Why are people obsessed with nerfs? - Feedback

It has become a trend.

Is it goal of community to make game less fun? Or to make unused and weak items/gems/passives more fun and viable just like the strong items/gems/passives?

I would go with the answer that goal of community is to make game less fun.

For consequence that would mean that the vocal community members actually think game is more fun when there are more things nerfed, even though it doesn't change their gameplay or gameplay style in any way, but they feel it is too good to exist.

Why should there exist a cheap build that clears t1-15 with no problems if there are mirror builds that do the same? Nerf

Why should there exist an item worth few exalts that is good as mirrored ones? Nerf

Why should a skill gem exist that deals damage and is a movement skill at the same time? Nerf


This pulls another question what is the perceived game balance that everyones mouth is full of?

Is game balance when you look at your characters and you envy some builds that are better than yours but you don't want to make them cause you don't like them, or cause you don't have the currency to do that?

Or is game balance ruined when majority of players play same 5-10 builds? Maybe it is because they are actually fun and make gameplay feel fullfilling and rewarding when compared to others? Why not make other builds/skills/gems/items desirable in a same way, that would be waay more healthier diversity than getting things nerfed and on the level of undesirables.

My subjective view, while ingame, is that there are skills/gems/items that are performing well, that are underperforming compared to well performing ones and 3rd category would be specific/special skills/gems/items that can be well performing in specific circumstances.

Other people playing this game, regardless if they use well performing or underperforming items/skills/gems, they don't affect my gameplay at all. My gameplay experience is what i make of it, and not what others make of it. Well performing builds can only affect me in a way that they can close the gap that is called rng better, but guess what, there is still rng. Someone with the fastest clearing build, best items, may have the worst of luck with rng, while some turtle build may have supreme rng luck daily. So why should i again care about others? What is game balance in this terms?

I acknowledge that game balance is what developers perceive of it, but what do players perceive as game balance?

Can we ever hope to see patch notes that look like this : "skill x has been underperforming for years, so we decided to increase its area of effect/hitbox/damage/effect by zz% so it is on par with other major skills used".

During my stay on this part of forums i have rarely, like 1 in 150 responses, had seen a good reason that would say why x thing should be nerfed, everyone pulls the game balance reason without ever explaining what is the game balance to them, and how it would affect them and their gameplay directly.

If i was better with words i would write a few more pages of reasons/examples or whatever but i think this is enough. (Also remember all those nerfs done years ago, compared to now, those nerfs seem harmless and could be easily reverted, they are meaningless and forgotten, game has moved on, but lot of people seem to forget that, that in a year or two, what they wanted so hard to nerf, will be meaningless)

/rant off

edit: i should have posted this on reddit, but anything that is longer than 5 sentences and has no pictures, gets ignored /sarcasm off

Didn't read everything but i'm getting triggered when people want to do dev's job

"GGG nerf this Unique ASAP!!!!"
"[Suggestion] How to nerf this gem"
"You can't make a balanced game so i'm here to tell you how it should be"
"I know GGG won't listen to me but i keep making threads because i can't play knowing there are op items that makes the game too ez"

Are they actually serious ? Do they think GGG need random players advice on what should be nerf and what should not ? LOL

The real question is, why does GGG implement said nerfs?
And the answer is, to push the new stuff they create on old users.
"Here, have some of that new stuff, i swear it's better than the old stuff, I nerfed the old stuff."

"

During my stay on this part of forums i have rarely, like 1 in 150 responses, had seen a good reason that would say why x thing should be nerfed, everyone pulls the game balance reason without ever explaining what is the game balance to them, and how it would affect them and their gameplay directly.

Well the thing is you can't go in one direction forever. We would have to deal with billions of dps, aps closing in on 100 etc.

There are technical reason for nerfing instead of buffing other things, which exspecially in the aps scenario means less server work. You usually also don't want numbers to get too big.

And also balance is pretty simple. If something is overused it means it is either more fun or just more powerful than other things. And since gamers care less and less about fun and more and more about power it is something you need to work with.

And the other thing, there isn't a good reason not to nerf things. There balance changes are mostly when a new league starts so they don't effect existing characters, besides standard, which is only played by a tiny fraction of the playerbase.

The thing is, your opponents, iE enemies, are balanced around what you can do to them. If there is a skill that clearly outperforms others these enemies are tuned against this skill, because people can use it. Which makes the use of other skills far harder. And right now the game is way too easy in general, so buffing in general wouldn't do the trick. Having an easy game means fun for some time, but after a while it gets boring, because you just kill anything within seconds without much trouble. In the long run you want something that challanges players. This is why nerfs are at some times the better way to go, and if the overall performance is too low then buffs are better. But right now the only thing that matters basically is movespeed since almost every build clears the whole screen with a single skilluse. As soon as movespeed is the most important stat for efficiency it is very obvious that people are clearing too fast, which means you need to either buff monsters or nerf players, and since the first just creates bigger numbers, making them smaller is the better choice.

because people think too much about how other play.

nerfs are good way to balance the game...unless you want for everything to be balance around voll's discharge and maybe some others 100+ ex builds, cause when i listen to a dev interview in which he said that most op builds are used as benchmark... gg (g), and thats sad.

Hence asking for items to be more in line with other powerful meta uniques out there is in line with keeping the game fun and challenging for everyone.
Yeah you read it write "nerfs to make the game fun"

most people joining early poe were doing so for the challenge: endless grind for items, no easy crafting system, competitive game play, free for all loot.

over time ggg rightfully nerfed the gameplay to make it more accessible for less experienced users to get more funding and establish the game on the mass market.



it's a permanent fight for the threshold where the easy part ends and as you rightfully discovered, the border between both parties isn't drawn between devs always want to nerf things while all players want to buff the gameplay.

it's also experienced users who want devs to balance their game experience because they are aware that removing the challenges is destroying their fun.

A bit part of the issue is not mentioned in your post. A big reason ppl don't want builds to be able to do high end content super easily is because the economy of the game is heavily effected by the speed people can do higher content and can find high end items.

Also in a game with so much customization people want all skills to be close in power to each other so you can use the skill you like or the skill that fits your play style and still accomplish near to the same build effectiveness that every other skill can accomplish.

Obviously at this point GGG doesn't give a fuck about each skill being useful as they have continuously created new skills that are better in every way than old ones and most people would consider that a problem.

There is also the fact that people want the ability to actually make meaningful choices in the building of their character. And at the moment most of the choices are "am i going to use an OP skill/item or am i going to intentionally handicap myself for the sake of "fun"" And "whats the most efficient way to get to the life wheel by scion with this build".

Basically it boils down to people wanting to be unique but still powerful and the way GGG are doing things makes that very difficult. Except for ascendancy that added power to alot of builds but that comes with a huge slew of other issues where most players consider the game to be laughably easy now and are resorting to handicapping themselves so that they can actually feel challenged which just feels bad man.

the only people that do not want broken items/builds fixed are people that base their entire self-esteem on 'being better than other players in a video game'. being better by basically cheating (using known broken item/build)

people that want the game to remain 'a game' opposed to 'self-esteem boost' want to get stuff like CoCS, ranged vs melee and RotC fixed. with them in the game it is not a game but some kind of a joke when one way of playing is 10 times better than the other one. and it matters because ggg creates the game around the top-end (rightfully so) forgetting what a balance-mess theyve created

One view of the situation can be approached from the perspective of each of the different types of players. The playerbase is largely separated into 2 distinct groups: explorers and achievers (from bartles taxonomy of player types). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types

Explorers are looking to try out new things. When some builds have 100s of times more damage and several times the survivability of others, it doesnt promote such a playstyle. From this perspective, a smaller gap between the best builds and a mediocre build is desirable. Thus nerfing ultra-powerful things is good.

Achievers are all about having the best build possible to get the best rewards possible per hour. From this perspective, any reduction in power is seen as directly reducing their rewards... thus nerfs are undesirable.

Often achievers 'burn out' after having a optimal build for a while and transform into explorers.