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the single most important lesson you can learn as a game designer is that not everyone thinks like you or has your perspective, least of all the players
here's a fun example from this week. so Fallen London has a mechanic where you can build dubiously authentic skeletons out of spare parts and sell them. each part has some inherent value that it adds to the skeleton.
due to a mismatch between our internal documentation and actual in-game scripting, this one skeleton part - the Ivory Humerus - added about twice as much value to a skeleton as it was "supposed" to
now, I wasn't even looking at bones when I came across this - I was looking at a different corner of the economy. these other, unrelated items could be traded for ivory humeri, and it seemed like all was well - the value of the humeri matched the expected value of the action
except they didn't of course, because the humeri were actually worth twice what the internal documentation said they were worth, in practice. oops. well, I added that to the huge slate of fixes to be made: correct the ivory humerus to its proper value.
when that change was actually made, it quickly led to two realizations:
1, to players, the reference for the value of the item was obviously not our internal documentation. they understood the ivory humerus to be worth about twice what it was "supposed" to be worth.
1, to players, the reference for the value of the item was obviously not our internal documentation. they understood the ivory humerus to be worth about twice what it was "supposed" to be worth.
in fact, the idea that the humerus had some inherent value that was half that was baffling to them. this had, of course, had an enormously distorting effect on player expectations for a long time (things were off by a factor of two).
it really impacted how people saw large sections of the economy, and it came down to our perspective not lining up with what players were experiencing. oops.
second, a small number of players were stockpiling humeri in large numbers. I didn't bother to check before the nerf because there's no explicit incentive to do this -- the humeri are in no way advantageous to hold. but a few players' inventories suddenly lost a ton of value.
we ended up compensating those specific players -- there's now 53 accounts in fallen london with a unique 'victim of the great bone market crash of '98' achievement granted by this. oops!
so yeah, always ask yourself: okay, but what do players believe about this? and also: okay, but what perverse player behavior might be lurking there that you didn't expect?
it is very, very easy for what you believe about the game to get radically out of phase with what players believe about the game, especially when it comes to fluffy things like design intent - players are not psychic and neither are you
so what's YOUR bone hoarding debacle
