Well, in the interests of fairness...
...it should be stressed that the only people affected by the changes are folks who've been playing since open beta and the official headstart. Everyone who started playing the game on launch day wouldn't have experienced how the game was like before.
Unfortunately, those headstart folks are also likely to be the most vocal and most hardcore players...otherwise they wouldn't have been there before launch.
Of course, not everyone is unhappy with the nerfs - many folks are saying they are justified, and the game was too easy before...as JPub pointed out, in fact.
But any sweeping nerf, no matter how legitimate, is gonna cause bad publicity.
Even if I were to buy the game now and log in...I'm gonna see the official forums and in-game chat filled with unhappy players. Doesn't matter that I never played the game before, and ain't personally affected by the nerf. I'll know the game was nerfed, and I'll also know that many players are unhappy.
Cryptic has just issued a full respec (or a full retcon, in their game terminology) for all characters created before the launch patch.
But they should have done that from day one. It's nice that they responded to player demands for free respecs in a reasonably quick fashion, but folks shouldn't have had to demand respecs at all. Even a couple days later is still a couple days too late.
And it only addresses one complaint - the claim that 'my character was screwed up by this change, and I can't fix it'. Well, now folks can fix it. But they were still screwed up. It was a screwup that also came without any warning or consultation. No matter how you swing it, players are gonna be miffed about such things.
-- Acyl
...it should be stressed that the only people affected by the changes are folks who've been playing since open beta and the official headstart. Everyone who started playing the game on launch day wouldn't have experienced how the game was like before.
Unfortunately, those headstart folks are also likely to be the most vocal and most hardcore players...otherwise they wouldn't have been there before launch.
Of course, not everyone is unhappy with the nerfs - many folks are saying they are justified, and the game was too easy before...as JPub pointed out, in fact.
But any sweeping nerf, no matter how legitimate, is gonna cause bad publicity.
Even if I were to buy the game now and log in...I'm gonna see the official forums and in-game chat filled with unhappy players. Doesn't matter that I never played the game before, and ain't personally affected by the nerf. I'll know the game was nerfed, and I'll also know that many players are unhappy.
Cryptic has just issued a full respec (or a full retcon, in their game terminology) for all characters created before the launch patch.
But they should have done that from day one. It's nice that they responded to player demands for free respecs in a reasonably quick fashion, but folks shouldn't have had to demand respecs at all. Even a couple days later is still a couple days too late.
And it only addresses one complaint - the claim that 'my character was screwed up by this change, and I can't fix it'. Well, now folks can fix it. But they were still screwed up. It was a screwup that also came without any warning or consultation. No matter how you swing it, players are gonna be miffed about such things.
-- Acyl