raving-fans
Latest
The Anvil of Crom: Player feedback and "Raving Fans"
A long time ago on a career path far, far away, I served as a director in a small business consulting firm. The project was spun off from a larger, older company, and its aim was to provide better and more personal services to a subset of clients that the parent firm was struggling to connect with. Along with my new assignment, I was handed a copy of the book Raving Fans by our CEO and instructed to commit its principles to memory and to integrate them into my daily workflow (despite the fact that said workflow had little to do with direct client/end-user interaction). How does any of this relate to Age of Conan or The Anvil of Crom? Well, the book is basically the businessman's customer relations Bible, and I was reminded of it earlier in the week when Funcom's Craig "Silirrion" Morrison commented on a Daily Grind that I wrote about game developers and the large gap that often exists between their products and their customers' desires.
The Daily Grind: Should devs prioritize player requests?
A couple of recent threads on Funcom's Age of Conan forums got us to thinking about MMO development priorities and how (or if) they're affected by playerbase desires. Leaving aside the more outlandish requests from the eternally dissatisfied vocal minority that lurks in the shadows of o-boards everywhere, most games feature an intelligent community filled with suggestions that would, on paper at least, expand the game and its playerbase. For whatever reason, though, it's rare that even the smallest requests are acknowledged, let alone implemented. Lacking development experience ourselves, we can only guess that this is because of time constraints, budget constraints, or visions of a game that leave little room for branching out. Ultimately, we're left to wonder if some MMOs wouldn't be better served by heeding a few of the wishes of their more reasonable players. As one poster succinctly stated: We asked for PvP and got Bori. We asked for a Priest of Mitra/Herald of Xotli revamp and got a Ranger/Guardian revamp. We didn't ask for horse racing or graphical engine upgrades (the former was recently implemented in AoC while the latter is currently Funcom's top development priority). For today's Daily Grind, we'd like to know your take on the situation in general. Should MMO devs prioritize customer requests? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
