VentureBeat article: MPQ's April Event Analytics

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Puritas wrote:

davecazz wrote:

I'm sure they play the game. but I dont think they play it like a lot of the players on the forum play it. I think there is something valuable to be gained from trying to get 1st place in an event.

Well to be fair, when I worked in game dev I quickly stopped playing at anything more than a very casual level the games I was working on, despite how much I enjoyed their mechanics
But then again, that's the kind of feedback beta and QA teams are supposed to be for

Problem is feedback is usually viewed as not important because those guys aren't the devs so they clearly don't know what they're talking about, and that's probably correct at least 90% of the time but you still need to account for the other 10%.

I always felt they really should have at least one person on the dev team whose job is just to play the game like crazy because there are some things that are only obvious if you play like crazy. I got the feeling from reading developer talking about games in virtually any genre that they deem a dev time too important for mundane things like actually playing the game. While I don't think hardcore players are actually all that valuable, there are some things you need the crazy guys to figure out. Just because someone plays 12 hours a day doesn't mean he necesarily knows more about the game, but you should at least respect the perspective, as opposed to say something like 'well I only play 30 minutes a day but I'm sure it's no differrent than playing 12 hours a day'. For example, if you ask a hardcore player about the alliances you'll probably get an unanimous answer of "Will work for Black Panther blue cover (first 3* alliance cover awarded)". That doesn't necessarily mean their viewpoint is correct, but don't be surprised when all those 20 man alliances pop up from nowhere. You need to at least recognize that a hardcore player's perspective is very different from the ivory tower casual perspective of a dev.

Puritas

Phantron wrote:

I always felt they really should have at least one person on the dev team whose job is just to play the game like crazy because there are some things that are only obvious if you play like crazy.

That's what I meant by QA.