Blizzard: Out of touch?

On June 13 2011 03:25 theburricane wrote:
Design is hard

Designing stuff is hard. Designing games is hard, designing thermostats is hard, designing web sites is hard. I think all of us will generally agree that this stuff is hard. But many people don’t know why it’s hard.

One of the reasons designing stuff is so hard is because there are no solutions to any problems, at least not in a larger, systemic view.

“But theburricane! What about chat channels at release? That seems like a pretty simple freakin’ thing to include that everybody and their dog wanted!”

Fair enough, if Blizz had included chat channels at release that would have solved the “have chat channels at release problem”. But if they had spent time on chat channels, something else would have had to fall off the radar. Maybe we would have had no Achievements.

“Pffft. Those are unimportant to competitive play.”

Perhaps we would have had no FFA matchmaking.

“Again, how does that affect the serious gamers?”

Maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps we wouldn’t have had the RealID friend system when the game launched.

“You mean facebook integration? Guffaw. Puh-lease.”

But you see the point? Design is not about solving problems, because those solutions will invariably cause problems elsewhere. Design is about making conscious tradeoffs to address the problems that are most impactful, and address them at the appropriate time.

Takeaway 1

I’m not saying “hey man, lay off Blizzard they’re tryin’ real hard here!” They are, but that’s no reason to lay off them. We simply have to sit down and ask, “Why is Blizzard making/not making this change at this time?” I guarantee you the answer is not because they have “bad communication”, are “blinded by their own pride”, or are “[fascinated] with ’meat shield units’.”.


Blizzard’s “bad communication”

It is easy to interpret good user research as bad communication. Research participants will make suggestions, “I think you should do X here”, but when they see the finished/updated product, their suggestions won’t be included. The designers will have implemented something that addresses that problem in a different way, and all the participant can see is “Well this solution doesn’t fix everything mine did! Why didn’t they go with what I had suggested?”

An example: Everybody and their dog says to Blizzard, “You really need to change your maps. Seriously, Steppes of War? Seriously?!” So Blizzard begins to add new maps into their map pool, and look to community feedback as to what maps they would like to see. “GSL maps, of course!” But when we finally get Tal’Darim Altar, it’s got a bunch of destructible rocks and giant chokes and crap.

“That’s not what we suggested! This doesn’t solve the problem. Look at LSPrime, he even gave them reasons why they shouldn’t do what they did. And they still did it. That’s aggravating.” (Of course, what LSPrime was arguing for, the imbalance achieved by a 3rd base with 8 minerals 2 gas, is something that will go unfelt by everyone up to very tippy-top of Masters League. How many of us have honestly thought to ourselves, “The third has 8 minerals?! Great, that means I can run Plexa’s Shock and Awe build more effectively once I take it!”, or something similar?)

However, from Blizzard’s perspective they are making balancing their solution so that it applies positively to every group. To simplify it, “We are giving the ‘competitive’ players larger maps, and we are giving the ‘casual’ players maps that limit their options enough to suggest clear goals.”

Takeaway 2

Think systemically when you encounter a solution different from the one you’ve proposed. Chances are either ‘solves’ the problem in an entirely different way, or it solves problems you didn’t even know existed.


Know your audience

It is very easy for us at teamliquid to labor under the misapprehension that we make up the majority of the SC2 community. Or that we + the reddit community are the majority. Or that we + all the online SC2 communities are the majority of SC2 players. But the truth is if you walked up to every SC2 player individually and said, “My opening build order is 10 depot, 12 rax, 13 gas” more than half would respond, “Why do you build 10 depots? Don’t you just have one SCV building depots the whole game?”

Most SC2 players lack even the basic vocabulary that we as a competitive community have developed as a tool to help us think critically and reflectively about the way we play. Most SC2 players don’t know why Steppes of War was removed, unless they’ve read the Blizzard Situation Report explaining why. They probably had no idea it was blacklisted by thousands of people.

Blizzard has the daunting, grizzling task of designing a product that meets the expectations and needs of an infinitely large and diverse user group. All designs suffer from this requirement to varying extent, but Blizzard in particular has a very polar user base. Bronze league 4v4ers versus Grandmasters 1v1 Rank 1.

Takeaway 3

When Blizzard designs for their broader user base, it feels like they are not listening to their competitive, online communities. Because we live in our dream world where everyone has a finely-crafted opening BO, aggressive yet thoughtful 3rd base timing, and over-arching gameplan, we can completely ignore the huge number of people who enter a game thinking nothing but “I’m going to make a forge right away so I can get a cannon up in case he zergling rushes me.”

When we encounter a decision by Blizzard that impacts us ‘negatively,’ we also need to think about the people who are being affected ‘positively’ and how their experience playing this game is going to change.


Overall takeaway

I have a lot of respect for sluggaslamoo, who took the time to voice the opinions of many community members. Specifically opnions regarding how Blizzard is out of touch with its player base via poor communication and decision making, even though they think they are right next to us, hwaiting all the way. Although I disagree with him whole-heartedly, I agree that the overall experience TL’ers have expressed, the feelings and emotions they have felt, over the past few months is that whatever Blizzard hands them is 50% treasure, 50% trash.

I think this is a mindset problem, however. We need to realize that what we as reflective, competitive gamers define as trash is really treasure for a gigantic number of ‘casual’, one-game-a-day players. They have extremely different needs than we do, and it is something Blizzard owes to everyone who pays them to play their game to provide the best experience possible. They have a duty to systemically support all of their user bases as they continue to design and implement two more expansions.

On June 13 2011 17:03 theburricane wrote:
I agree with part of your. I like the idea of “going back to BW” for someone who doesn’t like SC2, just as I like the idea of someone going back to soccer if they find out they can’t get into basketball. But I agree it’s a really crappy way to defend a burgeoning design, especially when the issue you’re dealing with is the experience of a large group of people who have invested a lot of time, money, and effort into something new.

You’re right about the poll, 39% said destructible rocks suck, while only 11% said they’re great. However, 28% said they think “a changing map makes the game more interesting.” While I think “changing map” is a loaded term, the sentiment behind the answer is positive. The other 21% left gave a neutral answer. So 39% of people don’t like it and 61% are either neutral or like it. Not great, but not wretched either. If the poll appeared on TL I’m sure it would be much more heavily skewed towards the “rocks get out” side of the fence. (I’ve got a lot more problems with how that poll was designed, from a user research perspective, but I think that’s for another discussion.)

Even the idea that BattleNet is the forum of the unwashed masses is a fallacy. The bridge between the ‘casual’ players and those who visit BattleNet regularly is very wide. To be frank, I don’t have the numbers to back this up. I can’t tell you how many players are ‘casual’, how many are ‘semi-casual’, or anything like that. But I can tell you that it is a very regular phenomenon for the majority of users’/players’ experience with a product/game to end with their actual interaction with it.

People who love to play (American) football don’t necessarily contribute to the NFL fan forums. People who love playing games on their PS3s don’t necessarily contribute to the PlayStation community forums. People who love Call of Duty: Black Ops as a series don’t necessarily contribute to the official CoD forums. Hell, most people who play World of WarCraft don’t regularly visit and contribute to the WoW forums.

Therefore it stands to reason that a very large amount of SC2 players will have little to no interaction with even BattleNet, the “dregs” of the SC2 community. And part of supporting those people, from Blizzard’s standpoint at least, is transitioning them from very casual players to people who are invested in the game and the community.

If I were given the task of reverse-engineering Blizzard’s design choices on the matter I would say that the point of adding destructible rocks to these maps isn’t to make maps easier to digest for the lower-end players, it’s to make them question the choices they make in any game. Back when BW started, the idea of expanding was nuts. Like, why would you make a new base before your current base was mined out, wouldn’t that just keep you from building more units now? It was actually a stroke of inspiration that allowed someone to come up with the idea of a “fast expansion.” Things like Xel’Naga watchtowers and destructible rocks are there to facilitate that kind of inspiration in players whose SC2 experience only extends to what they and their bronze level opponents do.

Which brings us to what I believe is your most valid point. “SC2’s longevity is directly tied to the ‘high-level’, the televised games.” But I also believe that it’s tied to another thing: supporting the development of the casual base over the X years it takes for the expansions to come out, not only in terms of unit sales, but also in terms of getting the casual base to transition to consumers of the ‘high-level’, of the televised games. So what we should do is ask, “Do we think Blizzard’s current strategy is supporting both of these goals in the long-term?”

The easy answer is “No, we are seeing detrimental affects to the highest levels of play. Unless competitive play is completely balanced and supported by Blizzard, we shall not rest.” The hard answer is identifying where we’re willing to surrender to the ‘casuals’, and where we have to dig in our heels and demand that the pendulum swings in our direction.