Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah argues that developers should treat player feedback as valuable diagnostic data rather than a design blueprint, since gamers are better at identifying problems than solving them.
Honestly, that’s fair. Just about any popular piece of media online is going to be full of people needlessly hating on it, as well as people defending it from the haters by calling it the best piece of media ever made. The vast majority of the time neither group is right, and the average person just thinks it’s pretty good, but their voice gets drowned out by all the hot takes.
There’s also the fact that one person will often call for one thing online while another will call for something completely different, but they both get wrapped up into the single entity of “the online community” with a completely nonsensical opinion made up of all the different people pulling in different directions.
Honestly, that’s fair. Just about any popular piece of media online is going to be full of people needlessly hating on it, as well as people defending it from the haters by calling it the best piece of media ever made. The vast majority of the time neither group is right, and the average person just thinks it’s pretty good, but their voice gets drowned out by all the hot takes.
There’s also the fact that one person will often call for one thing online while another will call for something completely different, but they both get wrapped up into the single entity of “the online community” with a completely nonsensical opinion made up of all the different people pulling in different directions.
I tend to agree to a certain extent. Art by committee rarely works, and devs should first and foremost build the game they envision.
Listening to feedback is useful as long as it doesn’t result in a watered down result that detracts from the original intent.