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Why Nerfing Exists - A Lengthy Guide To Why You're Really, Really Wrong


LazyTemplar
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"You just don't like being outscored!"

 

"It's a co-op game!"

 

"Tckthuhuluwapphffffuputututu!" (which is a translation of the above into an ancient and forgotten language)

 

These are the common justifications as to why nothing should ever be nerfed. The co-op argument is, in the small picture, a valid point. Why should you want allies to be weaker? But, thing is, there's a much, much bigger picture here, which I'll go into detail on right now.  

 

I. The character-by-character basis  

 

(The example here uses characters, but the same argument can easily be applied to weapons).  

 

To better illustrate this point, I'm gonna use an example:

 

You're playing your favorite co-op RPG shooter, Galaxy of Fantasy. At launch, you had the option to choose between Ninja, or Viking. Both characters are equally viable selections, as they both served different roles, but one wasn't necessarily a better choice than the other: it was merely all about how you preferred to play the game.  Ninja is really fast, and Viking has really high defense. All's good. But one day, GoF introduces the Cowboy DLC!

 

cnv.06-1.jpg

 

Cowboy is REALLY strong. As a matter of fact, upon release, he's so strong, that he can literally nuke anything just by attacking it. Who needs to move fast, or have high defense, when you can literally kill anything without effort whatsoever? At this point,  Ninja and Viking are merely novelty characters, meaning they're fun to play around with, but when you actually need a character to do a serious mission with, you're gonna turn to Cowboy. So now the GoF development team has two choices:

 

A) They can buff Ninja and Viking to the levels of Cowboy. This way, they're all on even terms.

B) They can nerf Cowboy so that he's about on-par with Ninja and Viking. Same results as above.

 

Problem with option A, is that if it's selected, the game will suddenly be easier now.  And if the game was easy before, it will suddenly be a cakewalk.  

 

If they choose B, then not only do you now have three equally viable characters to choose from, but you also preserve the game's difficulty, or at least whatever difficulty it had to begin with.  

 

 

II. The power-by-power basis

 

Now that all three characters are just as good as one another, we can take a look at their individual powers. In particular, let's look at Ninja. He has the skills Poison Shurikens, Speed Boost, and Immolation. Poison Shurikens is a nice skill, as it adds on some awesome DoT effects. But Immolation is where it's at! That skill just does so much damage and debuffs enemies so bad, it's crazy! But look at Speed Boost. Only a 15% boost in movement speed for 5 seconds if I max it out? What? Screw that, I refuse to spec into a skill so worthless! So what do I, as a player, do? Spec him with only Immolation of course. That's what everyone does. It's the best build for him.

 

The development team takes a look now. After assessing that Immolation's really powerful and Speed Boost is really weak, they now have two options:

 

A) Increase the power of Poison Shurikens and the speed bonus of Speed Boost to the competitive levels of Immolation.

B) Lower the power of Immolation to Poison Shurikens' level, and raise the potency of Speed Boost to Poison Shurikens' level.

 

The problem with option A, is that now Ninja is the more appealing option in comparison to Cowboy and Viking. Why take the balanced characters when I can take the one with three OP powers? And so balance will need to be re-issued.

 

If you take option B though, Immolation becomes a much less viable option, sure, but it's still a good skill, and a very handy one at that. Only now, Ninja has three good skills to choose from, making builds much harder to decide on, making individual players think about it themselves instead of just using the default cookie cutter build.

 

 

In short, balance is necessary for co-op games just as much as it is for PvP games. Why have options when one thing just destroys the viability of the other things? Balance. It's called that for a reason. Nobody's "out to get you" or "trying to ruin your fun". No, we're trying to help you, actually. Open up possibilities, and all that jazz. We all enjoy the game, and sometimes things need to be taken out of power. Nerfs are necessary, just as buffs are. That's the double-edged sword of competitive balance.

 

Note:  You can and should still argue for why a particular nerf was undeserved.  This is addressed purely at those who don't understand the point of nerfs at all, and is not for or against any particular balance change.  

 

***This post was originally authored by DullahansXMark from another forum, and has been edited to make sense for Warframe and formatting limitations.  

Edited by LazyTemplar
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Everyone' is complaining because Rhino's nerf made him not as viable anymore.

Before, Rhino had his god mode button, so he was the tank.

He doesn't have that anymore.

Now the preferd tank is Frost, for his globe of safety, and Trinity, for her god mode button.

With what you're saying, They should now nerf them as well, because they are unbalanced.


correct?

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Everyone' is complaining because Rhino's nerf made him not as viable anymore.

Before, Rhino had his god mode button, so he was the tank.

He doesn't have that anymore.

Now the preferd tank is Frost, for his globe of safety, and Trinity, for her god mode button.

With what you're saying, They should now nerf them as well, because they are unbalanced.

correct?

 

No.  This thread isn't for discussing the Rhino specifically.  

 

 

But if we were to extrapolate to the Rhino situation, my position would be closer to - instead of having only 1 great skill, let's give Rhino 4 good skills.  Buffs are just as important as nerfs for maintaining game balance.  And 1 trick ponies are less interesting to play.  

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No.  This thread isn't for discussing the Rhino specifically.  

 

 

But if we were to extrapolate to the Rhino situation, my position would be closer to - instead of having only 1 great skill, let's give Rhino 4 good skills.  Buffs are just as important as nerfs for maintaining game balance.  And 1 trick ponies are less interesting to play.  

 

 

And we have a lot of one-trick ponies right now.

 

Rhino, Frost, Nyx, Volt, Mag (although she's not so much as a one trick pony so much as she's an all disappointment pony), and Banshee all need a lot of work in that regard.

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What I feel they should do is take each warframe, one at a time, and rebalance them to whatever level they feel is approriate for the games difficulty.

 

If this leaves some warframes overpowered for a couple weeks or so while others are waiting for their tweak, what does it matter? This is still a Beta.

 

Look at WoW back in its vanilla days. The dev team did exactly this because there was imbalance between a number of classes. They took each class one (or maybe two?) at a time and completely rebalanced them (specifically their talent trees) in order to put them more or less on equal footing.

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Keep in mind that it's not just making them capable of thriving in the game (a lot of the one-trick ponies are actually pretty good), but making them interesting as well. And that usually involves making them internally balanced with a skillset that is usable as a (preferably synergistic) whole. If they're too one dimensional, they become boring to play, which was precisely the case with Rhino.

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If this isint strictly for the Rhino god mode button, then I agree with you.
Before it was
Banshee/Mag/nyx using their ubers in defense missions, letting everyone stand around useless.
 

They also changed shurikin into psychic bolt. Which was kinda lame.

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@OP, thank you so much for this thread. I only wish many people read it.

 

 

And we have a lot of one-trick ponies right now.

 

Rhino, Frost, Nyx, Volt, Mag (although she's not so much as a one trick pony so much as she's an all disappointment pony), and Banshee all need a lot of work in that regard.

 

You're obviously using Rhino, Frost, Nyx, Volt, and Banshee wrong then :P

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A nice and simple explanation. The only problem is that, in Warframe, you deal most of your damage with weapons and not every warframe has cc powers, protection powers like Snow Globe etc nor should they all receive these powers.

 

And we have a lot of one-trick ponies right now.

 

Rhino, Frost, Nyx, Volt, Mag (although she's not so much as a one trick pony so much as she's an all disappointment pony), and Banshee all need a lot of work in that regard.

Nyx isn't a one trick pony. Two of her powers do pretty much the same thing except one(chaos) only costs 25 more energy but does a disproportional amount of work rendering the other(mind control) useless. Her Chaos being 'OP' is the problem.

 

Frost probably needs a damage buff to Ice Wave. His Snow Globe lasts too long and can't be broken. Give it a damage cap like with Iron Skin. But a much higher damage cap.

 

Rhino's only real tank ability is Iron Skin and that only takes 800 damage per pop. His other cc's are good except Radial Blast which simply does knockdown and not enough damage to make up for the energy cost. He just needs a small amount of work.

 

Volt needs a buff to his Shock so as to provide an alternative to gun play. His Speed has good synergy with wall running. His Shield might need a slight buff depending on what DE does to Shock.

 

Mag is so underpowered and situational, it's not even funny.

 

Banshee is just wierd. She has potential and flexibility, but it seems most people only use her ultimate.

 

And yea, Trinity's Link needs a nerf IFF Energy Vampire isn't reworked or removed. Ever heard of Streamline? Totally breaks Energy Vampire even more.

Edited by Stygi
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Not really, back when I was using Rhino, and now when I use Nyx, I end up regularly as the top damage dealer in my group.

 

That doesn't mean much lol. First of all the end-mission stats are completely borked, and second there are a lot of rubbish players out there. I mean, if I can end up top anybody can.

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I wonder if it would be worth differentiating frames further than just their 4 abilities. Perhaps place restrictions or specialties on the weaponry that they can use, so as to help better balance their offensive capabilities, and to differentiate play styles further.

 

On one hand, it would give you less freedom in actually putting together your loadout (although this could be mitigated in time by having a wider selection of weapons), but on the other, it would serve to make the frames and the  game in general less homogenous.

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Balancing is a highly sensitive Porgess and isn't as easy as some of you think! +1 for OP

And complaining about Rhinos Ironskin? Are you serious? Because you can't "stomp the house" with that, in my eyes totally ridiculous invulnerability, like before? And now everyones using Frost, as said, as the maintank, because of his 3 skill... What if they change, that neither bullets could pass the globe in AND out? Then everyone starts complaining about how "useless" Frost gets and so on...

And regarding to Trinity and her Link: The way it works is just fine! It has decent duration and Trinity dies extremely quick when it wards off and she cant back it up in time! think about that! Frost and Rhino got their 150 Armor, Trinity has just 10!

Edited by Fischfilet
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That doesn't mean much lol. First of all the end-mission stats are completely borked, and second there are a lot of rubbish players out there. I mean, if I can end up top anybody can.

 If you can't explain why these frames are most effective when not played as the one-trick ponies they are, then don't suggest otherwise.

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I wonder if it would be worth differentiating frames further than just their 4 abilities. Perhaps place restrictions or specialties on the weaponry that they can use, so as to help better balance their offensive capabilities, and to differentiate play styles further.

 

On one hand, it would give you less freedom in actually putting together your loadout (although this could be mitigated in time by having a wider selection of weapons), but on the other, it would serve to make the frames and the  game in general less &*$$genous.

noooo, the most I could go for is passive for each warframe, but their abilities need to be balanced first. The abilities also have to be interesting while being useful. Yea?

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WHEN DID BANDIT GET INTRODUCED TO GALAXY OF FANTASY? OMG PAY2WIN

 

Whoops, my bad.  The original version had ninja, bandit, and copper, which happened to correspond to that forum's ninja/bandit/cop emoticons.  

 

I guess that means you were reading carefully then.  =D  

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 If you can't explain why these frames are most effective when not played as the one-trick ponies they are, then don't suggest otherwise.

 

Firstly, what a wonderful way of bullS#&$ting your way out of a corner.

 

But I'll indulge you.

 

Perhaps you could be even more effective if you didn't play them just as one trick ponies?

 

All the 'frames in this game has one skill which is usually more useful than his or her other skills. In that sense I could say Excalibur, Loki, Saryn are all also one trick ponies. What I was getting at is that those 'frames skills are perhaps a lot more useful than you think.

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Haha, good post. I like the original post by Dullahan so much. It explains things in an easy to understand manner.

I think we will see a lot of rebalancing among frame/power/weapon from now on. Now that U8 can actually live more than a few days for most players, DE will have some time to take a look at things in comparative term. Well, weekly balance change isn't exactly a bad idea after all. Many players got themselves trapped in a mindset that coop game doesn't need balance or 'this item is good, don't touch it' without looking at bigger picture. Sometime they even use 'perfect imbalance' by Extra credit to justify their stance without watching the whole thing.

Good work, sir.

Edited by neKroMancer
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