Quote:
Originally Posted by Ngruk  Hard thing is to understand, for the most part, they do. They can't NOT be smarter than you and know more than you about the game you're testing, and they're making.
That's not to sound pompous or arrogant by any means, it's just true. I've often watched players explode on boards when they feel they aren't being listened to or aren't making an impact, even though they are clearly providing invaluable and important feedback.
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Your points on communication and priorities are spot on, but I want to comment on the quoted text.
Players do often know better than devs. Although they might not know why an aspect of gameplay works or does not, they know because they experience the end result of it with relatively little bias. They aren't privy to the original design ideas and concepts and don't have any personal or time/budgetary attachment to them either. Perhaps this is more to do with focus testing than beta testing, but being open to feedback that may run counter to months or years (should focus test sooner) of work can really be insightful. Bug fixing is also separate and is more about proper allocation of resources by scheduling enough time and money to fix them - bug fixing and code cleanup milestones need to exist and cannot be an afterthought or last minute thing.
The biggest and most recent example I could think off is WoW's dual-spec implementation. It completely missed the mark with the original proposed level 80 limit, and it mostly still does as the players who can't afford the 1,000 gold in their 40s are the ones who need the benefits of dual spec the most - in general they don't have the same access to guild, gear, and power-leveling resources that make specs more on a non-issue as they are leveling. Blizzard simply could not fathom abandoning their original 1-spec system that far to make it both very affordable and available to even lower levels to promote grouping. Just like their original meeting stones.
