Is the Gaming Community Too Vocal?
If a video game consumer were to be asked "What would they describe the state of gaming in 2017?" I'm confident that a decent amount of the answers would be "frustrating". Given all the controversies that last year had, it's hard as a gamer not to be. Very few games came out without some sort of anger from fans directed at developers. Loud enough fan anger would get a press release from said developer with an explanation or apology left to the discretion of the fans to determine if its genuine or not, followed by a patch (maybe) that will solve the problem until a new problem arises and the cycle begins again.
With social media and Reddit, the streams of communication has never been so accessible on either side and when used constructively, great things can happen. My concern lies in the idea of what happens if we push developers too far into what the community wants then complain about lack of ingenuity?
I use one of my favorite games of this generation as an example: Destiny
Aside from the release of overall content that Bungie had for Destiny 1 was that the grind for exotics were mostly locked behind the raids and only the hardcore players were able to earn theirs. Full disclosure, I'm in-between causal and hardcore. I love Destiny and the sci-fi shooter element but I rarely raid because they could take 4-6 hours and burnout is real. So there were many exotics I never got. So Bungie decided to make a big adjustment and swing it the other way, making most exotics and legendaries super easy to get for more casual players in Destiny 2. This plus simplifying perks on each weapon and armor so that RNG (random number generation), dropped items more often with no big surprises or changes in perks between them. So once you got that one you want, when you get a duplicate, you don't care as much for that weapon again unless it came at a higher power level (if you weren't maxed out already.)
In this case Bungie listened to one side of the player base and got in trouble with the other side of the player base and alienating the hardcore players to cater to the "filthy casuals". That among many other decisions at Bungie has caused the concurrent player numbers to dwindle.
Community discourse has led to the improvement of many other games like The Division, Battlefield 4, and Rainbow Six Siege. But are we asking for too much sometimes and stifling the developers with our suggestions and needs?
Sometimes I wonder if having avenues of communication to developers for suggestions into what exactly we want in a title is beneficial? The worst among us abuse social media platforms to berate employees of developers that had no say in the bigger decisions of game choices. We like to think we know what we want out of our favorite titles but we have to retain from acting like we know whats best for us before we destroy the franchises we care about, either with a slew of changes or no changes at all.