Want a real feedback? Make an in-game poll.

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Sargoth_CZ#3391 написал:

Is there any good reason NOT to make an in-game poll?

Genuinely can't think of a single one.
I know the devs care and listen to some, constructive feedback.
They want to deliver the game as they see it, but also as much fun for most players. Knowing what most players (or most paying-players) want is a crucial information and no platform can gather objective data on that.

I wouldn't be surprised seeing that 75% of community calmly enjoys something way different that what is screamed at this feedback forum every day :)

yes, they don't have the manpower (or the desire) to make sure actual poll questions are what the community is feeling -- lack of analysis on the "feedback" part of the game and not even being around since 0.3.1 dropped to fix the stupid ritual tablet drop bug...

I agree, polls would be a great idea. To add on to the other person who mentioned gacha games, it is a very solid point. Look at Wuthering Waves, currently praised as being the best one around, because the devs listen to feedback through surveys, and just their fair gacha model. But yeah to say polls wouldn't work is just bs.

I like that idea. It would at least give them a better idea of what the player base thinks, and then the developers can take that into consideration.

My experience with surveys and polls in decision-making stuff is that often people answer them with lackluster information or without understanding the bigger picture.

You can get an objective measurement of the most common opinions, with a well-crafted survey. But common or not, they are still just opinions. Basing game-design decisions on the majority opinion makes about as much sense as basing say, how you fix a car on the majority opinion. A lot of people drive cars, few people know much about how to fix them. From whatever reason, people who drive cars and can't fix them usually don't think they can fix them, but people who play video games seem to commonly think they can also design them.

Yes/no and multichoice questions are also a bit problematic in game design if they aren't extremely specific and explained in detail. The issue is that people answer to them from different viewpoints and when you don't know the actual viewpoint, you miss on the most important bit of knowledge - why they think that something should be done differently. Knowing the why can reveal a better way of doing it differently than what you initially thought.

E.g. you can ask:
"Is energy shield too strong?" and someone will say "no", because they mean that life is too weak, while someone else will say "no", because they feel that despite having high energy shield, they still die too much. Someone will say "yes" because they think it's too strong compared to life, someone will say "yes" because they think it's too easy to be immortal.

You can make the question more specific; "According to our data and internal discussions, energy shield overperforms compared to life. Do you think we should (you can choose multiple options): (a) nerf energy shield (b) buff life (c) decrease monster damage". Then the problem is that some people will not answer because they think option (d), which you didn't have, is actually best. Some people will answer (a) but they would have liked (d). Some people will give a trollish answer. Many people will answer something based on lackluster understanding of the overall design goals and how changes can have many side-effects.

One okay option is to make a free-form survey about suggestions and opinions on a proposed change. In the past times, that was not very doable for big games, because the amount of feedback you got was just too high to go through. But with AI-based summarization and combination, you can get good results automatically without much human involvement, basically just need to go through a few dozen random answers to check that the AI works roughly correctly.

Old School RuneScape has in-game polling where things can only enter the game if 70% of the voters are in favour of it.

I'm not saying GGG should do this, but it has worked out great for the players in OSRS

I think GGG used these people as an excuse to shrink maps because of performance gain on their end. Because there are much more complex and time consuming technical problems exist right now. Who cares map size when your engine can't even load character models in 30 seconds? I cleared half of a map without seeing monsters today. Invisible monsters. Sometimes even the bosses are not being loaded as you can see in this video:

https://youtu.be/8jVO4aQ1Pm0?si=5knFFYTHGoF-13ha

This will be even more relevant than ever, since as usual, the instant gratification part of the playerbase will start crying day 1 that they can't zoom and 1-button click clear entire map :)

Please, make a poll to gather really relevant feedback :)

Quick ingame feedback surveys are nice, not sure why almost nobody is doing it, might be too much effort.

Did play so many EA and betas, the amount of games that had ingame surveys was really low like less than 10%

I was very disappointed to witness that the "leading feedback" was "the 0.01% of us who want to play this game as a trade simulator are more important than the 99.99% of players who want to kill monsters and find gear to kill more monsters."

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Sargoth_CZ#3391 написал:

Forums, Reddit, Streamers or Steam reviews won't give you the objective feedback.

Every active player should have the option in-game to answer your list of questions or take a part in a poll.

You obviously listen to your playerbase. Problem is, certain players tend to be more loud than others. Very often that group is never satisfied with changes, constantly wanting contradicting things. Maps are too big -> Maps are too small.

Main benefits:
- You can pair the answers to account / characters played, giving you more info to which characters tend to give which answers a bit more.

- You can get objective and more broad data sample, proactively asking everyone, not just listening to the loud ones. People also tend to give negative feedback more often than positive by themselves.

- You can pair the answers to the amount of real money spent, seeing what your most loyal supporters want. Or pair it with played time, to see what most active players want.

- This is Early Access, it is okay to make a poll once in a while and gather large feedback sample and evaluate.

--- Basically, my suggestion is to objectify the feedback a bit more, since your patches seem to be affected by some "loud" feedbacks, which does not always end up being healthy for the game.

Thanks :)

This is the way.