ITT: People still thinking PGI is IGP.
Johnny Z, on 03 August 2016 - 05:54 PM, said:
Your reply here is another buckets topic LOL. Completely irrelevant to the situation. Great stuff.
Keep repeating to yourself "players don't know what they want" if that makes you feel better.
If you think players have any clue as to what they really want, you're laughably ignorant to reality. Players know what they want
right now. It's rare that anyone without design experience can conceptualize the tangential ramifications of a proposed solution. Furthermore, most ideas presented benefit one player group--typically the one with which the player is associated. Why? Because they're not a part of the other sub-groups.
Just look at WoW. Blizzard gives players all the stuff they ask for and, in return, people look back at the vanilla game and no longer consider it broken, but rather the most perfect state. Just look at the number of people in
this community that remember Beta as the best MWO ever was. You'll find that most people think the period in which they started playing was the best. And this isn't unique to MWO, it's any game.
I'm not saying PGI couldn't work more closely with the community, as they certainly can. But, it's a pretty arrogant and entitled statement to think that players with no design experience, who only know the game from their personal perspective, can hold the singular solution to the game's problems.
For example, let's say you have a player who believes that convergence is ruining the game, and I can see the merit in that argument. However, implementing that change and getting rid of pinpoint damage would put off those players that actually like pinpoint, and you'd see a new vocal group come forward declaring that it is the end of skill in MWO.
PGI has the challenge of balancing dozens of player sub-groups and their various wants, needs, and desires. When you consider that ~10% of
any game's playerbase actually posts on forums/reddit/etc., then it makes a lot of these seemingly mind-boggling decisions start to make a lot more sense.
Maybe the solution to that is for PGI to be more transparent with the data it collects on player behavior? Perhaps contextualizing the realities behind why they opted for option A over option B would help. However, you'll probably just see what you already see: players who take issue with it post, and the rest just play the game.
Anyone can imagine the reality of game development. Maybe you're an auto mechanic, or an architect, salesman, or just someone that bags groceries for a living.
Okay, let's roll with that last one. So you're going about your job each day just trying to not be terrible at it, like most people at their jobs. Now, imagine that 1 out of every 10 people that comes through your line tells you that you suck at your job, you don't know what you're doing, and starts instructing you on the "right" way to bag groceries--even if they have no clue what they're actually talking about. So, not wanting to cause a stir, you do what they say and put the eggs in with the gallon of milk.
The next day, when you come into work, there's one of those customers yelling at your manager, telling them you're an idiot and should have known that putting the eggs with the milk would have ended horribly. Welcome to game development. Now you can imagine what it's like.
Suppose that you had protested and tried to warn the customer that if they put the eggs in with the milk, they'll break? Well, if the customer's interest is more invested in getting their way, and they're wholly convinced that it is
the best idea ever, then you'll probably get yelled at and told how stupid you are--and how horribly you suck at your job. Then they'll want to tell your manager all about it or tweet about the stupid bagger they had to deal with today.
TL;DR: The game dev life aint easy and too many people don't even stop to consider the challenges before complaining.
Edited by SamsungNinja, 03 August 2016 - 06:29 PM.
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