Marvel Rivals director reflects on hated Helldivers 2 nerfs – ‘Players don’t like things taken away’

Marvel Rivals is the latest live-service phenomenon, bringing in millions of players in its opening weekend. As a living multiplayer experience, the game will see countless balance changes across its lifespan, some of which may end up frustrating players.

Following waves of backlash for Helldivers 2 nerfs and Space Marine 2 in since-fixed updates, Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser revealed that sometimes it’s necessary for game updates to “frustrate players”.

Marvel Rivals updates may frustrate you

Speaking on an episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, Sasser revealed that it can be necessary to “frustrate players” with balance updates but also can “understand” the backlash if they feel that something has been taken away.

Speaking on the podcast, the industry veteran with decades of experience in Call of Duty and Battlefield was quizzed about his views on player reaction to nerfs in Helldivers 2 and Saber Interactive’s Space Marine.

“Well, it’s kind of the basic of game design that players do not like things being taken away from them, right?” he said. “There are very few exceptions when players do.”

“Sometimes it’s good to frustrate the player…because winning all of the time is boring, so it’s important to be able to lose, too and feel like you lost fairly and not be frustrated. That’s where taking things away can make players feel frustrated. If you take something away and they feel like they lost because you took the thing away and that feels unfair they’ll get frustrated by it, so I can understand that.”

Sasser went on to explain how the framing of a ‘nerf’ is extremely important in how it’s percieved by the players. “Some of it is honestly psychology,” he explained. “Suppose I coached it to you this way: instead of saying ‘Hey, we’re going to nerf players’, I’m going to say ‘Hey, we’re going to make the enemies harder’. Oh, now I’m interested… now it’s a challenge. You haven’t made me less, you’ve made them more. So it’s almost like a lens that you’re using to look at this problem and how you explain to the players.”

He continued: “If you let the narrative get out there that we’re nerfing the players, no actually what we did was we made things more difficult because we want the challenge to be different. Well, it’s hard to control that message sometimes, for sure. But I think there is something about the psychological perspective of how you couch what you’re doing to the game.”

NetEase’s six-v-six hero shooter has gone off to a flying start, with millions of thousands of players and a ‘mostly positive’ community review grade on Steam. Sasser confirmed that there will be events coming to Rivals, as per every live service game, with all eyes on Christmas as the first potential event.

For more Marvel Rivals coverage, read Sasser’s thoughts on why Concord failed to grab players or read about the awesome new skins coming to the game.