05-20-2004, 05:43 AM
/delurk
I've mainly been playing Star Wars: Galaxies over the last few months.
The forum experience has been interesting....
I can quite understand where the notion of listening to one's customers comes from, Sony has its roots in electronic goods and the needs of the average consumer are no doubt very different from the aspirations of the most technically adept engineer
Problem is it doesn't work in a competitive game environment
What do the customers want?
Well most of them want more damage, more invulnerability, more success for less effort and for everyone else to be nerfed
What's been fascinating to me about the SWG experience is that the developers seem to be taking such input on board and doing their best to satisfy it
I'd kind of always assumed that most game designers felt a very healthy disregard for the aspirations of gamers in much the same way as sports referees are disinclined to seek player opinion on whether a foul was or was not committed
It's a shame in some senses as the flawed development process results in a weaker product. The developers have simply given too much to the players and now everyone's stuck in the endgame and bored. Bit like D2 and the secret cow level
So what's this all got to do with WoW?
Well, it seems to me that posters like Pete and others on the official boards have a chance to wrestle control away from people who post stupidly but often to the posters who put some thought in. I probably won't take a great deal of interest until the game gets released since I'm not in the Beta and I strongly suspect that any such battle will have been won or lost by the time I'm playing
If you'll forgive me, I will now commit the triple sin of quoting myself, posting about an OT game and making an already lengthy post even longer :D
Here's part of a post I made yesterday on the Star Wars Galaxies forums in response to a thread wondering why the exact same threads with the exact same arguments get posted over and over, the precise subject being the nerfing of the Combat Medic class:
In response to the thread's question the reason people won't just listen is that most posters perceive that Developer reaction is shaped by post quantity not quality
In other words if I start a "Nerf Cm" thread and one of you posts an intelligent rebuttal, it's more effective to me to just start a new "Nerf Cm" thread than to address your points
The 9 consecutive nerf CM threads in the [PvP] forum that one of the posters here mentioned are probably more effective, even if they are "OMG I just got [instakilled]" type posts, than a single well-reasoned post would be
The recent reversal of the crafting experimentation changes due to popular outcry is a case in point. The Weaponsmiths (with gated resources) would have been adversely affected and successfully orchestrated a big forum reaction against the changes. Many of the ensuing protests came from professions like Architect and Artisan that actually benefitted from the changes
Very very few of the posts in the campaign were intelligent and yet it was successful
What I would like to see in general is more developer feedback in the forums. Thunderheart [player turned Community Liaison Officer] does a really great job but I get the feeling they hired him cos none of the other Devs want to talk to us
I think the Mods need to be a bit fiercer about enforcing constructive debate by simply deleting new threads about current topics. No way should a forum let 9 consecutive threads about the same issue be posted - just keep the first one and delete the other 8. This should help people develop their forum skills as well as improving the standards of these boards
For Correspondents [player advocates for each class - very useful idea] I would like them to be urged to bat for their own side a bit less and work out balanced solutions more. If all the correspondents could agree on solutions that solution would have a lot of weight with the wider community. For instance, the Combat Medic correspondent posting things like "sorry guys, we've wrangled out a CM balancing proposal and I had to give way on [X advantage]. What I gained for us was [Y advantage]
Alternatively the Devs could just stop listening to the players completely, a method which I'd prefer personally to the current whine-driven system
That's Star Wars Galaxies, that I gather is fairly typical of MMOs in general, and that I hope is not what WoW will become
I really do think it's in your hands
Cheers for now, I'll be back more once more Europeans are able to play :)
/re-lurk
I've mainly been playing Star Wars: Galaxies over the last few months.
The forum experience has been interesting....
I can quite understand where the notion of listening to one's customers comes from, Sony has its roots in electronic goods and the needs of the average consumer are no doubt very different from the aspirations of the most technically adept engineer
Problem is it doesn't work in a competitive game environment
What do the customers want?
Well most of them want more damage, more invulnerability, more success for less effort and for everyone else to be nerfed
What's been fascinating to me about the SWG experience is that the developers seem to be taking such input on board and doing their best to satisfy it
I'd kind of always assumed that most game designers felt a very healthy disregard for the aspirations of gamers in much the same way as sports referees are disinclined to seek player opinion on whether a foul was or was not committed
It's a shame in some senses as the flawed development process results in a weaker product. The developers have simply given too much to the players and now everyone's stuck in the endgame and bored. Bit like D2 and the secret cow level
So what's this all got to do with WoW?
Well, it seems to me that posters like Pete and others on the official boards have a chance to wrestle control away from people who post stupidly but often to the posters who put some thought in. I probably won't take a great deal of interest until the game gets released since I'm not in the Beta and I strongly suspect that any such battle will have been won or lost by the time I'm playing
If you'll forgive me, I will now commit the triple sin of quoting myself, posting about an OT game and making an already lengthy post even longer :D
Here's part of a post I made yesterday on the Star Wars Galaxies forums in response to a thread wondering why the exact same threads with the exact same arguments get posted over and over, the precise subject being the nerfing of the Combat Medic class:
In response to the thread's question the reason people won't just listen is that most posters perceive that Developer reaction is shaped by post quantity not quality
In other words if I start a "Nerf Cm" thread and one of you posts an intelligent rebuttal, it's more effective to me to just start a new "Nerf Cm" thread than to address your points
The 9 consecutive nerf CM threads in the [PvP] forum that one of the posters here mentioned are probably more effective, even if they are "OMG I just got [instakilled]" type posts, than a single well-reasoned post would be
The recent reversal of the crafting experimentation changes due to popular outcry is a case in point. The Weaponsmiths (with gated resources) would have been adversely affected and successfully orchestrated a big forum reaction against the changes. Many of the ensuing protests came from professions like Architect and Artisan that actually benefitted from the changes
Very very few of the posts in the campaign were intelligent and yet it was successful
What I would like to see in general is more developer feedback in the forums. Thunderheart [player turned Community Liaison Officer] does a really great job but I get the feeling they hired him cos none of the other Devs want to talk to us
I think the Mods need to be a bit fiercer about enforcing constructive debate by simply deleting new threads about current topics. No way should a forum let 9 consecutive threads about the same issue be posted - just keep the first one and delete the other 8. This should help people develop their forum skills as well as improving the standards of these boards
For Correspondents [player advocates for each class - very useful idea] I would like them to be urged to bat for their own side a bit less and work out balanced solutions more. If all the correspondents could agree on solutions that solution would have a lot of weight with the wider community. For instance, the Combat Medic correspondent posting things like "sorry guys, we've wrangled out a CM balancing proposal and I had to give way on [X advantage]. What I gained for us was [Y advantage]
Alternatively the Devs could just stop listening to the players completely, a method which I'd prefer personally to the current whine-driven system
That's Star Wars Galaxies, that I gather is fairly typical of MMOs in general, and that I hope is not what WoW will become
I really do think it's in your hands
Cheers for now, I'll be back more once more Europeans are able to play :)
/re-lurk