In-game protests are nothing new. In World of Warcraft, everything old is new again. Since the WoW expansion, lots of people aren’t happy. In fact I think the only truly content class are Warlocks (note to self: watch for Warlock nerfs next month).
It’s somewhat ironic, really, that these protests almost always impact just the customer service staff, most of whom usually agree with whatever grievance the players have (since they almost always play the game themselves, it usually being a hiring requirement). So the CSRs have to spend time clearing out the hundreds of Tourette’s-afflicted level 1s, thus causing them to fall further behind on their queues. Meanwhile, the designers and producers who made the decisions the players are up in arms about, if they become aware of the in-game discontent, will usually see it as justification that the players can’t be trusted to actually make decisions. Look, they’re all running around naked and screaming obscenities and you want to listen to them? Don’t mind us, we’ll be reinforcing the boiling oil we keep up in the Ivory Tower of Solitude.
As developers, if your players are literally rioting in the streets, you’ve failed in multiple ways.
- Your players don’t feel like they’re being listened to, and feel that antisocial behavior is a justified response. To them, it probably is. Aggro management is SERIOUS BUSINESS.
- Your community people are being ignored, whether by the players, the developers, or both. My guess: both!
- Your managers are going to pick that week to read a random board thread to keep up their street cred, and come charging into your office asking WTF you did now. Get ready to justify those nerfs!
I don’t think we’ll ever see again the likes of Abashi threatening people to be quiet or their tradeskill backpacks will be nerfed, but the lines of communication breaking down into virtual violence and very real drama seems to be always with us. In a way it’s a good sign – after all, if your players just sullenly assume you’re incompetent, they won’t bother to protest any more! But once things escalate to the level of gratuitous gnome nudity, you have issues — and despite how silly gnomish butt usually looks, they’re serious ones. Much like rioting is a sign of social disorder and breakdown in the real world. And for much the same reasons. Your broken windows have no less effect on the social environment for being virtual.
#1 by xzzy on February 28th, 2007
If you can’t reach critical mass, then perhaps you need to re-evaluate your complaint and see if it really has any merit.
Not a question of merit I think, but of the problem that a minority of players visit the forums, threads discussing what to do are generally deleted, and there is frequent disagreement about what to do about the problem.
That doesn’t mean the complaint is meritless, it means it’s hard to organize people onto a common course.
People don’t want to quit, they want to have the fun that the game is supposed to be offering.
#2 by Noel on February 28th, 2007
That doesn’t mean the complaint is meritless, it means it’s hard to organize people onto a common course.
It’s only hard to organize people to do a thing if they don’t want it badly enough. Which, again, leads credence to re-evaluating your complaint.
#3 by Amp on February 28th, 2007
“Cael |
Meh, it’s only the druids bitching and they were pampered and overpowered and needed a good nerfing. Not to mention a good kicking, too.”
You play a lock or 6kpyro critting mage don’tcha.
Druids sucked for 2 years. 2 years.
They deserved every buff they got.
I’m reading that the mangle fix they think will normalize damage is a bug.
Something about having maul lit up when you use mangle that makes mangle use the cat mangle modifiers.
Either way druids are in no way OP in the arenas. Actually they are pretty crap.
#4 by Jobrill on February 28th, 2007
I was never pampered. I was a die hard feral druid from day 1, and until 2.0, I had to fight like a rabid lion for every bit of respect I could get as anything besides an off-healer who was too selfish to spec into his real role for raids and groups.
It was awesome that I was finally wanted for what I rolled my class for, for what the description page for my class claimed I COULD play the class for, for the first time since I rolled the class a year and a half ago.
You better bet that I’m pissed that that’s being taken away from me now, and that does not make me pampered.
#5 by Apache on February 28th, 2007
Time for Blizzard to set the virtual Fun Police on their asses in-game.
#6 by Jarnis on March 1st, 2007
“Your wallet is an effective voting tool.”
Not really. I’ve dumped many games in the past due to clueless Devs.
- SWG (pure, unadulterated cluelessness)
- EQ2 (fix your damn game engine, and run your beta-style revamps *before* launch. plus ‘Station Exchange’ and the nickel’n'diming with the website features annoyed me big time)
- DAOC (There is nothing wrong with Midgard… Hibernia is not overpowered, they just play better… yeah right, plus the fact that Devs couldn’t take any criticism whatsoever in the Pendragon boards, which I was a member of for quite a while)
- City of Heroes / Villains (we don’t need content, we have super heroes… it’s sad they don’t have resources to actually expand on the base game they had at launch, and redoing the game second time over with villains was probably not the best way to expand your game, except for the alt-maniacs among us)
I’ve returned to look at each of these game every now and then – initially by reading the relevant boards or taking up on ‘free x days to check us out again’ offers, sometimes by reopening my account for a month.
Nothing much has ever changed. Well, DAOC is nowdays shaking up things quite a bit, but I’m way past that point where I would care any more. The game is dead, and EA will pull the plug after Warhammer is launched (well, as soon as it’s beancounters can make the case for it after EA/Mythic has another product out)
So much for voting with your wallet. If something major does change due to dwindling subscriber numbers, it usually comes so late that it’s some ‘quick fix’ done with the least amount of resources possible to try to entice a few people to resubscribe. “Too little too late” in just about every case I can recall – the subscribers already went away, and with them, any hope for the devs to get beancounter approval and resources to do anything major.
SWG at least had the balls to try a whole re-do on the fly. The game still sucks, as the re-do was a complete disaster, but at least they tried *something*. EQ2 has also done some major bits to combat it’s suckiness, but the fact that they apparently have no 3D engine coders left to fix their buggy ‘look, we have shadows but they disappear after 5 minutes, and we dont know how to fix it’ game engine just turns me off.
Sorry for the rant. We now return to our scheduled nerf thread, already in progress…
* Druid nerfs are fine, just add them bit more aggro generation to allow them to actually tank something.
* Priest PoH nerfs were uncalled for. Shadow priest nerf is understandable, but too severe.
* Paladin nerfs (already mostly rolled back) were just silly.
#7 by Andrew Crystall on March 1st, 2007
Psychochild, most people won’t quit for a month though. They’ll just GO, and that exit survey is an annoyance they won’t fill in.
And it’s considerably more expensive to get new players than to retain the ones you have.
#8 by scottj on March 1st, 2007
> plus the fact that Devs couldn’t take any
> criticism whatsoever in the Pendragon boards,
> which I was a member of for quite a while
As one of those devs that took quite a lot of criticism with good humor, I feel it necessary to remind you that you know better.
#9 by TPRJones on March 1st, 2007
“So much for voting with your wallet.”
All because you were outvoted by people who didn’t quit doesn’t mean it’s inneffective. It just means you were outvoted.
#10 by aaron on March 1st, 2007
hang the dj
#11 by Jarnis on March 2nd, 2007
““So much for voting with your wallet.”
All because you were outvoted by people who didn’t quit doesn’t mean it’s inneffective. It just means you were outvoted.”
No, actually I think I was in the majority at least on SWG and DAOC.
Problem is, even with majority of playerbase gone, nothing happens. Like I said – by the time the subscriber drain reaches the point where someone goes ‘omg we must be doing something wrong, everyone is cancelling’, it’s usually too late to fix anything, because the beancounters don’t see the point of spending more resources to fix the game since it’s already dying.
And as far as DAOC/Pendragon board story goes… well, apparently someone didn’t have enough humor as I left the board via a swing of the mighty banstick of doom, because someone apparently thought that if I’m editing a post, and an admin edits it at the same time removing something, submitting his edit before mine, that does not mean I changed the admins edit back to the way it was on purpose (hello banstick). And no, no amount of explanation helped at that point.
But that’s ancient history. DAOC *was* good fun for a good while, and I definitely got my moneys worth out of it.
#12 by HitNRun on March 2nd, 2007
Whatever happened on the DAOC boards, I think DAOC itself is a perfect example of the Unsubscribing Catch-22 VPellen is talking about.
Everyone hated Trials of Atlantis. Everyone complained to Mythic. Mythic didn’t care. (Of course, Mythic did care, but for obvious reasons the company couldn’t send Tweety out to write an apology for the fact that the game sucked now.)
So everyone voted with their wallets and quit. DAOC has had plenty of cool content added in the meantime, even a TOA-free server, but no one who would have stayed for that content still cares, because no one plays DAOC any more.
That’s the problem with letting your customers vote with their wallets. The vote is sometimes like a real electoral vote- that is, it’s irrevocable.
Xaldin: Just no. No. Your sentiment is understandable, but even if it weren’t abhorrent to suggest we steal people’s games from them at gunpoint (force being the only real weight any government carries), there are very few situations in life that government intervention does not deteriorate.
It’s the pastime of long-time Lum readers and our ilk to accord to these virtual worlds the same gravity normally reserved for nuclear weapon summits. However, it should not be overlooked that we’re essentially discussing highly evolved versions of Monopoly.
#13 by Kris on March 2nd, 2007
Perhaps threatening to crash servers IS why the buffs were removed.
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=206834
Okay druids, uncancel and go crash servers.
#14 by Jadawin on March 3rd, 2007
HitNRun nailed it about DAoC. I played DAoC at release for a couple of months (until it threatened my marriage) and then came back for SI for 6 months (had it better under control). I had tried EQ twice but DAoC kicked its butt twelve ways from Sunday as far as I was concerned. During my second break from DAoC, ToA came out and everyone I talked to online said it had turned into EQ as far as unbalancing PvP was concerned. I never went back. I’ve been playing WoW now off and on since release, but in 10 years I’ll bet I still have fonder memories of early DAoC, even though Blizzard has easily gotten twice as much money out of me as Mythic ever did. The idea that voting with your feet works sounds like a good idea, but no one has actually managed to bring up any concrete examples of it ever working.
#15 by Axecleaver on March 5th, 2007
—
The idea that voting with your feet works sounds like a good idea, but no one has actually managed to bring up any concrete examples of it ever working.
—
It’s a good question. Is anybody who is in a position to know, aware of a situation where a company has considered cancellation statistics and effected change in response to them? My guess would be that it has, but it’s a rare circumstance.
#16 by Meili on March 5th, 2007
Blizzard should take at least some heed, if players become so unhappy they can kill the game like they did with SWG and DAOC.
I don’t know why but developers do miss out on obvious things sometimes. One time the developers of the game I was playing did a “graphical update” which consisted of dozens of hills on formerly flat landscape. Lots and lots of hills in pvp areas = death, for supremely obvious reasons. Apparently they just thought it would look cool because the flat landscape was too boring…did they listen to the pvpers? Nope. :p
Nerfing always makes players complain, after all they did invest their time and membership money on their character – devs making it less powerful annoys them. Devs shouldn’t be surpised. :p
#17 by Mike on March 10th, 2007
Nerfs destroy a lot of games.
They should constantly raise everyones abilities up – like the classes are evolving – never nerf one – make the others stronger.
Rotate the imbalance around, one month make one class stronger, the next another class, that way everyone gets to be more powerful for a bit.