I’ve been playing games for a long time now, Starting out on my dad’s apple IIE, moving to a friends Tandy 1000, and eventually owning my own 086. During this time video game creators, who could and would do literally anything they wanted in the game worlds, ruled with iron fists. Though they’d often listen to their fans and implement changes that made their games easier to use, or often just easier.

When MMo’s where released – Everquest, Ultima Online and Asheron’s call (The Big three) These games became even more evolved, more difficult per say; and in some area’s more imbalanced.

My point here, is I question game developers who’ve undertaken the moral stand of:

Speak no evil, Hear No evil, See no Evil – There for Evil doesn’t exist.

This can be directly translated in the games industry to:
Speak of no issues, Hear of no issues, See no issues – The game is perfect

If there’s no one to voice the problem, Point it out, or make an issue about it, the game must be perfect; therefore they can keep on punching out games and expansions, expecting to make money – In their perfect world.

Take EverQuest for example; Players had to wade through years of developers stating working as intended. I.e. Snakes can kick, even in high fantasy. All-right it’s a lame example, but I needed to use something.

In the interests of players, why do developers ignore some obvious issues in favor of adding glamour to the game? A real example would be some glaring issues that will erupt in the near future with some racial abilities, in a game I won’t mention at this particular time.

Some developers have community representatives and moderators that think that if they delete, Mute and ban those who speak up, that they’ll take care of the problem – By removing negativity from the boards all must be well.

It’s interesting to see, that the suggested banning of people from boards is supposed to teach them to be better. I think there’s just more festering negativity waiting to pop out. For every person a game relations manager ban’s on their board, there’s that many more people that this person can influence from other boards when they go to rant about such bad problems that are occurring in said games. Perhaps if these people who are in control and charge of the boards had instead said to those people, “try to come out with something better then” those people with the issues could be forced into a positive suggestive manner benefiting both parties.

Ideally I think that heavy moderation of game forums leads to serious blind spots in games productions. I can’t speak from experience on this one, but I’m sure that Sony Entertainment was just as blatant with the deletion of threads and banning people from their forums when they decided to change star wars galaxies to that piece of crap it is now, (The NGE – New Game experience – which cost them about ¾ of their subscriber base. I can’t give the exact numbers of people who left the game, however those servers are mighty empty now.)

Smedley who works for Sony Entertainment, even now admits that the NGE was a mistake. I’m sure that if they had of originally listened to the people they were so busy ignoring in the first place that they’d still have a good majority of those subscribers.

I think that it eventually boils down to this; Game developers should listen to those who object to their games, the changes they make to their games instead of trying to stamp out the problem people.

Having said all that, unfortunately it boils down to personal perspective, for every “bad” change a game has, there’s someone saying it’s a good change, and usually not a developer. – Though lately in personal experience it’s been someone closely involved with the game developer, taking sides, usually those of the developers.

I think if more people who “tested” and played these games would speak out, then both the players and developers could come to agreement (Though, I’ve yet to see a game fail because enough players were disgusted with the game developers choices that they’ve all cancelled) Usually it’s the parent company who’s footed the bill of producing the game that see’s that there isn’t enough subscriber base to fill forecasted values and usually end up terminating a game before it comes into its own.