Aren't you making the game for your players?

[TheWindWalker]

Translation: Suck it, Casuals.

I want to point and laugh at you till I risk asphyxiation, but since they made a World-PVP expansion with legendary quests that involve doing PVP and gave Hunters the ability to use Aim Shot while moving, gave us actually difficult raid bosses and put berserk timers in LFR... yeah they were listening to their "hardcore" audience throughout this expansion's development cycle.

[Joey Ray III]

i agree with him. last thing i want is my games to be designed by a bunch of clueless, selfish teens. if you had any clue you'd be working in the industry.

you don't see steven spielberg going around asking people what movie they want to see and how to make it, do you?

[DeadmanWalking]

Translation: Suck it, Casuals.

Just like the OP you read what you want to hear. The guy said what he meant, what you made of it however could not be further from what was intended.

[oplawlz]

i agree with him. last thing i want is my games to be designed by a bunch of clueless, selfish teens. if you had any clue you'd be working in the industry.

you don't see steven spielberg asking people what movie they want to see and how to make it, do you?

That was probably a bad example, did you see the newest Indiana Jones movie?

And yes, a lot of feedback is crap, and yes, Greg Street is hubris incarnate. I don't know why those two things are mutually exclusive in peoples minds.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Ironically, I'm betting that the first step on their road to providing what you're talking about there is ... CRZ! Because that will enable zone population density to be controlled, so that interesting spontaneous group content (like in Rift or GW2) can be added.

that would be the theory, but even if they use the technology in that way, what are the chances of them actually making it fun and challenging? the default mode for WoW these days is simple and linear. you do everything in the precise predetermined order every time. what are the chances of them breaking those shackles for anything they do with CRZ?

(if you wonder what i mean, think back to Cata and hyjal. anyone who levelled a few alts knew the exact quest they would hand in to get the quest achievement for the zone. it was the same one every time, because you did the same quests, in the same order, every time. every. single. time. that is how Blizzard think things should be done in an RPG these days. until they lose that mindset, it doesnt matter what technology they bring in, or how they use it, imo).

[Zaqwert]

People in general are notoriously SHORT SIGHTED when it comes to what they want.

Ask a 5 year old what they want for dinner and they will tell you candy.

People think about immediate gratification and they think about what they think would make them happy in the moment.

The best everything (video games, movies, music) are done with artistic integrity and people respond to that without knowing why.

If you made movies by committee the whole thing would be nothing but boobs and explosions (ok that doesn't sound too bad)

[averykey]

You examples are o.O When has GC came out and said "we will never, ever, add a 4th spec to another class as long as WoW exists"? Or are you expecting Blizzard start coding everything as long as something sounds like a cool idea? I think aerial/water combat is pretty cool. I think Mario kart style racing is pretty cool. I think new raid tier every month would be awesome. I think a more robust recruitment system will be great. I think new models and dancing studio is the best. I think adding another display options so people can toggle between skyrim graphics or the existing cartoonish graphics will be super awesome. Hell, I think adding a virtual world brain device so I can live in the WoW universe is pretty damn cool. *more cool ideas*. THESE BETTER BE IN 5.2!!!!!!! If not? GC better promise they will be added!!!!!! If not? GC better respond and give us daily updates!!!!!!!

Let's get real, not everyone likes every single "cool idea" that's on the forums. That's why there is even a debate on the forums. Just because a specific thing isn't being added in the next patch doesn't mean it is not in some future plan or being considered. To say GC's twitt suggests he doesn't listen/care about feedback is just -_- GC simply said good game design isn't polling playerbase and pulling triggers (which is something you stated yourself in the edit portion of your original post). So stop making a big deal of out your misinterpretation.

I was just giving examples, I think the aerial/water combat sounds like a cool game play change, and I also think, "the raid tier every month", would be cool. Even though I play much more casually than I use to, having access to that much content would be great.

You are completely right, not everyone likes every idea, all I suggested was more interaction with the player base.

In example: His ideas, so he gets feedback before adding new things, maybe a poll on forums? Everyone gets a chance to give input as well, well moderated of course.

Balancing or fixing bugs with classes is of course not something that needs polls. They have more numbers than the player base, and know what needs to be fixed; A few classes are just more difficult to play and a lot of people aren't very good at playing, so people often bash him for nerfing/buffing.

I never made a big deal out of it, I didn't act like the sky was falling, I simply posted my opinion and asked what others thought.

[Frozen Death Knight]

I don't see the problem with his statement?

[Dblbaconator]

This thread reminds me of something General Ironicus wrote, specifically this part:

I’m not actively hostile to y’all… much… anymore… but your opinions don’t really enter into my mind until after the work is done and out there. I care about the work itself. I want to make something that I can look back on with pride in a year or two, and if that creates an audience anyway it’s more likely to be the kind of audience I’d want in the first place. What Mr. Longwinded calls caring I call pandering, and I think we’re better off without it. In fact, dumping truckloads of dogshit into the open mouths of your viewers is something I’d consider less than respectful.

Without bringing in the whole PewDiePie problem (because that's an unrelated can of worms), the sentiment still applies. A good game designer makes something that he can be proud of, without caring about what the audience is or who might buy the game. It's why going after the fabled "Call of Duty audience" has historically produced nothing but garbage; in an attempt to please a certain group of players, a game is changed so much as to alienate the existing fanbase while not attracting a new one.

Look at Kerbal Space Program, for instance. Do you think Toady decided to make a spaceflight simulator because there was a huge audience for it? No, he made it because he wanted to make it, and the audience followed. He's listened to the community and added certain things, but most of those things were likely on the drawing board anyway (docking, for example). If he hasn't made it and doesn't intend to, the game's open to modding, so anyone with the experience can do so. That's why there's a huge assortment of unofficial parts, as well as systems like autopilot.

Listening to your community too much can be a detriment, and for this I'd cite Minecraft. It started as a simple Infiniminer clone, and seemed full of potential. Eventually, though, development began to stagnate; what used to be weekly updates turned into months-long droughts. Despite all this, the game took off, and this seemed to make development drag on longer and longer as more pointless systems were added to the game (wolves?) without really fixing the game's underlying problems. Notch and crew spent more time implementing community-suggested ideas rather than fixing bugs and implementing that fabled modding SDK. Systems like enchanting and potions made an already easy game even more simple for those who knew how to use them, while being too complex for the average user to follow without having to resort to the wiki (I'd call it bad game design if you can't figure out how to do most everything without relying on outside sources). Now, over a year after its "release" (it's still a beta product, very clearly), the game is a jumbled mess that, for some reason, is still insanely popular. I believe its popularity is only holding because of its popularity, a la "famous for being famous." Because everyone has talked about it at some point, people who have never played it jump on board, only to find it boring after a couple hours because the underlying gameplay is so dull. But too late, that's another purchase made! I'm still disgusted by it today.

The point I'm trying to make after all this rambling is that, by pandering to your community and bending to their every whim, you do yourself a disservice by making your game stray from your ideals. The community doesn't understand what is best for the game, because in general they do not have the same experience. They don't know the underlying structure to the game, they don't know what resources you truly have, and they don't understand that their ideas, while good on paper, might not work out in practice. It's true that an idea from your community could prove to be good, or exactly what's needed, which is why you should always keep an ear open. But not every idea is gold.

[Deleted]

I knew GC has no fucking clue about pvp balance when he decided to nerf dks into the shithouse. He took a squishy class whose only niche for arena pvp was the necrotic strike, nerfed the shit out of necrotic strike and made it expensive as well and nerfed the instant incapacitate and replaced it with some shitty CC mechanic that requires the opponent to be a moron. So now dks are pretty much glorified enhancement shamans, one trick ponies for rbgs due to the aoe slow shit as frost, and the unholy spec is some fucking gimmick you play if you have a hardon for pets and shit.

Hunters and monks suck epic dooker at pvp, as well, not to mention they get told to fuck off when asking for rbg spots, because they bring shit all to a team, with their crap burst damage and little to no utility.

And it's not like GC was dropped from fucking Mars into Blizzard HQ and didn't know all these things. Oh, he knew but he chose to ignore it and see what happens.

NO FUCKING CLUE!

[crakerjack]

Most games revolve around the idea that you need to adapt depending on the situation... WoW is like that. Lets say you're a warlock and you love dueling paladins or some class... you're able to kill them and it makes your ego feel good, but when you face someone you're not familiar with, lets just a rogue, you end up losing because you fail to change your stratedgy... You attempt to do the same thing over and over... and the same conclusion continues to happen, you lose. Then follows the attempted rage on the forums about how certain class are OP, but the player fails to realize that he should change up his strat.

Because blizzard listens to players, the game becomes unbalanced and people continue to complain because they feel it's the only way to maturely fix things. I'm just glad I quit the game before it got worse.

[markdall]

What GC said makes sense. I just don't always appreciate their spin on things, like how they excuse CRZ.

[hyphnos]

Good games aren't designed by democracy. The old adage "too many cooks spoil the broth" applies here.

And one bad cook in charge can spoil the broth as well.

GC made a proclamation on par with Microsoft saying "sounds operating systems aren't designed open source".

Limited people in charge can easily fall into the trap of groupthink. Design by democracy might not be optimal, design by dictatorship has not been in any way proven to be better.

If it were, then after 8 years, Blizzard wouldn't have to reinvent the game every expac and patch. They have, by their own admission, gotten a lot of things totally wrong. If "experts" get it nearly 100% wrong at times, then there is no reason to think the collective input of the playerbase would produce inferior results. That is, unless you're a game designer who thinks that whatever you decide is the only right choice.

[melodramocracy]

If it were, then after 8 years, Blizzard wouldn't have to reinvent the game every expac and patch.

You really think that's the case? Aside from environments and a few outlying mechanics, I'm playing the same game I played in Wrath, and other players can probably agree farther back.

Tweaked? Sure. Hardly reinvented however, and certainly not nearly as often as you imply.

[Kraenen]

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/sta...87338077835264

.@CybranSpiderbot you don't get good games by just giving people what they ask for. Game design isn't just polling.

You don't get good games by giving people what they want in the game they play?

Anyone have opinions on this?

edit:

It's obvious Game design isn't just polling, a game designer needs to take ideas from the community and make them better and fit with the rest of the game, but a game designer also needs to make changes that make sense and make the game more enjoyable.

I really don't understand why this guy is a game designer, he seems big headed.

People often don't know what they want.
People yelling the loudest almost always don't know what they want.

[Alltat]

People often don't know what they want.
People yelling the loudest almost always don't know what they want.

To be fair, they often know what they want. It's just usually not something that anyone else agrees that they should get. Most of the time, the people who shout the most are the ones you should listen to the least.

[melodramocracy]

The point I'm trying to make after all this rambling is that, by pandering to your community and bending to their every whim, you do yourself a disservice by making your game stray from your ideals. The community doesn't understand what is best for the game, because in general they do not have the same experience. They don't know the underlying structure to the game, they don't know what resources you truly have, and they don't understand that their ideas, while good on paper, might not work out in practice. It's true that an idea from your community could prove to be good, or exactly what's needed, which is why you should always keep an ear open. But not every idea is gold.

And this is one area where MMOs and other closed-system games are at a bit of a detriment, it's impossible for the designers to give players free reign to mod things themselves to find out what 'most' players truly find enjoyable or not. WoW sorta does this with the UI, and indeed it seems that popular, well designed alternatives do wind up being used with high frequency.

Games like the UT series for PC's were the pinnacle of this sort of thing, the dev teams not only included DIY kits with the games, but how-to's that would allow you to almost entirely transform the game if you were so inclined were readily available. Most ideas didn't work out so well. Some were absolutely excellent however.

It'd be quite interesting to, for example, give players access to mod and host their own arena matches, and see if anyone could come up with a more balanced and fun-to-play version than Blizz has.

[BeastmasterGuardian]

Let's see. Even if 9/10 million people never spoke up at all, that still leaves 1M people. If 1M people speak up and 50% don't care one way or the other, that leaves 500K people. Of the 500K people remaining, statistically speaking, 1 in 40 people usually agree on an idea. That means that of 10M subs, only 12,500 people will actually like any one given idea. This is why devs don't bother to listen. Just enjoy the game for what it is. A game.

[Moradim]

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/sta...87338077835264

.@CybranSpiderbot you don't get good games by just giving people what they ask for. Game design isn't just polling.

You don't get good games by giving people what they want in the game they play?

Anyone have opinions on this?

edit:

It's obvious Game design isn't just polling, a game designer needs to take ideas from the community and make them better and fit with the rest of the game, but a game designer also needs to make changes that make sense and make the game more enjoyable.

I really don't understand why this guy is a game designer, he seems big headed.

ghostcrawler is an overrated piece of shit. he cant even get PVE balance right. (ask any raiding shaman for example)

i think his choice of words is poor. you very much want to make your customers happy. people want good pvp, it isnt there. people are qq'ing about dailies, they are making more dailies.

maybe the customer is right sometimes. im not saying do exactly what people qq about, but AT LEAST LISTEN. dont give me some copy pasta response that is meaningless.

[LiiLoSNK]

I want to point and laugh at you till I risk asphyxiation, but since they made a World-PVP expansion with legendary quests that involve doing PVP and gave Hunters the ability to use Aim Shot while moving, gave us actually difficult raid bosses and put berserk timers in LFR... yeah they were listening to their "hardcore" audience throughout this expansion's development cycle.

I feel bad knowing that I've personally wasted your time by not making my post sarcastic enough. Ignorance has cost you time out of your day that you will never get back and it's all my fault..

Just like the OP you read what you want to hear. The guy said what he meant, what you made of it however could not be further from what was intended.

Take a lesson from your own post. I've never made a post that wreaked so heavily of obvious sarcasm that caused this many people to get annoyed. I thank you for your time, but I recommend that you think before posting next time.