Does the hardcore even matter?

[Don]

So I was thinking about this recently. By hardcore I mean in terms of playing ability, not necessarily money spending. We'll assume that you're not a particularly marketable individual. That is, even if you're the best player at LoL or whatever in the world, if you're not a particularly good looking or witty guy there's probably not that going to be too many people paying to see you play the game. So why should you even matter? It's not like your legion of followers is going to abandon this game if you're not satisfied because we already assumed you're not particularly marketable. You don't particularly contribute an especially large amount of revenue to the game on a personal basis. Maybe you've some insight on the game, though playing ability doesn't necessarily have much to do with design ability (game developers are almost always inferior at their own game compared to any player at the top of that genre) let alone business acumen. For example I know Civilization V like the back of my hand but I sure can't tell you why a DLC for new Civ that costs about 2 hours to make can sell for $5-10 with a lot of buyers.

In fact, recently I started thinking if a game is totally P2W, it is likely a better game to play than a game that listened to guys similar to myself. That is, what I think would make a game good is likely going to make the game very niche. My ability to play certain genres certainly doesn't translate to business success so while the game might be enjoyable to me, it's not going to stay viable for very long due to a lack of players. Of course, they can easily listen to whom I thought was the wrong expert and then the game would not only die quickly but not even be fun (for me) to play at all. On the other hand, a totally P2W game would at least be very responsive to any suggestions that makes them money and if we assume the devs totally got the P2W part right, at least the game has plenty of money so the game will stay afloat, and maybe if the game was actually good it might even be worth it to spend money on it. While gaming companies aren't entirely altrustic, examples like WoW shows if you make enough money you'll eventually have the resources to get mostly everything correct. It seems more possible that a game starts out P2W and if it was actually successful at that can eventually get enough money to beef up anything else that is lacking, compared to a game that is not very P2W that turned out to be designed by the wrong guy (at least to me) and never have the resources to turn anything around. Maybe this is a reflection of the lack of a visionary in games. Nobody questioned whether Sid Meier knew what he's doing with Civilization or whether Miyamoto knows what he's doing in a Mario game. You can sort of just take it on faith that these guys won't come up with something ridiculously dumb in their flagship title. I know people always say games are getting more complicated and so on but just because the size and complexity of a game goes up doesn't mean Civilization is now a fundamentally different game compared to what it was before.

[Don]

It seems like at some point you're no longer guaranteed of anything. Before, I remember you know what you're getting into in a new Street Fighter game, or a new Megaman game, or a new XYZ General game. This doesn't mean the game is flawless and it is quite possible some of them can be very flawed, but you know that a XYZ General game is going to be a time-limited, objective based and quasi RPGish in terms of buliding your elite troops and not much in terms of getting a new army. For good or for worse, you don't have to wonder why is the next game suddenly nothing like the game before. At some point this just isn't true anymore. Shining Force started out as basically a RPG on a grid that pretends to call itself strategy, and then it become some kind of cross between Diablo and a dating sim, and then it become a Diablo game, and I have no idea what it is now. Sure I don't want exactly the same thing as what's before but really I don't need an idea like 'what if Shining Force is now a dating sim'. If you want to make a dating sim put it under another label. For that matter, I'm not sure when they suddenly decided Shining is going to be a Diablo clone.

[Eric]

I mean I guess it depends on what it is you're asking of your hardcore player. I reread this like 4 times before trying to type a response, you kinda go all over the place with your post and kind of make it out like your hardcore player is just a zero sum of all things and should be ignored because of that.

A hardcore player whining about a change to a game he thinks is bad for the game might not ultimately matter, and obviously a company can make a change that could be inferred as bad but still sell and make money.

That said the hardcore guys who understand your game CAN help make the game better. WoW does this every single raid cycle, they throw raids up on their Test Server and the hardcore raiders basically test everything that their internal raids can't handle to make sure the content is beatable, the feedback ranges from it's too easy for a decked out raid to a raid at the expected gear requirement might struggle or miss enrage by 5 seconds.

Capcom hired Seth Killian to be a community manager but he was instrumental in making Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Street Fighter IV better games and his background was basically a hardcore SFII Veteran, when he left Peter "Combofiend" Rosas took over his position and had a heavy hand in helping balance SF in the last update to the game which was far and away the most balanced the game has ever been in terms of match-ups and everyone having a chance, his background? Again hardcore tournament player.

Now this doesn't always work out, one could argue Starcraft 2 is a worse game because David Kim was placed in charge of the design/balance of it, and only 1% of the people who play SC2 can play it properly, but that's the risk you take if you go too hard in catering to the hardcore. This happened to Capcom with SF x T where I think the combo system went from being a hair harder then Marvel 3 to basically Street Fighter IV links/juggles that do no damage and ended in timeouts every other round.

There are no good P2W games that start out P2W and then get better over time because they get money for doing so, I literally can't even google such a thing and get a positive result.

[Don]

Your example is more like free labor as opposed to contributing in a traditional sense. It's no secret that people called MMORPGs as a paid beta and this applies to a lot of genres too where the devs figure the hardcore is some sucker that will do their job for him. So in this respect hardcore is useful but I don't support a game by being free labor. I don't mind offering insight to a game I like but if they want me to do the dev's work then I expect to get paid. This isn't the same thing as a dev not being as good as the player themselves. For example you can't expect someone to know if an encounter's enrage timer is 5 seconds too close or not because you obviously start with some theoractical DPS and then make some adjustment based on how much you'll deviate from that and you don't know if your estimates are too hard or too leninent. But that should apply only to very few encounters because even on the highest end rating, if you design 10 raids it can't be the case that every raid is going to be challenge people to the limit. Ideally it should only happen on the hardest one, likely the final encounter unless there's a good reason to not have an increasing level of difficulty. If it's earlier than the last then the encounters after it are likely impossible and a decent developer should start noticing something is impossible even if he doesn't have the skill to completely verify it.

To use some examples you don't have to be a hardcore Civilization 5 player to know having a unit that is great on attack and cannot be attacked directly by any unit in the game (bombers) is going to lead to some serious breakdown in the endgame, especially multiplayer. Of course multiplayer games rarely even get to the stage of bombers since it's pretty much immediately over as soon as anyone has a critical mass of bombers, but that'd indicate another flaw as you've a multiplayer dimension that is effectively first person to get 5 bombers wins. You can't cite a lack of expertise here. Anybody who played around bombers should've noticed something is wrong with a unit that can never be killed unless you made a blunder with them (not air sweeping before attacking). I've tested EQ1 high end raids too and there you can pretty much tell nobody actually tried this stuff internally and they're just expecting the players to do their job for them. I remember on SWTOR in nightmare mode on Soa, the trap you've to break players out of has literally 100 times the HP compared to the hard node, so basically anyone gets trapped is never going to get out of that trap unless you improved roughly 100 times in DPS compared to hard (which is actually pretty hard) and there's no way you'll beat the enrage timer after even 1 guy is trapped and of course it's a continous mechanism.

At any rate I don't think you'd ever have a game that didn't have someone isn't at least somewhat hardcore. It's not like you're going to have a strategy game team where nobody has ever played a strategy game, or a MMORPG raid team where the limit of the team's skill is Group Finder. Adding a new guy may offer the right perspective, or it might not, but I do expect the team to already have decent competency in the genre. Take another game I'm playing which I think is pretty balanced, Age of Wonders 3. They're currently running some devs versus player thing and it's not like you're going to see the devs get killed by creeps even though they're almost certainly outmatched the players. Now I wouldn't be surprised if a dev loses by turn 5 to a flying crow that sacked his capital but this is something that is sort of built into the gameplay of AOW3 multiplayer, or rather the lack there of as the game is meant to be a single player game and you really got to have some equivalent of 'no rush' rules because early defenses in the game suck since it is assumed your computer opponent isn't going to take their massively advantaged army and wipe you out before you even finished your first building, and that's okay.