited by Sangrar
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I'm not into PVP myself. But from my years of experience in other MMO's. SW TOR isn't any different. All other MMO's I've played are the same thing. The nerf bat is strong in the MMO it seems.

 

It's a vicious circle. From my days back in WoW. The Paladin always has been one of my favourite classes. I've played it from the release of Vanilla on and off till Mists of Pandaria. Class got changed several times along the way. But any change was always followed swiftly by the nerf bat. Most famous I guess was the Paladins "bubble" 12 seconds of invulnerability. Later Blizzard changed it to 8 seconds, and made it dispellable by some classes.

12 seconds of God Mode sounds overpowered. but once those 12 seconds were gone, the Paladin would become a sitting duck. No people just see bubble = god mode = OP = cry for nerfs. And the cry babies got what they wanted.

 

This is just an example from WoW. It's relevance in other MMO's (including SW TOR) is sadly 100%.

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complaining about eachother and ourselves, we have caused nerfs to every class.

 

 

Perfect example of how PVP ruins every mmo for PVE.

What they need to do, is keep pve and pvp abilities separate... period.

PVP'ers whine constantly, and they will NEVER stop.. causing the devs to make changes that affect pve, which is wrong.

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Yep, complaining has led BW to kill hybrid sorcs, and render mercs, dps operatives, and annihilation marauders to be sub-par.

 

I do think most of us agree that rage warriors and bubble sorcs needs changes. But given BW's track record, I'm sure they'll hit them hard enough to where it'll be added to the list of useless or underpowered specs.

Edited by Ainsland
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i think some of the complaining led to overcompensation (the massives nerfs to ops/scoundrel dps for instance), but if we as players don't let the devs know how we feel, we have to deal with a crappy situation.

 

 

for example, merc/commandos ARE terrible in pvp right now. they were really OP before, and that should have been addressed, it was, and now that we as players realize they took it too far, it needs to be rebalanced again. actually, i would strongly argue that it should have been fixed at least 6 months ago, but i digress.

 

 

it's not a 'vicious cycle', but a holistic one. things need to be continually balanced and changed, certain nerfs need to be undone and some things are operating above the expected values and need to be nerfed.

 

i don't think the problem lies in 'complaining' as you call it, letting the devs know how we as players feel, about the things that frustrate us and things we feel are unfair. i think the problem lies in the methods used to fix some of the problems.

some of the nerfs are very extreme, lowering the damage of a certain attack by 20%, or raising the CD of a skill by 50%, lowering the ranges of skills.

i think they should be employing smaller changes and tweaks over time rather than huge buffs and nerfs which ultimately result in these huge chasms of overcompensation

 

 

imagine though, if nothing in the game were ever balanced or changed again. think of how stale the game would be and how frustrating it would be for players dealing with the same things that they feel are unfair.

 

i don't think that you are remembering correctly the 'glory days' before 1.2 when all was good and no class was OP, but commandos were very OP. granted, a lot of this had to do with bugs in how gravity vorteces worked, but they were OP. i think the bugs should have been fixed first, then any balancing and such afterwards if it were still deemed needed.

but also in those days operatives could stun lock someone from full to dead and pop back into stealth completely unscathed. of course, surge going all the way to +50% and adrenals and other burst items in WZs were a major cause of this, so those should have been addressed, then individual class balances.

 

like i said, the problem is the exact implementation of the 'balances', not the cycle itself.

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See i don't think that there ever was an imbalance at all in any of the specs. I think that there was a perception that there existed an imbalance so it became the reality. Someone says Operative DPS is too strong people believe it. Maybe it is against once class but gets destroyed by another class. Balance shouldn't be about making everyone the same against everybody else it should be learning and playing to your class's strengths against the other class's weakness.

 

If we keep going down this "balance" road pretty soon every class will have a cc and every class will have stealth, and every class will be able to heal..... do i need to continue?

 

 

leveling as a jedi or sith (inquis/consular or knight/warrior) i find the hardest NPC's to fight against are the trooper styles (golds i mean not the regular trash), It wasn't until i lvled my own trooper style character did I realize what it was about that class that made me have trouble with them with my jedi/sith toons. Now i don't have a problem with them because i know what their strengths are and their weakness'.

 

So i now know that if i stand still with a commando and go "tower - tower" with him that's a bad strategy so i force him to move around so he can't use his channel abilities or i use LOS so he can't hit me. I know now that an operative has barely any activation time attacks so trying to interupt is useless on them.

 

We are listening to players who don't adapt to the situations and take their, it's not fair cry stories at face value, this is not just in pvp either. You see on the forums all the time about this boss is too hard waa ,waa waaa, nerf him. where all you really need to do is learn the strategy for that boss

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i think some of the complaining led to overcompensation (the massives nerfs to ops/scoundrel dps for instance), but if we as players don't let the devs know how we feel, we have to deal with a crappy situation..

 

I agree that some complaints are needed to improve stuf but as you said they overxcompensated for a wide range of players who wanted different things not realizing that severely nerfing one class caused a large number of complaints which had to be dealt with too, ending in, well this situation where everyone feels unbalanced and angry with how bad their class handles.

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  • 9 months later...
Perfect example of how PVP ruins every mmo for PVE.

What they need to do, is keep pve and pvp abilities separate... period.

PVP'ers whine constantly, and they will NEVER stop.. causing the devs to make changes that affect pve, which is wrong.

Yup, this. Simply this.

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Every day I hear some kind of complaint about a class or their abilities. Commandos spam grav round too much. Smash specs are ruining pvp. Mercs are useless in pvp. Sorcerer is the worst clas to play right now. You know how it got that way: complaining. I remember a time where everything was good, the beginning of the game, people weren't complaining as much as they do now, you could see Troopers and Inquisitors eveywhere you looked, and most importantly each class had something that made them more powerful and special. Then people complained. Watchman Sentinels have too much healing. Consulars can interrupt from 30 meters away and warriors can't. The smash spec is too powerful. I could list a bunch of other examples but the point is that because of us complaining about eachother and ourselves, we have caused nerfs to every class. Now you have to be within 10 meters to use short term stuns. The Pyrotech tree for powertechs gives their abilites a 10 meter range making it harder to be a ranged DPS. The Watchman healing bonus was reduced so now its not as useful anymore. consulars project ability animation doesn't look good anymore. Commandos and Sorcerers, once two of the most powerful and well known classes at the start of the game, are now ridiculed and put down and people often complain about them. Bioware wanted to please the people and hear their concerns which they have. The problem is that fullfilling them has caused something important to be lost. Each class had a significant advantage over another class, this made people want to play them because they seemed powerful or because they seemed to have an advantage they can use. Don't get me wrong I love the classes and still think that some have great skills, and bioware has made some great improvements to the game, auch as giving troopers and bounty hunters an interupt ability, but I remember a time where people didn't hate commandos or sorcerers, a time where There was no real squishy class, where people played characters over what advantage they had or the powers they used. I want a return to some of what we had at the beginning of the game, I want all classes to be useful in pvp and pve to the point where there is no "bad class" or no "waste of time". I hear every day how someone wants another class nerfed or this ability chould be reduced, and I am tired of it. Aren't you?

Overall i'm more tired of people posting a single huge bolus of text. A massive excrescence with no clear demarcations between different thoughts and observations. It really makes it less irritating to read if you use the occasional line break to create coherent paragraphs.

 

That said, i do appreciate the actual existence of complete sentences and generally lucid sentence structures and spelling.

 

i do disagree that all the negative changes are due to complaining, nor are all the improvements due to complaining either, and there have been improvements as well. Class and ability balancing in any game is an ongoing process and while complaints do help draw attention to things you might prefer to remain unchanged, praising of classes and datamining do play a role as well.

 

And good luck on getting people to not complain, especially when classes are not balanced, regardless of how much you might prefer the status quo. In my opinion the issue isn't so much that people complain as it is that developers rarely have the tools and mathematical knowledge to really understand the effects of changes on gameplay. Developers who know how to develop and interpret accurate statistical models of the game's rules and the way players actually play characters are extremely rare in the industry.

Edited by NyxNoxNothing
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Perfect example of how PVP ruins every mmo for PVE.

What they need to do, is keep pve and pvp abilities separate... period.

PVP'ers whine constantly, and they will NEVER stop.. causing the devs to make changes that affect pve, which is wrong.

 

No truer words have been spoken. Many a PvE game is ruined because of the vocal minority of PvPers

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No truer words have been spoken. Many a PvE game is ruined because of the vocal minority of PvPers

Plenty of cases in which PvE whining hurts class PvP performance. And you don't have the actual data on who is the "vocal minority" in this particular situation.

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Plenty of cases in which PvE whining hurts class PvP performance. And you don't have the actual data on who is the "vocal minority" in this particular situation.

 

Hence they should separate the 2 and no side could claim the other one influenced them negatively. Problem solved, both game modes could be tuned to its own unique characteristics.

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Any developer worth their salt will not, ever, listen to forum complaints. They may listen to tester feedback, but if they're serious about their game, that feedback should only be about bugs and exploits, not balance. How can you make balance decisions impacting the whole game based on very subjective opinions of several select players? You can't.

 

Which is why developers base their balancing decisions on a thing called "metrics". Basically a set of developer tools built to gather statistical data from the game, as it is being played. It's all number crunching. Every win, every loss, PvE and PvP, every player count, class count, level spread, everything of use, is gathered, processed and analyzed.

 

So forum whiners are whining in vain. They're not being listened to, nor ever will.

 

That is, if Bioware is even remotely competent to handle a MMO.

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Hence they should separate the 2 and no side could claim the other one influenced them negatively. Problem solved, both game modes could be tuned to its own unique characteristics.

 

I don't see this happenning in any foreseeable future because it means more developer time in regards to balancing and testing. Besides, PvP is a minor (and a pretty laughable) part of this game I don't believe it warrants so much attention.

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If anything the amount of time thats progressed between the original posting, and the lack of changes balance wise to the game would prove this topic is completely unfounded.

 

Its been what....10 and a half months since this was written, yet no changes have happened even though if you look through the past years pvp threads 80% of them are nerf this type threads.

 

If this topic were actually "true to life" and BW still made changes based on complaints, smash would of be nerfed into the ground, scoundrel heals would of been nuked into atoms, Stealth wouldnt actually prevent people from targeting you, it would just give you that cool purple/white lined outline effect. Mercenaries and sorcs would be able to fly, and BW would of committed mass suicide based on all the player reccomendations.

 

Last I checked none of these came to be, unless you consider being thrown by a gaurdian 30 meters as flying. This topic is not relevant based on the arguments provided.

 

The complaining will continue until one of two things happen.

 

One the PvP population goes catatonic meaning, that its numbers diminish to such an extent that the player base no longer is competetive, that instead every form of pvp is the have vs the have nots, where the haves completely decimate the havenots 99.999% of the time. The playing population will lose interest and move on to other things. Some would say that this has already happened on most servers. Its definately that way on Harbringer right now

 

or

 

Bioware makes atleast the dps classes in PvP balanced, since 9/10 of the population wanna go pew pew.

 

Until then enjoy the nerf threads, they will continue in droves until this game is balanced more towards pvp standards(which will never happen, imo you should just wait for the pvp implosion when one of these new games pulls enough mmo pvpers that the community just collapses)

 

Edit: the negativity in this post is strong, please dont take it as an attack against the poster, its more or less directed at the people behind the coding. They know that pvp is completely borked, yet they bait us and ask for suggestions, then pull the carrot back to give us the stick by replying with "we cant actually make balance changes until an expansion".

Edited by Haystak
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Overall i'm more tired of people posting a single huge bolus of text. A massive excrescence with no clear demarcations between different thoughts and observations. It really makes it less irritating to read if you use the occasional line break to create coherent paragraphs.

 

That said, i do appreciate the actual existence of complete sentences and generally lucid sentence structures and spelling.

 

L2R. I have no problems with walls of text.

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Plenty of cases in which PvE whining hurts class PvP performance. And you don't have the actual data on who is the "vocal minority" in this particular situation.

 

PvPers are a minority in ANY PvE game. The majority of players in this game are PvE players. This game is in the majority a PvE game. It was, and always will be advertised as a PvE game. If you came to this game looking for a robust and serious PvP mini-game it is no wonder you are sadly disappointed.

Edited by Brittaany_Banks
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