Beta & Player Feedback
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What feedback from beta players has been most helpful in making changes prior to full release?
- TIM: There’s a lot, actually - for the Heroes we get a solid “second line of defense” when we combine the beta feedback with our simulator results. If we do bigger, all-new Events or features the beta feedback is super valuable in making sure the feature is understandable, balanced, and bug-free (it’s just really hard to see some of the issues ourselves, especially when we get so familiar with the features when developing them).
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Do the Beta testers’ or feedback or the community’s opinion here on the forum have any impact on the development?
- TIM: Yeah the beta does a lot, as mentioned earlier - we use it basically to confirm if something is good enough to release and often we go back to the drawing board with things if the opinion strongly points that way. Do note that there are some economy and game direction related things where we do need to move onward with the chosen strategy even if community opinion would not be in favor of it - but it’s super-valuable to get a clear indication of this beforehand as well, and as said we’ve often adjusted even our strategy based on findings here.
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I loved the Global Beta for Raid Formations. Will we see more Global Beta down the road? Would like to see more come up in the future.
- TIM: The Global Beta was indeed really great - it allowed us to focus on just the right things for finishing the feature and the relative safety of having it in this kind of “test” phase made a lot of our work with it so much easier. We definitely hope to have more of these in the future.
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Why are the developers keen to introduce features like ‘Limit Breakers’ which 80% of the people polled here feel negatively about?
- TIM: As mentioned earlier there are some features where the overall direction is in a way set in stone beforehand, or at least in the sense that we know where we need to end up in the long term, but there simply is a fairly high chance that players do not see the steps along the way as we do. Limit Breakers is a very clear example of this - we have evaluated that we must raise the maximum evolution cap, so to speak, of Heroes at this stage of the game lifecycle and thus we set this as a non-debatable goal. There’s a lot in the feature itself we need to test and most likely adjust once it’s live, and the beta feedback did inform us of the pain points, definitely…but in this case, we realized that we’ll learn what exactly needs to be adjusted only when it’s played by a large enough population.
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Why do the devs/ game designers keep forcing content out which nobody wants or requests but ignore the innumerable features that players do want & repeatedly ask for?
- TIM: As mentioned earlier a lot of the content we decide to focus on is informed by the patterns we see in the entire player population and when looking at how to keep the majority of players engaged over the long term. This does not necessarily always align with the feedback we get from the players - and there we often must rely on the science and business parameters, if you will, instead of focusing on the individual opinions.
We may, for example, see that if we do not have enough new, sufficiently powerful Heroes and Events introduced at a regular enough pace the players, as a group, start to lose interest in things…and this may be a much stronger reaction than what we see whenever we do something more QoL-centric! So these things affect our priorities heavily - we’d love to focus on certain things (most of us play the game still actively every day, and we have no special developer accounts or anything) but there’s this ‘burden of knowledge’ where we, nearly daily, have to remind us what’s the order of importance to ensure we have a really solid roadmap for years to ahead.
- TIM: As mentioned earlier a lot of the content we decide to focus on is informed by the patterns we see in the entire player population and when looking at how to keep the majority of players engaged over the long term. This does not necessarily always align with the feedback we get from the players - and there we often must rely on the science and business parameters, if you will, instead of focusing on the individual opinions.