Continuing with the random flash games, Kingdoms CCG recently did rebalancing. “The goal was to remove the tiers and the associated power gap between Heroes to create a much more versatile and interesting meta game and battle experience.” This means that the free heroes got better and the heroes you might have bought with the RMT currency were nerfed. On some changes, you might argue about whether it was a “nerf,” but it was definitely a significant change, like turning an AE buff into a stronger single-target buff. Oh, and “The Hero Trade In program will no longer be available after this update.”
League of Legends does this sort of thing, but so far only with a few of its dozens of champions, and there will be a few with similar functions, and it is rare to completely change the role of a champion. Also, you probably bought most of your champions with the in-game currency rather than the RMT currency. Also also, they did not explicitly establish tiers of champions, make the higher tiers more expensive, and then eliminate the tiers.
While I have played some Kingdoms CCG, I don’t really have skin in the game. I had a tier 3 hero, but I used the RMT currency you receive free in-game. The rebalancing included resetting all achievements, and earning them now awards some of that RMT currency, and they removed grind, and they added free rotating heroes like the LoL champions, so this is an almost unalloyed good for me in the game, except for needing to grind achievements to unlock things I already had access to and changing my favorite hero’s abilities into something I like less.
But that is a heck of a thing to do to players who are your revenue source. How do you expect people to trust you enough to spend money after you do something like that? It’s like a tiny little NGE.
: Zubon
While it sucks losing stuff, it’ll probably help the longevity of the game. It allows new players to actually participate in the game more without giving up when they see that it’s essentially “pay to win” to buy a hero. The number of people they lose will probably be made up for the number of people they retain by having a more level playing field.
Frankly, with two exceptions (out of ten-plus MMOs I’ve played), -every- single time I’ve quit an MMO, it’s been over “major” rebalancing. And I believe that sort of rebalancing is far more likely to alienate happy current players than it is to bring in new ones.
It’s pretty basic marketing: it’s invariably cheaper to retain a happy customer than to attract a new one; people who are currently playing are probably “happy,” or they wouldn’t still be playing.
So -maybe- a revamp will help keep a few players who were on the verge of quitting, but it’s doubtful that number will compensate for those it drives off.
My thoughts exactly. Kingdoms drove me away long time ago and that kind changes wouldn’t bring me back. More than this – it shows me, that I can’t trust this guys, because whatever status quo they made now, it can change any day, leaving me on cold ground. It’s not like redoing dervish in GW1 by Anet, when they took the risk and actually pull it off quite nicely. But they did it on different basis, not cutting down existing meta game. Bad choice is a bad choice.