Altitis

OK, this is going to be another rant. Sorry for that.

In connection to my previous venting, there’s another element which annoys me to no end, the endless calls for Nerfing you have to wade through not just on the o-boards but pretty much any generalistic type forum related to the game.

Contrary to wide-spread belief, especially among those who discovered MMOs with World of Warcraft (nothing wrong with that, there’s about 8 million people in the same situation), Blizzard’s approach to balance is actually very light on the nerfing side. Whereas other game producers have taken the Nerf approach as their baseline strategy to balance things out, Blizzard, in the grand scheme of things, has always worked with a plan to progressively buff weaker classes up to the level of stronger ones. The true nerfs have, more often than not, been band-aids applied on some of the more burning issues, and while some of these have remained in place for a long time, many have also been removed and replaced by a change of mechanism for the longer term and for the better.
Now before my esteemed readers start counting up all the evidence where this hasn’t held true, let me also state openly that the devs haven’t always been highly successful in doing so. Nonetheless, during WoW 1.x days, each class has had a major review in turn, and while some weren’t exactly brilliant in addressing what the playerbase thought to be the most pressing issues, many were highly successful, including warlocks, hunters and mages. Patch 2.0, released before even TBC, came with a whole busload of improvements and boosts for most classes, and 2.1 as well as 2.3 will again quite significant buffs for most of us again.
Yes, there are classes who are getting the short end of the stick, and indeed, if your main is one of these, it may seem like all you get is a kick in the privates. But all in all, that’s not how Blizzard works, and it’s also a quite refreshing and unusual stance on the marketplace.
Take for instance Final Fantasy XI, which I used to play before hopping on the Azerothian bandwagon. Their strategy during my playtime (I spent about 18 months in that game) was, every so often, to take the then-strongest class (OK, technically they’re called jobs) and hit them hard where it hurts. Then wait until the dust settles, and start over with whoever was now the new king of the hill.
As a former coder for a couple of MUDs, where the amount of discontent people is numbered in dozens instead of hundred thousands, I can tell you from first hand experience that Perfect Balance is impossible to achieve, especially in an evolving game. Balancing is an act akin to the human walk: you are transitionning from one position of instability to another one, and it’s that very transition from instability to instability which allows us to move forward. The parents among us will only have to remember their children’s first steps to see what I’m describing here.
Game Balance is exactly the same, a developper has to accept that Balance is a pendulum which will swing from one extreme to another. A good developper will strive to keep the distance between the two extremes as short as possible while maintaining an overall progress.

When a game producer starts heeding the nerf calls, though, the overall progress gets removed from the game. Nerfing is a downward spiral which never ends, as there will always be a strongest class in line for the next nerf. Over time, as content doesn’t tend to get adjusted downwards either, the game becomes more and more of a treadmill and less and less enjoyable. Not least because players eventually start feeling that the game company does all this to milk their subscribtions for a longer time – in level-based games, it is, after all, commonplace to believe that the “true game” only starts with the endgame.

So when someone calls for nerfing another class, what they are advocating, in the long term, is a levelling down of the game to the lowest common denominator, a halt to the positive evolution of World of Warcraft, and in the end, to be milked for every single cent by Blizzard in exchange of a service which gets less and less enjoyable.
Beyond that, though, what irks me most is the mentality a nerf call displays. Yes, there are severall classes which are either really broken right now or at least have whole trees which need an overhaul. But instead of clamoring, to the top of their lungs, for fixes and buffs, the nerf callers would rather that everyone else end up as miserable as they are. These are the guys who’d rather drag everyone else down to the muck they are wading in instead of demanding to be given a ladder so that they, too, can climb to the top of the hill to admire the sight.

Is there anything more pathetic around this game than displaying this kind of mentality? I’m not sure. I for one would, however, climb a mountain and watch the sunset with all other classes rather than stand in the muck with them.

Edited for a few glaring spelling and grammar mistakes

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