EverQuest had a ton of good ideals in it, it was just that players found ways to abouse those ideals and turned a lot of what was considered fun, to time sinks, money sinks, hell levels, and so on.

Well then maybe they weren’t all good ideas after all. An idea is just an idea, it has to be vetted to determine if it’s good or not. Psycho’s example is a perfect fit. Flying mounts in expansion == good idea! Flying mounts allowed to go into old zones == good idea if we want to redo all those zones to make them work but since we don’t, not so much. Flying mounts alone is neither a good or bad idea.

Good Ideals are only as good as the discipline of your players. If they find a way to abuse the good ideal, then it can’t be called a good ideal anymore.

One problem is that a good idea isn’t universal. Are flying mounts a good idea? Well, sure, if you’ve design the world for them. Notice that WoW doesn’t allow you to take your nifty, expensive flying mount to the old world areas. So, that doesn’t mean that sticking flying mounts into an existing game is necessarily a good idea, even if on the whole flying mounts are cool.

There’s also the issue of long-term vs. short-term good. Most of the things that developers “refuse to listen” to are things that they believe are not in the long-term interests of the game. Sure, lots of players may like the idea and want to see it implemented, but it’s not the player’s job to think long term.

So, while some devs may be full of themselves, there are sometimes good reasons why “good ideas” get ignored.

(If you read this post in a stoner voice, it works pretty well.)

Something like that. Seems about the same idea anyway.