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Feedback Philosophy
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
I make this post entirely because I am a salty, bitter, toxic, frustrated person, so comments on that can be minimized. I already know.
I keep running into posters on these forums with whom I have a strong disagreement about the philosophy of how and when to give feedback, so...
This attitude of 'we don't know', 'we have to wait and see', 'we can't jump to conclusions', is wasting development time. Intrepid constantly asks us to give feedback. Specifically to give ideas and experiences from other games and what we would like to see, within reason. There are streams and videos where Steven himself practically implores people to come on forums and give their ideas.
Every time someone goes 'we don't really know so we should wait to see what they do', I bet some developer is sad. I believe we have to tell them what we expect, what we want, and what we see as the logical progressions of the bits of information that they do give us, so that they can iterate faster.
If we all keep going 'well you don't know what the Combat Revamp will be like, so we should wait to say anything', and we get all the way through Alpha-1, how will they know what direction the community wants it changed to? Even when they ask they get a lot of answers that literally say 'we don't have enough information so you're asking too early', when the entire hope of Intrepid is to make the game the players want.
If I'm right about this, everyone who is sitting saying those things is doing themselves a disservice. Let's just assume that they really want feedback to guide their development, and people like me always give it, and other people just respond to it with 'we don't know', 'we have to wait and see', 'we don't have enough information'.
What would happen would be, Intrepid would go from the Feedback they had, if it fit within their models, and you'd end up with all the sensible suggestions from the people who did speak up, implemented, and nothing contributed from any of the people who said those things.
At least disagree.
Make some counterpoint to whatever some 'crackpot' like me says. Or 'flag their posts for spreading misinformation'. Otherwise you're just suppressing the very forms of discussion Intrepid wants (do I have to say 'seems to want' here? Do we 'not know that for sure' too?)
Every person who comes onto these forums with an idea, even if it is not 'good', is giving feedback about something, and with a little effort, you can often pull something helpful to integrate out of anything that isn't explicitly against the direction they've said. Even considering avoiding scope creep.
Every 'we don't know' kicks the can further down the road and forces them to make big changes when someone finally sees an implemented system and goes 'oh I don't like that, I thought you were going to change it'. This usually happens en masse.
So I'm not going to stop 'giving feedback' of this type, and I don't think anyone else should either. If you think others should, report them or something, for being knowingly misleading. At least if that happens and someone gets a warning, they can review their post to see where they failed to tag all their speculation as speculation. I know I'm guilty of that, at least.
This post is mainly so that every time I get that response from someone and I am confident (rightly or not) that I didn't mislead anyone, I can just link it and ignore them. Because I really believe that people with this outlook are just wasting precious developer time.
I keep running into posters on these forums with whom I have a strong disagreement about the philosophy of how and when to give feedback, so...
This attitude of 'we don't know', 'we have to wait and see', 'we can't jump to conclusions', is wasting development time. Intrepid constantly asks us to give feedback. Specifically to give ideas and experiences from other games and what we would like to see, within reason. There are streams and videos where Steven himself practically implores people to come on forums and give their ideas.
Every time someone goes 'we don't really know so we should wait to see what they do', I bet some developer is sad. I believe we have to tell them what we expect, what we want, and what we see as the logical progressions of the bits of information that they do give us, so that they can iterate faster.
If we all keep going 'well you don't know what the Combat Revamp will be like, so we should wait to say anything', and we get all the way through Alpha-1, how will they know what direction the community wants it changed to? Even when they ask they get a lot of answers that literally say 'we don't have enough information so you're asking too early', when the entire hope of Intrepid is to make the game the players want.
If I'm right about this, everyone who is sitting saying those things is doing themselves a disservice. Let's just assume that they really want feedback to guide their development, and people like me always give it, and other people just respond to it with 'we don't know', 'we have to wait and see', 'we don't have enough information'.
What would happen would be, Intrepid would go from the Feedback they had, if it fit within their models, and you'd end up with all the sensible suggestions from the people who did speak up, implemented, and nothing contributed from any of the people who said those things.
At least disagree.
Make some counterpoint to whatever some 'crackpot' like me says. Or 'flag their posts for spreading misinformation'. Otherwise you're just suppressing the very forms of discussion Intrepid wants (do I have to say 'seems to want' here? Do we 'not know that for sure' too?)
Every person who comes onto these forums with an idea, even if it is not 'good', is giving feedback about something, and with a little effort, you can often pull something helpful to integrate out of anything that isn't explicitly against the direction they've said. Even considering avoiding scope creep.
Every 'we don't know' kicks the can further down the road and forces them to make big changes when someone finally sees an implemented system and goes 'oh I don't like that, I thought you were going to change it'. This usually happens en masse.
So I'm not going to stop 'giving feedback' of this type, and I don't think anyone else should either. If you think others should, report them or something, for being knowingly misleading. At least if that happens and someone gets a warning, they can review their post to see where they failed to tag all their speculation as speculation. I know I'm guilty of that, at least.
This post is mainly so that every time I get that response from someone and I am confident (rightly or not) that I didn't mislead anyone, I can just link it and ignore them. Because I really believe that people with this outlook are just wasting precious developer time.
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
5
Comments
Even if you provide dev quotes about the design.
Just write what you like to write. There will be some people who appreciate what you write and there will be some people who don't.
Your posts are great. Even when I have an opposing gameplay perspective.
Best solution, ignore them to 100%. You should never have to waste your energy on people that will only drain you dry for their own ego. Do not even offer them a single reaction when they shown their true color.
There was an article decade or so ago about this.
Players don't know what they want. The article pointed out how in one game the Dev's asked the community what they wanted them to add. The community wanted them to add medium weapons to the mix of heavy and light. The dev's wasted time adding medium weapons that nobody used. 0 players used the medium weapons.
I would agree giving feed back is very important. Communicating with everyone here and seeing how people think and their experiences can lead to some great thoughts. However giving feedback on something that don't exist is not possible.
How will the combat revamp look? Nobody out side Intrepid has even the slightest idea. So what feed back should we give? There are multiple new threads about such things that either have been stated as in the works, partly shown or as most of what we saw this last weekend is a place holder giving us a base system so we can test base systems and provide warm bodies on the severs to help the server engineers make stuff work.
"Sometimes, all popular opinion means is all the fools are on one side."
The problem is what you see is what you get. There are maybe three things that are in development right now that aren't in the current alpha and a lot of things just are unknown. We don't know how certain things will function. You can give feedback on what's their but you can't give feedback on what doesn't exist yet. You can point out how absolutely busted black hole is but it's busted in a game that doesn't have cc counter mechanics. We don't know how diminishing the returns are yet so it makes any feedback on black hole hollow and a waste of time because the moment they add cc counter plays it changes the game.
With a lot of other mechanics it's clear the devs have no idea what they want to do yet. Up until a few weeks ago there was two different stats that gave Crit chance. If you look at gear stats you can even see it. They are throwing them at the wall to see what kinda sticks. They don't know what they want combat to be yet.
I don't know what to tell you. What we see now exists to ensure the base and background systems function. Nodes level without dev interference, elections function, seige control points don't spam random alerts, the servers don't blow up the moment 300 people log, etc etc. Stuff like that. Judging what you see on a content basis is incorrect because what you are seeing is not representative of content in the final product. That's the flaw in your view.
Suggest whatever you want I don't care but also understand if you are judging a placeholder that will be replaced with something completely different in A2 then you are wasting your time. Which is what most of these people are doing.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
Personally, i think a lot & come up with what seems to be really cool ideas in my head, i share them on the forum in case they are of any use or sparks up an interest, even if it is just a small detail of what i suggested.
What's most important in my opinion is to be civil & polite and don't just give a Yes/No answer with no information tied to why you're saying it.
These people ARE giving feedback, it just isnt the feedback you wanted.
Saying "we will wait and see" or "it may change" is these people chosing to be more informed before they decide, which if you're actually listening and reading between the lines, means the studio should release more information on this topic if there's still too little for people.
"Not enough information provided" is still feedback.
People who need you to choose which hill you want to die on before you have the information to decide are a waste of your time. An opinion easily formed is one easily changed.
People like to think they are listened to, that their suggestions are heard and considered. As such, companies make people think this is the case, even when it is not.
Steven has many hundreds of years of MMO development experience working for him, and one year of MMO development experience is worth 100 years of playing an MMO in terms of knowledge of how to make the product.
Thinking that there is any suggestion that we players could make that Steven couldn't get better from his own staff is mind-boggling to me.
I mean, look at the developer questions they are asking. The current question about environments returned absolutely nothing that hasn't been around for well over a decade. There is literally no way everything Intrepid "took" from that thread wasn't already either in development or in the design document.
To me, feedback along the lines of "I don't like the white lines during sprint" is great. Saying what you do or do not like is potentially useful (note the word "potentially" in there).
It's when people that have never been involved in game development (or any profession, for that matter) think they know enough to tell a qualified, experienced professional in that field how to do things in their profession. That is when I personally take exception - though obviously everyone has their own take on things.
Exactly and I think people are under the impression that Intrepid is further along then where they actually are. This is open development and what you see is what they have. They may have ideas for future changes but until those ideas are coded they are just that ideas. Further a lot of what people are giving feedback on things Intrepid has no idea what they are going to do with it. Something that is a mechanic now might not be later and a mechanic added later might completely change something now.
The problem is people give feedback as if this was a beta. This is an alpha. A lot will change in the next three to four years as they finally get close to launch but that's the thing we are seeing 5% of the finished product. Everything from the music to combat and questing are placeholders.
Well I mean you can still give feedback now. You can say I like this aspect of combat or I like this element. I think that can be valuable but it isn't a lump sum this is what I think.... It's picking out the small pieces of gold they have thrown at the wall and have actually stuck. A good example is how all q-attack cycles have different animations depending on the weapon. That's something that might actually stick. They got a lot of positive feedback on this. But giving feedback on questing and saying it's boring. Or saying the game lacks any lore. That's a waste of time because we already know that what you are providing feedback on won't exist in the game.
I think it's fine for players to give feedback but it needs to be from a end user customer perspective. It is one thing to tell a dev how to do their job, it's another to tell them what you expect from them as a paying customer. Steven has done a really good job not compromising key cornerstones and listening to feedback. Just look at MyGames. Where I think the issue is.... is when people who have done absolutely no research come in and "suddenly found a significant flaw with a key system"..... something that apparently nobody had ever considered despite the 10 discord posts a week ago where people explained to them why what they are saying isn't accurate and when people provide feedback on something we know already won't be in the game. You can do both and if you really want to go ahead but don't get pissy if people call you out on your inability to do the most basic research on the game.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
It is, but more than anything it is only really valuable when we are telling them we had an experience they were not expecting.
Saying "I dont like it when this thing happens" is potentially valuable feedback because that thing that happens may not be intended to happen as it did, how often it did, or some such. We aren't expected to know things like that, so giving feedback on things like this can "potentially" help.
Your My.com example is a good example of this, actually. Steven thought they had a deal that would appease the issues people had with them - when he got reports that people's experience wasnt as he expected (even this early on) he terminated the agreement.
If Intrepid were using My.com with the expectation that they were their usual shit self, that feedback would have been pointless, as it is as Intrepid would have been expecting.
Again though, since we aren't to know Intrepids expectations, providing feedback on our experience is all good. That is just where it needs to stop in terms of feedback to Intrepid. Us players can discuss ways we think would solve various issues with each other, but I would expect any competent developer would be able to look at any such thread and just laugh and laugh at what we come up with.
Many people may have a good idea but struggle to put it into language that the developer can actually use.
Some are so married to their idea that they aren’t really receptive to questions. Questions can sharpen the idea and make it better than the original idea. That’s what some would call collaboration.
I am sure some responses are due to previously stated positions by Steven or Intrepid on what they will definitely not do. And I am quite sure some folks might not like the attitude of “this game isn’t for everyone”. Then there are some ideas that are already covered under an existing thread so that the forum doesn’t require the 100th thread on the same topic.
Some want AoC to be like some other game they like. While I think AoC may be influenced by other games, they won’t and really can’t be identical.
I also think there is a danger in getting what you ask for. The current forward movement on the Q attack is one such example.
Finally, ignoring nonproductive conversations is a life skill everyone needs.
What am I supposed to say to the thousandth person asking what Secondary Archetypes will look like?
They do not exists in the game, they barely exists as a discussed mechanic, and we truly have no idea how impactful they will actually be until further along in development.
Same for all the Animal Husbandry questions we get asked.
And the bonuses from Nodes.
And the Parlor games.
And Lore.
And....
At some point "We don't know" is literally the only truthful answer.
Rather than getting angry at those answering why not put the onus on those asking questions? Rather than yet another "Will Tank/Tank be the Tankiest Tank whoever did Tank?" ask "How tanky do you think Secondary Archetypes should make none Primary-Tanks?" or "What's the benefit to the toggle between tab and target b/c right now it feels less like a hybrid and more like two separate systems slammed together."