Learning from past successes and failures

[Phylast]

The forums have discussed a lot about incentives to go to war and theorized about crisis of conflict with scarce resources, but I would like to discuss some of the collective knowledge about the success and failures of previous games and what led to them. All games have a natural flux of active players at various points in the game, and those numbers are often due to more than just advertising. Moral seems to have a significant effect on the health of a game and its player base. A person will naturally weigh if the challenges in the game (like bugs/ playability) is worth the enjoyment of playing the game itself.

What are some of the challenges that other games have run into and deterred players from enjoying their game? Did recent games like Atlas, Planetside Arena, or Angels Fall First miss the mark for the playerbase? Were the exploits in Worlds Adrift so brutal that it ended the player base?

Inversely, what are some of the positive aspects of games that helped gloss over similar challenges? Was World of Warcraft's inherent reward for completing small goals so addictive that it didn't matter that you had to bring a torch into the night to play? Was EVE's perceived empire building so rewarding that it didn't matter that you need to devote a lifetime to accomplish that goal?

Obviously we won't be able to cover all of the nuances of making or breaking a game, but highlighting some of the challenges that tipped the scale might be beneficial or not.

The natural follow-up to this discussion is what can be done to address these challenges or invite these rewards into Starbase?

 

[Click]

I think there are numerous aspects that can lead to a successful game - It most likely comes down to what is the games purpose. I.e. is it just a game you can go on for a a quick session, have some fun and jump on and off, or it could be one that draws a player in for it's story line.

I think the community that surrounds a game plays a huge part in that, more so when it is a multiplayer game that depends on the interaction with other players to make it complete. Toxicity only causes new players not get into the game, I think that kills quite a few games, and stops some of the "older" ones from gaining popularity again.

Other games I think have just missed the market - Planetside Arena was just another battleroyale game, with its niche being that it was up to 12 players in each team - It was too different from Planetside 2 to bring any of that player base over (not that it is huge anyway).

Looking forward to seeing the full game of StarBase to see what market it is fully trying to integrate into. But positive signs so far.

 

[Phylast]

I agree the culture of the game and the tolerance/ prevalence for toxicity has a profound effect on the player base and if an individual will return to or give a game a chance. The length or limits of interactions as well as the ability to disrupt how a person plays a game, whether through griefing or verbal toxicity, also is an important factor. Using Rocket League as an example, whether it's a teammate or opponent that's being toxic, typically interaction last at most 5 minutes and they'll move on. This encourages minimal emotional investment with interactions of others. In a persistent world, actions will typically have longer lasting consequences, which will hopefully create a healthier environment.

Now, if there are fundamental flaws/ exploits that are used to destroy a player and aren't managed properly, this encourages a player or group to be a wrecking ball and created a scorched Earth effect. Have we seen these types of challenges in other prominent games?

 

[PopeUrban]

I agree the culture of the game and the tolerance/ prevalence for toxicity has a profound effect on the player base and if an individual will return to or give a game a chance. The length or limits of interactions as well as the ability to disrupt how a person plays a game, whether through griefing or verbal toxicity, also is an important factor. Using Rocket League as an example, whether it's a teammate or opponent that's being toxic, typically interaction last at most 5 minutes and they'll move on. This encourages minimal emotional investment with interactions of others. In a persistent world, actions will typically have longer lasting consequences, which will hopefully create a healthier environment.

Now, if there are fundamental flaws/ exploits that are used to destroy a player and aren't managed properly, this encourages a player or group to be a wrecking ball and created a scorched Earth effect. Have we seen these types of challenges in other prominent games?

Note that toxic interactions with other players are not always a negative. In rocket league there is an enforced culture of sportsmanship by the developers and moderators. The expectation is that players play against each other but are good sports about it.

In a PvP sandbox the game is often designed deliberately to allow and encourage players to do terrible things to each other, say terrible things to each other, and develop real and long lasting hatred for one another as a deliberate part of the simulation. There are of course rules for these interactions to keep things from spilling out of the game and in to real life, but a large part of why a lot of people play such games is for the social extension of that simulation. When the universe is truly full of assholes, the connections you make with friends are more meaningful, more compelling, and in general keep you more glued to the game to maintain them. When you want to just flex on people and collect screenshots of people whining about how you stole their stuff, you're not going to stick with a game that penalizes you for doing so. Successful sandboxes recognize that this social conflict is core to their longevity.

If you moderate too heavily or not heavily enough you lose the middle ground and end up with a universe where either conflict feels meaningless because everyone is so nice to each other, or even noncombat play is so fraught with emotional baggage that people quit to protect their mental health from what amounts to constant cyberbullying.

People want to have bad guys and good guys and have the freedom to define their own moral code in games like this one. People want to trash talk and insult and socially engineer and rob and murder each other. Its a big part of the draw of the genre and a big part of why some games endure and others do not. EVE's famously toxic culture retains just as many players as it puts off. People like talking trash and screwing each other over, people like feeling that their conflict had moral stakes which are only possible if you give players the ability to define that morality for themselves.

"Toxicity" is a relative term and its meaning can vary from game to game and has everything to do with the design's expectation of sportsmanship and fair play than the community on offer. Players develop cultures based upon what they CAN do in a game, not what they SHOULD do.

That comes down to FB's design chops. The first rule of multiplayer game design is to assume your players are all narcissistic sociopaths and to assume they will NEVER want to do the "right" thing and will ALWAYS want to do the "wrong" thing. Designing from that mindset prevents those kinds of wrecking ball problems, even though all of your players aren't actually the worst possible human beings.

You have to ask yourself all throughout the process of development "If I were the worst possible human being, how would I use this system to make people quit the game" and use the answers to design systems where people can have these rivalries and hatreds while still ensuring that getting dunked on doesn't completely annihilate the possibility of future revenge. You want to breed conflict not just in an economic sense, but also in a social sense within your world through your game design as much as your moderation. This means ensuring people have tools to do things like trash talk and leave taunting messages in the environment, that your systems are vulnerable to forms of sabotage that encourage betrayal, and that you have curated spaces you can watch that players view as the "default" place to hash out their animosity so it remains under the control of your light, but not entirely absent moderation in stead of retreating to unmoderated private spaces which may open up your players to behavior you prohibit like IRL harassment, doxing, racism, sexism, etc.

 

[KingQuantum]

i played life is feudal, devs here made a cool solution

MMO and singleplayer/minisever (your own)

mmo has ugly but functional bases

smal version has often nice bases much ruleplay, server events nearly null salt, except salt based servers

 

[Phylast]

What are everyone's opinion about Elite Dangerous's approach of having private servers to play the game? I get that ED is closer to a traditional mmo, but the different servers really takes the high stakes interactions away from most players unless they opt in. Could the developers have made ships less expensive to replace? Higher value rewards for open play?

I agree that fostering conflict both economically and otherwise is beneficial.

I guess weighing the positive and negative interactions with others and the actual game itself is hard to fix using a variable outside of those factors. For instance, let's use the original release of No Mans Sky's faulty stability and the game crashing often. Imagine being griefed while your game crashes on you. Extra punishing. It's difficult to fix that challenge by giving the player 50% more income.

 

[PopeUrban]

What are everyone's opinion about Elite Dangerous's approach of having private servers to play the game? I get that ED is closer to a traditional mmo, but the different servers really takes the high stakes interactions away from most players unless they opt in. Could the developers have made ships less expensive to replace? Higher value rewards for open play?

I agree that fostering conflict both economically and otherwise is beneficial.

I guess weighing the positive and negative interactions with others and the actual game itself is hard to fix using a variable outside of those factors. For instance, let's use the original release of No Mans Sky's faulty stability and the game crashing often. Imagine being griefed while your game crashes on you. Extra punishing. It's difficult to fix that challenge by giving the player 50% more income.

The game crashing on you is not a design issue and shouldn't be treated as one. You really shouldn't be altering gameplay designs around the assumption that your game doesn't work.

Starbase is designed as an MMO. If it doesn't support its intended player count with stable performance then the entire design needs to be tossed out in the first place and discussions of scale don't matter as we'd no longer be playing a game at scale.

Private servers only make sense when your game is inteded to have a very small population. Allowing them results in a splintered player base that can easily result in your social, economic, and pvp systems falling on their face.

If you don't want to be the victim of a gank, don't play a game that allows it, or do not enter the parts of the game that allow it. The moment you entered a virtual space that allows other players to attack you, you consented to PvP. if you didn't want to risk PvP, you shouldn't have been there.

 

[Vexus]

I think in the end, Dark Souls while still being a very popular and good set of games, ultimately destroyed itself by catering so hard to hardcore gamers that it limited its potential

I think you are incorrect in this assessment. The issue was they did not cater to the hardcore players. There was no new content to push players harder. No matchmaking to put people against others around their skill level. No new maps to explore. Nothing new was added, beyond new sequels. I only played and beat Dark Souls 3, and it was a lot of fun, but there was nothing at the end of the road to keep me going. The PvP was fun for a while, but it becomes repetitive, and no new meta shift ever happened.

This idea stands out for me as today I had a discussion with someone who was claiming League of Legends does not design their game for the top 1% of players, to which I disagreed. LoL does indeed cater to the top 1% of players, by releasing new champions with new mechanics to master on a regular basis. They give the heavily-invested player a ton of new stuff to consume all the time, as well as making huge meta-shifting game mechanic changes as they see fit. This is key to maintaining your hardcore players' interest, which drives everyone else who want to be just like those hardcore players. WoW does the same thing - releasing hard end-game content to further allow their most dedicated players something to chew on. Dark Souls did not offer new content outside sequels, and did not offer anything for the player who beat the game to do. No end game was designed for. As such, those players sought out competition at any point, and as more and more people beat the game and left - due to no new content - players went into a brand-new players' instance and fought them. Because they were the only targets left. It's not elitist. It's just poor game design on that aspect.

However, Dark Souls was also never really meant to be a multiplayer game. It was mainly the PvE difficulty that got people hooked. Within that statement is the takeaway - difficulty is important. The fact something is hard, means it is worthwhile to do, because few are going to do that thing. If it is hard to build a ship in Starbase, you will enjoy the same euphoria when you finally complete your first ship and take to the asteroid belt. If it is so simple as spawning a pre-fab, best-ever-made ship from a spawning station, then the value is destroyed. Starbase has to ensure that the game is hard enough for players to want to invest time and effort into completing things which those players find interesting, whatever it might be. There must always be room for a new player to think of and design a better mouse trap, so to speak.

Starbase has the issue of content solved already I think. In terms of combat, you give players a far-out world-event style goal, like reaching the moon. No one is going to pull that off alone. People will form on the sole basis of completing the task, and others will form for the pure intent of preventing those players from succeeding. This builds a natural, optional hot-spot for events. The most hardcore players will push for reaching the moon first, and fight tooth and nail to ensure they themselves win. Starbase to remain constant, will have to introduce new, far out goals for players to go for with emergent gameplay, and that will prevent them from backwashing down the line to slay new players just leaving the safezones. With this huge, 3D universe, Starbase has plenty of options to make sure the hardcore players are catered to, that gives them a reason to play every day, that drives the content and information production that the newest player can consume and get caught up with in no time. It is imperative that Starbase caters to the hardcore players like every other successful game while still leaving room for the new and less-intensive players to learn and grow and have fun. I believe it is simple with Starbase, to achieve this result, with factions which will fight, and world events which will focus player interaction.

 

[PopeUrban]

I think in the end, Dark Souls while still being a very popular and good set of games, ultimately destroyed itself by catering so hard to hardcore gamers that it limited its potential (it's still a very good series and I recommend it, but I mean this in the sense that it's meant for a minority of people rather than say a large amount of the gaming community). Maybe that's the point of that game, but what incentive does that leave for new people who may just want to come home and simply relax from a hard day of work? You don't hear people saying that they want to go home and relax to playing the Soul's series.

Your entire read on this is way off base.

Dark Souls was so successful it spawned an entire legion of copycats, now collectively known as the "soulslike" genre. It did so by sticking to a very specific set of design principles and filling a niche that wasn't being filled by other titles.

Attempting to please everyone is the easiest way to make a mess of a product that doesn't please anyone. Attempting to compromise its design simply to expand its market share would have been a case where FROM "ultimately destroyed" the very thing that made it popular. FROM didn't design dark souls to be for some phantom group of elitists. it designed it to be a fun game to play with a strong central creative vision.

The mistaken ideal that the wider market needs to be handled with kid gloves is conclusively disproven by how well the souls games did. Its not about how hard or easy your game is. Its about whether it obeys a compelling internal logic that doesn't fight itself.

If you've made a good game, particularly one that rewards and encourages learning and mastering its systems, and rewards that mastry, people will enjoy your game, and people will want to buy your game. Whether those systems are stamina based dodging, farming xp, doing 360 noscopes, or matching the same color gems is irrelevant.

The idea that "if we changed the game more people would play it" is a poisonous one. There is no more to gain by making DS more casual than there is by making bejeweled more hardcore. Everyone is not going to like your game. Attempting to make a mythical omnigame that appeals to everyone is always going to be destined for failure.

 

[TheEmperor1237]

Your entire read on this is way off base.

Dark Souls was so successful it spawned an entire legion of copycats, now collectively known as the "soulslike" genre. It did so by sticking to a very specific set of design principles and filling a niche that wasn't being filled by other titles.

Attempting to please everyone is the easiest way to make a mess of a product that doesn't please anyone. Attempting to compromise its design simply to expand its market share would have been a case where FROM "ultimately destroyed" the very thing that made it popular. FROM didn't design dark souls to be for some phantom group of elitists. it designed it to be a fun game to play with a strong central creative vision.

The mistaken ideal that the wider market needs to be handled with kid gloves is conclusively disproven by how well the souls games did. Its not about how hard or easy your game is. Its about whether it obeys a compelling internal logic that doesn't fight itself.

If you've made a good game, particularly one that rewards and encourages learning and mastering its systems, and rewards that mastry, people will enjoy your game, and people will want to buy your game. Whether those systems are stamina based dodging, farming xp, doing 360 noscopes, or matching the same color gems is irrelevant.

The idea that "if we changed the game more people would play it" is a poisonous one. There is no more to gain by making DS more casual than there is by making bejeweled more hardcore. Everyone is not going to like your game. Attempting to make a mythical omnigame that appeals to everyone is always going to be destined for failure.

Alright then.

 

[Burnside]

I agree with PopeUrban here, the game having its own thematic logic that remains internally consistent goes a long way to keeping the playerbase you get and abandoning the core feel of the game to attempt to gather a larger playerbase will only lose dedicated players for a short-lived burst of inconstant gamers. MMOs live and die on long-term repeat play, so it follows that holding onto the core identity of the game's mechanics and world is essential to its success.

 

[Caddrel]

Two quotes immediately spring to mind when it comes to learning from other games and developers.

One is, amusingly, to never listen to what your players say. Collect data, metrics, and analytics from your users, clients, and servers. Prepare for nothing to be as expected, and no-one to act as you expect them to. Focus groups of trusted testers and friends are exceptionally valuable.

Note the above doesn't exclude making sure there's a positive vibe and environment in your community and forums. Keep a happy shop.

The second insight came from a Japanese developer talking about Wind Waker. He talked about verisimilitude; make your game world internally consistent, immersive, and believable. A simple, small game which feels real and tangible is preferable to a huge one which feels empty and distant.

You can see this evolved in games like Breath of the Wild.

 

[Vexus]

Collect data, metrics, and analytics from your users, clients, and servers.

Sure, if you want to be a soulless game developer, this works.

Focus groups of trusted testers and friends are exceptionally valuable.

This contradicts your first sentence/quote in that paragraph.

make your game world internally consistent, immersive, and believable.

100% agree. More than anything else, the game has to remain consistent with itself.

Back to listening to players: I find that too often it is not listening to players that is the problem. That is, devs get loud feedback from only a limited amount of sources - and for valid reasons, because they cannot spend the time to read or listen to many inputs all day. But the issue comes down to not listening to enough feedback. When you have 10 people you listen to, the 'correct' solution is unlikely to have been presented. However, if you had 1000 solutions to browse through, you have a higher chance of finding the correct solution. I'd refine that first quote to: don't pick favorites and listen to only a small group of players. Instead, take the time to consider every suggestion, and to survey your playerbase for the most pressing issues and request they offer their own solutions to problems.

In your example of Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild; they got feedback from players in such volume that there was evolution into a new title. They listened to the players. The key component to an MMO is listening quickly enough to make critical adjustments that will otherwise cripple gameplay. Theme park MMOs don't have as much of a problem - they present the world and the players must consume it. More dynamic MMOs need to be on their toes at all times. Starbase devs being part of the dev factions should allow them direct insight into the evolving game world, though, I hope they realize those players they bring closest to them are unlikely to suggest options that are not biased towards success of their respective factions. It is rare someone will say, "We're winning too hard, X and Y need to be adjusted so that the other side has a chance."

 

[Burnside]

He's got a strong point though "people don't know what they like or why they like it, only what they think they do" is a solid axiom, the analytics will tell you more about a person's engagement than their partially aware self-reporting; this follows for any human being, we're best at knowing when we are or are not enjoying a thing but not specifically what part of it we enjoy or why. Mind you, a pure analytical approach to engagement gets us skinner boxes and microtransactions, so like anything under the sun, it needs moral moderation. You are right though, Vexus, a large volume of data helps, but sample size is just one of those key parts of the scientific approach a lot of people forget about.

Another thought, having your analytics available and, I think, transparent to the community, can help justify things like balance passes when they need to occur- public availability to the dataset can also tap the brainpower of the community to give you assessments your own team might have missed (again, moderation here because anybody can use stats to justify anything).

 

[Zistack]

Back to listening to players: I find that too often it is not listening to players that is the problem. That is, devs get loud feedback from only a limited amount of sources - and for valid reasons, because they cannot spend the time to read or listen to many inputs all day.

Ironically, that second sentence is precisely why the advice:

[...] never listen to what your players say. Collect data, metrics, and analytics from your users, clients, and servers.

It's not that you want to truly ignore the players. I think that it would be more accurate to phrase that advice as:

Don't pay attention to the solutions proposed by players. Instead pay attention to the problems they're describing and trying to solve.

You want to use data and metrics to then determine the exact nature of the problem, rather than just how players perceive the problem. Ignoring issue of loudmouthed assholes who like to think they're smarter than they are dominating suggestions boards and railing against anyone who disagrees with their ill-conceived ideas (not calling anyone out here - just saying that it's a thing I've seen happen in other games), you also have the problem that players are often not developers, let alone game designers. They'll pretty much always miss the mark on the best solution to a given problem. What's important is that they're identifying a problem, and developers need to take steps to make sure that they thoroughly understand that problem before they go taking drastic action like changing major game features. If they get that part wrong, they can seriously hurt the health and happiness of their playerbase. Recall how noobstomping in EVE Online was a serious problem until the developers decided to take some measurements and realized what was going on.

 

[Recatek]

@Zistack is spot on. Players are good at identifying pain points, but aren't really in the best position to be prescribing solutions. And I say that as someone who loves making suggestions for games. I'm perfectly fine with being ignored when I make suggestions because it isn't my game, and I don't have the full picture from the devs' perspective. It's fun to make suggestions anyway, but it's more catharsis than praxis.

Ignoring issue of loudmouthed assholes who like to think they're smarter than they are dominating suggestions boards and railing against anyone who disagrees with their ill-conceived ideas (not calling anyone out here - just saying that it's a thing I've seen happen in other games)

If there's anything I've learned over many years of making suggestions on countless video game forums, it's that my opinions are wrong and someone is always there to make sure I know about it. Usually, the merit of a given idea plays second fiddle to the tenacity of the person(s) lobbying for or against it.

 

[Vexus]

players are often not developers, let alone game designers.

I have a different perspective here. If you listen to feedback from developers and game designers, one thing is very clear: they never expected what the players eventually did. In other words... there's a focus by game designers to craft the experience for players. Players then actually play the game, and ignore everything that the designer tried to craft for them. As such, devs are now on the back foot, trying to figure out what went wrong, fixing and refixing something that never had to be an issue in the first place if they considered things from the player perspective - which is frankly not possible without asking players.

I was watching an interview recently with an Ultima Online dev talking about how they had an in-game ecology system in UO at the start, and how the players just went around killing everything. They thought they were adding in a cool feature that would bring this dynamic system to the game world. The players completely destroyed any chance of it ever existing. They then spent lots of time trying to increase the rate of spawn, and tinkering with how to fix these issues. In the end, they just scrapped the whole thing, and the players never even noticed.

I look at that example, among many others, and realize the devs wasted many days and hours attempting to fix a problem they created for themselves. If they asked players beforehand, "Would you guys like a dynamic ecology system where certain animals eat plants, other animals eat the herbivores, and you the players are incentivized to kill the carnivores?" - I think a lot of people would just ask... why? It's not necessary. Now granted, a lot of the reason this system failed is because of other intertwined game mechanics, such as skilling up from attacking anything, incentivizing people to just hit anything in sight. But I see this as an important lesson - players always have a different perspective from the game designers. As such, it's important for devs to question their motives for putting in a game system, and get feedback for if a feature is really worth it.

I was discussing radar in another thread (that the user deleted it seems... no worries, the internet is forever). I was trying to explain the huge effort the development of such a feature in a realistic manner would take, and how it's not really worth the development time. Devs focusing on a such a feature would be ignoring so much else, and as such, if they got tunnel vision on such a feature, I think it would hurt the game over all. In other words, it's important to question things over and over to find out if they're the best solutions to problems.

 

[Zistack]

If you listen to feedback from developers and game designers, one thing is very clear: they never expected what the players eventually did. In other words... there's a focus by game designers to craft the experience for players. Players then actually play the game, and ignore everything that the designer tried to craft for them.

The issue here isn't about whether or not the developers are listening to the playerbase and solving their problems. In this case, the issue is that the devs have a vision for the game, but the players entirely missed it. It just means that the game's design or some aspect of it didn't work as the designers intended. It's sort of like how artists create artwork that is meant to say one thing, but then people sometimes misinterpret it to mean something else entirely.

Understand that developers are not oracles, and foreseeing the emergent behavior of a complex system - especially one that involves humans - is extremely difficult. This kind of mistake happens all the time and it's basically impossible to completely avoid, even when in constant communication with the playerbase. Besides, if developers only ever chose to implement features that the majority of players asked for, you'd never end up with a game that actually does anything different from other games that already exist. There's no way in hell something like Starbase could have come from such a discussion.

I was discussing radar in another thread (that the user deleted it seems... no worries, the internet is forever). I was trying to explain the huge effort the development of such a feature in a realistic manner would take, and how it's not really worth the development time.

So, I saw that thread. I remember thinking to myself when reading it "Well, it's obvious that nobody here knows anything about how this feature would work.". It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when non-programmers start trying to estimate development effort involved in a feature. The implementation of that radar would actually have been really easy. It's basically just a fancy rangefinder array. The problem with it is the runtime expense. Raycasting with a high enough ray density to determine the strength of the signal that would bounce back based on armor angles and all that would be an insane load on people's processors. Anytime someone turned one on, even the big rigs would start to cry.

This only serves to illustrate my point. Players are neither game designers nor developers most of the time. I don't mind when players propose solutions to problems. In a round-about way, devs can learn about the problems that players are having by analyzing the solutions that players are proposing. On the other hand, I really mind when players start talking about dev time, because almost nobody I've ever heard talking about it actually knows a damned thing about what they're talking about.

 

[Burnside]

You're also forgetting that a viewer of a piece of art can have an entirely overriding frame of mind that precludes, rejects, or ignores the artist's message in favor of their own personal reality- and yet the art still has meaning to the beholder, it's just an unintended and alien meaning. Games are... not quite art, not quite science, but an unholy fusion of both- crafting experience requires that the player see the world as the designer does, orient themselves around its meaning like they do, and act on the game world to grasp that orientated meaning like the designer intends. That's THREE beholders in each player instead of just the one an artist has to contend with.

 

[Caddrel]

Very interesting series of replies. Particular thanks to Zistack and Recatek; you really got what I was trying to communicate.

Vexus' initial response inspired me to find a recent example of how game developers use analytics successfully. I've linked two fascinating videos, featuring the developers of Subnautica, who both explain the approach with far more authority than I could:

And the second video from GDC:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025691/-Subnautica

As a summary, Subnautica used in-game analytics (which tracked data taken from their entire playerbase) and an in-game feedback system (which relied on proactive feedback by players). The developers analysed the in-game feedback responses with algorithms to get actionable conclusions, and used the analytics to enable decision-making. They cite following community feedback as a cornerstone of their development process.

The two videos come to about an hour and a half total, but are well worth the time.

I should mention that in my earlier post when I said "to never listen to what your players say" this should have come with the disclaimer "in forums, Discord, or Reddit." Even at their best, those sources cover a fraction of your total playerbase. You don't know who they are, you can't interact with them, and you can't properly assimilate all the information they provide. I would always recommend using the best quality feedback, covering your entire playerbase. Note this doesn't exclude using specialist groups or individuals.