作者：Daniel Cook

我将通过下文指出口头评论者和用户反馈参数的不一致性。

标准理论

有玩家表示发表意见的玩家就好比是抱怨餐馆服务的顾客。保持沉默的多数群体未曾抱怨，但他们却很可能受到抱怨者的影响并发表同样看法。

此理论称虽然只有1-2人指出问题，但我们要给予充分关注，因为这涉及售后服务问题，若放任不管，会危及整个业务。

此模式受到发表意见玩家和自由评论者的推崇，目的是希望提高自己的重要性和权威性。

个人经历

但我多次遇到此理论不符实际的情况。某社区成员称某内容很糟糕。但参考玩家参数或调查保持沉默群体后，你会发现此抱怨并非重要参数，或者这不过是试图促使开发者调整游戏，迎合少数人口味的一种牢骚而已。

下面来看看若干例子。

例子 1：当我们调整导弹射程时，《狂神国度》出现网络暴动。

忽然玩家再也无法杀死屏幕远方的敌人，因为导弹射程缩减一半。我们这么做是因为很多玩家都采用迷你地图体验游戏，屏幕策略逐步淡出。很多人抱怨游戏如何因此遭到破坏。

但趣味性和留存率有明显提高。调整1-2周后，玩家开始转而讨论其他内容。

Triple Town from decisionstats.com

例子 2：在《Triple Town》中，经验丰富的开发者认为回合机制是个错误。传统硬核玩家抱怨微交易机制。Kindle玩家不满自己无法一次性付费得到所有内容。

我们做的第一件事是测试购物回合给用户体验带来多大影响。所获结果是这似乎不会影响短期留存率或趣味性。我们继续收集长期留存数据，但显而易见的是游戏面临的主要问题和评论玩家的抱怨内容没有关系。我们最大的问题是游戏指南的前200回合内容。但没有一个玩家提及此部分。

例子 3：在《狂神国度》中，我们就解锁某特殊地牢钥匙的操作方式做出细微调整。这在论坛上引起热烈讨论。很多玩家将此稀有道具当作储存财富及主宰稀有降落物获得情况的渠道。由于这些玩家是论坛的主流群体，他们大肆宣称游戏因此变得非常糟糕。

同样，参数反馈并未显示任何变化。从深层调查结果来看，精英群体运用自己的经济实力阻止多数玩家访问高端内容（游戏邦注：他们希望以此控制自己圈子内或者圈子外的玩家，这确实是一种不和谐的局面）。

普遍主题

出现不一致情况存在若干原因：

社区从内在来看是独立于游戏之外的游戏。首先社区所进行的是另一种游戏。在论坛里，某些群体总是争相获得权利和影响。他们会不惜代价提高自己游戏之外的地位。

有时这是旨在获得有利地位的预谋。有时这不过是视野有限的结果。在Realm中经营小型秘密组织的团体按照好友和游戏规则的指令进行游戏。新人存在不满无关紧要，因为他们并非游戏的有意义玩家。

丧失传统技能和知识或者要求玩家学习新技能总会引起愤怒的反应。

超出添加新内容的调整通常都会获得消极反馈。学习需要一定的时间和付出。只要游戏去除某既有技能，玩家就会觉得他们投入的时间完全白费。由于出现此变化，他们无法预见美好未来，而是一味觉得自己蒙受损失。

游戏能够起到宣传意识形态的作用。反“社交”的游戏同社交游戏毫无关系，而是硬核玩家标榜自己身份的一种需要而已。从你购买和玩什么游戏就可以看出你属于哪类群体，以及你和妈妈级人物的区别。

就此来看，任何套用老套模式的游戏都倾向重复系列理念。就硬核玩家而言，你会反复听到这样的嘲讽，X游戏采用“斯金纳箱效应”，“缺乏道德”，“不是真正的游戏”，“利用玩家”等。这些看法是否符合某游戏完全无关紧要。

想想Scott Brodie的《Hero Generations》（游戏邦注：这是直白独立作品的典型代表，旨在让世界变得更好）。但大家只要在Facebook看到这款游戏，就会发表各种差评，以“妖魔化他人”，通过负面帖子巩固原始帖子在漠不关心的盲信者心中的地位。

你会看到很多好笑的评论，如前一秒赞美《Farmville》，后一秒就跟风其他负面评价：

“游戏很好，但就像其他糟糕的Facebook游戏一样，玩了几分钟就不新鲜了。在现实生活中，你总是进行同样的事情，这糟糕，十分乏味，没完没了，就像名为farmville的挤奶机。

所需信息：实际玩家行为的测量标准。互联网囊括各种声音，偏见淹没玩家的真正声音。社区越是集中，焦点越是集中于内部活跃群体，而非游戏本身，其心智模式和解决方案就越缺乏价值。

这个情形令游戏评论者处于不利地位。其权威本身就不高，评论完全偏离客观现实。

我会继续倾听活跃玩家的意见，但会越来越注重用户行为参数，而非评论意见。但有些评论确实属实，能够促使游戏获得完善，同虚假的评论不同。

例如，有关破坏《Realm of the Mad God》附属黑手党的抱怨有助于将公会构思具体化。但即便是在这种情况下，更强烈的指示信息依然是用户行为，而非意见本身。

团队为何要采纳基于用户行为的设计经验？因为论坛上的批评文字价值甚微，缺乏真实性。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Opinion: Player Metrics Vs. The Vocal Minority

by Daniel Cook

["The internet is a series of echo chambers where bias massively swamps any real signal about player behavior," says Spry Fox's Dan Cook, who questions the role of the squeaky wheel in the age of metrics. (Reprinted with permission.)]

I continue to be fascinated by the disconnect between vocal players / reviewers and player metrics.

The standard theory

Over on Play This Thing, a user made a comment about how vocal players are like vocal customers that complain about service at a restaurant. The silent majority may never complain, but are very likely to share the same issues as the complainer.

The theory goes that even though only one or two people are pointing something out, you should pay extra attention to these words of wisdom since they represent large customer service issues that threaten your entire business if left unchecked.

This model is referenced by both vocal players and by self professed critics in order to boost their importance and authority.

My experience

Yet repeatedly I keep running into situations where this doesn’t hold true. A vocal sub-segment of the community claims that something is horribly broken. Yet when you run the metrics of player behavior or run surveys of the silent majority, the complaint is either not an important factor or is an attempt to manipulate the game in favor of a very specific minority voice.

Some examples (these have a lot more detail, but the gist will suffice)

Example 1: There was a virtual riot (complete with organized virtual protests) in Realm of the Mad God when we changed the range of projectiles.

Suddenly, players who could no longer kill enemies far off screen could, because projectiles went half as far. We did this because a group of players had decided to primarily play using the mini-map and onscreen tactics were going extinct. There were many complaints about how the game was completely broken.

Yet fun scores and retention increased. Within a week or two of the change, people had moved on to talking about something else.

Example 2: In Triple Town, experienced developers whom we show the game think that the turn system is a mistake. Traditional core players complain about the microtransaction system. Kindle players dislike the fact that this isn’t a one time price for all you can eat.

So one of the very first things we did was test how big an impact purchasing turns had on the player experience. The simple answer is that it doesn’t seem to alter short term retention or fun scores. We are still collecting long term retention data (the game just launched), but it is immensely obvious that the big huge overwhelming issues facing the game have nothing to do with the primary complaint of the most vocal players. Our biggest issue is the first 200 turn experience around the tutorial. This is something that not a single player or review has mentioned.

Example 3: In Realm of the Mad God, a small change was made to how a key for unlocking a special dungeon worked. This resulted in a massive fervor on the forums. A group of players was using these rare items as both a means of storing wealth and as a method of controlling who received rare drops. Since this group is the most dominant group on the forums, they created a large discussion about how the game was floundering.

Again, the metrics showed either no change or a positive change. On deeper investigation, the elite group essentially was using their economic power to dissuade the majority of the players from accessing top end content. There was indeed something very meaningful going on (players really want to self organize into smaller groups and control who is in the group and who is out of the group), but it was occurring in a dysfunctional fashion.

General themes

There are a few reason why the disconnect occurs:

Communities are internally consistent games independent of your game. The first is that the community is playing a game that isn’t your game. Within a forum there are groups jockeying for power and influence. They’ll say whatever it takes to advance their position independent of the actual situation in the game.

Sometimes this is an organized rhetorical attempt to gain an advantage. Other times it is the result of limited perspective. To the players engaged in the game of running a mini-mafia inside of Realm, they were playing the game as their friends and the rules of the system dictated. The fact that “newbs” suffered was unimportant since they weren’t meaningful players of the game at hand.

Loss of old skills and knowledge or the requirement that players learn new skills always provokes an angry response.

Change that isn’t merely the addition of new content is almost always seen in a negative light. Learning has a real associated cost in time and effort. Anytime a game takes away a perceived skill, players feel that their time spent within the game is invalidated. They have immense difficulty imagining a better future as a result of the change and instead focus almost entirely on the intense sense of loss.

The game is seen as an opportunity to promote an ideology. Being anti-”social games” has little to do with social games and almost everything to do with having an identity as a specific class of core gamer. How you buy and play games signals that you are part of an elite group and how you are not your Mom.

In this light, any game that fits within a rough stereotype is seen as an opportunity to repeat a variety of message points. For core gamers, you get repetitive digs that X game is “a Skinner box,” “immoral,” “not a real game,” “taking advantage of players,” etc. Whether these points fit the particular game at hand is rather unimportant.

Consider Hero Generations by Scott Brodie, a beautiful example of a painfully honest indie game trying to make the world a better place. Yet as soon as people see it is on Facebook, out come the various slurs that acts as a means of “dehumanizing the Other” and help a negative forum post cement the original poster’s position in the tribe of inward-looking bigots.

So you get hilarious comments like this one which one moment praises the game and then immediately starts repeating negative memes about Farmville:

“the game is nice, but just like the other crappy fb games, it looses its nostaliga in minutes. in reality, you do the same thing all the time, it sucks, tedious, and has bo ending, just like the milking machine called farmville.”

Needed: measurements of actual player behavior. The internet is a series of echo chambers where bias massively swamps any real signal about player behavior. The more specialized the community and the more that its interests are focused on activities other than the game at hand, the less meat there is in its mental models and proposed solutions.

This situation puts game critics at a huge disadvantage. Their natural authority is inherently low and their comments are deeply and systemically disconnected from any sort of objective reality.

I continue to listen to passionate players, but I more and more preference measurable and observable player behavior over rhetorical opinion. There are indeed moments of truth that lead to improvements in the game to be skimmed from the morass of disingenuous deceitful, warped, navel gazing and self-serving game commentary.

For example, the complaints about destroying Realm of the Mad God’s accidental mafia helped crystalize thoughts about guilds. However, even in this case, the stronger signal was the behavior of the players, not the ranting itself.

Why are teams embracing design empiricism based off measurable player behavior? Because the alternative forms of critique offer so little that is meaningful or truthful.（Source：gamasutra）