The kind of criticism that makes me eye-roll the most is the “I wouldn’t have made that mistake”, or “If you knew what you were doing” kind of comments. Those more born from being naive about what the process to make anything is, and often put me on the defensive.
I often play games where something frustrates me, is buggy, or I completely disagree with the design decision. The first thing I do is ask “I wonder why they made that decision?”. Often I can chock it up to “there just wasn’t enough time”. If I know the dev, I’ll send them a email or DM and ask them, “Why did you do this?”. Nine out of ten times, I’ll get back an answer where I go “Oh, of course.”, or “Yeah, it sucks to run out of time or money.” Or they say “yep, we blew it” and I think “Yep, been there, done that.”
Things are very clear when playing a finished game, they aren’t so clear in the heat of production.
I enjoy explaining why we made the decisions we did. Sometimes it was on purpose, other times we just missed something, or plain fucked up. What I don’t enjoy is explaining that and then getting a bunch of people saying or implying “I wouldn’t have made that mistake”, or “How could you not see that?” It makes me reluctant to explain why we did what we did. I don’t want to be attacked or second guessed for it, even if it was (in retrospect) a bad decision. I don’t think anyone would. I realize people aren’t attacking on purpose, but it’s how it comes across sometimes. When other devs make creative decisions I disagree with, I want to know why they made them, but I don’t argue with them. It is their “art”, not mine.
I guess it’s the difference between doing a post-mortem at a place like GDC, where your peers can empathize with your mistakes and learn from them. I’ve never felt attacked at GDC for talking about a mistake. I get asked a lot of tough questions and am challenged about what I think I could do better next time. But these are coming from people who what to learn, not criticize.
All that said, this is a great community and I do enjoy reading what everyone is thinking. Over the past two years, we’ve become “friends”. I put that in quotes, because, no, you can’t crash on my couch when you’re in town.
The changes we’re making to the game come directly from your feedback. Maybe we didn’t change them as much as you wanted, or maybe we didn’t change the one you wanted, but we do listen and take everything in.