Ghostcrawler on unsubbing

[Kontinuum]

“Unsubbing is often seen as the only ‘real’ way by players to express their displeasure in a way that affects the devs. However, one thing I’ve never known is how devs themselves react to this. Do you double down? Scrap plans? Abandon the game?”

There are a couple of different ways to answer this.

Developers do care if you stop playing their game and they want to know why. However, for games like WoW and LoL, the answers are almost always “I have less time to play now (job/school/family” and “My friends don’t play anymore.” (I’m basing that on having seen a lot of data - it’s not super open to debate.)

Dropping a game because of a specific design change (despite what you might read on forums / Reddit) is actually pretty rare. I know it happens, but if you’re stack ranking the reasons why people quit, those specific responses end up being so far down the list that it is hard for a development team to take actionable feedback. It’s really rare you see “Wow, that change we made cost us 10,000 players. Let’s revert it!” So overall, I would not advocate boycotting a game as a way to make a statement, especially if deep down you still love the game. You’re just not likely to drive change as a result.

(As an aside, the best way to drive change is still to try and clearly articulate your concerns in some public forum and hope that the developers take it seriously. I have talked to plenty of players to know how frustrating that answer might be, because at the end of the day, there just isn’t some kind of magic key that you can use to 100% guarantee that you will unlock that lock. Nevertheless, it’s still the best hope you have.)

Now, there are long term trends in the lifespan of a game. At the end of the day, I have really only worked on three games (Age of Empires, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends). All three are games that have lasted for many years, but there are macro trends of engagement, meaning sometimes you’re gaining players and sometimes you’re losing players over the course of a few months or a few years.

And it’s interesting. When you see a lot of players leave over the course of say half a year, it usually spurs two diametrically opposed views on the development team. You will get one faction of “Players are getting bored - we must be bold and innovate!” You get another faction of “We are changing the game so much that we’re losing our soul! We need to get back to basics!”
Like with so many things, it’s rarely so cut and dried that you must pick one of those directions over the other. Often the answer ends up being that you need to innovate in one direction, while still making sure the game is easy to return to, and perhaps even getting back to something familiar or even nostalgic in yet other designs.

My perception has been that the players and developers in the “We’ve changed too much!” camp tend to be those who are less engaged with the game than they once were. Losing track of change usually happens to players who once played every day and are now playing once a week or once a month. They remember being super engaged with the game and knowing everything that was going on, and so the dissonance of that no longer being the case for them is really striking, perhaps even alienating. On the other hand, players who are still really engaged are the ones most likely to need something fresh and new so that they don’t run out of stuff to do.

Overall as a developer, I tend to advocate being bold and innovating. This depends a lot on your business model. Some games really want to create new players as a fast as they can because they can’t hold on to current players for very long. (That’s not a holistic criticism - it’s just a different model.) But a game like League tends to be more reliant on keeping current players than it is on attracting new ones. (Example: if you’re a young man in Korea, chances are you either play LoL or have decided it’s not for you. There probably isn’t a young man in Korea who has just heard of this new LoL thing and wants to try it out.) For League, we weigh most of our decisions on resonance with active players. Yes, it is entirely possible to change so much that you drive players away, but we think the risk of stagnation is greater. So for League, the answer is usually double down. YMMV.

http://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/po...ly-real-way-by

[Deleted]

Yes? So what? what is your own opinion? Not really much ground for debate here...

[Pua]

Yes? So what? what is your own opinion? Not really much ground for debate here...

Sorry?

I think Ghostcrawler's post has a ton of room for debate. He brings up lots of points and a lot of them are widely open to debate, particularly because he's dealing in the grey areas that players typically don't (players typically deal in extremes).

Perhaps that's why you think there's no ground for debate - you're on the typical hunt for hysterics, don't necessarily recognise a nuanced argument, and think there's nothing to discuss.

Yeah, an annoying trend on MMO-C to just silently post a wall of text ^^

Or to post over 26,000 times, without ever actually saying anything... Eh, det?

[Forogil]

His analysis is seems oddly incomplete, he is missing 'the 5 whys'. If someone says 'my friends don't play anymore', there is likely a reason why those friends don't play anymore (or not seen as playing). Similarly when someone says 'I have less time' - the question is why people stop playing instead of playing less.

[McNeil]

Its just mostly what this board has been saying without having us actually develop the game at some point.

[Deleted]

Cataclysm heroic dungeons
Battle.net real name display
no-flight
etc.

...made them revert changes pretty fast.

[Menz]

the answers are almost always “I have less time to play now (job/school/family” and “My friends don’t play anymore.” (I’m basing that on having seen a lot of data - it’s not super open to debate.)

That would explain why many people quit in WoD. Because there were many things to do and they did not have time to play the game, oh wait....

[Deleted]

12 posts in and three people have successfully derailed discussion. Well done guys I'm proud of you.

[Lilija]

Thank you for this link. It went to my bookmarks and I will link it each time someone will argue that WoW is dying because of a feature x.

Also, I was fucking right ^^ I was saying for years that the main reasons people quit the game have nothing to do with the game itself. Also, Blizzard was really focused on making it easier for people who can't play so much. Gaming has gone out of teenagers rooms into adulthood and adults don't have so much free time for their hobbies.

[Deleted]

Perhaps that's why you think there's no ground for debate - you're on the typical hunt for hysterics, don't necessarily recognise a nuanced argument, and think there's nothing to discuss.

No, there really is no ground for debate, as the OP simply made a copy/paste without giving his own thought on the matter.

[MoanaLisa]

Interesting read. I agree with him on the change thing although I have believed for some time that they mess with classes too much. As it is now I don't play nearly as much as I used to and am often quite lost with a class I haven't looked at in a while. It's off-putting and these days tends to make me ignore alts pretty much entirely.

Glad it was posted; I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

[Relapses]

If it seems like this is "incomplete" it's mostly because GC is writing this from the frame of reference of League, not WoW. He brings up great points, especially about how existing players sometimes may feel alienated by the direction the game has taken. It also emphasizes one of the points I've made repeatedly up in the endless "{x} feature killed the game" threads which pop up around here: Players leave the game for personal reasons far more frequently than because of specific changes made to the game.

Additionally, it would also seem a core philosophy of his is that stagnation is far more dangerous for a product than innovation and I'd think his track record proves there's at least a bit of cadence in this theory.

[owbu]

Blizzard isnt posting their numbers anymore and now we know players dont even leave because of design decisions much. How are we going to have ""discussions" about game design now ?

[Bethanie]

Ghost Crawler makes some salient points. The truth is that the only effective way for most players to influence game developers is by posting constructive and detailed critique on a relevant forum.

[Deleted]

His analysis is seems oddly incomplete, he is missing 'the 5 whys'. If someone says 'my friends don't play anymore', there is likely a reason why those friends don't play anymore (or not seen as playing). Similarly when someone says 'I have less time' - the question is why people stop playing instead of playing less.

Yeah that's basically it. It's just when you dump or are being dumped by someone during a relationship. You usually round up the corners and don't tell the real reason, it a a human thing to do. Or maybe the players in question aren't able to tell why they don't like the game anymore.

[Sencha]

How does he know the reason why people are quitting?

[Deleted]

Thank you for this link. It went to my bookmarks and I will link it each time someone will argue that WoW is dying because of a feature x.

Also, I was fucking right ^^ I was saying for years that the main reasons people quit the game have nothing to do with the game itself. Also, Blizzard was really focused on making it easier for people who can't play so much. Gaming has gone out of teenagers rooms into adulthood and adults don't have so much free time for their hobbies.

Feature x missing or existing doesn't necessarily mean that WoW is dying. When you have a wombo combo of bad design choices, it makes players leave though. WoD was a sinking ship for a few simple reasons: If you didn't raid or PvP, the game offered nothing for you to do other than Garrison (Log in, click, log out).

Garrison was so much better for getting anything you wouldn't get from raids (Anything other than best gear really), that it was pointless to rely on anything else for getting resources. So people have little to do outside of raiding / PvP'ing, and what little remained was reduced further by the Garrison.

Last but not least, there wasn't a "real" content update for the first 7 months after release. Followed by 14 months of no new content. Compare that to Legion, where we have quite a lot of content being made since release, and a lot of new content on the way.

So yeah, not really sure what you want to prove to people.

[Niwes]

Sorry?

I think Ghostcrawler's post has a ton of room for debate. He brings up lots of points and a lot of them are widely open to debate, particularly because he's dealing in the grey areas that players typically don't (players typically deal in extremes).

Perhaps that's why you think there's no ground for debate - you're on the typical hunt for hysterics, don't necessarily recognise a nuanced argument, and think there's nothing to discuss.



Or to post over 26,000 times, without ever actually saying anything... Eh, det?

Det is born to do this. Its absurd how many content-less posts this person has given over the years. It nearly looks like there is an achievement when you reach xxx posts, and Det try to get it, by posting 1 line superficial posts on a daily base. Glad to see someone else recognized that, bc it slowly become an eye cancer to me.

oh, and dont forget: Det is born to complain about complains too!

[deniter]

It's a marine biologist talking about game development. Nothing to see here.

[Deleted]

People quit the game because it's no longer fun, time has nothing to do with it, if you can only play 2-4 hours a week and you have fun doing it why not continue playing? Changes made to the game made me quit, i still have plenty of time, but the game is not has engaging or rewarding has it once was.