Everybody who has played any online game and has visited its forums, knows the problem. Whiners. There is always a group that whines about how something is too strong, this skill is too weak, this quest is too hard, this gun is too accurate. No matter how much you enjoy the game, they will always find something to whine about. In reality, these whiners deal more damage than you may think.

A whiner’s post is easy to differentiate from other posts. First of all, it will say there is a very big problem in the game. Not just a tiny annoyance, but something that destroys the complete game as we know it, and if we leave it untouched, the poster will stop playing and so will everybody he knows. Of course, this is a hyperbole; there is not only a low chance that the poster will actually stop playing the game, but there is a low chance that his friends agree with his problems.

That brings us to the next point. A whiner’s post is incredibly biased. It is usually very clear from the post in question what class, race or weapons the whiner uses. Usually, they are underpowered, and all classes are too strong. To put it in simpler terms, “I play Scissors, Rock is overpowered, Paper is fine”. This means that most of  the whiners don’t agree with each other for the simple reason that they play in another way. While one whiner may be saying that the warrior class is terribly overpowered, and how it completely dominates another class, another whiner may be saying that his warrior always loses to said class, and that warriors need a big buff.

A last way to determine whether a post is simply whining, is to check the arguments that poster is using. Most of the time, it will be about his own experiences. This is of course not a crime by itself, but if you read between the lines, there is a high chance that the whiner is simply a bad player and, well yeah, if you’re a bad player, you lose. Another technique whiners like to use is to propose a hypothetical situation, in which everything is in favor of the enemy, and the player loses of course. These situations are created to show how overpowered or underpowered something is, so these are of course tainted by bias. Without this bias, you’ll probably come across a perfectly normal, balanced situation.

So why should you care? Well, these whiners love to open their mouth. Everywhere. On unofficial forums, but also on official ones. If the developers keep in touch with their community and actually read suggestions and complaints, there is a chance that they will take these whiners seriously and that is when you should start to worry.

If a developer listens to such a whiner, the game will start to become unbalanced. Maybe it was already unbalanced to begin with, but it will become more unbalanced. The problem is that most games only need minor tweaking to become balanced. But oh no, that is not enough for a whiner. A whiner wants a weapon to deal double the damage. A whiner wants to double the hit percentage of an attack. A whiner wants to make an armor set basically free.

Of course, these kinds of drastic changes are bad for a game. Sadly, there is nothing to do about this problem. The only thing you can do is to try and ignore the thread as big threads draw the attention of developers, who probably have little time to spend on reading complaints. What if it grows to become a big discussion? Let’s say I hope that you’re renowned enough in the game or on the forums that people will believe you when you say that the OP is just wrong.