Activision Blizzard Earnings Call, World Quest Assistant, Tweets, FinalBossTV #138

When developers/designers give answers that are less than satisfying like “the technology isn’t there yet”, was that usually the actual answer and the explanation for it would be technical jargon that would be too boring/advanced for most people to read/understand or was it a euphemism for something else like “too expensive for too little return” or “trade secrets, can’t tell you”?

In my experience, it’s usually legit. My general philosophy is that game players are pretty intelligent and they have the power of crowd sourcing any problem, so they’ll usually figure out when you’re not being completely honest.

So I will be honest that sometimes we are truthful but a little vague just because we don’t want a lot of folks with a little bit of subject matter knowledge but missing a whole lot of context chiming in about how we’re wrong. Those are kind of tedious conversations to have, and they don’t often seem to really end up with either party feeling better for having had the discussion.

This sounds harsher than I intend, but the kind of thing you see a lot is “I took a couple of classes of computer science, so I can tell you for a fact that the problem is that the developers didn’t use Java and I could fix this problem in my sleep.” You get the idea.

I see this a lot with statistics too. “Oh, but you probably forgot to exclude the level 1-30 players” or “You’re treating it as a normal distribution, but it should be binomial, or whatever.” It’s unlikely our business intelligence folks would overlook something really obvious, but if you try and engage in those conversations, it spirals out of control really quickly. It feels like you often get to the point where the only logical conclusion is “Okay, let me send you over all the data so you understand the nuance, and then I’ll walk you through how we came up with the analysis we did.” They are just long conversations and don’t often change the results. Maybe it’s a kind of victory if you get those few interested players to understand your logic, but you’re probably better off focusing your efforts on something with a better return for players overall.

So we fall back a lot on “This is our conclusion from looking at the data,” which isn’t very satisfying for some players, but I haven’t yet come up with a more fruitful way to have the conversation. (Source)