So I decided to install and play on a private server for Need for Speed World, a f2p game that I played for a time way back in the day and enjoyed my time with it back then. Apparently the server I had pick to visit my nostalgia was the wrong one, as the server runners had decided that they needed to make massive sweeping changes to the gameplay, especially for the cop chase parts of the game (admittedly they were pretty easy in vanilla).
So imagine my face when I go to do a pursuit/team escape with my racing car to break up the monotomy only to find out that the cops were made to be infinitely more bullshit, enough that it made me want to go on their discord and make a complaint that they ruined it. Then I found that someone else was making the same complaint, and the ‘devs’ of this server were just going “Lol that’s the point, you’re supposed to be a cheesedick, using the best car modded this exact way for the event 24/7, because we balanced it around you cheesedicking because the vanilla game was so easy. You’re just mad cause bad.” Okay, they weren’t saying that exactly, but you get the point.
Jesus christ man, I don’t get why when modders decide to go fix legit problems with a game they almost always end up thinking the lack of difficulty is an issue then proceed to overtune it to an absurd degree.
eh I think it’s just because modding has a lower barrier to entry than making an original game that you have a higher proportion of amateurs doing it and it also has a much lower barrier to entry for publishing versus a full game so they’re a lot more mods released that are incomplete, ill-conceived, etc. Most commonly what I’ve noticed is that the most popular mods tend to just stack tons of stuff on top of the base game, I think those are the most popular because the most eye-catching thing you can do is add a bunch of new things for players who are familiar with the original.
There are some mods that are genuinely great. My go to example of this is the mod Movie Battles 2 for Star Wars Jedi Knight 3: Jedi academy. that mod is a genuinely brilliant class-based Counter-Strike style game, and a lot of it’s unique mechanics are now super common in hero shooters.