Don't Fix What's Not Broke

Valve has fucked CS:GO up several times, but has fixed their mistakes right away each time. You can say what you want about the skins and how it's impacted the game as a whole, but the mechanics and gameplay itself is still pretty solid. They even added commands to allow bhopping on private servers just recently.

Now Gabe Newell is just one step to jail because of their gambling faggot shit.

Bhopping in CS:S and by extension CS:GO was never truly removed, but it has definitely been severely gimped since the early CS:S days. While it did break the map times when it was fully in the game, the removal of bhopping took away a lot of the movement skill from the game.

Valve has been against the gambling since the very start. It's only recently that they're actively taking down gambling sites, however.

Civil cases don't end in jail time though.

sage

But pokemon, Final Fantasy, etc showed you can make new games by adding features and improving on the formula. This thread is about when devs alter features that ruin games.

how do you decide whats an improvement and whats fixing or merely changing?

Did it improve the game? Then its an improvement, fixed or changed for the better.
Did it make the game worse? Then its a feature, fix or change for the worse.

im sorry i dont expect a real discussion to come out of this

That's unfortunate.

Not exactly a sequel and the game isn't even out yet, but the Nioh Alpha was a fantastic game with some very cleverly balanced and well designed mechanics that rewarded skill and encouraged improvement, while clearly and fairly punishing mistakes in a way that showed where you went wrong and altogether every fight felt engaging and tense and even played like an old school samurai film.

The Alpha came with a feedback survey, and it was jumped upon by several factions of people; those that saw it as a 1-1 Souls clone, tried to play it as such, and demanded changes rather than adjusting to the new game, those who saw the game as purely a Ninja Gaiden successor who couldn't deal with the more patient approach and RPG mechanics, those who simply couldn't handle the base difficulty and mechanics and complained rather than use the many options already in the game and enjoy improving their skills, and the few people who played the game for a decent length of time, saw where they were going with it and loved it for what it was.

Then because of all the complains on the survey, the Beta nerfed and changed many of the core mechanics and enemies, stripping a part of the game's soul and identity away, with no option to even change the game back to the way it was. All thanks to people who died on the first few enemies and gave up before even truly exploring the game, and then instead of just playing something else they selfishly demanded changes to ruin it for those that enjoyed it. It's a shame the game's still a ton of fun too.

Holy shit everyone cried about how removing prone and jets from Battlefield would kill the game, but it actually made the game infinitely better. All they had to do after that was remove snipers after that and it would have fixed everything.

Instead they put it all back in for BF3 and the series just went right back to sucking dick. Oh well, another BC2 will come around someday.

Some people thought the SupCom economy was too complicated, even though all it really did was change the way it displayed resources to the player. That proved too much for some retards however, and SupCom 2 paid dearly for it.

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At the very least, I can name one game that completely fucked itself up with a balance patch, and that's Plain Sight. Basically, everybody's a robot ninja flying around in a low-gravity environment trying to kill each other with swords. As you killed people though, your character got bigger and slower. At any time, you could self-destruct and take people with you for more kills, else they'd steal your size if they slayed you.

One patch, they decided to put a minimum kill limit on self-detonation. Instead of just making it a flat value or something, you had to score a certain number of kills on your own or some shit. Which meant if you stole somebody else's size, you were stuck as an enormous robot with almost no mobility and expected to chase down one of the midgets flying at light speed around you. Games either snowballed or went nowhere because nobody could get any kills unless they started the match well.

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I'm confident Nioh will still be very good in spite of the changes they've made, but I do wish they kept it the way it was in the Alpha.

To be honest, that only makes it worse. While I enjoyed the Beta in spite of itself, people shouldn't have to settle for a stripped down version of the game, and many Beta fans don't even know what the old game was like. The entire time the Beta was reminding me of how it used to be because it constantly shows they were unable to redesign it with the new system in mind. Despite so many people enjoying it the way it was and it only needing slight tweaks in explaining mechanics or something, they threw things out instead of objectively looking at the feedback and the people that actually played the game to see that most of their problems are their own doing. I mean, just watch this recent video, nothing actively stops this guy mashing buttons and when he dies he doesn't learn anything or even try to learn. They're selling the game on being hard, having great combat depth and being authentically Japanese in setting and feel. They then decided to take huge steps back in all three of those, except for keeping the setting itself intact (even if the combat lost it's authenticity) and if people wanted the game for that, they would get it regardless of how hard or deep it is.

-Introduction of flying mounts in WoW

Ruined community because nobody was moving on foot and meeting other people but everyone was just flying around at 380% speed in air not even seeing other people. (THIS WAS MAINLY REQUESTED BY CASUAL SCUM)

-Class homogenisation

Basicly some faggots were crying that they werent getting brought to raid because they were playing a shit class so Blizzard did homogenisation that made every class behave almost the same and give out same buffs/debuffs.

Truth is those casual scum werent getting invited to raids not because their class was shit as they claim but because they were leeching cunts who were asking for smoke break every 15 minutes on progression night.

every single time

What? How did flying mounts ruin the community?

You walk on foot from City1 to City2

You have to follow the path and meet other players that are either doing quests or PvP.

You fly from City1 to City2

You meet nobody and since you dont meet anyone you have 0 interaction

I think there is a Kungen video that explains it better than me prob

The only people who bitched about stacks were leddit casuals, with hit & run cavalry tactics + catapults/cannon/artillery any stack would be so damaged it couldn't do any real damage to your core cities, and if you're not simply a retard going for "LMAO look at my canal cities guys so fun XDD" and actually plan your settling attacks on your outer cities should wipe out half of any AI's stacks before falling, if not more.

Unless you were on RP servers, trust me when I say that ultimately, no one gave a flying shit about other people.

Warcraft has pretty much always been get to the end game content as fast as possible.

Arguably Hotline Miami 2.
Got rid of random weapon spawns along with good map design for the most part which ruined the pace and flow of the game.

Bullshit, flying mounts were one of the many things that removed any connection with the community. During vanilla I actually build up a friends list, nearing the end of TBC and beyond that I never added anyone to the list ever again. You actually go to know the people on your server and recognized names, later on everyone just turned into a faceless blob

Minecraft is full of these. Terrain generation that caused glitches, but made much more interesting worlds. Piston Translocation glitch that let you make fast and easy elevators, and a fuckton of other things. They're planning on removing the Furnace Minecart now, which is glitchy and broken but could actually be fun if they fixed it.
I'm tempted to say THPS has some of these too, but I can't think of any.

THPS in general never did until THPS5
THPS1 to THPS4 expanded in every direction

Don't forget tagging from 1.6 where if you hit somebone once you were almost guaranteed a kill and also the fact that you could spam through thick walls, CS:S improved on that quite a bit, now it is near impossible to do in CS:GO

Brawl wasn't panned but it dealt a serious blow to Sakurai's ego and set the stage to the longterm and lukewarm reaction to Smash 4. By the time Brawl came out, Melee was still as popular as ever and a popular EVO game at that. He couldn't wrap his mind around SSB being a fighting game which is why he added tripping and other things. Then once Project M's popularity and capabilities grew he had no choice but to embrace the competitive side of SSB, which is arguably the majority of SSB's diehard fanbase. And Smash 4 at this point is nowhere near the level of popularity that Melee or Brawl had post-release.

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There were a lot of people that complained EverQuest got too casual and that had killed it, so in Vanguard, McQuaid made travel difficult and made quests require grouping and various other things they players cheered on as 'fixes' and they demanded more. Then it launched and everyone suddenly realized they hated these things and he had to make emergency changes to make it casual like adding teleporters and making group quests optional.

Doom 3 was a total disaster. Doom 4 was a better Doom game in absolutely every way.

Doom 3 made so many terrible changes to what people loved about the originals just for the sake of being a tech demo, it's kind of astounding.

Yeah, nah.

What changed from the Alpha to the Beta?

Descent 3
The Descent games are 6DoF shooters, meaning you could fly in any direction regardless of the position of your ship. Descent 1 and 2 made full use of all kinds of 3D possibilities in their level design, which trumped even most contemporary FPS games. The levels were tight and small, not only due to technical limitations, but because a small space, loads of enemies which shoot loads of projectiles, and the ability to move in any direction encouraged the player to think creatively about how they'll approach any given situation.

However, many players (scrubs) thought the tight geometry was unfair and that they should be a lot larger in order to accomodate your movement abilities. That's essentially what happened in Descent 3, where levels were largely large open areas instead of tight 3D labyrinths. For multiplayer this approach was kind of alright, but the singleplayer suffered greatly. Where once you had to constantly take in account the level layout, now most fights are reduced to endless circlestrafing. To make matters worse, each enemy had more HP as opposed to enemies in D1 and D2 usually dying in one shot or two (if you could land a shot), and the once groundbreaking AI simply couldn't make full use of its capabilities with this new direction in level design.

Bullshit. In vanilla you cared about other players. You formed rivalries with the other faction (even on PvE servers, fucking faggots stealing my quest mobs) and you made friends with your faction. Being well known and liked on your server was a huge boon since it got you (and your alts) into guilds, raids, dungeon runs, PvP matches and gave you lots of clients for your tradeskills.

Flying mounts didn't exactly kill all that, but it hurt it a lot. What killed the community was the cross realm dungeon finder. Other players suddenly went from "people" to "annoying NPCs with bad AI".

Anyways here's some of mine:

Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? Sure FFT didn't reward you or punish you for a lack of diversity in your builds, but FFTA went full fucking retard
FF5 had gotten it right. And then in FF6 you had to constantly swap espers around (even worse if you cared about your lvl up bonus), in FF7 they changed it so you didn't have to swap shit around every 10 fights but there was basically no customization for your characters and FF8. I'm not even going to type it.
Diablo 2 had a problem where 99% of builds were enough STR/DEX for gear and sometimes block cap, rest in VIT. And then we got D3. Fuck you Jay Wilson. Fuck Blizzard.

Mass effect's everything from 1 to 2

I don't have the article (I think it was on gamespot) but the reason Descent 3 was such a clusterfuck, was because they went from a ~8 man dev team to having 20 people. Basically it suffered from poor project management because noone could tell the other guy to focus on A instead of B. Descent 3's art direction for example is alllllll over the place, there is nothing really unified about it. I think the only thing that saved it was the multiplayer and the map editor.

Age of Mythology - dramatically decreases population cap due to town center mechanics and limited number of houses

Dawn of War 2: Who cares about basebuilding anyway, we can have mobas!

Those glitches were the fucking best. A friend once set up a castle directly next to a cliff that glitched out into casting a shadow of eternal darkness, so it was spawning monsters 24/7

you are either trolling or just stupid.

The problem with that is it went from doom stacks to doom carpets which are more annoying because instead of just having a ton of units in one tile you have hundreds in every tile around so instead of actually fixing the problem they just spread it out and caused more problems in the process.

In the Alpha, if you took an action you didn't have Ki for, you would be Ki staggered, instead of having to be hit into it. Therefore the Ki management was actually real and encouraged proper Ki Pulsing and long term planning (sprinting was important for example), but you knew in advance what the dangers were and would get punished there if you made a bad move, rather than being able to mash (usually swinging before the enemy), and only knowing you get staggered when hit, which would feel unfair for beginners. Since it affects both of you it made fights really tense and have great moments where you're both tired trying to make the next move first. In some cases it was randomly still in the Beta for enemies which made no sense.
The second big change was that you always faced the enemy when running, whereas before you had to walk, dodge, or hold your guard up. This made movement and positioning pivotal, emphasizing that explosive samurai-esque approach along with the Ki mechanics, and making rear attacks important as well as guarding your back. It also allowed you to aim attacks better in crowd situations if necessary. Changing that makes circlestrafe plague the game like so many others, and nothing is properly designed around it making it far too abusable.
Durability was another thing removed, mainly because people didn't know how to handle it when it was actually there in a game, but it was important to push the loot economy, balance and vary equipment, made more varied enemies possible, meant you actually used both weapons and had to be prepared for long fights, but wasn't overly oppressive and gave a fair punishment.
Last but not least, there was a health reduction on all enemies, letting you cleave through many without properly learning combat until it's too late, and letting you brute force it anyway. Many fights end up anticlimactic and not as fun as they should be, like Nurikabe. They die too fast to be engaging.

The Beta had many other changes to skills, UI and way more content which makes it look better on the outside, and indeed some of those changes are for the better, but many changes were very bad for the game itself, and some very necessary changes weren't made at all, and still don't seem like they will be, even in the most recent change list. I find it telling that the "solution" to people having "problems" managing their inventory was to increase the carry limit, when all it will do is make things worse since they simply didn't offer equipment until they couldn't carry any more, and then they felt forced to sort through all of it.

Anyway, I picked up a really handy webm a while back that showcases the main changes in one go.

FFVI's system was ok, I think the idea was choosing between having a wide variety of magic or focusing on particular stats, but the game was easy anyway. FFVII has a ton of customization with materia, it's just the characters themselves that aren't so unique aside from limit breaks, although they do go a long way. And I don't wanna get into FFVIII but it was alright really, just a little misguided in some ways but at least it tried something different to find use for those spells you didn't use..

They 'should' have copied Panzer General for the hex based combat.

Doesn't Panzer have radically different deployment rules compared to Civ?

Also managing a stack of 20 units is easier than managing 20 individual units. It made the game tedious.

These are good answers.

You've never played it? I strongly recommend you do (ideally Panzer General II, this was back in the days sequels actually expanded and improved things usually). You had units you deployed at the start of the battle, but it could be worked into Civ. I'm not saying a like-for-like copy-pasta would work but… it's hard to explain, I just woke up. There's even open panzer general you can play in your browser, you should really try it and you'd see what I mean.

this

tony hawk eventually went the direction of more and more moves until it hit a point around american wasteland where there were just too many, and it was easy to accidentally do the wrong one and fuck yourself over

so with thps hd and thps5 they tried to go back to basics, and lost all the improvements that were made to the engine in thps4/underground. the problem was they stripped out too much, and what was there was remade from the ground up into this jerky, uncontrollable mess of a game.

i actually bought thps hd, Holla Forums. am i going to hell?

I kinda played some of it here and there on PC and DS. I didn't know all the maps were predeployed affairs.

Biggest, most devastating change in a single game brought on by community whining was probably moving from Soul Level to Soul Memory matchmaking from DaS to DaS2.

This was supposed to fix the "problem" of players staying at a low level, fully gearing up, and then invading low-level ungeared players and destroying them. But this meant that you could no longer stay in a specific PVP tier, and every lost soul or consumable spent was just ticking you up towards fighting higher and higher level players.

Obviously this failed spectacularly, and they then went back to Soul Level matchmaking in DaS3, while also putting players into "tiers" based on the highest level upgrade they've put on their weapon, which the twink problem (twinks can now only invade other twinks), and doesn't needlessly punish you for losing souls (the souls lost is the punishment).

I never understood why Soul Memory couldn't have been dynamic. Basically, use whatever stats and equipment you currently have on you for matchmaking.

Burnout is dead to me user.

Honestly, when you think about it, having matchmaking be based on weapon upgrade level as well as Soul Level is such a simple but clever idea it's amazing they didn't think of it first. The only thing they did wrong was make it so that it counts the upgrade level of weapons even if you don't have them in your inventory. There's still a slight danger of upgrading beyond the other players in your area, and that would fix it easily since you could just store the weapon and use other ones.

What's wrong with takedown cameras?

This has to be the most grievous case of fixing something that wasn't broken I've ever experienced. I remember timing how long it took for me to do a regular battle against common, fodder enemies. Fifteen fucking minutes. Completely unacceptable.

the fact that it rips control away from the player, and for around 3 seconds of ingame time your car is controlled by an ai racer that can do dumb shit, like steer you to face a pillar in an underpass. you cant actually crash in the takedown camera, but it can set you up for a crash easily, and often does.

you ever walk buy some rando, notice he's having a hard time, and start buffing or healing him, or even attacking the monster with him?

because I've done that in a few games and I totally get what he means

what about a modded rom?

it was only troubling if you were not autistic enough to appreciate it

the real problem with 8 is there are all of 3 enemies where using magic of any kind is a superior strategy to just hitting it with junctioned strength

Not a case of something being considered broken by the players, but definitely a case of a change for the worse:

Homeworld - > Homeworld 2
They removed the physics engine completely (Homeworld 2 is entirely scripted, no physics at all) and it completely destroyed the fun of the game. I was never really able to pin it down on anything specific about the physics engine that made Homeworld 1's combat more fun than Homeworld 2's. I think it's a lot of little things that just added up together.

You could expand the homogenization out into a full essay really, the goal to get us to bring "who we want" was more a problem of the game's basic designs (nobody wanted to re-roll to be a class they didn't like ESPECIALLY having to gear it up) and that just kept ruining everything they more they tried to make it work.

That said, I played on a PVP server and I assure you flying mounts made 0 changes there. You want to make friends and be social? You learned real quick to right click, send whisper, chat. You want to dismount and help them? Make sure you're on your A game because you could be dead in a moment here. Looking for people to run content with you? Meeting people in the world did not help this anymore than making friends normally would so no difference there. Most friends I made, and this went the same for friends too, was through dungeons/raids/quests or outside sources such as word of mouth or RL or whatever. You had to land eventually, and you were never safe parked in the sky. Well not in BC or WotLK anyway, I quit at the start of Cata because I'm smart enough to know when I'm unhappy and dumb enough to think that'll get better "in time". So if that changed over time, I'd imagine it has less to do with flying and more to do with:

-Dungeon queues from cities/anywhere
-PvP queues from anywhere (and xp to encourage shitting it up and getting carried through your levels)
-common core raiding
-essay worthy homogenization damages
-still no real solution to the lack of tanks/healers (or rarely dps)

The time limit in Dead Rising.

Sometimes it's worse than crashing, like when the AI drives you straight into a fairly broad wall but you don't crash because of the invulnerability, and then you're at a dead stop behind a wall and lose more time wiggling out from behind it and getting back up to speed than you would from the respawn.

Are you referring to the move from DR1 to 2, or from 2 to 3? Because I heard 3 gives you so much time that the time limit may as well not exist.

Things that CS:GO fucked up:

It greatly increased player acceleration and shrank hitboxes, making it way harder to properly hold angles and makes it far less rewarding to come to a full stop in combat. This rewards raw aim, but greatly diminishes decision making, experience, and deliberateness. It removed Russian walking/ crouch hopping, which was annoying for newer players, but gave more options for deliberate peeks and checking over boxes. Air control was greatly decreased, also removing a lot of options for baiting out shots. Wall banging and tagging have both been nerfed. When coupled with the acceleration, it's way harder to punish stupid peeks. Recoil patterns are smaller and have only one pattern per gun, but there is a massive amount of rng. This makes it easier to learn, but impossible to master. The AWP can't peek aggressively anymore and quick scoping is way less reliable. This hasn't removed its usefulness as a weapon, but it's made the weapon far more passive and less fun to use. Maps are more cluttered, so it's harder to make people out at times. The game is also horribly unoptimized because of said maps. Directional sound is fucked up. This isn't fully valve's fault since 1.6 benefited from a technology that valve licensed from a company that later got sued into bankruptcy, meaning that valve can't use the same system in a future iteration of the game.

There are other things that people might list (overpowered pistols, even sided maps, ect), but I've actually grown sort of fond of CS:GO's economics and every round counting, so eh.

An obvious one are the physics in Worms games. It's not like the core community thought the physics from W{2,A,WP} were bad, but most casuals did and all games afterwards became complete unpredictable messes.

Opinion discarded.

the control scheme from men of war 1 was fucky but i find men of war 2 unplayable

they also made the physics engine a lot less interactable, but this makes the game feel lifeless

Probably means 2 to 3, I haven't played 3 but I heard the same thing and 2 kept the time limit pretty much intact.

My guess is that it never crossed their minds. This was, after all, the team that decided tying i-frames to ADP was a good idea.

I think it's likely we'll see that get patched in at some point in the future, since at least this time around they seem pretty receptive (albeit at a very delayed pace) of fixing bad mechanics.

ALL
of them (well maybe 2-3 exceptions, dota 2 and cs).

Many others.

What are you talking about with durability.
The game rained fucking whetstones at you to the point where it was just a useless 4 second delay every couple of minutes

Actually the only reason we had so many whetstones was that part with the stone soldiers that gave out 6 of them, along with having two levels to redo over and over. Besides, just having the items isn't the only point to it, you need to actually have the chance to use them, which is hard to come by in fights, especially big gauntlets like the Beta side mission, so you have to stay prepared, meaning along with all the other stuff it brought it's hardly useless. But it did not take 4 seconds to go into the menu to use them.

You're right it took less.
So every few minutes, you had to do some menuing and use an item. Totally changes the entire game bruh.
Also they had a high drop rate from barrels and other random breakables.

You want more full retard? Look no further than FFTA-2. You think the laws in FFTA was bad, at least there's ways around it. FFTA-2's law system has the laws built into the mission(so you can't change the law willy nilly) Oh..and the law only affects YOU not the AI. And what's worse, most of the laws are made with the express intention to give the AI an edge over you. The enemy's all weak against Fire? The Law forbids you from using Fire for that mission.

Yes it did. Try thinking about it a bit more and what it affects as far as decision making, equipment and enemy balance goes, rather than just taking it at face value like most people did. Besides, it must have had some effect if people were whining about it so much.