Should GW take player suggestions seriously.

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**IwinUlose**

1. Some players and content providers of high skill playing level have in my opinion provided valuable informational suggestions that would increase WH40K popularity in rule and game play, which in turn provides more positive reviews from gamers which provides more new players which provides new money for GW.

What do you think in general?
Examples:
1. Tournament story driven content by winner. Example nexus battle story events with winners, culminating in who wins the final grand tournament. Each person registers for a particular army. Sisters, Space marine's chaos Orcs etc (chapter specific) can be added also.
2. Chapter detachment changes etc, an example WhatThe40k YouTuber on how to fix Imperial Fist Detachment. Not saying everything is perfect, but can help fix some issues.

**insaniak**

If you want people to discuss whether or not particular changes would be beneficial to the game, you might need to describe the actual changes you're thinking of. A nebulous 'some people suggested some changes' doesn't really give us anything to go on.

The two examples you have given don't help - the second one has no details and I have no idea what the first is even suggesting.

**IwinUlose**

#1 pretty self explanatory. But YouTube: the greatest story in gaming, Legend of the Five Rings. It explains in more detail. Imagine GW sanctioned tournaments where a story arc is driven by the players.
https://youtu.be/T9jxVbg_RWQ?si=ep0gEJgZqnUHY1Zn
As for #2. YouTube Where suggestions like this might improve the game.
https://youtu.be/gZ3sVZPP-NU?si=5XC6BBnrZyDjO5qX

**JNAProductions**

Should they listen to player suggestions?

Yes. But that doesn't mean they should implement them.

The end-users of something (in this case, the players) are generally pretty good at identifying where they have grievances and what spots need improvement. But they're generally not nearly as good at figuring out good solutions. If a lot of folk have issues with a certain detachment, that detachment should be looked at-but any given player suggestion on how to fix it is probably a bad idea.

**PenitentJake**

There is a Grand Narrative event every year, I'm not sure if those conflicts become canon or not, but they are officially sanctioned by GW.

There are are also global interactive campaigns every now and again.

Both of these suffer from the issue that GW doesn't want to alter the cannon severely enough to affect the existing ranges.

**Wyldhunt**

IwinUlose wrote:
#1 pretty self explanatory. But YouTube: the greatest story in gaming, Legend of the Five Rings. It explains in more detail. Imagine GW sanctioned tournaments where a story arc is driven by the players.
https://youtu.be/T9jxVbg_RWQ?si=ep0gEJgZqnUHY1Zn
As for #2. YouTube Where suggestions like this might improve the game.
https://youtu.be/gZ3sVZPP-NU?si=5XC6BBnrZyDjO5qX

Okay. So you're asking about two pretty radically different things, as I understand it.

1.) Should narrative events whose outcomes influence canon be a thing.

2.) Should GW listen to player suggestions when making game design decisions.

In regards to 1, sure. Narrative campaigns are cool. Feeling like you're influencing the fluff is cool. The trick is to come up with campaigns whose stakes are interesting enough for people to care about (and widespread enough that the whole galaxy isn't meeting up on a single planet Armageddon style every year) but also limited enough that they can have meaningful, decisive outcomes. If the stakes for a campaign determine whether or not the imperium is completely cut-off from Imperium Nihilus, you know the imperium probably isn't going to suffer a true and complete loss because that would cut off a bunch of possible story hooks for them. But if we're just determining whether Yriel joins the Ynnari full time or not, that's a meaningful-but-limited set of stakes.

In regards to 2... not in the way you're probably thinking. Look at any of the larger threads proposing rules changes on this forum. You'll see a bunch of wildly different opinions including a bunch that probably strike you as kind of stupid. While reading such threads can potentially give game designers some interesting ideas and some perspective on how various changes have been or would be received... you don't want them implementing changes just because some rando on the internet suggested them*. I've seen some suggestions that I absolutely hate receive a lot of popular support because they seem good at first glance.

*Unless they're my ideas. My ideas are always excellent and should be implemented immediately.

**Dolnikan**

No.

That might sound harsh, especially because GW isn't the greatest in the rules department, but players tend to have some pretty 'interesting' ideas on what would be good or bad for the game. Just look at what people tend to suggest and a large proportion is pretty, well, meh.

As for the narrative, I really don't think you would get much in the way of involvement if a few die-hard tournament players could influence the background. Then I'd rather see global campaigns again, but I fear that those would devolve into a huge mess pretty quickly nowadays.

**waefre_1**

JNAProductions wrote:
Should they listen to player suggestions?

Yes. But that doesn't mean they should implement them.

The end-users of something (in this case, the players) are generally pretty good at identifying where they have grievances and what spots need improvement. But they're generally not nearly as good at figuring out good solutions. If a lot of folk have issues with a certain detachment, that detachment should be looked at-but any given player suggestion on how to fix it is probably a bad idea.

Put more pithily:

Neil Gaiman wrote:Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

That said, this is GW we're talking about - depending on how cynical/jaded one gets, it can be hard to expect that GW would do any worse for listening to the bad ideas of the community, given their preternatural capacity to come up with bad (arguably worse) ideas of their own.

**Tyel**

The first can probably be put under "make White Dwarf like it was in the late 90s/early 00s again". Whether people would be interested in such is however up for debate.

The 2nd? Well... they obviously do.

I mean they may say they don't - and undoubtedly they get people posting that they should do dozens of different things. But I don't think its a coincidence that quite often "ideas of how to fix faction X" will be bouncing round the various 40k corners of the internet - and then GW go "voila, here's the new rules."

I mean you can I guess argue the infinite monkey theorem here - or that GW just reach the same conclusions independently. But I think its more likely they consume the media and aren't living in a complete bubble (despite, occasionally, evidence to that effect too).

**vipoid**

Yes.

Even if mistakes are made in the process, I highly doubt the result could be worse than the heaving pile of molten gak that is 10th Edition.

**Slipspace**

There's an adage in games design (actually it's about usability in general) that players are very good at identifying problems but absolutely terrible at creating solutions. It's important to gather as much good information as possible to identify problems. The designer's job is to figure out the solution.

GW have a lot of routes for gathering feedback. The problem may be how they filter the information they get and how deep they dive into it. For example, it's easy to see which detachments in which factions are doing well in tournaments. It's a bit trickier to figure out why other detachments aren't being taken because the lack of data gets in the way of figuring out the answer. It could be the detachment is terrible. Or it could be good, but clearly slightly worse than another detachment, so nerfing the good detachment may not change the faction's win rate.

The biggest problem with feedback is filtering it properly. There's also an ego issue for some people, who view any negative feedback as a personal or professional attack and try to dismiss it if it doesn't fit their pre-conceived ideas.

**StudentOfEtherium**

which players should GW be listening to? across various forms of social media, there are thousands upon thousands of voices each proclaiming their own takes for How It Should Be, and many of these are contradictory. fans can have valuable insight into problems, as others have said, but the solutions offered are just too multifarious

there's also the problem that everyone wants their faction to be strong, and they want that one army that the tryhard donkey-cave in their playgroup plays to be nerfed

after a point, GW gets too much static noise from the fans for it to coalesce into consistent feedback

**Uptonius**

IwinUlose wrote:

1. Tournament story driven content by winner. Example nexus battle story events with winners, culminating in who wins the final grand tournament. Each person registers for a particular army. Sisters, Space marine's chaos Orcs etc (chapter specific) can be added also.
2. Chapter detachment changes etc, an example WhatThe40k YouTuber on how to fix Imperial Fist Detachment. Not saying everything is perfect, but can help fix some issues.

1. Absolutely not. The most competitive players don't know the difference between the Mechanicus and Mechanicum. They have no business making lore changes.
Eye of terror campaign ring a bell? They already tried this. Someone won the ultimate card to play after a tournament, "Planet Killer". They could choose to have Abaddons personal planet killing ship destroy any planet in the Cadian system. Obviously destroying Cadia would have been the smartest and most obvious move, right? He played imperium and destroyed the chaos held prison planet.

2. In what way is a Youtubers opinion more valid than anyone elses? Some of us have been playing this game longer than some of those youtubers have been alive.

**JNAProductions**

And just because you’ve been in the hobby longer doesn’t mean your ideas are better.

They were using that as an example of a reasonably fleshed-out proposal. Presumably they think that the ideas presented have merit-who cares if it’s on a forum or uploaded to YouTube?

**Uptonius**

JNAProductions wrote:
And just because you’ve been in the hobby longer doesn’t mean your ideas are better.

They were using that as an example of a reasonably fleshed-out proposal. Presumably they think that the ideas presented have merit-who cares if it’s on a forum or uploaded to YouTube?

Just pointing out there have been generations of players whos suggestions have been ignored for decades. Theres really no reason GW would suddenly take the suggestions of Bricky.

**JNAProductions**

Sure. But this isn’t about “Will they?” It’s “Should they?”

A good idea is good no matter the source.

**Dudeface**

JNAProductions wrote:
Sure. But this isn’t about “Will they?” It’s “Should they?”

A good idea is good no matter the source.

Good idea is subjective, so what you really mean is "should they selectively pick the ideas they like out from the masses". Which, yes, probably.

But that isn't going to magically bring back armour values, points per head or whatever over night, if at all. Which is the calibre of a lot of the ideas they will get given.

**Lord Damocles**

Uptonius wrote:

1. Absolutely not. The most competitive players don't know the difference between the Mechanicus and Mechanicum. They have no business making lore changes.
Eye of terror campaign ring a bell? They already tried this. Someone won the ultimate card to play after a tournament, "Planet Killer". They could choose to have Abaddons personal planet killing ship destroy any planet in the Cadian system. Obviously destroying Cadia would have been the smartest and most obvious move, right? He played imperium and destroyed the chaos held prison planet.

Cool story bro. Shame St Josmane's Hope was destroyed as a result of Imperial control reaching 0% during the campaign, and not because of evil tournament players...

Also the reason Abaddon was trying to capture Cadia was that as nobody knew what would happen if the Pylons were destroyed, just blowing it up was considered too risky...

**PenitentJake**

Dudeface wrote:

Good idea is subjective,

Couldn't agree more. In fact, I'm trying to stop using the word "good" at all; it isn't specific enough to move a discussion forward.

More consisetent with existing lore, for example, is a very measurable, debatable phrase. It MEANS something. "Good" on the other hand can mean what ever the person using it wants it to mean.

Will player suggestions generate:

- More narrative content that is consistent with existing lore?
- Faster or slower progression through "Plot" events?
- A greater focus on a multiplicity of factions, rather than "All Marines, All the Time!"?
- Greater player engagement with narrative aspects of the game?

or:

- Simpler, more elegant solutions that reduce problematic rule interactions?
- Faster responses to unanticipated rule interactions?
- Limit Codex creep over time?

Answering any and/or all of these questions is far easier and more relevant than trying to figure out whether or not GW listenning to players suggestions is "good" or whether or not a given suggestion is "good."

**Jaxmeister**

No reason they should listen. The product sells well and if they tried listening to players all you'd get was each person shouting how to make their preferred faction better.
Even if they wanted to do so it wouldn't work as can be proved by looking back over some of the posts on this very site.

**Uptonius**

Lord Damocles wrote:
Uptonius wrote:

1. Absolutely not. The most competitive players don't know the difference between the Mechanicus and Mechanicum. They have no business making lore changes.
Eye of terror campaign ring a bell? They already tried this. Someone won the ultimate card to play after a tournament, "Planet Killer". They could choose to have Abaddons personal planet killing ship destroy any planet in the Cadian system. Obviously destroying Cadia would have been the smartest and most obvious move, right? He played imperium and destroyed the chaos held prison planet.

Cool story bro. Shame St Josmane's Hope was destroyed as a result of Imperial control reaching 0% during the campaign, and not because of evil tournament players...

Also the reason Abaddon was trying to capture Cadia was that as nobody knew what would happen if the Pylons were destroyed, just blowing it up was considered too risky...

The Imperials were at 0% because the planet was the only one that Chaos had gained any ground on. The writers changed the event card lore to "Creed told the prison guards to detonate their planets core" because it didnt make sense that Abaddon would destroy the only foothold Chaos had. I didnt say anything about tournament players being evil. I was pointing out how even the best laid plans often go awry.

And at that time the pylons were one small column story about servoskulls disappearing inside when the pylons were explored. They had absolutely no impact on the lore or campaign at the time.

So, the idea for Eye of Terror was to draw up a map and rules where tactical games allowed strategic moves. Because the individual moves would be tiny on such a vast scale (whole worlds at war. millions fighting) it would mean that the overall strategy would be generated by the players' decisions en masse. To facilitate this we created war rooms on the websites for the two sides' players to communicate and work on their strategies. We made up a set of event cards to distribute to individual players to allow them to make a difference in the fighting and create narrative ideas. We coordinated with the indefatigable GW Events and Retail Staff members so they could create an event packed with battles all over the globe. We met with clubs and talked about what was coming up in White Dwarf, at gaming conventions and on the net. We finalised the mechanics of the campaign for the website and awaited the big day.

We still had no clue as to what would actually happen.

CAMPAIGN EVENTS
I felt it was important to introduce some pre-programmed events into the campaign which would give it a sense of unfolding drama and engage the players throughout its duration. These allowed us to sketch out a broad framework of themes for the course of the campaign in narrative terms. So, over eight weeks the campaign moved from a period of insurrections, raids and sabotage up to a devastating full-scale Chaos invasion, the commitment of Imperial reinforcements, intervention of the Eldar and on to a final, suitably apocalyptic showdown with warp storms cutting off access to all but the key strategic areas. In addition to the programmed events there were wild cards too. Some of these were dictated by the turn of events within the campaign. For example we decided that the loss of Imperial control on certain worlds might ultimately lead to their destruction - the Imperials invoking Exterminates in order to stop the Chaos taint spreading further.

Within this broader framework we then used the player event cards to flesh out individual acts of bravery or infamy, random chance and cruel fate.

- Andy Chambers

**Kanluwen**

Hadn't the second Eisenhorn book come out by then? That dealt pretty heavily with the pylons.

**LunarSol**

They can listen to player feedback but they can't acknowledge player feedback. As is, the challenge is signal to noise. Someone might have the perfect fix for Imperial Fists, but its in a sea of hundreds of suggestions. If you make it known you're looking for player feedback, that sea becomes an ocean pretty quick.

**a_typical_hero**

I don't see this as a potential problem. Platforms that let users pitch ideas to devs usually come with some kind of voting system. The community would vote for the best sounding ideas, which then can be taken by the design team and translated into the current rules paradigm.

**Jaxmeister**

One thing for online votes, totally another for a fairly large company that trades globally and answers to shareholders to really take any notice. Try explaining why, when they have people paid to do this as their profession that they should be ignored in favour of anonymous responders online. If I owned any part of a business doing that I would be seriously asking what's the point of employing any to read these never mind put them into practice. We buy the products but that doesn't give us the right to demand doing things the way any individual wants.
Before anyone jumps on me remember there is no way you'll get any agreement by players on what to change. Everybody will believe they know best while pushing their own agenda.
If this was remotely a reasonable suggestion why aren't customers demanding that Google, Amazon, Asda etc don't do it? Simple because no business would accept it. If you don't like it then vote with your wallet and don't buy the products.

**a_typical_hero**

Jaxmeister wrote:
One thing for online votes, totally another for a fairly large company that trades globally and answers to shareholders to really take any notice. Try explaining why, when they have people paid to do this as their profession that they should be ignored in favour of anonymous responders online. If I owned any part of a business doing that I would be seriously asking what's the point of employing any to read these never mind put them into practice. We buy the products but that doesn't give us the right to demand doing things the way any individual wants.
Before anyone jumps on me remember there is no way you'll get any agreement by players on what to change. Everybody will believe they know best while pushing their own agenda.
If this was remotely a reasonable suggestion why aren't customers demanding that Google, Amazon, Asda etc don't do it? Simple because no business would accept it. If you don't like it then vote with your wallet and don't buy the products.

You confuse "not feasable" with "not needing it in their position". For examples where direct community feedback works, see any of the many indie Early Access titles that do this. For an example where "we are big enough and don't need feedback" failed miserably, see Ubisoft with their latest Settlers title. Constant negative beta feedback from everybody, but nobody was listening. Currently sitting at 50% approval out of a total of only 414 (!!!) given reviews.

It's just another kind of market research. I don't think the shareholders minded all that Sororitas money the last time GW asked what players want.
You overestimate the ratio of people who would pitch an idea to those who would simply upvote what they like. There will be community favourites among all entries.

**Slipspace**

Jaxmeister wrote:
One thing for online votes, totally another for a fairly large company that trades globally and answers to shareholders to really take any notice. Try explaining why, when they have people paid to do this as their profession that they should be ignored in favour of anonymous responders online. If I owned any part of a business doing that I would be seriously asking what's the point of employing any to read these never mind put them into practice. We buy the products but that doesn't give us the right to demand doing things the way any individual wants.
Before anyone jumps on me remember there is no way you'll get any agreement by players on what to change. Everybody will believe they know best while pushing their own agenda.
If this was remotely a reasonable suggestion why aren't customers demanding that Google, Amazon, Asda etc don't do it? Simple because no business would accept it. If you don't like it then vote with your wallet and don't buy the products.

Feedback is vital when designing anything. If a system can be put in place to gather more feedback more efficiently I don't see a problem with that. You say they have people paid to do these things, but fail to realise this is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect a good designer to be doing. Good designers recognise the need for feedback. What you're actually paying the designer for is the ability to filter and action that feedback in the best way. In practice, this is probably the biggest problem GW (or any large company) would have. Filtering the feedback is problematic. That said, I'm not sure GW would get so much feedback that it wouldn't be possible for some junior member of staff to collate it on a daily basis for the designers to then analyse.

**Wyldhunt**

Slipspace wrote:

Feedback is vital when designing anything. If a system can be put in place to gather more feedback more efficiently I don't see a problem with that. You say they have people paid to do these things, but fail to realise this is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect a good designer to be doing. Good designers recognise the need for feedback. What you're actually paying the designer for is the ability to filter and action that feedback in the best way. In practice, this is probably the biggest problem GW (or any large company) would have. Filtering the feedback is problematic. That said, I'm not sure GW would get so much feedback that it wouldn't be possible for some junior member of staff to collate it on a daily basis for the designers to then analyse.

I *think* I agree with this. It's important to pay attention to feedback so that you know how things are being received and what your customers/players perceive to be issues. However, even if a player tells you what they think they want, you shouldn't assume that their proposed changes are actually the change that would be most satisfying. People can absolutely latch onto suboptimal solutions to problems because they sound good on paper.

**Slipspace**

Wyldhunt wrote:
Slipspace wrote:

Feedback is vital when designing anything. If a system can be put in place to gather more feedback more efficiently I don't see a problem with that. You say they have people paid to do these things, but fail to realise this is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect a good designer to be doing. Good designers recognise the need for feedback. What you're actually paying the designer for is the ability to filter and action that feedback in the best way. In practice, this is probably the biggest problem GW (or any large company) would have. Filtering the feedback is problematic. That said, I'm not sure GW would get so much feedback that it wouldn't be possible for some junior member of staff to collate it on a daily basis for the designers to then analyse.

I *think* I agree with this. It's important to pay attention to feedback so that you know how things are being received and what your customers/players perceive to be issues. However, even if a player tells you what they think they want, you shouldn't assume that their proposed changes are actually the change that would be most satisfying. People can absolutely latch onto suboptimal solutions to problems because they sound good on paper.

I mentioned this earlier in the thread. You're correct - the job of the players here is to identify the problems. The job of the designers is to fix them.

**Overread**

Jaxmeister wrote:
No reason they should listen. The product sells well and if they tried listening to players all you'd get was each person shouting how to make their preferred faction better.
Even if they wanted to do so it wouldn't work as can be proved by looking back over some of the posts on this very site.

The time when GW stuck their fingers in their ears and closed themselves off to player feedback coincides with Privateer Press rising to second weight compared to GW and continuing to grow. It resulted in AoS being an actual choice GW made as a company to remove a game system and replace it with a boutique model line with no intention of a proper game (and just look how that turned out!)

A company that ignores its actual customers and feedback from those customers is a company that will, eventually, run a high chance of burning bridges and losing its customers.

It probably won't happen overnight, but you will run the risk of steadily bleeding customers. A big firm might hide that behind more and more marketing drawing in new people; but if you're bleeding what you get then your marketing is becoming less and less profitable.

At the same time when it comes specifically to rules and game balance and structure GW has major problems that mean even when they can filter player feedback and use it to help improve the game; the way they approach rules scuppers it The 3-6 year cycle on its own defeats this in a huge way. From what we know of resource allocation the rules writing team are not heavily invested in; there are elements of their direct feedback playtest groups being generally ignored and so forth. So I'd argue that there are management, policy, structural and perhaps also even ego issues within GW that prevent them making best effective use of player feedback.

I do think they ARE using it more now than ever before. the Kirby era management was vastly too closed off from its actual customers and led to unhealthy business choices with decisions made on paper and numbers without understanding the customer context of those stats (ergo they understood what did and didn't sell but not why customers were reacting to those sale patterns)