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>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

>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.

bheadmaster 8mo ago
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
- j_w 8mo ago
  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.
  - bheadmaster 8mo ago
    That's not quite how I remember it. But I can't think of a way to verify those numbers, so agree to disagree.
matthewkayin 8mo ago
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?).
AberrantJ 8mo ago
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?"
- masterlee_fn 8mo ago
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treetalker 8mo ago
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?
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  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.
  - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
    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.
Shank 8mo ago
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).
thewebguyd 8mo ago
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.
- jasonlotito 8mo ago
  > 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. 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."
  - GolfPopper 8mo ago
    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.
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    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.
- adampunk 8mo ago
  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.
manoDev 8mo ago
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".
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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.
devin 8mo ago
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.
jayd16 8mo ago
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.
- deleted 8mo ago
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sfink 8mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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.
  - oreally 8mo ago
latexr 8mo ago
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.
- tempestn 8mo ago
  Fortunately there's significant correlation between quality of communication and quality of ideas, so your approach might just be optimal!
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  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.
  - Thews 8mo ago
    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.
IncandescentGas 8mo ago
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.
- grim_io 8mo ago
  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.
  - keerthiko 8mo ago
    "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.
    - thewebguyd 8mo ago
      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.
pphysch 8mo ago
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.
- masterlee_fn 8mo ago
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lithobraking 8mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  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.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  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.
sidewndr46 8mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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.
- HauntingPin 8mo ago
  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?
  - sidewndr46 8mo ago
    You can start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKF9OcncX54 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.
JackSlateur 8mo ago
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
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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.
  - JackSlateur 8mo ago
    So what, they want nostalgy ?
    - HauntingPin 8mo ago
      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.
      - JackSlateur 8mo ago
        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
        john_strinlai 8mo ago
        >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.
Waterluvian 8mo ago
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.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  There's a decent video of someone playing WoW Classic for the first time - https://youtu.be/NjQgoaagS-E 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.
- HauntingPin 8mo ago
  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.
hnfong 8mo ago
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.
- HauntingPin 8mo ago
  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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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.
allthetime 8mo ago
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
asukachikaru 8mo ago
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.
- cjonas 8mo ago
  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 https://youtu.be/bcdHPZzyCxQ?si=a8_mDLFTcMrKFV_s
antidamage 8mo ago
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.
amatecha 8mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  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".)
andai 8mo ago
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.
savanaly 8mo ago
Exception that proves the rule, IMO.
triage8004 8mo ago
Warcraft III remake was bad
masterlee_fn 8mo ago
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vova_hn2 8mo ago
But in your example the version with less features that "knew when to stop" actually turned out to be more desirable, so...
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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.
catlifeonmars 8mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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".
hnroo99 8mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjQgoaagS-E TLDR classic is pretty damn good!
theshrike79 8mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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.
dizhn 8mo ago
>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.
intelVISA 8mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  >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."
smugglerFlynn 8mo ago
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)

bheadmaster 8mo ago

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

j_w 8mo ago
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.
- bheadmaster 8mo ago
  That's not quite how I remember it. But I can't think of a way to verify those numbers, so agree to disagree.

matthewkayin 8mo ago

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?).

AberrantJ 8mo ago

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?"

masterlee_fn 8mo ago
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treetalker 8mo ago

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?

john_strinlai 8mo ago
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.
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  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.

Shank 8mo ago

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).

thewebguyd 8mo ago

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.

jasonlotito 8mo ago
> 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. 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."
- GolfPopper 8mo ago
  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.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  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.
adampunk 8mo ago
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.

manoDev 8mo ago

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".

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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.

devin 8mo ago

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.

jayd16 8mo ago

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.

deleted 8mo ago
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sfink 8mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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.
- oreally 8mo ago

latexr 8mo ago

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.

tempestn 8mo ago
Fortunately there's significant correlation between quality of communication and quality of ideas, so your approach might just be optimal!
shermantanktop 8mo ago
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.
- Thews 8mo ago
  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.

IncandescentGas 8mo ago

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.

grim_io 8mo ago
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.
- keerthiko 8mo ago
  "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.
  - thewebguyd 8mo ago
    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.

pphysch 8mo ago

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.

masterlee_fn 8mo ago
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lithobraking 8mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
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.
hinkley 8mo ago
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.

sidewndr46 8mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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.
HauntingPin 8mo ago
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?
- sidewndr46 8mo ago
  You can start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKF9OcncX54 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.

JackSlateur 8mo ago

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

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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.
- JackSlateur 8mo ago
  So what, they want nostalgy ?
  - HauntingPin 8mo ago
    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.
    - JackSlateur 8mo ago
      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
      - john_strinlai 8mo ago
        >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.

Waterluvian 8mo ago

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.

bombcar 8mo ago
There's a decent video of someone playing WoW Classic for the first time - https://youtu.be/NjQgoaagS-E 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.
HauntingPin 8mo ago
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.

hnfong 8mo ago

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.

HauntingPin 8mo ago
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.
john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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.

allthetime 8mo ago

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

asukachikaru 8mo ago

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.

cjonas 8mo ago
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 https://youtu.be/bcdHPZzyCxQ?si=a8_mDLFTcMrKFV_s

antidamage 8mo ago

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.

amatecha 8mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
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".)

andai 8mo ago

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.

savanaly 8mo ago

Exception that proves the rule, IMO.

triage8004 8mo ago

Warcraft III remake was bad

masterlee_fn 8mo ago

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vova_hn2 8mo ago

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

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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.

catlifeonmars 8mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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".

hnroo99 8mo ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjQgoaagS-E TLDR classic is pretty damn good!

theshrike79 8mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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.

dizhn 8mo ago

>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.

intelVISA 8mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>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."

smugglerFlynn 8mo ago

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)