If the Devs listended to forum whiners, many of their games would be better. We forum whiners are the subscribers who actually care about the game enough to help it get better. When the forum quiets down then you know you are doing something right as people are too busy having fun to go complain on the forums. its the silent majority of sheeple that are the real problem here accepting whatever kill 10 rats quests the devs give them.
HELL NO!!!
Follow this advice for fail.
The whiners are the first ones bailing out on a game. Poll your in-game players, the silent majority that care about the game and will keep playing. Use this information only to fine tune your design and plan for the game.
It's less the developers then the Executives and PR department who monitor the feedback of the playerbase and influence the development of a title. When the executive from your production company (e.g. Microsoft) says Make all the girls pink to cater to the 12-16 demographic in your post apocolyptic sci-fi MMO, it's hard to fight back when they bring out marketing research boards and graphs provided by expensive research firms.
It's a bit of a trickle-down effect I think, where the people on top are more influenced by the communities feedback during development then the actual developers. But the developers are at the mercy of the people who fund the development. At the end of the day you're not always able to make the game YOU want to make, you end up making the game that a collaborative team of people determined was the best combination of current industry features which would appeal to the largest market to garner the largest revenue.
But as a developer you can't point to your boss's and say, it's his fault because it's not any individuals fault when a poor choice is made, it's a snowball effect from too many chef's.
But when you're dealing with ten's of millions of dollars, no ones gonna go on one guys GUT instinct for what he thinks people will want. They want to do research to insure their choices have data backing them up. But that data comes from a very vocal community, which on occasion is not aware of the influence it has on the development of it's own games.
That's odd, the return carriage add's a line-break in the editor... Sorry for the lack of spacing between paragraphs folks, it looked different in the feedback box.
Noone likes to see the vocal minority whinning, but if you dont have the vision to see the game through to the end or the wisdom to take suggestions from others, then you don't belong in the position you are in.
The reason the game industry is dying is because airheads sitting at desks don't know enough about games, gamers or development. With games taking 100 man teams years to complete, having an idiot stand over the real workers shoulders and do nothing but stifle thier creativity and push them to work faster towards profit with no real passion for the finished product is the real problem.
Get some real gamers into those suits, and let them make games they love. Games are Art, and they need artists to create them, not business men.
meh,there are a whole slew of reasons that creativity and quality have been on the decline for years now.
Publishers that demand that developers create for the lowest common denominator. Don't hear many reports of publishers telling Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Clive Barker that they need to make their books more acceptable to a wider audience. I udnerstand that there are differences (one writer vs a team of developers for example, millions of dollars in advances and the like is another) but when you boil it down it is still the production of artists.
Publishers strong arming blogs and game sites to make sure that reviews are acceptable. Unless you have lived under a rock you would have seen a number of these situations over the past 2 or 3 years, usually involving very large publishers. This of course puts the fear of god into the rest of the blogosphere that is incapable of earning a living outside of publisher dollars, thereby leading to inflated reviews, which in turn leads to a more vitriolic fan base as they are being lied to and manipulated by not only the publishers, but hte people that are supposed to be on the side of wanting and demanding great games.
Then, of course, there is the hubris of moronic game developers. Its like they finally got their heads pulled from the toilets or they finally freed themselves from their lockers and now they know better than everyone else. "John Romero will make you his bitch", is a perfect example. Look at Daikatana, one of the single worst excuses for a video game ever released, one that makes the cheap ass movie tie in games that flood the market every summer appear to be the top of development and design. Cliff with his on rails shooters, but you can curb stomp, ooooooo. Chris Cao and John Smedley whom both have stated very clearly that the gamers do not know anything and that it is they that will tell you what you want and what you will like.
Finally, yes, the gamers are a bit of a problem. I just deleted a big paragraph because I came up with the following analogy: You know what you reviewers have become? Los Angeles School District Teachers. A student (game) comes into your classroom (across your desk). The child cannot read (critical failure of development, inexcusable types of bugs for a perfect example: DCUO beta uninstall, deletes c:windows), the child cannot do simple arithmetic (pathetic boring gameplay) and you give them a passing grade. You aren't the only offender Bill and mmorpg.com, the gamers are too as I said. See keeping with the analogy the gamers here are like the parents of those students. Oh, the teacher gave my kid a B, he/she must be very smart, I can invest more into them (buying a failure of a game because some publisher's whore gave it a passing score).
This, in turn, leads to gamer frustration. I know that I am not the only moron that has been suckered because of an outright lie that was published as a review. When you fuptards do nothing but kiss the ass of a developer, someone needs to hold their feet to a fire. We, the community, are gamers, not professional writers with all the contacts that you have. We actually have to pay for our games with money earned from a real job, and in the case of MMO's, we have to pay our own subscription fees. It's easy to love a game and a developer that gives your their products for free and gives you early access. A professional, however, would be able to put that aside and be objective. Too bad objectivity does not exist among gaming sites.
Am I the only one wondering why we are debating a developer from a different aspect of the game industry? He is not a massive multiplayer online role playing game developer (At best its MO). Maybe I missed something (it happens), but its like comparing coaches in 2 different sports. Anyway love MMORPG and this is my virgin post (of course it had to be a bit grumpy :P)
40 Year old couples and gaming. Toons borrowed from Cyanide and Happiness.Text is Yours truly. Paint ftw
Developers need to listen to their players but only in the context of what they are trying to achieve.
Too many players want x game ot have y features which doesn't make sense in every game.
If a game decides not to have a tutorial, wants to plunk you down in an open world and you have to fend for yourself and there are players who like that sort of game, then they shouldn't be listening to the players who would want to turn that game into a themepark.
Same goes with predominantly pve games and adding pvp or vice versa.
If developers want to make a perma death game and there is a loud continent screaming against it then they should not be listening to those players.
Exactly.
It's not that we should not listen to any whining at all. It's that we should use selective hearing to listen to the right whiners. That's what feedback is in its raw form.
When a game is much too hard and the developers didn't mean for it to be designed that hard, some player's obvious responses will be along the lines of this: ,
with much whining involved.
Of course, the players should later calm down, formulate a professional response, and submit it through some medium for feedback. But sometimes their emotions get the better of them and the feedback comes out like this: "grr! waah! why!?" Then the developers should test it out for themself now that they have been informed of the problem - with some extra caution if the feedback sounded a little too emotion driven.
If the game WAS designed that hard, well... then I can see the developers getting this huge evil grin when reading all this feedback and should brush it all aside.
Recently, the community manager of a well-known online franchise blasted game fans as "stifling the creativity of game developers" with their constant barrage of complaints. In this week's column, MMORPG.com Lead Writer Bill Murphy analyzes the charges leveled by the community manager and offers a few thoughts along the way. Check it out and then add your reactions to the mix in the comments below.
I suppose the argument could be made that developers feel pressured to cater to these loud and often obnoxious vocal minority, and to be honest if that’s the case than those developers deserve to feel creatively held back. True creativity in any medium takes brass balls, and if you’re too busy worrying about what forum member “L33tHaxx0r” has to say about one of your design choices than you probably don’t deserve to be making games in the first place.
It's quite right that devs shouldn't listen to whiners - but they probably don't really. It's just an illusion.
IMHO, professionals (in any modern entertainment medium) seldom listen to the customer in that sort of way (the way the customer imagines).
What they are doing is datamining and watching playing patterns.
So in the end, yes, it's the customers that drive it, but via their revealed preferences rather than what they say. (i.e. that's the illusion, sometimes their revealed preferences will coincide with what they say, but the link is accidental, because what people think they want or say they want isn't always what they'll plonk down money for, or what they actually spend time doing. What people say often masks what they really want; or it carries baggage to do with who they're trying to impress, or some other sort of psychological game in the costless, anonymous snakepit of the interwebz; whereas what they plonk their money down for, how they actually spend their time in-game, reveals what they really want.)
Now this, combined with the intertwined syndromes Bartle talks about in his essay Why virtual worlds are designed by newbies, is what really drives what's happening (which is, in a sense, a decline in the quality of virtual worlds - or rather a decline from what might have been, had things been different - a downgrading from true virtual worlds to themeparks, in mmorpg.com terms).
On the one hand, people are getting what they want, and they are enjoying it in the short term; on the other hand, what they want isn't necessarily what's good for them (or the developers) in the long run. And any professional in their field will know this.
On the one hand: (as an example) in the music business, and probably in many other professional fields, there's a term - "turd polishing". Many professionals eventually get resigned to making to the best of their ability something they know in their hearts isn't the best (how shall we put it?) art, but they know will pay the bills because people like it and buy it.
On the other hand: the best-selling and most popular games do tend to be the most well-made, just purely in a technical sense. Whether themepark or sandbox, a game that's buggy and incomplete with poor service, simply won't do well, no matter how good the ideas, how much fun the gameplay might be in parts, etc., etc.
IOW, to sum up, whether a game is an artistic gem or a turd, if it's well-made it will sell, so long as it tickles peoples' short-term fancies. But well-made things that are also good art (i.e. made with a long term view, sub specie aeternitatis, to put it in pretentious terms) do have a chance, only it's very rare and mostly luck, whether that window of opportunity for the professional to lead the public taste will open up.
What do you think a game would look like if developers listened solely to the loudest and whiniest members of their online communities?
I suppose World of Warcraft. This artical should have been called "The List: Top Developer Mistakes 2", Not listening to their commuity. Dev's should be inteligent enough to know when good advice is coming from the forums.
I played in a World Famous IP sandbox MMORPG that was blown out of the water by WoWs STORY and quest driven leveling system. To make up for SWGs lack of quests, they incorporated a Bot system. This allowed a player to max a class in a week. But there was NO end game content, except to unlock Jedi. So the Devs hearing the Comunities cry for end game content, decided to Drop the Bot system, replaced the RPG combat (As seen in WoW) with a FPS twitch style combat, and replaced the 30+ classes with 4 Iconic Hero Archetypes.
The outcome, "All your revenue's, Belong to Us." Why because they didn't listen to the fourms, instead they listend to the IP owner. I'll admit that the Twitch combat sounds like something a Vocal Minoirty might ask for. The Devs should have had the Brass to ignore it.
There are two rules to game development, One make a game you woudl want to play, Two make a game your audiance woudl want to play. Despite the personal beliefs of WoW's detractors, WoW does this. My interpretation of Dev creativity; "We want to recreate the CU / NGE in our game because it was such a smash hit for SWG." Another example is; "We're done spending money on development, and we want to start making money of this half done piece of work." When the community demands that they "Finish" the job, don't label them “angry entitled fans”.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Part of being a professional developer involves being able to determine the difference between constructive criticism and pointless flaming. If the Devs of any game cant tell the difference between the two, then they shouldnt be Devs in the first place.
Also, it should be noted that every MMO on the planet has forums full of complaints. However, some do well, and others do not. So the forums cant be blamed for a games mistakes, since every MMO has people complaining. The determining factor between a game success and failure is the decisions made by the Devs, not the complaints on the forums.
I call B.S. on this one. It's not listening to the players that are causing a lack of creativity in game design. Alot of the players are actualy quite creative....even though often not very practical in thier ideas.
It's the CEO's and the Marketing Directors and the Business Analysts and the MBA's and the investors that are giving the marching order to make uncreative games. That's the dirty secret no one wants to tell..... Most of the people making top level decisions about game development know nothing about game development....and often even about game playing. They know about marketing, finance, self-promotion and corporate politics. Those are all important skills in thier own right but they really have nothing to do with designing good games. A few smart companies out there know this and basicaly keep the suits out of game design/development decisions and leave those to the people who actualy have some expertiese in that area. Unfortunately there are VERY FEW smart companies. Most Development Houses have Management micro-managing decisions in areas that they don't have the least bit of expertiese in.
Thus you have mandates from on high..... "You must have Wizards", "Blizzard does it that way, we need to do that too if we want to be successfull".... that litteraly handcuff the design of the application. It's like have a sales guy who doesn't drive and has never taken an engineering class in charge of designing a car.
This pretty much sums up my biggest beef with the entire MMO side of the software industry. And its one of the two things I will NO Longer tolerate. (The other being stupid Customer Service people that can't even read what I've typed up in a ticket and respond intelligently!) And ANY game where they do this is not going to get very many of my subscription dollars. If that means I'm "stiffling creativity" so be it!
They should be glad I don't know their phone numbers, or the address of where they work. Because there are times I would be tempted to face jail time to be able to show some of these people how I really feel... As in I'd show up at the curb with a loud speaker and "distrub the peace". It just wouldn't be the same kind of complaints they get on the forums.
Part of being a professional developer involves being able to determine the difference between constructive criticism and pointless flaming.If the Devs of any game cant tell the difference between the two, then they shouldnt be Devs in the first place.
Part of being a poster on a game forum involves being able to determine whether a post you make is either constructive cricitism, or pointless flaming. If the players of any game can't tell the difference between the two, then they shouldn't be posting on game forums in the first place.
It's the CEO's and the Marketing Directors and the Business Analysts and the MBA's and the investors that are giving the marching order to make uncreative games. That's the dirty secret no one wants to tell..... Most of the people making top level decisions about game development know nothing about game development....and often even about game playing. They know about marketing, finance, self-promotion and corporate politics. Those are all important skills in thier own right but they really have nothing to do with designing good games.
This isn't too far off in many studios. But actually, these things you list above have a lot to do with making a good game... because a good MMO costs tens of millions of dollars. The guys that are able to secure funding are the ones that have to answer to the investors, so yeah they want to be involved. When you try to sell an idea to investors (or shop it to a publisher), if "having wizards" means you can get $40 million instead of $10 million, then yea you are going to have wizards.
I actually agree with your point, but it is the way is. I guess someone on these forums needs to win the lottery. And (since that person likely isn't a professional game developer), hand over the money to a studio to make their perfect game and then back off. Wait, what? No, why should they back off? Of course they'll be involved! It's their money after all, so they'll tell the studio of professional game developers they hire exactly how to make the game, and how it all should work! Well, there ya go.
Part of being a professional developer involves being able to determine the difference between constructive criticism and pointless flaming.If the Devs of any game cant tell the difference between the two, then they shouldnt be Devs in the first place.
Part of being a poster on a game forum involves being able to determine whether a post you make is either constructive cricitism, or pointless flaming. If the players of any game can't tell the difference between the two, then they shouldn't be posting on game forums in the first place.
Devs = professional employees. Forum posters = a variety of people, from a variety of different ages, with a variety of different mental states. Despite what nonsense some people may post on the forums, the Devs should be professional enough to be able to distinguish between what is useful feedback and what isnt.
Everyone has different tastes, you can't appeal to them all, so do the best with what you want the game to be, then add player suggestions.
Unless of course your only in it for the money. Which is what it's beginning to sound like.
They goal is not to please everyone, but to please the MAJORITY of your customers. Whether the Devs happen to like a specific idea or not shouldnt really matter if the MAJORITY of their customers want it. The reverse is also true. Just because the Devs may like a certain idea, if the MAJORITY of their customers do not, then it shouldnt see the light of day.
This argument pretty much falls along the lines of publishers/developers blaming declining sales on piracy and insisting on implementing "features" such as DRM, DLC, Limit to installs, and other misc hoops into their games that detract from the paying customers experience.
I see them blaming their player base more and more for their failures and frustrations, but their solution is to never change their methods.
I can't understand why it's considered whining when people are pissed when their games don't function properly due to DRM or they have weird glitches with the game due to the servers it reports to being overburdened. This is something the developer chose to put into the game, this is something the developer should have to bear the brunt of when it backfires.
I also don't understand why it's OK for them to slowly sap features and content from games and try to sell them back to us in the form of DLC. Removing standalone servers creates instances where people can't play how they want to play because they can't host their own and modify the norms of the game, or you run into the situation where Blizzard will ban you if you cheat in the game (refering to Starcraft 2)..even though all players might be completely consenting to the cheats. Having week 1 DLC....shady. Taking out mod support so you can sell DLC without free competition? Evil.
And we ignore the games that never seem to change, or seem to be locked into a path of being the same game with new graphics and destructible environments....without as many features as previous less bloomy and shiny versions of the same series.
I have to say nothing pisses me off more than having a game that is absolutely infested with cheaters and they aren't trying to address the issue until they have more content to sell.
If all of the above is whining, then I guess Im a whiner. But I can see why they want to focus on the console market, because they can do less and get paid for it....every year with just one franchise...and crank the bloom. The claimed investment figures of the games with almost no formula change is quite unbelievable, I suspect some hollywood accounting going on...just like how they come up with lost earnings due to piracy (how do you even determine this without pulling numbers out of thing air?) and how it ends up being more than their gross sales by a very large margin.
I have to say, the more a company or it's employees complain about the people who shell out their money the less likely I am to ever buy a product from them. I mean why would I pay you for your work when you infer that all your customers would pirate if you didn't have all these "features" and then on top of that you imply they should shut up and buy what you make and thank you for it. All of this without ever having an honest conversation about why people have lost interest in your products or what they don't like. When's the last time you've actually seen a person who can make sweeping decisions in a game speak honestly with anyone? It's all scripted interviews and marketing.
Part of being a professional developer involves being able to determine the difference between constructive criticism and pointless flaming.If the Devs of any game cant tell the difference between the two, then they shouldnt be Devs in the first place.
Part of being a poster on a game forum involves being able to determine whether a post you make is either constructive cricitism, or pointless flaming. If the players of any game can't tell the difference between the two, then they shouldn't be posting on game forums in the first place.
Devs = professional employees. Forum posters = a variety of people, from a variety of different ages, with a variety of different mental states. Despite what nonsense some people may post on the forums, the Devs should be professional enough to be able to distinguish between what is useful feedback and what isnt.
My point is that even a poster who posts the most flamiest flame, probably thinks he's giving constructive critcisim. In fact 99% of forum feedback is probably not constructive. To be constructive, it needs to be actionable, and to be actionable you need to know the technology and the processes involved in adding features to that particular game. I would also point out that forum users represent a tiny minority of a minority of players.
If the developers and publishers didn't have pirates or paying fans who tell them to stop shoveling out crap, they'd have to blame themselves. That will never happen. It's a blameless industry full of saints of course.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Comments
HELL NO!!!
Follow this advice for fail.
The whiners are the first ones bailing out on a game. Poll your in-game players, the silent majority that care about the game and will keep playing. Use this information only to fine tune your design and plan for the game.
Gaming since Avalon Hill was making board games.
Played SWG, EVE, Fallen Earth, LOTRO, Rift, Vanguard, WoW, SWTOR, TSW, Tera
Tried Aoc, Aion, EQII, RoM, Vindictus, Darkfail, DDO, GW, PotBS
It's less the developers then the Executives and PR department who monitor the feedback of the playerbase and influence the development of a title. When the executive from your production company (e.g. Microsoft) says Make all the girls pink to cater to the 12-16 demographic in your post apocolyptic sci-fi MMO, it's hard to fight back when they bring out marketing research boards and graphs provided by expensive research firms.
It's a bit of a trickle-down effect I think, where the people on top are more influenced by the communities feedback during development then the actual developers. But the developers are at the mercy of the people who fund the development. At the end of the day you're not always able to make the game YOU want to make, you end up making the game that a collaborative team of people determined was the best combination of current industry features which would appeal to the largest market to garner the largest revenue.
But as a developer you can't point to your boss's and say, it's his fault because it's not any individuals fault when a poor choice is made, it's a snowball effect from too many chef's.
But when you're dealing with ten's of millions of dollars, no ones gonna go on one guys GUT instinct for what he thinks people will want. They want to do research to insure their choices have data backing them up. But that data comes from a very vocal community, which on occasion is not aware of the influence it has on the development of it's own games.
Arioc Murkwood
Environment Artist
Sad but true.
That's odd, the return carriage add's a line-break in the editor... Sorry for the lack of spacing between paragraphs folks, it looked different in the feedback box.
Arioc Murkwood
Environment Artist
Sad but true.
Fire that retard.
Noone likes to see the vocal minority whinning, but if you dont have the vision to see the game through to the end or the wisdom to take suggestions from others, then you don't belong in the position you are in.
The reason the game industry is dying is because airheads sitting at desks don't know enough about games, gamers or development. With games taking 100 man teams years to complete, having an idiot stand over the real workers shoulders and do nothing but stifle thier creativity and push them to work faster towards profit with no real passion for the finished product is the real problem.
Get some real gamers into those suits, and let them make games they love. Games are Art, and they need artists to create them, not business men.
meh,there are a whole slew of reasons that creativity and quality have been on the decline for years now.
Publishers that demand that developers create for the lowest common denominator. Don't hear many reports of publishers telling Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Clive Barker that they need to make their books more acceptable to a wider audience. I udnerstand that there are differences (one writer vs a team of developers for example, millions of dollars in advances and the like is another) but when you boil it down it is still the production of artists.
Publishers strong arming blogs and game sites to make sure that reviews are acceptable. Unless you have lived under a rock you would have seen a number of these situations over the past 2 or 3 years, usually involving very large publishers. This of course puts the fear of god into the rest of the blogosphere that is incapable of earning a living outside of publisher dollars, thereby leading to inflated reviews, which in turn leads to a more vitriolic fan base as they are being lied to and manipulated by not only the publishers, but hte people that are supposed to be on the side of wanting and demanding great games.
Then, of course, there is the hubris of moronic game developers. Its like they finally got their heads pulled from the toilets or they finally freed themselves from their lockers and now they know better than everyone else. "John Romero will make you his bitch", is a perfect example. Look at Daikatana, one of the single worst excuses for a video game ever released, one that makes the cheap ass movie tie in games that flood the market every summer appear to be the top of development and design. Cliff with his on rails shooters, but you can curb stomp, ooooooo. Chris Cao and John Smedley whom both have stated very clearly that the gamers do not know anything and that it is they that will tell you what you want and what you will like.
Finally, yes, the gamers are a bit of a problem. I just deleted a big paragraph because I came up with the following analogy: You know what you reviewers have become? Los Angeles School District Teachers. A student (game) comes into your classroom (across your desk). The child cannot read (critical failure of development, inexcusable types of bugs for a perfect example: DCUO beta uninstall, deletes c:windows), the child cannot do simple arithmetic (pathetic boring gameplay) and you give them a passing grade. You aren't the only offender Bill and mmorpg.com, the gamers are too as I said. See keeping with the analogy the gamers here are like the parents of those students. Oh, the teacher gave my kid a B, he/she must be very smart, I can invest more into them (buying a failure of a game because some publisher's whore gave it a passing score).
This, in turn, leads to gamer frustration. I know that I am not the only moron that has been suckered because of an outright lie that was published as a review. When you fuptards do nothing but kiss the ass of a developer, someone needs to hold their feet to a fire. We, the community, are gamers, not professional writers with all the contacts that you have. We actually have to pay for our games with money earned from a real job, and in the case of MMO's, we have to pay our own subscription fees. It's easy to love a game and a developer that gives your their products for free and gives you early access. A professional, however, would be able to put that aside and be objective. Too bad objectivity does not exist among gaming sites.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
Am I the only one wondering why we are debating a developer from a different aspect of the game industry? He is not a massive multiplayer online role playing game developer (At best its MO). Maybe I missed something (it happens), but its like comparing coaches in 2 different sports. Anyway love MMORPG and this is my virgin post (of course it had to be a bit grumpy :P)
40 Year old couples and gaming. Toons borrowed from Cyanide and Happiness.Text is Yours truly. Paint ftw
Exactly.
It's not that we should not listen to any whining at all. It's that we should use selective hearing to listen to the right whiners. That's what feedback is in its raw form.
When a game is much too hard and the developers didn't mean for it to be designed that hard, some player's obvious responses will be along the lines of this:
,
with much whining involved.
Of course, the players should later calm down, formulate a professional response, and submit it through some medium for feedback. But sometimes their emotions get the better of them and the feedback comes out like this: "grr! waah! why!?" Then the developers should test it out for themself now that they have been informed of the problem - with some extra caution if the feedback sounded a little too emotion driven.
If the game WAS designed that hard, well... then I can see the developers getting this huge evil grin when reading all this feedback and should brush it all aside.
It's quite right that devs shouldn't listen to whiners - but they probably don't really. It's just an illusion.
IMHO, professionals (in any modern entertainment medium) seldom listen to the customer in that sort of way (the way the customer imagines).
What they are doing is datamining and watching playing patterns.
So in the end, yes, it's the customers that drive it, but via their revealed preferences rather than what they say. (i.e. that's the illusion, sometimes their revealed preferences will coincide with what they say, but the link is accidental, because what people think they want or say they want isn't always what they'll plonk down money for, or what they actually spend time doing. What people say often masks what they really want; or it carries baggage to do with who they're trying to impress, or some other sort of psychological game in the costless, anonymous snakepit of the interwebz; whereas what they plonk their money down for, how they actually spend their time in-game, reveals what they really want.)
Now this, combined with the intertwined syndromes Bartle talks about in his essay Why virtual worlds are designed by newbies, is what really drives what's happening (which is, in a sense, a decline in the quality of virtual worlds - or rather a decline from what might have been, had things been different - a downgrading from true virtual worlds to themeparks, in mmorpg.com terms).
On the one hand, people are getting what they want, and they are enjoying it in the short term; on the other hand, what they want isn't necessarily what's good for them (or the developers) in the long run. And any professional in their field will know this.
On the one hand: (as an example) in the music business, and probably in many other professional fields, there's a term - "turd polishing". Many professionals eventually get resigned to making to the best of their ability something they know in their hearts isn't the best (how shall we put it?) art, but they know will pay the bills because people like it and buy it.
On the other hand: the best-selling and most popular games do tend to be the most well-made, just purely in a technical sense. Whether themepark or sandbox, a game that's buggy and incomplete with poor service, simply won't do well, no matter how good the ideas, how much fun the gameplay might be in parts, etc., etc.
IOW, to sum up, whether a game is an artistic gem or a turd, if it's well-made it will sell, so long as it tickles peoples' short-term fancies. But well-made things that are also good art (i.e. made with a long term view, sub specie aeternitatis, to put it in pretentious terms) do have a chance, only it's very rare and mostly luck, whether that window of opportunity for the professional to lead the public taste will open up.
But it sometimes happens.
Then everyone copies them
I suppose World of Warcraft. This artical should have been called "The List: Top Developer Mistakes 2", Not listening to their commuity. Dev's should be inteligent enough to know when good advice is coming from the forums.
I played in a World Famous IP sandbox MMORPG that was blown out of the water by WoWs STORY and quest driven leveling system. To make up for SWGs lack of quests, they incorporated a Bot system. This allowed a player to max a class in a week. But there was NO end game content, except to unlock Jedi. So the Devs hearing the Comunities cry for end game content, decided to Drop the Bot system, replaced the RPG combat (As seen in WoW) with a FPS twitch style combat, and replaced the 30+ classes with 4 Iconic Hero Archetypes.
The outcome, "All your revenue's, Belong to Us." Why because they didn't listen to the fourms, instead they listend to the IP owner. I'll admit that the Twitch combat sounds like something a Vocal Minoirty might ask for. The Devs should have had the Brass to ignore it.
There are two rules to game development, One make a game you woudl want to play, Two make a game your audiance woudl want to play. Despite the personal beliefs of WoW's detractors, WoW does this. My interpretation of Dev creativity; "We want to recreate the CU / NGE in our game because it was such a smash hit for SWG." Another example is; "We're done spending money on development, and we want to start making money of this half done piece of work." When the community demands that they "Finish" the job, don't label them “angry entitled fans”.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Part of being a professional developer involves being able to determine the difference between constructive criticism and pointless flaming. If the Devs of any game cant tell the difference between the two, then they shouldnt be Devs in the first place.
Also, it should be noted that every MMO on the planet has forums full of complaints. However, some do well, and others do not. So the forums cant be blamed for a games mistakes, since every MMO has people complaining. The determining factor between a game success and failure is the decisions made by the Devs, not the complaints on the forums.
I call B.S. on this one. It's not listening to the players that are causing a lack of creativity in game design. Alot of the players are actualy quite creative....even though often not very practical in thier ideas.
It's the CEO's and the Marketing Directors and the Business Analysts and the MBA's and the investors that are giving the marching order to make uncreative games. That's the dirty secret no one wants to tell..... Most of the people making top level decisions about game development know nothing about game development....and often even about game playing. They know about marketing, finance, self-promotion and corporate politics. Those are all important skills in thier own right but they really have nothing to do with designing good games. A few smart companies out there know this and basicaly keep the suits out of game design/development decisions and leave those to the people who actualy have some expertiese in that area. Unfortunately there are VERY FEW smart companies. Most Development Houses have Management micro-managing decisions in areas that they don't have the least bit of expertiese in.
Thus you have mandates from on high..... "You must have Wizards", "Blizzard does it that way, we need to do that too if we want to be successfull".... that litteraly handcuff the design of the application. It's like have a sales guy who doesn't drive and has never taken an engineering class in charge of designing a car.
This pretty much sums up my biggest beef with the entire MMO side of the software industry. And its one of the two things I will NO Longer tolerate. (The other being stupid Customer Service people that can't even read what I've typed up in a ticket and respond intelligently!) And ANY game where they do this is not going to get very many of my subscription dollars. If that means I'm "stiffling creativity" so be it!
They should be glad I don't know their phone numbers, or the address of where they work. Because there are times I would be tempted to face jail time to be able to show some of these people how I really feel... As in I'd show up at the curb with a loud speaker and "distrub the peace". It just wouldn't be the same kind of complaints they get on the forums.
Power to the people!
BTW since when CoD: Black Ops is creative and innovative ?
I couldn't read any more after I saw you use "than" two times where you should use "then." I'm sure it's a good article though.
Haha! @ thafireball --You made me laugh with your than/then comment. I like it.
Now...I'm not the biggest fan of "Forum Whiners"...BUT...some of these CRYBABIES are pretty damn intelligent and have some pretty damn good ideas.
No...the problem is not the SNOT-NOSE whiners on these forums...
The problem is the MONEY HUNGRY corporate asshats that wont publish anything that can't be categorized as a "WoW-Clone".
PLAYING: NOTHING!!!
PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
WAITING FOR: Dust 514
Part of being a poster on a game forum involves being able to determine whether a post you make is either constructive cricitism, or pointless flaming. If the players of any game can't tell the difference between the two, then they shouldn't be posting on game forums in the first place.
This isn't too far off in many studios. But actually, these things you list above have a lot to do with making a good game... because a good MMO costs tens of millions of dollars. The guys that are able to secure funding are the ones that have to answer to the investors, so yeah they want to be involved. When you try to sell an idea to investors (or shop it to a publisher), if "having wizards" means you can get $40 million instead of $10 million, then yea you are going to have wizards.
I actually agree with your point, but it is the way is. I guess someone on these forums needs to win the lottery. And (since that person likely isn't a professional game developer), hand over the money to a studio to make their perfect game and then back off. Wait, what? No, why should they back off? Of course they'll be involved! It's their money after all, so they'll tell the studio of professional game developers they hire exactly how to make the game, and how it all should work! Well, there ya go.
Everyone has different tastes, you can't appeal to them all, so do the best with what you want the game to be, then add player suggestions.
Unless of course your only in it for the money. Which is what it's beginning to sound like.
Godspeed my fellow gamer
Devs = professional employees. Forum posters = a variety of people, from a variety of different ages, with a variety of different mental states. Despite what nonsense some people may post on the forums, the Devs should be professional enough to be able to distinguish between what is useful feedback and what isnt.
They goal is not to please everyone, but to please the MAJORITY of your customers. Whether the Devs happen to like a specific idea or not shouldnt really matter if the MAJORITY of their customers want it. The reverse is also true. Just because the Devs may like a certain idea, if the MAJORITY of their customers do not, then it shouldnt see the light of day.
This argument pretty much falls along the lines of publishers/developers blaming declining sales on piracy and insisting on implementing "features" such as DRM, DLC, Limit to installs, and other misc hoops into their games that detract from the paying customers experience.
I see them blaming their player base more and more for their failures and frustrations, but their solution is to never change their methods.
I can't understand why it's considered whining when people are pissed when their games don't function properly due to DRM or they have weird glitches with the game due to the servers it reports to being overburdened. This is something the developer chose to put into the game, this is something the developer should have to bear the brunt of when it backfires.
I also don't understand why it's OK for them to slowly sap features and content from games and try to sell them back to us in the form of DLC. Removing standalone servers creates instances where people can't play how they want to play because they can't host their own and modify the norms of the game, or you run into the situation where Blizzard will ban you if you cheat in the game (refering to Starcraft 2)..even though all players might be completely consenting to the cheats. Having week 1 DLC....shady. Taking out mod support so you can sell DLC without free competition? Evil.
And we ignore the games that never seem to change, or seem to be locked into a path of being the same game with new graphics and destructible environments....without as many features as previous less bloomy and shiny versions of the same series.
I have to say nothing pisses me off more than having a game that is absolutely infested with cheaters and they aren't trying to address the issue until they have more content to sell.
If all of the above is whining, then I guess Im a whiner. But I can see why they want to focus on the console market, because they can do less and get paid for it....every year with just one franchise...and crank the bloom. The claimed investment figures of the games with almost no formula change is quite unbelievable, I suspect some hollywood accounting going on...just like how they come up with lost earnings due to piracy (how do you even determine this without pulling numbers out of thing air?) and how it ends up being more than their gross sales by a very large margin.
I have to say, the more a company or it's employees complain about the people who shell out their money the less likely I am to ever buy a product from them. I mean why would I pay you for your work when you infer that all your customers would pirate if you didn't have all these "features" and then on top of that you imply they should shut up and buy what you make and thank you for it. All of this without ever having an honest conversation about why people have lost interest in your products or what they don't like. When's the last time you've actually seen a person who can make sweeping decisions in a game speak honestly with anyone? It's all scripted interviews and marketing.
My point is that even a poster who posts the most flamiest flame, probably thinks he's giving constructive critcisim. In fact 99% of forum feedback is probably not constructive. To be constructive, it needs to be actionable, and to be actionable you need to know the technology and the processes involved in adding features to that particular game. I would also point out that forum users represent a tiny minority of a minority of players.
If the developers and publishers didn't have pirates or paying fans who tell them to stop shoveling out crap, they'd have to blame themselves. That will never happen. It's a blameless industry full of saints of course.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.