Fact: Game companies and developers can lie to the players. I’ve heard firsthand developers talk about how they lied to their players about certain mechanics to preserve game balance and there’s numerous documented instances of devs lying to the players. Now that we’ve reestablished this fact of life, we can move on.
Not all developers lie to their players and I’m inclined to believe that it’s the minority of them but recently, my bullshit meter as Grimmtooth calls it, is flashing alarm red. It all started so innocently too. I was wondering how a particular system was working, found the company official explanation for it and my reaction was : “Uh??? You guys are sure?! Because that’s not what I’m seeing here. But hey, maybe it’s just me being unlucky”.
Then I started seeing others who had the same reaction as me, then close RL friends who all had the same experiences and at some point, you start telling yourself that maybe, just maybe, the devs are not being completely honest with you. I’ve started to do some research and found some well backed research by other players who are suspecting the same thing as me.
There’s a saying that say there’s no smoke without fire and in this case, the smoke is a big black billowing column which can be seen for miles around.
I know I’m being mysterious and all but at this point I’m still doing research because I want to try to find some concrete evidence of my theories. There’s a ton of circumstantial evidence but I’d like to find some proof to really tie everything together. What I want to say is I don’t want to make this big post about how it’s all a big sham and find out I was wrong about a game that ultimately, I still like a lot despite this one thing I’m convinced they are lying about. So until I’m certain, I’ll keep on digging.
But I’m a bit curious to know if any of you have had this kind of reasoning before and how you handled it. Or how did you go about finding that elusive nail in the coffin piece of evidence.
Inquiring minds want to know – what is this system in question?
It’s one thing to show that an official explanation is incorrect. It’s another to prove (or try to prove) that somebody lied.
I work in software development. Over time, big, complex, evolving systems don’t work as they were intended to or as they used to or as they worked in the testing environment. Unexpected consequences happen. And there are bugs in even the best systems. That’s all at the functional level. There’s also another layer of communication that goes on between the developers and the designers and the community representatives. Often times, there’s imperfect understanding between developers and those who actually talk to users. Technical points get glossed over or misunderstood or forgotten. And it goes both ways; sometimes the community feedback isn’t well represented to developers so what’s actually not working gets a low-priority status. Which brings up the limited resources we all have. There are some problems which everybody knows about but which aren’t worth fixing or even explaining properly.
Users want everything to work perfectly, for the makers to have a perfect understanding of how their systems actually function and to take the time to discuss it all. That’s a high bar. I don’t know what you hope to achieve by proving that a developer is lying but there’s a reason this resonates with a lot of us: “this game would be so much better without our customers.”
I do work in software developement and I fully understand what you’re trying to say. At first, my initial reaction was like yours. When I started this I was doing it from the perspective of quirky functioning of the system. The designers want it to be A but the programming makes it B. Heck, I still hope that this is what’s happening.
But and here’s the thing, I also know it does happens that sometimes, companies do hide or mislead customers intentionaly for a number of reasons. It happens.
You ask what I hope to achieve? I hope to shed light on a topic that has been the source of much questioning and frustration in the community. It’s not so much trying to throw a stone to the devs as it is explaining how something works so people can understand what is going on. It’s obvious that in this particular case, the official explanation cannot explain how the game is behaving and this is a cause of frustration for many, including myself. I don’t want the game to work perfectly, I want to understand how it works currently.
Finaly, until I have definitive proof, wich I may never get, I’d rather not start pointing fingers.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. What are you looking at? Maybe you’re delusional, but why not just open up and share what you think might be going on so others can take a look at it too? There’s probably something interesting there, even if it’s not a grand conspiracy.