john_strinlai
5 hours ago
>Ignore feature requests — don't build what users ask for; understand the underlying problem instead
not quite in the same area, but this advice reminds me of blizzard and world of warcraft. for years and years, people requested a "classic" WoW (for non-players, the classic version is an almost bug-for-bug copy of the original 2004-2005 version of the game).
for years and years, the reply from blizzard was "you think you want that, but you dont. trust us, you dont want that."
they eventually caved and launched classic WoW to overwhelming success. some time later, in an interview, ion hazzikostas (the game director) and holly longdale (vice president & executive producer), admitted that they got WoW classic very wrong and that the people "really did know what they want".
anyways, point being that sometimes the person putting in the feature request knows exactly what they want and they have a good idea. while your default mode might be (and perhaps should be) to ignore feature requests, it is worth recognizing that you may be doing so at your own loss. after all, you might not not be able to fully understand every underlying problem of every user of your product -- but you might understand how to code the feature that they asked for.
latexr
4 hours ago
I have been in situations where a user makes a feature request and I don’t think it makes sense, but because they’ve been polite and understanding I decide to take the time to explain exactly why it wouldn’t work, but while doing so I basically rubber duck and come up with solutions to the problems I’m describing (which the user hasn’t foreseen yet). Sometimes that ends with me discovering yet even stronger reasons to not implement the feature, but other times it makes me delete the whole reply and work on it instead because I have worked it out. Sometimes doing so ends up taking less time than writing the full reply. Often the feature ends up being even better than what they originally requested.
In contrast, if a user has been rude, entitled, and high maintenance, I may end up not even trying to reply in the first place because I know they’ll just be combative every step of the way, and giving them what they want just makes them demand more, seldom being appreciative. These tend to be users who want something a very specific way and refuse to understand why the thing they are asking for is profoundly selfish and would shit the interaction for everyone else to satisfy their own desire. So I don’t do it.
This has been a bigger sidetrack than I originally intended. I guess the moral of the story is don’t be a prick to the people you’re asking something from.
shermantanktop
3 hours ago
A variant of the first is the highly imaginative user who keeps coming up with new variations or expansions of their idea. It’s not malicious but it can be exhausting.
Especially if you try to address their core need but their imagination doesn’t extend quite far enough to see how your effort would help, because they love their ideas.
latexr
an hour ago
I would describe those as a variant of the second, not the first. Those imaginative users may be polite, but they’re not understanding. While not rude, they are their own brand of entitled and high maintenance (I like your description of “exhausting”). One major reason I put them in the second category instead of the first is that the result is the same from my side, i.e. I interact with them as little as a I can.
To the first kind, in contrast, I’m happy to answer any question, no matter how silly it may seem, because I can be confident they’ll trust my judgement, that they’ll learn from the interaction, and that the next one will be even better. Just about the only thing I’m sad about regarding those users is that as they grow they start interacting less because they don’t need it as much, as they are able to help themselves.
Now that I think about it, that seems like a good way to differentiate: The good users delight you and demand of you less and less; the bad users drain you and demand of you more and more.
Thews
2 hours ago
I can imagine the kind of person you're describing, and I find the idea of the burn they get from reading this hilarious. They sound innocent and quirky.
hinkley
2 hours ago
Due to the XY problem what they ask for often isn’t what they need. And what they yell about won’t make them happy.
By and large I’ve gotten better feature requests out of looking at patterns of frequently asked questions and turning them into tasks instead of reacting to negative feedback.
thewebguyd
4 hours ago
To be fair on the Blizzard example, I think Blizzard could have also made the player base just as happy by, doing as your quote said, understanding the underlying problem.
It wasn't only a "we want WoW classic bug for bug," it was "the modern game has become so unrecognizable that it's basically WoW 2.0, you ruined it with the modern systems"
Blizzard could have rolled back LFR/LFG, class homogenization, brought back complicated and unique talent trees, remove heirlooms, re-add group guests and world mini-bosses, remove flying, etc. and players likely would have been happy.
Classic will only save them for so long without them making new content, but using classic's systems. So in a way, I think the point still stands, you have to understand what the underlying problem is. Users do generally know what they want, but they don't always know how to ask for it.
lemagedurage
3 hours ago
We shouldn't discount nostalgia. Sometimes an otherwise objectively worse product is better because it reminds people of the past.
bigstrat2003
3 hours ago
But there are people who didn't play WoW back in the day who still love classic, so it can't just be nostalgia. Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos than the later expansions did, and some people prefer that experience.
thewebguyd
3 hours ago
> Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos than the later expansions did, and some people prefer that experience.
Right, and that's my point. When you take away the nostalgia for the content, you reveal what players are asking for, which is a reversion to what is effectively a previous game as modern WoW lost all of what made it a good game, to those players, in the first place.
So yeah, there was definitely a group of players that literally did want Classic WoW, original content and all, but I also feel like Blizzard would have saw success continuing that Classic formula with new content. Blizzard sucked the soul and charm out of WoW. For all intents and purposes, modern WoW is a completely different game.
InitialBP
3 hours ago
Another example is Old School Runescape, who reverted back to an earlier save and has now diverged as an entirely separate game running with older systems as they lost a ton of players with their "Evolution of Combat" update. While nostalgia is definitely a powerful tool, I agree with the previous commenter that the original WoW was a very different game than the modern version and it seems like that is one of the core aspects of what people desired.
hinkley
2 hours ago
I spent some formative years helping people run MUDs and applying my pattern matching brain to the problem of how to make a multiplayer game succeed.
I played WoW precisely because they dodged the first bullet, which is inflationary or deflationary economies caused by each content creator trying to leave their mark by making better gear for their quests than are already available. The whole thing with used equipment only being for to be scrapped guaranteed that low level characters weren’t all carrying the third best helmet in the game.
But they still had the same problem with expansions - the need to change things in order to declare, “I made that”. They wouldn’t have needed classic if they followed your conclusions.
However, without those changes would they have stayed on everyone’s radar as long? Hard to say. Balancing in LoL and friends seems somewhat easier because the mechanics change less frequently. So maybe they would have been fine or maybe they’d be on WoW 2.0 now.
plorkyeran
an hour ago
Other than a brief huge burst of interest at the launch of WoW classic, retail WoW has consistently been significantly larger than Classic. Classic WoW has been a success, but killing the modern game in favor of something more like Classic would have been an astoundingly bad idea.
adampunk
4 hours ago
They knew exactly what they wanted and they knew exactly how to ask for it. That’s the point.
engineers love announcing that nobody but engineers knows what’s important in software; that’s complete and total bollocks. wow classic is a perfect example because it is exactly the sort of thing that the business unit and the engineers and the designers would not want to do. We don’t need to assume that because we have hundreds of Internet posts indicating exactly that. Not only did they not want to do it, but they argued that users didn’t know what they wanted for the sheer fact that making it was not something that was desired by either the business unit or the engineers.
Also, the point is not that classic saves them from making new content. It’s probably the case that the more content they make the more of a value proposition classic appears to be. Is there some new race in the new expansion that’s stupid? OK hop on over to classic.
Kill the part of your brain that makes you assume users are stupid.
jasonlotito
4 hours ago
> Blizzard could have rolled back LFR/LFG, class homogenization, brought back complicated and unique talent trees, remove heirlooms, re-add group guests and world mini-bosses, remove flying, etc. and players likely would have been happy.
100% nope. Classic is what we wanted. All of what you just said is you saying: "you think you want that, but you dont. trust us, you dont want that."
GolfPopper
4 hours ago
Agreed. Current WoW has done some similar things to what the prior poster suggested, and while I personally find the current game better that it was for a while, it remains a very different experience from Classic.
bombcar
2 hours ago
Classic is what we wanted, not that we wouldn't want "other things added in Classic-style" perhaps, but the problem with that is it becomes a whole new ballgame.
Classic WoW wasn't perfect, but it was amazing, and it's NOT all just nostalgia-glasses.
sfink
4 hours ago
Users usually don't know what they really want. But neither do developers or product managers. The "understand the underlying problem" part is hard, and easy to convince yourself of incorrectly.
There are also shallow wants and deeper wants. I don't have the experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, but they justifiably knew they couldn't trust Blizzard not to add anything without messing it up. So the only practical way to satisfy the desire was to just roll back all the way to the classic version.
In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW. But that would be really hard to get right, and distrusting players would fight it (with very good reasons for their suspicion), and you would have a giant mess of different people claiming that they know what to keep and what to discard, except nobody would agree on the same things, etc.
john_strinlai
3 hours ago
>I don't have the experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, [...]
>In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW.
this is exactly what they put a lot of effort into for 5-10 years or so. years! blizzard convinced themselves that the players asking for classic didn't really want classic, they just wanted some of the feeling of classic bolted on to the current game.
but players actually, really, 100% truthfully, no exaggeration, wanted classic WoW. not retail WoW with some classic-feeling bits. they wanted (basically) bug-for-bug classic.
and it worked out great in the end! classic is thriving. retail is thriving. no balancing act between the two player bases needed.
IncandescentGas
3 hours ago
The counter-example, in classic MMO terms, is Ultima Online adding non-PVP game instances in response to player feedback. Without the dramatic threat of PVP conflict at most times, UO was less emotionally engaging. The non-PVP players were bored without the emotional excitement (stress, danger, whatever) of ad hoc PVP. The PVP-focused players were bored when all the reputational mechanics became more or less meaningless in a world only occupied by PKers.
The release of Arc Raiders captured that original UO social dynamic perfectly. Players flooded forums with requests to make PVP optional. In that case, the devs knew better than to listen.
grim_io
3 hours ago
Arc Raiders and other involuntary pvp games will miss out on players like me who will not try it until pvp is optional and voluntary.
Involuntary pvp is the long term death sentence for a game. It punishes new players by making them easy prey for veteran players. Player numbers will fall hard and fast, like every other involuntary pvp game does.
keerthiko
3 hours ago
"I may play your game if you trim away a core appeal factor for the people who already play your game by splitting the active player base" is not that convincing a feature request to a gamedev.
Many live service games that are punishing for new players are still thriving like LoL and DOTA2. Much that punish-factor can be resolved by good matchmaking, putting new players mostly with each other.
thewebguyd
2 hours ago
Plus, not every game needs to appeal to every player, which I think is where games like that eventually have their downfall. WoW was talked about earlier in the thread, and Blizzard continuously trying to make it appeal to other types of players is what kept killing it.
It's OK for a game to exclude entire demographics of players. A PvP first game shouldn't try to force itself to appeal to PvE only players.
grim_io
2 hours ago
I thought the core appeal was the loot that you get from the PvE.
But I'm just an interested outsider, waiting for the crashing player numbers for the devs to come to their senses.
bikelang
2 hours ago
The loot itself is - quite literally - mostly trash. Sometimes you may find a high end weapon (although usually that comes from PvP…) - but typically you’re just bringing stuff back to put in your scrap hoard. The PvP is really the highlight - which is not to say it’s all about fighting to the death (certainly you can do that) but instead making friends with morally ambiguous strangers to fight the biggest robots. They may be a friend, they may be a jerk, they may be YOUR jerk. Sometimes the entire map will come together to take down a gigantic robot - but after that robot dies? It may be every man for himself in a huge firefight - or it might be a big party.
That’s the core draw - and it’s not necessarily for everyone.
bigyabai
2 hours ago
There are much better games for PvE looting, honestly. My recommendation is the STALKER: Anomaly modpacks like EFP and GAMMA, both of which are free downloads.
Trying to make ARC Raiders into a PvE shooter would require every map and enemy to get reworked for low-population gameplay. The game just isn't built for it, and their effort is better invested in catering to the preexisting playerbase.
bena
an hour ago
That's ok. They are also missing out on all the players who won't try it until it's a dating sim. Or a turn-based-rpg. Or a third thing.
Everything doesn't have to be for everyone.
socalgal2
an hour ago
Same. I don't play any PVP. I play co-op. I play co-op vs npcs. If PVP is the only option I'm not playing.
treetalker
5 hours ago
I'm not a WoW player, so perhaps speaking out of turn — but doesn't that example show that users know what extra features they don't want, not extra features they do?
john_strinlai
4 hours ago
that distinction sort of misses the point i was trying to make.
sometimes users want something. that something might be a feature request, or it might be a feature removal. it doesnt really matter for the sake of my point(s):
a) ignoring your users requests can sometimes be a bad choice.
b) you might not necessarily understand every underlying problem that every user has. worse, you might think you understand the problem when you dont.
expanding on b: blizzard thought they understood their player base and the underlying problems of retail WoW. on multiple occasions, ion explicitly said stuff like "you think you want this, but you dont". they kept making changes to retail WoW to try and stop the hemorrhaging of players.
eventually they said "fuck it, we dont know why you want this, but here" (not a verbatim quote). it ended up being very profitable.
bigstrat2003
3 hours ago
Sid Meier has talked about something similar: he likes to tell designers at Firaxis that "feedback is fact". That is, no matter how strongly you (the designer) believe that something is a good design, if the player says "this isn't fun" then that needs to be taken as the gospel truth. The players might not be able to explain why it isn't fun, and you might be able to tweak the design to make it fun, but what you can't do is insist that the design is for the best while players are telling you "no, really, this isn't fun".
Unfortunately Blizzard has had a problem for a long time where they are too stubborn to listen to player feedback about WoW. They will put systems into the game that people hate, and for years they will insist that the system is fine and meets the team's design goals, despite all the people telling them that it sucks and isn't fun. Then, finally, in some future expansion they will go "yeah guys that really did kind of suck" and remove or overhaul the system. They really don't have a culture of listening to player feedback, and it drags their games down.
thewebguyd
3 hours ago
Blizzard did the same exact thing with Diablo 4 too, and D3 also famously sucked at release.
You'd think they would have learned by now, as they repeat the same exact mistakes over and over again. It's like they hate their playerbase.
bigstrat2003
an hour ago
The biggest problem I remember from D3 release was that they listened too much to the "this is way too easy, not hard like D2 was" from the beta feedback. Inferno difficulty was absolutely ridiculous. I know people also were unhappy about the AH, alleging that the item drop rates were lowered to drive people to use the AH, but I don't know whether or not that was true.
hinkley
2 hours ago
What I’ve found is key to UI design is to take this a step farther. Users will often try to explain why it isn’t what they want and they will be wrong about the explanation.
manoDev
4 hours ago
That's reinforcing the author's point: the classic game already existed, users just wanted the same game with some maintenance updates - not a new game with new features.
In this case it was the producers (not the users) that were wrong in wanting to throw away something that already worked.
I believe his point isn't exactly about users not knowing what they want, but instead the tension between evolutionary design vs. "keep piling features".
john_strinlai
4 hours ago
>users just wanted the same game with some maintenance updates - not a new game with new features.
this is similar to the comment by treetalker, so i dont want to just copy/paste my reply to them, but focus on "add" vs. "remove" is sort of beside the point(s) i was trying to make.
Waterluvian
2 hours ago
I think there's possibly more to it. Many, many years passed and the people asking for it changed over time. There's a big difference between, "I wish I could go back 4 years and re-experience it all" and "I wish I could go back 20 years and re-experience it all."
I also wonder if maybe they were generally correct. What percentage of people asking for WoW Classic back in the day actually ended up there?
It's kind of like if my dad encouraged me at 17 to get a minivan because I'm going to want a minivan. And then I'm 35 with kids and I get a minivan and he says, "see? I was always right!"
Another way of reasoning about it is to reframe it as a shared problem: "What should we do with the resources we're committing to WoW?" "Do WoW Classic!" probably was a wrong answer for a long time if the goal is to make the most people happy (and make the most money) rather than make the loudest people happy. This quickly gets into how users (especially tech savvy ones) generally have no clue how things work and have zero sense of the associated cost. WoW was constantly full of people with quick opinions on how hard it should be for a multi-dollar company to do certain things. No appreciation for the mythical man-style difficulties associated with distractions and pivots and whatnot.
HauntingPin
an hour ago
This is such an odd line of argument. They continue to put a lot of resources into classic. Clearly it's paying off for them and there is a large enough demographic that it's financially sensible to do so. They don't run a charity.
bombcar
2 hours ago
There's a decent video of someone playing WoW Classic for the first time - https://youtu.be/NjQgoaagS-E
And it basically came down to "classic WoW was simpler and for new players provided something that modern WoW doesn't/can't really - especially the spontaneous community.
WoW started out as an MMORP, but it's really a massively single player game until you're top level anymore.
The demand for classic wow got much, much stronger after cataclysm, because then you couldn't even "pretend" anymore.
hnfong
an hour ago
The irony of your WoW example is that "retail" WoW basically evolved by Blizzard adding features in response to player feedback where each step when viewed individually seemed reasonable.
And eventually the situation got so "bad" that players realized they actually didn't want any of this (a lot of people have lengthy commentaries on how more in-game friction somehow makes the game better), and then the demand for Classic actually became overwhelming. And even so, I'm not sure Classic consistently has more players than Retail. Probably just two different player bases.
HauntingPin
an hour ago
Does it matter if classic doesn't have as many or more players than retail? Nobody said it would. Just that some players would prefer to play classic and that has certainly held up.
lithobraking
3 hours ago
On this note, I'm seeing this pattern crop up in retail WoW addons. (It's maybe an even more literal interpenetration of the title.) Many of the newer addons are heavy vibe-coded due to last-minute WoW API changes, like ArcUI.
The addons have _so_ many ways to customize displays that their configuration menus look like lovecraftian B2B products with endless lists of fields, sliders, and dropdowns. I hear a lot of complaints from raiders in my guild about how hard it is to put together a decently functional UI. I wonder if these tools are allowing and/or causing devs to more easily feature creep the software that we build.
john_strinlai
3 hours ago
the sudden influx of low quality UI addons has certainly been interesting to watch!
but, i dont think it is really an ai problem in this specific case. the biggest addons in wow have been like that since way before ai was a thing (elvui, weakauras, plater, etc.). they all have a thousand settings.
and, to be honest, in the specific case of WoW, i am totally fine with it. i dont want 10 different addons to change how my UI looks. i want 1 addon to do it. and there is just so much stuff to edit that of course you are going to end up with a thousand settings.
hinkley
2 hours ago
WoW at least figured out sometime around Pandaria or the previous expansion that they needed to launch the game engine changes a month or so before the full release and do beta servers so add on designers had time to adapt to api changes before everyone was trying to make World First achievements happen. It also probably saved their download servers from being slammed.
matthewkayin
5 hours ago
This is a good point, though maybe means that "understanding the underlying problem" requires a degree of humanity.
I think it's fair to say that Blizzard at a certain point went corporate and "lost the plot", so they thought they knew what people wanted, even though they really didn't (don't you guys have phones?).
bheadmaster
5 hours ago
Same with Old School RuneScape.
Jagex thought they knew better than the players what the game should look like, and overhauled the whole game to the point it was unrecognizable. It took a massive loss of paying members to get them to finally release 2007 version of RuneScape back.
Even now, OSRS has double the amount of players that RS3 has. Lol
j_w
2 hours ago
This isn't even true. OSRS was on life support with very few players for years until they started giving it updates.
Turns out the 2007 version of the game was ROUGH for a lot of reasons - they picked the time because, IIRC, it was the most complete backup they had.
OSRS has now had nearly a decade of consistent updates, a large team, and typically 10x the online player count of the "modern" game. The catch is that OSRS is not the 2007 version of the game, it's an alternative update timeline which broke off at the 2007 version of the game.
bheadmaster
an hour ago
That's not quite how I remember it.
But I can't think of a way to verify those numbers, so agree to disagree.
devin
4 hours ago
This reminds me of Origin Systems and Ultima Online. The number of player-run shards over the years promising Classic UO gameplay and the number of player hours spent on them is enormous.
Shank
4 hours ago
I would actually argue that Classic WoW and OSRS are not good examples. These games already existed. For OSRS, the mass cancellation of subscriptions immediately following game updates was a clear wallet vote. Most feature requests aren't asking for the return of something people already liked.
Classic WoW is also not as successful as OSRS, which is why they're exploring Classic+. Even OSRS, which was born on nostalgia, also gets significant new content updates (albeit polled).
sidewndr46
3 hours ago
But they didn't actually build WoW classic. They just built another version of the game. Gameplay wise it is drastically different.
Economics & business wise it is very simple while it is popular: monetization.
HauntingPin
an hour ago
Explain. Classic is nigh identical to the old version in all the ways that matter, primarily gameplay, with fairly minor improvements.
Drastically? What are you talking about?
john_strinlai
2 hours ago
>But they didn't actually build WoW classic. They just built another version of the game. Gameplay wise it is drastically different.
what?
i played vanilla in 2004, and i played classic when it released. your description is extremely inaccurate.
jayd16
4 hours ago
I think a large part of that is that Classic Wow is possibly not in the business interests of the bean counters. If it's classic, you can't sell new expansions, new MTX etc. I don't know how honest Ion was about the actual reasons Classic didn't happen sooner.
Still, by volume, there are thousands of examples of bad ideas and feature requests on the wow forum too.
AberrantJ
5 hours ago
That's also a good case of the difference between a "Yeah, it'd be cool if you added this feature for free" type of feature request vs "I'm actively paying a company making a hack version of what I'd like from you - would you please let me pay you instead - for the love of god, please please please take my money?"
pphysch
3 hours ago
The "underlying problem" here, for Blizzard, is shareholder value, and they understand it well. The decision to dedicate developer resources to re-releasing old content is driven by careful assessment.
In most cases it's probably driven by falling new player acquisition numbers, and so the equation switches to favoring player retention or luring back veteran players.
Every profile of player has their own preferences (some just want to see big boob textures, etc.) but that doesn't mean they are driving product decisions, except in the case that this demographic becomes core to the business model. But it has nothing to do with the particular preference.
JackSlateur
2 hours ago
And the underlying problem is that newer world of warcraft sucks, no ? So when people ask "give us wow classic", what they really want is "give us a nice version of the game"
And the team failed to do that multiple times
Is this wrong ? Probably
john_strinlai
an hour ago
>And the underlying problem is that newer world of warcraft sucks, no ?
no. retail has more players than classic. they just had a massively successful expansion release.
>So when people ask "give us wow classic", what they really want is "give us a nice version of the game"
no, they want classic. you are re-learning what blizzard finally learned. people literally just wanted classic wow.
JackSlateur
an hour ago
So what, they want nostalgy ?
HauntingPin
an hour ago
Classic represents a different design philosophy. One that still appeals today. It has nothing to do with nostalgia. Or games like Project Gorgon wouldn't be so appealing to people.
JackSlateur
5 minutes ago
So we are back to what I said earlier :p
People do not want "classic": people want a "good" game that has some specific characteristics