Be more open. - Blue Tracker

#1 - Aug. 30, 2012, 4:30 a.m.

This is kind of in regards to what happened with Aspects, but not just that.

Developers, you should be more open with the community. You made a change that basically started a 40 page thread which ended up as about 10 pages suggesting better ideas and 30 pages of insulting the developers... and then you reverted the change.

Look, I am going to go out on a limb here and make a suggestion:

Why not just ASK the community what they think about things that the dev team is considering?

Any Hunter could have told you that it wasn't a good idea, had you asked.

The most knowledgeable people about any one class in particular likely aren't the developers, the players are. After all, they likely PLAY the game for a living because of how well they do it instead of making the game for a living.

We can let you know what is broken, and we can give suggestions on things.. But if you never tell us what you are trying to fix how can we help you make the game better?

Sure, you don't like how people flame you every time you say something, usually because everyone has their own idea on how things should be. When you talk you are never asking for our opinions, you are just letting us know what is happening, and those people who don't like it just get mad.

If you instead just ask them for their ideas, instead of telling them what is going to happen no matter what, they would probably respond more positively.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#8 - Aug. 30, 2012, 5:41 p.m.

When you ask the community their opinions (and sometimes even if you just answer questions or post responses) you risk setting up the expectation that you're actually voting on something, working on an open source project, or designing by committee. None of those is the case.

Not all reasonable players will have this reaction of course, but enough do that it has made me reluctant to ever give that appearance. The way we like to work is to make informed decisions: we appreciate getting feedback from the community, but ultimately the game developers make the decisions. Those decisions aren't always going to be the popular ones, but sometimes they are still the right ones. It's a model that has served this company well for many years.

Also keep in mind that we have players all over the world who speak many different languages. To get a fair assessment of feedback we need to translate and post those questions everywhere. That takes time, which is not always feasible at this stage in development. Furthermore, very few players post on the forums at all, so their opinions, quite possibly the majority opinions, won't get heard from a simple beta forum poll.

If you ask players if they would like to be nerfed, the answer will almost certainly be no. That doesn't mean it's the wrong call for the game. :)