“People who do and say things on social media are doing so for social interaction, and these interactions are the driving reward behind it. We know that people will repeat opinions they don’t even hold so long as they believe that other people believe they are correct”
“The things you believe are “universal” may very well just be the algorithm working as intended and showing you things you like. Your Twitter feed is not even representative of Twitter as a whole, let alone the player base”
“Once something is being discussed in public, people get social rewards for discussing it and saying the right opinions. A staggering number of people will chime in about games they have never even played and repeat an opinion they believe to be Right, because again, Being Right About Games is what matters”
“Every live service game learns this over time. League of Legends, Overwatch, Apex Legends, Dauntless… we all chased Reddit’s approval at the direction of product managers, then watched our player counts crumble. The stark reality is that only a tiny fraction of ANY player base is on social media, and the ones that provide feedback aren’t a representative sample of the overall player base. Even if you get past this selection bias, people complain after only slightly bad experiences, but an experience generally has to be great in order for someone to leave positive feedback, so you aren’t even getting a representative sample of the opinions of the group you are seeing. Treating what you hear there as a global consensus is a recipe to crater your game, and every game that tries this learns the hard way”
“There was a time where in order to be a PC gamer, you needed to have a good grasp on technology. That time has passed. Most players have no expertise in computers or games. Unfortunately, they tend to believe that they do, and they have no idea that it isn’t true”
“Players are excellent at telling when there’s a problem. They’re useless at knowing how to fix it. Never mistake one for the other.”
“if your solution to basically anything seems simple, you can be assured that every other person on the team has also thought of this, because it is very simple. If you ever find yourself saying “I don’t understand why they don’t just [thing]” then your answer is right there: you don’t understand the problem”
“On every single game that has ever been made, either tech debt, design debt, timing, capitalism, or all of the above has forced developers to make something than they intended”
“You should definitely listen to players but you need to do so with intention, in deliberate ways, and then use their actual in-game behaviors and purchasing behaviors to supplement the things they told you”
“Every player will make suggestions they believe will benefit them, but it’s not their job to find solutions, it’s yours. Your job is to listen to their problems, then identify solutions that benefit the whole system”
“SBMM has been a community sticking point in the COD community for a long time, for a lot of reasons ranging from “content creators want highlight reels” to “people making up conspiracy theories” and finally settling in “no matter what we do to matchmaking, nothing will make it be 2007 again, the community has been playing for 20+ years now”.”
“The goal of SBMM is to make fair matches that either team has a reasonable chance of winning. The community claimed to not want this, so as an experiment, Activision slightly reduced the weight of ‘skill’ as a matchmaking input.”
“Almost immediately, unfair unbalanced one-sided matches went up, people started quitting mid-match way more often, and then ultimately started quitting the game forever significantly more. The data was astoundingly clear that all but the top 10% of players hemorrhaged and quit excessively under these conditions.”
“The issue is, when you tell people this, they all want to think they’re in the top 10%, so it wouldn’t affect them. While this isn’t even true on it’s face for most players, the second order effect is that when players not in the top 10% quit, players who were previously in the top 10% fall out of the top 10%, and then also start quitting. It is a slowly recursive quitting cycle that causes people from 90% of your player base to quit more, until eventually you have no more players.”
“This is exactly what happened when XDefiant launched on the promise of NO skill-based matchmaking.”
“as time passed and the player stories gave way to reality, people started to quit in exactly the manner described by the Activision research, and they slowly bled off players until eventually the game was shut down.”
“No-one goes viral for a nuanced and balanced take that explains everything without a bad guy. They’re never going to try to look for a truth to understand because they’re incentivized not to.”
“In the XDefiant/COD SBMM case we can even have mathematical proof that matching on skill provides a better experience, and that proof can be echoed by every matchmaking study ever done across every studio that ever made a PvP game, but some players will keep believing otherwise because they’ll either outright reject the data because it contradicts something they feel special for knowing, or they’ll argue for it anyway because that’s what high Elo players do, and they want to feel like they’re high Elo.”
“The reality is that you do actually have to listen to all of the data you have available, and that data includes social media, but the important missing step is that all of that data must be viewed IN CONTEXT.”
“With the correct context, every bit of data can tell a true story about your game, but without it, you can take the entire wrong meaning away from it.”
“if there’s ever a conflict between what people say and what they do, believe their actions.”