Yes, they absolutely should… But with a huge *
I help develop a mod for a game, and during my over half a decade of doing this I have received all kinds of feedback. Much of it is complete junk. Absolutely worthless feedback and bad ideas that would ruin the mod for everyone who plays it. Suggestions that are based on a complete misunderstanding of basic game mechanics. Bug reports that amount to “broken plz fix” that cannot be acted on. And a lot of personal insults.
All of this over a free mod I help develop in my spare time.
However… It is important to sift through this feedback and find the good ideas, the thoughtful feedback, the actionable bug reports.
And even the unhelpful feedback is, itself, not actually worthless.
Even the most unhinged, off the wall rant can point to a problem in your game.
I say a saying that I absolutely love and it goes something like this:
“Players are really good at telling you when something is broken, but really bad at explaining what is broken.”
That is so true. So even if someone is making a wild complaint not based at all in reality, maybe there is an underlying reason they are making that complaint. It might not have anything to do with anything they said in their post, but it can still be useful to read it.
As an example, let’s talk about delves. There were a ton of people saying delves are worthless and horrible and should be taken out of the game. Then they’d frequently go on to complain about how hard they are, they are dying all the time, it’s not worth the time to do them, etc.
The problem ended up not being that delves were too easy or too hard, worthless or OP. It was that there were problems with some spec specific tuning and solo vs duo scaling.
There was a point where enemies literally had lower stats if you were with another person than if you were solo.
So while the actual problems with delves were NOT what the players complaining were saying, fixing the underlying problems that lead to those complaints made them a much better experience for everyone.
I bring that up as an example of how while much game feedback and ideas are really bad, that doesn’t mean the devs should ignore them. Rather, it’s on the devs/Community to do the work to figure out what may be causing those players to have a bad experience. And that’s actually a lot of work, because it requires you to have this strange mix of being experienced and knowledgeable in both the game and development side of things.
I’ve worked with devs before, and there can often be a big disconnect between the person doing the actual programming, and the players who are actually playing the game. To the point where I have to basically take feedback from the player, and translate it into “developer speak” so they can understand what the issue is and work on a fix.
It’s exhausting. It’s a lot of work. But for the health of the game, it’s necessary.
