But what if someone else has an allergic reaction to chocolate cake? Is the build-of-chocolatey-goodness fun or not? Should it be nerfed or not?
No reason to go salty if you can’t stand one sweet dish. There are many others.
Let’s not forget, many people aren’t really allergic to chocolate cake, they just want to bring up an excuse to go for the cheesiest cheesecake on the market.
Don’t get me wrong, I like some cheesecake occasionally - but I rather much prefer the subtle hints of bitterness that chocolate cake brings, balancing the flavours.
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I think everyone wants the bugs fixed. That is not up for debate, right?
It’s being taken further than that though. Dangerously so. Now the call is for everything and anything to be nerfed just because not all classes/builds can reach wave x. This is just the beginning. Now that Locks are (half) fixed, the next scapegoat will rise. My money is on Healing Hands as it is generating a stupid amount of ward right now too.
Also, it is a very small minority that play arena and even fewer who do so competitively. Ever try to get an arena LFG going? You can’t. No one plays it. So it’s the same old trap of a very vocal minority getting much more attention than they should.
MG players don’t exist apparently.
There are clicker games for people who find simply more power fun. You just click on things and you win! I highly recommend you that. And your statement would actually be true in those games.
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Just like people aren’t “really” allergic to peanuts? They’re just doing it for the attention?
Dodgy metaphors aside, some people just don’t like certain archetypes (I’m not overly fomd of minion builds) or classes but that doesn’t mean that those archetypes/classes can’t/shouldn’t be considered fun or allowed to be fun or whatever it was we were discussing.
Its SO so awkward seeing people say “bugfixes are fine” while being mad and yelling about bugfixes that the bugs being fixed nerfed their builds.
Sorry you happened to be playing (or perhaps even actively chose) the bugged class/build to play?
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EHG made the dish, they have to eat it.
I really have no sympathy they got tons of feedback that class balance has sucked for years. No one expects it to be perfectly balanced except idiots.
But even if we nerf falconer by 20%, fix all the bugs on it and warlock and runemaster, its still night and day for the majority of the classes. So yes people will still complain, because they never should have dropped 1.0 with classes that have not even completed skills.
in what world do they not finish the first classes before they made new ones?
The balance is terrible and is a really sore spot for many people.
its not like its path of exile that has 10 years of design creep.
They simply stayed in beta for a long time, and instead of staying in beta for longer to finish the loose ends, they pushed out 1.0 with classes that dont even have 5 skills or have been unchanged for literal years.
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Of course, but fun is a 100% subjective feeling.
Only you can decide what is fun for you. It’s a gut feeling. And it might not be the same every day.
I can have fun with the same build that others don’t have fun with - and performance isn’t the deciding factor.
Changing the balance is not done to lessen the fun of the people playing the overperforming builds/skills/interactions. It’s done to allow competitive people to have fun with the other 99% of the possible combinations of masteries, skills, and items - by being competitive.
I don’t have stakes in competitive gameplay in LE - I generally don’t care. If they nerf my build because it’s bad for the competitive aspect of the game, I’ll adapt. There are enough other ways to have fun with the game. I can control - to a point - my mindset and if I get upset about changes or not. This is just not an issue worth getting upset about. If I want to get upset, I watch the news or read this forum 
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Have you ever been to the forums/discord of the clicker games on Steam?
Those things are usually VERY passive about finding the mathematically most optimal way to gain power. That’s generally the entire gameloop to people.
I know, because I used to play them a ton.
They are doing what the community voted. Honestly I do not care about the fun if it comes from a bug because that will be fixed eventually and gone forever(hopefully) but if a build is strong because an item is overpowering it or something like that and they nerf that specific thing a bit or stuff the build can still be fun and you can still enjoy it later while the bugged one Id rather have them rip the bandaid as fast as possible so I can get over it asap.
Every game with a market is a PvP game.
That’s kinda the point though
Agree with OP, and the survey showed most people have same feeling. Bugs are bugs, and should be fixed. If you are dumb enough to spend your time exploiting a known bug, then you can be salty about it all you want when the bug gets fixed. Don’t care.
As for imbalance in new skills and new items, and unforeseen synergies, that’s a different thing all together. This should be in any ARPG. It makes every cycle exciting for people creating new builds, to look for new ways to make really powerful builds.
Now all those who got the nerf now is going to say, but there’s no difference. There actually is a huge difference. Exploiting a bug results in complete breakdown of the game, and case like Smoke Bombs, actually caused server instability and performance issues. So you are negatively impacting other players in a real way. Other times completely circumventing the game, eg sitting with 60k ward etc.
Finding new unforeseen synergies or ways to improve a skill, or finding a imbalance, just make the build more powerful, but still within the scope of the design of the game. Like the case with the Wraithlord. Yeah, you do a lot more damage than was intended, but it does not break game mechanics, you can still die etc.
I mean, you can get 600k ward on at least 2 other classes, its probably a bug somewhere (a simple 0 to many for example) but those aren’t a problem I guess.
I moved on from warlock basically as soon as I started using the bug as I had to get rid of 2 skills I liked using and I got bored but holy shit people are mad about warlock when it isn’t even close to the best right now(even before the fix). I think people are just salty about the leaderboards, when that wasn’t even the bug they think it was.
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So… if a bug creates 60k ward but an unintended mechanic synergizing in odd ways does the same… it becomes fine?
What’s the basic logic behind that?
You could argue that mechanical bugs cause the expectation of the outcome to be severely different then one might suspect or math out… but your argumentation has no proper basis behind it.
If something synergizes so well it behaves vastly outside of the normative range then it needs to be reigned in as well.
If it just solely is a strong build though? That’s obviously fine.
I can only repeat.
No power disparity between builds leads to a stale game.
Too much power disparity between builds leads to a broken community environment.
Both aren’t allowed to happen no matter the reason. Overbalancing is as bad as underbalancing.
I don’t care which build is broken or for what reason. As long as basic balance isn’t achieved it’s an issue.
Leaderboard.
Market changes.
Simply vast disparity pushing the ‘meta’ builds so far that a mechanically more fun build is left on the side to choose the ridiculous power instead.
All of those are situations where it affects it and it shouldn’t. Reason for the existence plays no role, the existence itself does.
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Your point?
If you don’t understand why balance is important in games, just google it. Discussing this is kind of pointless. No serious developer would ever consider leaving broken stuff in the game because “it’s fun.”
What I don’t understand is why people, EHG included, get so fixated on the source of imbalance. It doesn’t matter in the least whether something is broken because of bugs in the code or the miscalculations on the part of the balance team.
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Most of the time, it’s not exploiting but simply just a cool skill to many people. If more people knew the power was caused from a bug abuse or such that violates tos, they would less use it in fright of being in trouble. This also applies in general. Many things people don’t do, not because of morals sadly, but instead, because fear of consequences.
If anyone is thinking leaderboard for the current state the game is in, they shouldve seen they signed up for the wrong game early into release.
And if we are talking about just overperforming and people complaining about unfairness from that, that will never end. There will always be meta where builds will be heavily ahead of others. I’m sure there are so more lowkey builds in this game that is even stronger than what we see so far, just not “viral” and publicly widespread yet.
P.S. still playing my explosive ballista postpatch but definitely still plausible. Just have to play more careful and a lot slower. Warding on the other hand, needed a hotfix. Clearly not how it was intended.
A full screen explosion build was a cool idea but with the dmg you can scale to makes it pretty op for sure but that’s part of the fun for such a game. The whole point of arpgs is to hack and slash and speedrunning and grinding/mfing is a big part of that fun satisfying factor.
I’m okay with where the character is at now to balance the class but I would hope to have that same full screen play if possible which I think was the original plan for the build since egh mentioned skill without any area boost items. Hope they can make the area affix work properly with it to improve the range to help us get back that similar sweet spot of where it was previously at.
Hang on, I’m confused. What you’re saying sounds very similar to “bugged skill I was playing was OP/bugged, but it was fun so that’s ok, but the other bugged skill was clearly OP/bugged in a bad way so the fix was totes justified”. That sounds just a teensy bit hypocritical to me & quite tonally jarring compared to the rest of the post…
It was never supposed to hit the entire screen, that was rather the point & why it needed to be fixed.
No, it wasn’t.
I am agree that bugs are fun, but disagree on everything else. Its fun when you play that build, but when I play on something else… hp build for example, or not so super-crazy performing lich build. I feel dissapointment a little and some other not so good feelings. Because I know that guys making 40k ward builds with 1 m dps and I am here with my 3k hp and 100-200k may be. Thats annoying at least, and make me feel bad, I dont want to feel bad.
More than than, coz of those guys community standards for “high level monolith” rised that overpowered standards and people thinks that if I am not doing 1k so my build is weak etc