Well, it's been interesting, so here's hoping the thread doesn't get locked!
Ah, Badcritter got there first and made a lot of the same points I was going to make haha, but I'll go ahead and finish my comment anyway because I think it adds to the discussion.
Couldn't that just be because the people who are satisfied with the direction of the game typically aren't going to go through the hassle of making an account on a niche forum simply to state that they're happy with what the devs are doing? How sure are we that the members of this forum, as well as the subreddit, are a true representation of how the community feels as a whole? This forum could be skewed toward people with a negative opinion of the game or the developers, who just came here to voice their frustrations.
The wisdom of the crowds is for sure a neat phenomenon, but I think it's a bit overrated, especially in the context of game development. The wisdom of the crowds tends to work best when there is an actual correct answer to a question, such as, "How many Jelly Beans are in this jar?" It starts to fall apart when it attempts to answer a subjective question, such as, "How should this game be balanced?"
People tend to fall back on their biases when they can't see (or flat out choose to ignore) the broader picture. In this case, these biases would include things like personal playstyle preferences, cynical personality types, past experiences with Early Access, negative feelings about the developers, and herd mentality/peer pressure. Nobody here has full knowledge about how this game works or where it's headed other than the ones who are making it.
Here is a nice concise article about the pitfalls of collective judgement. I'll outline some of the basic points of the article (but it's short and worth a read):
This forum is still a good place for discussion, suggestions, and other things, but I'd hesitate to base any critical balance decisions on the collective consensus of its most prolific commenters (no offense intended, I'm probably one of them). That doesn't mean that players can't provide valuable feedback or make good suggestions; of course they can. It also doesn't mean that the developers can't make mistakes in game design either.
Bonus food for thought from a
couple reddit
posts.
I think that what I've already posted tacitly acknowledges the limitations of player forum consensus - and thus any applications of the wisdom of the crowd principle - but yes, it's worth saying out loud that there should be nothing even like a straight line between player forum consensus and appropriate dev re-balances. And of course, as previously noted, the analogy exists to illustrate, not stand in for the referent situation 1-to-1 (that's how analogies work). That said:
1) When people talk about proposing abstract prescriptions for 'how much active income vs. how much passive income', people are of course basing that on descriptions of behaviors that can in fact be enumerated and, theoretically, measured. That is to say, people are saying, implicitly, 'I have to win X battles per game month and return to cities to sell loot Y times per month, which means that I have to be in battle Z percentage of the game, and, IMO, X, Y, and Z should be lower numbers because they restrict my gameplay options, etc. etc. '. Sure, everyone is thinking of X, Y, and Z anecdotally, and most people are not even offering anecdotal numbers, much less carefully measured totals.. Huge stipulations apply. But still, the issues here are not purely Platonic notions that cannot be enumerated, really; the wisdom of the crowd principle can still have applications w/ caveats.
2) Much of the rest of your response (+
@Badcritter) is about the problems with curating a representative sample out of forum respondents. Again, I would have thought this went without saying, but yes, of course. Thus my closing statements on the last post: Devs should factor it in, but not bend over to it. (In this way, I wonder if your response moves the goal-posts quite a distance from the place where I was aiming.) However, just leaving it there neglects to consider the counter-factual scenario: No forums, no EA player feedback, so, for play experience data, the devs have only their own experiences. If data sample of forum posters is small and less than ideally representative - and I agree, it's definitely those things - a data sample consisting of only the devs would be even smaller and even worse. Really, it's hard to think of a lot of worse data sets in this context than a very small group of people who made the game being assessed in the first place.
3) Finally, quick note on the other point: Forums can tend to shape and polarize collective opinion vs. assemble many different independently developed inputs. Totally agree. For me, this is an even more compelling reasons that the devs should consider forum feedback, but not yield to it in anything like a direct way. Also, this fact requires the art-not-science of trying to discern - from diction, tone, etc. - which posts look like hot responses to the thread title and which ones appear to be responses to other responses. (E.g. In this thread, it looks to me like we got a lot of posts, especially early-mid thread lifecycle, of people coming in to respond directly to the thread title.) Not ideal at all, but has to be considered.
Yeah, in general, there is a real burden on devs (assuming they are interested in EA player feedback) to read and consider player input while also considering all of the caveats and stipulations we've discussed. Not at all an easy job. Between that, and all of the inside information that they have and we don't, we should give them a lot of leeway in our assessments, such as they are. That is to say, I can only reiterate my original point: Devs should not bend over to forum player inputs, but they would be fools not to at least weigh it as one of many factors.
