
Vol Arm'OOO
Imperial Academy Amarr Empire
26
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Posted - 2012.09.25 19:24:00 -
[1] - Quote
Petrus Blackshell wrote:Over the almost 3 years I've been playing, and the various rebalancing passes or other changes I've seen, I have noticed a few types of responses from the playerbase whose playstyle is being nerfed. Which one are you?
1. The first (and loudest) is the rage train, or tears of unfathomable sadness. Signature phrases are overblown, inflammatory, or uninformed ("Eve is dying", "I am unsubbing my 37 accounts", "You killed small gang PvP, gj", etc). The people with this response opposed the nerf thoroughly, going as far as recommending a buff instead. Some of them even resort to personal attacks ("CCP are goons in disguise / CCP doesn't play their own game / You're just a CCP fanboi/alt!").
2. The schadenfreude enthusiasts, or trolls. Mostly make fun of group #1, and try to rile them up more, for purposes of collection of the tears of unfathomable sadness. Signature phrases include "posting in QQ thread", "umad" and similar.
3. The people who hate everything forever, or bittervets. These people will never be happy, and remind everyone of it. Signature phrases such as "It's about time tech got nerfed, what sort of drugs has CCP been on for all these years?" or "Why is the Tristan the T1 drone boat, but the Ishkur the T2 one?! This is an outrage!" Their arguments are typically a bit more well founded than #1, but the mad is strong with these ones, so #2 likes having fun with them too.
4. The opponent/skeptic offers intelligent discussion and contributions before and after the nerf. Accepts CCP's expertise and authority over Eve, adapts to change, but doesn't necessarily like it -- and expresses this via respectful discourse. Example: "Don't be so quick to judge titan tracking by the titan hitting MWDing, TP'ed Drakes, which are bigger than carriers," or "As we [opponents] anticipated, the nerf turned titans into little more than space taxis again; can we have a viable combat role for them?"
5. The supporter/enthusiast is very similar to #4, but holds the opposite position, arguing for why the nerf is a good idea and encouraging its implementation. Example: "It's ridiculous and unbalanced that a fleet of 30 people (albeit in titans) should be able to take on several hundreds of people and win, and goes against core Eve principles" or "Glad to see sanity return to fleet battles, thanks CCP!"
Every nerf seems to trigger varying amounts of composition of each of these groups, but #4 and #5 are usually (at least apparently) woefully small in number. How can we as players, forumgoers, mods, or devs (whoever is reading this) encourage more of that, and less of #1-3?
(Technically these groups show up in all changes, not just nerfs, but nerfs have the most pronounced effect because of someone 'losing out')
You forgot one type - the people who vote with their feet. In general, nerfs are always a bad idea. In eve terms, you have some player who has invested time, sp, and isk into being good in a certain ship, then ccp comes along and pulls the rug from under them. If the change is big enough a certain percentage of these folk are going to say f-it! and just quit. Conversely, imo ccp is unlikely to ever pull in new subs because they rebalanced one ship against another. So every time ccp nerfs something it runs a risk of driving a percentage of their players away without gaining any new subs. Ccp would be much better getting out of the balancing business and simply trusting the sandbox.
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