Might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe if the developers ignored all of the outside noise and stuck to their vision regarding gameplay each 2K would be much better than it ends up.
Most years the game at release is fun, but has minor issues that need to be addressed of course. If they stuck to their vision and weren’t persuaded by outside opinions, I think each game would end up in a better spot by the time Christmas comes around. Reasons being…
- Content creators who are so vocal aren’t voicing opinions for balance, they are doing it for monetary gain. Trying to convince changes that involve making themselves better. Or opinions that can make cheating easier (pure green window, minimal shifting in shot timing). Or just making some small issue into something huge to produce more engagement hoping to lead to more views.
- Posters on different social platforms are essentially doing the same thing in trying to make the game easier for themselves. It’s rare you see people, even on this sub wishing for balance just for the sake of balance, let alone on twitter or discord. Mostly people cant separate their personal preferences when voicing opinions for change. Shooting being a big one. Whatever you think one way or another, whenever someone asks for better contest, it’s met with a bunch of “keep shooting the same” type of caveats or comments.
If the devs deem a change is necessary, (on ball steals, contest, speed glitching) We would be better off with them truly seeing how players adapt, and trying to make changes from their data over time to see what they need to tweak instead of reverting a whole patch because the public outcry for something that they deemed necessary wasn’t the best change for the vocal minority.