It’s pretty easy to understand. Most people don’t take their games all that seriously and have limited play time. The end. And by play time, I’m including reading guides and forums time. Most people are not reading anything. They load the game and have fun with it. That’s it. This is standard typical mind fallacy…
I’ve been saying this last year. It becomes pretty obvious once you hear enough stats from enough companies. The stats are so insane you can give them to people and they’ll refuse to believe it. WoW, Destiny, it’s all the same. Only the elite speaking, mostly non-elite playing, confused feedback, especially for companies that forget about the fact that most of their playerbase is silent.
That’s why I really don’t give that much credence to feedback. There’s obviously value in that, but the game designers need their own systems and a head on their shoulders to know how to design a game without needing players to tell them what they want, because players will come back with very biased and conflicting feedback, and a lot of the time it’s not the right players.
That being said, one should be careful with discounting the hardcore* section of the game or the hardcore playerbase as useless. What’s important to note is that the hardcore portion of the game serves different purposes for different groups of people: the hardcore tend to see hardcore content as their core game and they plan their play experience around it. The non-hardcore see the hardcore content as VIP content they hope to get to or see one day but do not necessarily expect. It’s also often the region relative to which people will try to balance their playstyle.
There’s a decent amount of value to the latter for the average player. I will most probably not see Ultimate anytime soon: I don’t play a lot, I don’t understand the game very well, and I play in the Hardcore mode. Furthermore, the builds I roll with are often not very optimized on purpose. I will probably be spending most of my time in Elite, but nonetheless there’s a lot of value in having that Ultimate difficulty available as the final potential area I may one day end up in, especially if I luck out and build something strong. Of course, I’m not too representative of the average group, either, but most people don’t want to play a game that ends nowhere. On the other hand, most people also do not need a super evolved endgame, either.
What I wish people would do is give more space for non-hardcore feedback. We have a thread right now from a guy complaining about being one shot by some boss. Everyone keeps trying to give him advice and figure out his build. Talk about missing the point. It’s very hard to get proper non-hardcore feedback on a forum full of hardcore players who discount and disparage non-hardcore experiences.
The real trap here is if developers take the completely long-term approach and only balance the beginning or the end. I.e., if they make the intermediate difficulties clunky or awkward due to not paying attention to them. Players don’t want to have to suffer while looking forward to Ultimate. You do want to make sure your Normal/Veteran/Elite feels good. And you don’t want to kick people off the curve too much along the way.
A lot of players are lost in the beginning more than the end. The hardcore players will quit because of the end, but other players tend to quit because some small thing in the beginning threw them off. On the other hand, sometimes you do not want certain kinds of players in your game, so you may want to do such things on purpose.
For some reason, whenever companies focus too much on business sense, games tend to deteriorate. After all, games are works of art, there’s only so much business sense you can interject into them. At that point, you’re making a very different game for a very different audience, even if it’s very profitable. I generally believe great games developers ultimately make games for themselves, and the best games will not be profitable as the more bland and targeted games.
*hardcore used to denote highly devoted and involved level of play, not to be confused with permadeath mode.
