[No Men Sky] Sean Murray recent interview with PCGames.

[Crazozourus]

“Players are normally almost always right about problems,” Murray tells us. “That’s the thing I always find. They’re almost never right about the solutions .


Are you agreeing with that?
Can it be applied to World of Warcraft as well?

[Calfredd]

You can link the article, you know?

https://www.pcgamesn.com/no-mans-sky/problems

Players are normally almost always right about problems,” Murray tells us. “That’s the thing I always find. They’re almost never right about the solutions – or they can never agree on them, anyway.

[Wildmoon]

Players are not a single entity. It's hard to pin down what's the players's solution. It's also that it's generaly far easier to tell what you are unhappy about than fixing it. It applies to everything.

[Crazozourus]

You can link the article, you know?

https://www.pcgamesn.com/no-mans-sky/problems

Hey mate, yeah I tried it didn't work for me maybe I should post a text version. Thank you for linking it helps a lot.
My own opinion as a modder is that this guy is full of it. In Morrowind. Oblivion and Skyrim me and others identified the problems and fixed it within couple of days.

[Yunru]

Never right abauth solutions. Well this is 100% not true. Game devs and ceos just ignore them 99% of the time. They only do a change when they know they are gona lose a lot of money or they did something against the law. Like no mans sky false advertising.

[diarx]

“Players are normally almost always right about problems,” Murray tells us. “That’s the thing I always find. They’re almost never right about the solutions .

And you have a player leading WoW's game design. It's like an international drug syndicate putting a junkie in charge of distributing the drugs to dealers and laundering the cash.

[Biomega]

Obvious generalizations aside, it's not a shocking statement. The vast majority of players don't really know what they want - they only THINK they know what they want. Good game design is pretty difficult, and the bigger the game the more intricate and complex of a process it is.

Players tend to not think a whole lot when they make their statements in the vein of "come on just change X HOW IS THAT NOT SUPER OBVIOUS". Their perspective tends to be narrow, short-term, and loaded with personal bias. But as a game designer, you have to think bigger picture, broader impact, and wider audience.

A single player may, for example, be thrilled if you just gave them uber loot at very low effort. They'd run around wrecking stuff, having a blast. And then they get bored, and leave the game - and that's no big deal FOR THEM. But it is a very big deal for everyone else who would have liked to play for longer, or who wanted a challenge - or who just wanted more content down the road, for which the game developers need to, you know, get paid. You can decry revenue-stream concerns all you like, but it's one of the more reliable ways of actually getting good content. Take Diablo 3 for example - players have been clamoring for microtransactions to be added to the game, because a better revenue stream would (hopefully) translate into more active development and thus more and better content for everyone. But many other players tend to look at this differently, and just vehemently oppose it. Who is a developer to listen to?

And of course this all comes with the caveat that some players ARE good at finding solutions. They're a tiny minority, but they're not irrelevant or unimportant by any stretch.

[Mermeoth]

Well games are made for players. If players have issues than it is problem. So it makes sense players are right about problems
On other hand players usually don't see whole picture. If it was as easy as most players believe to fix the problems, than we would have many perfect games.

Most changes are done in expense of something else. For example players have problems to make quickly groups to dungeon. You solve it by adding LFG (tool to automaticaly make groups for target dungeon)
Yet at the same time you create completely different issue, because LFG will hurt social aspect of game.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Well, what is being said has a lot of truths in my opinion. Finding problems is easy. If you are on a boat with a hole, water is coming in, what do you do? Right.. you plug the hole! But with what, how, will it hold for the long haul, is it only going to last so long, did the water already do enough damage, how do we fix that additional damage? Right.. solutions are difficult because usually many are available and all have costs attached in the end. Then you plugged the hole with your sail. It was all that was going to work. But now your in the ocean with no sail, pull it out you sink, now a new problem! Crisis requires knee jerks and sometimes they burn you and everyone else shows up and lets you know they could have do it better, obviously, because in seeing what you did now obviously they wouldn't make the same choices. Of course that might means the boat sinks from the hole but gosh darn it they would have a sail.

[Rennadrel]

I wouldn't expect someone who released such a half assed, half baked product to understand whether players are right or wrong about making their mediocre product better.

[Tiwack]

Creation is messy but people expect order at the same time that they fear the same from others. Apology and forgiveness goes a long way in any given process.

[Kumorii]

Yes, player solutions are rarely right. Players in general knows nothing of game design.

[unholytestament]

Broken clock syndrome.

This doesn't make what Sean Murray did any less shitty.

[Nnyco]

Its almost like theres more than one person playin these games.

[Tech614]

Problems are easy to see, solutions aren't easy to come up with. So yea, it's kind of an obvious statement that is true no matter if people want to discredit it because it's coming from the mouth of a guy that lost his credibility a long time ago lol.

[Super Kami Dende]

He is right in the fact gamers are never right in the Solutions as a whole. This forum is a prime example of this for just 1 game out of thousands.

[Witchblade77]

bunch of people in comments - read the headline, but not the rest of the statement - draw conclusions out of context. he is very much correct. even when players have ideas for solutions - they end up being all over the place, and often contradictory to each other.

[Kallisto]

“Players are normally almost always right about problems,” Murray tells us. “That’s the thing I always find. They’re almost never right about the solutions .


Are you agreeing with that?
Can it be applied to World of Warcraft as well?

Just look at 99% of threads in the WoW general or even WoW classic with suggestions. That enough should know that he's right. Most solutions gamers come up with are mostly "Cater to me and me alone and if anyone disagrees fuck them and hope they go to another game that I despise."

- - - Updated - - -

bunch of people in comments - read the headline, but not the rest of the statement - draw conclusions out of context. he is very much correct. even when players have ideas for solutions - they end up being all over the place, and often contradictory to each other.

It's what I said many times about wow. You could get 100 players in the room, get 200 solutions that everyone is adament that theirs and theirs alone is the one true saving of wow and fuck the rest. Then you find out that the solutions each player gives contradicts each other so much they can't work in the same game.

[Yunru]

bunch of people in comments - read the headline, but not the rest of the statement - draw conclusions out of context. he is very much correct. even when players have ideas for solutions - they end up being all over the place, and often contradictory to each other.

This depends on situation.

Fix this bug = good
Nerf this class = bad
Please add this type of content = depends on suggestion

However i have seen developers ignoring old bugs for half a year, but if there was a bug with something that could make them less money, its fixed in seconds.
Priority system is usualy the problem here.

Same goes for content. They will always put lootboxes or other type of moneymaking things as priority, before even going after a good suggestions that would 100% improve the game and 99% of players want it.
For example -- a button that hides a specific cosmetic item slot.

And i could go on and on, so Murray statement is not 100% truth.

[quras]

If there was one person in gaming that should NEVER be listened to, it's sean murry.
The very second he starts talking, someone needs to just say, "STFU sean. No one wants to listen to a liar no matter how badly you want to pretend you aren't one and no matter what you've done years later."