Tgt was one the worst designed sets. On one hand you have the mostly underpowered inspire cards of which few saw play. On the other side of the power level you had mysterious challenger which is one of the heaviest tempo swings available and gave secret paladin a coin flip wincon. Not to mention tuskarr totemic which would sometimes just summon a free 3/4 totem golem and win you the game.
Mysterious challenger? Who are they? :)
I will never not be salty that Murloc Warleader got nerfed because Blizz couldn't stop pushing Murloc Pally. Murloc Warlock was much more fun.
Much more fun to say too.
This is really helpful, thanks for sharing.
Players are far from designers, they generally don't offer meaningful insights, though when they express discontent, something might not be right.
Having a somewhat open communication here and in other places does help, and posts like this are important. This is something the majority of developers can't be bothered to do, so I do appreciate your write-up.
Thanks. Your comment also reminds me of the other end of what I tell designers, "Even if a player's proposed solution doesn't make sense, that doesn't mean there's no problem or opportunity here. If a patient tells their doctor, 'my stomach hurts, I think I need a heart transplant' their solution might be non-sensical but... Their stomach still hurts. That's real."
If a player tells you they're bored, then they're bored. You can't quote game design theory to tell them they're not bored.
Professionally I work at a company with around 1k employees where I work in a team creating and maintaining a custom made CMS.
I have a couple of ideas for games I want to make in Unity one day personally.
Sounds awesome. Good luck with your projects. :)
Is there a way to send feedback anonymously? Right know I only know of this subreddit as a method for 'ranting'.
Hmm, anonymously? I suppose you could always make a new account. Directly? You could tag a dev on twitter or send one a message here I suppose.
Hey Dan! This is honestly a really helpful guide - as someone who's a non-dev myself, this is a great perspective on what helps (and what may be more difficult to interpret for feedback)
Wanna say, as a new folk to the community (joined about a month or so ago - you popped in on one of my posts in fact!) I love your participation in the community, and the interaction here. It's really refreshing coming from hearthstone, (communication was way less back some year or two ago in that group... and even then now it's different) and I super appreciate it - cheers!
That's great to hear. Welcome to the game. :)
So do you really have a friend in an MMO dev team or is it just an arbitrary example?
Yep, this is a real example from their career. I've actually heard them give this exact scenario in design interviews to candidates too, as a case study, which is how I first heard the story (we were interviewing someone together).
They're not currently on an MMO team though, this was a story from a few jobs ago.
Great write up, appreciated! And super useful to me as I'm in game design school, setting up feedback forms is pretty hard actually.
On a related topic, where can we give thought out feedback like you just described? Do we continue to do it on the subreddit? The Discord server used to have a great feedback channel but I can't find it anywhere (and I even got some replies from Rubin! I like to think I had a tiny bit of influence in the game lol).
I realize it's probably annoying because out of every like 10 feedbacks only 1 is really useful and the others turn into rants, but I really think it'd be of great value to both you guys and the community to have more of an open channel like this again!
I'm not sure if there's a more-official place, generally reddit is where I read the most. Other devs pay more attention to twitter or other places.
Great luck on your game design schoolin'. I'd suggest when looking for feedback, ask players what moments stood out as particularly exiciting, positive, feel-good in any way. It's very usefuly to build your game around the best parts and replicate success. Some people call this technique in game design 'follow the fun' but it's really a more specific version of a universally applicable technique called 'clone the bright spots'.
The excellent book...
Read moreAbsolutely amazing post here, and I think its really awesome you went into such detail on the topic!
Out of curiosity, is there somewhere where we may read more of your thoughts on games design? Or perhaps more details on how players can learn to help devs in other ways?
Thanks. :)
I've written a good number of posts on game design. If you're a DM or GM for a TTRPG you might like my podcast "The GM's Guide" - it focuses a lot on exploring game design and narrative design through the lens of D&D and similar games. A lot of random stuff can be found on my website danfelder.net, though I only sporadically update it when I get an urge to post something. You might need to dig back a bit to find the juicy game design pieces.
There's also some people that recorded random talks I gave to colleges or local dev groups and posted them on their youtube channels.
What an incredibly insightful post. Thank you for talking with the community. Love this dev team.
It's a pretty great community. :)
Thank you for this!
As a dev myself, I'm gonna use this explanation as well going forward :D
Glad I could help. :)
What are you working on?
That's definitely a good way to look at it. The big issue for me is its hard for me to think of criticisms as symptoms and not ideas. I guess it's rather that I usually don't have any hardline criticisms such as X is broken or Y is boring, but more ideas like "ooh wouldn't it be cool if..."
Would you distinguish the two as an idea vs a critism?
An example would be how I would love it if there were single cards that gave regions a mechanic they don't normally have but in just a single card to open up deck building options such as a freljord lurk card that cared about frostbite....my point being, would an idea like that be feedback or just a creative idea? I guess I could word it as "I feel bored the reksai and pyke usually only work together " but I don't really feel that way as I have a riven reksai deck that is a blast to play.
Sorry about the wall of text. I'm really just curious how devs feel about the line between fan made card ideas and critical feed...
Great question. Negative feedback gets a lot of attention, but frankly positive feedback is even more useful. This isn't because it feels good (though it does) but rather because it lets you do something called 'clone the bright spots'. It's a problem solving philosophy that focuses on identifying what is working and doing more of it, rather than looking for problems to solve. After all, theoretical solutions to problems may work but also might not while something that's already working... Already works.
So focusing on what you like and why, and why you'd like more of it? Great stuff.
When designers pitch ideas, we usually talk about our Design Goals for this reason. Someone randomly recorded a local talk I gave to a game dev group that opens with ...
Read moreSeveral players have asked me about how to write feedback in a way that's maximally useful for devs. I posted a few comments about this, so I figured it'd be more convenient to write up my thoughts in a post. After all, it's something game designers have to do as well, so consider this a chance to use our own techniques against us. :)
The core advice I'd give is, "Describe your experience the way you might explain how you're feeling to a doctor."
A lot of players jump past this and go straight to solutions, such as calling for specific changes in the game. This would be like a patient walking into a doctor's office and saying "Please schedule me for an MRI on my left leg, and prescribe me X medication for 14 days." Even if the patient is 100% right about what should be done, the doc can't know that until they've learned what the patient's symptoms are.
Doctors diagnose patients by matching their symptoms to a list of possible conditions, then go through test...
Read more External link →In my opinion, the option to let players build decks with themes that are spread through many different regions significantly expands design space - plus works well for the flavor of certain champions. More design space means more power to make cool stuff, and with great power comes great responsibility.
Design space issues are often somewhat invisible to players, because you don't get to see all the cards we want to make but can't because they break the game in a specific combination. More options on how to open and contain deckbuilding options are super valuable in letting you play with more cool stuff. Often the most fun way to use a card isn't the best way to use it, so a lot of cool designs are off limits otherwise - so you introduce region limiters and similar deckbuilding restrictions. Being able to break those restrictions in specific contexts that don't create wider problems, like through the runeterran champ concept, is super helpful
66$ per hour is not that huge? Where do you live?
Worth noting that jobs usually have benefits attached, in America the benefits are usually worth about double the salary (insurance, etc) so the freelance rule of thumb is to triple your base hourly rate if you're not getting benefits - just money because you're self-employed. So for things like this you need to cut to 1/3 when comparing against a job.
In America, $45 an hour freelance is like minimum wage with a job that has insurance and other benefits.
Hi there, the cap limit genuinely incentivises spending which is great.
However, the cap limit being exactly 40 means if you need to level a champ to 3 star (40 shards), having 37, 38 or 39 shards from relics means that you'll waste 1-3 shards from dailies. Is it possible to increase to limit to at least 45 or 50?
Otherwise the limit system is decent.
Agreed, I'd like it to work so that you only can't gain shards if you're already at or above the limit. Stops most overflow problems. Even so, players don't know about that safety valve necessarily so it might be good to slightly raise the cap anyway to reduce the anxiety.
Renekton has been showing this to everyone in the office all day. He asked me to type a comment out for him because he's still waiting on his claw-suited ergonomic keyboard.
I will say, a limit slightly higher than 40 (like 50) would be appreciated just because it feels bad saving up for upgrading from a 2>3 star champion knowing that I'll most likely have shards go to waste at the end of that grind unless I happen to have exactly 36/40 shards when i complete the daily.
Yeah we want to avoid the overflow issue, the intention is that if you have 39 fragments or less and gain any fragments you’d keep them but couldn’t gain more until you dropped below again. So what should happen is if you gain 50 fragments in one big chunk while you have 39, you temporarily have 89/40 but can’t gain more until you spend below cap again. I’m not sure whether that functionality is live yet, but it’s something I’ve asked for.
Sure... and what happens once you have all characters maxed? You still can't go past 40 which means any other shard you get is completly wasted this way.
Yes. It's similar to hitting level cap, if you fully max out all current content then you're done with the current progression.
I thought there wasn’t a limit so I didn’t use them
That's why there's a limit. We wanted to basically give players some flexibility on their incoming random fragments - while ensuring they spent them soon after getting them rather than feeling pressured to hoard forever, so this was a way to do that.
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