I Hope The Game Doesn't Become a "Nerf-Fest".

I am seeing people call for a nerf to tanks because "it might be overpowered when everyone has unlocked it". Same for the M4. We don't even know whether or not these things are overpowered yet, and we already have people calling for a nerf.

Personally, I think nerfing overpowered weapons very often leads to a neutered-feeling game rather than making it more fun.

When Apex Legends first came out, it was an absolute blast to play on PC: Weapons that required more skill were overpowered, so when you used the SMG your opponents would sometimes have no chance against you, but failing to track someone would lead to you reloading prematurely, which would make you lose the fight. Similar story for the Revolver - very deadly in the right hands, but missing even two shots would mean it's worse than the technically worse weapons. This led to people being encouraged to use these weapons over the others, which then led to very fun gameplay. Their solution was to make longe-range fights more viable, which then took away what made this game so much fun for such a wide audience in the first place.

Then there is Arc Raiders. Venator and Burletta were objectively overpowered, maybe Venator too much. I think the solution would be to make Venator "slightly" weaker than it was, and move Burletta up a tier in rarity. That would be great for the exact reason the game was so much fun when these weapons were overpowered: You had some weapons that you absolutely cared about losing, so you were not exactly happy about dying, but also knew that you were a threat to every other loadout. You wouldn't cry about it if you lost the weapon, but it was still relatively high stakes with the dopamine dose coming from knowing that you had a good weapon. When they balanced these weapons, we lost that aspect of the game.

And, to top it off, I actually can't think of a game that benefitted from becoming more balanced. Every other game I can think of has essentially become a shell of their former selves with balancing updates.

So, a game like WarDogs will inevitably have balancing issues. On top of that, it will have weapons that are supposed to be objectively better than others. However, some players will not like that. Players will see an objective balancing issue and, instead of thinking that it might make the game more fun, they will see it as an issue that the devs need to fix. I fear that, because those players are objectively correct in a lot of cases, devs might actually listen to the feedback.

Thoughts?