Design

Designers don't get to decide that the user, complaining about the experience of using their product, is wrong.

You can claim whatever design expertise advantage you want when you're in planning. Certainly, what the user asks for isn't always what they actually need, and they may not understand that yet. You can employ your integrity as a designer to not pander and provide the better solution to the problem. I think this is really important for designers, or else you're just a middleman for design by committee.

But once the product is in front of the user, or a tester, and they tell you that it's not solving their problem, they are always right, and it's always your problem.

Brought this up because of a discussion about Microsoft, and how they have a culture of elitism (i.e. we're the smartest of the smart and we only hire the best, blablabla), which can have its upsides, but it's led to these bad design decisions where users cry out that they hate using something (like Windows 8, or features of the XBone), and the MS response has been, "These guys just aren't smart enough to appreciate it," rather than fix it.

This is head explode-y, your family should be concerned and be considering having you committed, clinical narcissism-level wrong-headed thinking.

If you've done your job as a designer, and you create that great solution that the users didn't ask for, but you understood that they needed, when you put it in front of the user, the user is delighted. It's the moment where the user surrenders and is like, "This is better than anything I imagined," because it is. That's what your design experience buys you.

If the user's response isn't delight, that's not the users fault, and I can't imagine how you could be so deluded to think it is. Maybe it's impossible as an individual, but it's enabled by an elitist culture. I don't know.

There's an example I like to bring up a lot, because I think it teaches a bunch of lessons:

In Call of Duty 4, there was a perk you could select in multiplayer called Stopping Power, which gave your bullets a 40% damage boost, which was generally balanced so you'd kill with one fewer bullet. There were some other perks with a similar idea of gunfight superiority. Double Tap made your rate of fire higher. Juggernaut gave you more health. Sleight of Hand gave you faster reloads.

The thing with Stopping Power was that it was just better. You take fewer shots to kill, you spend less time per target, which makes you better in engagements with multiple targets. It increases your survivability because you're not tied up shooting for as long, so you can kill and keep moving, and you could do more with the element of surprise. You can take out more targets between reloads. You can go longer with less ammo in general. It applied to any gun you picked up, and it gave you a benefit every time you fired your weapon, which, if you're playing well, was a lot of the time.

Most of the other perks you could select in that slot suffered from reduced scope. Juggernaut's extra life is only useful if you're getting shot. UAV Jammer was only useful when the other team had a UAV in the air. Sleight of Hand is only good while reloading.

Double Tap had a similar effect on time to kill, but you had to fight extra weapon kick, and you'd blow through your ammo really quickly.

The point is that using something else was basically a mistake, and players understood this through experience.

And they complained about it.

Up until pretty recently, Call of Duty had been developed by two studios: Infinity Ward, and Treyarch. They would release on alternating years, so they'd have two years to develop each game.

Generally speaking, I'd describe Treyarch as the weaker studio. They'd piggy back on Infinity Ward's game engine tech, and they'd have stupid regressions in like hit detection that just struck me as lazy.

Eventually, Treyarch took the initiative, pandering to complaining fans, and rather than provide better alternative perks to Stopping Power, they just took Stopping Power out of the game, in Call of Duty: Black Ops (which still had the broken hit detection that had been patched 3 years ago by Infinity Ward).

Fans rejoiced.

They'd say stuff like:
"Treyarch is the best, and Infinity Ward is a bunch of assholes."
"Treyarch knows what the game needs!"

In basically the same breath, fans also said, "... but Black Ops isn't fun."

Somehow, the irony was lost on these people.

Without Stopping Power as a fairly standard choice, everyone was free to run the perk that lets you hide from radar. Also, gunfights were easier to escape from, because it took more shots to be killed.

The net result was vastly slowed down gameplay. People were afraid to move, because they had no confidence about enemy positions, and you just end up with a lot of people camping, and very little action.

When everyone was using Stopping Power, the UAV Jammer perk was actually very strong. UAVs would be up all the time, and be providing reliable information on your teammates, while you did sneaky shit. But it cost you gunfight superiority.

But when you just remove Stopping Power, you have a new standard choice that just makes for a more boring game.

By pandering to fans, instead of thinking things through, and designing around the new dynamic, Treyarch didn't improve variety, and didn't make a game that was more fun.

Just so it's clear, the feedback that mattered here that Treyarch continued to ignore was that the game was less fun. As a designer, you can't laser focus on a user complaint, and do exactly what users demand, because they will frequently not understand the consequences of the change.

Instead, you have to look at the complaint in the context of the system, and put in the effort to understand where the complaint comes from, what the problem really is, and how that can be improved most effectively, without undermining the purpose of the product.

Can you remove Stopping Power to placate people complaining about Stopping Power? Sure. Should you do that when the effect is that the game is less fun, when the point of a game is to be fun? No.

What users were complaining about was that they felt Stopping Power wasn't really a choice, because their other options were too weak in comparison. It will basically never be the case that the appropriate action is to remove that option and leave everything else untouched.

Removing the top option has no guarantee of improving the situation. The gap between the second and third best options can be greater than the original gap between the first and second. To have a greater number of viable options, you have to do actual rebalancing.

The point here is that design is complicated, and changes are rarely isolated and simple to do effectively. User feedback is essential, and it's important to do the work of actually interpreting it.

For the record, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was my favorite in the series. The maps were relatively small, with lots of flanking routes. If I knew where you were, I could punish you very quickly for staying there.

I only used UAV Jammer when my team was very bad, and allowing the other team to constantly have a UAV up. I played a very flank-heavy style with the general philosophy that if my enemies were looking at me, I was messing up.

I mostly used a silenced P-90, and would leapfrog from point to point, ambushing people looking to flank my team, as I worked up to clearing their front lines from behind.

Probably my favorite game of all time.