THE CUSTOMER (OR THE PLAYER) ISN'T ALWAYS RIGHT.

New dev here.

I haven't recieved any senseless complaints yet (though granted, that I only have two games...)
The comments were mostly constructive and helpful, and thus were acted on accordingly.

But I'll relate this in real life here. Majority of the people here in my place are blunt and outspoken, and as such, are quite a pain to the peeps in the customer service. Many times did I overhear some proud, bitchy customer rant on endlessly. Usually bringing shame to the poor guy/gal. And to think that their reasons were so shallow... Ie. They've been waiting in line for 3 min. just because the cashier had to put a cart-full of grocery into a bag, by herself. They can't even appreciate the fact that she did it that fast, alone!

I just don't get some people.

Sorry if my post veered off a bit...

My biggest project is an online RPG where I've hung out with my players in public chat for every day for the last ten years, so this is a topic I have a great deal of familiarity with.

I went through a phase where I tried to do things that everyone seemed to want even if I thought they were stupid ideas, I went through a phase where I tried to ignore what I thought was bad advice, and I then went through a phase where I tried to explain to players why I do things or show them firsthand what would happen if I tried things the way they were suggesting. That last method was by far the most effective, since it would very often result in them coming back with vastly superior counterproposals which gave a much better explanation of what they really wanted and why. But it was also the most time-consuming.

Over time, though, I learned to be able to read into what the players were saying. I realized that if I talked to them just a little bit and heard complaints from enough players, I could figure out what they really wanted without extensively interviewing them. I was learning to mind-read them a little, or maybe just becoming a more experienced designer.

See, even when a player's complaints are wrong and stupid, they have a reason for wanting the changes they're asking for. Something in the game is improvable, something can be changed that will make them enjoy it. That something just isn't actually the thing they're asking for. The thing they're asking for would fix what's bothering them but also cause major problems. But there's a way to make them happy without fixing it. Every time.

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Here's a great example: How to keep high level players interested in my game. This is an online game, and for a long time, it was possible to keep leveling up indefinitely. But obviously I can't keep making new areas and bosses and missions up to level infinity. So eventually it gets really boring. Some people keep leveling up though. The highest level content in the game was at level 125, but there were people who had reached level 200. These people were bored. They wanted shit to do. They wanted new higher level content.

Now, I don't want to ignore the complaints of the high level players. They spend more time playing the game than anyone else. Losing them would only make me lose about 1% of my total players, but I would lose about 25% of my active players online at any given time.

So for level 100 to 150 we add a bunch of new equipment, a handful of new areas to XP in, and some extremely hard superbosses.

But leveling up beyond level 125 is horrifyingly boring. It turns out that by creating incentives to do it, what I'm actually doing is creating incentives to start botting, because the other 99% of players can't stand it. Shouldn't have listened to you stupid fucking players!

As a bandaid, we create a level cap of 255 to keep the problem from getting worse. Would have made it lower, but people were already leveled up that high. This infuriates the 1%, of course.

Over time, listening to player, I realize something that I should have realized much sooner. The players who level up to level 200+ care more about becoming stronger than they care about having things to do. There are two types of players who play RPGs - those who only become more powerful because they need to in order to beat the content, and those who only beat the content because they need to in order to become more powerful. The stuff that we added is attractive to the wrong type of player.

Yet it's what the high level players fucking asked for, because they didn't think it through. They just knew they were bored and so they started suggesting stuff that sounded like it would alleviate their boredom. They also didn't predict the mindsets of the other players, which is totally understandable, because that's my job, not theirs.

We ended up lowering the power of those high level bosses so that everything is doable by level 140. Adding alternate ways to beat them. We also ended up increasing the levels of some areas, so that the game was at least not super boring until after level 140. We made high level parties vastly better, so that all players would enjoy the experience more. All of this was just to fix the problems we'd created by listening to players.

And then to solve the original problem for real, we added sets of missions that can be repeated once every two and a half days, and give a reward every time. We also made the superbosses keep giving rewards every time you killed them, forever. Now high level players have stuff to keep doing forever, and some of that stuff lets them prove how strong they are; they can eventually kill the superbosses alone instead of needing a party. But the players who dislike grinding can feel satisfied that they've seen everything after doing it all once.

The level cap is still there, because fuck you guys.

author=Kylaila
How is it for the developers here? Any shitstorms going on or just the occasional grumpy customer?

I love the people here. Now, I joined recently too, right around the Kontroversy, but all of the negative/critical feedback I've gotten from RMN was civil and thought-out. If I recall right, there's a strict policy here against harassing other members. It's wonderful. Love it.

Now, if you were to go to a place where people won't be held accountable for their actions, you won't have a good time.

I haven't been too worried about people just disliking my games. Any game dev should KNOW that not everyone will like their game... The scary thing is the threat of personal attacks over the internet. Yeah, I know, cyberbullying waa waa, but it's honestly pretty scary to think of what will happen if my next games don't handle certain subjects in a way people consider "tasteful".

Back on topic, I find it helps to think that people want something interesting, rather than to think "people want rpgs with 30 hours of gameplay" or "people want horror games with lots of jumpscares". If you can make something weird in the way no one else can, then you're on the right path.

man I don't want to spend effort on actually learning anything or improving anything I just want to make what I WANNA MAKE.


...except that I wanna make generic fantasy jrpgs, so it works out.

I agree with this philosophy in general. When you read feedback by a player (or fellow gamedev), you gotta figure what they're really getting at:

1. If they're obviously spitting off rage and vitriol, don't give them any time that you don't want to. Even if they have useful information within their feedback, you gotta know when to just write someone off, especially if it's incredibly stressful or harmful.

2. Sometimes they just... don't know what they're talking about. Players may give you advice on what they think would make a game better, but often haven't considered what the change will mean and how it will affect the game - certainly, they tend not to consider the scope of a request, and sometimes that player's just an outlier. No game is gonna please everyone.

In addition, sometimes a player will ask for a specific change, when what's really bothering them is something else entirely - for example, in an early game of mine players would get totally lost, so they asked me to add a mini-map. Instead, I just re-designed the map itself so that it was much more difficult to get lost.

It's worth giving feedback consideration and it's dangerous to ignore it completely, but if a piece of feedback really doesn't seem useful (or it's outright useless, or cruel) then throw it away and don't look back.

The player isn't always right, but they usually have a good point, since they're playing it fresh, with no knowledge of the inner workings of the game.

They've helped me find a few flaws in my design by giving me feedback on my recent demo. And although one bit of feedback REALLY annoys me since I really find the mechanic "works"...Since EVERYONE is complaining about how it's too dangerous and makes that character feel unusable, leading to them doing nothing but guarding with her...I've bitten the bullet and realized that maybe they have a point and that I should rework it a bit.

It's not easy, but I'm working on it.

The fun part however is figuring out how you should change something. If twenty players says something is too hard, making that something easier is perhaps in order. However the question still remains how much easier you have to make it and by what means you should make it easier. Best case scenario, you can solve the problem by explaining you game better.

A let's try could in theory help here. They let the developer see what the player is actually doing. I said in theory, because most let's tries seems to have been made by a select few people who play RPGs poorly.

You can't simply go by numbers. Often you don't even get 20 constructive "feedbacks" total.

Also even if a feedback comes only from a single person it might actually be more helpful than the feedback you got from the 19 others.

You need to learn how to handle the feedback. But we had that topic in another thread already.
Honestly, I don't fully understand why so many developers have problems with handling it, because for me it's quite easy to tell if feedback is good or just ranting. And even if I'm not sure, nothing ever stopped me from just asking the one who gave feedback to clarify a point.

author=Link_2112
Twenty people can be wrong about the same thing.

I think it's more like "if 20 people point something out, you probably shouldn't just dismiss it out of hand."