Counter Strike Co-Creator Reveals How Actually Stupid Players Are

I remember that in dead space they had the game tell you to cut off the enemies limbs 3 seperate times in the span of like 1 minute because the play testers would ignore the game telling them what to do, sounds like a certain streamer I know

Asmongold: "Bro, I just like the fact that I do a lot of damage." Devs: "Increase the damage displayed by a thousand, but don't let it have an actual affect on the boss."

This reminds me of this airport who got extreme amounts of complaints that people had to wait absolute ages for their baggage. Like people were actually raaaging. So they built a corridor around the entire perimeter of the building, so that people would have to walk 15 minutes to get to the baggage area and then only wait 5-10 mins. Complaints dropped by like 80%.. Humans are weird.

how do we fix this thing that isnt broken "just fuck'in lie to them about fixing" fucking worked like a charm

In no man’s sky, the planets used to orbit and rotate on an axis. Players thought it was a bug.

Reminds me of in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory where people were complaining that that the Allies SMG was way stronger than the Axis SMG. But the weapons were exactly the same numerically. The devs figured out that the Thompson just had bassier audio than the MP40, so players felt like it was better. They just brought down the bass and that "fixed" it. The idea that the Thompson was better was so ingrained, that players actually statistically did worse with the MP40 just because they thought it was weaker.

Reminds me of a developer commentary that I listened to for "Half-Life 2: Episode Two", where they were talking about the development process for a puzzle in the game involving an elevator in order to make it function. Initially, the puzzle was somewhat complicated, involving the player having to find multiple components in multiple locations within the area, then assembling them in a particular order; problem was, many of their playtesters were getting stuck on the segment because for them it was too complicated. One of the playtesters, and I shit you not, ended up drowning in a puddle maybe a foot deep trying to figure out how to solve the puzzle. The only way to refine the segment to the point that a reasonable number of testers could solve the puzzle in a reasonable amount of time was to grossly oversimplify the puzzle to the point that all the player now has to do is find ONE component, just mash it onto a very obvious component slot, then pull a lever. If you purchase "The Orange Box" it has that game and several others, all with developer commentaries you can listen to; the way they speak it, their play tester team was either a bunch of very competent monkeys, or people who spent a large part of their developmental years eating lead paint chips and headbutting brick walls.

In Half Life, there’s a section where you make your wave through a small cave-like opening. Inside, there’s two paths, one of which is blocked off. In playtesting, both paths were open, with one leading to the next room and the other being a short loop back to where you started. Valve decided to seal off the looping option after a playtester walked in circles for a reported 7 hours and complained that the game was too poorly signposted.

This guy is a true OG of gaming. He created one of if not the most played games in history.

This happened a few years ago in League with a Vlad nerf. They had it in the patch notes but forgot to ship it in the actual live build and players went "UGH, UNPLAYABLE NOW, TRASH, etc" and then they said that they forgot to ship the change and were surprised by players' reactions. The players got real quiet for about a day, then went back at it. Players are dumb as FUCK and just love any outlet for their life frustrations that they can get.

reminds me of a story of a linemen for a power company or internet company, they were installing 5g to a small town and the people started complaining of headaches and a few other things, the linemen says "you guys dont know we havent turned it on yet"

I wish he'd kept the "negative ping" bit, that was so funny

This is actually very known and even scientifically studied! For example in one study i've seen they gave pieces of exactly same cloth to subjects and asked them to count differences they could find while ofc claiming they were different. If i remember right it was over 90% of subjects who instanty began counting differences like colour, texture, thickness etc which wasn't there. Only a small minority of subjects could see they were exactly same..

Alright let's not act like there aren't dev teams that accidentally break stuff every time they update a game cough cough Diablo 4 cough cough

Same thing happened with God of War Ragnarok. The devs got tons of complaints from the public and their playtesters that the puzzles were "too hard" and "took too long" to solve. That is why Altreus gives you the answer in like a minute or so because that was the average attention span the developers found that playtesters/streamers had.

It's like that one game where the testers kept saying the shotgun was too powerful and broken but it turned out it was just too fun because the sound was too punchy so they just turned the sound down and it became more balanced

Reminds of the Darkest Dungeon incident. The devs changed the game strategy drastically by adding a new mechanic (corpses), which the majority of players were against. They got insane amount of negative feedback but they were like "Nah this is necessary for the game's health, this is staying." After enough complaints they added an option in the menu to disable this new mechanic. Then they tracked how many people played the game with that setting disabled, it was an incredibly small amount of players. Something like 99% played with the new mechanic on.

And people wonder why bosses have obnoxious flashing obvious weak points...

Lol hes right. I used to work in a tattoo parlor. Made the designs. I knew a design is good, customer complained and wanted changes that would make it worse. Send em home told them to come back tomorrow and ill change it. Changed nothing. Outcome: wow thats much better im glad i told you!

in the corporate world, we had users who just absolutely had to find something to complain about in demos, no matter how obscure. So we would actually modify the code before the demo to put in a visual glitch... an icon that wasn't aligned properly or something like that. Then they would point that out, we'd say, "oh, good catch" and then they would be happy that they found a "bug" and then shut up for the rest of the demo