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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8013354" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>No, I don't.</p><p></p><p>Focus-groups and acceptance tests don't lead to better products, they merely lead to ones that people <em>say they like better</em> in focus groups and acceptance tests. Which is a very different thing. This is very well-demonstrated by gaming history, whether it's tabletop or video. Here's even worse, because it's a small, motivated group of people giving feedback, rather than a genuine cross-section of the community (which would mean limiting input from some people, and trying to get it from others).</p><p></p><p>Plenty of daring and innovative games have done extremely well, just as plenty of games which have played it extremely safe have been massive flops. Do you think 2E would have succeeded if they'd just focus-grouped and acceptance-tested their products? It would have been a trashfire. Many of the best 2E products would never have happened. Certainly Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Planescape would never have come out.</p><p></p><p>Or the World of Darkness, if early White Wolf had decided to focus-group that with extant RPGers, would they have had extremely positive results? Nope. They'd have been told to put in classes and levels. And pretending like the WoD wasn't a massive success would be silly.</p><p></p><p>Loads of terrible fantasy-heart-breaker type games which faded into nothingness like the morning mist would probably have got well over 70% approval from the sort of people who think the Mystic was trash and so on, too.</p><p></p><p>It works for 5E only because it is the dominant game, and has a huge captive audience, and it's unclear if it's even helping them at all.</p><p></p><p>(Sometimes even for the dominant game, it could be their downfall, too - if WoW, for example, had taken this 70% approval acceptance-test-based theology to heart early on, then it'd be one of those basically-dead games that's F2P and gets occasional minor updates, because absolutely NONE of the changes to the game which have let it endure for 15+ years would have got 70% approval from the sort of people who would be actually bothering to answer such surveys. The designers got loads wrong about WoW, absolutely loads. But the community got way more wrong, and was so ultra-conservative, design-wise, that TBC would have been basically the end of WoW, design-wise. And sooner or later, someone would have come along and done to WoW, what WoW did to EQ. D&D isn't really in that position, because no-one is going to drop the time and money it would take to make a "D&D killer" into the RPG industry, that would be mad. But at the same time, the idea that this sort of approach is helping D&D, not locking it into a peculiar mindset/approach that existed at one time, in one, is mmmm, questionable.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8013354, member: 18"] No, I don't. Focus-groups and acceptance tests don't lead to better products, they merely lead to ones that people [I]say they like better[/I] in focus groups and acceptance tests. Which is a very different thing. This is very well-demonstrated by gaming history, whether it's tabletop or video. Here's even worse, because it's a small, motivated group of people giving feedback, rather than a genuine cross-section of the community (which would mean limiting input from some people, and trying to get it from others). Plenty of daring and innovative games have done extremely well, just as plenty of games which have played it extremely safe have been massive flops. Do you think 2E would have succeeded if they'd just focus-grouped and acceptance-tested their products? It would have been a trashfire. Many of the best 2E products would never have happened. Certainly Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Planescape would never have come out. Or the World of Darkness, if early White Wolf had decided to focus-group that with extant RPGers, would they have had extremely positive results? Nope. They'd have been told to put in classes and levels. And pretending like the WoD wasn't a massive success would be silly. Loads of terrible fantasy-heart-breaker type games which faded into nothingness like the morning mist would probably have got well over 70% approval from the sort of people who think the Mystic was trash and so on, too. It works for 5E only because it is the dominant game, and has a huge captive audience, and it's unclear if it's even helping them at all. (Sometimes even for the dominant game, it could be their downfall, too - if WoW, for example, had taken this 70% approval acceptance-test-based theology to heart early on, then it'd be one of those basically-dead games that's F2P and gets occasional minor updates, because absolutely NONE of the changes to the game which have let it endure for 15+ years would have got 70% approval from the sort of people who would be actually bothering to answer such surveys. The designers got loads wrong about WoW, absolutely loads. But the community got way more wrong, and was so ultra-conservative, design-wise, that TBC would have been basically the end of WoW, design-wise. And sooner or later, someone would have come along and done to WoW, what WoW did to EQ. D&D isn't really in that position, because no-one is going to drop the time and money it would take to make a "D&D killer" into the RPG industry, that would be mad. But at the same time, the idea that this sort of approach is helping D&D, not locking it into a peculiar mindset/approach that existed at one time, in one, is mmmm, questionable.) [/QUOTE]
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