MMO Gaming

The Q&A with Matt Miller (Lead Designer at Cryptic Studios (COH/V)) brought up a couple interesting points, one of which I thought was worth talking about in particular. To read the full Q&A check here, but I’ll focus at the moment on this quote from the article:

Q: What are some of the most valuable things that you have learned over the first year of City of Villains?

A: I learned to listen more to the users. We have lot of very passionate players in the game, and their insight and feedback can be really valuable as the design progresses. There are a lot of good ideas out there that help us prioritize our feature lists and at times will lead us in new directions that we might not have thoroughly considered. There are a lot of different desires the players have for the game, and it’s great to be able to deliver for them.

About 9 out of 10 times I’ve seen people give the opposite answer. Basically saying that players don’t understand how things really work and shouldn’t be listened to. It’s definitely a breath of fresh air to hear a developer say that players do often have good ideas.

The question came to my mind though, how much should developers listen to players? Looking through various games I think it’s hard to say any sort of concrete answer because each games community is very different. For instance, looking at WoW I wouldn’t trust about 99% of that community to throw anything useful or even intelligent into the mix. On the other hand, for City of Heroes I’ve seen complaints and ideas brought up, and supported by a great number of players among all different “classes” the game has to offer. I think that really explains the difference between what’s going on.

To the one side you have this group of players who are very sure that they are right and the rest of the community says they have no idea what they are talking about, on the other side you have a community that really agrees with one another.

Obviously this doesn’t happen all the time, but for real issues a community that sticks together, rather than looking out what is best for them or just their class, has a much better chance of bringing about a positive change to the game, and to making their own classes better when they post problems they have.

Consider this my rambling for the day.

City of Heroes, City of Villains, community action