"Her take on official message boards, for example, is that they’re inherently inefficient. Many-to-one-to-many. You can never get complete feedback from a message board thread, because it’s a self-selecting sample of people who have gotten quite good at jockeying for position on a message board."
while it is true that only a small part of a games population posts on these boards they usually give a good impression on what might be wrong. the hardcore-players you meet on these boards have a very good grasp of what the game "really" offers (just compare to the wow-pvp-rants posted on this very site) instead of what the developers tell players that the game is offering.
so keeping a close eye on the powergamers helps understand where a game does not deliver what it is supposed to.
the toa-desaster in daoc is a good example for that. it was on all boards after a couple of days, rants about bugged encounters were within a few days followed by massive complains about drop-rates, followed by complaints about players getting rolled by others due to overpowered abilities and items.
after reading those posts the mass-exodus of the silent majority was easily predictable. it would have been sanyas task to take a look at the points raised on the boards and very thouroughly check if there were valid arguments to be heard instead of alienating parts of the playerbase.
Re: Sanya quits Mythic
the linked pitch-letter has a good point:
"Her take on official message boards, for example, is that they’re inherently inefficient. Many-to-one-to-many. You can never get complete feedback from a message board thread, because it’s a self-selecting sample of people who have gotten quite good at jockeying for position on a message board."
while it is true that only a small part of a games population posts on these boards they usually give a good impression on what might be wrong. the hardcore-players you meet on these boards have a very good grasp of what the game "really" offers (just compare to the wow-pvp-rants posted on this very site) instead of what the developers tell players that the game is offering.
so keeping a close eye on the powergamers helps understand where a game does not deliver what it is supposed to.
the toa-desaster in daoc is a good example for that. it was on all boards after a couple of days, rants about bugged encounters were within a few days followed by massive complains about drop-rates, followed by complaints about players getting rolled by others due to overpowered abilities and items.
after reading those posts the mass-exodus of the silent majority was easily predictable. it would have been sanyas task to take a look at the points raised on the boards and very thouroughly check if there were valid arguments to be heard instead of alienating parts of the playerbase.