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Originally posted by qombi

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Originally posted by Trucidation

^... Most programmers are simply cogs in the machine, rats on the treadmill. Sure, occasionally you hear from big name studio people in the press like Carmack from id, but the vast majority of us are just peons.
Customer feedback gets filtered through like 10 layers of management crap before actually reaching the programmers, and by that time it's already in the form of "do this, then do that". That's the reality of it, unless you're talking about smaller no-name studios... but those aren't the guys making MMOs now, are they?

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I underlined what makes great games. I know the guy above said that some programs are like divas but I disagree. I think you guys make the most fun games out there when you are working with your ideas.

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Programming is like paiting a mural. A genius can get a bunch of normal painters, and make then draw faces, and horses, explosions... following his orders.

If these normal painters are not genius, wen you zoom-in on the details, you will see mediocrity. But If the genius is really a genius, wen you zoom-out you see a great mural.

Wen you work with a guy that is not a genius, and the painters are not a genius... you get something that is boring on all levels.

Wen you work with genius programmers, and a director that is not a genius, you can see genius details, but the whole thing suck.

So.. good games need a good director. The better games need the better programmers.

And the big the team, the smaller the contribution of the individual programmer. Trucidation is telling us than in a big project the contribution of the programmer is soo small, the oportunity to make a difference is small or not existing...

..on the other part, PR is telling us that the fire implementation on Farcry2 was the work of a small dude. True or not... we love and remenber games often by tiny details. A game can be good because a redeming feature. If a programmers is bad, maybe that cog will not work, and a resulting, a big cog will not work and a feature will not work.

Programmaers have already demoed that a programmer can drive the art of videogamme developping, now is time for other people (designers, writters,..) to take the role, and show what other type of people can do.

Methinks the "reign" of programmers as been glorious, with all these early 80's crazy games. No-Programmers people have still to beat that "score".

Originally posted by Dana

Ah, zones. Long ago in a virtual world, user initiated feedback told the developers of a particular game that they hated, HATED Zone X. They constantly mocked this zone – “the golf course.” It was, admittedly, not the finest zone in the game. It was large and green without a lot of features. It has been hastily assembled at the last second. The new zone was pretty neat on paper, lots of obstacles and control elements, requiring tons of strategy.

And yet removing the golf course was, shall we say, not popular. What? Whyever so? The usage data on the old zone showed that despite the mockery, the much maligned zone was where everyone went to play if they had nothing else to do. It was the default, where a group could always be found, and you didn’t need a minimum number of people to do anything, and you could always find someone to kill.
 

 In business, as in pretty much every aspect of life, something called the "80/20" rule applies: eighty percent of your expense comes from 20% of your customers. The trick to managing a business is identifying and then focusing on the part where you get the most bang for your buck.

I've seen a lot of very energetic and well-meaning owners go out of business because they gave in to their own egos, and focused on making their already-pleased customers even more slavishly devoted.  The problem is that fanatic customers always give the worst possible advice. First of all, no matter how much they whine; they are not going to leave.  They love your product a lot more than it costs them.  What you need to do is figure out new ways to suck more money out of them -- and that is the LAST thing they'll ever suggest to you.

In order to grow your business, the people you need to listen to are your marginal customers.  The quiet souls who (God bless them) sit around and pay their fees on time every month with no drama.  But a lot of those players have already left the game, and (for all you know) a bunch of other ones may be sitting on the fence right now.  The problem is that listening to them is hard to do.  You have to be motivated, take a proactive and disciplined approach to get this data. 

I suspect that in MMORPG's, for every ADD kid who hates wasting a whole week blowing past those first 50 "transition" levels to get to the "uuber-leet endgame"; and for every compulsive-psychotic who wants an even more fiendishly convoluted raid encounter that will require a second pair of adult diapers to complete in one sitting; there are a bunch of other players who really just want a giant sandbox to quietly hunt and fight in...  People who won't say a word if the class they're playing (let alone another class) is "unbalanced" - because they couldn't possibly care less.  People who don't scream like stuck pigs about every little change because they LIKE new aspects to explore.  People who will deal with a dungeon that doesn't perfectly fit their needs - because they've been doing their best to try and squeeze some enjoyment out of areas specifically designed to exclude them. 

I say I "suspect" all that because there's really no way to know for sure.  Those folks aren't the type who are likely to jump up and scream their heads off -- they'll just kind of quietly leave once they've finally gotten sick of infinitely re-playing the tiny fraction of the game's content they can reach. 

But when I see that a game designer ACCIDENTALLY made a zone these players loved more than any other, it sort of makes me wonder what would happen if somebody actually went out and TRIED to give these people the kind of experience they're looking for.

Interesting article.

Sanya regarding player feedback do you think adding polls at the game login screen would work?

This way devs would have not only the feedback from the forum users but also from all the others that never go on the forums. 

Originally posted by Deewe

Interesting article.

 

Sanya regarding player feedback do you think adding polls at the game login screen would work?

 

This way devs would have not only the feedback from the forum users but also from all the others that never go on the forums. 

Great suggestion!  We do something very much like this with one of our business application programs at work; and its been very successful.

This was a very good article but it told me a lot about why devs are sometimes clueless with regards to what the majority of the loyal player base of any game is thinking. There is one thing that you need to understand about all of these forms of feedback mentioned in the article. A lot of the people who regularly give feedback though these methods lie though their teeth about content that is not popular with them. Why? because they don't want you to listen to those who don't agree with them. This is true with rule sets, content, and probably most of all in existing games class balance.

I've been playing MMORPG from early 02 with pre Luclin EQ, beta tested a huge list of games [still do] spent years in WoW and EQ2 going back and forth between them. I'm prolly an odd person but I talk to people in game about what they like. I don't work for anyone, I just do it to figure out if my thinking about some of the game content is as way off in left field as forum behavior would seem to indicate. Turns out most of the time it isn't and the forum intell is often skewed way off from what a lot of actual players feel. I think what set me off on this kind of investigating was what I call the great horse nerf of early EQ2. There was a big stink with regards to the cheap crusader horse that had a moderate run speed [less than SoW]. I recall one individual who was very vicious about it and she insisted that ALL the paladins in her guild wanted it nerfed because it would prevent newbies from rolling paladins, then had her friends [and maybe other accounts] back her up, and even reposted the same demand every time the thread died down. She also resorted to threats and a lot of profanity when anyone had another view. Yes it sounds stupid now but she was fairly successful in her efforts. In the end the run speed of the noble steed got nerfed so bad you could get run down and killed while on it but the dev team [I suspect in resentment of the issue] also nerfed every other horse in the game as well. I didnt really have a position on the nerf but it was rather interesting to watch. Beta test forums can sometimes be even worse as some of the people there never pay to play but tend to just camp beta test and play free games. Forums get very political , yes they do.

At any rate that was what set me off wondering and I have been asking in game questions of people and making comparisons ever since. People are sometimes not honest on forums and in study groups. They defend the status quo or what the mentality of their group is. This is how words like "care bear", or "the grind" came about. Its just like real life politics , you take what your trying to undermine and then assign it a name you can call it then use it in negative ways. Never mind that thousands of people logged in daily and dutifully paid monthly fees to participate in "the grind" when in the early days of EQ the company didn't even expect them to. At some point end gamers made their way in later down the line and began to pay others to do "the grind" for them so they could just skip to the end and then of course set about establishing that nobody else wanted it ether. One of the trade marks of this particular type is that they like to speak as though everyone else had the same views as they do.
The main point is when she said silent majority, she hit the nail right on the head. Personally I think the only way to really get a chance at regular player opinion is to have polls in the game it self. Honestly most people I talk to in games don't even read the forums and are often shocked if I ask them about a discussion that is leaning in one direction or another. The great search for player opinion. This could be an epic quest.

I agree with that the official personnel should pay more attention to what the players have said on their official forum, after all that’s the most important source on the basis of which the developers could improve their production. But I do feel that the game developers are also not such cool blooded animals who never care what the players have said. In fact, I did have this kind of experience: when the developers really followed the players suggestion and launch a new version of game, players will very likely find more Bugs in that game. The conclusion is improving games needs time and it takes risk to produce more Bugs and more players complaint. Besides, game developing costs Capital. Take Funcom’s “the Age of Conan” for example, Funcom spends a great deal of money to produce high quality game, but it turns out that it will eat our hard drive severely and people complaint about it; Besides, Funcom also flaunt “the real combat system” as this game’s main feature, but not long ago I have read a review complaining that this system makes the game burdensome. So presently players are very easy to be weary of any new version of game, this is why the game developers don’t want to take the risk to alter the game program any more.

Nice read and a much needed insight to an aspect we hardly hear about, sadly.

There is a twofold issue here as we have one group conplaining about the issue at hand. Then there's the people who want their return on investment squeezing as much as they can from the Devs. So I can imagine how the Devs and teams holding them all at bay.

So how come we end up feeling ripped and fan the flames for us to leave?

I'm sick of getting the soft appologies from the feedback team about an issue and there's only so much they can actually do, even though they themselves see the problem.

Now behind the scenes must be the same, just like a theatre performance, things may look good and as long as the show goes on, us the audience do care.

Which brings me to your article, why if there are way to get the problems, do we all leave these games because nothing is getting done? Maybe things are being done, but on the wrong things if you ask me.

I'm yet to have a dev or feedback person contact me a month later and ask if things are better. Just like the players, maybe the Devs etc. focus too much on the bad too. So maybe it's a matter of changing "how" it's done and the procedure to fix it.

Napolian even understood that you cannot get people to do what you want, but offer them a ribbon and they'll put their life in your hands. So just maybe by asking how the problem could be solved could be another option.

Holy walls of text!   j/k  Some very insightful posts for a very young science (social science)

I agree that people need to realize that they are not that important (see Twitter heads) and that ultimately it is the decision of the service provider to determine what service they will provide.

However....I think it is important for game companies to open the doors a bit and provide feedback TO THE CUSTOMER. 

There is nothing more fustrating than to see a "blue" post from the game company on a forum to some stupid random comment but absolute silence following a well thought out post on a serious game issue.  For instance, I'm cruising the forums the other day and found a post relating to a controversial game mechanic.  The OP makes a very orderly and logical argument, that at the very least deserves some critical thought, and page after page of responses there was no "official" reply.  Some troll makes an asshat comment regarding something unrelated in the SAME thread and the Community Manager decideds to reply to the 2 lined troll bait of a post.

In the absence of good information (from the game company) bad information will fill the void.  People left to their own "theory crafting" will come up with every conspiricy and left field reasoning to explain why something was changed when there is no official word from the horses mouth.

BUT, the flip side of being "open and transparent" is that the customers will hold an official post from the company to its word....even years down the line.  If a Community Service Manager makes takes a stance on a particular issue that is in development and a year later things turn out different.....the forum warriors will quote that CSM from a year ago and want to know why the game company lied!!!???!!!

The reason so many game companies are secretive with their information?  Maybe because they get screwed to the wall everytime there is any kind of inconsistancy in what was said on the forums and what was done in game.  I say game companies need to grow some thicker skin and tell it like it is.  I'd prefer honest open transparency and get told "We changed our mind" than to be left in the dark and not be told anything.  But thats just me.

Thank you Sanya for a very good read.

I have posted many times that the majority of players do not read or join forum.  Forum regulars really do not understand how that impacts the wieght of thier opinion to the devs.  I am very pleased to see here how feedback is reguarded in that light.

This is a good read but I have a fundamental disagreement with what the Author purports in her usefulness of feed back. The most of the time before player feed back is requested a decision has been reached on what they are seeking feed back on. The time in which it takes to get valid feed back (Take the feed back and analyze it) the time period between this is too long. The design team has reached its conclusion by the time community has come back to them weeks later saying hey the users love this feature. Mean while the designer is often saying to themselves "So what you want me to undo 3 weeks worth of work drafting out this system?"
There are two major problems with feedback systems one an appropriate tool could resolve the second it cannot.
1. The time it takes to get feed back is often too long critical decisions are made and often they are onto the next issue. A tool could help with this process but there are issues with this as well. You have to ask the right questions so shape the specific type of feed back you need. If your questions are too general you have more work to do on the distilling of the feed back. Too specific and the community wont get their creative "juices" flowing.
2. You have to ask yourselves what kind of people are behind the scenes. Are they humble people who can take feed back or are they multiple? The reality is these people are VERY smart they understand aspects of game mechanics that the average player never even takes into consideration. When the basic premise of the game comes to light there a specific feel or idea that the Senior Design people are trying to get into the game, and once they are target locked they honestly don’t have the mental time to spend on feed back. This is even when that feed back is immediate.
So the part that I disagree with "The most common misconception in the MMO universe is that MMO studios do not care about feedback.". While the studio may desire feed back. The studio is made up of many types of people. The people who the feed back should make a difference too tend to really be oblivious to it. They would if they had 100 years to make a game implement every feature that was suggested. They'd make a individual game for each of us. But the reality they are there to make the game that was on the original design documents that was approved and funded. The more they deviate from that the more the cost of the production time the less money the Game makes.

Any ways thats my two cents.

Merxion
 

Sanya,

I appreciate your well thought out comments about how development teams use feedback and where that feedback comes from.  I will grant that the development companies must listen, but I have doubts about how well they understand.  

One of the most enjoyable MMO's that I have played was SWG.  I started with the opening day and played until changes made by the development company made the game virtually unplayable.   The changes were made over time and despite massive player resistance.  Did SOE hear or see the input?  They must have, but nonetheless, SOE chose to destroy an outstanding game.  Actions like those of SOE make players wonder if their input has any effect.  The changes in SWG must have been for some reason in the minds of SOE, but those reasons clearly had little to do with the player base. 

I would agree that game developers and companies should be more tansparent in their reasons for changing a game (or not changing), but it will take a long time to creat understanding let alone trust given past experience.

Robet DeWalt

veteren of EQ, DAoC, EQ2, SWG, CoH/CoV and LOTRO

I enjoyed your article this time Sanya.  Your experience with these topics lends obvious credibility to your point of view and it's nice to have a bit on an inside look at how all this works.  In my opinion the most important point you made was the comment on answered prayers.  If we could all be honest I think we'd admit that we most often want, nay demand that we get a "yes" answer.  Heh, that tends to frustrate me some.  Oh and just for the record, my Foozle is plenty powerful.

lol, Hibernia's original PVP Zone is the golf course she was talking about. I miss those days.

Oh I believe that developers listen to feedback... I have always believed that.

Sometimes its good, sometimes its bad and sometimes its taken somewhere that wasn't asked for.

Issues in general:

1) The loudest voices are usually not the majority of players.

2) As seen with many MMO's (SWG a good reference) the "forum game" is in general a very small percentage of the "game".  Thus people who "play the game" and "don't play the fourms" log in one day to a totally screwed up experience.

3) If a lot of negative feedback is given do you actually see a drop off in subscriptions to tie these things together (aka is it just some unhappy vocal people but most people are happyily playing).

They are all kind of the same thing and obviously tied together.

On the other hand I also know that developers sometimes seem:

1) To lie

or

2) To be mis-informed

or

3) have very potent drugs in their systems.

Tho I use SWG as a reference to some of this..

Dark Age of Camelot and Mythic Entertainment are THE emboidement of ALL of these things.  Which somehow seems ironic...  and that goes back many years when a certain someone was still doing the community updates on the Camelot Herald.

My favorite two arguements from developers when their views do not mesh with feedback:

1) You have rose colored glasses.  (yet developer cannot explain why their awesome idea have resulted in one server and the loss of some 55,000 to 60,000 concurrent online players).

2) We were bleeding subscribers (yet developer cannot explain why they had 250,000 subscribers when they were bleeding but only 50,000 when everything is "ok").

Is it really that hard to see why the people who give feedback but don't post on forums think they are not heard?

I think the entire subject is to wordy to get into and the article was a good read and illustrates much of what I think personally.  Oddly most people who played a game and left almost always have a common time frame that the game was "no longer fun" even tho they may not agree on much else.

That "time frame" when things were no longer fun is 99% tied to a change that was made which no one seems to have wanted or asked for.

Now how all that ties together is... changes are made based on feedback.

That feedback doesn't represent the majority of the player base.

Or was most likely given by someone who just rage quit and isn't coming back anyway.  (which is why the people left behind don't know why the game was changed the way it was... which just moves the cycle onward).

Obviously Devs have access to data we don't.. but the main issue is lack of communication.  If there was more open and constructive communication then more people would be happy.  Happy players = subscribers = money = happy devs with jobs.

I think a bit part of this is simply the design and implementation process at most MMo studios as well. If I have learned one thing from all my many years on "test" servers, submitting feedback and talking to the occasional dev it's that by the time nearly anyone in JQ Public category gets to see a "change" or "New feature", it's too late. The train has already left the station so to speak. You may be able to slightly, very slightly tweak some minor details with good feedback, but the change/expansion is basically happening anyways because the dev team has already spent XX days of paid time on it and no managing exec is just going to willingly write if off and say "oops, mabe that was a bad idea after all".

I loved the article, and I so miss the golf course. 

I think the problem is that developers are champing at the bit with ideas they want to implement and when they see player feedback say: " We want the Frontiers to be bigger and the keep setups to change, running in a cirlce up to the lord room is silly" , developers attach their ideas to what the player has said instead of just giving us what we asked for.

Example:

Players": We want a bigger frontiers with more travel paths to run around in.

Developer:  Oh sweet!  Let's add triple the size of the frontiers and add in places that are "Too Steep" to run across. While we're at it,  let's add in boat travel routes instead of portals. But we can add in a system of teleports too at every keep, that way people will only need to run from keep to keep if the portal system is broken. Oh and we can add bridges at every keep.

Players: We want keeps design to be updated. Currenty they are all just an open box with one room and one entrance to the lord.

Developers:  Oh nice, we can add in destructible walls. That will take forever to destroy giving it the feel of a real world assault on a keep. Let's also add in towers that are shaped like a box and have on entrance to the keep lord.  Oh we can put swamps around the keeps so people will run 1/5th their normal speed, further slowing down RvR and travel.  Don't forget to put a lot of water around keeps so people dont lose health while sneaking up on the castle.  It makes it near impossible to escape the keep if they are failing too!!  

It was simple. We wanted bigger keeps that had better design. We didn't ask for standstill combat and blanket additions to turn RvR from dynamic warfare to keep sieging.   We wanted bigger frontiers to run around in with multiple access to them so when the milegates were zerged or camped by the stealthers we had an opportunity to port into a second location via port!

Part of the problems with feedback in my opinion are :

Developers looking for a moment to exploit feedback to implement designs they want. Then blaming the players saying "You asked for this!""    No.. that's not really what we asked for...

Developers really not caring about feedback. " When we created Dark Age of Camelot we always had it in mind that siege warfarce would be a core concept of game design and the focus or our RvR experience where large battles of over 200 players would crash together."  ---- Except that's not what was bringng enjoyment to the game for everyone. The players loved many aspects of RvR not just the large battles and keep sieges.

Developers not asking the right questions to narrow down exactly what that feedback is looking for.   - So when you guys say you are unhappy with keep design what exactly are you asking for?   Is it the difficulty, the shape, the lord room's tower in particular?

Here's hoping some miracle worker with a good listening skills can put together a game that could be dubbed DaoC 2: The Realm Wars Created Right.

Originally posted by ericbelser

...but the change/expansion is basically happening anyways because the dev team has already spent XX days of paid time on it and no managing exec is just going to willingly write if off and say "oops, mabe that was a bad idea after all".

I think this is where the best companies (like Blizzard) really differ from the rest of the pack. 

Nobody always has perfect ideas, and throwing ten times as much money in the wrong direction just results in a pile of crap that's ten times bigger.

The difference is that good designers aren't afraid to pull the plug on bad ideas, eat their losses and get it over with.   Most companies have a feedback disconnect on the INSIDE.  No amount of "customer community dialogue facilitators" are ever going to fix that.

 To the OP:

Great article. 

Thanks!

Good article, and one that can be expounded on somewhat.

The utility of feedback isn't just sabotaged from the customer end.  While customers do tend to give crappy feedback ("I like this class, so make them capable of doing everything and I'll be happier"), we also have to consider the flaws on the other side of the screen.

What flaws?  Let's say a lead developer has a certain notion of how raids should work.  They put some folks on a design they want, then go out to get feedback on it.  But if they aren't objective enough, they start skewing their viewpoint on the feedback.  If feedback is negative to the new design, they start looking for reasons for the negativity other than poor design on their part.  If the feedback is positive, they will frequently refuse to put the design through rigorous testing to make sure nothing really bad will come from it.  They sabotage the customer feedback this way by not remaining objective themselves

Or let's say that a certain developer believes a class is imbalanced and wants feedback on it.  But the developer never bothered to play the class themselves; they only take second-hand accounts of what the class is doing in the game to base a decision on.  No matter whether the reaction is positive or negative, they make a poor decision because they aren't getting any actual face-time with the class, just using other players to gauge the extent of the change.  They sabotage the customer feedback here by being less informed on the issue than the customer is, and that's just plain not acceptable (after all, we're paying them to be professionals so we don't have to be).

Blizzard and SOE have both been infamous for being somewhat sloppy about checking their data in a timely fashion, and often seem astonished when the data supports something the community has been trying to tell them about for some time.  The fact is that you often see better math skills posted on the official forums at times than you see in the patch notes when some change is made, and that's just shameful.  I don't expect devs to be perfect, but some of the seesawing being done in many MMOs these days is getting ridiculous.  If they don't have the supposed math skills needed for programming computations of this nature, why were they hired in the first place?

Perhaps that is what we need in Quality Assurance departments in these companies: a division between customer feedback, and hard number crunching.  Get some sociologists working on the customer end, do some questionaires, see if they can pick up the signal out of the noise on forums and such.  Then get some folks, ideally programmers and mathemeticians, to look at the numbers being debated, see how things add up, and if not find out why.

One last thing that might help is if some of us customers stopped acting like $15 a month meant that these people had to do what we told them to do.  We should also be a bit more objective.  Is a class overpowered because they beat another one?  Or is there a defect in the loosing class that needs to be addressed, rather than nerfing the other class?  Is something "challenging", or is it really just too difficult to the point of stupidity?  We're paying to play a game with other people, not above them.

I think if we were more realistic about what was going on in a game, and the companies were more interested in being more careful about analyzing potential issues, we'd get amazingly better results.

Another good article from Sanya. I remember the grab bags and Sanya's CM days for DAoC, although I played in Europe, not the US. The Herald Grab Bags were us Europeans' way of getting most of the info available and I remember back in the day that Sanya raised the bar for CM feedback.

Semi-related to this thread we have an event occuring in Warhammer Europe on Monday 27th July which is related to a lot of the issues raised in this article. Rather than waffling on, I'll just link you to the thread here on mmorpg.com,

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/244858/Warhammer-Europe-27th-July-2009-Europe-Stand-Together.html

For further info, feedback or if you wish to support the event, drop by my blog at warofalts.wordpress.com