How To Give Development Feedback.

Turelus

I've posted this on the forums many times before but it's always lost in threads that eventually burn out. As this is a time where so much chaos is happening I wanted to make a thread for it and put it in front of everyone again.

This is a direct quote from a developer from another game explaining how he gathers feedback from forums and what's actually helpful in changing his mind. Please if you want to help drive ESO in a better direction and want to give feedback read this over at least once, it's very enlightening.

1. Here's the general guide, in approximate order of importance from my personal perspective

• Be calm and reasonable. Angry posts are harder to process, both because the actually worthwhile bits tend to be broken up by the angry bits, and just because it takes additional effort to filter out the negative vibes while you're trying to extract the useful information.
• "Show your working". The single most useful thing you can do in a post is to explain, in as much detail as possible, why. Simply stating things you believe to be true is somewhat unhelpful, as it's incumbent upon us as developers to be able to explain why we are making changes, and also to filter out things that players are saying because they are true from things that players are saying that they mistakenly believe to be true from things that players are saying that they know are false but hope will sway development decisions anyway. For both of these reasons, an explanation of why you are saying what you are saying is the biggest thing you can do (in combination with the previous point) to get a developer to make changes based on what you're saying. A lot of people seem to be under the misapprehension that simply stating their opinion should be enough for developers to change their mind; this isn't viable for a number of reasons, but the most obvious one is that any given thread will generally have multiple players stating mutually contradictory opinions. We have to be able to pick between them somehow, right?
• Be specific. I love players who actually present numbers rather than just saying "that is too big", because it makes it very clear what they're actually hoping to see, and gives context for what they find reasonable.
• Consider the whole picture. It's very easy to express an opinion about things that affect you directly. It's much rarer for people to consider how the changes they're suggesting affect other players, particularly those of different playstyles or levels of experience. As developers, we have to consider everyone, and that often involves tradeoffs. Your common-or-garden post says "this is what *I* want", and we have to then synthesize all those different points and figure out how to balance competing interests. Showing at least an awareness of this, and better still actually accounting for it in your working, is a good way to make a post more useful to a developer.
• Have a good, short opening paragraph. If your post starts off badly, I will jump through it quickly looking for anything that sticks out, because I have lots of posts to read and other work to do. If you catch my attention with your opening, I will read it carefully. Note here that I'm not saying it has to make an effort to be catching or provocative, just that a clear, well-written paragraph which meets all the other points in this list suggests that it's a post that's probably worth reading slowly.
• Be novel. Posts bringing up things that haven't previously been mentioned in the thread are generally more useful than posts repeating the same thing that's been mentioned twenty times. I want to properly clarify this: I'm *not* saying not to repeat points, or even that doing so isn't useful. Seeing the same thing brought up multiple times is a good indicator that there is a broad concern about a particular thing. It's not as powerful as a single post laying out succinctly and convincingly why a particular thing is problematic, but it's still useful information!
• Be nice to read. If you can be gently witty, or format and punctuate your post so it's easy to read, that will always score bonus points.

2. Nothing in this thread has been outright ignored. With fifty pages I'm happy to hold up my hand and say that some posts I skim-read because, as above, I have other work to do too, but I have read every post for some definition of "read". I have not replied to every post raising an important point, for a variety of reasons:

• In many cases a reply doesn't really add anything to the discussion
• In some cases that you are considering important posts, I probably simply didn't find the points they were making particularly compelling. YMMV, obviously
• I can't reply to everything, both because it would take forever and because it would destroy the rhythm of the thread.
• What a developer does and doesn't reply to tends to, over time, influence the character of the forum. I am less likely to respond to a post which makes good points in a bad way, because while good points are good, bad presentation is bad. Conversely, people making really good posts I will go out of my way to reply to, because I would like to see more posts like that.

3. This is kind of repeating the first question, at least in the case where I take it seriously rather than snarkily. I'm going to use this opportunity then to say why I replied to Shoogie's post:

• He starts off by giving a suggested rank for Titans. I am immediately reading this post carefully. There have been a lot of posts saying "caps take too long to research". Here is somebody actually proposing a solution. Excellent. (Yes, I note that he said the same thing earlier, I guess I didn't catch it the first time round? Sloppy reading on my part, sorry.)
• Good paragraph length, well written, clear, not angry. Good.
• Shows his working for what factors he's taking into account, and covers some edge cases (Hyasyoda lab). Lovely.
• Considers that his suggested number might be too low. I love posts which consider the possibility that they might be wrong, it shows great awareness of how balance actually works and suggests that the author is carefully considering their suggestion.
• Frames things in terms of typical player reactions, this is both a sign that the author is thinking about things from a good perspective, and also allows us to figure out where they're coming from and what other assumptions are being made.
• Thinks about new players in a way that's not transparently just about advancing their own interests. Rare as hens' teeth.
• Writes out a *** table, I love this, saves me doing math
• Thinking about interesting decisions, which suggests a decent understanding of game design principles.
• Considers the impact of other changes happening at the same time, which has been surprisingly uncommon in in the discussion of industry changes as a whole. (Also doubles down on this in the post about job costs a few posts further down.)
• Wraps up with some other suggestions for changes, and also mentions things he thinks seem reasonable as-is.

You'll note in my response that I don't agree with everything suggested, specifically with regard to T1 ammo. But the post as a whole is an excellent post that hits a whole lot of "good post" checkboxes at once, and as a result is really damn useful to me as a developer. In the absence of anyone else's input, and given that such things are within certain bounds largely arbitrary anyway (ie, there's no obvious compelling reason to home in on any specific number from a balance perspective), I may just end up kicking Titan rank to 600 simply because Shoogie suggested it and his reasoning looks sane.

Sausage

I think you forget the most important one, tons of people just expect they do changes instantly, when they want them, thats not how this works. The reality is devs is doing stuff what we discussed at launch, well maybe now we are like 4 month or so from launch.

Man, I just dont get it why they didnt do those Road Aheads, it would be so easy, too easy?

Demion

As I know where this comes from I highly recommend alot of players takes time to read this and jump them-self on to Player Test Server and test the this out and give feedback instead of forum rant that brings noting to the table.

Magdalina

Have you ever seen a dev or anyone respond to a reasonable, well thought out, constructive and popular suggestion on this forum? Because I have not.

People freaking out won't help anything(actually it might. They have been known to change their decisions due to massive community outcries before), but thing is if there's one thing we've learnt about ZOS, it's that constructive feedback won't help anything either.

The quote you provided seems to imply there was actually a dev, or someone of the sorts, replying in a thread. He even mentioned being unable to respond to all the posts kind of implying he responded to several at least. A dev posting in a thread several times in order to discuss constructive feedback. That sounds like such an amazing thing we'll never see here, kind of like seeing a unicorn irl.

Demion

As the title suggest of OPs post the first part of the quote is what is interested for players, the rest is very much as you can see a Dev for a game responding and to what was a player outcry. As no I haven't seen a Dev communicating much in ESO which I feel in disfavour for ZoS in general.

ZoS could do much more to communicate with the playerbase but so could we, I confident that they both read the forum and notes from us and also watch certain angry tantrum Twitch gamers...

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

lunalitetempler

Rage on twitter?

Nelson_Rebel

There have been multiple posts that meet many of these requirements. Alcast in particular being one of the best examples. (note I do not agree with most of what alcast says but he presents things properly regardless of his notions)


I've yet to see many at all get any sort of a acknowledgement. Maybe 1

Turelus

Magdalina wrote: »

Have you ever seen a dev or anyone respond to a reasonable, well thought out, constructive and popular suggestion on this forum? Because I have not.

People freaking out won't help anything(actually it might. They have been known to change their decisions due to massive community outcries before), but thing is if there's one thing we've learnt about ZOS, it's that constructive feedback won't help anything either.

The quote you provided seems to imply there was actually a dev, or someone of the sorts, replying in a thread. He even mentioned being unable to respond to all the posts kind of implying he responded to several at least. A dev posting in a thread several times in order to discuss constructive feedback. That sounds like such an amazing thing we'll never see here, kind of like seeing a unicorn irl.

I fully agree this is something ZOS is bad at, and something I have repeatedly asked them to improve on.

However I don't feel that makes the entire of the above irrelevant to these forums and our feedback. As Demion said the first part of this is really something which everyone who wants to deliver feedback should try and grasp.

It's fine to be upset or have an opinion about a change but if you hope to sway a dev you need to give some punch to your argument.

PelinalWhitestrake wrote: »

Instructions not clear. Lusty Argonian Maid stuck in 69.

Oh my...

lunalitetempler wrote: »

Rage on twitter?

I am, but mostly about politics. Yay general elections.

Nelson_Rebel wrote: »

There have been multiple posts that meet many of these requirements. Alcast in particular being one of the best examples. (note I do not agree with most of what alcast says but he presents things properly regardless of his notions)


I've yet to see many at all get any sort of a acknowledgement. Maybe 1

Generally ZOS don't acknowledge things until ESO Live or the next phase of notes. Could also be happening on the beta forums where we can't see.

Danikat

That's a really good list!

I'd also add: Never assume anyone else shares your experience or opinions.

Always explain in full and if you're using examples from other games name the game in full (contrary to popular belief that is allowed on the forum) and explain how their system works, why you think it's good and how you think it could be incorporated into ESO.

For example I could make a topic like this:
Title: Questing fix
Message: We all know the problems with questing. Why don't ZOS copy GW2's events systems? It would be so much better!

Regardless of whether it actually is a good idea or not (for the record I don't think it is) there are 4 major problems with this:

1) We don't all know the problems with questing. Everyone has different experiences and opinions and what one person considers a problem may be another person's favourite thing about the game. In this case for example some people use add-ons to make it more obvious what choices do so they can click through the dialogue as soon as it comes up and end the conversation as soon as possible, others use add-ons to make the dialogue appear gradually so they don't read ahead of the NPC speaking and to hide the choices until they're finished so they make sure they hear it all.

2) Many people won't have a clue what a GW2 is. You can probably tell from the context that it's another game, and you could google it, but it'd be much better if I'd written out Guild Wars 2 in full to start with.

3) Even if you know what the game is you may not have played it and may have never heard of this "event" system. Do I mean we should have more festivals like New Life and the Jester's festival? Is it something to do with PvP tournaments? Are these player run events? Unless you've played GW2 you probably won't know it's referring to their 'dynamic events' where quests start, progress and finish with or without players participation. If someone tells you a town is under attack then it's under attack right now and if you leave and come back to it later it may be destroyed or someone else may have saved it. You don't need to speak to anyone to start, you just jump in when you see stuff going on.

4) Obviously I am familiar with this system, and I'm familiar with quests in ESO too, but I'd be very hard pressed to say which I prefer so it's not at all clear to me why one would be better than the other and the post doesn't explain it at all.

(There's also a 5th problem of presuming to speak for other players who may in fact completely disagree with your view, but I actually see that as less of an issue because they'll be quick to tell you if they disagree!)

Cadbury

In a nutshell:

"You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar"