The Customer is Always the Customer

The customer always remains the customer, and publishers and developers, are selling something to them. Here is the problem I see with people assuming that everything they say the the devs need to take seriously. The problem is actually really simple.

The devs know alot more about video game design than the customer does.

Does that make sense? If your mind doesn't wrap around that fact you might want to go ahead and find something else to read. If you live upstairs in an apartment with bad insulation, and the heat index in 110, and your air conditioner is making the room 78 degrees at five in the afternoon, you can call the A/C mechanic an idiot all you like, you can say that the unit is freezing up, or the duct work is caved in all you want, it doesn't change the fact that nothing can be done to fix the problem, save re-insulating the building, sometimes even if you don't like it, things are working as best they can.

How many times does someone make the comment "All they have to do is make x work like this, and y work like that, and boom problem solved." I'm probably guilty of it myself, cause we all do it. but it might not be that simple, interactions in code might cause such a change to cause the whole game to crash. It might cause people who use 64 bit computers to see all avatars as Ronald McDonald and Hamburglers, or it might be as simple as

The people making the game think that your idea is crap.

Not the worst thing that could happen, and if a large group of people think the same thing, that can be taken with a grain of salt too. cause it boils down to the fact that business people make money by calculating and managing risk. if you and the 18 people on the forum think the same thing about a game, and want to see this change, or your leaving. Well in a small MMO with a subscriber base of say 50,000 you and those 18 are about 0.036% of their population, and therefore less than one tenth of a percent of their revenue. Your probably going to be rolled into a statistic concerning monthly flow of customers gained over customers lost.

That being said, the thing I think we all need to remember is there are MILLIONS of us, and no company really cares to read our opinions because we really don't know what we are talking about. At your job how seriously do you take customers? You probably care about them, and want them to be happy....until they start telling you how to do your job.

I think devs feel the same way, they want us to enjoy their product, and try to improve it over time, but the instant we start telling them how we would have done it, they think to themselves, "your more than happy to try" and they stop caring about our opinions. We as customers do it to ourselves, cause we are too proud, and think we know everything, cause we think were always right,

Go to McDonald's and order a Rib-eye, baked potato, and corn, when they say they don't have it, tell them that your the customer and that makes you right, if they are smart, they'll tell you with those demands, your not their customer.

Make it a point, not just in gaming, but in all areas where you are the consumer, to give positive feedback when there is something you enjoy. Producing things can be a joyless work. The only real reward you get sometimes is knowing that people are buying what your making, and the only words you read about it are complaints. We so often say to ourselves "why should I thank them for everything going the way it is suppose to?" I suppose there is some merit in that, you did pay money, and there are expectations. I can tell you this though, I always get an extra scoop of ice cream on my pie ala mode at my favorite restaurant, get the best customer service at my local Best Buy, and get told when the sales will be at my favorite clothing store.

I know the customer isn't always right, that they are just always the customer. Doesn't mean they have to be assholes about it.