sharquez wrote: »

Jameliel wrote: »

How about firing whoever is in charge of making these decisions and whichever pions actually agree with him.

Because someone's livelihood should be compromised over you not liking patch notes in a video game. *eyeroll*

In the real world, people are evaluated based on their performance. If they perform too poorly, they are first reprimanded, then potentially demoted, and if the problem persists they are fired. Game devs shouldn't get a pass when they produce objectively bad content or make objectively bad changes. They should be held accountable, the same way I'm held accountable for my job. But they aren't, and here's why:

The problem is that the gaming industry (at least for larger companies) is run by the private sector, but doesn't seem to receive the same scrutiny because their success / failure is only based on subscription numbers / revenue and not how good their work actually is. Their performance metrics, I'm guessing, are almost entirely monetary, with a dash of game reviews thrown in.

If you need an example of this, look at the original ESO. I wasn't around, but I'm told that most of the original dev team was canned because the game wasn't profitable. By all accounts, it was much more balanced and combat / mechanics / etc were better in most regards, but it wasn't profitable so the execs replaced most of the devs with a new team more focused on cosmetics and lowering the difficulty of content and a PvE over PvP mindset. For the record, I agree with some of these sentiments (I mostly PvE, and vanilla content is sometimes boring), but Zenimax went about it entirely the wrong way, and the game has been suffering for it ever since.

So, you can keep rolling out bad / unpopular changes to a game and as long as the casuals flowing in exceeds the disgruntled players leaving, their job is safe. A LOT of these changes don't affect casual play at all, to the point where I doubt any casual has noticed the vast majority of the changes since Morrowind. Most of the reviewers are casual MMO players as well, and only review the content itself that is presented in the latest DLC / major update. They don't stick around long enough to understand any of the under-the-hood changes that have been plaguing us.

TL; DR We can all hate the changes and agree that they're wrong and / or unnecessary, but as long as the game keeps making more money than it did yesterday, nobody's getting fired.