Game Mechanics, an opinion

There has been a considerable shift in games throughout the years, nowadays I mostly focus on city building and grand strategy games, there are some first person shooters (I miss Ghost Recon [Racoon]: Phantoms even with all the damn Pay-to-Win) that have driven me back but nothing else that really catches my attention. One of the things that I believe everyone who has been playing for a while will notice is that there has been a real polish in some genres which favor end-user experience more than true mechanics or true playability, that is that you enjoy the game so much that you can replay it again (FPS have something that even though people hate on them they keep buying the next game, so that is that). Fine tuning mechanics is essential for great game-play, especially when doing online competitive gaming, so there are some cases that I can think of in which they were both a blessing and a curse, below are some points with considerations about the subject:

• The polishing and eventual simplification of mechanics makes the game flow faster and I would assume that in some way or form this also helps code work smoother and cause less bloat when performing some of the calculations (I can only imagine what goes behind the Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis IV background). On the other hand this can feel as something valuable being lost in the process, while this is debatable it depends how big the change is and I can think of some considerable changes in gaming that brought so much commotion about a set of simple changes:
  
  • e.g.: Some of the Starcraft patches back in the day like patch 1.08, in which Zealots got their numbers moved around from 80 shield and HP to 60 shield and 100 HP, while this was not the only drastic change, on this same patch would see the cost of Battle Cruisers go from 8 to 6 supply which is a massive change also. Back with this patch the community of Starcraft went up in flames and was split up with the decision, this and other balancing efforts in the future would continue to provoke this behavior but this is expected when a community this large finds new ways to play the game and take advantages of the buffing or nerfing of whichever mechanic is/was broken/fixed.
    
  • e.g.: Civilization III combat, one of the main complaints about what was a great game (personal opinion) was that the combat mechanics were broken as hell, a barbarian warrior (the earliest type of unit in the game) with only two/three blocks of life could defeat a late age tank with five blocks of life, how this worked (or not worked) was a true mystery at times which drove players mad, the problem about having this little barbarian going around tearing your improvements up was that wasting tanks during what could be a tense period of the game meant risking it maybe twice of thrice to get that nuisance off your yard (yes, I lost three tanks once to a barbarian). Civilization IV did not suffer from these issues and they also fixed the problem with Saltpeter being a very rare mineral, if you did not have the expansions to bring in Guerilla fighters to the fray you were truly out of the contest with your peers or stronger opponents.
    
• Players may also not fully understand the reasoning behind some of the changes (or developers either do not wish to put too much on the table or are just bad at it, take your pick, not dissing anyone though) performed on the game mechanics. While balancing is mostly the reason to do this it is not the same to test it in a closed environment with a couple of players than test it on the wild (this is why some games will give you the option to beta test their new patches so that you can report on whatever bugs or issues you may find, even broken mechanics). While some balancing is performed due to exploits in the code (which is unavoidable) there is also the fact that some players will also find a way to break the current balance by performing X, Y, Z action to do so (not an exploit, more like number crunching and some hard thinking, for reference look at all the changes that World of Warcraft has gone through since Vanilla)
  
• Sometimes mechanics just don't work as intended or simply don't pickup as expected and this happens because the final product is not what was intended or the player base has a different understanding of what the whole thing is/was about, at times this is not the fault of either party as things change and these are no longer relevant in the game and either disappear or are changed for a different mechanic.
  
• New mechanics “are” (this is a very broad word) required with new improvements to the original game/expansion/DLC (does anyone do real expansions anymore or are we just calling them DLCs now?), again these mechanics can be broken as all hell or may not have a counter-mechanic to balance them, sometimes this is intended and inevitable so that the player must make their time due, not necessarily talking about time running out but some other factor that can either end the current game drastically or reduce the possibilities of the player enjoying the game, this leads me to the following point.
  
• The fact that the player always wins a game does not a fun game make, something that I like about Paradox games is the fact that I can make a stupid decision and feel the consequences rolling over immediately and for the next hundred years as other nations swallow me up, characters die, planets are burnt to a crisp and I find myself asking “What did I do wrong and how could I have avoided this?”. This in turn has made me stop caring about reloading a game when this happens, I just let it roll and see what is the end result of what actions I have taken as with real life you cannot take it back.