time for Chester's NA hot take. Tydeus is actually one of my favorite crpg devs of all time. People love saying that he ruined the fabled perfect 2011 balance (ROFL), but I almost always have no idea what they are actually referring too. I have seen him blamed for ruining strength builds, agility builds, hybrid builds by the same person. I just wish we had a list of changes he actually made so we could start judging them more objectively.
If he made nudges and rolls, kudos to him, because those two systems added a tremendous amount of flavor to warband combat (although I could be wrong and tydeus didnt make these systems). Only shitty players that never wanted to or lacked the capacity to adapt dislike those mechanics.
I know he tweaked 1h animations. Pre Tydeus 1h was trash compared to how it is now. Sorry retards your old, slow, and long 1h stab is way worse than the tydeus tweaked version, pretty much the same with tydeus tweaked 1h right swing. I just know some of you are reading this and fuming because you are thinking that the old right swing was so good because the angle was more controllable and the sweetspot was more delayed, but the amount of pressure you can apply with the current 1h right swing is enormous in comparison with its far quicker sweetspot and head focused angle.
Pretty sure he changed polearm left swing and overhead into smoother feeling moves with better sweetspots, and semi nerfed polearm stab.
Tydeus was a daring dev, who pumped out changes that I think improved the game overall. You people turn him into a scapegoat for declining player population and your own gameplay shortcomings.
The Tydeus hatred is generally just a meme at this point as Cassi pointed out, and while I'll agree with many of your points I think the origin of the hate was relatively well-founded (at least at the time). It's a slow work day, so here's a little rant about it all below, from someone who was fully aboard the hate train in the past and gained slightly deeper insight upon joining the item advisers years back (which allowed me access to his posts in the balance section of the forum).
1) Strength/agiliity balance
He definitely "ruined" str builds in the great rebalancing of 2012-ish when wpf was reworked which greatly favored agi builds as you no longer got free wpf upon leveling up, and not only that, but high agi builds got more wpf than ever before which decently increased their max damage. Seeing how at the time 98% of melee players had been bandwagoning on the str-and-armor crutching meta it is easy to see why this change was widely met with disapproval. As someone who was an agi build at the time, and always had been, I'll be first to admit the change was probably too much - simultaneously nerfing rock while buffing scissors made for a rather massive balance shift, when it should have been a little more subtle. Nerfing str alone would have put balance in a pretty good place, imo. All that said, imho, the balance after the patch was better than before, but you still had a lot of angry players. Counter-meta changes in any game will always be poorly-received since you're obviously nerfing the way most people play
2) The new animations
I'm not sure if it was his intention, or just general laziness on his part, but his apparent philosophy when creating the new 1h stab (and 1h rightswing and polearm overhead) was that 2h had an absurdly busted stab that would be tricky to nerf further, so might as well just buff the other classes so that they too have busted animations. Now, in general I am in agreement with this philosophy... nerfs are widely disliked as it weakens the way people prefer to play (see above), while buffs to weaker playstyles are more favorable since the meta (2handers) aren't negatively affected, giving rise to more diversity among the "viable" builds/playstyles/classes. However, he just seemed lazy in his implementation of the new animations and adjusted sweetspots where at a certain point he just said "meh, its not game-breakingly OP and its certainly better than before, so it's good enough." What makes me think that? Well iirc (which I may very well not, but I sure ain't gonna go digging for any proof) even though 3 new animations were added (and potentially more had their sweetspots tweaked) he only adjusted a new animation once or twice, tops, after they went live. And that was one or two animations he changed total, not how many times he changed each new one. Imo the 1h stab (and potentially the polearm overhead) are too strong and should have been toned down from what he implemented, and yet all I can recall him ever updating was the 1h rightswing after he changed it initially, and for all I know he simply made it better since his first change might have been too weak. Look at how the 1h rightswing compares to the stab and polearm changes... much more balanced imo.
3) The ranged rollercoaster
I'm not as familiar with the balancing of ranged classes as it never applied to me, but I'd imagine that since Tydeus was lead balancer he implemented or at least approved the constant buffs/nerfs that ranged weapons received. Ranged weapon balance has always been a sore subject, and after knowing how many variables are involved in properly balancing it, and how they all stupidly affect other variables, I personally cut him some slack here. The code he had to work with was quite spaghetti to say the least, so it's no wonder his nerfs would generally break the class and the buffs were also too severe. Also the wide spread of ranged player skill is incredibly hard to balance around as well, and even with workable code I wonder if decent balance could have ever been achieved.
4) The inevitable population decrease
What killed crpg... time or poor balance? While plenty of players promised with each patch that they'd never come back since their build was broken, very few ever did. But that doesn't mean some didn't get fed up with the rollercoaster of changes and the dev's slow pace of fixing things, and while they might not have left after just one or two patches, they did eventually leave. This isn't really even his fault since at this time chadz and co. were already moving on to "project asinus" and afaik Tydeus never received the ability to patch the game himself so they were the bottleneck in this case.
5) Tydeus himself
The real reason why he drew so much hate his way, other than everything he got due to his position, is that he was kind of a dick. If you ever had a complaint about a change he'd often just say "lol you're just uninformed that's not even how it works." While perhaps true, that doesn't really help. I realize it was never his "job" to educate the masses, but it sure would have helped. Rarely, and more noticeably later on (at least for major changes) he would post graphs and show how damage is calculated and such... which at least helped alleviate any flack he got from level-headed individuals. Not to mention that he also just acted like an ass in other ways, not just his superiority complex. Reminds me of cmp in many ways, and desite cmp perhaps being the single most important dev of the donkey crew, he was probably also the most hated simply due to his behavior.
As mentioned by Chester, this also ties into how he wasn't at all transparent. His changes, and more importantly the reasoning behind them were rarely if ever revealed and people instead just had a brief summary of what was changed in each patch along with the usual table of patch notes generated by chadz. I don't think Tydeus was ever seen asking the playerbase what their opinion was on something balance-related, and he seemed to think his way was the best, for everything. Maybe he spoke to his friends in CHAOS (aka the Great Plumbo Conspiracy) and EU and we outsiders just never saw his conversations, but even then he had a very small sample size (of players all with a similar skill level).
6) Overstepping his bounds
Last but not least, another nuisance is that while Tydeus was undeniably a skilled programmer and certainly knew his stuff with regards to models and animations, that doesn't necessarily mean he was the right guy for his job... any of his jobs. For instance, we now have a crpg "balancing team," it isn't just one guy doing it anymore (okay Tydeus was technically never the only balancer but judging from the posts on the forums at least for a number of years he did 99% of the work since the other guys were pseudo-retired and would just chime in now and again with "seems fine to me"). In our team of balancers some of us don't know a single bit of programming, and are just included in discussions for our (hopefully) valuable insight about the game from years of experience. We help provide the actual ideas while the code monkeys do their thing and implement it. It is easy to see why Tydeus was made balancer years back, he certainly had the required skills for the job, but why he was essentially the
only person made a balancer is questionable decision-making on the donkey crews part.
Also, he wasn't just a balancer, he was an active admin as well, with many controversial decisions over the years (as any admin would). Nowadays balancers are given admin permissions but aren't allowed to use them because while we may qualify to balance the game, it doesn't mean we're qualified to police it. Back then however Tydeus was able to police as he wanted, and lets face it, admins are gonna get a lot of hate just from their job alone. Not to mention that he wasn't exactly the best at it...
...
All in all, I honestly think that if Tydeus had been given strictly a coding position as part of an active balancing team, didn't work as an admin, and kept his asshat comments to himself a bit more, he would be remembered in a much better, perhaps even good light. The man had more on his plate than he should have, and that alone led to most of his meme-worthy status. Did he make the mod better or worse in all his years of work? Did he alone kill the mod? No way to know, and although I hate to admit it he probably had at least a slightly positive impact on it in the long run. If absolutely nothing else he brought melee elitists and ranged my old friends together in their hatred of him.
Whew boy that was longer than expected, a good 20 or so minutes of the day gone, time to kill another 8 hours somehow.
