rhprocter asked: I have never seen you accept criticism for a card or design decision. You tend to shrug it off with "some other players like that card" or "I liked the card even if it was unbalanced and we had to ban it soooo I guess it was okay because I liked it." Okay that last one was a little unfair but it is absolutely the vibe you give off. My question is how much, if any, criticism weighs into any of the decisions you make.
I do try to own up to my mistakes. I have written numerous columns about all the different mistakes I’ve made. In “Tales of the Pit” earlier this week, for example, I made fun of my decision to have all the rare creatures in Kamigawa block be legendary which was a horrible mistake.
Note though that me making a card that Player A doesn’t like because it was made for Player B is not a mistake. Players not liking something because it doesn’t do exactly what they want it to do is not a mistake. Players disliking a particular choice I made because it’s not the choice they would have made is not a mistake.
A lot of what we do is trial and error and there are plenty of decisions I’ve made that I would do differently. Mistakes, to me at least, are things that when I look back I say “oh, we did it wrong in such a way that the game was less for that decision”. In that regard, I’ve made tons of mistakes.
My goal is to learn from them so that I become a better designer. Making mistakes is part of any creative process. Not learning from them is the real problem.
That said, I’ll own up to a mistake I believe I made in Dark Ascension. Having looked over all the feedback, it’s clear that I should have figured out how to make a legendary werewolf. It’s something a segment of the audience wants very badly and I believe if we had given the issue enough of a priority, we could have figured out how to do it.
