Aresye, on 23 June 2016 - 05:24 PM, said:
The community more often than not has no idea what it really wants. That's why things like the player council failed spectacularly, and likely one of the reasons why PGI has more recently decided to go for a, "Make the change first, see how it goes on the live servers...yolo," type approach.
I think you can dissect segments of the community into subsets. There are a bunch of groups... that don't just include competitive... but also like the those too hung on lore (people still pining for stock values and/or 12v10), addicted to mechpron, and those that have played previous MW incarnations (there's surely more, but there are some obvious and distinct subgroups). A lot of these tend to clash heavily with each other.
The actual problem is that PGI has no real direction. The direction PGI takes is kinda like a politician... it's whatever will get your vote... or specifically a "donation". That's the actual problem. It's not limited to balance... but includes design decisions, things that get left unchanged nearly indefinitely.
I bet if you questioned Russ with truth serum (not that it'll ever happen), you'll get a lot of "I dunno" answers. You have to have a long term plan and vision for things, and what I've seen is a lot of short term changes in the attempts to see if you'll give them more money. I'm not saying you can't aim for getting more money - but if any of this was done right the first time... it would never be a discussion.
I'm not saying we'd all be in the same boat for some things.. but if you were to question whether PGI had a direction, you're more likely to get blocked by Russ on Twitter than getting anything... and it's simply because there is no direction.
Edit:
As an aside - do you remember any of the feedback threads for the PTS.. whether it was for UI 2.0 or that "laserlock" BS. Whenever PGI has asked for feedback, I have felt as if they didn't know what they were looking for... the questions weren't very pointed/directed, so inevitably you'll get so many varied and non-useful questions.
For instance, if you to be asked, "what is wrong with the game?", everyone will have their own answer. It's too open ended to get useful feedback.
If one were to ask "what is wrong with the gamemodes", you might get some different answers, some specific to a particular mode. While useful, it doesn't give a necessarily useful base to work with sometimes.
If one were to ask "what is wrong with Domination?", you are likely to get a lot of specific feedback (useless/pointless secondary objectives, location of circle is suboptimal - unfavorable for certain spawns/locations, etc.).
PGI usually asks questions of the first type, and occasionally of the second type... and generally does little to act on it (because, I wasted my time explaining my answers when UI 2.0 feedback was concerned).
So, I dunno what to tell you, but you'd have to have a direction or idea before you can make good decisions (it's like drop commanding, but you don't have to watch Lurm Atlases do their thing). It's just not there when it comes to PGI.
Edited by Deathlike, 23 June 2016 - 07:18 PM.