Originally Posted by Phades

Let me use an example im a bit more familiar with than the swg one you provided. I avoided that game personally, no fault to those that tried to of course. For the first ~6 months of planetside people began noticing problems with the balance of weapons between the 3 different factions. (I dont know what happened prior to that time, as i was not in the beta) There was also one side that was consistantly losing every day, which indirectly supported this sentiment. Later the player base basically proved that their weapons were mathmatically inferior based around the mechanics of the game. While this occured the representative of the development team in more than one instance stated that the game is as intended and that our numbers were wrong. Although it didnt explain why near stationary targets could begin to move and outrun projectiles that were supposadly faster than their max speed.

The development team, as the game reached month 7, began "small changes". By this time the community began to shift away from the "weaker" team or quit altogether due to frustration and the dislike for a monthly fee as their game cards expired. These changes did not address the basic and fundamental game issues causing the problems, while at the same time began adding spins on content. Each side began to have more flavor and diversity with the performance of vehicles and they added more vehicles. Unfortunatly, when adding these new vehicles and doing some small fine tuning to the weapons, created situations where the weapons could not strike a target that it was intended to counter. The projectile simply did not fly far enough, this was partly due to the guidance mechanism for it, which was causing the initial speed problem. The thing had problems (even visually) tracking a target while changing elevations. There were other problems within the elevation changes that caused high speed ground based travel to incur damage while even making the slightest changes in elevation. This was otherwise known as unarmored units dying while walking down stairs, but could jump from the roof of a building and live. They continued to make bandaid changes to reduce the bad side of the effects while not addressing the real issue of the elevation code. Many times breaking other aspects of the game while making these adjustments in "small changes". The game prediction code also had issues with high speed objects that changed elevation rapidly causing many different warping effects, which was not addressed for around a year and still only used a work around to fix it and still existed in other areas of the game. There were many other oversites such as over powered combinations working towards the primary playstyle of the game defeating all others for different reasons, in addition to flavor mechanics creating artificial crutches on weaponry over distance and the weaponry class was designed to operate at a distance competing against others of the same class. These things were also brought up by the community and largely ignored for many months. There were even basic damage to clip to time spent reloading calculations that went ignored for months or longer in some cases close to a year, with the little changes still leaving it sub-par after it was addressed.

Months would pass while many issues were ignored or only given a band-aid, while the development team (who many of the lead designers were continually cycled out to other jobs) continued to release buggy and incomplete content, some of which was pay for content. Durring the testing phases, most of the problems and bugs were found from the player base and would continue to be problems for months to a year or more before it wold be addressed. Many of the changes ended up being word for word suggestions for a fix from the playerbase, but unfortunatly many of those people who were working for change ended up moving on from the game long before the changes came to be. This is the problem with "small changes".

Things such as changing the mechanic of the melee animation in conjuction for the timing of skills and movement is something that would require alot of reworking of the basic game functions and could likely cause some unintended side effects. Changing the refresh time on enchantment spells is not something that would require alot of reworking. Setting the value for remove all enchantments upon effect from 1 to 0 is not something that would require alot of reworking. Doing both internally and reviewing the ability to heal versus the ability to damage then implementing other fixes to compensate would take some time, but is not on the same level as the first example. Addressing a fundamental issue of unlimited reuse and redundancy of skills is something very basic to the core of the game, but needs to be changed, opposed to making a bandaid fix that would limit just one spirit out at a time in the same area of effect and would most likely require more coding to sort out all the contingencies. This would be instead of changing the values of the refresh times for the skills that make the afore mentioned skills potentially abusive. In reality both probably need to occur, but doing one then evaluating the change then doing the next is acceptable opposed to the long silence and possible change after the community has splintered or moved on.