In them answering someone saying “they only care about players’ sentiment when they balance” they responded with “we always confirm the sentiment is backed by data”.
This is absurd; they admitted they START by sentiment; but the players may be occasionally dumb so that’s a very bad starting point to have.
I think you are reaching for something to be outraged about.
Of course this must be backed up by data. That does not mean the players are dumb. Both must go hand in hand.
They receive opinions from players
They check to see if that sentiment is legitimate because something they could have missed has to be addressed or if its just a niche of players complaining for nothing
How is that a bad thing ?
Would you prefer that they always only check on data and never care about the playerbase opinion ?
It’s about the priority. They imply the process always requires the players to provide a sentiment. That’s a dumb design process; the players may say dumb things for a patch cycle; i.e. sentiment might have to be ignored.
Yes, they are making a game where the number 1 goal is that people are having fun so that they keep playing.
Sentiment is correctly the place the devs should be looking at for balance changes.
It doesn’t matter how well balanced the data is if no one is having fun in the environment.
Feelings don’t care about your facts
You incorrectly assume players know how to design a game and have fun.
They have no clue. E.g. 80% of sentiment is whining “I don’t always win!”.
I think they are full of hot air.
I guarantee they had no data to justify any of the nerfs they have given mage lately in Wild.
It was all feelings, and biased ones at that.
Still giving to much credit.
The only data that appears to really be used is frequency.
So we end in:
If it exists and someone don’t like then it must be nerf.
Proof is that many stuff was allowed to sit tier 1 for months with ridiculous winrates while they nerf tier 2 and sometimes even tier 3 decks based on popularity.
And that is one of the dumbest ways to think.
No, I assume people are fully capable of telling whether or not they are having fun.
It’s on the devs to figure out how to modify their game from that feedback.
Just one person’s feelings, I think.
I won’t name them here, but you are absolutely right. Anything they don’t like gets nerfed.
The most likely scenario involved here is that they either have a forum bot/unpaid intern crawling over each new days’ threads and posts that have relevant card names in standard and log each one of those complaint threads/posts and at the end of a cycle like a couple weeks or a month or whatever their cycle time is, and take a sum of each complaint and address each one in order of highest number to lowest. Id assume there would need to be a minimum threshold in order to even make their whiteboard of complaints worth sorting. Along with rules involved to sort out serial posts or threads by the same user, or if its wild, etc. This is the most logical means they are doing the sentiment portion as they go and check their data for a confirmation or not. I doubt they have much input from the forums here vs the reddits and social media. But I would assume this is their process to assess where the pulse of the community is concerning cards that need buffs or nerfs in standard.
I guarantee they aren’t doing any of that.
They have roughly three people that make all the decisions regarding card nerfs.
I say roughly because at the end of the day only one person’s opinion matters.
You are forgetting that the main goal of the game is to make money.
If the people paying for your product don’t like a part of the product, you change said product so they like it.
This happens in practically every end user product.
If you designed something that has a negative impact on your product but does something you intended it to do but ended up unintentionally not being liked, you don’t dig your heels in and ignore your consumer and not change it.
It’s a pretty universal concept.
Another concept is that there is only one person with any real power regarding nerfs. They have final say, and they use it however they see fit.
Anyone who thinks there is some democratic process is mistaken.
i think the biggest embarrassment on their end is using reddit.
I shiver reading this.
Ben Shapiro has ruined this saying.
Yeah… and perfect balance isn’t even how you get a good game.
No one thinks that coin flips, or the card game war is the pinnacle of fun because their balance is perfect.
Balance is an important part of a game, but the player experience is far, FAR more important. The only way you know how your player base is feeling about the game? You look at their feedback/complaints to get a guage of the current sentiments. There’s some other data you can look at, like noticing that people instant concede when they see priest even if they technically had a 50% chance to win like what happened in badlands, but without a strong data marker like that, the direct player feedback is really the only place you can look.
Well, you should be in charge, ‘cause I’ll bet ya’ a nickel they don’t do any research at all, beyond asking two people, who won’t be named, what playrates and winrates are, and then those two make suggestions, then a third nameless person decides what will ultimately be done.
It has been that way since the game was created. The only thing that has changed is who the people are.
Lol no.
While it is completely reasonable for a game developer to prioritize customer sentiment, it is insanely stupid to assume that an internet forum or a subreddit is at all representative of customers overall. It’s called selection bias; you can Google it.
Forumers are less than 1% of players. They don’t represent players and they’re not a large enough population of players to care about. It IS about player feelings, feelings which don’t care about your facts, but it’s about the feelings of the silent 99%, not the whiny 0.1% who come here.
Forums exist because some people feel better after venting. Not because anyone from Blizzard has any intention of listening.
That said, there are situations where, by sheer raw coincidence, opinions that are popular with an internet forum actually are popular with the larger playerbase as a whole.