Theory and Practice of Stat Nerfing Sometimes game developers and modders nerf their own creations. Typically the phrase "game balance" is stated, but usually there's no comparison between the thing being nerfed and competing options. I don't think that's coincidence. Two contributing factors Viewing the subject in isolation: Stats have meaning during comparison; one is bigger than another. That is their primary purpose, to compare and sort things out. When no comparison takes place, usually the author reduces the stat's value. Scale of stats: If adjustment of stats does not change the sorting of things under consideration, then the scale of the stat is too small. The result is the author senses that insignificant resolution and reduces the stat to the lowest value that doesn't change the sorting. What can be done? Examine first the sorting of things and choose where to place the subject in that sorted list. Then fill in the stats to make that position happen. When considering adjustments, if it doesn't change the sorting order then it's not worth doing. If in the unusual position of engineering stats, use the widest possible divisions, miles instead of inches. Got a hundred items to sort? Then the range only needs a hundred positions.
I'm gonna have to nerf everything in my mod, unless I decide to buff the enemies instead and add new and stronger ones as well. But there is a point in this, devs tend to nerf their items without any real cause or without real balancing, making nerfed items useless. This should never be the case, a nerfed item should always remain a useful possibility, maybe just narrow the gap between it and the next best thing, instead of making it worse.
While there are many factors in a weapons strengths and weaknesses and other stats I believe there is a reasonably easy way to fix over powered weapons. 1. You grab several players and have a free-for-all brawl, providing the players a random and varied assortment of weapons, 2. Give one player the possibly over powered weapon, no two players should have the same assortment of weapons, 3. Watch all of the players in battle from the perspective of a competitor; once you have done that several battles watch all of the players from a spectator view, (pay special attention to the one wielding the weapon in question) 4. Give each player a new assortment of weapons. 5. Repeat until you have found what makes the weapon too strong. Once you identify what makes it too strong you simply lower the stat by a tiny amount and repeat the given steps until the weapons performance rating matches that of every other weapon around it. Additionally you could also replace steps one and three with a situation similar to the mission "The Baron's Keep" Please let me know what you think.
That could work for MOBA games such as Strife, Smite and Paragon, where summaries can be made from large collections of combat results. Strife Smite Paragon
I was careful when making thinking up this process (took me about a minute). These could pretty much be applied to any competitive and or cooperative game. The very most important part of this process are the players you select; you must make sure that they are of a similar skill level otherwise you will get skewed results. Another option would be to pit AI against AI, although I do not recommend it.
The MOBA League of Legends has that problem with skewed results. There's a challenge set for gaining relative rank instead of moving up and down as a function of victory/defeat, there are match-ups with players who don't appear in the history lists, there are annual rank resets that indicate ranks are not an evaluation of player history or a method of sorting players into similar performance groups. Looked like an effort to arbitrate status rather than measure it, the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. So yeah, match-up selection is a significant issue and has to remain transparent for competition to provide useful measure. Without that clarity other people's motives begin to pollute the process.
One last thing I realized; you have test a potentially over powered weapon against weapons you know are properly balanced. Having another over powered weapon in the testing will most definitely sully the results.
