You want constructive feedback? Give the community some substance to construct with.

curious comment. why would you make small balance changes if the majority of your player-base didn't particularly care? who are these changes being made for? did the people making these changes consider the impact (positive and negative) they might have on the minority?

all the questions I don't have an easy answer to

 

I'll try to answer this very open-ended question with my own experience as a dev in charge of balancing a game with a similar playerbase to Royals (Though, it should be noted that I dev for a PVP game and PVP balance is very different from PVE balance)

Even if people don't care, if something is imbalanced, then it's imbalanced, whether that imbalance is addressed is entirely up to the devs and their opinions on the game's health. Even if people don't care about certain changes it still impacts them somehow, and it's up to the devs to decide if it's worth changing, and they can get a measure of that change and its worth by listening to feedback, but only to a certain extent. Across all games, the playerbase's opinion on balancing their own game is almost always horrendous, league being a prime example of what is, all things considered, a very well balanced game, and yet almost every character is said to be both far overpowered and extremely underpowered at the same time. You kinda need to take a mix of data and player opinions for balance, because too much of either ends up leading to either unsatisfied players or stupid balance decisions.

There's also a problem with balancing a game like Royals, which is the divide between new and old players. This is most easily seen when something is broken/centralizing, people tend to gravitate towards it, meaning if or when it gets nerfed, more people will be upset by that change, and since old players have been playing longer, more of them tend to gravitate towards that thing. A good example would be HP washing/mules, the game would almost undoubtedly be better if both of those things were removed but they're such a large part of the game now that they can't be removed without hurting old players, even if it might be better for new players and the game as a whole.

As for who the changes are made for, the way I personally look at it is that you don't make changes for any set of people, but more-so for the game's overall health. The only changes that should be made specifically for people are QoL changes that don't or hardly impact the game's overall health. What I mean by this is odd to explain, but in essence, the less degenerate things and strategies in a game, and the more fun the players have, the healthier it is. This kicks back into deciding what actually needs changed, for example if something is extremely overpowered in theory, but in practice it's not/no one is capable of utilizing the broken strategy, then it's not something you'd change since it doesn't impact the game health, conversely if something is underpowered but buffing it would lead to degenerate play, then you don't buff it even if it's weak.

As for the last thing, yes, even though I'm not part of the Royals dev team, for a server with this culture of change nothing ever, they discussed and hypothesized the potential impacts of changes at extreme length, especially any sort of balance change. Unless the devs are incompetent, changes that are off-brand are heavily discussed, with not everyone agreeing at the end, and having the lead devs make a final say.

 

You can source your numbers from how many people view large threads vs how many players there are daily, for the Nightlord/Shadower nerf thread they've had 540 unique views, and I'd estimate Royals has maybe 4-8k unique players a day. I think from that alone, it's easy to see that most users don't use the forums (by this I mean actively, rather than at all), and as for your second thing, it's kind of just a trend of PVE games where people who play more casually don't care about class balance since they're not competing against other people in the same way you would in a PVP game. You only really get that sense of competing with others when you're extremely active in the game, which your average player is not. Hell, I'd even wager to say most players aren't 4th job but that'd just be a guess.

Addressed some of your other stuff in my comment above, but I agree with your sentiment of "leveling the playing field does not allow for new players to transition into a 'higher tiered player' ". Taking away things from end game players doesn't really help with retaining new players nor does it help boosting the new players to that point, it just makes the end game players upset (with that being said, sometimes it's necessary).

 

I started playing the game in earnest from 2020 and have been working hard to get the end game gear.
Specifically, it is farming using mages, in order to close the gap with advanced people, I used a lot of time and resources to prepare, and spent more time engaged in farming. ..
But they were nerfed by macro changes (and at the same time as the env event I've been looking forward to for over half a year).
My motivation was destroyed at that time.

In the current situation where items other than end game gear, chaos scroll, and white scroll are all losing value, to close the gap with veteran players who earned from the first-mover profit before being nerfed, now other than gambling with chaos scroll There is none.
These nerfs only undermine the opportunity for new efforts.

 

Improve board-management.

 

They reverted snipe to hit again through cancel. When they first nerfed it, they were *very* adamant about their reasoning.

I can't stress how weird and unexpected it was when they rolled it back, for MM of all classes, almost a full year later. But by the time it was reversed the crash mule culture was peak. People were taking them to crash krex even lol, so it made the old snipe feel even older somehow