Altering The Deal: When The Game You Play Isn’t The Game You Bought

While Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3 provide some good examples of altering the deal, they’re far from the only example’s of this increasingly common practice.

I mentioned the Call of Duty series earlier, and as you may already know, the developers of Call of Duty: Black Ops II recently received death threats over making some slight adjustments to a few of the weapons in the online mode. The rechamber time of one sniper rifle in particular was adjusted from 1.0 seconds to 1.1 seconds, which is arguably just about as small of an adjustment as someone could make to a game.

And while you could argue that weapon balance is needed to make sure that players can have a “fair” experience with any weapon in a competitive multiplayer title, what about singleplayer or co-op games? What about games where, no matter how broken or overpowered something is, the only fun that is possibly threatened is your own?

Gearbox Software, the developer of Borderlands 2, has been quite excellent in supporting their game. One look at the patch notes should tell you that they’re committed to continuously improving the experience that their players have with the game. They’ve also released several paid DLC add-ons, featuring new characters and environments, most of which their customers seem to love.

What wasn’t loved by everyone in the Borderlands 2 community, however, were the changes made to certain weapons and other pieces of gear to dramatically lower their power. The “Bee shield” in particular saw a rather large decrease in overall effectiveness. The developers have stated that the shield was never intended to be as overpowered as it was for the first few months. Without going into too much detail, the shield worked by adding extra damage to each bullet that you shot. The unintended problem was that before the release of the game, Gearbox failed to notice that this included shotguns and other multi-projectile weapons with high rates of fire, where each bullet received the full damage bonus.

Arguably, the combination of certain weapons with the Bee shield became a late game “win button” of sorts. Many players only used the setup when repeatedly killing the game’s most difficult optional bosses, because it was the fastest way to defeat them and try your luck at their random loot drops. However, other players used the Bee shield everywhere, and then foolishly complained when they flew through the new DLC campaign in less than an hour. With more DLC coming soon, Gearbox felt that something had to be done.

They decided to fix this by dividing the overall damage boost by the number of projectiles. In other words, if you used a single shot weapon like a revolver or sniper rifle, you would get the full damage boost. If you used a shotgun or other multi-projectile weapon, you would only get the full damage boost if all bullets hit the target, and you would only get one damage boost, rather than one for each bullet.

The problem with this fix is that it didn’t just alter the affects of the bee shield. Any item in the game that boosted your overall damage was now divided across all projectiles, which not only resulted in making all shotguns far less effective, but the change also made many other pieces of equipment pretty much worthless. These issues were eventually fixed, but all players–including those who had never even heard of the Bee shield–had to wait more than a little while before their game started working properly again.