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How can we give IS better feedback?
maouw
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
After this post by @bloodprophet I got hooked on a few more videos by Kevin Jordan (WoW Dev who worked on Vanilla to Frozen Throne) and he has pretty great insights.
He mentioned some of the difficulties he experienced with player feedback from a developer perspective. The ones that stood out to me:
As we head into alpha 1, it's worth asking: Is there anything we can do as a community to be more helpful in how we give our feedback?
He mentioned some of the difficulties he experienced with player feedback from a developer perspective. The ones that stood out to me:
- The vocal 1% who sway the opinion of the sheep
- Players asking for bad solutions to a problem, without properly grasping the underlying issue
- Feedback tends to miss out on over tuned aspects of the game and devs only hear about the disappointing aspects of the game that need a boost
As we head into alpha 1, it's worth asking: Is there anything we can do as a community to be more helpful in how we give our feedback?
I wish I were deep and tragic
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Something that is going to be important for feedback is: respect other peoples opinions. Just because they have a different opinion, doesn't mean they are wrong.
We see it on the forum day in day out. Give your honest opinion and back it up with facts, then let IS decide what is best for the game.
Eternal Guild
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The key quote most important for the DV team is where he said the DV`s must, "Have to fight against the player base to have the ego and vision to say no" to them, and do what is they believe is best.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jMABKEdcUJo
As someone who works in the software industry and has to fight developers to get anything fixed, I can absolutely say that the devs do not always know what's best. Most of the time they tend to doggedly stick to original specs that testing has proved to be insufficient, or they try and pass off bugs as unnecessary enhancements.
Now, I'm not saying this is what the AoC devs will do, cos obviously I have no experience of their work, but the above is my experience of working within multiple software houses. The idea that "Dev Knows Best" is a dangerous and potentially damaging one.
When something doesn't work as it should, the answer is often "It's due to your connection", "Your PCs are not strong enough", "There is nothing wrong with the program", "Did you restart your PC?".
A good dev should acknowledge flaws and errors in their system, but should be able to say No to specific suggestions that do not fit into their idea for the game.
Eternal Guild
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"Fireball sucks!!!" has no valuable information.
"Fireball sucks because it doesn't do enough damage in dungeons!" is information that points out a flaw, in the players point of view.
Eternal Guild
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To an extent. Otherwise you end up looking like WoW devs did in the BlizCon2013 with the whole, "You think you do, but you don't" fiasco.
I stumbled across him on YouTube. I also watched most of the developer videos I could find. I learned a lot from him on the Developers Perspective.
Giving good feed back starts with good clear communication. As Flip said saying fire ball sucks offers very little information on why. Unfortunately using written word as a primary means of communication has it's strengths and weakness's. How many times we seen a snarky comment get misinterpreted by someone else here and be blown out of proportion. The written word has some great strengths but leaves out a lot of the non-verbal queues we use everyday in communication.
Some of what is "seen" as feedback by some posters is actually just personal perception and emotion or a lack of understanding. Instead of asking how is the system supposed to work and why it don't? Most people look at it and "feel" this is bad I don't like it and then come here and post a giant wall of emotion. Then when asked to clarify "why" does fireball suck they spiral even further out of control. Not everyone does this which is good. But we need to have a more nuanced approach and ask what is the intent here and what are they trying to accomplish. Then we can look at it from a more neutral approach (stoic) and give proper feed back.
Word economy is also important. Some things will take time to explain as they are very complicated ideas some are simple and easy to communicate and don't need a giant wall of text.
Also this for those that didn't watch Kevin's other videos.
For example, if a low ranked pvp player says that a class is imbalanced (multiplied by alot of low ranked players saying the same thing) but in the upper bracket of pvp the class they are complaining about is actually 2nd tier, Devs should look at this complaints as "this class isn't imbalanced, but it is seen as a gatekeeper, perhaps lower tier players find their abilities confusing or is this simply a gear issue and once these players get better gear they will get passed it?" However, if high ranked players complain about a given class and every arena team worth their salt has that class in their comp, devs should interpret that as "this class is imbalanced, we need to tweak their numbers or lessen the length of their cc." the same could be said of raids and PVE content, the complaints of lower difficulty players should be ignored somewhat (AKA Git Gud Scrub) while those of higher end players should be listened to more (perhaps rewards are not high enough relevant to difficulty, maybe a boss is too bleeding edge, etc.)
However, there are exceptions to this rule. if a low tier player perhaps someone who is new to the scene, provides paragraphs of detail with statistics data analysis as well as personal observations, they should be listened to (perhaps even doing a DM conversation) more than a high tier player who just says "________ is IMBA!"
TLDR: Background is important to feedback discussions. More data is better than less data. If you are part of the lower tier of player, explaining why something is difficult of feels imbalanced is important (if you have data SHARE IT). if general complaints (IE complaints with little to no data) match in game observable data (team comps/ raid comps) then devs should act on it, however, should ask dependable players (players with a track record of providing high value feedback) for more specific information.
I have to agree with him that a low skill class should not have the same "feel" and output of a high skill class. But back ground is also important as well. I tend not to play melee classes I don't like the feel of them and my play suffers. So me giving feed back on the rouge being one way or the other would be bad to mediocre feed back at best. Aside from my feel and perception of them attacking me.
One thing he did bring up is peoples exaggerated sense of their own ability. Confidence is a good thing but understanding your own strengths and weaknesses is also important.
Attempting to offer potential solutions to a fix is pointless as feedback (though is fine for general discussion between players), because we do not understand the process of game development.
This is applicable to literally every single product or service that has ever or will ever exist. Every product or service gets mountains of feedback from people that think they are being helpful, but 99.9% of it is utterly pointless.
Feedback ideally would form what is liked, not liked, what might be useful to complement, delete, and/or could do with improvement.
The "why" becomes the most important as an unqualified answer provides little to work with.
There is nothing wrong with providing references and/or possible solutions/workarounds. There might just be one idea from the 10,000`s of interested players from a myriad of backgrounds (experienced or not) that the 10-100s developers may not have considered.
Prezacly!
This kind of feedback is appropriate when - and ONLY when - the feedback is coming from someone with more experience on the matter than the person producing the item.
Imagine a relationship between an undergraduate student and a professor. The professior may give the student feedback on an essay, thesis or other project along the lines of what you are saying, but the student would be unlikely to give that professor similar feedback about the content of their lectures. Yes, there is. There are several things wrong with it, in fact.
The first thing is that it means essentially all feedback you are offering will be ignored. If this feedback is not being ignored, that means the company has to actually pay someone to read that drivel, which is a detriment to the bottom line of the company whose product you like enough to try and help.
The second thing is it means you are saying that you think you know better than actual experts. You don't. Place some value on expertise, the world is lacking that right now. While your idea may seem really good to you, you have literally no idea of the implications it would have on other aspects of the game.
I do sometimes wonder what jobs some people have if they think this kind of feedback could be useful. The only thing I can say for sure is that such people are not experts in any field - as no expert in any field would ever think they they could provide useful suggestions on how to product something to any expert in a vastly different field.
Yeah the people with proven track record are great for late-game balance, but I think Kevin Jordan somewhat disagrees with your point about "git gud scrub nubs":
He says he hears from the top players all too often and their voices get echo chambered - which makes it really difficult to see how the early- and mid-game experience is playing out. This is probably what contributes to the trend of MMO's being stuck with their initial population, and why all the catch-up mechanics get implemented.
Would it be helpful if we briefly say a sentence about our background when we give feedback?
As I stated, if a low or mid level player provides sufficient feedback with data analysis and the community is supporting that feedback through comments, then the devs should consider it. But to be perfectly honest, much like Dark Souls, Difficulty in PVE scenarios 95% of the time just comes down to "Git Gud Scrub." if people can beat the content with some flexibility in comps (IE fight still requires 2 tanks 5 healers and 13 dps, but the classes are random) no matter if only 5% of the player population is beating the content, then its fine (so long as we are not getting Pre-Nerf C'thun fights where things are literally spawning inside the walls and the entire fight is a bug ridden mess). Beating hard PVE content should have exclusivity involved, it should feel epic beating something so difficult that you are probably one of a group of 80 or so players on a given server who can say they beat the hardest content in the game.
Also, just to be sure, are you defining early-mid level gameplay in terms of max level gear? or in terms of leveling itself? because my thought process on leveling is that dungeons and the leveling experience should be the Training wheels to mastering your class and understanding end game boss mechanics. in other words, difficult, but clear. Also, Good dungeon design follows the same concepts. Mobs in the dungeon prior to each boss, should share similar, but obviously weaker, mechanics to the boss so that the party or raid is already in the right mindset of how the boss is going to operate. If players are not going to have addons (which is how i have always played even as a mythic raider) then this has to be a core idea of each dungeon and raid.
No, discussions and feedback are vastly different things, that happen in different places, among different parties.
It would seem that if we wanted to improve the general standard of feedback in MMO's, we need to go back to actual basics of what feedback is and what feedback is not.
That is depressing.
Yeah, I was thinking more about the levelling process.
In this video, he was talking about how different stats drop off as you go into late game (hit rating vs armour pen)
He regretted that their designs completely disregarded stats that were useful early/mid and they became tunnel visioned on the ideal late game stats - losing sight of the transition to late game.
I agree you don't want scrub nub input for late game content, but I think his point is that late game players tend to be more vocal. So the danger is if you only listen to them, you lose sight of the bigger picture.
Agree. I feel like this is common with people who are fresh to the community. I know I was intimidated.
Coz newer members don't know we've had 89 discussions about PvPvEvX/Corruption/etc.
I think our instinctual responses to these "new" threads have sometimes been out of line and provocative.
As I mentioned before, early/mid game (meaning leveling) should be all about teaching the player about how their class functions, what is their optimal dmg or mitigation rotation, how to properly cc mobs and clear dungeons, and what items or stats are best for them. If a player reaches end game without learning all of the above, then the devs have failed in that aspect. WoW is guilty of this currently as early/mid game content is so easy, mobs die in one to two hits, you don't have to cc or interrupt in dungeons so people reach the end game and don't even know how to play their class and ask themselves why no one wants to play with them.
I am sure there will be thousands of guides when the game is released, but the goal of the game is that you should achieve 99% of your class's potential just through what you learned while leveling and doing early end-game content. if Intrepid can achieve this, then early/mid game won't be much of an issue.