19 Jun, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
Some context:
Lately, my game has been undergoing rapid change, and many of my late-career players have started grumbling almost non-stop. Even when we add features that unquestionably make them stronger, e. g. ranged combat or extended stat buffs, some complain that now they have to figure out new optimal builds and that what they thought was the greatest set of gear is no longer the greatest, etc. The grumbling takes many other flavors, as well, which I will spare you from. I've even had an instance of a player quitting after 2 years of almost non-stop playing and leaving a jilted-lover-style negative review on TMC that is likely to turn away many new players. For the record, I try to be very attentive to player feedback, and any requests that have to do with improving usability or fixing obvious bugs are addressed as quickly as humanly possible. But I don't really know what to do about player feedback that boils down to "I hate change" because I don't think my game is finished (and I'm not sure it will ever be).

So, my question to other admins out there is, how much do you listen to players when it comes to game design changes? How do you handle situations where some of your most valuable players threaten to leave or complain continuously and drive down the morale?
19 Jun, 2012, Runter wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
One answer is making changes all in one fell swoop in major expansions to your game. Once players realize that every year or so there's new content, new gear, new features coming out, their mentality somewhat changes and I think there's a certain excitement to getting ready to conquer the next set of stuff that comes out. Even if that means their gear might become outdated or not as useful. From a players perspective, that's definitely what I always preferred.
19 Jun, 2012, Detah wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
As an established mud, I think you should care about player feedback much more than a new mud might. Having an established player base means that you have something on your mud which players like. It may be your theme/genre in general, or it may be something as specific as your vampiric drain ability on your warhammers. I don't know. But there is something about your game which they like. I think we are all, as designers, aware that our games are constantly in a state of transformation and development. So knowing where you are in that development stage may be apparent to you, but less apparent to the players. You might have known all along that the warriors guild was just step one of your grand design to introducing specialized warrior types. But unfortunately, the players really liked that warriors guild design.

I do not know what your players' specific criticisms were, but I would try to glean from them what it is that they liked and wanted to keep. It may be that the warriors guild had a cool powerstrike ability and you removed it when you created the specialized types. There might be ground for compromise. By listening to the players, you could incorporate the powerstrike ability in the specialized classes and everybody wins. However, if there are things which you are simply not willing to change and the players adamantly love them, then it seems unavoidable that you will need to make a choice between keeping the powerstrike ability or losing the players. I would try making a bulletin board post&poll to extract information from your players about what it is that they liked or don't care about. As an added side-benefit, players will observe your information-seeking behavior and at least feel that you are considering their wishes.

-Detah
19 Jun, 2012, Davion wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
When it comes to making your existing features better or more robust, I'd listen to your players. When it comes to The Next Great Feature, do not.
19 Jun, 2012, Lyanic wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
One answer is making changes all in one fell swoop in major expansions to your game. Once players realize that every year or so there's new content, new gear, new features coming out, their mentality somewhat changes and I think there's a certain excitement to getting ready to conquer the next set of stuff that comes out. Even if that means their gear might become outdated or not as useful. From a players perspective, that's definitely what I always preferred.

Runter hit the nail on the head. I do ~quarterly major version updates (2.6.0 in Feb and 2.7.0 in May of this year) to my codebase. They tend to be fairly massive in scope, and they get treated as big events by the players. I also try to communicate with players in advance, letting them know it is coming (1-2 weeks ahead of time, typically), and in addition to the standard change logs, I also post a note giving some context to changes I expect would receive the most grumbling. Some players do still grumble a bit, particularly those who have been hibernating for 6-12 months and come back to several major change sets at once. However, they seem to have accepted that when there's a major version update, they should discard a lot of what they know about the game (best builds, best equipment, etc). Many of them treat it as a challenge - rushing to be the first player to possess all the knowledge about the new stuff. I think my system has worked out well, since I don't know of any players quitting over new changes yet. Take that as you will.
19 Jun, 2012, Hades_Kane wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
My perspective is probably a little different, because we haven't officially opened yet. We expect to by the end of summer, however.

We have a disclaimer, or have had at least, on the MOTD indicating that we are in development. Many major changes or decisions are discussed amongst the players on the "immnote" board (which the idea is that everyone's voice is equal, we are all "immortals" discussing changes).

When we make a change and there is a very popular dissent toward it, often times we work to try to figure out some way to meet in the middle, or I explain until I'm blue in the face and then some.

Before we started promising no chances of a pwipe and "actively" recruiting "players/play-testers", we got all of the major gameplay modifications out of the way, that is, the changes that would be likely to significantly alter the course of a character or the balance of power with what we have in game. Some tweaks are made here and there, such as balancing backstab, or soon-to-be re-evaluation of the power of the blitz skills. Anything that would be likely to force a character to completely rethink the way they made or built their character? I think that's important to have those things -done- before players are investing anything in the game with any expectation of stability.

Equipment changes, or new equipment being added and forcing re-exploration to find better equipment? That's whining, as far as I'm concerned.

But if you guys are routinely making changes that are drastically changing the balance of power and making previously viable builds not so viable? I can understand the players being upset.

With where we have gotten in development, we are making any last minute tweaks or changes that we might feel is necessary prior to opening, but once we do open, I figure we are basically locked into what we have, because to drastically alter things would be a bit of a betrayal of the expectations of the players who have come into the game and put time into their characters based on the way the game plays now.

Minor tweaks to balance, fixing bugs or exploits is a different story, along with the equipment changes.

In any case, these would be my thoughts:

1) Make the changes to balance/power very gradual where the players generally won't notice it
2) Make it clear you guys make frequent changes to balance/build viability and to be aware their strong character with lots of work may not be as viable a handful of weeks or months down the road
3) Do those changes in a big update as other posters have mentioned, and make it clear that there is the expectation of big changes/updates that may affect balance/builds every X months/years/etc.
4) Figure out how you want the core fundamentals of the game to play, get there, and keep them that way, and just work around those if adjustments need to be made
19 Jun, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Wow, lots of thoughtful points. Just thought I'd comment on a few of them:

Runter, I don't think I can live with a yearly release, but I'll try to at least wind it down to a bi-monthly one and spend more time mentally preparing people for it. The players who like novelty are never the issue, really. It is the players who think they've found a special edge (or the easiest, and therefore only, way of doing something) that perceive any change as a personal attack designed to take away their advantage. Maybe slowing the pace and bundling changes will make them less likely to see themselves as the only "victims" to change.

Detah, I've never taken away a feature that enhanced enjoyment. If a feature is found to be overpowered, however, it would be balanced against other similar skills, etc., to ensure a level playing field. And how do you convey that to the person who really enjoyed, e. g., stacking curse spells and soloing their way through zones they were never meant to solo? Say we've just added a cool new skill, but the initial version of it was a bit overpowered, so it gets toned down within a day or two. Then I immediately hear from several people how they felt targeted and nerfed. Some even "forget" that the skill is new and claim they created this particular class especially for this new skill. Now, I think that's just devious haggling, but I don't have an effective strategy for handling that.

Lyanic, maybe most of your players are just better than some of mine :)

HK, I spend a good bit of time thinking through how changes affect existing chars and I think I've preserved pretty much all of the advancement people have made since we opened doors 3 years ago. There have been no pwipes, gear wipes, or changes to the basic stats that define a character. In the rare cases where something more basic had to be tweaked, I've religiously issued reimbursements, compensations,etc. Everything we've added has been gradually making players more powerful and the game easier and more casual overall. But that's not how the people complaining see it. I keep asking them for specific things that they think we "broke" with our changes, and the usual response is something we rolled out in an overpowered form that we balanced a few days later, or something we fixed that was always broken but never reported (until we saw someone exploiting it).

Or, maybe my complainers are a loud minority and no more numerous than in other games…
19 Jun, 2012, Lyanic wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
When you say bi-monthly, do you mean twice per month, or every two months (English is a tricky language sometimes)? If the latter, that's close to what I do. It works rather well.

plamzi said:
Lyanic, maybe most of your players are just better than some of mine :)

Well, I do keep all the best players. Other MUDs can fight over the rest. :-p
19 Jun, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Lyanic said:
When you say bi-monthly, do you mean twice per month, or every two months (English is a tricky language sometimes)? If the latter, that's close to what I do. It works rather well.


I meant once every two months, but with full knowledge that it can mean either ;)
20 Jun, 2012, Kline wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
What is your goal behind your game? Do you run it because you enjoy designing the new features, tweaking the old ones, and sitting back to see others enjoy your work? Or are you trying to build your ideal Utopia of a game you would most want to play?

When I was actively running my own game the friend who I ran it with wanted to go in a drastic new direction. We went from a traditional GodWars game (same classes as everyone else, same stock zones, etc) to removing all notions of a "class" and forcing people to "build your own" by picking from various skill groups. Some people really liked this, figured our the best builds, and had fun experimenting, but a lot of the core players we had were not interested in something different. They wanted the "different, but familiar" feeling that I'm sure we've all had at one point. We (my friend and I) stuck with his ideas and tried to encourage people to try it, listened to concerns, changed some things, etc. A lot of players departed over it since they just did not want that, and we eventually re-introduced the "traditional" classes alongside this new system, which got some folks back, but still never undid the initial damage from "creating the game WE wanted to play" rather than focusing on something our players would enjoy.

I'm not saying you should listen to everything your players complain about, as you obviously can't make everyone happy all the time, but figure out if your goal is to create a dream game for yourself to play or if you are more enjoying the aspects of creation and running a game while watching others enjoy it, even if it's not something you personally would want to play. I'm not sure if you've followed Diablo 3 any, but go take a look at the uproar caused from the latest patch today (1.0.3). I realize that D3 is a very different beast than your MUD, but I think it's a shining example of knee-jerk reactions (on both sides, players and developers) and exactly what NOT to do if you want to keep the majority of your players happy and still enjoying your game. A specific example is that people were "abusing" destructible items (pots, chests, weapon racks, etc) due to the high amount of gold they dropped and farming them for easy money. I call that a design fault. On the same note, players were also "abusing" corpse hopping to bypass difficult / impossible groups of monsters since the cost to repair was so low, and death had no other penalties. Again, another design fault. The solution to both? Gold now rarely drops from destructible items and repair costs were increased exponentially. Those two things in and of themselves aren't horrible solutions to an initial bad design. The fault comes when players are actively reporting that the game is essentially punishing you for playing. Smashing a single destructible item just earned you a 50g repair bill (and only 10g dropped from the item, if any at all). Getting hit once in combat gave you a 250g repair bill, and subsequent hits only slowly taper that amount (yet the monster only dropped 25g). There are essentially very few ways to actually play now while still passively collecting enough money to keep your gear from breaking, at a minimum.
20 Jun, 2012, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
I listen to players when it add something that is unrelated to other contents (new commands to ease their life, skills/spelll that dont have any possible synergies.)
When it comes to the gameplay though, nope. Gameplay is your trademark, change it, and you are basically another game. You can tweak it if majority of the players complain abut a new feature though.
20 Jun, 2012, Hades_Kane wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
HK, I spend a good bit of time thinking through how changes affect existing chars and I think I've preserved pretty much all of the advancement people have made since we opened doors 3 years ago. There have been no pwipes, gear wipes, or changes to the basic stats that define a character. In the rare cases where something more basic had to be tweaked, I've religiously issued reimbursements, compensations,etc. Everything we've added has been gradually making players more powerful and the game easier and more casual overall. But that's not how the people complaining see it. I keep asking them for specific things that they think we "broke" with our changes, and the usual response is something we rolled out in an overpowered form that we balanced a few days later, or something we fixed that was always broken but never reported (until we saw someone exploiting it).


In that case, sounds like they are just whining. In those instances, I do one of two things, either try to discuss it out with them, or point them toward the idea board if they have any suggestions on how things may be improved. If I disagree with their idea note, I'll generally just ignore it, and if there are good points in it, sometimes I'll make those changes and often reference them in the change note.
20 Jun, 2012, KaVir wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
I've always tried to listen to players, and at least consider their suggestions (and if I don't feel their ideas fit the mud, explain why). But some players can be really difficult to deal with. Particularly the "your game sucks, but luckily for you I will show you how to save it" kind, who become insulted if you don't follow their suggestions. Sorry, but no, I'm not removing PK and turning GW2 into an RP mud.
20 Jun, 2012, Hades_Kane wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Sorry, but no, I'm not removing PK and turning GW2 into an RP mud.


Haha, yeah, gotta love those types.

Biggest thing we get are people insisting we add a job system, or materia, or magicite (or X class system from our theme that doesn't fit the with defined class system / class promotion system we have in place).

I understand you loved Final Fantasy 6 and it's magicite, or Final Fantasy and it's Materia, or FF5/FFT and it's job system, but that isn't the route we decided to go, and to incorporate any of that would make necessary to completely gut our class system, as the systems simply aren't compatible.

I often give them a friendly reminder that there are close to a dozen other Final Fantasy based MUDs if materia, magicite, or a job system is one of their defining game systems they want out of a Final Fantasy game.

Been working on a helpfile to detail various systems from our theme that we decided against using, and why, with hopes to being able to quell those requests before they happen, or at least to avoid having to repeat ourselves a bunch.
20 Jun, 2012, Edma Largo wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
Hello! I was reading this thread and thought I could add a little something. First, I'd like to say I'm impressed with how many great posts there are here. Lots of good ideas! Second, I do run a small mud that is still very much in development, and I play a large, commercial mud that is still very much in development.

Two things:
#1. the mud I play allows people to be part of the development process by submitting proposals for changes, where they describe the problem, and give one to three alternative solutions. These are then voted on, essentially, and people more or less are aware of the upcoming change (if they follow this process). The administration doesn't always go with what's suggested, but more often than not, it allows players and developers to work together to coordinate new features.

#2. I have played this mud for a long, long time.. over the years, I have seen a fair number of players drop off because 'x system' was changed, 'y feature' was removed, or they didn't like the new 'z system'. My conclusion is that this is, in some ways, entirely unavoidable. Some people just won't be happy. (Take World of Warcraft, for instance. There were a lot of broken things with Vanilla WoW - broken features, that made it fun for people who wanted to win all the time without a challenge. These have been fixed in recent expansions, hence, those players quit.) However, overall, I have observed that the continued development of the mud has attracted more new players than those grumbly players who left in protest of anything less than stagnation.

Keep developing, but listen to your players! You need them!
21 Jun, 2012, Izmar wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
And how do you convey that to the person who really enjoyed, e. g., stacking curse spells and soloing their way through zones they were never meant to solo? Say we've just added a cool new skill, but the initial version of it was a bit overpowered, so it gets toned down within a day or two. Then I immediately hear from several people how they felt targeted and nerfed. Some even "forget" that the skill is new and claim they created this particular class especially for this new skill. Now, I think that's just devious haggling, but I don't have an effective strategy for handling that.


We're right in the middle of some changes like this at the moment, and having the same issues. Often this type of complaint can be defeated by the power of MATH. Show the average levels that other classes have to be to solo X zone; work out the average damage of other classes and show how the nerfed ability was above and beyond those averages; etc. In a nutshell: show your work as much as possible so players can see where you're coming from.

You will probably get some pushback at first, but try to encourage players to do their own calculations and experiments. Sometimes, just hearing "yeah, X was OP" from someone else besides the admin can help people realize that changes are justified. Try to reward reporting and discussion of OP mechanics with admin action to help refocus the community goals away from hiding OP tactics and then whining when they're nerfed and towards a collaborative effort to make the game better/more fair/more balanced.

Usually, you can't go wrong by letting players in to see your mental process. It makes them feel included and shows them that there's logic behind the changes, not personal vendettas. =)
21 Jun, 2012, Hades_Kane wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Izmar said:
Often this type of complaint can be defeated by the power of MATH.


21 Jun, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
Izmar said:
plamzi said:
And how do you convey that to the person who really enjoyed, e. g., stacking curse spells and soloing their way through zones they were never meant to solo? Say we've just added a cool new skill, but the initial version of it was a bit overpowered, so it gets toned down within a day or two. Then I immediately hear from several people how they felt targeted and nerfed. Some even "forget" that the skill is new and claim they created this particular class especially for this new skill. Now, I think that's just devious haggling, but I don't have an effective strategy for handling that.


We're right in the middle of some changes like this at the moment, and having the same issues. Often this type of complaint can be defeated by the power of MATH. Show the average levels that other classes have to be to solo X zone; work out the average damage of other classes and show how the nerfed ability was above and beyond those averages; etc. In a nutshell: show your work as much as possible so players can see where you're coming from.

You will probably get some pushback at first, but try to encourage players to do their own calculations and experiments. Sometimes, just hearing "yeah, X was OP" from someone else besides the admin can help people realize that changes are justified. Try to reward reporting and discussion of OP mechanics with admin action to help refocus the community goals away from hiding OP tactics and then whining when they're nerfed and towards a collaborative effort to make the game better/more fair/more balanced.

Usually, you can't go wrong by letting players in to see your mental process. It makes them feel included and shows them that there's logic behind the changes, not personal vendettas. =)


That's all very good advice, and a lot of it I try to follow already. For instance, in the case of stackable curse, which had been going on quietly for a while, I pointed the person to our by-class leaderboard, which showed that over 50% of high-level chars being made are class Crusader. The person still refused to see my point even though it was transparent (to everyone except a few mortals) that we have a balance issue rendering most of our other classes useless. (I believe that from a mortal perspective, what makes some people clamor against a balance patch is that they feel others have exploited it much more than they got the chance to.)

I think that any reasonably intelligent game designer understands that listening to a certain set of complaints is dangerous–because they shorten the careers of even the players who are campaigning for them. The whole point of trying to balance features is to make multiple builds viable and extend the average player career. But if I had listened to some of the mortal 'feedback' regarding classes, I believe even the people who go on complaining now will have quit a long time ago. And if you leave imbalanced features in for the "clever" to exploit them, then you also risk turning off those who want to immerse themselves in the game, figure out everything there is to figure out, and basically experience its fullness–but then see someone get rewarded much more for doing the same thing again and again.

What I'm getting at is that often times I feel players should be careful what they wish for. I know that as a player I always dreaded the moments when I found an exploit (or even a very strong edge), because I knew I'd be tempted to hammer at it until I'm totally disgusted with the game experience and need to take a break. And that break can get really long if the developers are afraid to take the appropriate measures.
21 Jun, 2012, Runter wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
I'll add one other bit of advice. Test your stuff for power balance throughly before it's put live into the game. Players feel like you aren't doing due diligence if you didn't catch players being able to solo areas they weren't supposed to be through using the intended class mechanics.

There's a vast difference in not catching a bug, and not realizing the intended mechanics you designed were not reasonable. Being able to build simple spread sheets that tell you maximum sustained dps, maximum burst dps, maximum mitigation, maximum avoidance… all these things help in determining before a character goes out the door what the possibilities are. If you're just throwing in numbers that sound right and waiting to see how far players can get with it, well, it might work for some people but it's definitely not very scientific and results won't surprise me to be negative.
21 Jun, 2012, Lyanic wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
I'll add one other bit of advice. Test your stuff for power balance throughly before it's put live into the game. Players feel like you aren't doing due diligence if you didn't catch players being able to solo areas they weren't supposed to be through using the intended class mechanics.

There's a vast difference in not catching a bug, and not realizing the intended mechanics you designed were not reasonable. Being able to build simple spread sheets that tell you maximum sustained dps, maximum burst dps, maximum mitigation, maximum avoidance… all these things help in determining before a character goes out the door what the possibilities are. If you're just throwing in numbers that sound right and waiting to see how far players can get with it, well, it might work for some people but it's definitely not very scientific and results won't surprise me to be negative.

That's good advice. However, sometimes, even when you have done your due diligence and think something is balanced prior to releasing it, it ends up being exploitable anyway. I've come up with two strategies for handling that:

1) Figure out who your exploiters are (they're fairly easy to spot) and set logging on them after release of new stuff. If you spot them exploiting it, you can patch in a fix quickly and only risk upsetting that small group of players (or perhaps only a single player), as the general population hasn't discovered it yet.

2) Intentionally nerf new stuff prior to putting it in and wait for the players to complain about it being underpowered. Then, gauging from the amount of complaining and the occasionally well reasoned argument from a player-type, deploy the appropriate degree of anti-nerfing.

Neither of the above strategies are ideal, but in an imperfect world, they tend to minimize the amount of discontent among players.
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