I'm up for this. As long as we all get individual vetoes. ;-)
Request for a "Player Council", Resurrected DDF, Streamer Representation to Dev track, Focused Feedback or Similar Directed Community Engagement
- Thread starter Hydrino
- Start date
I've worked in the retail and food industry in the past and they absolutely do not listen to feedback unless it affects the bottom line.
You stop mattering shortly after your start playing the game because that's the time period where you spend the most money. It's a numbers game. They have metrics that show players spend less and less after a certain amount of time, so catering to what those players want makes no sense. catering to new players (or attracting new players) does.
You want someone to pretend to care? that's much more of a waste of time and resources than developing features in the game you dont care about. At least one is getting something done. Fdev is going to do what they've plannned to do. What drives them and motivates those changes is something only they know, but they have 0 reason to care about holding onto players for a bunch of years. Those players costs keep going up as they demand more and more complex and interesting things, while the cost of entertaining new players remains fairly constant and so gets a much higher ROI.
I think you mean, realist. I've been here since launch and this is not a new discussion. Surprise, Fdev has done what they've roadmapped they were going to do regardless of player sentiment and without these semi-official player bodies for the last 6 years and their bottom line is doing just fine. They do not care about LEP's and long term players .... if they did, the game would be getting developed a whole lot differently.
You need to watch Gordon Ramsay helping those restaurants out and think 'If only they'd listened earlier...' Feedback is not entitlement and I keep stating 'Whether they act on it or not is up to them but they at least listen' to the feedback. Listening doesn't mean saying Yes to everything or anything for that matter, it just shows you value the customer, all the customers not just a select few.
And I obviously worked in better restaurants coz it was just standard practice to get feedback. 'Is everything OK?' 'Did you enjoy your meal?'
Banana stands against this madness!
Weirdly, I watched one of those GR KN episodes yesterday, the one with Momma Cherri where she fed GR and he cleaned the plate. He never once told them how to cook, only how to run their business. They did fine and expanded until the recession hit and they had to close.
Perhaps the only real solution is for FD to create individual versions of the game for each and every one of us!
You only need 2
1. that is non-canonical with mod support that has a local server instance with the client (that is impacted by mods) that allows for an effectively off-line version of the game that can be tweaked and added to on an individual basis changing everything from gameplay to mechanics etc thru the mods to the client and server (including added missions and a new narratives etc). Though, it would still require a frontier login to run and still have access to the shop (there would be no way to override things the shop offers with free alternatives thru mods (this means no new ships can be modded in, no new suits etc... the mods will basically impact triggers/routines/bgs values/ faction database etc and manual overrides of the stellar forge etc ))
2. The canonical persistent game.
Unacceptable I want a game 100% tailored to my wants and needs.
Again, you need to bring this to the council. You probably want to bring a finer bottle of ginger ale as well, get him a bit tipsy. It works on him, just don't tip him off what you got for him.
Join me, and we can rule the galaxy as Banana and Gibb! We can end this madness and bring order to Elite!
You'll get a semi-moddable compromise and YOU'LL LIKE IT!
Noooooo!!!
Join me, and we can rule the galaxy as Banana and Gibb! We can end this madness and bring order to Elite!
We would just fight over the chicken supply much like any "council" will do over far less tasty things.
It was a very tempting offer though.
I wonder what Arf thinks of his transition from outsider to part of the CM team and if his ideas of what he could affect have changed?
Thanks for all the interesting responses. I missed the other thread on resurrecting the DDF.
The Exobiology fiasco shows how early feedback could save wasted effort which is also money. Exobiology got an entire new Elite rank and was an entire Phase of Alpha but so negatively received FD basically announced they were pulling it two days later. Even if that was the only feature that FD presented that got focused rejection before coding, it seems it would have been a win.
Tough one to figure out but might be nice to see some innovation in this area at FDEV.
Thanks for all the interesting responses. I missed the other thread on resurrecting the DDF.
The Exobiology fiasco shows how early feedback could save wasted effort which is also money. Exobiology got an entire new Elite rank and was an entire Phase of Alpha but so negatively received FD basically announced they were pulling it two days later. Even if that was the only feature that FD presented that got focused rejection before coding, it seems it would have been a win.
Tough one to figure out but might be nice to see some innovation in this area at FDEV.
God no, just no. A player council totally ruined Eve Online. Anyone that wants to go into politics should be prevented from doing so by virtue of them wanting to go into politics.
Seriously... gamers are customer. It doesn’t mean they are entitled to take decisions.
Their voice is the number of copies sold.
Do you realize how many deaths a « driver council bouncing off ideas » would result in the automobile industry?
Their voice is the number of copies sold.
Do you realize how many deaths a « driver council bouncing off ideas » would result in the automobile industry?
The only thing about Exobiology that's being pulled is the minigame around using the scanner - it'll instead just work when you point it at the plant.
All the rest - finding plants, scanning them, selling the scans for money and Exobiology rank - is being kept.
And the specific thing the Exobiology mini-game was criticised for (the need for reaction speed in an environment where it doesn't make sense, exacerbated by the pre-hotfix version being virtually impossible at low FPS) wouldn't even necessarily have shown up in a "complain about ideas before you see them in action" thread anyway. None of the previous feedback collections like the DDF or Focused Feedback went into anywhere near that much detail as to how things were going to work...
... for the obvious reason that at that early stage of the design process, Frontier don't know in that much detail how things are going to work either. If programming worked on a straightforward principle of "make design, agree design, then implement that design exactly", Fleet Carriers wouldn't have been delayed almost two years.
For an example from Focused Feedback, prior to the Crime and Punishment updates there were extensive discussions of Frontier's proposed design. Some of the things people were very positive about were:
- the detention centres (and "being sent to a prison colony for your crimes" was a regular suggestion pre-Beyond, too)
- bounties not being trivial to ignore entirely
Guess what the most complained about aspects of C&P are now... (which will be in for a new run in Odyssey with so many of the surface missions being somewhat illegal, though this is getting only a small amount of complaint in Alpha itself)
Now, speaking hypothetically ... would it be better or worse if people complaining about "being sent to a detention centre 100 LY away over a 200cr assault bounty" - which is exactly as designed and as approved of by "the community" - could instead point to specific named community members who were on the Council at the time, and had approved of that idea (or, should its conversations with Frontier be secret, be presumed to have approved)?
I'm for this. There needs to be a Player Council in place that vets all development choices and approves or rejects dev ideas. It would make things so much better.
A council of people with no actual responsibility or consequence of failure. They don't need to be experts in a field, just really like to play games or make YT videos. They get to shoot of opinions and advice, and tell the people that must deal with the consequences what they should do.
Where can I apply?
Where can I apply?
I am sure a bunch of know it all armchair experts will make this better.
Hey, you want to see a game studio empty itself at light speed? Do exactly this. I know I would flip my desk and send a resignation letter pretty fast if a bunch of know it all with too much time on their hands that never even set foot at my work place would get to say what I can or can’t do.
You want to have a say? Apply for the job. If you can’t get the job you don’t get to boss people who have years of experience around.