Know What You Know, Know What You Don’t

One of the endless debates surrounding MMO design is to what degree developers should listen to players–specifically those at the bleeding edge of content, commonly referred to as the end game. This gets debated as if it’s some kind of binary issue, like it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.

But it’s not about absolutes, or about paying lip service to the comments your customers make. It’s about coming to terms with what you really know about the game as opposed to what you don’t. And that goes for both sides of the curtain.

MMO devs have to accept that sometimes players really do know how aspects of the game function in practice better than they do. No matter how much a dev plans and tests a complicated raid, that dev will never be able to match the knowledge gained by masses of people playing through that content dozens of times. While intangibles like the ephemeral risk vs. reward can be debated, the hardcore raiders are very likely able to objectively tell you things like how challenging one event is compared to another. There’s simply no substitute for playing through content over and over and over again. Endgame players have far more time to do this than the average dev or QA team, which makes them a valuable resource waiting to be tapped.

Conversely, players need to realize that they don’t understand the intent of the content like the devs do. Players interpret content and assume they know the thought process behind it, but many times those assumptions are based purely on opinion. There may in fact be some very good reasons why things are the way they are, or it may be due to an oversight or a mistake. It’s good to draw attention to situations where, from your perspective, the implementation doesn’t seem to match the intent, because that at least points out potential problems and gives the devs an opportunity to respond.

Another thing devs know better than players is resource costs. While all of us have said “that should be easy,” sometimes it’s surprising how tricky certain changes can be. Because MMOs take years to make, it takes a lot of people to build them. Sometimes the decisions made early on can really screw things up later when a better idea comes along. So when a dev says that a requested change would be stupidly hard or time consuming to implement, it’s probably due to a poor decision made much ealier in development.

The missing piece that ties it all together is community. In my opinion, the most crucial job of a good community team is to strip out the emotion on both sides of the equation and get to the facts. When players rant, good community teams look for the core issue and bring it, insult free, to the devs who can fix it. When devs are crunching away on deadlines and don’t have time to scour message boards looking for complaints, good community teams do the legwork for them and bring them the facts, getting to the heart of the problem and carrying a response back to the people.

I say this is the most important task of community not because fansite support, contests, and press tours aren’t crucial to the success of the game; I say it’s most important because without an agile and active support of the player base, none of the rest of that stuff is going to matter.

The customer isn’t always right, nor is the developer always smarter than the player. Community needs to cut through the crap and get to the heart of the matter. When they do that, both sides ultimately win.