Interesting Interview with a Dev from NCSoft

Sebrasis · 08-03-2007, 11:46 AM

Interview can be read at SomethingAwful.com

One of my favorite snippets:

Q: Being on the other side of the fence - how do you feel about the difference between player perception and reality? Players often have a lot of unreasonable expectations and requests, and a lot of the responses are usually "It's not in the tech" or "It's not a priority at this time". Being on the other side, how does that feel? Are players really just that clueless? Do you ever sympathize with them and know it would be a great thing to add, but the "higher ups" don't see eye to eye?
A: Players are clueless sometimes. My favorite example of cluelessness is when players insist we are making some change in the game just because "OMG the developers play in Midgard" or "OMG the developers all play Rogues". That's just ...silly. Yeah, it's a game, yeah, presumably the devs (or at least some of them) are "eating their own dog food" and playing the game they made, but screwing with their business' long term health to make their e-peen three inches bigger? That's just... mindblowing. But MMO message board posters tend to have... um... a lack of perspective sometimes.

And of course the reverse is always true as well. Like I said, the players know a lot more about the game than the developers do. And sometimes there's someone in charge who disagrees and thinks they know more than the players. That is why stupid mistakes happen. Note: the Vision(tm) is only good in moderation.