Trip_Nero said:
The bases of this idea is to pit the players against the developers. Imagine players are first person or third person, and developers are RTS style.

I see two problems: 1. Nobody has managed yet to unite RTS and FPS, although the idea seems obviously promising. 2. Devs may not have enough time to play their own game, aside of developing it.

Beside that, your idea seems, e.g. players win over devs, and so ‘force’ them to change / extend the game in some aspect? Interesting, but how do players organize and agree on their wishlist? Isn't this something where only the devs could make proposals about potential new features, resulting in simple voting but no true influence from the players side again?
If not that restricted, what happens if players requests are simply impossible to fulfill for various reasons? Devs have to present appologiezes?

Eventually, the ‘toxic / dissatisfied / rant about broken promises’ situation would only become worse not better?

In this regard, the other obvious option is to give players the option to develop the game further themselves. E.g. like Dreams, or the thing epic is trying to pull off currently (forgot the name), with better modding SDKs, etc.
Not really a new idea, and showing players making games is not easy does not help the situation either it seems. Those who prefer to rant are usually not the creative ones.

OP:
Allow me to give you a tip that i think could help you to get a better experience in public forums -

Avoid giving statements that are impossible to prove or disprove. You claimed games are not fun anymore. Sure lot of people enjoy lot of games. You claimed nobody wants to work in a team. Sure lot of big teams out there work together to achieve a common goal.

You could have formulated it this way instead - “An idea that could make me enjoy a game again” and - “The idea of the client working with the developer in the same team, and even playing the same game looks interesting to me.”

(Personally i hate working in teams. But this is a personal opinion of mine. I've seen lot of people who want to work in a team in order to learn new skills and even in order to learn about teamwork.)

(A dev can instantly kill not only whole alliances, but all of the other regular users in one single “attack”)

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Lot of game developing companies hire people only to play their game. These are often people who don't know how to program at all. But they do play the game and give a feedback. I think they could be considered to be part of the developer team and they do play the game being developed.

Clients already have ways to report bugs, to post in wishlists and generally opine about the game. This is nothing new. Then, nothing prevents a developer from logging into his own game and play anonymously against the clients.

If we make a client who not only does not know how to program, but has not access to the source code to play against the developers who can instantly kill any client-player and use cheat codes… i think it is not fair. So much not fair, it would never work in practice. Could be some experiment. Could work as experiment. But would not be a game. I would personally consider it to be an experiment and a way to meet the developers in the chat stream, rather than a game.

Personally, i would not play in a game where there are players(the devs) who can instantly burn my whole empire. I think i would not enjoy this even if i were the overpowered developer who can instantly burn a whole empire of the opponents. You could think of admins in a forum to be like that. But as you can see, admins(educated ones) avoid taking it personally in arguments. Imagine posting in a forum where the overpowered admins take it personally. If you play against a developer in a game, and if the game is fun and is good, it is inevitable the developer to get heated and use his cheat codes. How you tell the client there are overpowered players who are there to take it personally with you in a battle and try to burn your empire at any cost.

Can an admin enjoy his forum properly? He tries to not take it personally and people treat him always differently. If i were an admin, i would have a second profile in the forum and use it as a regular user in order to can opine freely, in order to get heated too. If i were a developer, my duties as a developer would prevent me from enjoying the game. I would rather create an anonymous profile to play the game in equal conditions. If not, it is not a game, it is a duty, it is a job.

As an artist i can not enjoy my art properly. This sucks. Example - you was working on a comedy movie for the last 6 months. You seen the funny scenes and heard the jokes thousands of times. It was fun once(fun in a weird way). But it is not fun at the thousandth time, it is a pain to hear a good joke one thousand of times. You can not enjoy your final product. This often happens to me as an artist. I do care about my art and value it, but i never can see it through the eyes of the client.

As a dev, i enjoy developing games, and test them by playing. But i am not sure i would enjoy the final product, when the game is finished. This is in the case of a game like Tomb Raider or LofUS. I would not enjoy playing my own game if i knew it all. I would rather not play my own game, but play the game another person created instead. In the case of games where other people play too, i think i could enjoy playing the game i was working on for years. Because the unexpected actions of strangers would make it interesting again. Interesting again after years of working on the same game. But still playing it from an anonymous profile that has not superpowers. Having superpowers is not fun, at least for me. I do know of lot of people who would love to have superpowers and use them to destroy the gameplay.

@joej If the players were knowing how to program, this changes it all. Maybe if there were a very simple, very user friendly way(like Scratch and Blockly) to program AAA games. If everybody learned how to program, being a programmer would not be nothing special. I think, maybe, client and dev must both know their places/duties. Client consumes and enjoys, dev is mainly working and only trying to steal some fun out of his job. Personally i never believed in - “work a job you enjoy and you will be never working”. If somebody tortures me to draw for deadlines for 10 months, i could end up hating my drawing talent. Maybe it works for some people, but i never was able to mix joy and work. What i want to say is, maybe client must never learn how to create a product, because to consume is pure happiness. Ignorance is happiness. If you knew how a given AI works inside, you would know how actually simply it is, and you would not enjoy it. You lose the hype once you know what is inside the black box. Technology we don't understand is magic, and can bring hype and happiness. Once you know how the magic tricks work, they are not fun anymore. This is a very popular argument in magic tricks - “the trick behind should be never explained. Because if you knew how the trick is made, it is not magic anymore.”

Maybe we should keep the client on the one side of the curtain and the developer on the other side. Ofc you can be a client too, even if you are a developer - just play the games other people did, not the ones you did.

Though there is nothing bad in trying new things. Like Dreams the game. But going further than Dream is challenging.

Consider this movie -

There is the gamer -

there is the one who is being played -

there is the mofo who uses cheat codes -

and notice, the game developers are not playing the game. They stay aside not taking part in the game -

The developer maintains the ecosystem, maintains the universe itself, the laws of nature. The developer is not a gamer. He plays a different game - game of creation. You try to steal some fun from the job, when you play your own games in order to test them. But you will never see your own game as the client sees it. You have literally put pain and blood into it. It was not easy. There is the saying - “this tool makes this usually complicated task look as easy as playing a game” - notice - “easy as playing a game”. To develop is hard. When i was teaching kids to use Scratch(as part of a big team of volunteers), i have seen kids who were turning Scratch off and started playing games that were already created by others. And there were kids who enjoyed the process of making a game. They used Scratch to make simple games and test them, and enjoyed mixing creation with gaming. But when the programming was becoming a little bit more complex, most of kids were abandoning it. Only the one single total-nerd kid was keeping developing when the programming was becoming too much. Can you make serious professional game developing become as easy as playing a game? Can you make debugging as fun as shooting zombies? Sure it can be done, but would be very challenging.

Somebody could try to bring Dream to the next level, but would be challenging. And in the end could bring satisfaction or not. Why not trying it. Yeah, why not. If somebody can do it, i would be curious to see it. This in the case, the client becomes a developer or even a programmer. I don't think it is fun to play against overpowered deities. You need to share powers with the devs. And programming is not always fun.. it is mostly debugging.

NikiTo said:
What i want to say is, maybe client must never learn how to create a product, because to consume is pure happiness. Ignorance is happiness.

Maybe. From my personal experience with gamers of the really toxic kind we can not expect any design help from them. We can only listen and hear what they don't want, but they won't make proposals about what they miss or what they would like to improve how. They simply have even less ideas about making better games than we have, obviously.

But that's not true for all. Examples are modding or community driven games (e.g. user made levels or Quake 3, Trackmania, Super Mario Maker etc.) Here, non professionals often achieve better results then what was shown in the original game IMO.

So if there is an eventual cooperation between devs and gamers, success may depend on questions like ‘which kind is the majority?’ and ‘how to differentiate?’ matter a lot as well, not only ‘Which tools should we give them?’ I think it can only work if they do this ranking themselves too, similar to how Twitch streamers become superstars from attention. Game devs themselves are not good at that. Watching a random dev diary video always feels like watching geeky wannabe rockstars in the shadow of Lord British : )

NikiTo said:
Somebody could try to bring Dream to the next level, but would be challenging. And in the end could bring satisfaction or not. Why not trying it. Yeah, why not. If somebody can do it, i would be curious to see it. This in the case, the client becomes a developer or even a programmer. I don't think it is fun to play against overpowered deities. You need to share powers with the devs. And programming is not always fun.. it is mostly debugging.

Well, some day it will work. We do the programming, give them all options, give them assets, they make the games they want with ease. Skill and talent is always necessary, but the smaller this capable minority of creators is, the better works a rewarding and motivation hierarchy.

Though that's another topic and not really what's asked here, i guess.

If i were at the lead of a project of this kind, i would try to ignore the likes/dislikes system. I think it is not fair. If the likes/dislikes were truly motivated by the game, it could work, but there are hundreds of other reasons people exchange likes. Reasons not related to the product at all. Let say, just to say something, that our metrics are how much time a player spends on a level. If the player is not liking a boss fight, he would never come back. If a boss fight is enjoyable, the player would repeat the level, even if it is not needed, because the level is unlocked. Even so, the player could replay over and over again the same fight. I would try to measure engineer-things that can be processed by my autistic mind. I really don't like likes/dislikes system. Likes can make you sell a bad game. I don't think likes can help making a better game. For games, one often using indicator is how addictive the game is.

This is how useful/meaningful is the likes/dislikes system or the opinion of the masses -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T58lGKREubo

I agree, modding and level building is partially an example of it - delegating the developing process to the player. But it is far from “the game”. And not everybody is building levels. Only one out of millions of players has the skills and free time to create assets of quality. It is not a trend for me.

Lets picture this better -
Case 1 - A game gives you the opportunity to drop asset files to the folder of models. Then one person in a million installs a full pack of 3D modeling programs, learns how to use them, creates the models starting from triangles in 3Ds Max and starting from a sphere in Z-Brush. Then after 6 months of hard work, that one in a million person uploads his model to the game and uses it.

Case 2 - The gameplay of a game, encourages ALL the players to be creative by building their own weapons, levels, maps, castes architecture, etc. And you need it to level up.

Modding could be one example for delegating the developing process to the player. But there is a huge difference between case 1 and 2. It is not about “only one in a million wants to mod”. It is about “millions want but could not do it, because it is prohibitively hard”.

JoeJ said:
We do the programming, give them all options, give them assets, they make the games they want with ease.

In practice would take you 20 years to finish such a game.

I want to play Mortal Combat. Then tell the game by using my own voice, by outspoking my ideas - “Mr. Game, please take Ironman from the movie and put him inside the game. Then copy his attacks that were shown in the movie and make him use them in fight.” Then the game processes your speech, googles for ironman, understands it is a movie character, downloads all the movies about Ironman, copies the 3D Model of Ironman, sees his rockets attacks, creates 3D models for the rockets and adds particle simulation for the rockets. Then makes it fly as in the movie if you use some combos. “Mr. Game, make Ironman throw pizza over his opponents. Make it inflict 30% of damage.” The game then tells you - “I would suggest you to make the pizza look more cyber or put a chef hat on the head of Ironman. Do you anyways want to keep this version of Ironman?”. Millions of people want this level of easy of development, but only one in a million can do it and it takes months or years. This is the level of easy you need to make literally everybody regardless his IQ and skills to be developing and enjoying the development process.

Disregarding the “make games fun and engaging again” thing and also the player and developer labels, I think the idea of one person playing an RTS against a bunch of 1st or 3rd person players is not bad at all. The trick would be balancing it out.