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WildStar: They're Listening
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The WildStar team has a new blog post called "Yep, We're Listening". In it, Robert Land discusses how the team is committed to listening to the community, not just appearing to do so. In the first in a series of discussions called "Uplink", devs asked folks what they thought of seasonal events. The second Uplink centered around griefing.
Over the past few weeks, we tried out something we feel very passionate about: Community Uplinks. These are our conversations with the community on various topics we feel are important to the community. So far, they've been a hit!
Find out what the community thought about these two topics and what the dev team learned from the discussions on the WildStar site.
Comments
Listening to the MMO community and implementing ideas based of said discussions? I'm not sure this will end well.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Cool Idea, but I would like to see how well others ideas would be implemented into a game with out the dev's losing the vision they had created for it.
Design-by-committee generally produces really poor results.
Imagine the 100 page thread following "Sandbox or Themepark?" poll on this message board.
But it honestly depends on how much filtering is applied, listening to alternate ideas before making your final decision and making YOUR game is not an inherently bad idea. Watching the design process over at Dominus for a while was enlightening--"we'll include lots of polling and consider lots of message posts, but in the end it's our game and we'll override certain minority (or even majority) positions if we feel strongly enough about it." Sensible.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
listening to your community is a very dangerous path to go down because the online forum community of a game is usually the very vocal MINORITY. If you listen to all the whiners and complainers and elitists, you will be left with a horrible game. The best thing a mmo developer can ever do is IGNORE the community.
Sure, you can listen to feedback, and having a test server with feedback from actual gameplay before making it live is the best way to go, but just designing around a forum atmosphere is a very bad idea.
Let's face it, 90% of the "community" of mmos are horrible. If you listen to the needs of the barbarians, you will wind up with a barbaric result.
Listening to the community doesn't necessarily entail blind obedience to it. It's smart to listen and gauge general reactions to things, especially negative reactions to your plans before you start sinking resources into them. The trick is to be realistic about the community's expectations and not give them what they want, if what they want is going to be bad for them. It's just like dealing with children.
It's funny...I think I've been around this genre too long. This sounds pretty much exactly like EVERY OTHER MMO in the last 6 years or so. The dev teams all say they are listening to the community, and everyone talks about how open and responsive and great they are...then they turn out another WoW-formula stale snorefest of regurgitated and ever-more-shallow mechanics, and try to pretend that's exactly what everyone asked for. It's the casual mass market, they all want crappy, short, and shallow games! No really!
At this point, I could honestly care less if they are listing to the community. What matters is the game they are making. No matter what specifics the community says they want or don't want, the developer still needs to be able to see the forest for the trees and create a cohesive, solid, fresh, innovative, addictive game.
What do players want? You don't even need to ask them, I'll tell you. They want the WoW-formula BS in this genre to stop, the conventional wisdom to be turned on its head, and a fricken good game to be released in a completed state. We've been waiting a long time. Make a great game with some depth and an immersive virtual world, and people won't give a shit if you listen to them or not...they'll be too busy enjoying the game.
Foz, "they" didn't all ask for that. But it's ok if you ask for it.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Well thats disapointing news ...
The list of games that the "Community :" has ruined with there whining "Gimme-Bear " ........."I want an Oompa Loompa and i want it now ,Daddy" attitude is far to long to mention...
You're right. Most people are asking for more formulaic, shallow games released unfinished. That's certainly proven to be a formula for massive success so far. (sarcasm intended)
Of course I didn't mean everyone. Some people are willing to continue to slog through the same old mechanics expressed in ever-simpler and shallower ways in order to enjoy a franchise or a few new elements...but you must admit there are a substantial number of folks who seem to not be satisfied with the state and direction of the genre.
They leave each new game after a month or two, or never buy them at all after playing them in beta. They head back to their old game, or sit on the sidelines and continue to wait for some developer to get a clue. Many of those players probably couldn't tell you exactly what's been missing (so a developer asking them doesn't help). Partly because it's so many different things that must come together to make a game good. Its really hard to put our fingers on that certain something...the sum that's greater than its parts...but we know it when we see it, and we know when it's NOT there.
Hopefully games like Wildstar, GW2, TSW, and Copernicus will change that. I'm feeling optimistic, can't you tell?
Listening to your target audience is a critical factor in the success of any software/service based company. Most software/service companies in other verticals WISH they could get the level of audience feedback that many MMO Developers seem to regard as a nuisance.
The key is to understand and define who is your target audience and who isn't. If you are designing a pickup truck primarly targeted at an audiance who want to do rugged off-road driving. Then you need to recognize the difference between someone who is interested in a vehicle that does that and the guy who really would rather be driving a Prius instead but somehow found his way onto your forums.
You also need to understand the difference between LISTENING to the feedback of your audience and letting them DESIGN your product for you. Most of them aren't equiped to design your product..... but they ARE very much equiped to understand thier experience of your product and thier concerns and preferences.
Using our pickup truck analogy, listening to someones concern that they are bouncing around like crazy every time they take a bump at over 5 mph is very different from letting them tell you how to build your suspension.
I was out on the piss with a mate of mine 2 weeks back. We kinda exchanged places as wow addicts in the past 3 years.
He's a father of 3 and I'm a father of one, and god father to his eldest, even he is somewhat jaded by he genre now, and although I broached the subject of sandbox mmo's, he as an ex swg vet was entirely dismissive of that genre as well.
Tbh I liked the vids of Wildstar, but kinda cynical about it at the same time. Tbh, I'm almost done trying new pixels these days.
Think I'm gonna return to rl while theres the lure of death destruction and chaos...just surf the net for end of the world conspiracies, theres plenty of rl adventure coming over the next 20 or 30 dystopian years....who the fuck needs video games now? :P:P:P:P
Gief lithium/vallium plx !!!!!!
Er yeah I'm moving this week......stressed!!!!!!!
... & not forgetting Firefall. Certainly some good features/intentions in all the above.
I do get excited when I hear of an mmo that is trying to rewrite the rule book a bit more eg no compass, no levels, ffa-pvp, destructable environs etc and then IF ONLY such devs could gel them *somehow* altogether alchemically that would be a mmorpg to be excited for.
Totally agree "we're listening" sounds like more of the same marketing spiel, even the same words, hehe!
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Incidentally, I liked your generalized list of things where MMOs could/should improve themselves. Not commenting on the content, only the assumption of "me=we".
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Bingo. That's it right there.
When a developer says "they're listening" what they mean is "we're following forums, collecting feedback and taking it all in, filtering out the signal from the noise, and taking it into consideration as we develop the game.
What they don't mean - and what I think a lot of people think/expect (based on their reactions when they don't get what they want) - is that the developer is "obeying" what the community says.
It's not "listening to" in the way you're supposed to "listen to your parents", as in, doing what they tell you do.
It's "listening to" by way of paying attention to what's being said and not just ignoring.
The developers may very well listen to every piece of feedback they get... That doesn't mean they're going to agree with it. And it's well they don't, when you consider how many of the "suggestions" given in the form of "player feedback" is really just people asking for changes/improvements that will benefit them personally, even if it's at the detriment of other players, or other parts of the game.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
pretty much this. it's almost like marketing at this point. if you're making an MMO, you have to make a "we're listening" press release. at this point there's nothing really special about it, it's just trying to look good.
Not entirely true. If you look at who they have working on the game and in what capacity, you would see they are going thinga bit different. They have one producer that was and has been a community manager for a long, long time. The whole point of making him a producer was to integrate more of the community aspects into the game it's self. It may make for an interesting dynamic in the game.
I am not a fanboy, (I just keep tabs on games, and a few people from the industry). What I see isn't going to make the game amazing, but it is poised to offer somthing unique and different. Will it work? I honestly don't know. But it is a step in a new direction for the mmo genere, worst case the industry will figure out somthing else that doesn't work. IMHO the industry is in dire need of somthing new, interesting and different. As is, the mainstream MMO market has not seen much that is new and innovative in a long time. Re-invented maybe, but not much that could be considered unique. Is this game a step in the right direction? Who knows. But somone is willing to take a shot at it, and is hopeing they will turn a profit in doing so.
- Ice_Hole
What the HELL is wrong with you people? You complain that he devs never listen to players feedback or implement anything the players want and yet here is this game company doing just that and you're complaining about that?
I get the feeling that a lot of people who play mmo's just like to bitch and moan.
Smile
I saw this video earlier and it seems relevant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBddZ1uwtsk
Trion listens to its community, and implements quite a bit of suggestions. I think thats why they have so many loyalists
It was the same shit with TERA, 2 years ago. Then the game looked like finished product, it had it's vision everything was at the right place. When EME started westernization they began to listen to the players and implement. Now the game looks like friggin Frnakenstein. They added a lot of stuff, not bad if you look at one at a time, but together they look like a bunch of stiches and patches that are going to fell apart anytime soon
And still nobody knows when the game will get released...
I hope they won't make the same mistake with Wildstar.
http://www.teraonline.info.pl Polski Poradnik Gry Tera Online
Incidentally, I liked your generalized list of things where MMOs could/should improve themselves. Not commenting on the content, only the assumption of "me=we".
Oh, well...thanks. Stop being reasonable, I was trying to have a rant.
Haha! Damned if you do... The thing is, SUPPORT from mmo devs is a big deal, a bit like actually making a successful deal with someone you are trading with, part of the success is the ppl on the other side as much as the profit, if not more so for return business. So yes, it's important, that said, when the marketing boys churn out their slogans, you can hear the clanking of the cogs and wheels in the background of the great marketing machine being rolled out once more; it feels faux-friendly and the opposite reaction is more than necessary: Cynicism.
Educating your audience might be a better way of criticizing this tired slogan even if it is, afterall, 'genuine' marketing. people like sounding off about a game they are interested in, but does it add up to a hill of beans? I think the devs listening needs to be a little more proactive than "post your views and enjoy yourselves!" that would show more anticipation and education.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
No matter what when the devs listen to the community the game is always gonna come out "Just like WoW" because everyone thinks that wow is the greatest game ever, which is definitely not true cuz wow blows really bad, but all these immature softcore gamers want this childish wow bullshit when are they gonna make a real fucking mmo jeez