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Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Celestalon usually looks down on people who whine about clunky or broken when people talk game mechanics, what do you think when someone approaches you that way“Clunky” is one of those words that has just lost a lot of meaning over time. I feel like we all used to use “clunky” to mean a lack of elegance, as if little thought or polish was given to the design. Rather than painstakingly crafting a gourmet meal, the designer just threw a bunch of stuff in the stew pot and didn’t give it much additional thought. Or to switch metaphors, I always imagine a car trying to roll on square wheels. It will get you where you’re going, but inefficiently and with a lot of discomfort, and the alternatives is both obvious and a massive improvement.
To me the things that are most clunky are a general lack of responsiveness (you click, but nothing happens for a bit), or a UI that requires excessive clicking (especially targeting), or bad timing to the flow of something, such as cooldowns all coming up at once, or alternatively long breaks in the cooldown.
The problem with “clunky” and “broken” is that over time they have lost enough meaning that a lot of players just use them now as a generic “I don’t like this.” Low power or dps can be described as clunky, which is pretty different from the original intent (unless it’s something like the rotation requires a lot of weird hoops to jump through to be competitive, in which case the clunkiness and effectiveness may truly be linked).
From a developer perspective, we don’t get much specific, actionable feedback when something is described just as clunky or broken. We don’t know what the specific concerns or complaints are, so we feel like we’re just guessing about how to potentially fix it.
Stepping back a bit, yes, developers should have good intuition about these things and be able to detect problems before they even ship. I also realize that it can be frustrating when you know you don’t like something but can’t quite articulate in game terms what it is. Writing can be hard. Just be patient with us when we can’t read your mind in these situations.
Yes, given enough time and back-and-forth, I can often tease out more useful feedback. I can ask “What do you mean by the term clunky?” I can offer some kind of multiple choice to help the player really zero in on what their feedback really is. But that kind of conversation takes a ton of bandwidth, and when the situation is typically one of us having a conversation with forty, or a hundred, or a thousand of you at once, it’s sort of hard to justify.
I think “look down on” is overly harsh. I’d describe it more as mild frustration ranging to disappointment on our end, especially if the player is also angry and impatient in the same breath in which they are being really vague.
My advice is if you want to be as helpful as possible with your feedback, avoid generic adjectives and intensifiers. Explain as plainly and succinctly as you can what the problem is. Avoid ascribing intention to the developers. Avoid how the change makes you feel, unless emotional resonance is really the issue in question (such as in a story). Don’t make us sift through a haystack of words to find the needle of insight. (Source)
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