Brandon Sanderson says the same for readers and writing. Readers are great at identifying something wrong, but their suggested fixes are truly awful.
Is there a writing circle equivalent for game dev?
The headline is inflammatory, but the article just boils down to “Feedback might be that a class is boring, but the solution isn’t necessarily tweaking the class itself. Rather tweaking the progression systems or other tangentially related systems could be the solution.”
Which seems level headed to me
G*mers are idiots
In other news
Water makes things wet
This and other shocking revelations to come
Wow. Where did this fountain of wisdom come from?
Maybe…and I’m just spitballing here…they shouldn’t have to? It’s kind of the job of the development team to make a functional, fun, and relatively bug-free game.
Users are good at identifying problems, but are unable to articulate what the problem is and are quick to invent solutions that aren’t even directly related to the problem.
We’re good at providing guidance to solutions when we openly discuss the problems. We can also often provide direct solutions too. (Just look at the modding community, constantly fixing and optimizing games…for free.)
And users, for sure, are good at finding problems…because they use the thing. (Keep paying less for QA and users will find more problems 🤷♂️)
We’re just focused on providing/delivering a quality experience and centering people and the art.
They don’t often center making more profit and reducing headcount.
So yeah, to a producer, we don’t offer any solutions that please their upper management.
But the whole point of a producer is to understand what the users want, even if they don’t know it, and articulate it into the production. I know my body and my symptoms, but I can’t treat myself because I’m not a doctor.
So is he really just saying he doesn’t like his job?
Too bad the vast majority of issues with BioWare games have nothing to do with development, and everything to do with casualization of gameplay, lack of cohesive vision, and each iteration not giving a fuck about the world and the lore established in the previous one.
Patients are good at identifying symptoms but not providing solutions because they aren’t doctors
Drivers are good at identifying problems but not providing solutions because they aren’t mechanics
Diners are good at identifying dishes they don’t like but not at providing solutions because they’re not chefs
Music fans are good at identifying music they do not like but are unable to write record and perform hit songs because they are not the artists and musicians that wrote recorded and performed said hit songs.
Don’t sell your company to Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia. That’s my solution. Until then, one clearly cannot play a game like Mass Effect and not expect some kind of tearing of reality or paradox or some shit.
Devs: Players have no idea how to solve problems!!! 😡😡😡
Also devs: *Rolls unofficial patches and mods into the official game*
A few devs who are players does not make all players devs.
Bring devs problems, not solutions from people that think programming is “if not fun then make fun”. Otherwise we have to work backwards.
If (!fun)
{
return fun
}
I don’t think that does what you think.
If not fun return fun?
fun=false
if (!false) return false
You’re looking too far into a joke.
You’ll find that even if I set fun to true before returning that it doesn’t actually work that way.
Yeah there’s no return for a true. Depending on your language your compiler may complain.
And yeah I tend to kill the joke.
For the most part, I agree. A lot of people aren’t good at providing solutions to a lot of things. But there are definitely good ideas that come from players.
Yeah. I’ve seen some players’ ideas. Players are, on average, idiots.
I’m reminded of when players want to add critical miss effects to DND. “I added critical misses to my DND game! On a natural one really bad things happen! Like you drop your sword!” -> “But fighters make way more attacks, right?” -> “yeah” -> “so they’re going to critically miss a lot more” -> “…yeah” -> “so a fighter making four attacks a round has a 18% chance of dropping their sword every round” -> “…what?”
This seems to complete dismiss the existence of mods which for pc gamers some find hard to go back to the vanilla version.
Which overturns the idea with it not being concepts but actual ideas to solutions put out by people who weren’t part of development.
I’m sorry, what? This reads like it went through a machine translation.
Are you trying to say that mods are good, and thus players have good ideas?
If so, I’d respond with a reference to sturgeon’s law. Many players are idiots. There’s a small minority that have good ideas. So my original claim that players are, on average, idiots, would hold up.
It seems you are insulted at the general idea of having suggestions given, and fall to subjective claims for your argument and throw in insults like saying I sound machine translated.
Doesn’t seem like you ever wanted a discussion in the first place but to vent.
It’s not an insult. Your writing does not seem native, with errors and unusual phrasings, and was hard to decipher.
Sturgeon’s law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon’s_law ) is jokey but pretty well known. Not sure why you think I’m insulted.
Loads of good ideas posted in forums about games would say otherwise. Unless they specifically want the actual code to said solution and not just a guy saying “the bad guys are too dark and blend in with the background, they should make them lighter or glow or something.”
That’s identifying a problem. Then various solutions need to be proposed and their interactions with other parts of the system considered. If it’s as trivial as “make them lighter” then perhaps that’s it. But very often there is a lot more to implementing the chosen solution.
Are modders considered players or devs? Lot of mods have fixed the problems I had with games. So modders at least are not only identifying the problem but providing the solution themselves.
But, they are kind hybrid of being a player first but also taking on the role of devs due to having the technical skills to make solutions a reality.
They’re both. This is about the “idea guy” issue. The ones who see an issue and make up a solution, and think it’s easy to implement. They have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s, as an example, the people who say Bethesda should just switch to Unreal Engine, because The Creation Engine is based on an old engine (as if UE isn’t also).
I think proposing a completely different engine is different from gameplay balancing suggestions.
Which that article doesn’t even seem to be fixating on, but discussing the creative side.
It was an example of probably the most common recommendation from stupid players. It’s also one of the most ridiculous. The point was to show that their opinions are based on nothing but vibes. This isn’t to say they’re always wrong, but it is saying listening to their solutions is usually fruitless. Their complaints are often valid though.
Mod creators, on the other hand, usually have enough technical knowledge that they often get things correct. I would listen to their solutions. The average player can, at best, reliably point to frustrations. Beyond that, even in regard to the frustration being bad, it isn’t worth much. It’s worth looking at and then considering what can/should be done, if anything.
Maybe it is because of the online spaces I visited like nexusmods or skyrimmods, but switching to unreal isn’t a common request I’ve seen.
I remember there being more disappointment when hearing that CDPR would be moving to unreal for their future games.
Of course, different online spaces dictate the reality people are most exposed to and Im going to guess devs might be more active on places like Twitter and Tiktok with it having more reach? Which is going to lean towards more dumb and toxic takes with shortened character limits and opportunity to directly harass people.
I think you see it less often now, after almost every game in UE5 running like shit. It used to be a really common take, even here on Lemmy, a few years ago. I also saw many YouTube videos from these armchair designers with long videos that say this, so it’s not short-form content that’s the issue.
Regardless, the point is that many people will call for changes like this. They have no idea how complicated it’d be to get a new engine to work the way they want, let alone getting everyone adjusted to it, compared to the engine they’ve used for decades and have custom-built to do what they want from it.
Again, this is just a single example. There are millions of smaller changes people ask for that are similarly out of touch with what it’d take to do, and how that’d affect the games.
…players are paying you; solutions are your f*cking job…
