Mod teams - Community surveys? Thread

Just wondering if any mod teams have ever conducted community surveys to guage public views and interests on issues and areas related to their mod.

For example, a mod dealing with WW2 could have surveyed some randomly-picked community members and surveyed them about their knowledge of WW2 history, their favourite weapons, favourite areas of conflict, least favourite aspects, methods of play, geographic location etc.

Anyone ever done something formal like this, and if so, how did it go?

Bad bad bad idea. Modding by focus group just leads us back another step towards the commercial games industry. Focus grouping never leads to original ideas, it always ends up with the same crap coming out again and again. The company takes all the results, averages them and makes an average game.

As an independant game developer you should make the game you want to make. Tailoring your ideas just to fit the average gamers' wants leads to unoriginal, bland crap. Independant game design is about making games/mods you won't see in the shops.

Bouncing ideas off just one or two people, however, can be a good idea. Often that's the best way to be original, yet still get something feasible. But remember, too many cooks spoil the broth.

So please people, make the mod you want to play, not the one you think will get the most players.

Thats your view, I'm wondering if any mod teams have actually conducted them in the past and had any success with it.

Isn't this practically what happens in the modDB mod ideas section?

Someone posts an idea and everyone jumps in with why their not origina or why this or that needs to be in their project, ect ect

"for example a ww2 mod" < gone wrong already...

yes but thats more flexible, and (generally) a more freindly environment.

If you ask for the great unwashed's opinion, you will end up goin, oh, i cant make this mod because its counter strike but with "insert current fad here"

A mod you create should have things that you want, to that others want. Otherwise, like Mauve said, it becomes a commercial project (without the money!!!)

if you want my opinion

to get me to download a mod

just make it look interesting.
and keep the filesize under 200mb.

I think the filesize is neglegible, if someon really thinks it looks good, unless your on a 56k, or are REALLY obsesivle compulsively disorder style worried about viruses, then theyll download it.

Me, ill download any filesize, but a mod really has to GRAB me, by the collar, and heabutt me into next week, because im really lazy, so lazy in fact, ive not even downloaded garrys mod yet, so yeah, it takes a lot to make me dowload something (i plan on getting garrys mod after the surge of version 8 downloads is gone) Then i plan on downloading Classic Doom3, because it looks better than doom3

I agree with Mauvebib. Asking people what they want just sucks. Sure, you can do everything they want but you'll just get more of the same. I want to tell my story through the material that I make and will make use of the tools I need and want to use. If I were to ask other people then I'd probably end up using a mediocre plot, using lousy tools making same of the crap material.

I much prefer to do what I want to do and if I do it right, then people are bound to like it. Not because it's what they want, but because I put my heart into it and made something out of it that's quite likely to have quality and originality.

This is all assuming that the community can agree on something. In my experience that isn't the case.

lemme quote flayra (of natural selection fame) here - embracing the mainstream is a not a bad thing, provided you don’t have to sacrifice your vision.

Ultimately what it comes down to.

While Team Dystopia didn't run anything as formal as a focus group or questionaire, we have asked our fans about what types of weapons they most enjoy in FPS's, what they favourite situations in previous games were and what sort of roles they enjoy playing in FPS games.

Right from the outset we've been creating Dystopia purely from the view of making a game the development team loves to play. However, it was very interesting to see how our ideas aligned with those of our fans. The feedback from fans helped us sort out priorities for "minor" features. Some of the little things we'd planned to include were shown to be more important to our fans (such as player customisable decals) than we had anticipated.

I agree that the core features of your game should be locked into place based purely on your team's game design. But a mod team should never discount the input of the fans. Mostly they're gamers like yourselves and some of them have some great ideas (of course others are trash ).

more important to the media-eating fans maybe, but customisable decals don't make a game, for a perfect example of a mod ruined by trying to do what it's "fans" wanted, look at desert crisis, that was shit, but had all the "cool" things from all the other mods at the time, had stunts like AHL, had cap points like FLF, had "realistic" weapons like CS, had shitloads of gameplay "types" cos was mapper set gameplay, had "custom" heads, had ...

but it was all "cool features" and lacked the gameplay or solid vision to keep it any fun or good.

Not saying dyst will be like that tho, dyst is the only mod I've seen that I've thought will ever be released yet for HL2, and I can't wait, just wish I was in aus

I wasnt going on the hypothetical - I was asking if any mod teams HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED a community survey about their mod. I would imagine anyone who releases a survey would be a team with a mod already available for play.

The Dystopia team member was a perfect example of a good response to the topic.

ummm, how many mods have actually been released yet? none that would need any kind of survey, i mean garrys mod is bit, but if garry wants to include x feature he will.

I dont beleive an total conversions, or even any substantial single/multiplayer mods have been released yet.

Ok, so Sven Co-Op, Counter-Strike, Desert Combat, Forgotten Hope, and all the others havent been released?
Im talking about any mods - how did you imply it was HL2 only?

I agree with you on that point, all the HL2 assumption on this site has to stop.

A very important thing is that if you don't listen to the weapons and type of environments / what sort of situations they'd like to be in, then you can surprise them with the new weapons / environments that you have created and hook them to them. Since seriously: how many games features an AK-47 or M4A1 before counter-strike? How many desert maps were popular before De_dust? How many people liked playing as an alien before AvP was released? Etc. Etc.

De_dust isnt a desert map.

I apologize, sorry, i am only modding for HL2 at the moment so i only tend to respond to things in a hL2 related way. Again, sorry, my bad

Ummm, some games featured m4a1's and ak's before counter strike, i can think of a number of old gameboy games (even if they werent very detailed), metal gear on the nes i think had an ak, or similar, besides, how many games were there before counter strike, not many that involved real world weapons, Half life was one of the first, and wolfenstein and doom, not being the correct environments for said weapons kinds excludes them.

Edited by (in order): Diablobasher, Diablobasher

De_Dust isn't in the desert? Where do you live? On the moon?

sickre - even john carmack once said in an interview about a year before quake was released (I'm paraphrasing I haven't read this for about 5 years) "create the game YOU want to play and hope others also like it". Pink also said the same in an interview when FLF came out.

Asking "communities" what they want is just dumb, they all want to play YOUR mod they just don't know it yet! And if they don't, well they can fuck off and play something else

well said.

I would say its a shame carmack left, but considering the way ID's gone since then, its not really, im glad for him hes out. Dunno what hes doing now though.