Has the industry already forgotten the lesson of Blizzard's "you think you want it but you don't" moment? (Another ship interiors thread)

[Durgan]

It ought to be well understood in the industry by now that you don't tell your player base that something more than 90% of them have been polled wanting "doesn't add enough value to the gameplay loops." Especially when your existing "gameplay loops" are a grindy joke that's been left woefully undeveloped.

Blizzard's J. Allen Brack coined the infamous "you think you do but you don't" when asked about plans to launch previous servers, and rightly got backlash. You don't tell your customers what they want. The customers tell you what they want. You can fail to listen at your title's peril.

But the cool thing about that story is that to Blizzard's credit they also turned it around. They backpedaled, developed the feature that was asked of them, and in return got a major boost to a very happy player base.

It's not too late for Elite to do that, but as discouraging it is that FDev not only brazenly repeated Blizzard's mistake, it's moreso that they're using the intervening time to actively double down.

I'm not disappointed that FDev said no to ship interiors (despite the long history of promising and supposedly working to that end). I'm disappointed that they haven't read the cards and turned around with a yes yet.

 

[Slange Lands]

People don't learn from history.

Fdev didn't even learn from the recent well-documented fiascos of CP 2077 and Fallout 76 and proceeded to launch a buggy unoptimized Odyssey instead of waiting. The Steam rating is at 31%.

It is truly mystifing. Cause and effect rarely make exceptions.

 

[varonica]

People don't learn from history.

Fdev didn't even learn from the recent well-documented fiascos of CP 2077 and Fallout 76 and proceeded to launch a buggy unoptimized Odyssey instead of waiting. The Steam rating is at 31%.

It is truly mystifing. Cause and effect rarely make exceptions.

Or maybe they did learn, from EVE Online and the legs fiasco (actually the two legs fiasco's) and that providing interiors with nothing to do just doesn't work!

 

[Erei]

Or maybe they did learn, from EVE Online and the legs fiasco (actually the two legs fiasco's) and that providing interiors with nothing to do just doesn't work!

The center of the fiasco was in the 50$ monocle debate. It was a big drama, and eventually they scrapped the entire expansion because of that.

Dust 514 the other tentative was on console only, while Eve is on PC (you can see the issue coming already). Also, it was barely linked to the main game (remind you of a recent DLC ?). It's failure was planned from the start.

CCP have abandoned more projects than they did successfully. Maybe it's an issue with the company.

 

[Kotoku]

Easily found: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/monocles/

 

[DøømHåmstër]

Or maybe they did learn, from EVE Online and the legs fiasco (actually the two legs fiasco's) and that providing interiors with nothing to do just doesn't work!

Key phrase being "with nothing to do".

 

[Eeka]

I don't even know why we still waste time discussing the need for ship interiors. This is a spaceship game, not having interiors is like having a religion but not being able to enter the church. The game creator can give more details about how fun it can be, you don't even need to go look for Star Citizen videos.

I believe ship interiors will come in the future as Braben seem to believe that flooding new releases helps the games continue delivering sustainable multi-year revenues and earnings, i just fear it will come as another badly pushed update over a badly patched Odyssey thus giving us more broken features. Still, it would be nothing to worry about, since customer satisfaction is not included in the company's KPI.

I just hope they work hard enough to earn what they want:

 

[Kotoku]

I don't even know why we still waste time discussing the need for ship interiors. This is a spaceship game, not having interiors is like having a religion but not being able to enter the church. The game creator can give more details about how fun it can be, you don't even need to go look for Star Citizen videos.

I believe ship interiors will come in the future as Braben seem to believe that flooding new releases helps the games continue delivering sustainable multi-year revenues and earnings, i just fear it will come as another badly pushed update over a badly patched Odyssey thus giving us more broken features. Still, it would be nothing to worry about, since customer satisfaction is not included in the company's KPI.

I just hope they work hard enough to earn what they want:

View attachment 240750

Still, it would be nothing to worry about, since customer satisfaction is not included in the company's KPI

Well caught!

I loved this one:

See breathtaking new scenery and explore with unrestricted freedom from a first-person, feet-on-the-ground perspective, something we know many players are keen to see.

And still are!

 

[JosiahD]

It ought to be well understood in the industry by now that you don't tell your player base that something more than 90% of them have been polled wanting "doesn't add enough value to the gameplay loops." Especially when your existing "gameplay loops" are a grindy joke that's been left woefully undeveloped.

Blizzard's J. Allen Brack coined the infamous "you think you do but you don't" when asked about plans to launch previous servers, and rightly got backlash. You don't tell your customers what they want. The customers tell you what they want. You can fail to listen at your title's peril.

But the cool thing about that story is that to Blizzard's credit they also turned it around. They backpedaled, developed the feature that was asked of them, and in return got a major boost to a very happy player base.

It's not too late for Elite to do that, but as discouraging it is that FDev not only brazenly repeated Blizzard's mistake, it's moreso that they're using the intervening time to actively double down.

I'm not disappointed that FDev said no to ship interiors (despite the long history of promising and supposedly working to that end). I'm disappointed that they haven't read the cards and turned around with a yes yet.

Except the polls I've seen are skewed by a particular audience, for example those posed by certain content creators are responded to by that particular creator's audience. Now if FDEV actually surveyed the playerbase and got a representative sample as a result that indicated 90%, that'd be different. Typically the question is also not posed alongside 'what are you prepared to sacrifice in order to get ship interiors' - asking do you want ship interiors, or select from a list of what you want (one of which is ship interiors) results in different findings, at least based on what I've seen. So while yes they need to listen to what the playerbase wants, what a subset of the playerbase wants is not necessarily what is best for the game at a given point in time. And how the question is framed influences the result to boot.

 

[Templar01]

People don't learn from history.

Fdev didn't even learn from the recent well-documented fiascos of CP 2077 and Fallout 76 and proceeded to launch a buggy unoptimized Odyssey instead of waiting. The Steam rating is at 31%.

It is truly mystifing. Cause and effect rarely make exceptions.

Wow!!! At first I thought this may have been hyperbole. 31% just seemed off from the last time I looked at steam. But there it was.

Can anyone remember any game that had this low an approval rating and was ever able to recover? I certainly can't.

What's bizarre are that even the positive reviews slam the game as beta. So one has to wonder are the 31% who approve of the game are they simply folks who will never say anything bad about their beloved no matter how much the company they paid for screws them? Kinda like Apple fans. LOL.

 

[Jmanis]

Or maybe they did learn, from EVE Online and the legs fiasco (actually the two legs fiasco's) and that providing interiors with nothing to do just doesn't work!

Exactly this. Granted it was station legs, not ship legs, but nonetheless, unless there's actual game activities resulting from it, just a cosmetic thing is not really worth it to create, essentially, 30-40 unique interiors per ship (and they have to be unique, because i can already hear the "lazy dev" crowd if they aren't).

As it stands, the only reason i tolerate going on foot in stations is because it's the only way to access Odyssey content. In a ship i can be done with my transactions in a minute. That blows out to at least 5 if i do Odyssey stuff, for no real added benefit.

Most of the suggestions for activities inside ships are also so outside the realms of sane mechanics within the current game construct that they simply wouldn't make sense (e.g hijacking another players ship; good thing i can just rebuy death, which totally isn't exploitable). Of course, some would be plausible with a complete ground up rework of the game, which i imagine its exactly why FD don't want to do this.

 

[Eeka]

Well caught!

I loved this one:



And still are!

There is so much to be seen in their Investor page.. we usually just look at FDev from the developer perspective and fail to see what they are really advertising as success to the world. Some in the community even protect their mistakes, try to make excuses for them or even go silent about what is clearly absurd..

 

[[VR] James Constantine]

Or maybe they did learn, from EVE Online and the legs fiasco (actually the two legs fiasco's) and that providing interiors with nothing to do just doesn't work!

This. Features are not of much use, no matter how potentially good, if that potential isn't leveraged. And given the new Odyssey on-foot content doesn't seem to have been terribly well designed in terms of gameplay, I'd doubt they'd be able to implement ship interiors that aren't simply something you see once or twice, but having no impact on gameplay, would end up being ignored in the long run.

This is before one considers the long list of more critical issues and features that would need to be addressed first, starting with bugs and performance, then additional content or VR integration - long before one even considers adding something new such as ship interiors.

So even should we see ship interiors, realistically, we won't see them for a very, very long time.

 

[Sighman]

Typically the question is also not posed alongside 'what are you prepared to sacrifice in order to get ship interiors' - asking do you want ship interiors, or select from a list of what you want (one of which is ship interiors) results in different findings, at least based on what I've seen.

100% agree. I mean ...

Poll from ObsidianAnt

If you had the choice on just one, which would you choose in Elite Dangerous?

www.youtube.com

 

[Ian Doncaster]

"you think you do but you don't"

Counterpoint: up until 3.0 released there was a very loud and vocal consensus on the forums that Crime and Punishment in Elite Dangerous was far too lenient and needed to be toughened up. Letting players get away with murder was "unrealistic" and "bad for the game".

This consensus lasted through public discussions lead by Frontier about what a new C&P system might look like, a multi-week Beta featuring it, and excited pre-release conversations about how it would mean the "end of ganking".

This consensus did not survive live release. Not only did "tougher C&P" not mean the "end of ganking", it also meant bigger punishments for players who totally thought of themselves as upstanding citizens for whom the C&P system would only apply to other people.

Nowadays the majority of forum complaints about C&P are "I did a crime then ended up transported to a detention centre 200 LY away, this is terrible design". But prior to 3.0 the suggestion that criminals should be moved some distance from the site of their crime, perhaps to a dedicated prison, to if not deter them at least put a break in their offending ... that was a really popular idea on these forums.

Not the only time where Frontier have implemented something that's actually a pretty good technical match to what "players were asking for" only for the result not to be what those players expected.

Can anyone remember any game that had this low an approval rating and was ever able to recover? I certainly can't

Are we counting previous releases of Elite Dangerous in this? Because while I can't remember if Horizons got as low as 31% at any point it definitely sat around in the "mostly negative" region for quite a while after it released on Steam.

That's not to say that Frontier will manage it twice, of course ... but they still do have the advantage that no-one else is actually trying to compete with them. If you want a somewhat multiplayer game which combines a realistic galactic scale with spaceship and on-foot activities, your choices are pretty limited.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

It ought to be well understood in the industry by now that you don't tell your player base that something more than 90% of them have been polled wanting "doesn't add enough value to the gameplay loops." Especially when your existing "gameplay loops" are a grindy joke that's been left woefully undeveloped.

Blizzard's J. Allen Brack coined the infamous "you think you do but you don't" when asked about plans to launch previous servers, and rightly got backlash. You don't tell your customers what they want. The customers tell you what they want. You can fail to listen at your title's peril.

But the cool thing about that story is that to Blizzard's credit they also turned it around. They backpedaled, developed the feature that was asked of them, and in return got a major boost to a very happy player base.

It's not too late for Elite to do that, but as discouraging it is that FDev not only brazenly repeated Blizzard's mistake, it's moreso that they're using the intervening time to actively double down.

I'm not disappointed that FDev said no to ship interiors (despite the long history of promising and supposedly working to that end). I'm disappointed that they haven't read the cards and turned around with a yes yet.

rummages around in his meme bin

 

[Factabulous]

Fdev didn't even learn from the recent well-documented fiascos of CP 2077 and Fallout 76 and proceeded to launch a buggy unoptimized Odyssey instead of waiting. The Steam rating is at 31%.

Cyperpunk is coming back to the PS4 https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-playstation-store-return-date-announced , and Fallout 76 survived and seems better regarded. So yes, they probably have learned that listening to internet 'experts' is not required, they just need to get their stuff together. Hopefully soon.

 

[Jmanis]

Counterpoint: up until 3.0 released there was a very loud and vocal consensus on the forums that Crime and Punishment in Elite Dangerous was far too lenient and needed to be toughened up. Letting players get away with murder was "unrealistic" and "bad for the game".

This consensus lasted through public discussions lead by Frontier about what a new C&P system might look like, a multi-week Beta featuring it, and excited pre-release conversations about how it would mean the "end of ganking".

This consensus did not survive live release. Not only did "tougher C&P" not mean the "end of ganking", it also meant bigger punishments for players who totally thought of themselves as upstanding citizens for whom the C&P system would only apply to other people.

Nowadays the majority of forum complaints about C&P are "I did a crime then ended up transported to a detention centre 200 LY away, this is terrible design". But prior to 3.0 the suggestion that criminals should be moved some distance from the site of their crime, perhaps to a dedicated prison, to if not deter them at least put a break in their offending ... that was a really popular idea on these forums.

Not the only time where Frontier have implemented something that's actually a pretty good technical match to what "players were asking for" only for the result not to be what those players expected.

Can you imagine if FD went for the even more inane ideas like RL login time penalties for crime. Imagine the amount of "banned from the game for hours because i couldn't control my trigger finger" threads. Heck, that already happens even though the current c&p is entirely manageable if you happen to get notoriety.

 

[ADAMtheWELSHMANz]

I'm more interested in the longer term roadmap we're expected to get at the end of the month.

It'll be interesting to (hopefully) see what FDevs plans are post bug fixing and console release of EDO.

 

[metatheurgist]

100% agree. I mean ...

Poll from ObsidianAnt

If you had the choice on just one, which would you choose in Elite Dangerous?

www.youtube.com

View attachment 240758

Oh dear....