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[Poll]The Silent Majority vs. The Vocal Minority vs. The Elusive Masses
Ramonski7
Member UncommonPosts: 2,662
Time and time again you hear people complaining about devs and their lack of communication with their playerbase. Often a mmo's dwindling population and/or eventual closure is blamed on the lack of feedback accepted from it's vocal minority that could have turned things around. But when it comes to that playerbase, who should they actually listen to and at what stage of a mmorpg's life cycle? Should it be during Alpha? Beta? Open Beta? Launch? Or should a development team have a clear direction for their creation and stick to it until the numbers start to stall? Either way, at least during the begining of a mmorpg's life cycle, devs gather input from both groups.
Closed beta is usually the first instance of when a vocal minority surfaces. They are the ones that are the most knowledgeable about a given mmorpg and are some of the most ardent defenders. Their input is crucial to the fine tuning and polish required to appeal to a silent majority. And that silent majority (not to be confused with The Elusive Masses) often makes it's appearence during open beta. Devs often gather feedback from the silent majority through surveys and data mining to help them pinpoint areas that may need improvements or further attention. But let's be clear, when I say silent majority, again I'm refering to those that show a good amount of interest for a given mmorpg, but for whatever reason offers very little vocal feedback via official forums. But nevertheless they are the key that could potentially lead to a groundswell that bring in big numbers..
The elusive masses are a group of mmorpg players that, regardless of popular opinion, do not operate via hive mentality. At best they are a large group of vocal ex-mmorpg players from different types of mmorpgs.These players don't all like the same things, but their presence is felt through changes made to past, present and future mmorpgs in the hopes of appeasing to them as a collective whole. And now with the emergence of Kickstarter and a potential motherlode of money, players and opinions, it's clear these types of vocal players will get a shot at the soapbox first. But when should devs forego what the vocal minority is saying in order to keep the silent majority happy? Or should they? And now I pose my question:
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Comments
"The squeaky gear gets the oil."
If someone cant be pained enough to formulate an opinion and express it, they obviously dont feel it strong enough. Ive seen alot of betas that randomly popup "Rate 1-10!" and whatnot, but in general Masses of people are just not intelligent enough to make decisions on their own. My opinion anyway. Only the elite few should rule :P
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Both and none. Trouble with vocal feedback is that people usually don't know what they're talking about, what they really want or, at the very least, cannot express their wants and needs adequately. In contrast, indirect or sensory feedback is much more reliable and does not require anything from the player.
For example, forums are often skewed toward negative because, in general, those who are more or less satisfied have little reason to post.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I have to agree if I'm having few issues with a game a I rarely post an adaboy type post. Mostly because with the culture of forums you will just be called a fanboi and flamed up and down. Also if I am enjoying the game and how it's setup I'm probably playing it and not on a forum. Unless it's a forum set up around discussing tactics and more about how to play the game then whether it is good or not.
The vocal majority.
Secrets of Dragon?s Spine Trailer.. !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwT9cFVQCMw
Best MMOs ever played: Ultima, EvE, SW Galaxies, Age of Conan, The Secret World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2X_SbZCHpc&t=21s
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The Return of ELITE !
[X] The money majority. People who spend money should get priority. SWG's NGE pissed off a ton of paying customers.
Also, I suspect many who complain about dev communication are more upset that they are getting their way. Devs don't agree with me = devs don't listen. It's especially true with F2P players who want more but don't spend a penny on games.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
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?"
because there is no freakin vocal minority, if a game design decision gets mostly hate on forums and results in devastating metacritic user ratings, you can be 100% sure it sucks monkey balls.
there is no silent majority of happy, happy users without opinion if a game gets one shitstorm after the other.
Secrets of Dragon?s Spine Trailer.. !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwT9cFVQCMw
Best MMOs ever played: Ultima, EvE, SW Galaxies, Age of Conan, The Secret World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2X_SbZCHpc&t=21s
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The Return of ELITE !
not everyone who has money is smart enough to give critical feedback. I am not willing to purchase a stinky piece of garbage just because paying testers gave bad feedback that affected the development. That will only take away the reputation of the company.
Everyone who has a voice should be taken into consideration, but the companies are professional developers so they have to be smart enough to pick critical feedback over crappy cravings of some people no matter who payed or who didnt pay.
They offer the option to pay, you pay if you want. So feedback priority for paying should not be an option. NOTE i said priority for paying to provide feedback. Should not be an option at all.
Also, why do i have to pay the company to receive my feedback first than other people. IF they dont like my feedback they delete my feedback and i lose my money. This is madness. Beta Testing used to be a critical job back in the day, now we have to pay for doing it, and you want to pay more for priority.... This... is.... madness....
SWG's NGE complaints were made by the vocal majority, significant majority as it happened, as it lost them 80 percent of their player base in a matter of weeks.
the OP's limit of a vocal minority and a silent majority, is just another of those generalisations, that has no real bearing outside of a 'theoretical' argument, neither group really exists.
and as any CSR will probably tell you, ignoring those who can be bothered to actually take the time to be 'vocal' about issues within a game, particularly if their real, is a recipe for disaster.
Devs should only listen to target demographics. It's impossible to please everyone.
If it's a sandbox, then post a clear sign on the door. "This is a sandbox*. If you don't like this sort of game, stay the hell out".
Of course they'll never do this, but I would dearly admire the honesty.
* even better yet, tell them what kind of sandbox it is.
Ok Ram(OP) using GW2 and Warhammer and Rift as an example, can you explain these groups using examples.
vocal minority you describe seem to be the people that are first on the forum to call out issues.
yet in each of these games, when the vocal minority as it seem to be labeled in the OP, call out these issues, the masses tend to follow and leave.
look at GW2 for example, since it was such a major hype monster on this forum, that's why I will single it out because most people here can relate to GW2 in some way. Early on, people were calling out issues with the design of the game. The fans would call these people trolls. But a month after release or so, these same fans that were calling others trolls for pointing out these flaws, then in turn made threads for the same issues that the so called trolls did.
i would link to examples of this, but last time I did that I got banned , so I won't. But seem like this vocal minority seem to have a similar voice to the masses or silent masses after the blinders fall off.
if anything, I believe the developers should listen to the critics on what they find to not be fun in the game, as well as pleasing fans.
if group of people from set A complain about this game having FFA PvP, while set B loves FFA PvP full loot, than why not make servers with different rulesets. Problem solved. Designs like that fix a lot.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Lol if developers did that, games like WoW, Rift, Darkfall, would have died long ago.
WoW was aimmed as a PvE raid core game. Lol at that. If Blizzard tried to go back to that they would fail hard "cough CATA design cough"....
fans never really know what's best for a game if they are blind. I learned this long ago. It's why I try to stay critical of games I enjoy. I would never back down from critisim of Rift, because I want it to improve. If I were blind and believe it was really perfect and not pointed out issues in design, that game would have flopped in beta.
trion world made a huge mistake on Storm Legion, they listen to the vocal minority which are the blind fans. They really never understand game design flaws.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I partly agree with this, but not the wording. I don't believe the causality is to blame as some like to fall back on.
developers just fail to understand the cause and effect of modern day MMO game design. Getting stats need to be used and understood. Currently it's not being understood or at least addressed correctly.
using WoW for example since its so popular and had similar situation that best fits my example.
blizzard had inside stats that show most new players QUIT THE GAME BEFORE LEVEL 10.
so what did they do about these stat data? They changed the lower level zones and applied some of the Roleplayijg features of the past expansions to the lower level area.
but did that address the cause of this effect?
NO. Clearly, Blizzard saw the data mine and applied the wrong understanding of it. Making low level areas more flashy isn't the solution since it has nothing to do with the issue. The issue is people now days have a different mindset of MMOs now days, and don't like playing filter content anymore. Nobody wants to play 60+ levels of content filler just to unlock assess to the real game. That was ok in the past, but not anymore. People will leave. This is why Blizzard introduced the SoR to allow people the chance to skip useless filler content.
blizzard took data and applied the wrong logical understanding.
Rift recently done similar flawed design decisions based on input from the wrong source of community. The vast and vocal minority who never really understand good game design, only elitism.
if I were lead developer of some of these games like Rift, GW2, Warhammer,TSW, SWTOR, Alganon, Darkfall, I would totally make smashing hits out of these games.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
There are a lot of facets to consider when your talking about player feedback and relevance. I think the first part is that all groups should be studied, and none obeyed. If their's one thing I've learned in my time seeking MMOs and prowling forums, it's that almost no players are ingenious enough to solve their own problems. They come up with patchwork solutions to satisfy what they immediately want which, when applied, they realize isn't what they wanted, or isn't adequate, they oversimplify problems and exercise extreme bias toward their specific interest with little to no regard for how a solution can be made to suit them and others simultaniously, and they often just preach some commonplace mechanic they have adopted elsewhere, exposing a lack of creativity or adaptation to the media in question.
Developers should get feedback from everywhere, because they all matter, what doesn't matter is the specific instruction those players give, they will tell you how to fix the problem that they have because they think they know what their talking about, and sadly, sometimes some are actually more ingenious than professional designers, but that's the world wide web for you, your introducing people from everywhere, and the designers arn't often the most inspired either. But the designers of the game should be more competent and talented than the gamers, if their not, they need to correct that. The designers should be able to come up with better solutions than their gamers, they should be reviewing everyones feedback and looking for the problem they want fixed, not the solution that is offered, and come up with a solution which will remedy the maximum amount of issues all together.
There are bound to be a few great ideas on the forum, and shame on them if they do not recognize them, but most of the time that's clearly not the case, it's usually just someone whose highly bias, and willing to gripe. And it's hard to distinguish which ideas are good when the developers are actually less inventive than the typical gamer, they may actually take some feedback simply because it's better than their idea, but they fail to make a great solution which will solve problems above and beyond the direct obsession of the gripe, which is the biggest problem with "accepting feedback". A professional "problem solver", needs to have a lot more scope than just, how to resolve some simple complaints, especially when it pertains to how the gameplay operates and the typical balance woes.
Beyond that, I do not actually think the silent majority merits much more concern than the vocal minority, or whatever other group. Why?, how could more people be anything less than more important? Simple really, the silent majority is silent because they don't care as much, their easier to please, or their satisfied. They may have ideas for improving the game, they may have their own preferences, but their desires arn't strong enough to seek attention and ask for solutions. There are many other reasons why a player would abstain from the forums, but that likely sums them up. Any that are participating but unwilling to seek recognition are probably part of the elusive mass which has opinions but simply doesn't plant any stock in sharing them.
You can learn a lot from feedback, you can see what players want. It's not about which player is right or wrong, because it's a game, what is right is satisfying the most players. So that's the solution they need to find among any type of feedback and data, how do you improve the game for the most people in any given situations. If one player want's A, and another want's B, and the next want's C, why would you settle for just one option? it's not a multiple choice test, and the vast majority of the time, all of the options given by the players fall short of encompassing quality, the designer should be looking for the alphabet solution which includes them all, even seemingly conflicting interests, at the same time, by being inventive and insightful.
There are plenty of games which are not above critisizm and improvement but have been able to satisfy gamers and impress none the less, MMOs as a whole have been short in their offerings and failed to incorperate a great deal of fundamental satisfaction. That is why there are so many suggestions even though the ideas of typical players arn't very inventive, it's because the designers are just as bad, or worse, and leave an opening for bad ideas to get attention. Nobody cares if a bad idea or a poor review exists when the game is clearly good. Consider GW2?, there are clearly people who don't like it and automatically reject it? Yet there are plenty of people who love it, and it's successful. It's managed to make a profit and a significant impact on gamer satisfaction, so the bleting of bad suggestions and bias gamers can be ignored. That's not to say that GW2 is the way to make it and that different preferences don't have meaning, it just points out the fact that a good game that is simply done well is not beholden to every bad piece of feedback, because it's clearly doing something right. WoW has a lot of room for improvement, but it's wildly successful, so it's not going to make jurassic changes to cater to irrational feedback when it has more to lose in the already satisfied players.
If a game is unsuccessful from the beginning and the "silent minority" is the majority of your participation, well you've pretty much failed as a designer to begin with, accepting all their wonton bias isn't going to solve a more fundamental problem.
I have generalized a great deal, but this is a generalized subject, so it applies in general, not on a case by case basis. The main thing is that designers need to be more talented, they should be very receptive to feedback, and surpass the admission of suggestions. If they can't do that, then their done, the overwhelming majority of gamers don't have what it takes to make good game judgements.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
The silent majority are the 60+% of the population that never touch forums. They are the ones that developers pull the bulk of metric data from. Metric data is many many times more accurate than anything the forums will tell you.
http://chroniclesofthenerds.com/nerdfight/
Y U NO FLIP TABLE?!?!?!
If you include people who read but never post it's more like 95% of the people in a game. Very few people think posting on offical forums is worth the time it takes and it's just the complainers who do it.
That may not be 100% true but it's why "feed back" from officlal forums is always risky. They do not repreisent a large % of your games happy population.
I didn't vote because my answer isn't there.
C) The data identifying the silent majority
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
The trick is creating an environment where everyone can speak up and offer explanations of what motivates/demotivates them. The problem is that game forums tend to become a sort of PvP battlefield where some people try to shut down their fellow players. The damage the vocal minority does is not that they are advocating for themsleves, it's that they begin to actively take runs at anyone who has a different playstyle.
(data can identify silent majorities, but without running round after round of experiments, it's hard to understand why they do what they do)
Not everyone has any interest in speaking up. Most people are just playing a game. You will never hear from them and if you try to coax feedback from them, a good number of them would probably find that an inconvenience or bother.
This is one of those areas where narius is spot on. Most people have no desire to analyze why they found something enjoyable. They just play it if they find it fun and leave when it no longer is.
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 didn't vote either; Choices were to (1) listen to feedback or (2) ignore feedback? Since the slient majority, by definition, cannot be heard.
My vote is listen to beta testers.
Pirates of the Burning Sea, I heard, was an awesome game in Beta. But 'the suits' imposed major gameplay changes, such as "oh everyone will want to be a ship captain" or "players won't like sailing in first person view unless they are in combat." Stupid stuff like that. The result was a game with no longevity whatsoever; and very little cooperation (community).
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Devs need to decide if they are making a PvP game or a PvE game. If you try to mix those up you get nothing but a trash game. PvP players and PvE players CANNOT AGREE. They do not belong in the same game.
Once you have gotten rid of that turbulence you might stand a chance at hearing reasonable suggestions. For that there needs to be a staff actually reading the forum for that game. Reading the thread entitled GAME SUGGESTIONS HERE.
On this note, have you ever repeated a suggestion on the forums and got a surprise to see it implemented? Especially a suggestion that was unique and not shared by the general consensus? I have. Made me wonder if someone was reading. More likely I just jinxed with a dev.
I did say "can" and not "must". Metrics are good, but they are not the whole story of the silent majority. I agree that not everyone goes to the trouble of self-analysis of the whats and whys of their play, but there are a lot of people who do and who have valuable insight to provide, but who become deeply uncomfortable with being around forums dominated by a subculture of the game. (I think I've been on both sides of that fence in different games)
The Eve system of a player-elected council is fascinating to me. Despite, or perhaps because of, all the gamesmanship and politics and manipulation, it reminds me of the old saying that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others which have been tried"But if they're silent how did you gather any data? I don't believe most players care enough to give feedback.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville