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good piece. it is funny that the example is "why don't they just take the easy win and make titanfall 3" when titanfall 2 pretty famously underperformed

oh god i'm gonna armchair Titanfall 2 suffered in part from its release window, releasing a week after Battlefield 1 and a few weeks before Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It did fairly decent, with the head of Respawn, the late Vince Zampella, remarking that... 1/

... “The game was successful, it sold well, but it didn’t quite sell as well as it should have. Maybe because it was super-crowded, the pricing was aggressive – it was a rough window to launch our game.” There was continuous support for Titanfall 2 after release, and when Apex Legends released... 2/

Starting off with dunking on Tassi is a good start

i try not to be mean to people but he just says things

Tassi needs way more scorn for his invention "game released 2 weeks ago lost 80% of players" blogger clickbait 'articles'. Not any actual noteworthy information given, just give me clicks clicks clicks and farm comments with shitflinging outrage.

I simply say "he writes articles for Forbes, and I make games for a living."

"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." 💯

They also often can't identify the source of the problem, just that there is one

Yeah, I'm definitely reading this. I'm one who does this (with a heart of good-intentioned hopeful suggestions), but I imagine it's annoying. I've realized devs have already thought of anything I could think of, and there's a reason why it's not there. Thanks for sharing this.

thanks for saying so you should definitely share your experience with developers! tell them about it in as much detail as you can it's not your job to come up with a solution to your problems, best thing you can do is arm them to fix it for you

Giving good feedback is also not easy! That's why the internet generally sucks at it. I have to actively work on it too when I give internal feedback to colleagues because it's so tempting to armchair design and suggest the seemingly obvious solution that comes to mind

It helps when you've been on the side of the fence and run into issues where you understand how and why things why you can't "just do that". IMO good feedback focuses on your experience and when you liked and didn't like about the thing, not what you think the think should be instead

The shear number of people online who can "Fix D&D 5e if they did this one simple thing" is astonishing. A lot of people have solutions but are ignorant or incurious about design.

The amounts of "yup" I uttered to myself reading this lmao

You'll get "forced int"? I thought this was more universal than just League...

god this editor sucks

Great article! I will say, as one of those redditor types (horrible, I know), it's just incredibly easy to slip into the "well, how *I* would've solved this thing which makes the game not popular" (I had particularly strong opinions around Payday 3), you just kinda trick yourself~

~into that "problem-solving" state, but it basically becomes an equivalent of trying to solve an equation while not seeing 90% of it. Like, I remember writing feedback posts, where I put all kinds of disclaimers about "not knowing better than the devs" and all that, and still falling into the~

My personal painful experience along these lines was that I spent years going "one day, I'll start building this retro game I've always dreamed about, it'll be amazing", then someone else made actually almost exactly that game, and I played it for 20 minutes and never ever touched it again

See so I actually would like Titanfall 3, but in retrospect, I realize that the Titanfall 3 I desire was made by people who are most likely no longer at Respawn, or otherwise things have changed such that the Titanfall 3 I have in my head is not what they would make today.

This is making me think back on my time with TF2 in recent years, and wondering if sticking with unranked for so long after ranked got added is what caused me to cool off from the game... (also got caught out a little by the FFXIV quote at the end of the article!)

Yeah I often have to remind people that for any given ask, there's a lot of people who want that and a lot of people who explicitly DO NOT want that, and you have to consider and balance that, and almost nobody has the self-awareness to frame it that way. Even us devs fall for that thinking often.

And then as your article gets into, there's also a lot of people who would be like "Yeah! Why haven't we gotten a game based on Glurp Shitto?!" but then they make the Glurp Shitto adventure for $60 and you're like "eh, maybe I'll get it on sale next year" and the studio struggles

A lot of what you're talking about here is (and forgive me if you know this already) is 'stated preference' vs 'revealed preference', a long-studied phenomenon in psychology and behavioural economics. Ie stated preferences (eg polls) are almost always 'wrong' with regards to actual behaviour.

yes, exactly. i try to stay away from using formal UXR terms so it forces the explanation