As Ian Bryce Jones made abundantly clear in his essay about the "iterative design" model of early-access games, players often react, erm, poorly to developer updates. For games that are still in active development, even the addition of more mechanical nuance is bound to produce complaints about how the game has been irrevocably changed. And frankly, this makes intuitive sense to me. While these iterative changes signal progress for the developer's project of game-making, they often force players into a position of "re-learning" how to play the game effectively. To many players a developer update is not an addition but an overwriting of pre-existing rules and mechanics. The player-side attempt to defy patches and recreate the habits that older versions of a game enabled - what Jones terms "preservative labor" - speaks to a certain comfort in consistency and stability of knowledge that is disrupted with every new mutation of a game.
So what about games where this kind of nostalgic re-enactment isn't possible? The aforementioned design style that situates a game as a constant work in progress brings to mind multiplayer games and the phenomenon of "balancing," where developers release periodic updates intended to tweak the stats of characters, weapons, or abilities in order to make competitive play fairer. Because Blizzard's team-based FPS Overwatch is never far from my thoughts, this was my framework for thinking through the meta-cultures built around developer updates and the ire they provoke among the player community. Overwatch is a prime example of a multiplayer game under perpetual revision. A full two years after its release date, the game has been patched over 70 times - these patches account for innumerable "nerfs" (making a character weaker) and "buffs" (making them stronger), new game-modes and maps, and the post-release addition of 8 more playable characters to the game's initial roster of 21. These developer updates are generally big news in the player community because they dictate which characters gain or lose viability for competitive play. When you account for the fact that most competitive players stick to one or two "mains" (characters they routinely choose in play, due to a level of comfort/proficiency with that character's ability set), character tweaks are often received as oddly personalized offenses against subgroups who align themselves with specific playable heroes. One need only look to the repeatedly vocalized strife of players who main Mercy (a healing-focused character who has undergone countless nerfs in developer updates) to understand the personal stakes that players have in their favorite characters. And because the multiplayer nature of the game requires that all players use a standardized iteration of the game's software, these are not changes that one can opt out of or revert. Character changes are mandated, and there are no preservative practices to resist them. Once-familiar characters become alienated from the players with the strongest bond to them, and players who consider themselves specialized experts with a certain hero must "relearn" them. Sometimes it's not just a character's numbers (total health, damage dealt, etc.) that is changed in a patch, but the very mechanics that mark their specificity as a distinct hero. Several of the game's characters have been "reworked" in such a way, fundamentally altering how people play them and positioning these new versions as functionally new characters that have permanently replaced the old ones.
This sort of surprise re-shaping of the game and its characters is often protested as unwanted or done poorly. Jeff Kaplan, the game's lead developer and harbinger of all updates, has become symbolically tethered to this ceaseless barrage of changes, and frequently appears in memes as a capricious god delighting in disfunction. Often, the perceived will of the developer is inflected through a lens of divine or paternal sadism, reflecting a slangy obsession with "killing" characters or punishing players in some way. Though it's all good-natured - an extensively rehearsed in-joke about the fickleness of a development team that giveth and taketh away - there's some real frustration that's exorcized through the maintenance of this developer meta-fiction. It's even baked into the game as an expected reaction - D .Va, a geeky, game-savvy hero in-fiction, yells "Nerf this!" when she releases her ultimate attack, mirroring via defiance the discontent often expressed towards developer changes (how ironic that this move has, in fact, been nerfed). And the discontent makes sense. With each change forcing players to reconsider their own knowledge of the game, it's easy to write off these updates as definitive proof of the game changing for the worse. Nobody likes to feel alienated from a character they have a mechanical, habitual, or otherwise personal connection to, especially considering the work that Blizzard puts into providing each hero with a personality, history, and motivation that distinguishes them as "characters extant in a world." Irreversible changes often connote violence against not only the established characters themselves, but against the players who are suddenly thrust into a position of unfamiliarity and humility.
The very act of balancing, in seeking to make the game more fair, always seems to come across as the opposite, even verging on authoritarian. At least initially, anyway.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a really interesting and important discussion to be having in the realm of competitive multiplayer games. In most of the multiplayer FPS games I have played, the issues of nerfing and overpowered weapons have always been central to player discussions. One particularly salient example is the Model 1887 shotgun in MW2, whose laughably long range was reduced drastically after one of the game's earliest patches, However, decisions to nerf weapons and abilities in games are definitely not always this obvious, as extremely fine-tuned and constantly updated games like Overwatch demonstrate. Often, the player experience is complicated by the fact that if one method is "OP", it's an easy way to perform strongly in the game that comes at…