Nerfs are bad business

Degrading parts of your own product to strengthen sales in another part, is literally cannibalizing your own product. I have said this many times. There should never be nerfs. There should be counter measures made available for purchase. Put stipulations on the new weapons etc. Maybe a required battle rank ? Anything but a nerf. It only degrades your product.

But but , this thing kills us with 1 hit...

This thing takes 8 rockets to kill someone... OP
This armoured vehicle's shell takes 1 hit to kill an infantry... OP
This cam-guided missile 1 hits infantry... OP
This HIGH EXPLOSIVES round also 1 hits infantry... with it's blast radius... OP
This grenade launcher takes 2 hits to kill someone.. OP
This purple glowy crab is too fast QQ... OP
This flying gunship that is designed to combat ground and air is broken... OP
This 5-smart-missiles launcher is killing the game... OP
This high velocity lazor beam is 1 hitting my face ... OP
Grenade launchers are killing people.. they should tickle...OP
This shotgun isn't supposed to be dominate in CQC... it should be good at 1 meter ranges only..OP
This chaingun isn't supposed to do THAT much damage on my tank...uknow AP rounds...OP
Why is the prowler's shell faster than sonic... OP(Velocity nerf on lockdown reference)

I think that sums every nerf thread we got for the past year.
I can see the game having a minimum of 30seconds TTK in like , a year or so.(when it takes 4 AP round shells to kill an infantry)

I remember a time where simply being outside on the ground was dangerous due to the incredibly OP A2G ability of ESFs and Libs.

I remember a time where shotguns were better at SMGs in thier intended role. That says nothing about what NC MAXs used to be capable of.

I remember a time where nobody could use vehicles against the TR, due to ghost rocket Strikers and Vulcan Harassers.

I (fondly) remember a time where VS MAXs melted all competition before them.

But really, im glad all of that is gone.

Yeah...now we have a tepid pile of manure for a game thanks to people like you. Real glad.

Whats fun about being 2 shot in ur tank by a plane everytime you pull it?
Or having a single plane farming an entire infantry platoon cuz the rockets are so effective?
Or a VS MAX with his super man ability rushing around murdering everything?

Sure, its fun to be in the thing, but to face it...yeah, its pretty boring. Im sure no one plays a shooter game to constantly be looking at the respawn screen cuz everything is a 1 shot killer...

There is a time for nerfs, but over doing it by nerfing everything all the time like Soe has been doing..and pretty much every game company...yeah, its a bit much.

If every weapon is an overpowered OHK, does that make the game balanced?

Changes were needed, outright nerfs often not. Good example is the reduction of splash damage on virtually everything. Yes, vehicle spamming shells constantly were a problem, but that was an issue of vehicle availability and map design, not the weapon itself. SOE is rather lazy concerning balancing and chooses the easiest way to balance things, by applying outright nerfs, which is being short-sighted. Of course they were sometimes needed, but more often than not they took the wrong path.

Yeah, now everything is reasonably balanced against each other, but everything is stale, with exception to the infantry vs infantry combat. But then again, this is more subjective and just my opinion.

It's virtually impossible to handle balancing without doing something that can be considered as a nerf at some point. I mean, sure, you could buff a long chain of other items to balance out weapon X, but it'll still end up being a nerf by exclusion anyway. It would also mean a lot more work in altering items related to the items you buffed to handle weapon X. A lot of needless work just to avoid the buzz word "nerf" that would end up being moot anyway.

It's a PvP game, nerfs happen. Sometimes the nerfs can go overboard, but thinking you can get away without any is just silly. No one balances everything perfectly the first time around.

Threads and statements like these make me go /facepalm. People like you are so obviously unable to think in terms of balanced gameplay and logical reasoning it is really depressing.

New OP weapons requiring a certain battlerank? Sure, why not f*** those new players some more. This is a PVP game not some WoW RPG game. New players have to be on a relatively equal term in terms of firepower, armour etc etc. Everything else will only lead to giving new players barely a chance to survive, in turn leading to farming of new players and said new players leaving the game because, duh..., it only favours P2W and longterm players.

Nerfs are required for balanced gameplay. Some weapons are always introduced without considering some imbalances because the devs are just humans like us and make mistakes like us. Therefore said OPness can only be confirmed through in-game experience.

As Gigastar/Dualstar said it, OP weapons are never good. They are only "fun" (a dubious way of having fun imho because it's basically cheesy and exploiting) to the user, not to the receiving end, which mostly is unable to use said OP weapons due to not having the money to buy them or not having played long enough or not being on the faction the gun is available to etc etc etc.

Having a grossly imbalanced game is better for business?

I think that's the point. The concept of making something "weaker" is entirely subjective to the individual.

In the listed case of shotguns versus SMGs, the SMGs may have been in a good place against other weapons. They had, however, questionable competition from shotguns within their overlapping competency zones. Making SMGs "stronger" would mean having to re-plot them against all the weapons they were already in a good place in respect to. Impacting the shotguns was not only the easy solution but it is also the utilitarian solution. In some respects, it also put them in a more agreeable position against other weapons, the users of the said other weapons would say. The reality is, however, that shotguns are still powerful in the same situations that they were before.

In a great deal of the cases, making the difficult choice is a case of balancing priorities. Do you invest considerable time out of an already limited schedule of slower development to make some unplanned radical change and then deal with all the issues that could ensue from it, or do you make a change that is easier to plan and has hopefully foreseeable and limited ramifications? Unless things are really that broken, you will usually find lots of reason why the latter is preferred.

You'd have an unplayable game.

Every weapon requires balance; and you don't know how it affects gameplay or what that balance is until it's in a live environment.

Yes, there's testing servers, but they only give devs an idea if the weapon works or not; not how well its balanced in the grand scheme of things.

you guys don't understand the OP when someone buys a weapon and then that weapon is rendered ineffective and then another weapon pops up to takes it's place. You feel screwed over like your purchase just got stolen

a) He didn't write/word it like that.
b) As is stated in SOE legal terms of conduct, SOE has all the right to adjust the values of all content it offers via microtransactions. And said adjustments are needed if the weapon is basically gamebreaking and thereby endangering long-term-profits.

Besides, I don't feel sorry for anyone buying an obviously overpowered weapon just for its overpowerdness' sake and with the intention to abuse the farming potential of it.

If vehicles are being spammed that should be addressed separately. I miss having fear of vehicles, now you can have a squad of infantry in flak armor run around and gank vehicles way too easily. I think fighting vehicles with infantry should be something you do out of desperation, not the go-to option.

It is a complicated issue though obviously. But I am also sick of hearing people who never use vehicles complain about them. Why would you even want to play this game if you didn't like vehicles? That's the whole point of this game, a massive war zone filled with everything. I am sick of people coming to this game from infantry only games, wanting to change it to be more like those. That makes no sense to me. And I play infantry more than anything else. You should be able to kill vehicles with infantry, but it should be extremely risky and exciting.

I’ve found that usually, the infantry-only playing vehicle haters are snipers. And the reason they like the game over typical infantry-only games is that no other game gives them the space to snipe from really far distances that they can hide anywhere. But they typically die to vehicles out there. Well you can’t have it both ways, if you want the massive battle zone filled with chaos to snipe in, it is going to be filled will a lot of other things and different play styles too.

Weapons should have "autonerf". The more you kill with the more they nerf themselves.
A brand new Dalton would be as OP as when it was released.As you get medals,
its effectivemeness decrease.
Once you get that auraxium medal, it's as nerfed as today, or more nerfed.
Such system allow beginners to enjoy their weapons as much as the vets when they got them.

I just don't think that game balance should come second to avoiding making people feel bad about their weapons. I've said it before, but I don't think OPness is just a comparison to other weapons. An OP weapon is any weapon that has more pros than cons. Think of it like a scale. If weapon A has high damage and high accuracy, it also needs low clip size and high reload time. So the two sides cancel each other out. Nerfing is just adding cons to an imbalanced weapon, or reducing pros. Buffing is just the opposite, and I think both of them are needed to balance weapons, comparison to other weapons is really only to be used as a demonstration of abilities, not as a balance itself.

I think the problem is that SOE doesent know how to gently balance something. Its usually either full on crazy OP or useless.
There is no "Lets tone it down a little bit and see how it performs for a few weeks"

And when they nerf something into the ground, they leave it for some reason.
Almost like "Well, it was so OP that it doesent even deserve to be viable ever again". Yes, im looking at you ZOE and Striker.

I would like to know why the principle of balance is not followed anymore. See, when you take away one weight from left side of scale, you have to put it on the right side, until both sides have equal numbers.

This is why a nerf is a bad thing, because you didn't used the numbers, and since then the scale never have equal sides.

Yes and no. On the fields and plains between bases I would agree, as this is a typical staging ground for tank warfare. But as soon as vehicles enter an "urban" (read: base) area, infantry is supposed to have a sort of advantage. In reality all it takes is one anti-tank missile (fired from a shoulder-mounted RL) to take out a tank that has ventured into narrow streets and infantry usually have lots opportunities to do so shooting from roofs, out of windows, bunkers etc etc.