Every time we had a nerf in CoX, we had fifty people in the forums screaming about how valid the nerf was, because it was "bringing balance to the game."
The fact that others saw the nerf as a new UNbalancing bounced right off of their armor. They didn't care, just so long as the game mechanic they hated most got nerfed. And don't even bother posting about why you thought the nerf was wrong, because you'd get called all kinds of names.
I guess I was one of those "nerf-validity" posters depending on the specific nerf in question. Over the years I was in favor of multiple nerfs that the CoH devs implemented. Of numerous buffs as well, but I'm more curious about the perception that agreeing with any nerf was seemingly bad.
So lets get to a specific example as all too often the vague and generalized notion of "nerf" ends up with people talking around each other. Lets take... say, regen scrappers. Early on (Issue one, IIRC) I was playing a claws/SR scrapper and boy it was an uphill battle. If you'll recall DEF scaling worked differently back then, perhaps best described as it *didn't* scale. Taking on +2 critters effectively turned my scrappers armor into tissue paper, running on an 8-man team was asking to be dropped every single battle unless I was quick on the draw with Respites. DEF was in dire need of some dev attention and I said so on the forums.
Meanwhile, regen scrappers were nigh-unstoppable. They weren't merely good, they transcended scrapper-dom and effectively served as an additional tanker option with greater damage output to boot. In some cases they were superior to other tankers, notably Ice tankers who were suffering all on their own with the games DEF issues. My best friend had a kat/regen and we routinely duo'd as well as PUGing, we even traded accounts now and then as I wanted to verify what I was seeing but really it didn't take a rocket scientist to spot the vast performance gulf between these two powersets. So I said so on the forums as well.
I know some "anti-nerfers" were of the mindset to never reduce the power of anything, that the solution would always to bring the powerlevel of everything else up to par. Thats a nice idea but I didn't see it as a practical solution, in this case it would mean every scrapper secondary needed a substantial buff and even worse every single tanker primary AND secondary needed to be buffed up to the over-performer's level. Or a single powerset that was clearly doing more than it was ever intended to do could be tweaked downwards. Realistically there was only one choice here and the devs followed it. Regen was nerfed to being "only" a solid scrapper armor set. And the DEF rules eventually got adjusted too, SR became playable on teams. More viable sets = more viable alts to keep the playerbase happy exploring new builds.
The only argument I ever saw against regen's nerf that I found to have any validity was claiming it would run off players. I've no idea if the claim was valid or not, I saw some people state they'd leave the game if the nerfs stayed in place only to see them continue posting weeks and months later. Maybe some people did leave the game over it, I honestly don't know. But I truly believe *more* people would have left the game over the then-coming months and years if the only viable scrapper secondary was Regen. So while I acknowledged the argument as a valid point but believed there was a stronger counter-point. There were plenty of nonsensical arguments passed around including threats of legal action. The rebuttal I remember being entertained by the most was "regen is balanced... everyone can roll a regenner". Apparently some players would have been happy if the game devolved into City of Regens, personally I championed for every set being roughly on par made for a better, longer-lasting game.
I loved the regen set. Ended up with two or three L50s regenners in my stable, even with the nerfs it was capable of amazing feats of survival. And I honestly believe the set, the scrapper and tanker archetypes, and the game as a whole benefited from Regen's demotion from a tanker-level armorset to scrapper-level. There was no "hate" or animosity. Never understood this assumption of hatred when to my eyes I loved the game more than diehard regen-only players who appeared to only being jealously guarding their advantage. I wasn't a regen player, I wasn't a SR player - I was a CoHer who played both and more besides.