Guild Wars

[Navaros]

FRICKING IWAY TEAMS that would get owned easily by any decent team with a brain.

That's exactly the point I was making earlier. Despite the fact that IWAY teams would get owned easily by any decent team with a brain, IWAY has been directly nerfed at least 5 - 10 times to appease those who complained about it. But after each nerfing, most people still loved it because it's the only build that a PUG without hardcore third party voicechat could run. So they kept using it despite the nerfings. Then the complainers kept complaining and the devs nerfed 8vs8 to 6vs6 (which is like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face) just to get rid of it.

The "stale" exsuse to justify unnecessary nerfings comes up a lot. Any game that needs to drastically change & warp the rules from one week to the next in order to not be "stale", is not a worthwhile game to begin with.

[TevashSzat]

What really pissed me off by it was that it had no really good basis. All it really gave you was insane health regen and armor for like 10 secs when you had lots of dead teammates which by that time the game is basically over for your team anyways. If they had a reliable way to kill of their pets it might have been a mediocre build, but still they would have had trouble against any other build.

IMO, gimmicky builds are nerfed because they simply makes the game less fun. The people that originally came up with the build probably had lots of successful so everyone started copying the build, but they can't pull the build off and before you know it, all you see is the gimmiky build just destroying the game for anyone who can't be a part of that build.

Was just playing for 15 min last weekend and noticed that quickshot was nerfed too....sigh. They turned an elite skill that was already only usable under very special circumstances and skill shots into one that has no benefits under any circumstances

[Crandaeolon]

Over-usedness is sometimes a good reason for nerfing. Relative balance also differs between game modes and skill level of players. Take IWAY, for example. It wasn't imbalanced at high levels of player skill; the imbalance was lower. Crap IWAY teams could pretty much always defeat other crap teams, which forced the other crap teams to switch to IWAY or lose. Nav's comment proves my point:

[IWAY is] the only build that a PUG without hardcore third party voicechat could run.

Indeed, it was pretty much the only build that a PUG could run. They couldn't win good teams, but they could roll mediocre or bad teams. This resulted in Tombs filled with IWAY teams. It's the very definition of degenerate, or stale, gameplay when 9 out of 10 teams you encounter use the same build.

I didn't mind good IWAYs, the best of them were actually good players and the games were hectic and furious. It's the vast hordes of dung IWAYs that were the problem.