It's pretty common actually (Destiny)

by electricpirate , Saturday, August 15, 2015, 18:14 (3485 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

I run in to stuff like this often in my line of work... people will know there is something they don't like about the guitar they are playing, but they'll identify the problem incorrectly. I had a customer tell me "I hate the shape of the neck on this one". I examined the guitar he was playing, took it back to my work bench, lowered the strings a bit to make it easier to play, and handed it back. "This one feels great! Is it the same model?"

The difference though, as far as I see it, is that even though my customer identified the problem incorrectly, there was a problem with how the guitar felt in his left hand. If Gjallarhorn's visual effects weren't apparent enough, I can see how one or two people might say "this gun isn't powerful enough"... but I would think someone, somewhere along the way would identify the actual problem and correct things accordingly, just as I did when my customer complained about the shape of the neck he was playing.

Yea, being a good game design is often times the exact same thing. People know that something is wrong, but they almost never know what. There's an anecdote about borderlands where people complained of too many enemies in a zone, making it too slow to travel through, so gearbox tripled the number of enemies and no one ever complained about it again.

And who knows... maybe that is exactly what happened. The visual effects of the wolfpack rounds are plenty visible now, so by the sounds of things they did get visually beefed up at some point. But I have a tough time believing that nobody at bungie was aware of how earth-shatteringly powerful it is, which is why I still think Gally's damage output is intentional.

Yea, the article is abit awkward about that thesis (that's why I put the subject in quotes). I think Gjally was always supposed to be desireable, but I think the response is more about why it became this status symbol in the community.