Interpreting “What The Players Really Want”
A short post by a MMO player on a forum caught my eye today. It read, in part:
As for me, I think it’s a relatively moot point. Whether or not there are official forums, MMORPG developers have almost universally demonstrated that they’re unable to interpret what the players really want, especially if they’re listening to the vocal minority on the forum rant.
What IS so difficult about JUST doing what the players really want?
Why do MMO developers seem to constantly FAIL at getting this right?
Game after game, MMO developers make all the mistakes. In the post I’m quoting, one of the biggest gripes is brought up. The developers only listen to a stupid vocal minority! Or they don’t read the boards at all! Do they listen to ANYONE?
The problem here is that it quickly becomes impossible to do what EVERYONE wants in a MMO. By definition, MOST online games (or, the developer would hope, anyway) are multiplayer. If you attach the MMO/MMORPG tag to your game, you’re obviously hoping that it is massively so.
That means there is a MASSIVE number of people playing your game, with a massive number of different opinions of what should be actually going on. This is difficult to manage. So difficult, in fact, that you probably shouldn’t try.
Chasing after EXACTLY what everyone wants will doom you to failure. Everyone wants something just a little different, usually for a selfish reason. They want something changed in game to suit THEIR style of play better, to allow them to dominate others. This isn’t rocket science. But when everyone is scratching and clawing for your attention, sometimes it’s hard not to desperately try pleasing everyone.
In fact, I’d go so far as to make it public knowledge that there is a strong vision for the game, and that while suggestions of various types ARE listened to carefully, development is absolutely not, nor ever will be, based on player suggestion or demands. This has become a problem, for example, with World of Warcraft. The amount of whining from players on the official forums is enormous. If you go and have a look, it seems to be the only thing that happens there aside from various trolling (and I don’t mean the board mods).
This has happened because it is very easy to make a case for the possibility that those who whine loudest actually direct change. That’s because changes happen after a large amount of whining for change. Whether or not the developers were influenced isn’t even the point. Whining happened, changes followed. As such, everyone whines. Because whining is constant, every time a change happens, a class gets buffed, or a class gets nerfed, whining for that change LIKELY preceeded the change itself. Players assume that the whining caused the change.
A strong vision behind the game is always necessary. Listening to the players is always invaluable, but one must keep in mind that they are self serving twits above all else when asking for a change to be made. Have a strong vision when going in, and stick to it. Let the players know that this is how things work. The ones who don’t like it may leave, often complaining that “THE DEVELOPERS DON’T KNOW ANYTHING AND DON’T LISTEN”. That’s fine.
This is, however, simply a case of those players who do not enjoy your game or your vision for the game world leaving (or just complaining). Running around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to please all of these people so they don’t complain, or leave, is just about the silliest thing you can do. This is risking the alienation of those who dislike your game AND those who like it by constantly implementing a mishmash of changes, attempting to listen “too carefully” to the player base.
Create an audience and stick to it. Let them know that they are your audience by letting everyone know the general direction of your vision through your actions. If you are in the position to dictate the design direction of a game, you are not only a leader to your staff, but a leader to your players. Wishy-washy design decisions will only serve to anger everyone, but don’t be afraid to make the slight adjustments you feel are necessary. Just don’t run from “casual” to “hardcore” to “this class should be the best DPS class” to “that class should be the best DPS class”. Famously, if you advertise your game as one thing at launch, changing it entirely at some point when the game is live will earn you many enemies - and probably not many more subscriptions. Your game is what it is at launch, and altering that drastically is not often a very good idea.
Write your vision down if you have to. Make yourself a big presentation out of post-it notes. Embrace your audience, because if you think your vision is wrong — you should have changed it before you started development.
-Az
November 19th, 2007 at 5:06 am
Call it vision, a core theme, or a principle, people want to know what they are getting for their dollar. The problem is you have developers out there who think to be the most successful is to devvelop a product that has the greatest CHANCE to appeal to everyone.
Under this kind of development, when there is a lack of vision/core theme/principle, then the loudest bunch of trolls/board warriors/whiners will have their gripes as the focus of development, and the vicious cycle begins.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Someone actually posted something a lot like this in the thread after a while, and they brought up something else that’s interesting — Polls.
DAOC apparently has a permanent login poll for their players. Let’s be honest here - only a VERY small minority of players are going to cast their vote for the option they think is best for the GAME, and simply vote for what makes THEIR character better/more powerful/wealthier/whatever.
Instead of being a valuable tool to gather player opinion, a poll of the players simply becomes a raise of hands regarding who plays what class.
This coming from a guy who, in his early UO days, thought polling players for what was “REALLY!” wanted was just about the best idea of all time.
It’s just sort of hard to understand why it wouldn’t be unless you can take a step back and view the situation from an impartial standpoint.
November 23rd, 2007 at 8:48 am
Don’t advertise UO shards on my site please.
-Az
November 23rd, 2007 at 2:58 pm
just trying to get it more players, and a home for the IPY community.
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:46 pm
That’s fine, but the “IPY community” was a community over three years ago. Anyone who played it and still wants to play something like it has probably found some shard that is very similar by now.
But, let’s be honest, what you were doing was blatantly advertising on my website. Now I’m not trying to harp on you here, but I don’t consider randomly advertising for things on my site totally kosher and I don’t know many people that would.
It’s not a big deal, but it’s not really something I prefer to go on here.
November 24th, 2007 at 8:04 am
I can see this thread moving in the direction of the pros and cons of participatory democracy (if the people choose it, it must be right!), but then again where I am we just had another farce of an election so maybe i have that on my brain too much.
November 24th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Well, there’s still the same “people are stupid” effect in democracy. On one level, it’s why you end up with snakes like Bush in the Whitehouse. Twice. On another, it’s amusing to me that people still vote at all because the entire thing has become such a perverted farce.
But the point as it relates to online games would be relating login polls to voting on, say, distribution of tax money in the federal budget, for instance. In real life, I don’t necessarily see a problem with this. From the outside, you may think it would be more intelligent for a smaller group of people with a better understanding of the issues at hand to decide these things. Look a little closer, and these people are the circulatory system of the military-industrial complex, massive corruption, among other things.
So not only should people HAVE the right to choose where THEIR tax dollars go (possibly a clearly defined definition between federal and local dollars with a safety net percentage for certain social programs) but they should probably have full access to see exactly where their money is going, where it’s gone, and that it hasn’t gone somewhere they don’t want it to.
It’s your money, why shouldn’t it be fully visible to you and why shouldn’t you have a say in where it goes? Voting in some crook every four years isn’t a choice, because he turns around and does whatever the fuck he wants anyway.
Obviously certain mathematical formulas need apply. A tax “voting” form could never be marked down with a bunch of zeros until someone gets to “Service Of My Choice” where their entire lot of tax dollars goes. Which would happen with regularity. More likely, highest and lowest percent of acceptable tax revenue toward a certain area would have to be decided, and this would have to apply directly to the tax voting form.
For instance, even if I don’t LIKE Welfare, we can’t just dump everyone on their ass next month. Even if, say, I don’t LIKE government/military contracts, the possibility of the military getting $0 this year can’t exist. A form could easily accompany the tax voting form, or possibly 6-8 months later after things have begun to play out with the new budget. This form could deal with voting regarding adjusting the minimum and maximum percentages.
Now, obviously, my government can still lie through their teeth to me, tell me the Iraq war is important and needs to be funded with billions and billions of dollars, and maybe I’ll buy that and vote a lot of my dollars toward the military. But that’s a whole other problem, and giving people control over where THEIR money goes (and the ability to see it actually made it there) is a pretty good god damn start.
Games are a little different. Simple polls are used nearly exclusively by players to get what benefits them the most. The only way this would parallel the above system were if a player could use each of their 15 dollars (or whatever) for a vote on the things development is concentrated on over the next month, 3 months, 6 months, whatever. However, since I don’t think Turbine or Mythic are directly funding bloody, illegal wars overseas or anything of the sort - I’d be more inclined to tell you to vote with your dollars by picking up and moving to a game more suited to your tastes. There are quite a few. And the voting would simply make the already difficult process of developing and/or maintaining a successful online game MUCH, much more difficult.
And in the end, this would never save a dying game.
Something going into the pits because, say, it appealed only to hardcore raiders… would inevitably have more and more of its budget dedicated to raiding. The developers would have to sit back and watch as the game was driven into the ground.
In the real world, there are big, big, very important reasons to know where all of the money is going, and maybe have some control over it. While on paper things might be easier or better having trained, highly educated individuals making these decisions - in reality, they’re a bunch of fucking crooks.
And I can’t pick up and move to another world.
November 24th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I also realize that the stuff about taxes is probably retarded for about ten reasons. That’s not exactly my area of expertise.
My point was about player opinion/actual polls in online games and how they relate to democracy, as brought up.
The summary essentially being that whereas there are some parallels citizens and players as well as between governments and developers essentially “with a vision”, or more accurately, wanting to do a bunch of shit without the common folk barging in on it, there are some pretty huge differences too. One being that, hopefully, your Online World is being crafted by leaders in the interest of balance and fairness - and if it’s not, or you perceive that it isn’t, you can find another one.
In the real world, the objectives of leaders are often questionable and quite often not entirely in the interest of the common folk, and this has some much more serious implications than possible favourtism in online game development. You also can’t get away from it, because, well, the entire Western world is pretty much run in the exact same fashion.
Where it’s reasonable to not impede an online game developer’s progress because of the scaled back nature of the obvious issues which exist in relative parallel with the real world example, in the real world it is reasonable for people to demand change where they see fit because of the direct impact on human lives and only the proven deceptions and number of questionable motives hidden behind cheshire cat grins that cause a valid level of distrust of politicians and world leaders.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
In the end, it comes down to money. Blizzard is making a killing off WoW so I doubt they care about following a “vision”.
And btw, a guy comes in here trying to attract some people to a decent T2A shard in response to your hundredth “What’s the matter with MMO’s today” blog and you edit his post. I’m a little disappointed you wouldn’t try to help UO:Divinity grow a bit since it really is the last good shard out there.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
I just find it amazing that no MMO has come close to the game UO is. I agree with Divinity being the last good freeshard left.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
I think I was pretty nice about it.
Now, I realize you guys are going to get defensive because it’s your favorite shard and whatever, but I just don’t see why I need to allow a bunch of advertisement posts like the one above yours to be spammed on my site?
(I’ll, of course, be deleting the spam, sorry boys.)
And by the way.. if you don’t like what I post on my blog, brother, I ain’t forcing you to come here and read it. All you have to do is not type the url into your browser.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Maybe it is Choppa. I’ve heard it’s extremely similar to IPY, so it can’t be all bad :P
All I’m saying here is that I don’t want my site spammed with links. Feel free to discuss whatever you want beyond that.
November 30th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Back to the topic that was being discussed, it may be appropriate for me to state that what you, I and others want is to interact in a manner where the fundamental rules do not change. In MMOs, if I get onboard a pkfest, I want it to remain a pkfest. Diito carebear land. In politics, you dont want the rules to change, hence why a country with an established rule of law which is adhered to is the best. Unfortunately not too many of those countries are around any more.