Sunday, May 26, 2019

Love Thy Fans Pt. 2

Imagine, if you aren't already, that you're a successful game developer and you have your game on the market, and you want to get some feedback from your customers because you're good at what you do and you want to make the best game you can.  When you set out to canvas your current audience, you quickly discover that their suggestions contradict each other.  What do you do?

Well first off, don't be surprised.  Remember, not everyone will enjoy your games the same way.  One person will derive their most fun from a game by setting limits on themselves and accomplishing challenges, whereas another person will get the most fun from a game by making their avatar wear the most fashionable clothing they can find.  Thus, one person suggesting changes to maximize one area, will find their suggestions either explicitly or implicitly contradicting suggestions from another.

The next thing to realize is that your game cannot be everything, to everyone.  It is impossible, and to attempt this is to water down your game so much it has lost all tastiness.  It can certainly be a lot to some, but it can't be everything.  Part of this is due to the amount of time, money and manpower you have available to develop things, but part of it has to do with simply contradictory things.  Do you make an easy mode for Sekiro, or do you not?  Attempting to split the difference on things like that makes everyone dissatisfied, so you have to pick one or the other.

So you have to be selective with what feedback to actually implement.  Who do we take more seriously?

Your actual hardcore fans.  These hardcore fans are emotionally invested in your success, and really want to see you make a great game.  Feedback from casual players can be useful, but along the lines of bug reports and how to make any tutorial make more sense.  Be very wary of taking gameplay balancing or feedback of new systems from casual players, since they often don't have as good of a grasp of the big picture.

Again, your hardcore fans won't all agree with each other since they'll like different things about your game, but immediately it's a smaller section of feedback to wade through.  Instead, you subdivide the feedback again.

The long-time developer of Defense of the Ancients and DotA 2, Icefrog kept in contact with the absolute highest skilled players of the game for balancing testing.  Since DotA is a game about competitive player versus player, the top players had a far more accurate idea of what was strong, what was weak, and what was outright broken than Icefrog knew himself.  Numerous posts on the forums about so-and-so being overpowered, Icefrog please nerf, would correctly go ignored, as after various minor tweaks to completely different systems lead to different play, and those in-game heroes or items decried as overpowered just fell out of favor.  Nothing really different about them, they were still good at what they did, but those situations in which they shined just didn't happen nearly as often if at all.

Those players on the forums were just as hardcore of fans as the top-skilled players were, but relying on them for feedback on balancing would have been a terrible idea.  Too often, they'll want something nerfed into the ground or buffed into heaven, to simply scratch an emotional itch they had regarding some dissatisfaction.  Still, they're your hardcore fans, you have to treat them well.  They can still give good feedback, just don't weigh it as heavily as the skilled players.  In many cases, these middling or poor-skilled players can give a wide panoply of suggestions that the top-skilled players didn't even think to cover which are still valuable goals.  Is there something about the UI which could honestly be improved?  The average-skilled player who puts in a lot of time can give effective advice on that.  The top-skilled player may not even remember it most of the time, when they've focused on wrangling out the rules for a competitive advantage as much as they can instead.

Something to keep in mind during all of this though, is that the vision of the game your hardcore players want probably will be a slightly different game than what you've intended.  Still, love thy fans.  They're the reason you can feed your family.  Treat them well, and it'll be hard to drive them away.

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