Steam recently hosted its Steam Dev days in Seattle where it held a number of talks about developing games for their Steam platform.
One of the lectures was by Valve’s internal PhD. psychologist who also work on Dota 2 (and Counter-Strike and other games).
While no press were in attendance, Reddit user Palso was. Here are some of the interesting notes he took about the psychology of gamers:
- Valve puts a lot of effort into Dota 2 on-boarding from the psychology perspective – e.g. they lock tutorial heroes so new players can pick up mechanics more smoothly.
- He said currently around 8% of active players are in the low priority pool in a current time, but I’m not 100% sure I understood this one correctly – the number seems plausible though.
- They see much better results with strict low priority rules and a lot of players are being “rehabilitated”, they’re still notoriously toxic people though.
- When they introduced former match quality rating system they saw lowered report rate because people were actually thinking about the match quality and their own performance and afterwards were less likely to report someone as they knew they were toxic themselves.
- They see much better player behaviour now since they introduced reward system into reporting – that everyone can see a reaction to their action after the report (“We’ve recently taken action against…”).
- They tested psychological anchoring in match making in Counter-Strike – they showed longer waiting times to players searching for matches than actual waiting time – this led to more satisfied players as they “waited” less than they expected. They don’t use this however and instead they’re honest about waiting times.
- He made a funny case study about anchoring in Valve – he asked people (outside the Dota 2 team) about last two digits of their SSN (Social Security Number) and then about the number of heroes in Dota 2 – those with higher SSN digits were guessing there are more heroes in Dota 2 than the group with lower SSN.
- They don’t take crying about something being imbalanced much seriously, they always look at data (as all game devs do).
- He talked about a HUGE Dunning-Kruger effect in Dota 2 (see Wikipedia).
