Many an MMO underestimates the value of players being listened to

[Kikokuma.9405]

17 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

The developers went with the later, making sure boons are easier covered

Meanwhile destroying class identity, forcing more people that were avoiding a "boon meta" class to now play one if they want to be anywhere close to proficient with their class of choice now. And now every class can now do just about anything. Just go the extra step and delete classes completely. Everyone is basically the same now. 

 

17 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

You might want that graphic engine or physics engine overhaul and it might be the best thing to grace the game since its launch, but it just isn't feasible from a resource standpoint

Eve Online has done this regularly since they had a player base of roughly 2,800 - 3,000 players online at any given time. Sure there is less to render in a game like that. It's a completely different genre but they made base level changes to their whole game engine. Why everyone just seems to agree that it's literally impossible in these games that are 10x bigger is just dumb. The company just never prioritizes it. It doesn't add to making them money. You know what does? Rushing out the smallest expansion yet with more monetizable aspects so they can milk their players.... *cough cough* Boat skins, jade bot skins, turtle skins, freaking fishing pole skins.... 🙄

[patton the great.7126]

1 hour ago, Labjax.2465 said:

People hated the NGE tho, so I don't get how NGE is a result of listening. What I remember was that it had to do with them wanting to make it into a WoW clone, to compete with WoW. Don't remember where I got that idea from, but it would make sense with the design it was turned into.

No swg vet likes to admit it but if we go back in time the forums were alight with crybabies in regard to unlocking jedi or the admittedly abysmal combat system from the CU bounty hunting etc. There is alot of people with alot of blood on their hands that weren't there when the lights went out like I was. Now I actually kind of enjoyed the NGE, the last devs that swg had for the last 3 years of its life were actually doing a heck of a lot of good. Point is those devs early on while yes were very interested in competing with wow for good reason, they were also being bombarded daily with complaints that would make the WvW forum blush. It's good to an extent that they stick to their game plan and not let the inmates run the asylum.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

3 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

I think some people are getting confused here. It's not about which player is being listened to. I see no reason to believe they are listening to players of any group, desires, etc., on any kind of dedicated basis. As a result of occasional whim when something happens in front of the right dev's eyes at the right time, sure, but not with any kind of dedicated focus.

Over ten years, many, if not most of the changes to the game were things that one group or another asked for.  Start all the way back with Fractals, which put in progressive agony resistance when people were complaining about lack of gear progression.

 

3 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

And with the example you cite... with the timing of it, it could just as easily be attributed to them thinking about steam release and the outside perception of their game's end-game PvE, and have nothing to do with player feedback at all. So I'm not sure that really works well as a point of them listening to someone.

So, no matter what ANet does, you are going to attribute it to something other than them "listening?"  Why?  The raid changes are just them positioning the game to appeal to new players,?  Why couldn't it be in response to player feedback?  Why not BOTH.  What would ANet have to DO for you to conclude that changes they make are in response to feedback?  What changes to the meta-game of community/dev interaction would satisfy you?  Without something more specific than, "They're not listening!" it's hard to see this as more than just frustration over something unclear.

Edited July 28, 2022 by IndigoSundown.5419
Fat fingered Save too early.

[Cyninja.2954]

5 hours ago, Kikokuma.9405 said:

Meanwhile destroying class identity, forcing more people that were avoiding a "boon meta" class to now play one if they want to be anywhere close to proficient with their class of choice now. And now every class can now do just about anything. Just go the extra step and delete classes completely. Everyone is basically the same now. 

That's the developers approach to making the game more accessible instead of just providing content which is not in the slightest adjusted to what classes can do.

Also something which has been asked for by large parts of the player base:"make my class viable in content XYZ".

So while you and I might disagree on how this is handled, it still might be a net positive for getting more players involved or access to content (with potentially the added benefit of again more diverse pve content in the future difficulty wise).

Quote

Eve Online has done this regularly since they had a player base of roughly 2,800 - 3,000 players online at any given time. Sure there is less to render in a game like that. It's a completely different genre but they made base level changes to their whole game engine. Why everyone just seems to agree that it's literally impossible in these games that are 10x bigger is just dumb. The company just never prioritizes it. It doesn't add to making them money. You know what does? Rushing out the smallest expansion yet with more monetizable aspects so they can milk their players.... *cough cough* Boat skins, jade bot skins, turtle skins, freaking fishing pole skins.... 🙄

Eve  Online, interesting example. Let's go through some of CCPs greatest from the past as well as significant differences to GW2 shall we?:

- EO remains a subscription based MMORPG (kind of a big one I'd say in regards to monetization)

- EO has very different requirements as far as physics and graphic engine go. It's basically no area and only object collision, which suffers severely when the games big fights happen to this day. It's basically light and easy when not pressured and completely not up to the task when pressured.

- can someone say 60$ monocle?

- Incarna, enough said (and another great example how two different types of engines can be very different challenging to design and manage)

- EO has not released a significant expansion in years. They are much closer to a living world model in types of releases and most content is player made building on those releases

Eve Online is not just a different genre, it's a different cosmos as far as their games engines and monetization go.

Also talking of monetizing their players... you can't be serious. They monetize their players left and right. Character changes, skill point purchases, ISK purchases (which the entire game revolves around), in game cosmetic store, you name it and the list has simply expanded over the years. Have you ever taken a guess as to why the PLEX price has gone from roughly 400-500 million ISK to around 1.5 billion ISK by now?

Edited July 28, 2022 by Cyninja.2954

[mythical.6315]

On just about every topic you’ll have a group of people in favor and a group of people against. Who is right? Who is wrong?  

You can say that they should listen to players but who should they listen to?  Anything they do take action on is likely to go against what someone wants. Do the people requesting things really know what it is that they are truly requesting as well as any potential ramifications (short/long term) for them?

[Khisanth.2948]

7 hours ago, IndigoSundown.5419 said:

Take the Empowered buff in raids.  For years, raiders fought tooth and nail against easy-mode raids.  Others demanded them.  Meanwhile, raiders asked for more raids.  So, is Empowered about listening to those who wanted easy-mode raids?  Or, is it about both catering to those who want easy and those who want more, by growing the population of players who want more raids?

It reminds me a thing NBC did years ago when then were doing reruns of a bunch of shows. "If you haven't seen it then it's new to you!".

Seems like it is simply a case of Anet creating "new" content for some people without actually having to create anything.

[Ashantara.8731]

20 hours ago, Taclism.2406 said:

Its moreso players overestimate the value of their input.

That's possible. Yet, there wouldn't be such an entitlement of player input if the devs had dedicated play testers and things were properly tested beforehand instead of having players "test it" on the live servers, being stuck with certain changes for months (or forever).

10 hours ago, Kikokuma.9405 said:

Meanwhile destroying class identity [...]

This is another point. I'm certain, had there been a (let's say) an in-game poll, the majority wouldn't have voted for the classes to become a mishmash of all professions.

(As for skins etc, sadly that's a desicision that is 100% out of players' hands.)

Edited July 28, 2022 by Ashantara.8731

[Labjax.2465]

13 hours ago, IndigoSundown.5419 said:

Over ten years, many, if not most of the changes to the game were things that one group or another asked for.  Start all the way back with Fractals, which put in progressive agony resistance when people were complaining about lack of gear progression.

 

So, no matter what ANet does, you are going to attribute it to something other than them "listening?"  Why?  The raid changes are just them positioning the game to appeal to new players,?  Why couldn't it be in response to player feedback?  Why not BOTH.  What would ANet have to DO for you to conclude that changes they make are in response to feedback?  What changes to the meta-game of community/dev interaction would satisfy you?  Without something more specific than, "They're not listening!" it's hard to see this as more than just frustration over something unclear.

If you want to insist it is evidence of listening, all of that can be attributed to whim or making reactive changes based on big enough outcry, rather than even a single person whose job is to listen. I don't know what to tell you. I thought I laid out what I was suggesting pretty clearly in the OP.

[Labjax.2465]

16 hours ago, patton the great.7126 said:

No swg vet likes to admit it but if we go back in time the forums were alight with crybabies in regard to unlocking jedi or the admittedly abysmal combat system from the CU bounty hunting etc. There is alot of people with alot of blood on their hands that weren't there when the lights went out like I was. Now I actually kind of enjoyed the NGE, the last devs that swg had for the last 3 years of its life were actually doing a heck of a lot of good. Point is those devs early on while yes were very interested in competing with wow for good reason, they were also being bombarded daily with complaints that would make the WvW forum blush. It's good to an extent that they stick to their game plan and not let the inmates run the asylum.

No because here's the thing. Player feedback is powerless. This has always been the case. To a very limited extent, players can force a studio's hand en-masse if, for example, it's a game where you sub and they unsub, or something gets picked up by a game media outlet and threatens the game's reputation. But for the most part, even prolonged outrage regularly gets ignored and nothing is done.

Even if a studio had a large team dedicated to listening to player feedback around the clock, that wouldn't in any way make the player feedback have power. It would just mean that the studio is choosing to devote resources to listening on a dedicated basis. And it would still be the job of that team to look at feedback relating to gameplay (e.g. things more substantial than low priority bugs or QOL) and determine whether and what can be done with it in a way that matches the game's direction as decided on by the studio, and ultimately reject feedback that can't be reconciled with the game's direction.

It is a top down power system and the closest thing to any say that players ever have is taking their business elsewhere, which generally means nothing unless they do it in such large numbers and are so consistent in their stated reasons for leaving that the studio has a clear path to take to try to win back people of the mindset who left, or are on the verge of leaving. And at that point, they can still ignore it if they so choose and may be weighing the numbers sometimes, internally, trying to determine the loss of players is enough of a cost that it justifies being reactive with changes.

[Westenev.5289]

On 7/27/2022 at 7:47 PM, Mungrul.9358 said:

 

Jon Peters, outlining the philosophy of GW2 before release:

“Our professions aren’t dedicated healers, DPS, or tanks because frankly, we built a combat system that just doesn’t allow it.”
 

That's what I was sold.

No single profession was ever intended to provide 100% uptime of any beneficial effect. The burden was made to be shared amongst players. But people who came from more traditional MMOs couldn't understand that, and instead of adapting, just whinged until they got their way.

It took them ten years, but they now have the homogenous boon spam that the modern high-end game has become.

 

I was always a little critical of that dream, since w/o support or tanks you have DPS. This leads to dungeon/fractal teamcomps like 4 ele 1 bs warr being meta, and Ranger/Thief/Necro actively being bullied in instanced content (cool community though if you don't play those classes and had 5k ap).

[Sobx.1758]

3 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

If you want to insist it is evidence of listening, all of that can be attributed to whim or making reactive changes based on big enough outcry, rather than even a single person whose job is to listen. I don't know what to tell you. I thought I laid out what I was suggesting pretty clearly in the OP.

The thing is, I don't think you were clear about what you want in the OP. It's all just vague and in your subsequent responses you show that the changes don't matter, since you will still judge whether or not it was due to player feedback -and for now your default stance seems to be saying that nothing is.

What feedback exactly would you want them to listen to? Lets take one of your latest threads about making mystic coins more farmable, where at the same time you claim it's "not about making them easier to get". If you add more sources of a material, not only you automatically make them easier to get, but at the same time you're driving the price down, which adds yet another layer to making the acquisition easier. Do you think that idea/feedback thread was good? Because it was either dishonest about the goals of introducing it in the first palce OR it failed horribly to even understand what are the obvious and inevitable results of introducing the change it was talking about.

So... what and who exactly are they supposed to listen to? Majority of the forum? The most logical ideas? Ideas that are also in line with the studio's goals? What about people that are just happily playing the game instead of complaining on the forum, do those players matter in this context?

Edited July 28, 2022 by Sobx.1758

[Khisanth.2948]

2 hours ago, Westenev.5289 said:

 

I was always a little critical of that dream, since w/o support or tanks you have DPS. This leads to dungeon/fractal teamcomps like 4 ele 1 bs warr being meta, and Ranger/Thief/Necro actively being bullied in instanced content (cool community though if you don't play those classes and had 5k ap).

It can work or at least I have seen it work for another game. Surprisingly the class that can heal, tank and DPS did not end up dominating that game.

If they wanted everyone to do everything then they needed to make enemies that require everyone to perform every role but we've never had that. Enemies generally stick to a single player.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

7 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

If you want to insist it is evidence of listening, all of that can be attributed to whim or making reactive changes based on big enough outcry, rather than even a single person whose job is to listen. I don't know what to tell you. I thought I laid out what I was suggesting pretty clearly in the OP.

Insist?  No.  You're the one insisting it isn't.  I prefer to acknowledge the possibility their actions are evidence of listening.  This is an educated guess based on the fact that an awful lot of player feedback has appeared in one form or another in the game.

 

As to your suggestions about staff dedicated to perusing and acting on feedback... which you think might satisfy your complaint.  The truth is that there was a collaborative initiative between ANet and players years ago.  It's no longer here.  Turns out that a lot of people weren't satisfied with ANet conversing openly about changes to the game.  Many were unhappy if their views were not the ones heeded.  Maybe I'm cynical, but I would see much the same happening as happens now -- people claiming ANet doesn't listen to the player-base, when the truth is they mean ANet didn't give them what they wanted.  That's also based on (anecdotal) evidence from ten years of the official forums.

[Kikokuma.9405]

20 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Eve  Online, interesting example. Let's go through some of CCPs greatest from the past as well as significant differences to GW2 shall we?:

- EO remains a subscription based MMORPG (kind of a big one I'd say in regards to monetization)

- EO has very different requirements as far as physics and graphic engine go. It's basically no area and only object collision, which suffers severely when the games big fights happen to this day. It's basically light and easy when not pressured and completely not up to the task when pressured.

- can someone say 60$ monocle?

- Incarna, enough said (and another great example how two different types of engines can be very different challenging to design and manage)

- EO has not released a significant expansion in years. They are much closer to a living world model in types of releases and most content is player made building on those releases

Eve Online is not just a different genre, it's a different cosmos as far as their games engines and monetization go.

Also talking of monetizing their players... you can't be serious. They monetize their players left and right. Character changes, skill point purchases, ISK purchases (which the entire game revolves around), in game cosmetic store, you name it and the list has simply expanded over the years. Have you ever taken a guess as to why the PLEX price has gone from roughly 400-500 million ISK to around 1.5 billion ISK by now?

I don't see the need for all the extra info on Eve online. I used them as an example of an MMO with a very small player base at the time, yet still giving the time and resources to updating their game engine. That's it, yeah it's a P2W mess now, it honestly really sucks now. I haven't played it for years and years. But that's not what i was talking about. Just cuz i bring up a game as an example doesn't mean i am a zealot for that game. 😆

[robertthebard.8150]

Player A:  They need to do (insert idea here).

Players B through E:  Yeah.

Players F through K:  Why?

Players K through Z:  That's the worst idea ever.

All of this is player feedback.  If Player A's idea is implemented, Players K through Z will claim the devs aren't listening to feedback.  If it's not, Players A through E will also claim they're not listening to feedback.  So, it can become a lot less about "they're not listening to feedback", and a lot more about "they're not listening to me".

Sometimes, this is a very bad thing on the dev's part.  My best example is DDO spitting on 7 years of my personal character development by introducing an overall OP ranged class, and then, instead of fixing that, they just nerfed all ranged combat.  Well, they listened to player feedback, but from my perspective, where I was building something that didn't involve that particular class at all, they destroyed all the time and money that I had invested in a character, in order to bring the problem class in line, they listened to the wrong feedback.

[Labjax.2465]

16 hours ago, IndigoSundown.5419 said:

Insist?  No.  You're the one insisting it isn't.  I prefer to acknowledge the possibility their actions are evidence of listening.  This is an educated guess based on the fact that an awful lot of player feedback has appeared in one form or another in the game.

 

As to your suggestions about staff dedicated to perusing and acting on feedback... which you think might satisfy your complaint.  The truth is that there was a collaborative initiative between ANet and players years ago.  It's no longer here.  Turns out that a lot of people weren't satisfied with ANet conversing openly about changes to the game.  Many were unhappy if their views were not the ones heeded.  Maybe I'm cynical, but I would see much the same happening as happens now -- people claiming ANet doesn't listen to the player-base, when the truth is they mean ANet didn't give them what they wanted.  That's also based on (anecdotal) evidence from ten years of the official forums.

Yeah, I mean you sound pretty cynical. What I proposed sounds to me very little like the example you are giving of something that fell apart.

Some of you in this thread keep ignoring specifics of what I proposed to focus on this hypothetical of people being upset because their feedback wasn't listened to, while others was, creating a worse game for them and a better game for others, but not everything that can be listened to is like that and it baffles me because I directly talked about it in the OP. I specifically mentioned low priority bug fixes and low priority QOL as two elements that I don't see indications of anyone being devoted to working on year round. If someone goes and fixes an old visual bug, is that choosing one player's vision of the game over another's? No. It's fixing an old visual bug for everybody. If someone goes and adds a QOL option in settings, is that choosing one player's vision of the game over another's? No. It's adding a QOL option in settings.

When it comes to the last element, more sensitive zero-sum matters in how the game should be experienced and so on, yes of course it can't satisfy everyone or even most people. However, it can create more confidence that attention is being paid to that area. As I stated in another post, and I guess I didn't mention this in the OP because I thought it would be implied but apparently I need to state it for some people: it would be part of their job to check that feedback they are considering listening to does not contradict the studio's direction of how the game should be overall. And perhaps it would be necessary if communicated to players that such a role or team exists at the studio, to also communicate that this is a limitation they face when listening to feedback and they cannot act on feedback just because it's stated frequently enough by enough people.

For comparison, I can't speak for everyone, but when I knew that there was an economist working on GW2 (as opposed to games that free-for-all their economy design and end up with a mess) it gave me increased confidence in the stability of the game's economy and that generally proved to be well-placed confidence; they kept it relatively consistent over years of new content and materials and other such game elements interacting with it. Now that I'm not sure if they still have one working for them (as I understand, the original one is no longer with them), I have less confidence in the game's economy going forward.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Labjax.2465

[ugrakarma.9416]

i guess they list, but obviously, they have filters.