by TigerKnee on Fri Feb 15, 2013 9:22 am
Incidentally, I think the example given in the post about "changing gun sound effect = players are happy, gun was fine all along! Players were just whiny and there was no reason to change the gun's stats!" to be a really bad example.
Normally when this happens, the gun itself may have not changed that patch, but the situation around it (or the "Meta", so to speak) has changed which now makes the gun viable to use.
As an example, consider a "soft" weapon weakness chain of
Pistol > Rocket Launcher (our "Sound effect was changed gun" for this example) > Shotgun > Pistol
And let's say this chain isn't obvious. Players might have gravitated towards Pistol for whatever reasons that might not be known to them. Therefore, tweaking the RL's numbers tend not to help, because unless the numbers are tweaked so high that it becomes overpowered, it will always be at a disadvantage through the properties of being a Rocket Launcher weapon.
Now let's say a month later, you do the patch that changed the RL's sound effect but also have a bunch of other changes. The pros developed a shotgun strategy that is really really effective and now everyone wants to use a shotgun. To counter the shotgun, people now turn to the rocket launcher, and now the RL gets used where it didn't before.
You guys would go "Look, there wasn't a need to change the RL stats all along!" but well, that's wrong. If everything else had remained the same, it wouldn't be an acceptable weapon. The enviroment changed and thus it became viable.
Man that's really rambly.