Thanks YaeVisla, I think taken from that angle, it becomes more understandable why a potential nerf to JKA was acceptable to people had it been able to create JKR Part 2. I do accept that the meta is designed, I can't imagine why people would imagine otherwise.
I just don't like it, when I, the player, am the one who is punished for their design goals collapsing. Granted, from their perspective, they would be punishing players either way. In the example of the palpatine nerf (through malak's tweaks), they could
a) punish the people who worked for/bought malak and leave it be or
b) punish the people who upgraded palps to beat dr+dm (an admittedly narrow, but not necessarily F2P slice of the game)
From the capitalist perspective it's easy to see how this was decided.
If you can wish for an ideal world where people don't have myths about this game being organic, then there's room to wish that smart design decisions are made so that no part of the player base is punished by rushed or incomplete design.
I do accept that what they're doing is game design. But is it good game design? Is releasing content, that causes players to invest resources in a certain way, then very quickly taking away the value of said investment good game design? Even the devs seem to think it isn't, or else they wouldn't be pushing for a more rigorous way of testing their releases before dubbing them final.
