Training the Devs to take general player experience into consideration

[NBG]

Please discuss the reasons on why the Devs need this type of training and how this would benefit the game and the player base.

I believe that player experience is an important factor on determining the success of a new game feature. Unless developers start taking player experience into consideration when they are developing new features, retaining existing player base and attracting possible returning players will not happen anytime soon.

Another issue that needs to be discussed is the disconnect between the producer and developers. It is often too late to recover player confidence when the producer does not know what is being developed and released until players start raising the issue. Both producer and developers needs to treat players as customers when they are developing new features. First player impression on a feature is important and impact on the whole player base needs to be considered even if a feature deals with specific player segment. That way, possible impact on the rest of the player base could be identified and fixed prior to feature publish.

 

[Tanivar]

I've often wondered if the Devs kick back and entertain themselves sometimes by trying to come up with ideas to aggravate us as much as they can without getting to the point of to many accounts being closed.

All the used puppychow they dump on us can't all be unintentional.

 

[Tanivar]

I'd say the only real motivation that might be effective ia a profit-sharing situation. The average player-in-game time goes up, they get perks, the average player-in-game time goes down, perks get lost. The Dev's work results in more paying accounts being opened, they see a $$ benefit to their paychecks. The Dev's work results in paying accounts being closed (due to lack of fun, exasperation, b.s. overload, whatever), they see those little bonuses go away.

Complaining in the Forums has proven to do little good. The Dev's are not listening. Some new form of direct personal motivation is needed.

 

[Driven Insane]

It just proves the Devs don't play this game. Who in their right mind would think that some of the "content" is fun or even mildly entertaining. Grinding for weeks.....even months... doing a task that was clearly made for scripters is mindnumbing at best.

If I had the millions to buy EA or at least the Dev team and UO. My first task would be to make them play the game starting from scratch. Just so they could experience first hand how frustrating and downright irritating some of the "content" of this game really is.

No super Dev powers, no instant set skill to 120, no set bank balance to 1 billion gold. Start from scratch and see how long it takes for the very designers of this game to give up and admit that a change is needed.

 

[DJAd]

I agree with the above statement. I first started a trial account when I was having problems re-activating my old account. After 2 days of playing I was ready to give up. Luckily I managed to get my old account back up and running and used this. If I had to start over, no way, I'd rather try a new game.

 

[Winker]

So you sugest that the Dev's in their spair time do some work? Its a bit like asking a builder to come home at night and start building walls around his garden for fun. Or a chef to come home after a hot day in the kitchen and just make food for fun.

Just because they do this for a living does not mean they have to do it for entertainment

 

[Tanivar]

Just because they do this for a living does not mean they have to do it for entertainment

I think they are doing it for entertainment, their's, not our's.

 

[Winker]

I think they are doing it for entertainment, their's, not our's.

Sitting in an office all day long staring at a computer screen and churning over code that someone else wrote is not fun for anyone. Trust me i done it for years, then gave up doing it as it just consumes your life with next to no thanks for it.

I find it hard to believe many of you here think/expect these people take their work home with them and forgo a family life

I developed a piece of software for a psychologist called GeneSys, which preformed psychometric tests on people. I did not need any knowledge of psychometric testing or a degree in psychology to write the software. I just needed to know what tasks it was meant to perform and which order to execute them.

 

[MalagAste]

There is a big difference to the DEV's who do read these forums between reading something that is a complaint (genuine) and weeding thru the negative criticism. When all you read is negativity it makes you not want to read it anymore.

So that said if you want to criticize something I suppose you should do so on your own in chat somewhere.... but if you want to help improve the game I guess we will need to learn to offer up a bit of constructive criticism and offer alternatives as well as telling them this is exactly WHY I am not happy about ABC and I feel it could have been better if..... xyz... were done.

Rather than to point blame and jump to conclusions and then cross the line into assumptions... and start just throwing negatives at everything.

If there is something you feel needs fixing and needs to be addressed then certainly ask about it.... but remember and keep in mind that the higher and higher the negativity and stronger complaints you put into your request the less and less likely your going to get it read.

 

[Tanivar]

but remember and keep in mind that the higher and higher the negativity and stronger complaints you put into your request the less and less likely your going to get it read.

That higher and higher negativity and stronger complaints would be taken as a clear sign they have done the wrong thing and are continueing to do the wrong thing, by most Companies. Those companies who wish to survive would change what they are doing and work to make their customers happy so that they will continue to be customers in the future. Not continue to do what makes their customers complain and look for another Company who will supply what they want and then go to that new Company. UO Players want fun, not the aggravation, grinds, irritations, and the other used puppychow that EA has been giving us in place of fun.

EA's UO is driving away paying customers, they are apparently unable to understand that, or unable to adapt and do things to draw in more customers than they are driving away. They should monitor some of the free-shards and learn from the free-shards whats popular. EA's UO does that, perhaps they will survive. If not, then they bleed out to many paying customers and go extinct.

 

[MalagAste]

That higher and higher negativity and stronger complaints would be taken as a clear sign they have done the wrong thing and are continueing to do the wrong thing, by most Companies. Those companies who wish to survive would change what they are doing and work to make their customers happy so that they will continue to be customers in the future. Not continue to do what makes their customers complain and look for another Company who will supply what they want and then go to that new Company. UO Players want fun, not the aggravation, grinds, irritations, and the other used puppychow that EA has been giving us in place of fun.

EA's UO is driving away paying customers, they are apparently unable to understand that, or unable to adapt and do things to draw in more customers than they are driving away. They should monitor some of the free-shards and learn from the free-shards whats popular. EA's UO does that, perhaps they will survive. If not, then they bleed out to many paying customers and go extinct.

The "companies" IE EA Games head honcho's are NOT reading stratics...... the Producers might be...

 

[SpyderBite]

People have been whining about game developers lack of player experience since the days of the MUDs and MOOs.

Your delusional if you seriously believe that these guys spend time coding a game they've never played before.

I'm not a fan of Mythic, but I am very familiar with how things work at EA and SOE. There are prerequisites to becoming a game designer on their teams. They're not hiring punks fresh out of Devry with no real world experience.

Criticize all you want. I'm no stranger to the "Players are the experts" armchair coding arguments.

I don't criticize your dentist for your lousy dental work even though I've got no more experience as an orthodontist than basic brushing and flossing. Even if I have GM'd both with power scrolls.

 

[NBG]

Players are not experts but some of us are software developers \ software designers and it is not hard for some of us to spot design and implementation problems with current UO team's feature development process.

The developers may have played the game, but the real question here is "Does UO developers determine how UO features should be designed and implemented based on their own personal opinion on the direction of the game without considering general player experience?" Even regular players can observe repeating patterns of game features being released on production shards that are designed and implemented without taking such consideration.

Yes, the issue concerning player experience has been around for a long time. Some gaming companies are successful at improving their own design\development processes to minimize impact this issue on the player base. Does UO development team fall into that category? Most players' answer in this case would likely be NO.

 

[Tanivar]

Your delusional if you seriously believe that these guys spend time coding a game they've never played before.

They may have played it and just did so to note various details of operation, nothing more.

They only have to be able to make certain effects happen under certain specific conditions. If this word is entered by the player, have the spell word appear over the players character, a red flickering dot proceed to the target, then have the target effected by the ghost subroutine and have the display change to black & white. I've done such things in Basic & Machine language back in the 80's & 90's. You only have to write code that gives specific outputs after specific inputs. You don't ever have to have experienced it.

It's just basic rocket science, not subspace theory.

 

[blinkdog]

The devs just have no idea what the game is even like. They say things like...

"And then all the players who killed the pirate split 10,000 gold!"
"And then the item disappears after 25 hours of use!"

...and stuff like that, and they honestly think PEOPLE WILL CARE. They're so out of touch they don't realize that everyone is going to go "lol!" and keep farming abyss/champs/peerless/whatever.

 

[Tanivar]

..."And then all the players who killed the pirate split 10,000 gold!"

And the first two cannon broadside on Chessie costs something like 17,000 gold in saltpeter and you have to score like 30 hits to scuttle the pirate ship. 15 x 17,000 = 255,000 gold. So it costs you over a quarter million gold to get 10k gold to divide up, plus the costs of any repairs to your ship.

 

[Tina Small]

Or one of my all-time favorites: A team member telling a player who was unsuccessful in finding spellweaving scrolls for sale on vendors to just have someone inscribe them.

 

[puni666]

There is a big difference to the DEV's who do read these forums between reading something that is a complaint (genuine) and weeding thru the negative criticism. When all you read is negativity it makes you not want to read it anymore.

So that said if you want to criticize something I suppose you should do so on your own in chat somewhere.... but if you want to help improve the game I guess we will need to learn to offer up a bit of constructive criticism and offer alternatives as well as telling them this is exactly WHY I am not happy about ABC and I feel it could have been better if..... xyz... were done.

Rather than to point blame and jump to conclusions and then cross the line into assumptions... and start just throwing negatives at everything.

If there is something you feel needs fixing and needs to be addressed then certainly ask about it.... but remember and keep in mind that the higher and higher the negativity and stronger complaints you put into your request the less and less likely your going to get it read.

That's what the test center forum was for... and look how much they responded to that... Why do you think the members of their dev team jump to something else when they're offered it?... I think this game is just a stepping stone for employees to be able to move on to bigger better games. Or more of a hazing.