Listen to me! Or rather not

There has been some discussion lately in the MMO blogosphere whether game developers should listen more to the proposals from players and bloggers on how to improve their games. Hey, I get 3,000 readers a day, I'm obviously qualified to improve a game with 9 million subscribers and annual revenues of over $1 billion. NOT. Everyone is an armchair game designer, but it is only easy because our ideas never get realized and thus don't have to prove they actually work. If you poll people about their intelligence, a majority of people will claim to have above average intelligence, and only very few people will say they have below average intelligence. As obviously only half of a population can have above average intelligence, with the other half being below, this just shows that people have a tendancy to overestimate their abilities. Most of us, me included, couldn't even design Vanguard, and certainly not World of Warcraft.

Listening to players and bloggers has the added problem that the players who write their opinion about a game are already just a small minority of the total population, and not necessarily representative. In fact it is often said that some developers listen *too much* to the opinions of a small vocal minority of hardcore players. You really don't want the devs to follow all the "nerf " cries from the official forums.

That doesn't mean that game forums or blogs couldn't be an important resource for game developers. They just have to be handled right. One approach is to take ideas from all of these player sources and use them in brainstorming sessions. I don't know if you ever did a real brainstorming, but the process there is to first collect a large number of ideas, even crazy ones, and then sort them out later. As a provider of crazy "out of the box" ideas, the internet can't be beat.

The other approach is to listen to player concerns and verify whether they are true. For example me and other people often state that too much development time is spent on creating content that ends up being seen by a too small percentage of the player base. But of course we have no data whatsoever what it did cost to develop the Black Temple, and our data via WoWJutsu on how many players visited it are at best incomplete. Blizzard obviously has much better data than we have. They should know how much it really did cost to create that raid dungeon. They should know how many people are visiting it. And they should know how many people quit the game after having reached level 70, not visited a raid dungeon, and wrote "nothing more to do" in their small exit interview form. There are hard facts that business managers at Blizzard should have access to, and where it is not only their right, but even their job, to challenge the developers to come up with a solution. Running a MMORPG is a business, and the churn rate is extremely important for the profitability of the game. World of Warcraft is very successful, and very profitable, but that doesn't mean that there is no way to improve it.