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"You have a vocal minority screaming the loudest": Marvel Rivals devs are careful with balancing because players found Jeff the Land Shark OP until they discovered a quick fix
Marvel Rivals' developers are being careful about balance changes because sometimes the loudest fans in the room aren't representative of the majority.
Case in point, Jeff the Land Shark, an adorable character who looks all innocent but was the subject of so, so many fan complaints once upon a time. Some players grumbled the support hero was too overpowered... until they found out that all you had to do was jump to counter his strongest ability.
Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo says as much in an interview with GamesRadar+ at the Game Developers Conference. "I think there's one time where everybody was complaining about Jeff the Land Shark – just too powerful, eating everybody," Koo explains. "Until someone figured out all you have to do is just jump, right? So that's the emotional part of it."
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Koo goes on to say that it can be "very dangerous" to act on those emotional responses from players who might ask for nerfs or buffs based on their personal experiences. Often times, the complaints don't represent how most of the player base feels about a subject, according to Koo.
"Because then you have a vocal minority screaming the loudest, saying 'This thing is broken, this thing is underbalanced.' But the data for the majority show otherwise, they have no problem with it. So that's careful balancing. And then with the balancing team, there are different tiers of players. There are casual players within a team, pro players within a team, and they take all of that into consideration to find where the median is," he explains.
Balancing is a tricky thing to get right in any competitive game. Go too far in one direction and you risk stripping a character of what made them fun to play in the first place. Lean too far in the other direction and you make life a living hell for anyone on the receiving end of an OP ability, but at least developer NetEase isn't reacting to players on a whim.
Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.
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