Chronojam, on 12 September 2013 - 09:51 AM, said:
That was before they introduced Ghost Listening. That's where they ignore what we're saying, then announce things like that stunt Russ pulled where he said that everybody's cool with the direction the game is going buried in the almost-apology for ******* everybody off.
"Ghost listening!".. I do wonder sometimes how many folks on here have read 'politics and the english language', because some things are a bit transparent and condescending to the people you're trying to incite (or was it represent? I'm still not quite sure what you're going for. ) When the language becomes something on the order of 'defense of marriage' .. But, hey, i'll let that one slide so we can move on to the next interesting bit. "THEY ARE NOT LISTENING TO US!!" you say repeatedly. "They are doing whatever the hell they want to!" .. And that gets me thinking about game development in general, the freemium model in in MMOs, and a good deal of other stuff that would probably do well as a writeup somewhere like gamasutra.
Several problems i'd like to point out, the first of them being that there are relatively few clear directions the community ever offers in response to problems. There are voices outlining what is wrong with unanimity, but solutions are few and far in between. when solutions are offered, they tend to be all over the place. Many players regard the design process as something that, ideally, leaves their preferred play style alone if they are doing well or, in some other cases, makes other people's play styles less efficient because they've been doing poorly against them.
Take a look at this guy for example - he is also that 'us' you are referring to, isn't he? Now, add to this several different perceived 'eras' of the game in which different approaches seemed predominant and you've got different sub-groups that forever look back upon those days through rose-tinted glasses, blaming the developer for taking their idea of fun (usually defined as pwning face) out. If you add some real money into this, folks appear with the attitude of 'i paid for this when it was in a state of X and, consequently, it is in a state of Y, therefore i feel deceived out of my money, want refund, f you and your game, etc.
Attempting to balance a game exclusively through 'community feedback' is challenging precisely because opiniond offered are rarely objective, views rarely holistic and, even when they are, may radically disagree with each other's envisioning of the game. Small case in point: the people who, before ghost heat, raged about the high-alpha gameplay, raged for sets of solutions as different as removing group fire to breaking individual weapons in different ways, then raged about ghost heat making same high-alpha builds non-viable and the gameplay being too slow.
Here's a guy who is blaming the game's problems on PGI having listened to the community too much! And i didn't have to fish these posts out from the depths of the forum - they were all top-activity threads made today alone. This aside, I'd like to postulate for a moment that maybe, just maybe, a person with the title of 'game designer', relevant credentials and position of such authority on a game of this sort probably has at least as much of an idea on how to make the game as the people playing it. Just entertain that concept for a split second. Someone who is this game's designer is by definition
entitled to their vision of it. You (the player) are entitled to access to the game and to your opinion of it. You are most certainly not entitled to design the game.
Entitlement is an important word here, because the issue isn't binary. There had been some very good ideas coming from the community. Even quite recently,
one of your fellow goons had suggested an interesting change to the UAC mechanic (I wonder what you'd call it. The awful charge-up of terrible badness?) But the idea that the community has some kind of an automatic right to design the game via some direct or representative democratic process can be easily gamed.
Incidentally, that was sort of what went down in eve online, for a while at least. because goons could very easily mobilise a voter base, the CSM - a kind of community-elected body set to help oversee the development and voice player concerns - became a means of protecting the status quo from design changes both for goons and various other power blocs that could mobilise enough votes. Even with a direct path to democracy, you see, 'the community' - that 'us' you keep referring to, had relatively little interest in involving themselves directly. Instead, goons pretty much hijacked the process. At least until their most notable leader
got sauced and went on the record making fun of griefing some person to the verge of suicide and encouraging others to help as though it was a stand-up comedy routine.
Even still, would you like to have mechwarrior online where design decisions are made by a bunch of sociopathic trolls over at something awful? because that seems to be the precise point of the whole 'drown the game in negativity, take it to the press' exercise you're engaging in. My guess is that you're hoping, through all of this thinly-veiled 'save MWO' bs, that a similar setup can happen here and consolidate that power with the goons/4chan through liberal amounts of pubbie rage.
Except it isn't going to happen, and most of your brosefs have already ragequit/got ragebanned.. You've ended up a kind of lone voice in this wilderness, doomsayer's sandwichboard and all. I can see PGI privately approaching units like snow ravens or dv8 regarding balance issues. But goons, despite all of their insistence that they're the most passionate battletech fans, have been rather mediocre when it came to
actually playing MWO. They'll most likely be remembered for spamming chat, organised team-killing and eventually getting purged over being a hodgepodge of 'sperglords and sociopaths.
tl;dr: the "Us" that chronojam keeps invoking is a broad collection of opinions that rarely agree upon anything, even what the problem really is. Even if we could dictate this game's design, we could not agree upon which direction to go in as a group without assigning more merit to some opinions over others, and most of our current idea discussion threads quickly devolve into petty, personal insults. what chronojam is after in trying to speak for the entire community is embarrassing PGI into agreeing to some form of an official player-input channel that the goons could manipulate to whatever ends they wish, or just call it a personal/cultural victory. Everyone is playing a game according to their own rules, boundaries and victory conditions. This happens to be theirs.
Edited by merz, 12 September 2013 - 12:10 PM.
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