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Do MMO devs listen to players?
l2avism
Member UncommonPosts: 386
To me it has always seemed that MMO designers always had their idea of what their game was going to be like and then they were always trying to pursuade everyone else to like it.
When the players would complain, their response was always something like "its our game you are playing, you will play it our way and you will pay us for it, and you WILL be grateful for it".
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https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
If I am ignored, bills go unpaid and the game closes down.
But listening to the players is not limited to implementing "advice" given on the forums, or making changes in response to player "demands". It can also be by analysing server metrics, i.e. looking at what the majority of the players are actually doing in the game and then reacting to that.
The customer is (clearly) not always right.
En Masse? Sure, we should give some consideration to the customers pitching their desired changes, particularly if it's a very large number of them (four is not very large).
We shouldn't be slave to it though, they're consumers, the vision of the game (and responsibility for maintaining that vision) belongs to the company.
They can vote with their dollars, that's how the marketplace works.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Once development is well underway, changing things can throw the entire game design into a state of chaos. It can also alienate the players that actually followed or spent money on the game because they actually liked the original design.
Under most circumstances there are things that can and can't be changed, and the problem is listening to the players and parsing what valuable information is hinged on things that can be done and won't negatively impact other aspects of the gameplay or run into severe limitations later.
One example would be ESO and the fact that it's engine uses the tab-target system. The game was not originally built to utilize the action gameplay style that it is now represented as, and that is an aspect that Zenimax could not remove from the game unless they were willing to completely rewrite the game. Instead, they rebuilt the way inputs and actions are delivered to give the game more of a action gameplay facade to otherwise traditional mechanics. Under most circumstances this doesn't cause any problems and it's been tuned by them over time to minimize error, but there are aspects of the combat that are unchangeable, such as the homing projectile attacks and the lag on the reticule targeting.
It's not something you as a gamer tend to have any immediate concern over or necessarily notice, but it has a lot of impact on the developers and their ability to modify and manage the game and it's operation. The more compromises and workarounds they implement to satisfy features they did not intend in the core design or that the engine doesn't properly support, the more roadblocks the game and it's gameplay is going to experience.
Not saying that devs should ignore player input. More so I'm pointing out that there is a window in which player input and dev design has to find compatibility between the desired features and the limitations of the system being built.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I kind of agree agree with Antiquated. Players may not be the best ones to listen to, especially since we can not agree on what is wanted or even what may be possible. Feedback, though, is usually a good thing. Sometimes.
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Game developers should have a clear vision of the game they want to do, and they should communicate it clearly beforehand, too.
Obviously they need realistic estimations about how many people would be interested in such a game, in order to avoid having a finished game but not a sufficiently large enough market.
And also obviously they will have to do constant changes of some sort or another, because the world is never standing still and making a game takes about 5 years - far too long time for the original concept to be still up to date.
But game developers shouldnt listen to people who want a different kind of game. Because these people should have known they are in the wrong game beforehand, and its not OK to kill the game for everybody else just because these people couldnt make up their mind in the first place.
If the game devs listen to gamers too much, every games turns into a WoW clone.
Meaning no challenge, heavy instancing, and everything gets trivialized.
Official forums - Local forums are good sources of information. Although they have an inordinately high signal to noise ratio, they are somewhat moderated and can filter information through feedback threads on specific features, changes, updates, etc.
Social Media - The immediate, short-message, two-way interaction of channels like Twitter and Facebook, offer not only very accessible channels for interaction, but they also provide a good amount of information on the reach, interest, and 'temperature' of a topic, issue, or event.
Player representatives - DAOC's Team Leads, EVE Onlines CSM and CPM, ATITD's Law Making, and Beyond Protocol's Galactic Senate all give insight into the interests and needs of the players. They allow the players to participate in development discussions. It reduces the signal to noise, especially when the players are elected, because it requires those players to filter out the noise and bring set concerns of their constituency. While this gives developers excellent direct contact with the players, it is with a specific subset of the playerbase - your heavily invested players. They are some of the game's most knowledgeable players but they bear the curse of expertise which often presents itself in a disconnect with the new player experience and casual gameplay.
In-game metrics - Where players go, how they got there, what they use, how frequently they use it, what they complete, how fast/often they compete it, what they abandon, when they abandon it, what they do immediately after completing/abadnoning something... all this data is available, and devs can see the real play patterns. This is one of the best sources of what is actually happening, but the reason WHY it happens isn't always that apparent, thus the need for other sources of information and feedback.
There are more, but those are some of the big ones.
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 feel that devs and others listen to what people want in general too much in this day and age.
I also feel devs should focus on making a game they would enjoy to play instead of the player base. It's difficult to make something with heart if you don't really believe in it past making a buck (catering to whims).
Most current MMOs are the result of listening to players feedback on what they want (Quick leveling, endless short and easy quests, instances, raids, PvP, lots of structure, difficulty sliders, GPS, journals, maps, free to play, etc.
On occasion feedback and changes are actually helpful. For instance if the text size is too small and you want options for bigger text because you are sitting 15 feet away from the TV instead of 2 feet from the monitor.
I guess you could say the majority wins in this day and age. They almost always get what they want.
At this point we have two solutions:
a) listen to what people want - i.e. listen to few forum activists that may represent minority;
b) ignore 'em all - we are gods.
Option "a" is bad, because different people would advocate too different things. Make game P2P, because that's how we would attract new customers; make game F2P only, becayuse that's how we would attract paying whales. Make content soloable. Make content forced-groupable. Make many many quests. Make no quests. Make pvE only, because PvP sucks. Make PvP only, because PvE sucks.
Option "b" is bad, because one then ignores normal criticism, like "in this quest I would suggest relocating NPC 20 meters to south and increase time to kill 10 rats by 35 seconds". or "Great Tooth of Sick Rat should be dropped by rats, not by Lizard Monkeys".
Solution is very simple: ignore forums, but do force developers to play as ordinary players (f2p with all restrictions) and listen to what players are actually talking about. But this is too much of non-science fiction...
http://www.mmoblogg.wordpress.com
We need developers who have a goal in mind and do what THEY want. Not this mish mash try to make everyone happy crap.
...or a variety of sources, like listed in my post above.
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
They are going to want to hone in on a specific demographic and develop toward that demographic.
The problem is that there are so many players who want so many things that it's not feasible to "listen" to every player. Of course those players who don't feel they are being listened to are going to feel disenfranchised.
Then again, there are realities to game development and the developers might have to change their designs in order to meet deadlines and budgets.
Honestly I don't think developers should tell players what they are working on anymore. Just make their game and when it comes to beta start advertising it. Let the players who like it come and let the players who don't find something else.
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Devs hardly ever do what players want (which is what you meant).
Devs have to make a game based on what players do, not what they say. These two hardly ever match.
Sometimes it can take a very long time before they actually do it though, or sometimes the suggestions are just not compatible with their vision for the game.
Not to mention that if Devs listened to every player out there, they'd wind up with a game that's incredibly bi-polar with no PvP one day and full loot perma-death crap the next. The latter is also where such a game would quickly end up. =P
The best you can do is give constructive criticism and hope for the best. Oh, and a tip for when doing the latter, don't go around insulting the developers and every player that doesn't agree with you when doing it.
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https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
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