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MegaVolt

Join Date 07/2004

"Vocal minority" and noise on the forums

I just listened to the recent IM podcast. The "vocal minority" in the forums is mentioned. This means: People posting stuff again and again while not representing any high percentage of the community.
From the way it is mentioned in the podcast I assume you see this as a bad thing (noise on the forums which is hard to filter) and that you generally disregard this "vocal minority".

This is a good way to handle single player suggestions. If a campaign only appeals to one guy and not to many then there is no point in making one. On the other hand, if many people like it it's probably a great idea.

On the other hand, for multiplayer balance issues disregarding the vocal minority and listening to the majority is absolutely fatal.
The fact is that the big majority of players has no clue of the finer strategly nuances possible in the game. This is the same for every game ever released: Only a small minority really gets into it and only this small minority actually as a clue what they are talking about when suggesting multiplayer changes.

So in listening to the majority in such cases you unbalance the game, you make big mistakes in balancing. It simply does not work like that.

To be able to have a competitive game (which is simply necessary to keep it alive in the long run, see StarCraft) you need to listen to the minority for multiplayer changes, NOT the majority.
I for one believe people like innociv or HuntingX if they suggest stuff and I'd say they generally have a clue what they are talking about. If they say "hey, X is imbalanced!" then it should be looked at and probably changed.
On the other hand, if a tausand noobs without a clue complain about "hey, siege frigs are way too strong" listening to this majority is just bad. I makes the game bad. Please don't do that! If you get noobs complaining just change the AI to not use that strategy on the easy settings or something like that.

In the end it is better for everyone to have a nice balanced game, for noob to pro-gamer.

My point: In "filtering the noise" I'd say it's not at all important if the minority or majority asks something. Just look at who posted it and how well he can play. If he is a good player, no matter if he is the only one asking for a specific change, it should be taken seriously.

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I think you're misinterpreting the meaning

They do read and listen to everyone's ideas. They don't ignore the minority, but what they don't like is when the same few people go into every possible thread and derail it with their opinions.

It's one thing to disagree with a change and create a thread discussing the why and their suggestions for changes, but it's a whole other thing to continuously hijack other threads that may or may not have had anything to do with the subject, and turn it into a huge argument. When this happens, from the same few people, on multiple threads - that's what they mean by "vocal minority", and that's what they don't like because trying to find something substantive through 2-3 pages of different people trashing each other on 5 different threads really is difficult.

In short, if people who strongly disagree make a thread, keep it civil, they'll be heard. If they hijack threads and turn it into derailed personal arguments, chances are they'll get warned, their posts will be deleted, etc - that's the noise, not their actual suggestions for the game

Hopefully that clarifies it a bit

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

I see several problems here:

1. The forum community is itself a vocal minority. The majority of people who buy the game never post here. The vocal minority of the forum community is a small part of a small part of the actual player base.

2. Theorycrafters are often wrong, and severely fatalistic. If you take a look at the 1.0.4 change log thread, there's people predicting doom and gloom, flaming each other over how its going to be impossible to win as Advent. None of them have actually played 1.0.4 yet. Go read the level of discussion in that thread, then come back and tell me that as a developer you'd actually want to read it, let alone take any of the advice.

Speaking as a developer of business software (which isn't entirely the same thing I know), I'd flat out ignore threads filled with that much flaming nonsense. Wading through pages of people arguing like 10 year olds is really not my idea of a productive day. In fact, I suspect the flaming and silly predictions are the noise they're talking about. I really doubt they ignore more intelligent balance discussion.

Back in the early days of Starcraft there was a guy named Zileas. Great player, one of the best at the time. But he had incredibly stupid balance ideas that were centered around how much he hated Mutalisk rushes (since he only played Protoss). His ideas would have crippled the Zerg and enraged *millions* of players who didn't actually have a problem, all because he personally hated Mutalisk rushes.

My point: even good players can come up with terrible solutions to balance problems. Ideas should be debated based on the merit of the idea, not on the win-loss record of the person who came up with it. If one of these great players also has great ideas, the ideas will stand on their own merits.

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Not wanting to listen to the entire podcast (sorry, rushed!), is it:

"the vocal minority IN the forums"
or
"the vocal minority THAT IS the forums"?

There's a huge difference. The former may be referring to the people that post their complaints or suggestions over and over, every chance they get and in every thread they contribute to. Some of them likely will never be satisfied as they pursue their own interpretation of perfection. The latter group would represent all of us, but that can't be right, because Blair wouldn't come here and specifically ask questions that helped him with designing the game if he didn't feel that we had value to add.

From the context, I'd interpret the statement as a simple "you can't please all the people all of the time, no matter how much they 'shout'. "

-- Retro

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Even we can't always agree on things relating to balance. A lot of people keep crying about RA imbalance or subverters, where I feel that RA is the only late game tech worth it, and subverters are for the most part how other support cruisers should be. We don't disagree that both are very good thou and valuable when used.

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The fact is that the big majority of players has no clue of the finer strategly nuances possible in the game. This is the same for every game ever released: Only a small minority really gets into it and only this small minority actually as a clue what they are talking about when suggesting multiplayer changes.

So in listening to the majority in such cases you unbalance the game, you make big mistakes in balancing. It simply does not work like that.

Typical intolerance and closed-minded thinking. You think that because the majority isn't vocal they're clueless. You think that because they aren't vocal they should be ignored. This line of thinking is extremely annoying in the world today and highly detrimental. This line of thinking causes things to be changed due to hysteria, fiction, and some people thinking their opinions are better than everyone else's because they just have to have their way. It disgusts me. "It's my way or the highway," is what this all leads to.

I have to deal with this line of thinking almost every day. Getting the majority to step up and do something is extremely hard to do because it's assumed that a few complainers won't get their way. Then surprise, someone passes a law that makes it mandatory to spay/neuter your pet, makes your reptiles illegal, or takes away your ferrets. Then people are outraged and the majority starts to do something, but by that time it's too late since they don't normally pull their resources together to hire lobbying firms like their opponents did. As usual, the majority gets screwed because of a couple of people complaining. This happens all across the world especially in the USA.

The vocal minority should be mostly ignored. These people can keep an old product going, yes, but they also routinely derail newer products because the majority weren't considered enough during design and balancing. The vocal minority has very little interest in compromising or hearing the other side of the story because they must have things their way--they think they're entitled to it. It makes me sick.

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You think that because they aren't vocal they should be ignored.

Well... being silent generally goes hand-in-hand with being ignored.

Nature of the beast, I'm afraid. You may as well get upset about people waking up when the sun rises.

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Megavolt, what you wrote is not about the minority, or the majority, or anything like that. Yours is simply an argument of "I am right, you are wrong, why? because i says so and i know better than you, now shut up and do what i say."

What Annatar11 said is right, the real problem are the people flaming each other in every thread. If the WHOLE community can have civilized discussions about the balance of the game, it doesn't matter what each player likes or dislikes, a favorable result will be reached in due time. The only "minority" to speak of here, are the people that do not post at all on these forums.

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I see several problems here... ... If one of these great players also has great ideas, the ideas will stand on their own merits.

I have to say, as one of the people who rarely contributes on forums, that this is one of the best posts on this subject i have ever seen! It even made me log in and post

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Because the l33t minority obviously know more than the majority when it comes to multiplayer. They should be the ones listened to, unlike the majority who might just be happy with how things are? Riiight. Listen, if the majority are happy with something the minority should not be pandered to at the expense of the majority. Regardless if it's single player or multiplayer. In fact I bet the ones who are always talking about numbers and values are the minority of online gamers. The majority don't care about statistics to that degree.

In fact, it really says a lot about the person since they insist on "noob" this and "noob" that. Not in a good way either.

Let me spell it out in case it isn't clear why. Out of 100 people let's just for argument's sake say 2 of them are the l33t awesomesauce type - or at least think they are anyway. The other 98 are your "noobs". 98 complain about something "hey we don't like this" Now according to your logic since they are noobs they should be ignored in favor of the 2 l33tsauce ninjas who spend their time looking at spreadsheets. Yes, end result 98 people who end up thinking "Wtf?! we got ignored? Screw this, I'm going to go play something else." and meanwhile all is happy with the remaining two awesome players who know it all. Yes that makes perfect sense...

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

In fact I bet the ones who are always talking about numbers and values are the minority of online gamers. The majority don't care about statistics to that degree.

They are. Thats true in almost every game. The only real exception is games that are designed to be massive number crunching exercises anyway, because those only draw in the type of people likely to post on forums.

The thing to remember is that the forum posters don't form an accurate view of the entire player base. People who post on the forums a lot skew more towards the technically savvy, the hardcore, and the theorycrafting inclined.

MMO forums are the best example of this. Blizzard routinely ignores what the players say they want on the official forums, because the players on the official forums mostly represent hardcore raiders, hardcore PvPers, and not the more casual folks. Unfortunately the casual folks represent the vast majority of the actual set of paying customers.

Another MMO tried to cater to the forum posters. They listened to people whose feedback was based on nostalgia-tinted views of the "good old days" of Everquest, and how WoW ruined the genre by being too "noob friendly." Based on that feedback, we got Vanguard, which was probably the biggest failure in MMO history because it appealed to absolutely nobody outside of the whiniest forum posters.

By all means, they should listen to people who post here. The forum community tends to have a lot of dedicated players who can do analysis and come up with good information. But they can't listen to this group exclusively. This group doesn't represent what the majority wants, and it doesn't represent a group big enough to make a game successful. The game experience of the people who only play single player, or play multiplayer with their friends on a LAN against a computer team matters too, but those viewpoints get totally ignored in the doom and gloom about how "race X can't possibly win!"

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Yes that's a very good point about the single player portion and those who play LAN or with only a friend or so. Unfortunately there is no way to know what proportion of the playerbase play like that. After all it those who mostly like it in single player mode are probably even less likely to be posting on the forum, but they might still be downloading patches and updates. Who knows how the complaints of a few hardcore PvP'ers might be affecting them... and you're right, they probably do get the short end of the stick in this regard.

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This is not an MMORPG. This is a strategy game. There is a HUGE difference.

Yes, in delivering content (as I said: single player campaign stuff or something like that) ignoring the minority is the best way to go. It has to appeal to the majority to sell, there is no way around it.

However, in terms of multiplayer balance exactly the opposite is true. I am not saying forum posters should be able to heavily influence other aspects of the game but balance discussion simply can not be done by anybody else. The good players in any game are usually FAR better then the developers themselves. They are simply the only ones to turn to with balance issues.
And balance issues can very well be dealt with spreadsheets. Damage/armor types say a lot and obvious mistakes (like Illuminator vs LRM) can be seen clearly there.

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This sentiment completely ignores the fact that very frequently, changes made for "competitive" play make things miserable for other players. As a recent example, take a look at World of Warcraft, where Blizzard is trying to balance the game for both competitive player vs. player arenas and casual player vs. environment dungeons. Many recent changes that were good for arena play were horrible for people who spend their time questing and raiding.

The simple fact is, balancing a game to appeal to the minority of players only makes that minority happy. If you're part of that minority, that's a good thing. If you're in the majority, you may or may not notice the changes, but if they do affect you, it's likely to be in a way detrimental to how you play. Competitive and casual players play the game very differently, and focusing on either group to the exclusion of the other is a bad idea.

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Based on that feedback, we got Vanguard, which was probably the biggest failure in MMO history because it appealed to absolutely nobody outside of the whiniest forum posters.

To be fair, I think that flop had just as much to do with being a buggy, unfinished mess that ran reliably on only the most powerful systems as anything you mentioned. The general lack of advertising didn't help much either (I think they put a little too much stock in the word-of-mouth of hardcore forum-goers).

There were a lot of good ideas on that forum but Sigil simply didn't know how to filter them while sticking to their own 'vision'.

As far as balance issues are concerned, I understand the fear that balance changes made with multiplayer in mind will somehow break the single-player game for people but honestly, if people are, indeed, happy with the imbalances as they are and not playing by the numbers, are they really going to be that upset if an ability cooldown or a few damage values change slightly? A decent player can beat the AI on any difficulty with practically any combination of units. A few value tweaks aren't going to change that.

As a recent example, take a look at World of Warcraft, where Blizzard is trying to balance the game for both competitive player vs. player arenas and casual player vs. environment dungeons.

What happens in MMO's doesn't apply to balance discussions in games like this. PvE and PvP are fundamentally different games in World of Warcraft. Players in combat are all bound by more or less the same rules. Monsters in the PvE portion of the game (especially raid dungeons and the like) are capable of breaking many of those rules. In an RTS, however, everyone is playing the same game with the same limitations so it's a lot easier to make changes that won't break one side or the other.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

This is not an MMORPG. This is a strategy game. There is a HUGE difference.Yes, in delivering content (as I said: single player campaign stuff or something like that) ignoring the minority is the best way to go. It has to appeal to the majority to sell, there is no way around it.However, in terms of multiplayer balance exactly the opposite is true. I am not saying forum posters should be able to heavily influence other aspects of the game but balance discussion simply can not be done by anybody else. The good players in any game are usually FAR better then the developers themselves. They are simply the only ones to turn to with balance issues.And balance issues can very well be dealt with spreadsheets. Damage/armor types say a lot and obvious mistakes (like Illuminator vs LRM) can be seen clearly there.

Whats considered balanced by the top tier players may not be balanced at all for beginners or intermediates.

Only listening to the smallest group is the definition of catering to the minority, and its a great way to screw a game up.

When they were balancing Starcraft, Blizzard didn't listen to just what the most competitive players said, and ignored a lot of their advice. The fact is that a lot of their advice was completely wrong (like Zileas and the Mutalisk stuff).

Its no different here. I'm sorry to break this to you, but a good win-loss record doesn't make you an expert in game balance.

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This is not an MMORPG. This is a strategy game. There is a HUGE difference.

Actually no there isn't. The same principle applies to most games and game types and in real life too. Pandering to the "best" players - who really are the best, or just like to think they are - means just that. Pandering to the minority. "Pro" gaming is an even tinier minority...

You could, for example, pander to the whims of the the self professed baseball fanatic hardcore player who thinks he is better than everyone else. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't but by doing so chances are you'll be making the game overall less fun for everyone else. And that's what matters at the end of the day. If it's great and tailored to that very small minority.. well that's great. If you like having a playerbase of a handful of people or so.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

In an RTS, however, everyone is playing the same game with the same limitations so it's a lot easier to make changes that won't break one side or the other.

Changes to multiplayer balance in Warcraft 3 broke the single player campaign so badly that in one patch Blizzard divorced them, effectively creating seperate rules for how the damage types in single player interacted.

Since Sins doesn't have a single player campaign right now, I agree thats less likely. But we're getting one at some point, so the single player folks are a group that Ironclad has to think about when making balance changes.

Nobody is saying to ignore people here (I'm not, anyway). The good, experienced players have a lot of useful information to offer. But the developer has to take their concerns and balance them with a very different set of concerns for the other groups of players.

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I think it's important for the developers to look into the feedback of expert players (whether real or self-professed experts) to see what kind of issues they find with the balance with respect to that type of (expert) game experience. But they definitely need to take into consideration the silent majority and how any of these balance suggestions may affect them (like it or not, the silent majority is the bread and butter of the game company).

That being said, I think if these 'expert' players couch their posts in inflammatory remarks, flame baiting, condescension, and outright childish tones, they should be summarily ignored (which is what, as someone previously mentioned, I think was meant by the 'vocal minority noise').

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The vocal minority often represent the silent majority.

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That being said, I think if these 'expert' players couch their posts in inflammatory remarks, flame baiting, condescension, and outright childish tones, they should be summarily ignored

Fair point. In many cases though, I can see why they get a little annoyed by some of the responses to their concerns. Constantly having to repeat oneself to people who don't understand the proposed problem, how the units involved actually work, or some other important piece of information can get incredibly tiresome, especially when those people are, themselves, of the incredibly condescending 'I don't have a problem with it. LTP' type.

Being constantly berated by the other subset of people who have stated outright that they don't care one bit about multiplayer balance doesn't help either.

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The vocal minority often represent the silent majority.

*represents.

And not true at all. Complaints are much less often kept to one's self than praise.

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In many cases though, I can see why they get a little annoyed by some of the responses to their concerns. Constantly having to repeat oneself to people who don't understand the proposed problem, how the units involved actually work, or some other important piece of information can get incredibly tiresome, especially when those people are, themselves, of the incredibly condescending 'I don't have a problem with it. LTP' type.Being constantly berated by the other subset of people who have stated outright that they don't care one bit about multiplayer balance doesn't help either.

Fair enough, but I moderate on another game board and I can say with certainty that if one responds to flaming with more flaming, things just go downhill very quickly. On the other hand if one ignores a flame, it will often die out and other people posting in the thread will look at the flamer with derision.

Basically, why get into an argument about a point one is making? Make the point and move on (elaborate if someone asks for clarification, of course). If the point has merit, it will be noted.

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I certainly have no problem letting a minority of skilled players who understand the game speak for me. I've seen some recordings from Astax, HuntingX and others and they have always improved my game. I'd certainly hope that anyone who demonstrates a high degree of understanding of the competitive aspects of the game would have their opinion weighted more heavily.

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@ZJBDragon, Annatar11, Tridus & Coelocanth - excellent retorts.

Without touching on ground already covered by you guys. I think the best way to "develop" a title pre and post release is to try to identify the different groups within the community and try to balance out changes that equally address those groups' needs and concerns. When a change fundamentally affects or changes the experience for more then one group then the developer needs to consider the original goal of the title and act accordingly.

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*represents.

And not true at all. Complaints are much less often kept to one's self than praise.

Perhaps you skipped history class to read your English 101 book.

Tyrants, dictators, and status quo have often created a silent MAJORITY. Thank Gog for the vocal minority.

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