During the announcement and development of every new game, the gaming community drops in with a lot of propositions and ideas what the game should and shouldn't be like and what and what it should and shouldn't contain.

I am not a professional game developer, but I have some experience due to my years of work with D2X-XL, and I'd like to present my thoughts about this issue.

First of all, from all I've seen, most propositions for game content coming from the game community are completely standard and vanilla and nothing the devs wouldn't know and consider themselves and have greater expertise to judge than the community. There are few ideas that really stand out from the banolity of the rest, and as a dev I would consider only these and see whether they fit into my time and development schedules and the overall concept of the game.

What I have also learned from my time with D2X-XL is that whenever you give a configuration option to the game users, there are some who will find a way to break the program with it - usually because they cannot be bothered to really understand what that option does.

What the community can do is to give the devs a good idea about what the game in its entirety should look and feel like, but even this is only true if there are enough people submitting their ideas to be truly representative.

So if I was a dev I'd make sure to distill what is really useful for my game from the communitie's input and gladly ignore everything else. If I wouldn't, and I would pack my game full with all that people would like to see in it, I would not only very likely not be able to deliver the game in time and in a truly working state, but I would also risk that exactly those people who yelled so loud at me what I should put in the game are the very first to put it down just as loud or even louder whenever any of these features doesn't work as desired or breaks.

There you have it, community. You may not like to hear it, but game development needs a sound foundation, and imvho most of you are not able to provide that.

karx11erx
Descent 1 & 2 for Windows, OS X & Linux
Only a dead troll is a good troll.

I think game developers should use the community to bounce ideas off of occasionally, while taking responses with a grain of salt. Too often nowadays companies are VERY secretive about their design process and have little to no community interaction, beyond simple Forum moderation and the occasional contest (Bethesda, Ubisoft, EA) however there are still some old school devs that like to see what the community thinks and do a good job either implementing the ideas in interesting ways, or at least forming a good relationship with the community through feedback and question and answer sessions (Valve, Blizzard, Tell Tale Games)

I think the community is a very important tool in the developers arsenal, but just like any tool you need to use it in the right situation.

There is a very good reason that companies are "very secretive" about their projects. .. a couple really.

It keeps noise from for-mentioned "community" quiet. Karx is right, the populace on the whole has no idea what balanced game play is. or how to enjoy such a thing. The creation of Descent3 was an excellent example of that.

Another thing is that industrial espionage is a real thing. You don't need your competitors to have access to too much info too early in a project. That's just bad business practice these days. Don't think that there is a lot of honor in amongst businesses where you're vieying for each consumer's dollar. Look at how many games get "leeked" before beta. If the dishonor doesn't exist in upper management, then it will surely be present in the "underlings"; you know, part-time texture artists, outsources modelers (in bigger companies).

Each company has its policy of dealing with outside input and that is their decision depending on how they have constructed their business model.

but very directed questions at a broad topic would work as a sounding board.

i wasn't much impressed with a game called "Rohan" (F2P mmo, the company behind it was too crappy with there cash shop design and ruined the game play) but one thing i did like was late in the open beta the head GM / forum moderator started a thread asking the players what were the three things they wanted most. many of course added in a fourth peeve/desire for the game but gammers neven doo well with direction.

two of th most requested things were a skill reset and cross racial mounts.

two patches latter we all got a skill reset stone at lvl 50 and a bit after i quit playing the game cross racial mounts were in the cash shop. hay, "OC" ..... i got something for ya right here! _|_ (^.^) _|_


"MMO-RPG" = "Mass Market Oriented - Repetitive Profit Genera"
- damned things still svcked me in ...