The Daily Grind: When have changes overwhelmed you?

I don't know about being overwhelmed (I was not) but there are only two MMOs whose changes really got my attention while I was still playing them.

Star Wars Galaxies - Combat Upgrade and then New Game Enhancement
Champions Online - The untested sweeping changes right after head start

today!

at this moment ...

right now.

Fallen Earth's own version of the CU has totally fucked things up.

Easy:

Ultima Online, Age of Shadows. hell broke loose on al fronts.

Balance, Bugs, gameplay, population,...

hell, the devs themselves gave out items with slogens like "I survived the age of shadows release" and so on.
HORRIBLE HORRIBLE change for the game, and not so strangely, the day it lost me after 4 years.

theirs a free to play MMO called seal online.there was a toddle overhaul to it.changing almost everything and restarting everything.it was to take care of gold sellers who ran armpit throughout the game.this back fired and they deleted items from the game it self.suits of armor went uncompleted and everyone had to restart.the sad thing is after burning and salting the game the gold sellers still popped up after they shunned the players in a sense.

NGE, CU, and any WoW patch that includes class "balancing"

NGE & the CU were definitely unsettling but that never stopped me from playing both heavily. In the last few game updates they've released, many of their mechanics have become grinds.

Collection System, Rare Loot System, Beast Mastery, Chronicle System. They extended gameplay by having extremely long grinds associated to them. The Chronicle System is probably the biggest perpetrator.

If you want to build a quest, you need to kill the mobs you want to be used in your quest. I can't just design a neat little story arc which takes a long time on it's own. I need to kill Tuskens for a few hours to make sure I have enough tokens to build a quest involving the slaying/looting of Tuskens.

Most collections involved looting 10 or so pieces from specific mobs but at least one of those pieces is extremely rare. Most slayer collection (space and land) involved killing a huge number of sometimes very hard to find mobs.

It would take 3 days to make a beast from scratch due to time barriers. Even with all the parts you needed. If you wanted a mutation, good luck because even with the right combo, you had a small chance of getting that mutation.

The game became grind, after grind, and it felt like a grind. Hoth is still fun to run every now and then if you can detach yourself from the token grind.

I think changes are wonderful, and certainly needed to keep the game fresh, alive and interesting. But in the case of WoW, Cataclysm when changes become so retentive to the point of defining one's experience only on the developers' terms and not that of the player (ie. my way or the highway)...then do I feel overwhelmed, disheartened and lose interest in the game. Because it became something I may of never would of wanted to play to begin with.

WoW ... first it was the Cata systems rollout ... changes to hunter blew me away for about a month ... then after Cata launched, repeated nerfs to warlocks screwed me up for a while (I hear that lately locks have made a bit of a comeback) ... But the biggest thing that soured me with Blizz (which was not directly a game change per se) was Ghostcrawler's infamous condescending post regarding the difficultly of cata dungeons which basically called (paying customer) players whining idiots ...

The only times I get overwhelmed is when I go back to a game after a very long break. You come back and there are so many changes, sometimes those changes completely distort your character's role, or at least change the way you fill that role.

I don't really agree with the premise of the question. I never feel "overwhelmed" by changes in an MMO. The only thing I care about when it comes to changes is if it's fun or not. Some changes add a lot of fun to the game for me like WoW and flying mounts or daily quests. Some I couldn't care less about because I either don't care or don't care to participate like Eve Incarna and Incursion. Some just turn it all into a game I don't find interesting or fun to play like NGE.

As far as games that turned uninteresting to play. NGE of course. Fallen Earth and Eve going to micro-transaction just became games I didn't want to play. STO trying to go subscription and Micro-transaction turned Crytpic into a company I didn't want to give any money to.

Classic Everquest aka EQ1 prior to Planes of Power, was a MMO that catered to all player types. If you chose a certain class such as a druid or necro, you could solo. Classic EQ was designed mostly around small group content, enough of which became solo content for individuals at higher levels, without the need to dummy down any challenges to accommodate soloers.
There was also raid content, added after initial release, but raiders are an insatiable bunch, always demanding more to be designed specifically for them, which by definition cannot be enjoyed by small groups or soloers and thus creates a rift between the playerbase, dividing them into the camps of can access and cannot. Those who cannot are usually doubly denied, when developers slap artificial tags on raid content items, preventing them from being traded legitimately in the marketplace.

Such was the case when Planes of Power was introduced, an almost exclusive raid content expansion. The worst part though was what happened to crafting and those soloers and small group players who previously had earned the ability to craft the best items and enjoyed crafting as a major pursuit. Developers stupidly added a higher tier of crafted items whose ingredients were only found in this raid content, thus denying non raiders access to the ingredients, and diminishing a non raider master craftsman of the highest skill to mediocracy.

Now some, including the developers, would say, just build relationships with some guild players and trade for the ingredients.
Sounds good in theory, but was not possible in reality. Guilds hoarded these ingredients and powerleveled their own crafters, a pursuit which interestingly enough, many guildies formerly berated.

Overwhelming seldom happens .....

But generally I am overwhelmed when a change is made and the developer insists that there was no change and the class in question has always functioned like X since the game launched.

When months to years of game play would suggest otherwise.

@Tempes Magus

I'd have to agree with CoH and the Invention system; I have yet to try "Going Rogue" and the Incarnate stuff and I expect that will be a bit of a mind-numbing shock.

Actually, I do tend to leave MMO games for a bit too long and generally speaking, I find myself coming back and being overwhelmed and adapting to change in most any MMO game! (I have been known to be gone from anywhere to a few weeks to around 2 years.)

Going back to some older games are a bit of a shock; just went back to AOC and I figured best way to re-learn was to do the tutorial. I'll probably follow this advice in the future whenever I return back from a leave of absence.

World of Warcraft ongoing constant need for change just for change. It is one thing to fix bugs, improve game play features, but Blizzard comes off at times as if they are just changing things just to change them.

Between that and the constant need to remove all concepts of risk/challenge reward balance, they finally drove me off. I felt I simply pulling a choice of levers and getting a treat. No balance in risk/reward, effort/payoff.

Moria. Turb took a solid, fairly egalitarian game and tried to turn the shiny leet gear chase factor to 11. The old open groups on my server largely died out; it seemed like most were guild runs. Itemization and crafting got fouled up as they just kept adding layers of grind. Get the gear to get the gear to get the gear. They're still trying to clean up the mess.

Not that would ever happen, but if there was ever a 'SoA rules' server I'd go there in a minute.

I know they have a lot of fans here, that's cool, just how things panned out for me. I lost my niche and never could find it again.

Dark Age of Camelot - New Frontiers

Of all the changes in all the MMOs I've played, I think New Frontiers was the one that "killed" the game for me. It vastly changed a core aspect of the game (RvR) from something I enjoyed, to something I didn't. Too bad, because I always look back fondly on DAoC up to New Frontiers (even including Trials of Atlantis, which a lot of people hated).