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).

...

I'd quietly petition for a respec and explain why... I would not be whining in the forums about it in an attempt to get CCP to care about my personal plight.

If your piece of equipent/class is objectively nerfed into uselessnes then you have a legitimately UP piece of gear/class and can rightfully demand correction i.e. a balancing pass.

If you spec into, say cal logi with tac ar because that combination is considered OP by the community and you don't want to be stomped by others then you should be fully aware of the fact that a nerf is very possible and are responsible for speccing into it. (extreme example)

You are supposed to choose a piece of gear based on playstyle and personal preference (or tactical considerations).The stats are supposed to allow you to do so. If your choice is/has become inferior due to balance changes then we have a balance issue at hand wich is completely unrelated to a respec.

Balancing is a relative term. Someone is always getting nerfed. As soon as we acknowledge that as a respec worthy situation by default we end up with constant respecs for possibly large portions of the playerbase everytime any stat change is made.

This scenario would be a complete disaster for the whole concept of skilltrees.

To answer you question, yes. And if CCP made me spit and curse (they took 5% resists from my battleship!) i would still have that view because balance is bound to happen and someone is always affected negatively.

I absolutely agree that the amount of information concerning inportant metrics and changes thereof is hideous right now. There will be changes though, that affect so many or advanced skills that even the earliest possible announcement will be far too late for anyone to avoid beeing affected and we all have to make sure that we choose the skills/gear because we identify with them so we can live with reasonable nerfs (read: limited to the required extend), should they happen.

It's a personal plight when people come to the forums to air their laundry. If there were objective discussions about why something is or is not UP or OP then it would be somewhat better.

Frankly, I hope CCP doesn't put much stock in the QQing forums... there are better ways to make your case then crying in public about things.

It is interesting that the entire industry operates this way but you feel it is not a valid solution.

You may not like their method but this has been The method since early on. The transparency is better than it had been before the CPM made their positions clear and your underlined concern is actually about CCP being honest that they were surprised by the difference between playtesting and released into the game results. Maybe they will look into why there was such a difference.

The one thing that is very consistent regarding CCP is they have a plan that is not shared with the players. They share Some details but that is it. This seems to be true in EVE and DUST. If something needs to be addressed to allow Their plan to work then that is their first priority.

Whether this is a workable plan remains to be seen. I have played significantly less recently because of RL and because the game is not fun currently. I miss Chromosome but it is not coming back. I would prefer a different solution as the constant Nerf Hammers and the overpriced SP requirements have essentially changed the game from something I could not get enough of to one that I wait until some update occurs to see if anything is better before I bother to play it again. The last time I logged in was to see the changes in the Skill Tree and to discover that I needed the SP respec to recover the very expensive SP that was required is now wasted.

If we all leave as a result then their plan was not a good one.