Why I Quit Playing [INSERT_GAME_HERE]!

why are people quitting League of Legends five reasons why I quit fortnight why I'm quitting pop G after 1000 hours there are a lot of videos like this out there not sure if you've realized in this video I want to go through the top 10 reasons why youtubers quit playing certain games League of Legends fortnight whatever and I'm gonna debunk some of them because I think some of the reasons they mention are completely ridiculous and I'm also gonna tell you which of the reasons I think are pretty legit let's get some number 10 bucks and bad performance prime example pop G of course so if your game just runs poorly and has a lot of bucks is that a legit reason to quit yes of course it is as a game developer it's your responsibility to make sure your game runs properly and if you don't care enough to fix it then say goodbye to

your players reason number 9 cheating and the abuse of game systems obviously a legit reason if you can't be bothered to play against hackers and cheaters of course you're gonna quit so once again it's just the responsibility of the game developers to keep the game safe and clean reason number 8 the game is dead I think calling a game dead is a little exaggerated most of the time especially if you use it in combination with a really popular game like Starcraft League of Legends pop G whatever those games they don't die that easily okay a game is dead if you queue up for a game and you can't find a match when you can't find anybody to play with basically that's when a game is dead and yes that can happen and yes that is a very legit reason to stop playing a game but I just think the term the games dead is a pretty overused and most of the time it's just not true we also need to keep in mind that we're looking at the opinion and the videos of youtubers here though so what they are basically saying is the game is dropping

in popularity and obviously that can be a very religious reason for a youtuber to stop playing again if a game becomes less popular that means less views etc etc so yes in this case I kind of understand at that point calling a game dead is not really fair though reason number seven is not enough updates so not enough patches not enough new content maybe the bugs are not fixed quickly enough necessary changes to the game balance are taking too long players have to wait for a very long time for new maps or for new player characters so yeah just not enough updates to the game does that sound like a legit reason to quit yes at first it does but it's a little more complicated because reason number six a lot of you to receive to quit playing games is because there are too many updates too many changes to the game and yes of course they don't mention both of these reasons in one video that wouldn't make any sense it's just for some games there seem to be too many updates and for some

games there seem to be too little updates but why are too many content and balancing patches a problem you might wonder and one of the main reasons is just that it can get very exhausting to keep up with all of the changes even for professional players League of Legends probably the prime example for that because riot just keeps reworking a lot of the old systems all the time and even professionals seem to have a hard time keeping up if you don't play the game for half a year and you try to come back to it pretty much everything has changed congratulations everything you've learned about the game so far is now useless have fun on top of that there are always some people who just like the old system better than the new system so whenever you make a change you will just piss some people off by default I hope you can see the dilemma game developers are in here they make too many changes people get pissed overwhelmed confused they make too little changes people get bored and the game gets stale anyway people will quit there's no way to win BAM wait you think

there's a middle ground somewhere in between honestly I'm not that sure because usually games don't pull it off to stay relevant for a long time in my opinion you probably have the highest chance if your game is just very good and interesting in the first place so it doesn't need a lot of updates and content patches to be interesting if you manage to make a game that is just fun and really stays fun just by itself without needing any updates when you have the highest chance to stay relevant for a very long amount of time in my opinion because finding the middle ground between too many and too little updates ah I don't think that's possible and to be fair yes there is probably something like a sweet spot somewhere in between it's just not a sweet spot that is perfect and that will keep your game going forever it's basically just a spot where you will inflict the least amount of suffering onto your players but that's this far from perfect of course it also depends on which updates and which content you introduce into the

game some changes definitely have to make the game more interesting without pissing anybody off for example just adding a new game-mode who could be angry about that one and it still provides something new to the game it's just these options are limited you can't keep adding new game modes forever at some point the maintenance cost for that it's just gonna get too high you're gonna split the community too much and worst of all at some point it just gets overwhelming as well for the players especially for new players if there's just too much stuff in the game it can be really intimidating and overwhelming for new players and without any new players the games obviously doomed to die earlier or later so long story short not enough updates and too many updates are both legit reasons to quit playing again from a developer game designer perspective it's just a little more complicated than that it's very hard to find the correct balance in my opinion how do you handle this situation as a developer I don't know you tell me I don't have enough experience the only thing I'm saying is

from now on watch your mouth if you're saying things like because things are not that easy sometimes they are sometimes developers are just too lazy to fix a back or taking too long to release the new map pad you get the point reason number 5 a toxic community you don't want to play with is that a legit reason yes of course nobody wants to play with people who constantly scream at you and throw the game on purpose and write mean things into the chat that's just no fun of course if you want to play online games you have to kind of develop a thick skin because you'll always meet people like that but too much of it is just no fun and it's totally a reason to quit I understand once again this is a thing where I think developers can only do so much they can give you a way to report players who behave poorly they can give you a way to reward players who behave well but really what other ways are there to make sure toxicity doesn't become too much of a thing good matchmaking might help because if

the matches are really close people tend to be a little less toxic in my opinion games where you get completely steamrolled and you feel like there's nothing you can do about it other ones where you get the most toxic players overwatch is definitely one of those games where basically every second matches a complete steamroll and if the game doesn't allow you to surrender that can make matters even worse because you feel like you're stuck and the games already lost but you have to keep playing for another 15 minutes just to finally lose League of Legends other heroes of the storm that obviously creates a lot of toxicity so yeah there are things developers can do about it make sure the matches are closed make sure people can surrender reward players who behave well punish players who behave poorly but that's about it and I can tell you it's not enough to get 100% toxicity free not ganna happen reason number 4s won't you hear very often and one that I think makes a lot of sense bad communication from the developers the first of all it feels like they are not listening they're not

reacting to what the community wants and then secondly the developers are not communicating properly what their plans for the games are what they want to do with the game and where they are taking the game so of course that can feel frustrating for players of course that can make players quit from a developer perspective I think it's a tough one to pull off correctly but at the very least it's possible good communication is not an impossibility you can actually pull it off if you really want it the hardest part is probably not the talking because yeah as a developer you should just share your plans for the game you should share where you're taking the game and you should always explain the reasons why you are changing something that is very important don't set any wrong expectations all that sort of stuff but the listening is definitely the difficult part because there are so many different voices in your community everybody wants something else and the people who make the most noise are probably also not an accurate intention of your player base the players who are happy don't make any noise the players who are unhappy make

all of the noise which means even if the majority of your player base is happy you will still pretty much you're only unhappy people who tell you to change things up so it's a very natural response as a game developer to just chat a lot of this down and ignore a lot of this and just make your own calls which is obviously pretty dangerous as well because when the majority of your player base is actually unhappy you might not realize it bad communication everybody is something that can definitely ruin your game but it's also something you can do correctly if you really want you for example I think more games should use surveys on polls to find out what players want surveys a such a nice way to get an accurate representation of what your players want just ask them a couple of questions and with that data you can do a lot more than with a couple of forum posts of people telling you how unhappy they are with the state of the game surveys also make you feel like the developers care about your opinion which was also a nice feeling to have as a player why why aren't you doing more of them I don't understand reason number three why youtubers quit

their beloved games also a very very common reason bad balancing and this is one where I have to say I'm leaning more towards nah not legit if you are complaining about balancing in a game like League of Legends you have to understand that it is simply not possible to balance 80 characters with hundreds of different variables because even very small changes can have absolutely massive ripple effects let's just say you give hero X one additional HP and even though that's absolutely minor change it could mean hero B now takes two instead of one hits in order to kill it though basically takes twice as long to kill that character just because we gave it one additional HP and there are just so many things you can't account for you don't know how players will behave once you're balancing changes go live and there's no way to test it before that either if you set up a test server with a couple of play testers that's always gonna give you

very different results from actually pushing it to the live servers so that's just point number one it's not possible to balance likes games like that and then point number two is you don't even want them to be perfectly balanced in the first place you want them to be imbalanced there's a video called perfect imbalance by extra credits if I remember I linked that somewhere here they do a really good job explaining this concept they basically state that as long as everything has still a counter imbalance makes for a more interesting meta game for a more evolving meta game because everybody is trying to come up with a creative and effective counter the problem only occurs if there is no counter to a dominant strategy at that point that strategy is just broken and should be fixed and yes sometimes developers don't fix these strategies which sucks and which is a reason to quit a game for sure so yes balancing can be a legit reason to quit playing a game but most of the time it's just not as bad as people make it look in there why I've quit videos it's just if you

have played a game for 1000 hours plus you're way more likely to notice these imbalances maybe you don't like the meta it creates yeah that's a reason to quit as well I guess but the good news if you don't like the current meta of a game is that the meta will keep changing and it might become better sometime in the future that's just the way it goes and it doesn't necessarily have to be the fault of the balancing reason number two is probably the most legit the most honest one on this entire list it's that you just got bored let's be real if you play a game for 1000 hours plus you're just gonna get part of it there's almost no way around that I mean don't get me wrong there are games you can play for way way longer about 1000 hours is definitely the point where I'm no longer surprised if you're like okay I've had enough of this and also things the youtubers said mentioned this reason are definitely the more honest ones sure you can come up with all kinds of other reasons but in the end it's just what do you expect did you expect you could play this game forever no the video game that stays interesting

forever still needs to be invented and now finally reason number one is the one where I call ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba [ __ ] at the very least most of the time it's just not the game I fell in love with anymore and this is just a point where I'm really what do you want if the developers update the game they change the identity of the game it's just not the game you fell in love with anybody if they don't update the game it gets boring it gets mundane they don't even update the game the game is dead I mean can you update a game without changing its core identity yes you probably can true but you're gonna change something it's never gonna be exactly the same and also let me say if you play a game four thousand hours it will still not be the game you fell in love with 1000 hours ago if you play a game for that long you're gonna get sick of it your lofts gonna get stale just like love and real life if you know our game that well you're gonna notice all of the little flaws and all of the

imperfections and they're gonna start pissing you off more and more the longer you play and also games are just different in the late game if you get really good at the game the game changes let's take Starcraft for example if you get started playing Starcraft there are so many different creative strategies you can play but the better you get the fewer strategies there are that actually work you get more and more constrained and the game just isn't the same anymore at a higher level it might still be a good game but it's definitely almost a different game and it's definitely no longer the game you fell in love with anymore the only thing that might be left is a little bit of nostalgia but that's it by the way the lease why I've quit videos show up on your feet at all they definitely do for me maybe because I always click on them I think it's absolutely fascinating and interesting to see why people quit games is one of the most interesting metrics for a game designer like me because we don't obviously we don't want people to quit playing our games most of what I've talked about up only applies to online games but I think there are also a lot of takeaways for just casual indie games

I'm very curious to hear your take on all of these points so leave a comment this is a youtube channel about game development and I'm gonna see you in the next one