A falsis principiis proficisci — To argue from false principles
How to avoid the pitfall of assuming what the players want from your game?
In my days, I’ve talked to brilliant people, many of them being some of the most logical minds that I’ve come across. However, there is a big problem with logical thinking that often gets overlooked. The Romans even had their own phrase for this: A falsis principiis proficisci — to argue from false principles.
In essence, the sentence highlights the issue that no matter how excellent your logic is, it is just as flawed as the initial premise where your trail of thought began.
Example:
This argument is very logically sound and can’t really be argued against.
But what if the initial setting is false? How do we actually know what the end users want? Is the idea or concept within the team aligned enough to make a judgment call? In the end, we only see everything from our own perspective.
Recently I witnessed an occurrence in World of Warcraft, where the developer Blizzard introduced a new 90$ costing mount for the game. Usually, the mounts purchasable from the in-game store are around 20–25$. This all happened a few days after releasing the most broken and bug-ridden patch in years.
What was the players’ reaction? They loved it and forgot all the previous issues. The cities within the game were riddled with the said mount. People couldn’t hold on until they got off work to give their hard-earned money to a company worth billions just to add some new pixels to their collection. Granted, the said mount also does add some slight quality of life.
If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago what the player base would think about releasing a 90$ mount to the game before fixing all the game-breaking bugs introduced in the new patch, I would’ve bet all of my belongings that they get crazy. And not in a good way.
Value
Monetization has always been a big topic in gaming. Whether it’s the price of new AAA titles that increase year-over-year or the controversial personalized cost of microtransactions in mobile games.
But if anything, I’ve learned over the years that gamers want to pour money into games if they are enjoying it when they see value in their investment. Digital skins, currencies, and other shiny objects seem to attract players.
If you think about it from that perspective, isn’t it counterintuitive to not give the players what they yearn for?
Let’s circle back to the topic at hand
During my time in the gaming/tech space, I’ve had more than a handful of discussions that follow the same line.
“We can’t do that, they will hate it”
My question is, how do we know? And does it even matter?
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It’s true that some principles are known to work, and there is no reason to reinvent the wheel at every turn. But are we as developers so omnipotent that we know what our users want without giving them a chance to tell us?
I don’t recall many companies that can tell their customers what they want and don’t want. Apple comes to mind as one such example. I still personally think it’s idiotic to put the charging port to the bottom of your mouse so you can’t use it while it’s charging, but hey, they’ve sold millions of those, so that just proves how little I know.
Percentage vs volume
Recently while listening to a podcast, I stumbled on this concept of percentages vs volume when it comes to user reaction.
So example’s sake, let’s say I run a beta test on 100 people, out of which 70 hate my game with a passion. That still leaves me with 30 happy players.
Sounds horrible, right? Something needs to change immediately.
Now let’s scale the number to a million and again, for example, let’s say the like-to-dislike ratio stays the same, which leaves me 300,00 happy players. Now that sounds like a nice number for my little indie game, yes?
Am I bummed out that 70% of the players still dislike my game and won’t buy it or am I happy about the possible fortune my game can make?
Surely, 700,000 people not liking my game sounds like a big number and feels bad, but would’ve it been better if I adjusted something in the game after the initial testing with 100 people? Is it better to try and please everyone rather than have your own little niche of players who love what you’re doing?
In today’s world where the attention span is a blink of an eye, I think it’s better to be polarizing than lukewarm.
Non-dissatisfaction
Non-dissatisfaction is a term that in essence describes how well you appease mass markets. Something that leaves a positive or neutral feeling, ranks highly on the non-dissatisfaction scale.
In the context of games, I would say Minecraft is one of these. It’s fun, cozy and easy. Never have I heard someone rage at or truly hate Minecraft.
Then we have games like Path of Exile, which is targeted at a very hardcore audience of gamers who enjoy diving deep into different systems and enjoy spending days preparing their builds for the next season.
This would rank much lower on the non-dissatisfaction scale, as it really leaves a bitter taste in some players’ mouths. It’s a game that some love and some despise. There is not that much in between.
Both of these are great games in their own right and huge successes. But they have a very different approach to designing. There have hardly ever been any revolutionary changes to Minecraft that drastically change the way the game is played.
Path of Exile on the other hand changes from season to season. All your progress is removed and you start again. There are often seasons that players really hate with a passion, and that’s all right. It’s all right to have a love-hate relationship with the players towards your game. That means they are passionate about it and will keep coming back to it.
Neither of the design paradigms is better than the other, but you need to choose where you want to locate yourself on this scale and stick to your guns.