however, and no offense to you psychochild, if this is the pervasive attitude in the industry, will it not eventually stagnate?

to cite a general developmental axiom in the eqii system, greater risks beget greater rewards.

again, all to easy to say by someone with absolutely nothing to lose.

Anyway: Yes, I like PvP. No, I don’t think every game needs it; not every game I’ve worked on or consulted for has been PvP-focused (but many have). Yes, game designers actually are conservative because if they try anything radical, it’s their ass on the line. They tend to copy existing because it’s easier to make excuses. “Well, orcs riding wolves worked in WoW! I don’t know why our game failed…. Certainly nothing I did!”

Take care,

There are plenty of good sociology studies out on social networks, demographics and how they have changed how we interact with people. Some of this is applicable to games — some is not. Some of it is quite interesting and really is something more designers and developers should read as it might help them perceive better what the player base wants.

I think most MMO’s are designed on the principals of game play which were valid 30 years ago when pen and paper roll playing and D&D were in their hayday. That was a different society with different norms than today. Part of the problems in MMO design is that they somehow believe that what worked 30 years ago in Pencil and Paper will work today in an online game.

I disagree with your view that designers are conservative, but I say that rather they are wedded to an outmoded model like D&D. You may choose to define this as conservatism, I don’t. There has been a tendancy from the earlies RPG computer games right up to today to have fairly linear games played by a group of adventurers which must end in some major battle between the Forces of Good ( the group of adventurers) with the “Forces of Evil” and their Boss. That model needs to be broken for good!!

I don’t think that construct is valid today for the wide variety of demographics now playing MMO’s. There are many diverse groups of players ( I don’t mean this in the guild or grouping sense) who come from many different countries — they all bring a different perspective to the game and want different things from the game which are not easily distinguished by posts on a board. The loud-mouthed guild leader always get attentions and is “petted” and adored by designers and developers as they believe this person speaks for a lot of people just because he inserts himself/herself into every major post — actually he/she does not speak for a large number of customers and herein comes the first trap for developers and designers.

You are correct in saying that many people who will leave a game over a design changes are never counted — they don’t post, they say very little, they just leave. I left WoW over a design change — I didn’t even reply to their E-MAIL asking me why I left, I saw their game vision and I did not like the course they were set on, canceled my account and I was gone.

What developers need is someway to find out why the silent player just ups and quits — and usually refuses to answer the exit survey. They don’t answer the exit survey as they see it an exercise in futility — something that won’t change the higher ups minds or influence the direction the game is taking.

It is the lack of dialogue between players and management/designers that often creates the frustration ending in a cancelled account. And this lack of dialogue comes about as no-one is sure whome they should be listening too. A better testing environment would be very helpful in rectifying this and right now EQ2 testing environment does not serve them well.

The vocal ones…

“What the customer wants is better products for free,” – Dilbert
No, that isn’t an argument using an advertising-based business model in online games. In the Dilbert comic strip, the PHB claims they are going to start listening to the customer, and…

But there are reputable polling organization that make a point of asking the questions in a more neutral way. The art is all in framing the questions and if you are serious about polling you would want professional help in framing the questions. One piece of advice — always leave the options for the person to select “Don’t care one way or the other” and “Don’t know enough”.

Keeping the player base happy is very difficult and is fraught with danger for the designer since the demographics of MMO’s players is much broader and wider than it used to be. Meaning relatively small subsets of players want a variety of different things to keep the subset happy. If you make the wrong design decision it can come back to bite you. Game design costs money so you have a limitation as to how much you can do. And for today’s game to succeed there really has to be a wide variety of things for various demographics groups to do. But you need to find a way to do them economically.

I don’t know if there are professional magazines out there which discuss the design of MMO’s as they related to player base demographics and where you get the best return for dollars invested. And here I don’t mean “how to design X” — I mean the design at the marketing and management level.

Feedback in EQ2 is rather useless ( sorry abou that) but people mostly use it as a complaint function, a step 2 in filing a bug report. I have the feeling you expect something more from Feedback than how the players currently use it. I will use Feedback to comment on game changes if I am actually involved in testing them on the Test server– as I see its purpose there. I don’t believe it has any purpose except as part of a bug report on the live servers.

Perhaps you need to focus more on the Test Server design and structure if you want to get better feedback. I see a problem with the way the test server is currently set up — since only people with a lot of time to spend can develop a character on test and probably many don’t play on Live but make test their permanent server. Personally I think that is a bad idea, since you are getting more of a “fanboi” on the test server now, as oppose to a good subset of all players.

Also I think involving a wide spectrum of players in the “thinking” stage would help avoid some catastrophes and implementing changes that everyone “hates” — too much of that and people get unhappy, leave and take their friends with.

Regardless of what people say to the contrary, everyone knows Brad McQuaid was forced out of EQ1 Design. He took uncompromising stands such “no melee binding, no easy travel(use wizards and Druids), death must sting, no fix for Hell levels etc. — well he left and Voila – all of a sudden the game had all those things in it which Brad had sworn he would never implement. I do think that some of Brad’s design cost them players especially when new games arrived on the market.

I am really long winded – sorry about that!!

the rather small amount of time i have gotten to speak face to face with a game developer (lol eqii devs are the only ones i’ve ever met) they all had one thing in common…they play their game…

they play it right alongside subscribers, and i believe oftentimes unbeknownst to those subscribers as to their actual identity…

to me this is an excellent way to see how others enjoy or dislike certain aspects of gameplay…

kind of like taking a picture…alot of times the best photographs are unrehearsed and snapped live…they show the true emotion of the moment. someone posing for a photo often lacks that humanity and is seemingly contrived (because due to the pose, it somewhat is)

the trick to getting the true feedback imo, is to get it on the sly perhaps, if possible…moniter certain guild chat channels for a set of key words…or a certain factional level channel that may have some change recently implemented…agn, using a keyword search of sorts…

some people do troll the forums, certainly not all threads there are at all constructive, and often the ones that are degenerate into mudslings…

some of us are actually there to suggest things we actually think might make the game better, to share ideas, to explore avenues of possibility thru discussion…this we must do while dodging and dealing with the aforementioned slinging going on around and upon us…often many decent rational and clever ideas are diverted due to childishness.

note : just because a forum poster posts an idea doesn’t mean if unrefuted ad nausium the idea will be implemented, sometimes if left alone that idea (unusable in current form) will evolve into something possibly quite wanted by a large portion of players…some things take time to hash out..many ideas are so pounded upon at times they have nearly no chance of being thought about and reconsidered…and redefined in terms.

at times the forum seems a bit of “king of the mountain” and thru flaming and the like, people try and knock down those they tend to percieve as being on top etc…which of course is not really what the forums are for.

i believe i have also now gone off topic…

influential players : with any power granted or gained through whatever means comes the responsibility of weilding said power, in a manner pleasing those agents whom have vested the power within the powerful.

In this case of influential players the power has been given them by those they influence, those that read or listen to what they have to say and allow themselves swayed…the responsibility of a person finding themselves in this position imo is akin to a state representitive in a way.

in government the state rep has a certain district of people they represent that have interests specific to their part of the world, and the representitive, being given the power by these people must weild said power in a way pleasing those people, or they will take that power away.

Long Live the Leaf.

As I pointed out in my previous comment, influential members of the community are not limited to members of a game’s forums. Most of them aren’t even on the forums at all, because they spend most of their time in the game.

For what it’s worth, I agree that it’s not just the forum folk who we need to pay attention to. Many of them are definitely worth listening to, but that’s not necessarily the place to go if you want to know what people are thinking. The problem is, how do you figure out what people are thinking?

Polls are well and good, but a majority of the time you know the answer to your poll before you put it up. You present a limited set of options to players, which makes it much easier to predict the result (you can almost lead them to the result you’re looking for).

Can you simply drop in a text box and ask for feedback? Sure, but it’s impossible to read it all. Most games have a /feedback function, but it is hard to get a really good impression of what players are thinking even that way.

Okay, now I’m diverting from the point of the article. Players influence other players, and the more influential the player, the more important it is to attempt to keep them in good spirits.

You need to go out and get the opinions in a more scientific manner, as others suggested. Login polls that everyone completes for example. However, hopefully you’re smart enough to poll your growth market though: People who don’t yet play your game!

But I question whether you really want to know what players think or not. You do not act like you really are interested in player opinion or what the majority of the players want.

If you truly were interested in player views on a topic you should run a poll ( and I don’t mean those silly ones on the website that only readers of the website see). I mean one that has to be answered at Login.

Remember how in EQ1 they used to run polls that came up when you logged in? Well if you really want to get a feel for the player base you should try running polls that appear when a player logins. Then you would have a fair chance of sampling player opinion. Right now you have none !!

And make your job easier? Come on now Ryan!