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crazedrat
272 Posts
On February 02 2016 03:42 Djzapz wrote: I think you're confusing your perceptions with reality. I've read this thread and there's not very much "abstract babble". Well your own statement is abstract babble: "I think you're confusing your perceptions with reality". That really means so much | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On February 02 2016 03:44 crazedrat wrote: Well your own statement is abstract babble: "I think you're confusing your perceptions with reality". That really means so much If you think that's "abstract babble", you probably have an extremely small vocabulary or some sort of cognitive issue. | ||
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crazedrat
272 Posts
Take your post here for another example. So I am going to babble now with you over whether I have a small vocabulary.. No. This is what I'm talking about. It's like this forum gets derailed in abstract bullshit. Actually if you want to go there I think this forum on the whole has some cognitive problems. | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On February 02 2016 03:49 crazedrat wrote: No I just don't masturbate over my vocabulary while saying essentially nothing. You could summarize your entire point in: "I disagree" and nothing would be removed from what you've said. Ok | ||
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Penev
28440 Posts
Haha | ||
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crazedrat
272 Posts
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BronzeKnee
United States5212 Posts
On February 02 2016 01:24 NonY wrote: Yeah, it's funny that the one thing almost everyone is agreeing on here is that DK wrote the wrong things. And yet DK directly communicating with the community is the result of the community's demands. The community wanted this transparency! They wanted DK to take on this extra responsibility! I think it demonstrates how the demands of the community that seem reasonable and helpful are often misguided and unhelpful. If Blizzard ever listens to the community and it doesn't turn out well, then the community will say (1) That's not what we wanted. That's what one stupid minority group wanted and you shouldn't have listened to them and (2) We gave you the right idea but you failed in execution. To me it just seems like a very tricky thing for a video game development team, especially one with an esport, to be involved with the community. Sure, but if you search hard enough you can find pretty much any opinion you want on anything on the internet. The disturbing part to me is that the "mean" comments demotivate David Kim (which again, you'll find no matter how well or poorly SC2 is doing) and his team. That is an atrocious attitude that signals poor leadership and vanity. Mean comments don't demotivate people who do something successful in life. If you study successful people, in most cases, they served to do the opposite. But David Kim's work with SC2 can hardly be considered successful by any objective measure (such as number of players over time, viewership, ect). | ||
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crazedrat
272 Posts
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SC2Toastie
Netherlands5725 Posts
On February 02 2016 03:03 Darkwhite wrote: The community can't just wave a magic wand at David Kim and get their perfect game. But this argument cuts both ways. David Kim can't just whine to his customers and transform them into his ideal fans either, who understand and love his game and praise him as their hero. David Kim is getting a paycheck to be able to cater to the needs of his customers. A lot of whom are probably still in school. How malleable do you expect them to be? And when you think about it, the argument cuts a lot more strongly in the direction of David Kim. Statistically, it's a lot more likely than he and his team is performing below average along some or other axis, than that his customers are a particularly demanding, unreasonable and abusive subset of paying customers in general. And when you think about it, David Kim can at least conceivably be replaced. There is simply no way for Blizzard to abandon their current fanbase and just pick up some ten thousands of new, better behaved customers. No. The solution is for David Kim to take a good, long and hard look in the mirror every morning and repeat to himself ten times: You get the response you deserve. When these people who kept SC:BW alive and kicking for ten years with next to zero support from Blizzard are acting up like this, I have to be doing something wrong. And because I'm a professional with a lot of talented people around me, I'll take responsibility and sort this out. Installing a middle man between yourself and your customers is practically the worst way of going about things. Filtering the negative emotions out of the feedback doesn't refine it, it degrades it, and leaves you with a sugar-coated understanding of the realities. If you don't have enough confidence in what you are dong to handle negative feedback, then that's the real problem, no the feedback. Adding an extra layer of interpretation produces a Chinese whispers effect and leaves everybody frustrated with how their criticism seems to consistently get lost in translation. And your middle man will inevitably jump through hoops to present you with the things you want to hear, because you're his boss, and good news is always more popular than bad news. And that's how you wind up, where David Kim thinks the map pool is better than expected, and the community collectively shakes their heads in disbelief. The fundamental disagreement here is that you are treating negativity as the root cause - as if there's some sort of runaway process that's come out of nowhere, and once you get that in check the rest will fall into place eventually. The other possibility is that the negativity is merely a symptom of something urgently in need of fixing. In that case, you need to confront the negativity head on, rather than locking the doors and hoping it's just some weird phase your customers are going through. Positivity and optimism tails behind a good product, not the other way around. Darkwhite completely dominating this thread. GG sir! | ||
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Tenks
United States3104 Posts
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Nazara
United Kingdom235 Posts
Every single one of those maps has easily secured and close 3rd base (apart from Central Protocol). Bases are really close together. Where are the maps that promote strategic thinking? A harder to secure gold 3rd, or one that is easier to secure, giving you a strategic choice? Or narrow ramps to naturals on 4 player maps, so that you can skip your "normal" 3rd, but grab another natural, secure it, and get a free 4th behind it in the main? But I do not dislike the maps. They are ok. To me, however, it seems strange that a developer/designer of a game would spill his frustration like that. It's normal that the community is frustrated. There is always going to be negativity, even in successful product. I feel sad for them, the whole team, but they are themselves to blame for that. Everyone thought that LotV is going to be the new beginning. They seemed bold in the Beta, at least having the balls to test removal of Macro Boosters (they probably had to leave Injects, as otherwise making more then 2 Queens is pretty useless otherwise). However, the rest of the Beta time was wasted, and other major, bold changes never happened. People knew from day 1 in WoL that Protoss is a badly designed race, that Warp Gate is the source of gimmicky units (weak units -> reliance on abilities and t3) that kill defenders advantage, that Nexus Overcharge and MSC was only another piece of tape to hold Protoss together, that lack of real high ground advantage puts shifts the scale to Real Time more then Strategy, all the great threads like Depth of Micro etc. After all 5 years of applying band-aids to the game, people will be frustrated. It's the core aspects of design that are rotten, and still hurt.You won't heal internal infection with a bit of face cream and make-up. Also, lack of flashy goodies to keep people entertained is just bad in today's market. There is a multitude of already working, animated, textured models in the games 3 campaigns. Yet no skins based on them, which is strange, as it only requires programmer to put them in. Maybe it would take him a day, maybe a week, or maybe a month. But majority of work is already done, and it would enhance user experience. Instead, we need to wait for Nova mission pack, which, going by latest record, is going to be fun to play, but is going to be a piece of garbage in terms of storytelling and logic. Co-Op? Great addition, can be done a lot with it. Community could also contribute to it, if Blizzard hosted a contest for maps. New commanders, even locked by a a paywall of DLC would be great. I would buy Abathur Commander with a voice pack for £7-10. Straight away, just give me your bank details Blizz. However, Co-Op in it's current state is lacking. No end game. Nothing to do with your 15 level Commander. Leveling others? Just a boring grind, as the map and opponent variety is low. Archon? Nothing more then a glorified Micro Macro map from BW with a bit of polish. Maps like this were created before in the Arcade, however (I might be wrong on this one) something was missing from the editor to make it work as it is now. Tournaments? All cool and all, but there are obvious problems here as well. First, you can check your opponents games and his usual build order, allowing you to counter it. I won a tournament this way, just to test it. Not one player deviated from his build. How this passed QA, I have no idea. I would prefer a better reward for winning. And maybe BO3 for the final at the same time. Because as it is now, what is the difference between a tournament, and clicking Play in the menu to find another 1v1? Yes, I whine about things. Plenty of people do. I want more features, more skins, voice packs, I'm willing to pay for them. I want to give Blizzard more money to improve my experience. I'm sure plenty of others think the same way. Instead, I hear "wait till we finish Nova pack". Maybe if Blizzard was still good at writing, I'd be excited. But I'm mortified instead. | ||
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TimeSpiral
United States1010 Posts
Kim is making what some would refer to as mistakes, as a member of leadership charged with directly communicating with the end user. He has specifically mentioned what he considers to be bad (or nuisance) behavior, and once that is done, it almost doesn't matter what he says about it. Spending any amount of time on it could potentially feed and encourage the negative behavior--having the opposite effect on his intent. And it almost certainly changes the tone of the messaging, robbing the positive messaging of its potential efficacy. A tactic David Kim may want to consider: ignore nuisance behavior. That behavior might be bolstered by clingers-on in the community, but it will eventually just die off if no official / meaningful attention is given to it. Revealing the inner disposition of the team was probably a mistake. If the nuisance behavior is getting to a point where it is affecting the team--as Kim alluded to--then a different set of leadership skills could be employed to fortify the team. Which you and I should never know about. Building a perception of the team to the community is a different set of skills, and is basically a political strategy. Here he is attempting to express vulnerability, humanity, and brotherhood -- a mistake with this community, in my humblest opinion. Remember, Kim, your team is at the helm of an incredibly awesome and important game. Own it! It looks as if Kim might be getting nicked by his own double-edge sword, and maybe didn't put on the correct set of armor. He wants transparency. The community wants transparency--which is bullshit. They want control, which they can't reasonably have. Sorry!--so Kim gives it, perhaps without thinking through all the iterations of what comes next. Kim and his team have a goal. They will work towards achieving it. The community can help achieve that goal, but probably can't or won't change the fundamental nature of that goal. Kim may want to consider focusing on the behavior he and his team find useful, and that's it. The members of the community that are behaving in such a way that is being called out, specifically mentioned, even lauded by Kim, will be encouraged to feedback even more, and with even more zeal. This cuts both ways. Cultivating a community such as this is extremely difficult work, but there is gold in here. Gold! Kim's tone is conversational, which is nice, but could probably be edited up a bit : ) Phrasing like: obviously, like I said, like we mentioned, since we're only, you should, as you can see; can be problematic, and in most situations, just cut out completely. Look at this example: David Kim wrote: Obviously, we are seeing some balance issues on this map, so this is a map where we definitely want to focus on making some balance tuning passes. Let’s discuss what specific changes we could make to this map. [...] So as you can see, each map is unique and contributes to the map pool as a whole being an extremely diverse play experience. Map balance, however, is a different thing. Obviously if a map balance has clear problems we should work towards fixing that like we’ve already mentioned in the weekly update. We would like to thank and do a major shoutout to the people out there that are sharing specific solutions that we might be able to implement to make specific maps better. It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon of “Map X just sucks and there’s nothing anyone can ever do about it to make it any better.” There are two major problems with this mindset: It’s just unproductive, and the statement is just not true. We should know better than this especially since we’ve been iterating on and polishing various design problems together as a whole. I will modify them slightly, with some of the principles above implemented: TOP: We are seeing some balance issues on this map, so this is a map we definitely want to tune. Let’s discuss what specific changes we could make to this map. BOTTOM: Each map is unique and contributes to our intent for a diverse play experience. We would like to thank you and do a major shoutout to the people out there that are sharing specific solutions to potential balance issues. We value this feedback and we use it to enhance the maps. Keep it coming, guys. CONCLUSION I really like what Kim is trying to do, but believe me, this sort of community outreach and cultivation is difficult work. I'm sure he has enlisted some help editing and strategizing these notes, but it's my opinion that they could still use some work--mainly style and voice--if he really wants to leverage the genius lurking in the pages of these great forums. Thanks for reading! | ||
NonY
8748 Posts
On February 02 2016 03:03 Darkwhite wrote: The community can't just wave a magic wand at David Kim and get their perfect game. But this argument cuts both ways. David Kim can't just whine to his customers and transform them into his ideal fans either, who understand and love his game and praise him as their hero. David Kim is getting a paycheck to be able to cater to the needs of his customers. A lot of whom are probably still in school. How malleable do you expect them to be? And when you think about it, the argument cuts a lot more strongly in the direction of David Kim. Statistically, it's a lot more likely than he and his team is performing below average along some or other axis, than that his customers are a particularly demanding, unreasonable and abusive subset of paying customers in general. And when you think about it, David Kim can at least conceivably be replaced. There is simply no way for Blizzard to abandon their current fanbase and just pick up some ten thousands of new, better behaved customers. No. The solution is for David Kim to take a good, long and hard look in the mirror every morning and repeat to himself ten times: You get the response you deserve. When these people who kept SC:BW alive and kicking for ten years with next to zero support from Blizzard are acting up like this, I have to be doing something wrong. And because I'm a professional with a lot of talented people around me, I'll take responsibility and sort this out. Installing a middle man between yourself and your customers is practically the worst way of going about things. Filtering the negative emotions out of the feedback doesn't refine it, it degrades it, and leaves you with a sugar-coated understanding of the realities. If you don't have enough confidence in what you are dong to handle negative feedback, then that's the real problem, no the feedback. Adding an extra layer of interpretation produces a Chinese whispers effect and leaves everybody frustrated with how their criticism seems to consistently get lost in translation. And your middle man will inevitably jump through hoops to present you with the things you want to hear, because you're his boss, and good news is always more popular than bad news. And that's how you wind up, where David Kim thinks the map pool is better than expected, and the community collectively shakes their heads in disbelief. The fundamental disagreement here is that you are treating negativity as the root cause - as if there's some sort of runaway process that's come out of nowhere, and once you get that in check the rest will fall into place eventually. The other possibility is that the negativity is merely a symptom of something urgently in need of fixing. In that case, you need to confront the negativity head on, rather than locking the doors and hoping it's just some weird phase your customers are going through. Positivity and optimism tails behind a good product, not the other way around. The feedback Blizzard receives is at the level of quality that can be expected from video game players providing feedback on in the internet. There's nothing especially bad about the current players when the context is considered, but this context is notorious for unproductive and unpalatable communication. To be perfectly clear, I'm not expecting either David Kim or the players to significantly change. I think that it was a mistake for David Kim to ask for more constructive feedback and to mention the demotivation, because even if it does result in better feedback, that's not worth the message it sends. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that one gets the response one deserves. I'm not sure if you just haven't exposed yourself to enough of the absolute chaos and abandonment of reason that occurs on the internet or if you really think there is some logic behind it all. From what I've seen, there are many people giving opinions who do not know enough of the facts to even be speaking about the topic. There are many people who do a very poor job of reporting, letting emotions get in the way of facts and letting their agenda take priority over the facts. People need to be knowledgeable and rational, at a minimum, to evaluate a thing and judge it well. The minimum is not even met. They may write words that are relevant to the issue, but no effort on their part is being made to employ reason to evaluate the thing, much less evaluate it well. There's a lot of unreasonable hate out there. I don't understand why you'd advise respecting it and taking it to heart. If you narrow the feedback from all of it to just the feedback originating from the people responsible for SC:BW, then I think you can start to get somewhere. But first of all, there are people who worked on SC:BW still around at Blizzard during the development of SC2. So the advice from the developers who actually made the game is already there internally -- no external feedback needed. Second of all, the expectations for SC:BW were a lot different. It was cool for it to be a competitive game, but Blizzard went decidedly hands-off and moved on to WC3, and then were pleasantly surprised that it had such longevity. It certainly did suffer from long periods of stale gameplay and imbalance. In our current environment which LotV has to endure, SC:BW would have had many disgruntled fans as well. What merit do the people who kept playing SC:BW have in this case? I think that their general experience with the scene makes their feedback privileged above others but I see nothing in particular that they figured out that would be especially helpful at making LotV a better game. And just like they have advantages, they have disadvantages too. They might want to mimic SC:BW too much instead of letting SC2 be its own game. They might apply reasoning to 2016 that ceased to be relevant a decade ago. Such non-developers are worth being heard, but what did they do to earn the SC2 developers' acceptance of their judgments as truth? We don't need to make arguments about whether filtering out negative emotions from feedback is helpful and we don't need to make assumptions about what negative to positive feedback ratios are ideal. Researchers have been interested in the topic for decades and the picture you paint is simply inaccurate. If you want to debate the research then debate the research but I'm not going to entertain your rhetoric on a scientific issue. As for having no faith that a person could do the job of liaison without being corrupted, I think you're being extreme. I think people have done the job well and I'm sure some people have fallen to the temptations you describe. Inevitable seems extreme. But even if there is some corruption, the goal isn't perfection but rather improvement. It is incredible to think that the way each and every person decides to present their feedback is in the perfect way to maximize its helpfulness to the developers. Much of the feedback is not concise and yet also not specific enough. Putting aside the issue of whether the liaison should keep all the negative emotions in with the critiques, it seems likely that a professional could improve the writing of what these people jot down on forums. Even professional writers benefit from editors. Forum posts are ripe for immense improvements. How can you use David Kim not having a feel for the community's regard of the map pool as an example of a liaison being a bad idea? As far as I can tell, you've taken an actual failure that just happened, which happened while the feedback is being communicated the way you want it, and attributed it to my hypothetical liaison scenario. I don't understand your point. Here is what I think has happened for SC2: For WoL and HotS, Dustin Browder and team wanted too much to create their own game, avoiding making a copy of SC:BW. For LotV, someone at Blizzard decided to give in a bit and make the game more like SC:BW in some ways, or at least stop caring if what's good for SC2 happens to be similar to SC:BW, and also put a much higher value on community feedback. Throughout LotV development, they've listened to the community a ton and it has helped. They've made a better game because of it. But I don't think the process they're using right now is perfect, as this post by DK indicates something is wrong, and so I've suggested it can be improved with a liaison. If negativity is just a symptom of some other cause, why do you pay attention to the negativity (take it head on)? I feel like you got lost in your metaphor because you are supposed to treat the root cause, not the symptoms. If you really believe that when something goes wrong which causes something else to go wrong, you succeed by devoting all of your attention to the second thing, then we have completely different understandings of causality. | ||
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Penev
28440 Posts
On February 02 2016 05:38 TimeSpiral wrote: So I wanted to read what wadded so many panties and whitie-tighties. And frankly, I was underwhelmed, but I will add my $0.02 from a leadership perspective, because there are some interesting dynamics happening here. Kim is making what some would refer to as mistakes, as a member of leadership charged with directly communicating with the end user. He has specifically mentioned what he considers to be bad (or nuisance) behavior, and once that is done, it almost doesn't matter what he says about it. Spending any amount of time on it could potentially feed and encourage the negative behavior--having the opposite effect on his intent. And it almost certainly changes the tone of the messaging, robbing the positive messaging of its potential efficacy. A tactic David Kim may want to consider: ignore nuisance behavior. That behavior might be bolstered by clingers-on in the community, but it will eventually just die off if no official / meaningful attention is given to it. Revealing the inner disposition of the team was probably a mistake. If the nuisance behavior is getting to a point where it is affecting the team--as Kim alluded to--then a different set of leadership skills could be employed to fortify the team. Which you and I should never know about. Building a perception of the team to the community is a different set of skills, and is basically a political strategy. Here he is attempting to express vulnerability, humanity, and brotherhood -- a mistake with this community, in my humblest opinion. Remember, Kim, your team is at the helm of an incredibly awesome and important game. Own it! It looks as if Kim might be getting nicked by his own double-edge sword, and maybe didn't put on the correct set of armor. He wants transparency. The community wants transparency--which is bullshit. They want control, which they can't reasonably have. Sorry!--so Kim gives it, perhaps without thinking through all the iterations of what comes next. Kim and his team have a goal. They will work towards achieving it. The community can help achieve that goal, but probably can't or won't change the fundamental nature of that goal. Kim may want to consider focusing on the behavior he and his team find useful, and that's it. The members of the community that are behaving in such a way that is being called out, specifically mentioned, even lauded by Kim, will be encouraged to feedback even more, and with even more zeal. This cuts both ways. Cultivating a community such as this is extremely difficult work, but there is gold in here. Gold! Kim's tone is conversational, which is nice, but could probably be edited up a bit : ) Phrasing like: obviously, like I said, like we mentioned, since we're only, you should, as you can see; can be problematic, and in most situations, just cut out completely. Look at this example: I will modify them slightly, with some of the principles above implemented: TOP: We are seeing some balance issues on this map, so this is a map we definitely want to tune. Let’s discuss what specific changes we could make to this map. BOTTOM: Each map is unique and contributes to our intent for a diverse play experience. We would like to thank you and do a major shoutout to the people out there that are sharing specific solutions to potential balance issues. We value this feedback and we use it to enhance the maps. Keep it coming, guys. CONCLUSION I really like what Kim is trying to do, but believe me, this sort of community outreach and cultivation is difficult work. I'm sure he has enlisted some help editing and strategizing these notes, but it's my opinion that they could still use some work--mainly style and voice--if he really wants to leverage the genius lurking in the pages of these great forums. Thanks for reading! Can't get much more constructive than this, thanks. You too Nony. This thread delivers, as they say | ||
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fluidrone
France1478 Posts
 nony on topic!On topic: blizzard has done more than activision ever would have done .. given the venture they are on. People need to learn to see things for what they are.. free model etc.. the competitive scene will die if games are bad, that we have to wait for it to be good only makes the victory sweeter. The rts of 2010ies is here and WE can make it great.. or lose it. mapmaker open arm's race hype => here! | ||
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Spyridon
United States997 Posts
On February 02 2016 01:24 NonY wrote: Yeah, it's funny that the one thing almost everyone is agreeing on here is that DK wrote the wrong things. And yet DK directly communicating with the community is the result of the community's demands. The community wanted this transparency! They wanted DK to take on this extra responsibility! I think it demonstrates how the demands of the community that seem reasonable and helpful are often misguided and unhelpful. If Blizzard ever listens to the community and it doesn't turn out well, then the community will say (1) That's not what we wanted. That's what one stupid minority group wanted and you shouldn't have listened to them and (2) We gave you the right idea but you failed in execution. To me it just seems like a very tricky thing for a video game development team, especially one with an esport, to be involved with the community. It is tricky when you try to leave the development in the hands of the community. Which is why I've said in the past (most recently in the design vs balance topic) that one of their main problems is they are handling community interaction and feedback in completely the wrong way. Allowing the community the power to control the direction of the game is destined to fail. The players are not on the same page, have different hopes for the game, etc. Leadership of the direction of the game should still be determined by the lead game designers. They are meant to have clear goals and a clear vision for the future of their game and where they want it to be. Feedback is best used to support these goals and help achieve this vision. Make some changes to the game based around the goals, then give it to the community. Ask for feedback from the community as to if it achieves the intended goal properly, and to report any potential problems, exploits, or unintended use of the new mechanics. If it achieves the goal properly, move forward. That is not how they are using the feedback though. They don't list the long term goals of these changes. Actually, they usually don't even address anything unless there is a problem. And they do short-term fixes (bandaids) to the problem, rather than trying to steer the direction of the game away from the problems. They make changes to the game, and let the community decide if they want to keep them or not. Their reasoning has nothing to do with if the changes to the game achieved the intended purpose. It only goes as far as "if the community doesn't explode, we will keep it". And that's the problem. Regardless of any change in the game, some people will like it, some are not. That alone should not determine the direction of the game! The direction should be set towards the designers vision. And they have no long-term vision, all of their changes are short sighted. Even if the players did not agree with a change that was being made, they would be MUCH less pissed off, if the game had a clear direction. Imagine if players were actually able to say "Well, I don't like the new change they did... but I could see where they are going with it, and in the end things might work out"?? That would be a far different feeling than we have now. We would actually have HOPE for the future! But what hope do we have right now, really? Does anyone really see SC2 doing anything amazing in the future? Do any of us have any idea of the vision the designers have for the game? Is there anything to really reassure us of the direction of the game? It shouldn't be ONLY about what the "community wants". In the end, what the community wants is a GREAT GAME! They might have ideas of what fits their image of a great game, but they do not know how to make changes to every single system of the game to actually make it work how they are imagining! That's what we need designers for, people who specialize in creating a plan on how to get the game to reach the vision, and make all the various ideas for mechanics & all the moving parts work together. Applying random balance updates that the community votes on will never get us there. Whether a change should be added to the game or not should only depend on 2 things: 1) Does the change match the intended vision of the game, and 2) Does the feedback respond that it achieves this purpose properly. This is how software is supposed to be designed, and how feedback is supposed to be used. ------------------------------ Here is a real life example of the design process & feedback usage in a real life situation... At my job I was initially hired to design their software that they wanted to run their ENTIRE online business. When I was hired, they were running 100% out of Excel files, not a real database. I put a database in place, but then it came time to create a listing system that is integrated with all their marketplaces - their website, eBay, Amazon, etc. This led to a major issue - 3 different people were creating listings, and each listing had their own (slightly different) information. In other words, they had 3 products in the database that were all basically the same thing, each on a different marketplace, and 3 different employees were doing the same job on a different market. To solve this problem, one of the largest updates we needed to do to the software was creating this listing system. My design goal was to have it so 1 employee can create a listing through our software, and then the listings are automatically generated for all 3 marketplaces, and all 3 listings are tracked as 1 single product of data in our software. One fully integrated database. Those changes take a very long time to complete, though, and had to be separated in to many steps. Step 1 of the process was for the software to start collecting data - prior to the software, when employees would create listings, they were putting NOTHING in to the database but the product code & stocks. For the software itself to create a listing, it needs all the information such as listing title, product type, product categories, vehicle fitment (the products are auto parts), shipping information, photos, etc etc. Then came time to implement step 1... Which meant entering all the data in to our software. At this point, the software did not yet automatically create the listings, so they had to enter data in to the software IN ADDITION to entering it in to the marketplaces. I knew this would not be well-received at all. Nobody wants to have to do their job twice. So in exchange, I needed to add some features to alleviate the pain. I had it generate the actual HTML to be used in the listing (saving them from having to edit it in a Dreamweaver-like program for each listing). This way, the information could still be entered and saved in our software, and the employee will get something in return. After implementing this, the question of the employees is "Why?". Did it take less time to use this new method? No... Did it take more time? No, not really. It was approximately the same time. But staff had to be re-trained to use this new method. No one really understood the reason for this, and felt it was an extra burden. At this point, I had to reassure them. This is only a first step. We are in a state of transition. They can not see it right now, but simply having all the data in our software is a huge upgrade. Since we have all the information, we can literally automate anything we want. That is not what the employees seen though. The employees seen new places to enter information, for the same amount of time spent, and a few more areas to possibly make a mistake. I explained all this to the listing manager. He understood as well as he could, but did not fully see the big picture at the time. But reluctantly agreed with me to move forward. The employees, again, did not understand this. It seemed like an extra burden to them. Especially considering the software couldn't do what they were used to doing, and I had to take a few days to make a special feature in order for them to do what they wanted. This led to even more growing pains. Listings can be complex on various marketplaces, and they needed to add many things to the listing system that it did not support. About 2-3 months of upgrades was required until the listing system in the software was suitable to do EVERYTHING they needed. Vehicle databases needed to be integrated, search systems for the marketplaces, different template options, etc. Keep in mind, this is being created for employees that have little to no technical knowledge/HTML/CSS history. But during this time, the listing manager and I had many discussions. He knew the future plans. It was his job to get the feedback from the listing employees. He approached me with required updates, as well as ideas that himself and the employees had. He helped me come up with priorities for each update. He let me know if something was working well, or if something didn't cut it. We scrapped some things that didn't work well, remade the interface a few times to make it more basic/elegant. We consulted with the employees for any ideas of features that would speed things up for them. At one point, a month or so in, he came to me and said "After these last few updates, I think I see where you are going with this". Fast forward to when the final version was deployed. The listing employees were amazed when I taught them how to use it. Simply enter the form in our software, click Create. Job Finished. "That's all they have to do? I don't need to log in the website and fill out all the listing information?? Or upload the pics? Or retrieve the listing ID's and add it to the spreadsheets? That saves so much time!" What is the point of this story? It's an example of how design and feedback is intended to work in software! Your design has to have a clear goal & purpose. Your feedback should be directly related to fulfilling that purpose. Sometimes (as expected) the feedback will be VERY NEGATIVE initially. If you do a good job of communicating the vision & goals to the people using the software... They will still be nervous and reluctant. Your changes may straight up seem like a VERY bad idea, and like it doesn't help at all. But as time goes on, if they see the changes all working towards a bigger picture, and they see the software getting closer and closer to reaching the intended goal, you will have happy customers. Now ask yourself, in my example, what would have happened if we did not have clear design goals before performing the updates to the software? If we just looked at what was needed IMMEDIATELY and patched fixes for that? What would have happened if we decided to let the users initial bad feedback control the direction of our software, and just scrapped the new system during the transition before users seen the whole picture? What would have happened if we did not clearly communicate the goals of our changes as they were performed? What would have happened if we did not have the listing manager collecting feedback from the users (not ALL feedback, but feedback that SPECIFICALLY pertained to if it was achieving its goal, and how we could better achieve its goal)? Long-term, would the users have been happier with the end product if we did what they wanted when they first expressed discontent with the new system? Or would they be happier in the end with a better designed final product? This is why I say, Blizzard is handling design and feedback COMPLETELY the wrong way. If they have any clear goals or a vision for SC2 in the future at all, they do not inform the community of it, and their changes do not seem to indicate any specific direction they are moving in. They are accepting feedback in all the wrong places - they are allowing feedback to control the design, rather than allowing feedback to tell the user if the mechanics are supporting the intended design. They have the lead designer doing the community updates, rather than having someone filter the feedback based upon the intended design. They are not giving players any hope for the future, and THAT is the single most important thing when making changes to software. Even though your user base may not be happy at all times, they can still have hope that everything will come together in the future. But in SC2, the hope is all but gone. LotV is where all the players expected everything to come together. They claimed beta was going to go "far longer than any of their other betas". But in the end, it was a lie and the beta was just as long as HotS. They scrapped the changes they worked on for nearly half the beta. They fooled me in to purchasing the game they had in beta because I was actually happy with the direction they were going, and then they completely changed direction, after I was locked in to a preorder since I ordered through Blizzard Store. They did NOT take the old "Blizzard path" where the game will be "ready when it's ready". They sold us short. And now they want us to pay them again before they even finish delivering all that was promised for the LotV package? Not going to happen - Not with my money. The development team has failed on nearly all fronts. Their marketing team and business practices have shown they do not care about the players. Their lead designer has not shown any vision or hopeful future for the game. It has been clear for years that they need to do major changes to the game like they did with D3 in order for it to recover, and have shown no signs of actually caring enough to do them. The game has been slowly dying since WoL. They have even moved their top designers from SC2 on to other games... And their current lead designer straight up admit to giving us inferior design in order to avoid a "negative perception in the community"! The lead designer isn't doing his job of giving us the best design, and negative perception is expected in the community during states of transition! No more of my money for them until they show they actually care about the SC2 product. | ||
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Gwavajuice
France1810 Posts
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/20420494720#1 | ||
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Penev
28440 Posts
On February 02 2016 09:37 Gwavajuice wrote: Dunno where DK found contructive feedback, but it seems maps will have a balance change next week. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/20420494720#1 Thank you everyone for focusing on discussing the specific changes to maps that will help out balance. heh Edit: You should give it it's own thread btw | ||
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Gwavajuice
France1810 Posts
On February 02 2016 09:40 Penev wrote: heh Edit: You should give it it's own thread btw Yeah, I just did. | ||
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Penev
28440 Posts
I like the title  | ||
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