For a deeper insight in to my opinions check my blog.
How to engage with the silent majority. The group of a user base that at best comes to a community site when something is wrong but beyond that stay silent and unmoving. This is a question that have been nagging my mind for some time. Not only because it is a interesting mental exercise but also vital in order to get a proper product development. The latest thing to spark this train of thought is from MechWarrior online. A new matchmaking system was introduced. The preview of the system was met with a positive response and the general attitude was good. Then comes the patch with the new system and people flipped their collective tables.
So how do you engage those that prefer to remain silent until the bio-waste hit the air circulation system? Because i am seriously stumped. Also if you are part of the silent majority usually, would you care to shed some light on why? this would be helpful to understand the issue.
Best regards
T
I believe your basic problem is in how you have approached the question. You do not engage the silent majority, you simply track there choices. If they had wished to be engaged, they would be part of the vocal minority. It is their decision to NOT be engaged that is important.
You have to treat the silent majority different than the vocal minority. Attempts to engage simply drive the away, as you are creating a hostile environment for them. What you need to do is setup simple logic traps, and let them vote via their choices (not words). Make simple A/B choices avaialbe in game, and see which are more popular. The silent majority gives clear feedback with their choices, you just have to listen to them. This group is all about actions, not words.
Why should you? Majority don't look for raiding, or battlegrounds, or arena, or roleplaying or deep crafting, they just want a game to play and they probably play it solo.They won't tell you anything that could actually improve the game, just like most of the vocals don't really tell you anything that could improve the game, except if a quest is bugged or something is unbalanced.
Its the extreme minority that gives you ideas on activities that can be added to improve the game, they will give you specific feedback that can actually lead to a solution on a problem and those are the people you as a developer should listen to.
Iselin: And the next person who says "but it's a business, they need to make money" can just go fuck yourself.
Throw them a bone. Offer something small for free that will make the person feel like it is worth their time to give you feedback. They will appreciate that you value their opinion enough to compensate their time and will be more likely to give you honest answers.
If you're a developer you pull metrics from the game they are playing. Where do they go? What do they do? What do they avoid? What do they buy? What do they sell in the auction house? How many quests do they complete? And so on.
Exactly. You don't ask, you observe. Often what people say and what people want are two different things.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Originally posted by GdemamiYou don't, that is why it is called silent.
But catering to the vocal minority hasn't worked for the last decade... So surely it is a valid question and something that Devs should try?Listening only to the received wisdom echo chamber of the PvP action combat minority, for example, has done a lot to destroy this genre.
You are 100% incorrect... because you have set out two choices, which are obviously bad... but not allowed for the good choice.
Dont cater to the vocal minority. Dont engage the silent majority. Design your game based on metrics measuring the preferences of the silent majority.
If we look at city planning, or even store design, neither of these are done based on the vocal minority, nor are they based on engaging the silent majority. They are done based off measurements and observations of the silent majority, and designed to accomodate both function and form.
Originally posted by Kuinn Some games have short polls about upcoming or existing features, that take less than a minute fill. I think it's a good system...
Interestingly enough, in all my years of playing Everquest, I only ever saw one in-game poll. Shortly after the 1999 Halloween Event, an in-game poll asked me if I liked it. Not one single poll other than that. This shows how absurdly clueless SOE is in the area of customer retention/satisfaction.
Originally posted by Octagon7711 Aion had a good idea. A survey icon would pop up in the corner of your screen while you were playing. If you took the survey you got rewards in the form of boosts. So every active player could contribute.For inactive players you could provide email surveys that gave in-game rewards when completed.
Excellent idea. They can obtain customer insight with almost no cost; as someone who's worked in the Market Research industry for 15 years, I can tell you this is a researcher's dream come true.
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
There is an old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The silent majority hangs out here much of the time.
If you "fix" what wasn't "broke", you may hear from some of the no-longer-silent majority, complaining about how you broke their enjoyment. The rest will either walk away or suck it up. The short answer to the OP's question is that you can't get people to change.
Originally posted by GdemamiYou don't, that is why it is called silent.
But catering to the vocal minority hasn't worked for the last decade... So surely it is a valid question and something that Devs should try?Listening only to the received wisdom echo chamber of the PvP action combat minority, for example, has done a lot to destroy this genre.
You are 100% incorrect... because you have set out two choices, which are obviously bad... but not allowed for the good choice.
Dont cater to the vocal minority. Dont engage the silent majority. Design your game based on metrics measuring the preferences of the silent majority.
If we look at city planning, or even store design, neither of these are done based on the vocal minority, nor are they based on engaging the silent majority. They are done based off measurements and observations of the silent majority, and designed to accomodate both function and form.
Pretty much this.
Dev teams don't listen to the vocal minority as much as people might think. However, that vocal minority has delivered valuable information to developers in terms of giving examples of mechanics that are broken, etc.
However, if you want to have an example of where a development team used metrics to make game changes that ignored the voices of the vocal minority, look at WoW.
First, going from Vanilla to TBC; Blizzard took out 40 man raiding. The vocal minority wailed and did a lot of fear mongering (the game will die, blah blah). 25 man raiding worked just fine and Karazhan which was a 10 man raid was one of the most popular raids of the entire expansion pack. Hence, come WotLK Blizzard introduced 10 man progression raiding. Again, we heard all of the doom porn from all of the naysayers, and again they were proven wrong.
What's more interesting is that for the launch of Cataclysm, Blizzard went back to "harder" 5 man heroics, need for CC, triage healing, tanks needing to manage cooldowns better in 5 mans, etc. Ironically, the vocal minority seemed pretty happy with Blizzard bringing the challenge back to WoW. Of course, this is when WoW started to bleed out subs and lost millions over the course of the expansion pack since we went from the aoe fest that was wotlk back to a more dungeon crawl environment from TBC.
Developers should have all of the tools available to them to see what's trending among their player base. Yes the vocal minority has it's uses, but for the most part they don't represent your average user. Developers shouldn't ignore the vocal minority, but they also don't have to try to get the silent majority involved in open discussions. Metrics are the voice of the majority.
Originally posted by Kaneth Metrics are the voice of the majority.
Metrics do not tell you Why.
You can have all the data you want - forum feedback, metrics, surveys, you name it, but the root issues are how to interpret those data and then, even if you had some solid idea what people want, implementation of those ideas.
You can have all the data you want - forum feedback, metrics, surveys, you name it, but the root issues are how to interpret those data and then, even if you had some solid idea what people want, implementation of those ideas.
Guess based on those data, implementation, then see the reaction.
Big data analytics. You have the servers track how many players do what under all sorts of circumstances and figure out what players like that way.
A Tale in the Desert would occasionally have poll questions. You click an icon, you choose an option, and your feedback gets sent off to the developers. It's a simple idea, and it's one of the many things in ATITD that I'm mystified as to why more games haven't adopted it.
*****DON'T***** change something just because a lot of users are screaming on a forum for it to be changed *****UNTIL***** you have taken a poll of all users because the things that 10% of your user base hate might be the things the other 90% love.
Instead ask users what are the top 10 things they dislike about the game and AT THE SAME TIME ask what are the top 10 things they like, then compare the two lists and don't change the things that appear on both lists.
Put another way: there is more than one type of a player so stop trying to make a game to suit a non-existent single type of average player and make a game that targets the multiple types of player separately i.e.
a good pvp sub-game for pvpers
a good fast leveling & raiding sub-game for raiders
a good slow leveling sub-game for altoholic levelers
a good exploring and collecting sub-game for explorers and collectors
a good crafting sub-game for crafters
a lot of the earlier games did a lot of this by accident because they were trying to create fantasy *worlds* and it happens naturally if you try to do that.
First, going from Vanilla to TBC; Blizzard took out 40 man raiding. The vocal minority wailed and did a lot of fear mongering (the game will die, blah blah). 25 man raiding worked just fine and Karazhan which was a 10 man raid was one of the most popular raids of the entire expansion pack. Hence, come WotLK Blizzard introduced 10 man progression raiding. Again, we heard all of the doom porn from all of the naysayers, and again they were proven wrong.
What's more interesting is that for the launch of Cataclysm, Blizzard went back to "harder" 5 man heroics, need for CC, triage healing, tanks needing to manage cooldowns better in 5 mans, etc. Ironically, the vocal minority seemed pretty happy with Blizzard bringing the challenge back to WoW. Of course, this is when WoW started to bleed out subs and lost millions over the course of the expansion pack since we went from the aoe fest that was wotlk back to a more dungeon crawl environment from TBC.
Developers should have all of the tools available to them to see what's trending among their player base. Yes the vocal minority has it's uses, but for the most part they don't represent your average user. Developers shouldn't ignore the vocal minority, but they also don't have to try to get the silent majority involved in open discussions. Metrics are the voice of the majority.
Here is the problem.
First of all you use the vocal minority to say "other people", its filled with us vs them, which is the Richard Nixon of "vocal minority and silent majority",and fail to recognise that the vocal people have a lot of different desires.
Second, the decision to remove 40-man raiding was never due to player feedback. Also, stripping down from 40-man down to 10-man karazhan and up to 25-man raiding was hated by the raiding community, and blizzard acknowledged that it was a huge mistake doing it that way.
Third, if it hadn't been for player feedback and power creep karazhan would never have become popular among casual players.
Fourth, 10-man raiding during wotlk had a lot of issues. You had a vocal minority that complained that loot was better in 25-man, you had a vocal minority that complained that 10-man was awful for progression raiding, and you had vocal 25-man raiders that complained about repetition fatigue because you ended up doing two types of raiding. All those vocal minorities were right, because the silent majority never cared about raiding to begin with.
The lesson here is that the majority player doesn't exist, its filled with different minorities that want different things. If you listened to what the majority wanted, there wouldn't be raiding, battlegrounds, arena, heroic dungeons because it was minorities that asked for those things.
Iselin: And the next person who says "but it's a business, they need to make money" can just go fuck yourself.
First, going from Vanilla to TBC; Blizzard took out 40 man raiding. The vocal minority wailed and did a lot of fear mongering (the game will die, blah blah). 25 man raiding worked just fine and Karazhan which was a 10 man raid was one of the most popular raids of the entire expansion pack. Hence, come WotLK Blizzard introduced 10 man progression raiding. Again, we heard all of the doom porn from all of the naysayers, and again they were proven wrong.
What's more interesting is that for the launch of Cataclysm, Blizzard went back to "harder" 5 man heroics, need for CC, triage healing, tanks needing to manage cooldowns better in 5 mans, etc. Ironically, the vocal minority seemed pretty happy with Blizzard bringing the challenge back to WoW. Of course, this is when WoW started to bleed out subs and lost millions over the course of the expansion pack since we went from the aoe fest that was wotlk back to a more dungeon crawl environment from TBC.
Developers should have all of the tools available to them to see what's trending among their player base. Yes the vocal minority has it's uses, but for the most part they don't represent your average user. Developers shouldn't ignore the vocal minority, but they also don't have to try to get the silent majority involved in open discussions. Metrics are the voice of the majority.
Here is the problem.
First of all you use the vocal minority to say "other people", its filled with us vs them, which is the Richard Nixon of "vocal minority and silent majority",and fail to recognise that the vocal people have a lot of different desires.
Second, the decision to remove 40-man raiding was never due to player feedback. Also, stripping down from 40-man down to 10-man karazhan and up to 25-man raiding was hated by the raiding community, and blizzard acknowledged that it was a huge mistake doing it that way.
Third, if it hadn't been for player feedback and power creep karazhan would never have become popular among casual players.
Fourth, 10-man raiding during wotlk had a lot of issues. You had a vocal minority that complained that loot was better in 25-man, you had a vocal minority that complained that 10-man was awful for progression raiding, and you had vocal 25-man raiders that complained about repetition fatigue because you ended up doing two types of raiding. All those vocal minorities were right, because the silent majority never cared about raiding to begin with.
The lesson here is that the majority player doesn't exist, its filled with different minorities that want different things. If you listened to what the majority wanted, there wouldn't be raiding, battlegrounds, arena, heroic dungeons because it was minorities that asked for those things.
I never said the decision to remove 40 man was due to player feedback. I implied that it was due to Blizzard NOT receiving feedback, but looking at metrics to make the decisions for them. Additionally, aside from maybe a blurb about going with a smaller, singular raid size (like 15-20) I have never seen Blizzard acknowledge the current raiding as a mistake.
Sure 10 man raiding had issues in WotLK, it was brand new in terms of progression and the kinks weren't worked out. Those who complained about repetition fatigue were at fault themselves. There was literally no reason to do both types of raiding, aside from those who wanted to gear faster. Blizzard took that opportunity away, since they didn't really intend for people to play that way. To say the silent majority never cared about raiding is silly, because the amount of people raiding from vanilla/tbc to WotLK and beyond went up. LFR really skewed things with the release of Dragon Soul, but that's another conversation.
Of course, the difference between 10 and 25 man is going away come WoD since normal raiding is all flex (10-25 for normal and heroic scaling difficulty depending on raid size) and the hardest raiding went to 20 man (which is interesting). Which also might be their ultimate response to how they felt about making the two different raid sizes originally.
The silent majority does exist, in the terms that the OP laid out. The fact is that the majority of users in any game are not forum goers, and he was mostly wondering how to get those people to interact. If you break down the silent majority, yes they would fall into different categories, but that doesn't matter for this particular discussion.
I would say integrating communications into the actual game and making it as painless as possible would help. Also, offering some kind of "reward" for using it however small it is for using it would entice people to do it. For instance, in a game like Archeage you might offer an extra 10 laber points every day someone offers feedback or posts on the in game message boards. It's not much, but it's enough someone might bother.
The thing is the silent majority don't really want you to engage them.
They probably just came back home from school/uni/work, are dead tired and just want everyone to leave them alone as they relax playing a computer game. I don't get why that is so hard to understand.
Originally posted by nethaniah
Seriously Farmville? Yeah I think it's great. In a World where half our population is dying of hunger the more fortunate half is spending their time harvesting food that doesn't exist.
Deliver a product of great quality and actually work to maintain your customers.
So many companies these days are so profit driven it's unreal - what happened to the customer? What happened to a quality product being enough to provide the profits?
If we look specifically at the entertainment industry (games and movies) it has become a cesspit of greedy gophers. For every product that's good quality and a solid buy/watch, there's 50 that aren't.
For every indie dev who pours his heart into a game like Dust, there's 100 others looking to rip off some concept for a quick buck. For every movie like 12 Years a Slave (amazing movie I thought) there's red-eyed money hounds like Michael Bay releasing insulting tripe year after year.
Experience has taught me that the silent majority will come alive (both financially and vocally) if they're really passionate about what they've bought into. If they're not, they move on to the next thing and you become a distant past event.
Sure, you'll always have your vocal-from-the-start crowd but that only ever makes up a very low percentage.
To summarize: I think the entertainment industry used to be about passion, art and quality work - it's far more about ROI, profit and bilking your customers for the lowest cost now.
The thing is the silent majority don't really want you to engage them.
They probably just came back home from school/uni/work, are dead tired and just want everyone to leave them alone as they relax playing a computer game. I don't get why that is so hard to understand.
Basically this.
Many want some fast entertainment ... they are not looking for a second life, or art.
Comments
I believe your basic problem is in how you have approached the question. You do not engage the silent majority, you simply track there choices. If they had wished to be engaged, they would be part of the vocal minority. It is their decision to NOT be engaged that is important.
You have to treat the silent majority different than the vocal minority. Attempts to engage simply drive the away, as you are creating a hostile environment for them. What you need to do is setup simple logic traps, and let them vote via their choices (not words). Make simple A/B choices avaialbe in game, and see which are more popular. The silent majority gives clear feedback with their choices, you just have to listen to them. This group is all about actions, not words.
Why should you? Majority don't look for raiding, or battlegrounds, or arena, or roleplaying or deep crafting, they just want a game to play and they probably play it solo.They won't tell you anything that could actually improve the game, just like most of the vocals don't really tell you anything that could improve the game, except if a quest is bugged or something is unbalanced.
Its the extreme minority that gives you ideas on activities that can be added to improve the game, they will give you specific feedback that can actually lead to a solution on a problem and those are the people you as a developer should listen to.
Nowadays , most MMORPG publishers use some program like Glyph (trion world) or other log in program so it easy to get the feedback of the majority.
You only need to add feedback options in patching time and reward them for feedback then you can get the list .
But catering to the vocal minority hasn't worked for the last decade... So surely it is a valid question and something that Devs should try?
Listening only to the received wisdom echo chamber of the PvP action combat minority, for example, has done a lot to destroy this genre.
Exactly. You don't ask, you observe. Often what people say and what people want are two different things.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
You are 100% incorrect... because you have set out two choices, which are obviously bad... but not allowed for the good choice.
Dont cater to the vocal minority.
Dont engage the silent majority.
Design your game based on metrics measuring the preferences of the silent majority.
If we look at city planning, or even store design, neither of these are done based on the vocal minority, nor are they based on engaging the silent majority. They are done based off measurements and observations of the silent majority, and designed to accomodate both function and form.
i agree
EQ2 fan sites
Interestingly enough, in all my years of playing Everquest, I only ever saw one in-game poll. Shortly after the 1999 Halloween Event, an in-game poll asked me if I liked it. Not one single poll other than that. This shows how absurdly clueless SOE is in the area of customer retention/satisfaction.
Excellent idea. They can obtain customer insight with almost no cost; as someone who's worked in the Market Research industry for 15 years, I can tell you this is a researcher's dream come true.
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
There is an old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The silent majority hangs out here much of the time.
If you "fix" what wasn't "broke", you may hear from some of the no-longer-silent majority, complaining about how you broke their enjoyment. The rest will either walk away or suck it up. The short answer to the OP's question is that you can't get people to change.
Pretty much this.
Dev teams don't listen to the vocal minority as much as people might think. However, that vocal minority has delivered valuable information to developers in terms of giving examples of mechanics that are broken, etc.
However, if you want to have an example of where a development team used metrics to make game changes that ignored the voices of the vocal minority, look at WoW.
First, going from Vanilla to TBC; Blizzard took out 40 man raiding. The vocal minority wailed and did a lot of fear mongering (the game will die, blah blah). 25 man raiding worked just fine and Karazhan which was a 10 man raid was one of the most popular raids of the entire expansion pack. Hence, come WotLK Blizzard introduced 10 man progression raiding. Again, we heard all of the doom porn from all of the naysayers, and again they were proven wrong.
What's more interesting is that for the launch of Cataclysm, Blizzard went back to "harder" 5 man heroics, need for CC, triage healing, tanks needing to manage cooldowns better in 5 mans, etc. Ironically, the vocal minority seemed pretty happy with Blizzard bringing the challenge back to WoW. Of course, this is when WoW started to bleed out subs and lost millions over the course of the expansion pack since we went from the aoe fest that was wotlk back to a more dungeon crawl environment from TBC.
Developers should have all of the tools available to them to see what's trending among their player base. Yes the vocal minority has it's uses, but for the most part they don't represent your average user. Developers shouldn't ignore the vocal minority, but they also don't have to try to get the silent majority involved in open discussions. Metrics are the voice of the majority.
Metrics do not tell you Why.
You can have all the data you want - forum feedback, metrics, surveys, you name it, but the root issues are how to interpret those data and then, even if you had some solid idea what people want, implementation of those ideas.
Guess based on those data, implementation, then see the reaction.
Big data analytics. You have the servers track how many players do what under all sorts of circumstances and figure out what players like that way.
A Tale in the Desert would occasionally have poll questions. You click an icon, you choose an option, and your feedback gets sent off to the developers. It's a simple idea, and it's one of the many things in ATITD that I'm mystified as to why more games haven't adopted it.
Yes, at the end it is about intuition and luck.
If i understand your question my answer is:
*****DON'T***** change something just because a lot of users are screaming on a forum for it to be changed *****UNTIL***** you have taken a poll of all users because the things that 10% of your user base hate might be the things the other 90% love.
Instead ask users what are the top 10 things they dislike about the game and AT THE SAME TIME ask what are the top 10 things they like, then compare the two lists and don't change the things that appear on both lists.
Put another way: there is more than one type of a player so stop trying to make a game to suit a non-existent single type of average player and make a game that targets the multiple types of player separately i.e.
a good pvp sub-game for pvpers
a good fast leveling & raiding sub-game for raiders
a good slow leveling sub-game for altoholic levelers
a good exploring and collecting sub-game for explorers and collectors
a good crafting sub-game for crafters
a lot of the earlier games did a lot of this by accident because they were trying to create fantasy *worlds* and it happens naturally if you try to do that.
Here is the problem.
First of all you use the vocal minority to say "other people", its filled with us vs them, which is the Richard Nixon of "vocal minority and silent majority",and fail to recognise that the vocal people have a lot of different desires.
Second, the decision to remove 40-man raiding was never due to player feedback. Also, stripping down from 40-man down to 10-man karazhan and up to 25-man raiding was hated by the raiding community, and blizzard acknowledged that it was a huge mistake doing it that way.
Third, if it hadn't been for player feedback and power creep karazhan would never have become popular among casual players.
Fourth, 10-man raiding during wotlk had a lot of issues. You had a vocal minority that complained that loot was better in 25-man, you had a vocal minority that complained that 10-man was awful for progression raiding, and you had vocal 25-man raiders that complained about repetition fatigue because you ended up doing two types of raiding. All those vocal minorities were right, because the silent majority never cared about raiding to begin with.
The lesson here is that the majority player doesn't exist, its filled with different minorities that want different things. If you listened to what the majority wanted, there wouldn't be raiding, battlegrounds, arena, heroic dungeons because it was minorities that asked for those things.
I believe the best way to tap into the silent minority is data mine their activities, not their conversation.
-WL
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
I never said the decision to remove 40 man was due to player feedback. I implied that it was due to Blizzard NOT receiving feedback, but looking at metrics to make the decisions for them. Additionally, aside from maybe a blurb about going with a smaller, singular raid size (like 15-20) I have never seen Blizzard acknowledge the current raiding as a mistake.
Sure 10 man raiding had issues in WotLK, it was brand new in terms of progression and the kinks weren't worked out. Those who complained about repetition fatigue were at fault themselves. There was literally no reason to do both types of raiding, aside from those who wanted to gear faster. Blizzard took that opportunity away, since they didn't really intend for people to play that way. To say the silent majority never cared about raiding is silly, because the amount of people raiding from vanilla/tbc to WotLK and beyond went up. LFR really skewed things with the release of Dragon Soul, but that's another conversation.
Of course, the difference between 10 and 25 man is going away come WoD since normal raiding is all flex (10-25 for normal and heroic scaling difficulty depending on raid size) and the hardest raiding went to 20 man (which is interesting). Which also might be their ultimate response to how they felt about making the two different raid sizes originally.
The silent majority does exist, in the terms that the OP laid out. The fact is that the majority of users in any game are not forum goers, and he was mostly wondering how to get those people to interact. If you break down the silent majority, yes they would fall into different categories, but that doesn't matter for this particular discussion.
The thing is the silent majority don't really want you to engage them.
They probably just came back home from school/uni/work, are dead tired and just want everyone to leave them alone as they relax playing a computer game. I don't get why that is so hard to understand.
Deliver a product of great quality and actually work to maintain your customers.
So many companies these days are so profit driven it's unreal - what happened to the customer? What happened to a quality product being enough to provide the profits?
If we look specifically at the entertainment industry (games and movies) it has become a cesspit of greedy gophers. For every product that's good quality and a solid buy/watch, there's 50 that aren't.
For every indie dev who pours his heart into a game like Dust, there's 100 others looking to rip off some concept for a quick buck. For every movie like 12 Years a Slave (amazing movie I thought) there's red-eyed money hounds like Michael Bay releasing insulting tripe year after year.
Experience has taught me that the silent majority will come alive (both financially and vocally) if they're really passionate about what they've bought into. If they're not, they move on to the next thing and you become a distant past event.
Sure, you'll always have your vocal-from-the-start crowd but that only ever makes up a very low percentage.
To summarize: I think the entertainment industry used to be about passion, art and quality work - it's far more about ROI, profit and bilking your customers for the lowest cost now.
Basically this.
Many want some fast entertainment ... they are not looking for a second life, or art.
the critics tend to be the Silent Majority's spokes person. so listen to them instead of the fanboys.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design