04-07-2003, 01:41 AM
Thanks for the support Bolty, Roland et al. You guys are great.
That said, I'm an adult and can handle a certain amount of abuse :) And I certainly don't mind discussion.
I had this weird thought running through my head yesterday about whether or not any other games generate this much vitriol from its "fans". However empowering it might be if everyone was just full of praise, I'm not sure that in the long run that that would be such a good thing you know?
re: what Roland said about this being "blizzard's" game -- I had an interesting argument several years ago with someone in the diabloii.net chat room about this very thing. His point was that the customer was always right and that if the majority of customers felt that we should take out non-consensual PvP then that is what we must do. My point was that while the customer is always right in the end (ie. the customers will either spend money on a product or they won't), the common adage doesn't actually apply to each detail of the design of a game. For multiple reasons, one of which is that if the designers aren't making the game that they want to play, then the game will be total crap (or it won't exist at all). And two, the majority is quite often wrong. For example, if you took a poll of the general battle.net population and asked, "would you want to be able to see the entire map and all the monsters on the map all of the time", well -- I think we have a pretty good idea what the results would be. Perhaps that's elitist of me though.
This isn't to say that our decisions are always right -- they're most definitely not. And even within the company there's usually quite a lot of debate about some of these "hot" topics. Oh well, just my thoughts on the matter.
That said, I'm an adult and can handle a certain amount of abuse :) And I certainly don't mind discussion.
I had this weird thought running through my head yesterday about whether or not any other games generate this much vitriol from its "fans". However empowering it might be if everyone was just full of praise, I'm not sure that in the long run that that would be such a good thing you know?
re: what Roland said about this being "blizzard's" game -- I had an interesting argument several years ago with someone in the diabloii.net chat room about this very thing. His point was that the customer was always right and that if the majority of customers felt that we should take out non-consensual PvP then that is what we must do. My point was that while the customer is always right in the end (ie. the customers will either spend money on a product or they won't), the common adage doesn't actually apply to each detail of the design of a game. For multiple reasons, one of which is that if the designers aren't making the game that they want to play, then the game will be total crap (or it won't exist at all). And two, the majority is quite often wrong. For example, if you took a poll of the general battle.net population and asked, "would you want to be able to see the entire map and all the monsters on the map all of the time", well -- I think we have a pretty good idea what the results would be. Perhaps that's elitist of me though.
This isn't to say that our decisions are always right -- they're most definitely not. And even within the company there's usually quite a lot of debate about some of these "hot" topics. Oh well, just my thoughts on the matter.