I'm not a WoW player, so perhaps speaking out of turn — but doesn't that example show that users know what extra features they don't want, not extra features they do?

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john_strinlai 6 hours ago | parent [-]

that distinction sort of misses the point i was trying to make.

sometimes users want something. that something might be a feature request, or it might be a feature removal. it doesnt really matter for the sake of my point(s):

a) ignoring your users requests can sometimes be a bad choice.

b) you might not necessarily understand every underlying problem that every user has. worse, you might think you understand the problem when you dont.

expanding on b: blizzard thought they understood their player base and the underlying problems of retail WoW. on multiple occasions, ion explicitly said stuff like "you think you want this, but you dont". they kept making changes to retail WoW to try and stop the hemorrhaging of players.

eventually they said "fuck it, we dont know why you want this, but here" (not a verbatim quote). it ended up being very profitable.

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bigstrat2003 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sid Meier has talked about something similar: he likes to tell designers at Firaxis that "feedback is fact". That is, no matter how strongly you (the designer) believe that something is a good design, if the player says "this isn't fun" then that needs to be taken as the gospel truth. The players might not be able to explain why it isn't fun, and you might be able to tweak the design to make it fun, but what you can't do is insist that the design is for the best while players are telling you "no, really, this isn't fun".

Unfortunately Blizzard has had a problem for a long time where they are too stubborn to listen to player feedback about WoW. They will put systems into the game that people hate, and for years they will insist that the system is fine and meets the team's design goals, despite all the people telling them that it sucks and isn't fun. Then, finally, in some future expansion they will go "yeah guys that really did kind of suck" and remove or overhaul the system. They really don't have a culture of listening to player feedback, and it drags their games down.

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thewebguyd 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Blizzard did the same exact thing with Diablo 4 too, and D3 also famously sucked at release.

You'd think they would have learned by now, as they repeat the same exact mistakes over and over again. It's like they hate their playerbase.

	▲	bigstrat2003 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The biggest problem I remember from D3 release was that they listened too much to the "this is way too easy, not hard like D2 was" from the beta feedback. Inferno difficulty was absolutely ridiculous. I know people also were unhappy about the AH, alleging that the item drop rates were lowered to drive people to use the AH, but I don't know whether or not that was true.

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hinkley 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What I’ve found is key to UI design is to take this a step farther. Users will often try to explain why it isn’t what they want and they will be wrong about the explanation.