I started reading the thread about the Carb-9 nerf, and I began skimming about halfway through, when the fanboys started their typical condescending comments. I agree with the OP for several reasons, and I was writing a response, but then it occurred to me: why am I holding out for the DLC?
Buffing all guns, instead of nerfing the best one, would be a better tactic. If everything feels overpowered, then everything is balanced, and no one would complain. I worry that, post-patch, every gun will feel weak and inaccurate. And since they’re giving my default weapon, the Gerund, a nerf as well, I don’t know what I’ll use.
Players will always use the best weapons available. If the carb is no longer best, some players will leave the game, and everyone who stays will default to the second-best weapon. Then people will complain that “everyone just uses the Kross/Tampa/whatever,” and they’ll ask for that to be nerfed as well, which will cause more players to leave the game. In economics, this is called an adverse selection death spiral. In video games, it’s called “empty lobbies.”
It’s time to stop serving the needs of the few. Brink’s supporters have given it every excuse in the book, from “It’s a smarter game than COD/Halo/BFBC2” to “it’s not meant for the general public, it’s meant for team players.” Guess what that translates to? Empty lobbies.
I wanted to love this game. I took a week’s vacation off of work to play it when it came out. I bought two copies so I could play with my son (we each have a 360). I followed this game for a year before it came out, searching for every tidbit of news I could find. I ignored the mediocre reviews because I believed the reviewers “didn’t get it.”
But now that I haven’t played in a few weeks, and I have some distance betweed myself and the game, all I see are flaws. The difficulty in regularly finding a lagless, bot-free game with 16 players is inexcusable. This is the base expectation of ANY online multiplayer game. When I put in a multiplayer game, I expect to play with other people. If the game can’t support 16 players, then it should have had some small and medium sized maps. I’d be fine with 4 v 4 if the maps were the right size. But under these conditions, it’s just awful.
The “everyone spawns together and runs right back to a chokepoint” gamestyle must have been obviously flawed during playtesting. The repetetive nature of the objectives had to be transparent. Yet I was blind from the great marketing campaign and my own desire for a game that was everything Brink claimed to be.
So why can’t I trade my last copy of Brink in? Why is it still sitting on my shelf? Am I really so duped that I think a patch and a couple of maps will fix a game with so many fundamental flaws?
Anyone else in the same boat as me?
