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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

>Ignore feature requests — don't build what users ask for; understand the underlying problem instead

not quite in the same area, but this advice reminds me of blizzard and world of warcraft. for years and years, people requested a "classic" WoW (for non-players, the classic version is an almost bug-for-bug copy of the original 2004-2005 version of the game).

for years and years, the reply from blizzard was "you think you want that, but you dont. trust us, you dont want that."

they eventually caved and launched classic WoW to overwhelming success. some time later, in an interview, ion hazzikostas (the game director) and holly longdale (vice president & executive producer), admitted that they got WoW classic very wrong and that the people "really did know what they want".

anyways, point being that sometimes the person putting in the feature request knows exactly what they want and they have a good idea. while your default mode might be (and perhaps should be) to ignore feature requests, it is worth recognizing that you may be doing so at your own loss. after all, you might not not be able to fully understand every underlying problem of every user of your product -- but you might understand how to code the feature that they asked for.

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I have been in situations where a user makes a feature request and I don’t think it makes sense, but because they’ve been polite and understanding I decide to take the time to explain exactly why it wouldn’t work, but while doing so I basically rubber duck and come up with solutions to the problems I’m describing (which the user hasn’t foreseen yet). Sometimes that ends with me discovering yet even stronger reasons to not implement the feature, but other times it makes me delete the whole reply and work on it instead because I have worked it out. Sometimes doing so ends up taking less time than writing the full reply. Often the feature ends up being even better than what they originally requested.

In contrast, if a user has been rude, entitled, and high maintenance, I may end up not even trying to reply in the first place because I know they’ll just be combative every step of the way, and giving them what they want just makes them demand more, seldom being appreciative. These tend to be users who want something a very specific way and refuse to understand why the thing they are asking for is profoundly selfish and would shit the interaction for everyone else to satisfy their own desire. So I don’t do it.

This has been a bigger sidetrack than I originally intended. I guess the moral of the story is don’t be a prick to the people you’re asking something from.

There are few things so valuable as a good user who is willing to work with you. Many years ago I worked at a company that was going to shutdown a very buggy product. There was one user who relied on it heavily and convinced the CEO to make one more release, and I was tasked with working with that customer to make it happen. Over the next month, we fixed the bugs (I coded, he tested). We wound up making a stable and more user-friendly product. It was a real pleasure to work with that guy. The company still mothballs the thing, but I know we had at least one happy customer in the end.

A variant of the first is the highly imaginative user who keeps coming up with new variations or expansions of their idea. It’s not malicious but it can be exhausting.

Especially if you try to address their core need but their imagination doesn’t extend quite far enough to see how your effort would help, because they love their ideas.

I would describe those as a variant of the second, not the first. Those imaginative users may be polite, but they’re not understanding. While not rude, they are their own brand of entitled and high maintenance (I like your description of “exhausting”). One major reason I put them in the second category instead of the first is that the result is the same from my side, i.e. I interact with them as little as a I can.

To the first kind, in contrast, I’m happy to answer any question, no matter how silly it may seem, because I can be confident they’ll trust my judgement, that they’ll learn from the interaction, and that the next one will be even better. Just about the only thing I’m sad about regarding those users is that as they grow they start interacting less because they don’t need it as much, as they are able to help themselves.

Now that I think about it, that seems like a good way to differentiate: The good users delight you and demand of you less and less; the bad users drain you and demand of you more and more.

I can imagine the kind of person you're describing, and I find the idea of the burn they get from reading this hilarious. They sound innocent and quirky.

Fortunately there's significant correlation between quality of communication and quality of ideas, so your approach might just be optimal!

> [...] I decide to take the time to explain [...]

Do you just explain or do you start by asking a question?

What I usually go with is _asking_ what they want to achieve. Because usually, the user describes features/functions/forms instead of explaining the business case. And while the user describes a business case (a thing that generates him money/...) it becomes obvious how/why to implement the request.

So often, people forget to just ask and listen.

Due to the XY problem what they ask for often isn’t what they need. And what they yell about won’t make them happy.

By and large I’ve gotten better feature requests out of looking at patterns of frequently asked questions and turning them into tasks instead of reacting to negative feedback.

> In contrast, if a user has been rude, entitled, and high maintenance, I may end up not even trying to reply in the first place because I know they’ll just be combative every step of the way,

get paid. Stop this nonsense. You shouldn't work for free it makes you disagreeable (I am the living proof).

> I guess the moral of the story is don’t be a prick to the people you’re asking something from.

This is your salary. That's how you get paid. In power. Power over what? "I am a latex maintainer". I'm not impressed. You're wasting your time. Show me your Ferrari instead.

To be fair on the Blizzard example, I think Blizzard could have also made the player base just as happy by, doing as your quote said, understanding the underlying problem.

It wasn't only a "we want WoW classic bug for bug," it was "the modern game has become so unrecognizable that it's basically WoW 2.0, you ruined it with the modern systems"

Blizzard could have rolled back LFR/LFG, class homogenization, brought back complicated and unique talent trees, remove heirlooms, re-add group guests and world mini-bosses, remove flying, etc. and players likely would have been happy.

Classic will only save them for so long without them making new content, but using classic's systems. So in a way, I think the point still stands, you have to understand what the underlying problem is. Users do generally know what they want, but they don't always know how to ask for it.

We shouldn't discount nostalgia. Sometimes an otherwise objectively worse product is better because it reminds people of the past.

But there are people who didn't play WoW back in the day who still love classic, so it can't just be nostalgia. Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos than the later expansions did, and some people prefer that experience.

> Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos than the later expansions did, and some people prefer that experience.

Right, and that's my point. When you take away the nostalgia for the content, you reveal what players are asking for, which is a reversion to what is effectively a previous game as modern WoW lost all of what made it a good game, to those players, in the first place.

So yeah, there was definitely a group of players that literally did want Classic WoW, original content and all, but I also feel like Blizzard would have saw success continuing that Classic formula with new content. Blizzard sucked the soul and charm out of WoW. For all intents and purposes, modern WoW is a completely different game.

Yes. I've watched some videos on wow by Kevin Jordan, who was on the original team. He said the original game was built on 3 pillars:

1. Advancement over time.

2. Player interaction. Hard content should be hard in order to push players into working together to overcome challenges.

3. The world is a character in the game. Even when you eventually got mounts later in the game, they made it so mobs can knock you off & daze you. The world is big and full of wonder. Especially at earlier levels, just getting from point A to point B can be a journey in itself. Wanna play with your friends who started in a different zone? Fine, but just getting there will be an epic journey.

They abandoned those principles later on. Eg, by adding "sidekick" characters you can summon when you're playing on you own, to overcome hard content. The point of that content was to push you into making friends with other players. Flying mounts made the world small and safe. Just point in the vague direction you wanna go and go AFK for a few minutes. They also added more and more teleports, so you don't have to schlep overland yourself. And the LFG system.

It was a really different game back then. I didn't get that much out of classic wow. But I'd enjoy playing a new MMO built around those same principles.

Just understand that you are one of the player groups that Blizzard targets and they found that a significant if not plurality of their player groups were solo players. This is why they've actively changed the product to try to keep that player base subbed between expansion. By their account it seems to work.

I do think Blizzard is big enough they can maintain multiple experiences. One thing that is challenging is a vocal group of players really feel like they need to do everything in the game. It's compulsory (some game design choice did also force that at times). This leads to them not enjoying the content not designed for them. Blizzard has a challenging line to solve.

Classic was the right move, I do agree with your idea of someone making a similar game with the original principles. It probably can't be Blizzard anymore, their have a 0-1M user problem. Anything they make has to cater to everyone or they get flak. So a smaller outfit needs to do it. Challenging in this funding environment.

> And the LFG system.

The LFG system basically killed most social interaction in WoW.

So if you played for that, you got excluded.

They also sort of killed build diversity, but there was no build diversity in classic either, at least if you wanted to raid.

The grinding... I don't miss it. That could have used toning down.

> The LFG system basically killed most social interaction in WoW.

I started playing Anniversary vanilla one year ago. I played through it all and now I'm playing Anniversary TBC. I visited many dungeons. There's no LFG system, yet I didn't find any social interactions in dungeons. I'm pretty sure the whole social interactions thing is overblown. 99% of dungeons is like leader silently invites you or you write "inv holy pala GS 1400" and he silently invites you. You silently run through dungeons, silently leave. That's about it. There are no interactions. Zero. Some people write "hi" and "ty", some don't bother.

Might also be a feature of cross realm play. Or whatever is cross server play these days, I haven't touched WoW in a long time.

If you know you're not likely to ever meet those people again, you don't bother.

That's exactly what's happening on Anniversary servers. They crammed like 20 servers into one megaserver, so there are like 100 000 players on the same server and you're very unlikely to meet the same person twice.

>The LFG system basically killed most social interaction in WoW.

as someone who has played since 2004 with only a handful of month-long breaks, this is simply not true.

I played until (and including) WoTLK. The conversations outside my guild simply ... stopped.

Another example is Old School Runescape, who reverted back to an earlier save and has now diverged as an entirely separate game running with older systems as they lost a ton of players with their "Evolution of Combat" update. While nostalgia is definitely a powerful tool, I agree with the previous commenter that the original WoW was a very different game than the modern version and it seems like that is one of the core aspects of what people desired.

They knew exactly what they wanted and they knew exactly how to ask for it. That’s the point.

engineers love announcing that nobody but engineers knows what’s important in software; that’s complete and total bollocks. wow classic is a perfect example because it is exactly the sort of thing that the business unit and the engineers and the designers would not want to do. We don’t need to assume that because we have hundreds of Internet posts indicating exactly that. Not only did they not want to do it, but they argued that users didn’t know what they wanted for the sheer fact that making it was not something that was desired by either the business unit or the engineers.

Also, the point is not that classic saves them from making new content. It’s probably the case that the more content they make the more of a value proposition classic appears to be. Is there some new race in the new expansion that’s stupid? OK hop on over to classic.

Kill the part of your brain that makes you assume users are stupid.

> Blizzard could have rolled back LFR/LFG, class homogenization, brought back complicated and unique talent trees, remove heirlooms, re-add group guests and world mini-bosses, remove flying, etc. and players likely would have been happy.

That would be a tremendous failure. There are millions of players who love LFR/LFG, who love somewhat balanced nature of the game, etc. You would lost all of them in favor of Classic players.

The truth is, a lot of changes Blizzard made to the game, were good ones. If you would browse WoW Classic forums, you'd find plenty of players requesting retail features to be added to Classic game. They want LFD because they're tired sitting for hours being denied for dungeons, because their class is not very good. They want class homogenization, because their beloved class is genuinely lacks tools to be useful.

When you make any change to the game, some player will love it and some player will hate it. Over time more and more players will feel alienated. But other players will come and they won't know other game. There's no simple solution here, other than maintain several versions of the game for different players. One size does not fit all.

> I think Blizzard could have also made the player base just as happy by [...] understanding the underlying problem.

I'm reminded of the 1995 interview in which Steve Jobs elucidated the fundamental reasons that Xerox missed its golden opportunity to own the computer industry and why former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley later ultimately failed at the helm of Apple.

It's fundamentally the same issue with a number of gaming conglomerates nowadays. These companies are more interested in increasing the sales of sugar water than making great games. Perhaps, then, it's not surprising in the least to learn that former Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick was on the board of Coca-Cola for a decade.

I spent some formative years helping people run MUDs and applying my pattern matching brain to the problem of how to make a multiplayer game succeed.

I played WoW precisely because they dodged the first bullet, which is inflationary or deflationary economies caused by each content creator trying to leave their mark by making better gear for their quests than are already available. The whole thing with used equipment only being for to be scrapped guaranteed that low level characters weren’t all carrying the third best helmet in the game.

But they still had the same problem with expansions - the need to change things in order to declare, “I made that”. They wouldn’t have needed classic if they followed your conclusions.

However, without those changes would they have stayed on everyone’s radar as long? Hard to say. Balancing in LoL and friends seems somewhat easier because the mechanics change less frequently. So maybe they would have been fine or maybe they’d be on WoW 2.0 now.

Other than a brief huge burst of interest at the launch of WoW classic, retail WoW has consistently been significantly larger than Classic. Classic WoW has been a success, but killing the modern game in favor of something more like Classic would have been an astoundingly bad idea.

To be fair to this example it was also an tough situation: imagine MS trying to release W10 Classic with W11 still in prod!

E.g. the older ver may well be better, and even what most users want, but pulling off the optics of selling both without damaging the modern variant is difficult if you're not c-level. The internal champion would basically be ending their career with "yeah I messed up the product let's roll back". Also sends a very interesting signal to shareholders and competitors about the direction of the corp.

100% nope. Classic is what we wanted. All of what you just said is you saying: "you think you want that, but you dont. trust us, you dont want that."

Agreed. Current WoW has done some similar things to what the prior poster suggested, and while I personally find the current game better that it was for a while, it remains a very different experience from Classic.

Classic is what we wanted, not that we wouldn't want "other things added in Classic-style" perhaps, but the problem with that is it becomes a whole new ballgame.

Classic WoW wasn't perfect, but it was amazing, and it's NOT all just nostalgia-glasses.

Users usually don't know what they really want. But neither do developers or product managers. The "understand the underlying problem" part is hard, and easy to convince yourself of incorrectly.

There are also shallow wants and deeper wants. I don't have the experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, but they justifiably knew they couldn't trust Blizzard not to add anything without messing it up. So the only practical way to satisfy the desire was to just roll back all the way to the classic version.

In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW. But that would be really hard to get right, and distrusting players would fight it (with very good reasons for their suspicion), and you would have a giant mess of different people claiming that they know what to keep and what to discard, except nobody would agree on the same things, etc.

>I don't have the experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, [...]

>In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW.

this is exactly what they put a lot of effort into for 5-10 years or so. years! blizzard convinced themselves that the players asking for classic didn't really want classic, they just wanted some of the feeling of classic bolted on to the current game.

but players actually, really, 100% truthfully, no exaggeration, wanted classic WoW. not retail WoW with some classic-feeling bits. they wanted (basically) bug-for-bug classic.

and it worked out great in the end! classic is thriving. retail is thriving. no balancing act between the two player bases needed.

> but players actually, really, 100% truthfully, no exaggeration, wanted classic WoW. not retail WoW with some classic-feeling bits. they wanted (basically) bug-for-bug classic.

You're speaking in the same manner of absolutes like most gamers tend to speak on discussion forums. It makes you unbelievable tbh.

Get this: The playerbase for retail is still larger than classic. And those who advocate world PVP have their servers eventually trend towards one faction. These are the just effects of the vocal minority. It doesn't mean the vocal minority are right for all instances. Just that the incentives lined up.

>Get this: The playerbase for retail is still larger than classic.

get this: this is completely irrelevant to the point of my comment.

>It doesn't mean the vocal minority are right for all instances.

good thing i didnt say anything close to this!

> but players actually, really, 100% truthfully, no exaggeration, wanted classic WoW.

Yup.

The counter-example, in classic MMO terms, is Ultima Online adding non-PVP game instances in response to player feedback. Without the dramatic threat of PVP conflict at most times, UO was less emotionally engaging. The non-PVP players were bored without the emotional excitement (stress, danger, whatever) of ad hoc PVP. The PVP-focused players were bored when all the reputational mechanics became more or less meaningless in a world only occupied by PKers.

The release of Arc Raiders captured that original UO social dynamic perfectly. Players flooded forums with requests to make PVP optional. In that case, the devs knew better than to listen.

Arc Raiders and other involuntary pvp games will miss out on players like me who will not try it until pvp is optional and voluntary.

Involuntary pvp is the long term death sentence for a game. It punishes new players by making them easy prey for veteran players. Player numbers will fall hard and fast, like every other involuntary pvp game does.

"I may play your game if you trim away a core appeal factor for the people who already play your game by splitting the active player base" is not that convincing a feature request to a gamedev.

Many live service games that are punishing for new players are still thriving like LoL and DOTA2. Much that punish-factor can be resolved by good matchmaking, putting new players mostly with each other.

Plus, not every game needs to appeal to every player, which I think is where games like that eventually have their downfall. WoW was talked about earlier in the thread, and Blizzard continuously trying to make it appeal to other types of players is what kept killing it.

It's OK for a game to exclude entire demographics of players. A PvP first game shouldn't try to force itself to appeal to PvE only players.

I thought the core appeal was the loot that you get from the PvE.

But I'm just an interested outsider, waiting for the crashing player numbers for the devs to come to their senses.

The loot itself is - quite literally - mostly trash. Sometimes you may find a high end weapon (although usually that comes from PvP…) - but typically you’re just bringing stuff back to put in your scrap hoard. The PvP is really the highlight - which is not to say it’s all about fighting to the death (certainly you can do that) but instead making friends with morally ambiguous strangers to fight the biggest robots. They may be a friend, they may be a jerk, they may be YOUR jerk. Sometimes the entire map will come together to take down a gigantic robot - but after that robot dies? It may be every man for himself in a huge firefight - or it might be a big party.

That’s the core draw - and it’s not necessarily for everyone.

There are much better games for PvE looting, honestly. My recommendation is the STALKER: Anomaly modpacks like EFP and GAMMA, both of which are free downloads.

Trying to make ARC Raiders into a PvE shooter would require every map and enemy to get reworked for low-population gameplay. The game just isn't built for it, and their effort is better invested in catering to the preexisting playerbase.

That's ok. They are also missing out on all the players who won't try it until it's a dating sim. Or a turn-based-rpg. Or a third thing.

Everything doesn't have to be for everyone.

What are you talking about? The top 3 most played games on Steam are all “involuntary pvp” games - Counter-Strike, Dota 2, PUBG. These are all games with a lot of age on them as well.

None of them are easy for new players, with Dota 2 in particular requiring at least 2000 hours to have a chance of not being horrible at the game. Yet it isn’t causing any fall off. Instead it is binding people’s lives to these games, achieving retention rates that easier games can only dream of.

Same. I don't play any PVP. I play co-op. I play co-op vs npcs. If PVP is the only option I'm not playing.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some phrase I heard a while back, I think it was from bill hader. "People are ALWAYS right when telling you something doesn't work. They're rarely right when telling you how to fix it."

Exactly. Complaints are a Yes And situation. You have to improvise off of their cue but have fun with it or soon nobody will. Each loud user will try to pull the app in a different direction and it’ll end up being schizophrenic if you don’t stick to your own voice.

It’s really questions where I delight the users. They know something is wrong but they cannot articulate it so they assume it’s them and ask how to do something. Which tells you that the feature is missing or not discoverable. If four people ask you the same question it’s a bug not a feature and you should fix it.

The irony of your WoW example is that "retail" WoW basically evolved by Blizzard adding features in response to player feedback where each step when viewed individually seemed reasonable.

And eventually the situation got so "bad" that players realized they actually didn't want any of this (a lot of people have lengthy commentaries on how more in-game friction somehow makes the game better), and then the demand for Classic actually became overwhelming. And even so, I'm not sure Classic consistently has more players than Retail. Probably just two different player bases.

>WoW basically evolved by Blizzard adding features in response to player feedback

blizzard is notorious for not responding to player feedback, as my original comment serves as just one example of, so i am not sure where you are getting this idea from. there is probably a super compilation somewhere of ion telling the player base that they are wrong about wanting X.

(to be fair to blizzard, they have been better at listening to feedback in the last ~2 years, but that is a very recent change.)

>and then the demand for Classic actually became overwhelming

this is the point in time where my comment starts. demand for classic became overwhelming, and yet they ignored it for years, while telling everyone "no, you are wrong, you do not want classic".

this is the key part: blizzard eventually released classic, and publicly admitted "we should have listened to you guys. you really did want classic.". turns out the player base did actually know what they want.

>And even so, I'm not sure Classic consistently has more players than Retail.

i am not sure what the relevance of this is.

Does it matter if classic doesn't have as many or more players than retail? Nobody said it would. Just that some players would prefer to play classic and that has certainly held up.

Runescape has a similar thing going on. What everyone's not understanding is not that improvements are bad, lots of the player base also want to see games evolve. It's just that a significant proportion of the audience also like The Old Thing and they're often more engaged as an audience in the first place.

You hear this story over and over about every kind of software.

There are two audiences every successful developer needs to cater to: the "I wish this did X, I want new features" side and the "I liked it the way it was" crowd and they're distinctly different groups.

For a long time I produced a popular technical art asset for video games and even I realised I needed to include every single version of the tool with every single installation. If a developer has to go and find out how to get "the right version" at all then I'm 90% likely about to lose a user.

Focusing on the "we did this right just keep going like that" and really understanding WHAT you did right and WHAT people like is really important. It's really hard to be impartial when you made the world rather than consumed it, but always take the win.

There is no cookie-cutter approach to all software products at once.

"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.

Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)

That's reinforcing the author's point: the classic game already existed, users just wanted the same game with some maintenance updates - not a new game with new features.

In this case it was the producers (not the users) that were wrong in wanting to throw away something that already worked.

I believe his point isn't exactly about users not knowing what they want, but instead the tension between evolutionary design vs. "keep piling features".

>users just wanted the same game with some maintenance updates - not a new game with new features.

this is similar to the comment by treetalker, so i dont want to just copy/paste my reply to them, but focus on "add" vs. "remove" is sort of beside the point(s) i was trying to make.

This is a good point, though maybe means that "understanding the underlying problem" requires a degree of humanity.

I think it's fair to say that Blizzard at a certain point went corporate and "lost the plot", so they thought they knew what people wanted, even though they really didn't (don't you guys have phones?).

Same with Old School RuneScape.

Jagex thought they knew better than the players what the game should look like, and overhauled the whole game to the point it was unrecognizable. It took a massive loss of paying members to get them to finally release 2007 version of RuneScape back.

Even now, OSRS has double the amount of players that RS3 has. Lol

This isn't even true. OSRS was on life support with very few players for years until they started giving it updates.

Turns out the 2007 version of the game was ROUGH for a lot of reasons - they picked the time because, IIRC, it was the most complete backup they had.

OSRS has now had nearly a decade of consistent updates, a large team, and typically 10x the online player count of the "modern" game. The catch is that OSRS is not the 2007 version of the game, it's an alternative update timeline which broke off at the 2007 version of the game.

That's not quite how I remember it.

But I can't think of a way to verify those numbers, so agree to disagree.

Similar thing happened to Diablo II recently as well. Blizzard added a new class and couple of quality of life updates, after not touching it for over two decades other than the pretty authentic resurrected remake. Some of the QoL updates such as loot filter are very long overdue (integrated by competitors and have been asked by the community for years). Blizzard even sent surveys looking for player opinions about further updates for this 25 years old game. All these while D4, the one that should be their flagship product has its expansion announced. I believe there is something other than nostalgia that makes D2 superior than all successors. I don’t believe current Blizzard is capable of adding contents without breaking that authenticity though.

There an interesting series on the modernization of diablo[0] that dives deep into the game mechanics that makes d1 and d2 "better" games than d3 and d4. Basically it all comes down to creating tension, power variable spikes, and meaningful itemization.

https://youtu.be/bcdHPZzyCxQ?si=a8_mDLFTcMrKFV_s

The "underlying problem" here, for Blizzard, is shareholder value, and they understand it well. The decision to dedicate developer resources to re-releasing old content is driven by careful assessment.

In most cases it's probably driven by falling new player acquisition numbers, and so the equation switches to favoring player retention or luring back veteran players.

Every profile of player has their own preferences (some just want to see big boob textures, etc.) but that doesn't mean they are driving product decisions, except in the case that this demographic becomes core to the business model. But it has nothing to do with the particular preference.

On this note, I'm seeing this pattern crop up in retail WoW addons. (It's maybe an even more literal interpenetration of the title.) Many of the newer addons are heavy vibe-coded due to last-minute WoW API changes, like ArcUI.

The addons have _so_ many ways to customize displays that their configuration menus look like lovecraftian B2B products with endless lists of fields, sliders, and dropdowns. I hear a lot of complaints from raiders in my guild about how hard it is to put together a decently functional UI. I wonder if these tools are allowing and/or causing devs to more easily feature creep the software that we build.

the sudden influx of low quality UI addons has certainly been interesting to watch!

but, i dont think it is really an ai problem in this specific case. the biggest addons in wow have been like that since way before ai was a thing (elvui, weakauras, plater, etc.). they all have a thousand settings.

and, to be honest, in the specific case of WoW, i am totally fine with it. i dont want 10 different addons to change how my UI looks. i want 1 addon to do it. and there is just so much stuff to edit that of course you are going to end up with a thousand settings.

WoW at least figured out sometime around Pandaria or the previous expansion that they needed to launch the game engine changes a month or so before the full release and do beta servers so add on designers had time to adapt to api changes before everyone was trying to make World First achievements happen. It also probably saved their download servers from being slammed.

This reminds me of Origin Systems and Ultima Online. The number of player-run shards over the years promising Classic UO gameplay and the number of player hours spent on them is enormous.

I think there's possibly more to it. Many, many years passed and the people asking for it changed over time. There's a big difference between, "I wish I could go back 4 years and re-experience it all" and "I wish I could go back 20 years and re-experience it all."

I also wonder if maybe they were generally correct. What percentage of people asking for WoW Classic back in the day actually ended up there?

It's kind of like if my dad encouraged me at 17 to get a minivan because I'm going to want a minivan. And then I'm 35 with kids and I get a minivan and he says, "see? I was always right!"

Another way of reasoning about it is to reframe it as a shared problem: "What should we do with the resources we're committing to WoW?" "Do WoW Classic!" probably was a wrong answer for a long time if the goal is to make the most people happy (and make the most money) rather than make the loudest people happy. This quickly gets into how users (especially tech savvy ones) generally have no clue how things work and have zero sense of the associated cost. WoW was constantly full of people with quick opinions on how hard it should be for a multi-dollar company to do certain things. No appreciation for the mythical man-style difficulties associated with distractions and pivots and whatnot.

This is such an odd line of argument. They continue to put a lot of resources into classic. Clearly it's paying off for them and there is a large enough demographic that it's financially sensible to do so. They don't run a charity.

There's a decent video of someone playing WoW Classic for the first time - https://youtu.be/NjQgoaagS-E

And it basically came down to "classic WoW was simpler and for new players provided something that modern WoW doesn't/can't really - especially the spontaneous community.

WoW started out as an MMORP, but it's really a massively single player game until you're top level anymore.

The demand for classic wow got much, much stronger after cataclysm, because then you couldn't even "pretend" anymore.

>Ignore feature requests — don't build what users ask for; understand the underlying problem instead

That sounds like good advice on the surface but it should be "understand what the user is asking for" then see if it is a valid thing, after which you can decide how to accomplish it. Users usually come to you with the last bit. They ask you to do it in a particular way.

I would actually argue that Classic WoW and OSRS are not good examples. These games already existed. For OSRS, the mass cancellation of subscriptions immediately following game updates was a clear wallet vote. Most feature requests aren't asking for the return of something people already liked.

Classic WoW is also not as successful as OSRS, which is why they're exploring Classic+. Even OSRS, which was born on nostalgia, also gets significant new content updates (albeit polled).

But in your example the version with less features that "knew when to stop" actually turned out to be more desirable, so...

>But in your example the version with less features that "knew when to stop" actually turned out to be more desirable, so...

if you read my comment and came away with this, you have completely misunderstood what i said. my comment is not about whether having more features or less features is better.

I think a large part of that is that Classic Wow is possibly not in the business interests of the bean counters. If it's classic, you can't sell new expansions, new MTX etc. I don't know how honest Ion was about the actual reasons Classic didn't happen sooner.

Still, by volume, there are thousands of examples of bad ideas and feature requests on the wow forum too.

Asking for WoW Classic isn't a feature request, that's asking for an entire game. People asking for it want to go back to how WoW was a decade+ earlier. The issue about "ignore feature requests" is talking about features for the existing software that distract from the overall goal/purpose of the software.

please read the last paragraph of my comment.

(you could also note that in the first ~10 words, i say "this reminds me of blizzard" instead of "this is exactly like blizzard".)

There was a similar situation with Old School RuneScape.

If I recall correctly, at some point a pirate server running an old version of RuneScape became more popular than the actual game. So then they made their own official "classic" version of the game. I think it's more popular than the "main" one now.

Well to me it sounded like they followed the first part (ignore feature requests) and failed at the second part.

Just build the feature is the wrong lesson to learn. The right lesson is to expend more effort to understand; and yes, part of that _could_ involve shipping the feature in order to get data/feedback.

>Just build the feature is the wrong lesson to learn.

good thing i didnt say anything remotely similar to this

in fact, i very specifically say almost the complete opposite! "while your default mode might be (and perhaps should be) to ignore feature requests".

That's also a good case of the difference between a "Yeah, it'd be cool if you added this feature for free" type of feature request vs "I'm actively paying a company making a hack version of what I'd like from you - would you please let me pay you instead - for the love of god, please please please take my money?"

As always the answer is… both. We make things that people didn’t know they wanted, and then they have good ideas about them that we didn’t think of. A truly great product finds the balance between developer creativity and user satisfaction

And the underlying problem is that newer world of warcraft sucks, no ? So when people ask "give us wow classic", what they really want is "give us a nice version of the game"

And the team failed to do that multiple times

Is this wrong ? Probably

>And the underlying problem is that newer world of warcraft sucks, no ?

no. retail has more players than classic. they just had a massively successful expansion release.

>So when people ask "give us wow classic", what they really want is "give us a nice version of the game"

no, they want classic. you are re-learning what blizzard finally learned. people literally just wanted classic wow.

So what, they want nostalgy ?

Classic represents a different design philosophy. One that still appeals today. It has nothing to do with nostalgia. Or games like Project Gorgon wouldn't be so appealing to people.

So we are back to what I said earlier :p

People do not want "classic": people want a "good" game that has some specific characteristics

>People do not want "classic": people want a "good" game that has some specific characteristics

as long as those "specific characteristics" are literally and exactly what classic wow is, sure.

Kinda. I think people want "classic WoW" because they aren't able to articulate what, exactly, would need to change with WoW to make them happy again. But they can pretty easily paint to the old version and say "I liked that, bring that back". I think it's plausible that you could (with time and effort) design something that isn't the same as classic WoW while keeping the players happy.

>I think it's plausible that you could (with time and effort) design something that isn't the same as classic WoW while keeping the players happy.

blizzard tried to do this with the retail version for literal years while people kept saying "please, i just want classic wow."

now, if you mean that it is plausible that those same people would play a different non-wow mmorpg that shared some aspects of classic wow, sure. but that is drifting pretty far from my original point.

They wanted _classic_. There was an active vanilla underground private server scene. Those players all went back to Blizzard when Classic dropped.

I got out of my WoW addiction, but I think in this case "Classic" was people asking specifically for LESS features in their game

And the people owning the product were convinced players wanted more features.

>people asking specifically for LESS features in their game

my comment isnt really about number of features.

the main point of my comment isnt even about WoW.

But they didn't actually build WoW classic. They just built another version of the game. Gameplay wise it is drastically different.

Economics & business wise it is very simple while it is popular: monetization.

>But they didn't actually build WoW classic. They just built another version of the game. Gameplay wise it is drastically different.

what?

i played vanilla in 2004, and i played classic when it released. your description is extremely inaccurate.

Explain. Classic is nigh identical to the old version in all the ways that matter, primarily gameplay, with fairly minor improvements.

Drastically? What are you talking about?

You can start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKF9OcncX54

According to Blizzard, they don't even have access to the original source code. Instead starting from some version they happened to be able to recover.

When you say "nigh identical to the old version in all the ways that matter", what you are saying is that the game is identical in the ways that matter to you. Some of us actually value the original 1.0 experience. Just for example, the original WoW never had server transfers or "layers" in the game.

Sure but games are entertainment, not software, if we're being pedantic.

You can't really map b2b enterprise software tropes onto b2c entertainment products, as ActiBlizz would discover.

>Sure but games are entertainment, not software, if we're being pedantic.

>You can't really map b2b enterprise software tropes onto b2c entertainment products, as ActiBlizz would discover.

you appear to be another person who decided to stop reading my comment before reaching the last paragraph.

its only 3 sentences long, so i cant really condense it much more, but here is a copy/paste from another comment i made that is formatted extremely clearly for my two points:

"[...] sometimes users want something. that something might be a feature request, or it might be a feature removal. [...]

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."

Exception that proves the rule, IMO.

Warcraft III remake was bad

Speaking of classic WoW... found this gem recently where a guy talks about his experience playing classic in 2026 without any nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjQgoaagS-E TLDR classic is pretty damn good!

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