I've been on a bit of a Rory Sutherland binge of late. He's a really great behavioral marketer, who explores how the statistically ideal solution is often not the true ideal, because it fails to account for the human element.
One of the big points he often makes is to do with Bees.
There's something interesting about bees: They have a thing called a 'waggle dance', where they use a sort of dancelike motion to tell other bees where there's a source of pollen. Most of the other bees then follow this to said source of pollen, and the whole hive benefits.
Broadly speaking, this is things like, say, paintjobs, ARX buys, bug fixes on well-used gameplay elements, etc.
But interestingly, there's about 20% of bees that IGNORE the waggle dance and just fly off seeming at random. And at first this might not make much sense - until you remember, if no bees did that, then if anything should happen to the existing sources of pollen, suddenly there will be nothing left!
With this in mind, it would make a lot of sense to me if Fdev spent about 10-20% of their effort at any given moment improving relatively random elements of the game. You know, maybe you spend some time improving Odyssey settlements, or fiddling with hotpsot generation in rings, or adding some new exploration stuff to find, or something entirely new altogether.
The point is, it's random. It might not work. But it also MIGHT work.
I love the way the game has moved of late, I wont lie - but I also think that there's an inherent weakness in this sort of top-down, all in one direction approach. It neglects the potential of random improvements, of the discovery that might result. Because it's impossible to predict exactly what will happen in a given situation! One tiny change can have huge benefits!
One of the big points he often makes is to do with Bees.
There's something interesting about bees: They have a thing called a 'waggle dance', where they use a sort of dancelike motion to tell other bees where there's a source of pollen. Most of the other bees then follow this to said source of pollen, and the whole hive benefits.
Broadly speaking, this is things like, say, paintjobs, ARX buys, bug fixes on well-used gameplay elements, etc.
But interestingly, there's about 20% of bees that IGNORE the waggle dance and just fly off seeming at random. And at first this might not make much sense - until you remember, if no bees did that, then if anything should happen to the existing sources of pollen, suddenly there will be nothing left!
With this in mind, it would make a lot of sense to me if Fdev spent about 10-20% of their effort at any given moment improving relatively random elements of the game. You know, maybe you spend some time improving Odyssey settlements, or fiddling with hotpsot generation in rings, or adding some new exploration stuff to find, or something entirely new altogether.
The point is, it's random. It might not work. But it also MIGHT work.
I love the way the game has moved of late, I wont lie - but I also think that there's an inherent weakness in this sort of top-down, all in one direction approach. It neglects the potential of random improvements, of the discovery that might result. Because it's impossible to predict exactly what will happen in a given situation! One tiny change can have huge benefits!
