This is an ancient problem, and every online game has been plagued by it. The cycle goes thusly:
- Company X creates great game
- Early adopters flock to the game, create a great community, give tons of feedback, and make the game great
- Game gets popular, second wave comes in and integrates with the great community
- Older community hates newcomers, early adopters leave for another game
- Second community fiercely supports game, game explodes, me-too's join
- Third community complains about how much game sucks, it's too hard, takes too much work, etc; game changes
- Second community of loyalists hates game changes, and leaves
- Me-too's are disloyal hangers on, and leave once the community shrinks
- Game dies, devs struggle to hold on to player base
I have watched this exact cycle happen with:
Ultima Online
EverQuest
World of Warcraft
Diablo 2(enshrined in Diablo 3)
Numerous other online games
When whiners win, everyone loses. And in all fairness, the devs have an impossible job: Sift through the mass of forum garbage and game data to find true problems with the game. And we have an impossible task: endure what may be temporary discomfort to avoid ruining the game through our whining. And the devs also have to contend with the inevitable bean counters that flock to game companies like this once they become profitable, and become driven towards ever greater profits - which means increasing the player base of easy to please and easy to fleece sheep.
A few examples:
-
Ultima Online
- What made it great: Hard as nuts gameplay, rewarding game cycle, strong verisimilitude, extremely hardcore high level competition
- Ruined by: Trammel; An easy to play Theme Park version of UO. Hand holding ensued, the player base became more whiners than players, and the game slowly become easier - and less satisfying to play. Button-mashing become more important than strategy, the devs stopped experimenting with interesting gameplay in favor of quick and easy reward systems, and the game rapidly decayed.
-
Everquest
- What made it great: Strong fantasy themes, gorgeous art, interesting world history and writing, great magic system, humongous world filled with mystery that was difficult to traverse, granting a sense of realism and wonder
- Ruined by: Fast Travel; The world of Norrath was once very difficult to traverse, with enemies insta-killing low level players. There was an economy built around facilitating travel between increasingly harder zones. Starting in Luclan, the game zones became easier to defeat and level through, and the harder, higher level zones became overridden with farmers. Then they added Fast Travel stations. The game quickly went from a mystical world of mystery and danger to a theme park of easy, boring encounters. The newer zones lacked the story, background lore, and interesting design of the earlier zones. High level raids became highly accessible, and no longer a challenge for high level players. The game quickly dissolved into a simplistic grindfest.
-
World of Warcraft
- What made it great: Gripping, seat of your pants gameplay, beautiful world, strong community, hardcore high level raids, solid release cycle for new content
- Ruined by: Easy raids and dungeons; WoW was a brutal grind at release, and didn't even have any end game content. It offered very little outside of consensual PvP and a massive, time-consuming grind. But it was beautiful, and the visceral, satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay redefined the MMO genre. Blizzard iterated on the raid structure seen in EQ, and polished it to a gleaming shine by the end of Burning Crusade. In the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, they tried to make raids more accessible due to players whining about not accessing the content. But the fun of raiding was the challenge, and once the challenge dissipated, so to did its player base. From around 11 million at its peak to less than 6 million in a couple of years. The game is now super simple to play, without a single challenging encounter until max level. Even the early raids are super easy. Now, to access a challenge, you have to play on "hard mode", hidden away deep in the recesses of the game.
Now this is all from my perspective and from the anecdotes of my peers. But I watched the changes happen, I watched the pushback on forums and from in game chat, and I watched the player populations decline with each poor decision to capitulate to whiny, weak players who just want an easy, simple experience. And it has destroyed every game I have loved through the years.
Now, in League, I am seeing the very beginning of this same cycle starting to come to the third stage, the me-too stage. Where new players join because of the popularity of watching eSports, but want to be able to play at a pro level, or feel like a pro player, with no work invested. The game is too hard, requires too much learning, and they want to blame everyone but themselves for their failures - up to and including the people who made the game.
There are DEFINITELY balance problems in LoL. And there always will be. But at the end of the day, Riot has to be careful they are balancing themselves for a game that is deep and satisfying, because when they balance the game for easy and cheap, they are going to draw a crowd of temporary users. These players will play the game while it is popular, and either force it to be the game they want, or move on. Then they will move on anyways. And the hardcore players who have been playing since S1 will have moved on, and remember wistfully the glory days of League. And you can never go back, Riot. Once you alienate that hardcore base, they will probably never come back.
And finally...
- League of legends
- What makes it great: Scaling competitive structure, interesting variety of champion mechanics, variety of character builds
- Ruined by: ???; I would guess LoL will be ruined by too-easy gameplay that makes differentiating the skill of different player classes very difficult. When players can win without any of the fundamentals that LoL has been known for, there is a serious problem. Cheap builds, OP champs, and Ranked queue tactics should not ever allow terrible players into high level Ranks. And changing the game into a twitchfest will achieve exactly that. The game needs to be balanced, easy to learn, difficult to master, and fun. The game has been there, but lately things are moving toward being easier to mash'n'win. The game is still great, and has plenty of time to turn around and balance to a more hardcore crowd. But eventually the crowds will leave, the pros will get tired of losing to clearly inferior players, and the community will leave.
Don't give into your own hype, Rito. Pls.
was buffed on the PBE? People were begging Riot not to bring him to the live servers, but they ignored the players, and guess what happened? Xin's winrate skyrocketed to 60%.
rework. I do not post on the Boards often, but I know there's a guy called Malicious Metal who is a very passionate Morde player. He could probably tell about this better than me, but I will make a try. When 
