This week's column looks at how developers really gather and use the feedback of their players. Sanya's peek behind the development curtain appears every Friday.
The flaws with user initiated data are many. The feedback is limited to those members of the playerbase who are highly motivated to post. The term “silent majority” isn’t a cliché for nothing, y’all. For example, every class has its group of people screaming that their Foozle is underpowered. When no one of a particular class is screaming about their Foozle, it is drastically overpowered and the entire class should probably be removed from the game.
There was a point early in City of Heroes where I went to the forums to look something up about my class, and I noticed that the forums were eerily silent. No activity at all. My spidey senses went haywire, and just for yucks, I checked the other class forums. Indeed, they were all packed full of people complaining. Experience told me that either my class was so awful that no one was playing it at all, or I was going to get nerfed down to the atomic level. The hammer fell two patches later. Owie.
Read more here.
