From viewing these forums for a while i've come to the same conclusion that is also true of the general public.
If you try and do something, then someone else won't like it.
Some want sandbox while others want theme park, some want a theme park with sand box elements, while others want a sandbox with some theme park elements
Some want perma death, some don't
Some want full PvP FFA loot, others don't
Some want fast combat, some want slow
Some want a great story while others don't care for it
Some want to make their own story, while others want to just sit down and have fun
Some want fantasy others sci-fi or any other genre
Some want FPS style while others prefer tab targeting.
The only thing that nearly everyone can agree on is that what is out now is no good and it needs changing. Yeah i know not terribly helpful in deciding where to go. In the end, do something and a sect of people won't like it and will voice their opinoin on it and say thats the genre is going in the wrong direction or whatever else that comes up.
In the end no it's not possible to make the best MMO regardless of the forum you listen to because somewhere, someone will think it's the worst idea, and trying to mash all the ideas into a game would make it the worst MMO in history, as it would not only consistantly be changing how it's played but backgrounds, character designs, hardware settings and who knows what else in short it would be constistantly changing from one moment to the next trying to please everyone while pleasing noone.
Now if each MMO went for each part then that is the best chance of please the majority of the people. Bring out a action RPG, a sandbox game, a sci-fi game, a FPS game, a modern day game.
You know...GW2, Archage, SW:TOR, Tera, The secret world.
I personally think thats the best and probably only way to really solve the problem. Have each one cater to a different type of people and you'll please a lot more people then if you tried to smash all these ideas into one and end up causing your game to implode from sheer contradiction and lack of physical possibility :P
In short listening to these forums or any other for that matter and trying to make a game that will be the best ever in the eyes of the majority of the forumites is impossible. If you make your game one way you lose the other half. This is true in each feature. Add FPS, you lose the tab targeting crowd, you put it in sci-fi you lose the fantasy crowd, you put in elves, you lose the people that prefer elves not in their game.
I think with the releases above they may have provided the answer as best as possible without ever reading the forums. Thats of course they haven't read them. in the end theres too many conflicitnig ideas to get a concenses of what people want just by looking at the forums. So No, i don't think listening to these forums would have given us the best MMORPG by now, in fact in some cases doing that would have made it a lot worse, of course thats just my viewpoint based on what i like.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
I didn't bother to read all the replies, so I'm assuming this has been said 32435 times, but NO.
Ask 1000 people what the perfect MMO is, and you'll get 1000 different games.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.
There are about 200 consistent posters on these forums at any one time. We can't even agree between us what the best mmo would be, not even close. Though to be fair, over the years I have seen some really good idears posted here. And we can be the most critical bunch in all of the internet. It's not often you see anybody impresed with anything around here. If I was a dev (with thick skin) I think I would find this place a useful resource. Tha's my opinion anyway.
My main point being that these forums offer highly critical criticism and ideas that are great and repeatedly constantly of what a game should have and be.
A game developer's questions for you would then be:
What is that feature list, and what data do you have that identifies the size of the playerbase that would play a game with that feature list?
Note: Your ass is not a reliable source of data.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I agree with many of the comments about typical users or forum posters not understanding game design and there is definitely a lot more complaining on game forums than constructive ideas.
That being said however, I do agree with the basic premise of the OP in this sense. Any company making a product to sell to consumers needs to understand what those consumers want. For game companies one of the best sources of information is to read what gamers have to say on the various forums. Yes, there is a lot of garbage to sort through and a ton of whiners to deal with, but at the end of the day this is their target audience so in order to be successful they need to understand what we want and then figure out how to deliver that to us.
It may be that we don't really even know how to express what we want but the good publishers will understand how extract the important information from what we say. It's no different than trying to collect requirements for any other piece of software. Users always have trouble explaining what they really want and they always complain, but a good business analyst can still get the real requirements from them.
I would bet that Blizzard has a very large number of people in their employ who do nothing but read forums and distill the information from those forums into something they can use to improve thier game experience. WOW does not have 11.5 million subscribers by accident. Blizzard obviously determined what MOST gamers wanted and then gave it to them. I bet a lot of that came from forums where people were complaining about UO, EQ, AC and DAOC back in the early years of MMOs.
My main point being that these forums offer highly critical criticism and ideas that are great and repeatedly constantly of what a game should have and be.
A game developer's questions for you would then be:
What is that feature list, and what data do you have that identifies the size of the playerbase that would play a game with that feature list?
Note: Your ass is not a reliable source of data.
^This^
Here's something fun to do, it's something I started doing a few months back. Helps me never forget the contextual relativity on these forums:
In the past 6mo of steady viewing/reading these forums, 2 recurring trends popped up.
1. The "Online" members never exceeds 200 at a time. I've checked at all hours for reference, 170ish is the avg high-ball.
2. The "Guests" rarely if ever exceeds 2000 at a time. i've seen some 2300's for a short spurt, usually tied to beta keys or some other promotion/recent news post, but then it hovers between 1300 and 1800 on avg.
When there's the one core-group of 150-200 people (unique accounts/login times considered) who constitute the core-posting on this site, well, it's just not the best place to get any form of an objective opinion.
EVERYONE who posts here has some vitriolic trigger where we typically devolve to "X is stupid, and Y are stupid for liking X because I say so". That's not something people should learn from or listen to.
The only thing we may have "gotten" by active, employed, not-armchair devs reading these forums is laughed at.
Lets Push Things Forward
I knew I would live to design games at age 7, issue 5 of Nintendo Power.
Support games with subs when you believe in their potential, even in spite of their flaws.
I don't think developers would use the comments and suggestions of general users on a public forum as a foundation for development. It just doesn't work that way.
It's not that the ideas are bad, or not worthy of implementation. It's about Systems Analysis.
Originally posted by gigat I don't think developers would use the comments and suggestions of general users on a public forum as a foundation for development. It just doesn't work that way. It's not that the ideas are bad, or not worthy of implementation. It's about Systems Analysis.
Here is a quote from Paul Sams (Blizzard COO) in an interview with VentureBeat. Now I don't believe they actually read every post on the forums like he said, but clearly they are reading the forums to see what their customers are saying.
So we have the largest number of community team members of any game company out there. We listen to our players intently, and we really try to be focused on delivering what they are asking for. We are on the forums, we read every post, we get tons of petitions and contacts. All of those pieces of information come in we break down to bite-sized actionable chunks. We deliver this intelligence to the applicable people so they can effectively address concerns and issues quickly. We do make mistakes, and we hope we learn from them faster.
The game companies who are able to understand what their customers are saying and what they actually want are the successful ones. Obviously posting on the forums is only one part of this, but it's a significant part.
I believe that players, generally speaking, have very little idea about good game design. They know what they like and are good at noticing problems in a game, but are generally horrible at recommending GOOD solutions to those problems. Certainly this forum has a lot of creative ideas on it, but that doesn't mean those ideas would actually work out well in a game (and certainly even if you magically knew which ideas were good, some good ideas are incompatible with other good ideas and this isn't always readily apparent).
I think a large part of the lack of good MMOs is the fact they are so expensive. WoW (and to a lesser extent other some other MMOs) make companies realize there is a lot of money to be made. There are tons of failures and MMO development is expensive, however. That means businesses will tend towards less risky decisions, since being risky increases the chance of failure (even though lack of risk and creativity is also a real problem in terms of the games coming out, that doesn't mean it is less financially risky to do something that has never been done before). Bit by bit we are getting more creative ideas, however...it'll just be slower because of the expense of MMOs.
Anyhow, while forums can be helpful sometimes, it is hardly an easy task to find the very rare good ideas in them.
I completely agree. Reason I voted "no" in this poll.
There is a huge difference between being someone without any actual investment or without anything on the line being a monday morning quarterback when it comes to development and someone who is on the front line, knows what issues there are to bringing these games to launch and knows that not every endeavor is goign to work like they would hope.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I voted NO. The reason is simple. We have so much crud on this site, mostly bad ideas. Some good ideas. But for the most part if they listed to all this tripe and crud posted in the forums on a daily basis we would receive the most screwed up mmorpg of all time.
I really don't see how anyone can develop a game that goes beyond the end game woes. All MMO's get boring after you gear up at max level. That's why a sandbox game for me is always the best game to play. I don't think devs are even interested sandbox MMO's anymore to be honest. SWG will always be my favorite due to the fact that you had so many different things to occupy your time. ie...harvesting, crafting, PvP, exploration, space content, collect rares, decorate your house, group up for Gorax hunts, and the list goes on. After you cycle through all of that, rinse and repeat to break up the boredom.
My experience.Assume my description of a game as having 3 rings...inner, middle and outer.My experience...inner ring and middle ring of features.....no way in heck the devs will touch anything.Outer ring of least important features..possible consideration of a very small percentage.
Nope. That's crazy talk. I lurk around here for free beta keys, info about upcoming games/ release dates, etc., . . . I only read the posts that the "old timers" and mmo vets make for laughs.
Read the forums for a bit, you see the same names over and over again. They'll tell you what's wrong with a given game in a heartbeat then tell you how it SHOULD be done--based on personal preference. My biggest giggles come when ppl say WOW is crap and the sub numbers don't mean a thing, then say a new game is fail because it didn't generate a large amount of subs . . . WTF?
I've never actually heard anything about how sad a state the mmo genre is in the games I actually play, just this site, home of the vocal minority. The silent majority are busy playing their games.
I think borrowing ideas from members of this forums is a pretty bad idea, because the scope of their ideas is generally limited to the games that they have played. If you took all of those ideas and rolled them into one big package, you'd get an extension of WoW, more or less, because that's what most players have experienced, and what they base their ideas on. That's not even mentioning the division between sandboxers and themepark players on here, many elements of which are mutually incompatible.
I think the best place for game developers to get their ideas from is other games. This is exactly what Blizzard does, and it's a clever way of designing. It means that you can take proven ideas and push them that little bit further, tweak them that little bit more and change the experience. Personally, I just wish game devs would stop looking at WoW and look farther afield for inspiration, like PnP RPGs, MUDS, card games like Magic: the Gathering. These games may not always be balanced, but they're generally a lot of fun, and there's a huge range of playstyles. I think there's more to be said for that than a game balanced like a razor, that only gives you a few choices in how you'd like to play.
It is kind of a shocker after you hand in your first progress report. The next week you could be putting on 100s of chimneys to houses because your funding will be cut if you don't.
don't think developers would use the comments and suggestions of general users on a public forum as a foundation for development. It just doesn't work that way.
It's not that the ideas are bad, or not worthy of implementation. It's about Systems Analysis.
Here is a quote from PauSamsms (Blizzard COO) in an interview witVentureBeatVentureBeatg.
So we have the largest number of community team members of any game company out there. We listen to our players intently, and we really try to be focused on delivering what they are asking for. We are on the forums, we read every post, we get tons of petitions and contacts. All of those pieces of information come in we break down to bite-sized actionable chunks. We deliver this intelligence to the applicable people so they can effectively address concerns and issues quickly. We do make mistakes, and we hope we learn from them faster.
The game companies who are able to understand what their customers are saying and what they actually want are the successful ones. Obviously posting on the forums is only one part of this, but it's a significant part.
Well you found the information I used to make this thread in the first place. I read that whole thing before and decided on this threads title and what I wanted to say based on that. I didn't want to add that this was part of the threads source as there are so many people who would of automatically gone to the other side of things. Guess after seeing these responses the people here have little faith and trust in their own ideas and comments previously thought out on these forums. I think they don't give credit enough to the fact that the gamer does and will always give opinions and ideas that can be used to better a game no matter how many bad ones are thrown in-between them all. And to point this out where all others in this thread have failed to realize that just commenting on how there are so many bad in-between doesn't mean that all is lost.
Like Blizzard said sorting through and understanding it's customers is why they are so successful. And to me I think it is possible a MMORPG could be made to cater to the masses and put ever good idea and leave all the bad out that it could be the best MMORPG of all time. Imagine a EQ-DAOC-WOW-UO-AC-EVE-GW game all in one but smoothly integrated with solutions to match the immersion of ideas.
Blizzard has also said many, many times that they do not bow to the community. They examine things on their own merit regarding what needs to be done with the game. Just because they pay attention to feedback, problems, and concerns doesn't mean they think even 10% of the ideas on the forum are any good.
Also, I'd wager that statement is heavily influenced by the marketing department.
Blizzard has also said many, many times that they do not bow to the community. They examine things on their own merit regarding what needs to be done with the game. Just because they pay attention to feedback, problems, and concerns doesn't mean they think even 10% of the ideas on the forum are any good.
Also, I'd wager that statement is heavily influenced by the marketing department.
Yeah sure you would say that. Just like what people say about SOE when they hate them, they will speculate and say all sorts things, nothing different here about that last comment you made. It's not hard to believe that they read forums and look for ideas and what people are saying about their product, just so they can gather information to better the game for the customers. Why is this hard to believe for some?
Blizzard has also said many, many times that they do not bow to the community. They examine things on their own merit regarding what needs to be done with the game. Just because they pay attention to feedback, problems, and concerns doesn't mean they think even 10% of the ideas on the forum are any good.
Also, I'd wager that statement is heavily influenced by the marketing department.
Yeah sure you would say that. Just like what people say about SOE when they hate them, they will speculate and say all sorts things, nothing different here about that last comment you made. It's not hard to believe that they read forums and look for ideas and what people are saying about their product, just so they can gather information to better the game for the customers. Why is this hard to believe for some?
Oh, I don't doubt that they get the occasional idea on the forums. I still say that well over 90% of the ideas on forums (perhaps more like 95-99%) ARE no good. I expect they get far more ideas from the designers themselves and ideas that they do get from the forums would often have to be greatly changed to work.
It IS a fact that Blizzard has said many times they don't simply do what the forums say. Do you deny that?
Blizzard has also said many, many times that they do not bow to the community. They examine things on their own merit regarding what needs to be done with the game. Just because they pay attention to feedback, problems, and concerns doesn't mean they think even 10% of the ideas on the forum are any good.
Also, I'd wager that statement is heavily influenced by the marketing department.
Yeah sure you would say that. Just like what people say about SOE when they hate them, they will speculate and say all sorts things, nothing different here about that last comment you made. It's not hard to believe that they read forums and look for ideas and what people are saying about their product, just so they can gather information to better the game for the customers. Why is this hard to believe for some?
Oh, I don't doubt that they get the occasional idea on the forums. I still say that well over 90% of the ideas on forums (perhaps more like 95-99%) ARE no good. I expect they get far more ideas from the designers themselves and ideas that they do get from the forums would often have to be greatly changed to work.
It IS a fact that Blizzard has said many times they don't simply do what the forums say. Do you deny that?
Okay, would you agree that you could get ideas from criticism by reading other posts by gamers of another game in development? For instance, a new game coming out soon, people use criticism to say what they think of it, dislikes likes etc. You could as a game developer get as much info from that as good ideas occasionally on forums, because those are real measures of a games potential to the future of those gamers. And I did in my thread title had posted that and highlighted it Criticism mainly. People over looked this in this thread, not all what they get off forums is ideas, the other part is criticism and taking from that of other games in development and making them get new ideas of what could be done better differently. So in short, forums offer the best criticism of upcoming games in development that can give the best ideas and measure of where people stand. If people can't agree on this then they need to really think it through or at least post why they think not.
Its a hard earned bussines lesson, you make a plan, and you stick to it, no matter what anyone says, even the developers working on the game have to have a real big case before anyting changes.
Any changes always comes after the project is finshed.
the reason? A project would never ever finish since theres always someone or someting that finds a flaw, there is no prefection.
Blizzard has also said many, many times that they do not bow to the community. They examine things on their own merit regarding what needs to be done with the game. Just because they pay attention to feedback, problems, and concerns doesn't mean they think even 10% of the ideas on the forum are any good.
Also, I'd wager that statement is heavily influenced by the marketing department.
Yeah sure you would say that. Just like what people say about SOE when they hate them, they will speculate and say all sorts things, nothing different here about that last comment you made. It's not hard to believe that they read forums and look for ideas and what people are saying about their product, just so they can gather information to better the game for the customers. Why is this hard to believe for some?
Oh, I don't doubt that they get the occasional idea on the forums. I still say that well over 90% of the ideas on forums (perhaps more like 95-99%) ARE no good. I expect they get far more ideas from the designers themselves and ideas that they do get from the forums would often have to be greatly changed to work.
It IS a fact that Blizzard has said many times they don't simply do what the forums say. Do you deny that?
Okay, would you agree that you could get ideas from criticism by reading other posts by gamers of another game in development? For instance, a new game coming out soon, people use criticism to say what they think of it, dislikes likes etc. You could as a game developer get as much info from that as good ideas occasionally on forums, because those are real measures of a games potential to the future of those gamers. And I did in my thread title had posted that and highlighted it Criticism mainly. People over looked this in this thread, not all what they get off forums is ideas, the other part is criticism and taking from that of other games in development and making them get new ideas of what could be done better differently. So in short, forums offer the best criticism of upcoming games in development that can give the best ideas and measure of where people stand. If people can't agree on this then they need to really think it through or at least post why they think not.
No, various forms of testing will give far superior information on an upcoming game. People on forums at least half the time don't even have the feature list right (it's really rather pathetic). They also won't know if something novel will work or won't the vast majority of the time -- many times a good idea can sound bad on paper or a bad idea could sound good, and implementation even of good ideas can vary a great deal. The vast majority of forum goers just aren't good with things like that.
Forums are best to get somewhat biased feedback on features that players are actually using. And even here there are a lot of limits. Not useless, but not anything close to a holy grail of game design either.
About 5 years ago if i remember correctly, we discussed about how it would be awesome if we had dynamic content like mobs weather and realtime influence on game world. Lately we see games pop having dynamic content so maybe some developers saw this topic here and implemented some ideas we discussed back then.
I forgot what exactly what we all discussed, its a longtime ago but maybe sometimes devs check out this forum here who knows?
So devs GET RID of numbers in games try find someway we progress without idea we must lvl with numbers and i mean through xp numbers,lvls numbers or skills numbers(replace skills for lvs is still to me lvls i dont see much difference like in darkfall). Just when you train a character he become slowly stronger but not showing through numbers. Then at least we dont have the grind any more with lvls to some end game.
Just an idea if its good or bad thats up to all of you thank you:)
Comments
From viewing these forums for a while i've come to the same conclusion that is also true of the general public.
If you try and do something, then someone else won't like it.
Some want sandbox while others want theme park, some want a theme park with sand box elements, while others want a sandbox with some theme park elements
Some want perma death, some don't
Some want full PvP FFA loot, others don't
Some want fast combat, some want slow
Some want a great story while others don't care for it
Some want to make their own story, while others want to just sit down and have fun
Some want fantasy others sci-fi or any other genre
Some want FPS style while others prefer tab targeting.
The only thing that nearly everyone can agree on is that what is out now is no good and it needs changing. Yeah i know not terribly helpful in deciding where to go. In the end, do something and a sect of people won't like it and will voice their opinoin on it and say thats the genre is going in the wrong direction or whatever else that comes up.
In the end no it's not possible to make the best MMO regardless of the forum you listen to because somewhere, someone will think it's the worst idea, and trying to mash all the ideas into a game would make it the worst MMO in history, as it would not only consistantly be changing how it's played but backgrounds, character designs, hardware settings and who knows what else in short it would be constistantly changing from one moment to the next trying to please everyone while pleasing noone.
Now if each MMO went for each part then that is the best chance of please the majority of the people. Bring out a action RPG, a sandbox game, a sci-fi game, a FPS game, a modern day game.
You know...GW2, Archage, SW:TOR, Tera, The secret world.
I personally think thats the best and probably only way to really solve the problem. Have each one cater to a different type of people and you'll please a lot more people then if you tried to smash all these ideas into one and end up causing your game to implode from sheer contradiction and lack of physical possibility :P
In short listening to these forums or any other for that matter and trying to make a game that will be the best ever in the eyes of the majority of the forumites is impossible. If you make your game one way you lose the other half. This is true in each feature. Add FPS, you lose the tab targeting crowd, you put it in sci-fi you lose the fantasy crowd, you put in elves, you lose the people that prefer elves not in their game.
I think with the releases above they may have provided the answer as best as possible without ever reading the forums. Thats of course they haven't read them. in the end theres too many conflicitnig ideas to get a concenses of what people want just by looking at the forums. So No, i don't think listening to these forums would have given us the best MMORPG by now, in fact in some cases doing that would have made it a lot worse, of course thats just my viewpoint based on what i like.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
I didn't bother to read all the replies, so I'm assuming this has been said 32435 times, but NO.
Ask 1000 people what the perfect MMO is, and you'll get 1000 different games.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.
Pi*1337/100 = 42
There are about 200 consistent posters on these forums at any one time. We can't even agree between us what the best mmo would be, not even close. Though to be fair, over the years I have seen some really good idears posted here. And we can be the most critical bunch in all of the internet. It's not often you see anybody impresed with anything around here. If I was a dev (with thick skin) I think I would find this place a useful resource. Tha's my opinion anyway.
A game developer's questions for you would then be:
What is that feature list, and what data do you have that identifies the size of the playerbase that would play a game with that feature list?
Note: Your ass is not a reliable source of data.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I agree with many of the comments about typical users or forum posters not understanding game design and there is definitely a lot more complaining on game forums than constructive ideas.
That being said however, I do agree with the basic premise of the OP in this sense. Any company making a product to sell to consumers needs to understand what those consumers want. For game companies one of the best sources of information is to read what gamers have to say on the various forums. Yes, there is a lot of garbage to sort through and a ton of whiners to deal with, but at the end of the day this is their target audience so in order to be successful they need to understand what we want and then figure out how to deliver that to us.
It may be that we don't really even know how to express what we want but the good publishers will understand how extract the important information from what we say. It's no different than trying to collect requirements for any other piece of software. Users always have trouble explaining what they really want and they always complain, but a good business analyst can still get the real requirements from them.
I would bet that Blizzard has a very large number of people in their employ who do nothing but read forums and distill the information from those forums into something they can use to improve thier game experience. WOW does not have 11.5 million subscribers by accident. Blizzard obviously determined what MOST gamers wanted and then gave it to them. I bet a lot of that came from forums where people were complaining about UO, EQ, AC and DAOC back in the early years of MMOs.
^This^
Here's something fun to do, it's something I started doing a few months back. Helps me never forget the contextual relativity on these forums:
In the past 6mo of steady viewing/reading these forums, 2 recurring trends popped up.
1. The "Online" members never exceeds 200 at a time. I've checked at all hours for reference, 170ish is the avg high-ball.
2. The "Guests" rarely if ever exceeds 2000 at a time. i've seen some 2300's for a short spurt, usually tied to beta keys or some other promotion/recent news post, but then it hovers between 1300 and 1800 on avg.
When there's the one core-group of 150-200 people (unique accounts/login times considered) who constitute the core-posting on this site, well, it's just not the best place to get any form of an objective opinion.
EVERYONE who posts here has some vitriolic trigger where we typically devolve to "X is stupid, and Y are stupid for liking X because I say so". That's not something people should learn from or listen to.
The only thing we may have "gotten" by active, employed, not-armchair devs reading these forums is laughed at.
Lets Push Things Forward
I knew I would live to design games at age 7, issue 5 of Nintendo Power.
Support games with subs when you believe in their potential, even in spite of their flaws.
I don't think developers would use the comments and suggestions of general users on a public forum as a foundation for development. It just doesn't work that way.
It's not that the ideas are bad, or not worthy of implementation. It's about Systems Analysis.
Here is a quote from Paul Sams (Blizzard COO) in an interview with VentureBeat. Now I don't believe they actually read every post on the forums like he said, but clearly they are reading the forums to see what their customers are saying. The game companies who are able to understand what their customers are saying and what they actually want are the successful ones. Obviously posting on the forums is only one part of this, but it's a significant part.
I completely agree. Reason I voted "no" in this poll.
There is a huge difference between being someone without any actual investment or without anything on the line being a monday morning quarterback when it comes to development and someone who is on the front line, knows what issues there are to bringing these games to launch and knows that not every endeavor is goign to work like they would hope.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I voted NO. The reason is simple. We have so much crud on this site, mostly bad ideas. Some good ideas. But for the most part if they listed to all this tripe and crud posted in the forums on a daily basis we would receive the most screwed up mmorpg of all time.
I really don't see how anyone can develop a game that goes beyond the end game woes. All MMO's get boring after you gear up at max level. That's why a sandbox game for me is always the best game to play. I don't think devs are even interested sandbox MMO's anymore to be honest. SWG will always be my favorite due to the fact that you had so many different things to occupy your time. ie...harvesting, crafting, PvP, exploration, space content, collect rares, decorate your house, group up for Gorax hunts, and the list goes on. After you cycle through all of that, rinse and repeat to break up the boredom.
My experience.Assume my description of a game as having 3 rings...inner, middle and outer.My experience...inner ring and middle ring of features.....no way in heck the devs will touch anything.Outer ring of least important features..possible consideration of a very small percentage.
net net. just shut up because nobody cares
Nope. That's crazy talk. I lurk around here for free beta keys, info about upcoming games/ release dates, etc., . . . I only read the posts that the "old timers" and mmo vets make for laughs.
Read the forums for a bit, you see the same names over and over again. They'll tell you what's wrong with a given game in a heartbeat then tell you how it SHOULD be done--based on personal preference. My biggest giggles come when ppl say WOW is crap and the sub numbers don't mean a thing, then say a new game is fail because it didn't generate a large amount of subs . . . WTF?
I've never actually heard anything about how sad a state the mmo genre is in the games I actually play, just this site, home of the vocal minority. The silent majority are busy playing their games.
I think borrowing ideas from members of this forums is a pretty bad idea, because the scope of their ideas is generally limited to the games that they have played. If you took all of those ideas and rolled them into one big package, you'd get an extension of WoW, more or less, because that's what most players have experienced, and what they base their ideas on. That's not even mentioning the division between sandboxers and themepark players on here, many elements of which are mutually incompatible.
I think the best place for game developers to get their ideas from is other games. This is exactly what Blizzard does, and it's a clever way of designing. It means that you can take proven ideas and push them that little bit further, tweak them that little bit more and change the experience. Personally, I just wish game devs would stop looking at WoW and look farther afield for inspiration, like PnP RPGs, MUDS, card games like Magic: the Gathering. These games may not always be balanced, but they're generally a lot of fun, and there's a huge range of playstyles. I think there's more to be said for that than a game balanced like a razor, that only gives you a few choices in how you'd like to play.
No...... unless you hold the check book.
It is kind of a shocker after you hand in your first progress report. The next week you could be putting on 100s of chimneys to houses because your funding will be cut if you don't.
Well you found the information I used to make this thread in the first place. I read that whole thing before and decided on this threads title and what I wanted to say based on that. I didn't want to add that this was part of the threads source as there are so many people who would of automatically gone to the other side of things. Guess after seeing these responses the people here have little faith and trust in their own ideas and comments previously thought out on these forums. I think they don't give credit enough to the fact that the gamer does and will always give opinions and ideas that can be used to better a game no matter how many bad ones are thrown in-between them all. And to point this out where all others in this thread have failed to realize that just commenting on how there are so many bad in-between doesn't mean that all is lost.
Like Blizzard said sorting through and understanding it's customers is why they are so successful. And to me I think it is possible a MMORPG could be made to cater to the masses and put ever good idea and leave all the bad out that it could be the best MMORPG of all time. Imagine a EQ-DAOC-WOW-UO-AC-EVE-GW game all in one but smoothly integrated with solutions to match the immersion of ideas.
Blizzard has also said many, many times that they do not bow to the community. They examine things on their own merit regarding what needs to be done with the game. Just because they pay attention to feedback, problems, and concerns doesn't mean they think even 10% of the ideas on the forum are any good.
Also, I'd wager that statement is heavily influenced by the marketing department.
Yeah sure you would say that. Just like what people say about SOE when they hate them, they will speculate and say all sorts things, nothing different here about that last comment you made. It's not hard to believe that they read forums and look for ideas and what people are saying about their product, just so they can gather information to better the game for the customers. Why is this hard to believe for some?
Oh, I don't doubt that they get the occasional idea on the forums. I still say that well over 90% of the ideas on forums (perhaps more like 95-99%) ARE no good. I expect they get far more ideas from the designers themselves and ideas that they do get from the forums would often have to be greatly changed to work.
It IS a fact that Blizzard has said many times they don't simply do what the forums say. Do you deny that?
Okay, would you agree that you could get ideas from criticism by reading other posts by gamers of another game in development? For instance, a new game coming out soon, people use criticism to say what they think of it, dislikes likes etc. You could as a game developer get as much info from that as good ideas occasionally on forums, because those are real measures of a games potential to the future of those gamers. And I did in my thread title had posted that and highlighted it Criticism mainly. People over looked this in this thread, not all what they get off forums is ideas, the other part is criticism and taking from that of other games in development and making them get new ideas of what could be done better differently. So in short, forums offer the best criticism of upcoming games in development that can give the best ideas and measure of where people stand. If people can't agree on this then they need to really think it through or at least post why they think not.
I think some devs do read thse forums, so no. I don't think it makes any difference.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Its a hard earned bussines lesson, you make a plan, and you stick to it, no matter what anyone says, even the developers working on the game have to have a real big case before anyting changes.
Any changes always comes after the project is finshed.
the reason? A project would never ever finish since theres always someone or someting that finds a flaw, there is no prefection.
No, various forms of testing will give far superior information on an upcoming game. People on forums at least half the time don't even have the feature list right (it's really rather pathetic). They also won't know if something novel will work or won't the vast majority of the time -- many times a good idea can sound bad on paper or a bad idea could sound good, and implementation even of good ideas can vary a great deal. The vast majority of forum goers just aren't good with things like that.
Forums are best to get somewhat biased feedback on features that players are actually using. And even here there are a lot of limits. Not useless, but not anything close to a holy grail of game design either.
About 5 years ago if i remember correctly, we discussed about how it would be awesome if we had dynamic content like mobs weather and realtime influence on game world. Lately we see games pop having dynamic content so maybe some developers saw this topic here and implemented some ideas we discussed back then.
I forgot what exactly what we all discussed, its a longtime ago but maybe sometimes devs check out this forum here who knows?
So devs GET RID of numbers in games try find someway we progress without idea we must lvl with numbers and i mean through xp numbers,lvls numbers or skills numbers(replace skills for lvs is still to me lvls i dont see much difference like in darkfall). Just when you train a character he become slowly stronger but not showing through numbers. Then at least we dont have the grind any more with lvls to some end game.
Just an idea if its good or bad thats up to all of you thank you:)