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In your experience, are gameplay tweaks often based on legitimate balance concerns? Or more on public demand? (E.g. whining from a vocal minority that doesn't like losing to a certain tactic "noobs" keep spamming, or whatever.)

I've been thinking how plenty of games have op options that don't get nerfed (See the holy four from Marvel vs Capcom 2), and was wondering where the line was between "needs balancing" and "That one guy who can trash the entire cast of 50 is fine."

Mostly legitimate balance concerns.

But balancing is ridiculously hard thing to do because it's hard to predict how it's going to work out in the public. You can beta test for years with tons of people but once it goes public, who knows whats going to happen.

People figure out things that are new that designers could not possible predict. My favourite story regarding this is when Deus Ex was released. The designers made a game where there can multiple ways of attacking an objective (and it was ****ing awesome for a game that was released 16ish years ago) and had all these avenues worked out.

There was a compound that you need to get into and it's surrounded by a wall. I'm pretty sure you had go on this little journey to another part of the area and talk to a few peeps to get some sort of code, or way to get in. However, some guy/girl figured out that you can jump onto proximity mines. So instead of doing all other shit, they placed mines on the wall and just climbed up and jumped into the compound. The point is that it's very hard to understand what somebody is going to do while playing the game.

The Division is having this issue right now. People complained regarding the insta-kills from players who have extremely high DPS. So they buffed armour mitigation to 75%. Now, everybody runs around with tank and skill builds one shotting people sticky bombs...and guess what people are complaining. It's ****ing hard to do.

I consider it nice for the first few months but anything after that is pretty pointless. People will always find tactics, builds, skills etc to exploit.

Yep. That it is true unless new content has been added. Or something is found that can ruin the experience completely and drive people out.