It often isn’t that the change is so bad, but that the change provides a break point. When WoW hunters changed from mana to focus as a resource, it wasn’t that the new system was so much worse, but that the change was fundamental to the play style.

If I’m essentially starting over to learn a new class, if I’m going to have to learn a new system of damage dealing, why not learn it on the shaman instead of the hunter, or even on a Jedi Consular?

And I think some of the disruptions I’ve experienced in MMOs could just about be described as personal crises (especially when they involve guild drama.)

It’s one of the main reasons I like Rift’s soul system. The character and identity you have can be tweaked (as has) but the toolset you’re provided allows you to still be relevant in the core concepts of the game. It sucks in WoW when you’re a Rogue and the boss is simply incompatible with melee dps or whatever mechanic that targets an entire playstyle.

To riff on Diablo 3 along the same thread, pure melee are having a heck of a time finding moderate success to their playstyle, instead finding that they have to follow a specific path for success while their ranged counterparts have quite a few more options. Why let me play the game as a damage whirlwind only to provide me with an artificial wall that requires me to abandon what I was able to do for 20 hours?

Frex, at the start of TBC, both the classes I played (warrior and priest) were much weaker in their roles than other classes. Paladins were godmode healers and bears were brilliant tanks. Blizzard probably felt they had to do this because warriors/priests had been THE default tanks/healers in vanilla. But I don’t think I ever entirely trusted them afterwards not to take a character I had loved and make it comparatively inferior (I mean significantly).

For example I hated it when they changed shadow priests from utility to “proper dps” from BC to WOTLK. I enjoyed having my very own role as the mana battery, and being turned into just another run-off-the-mill damage dealer was boring. I sort of circumvented the problem by becoming a full time healer from WOTLK onwards.

Then I remember when 4.0 changed and nerfed holy priests so hard that I suddenly felt completely unable to cope in raids. It was really horrifying to have this class that I had loved and played for four years turn into something that I barely recognised, and I did actually stop playing priest for the rest of the expansion, finishing Icecrown Citadel on my druid instead.

By the start of Cata I managed to get into it again, but whether I was PvPing or raiding, things still seemed to come down to holy never being as good as discipline. I respecced again and I didn’t really like it. Shortly after I quit. I suppose talent specialisations are a lot more malleable than classes, and some people actively love fiddling with them constantly, but I’m not one of them.

Actually, counter to the point you make in this post, there is also a strong culture that always considers the status quo stale and likes to change things up constantly just to keep things interesting. I get the impression that this is an important mantra at Blizzard too.

Nerfs suck. Nobody likes being on the receiving end of a nerf. But let’s pretend that the devs couldn’t nerf, they could only buff. If one class is out of whack (say, Frost Mages do too much damage with Ice Lance, so they’re too bursty), the dev could fix it by nerfing the crit damamge on Frost Lance. Or they could make all the other 29 specs more bursty, or give all the other classes/monsters more crit suppression. But consider how much work it would be to fix 29 specs, or worse, fix 29 specs and all the monsters! And on top of that, now instead of fixing one moving target (Ice Lance crit damage), you’re fixing tonnes of moving targets. Adding crit suppression to everyone to reduce Ice Lance damage would affect all of the other classes’ burst damage as well, meaning you’d have to re-balance again.

Basically, calling for no nerfs is a mathematically impossible game to play. It’s not realistic for any value of never nerf. But I suppose that this isn’t really news that the average person doesn’t understand this concept. Considering most people don’t understand technical reasons for gameplay decisions in general, or why servers need to be brought down for maintenance, or why you can’t just add 30 developers to a project and expect more work to get done, or why just because they’re changing up UI doesn’t necessarily mean they’re taking resources away from something else, like new character models.

There’s always going to be a disconnect there, and I guess it becomes a marketing problem of how to mitigate negative feelings associated with nerfs and such, since they clearly cannot be done away with.

When we came back, inevitably, a while later, the exploits had been fixed, no-one was doing MMs any more and DoD turned out to be one of our most-enjoyed later expansions. In my experience, most MMO changes that seem awful at first sight either get changed, go away or you get used to them.

There was an article in the WSJ Magazine a few months ago about how companies collect data about you without you knowing – not by prying, but by observing behavior and figuring out trends. They focus on Target, which uses Adobe Omniture and some PhDs to figure out when women get pregnant:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

The article is interesting for several reasons, but the one appropriate to this discussion is why, exactly, retailers are so interested in detecting a woman’s pregnancy as early as possible: because it signals a disruption point in their lives where all kinds of brand and store loyalties are up for grabs. If Target can figure it out first and get the mom-to-be to consider Target her place to go for prenatal care, then other brand loyalties are called into question and they can acquire a customer for years.

“Disruptive events are likely to move a player along this career trajectory because they encourage change.”

I think this idea of a gaming career is a good one, with disruptive points throughout which call our loyalties into question. I certainly had one at the end of 4.1, when the PvP gear fiasco was the flashpoint which drove me off my warlock – even though it was a series of changes to the class in Cata which caused it. Expansions are disruptive, but balance patches are disruptive, too. The death of a guild makes you wonder if it’s worth playing at all – something you don’t even question when you’re logging in, week after week, as part of the routine.

I really enjoyed this post. It’s making me think again about my playing habits, and that’s always a good thing.