Once the desynch issues are fixed, could you please just revert the MD back to how it was in Chromosome? There was absolutely nothing wrong with the weapon. It was balanced enough for players good with it to stand out and had a huge learning curve for anyone who would think it was an "I win button."

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call bull*** on what you just said on the grounds of this.


That underlined portion openly states that you guys took a weapon that was perfectly fine outside of flawed coding and decided to nerf it on the grounds of what went on in your little playtests over actual player feedback. I've already said this before in just about every MMORPG game I've played: there's a designed purpose for a game mechanic and then there's the practical use that gets applied. Whatever you guys were doing with the MD should have no affect on how we, the players discovered the practical use. Instead of taking joy in the fact that we found a cool way to use a designed game mechanic, you gave it an unwarranted re-purpose that almost every other weapon in the game can fill better.

I've been a customer of CCP for 5 years and I can confidently say that while your company's intentions are good, your methods can be questionable at times. For every Titan that gets a much needed repurpose, a battleship loses it's purpose as an effective counter to a cruiser class vessel. You guys already went through this with the HMG and it took a threadnaught by the majority of the heavy community to see the error of your ways. Both the HMG and MD are similar in this aspect because you guys made a bunch of sweeping changes for some crazy reason and without any concern to our feedback. The only difference is the heavies got to see it coming, we had to find out on the 6th. Hell, I didn't even realize the changes until I got on here that same day because it wasn't in the patch notes.

I've been a part of this nerf/buff merry go round we've been on for so long, that I've grown jaded by any hopes of a significant change in quality of play. I started as an AR assault, and because of the nerf witch hunt that's makes forum warrioring part of the meta game, I ended up as a logibro with a MD. My weapon got nerfed to the level of a potato launcher, and my suit is probably next thanks to CPM members QQing about the entire logistics class, even though their base stats are completely horrible compared to the other suits and the other racial suit bonuses could need some work. What makes it funny is I'm a Minmatar logi, which has remained unchanged since the E3 build.

You guys have the audacity to make these huge sweeping changes, turning a deaf ear to feedback and now you want to play it safe after the fact? Really? You got an AR on the loose, that literally stops people from wanting to play because it's an exploit and you're worried about a grenade launcher that's supposed to act like a grenade launcher. At this point, I don't know if I should be laughing or looking for another game to play.

And to add insult to injury, the standard Flaylock out damages the Freedom MD and don't even get me started on Fused Locus Grenades being back despite feedback against it in the past...

Smokey don't give up it's just these forums.

Seriously these forums can be notoriously bad. I'm not kissing any a$$es here but CPP is a pretty serious company, and this game is still being worked on intensively.

I've posted on a fair number of game forums and this is the only one that has inspired me to lay down some gratuitous s**t.
There are some really smart respectful people here, and some real idiots too. Just don't take it too seriously and pay attention to what happens with the game and it's changes. Patience, thick skin and or indifference will see you through.

The MD was a good support weapon for a class that can run support. We don't want the weapon rolled back to make it easier to get kills, we want the tactical aspects back for the weapon. Defending points, scattering squads that use blob warfare, herding enemies away from a downed ally to raise them. All that is gone and the MD has been downgraded from a weapon of terror, to a potato lanucher that you could instill more fear by swinging it.

It's not greedy when a game mechanic is altered based on personal opinion when a company prides itself on transparency through attention to player feedback. Aside from the occasional person crying nerf that would get shut down by players that have been on both sides of the weapon, there wasn't any feedback warranting these sweeping changes. Even with the desynch issues which are entirely unrelated, having the Chrome equivalent of the MD now would only be fair since EHP had been significantly buffed and nanohives were nerfed, which starve the weapon as well. At the very least, we would have some semblance of a fighting chance. Instead, we get stuck with a lower ROF AR that just happens to shoot grenades when they want to work when a sidearm with similar properties does the job better.
Also, after next week our discontent will fall on blind eyes when fused locus grenades begin selling for in game currency.

To be perfectly honest, I'm a little baffled at what's happened with the Mass Driver. The reason for the splash and blast range nerf was that in playtests we found the MD to be so effective that at one point almost half the people in the office were using it in battles. Clearly, that's not been the case with Uprising and after getting the engineers to go elbow deep into the code it appears there may be a few reasons beyond dry numbers that are contributing to the MDs underwhelming performance.

One, there appears to be a de-sync between client and server so that (more often than it should) the server and client think the projectile exploded in different places. They're not far off, but enough so that shots you *think* are spot on are off the mark enough to do only minor splash damage. And two, I'm told splash occlusion is getting blocked by a single player character more than it should, contributing to the "randomness" of the damage dealt and the sometimes smudgy feeling of the weapon.

I'm hesitant to rebalance the weapon until we get these issues looked at (which is happening right now).