They nerfed the Galaxy....for better or worse.

[SmokeJumper]

How many of you played UO back in the bad ol' days right after release?

Well...Archery used to be REALLY powerful. So powerful, that everything else looked stupid in comparison.

Then one day, the UO team decided to reduce the power of arrows. The forum post that went up the next day said "Man...you turned our arrows into NERF ARROWS!".

And thus, the process of "nerfing" was born.

Basically, to a dev team, and in most communities, "nerf" = "reduce the power of something in game". And that's usually annoying to folks because they built their characters to best embrace the current rule set so they could be powerful within the scope of the rules. When devs change those rules, and invalidate some of the careful character balancing going on by the players, then the players scream "NERF!" at the dev team because they (somewhat reasonably) hate that process.

So...as developers...we try really hard not to "nerf" anything anymore. Of course, the "anti-nerf" (the process of bringing everything else up to the power that balances out the overpowered item/weapon) is pretty much just the same thing as nerfing, but it annoys less people because it's more deceptive. It basically still "nerfs" that original item, but through the guise of strengthening everything else...which a lot of players like because it seems good for their characters.

Anyway...very long story describing something you probably already know. But that's why I spoke about the Galaxy change not being a nerf. We actually made it better at succeeding at what it was designed to do...which is to successfully get a squad, intact, to a point on another continent. Air vehicles were wreaking havoc with Galaxies, so we strengthened them against air vehicles. We'll keep shoring things up during beta as we find various issues...

...and hopefully avoid the nasty nerf beast after release.