Thank you all for your input, it sounds like an empty phrase, but I did read it with great interest and Thomas, I really respect you for being so honest in your post!
I can't comment on everything in detail, but I did read everything. Below you can find a part of my notes that I took that are half-finished reflections on some things that were mentioned here.
Top players that basically only play in tournaments still manage to stay at the top. Does this mean we need to change the meta?
It's a bit absurd that people manage to stay at the top with hardly any practice. People complain about rust all the time and doing anything on a high level requires you to regularly do it or you will get worse over time.
One problem is that medium-good players don't have anyone to practice against, because the top players are so afk.
In this way the problems in the top-rated scene are indeed self-inflicted, because they could partially fix it by being more open to playing with new people. But raising your own competition is irrational if you want to stay at the top with little effort.
We could maybe solve some of the problems with low activity by experimenting with tournament formats that require playing the game more, but we have almost zero tournament directors.
I suspect directing tournaments is unfun and takes a lot of time.
Do we need to shake up the meta to encourage more high level activity?
It's true that many games use regular changes as a way to drive engagement.
Chess is a popular game and doesn't have any balance patches. Chess is even a solved game in the sense that we can have computers play it better than humans ever could. Still, many people start playing chess.
My personal take is that many games that changing regularly is not necessary. It can be used to cover up mediocre games, because then you can paint over the fact that the core gameplay loop is not very engaging or that there are serious disbalances in the game with the rush of discovering something new and that many op things are not found out yet.
Still, we do have the problem that many people say there is no reason to play the game.
@thevvheelie said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
one of the biggest problems is that players should be but aren't getting rewarded as much for making better plays whether thats micro or macro
Can you elaborate what you mean by that? Doesn't the person with the better plays win? I don't really see a way to reward good play inside of the game other than winning the game.
Changes/new features get introduced and it doesn't seem like it matters what kind of feedback people give -> people feel powerless.
We're stuck in a vicious circle where the powers that be say that they are open to feedback, but the feedback is of too low quality. The people at the bottom don't think it's worth it to put in a lot of effort, because they have seen no change even from feedback that they see as good enough to should have passed.
The powers that be spend less effort explaining changes, because they feel how much they get shit on is not a sensible metric to inform their policy, so they go on doing whatever they personally think is in the best interest of the community.
When people argue against something and then the original plan gets executed anyway it feels to them like it was all for nothing. How can we encourage them to still voice their opinion next time? Sometimes the feedback changes the long term plans or leads to changes in subtle ways that don't get communicated explicitly. For example I originally was in favor of scrapping global rating entirely. Having read various arguments against that, my opinion is now much more nouanced about this topic. These arguments didn't actively reverse any changes that have been made, but they prevented me from working on things that would have been a bad idea. So it definitely had a positive impact, it was just completely invisible (So thank you people, whose names I unfortunately forgot in the meantime because some of these discussions are years old). I'm not sure how we could improve this.
A general problem with explaining reasoning is that it takes an ungodly amount of time. This is true for both the developer and player side. I wonder if it is actually more time-efficient to take the time to compile relevant arguments once instead of repeatedly arguing with arguments that are only half-formulated each time. Still, doing this takes a lot of time and can't always be done in advance. Nobody expected that changing the HQs would be such a hot topic, so it just got mentioned in a changelog as a minor feature. Somebody was actually complaining that the feature was "hidden" in the wall of text of the rest of the changelog. It's obviously a bit ridiculous to demand that each feature has to be prominently displayed at the top for the people that stop reading after the first paragraph because that is literally impossible to do for each feature. So for every change you have to guess how important it is, to decide how much effort you put into promotion and explanation. You inevitably get it wrong sometimes and then people say with the power of hindsight that feature X should have oBVioSlY been promoted better and sometimes it's really hard to discern if you indeed made a mistake there or if it's just an entitled ass speaking to you.
In general we can't know what the average player wants, we can only do educated guesses. It seems the most sensible way to decide changes is to collect arguments for and against it and then weight the arguments.
Having multiple people complain about something does have utility because it makes it less likely that the person complaining is some sort of outlier and is just claiming that everyone else feels the same. But it doesn't make sense to define some sort of threshold as in "if 10 people complain it gets scrapped".