New World Outlines the Many Changes Made to Season 1 in Response to Player Feedback | MMORPG.com

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New World Outlines the Many Changes Made to Season 1 in Response to Player Feedback | MMORPG.com

New World  has a new Forged in Aeternum giving insight into how the PTR helped shape Season 1, and how the team does respond to community feedback. 

Read the full story here

Mensur

They take one step in the right direction and then two steps back. Now I just read updates for the humor.

Theocritus

The problem with listening to the community is we really dont know what we want either...Ask us a question on an issue and you will get 10 different responses....What is good for player A will drive away player B...Eventually your game ends up going whichever way the wind blows at the time.

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TheDalaiBomba

Theocritus said:

The problem with listening to the community is we really dont know what we want either...Ask us a question on an issue and you will get 10 different responses....What is good for player A will drive away player B...Eventually your game ends up going whichever way the wind blows at the time.

Listening to feedback doesn't mean taking one piece and implementing it, though.

They should be aggregating feedback and identifying trends.  If they're doing that, they're not asking a question and picking one of ten different responses.  They're asking a question, aggregating the responses, and changing the game to better fit with the desires expressed by the most common sentiments.


Obviously that's a hypothetical best case scenario, but it should be the goal here.

Angrakhan

TheDalaiBomba said:

and changing the game to better fit with the desires expressed by the most common sentiments

The problem with this historically has been distinguishing between the most common sentiments and then sentiments most loudly professed on the forums. The fact of the matter is the people that are happy playing your game are playing your game, and not engaging in forum debates. Thus, it's pretty easy to stumble into a mass exodus because you made a change less than 1% of your players wanted (but posted repeatedly and loudly on your forums) that alienates the 99%. You're sitting around in your status meetings all looking at each other asking what happened. Well what happened was you oiled the squeaky hinge on the hood and forgot to maintain the engine. Be careful what your source of aggregate data is. You need to make sure it's actually representative of your player base and not just the 1% special interest crowd wanting to do whatever it is they are demanding.

TheDalaiBomba

Angrakhan said:

TheDalaiBomba said:

and changing the game to better fit with the desires expressed by the most common sentiments

The problem with this historically has been distinguishing between the most common sentiments and then sentiments most loudly professed on the forums. The fact of the matter is the people that are happy playing your game are playing your game, and not engaging in forum debates. Thus, it's pretty easy to stumble into a mass exodus because you made a change less than 1% of your players wanted (but posted repeatedly and loudly on your forums) that alienates the 99%. You're sitting around in your status meetings all looking at each other asking what happened. Well what happened was you oiled the squeaky hinge on the hood and forgot to maintain the engine. Be careful what your source of aggregate data is. You need to make sure it's actually representative of your player base and not just the 1% special interest crowd wanting to do whatever it is they are demanding.

This is where they should be using analytics created by collecting player data to confirm the feedback they're being given.  If players claim that a certain activity is boring, and analytics tells them that activity gets little participation, then they are comfortably assured the issue lies with that activity in some way.

Again, this is all assuming best case scenario in the studio office, with everyone being able to take a clear-eyed stance on accurate data.

ashiru_1978

I'm just waiting for it to go F2P so I will add it to my Steam Library and never play it. Any time now...

Kyleran

DarkZorvanReturns said:

If you hate PvP, you can't complete a full card and lose out on the bonus.

Is a bit of a double whammy for me as I'm not a fan of expeditions so if any shields come up on the card I won't be able to finish it either.

It would be nice if players could also reroll the incomplete slots on the cards for Azoth and not just the activities list

It's never great when developers unnecessarily penalize their player base for refusing to play a game the way the devs want them to, be it forced PVP or forced dungeon running / raiding.

Darkhawke

Angrakhan said:

TheDalaiBomba said:

and changing the game to better fit with the desires expressed by the most common sentiments

The problem with this historically has been distinguishing between the most common sentiments and then sentiments most loudly professed on the forums. The fact of the matter is the people that are happy playing your game are playing your game, and not engaging in forum debates. Thus, it's pretty easy to stumble into a mass exodus because you made a change less than 1% of your players wanted (but posted repeatedly and loudly on your forums) that alienates the 99%. You're sitting around in your status meetings all looking at each other asking what happened. Well what happened was you oiled the squeaky hinge on the hood and forgot to maintain the engine. Be careful what your source of aggregate data is. You need to make sure it's actually representative of your player base and not just the 1% special interest crowd wanting to do whatever it is they are demanding.


Ironically,  we cam just out the word Game for Life to reflect what we see going on outside of gaming in the world today.

Angrakhan

TheDalaiBomba said:

Angrakhan said:

TheDalaiBomba said:

and changing the game to better fit with the desires expressed by the most common sentiments

The problem with this historically has been distinguishing between the most common sentiments and then sentiments most loudly professed on the forums. The fact of the matter is the people that are happy playing your game are playing your game, and not engaging in forum debates. Thus, it's pretty easy to stumble into a mass exodus because you made a change less than 1% of your players wanted (but posted repeatedly and loudly on your forums) that alienates the 99%. You're sitting around in your status meetings all looking at each other asking what happened. Well what happened was you oiled the squeaky hinge on the hood and forgot to maintain the engine. Be careful what your source of aggregate data is. You need to make sure it's actually representative of your player base and not just the 1% special interest crowd wanting to do whatever it is they are demanding.

This is where they should be using analytics created by collecting player data to confirm the feedback they're being given.  If players claim that a certain activity is boring, and analytics tells them that activity gets little participation, then they are comfortably assured the issue lies with that activity in some way.

Again, this is all assuming best case scenario in the studio office, with everyone being able to take a clear-eyed stance on accurate data.

You keep using the word "analytics" like it's some magic wand you wave and it solves all your problems. In order to use analytics like you are suggesting you have to log literally everything that goes on in your game. Every player action, every mob action, all relevant data such as how they're equipped, in real time. This level of logging not only can present a performance challenge to the servers, but it chews up an absurd amount of space. All this compute power and storage space costs money. What you're suggesting is neither easy or cheap.

Now ironically we're talking about New World which is running on the Amazon cloud, so yeah they have the compute and space to spare. So yes I concede New World should do this, but I'm not sure it's realistic for most MMO teams to do on a perpetual basis. Blizzard can for sure, but not your Indy shops.

TheDalaiBomba

Angrakhan said:

TheDalaiBomba said:

Angrakhan said:

TheDalaiBomba said:

and changing the game to better fit with the desires expressed by the most common sentiments

The problem with this historically has been distinguishing between the most common sentiments and then sentiments most loudly professed on the forums. The fact of the matter is the people that are happy playing your game are playing your game, and not engaging in forum debates. Thus, it's pretty easy to stumble into a mass exodus because you made a change less than 1% of your players wanted (but posted repeatedly and loudly on your forums) that alienates the 99%. You're sitting around in your status meetings all looking at each other asking what happened. Well what happened was you oiled the squeaky hinge on the hood and forgot to maintain the engine. Be careful what your source of aggregate data is. You need to make sure it's actually representative of your player base and not just the 1% special interest crowd wanting to do whatever it is they are demanding.

This is where they should be using analytics created by collecting player data to confirm the feedback they're being given.  If players claim that a certain activity is boring, and analytics tells them that activity gets little participation, then they are comfortably assured the issue lies with that activity in some way.

Again, this is all assuming best case scenario in the studio office, with everyone being able to take a clear-eyed stance on accurate data.

You keep using the word "analytics" like it's some magic wand you wave and it solves all your problems. In order to use analytics like you are suggesting you have to log literally everything that goes on in your game. Every player action, every mob action, all relevant data such as how they're equipped, in real time. This level of logging not only can present a performance challenge to the servers, but it chews up an absurd amount of space. All this compute power and storage space costs money. What you're suggesting is neither easy or cheap.

Now ironically we're talking about New World which is running on the Amazon cloud, so yeah they have the compute and space to spare. So yes I concede New World should do this, but I'm not sure it's realistic for most MMO teams to do on a perpetual basis. Blizzard can for sure, but not your Indy shops.

I only used analytics precisely one time in my previous post, and I never claimed it to be a magic wand.

You don't need such granular detail to get useful data.  Simply tracking the number of times a certain instance is completed compared to others can give you useful information.

Studios like Team17 (note: indie) are doing this stuff with twitch shooter multiplayer servers of 100 players.  One of the first things they did when they acquired Hell Let Loose was to start adding these in-game analytics tools, actually.  This is in a game where network stability and efficiency needs to be even more precise than in New World, with the same number of players per map instance.  IIRC, there was even an interview with a New World dev not too long ago talking about their use of this very thing.

Puffpuffpassss

ashiru_1978 said:

I'm just waiting for it to go F2P so I will add it to my Steam Library and never play it. Any time now...

Funny thing, i got the game when it was F2P back before the first playtest when the game was full loot pvp. Man those were some fun times that weekend before they changed it to having to flag to pvp.

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Kyleran

DarkZorvanReturns said:

Kyleran said:

DarkZorvanReturns said:

If you hate PvP, you can't complete a full card and lose out on the bonus.

Is a bit of a double whammy for me as I'm not a fan of expeditions so if any shields come up on the card I won't be able to finish it either.

It would be nice if players could also reroll the incomplete slots on the cards for Azoth and not just the activities list

It's never great when developers unnecessarily penalize their player base for refusing to play a game the way the devs want them to, be it forced PVP or forced dungeon running / raiding.

Same. PvP and Expeditions hold no interest for me. Being able to reroll slots would be nice. Ah, well. I bought the Premium +20 for the SP with the free 30,000 cash shop coins they threw at me between beta/release/Twitch/etc., so I'm finally 60. lol

You will have to let me know if it was worth it, have considered buying it for cash but taking a wait and see approach for now.

Grats on getting to 60, now the real game begins for you.  ;

I've got one character at level 625 for one gear set (fire mage/blunderbuss) which I really enjoy playing.

Also have an alt which is nearing 625, should be done in a few more weeks, a light armor wearing Great sword /Great  Axe zerker who isn't very good at the concept of staying out of harms way while keeping DPS up but is a work in progress.

All done without endless chest runs or dungeons, but I am very patient and am willing to grind in other ways to acheive my progression.

Scot

Darkhawke said:

Angrakhan said:

TheDalaiBomba said:

and changing the game to better fit with the desires expressed by the most common sentiments

The problem with this historically has been distinguishing between the most common sentiments and then sentiments most loudly professed on the forums. The fact of the matter is the people that are happy playing your game are playing your game, and not engaging in forum debates. Thus, it's pretty easy to stumble into a mass exodus because you made a change less than 1% of your players wanted (but posted repeatedly and loudly on your forums) that alienates the 99%. You're sitting around in your status meetings all looking at each other asking what happened. Well what happened was you oiled the squeaky hinge on the hood and forgot to maintain the engine. Be careful what your source of aggregate data is. You need to make sure it's actually representative of your player base and not just the 1% special interest crowd wanting to do whatever it is they are demanding.





Ironically,  we cam just out the word Game for Life to reflect what we see going on outside of gaming in the world today.

It does not matter if you use analytics or not, listen to the loudest voices on the forums or not, a studio has to make the decision not the player base. What analytics is good for is finding a system that does not work after a patch, many players report the same thing, or do the players like the new outfits? What is is no good for is deciding on the relationship between one game system and another like PvE and PvP, what the rewards are, what the the entire focus of end game should be and how it makes a coherent whole.

Any of you who have played MMOs over the decades know how wrong a game can go if it follows player feedback too closely, it should be an indicator factored in, not a litmus test for a studio.

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