Nerf

Nerf ® originally is a soft plastic foam material for making toys, invented by Parker Brothers, now owned by Hasbro. The idea is that if you replace the wooden toy sword, a toy classic for over 1000 years, with a nerf sword, the child is doing considerably less damage to the furniture and his little brother. Same principle for arrows, boomerangs, balls, and all other sorts of weapon-like or throwing toys.

Now imagine you are a heroic warrior in a fantasy world, and somebody sneakily replaces your magical mithril sword with a look-alike sword made out of nerf. You unknowingly attack a monster you used to be able to beat, and now you do much less damage. You barely escape with your life, cursing loudly. You have been "nerfed". Sounds like an improbable scenario, but in fact it happens all the time in MMORPG. Welcome to the wonderful world of MMORPG nerfs.

In MMORPG the term "nerf" has come to mean "diminishing the power of a virtual object or skill by the game developers". The devs aren't actually using nerf to replace your sword, but it well feels like it. Nerfs are always a result of a bad design decision. A developer designed a weapon, another item, or a character skill/power, and when the players actually use it, it turns out to be too powerful. So it gets nerfed, to balance the game.

It goes without saying that nerfs are hugely unpopular with the players. Game balance is a very abstract concept, and players find it hard to see why their magic sword has to be nerfed for the greater good of all. The human brain is built in a way that is notices the change of a quantity far stronger than the actual quantity itself. So if one guy has $100 and another guy has $1000, and some higher power transfers $100 from the rich guy to the poor guy, the poor guy notices a positive change and is happy, while the rich guy notices a negative change and is unhappy. In spite of the rich guy objectively still being better of with $900 to the poor guys $200. Nerfs are even worse, because one guy gets noticable poorer, but the profit is going to everybody and is unnoticably small.

Because of their unpopularity, developers should use nerfs a lot less often than they do now. There are sufficient examples of players leaving games because their favorite character has been nerfed. Players often take decisions in a game, some of those decisions being irreversible. So if the facts on which those decisions are based change, players might end up with a character that is actually underpowered (a.k.a. "gimped"), through no fault of their own.

Games in which nerfs are frequent acquire some other unpleasant characteristics: People start dreading the next patch. Patches are supposed to be good for the players, fixing bugs and adding content, but if every patch brings one or more nerfs, patches become feared instead of enjoyed. The enjoyment of finding a powerful new item or getting a powerful new skill is diminished a lot if your first thought is "this is good, the devs will soon nerf it". Another unpleasant result is that if nerfs happen often, "nerf wars" break out on the games message boards. Many players, afraid that they might be next to be nerfed, try to avoid that fate by pointing out how overpowered somebody elses character is. Warriors try to get mages nerfed, and mages shout for warrior nerfs. And the developers think that they are just nerfing everybody "due to popular demand".

Nerfs might be necessary in extreme cases, like obvious bugs. Or if one character class is so much more powerful than the others, that it becomes really unbalancing, because a majority of players all play the same class. But power gamers actually enjoy finding the "best" template, and it is impossible to totally balance everything, so just because something is a bit better and a bit more powerful is not reason enough to nerf it.

Unfortunately overpowered things in a MMORPG are a lot more visible than underpowered ones. In their famous defence of nerfs the Verant EQ developers said that if A is better than B, C, and D, it is sensible to nerf A, instead of making all of B, C, and D better. But they had a tendency to nerf A that much, that it actually became worse than B, C, and D. Then they nerfed B next to make it worse than A again, and the game went on a slippery slope downwards. The better method is either to decide that A isn't that much better than B and leaving it alone, or to decrease it power only slightly, so that it is still better than B, but not by such a large margin. And even more important, have a look at D, and power it up at the same time, so the average power level doesn't decrease.

I am thinking of nerfs because in City of Heroes my tanker has acquired a very good new power, Burn, which creates a patch of fire around me, dealing a good amount of damage to my close combat enemies. This power can be abused, by combining it with team members powers that hold an enemy in place. Freeze enemy in place, light a fire under his feet, walk away and watch him burn to a crisp. Now if Verant would handle this, they would diminish the damage of Burn by half or something, making the power relatively useless. But the developers from Cryptic Studios / NCSoft discussed on the message boards that they just want to nerf the interaction with holds, making Burn break the hold. Much better approach, removing the exploit without making the power useless. I hope they manage all nerfs that way. And in the patch notes there are quite a lot of items where underpowered skills were improved. It seems that now that MMORPG left the age of quasi monopoly, they are getting a lot more player friendly. Great!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:21 AM Permanent Link