You are so ignorant.
ad hominem
If the player base puts forward their criticisms nicely and calmly, then they can be a great help.
When was the last time you saw that?
Someone joins the dev server, sees something different, tells it it sucks, well tell them its 1.2, they say then they'll never upgrade. Most people who join who aren't already known do that. They see one change, out of context, and rag on it and quit. People who play a few games generally always agree its better, 99% of players don't get that far.
There's no better person to tell you what's wrong with your game - they will find bugs and possibly report them so they can be fixed, give you a gauge of how well certain features or aspects perform and generally help a developer personally grow (if they take those criticisms on board in the first place) and find out what is fun and what isn't.
You design a game you'll find fun. If you don't the game will suck. Even if you do, the game may suck, but if you don't design for you its guaranteed to be shit. Game company's are trying to bin the gamers and go to more traditional "software factory" models, but that doesn't work for designers.
People who aren't already involved in the dev work never report bug. They sometimes spam bugzilla and post old bugs that are there 20 times already, and they never bother with any of the needed details etc.
And how do players help a dev grow?
What I don't get is why you seem to assume everyone has to be completely happy with everything they ever get and play and have no right to make criticism - that may not be your intention, but that's what comes across.
You got this for free. What rights do you have? Name but one. You have none.
People don't have to be happy. If you don't like it, go away, no one is forcing you to be here.
But I'm not saying you can't voice criticisms, but no one ever does. They just flame and then site around spamming the forum for no reason.
What's the point the developers might say?
Improvement both personally and within the game itself, along with the potentially hundreds and thousands of happy smiling faces people get when playing the game. With any entertainment medium, it's always other peoples satisfaction before yours - that's the nature of the business. Of course you have to enjoy what you do in the first place, but to think that's all that matters is ignorant and means you shouldn't be involved anyway.
Take the pragmatic view. What use are happy people. What's the benefit?
And the "other peoples satisfaction before yours" is pure bullshit. I should work hard, for free, putting your needs before mine? Why would anyone want to do that?
This isn't the entertainment business. Its a coding job. They're coders who wrote it to prove they could, like the good little hackers they are. If entertainment was the aim, they would have gone into a different business.
To be anyone in any form of entertainment or arts you have to have a thick skin and conviction. Fact: You are going to be criticised, you might even be insulted (but those people shouldn't be listened too unless something's truly terrible has been made in the first place), that's life, get over it. You are going to get "whiny little shits" like us, but as I said only 2 or so pages ago, it's some of those whiny little shits that care the most. It's why we stick through the game when there hasn't been a new version after over a year, it's why we put forward criticisms in the hope of not shattering the developers dreams, but helping them personally and the game to be better. If you didn't have whiny little shits, we'd still be stuck 20 years ago in terms of game design, except now with games where you can't even move and to shoot you have to lick your earlobe three times and rotate your elbow 90 degrees because no one told them that isn't fun nor easy.
Again, not the entertainment business.
And see the above bit about game design. Big studios don't listen to a word people say. There doing just fine.
Of course you can't make everybody happy - some people have personal preferences, some just don't like a genre and some are just ignorant idiots with phrases like "Lol THiss GAame Suxxx". Simply don't listen to those last ones, and sometimes even the first two might have a point and make valid criticisms that should be listened too.
Why is it so many people are of the position that we shouldn't criticise? That's just idiotic and ignorant.
Again with the ad hominem.
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