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Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson has a message for developers considering surveying their players: don't.
Wilson has some experience managing teams behind popular live-service games having founded Grinding Gear Games, directed the original Path of Exile, and served as company CEO until his departure in early 2025. He now runs his own small studio, Light Pattern, and is working on an unannounced project. Naturally, he's seen the ebbs and flows of the temperature on a live-service game's player base over many years heading up GGG, and there's one thing he avoids when trying to decide on a path forward: surveys. Why? Well, he sums it up neatly with a quote from Magic The Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater: "'Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them.'
Elaborating on that, he says developers should avoid surveying players specifically when it comes to deciding on a game's design direction.
"Now, that probably sounds strange because asking your community how to improve your game seems completely reasonable, and to be clear, I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to your players. Of course you should," he says. "You should solicit feedback about specific topics, watch how people play, pay attention to complaints, and take reported problems seriously. But there's a big difference between listening to feedback and asking players to help you decide what your vision for the game should be."
Wilson goes on to list four distinct reasons why you shouldn't let your players dictate the general direction of your game. For one, he says, it makes it look like you don't already have a direction in mind.
"As the game's developer, you should have a clear vision of where the game is heading, and if you don't, you should fix that while at least projecting the impression that you have one," says Wilson. "When you ask players to choose between possible game features in a survey, it can make it seem like you just don't have that vision. It gives the impression you are unsure about what matters, or that you don't understand your own game well enough to assess what's important."
Per Wilson, the second big problem with surveys is that they can create false expectations for the features you're polling players about.
"The moment you put an idea in front of your players and ask them to weigh in on it, you imply that it's on the table. You imply that it might happen," Wilson says. "Once players believe that the only thing stopping an idea from becoming reality is persuading you to go ahead with it, they'll campaign for it and expect it."
And then there's the issue at the heart of Rosewater's quote from earlier in this story: players know how to find and report problems, but unless they're professional game developers, they probably aren't as good at finding solutions.
In Wilson's words, player feedback regarding issues that feel "frustrating, unrewarding, unfair, or confusing" is "incredibly valuable," but "the solutions they propose are often not the right ones, because unlike you, they don't have to balance the entire game."
This is something I've long worried about with Diablo 4. That game's online community is extraordinarily vocal about everything from balance to loot to transmog and every other aspect of the game, and while the feedback coming from players should undoubtedly be taken onboard, it seems like some Diablo 4 updates are just lists of demands from streamers and the game's subreddit, which aren't representative of the overall community.
Back to Wilson. He says the issue with surveys that "worries [him] the most" is bias in the sample. "If the samples are biased, the answers are self-interested, the questions are focused on solutions instead of problems, and if you've already started giving up on the perception of having a strong vision, then the survey not only fails to help you, but may actively pull you in the wrong direction."
In this scenario, Wilson says you'll start "optimizing for the loudest players instead of the whole community," and you'll start "reacting to short-term discomfort instead of thinking about long-term health." This is precisely what I was describing with Blizzard's approach to balancing Diablo 4, which can leave more casual players feeling left out.
Even more dangerous to a game's vision, you may even start "drifting toward safer, more obvious ideas instead of making the stronger creative decisions that your game may actually need," according to Wilson. Instead, he says devs should stick to their guns, because "sometimes the things that players push back on the short-term are exactly the things that give a game depth, meaning, and memorability over time," and that's why "the design direction has to come from you, the developer.
Wilson reiterates that he's not telling developers to stop listening to players, and that they definitely should continue doing that, but that there's a "real danger to asking players to tell you how to change your game." Instead, he advises you listen closely to your community to identify common pain points and then decide for yourself how they should be addressed, which sounds like reasonable advice.
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