They should constantly raise everyones abilities up – like the classes are evolving – never nerf one – make the others stronger.

Rotate the imbalance around, one month make one class stronger, the next another class, that way everyone gets to be more powerful for a bit.

I don’t know why but developers do miss out on obvious things sometimes. One time the developers of the game I was playing did a “graphical update” which consisted of dozens of hills on formerly flat landscape. Lots and lots of hills in pvp areas = death, for supremely obvious reasons. Apparently they just thought it would look cool because the flat landscape was too boring…did they listen to the pvpers? Nope. :p

Nerfing always makes players complain, after all they did invest their time and membership money on their character – devs making it less powerful annoys them. Devs shouldn’t be surpised. :p

It’s a good question. Is anybody who is in a position to know, aware of a situation where a company has considered cancellation statistics and effected change in response to them? My guess would be that it has, but it’s a rare circumstance.

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=206834

Okay druids, uncancel and go crash servers.

Everyone hated Trials of Atlantis. Everyone complained to Mythic. Mythic didn’t care. (Of course, Mythic did care, but for obvious reasons the company couldn’t send Tweety out to write an apology for the fact that the game sucked now.)

So everyone voted with their wallets and quit. DAOC has had plenty of cool content added in the meantime, even a TOA-free server, but no one who would have stayed for that content still cares, because no one plays DAOC any more.

That’s the problem with letting your customers vote with their wallets. The vote is sometimes like a real electoral vote- that is, it’s irrevocable.

Xaldin: Just no. No. Your sentiment is understandable, but even if it weren’t abhorrent to suggest we steal people’s games from them at gunpoint (force being the only real weight any government carries), there are very few situations in life that government intervention does not deteriorate.

It’s the pastime of long-time Lum readers and our ilk to accord to these virtual worlds the same gravity normally reserved for nuclear weapon summits. However, it should not be overlooked that we’re essentially discussing highly evolved versions of Monopoly.

All because you were outvoted by people who didn’t quit doesn’t mean it’s inneffective. It just means you were outvoted.”

No, actually I think I was in the majority at least on SWG and DAOC.

Problem is, even with majority of playerbase gone, nothing happens. Like I said – by the time the subscriber drain reaches the point where someone goes ‘omg we must be doing something wrong, everyone is cancelling’, it’s usually too late to fix anything, because the beancounters don’t see the point of spending more resources to fix the game since it’s already dying.

And as far as DAOC/Pendragon board story goes… well, apparently someone didn’t have enough humor as I left the board via a swing of the mighty banstick of doom, because someone apparently thought that if I’m editing a post, and an admin edits it at the same time removing something, submitting his edit before mine, that does not mean I changed the admins edit back to the way it was on purpose (hello banstick). And no, no amount of explanation helped at that point.

But that’s ancient history. DAOC *was* good fun for a good while, and I definitely got my moneys worth out of it.

All because you were outvoted by people who didn’t quit doesn’t mean it’s inneffective. It just means you were outvoted.

As one of those devs that took quite a lot of criticism with good humor, I feel it necessary to remind you that you know better.