If you've ever played a competitive game before, odds are you have heard PLENTY of requests for gameplay changes. Most of the time they fall on flat ears. This is because developers typically have contigency plans for how they change their games: they make it clear if they're going to fix glitches, nerf strong options, buff weak ones, and typically set some groundwork on how they evaluate the performance of their game. If you're interested in a framework, riot put out a good one here.
For most mid 2000s games, the plan was no patching. The game was done on release. Obviously this is no longer the case, but I wanted to bring up one of the first competitively balanced fan games: Project M.
Project M is a mod for Super Smash Brothers Brawl. In short, that game was not competitive, so PM sought to fix that. They redesigned the newcomers to make them fit in with fan expectations, and it was honestly a roaring success. As a competitive Ultimate player, I here to this day "I wish Snake/Sonic/Wolf was still like their PM design". They were creative, they took risks Nintendo never would, and they added some designs that would revolutionize fighting games.
Sadly PM got cease and desisted, but not before a lot of controversy. PM was meant to be a community project, and once it blew up it became hard to define that. As is Smash community tradition, A LOT of people complained about the best characters being cheap. And this is kind of where PM began to fall apart.
The creators had no idea how to deal with changing their game. At the end of the day, their games mission was to serve its community. Should they change their game to accommodate players, or preserve the designs they made?
Sadly, the decided to tear up a few characters (namely pit). They removed mechanics and it just didn't feel as creative as it once did. It'd be hard to argue the player base was even happy about it. The complainers just complained about different things on SmashBoards, and the Pit players moved on to a different game.
This is why I feel so weird about the current state of modding. PM developers obviously borrowed technical assets, but on a creative level they weren't too different from any fighting game developers. Why was the pressure exerted on them so different form the pressure exerted on modern day competitive developers? We see developers change parts of the game due to feedback, but I've hardly seen a full time developer bend for the community to the same level as PM.
To me, it's a travesty that they changed pit so drastically. It's akin to Superhot changing the time mechanics because players felt frustrated with them. When you ask a developer to change a character from the bottom up, you're rejecting their art. It's akin to asking a painter to repaint their project.
I think I'm overall proposing two major questions. How do living games and game communities set boundaries to coexist? And is this relationship different if the developers are from AAA studios, or just a couple modders on a discord server?
Man, I'm so happy you brought up PM. It's a very cool game and it is very sad the extent to which it has died out. To answer your second question, I think there is definitely a big difference between the big studio/fanbase relationship and the modder/fanbase relationship. It seems like, as was the case with PM, the fanbase for a particular mod may have a lot more sway over the creator of the mod, at least when the mod is being made primarily for the community. I think it might have to do with size and diversity of the fanbases. PM's fanbase was exclusively competitive players. So when the makers of PM get complaints about the competitivene…