Last week was a pretty big one for Lord of the Rings Online. The 17-year-old MMO opened up a pair of new progression servers, introduced its second-ever hobby with birdwatching, injected some real life into its PvP scene, and gave crafters a fun coop event to enjoy. Yet almost all of that was overshadowed by a sweeping, top-to-bottom rework of the game’s Lore-master class – a rework that didn’t exactly dazzle the playerbase.
At best, the rework saw a mixed reception, with some players absolutely loving the buffs to the pet-centric line. The controversy arose when “red line” (direct DPS) Lore-masters logged in to see that they no longer had permanent pets but an array of very quick temporary summons. Even if this did result in a net DPS increase, the heavy-handed retooling of the class left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.
Of course, LOTRO is by no means the only MMO that’s had classes on the receiving end of ambitious but somewhat misguided attempts by the developers to reinvent its design. Plenty of online titles have seen updates arrive that go well above and beyond mere tweaking and adjusting of a class to tearing out its guts, rearranging it, and trying a different approach altogether.
World of Warcraft is notorious for doing this with almost every expansion. In fact, this MMO needs a full month of “pre-patch” to adjust players’ expectations and playstyles due to the radically altered nature of their characters’ classes.
When these reworks come around, they function as a huge roll of the dice on the craps table. Maybe you luck out and get a vastly improved in every way profession. But maybe you get snake eyes, and you’re stuck with a deformed build that mocks your memory of better days. It seems like the latter happens more than the former.
While in some cases it might very well be the community agitating for some class love, I’d pin most of the blame for these misguided revamps on the heads of developers who can’t help but keep monkeying around with situations that are better left alone.
So here’s the thing: Making huge changes to a class before the game’s launched is one thing because everything’s still being built, tested, and is in flux. But when it’s been many years — maybe decades — of live operation during which players have become very familiar and very attached to their characters, it becomes dangerous to suddenly decide to radically reinvent the wheel.
I’d argue that there is almost no situation that calls for this when smaller, more careful adjustments can gradually improve an underperforming class while giving players time to adapt and give feedback. This huge “all at once” effort might look impressive as part of a patch headline, but I guarantee you that such a sweeping change hasn’t been adequately tested and vetted by the playerbase. It’ll arrive, make a lot of folks upset, and perhaps leave the class in a worse state than before with no easy way to backtrack.
There’s an old proverb, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” MMO devs need to stop “fixing” things that are working perfectly fine and keep in mind the temperament of players who have become quite accustomed to their classes.
It’s as if I barged into your house and declared that I was going to rearrange your furniture to become more optimal and harmonious. No matter what I do with that space, you’ll be upset because you’ve been living there for a while and don’t want to trade that familiarity for a whole new style even if it’s better (and definitely if it’s not). Maybe I do know better about interior decorating (I don’t), but it doesn’t make it right to impose my vision over your sense of ownership.
Developers may be quite smart in class design, but they’ve also got to take a course or two in diplomacy, empathy, and humility as well. Cut it out with these “reworks” already and show a more moderate, measured hand when seeking to improve our classes.
Everyone has opinions, and The Soapbox is how we indulge ours. Join the Massively OP writers as we take turns atop our very own soapbox to deliver unfettered editorials a bit outside our normal purviews (and not necessarily shared across the staff). Think we’re spot on — or out of our minds? Let us know in the comments!
