People who think like me are really useful to have on your MMO team. They won’t just dig into the guts of your game, they will revel in the guts of your game, sorting them this way and that, modeling them in myriad ways. This will, generally, result in a better product.

But they won’t ever come to the producer and say, “Okay! The balancing is all finished!” Trust me: that will never happen.

In the latest WoW update, the systems designers are revising everything. Why? Because it wasn’t perfect. And it needs to be perfect. Take the Hunter ability “Volley”. They cut it from the game, because:

Channeling a spell that makes arrows fall out of the sky doesn’t feel like a hunter ability and doesn’t even really match the name of the spell.

But fear not, because hunters can now launch their traps! And a long-distance snake trap should be a hit at parties; the snakes have various debilitating effects. Of course, propelling traps a great distance is a bit odd, as players were quick to point out:

Trap launcher? 

I have to admit, I find it silly that they think Volley is too “magical” but us tying a bag/box of snakes to an arrow and shooting them at people is perfectly reasonable.

But this is how designers think. After manipulating these skills for years and analyzing them from every angle, it starts to make sense in a way that sane people can have a hard time seeing.

Ah, a classic: I remember when Strider used a snakes-over-time attack to slow the ring-wraiths' movement speed for 15 seconds.

Summoning arrows is ridiculous, that’s something a wizard would do — and the WoW hunter is no wizard. No, the Hunter is apparently modeled after the cheesiest version of the Green Arrow, who has a specialty arrow for every situation. That’s pretty cool, actually… but I’m not sure how that makes more sense than abstractly raining arrows on a target. Then again, I haven’t been poring over these skills for thousands of hours, either.

Expect Systems Designers To Think Like… Systems Designers

What I’m trying to say is this: you hired these guys because they love to create fun mechanics and then balance them. The same personality traits that make them good at this job also tend to give them a bit of an obsessive streak, to put it mildly.

To a systems designer, the game is always imperfect. And not just mildly imperfect – radically imperfect. In need of a total do-over. And when you finish the total do-over, it won’t be perfect either, and you’ll need another one. And then you just need to touch up every single thing four or five times over several years, and then, you know what? We really need to just wipe this system and do it over.

It will never end.

Philosophical question: is the boxing-glove arrow more insane or less insane than the bag-of-snakes arrow?

At first, the designer is completely right, and the game probably really is horrifically imbalanced. But at some point, perhaps years later, the designer’s opinion of “imbalanced” will be so subtle that players will have trouble even conceiving of the problem being solved. At this point, further changes will have very small return on investment. However, knowing when you reach that line is not easy, since it requires your systems designers to step away from their beloved spreadsheets and be objective about a problem’s actual impact on the game. This is a learned skill that systems designers do not just magically have.

Conclusion

So here’s what I’m telling you:

1. If you’re a systems designer, realize your obsession, so that you can occasionally take a step back and see if you’re still sane.
2. If you’re a producer, realize your systems designer is obsessed with perfecting the game and they will never ever be done. And every problem will always be presented as a heinous game-ruining problem. It’s up to you to decide what to do about that, if anything.

Elder Game is sponsored by:

This experiment from 1999 was quite astonishing. Framed as a test, the video asks you to count the number of times some kids pass a basketball back and forth. Partway through, a person wearing a gorilla suit saunters into the video, mugs right in front of the camera, plain as day, and leaves. In the experiment, fully half the people who watched this video did not notice the gorilla. They were too busy counting basketball passes.

None of those people would believe they could miss a friggin’ gorilla. When the gorilla was pointed out to these people, some insisted that the experimenters had switched the tape! They pretty much universally said “of course I would see a gorilla.” But yet, half of them were wrong. The new book by one of the authors of this experiment is engaging and worth a read.

If you didn’t see the gorilla in that video, you aren’t stupid. Even after many experiments, the researchers couldn’t find any way to predict the people who would notice the gorilla (or whatever other random thing they added, in any context). Regardless of the experiment or the person, some people notice the external details sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. But people always think they will notice all major details. Worse, when they see somebody not noticing an important detail, they assume those other people are idiots… even though it’s just dumb luck that they noticed it themselves.

EDIT (bonus paragraph): the first thing commenters say is “well, but the gorilla blends in!” That was the first thing the psychologists assumed, too. I’ll give you that they are psychologists, but in this particular case that doesn’t mean they’re completely stupid. They tried numerous additional experiments, including, for instance, one where you are supposed to count the number of small black digits floating by in a big white empty screen. Then a gigantic red letter E flies by. Half the people still missed the giant letter. It doesn’t matter what the context is, and it’s not about something blending into the noise. Even incredibly distracting interruptions will still get tuned out. That’s why this is an interesting phenomenon.

We have a highly-ingrained belief that we notice everything around us, but the truth is that we have very selective attention. When we’re focused on something else, we often miss very obvious things in our surroundings. But we believe only idiots would do that.

This is the crux of the book, although it unfolds into a lot of other interesting experiments and diversions. The authors are concerned with how this affects our court system, among other things. I am more concerned with how it affects the games we make.

Instant Death

It’s an MMO designer classic: stick some giant horrific monster into an area to keep players on their toes.  If the players refuse to run away from said monster, they get killed. But they always have plenty of warning. “The earth shakes when the giant walks,” says the designer — “they can’t help but notice that! So it’s not unfair. It’s just something to keep them on their toes.” Or how about the old “random firetraps in the middle of a raid dungeon” trick? Spices things up without being unfair, right?

Unfortunately, half the time these sorts of encounters end in unavoidable death. The players are deeply engaged in playing the game — watching the little bars tick down and using the right skills at the right time — and half the time, they miss your deathtrap cues, no matter how obvious you think they are. When they die, they are understandably upset.

The really frustrating part is that other players think they’re morons. Hell, the players themselves often come to think they’re morons. “How did I manage to get ganked by an elite cavalry unit when you can hear the horse steps a mile away?!” The general conclusion seems to be that the average MMO player is really stupid. Right?

Caption: Unpredictable instant death is not a fun game mechanic.

But in actuality, designers are being just as misguided as the players. Most designers would agree that it isn’t fun to die instantly without any warning. But yet half the time, these “easily avoidable” deathtraps go unnoticed. There’s nothing the players could do to pay more attention. It’s not possible to focus on the gameplay and also notice 100% of the other stuff going on all the time.

The result is that half of those kills are insta-kills without any warning. They are the antithesis of fun. Worse, other players often make fun of them for something they couldn’t avoid. What a stupid thing to include in an MMO!

To HUD or Not To HUD

A related study referenced in the book looked at pilots being trained to use new HUD systems. The pilots would get so transfixed managing the HUD data that they would miss things going on out the window — things happening literally underneath the translucent HUD, or just an inch away from it. It’s not about visually missing something, it’s about our brain completely filtering things out as noise.

We’ve all played games where the GUI was more important than everything else going on. Hell, I still have no idea what the 3D characters do in Rock Band — I can never take my eyes off the fretboard GUI long enough to notice anything.

Among designers who have learned about this psychological phenomenon, there is a tendency to try to integrate the gameplay right into the world. (I have often been in this camp, with mixed success.) For instance, in Red Dead Redemption there is no health meter. The screen just gets redder and redder as you are about to die. I find that this does make it easier me to focus on the world around me instead of constantly glancing at that damned health bar… but on the other hand, I am often surprised when I suddenly keel over dead. (I can hear you thinking “But the screen turned bright red! How could you not notice that! Oh… wait, right.” Just because it’s impossible to miss doesn’t mean we won’t miss it anyway, half the damned time. HALF THE TIME!)

How Do We Fix It

The authors of The Invisible Gorilla want to make you aware of the fact that your attention is extremely selective — that you are missing crazy things happening around you all the time. That is a great thing to teach people, but that’s not the role of video games.

Most video games (including the ones I like to make) are escapism, much like books or TV. Here, we want you to feel good about yourself. We don’t want to teach you that your brain can miss important things going on around you — instead, we want to hide this flaw in the human brain. When you’re playing a video game, you shouldn’t be surprised about unfortunate outcomes. You shouldn’t go “How did I die?!” or “Where did that level-80 elite mob come from!?” Those questions indicate that the player is feeling abused. Moreover, they aren’t learning anything, either (except, perhaps, not to play your game): it is not possible to “learn to pay more attention”.

The only band-aid fix is not to have nasty traps like that in your game. That isn’t really a deep “fix”, though, because the problem happens with rewards, too – I mean, you are probably running past tons of ore mines, rare monsters, spontaneous treasure chests, and who knows what else, without ever noticing them. On the one hand, that stuff didn’t kill you, so it doesn’t hurt you. On the other hand, designers didn’t factor in that you would miss half the stuff they stuck in, so the game may feel more sparse and empty than they expect… because if you’re focusing on combat, you are literally missing half of the cool stuff around you.

More Research

Until reading this book, I didn’t realize that psychologists have done quite so much research on selective attention. The book is obviously not too concerned with video game design, but I’m hopeful that there are experiments by human-computer interaction psychologists that may help us understand how to work with this issue when designing games. If I find some, I’ll post about them. (And if you have leads, please share them!)

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I’ve been avoiding talking about it because, well, it’s a little indie project and I normally like to talk about much bigger games. But this experience just has too many interesting bloggable topics — as well as funny moments during prototyping — that I can’t help but talk about some of them!

First of all, the biggest early risk in an indie MMO is having the wrong mindset.

Prototyping and Guerilla Development

When you’re just a couple of people trying to make a big game, every day of development time is precious. You have to choose what to focus on: graphics, technology, or gameplay. But that’s a trick question. You should choose “gameplay” because that’s the only one a small team can compete on. You need to spend most of your effort on making a fun game, and just the barest possible amount of time on the underlying technology. Making an indie MMO means cutting corners — cutting every corner you possibly can — to save time and cost.

Repeat after me: nobody cares how cool my server tech is. Say it! If you don’t believe that mantra, then there’s no sense trying to make an indie MMO. You will get stuck in technology limbo like everybody else does.

I mentioned earlier that we’re using SmartFoxServer as the base of our server, and several people have asked us why. For instance, in a recent blog comment, ‘Jason’ said:

I’ve done commercial work with SFS. I’d say it’s just as I described it as well. if you want to chat, it’s probably fine for that. But it really is junk for anything more.

Everything it does can be replicated by a good server side Java programmer in a couple of weeks and not suck.

Jason is right: there is no magical goodness inside SFS; it’s kind of clunky and mucky inside, and all it really has is a fast messaging-relay system written in Java. But let’s assume Jason’s estimate is right: one engineer needs two weeks to replace it. Eighty hours! TEN FULL DAYS of development time, just to replace a cheap off-the-shelf component! This sort of comment reflects the dangerous technology-limbo scenario I’m talking about (no offense, Jason). It reveals an all-too-common tech-centric mindset that is not going to help you ship a game.

One of the best engineers I know started working on his own MMO when he was out of work. But all he ended up with was some cool streaming technology, because that was the part that was interesting to him. And I too have fallen into this trap myself on several previous attempts — our home SVN repository is littered with the husks of MMO’s that will never be, each with one kick-ass technological feature, and nothing else.

We’ve found that the best mindset to have is very similar to the mindset you would have if you were making a commercial MMO prototype (that would later get rewritten into a full commercial release): focus on making sure the game is fun first. Fun is the most important thing. Only then do you even consider how the technology should be tuned.

Of course, the difference between a commercial prototype and an indie MMO is that when the prototype is done, a team of 12+ engineers rewrites everything from scratch to get the highest performance and the best-looking graphics possible. For an indie MMO, the prototype is the game. You refine the prototype, caulk up the seams as best you can, maybe strap some more motors on here and there, and ship it!

So this is a very tricky balancing act. It means being agile as hell, and it means that 90% of the time you skip worrying about the technological details until you’re sure you need them… but at the same time, you don’t have the luxury of rewriting it from scratch later, so in a few places, you really do need to plan your tech ahead of time to make sure your game can float. No amount of caulk and spit can save an MMO engine that is intrinsically tied to failed underlying components.

Unfortunately, the best advice I can give you is “work on a commercial MMO or two, and then you will know where you can cut corners and where you can’t.” I don’t have a list or corners not to cut (though maybe I will try to make one now that the thought has crossed my mind). For instance, you need to insulate yourself from your serialization solution, and you need to isolate your game code from your networking code. But don’t go overboard! When I tell people to insulate their networking, they inevitably reply with, “Oh I totally did that, check out this wicked six-layer class hierarchy that perfectly encapsulates…” no. Wrong, bad. You need to isolate it JUST ENOUGH that you will be able to replace the subcomponents later. Spend a few hours, then move on. You don’t want to PERFECTLY wrapper anything because that wastes time. You don’t even know what’s going to be important yet!

So making an indie MMO is like prototyping a game, yet mysteriously knowing just how to code your prototype so that it can later be made to work under live loads. I… I need to figure out how to define this better in future blog posts, don’t I?

Of course it’s inevitably going fail in some ways, and you’re going to have to scramble to fix things, painfully. But the alternative is having clean tech but no game. That is what most people end up with.

But you know what? It is incredibly tempting to rewrite SmartFoxServer from scratch. I could do it so much better! But I’m not falling for that trap again. We may very well need to replace it, possibly with ElectroServer or some other similar product, or possibly with a home-brew solution. But that will not happen until we have a fun game prototyped, so that we know precisely WHY we’re replacing it and what the goals are. First, we have to make it fun.

See If It’s Fun First, Stupid!

I just have to keep reminding myself: don’t code infrastructure until you know the basic premise is fun. That seems like common sense, but it’s very hard to do! For instance, when we implemented combat, what’s the first thing I added? I implemented WoW-like combat statistics and all the things that go with it, like armor ratings and stat buffs and so on, because of course that’s where combat starts. Dumb, dumb, dumb!

Only then did we start exploring exactly how combat should work for the game we want to make. The first thing we threw out was WoW-style armor ratings. It’s boring. So all that code went out the door.

Admittedly that’s not a lot of code in this case… but if it was, would we have been willing to throw it all away in the name of fun? I’m not sure. That’s the other danger of writing code that isn’t fun: you get attached to it. You don’t want to throw away hard work!

So try not to write infrastructure until you’re sure you need it. Not always possible, but something to strive for.

Follow The Fun

What's that icon mean? Oh he's vulnerable to fire! Better use the fireball power.

Of course it’s not as simple as “sit down and code something fun”: you need to know who your target audience is and what each game system is trying to achieve. (This is extra important for an indie game!)

I’ll go into our target-audience analysis some other time, but we used that information to decide how combat should be: mostly soloing, no PvP, and as engaging as possible. While combat shouldn’t be necessarily HARD, fighting monsters should require a bit of thinking and reacting; there shouldn’t be a perfect order of abilities that works the same for every fight. So we’re exploring ways to achieve this.

But we want the goals to be a guide, not a straight jacket. Follow the fun — if you accidentally stumble upon something interesting, explore it and see where it takes you.

For example, right now monsters have “spontaneous vulnerabilities.” When an icon suddenly starts flashing over a monster’s head, that means he’s vulnerable to some type of attack. Better use that attack type quickly to kill him fast! This has proven to be a fun mechanic because it keeps you on your toes. So far so good — a basic mechanic that meets our goals.

I discovered this skeleton's weakness! It's... oh... that's not too useful. Also, TMI, skeleton dude. But that is kinda funny... Let's explore this idea...

I wanted to expand on this mechanic, so I added an ability you can use to make a monster become vulnerable immediately, so you can take advantage of it when you want to. That was interesting, but not quite right: it needed to only work sometimes. But having it “miss” is boring. (Missing is always boring, unless you’re the one doing the dodging!)

So now the skill always finds a vulnerability… but sometimes that vulnerability isn’t something you can use in combat. I rebranded the ability as “Psychoanalyze”, and now monsters have phobias and quirks that you might discover. For instance, sometimes a monster is afraid of spiders, or heights, or success. I just tried it out on a whim, and it was fun and funny. Now I’m exploring how an entire Combat Psychology subsystem might work.

Will any of this be in the final game? I don’t know yet. But I suspect some element of it will, because even after many hours of play I still laugh when I fight a giant wasp whose only weakness is a crippling fear of success. Tuned just right, this might be the sort of offbeat, indie, niche fun we’re looking for. (And “Psychology” wouldn’t be too out of place, given our other prototype skills like Mycology, Acupuncture, and Chutzpah. This is going to be an unusual game, I think.)

I don’t want to make it sound like we just sit down and go “let’s code stuff and see if it’s fun!” Our goals for the combat aspect of our game constantly inform our decisions to either explore or abandon an idea… but we still poke in corners to see what we find.

I guess the summary of this blog post is: making an indie MMO is crazily hard, so remember to cut every corner you can, focus on making fun gameplay, and try not to implement things you don’t end up needing.

Elder Game is sponsored by:

Normally I am pretty darn polite, but it turns out there’s an easy formula to turn polite people into assholes. The formula is easy:

• customer has problem with your game or product
• customer submits a ticket
• customer receives a useless, generic email reply
• customer emails back more information
• customer waits impatiently for days
• customer gets an automated email saying “We didn’t hear back from you, so I guess the case is closed, buh-bye”
• customer gets irate

My email reply was thrown away (not even bounced back to me) because it was sent to a “noreply@company.com” email address. The email didn’t specifically tell me not to reply via email… apparently I was just supposed to scrutinize the email address before sending a reply. I’m used to modern ticketing systems that let you reply via email, so I didn’t think twice about it. But their ticket system, like far too many, was designed for a previous era.

Back in 2002, ticketing systems were pretty cool. They were like magic! You enter a ticket on the website, and then it gets copied to your email so you know when it’s updated! WOW!

It’s not 2002 anymore. Ticketing systems are not cool, and logging into a website to send a follow-up response is really annoying. I often check my email on my phone, where logging into games or websites is difficult or impossible. Fortunately, the phone’s email program has this neat “Reply” button. So I should be able to use it.

Not Just For Stupid Morons

“But Eric, you’re just a stupid moron!” I hear you say. “Everybody knows you can’t reply to automated emails!” Wrong! But your misconception is quite common.

The FlashGameLicense.com website sends tons of automated emails. Sometimes, we expect a reply from the developer, and we got to wondering how often people were replying to our “no-reply” email address. So we created an actual email account for it, and that account suddenly started getting tons of replies. A large percentage of our HIGHLY-technically-skilled user base replied to our no-reply email address. The emails said not to do that, but they did it anyway. It’s almost as if they’re stupid morons… orrrrr…. mayyyyyybeeeee they don’t have time to read every detail of the email, so they gloss over the pedantic instructions, and use the big shiny Reply button in their email app to dash off a response.

So we made that Reply button work. It wasn’t hard. Now automated emails that expect a reply can get a reply from email. It’s automatically associated with the right ticket and everything. How hard was it? Including the time needed to make sure it was relatively secure, the whole implementation took maybe 16 hours of development time.

When I Make Email Mistakes, I Get Angry… At YOU

The thing is, I do feel stupid after making a mistake like this. Of course I should have read the fine print on your antique, sub-standard ticketing system. But I didn’t, and it cost me time and possibly money. I feel stupid.

But guess what? I don’t respond by apologizing. No no no. I’m taking it out on you. You let me stew in my annoyance for days, and then told me that it was my fault you weren’t talking to me due to a technical hurdle I didn’t notice. My annoyance doesn’t go down. It goes up. That makes me feel bad, and makes your customer service staff feel bad when I yell at them, and nobody wins. Now it’s that much harder to have a happy customer.

Don’t let the customer get irate if you can help it. And you can help it here.

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Unfortunately, making a full 3D MMO on just a few days a week is very hard. We’ve tried it a few times in the past, but when it comes time to make the timeline projections, we always shelve the idea. The problem is, we have a lot of experience in the industry, which keeps us from trying to do things that are “stupid” and “irrational” and “never going to work”. Industry-naive developers can sometimes pull off amazing miracles by sheer insane doggedness — and by not knowing that what they’re doing is impossible — but we know the actual amount of time each feature is likely to take, and we know from experience that by the time you finish the “engine” parts, you’re so focused on technology that you don’t have any mental room left to make the game itself.

The thing is, players don’t give a crap about the technology. They care about the game mechanics, the graphics, the atmosphere… but not the tech. So what we need is a way to skip the “engine” part and get to the part that matters.

So naturally we keep a close eye on all the MMO-capable “engines” (or engine parts) as they showed up. Mostly these are pretty useless. There are dozens of MMO engines that sound great on a website somewhere, and then you download them and realize that step #1 is “write 75% of the engine” (such as Project Darkstar, which is not much more than a handful of low-level server-side architecture primitives) or “refactor the engine to be usable” (such as Ryzom engine, whose code is an utter mess at the moment). These projects have ongoing developer support and some day they may be amazing. But that’s not helpful now.

But one product has stood out to us as being a viable client-side 3D platform: Unity. Not only does it have a really powerful development environment, it has a web-player that lets people play Unity games in a browser. That’s huge for indie games because it removes one of the biggest hurdles: convincing people to download your product and install it. Combine Unity’s network-friendly architecture and primitives with a simple server like SmartFoxServer, and maybe you’ve got something workable after all.

Unity 2.5: Not Good Enough

Sandra and I played with Unity 2.5 back in April of last year. We were very impressed with what we could accomplish in just a single week, and we were totally jazzed about going forward with it. But it defeated us: Unity 2.5 wasn’t really usable for MMO development.

Although Unity said that Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall MMO was written with Unity, that was a lie of omission. Sure, Fusion Fall used Unity. They just used a special version with all kinds of cool powers you couldn’t replicate in Unity 2.5. We were quite frustrated when we couldn’t do the same tricks that Fusion Fall did. For instance, we couldn’t really stream character assets the way Cartoon Network’s game managed it: the features just weren’t there. That meant we would have to be really picky with our assets, because the options for streaming were very restrictive. That was pretty depressing.

But what really killed Unity 2.5 for us was the crashes: Since Unity 2.5 didn’t support typical version control products, we had a hell of a time managing our work between two programmers. (The entire project was stored in proprietary binary files.) And sometimes when it crashed, those binary files got corrupt, and you lost all your work since the last manual backup. So we hung up the Unity project and went back to doing actual lucrative work.

Unity 2.6: Huge Improvement

Well, a couple months ago we got that itch again. Unity 2.6 has been out for a while, so we dove in — and it was a huge improvement. In fact, yesterday we bought the first of at least two Unity Pro licenses. At $1200 each, that’s not a snap decision, but we believe that this time our MMO can really happen.

We’re happy with the product, and we’re amazed at what we’ve been able to accomplish in about two hundred hours of development time: we have an entire working proto-MMO, complete with melee combat, projectiles, inventory management, skill systems, shops, harvesting, and more. By letting us spend our time on these game systems instead of the nuts and bolts of 3D displays and asset streaming and so on, we have been able to do a ton of game systems very quickly. We’ve got an indie art team making art for us and things are happening at a rapid pace, given that it’s a side-project done in our spare time.

However, working with Unity 2.6 has a down side, and that down side is that Unity is only magical when it’s magical. But first, the good stuff:

It’s got everything Unity 2.5 should have had.

Unity 2.6 inherited a bunch of nice features that were originally written for the Cartoon Network folks. You can now stream any kind of asset, and there are a lot of powerful mechanics for managing streamed data. This is a lot more like it — making a tiny lightweight game is actually possible now!

Plus, Unity 2.6 has support for actual version control systems (instead of just their overpriced proprietary solution). When enabled, Unity creates a binary data file that stores the “compiled” data for each original asset (be it a source-code file, a JPG, an animation, whatever). So to version things, you put both the original asset and the binary Unity file into your SVN repository. Ta da!

Perhaps most importantly, it’s a lot less crashtastic. Well, it still crashes plenty (mostly when your code dereferences a null pointer in a fragile state such as during a screen refresh) … but it doesn’t crash completely randomly. And when it crashes, it almost never corrupts your assets anymore. And if it does corrupt your assets, you have several ways to fix it: you can reimport the single damaged asset or you can reload stuff from your SVN repository, for instance. You aren’t just stuck with a corrupt project forever.

As an added bonus, Unity 2.6 has a built-in animation editor! (You would be forgiven for thinking that came with Unity 2.5, as I initially did. It was in earlier versions, but they actually took it out for Unity 2.5, and put it back in for Unity 2.6.) While you could theoretically animate anything in this animation-editor, it’s really designed for background animations, special effects, and the like. For instance, the fish in our lake swim about on an animated path. Certain special effects cause creatures to pulse a glowing red color, which is also done as a Unity animation. It’s a great tool for little snazzy tricks. It’s a bitch to figure out how to use it, but it’s still a million times easier to understand than 3DS Max. So that’s good.

So Unity 2.6 is a perfect tool of development wonderment, right? Well, once you get over the learning curve, yes, for the most part, it is. But outside of the product itself, things get scary.

Uh … Support?

When I was first using and learning Unity last year, the forums were abuzz with feedback from the Unity team. Unity employees actually helped people  figure out problems and worked with us. That seems to have stopped.  There’s one or two posts a week where QA will pop in and say, “Is that still happening? Send me a proper bug report,” but that’s it. For a young product, support is essential. Bug fixes are essential. There should be patches to the development platform every few months, not one per year. What the hell is going on over there?

In fact, I was pretty annoyed when they made Unity Indie a free product. I wasn’t upset because I’d already paid my $200 for an Indie license — I was upset because of the subtext: when you make your product free, your support quality goes way down. When the barrier to entry was $200, there weren’t very many 13 year olds trying it out on a whim. Now that the introductory product is free, though, there are so many newbies using the product — and let’s be quite frank, most of them are complete newbies to programming — how could Unity possibly keep up with their friendly forum support?

The answer, of course, is that they haven’t. They created Unity Answers where developers can help other developers. This works great for easy questions (newb questions and the like). It doesn’t work at all if you are having an unusual experience or trying to do something esoteric. Best case is that you will get an answer that restates the documentation, sometimes slightly more clearly. Normal case is that tough questions are ignored. Worst case is that some Internet Super Hero will ride in and tell you how you’re doing it wrong anyway (at a philosophical level that ignores the actual problem, such as “Unity isn’t ideal for manipulating textures; you should have the artists do this in Maya”), and then ride off into the sunset.

And speaking of Internet Super Heroes… there’s a lot of them now. While there are still a good number of really smart developers on the Unity forums, and I still search there when I have a problem, the fanboys are also a lot more prevalent now. For example: I found a fairly annoying bug in Unity 2.6′s streaming loader, but when I asked for a workaround or confirmation that it was a bug, a fanboy told me that I just needed a better webserver. (A better web server to keep my client from crashing?) I pointed out that Flash player’s streaming loader doesn’t have trouble on the same server (when streaming much larger files), so that ruled out my webserver as being the primary culprit. To this, I was told that I was clearly wrong, or I didn’t know how Flash worked, and there are no Flash games anywhere near as big as Unity games, and anyway Flash doesn’t cache files (!), and so on.

Basically if people bothered to talk to me at all, it wasn’t because they had advice to offer. It was because they felt they needed to stick up for Unity since the employees can’t manage to even read all the threads on the forum, let alone respond usefully to them all. Gee thanks, guys.

The kicker is that I eventually found a couple of blog posts in a corner of the internet discussing the bug, where Unity’s developers acknowledged that it was a tough issue because the fix was very browser- and OS-dependent, and that they are still trying to find a clean fix for it. That’s all I wanted to know — that, and maybe a time estimate. I understand that it’s a hard problem, and I wasn’t demanding a hot-fix that afternoon. The last thing I needed, though, after hours of banging my head on a problem, was to be considered a troll.

I’m not a troll. I’m a developer who hates spending hours and hours of his weekend researching undocumented functions because the docs are shit and the forums are unsupported. The docs are adequate for easy stuff (now), but once you leave the friendly happy land covered by the demos, the docs become more and more skeletal. You just try making a complex  graphical Editor plug-in, or doing fancy things with the “headless” command-line client, or adding GUI features like focus-management to your game. (These all require using undocumented functions and techniques. At least in the latter case, the forums have a few clever people who found the undocumented functions and showed how to use them.)

For these sorts of things, I would be happy to pay a nominal fee for support. Let me give you a few hundred bucks for you to answer my damned questions, PLEASE.

Unity for iPhone: Completely Dead or Just Mostly Dead?

Unity has been focusing a ton of their effort on iPhone support. It gets more updates than the main Unity product does, and obviously a lot of Unity’s attention is on it. The reason is obvious: developers are paying for Unity iPhone licenses.

Well … the writing is on the wall for Unity for iPhone. The next big iPhone upgrade explicitly disallows most kinds of third-party development tools, and explicitly states that:

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Wow. Bye-bye Unity for iPhone. The forum users are hoping this somehow doesn’t apply to them, but come on. It’s pretty darn clear. It says iPhone programs have to be originally written for the low-level Apple APIs. No matter how you phrase it, Unity apps are not written “originally” for WebKit or Objective-C. They are written in Unity and transliterated into Objective-C. This is clearly no longer allowed.

Steve Jobs weighed in on why he did this: it was to kill Adobe’s new Flash-to-Objective-C compiler product. Now, many of his arguments are bull (such as Flash not having multitouch support, or all that talk about how important “rollover” support is). But I saw Flash running on an iPhone at a conference a couple months ago, and it was really, really slow. I can see him wanting to ban products running this poorly. Unfortunately, this also quite clearly covers Unity, too. Steve goes on to say:

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps … we cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

This applies to Unity too. Third-party layer? Check. Cross-platform development tool? Check. Now it’s true that Unity apps perform a whole lot better on the iPhone than Flash does. But that doesn’t seem to matter here; Jobs’ same arguments clearly apply, in principle, to Unity. If Unity finds a technical way to weasel around this, you can be sure Adobe can do the same. And if Apple just selectively bans only Flash but not Unity that would seem to open them up to lawsuits.

Unity’s CEO has posted about this on the Unity blog, saying, in a nutshell, that Apple hasn’t explicitly told them personally that they are screwed, so they are optimistic. That sounds crazy to me, but what the heck do I know. Maybe they will be fine. Maybe they have a crazy hail-Mary plan. Maybe the Department of Justice will save the day. I just know that if I were making iPhone apps, I would be exploring new platforms right about now.

I don’t mean to say they’ve been ignoring non-iPhone development. They seem to be working hard on a new major revision, Unity 3. But if Unity’s iPhone support is killed, there is a silver lining: 1) I don’t want to make iPhone apps anyway, and 2) maybe they will start working on the web player more aggressively again. Partnering with somebody to increase the installed browser user-base would be great.

Unity 3

Very little is known about Unity 3 — which is terrifying since it ships in a few months. We know if you buy a 2.6 license now, you get a free upgrade to Unity 3. That sounds awesome! But in practice it seems to mean that they have stopped bug-fixing Unity 2.6, so we’re probably going to need to upgrade. Will that be hard? No idea. Is the API mostly backwards-compatible? No clue.

They showed off some cool GUI features on the blog. The features are cool. But what I want to know is: will I have to rewrite big chunks of code (such as my GUI code, rife with those damned undocumented-function calls)? Or will I just need to spend a day or two in code-upgrade hell? This is a pretty important question for me. If you’re worried about it, you should probably wait to buy until Unity 3 comes out. Although if you do, you will lose out on the pre-order discount pricing …

So do I hate it or love it?

If I come across here as schizophrenic in my opinion of Unity, it’s because I am. First, I love it. It is the only way a couple of developers like Sandra and I can realistically make a full 3D MMORPG on a part-time schedule. There is no other product that can realistically do this given our limited time constraints. And I am pretty confident that the performance and stability can reach satisfactory levels.

On the other hand, the lack of good docs are a severe hindrance, their sluggish bug-fixing pace is irritating, and their lack of web support presence can be infuriating. Add in my other fears: that Unity 3 will be a hellish upgrade or that Unity the company may actually go out of business if the iPhone product dies. So maybe it’s not such a good time for you to be following in our footsteps and making your own Unity MMO.

And anyway, we really don’t need the competition …

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Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or “Life Grip”) is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can’t seem to get out of the fire in time. Instant. 30-yard range. 45-second cooldown.

But some priests hate it:

The main problem with Leap of Faith is that the raid member who can’t learn to get out of the fire in time now is able to point the finger at the healer and shout “I died because you didn’t pull me out of the fire”. /facepalm.

And on and on; this is horrible because players will hate it, why didn’t Blizzard think about whether players will hate it? How stupid are they? Think for a minute, damn! What players mean is, “My initial impression is one of fear, and I am afraid of this (and most) change,” and they should be ignored.

Now, I don’t mean they should keep getting ignored forever… they just need to be ignored until they have in-game time with the actual changes. If you’ve come up with a potentially very fun new game verb, you should try it out and let players use it for a while. If there are social problems with it, you can usually fix them, and if you can’t, you can always remove the power.

Why bother? Well, think about what your goal is here. If you’re even considering adding new game verbs to a live, launched game — in an old class to boot — it’s because you’ve decided that the gameplay of said class needs to be “more fun”. Assuming number-tweaks are not adequate for the task, you need new verbs — new fun things for players to do.

And there are no interesting game verbs that do not cause alarmed panic among some part of your audience. Most of the time, it turns out the verbs work fine after minor tweaks. Not always, but usually. It’s definitely the way to bet. Fun verbs that work in your engine are precious and should never be thrown away unless their problems are absolutely insurmountable.

Of course, fine-tuning this during beta-testing would be sane… which looks like what Blizzard is going to do, anyway.

[I am having a hard time finishing any of the vast, overly long articles I wanted to post next, so I figured I'd just do some really short blog posts for a few weeks. And even this post is based on weeks-old news. Blogging is hard! I blame all the really good games out these days. And sun spots.]

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Mixed Bag of Fun and Crap

Get ready to blow up countless numbers of space jerks! Wait, wasn't there an ethics code in Star Trek? Whatever. Let's genocide some species!

Confusing. Buggy. Laggy. Did I mention confusing? And yet … here I am waiting for the servers to come back up.

As I write this, it is Friday night at 2:30am and the Star Trek Online servers are down. They have been down for hours. The game was patched at least twice today, with huge hundred-meg patches each time. My naive inner voice says, “Maybe they fixed the quest bugs!” but in reality I know they’re just trying to get new hardware working. Something has gone very wrong and they’re scrambling to fix it.

The launch has been problematic. Tons of downtime. Problems with the billing server. Severe lag in some parts of the game. But the space combat is fun.

I had to Google where a great many quest NPCs were because the in-game maps are cryptic and terrible. I had to ask other players for help about how to advance my crew members’ level, and how to increase in rank, and I spent twenty minutes remapping the keyboard keys because Cryptic doesn’t playtest for lefties. But it doesn’t matter because the space combat is fun.

The ground combat is not fun. It’s not bad per se. It just isn’t anything to write home about: it’s boring. The space combat, though, has just the right amount of tactics and pacing to keep you glued to your chair, killing Klingons until the wee hours of the night. Why is it fun? It just is: the moment-to-moment activities are entertaining. Okay, it starts off a bit slow and it takes a bit too long to open up the next ship — but the payoff is great.

Space combat cribs extremely heavily from Star Fleet Command, but who wouldn’t use that as their starting point? It’s the best of the Star Trek space games by a large margin.

A Very Special Audience

This game hits a very specialized audience. Sandra is a Star Trek fan and an avid MMO player; she would be an ideal target audience for this game. Except that they used vaguely-3D space combat … just 3D enough to make her seasick whenever she tries to fly anywhere.

A lot of people get seasick when navigating in 3D. It’s one of the things they teach you in any gaming school. Cryptic had to know this. So they made a very specific choice: “Fuck those guys! We’re making a 3D space game for the nerds who like epic space battles.” That’s what they did, and it paid off in fun. Nerds like me think this is a fun game.

But this game is far from being even as accessible as other major MMOs. Sandra can play WoW for 12 hours straight but she can’t handle STO for more than 15 minutes. I hope they weren’t expecting to gather the casual gaming crowd with this thing.

Also, if you don’t like Star Trek, don’t bother. I have a friend who is loving the game, who admits to “doing the voices” during fights. He loves the game. (Yelling things like “Emergency power to the starboard shields!” or “Dammit I need those torpedos now!” definitely makes the game more fun, unless of course people around you are pointing and laughing.)

Another friend couldn’t get past the tedious beginning to get to the good parts. To enjoy STO you need to like Star Trek and space battles and not get seasick when the camera swings around and have a bit of patience to wade through some dull bits.

Amazing Achievement Even With Help

Meet my tactical officer Mordak. Don't make fun of his 70s 'stache or he'll break you in half.

I worked as a designer on STO when the license was owned by Perpetual. Perpetual disintegrated (because their engineering department failed to make an MMO engine), and the license was sold to Cryptic. I assume Cryptic obtained all of Perpetual’s assets and docs as part of the handoff, because the game has many little touches that come right out of our original docs.

Just as an example, I worked on the character classes, races, and traits, and many of the bits I had planned are in the game. For instance, Bolians have acidic blood when they get hit by melee attacks. That was one of mine. Not special or important, but recognizable. There are too many for it to be a coincidence — and yes, it is awesome to see random bits of my design docs in the game.

On a larger scale, they reused Perpetual’s notion of how Warp Space works. They obviously used the mock-up screens we had made. However, in our design, the blue ribbons that flow along the map were highways that increase speed. In Cryptic’s STO, they seem to just be pretty ribbons of light.

However, there are big differences too. Perpetual had designed the ground game to some extent, including the three classes as seen in Cryptic’s version, but the big thing that Perpetual didn’t have was a fun space game. When I abandoned Perpetual’s sinking ship, we still had no fun space-combat prototype.

We were, of course, playing tons of Starfleet Command, but we were running in random directions, trying to do too many things at once. We argued, “You should be able to beam a PC bridge crew onto your ship, and take stations!” or “If the ship is severely damaged, the captain should be able to rush off the bridge and put out the engineering fires!” and on and on. In other words: we had just begun to brainstorm what would be fun space combat in an MMO.

Cryptic must have spent a good amount of energy making the space game fun. They certainly didn’t crib from Perpetual’s notes there. This was all Cryptic. And it’s the best part of the game. So hats off to them!

Space combat is the core of the gameplay; it’s a lot more fun than ground combat, which feels chaotic and mushy and has terrible AI. And all other aspects of the game — such as crafting or exploring your ship — are barely there. They’re just little placeholder systems that are clearly supposed to be improved later.

The amazing thing is that they made this entire game in two years. Yes, they reused Champions’ engine. (It even has the same bugs as Champions had when it launched, so it’s obviously based on an older branch of Champions.) And yes, they cribbed from Perpetual’s docs and probably from anywhere else they could, too, because holy crap they had only two years to make a HUGE game. But I gotta say, for just two years of work, this is an amazing accomplishment and I am quite impressed at the team’s finesse.

Containing an entire space game and a ground game at once is an incredible undertaking. Now if only they’d spent another year finishing the game, they would have a knockout product that would … well, it’s too inaccessible to steal many players from WoW. It might have stolen some from EVE Online though … hmm, yeah, okay I agree: better to ship it now. They did at least do one crucial thing: launch with a core gameplay mechanic that is inherently fun.

Buggy, Confusing, Boring

Tactical officer applies harmless fire suppressant to an out-of-range opponent who is not on fire anyway.

That said, the game is a mechanics nightmare, with so many interactive parts that a million little quirks occur in the game. Here’s a bug report from their open beta just a few weeks ago:

So there I am, rescuing scientists from a burning science station. There are fires everywhere, so I rip some fire extinguishers off the wall, and pass them out to my away team- keeping one for myself, of course.

When we came to a fire, sometimes the team would try to find a way around; other times they would just stop at the fire, and go no further; and once in a while they would just run right in and catch on fire. The one thing they never tried was putting out the fires- well, if you want something done right… So I put them out myself, and we rescued the scientists.

A mission or two later, we’re down in the swamp, surrounded by Gorn warriors, mortars, and pet dinosaurs- I’m talking about some really nasty troops here, and the whole swamp was full of them. Luckily, I had my bridge crew with me! What would I do without these guys, right? They’re my brain trust, my A-Team! So the Gorn attack, and my crew charges into the fray (very outnumbered, mind you), and do the only thing that makes any sense in this situation. They use the fire extinguishers.

On Gorn assault troops.

I kid you not. They pulled out those fire extinguishers, and started spraying gray smoke everywhere! Much dying ensued. Not the kind I had hoped for, either.

After we rezzed, I went around the group and confiscated everyone’s firefighting equipment before we went back into battle. I just hope my ship never catches on fire, because we will be doomed.

I reproduced this awesome glitch myself and it is awesome. I gave one of my tactical officers a fire extinguisher, and every so often he breaks that sucker out and goes to town.

And there are a great many other funny stories to be had, especially on the ground combat (where you basically play a “pet class” role, managing four pet NPCs at all times). Some of them are intentional (try equipping Tribbles on your crew members), some not so much — I gave my science officer a bunch of medical hypos, and then watched in horror as he injected all of them into his body, one after another, like a burned out junkie.

Less amusingly, the game’s skills are a muddled mess. Buying the first point of training for any of your bridge crew actually decreases their effectiveness, according to the in-game GUI screen. Buying the second point brings them back up to where they were before you bought any points. Buying the third point is when they actually get better. This is, of course, a bug, even if they did it on purpose.

And certainly the worst problem is that the game doesn’t get to the exciting parts nearly fast enough. You will be stuck on your newbie ship for 12 hours or so of gameplay before you get the better ship with more options and interesting setups. This is a long time to be flying around in a ship with two phaser banks and one photon torpedo tube. They should definitely give you more options more quickly.

The Future: Brighter than Champions

The game is woefully imbalanced. Let’s just get that right out there. But they didn’t make the mistake they did on Champions, where they jacked up the difficulty through the roof on launch day. Kudos to learning from your mistakes, guys. It’s imbalanced, but it’s imbalanced in the player’s favor. They can slowly make the game harder until it reaches the desired point.

The ground combat is really boring. And I am sad to say that, because they obviously cribbed the basic ideas from design docs I wrote at Perpetual! But nevertheless, boring boring boring. To save it, they will need to cut out boring bits and add in new bits until they find more compelling moment-to-moment game mechanics. However, space combat has the spark of fun needed to carry this game forward in the meantime.

I thus predict a nice strong (200k?) audience for this intentionally niche game. When it comes out on XBox 360, with lots more polish, it could do even better. They just need to focus on bringing the fun mechanics to the light and fixing up all the broken and incomplete stuff.

This is a great game for being a part of the live team, because they will be able to make the game a lot better with relatively small amounts of effort. Good luck guys.

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And it’s true. AC2 had a great community in its later years; people would help one another; in-game chat was friendly and relatively benign (there was cussing and off-topic chat, but not a lot of slander and racism). How’d we do that?

Just to compare, when I started playing Aion a few months ago, if I asked a newb question in chat, people would compete amongst themselves to come up with the most outlandish lie they thought I might believe. If the lie would get me killed, so much the better. And we’ve all had experiences in WoW where people were rude and insulting in chat. What’s the difference between these games and AC2′s community?

Sadly, the difference is size. That’s all, just size. As Aion has bled off players over the past few months, the professional trolls have all but disappeared, fleeing to greener pastures. The people that are left actually hope to play with you some day, and they care about how you remember them. And they are, generally speaking, more patient than the people who left early.

Same with AC2. When it launched, it was full of cheaters, gankers, and the regular collection of assholes. But then chat broke in AC2. I mean that you could not chat, at all, for two months. (It was broken sporadically, but more often than not.) This wasn’t exactly a technical failing as much as it was a political failing with Turbine’s publisher at the time, Microsoft. But the details didn’t matter. The game bled off over half its players in two months, and never recovered momentum. But who was left? It wasn’t the people who delighted in verbally insulting others — those players had gone elsewhere. What was left were the people who loved the game, or who were very patient, or who didn’t even realize there were other places they could be playing. These people tended to be a bit older, but even when they weren’t, they acted older, to fit in. Most of them didn’t want to get ostracized by the small community remaining.

Small = Less Anonymous

The smaller your community is, the less anonymous you are. When I was playing EQ2, I would see the same dozen people every day when I played. If one of those people was a dick to me, you better believe I would remember it. They wouldn’t be invited to my group. Their behavior mattered! Of course, that’s only because EQ2 has a tiny population remaining. If it was WoW where there are literally hundreds of people I can group with at any given level, I couldn’t possibly keep track of all the assholes.

This idea of “smaller communities are nicer to each other” isn’t new. In fact, when DDO was first being designed, that was one of its design features: they planned to cap each world to just 1500 concurrent players, far smaller than the server architecture could actually support, in order to keep each world small, tight-knit, and friendly. Since DDO was designed to be a grouping game, the designers believed that fostering relationships among players was key to creating the social fabric.

Of course, DDO was re-envisioned many times after that first design, and in the end the game launch was basically a dud, so it was good that the game was designed to work with small populations, because that’s all they had. But this setup did still develop friendly groups of people who knew each other and would be nice to you even if you sucked. Now that DDO is open to the public, I assume the population has a lot more immature people in it. (Does it? I haven’t had a chance to play it again yet.)

This also points out the big drawback of the “One World” MMO architecture, such as Guild Wars or Champions uses, where every zone is an instance on the same global server. In a game where people can have the same name as other people, and may or may not be in the same version of the world as you at any given time, it’s basically impossible to make friends or keep track of who’s who. That doesn’t stop people from being nice to you in those games, but it definitely lets them get away with being assholes with relative impunity.

Of course, many players would prefer having hundreds of people to play with, even if there are a handful of assholes in there, rather than having only a dozen people to play with on an EQ2 server. The single-world architecture definitely has benefits. But the anonymity it provides is not one of them.

Bad Apples Ruin Entire Pies

But really, what are we talking about here? What’s the difference between a good community and a bad one? It’s not like AC2′s community changed when half of the players left. The remaining players didn’t get replaced with nice friendly people. They were always nice friendly people. And they were always helpful. But it’s easier for us to remember the bad apples than the good ones.

Log into WoW and ask a newb question, and you’re likely to get four or five answers. One of them will call you names and tell you to GTFO. Four of them will give you the right answer, and one of those people will go to the trouble of guiding you precisely to where you need to be. Similarly, in Aion, even if you got a bunch of lie responses, a few people would IM you and say, “Don’t listen to those guys, you need to do such-and-such, located here”, and then send you an automated map showing exactly where you needed to go. (One of Aion’s cooler features, btw.) There are always nice people in MMO’s. But we don’t count the nice people when determining if the community is friendly or not. We count the assholes. So when the population is diminished, and there are fewer assholes to count, we interpret the community as being nicer.

It’s an interesting bit of psychology here: if you ask a question and get five responses, and just one of those responses is insulting, you’ll still walk away with an unhappy memory of the experience. People don’t like being insulted; it hurts our feelings and creates negative connotations in our heads. Similarly, this is why blogging requires such a thick skin, or posting on forums or Youtube or anywhere else. The vast majority of people aren’t going to insult and attack you, but the few that do attack you really sting, more than you let on. I don’t mean they hurt you consciously, necessarily. Even when you don’t take it personally, you still remember it as a negative experience. The fact that they’re anonymous cowards doesn’t dilute the insults.

This is why anonymity is bad for cooperative games. And it’s why small games with less-anonymous audiences tend to be perceived as friendlier.

Making Friendlier Communities = Removing Anonymity

What we’re talking about here has very obvious real-world counterparts: living in New York is a whole lot different from living in a small town in Indiana. A big part of the difference is the population size. In New York, you can get away with being a jerk to people on the street. You’re never going to see them again. But if you live in a small town of a few hundred, you don’t want to piss off the neighbors. So people are friendlier. Okay, maybe a bit oversimplified, but you get the idea.

So far, MMOs have mirrored the behavior of real-world populations. When the population is small, you’re less anonymous than when the population is large. But that doesn’t have to be the case… MMO’s don’t have to be like real life if we can think of a better way. Maybe there are ways to remove the anonymity to an extent — just enough to keep people from being rude and hurtful just because they can. Or maybe that’s not possible — maybe our culture, at this point in time, couldn’t accept anything like that. I dunno. But I do know that MMO’s are young. Really young. One clever idea can still flip the MMO industry on its ear.

And if you’re just looking for an MMO with a friendly community, might I suggest visiting LoTRo? I’m enjoying myself, and so far, all six players have been very pleasant.

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What’s Turbine been doing the past year? Nothing too exciting, it seems… even though DDO went free-to-play and is apparently making lots of cash, it still has only a skeleton crew working it. But Turbine did just launch a new Lord of the Rings expansion — Siege of Mirkwood. It’s supposed to be really good, too. “Okay cool, it’s probably time I check in on Lotro,” I thought, early this morning. As of 1:30 am the following day, I am still not finished downloading.

I went and got the “Play in Under An Hour” download package. It started off downloading really fast, faster than my regular torrents, even. Then it stopped. I mean, it completely stopped downloading at all, for an hour. I shut it down and restarted it and it went for a while longer and then stopped. Repeat ad nauseum and finally it was finished! I logged in to the character-select screen, and … hey, that’s not what my old character was supposed to look like! He’s only wearing underwear!

Ha ha, of course, the quick downloader hasn’t downloaded my old avatar’s clothes. That’s fine. I’ll just look naked or whatever until it downloads. I click Log In. No, actually I will sit at the “loading” screen for HOURS without any feedback, while it downloads the needed art in tiny scrips and scraps. After hours of waiting, I gave up. (EDIT: apparently I should have shown up as red with a note that my character wasn’t available. But he was in the newbie town of Bree so I guess it figured he was available. I dunno.)

Eventually I uninstalled and tried to get smarter about this. “I do own the original disks, I’ll just install from disk and then patch.” As of this writing, the CD install is still patching. It’s been patching for 10 hours, with an average 200 KB/s download speed. So that’s like 8 gigs of downloaded data and I’m still at -700% complete.

No, really, I’m at -700% complete.

Is that good? Am I almost done? I don’t know. It went to 100% and then kept right on going, all the way up to 800% or so, and then flipped. Now it’s a negative number, but it’s slowly getting smaller. Maybe when it reaches 100% again it will be done.

I don’t know. All I know is they need to work harder to make this game accessible to returning players, because this is the second time in recent memory that I’ve tried to play Lotro and the second time I’ve failed to manage to play at all. Turbine could spend some time on this. I think that would be okay. I mean, they would make their money back for the time spent.

Okay, I’m done with the vitriol now.

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Fate Was Not Kind To You, WAR, Because You Were Developed By Morons

Some readers have asked me why I didn’t pick on Warhammer Online. The fact is that I did write about how doomed they were… but those posts never left the “drafts” section of the blog, because it was too easy a target. It’s like making fun of the mentally challenged kid: you don’t get points for showing them up. Anybody in the industry could have predicted what happened to WAR with 100% accuracy.

Gee, was WAR created by somebody who thinks people who disagree with him should be “burned at the stake”? Wait, and did that same article point out that WAR was developed primarily by inexperienced developers because they were easier to cow into obedience? Yes? Wait, literally? That wasn’t even exaggerated? Huh. And they said they hate playing other MMO’s because it “gives them ideas”? Weird. Maybe… maybe… could any of that have had something to do with the tons of newb mistakes they made? Nah. It was probably just the economic downturn.

In case you are confused by sarcasm, what I mean is the company deserved to fail due to their incompetence and they did, and anybody surprised by this is probably surprised by other predictable things, like the sun rising. They made a DAoC clone that wasn’t as compelling as the original, with a weaker IP (sorry, Warhammer tabletop fan(s), but it’s true: your IP is not even as big a draw as the free “Vaguely Camelot” IP), and they spent an amazing amount of time and money making the game, yet launched it with a pittance of content. And then they did all sorts of crazy things, like opting not to open forums, even for support. This made many players’ initial experience, including my own, pretty miserable. I had originally predicted they would have only 100k by their first-year mark, and I don’t know what exact number they have now, but I’d be a little surprised if they have that many playing customers.

Champions Online Falls On Face

I just canceled my Champions Online account yesterday. The place is a ghost town; I’d be confused and amazed if they have more than 50k subscribers (because, if so, where the heck are they?). Frankly, the game was launched way too soon, and they did the dumbest thing you can possibly do to a fragile game: they made a launch-day patch that made the game tons harder. After months of beta-testing, they threw ALL their data out the door, jacked all the monster difficulties way up, and shipped it. What kind of an idiot would do that? Actually, every newb team makes this mistake. It’s caused by thinking, “Holy SHIT, players will reach level 50 in a month of play! We have to fix it!” And so they fix it, all right. They make the game so un-fun that nobody bothers to get to 50 at all. Ta-da!

The thinking is really just that simple, and it’s always this stupid knee-jerk last minute reaction among the team. MMO’s need players to survive, and a traditional boxed game gets 90% of its players from its initial launch. So MMO companies are really keen to keep all those players paying for at least three months… ideally six months. But they realize they’re out of time, so they just flip some knobs, twiddle some monster skills, and hope for the best. Inevitably, they would have been better off letting people level quickly. Some might get bored, but they are likely to come back later when more stuff is added. If you make the game into an unbalanced muckball, everybody’s experience will be terrible and they won’t come back.

Sandra and my newbie experience was pretty amusingly bad. Our level 13 characters got stuck, unable to continue playing because we picked the wrong skills — we could no longer defeat monsters anywhere near our level. We had to roll new characters! That was basically when Sandra quit. I kept going a while longer, but the imbalances were pretty dramatic (both too easy and too hard, randomly, in every aspect of the game), and it sapped the fun out of being a superhero.

It’s better now, actually. It’s kind of fun now. If you like playing in a ghost town. Because there’s almost nobody left. If you want to play, I recommend you do it now! It’s getting hard to find PvP arena groups as it is… soon it may be impossible. I don’t know what they’re gonna do… well, if Cryptic can hold on until the Xbox 360 version launches, I’ll be happy to give the game another shot on the console.

“Of course Cryptic will stay alive!” you say. “They have Star Trek Online coming out in a couple months!” Uh, hrm. Well, here’s where I don’t pick on Star Trek Online because it’d be like making fun of the mentally handicapped again. Sorry, guys. I love the IP, and I know Cryptic is working hard, and I’d love to be proven wrong, but I can’t see it happening. STO won’t be substantially more polished than Champions was at launch. Why? Because it’s a significantly more complicated game, and it’s launching much too soon to be good enough. It will be lucky to retain 100k subscribers a year after launch. That number would be fine, except they probably need a lot more money than that to keep the lights on at Cryptic HQ, let alone repay their debts.

Aion Core Gameplay Involves Grinding and Being Murdered Repeatedly

Oh god Aion is a beautiful game. I don’t just mean the inhumanly pretty avatars. I mean the whole world has great art direction. It feels like Asian Disneyland From Hell. It’s wonderful. Cute kangaroos hop up to you and box you to death. Mole people squeal and fall over in mid-combat, too excited to keep fighting. One of the first surprise encounters comes from cute animated stalks of evil corn. There are beautiful lakes full of loons calling, fish swimming, adorable lobsters nipping at your feet. This game has serious atmosphere.

But it has the biggest grind EVAR. I had lots of friends who started it and were excited by it, and they have all left, except for one. The invariable reason? “This game is grindy as hell.” It’s got serious pacing problems, and for a PvP game it takes WAY too long to get to the PvP part.

And then when you get to the PvP part, turns out it’s full of these bird men who are 20 levels higher than you who continuously kill you, for fun, just for the hell of it. I had read that there were, like, these elaborate tiers of combat, so I could occasionally fight people somewhere near my level. That has yet to ever happen. Well, sometimes I can sneak up on an enemy while they’re fighting in PvE, and gank ‘em. That makes me feel like a big dickhead.

I’m still paying for Aion, but… I can’t see myself staying in it for much longer. And I lasted longer than almost everyone I know. The worlds are still relatively populated, though not nearly as much as two months ago. But it’s a beautiful game, and the US maintainers are desperately trying to fix things — they’ve gone to double-XP weekends every weekend in order to try to get people up to higher level so they can PvP. Will they succeed? Search me.

Aion is still a big hit in its homeland. But it’s a just modest success in the US. And the sad thing is, it’s the biggest US hit of the year by a long shot. (Ignoring WoW, which is on its own scale.)

Big-Ticket MMO’s Still Sucking, Facebook Games Growing More Fun

Another thing Scott’s blog pokes fun at are the terrible Facebook games that seem to be soul-sucking leeches, designed to hook players like crack and then spam their friends list for more suckers. Those games really are pretty terrible. But why is everybody focusing on these leech games? They are the dying breed on Facebook.

I was just working on a Facebook game with a lot of actual gameplay. It’s in Flash and it’s actually got a real virtual world and avatars and everything. And content and gameplay and so on! This is the future of Facebook games: actual games that happen to be integrated closely with Facebook.

Smart devs should get in on this while they can — there’s still time to make one of these second-gen Facebook games… that is to say, games with actual content. But I understand if you want to just make fun of Farmville some more instead. It is definitely easier.

Games Are Nickel And Diming Me, But I Am Still Not Angry

Another thing Scott’s blog pokes fun at is how games are charging for more stuff now. He listed off a lot of examples, but none of them were at all upsetting to me, with one exception: charging for rerolls in Champions, because Champions was designed to need lots of rerolls in order to play well. So charging for it is exceptionally mercenary for a subscription-based game.

But the other stuff? Charging for world transfers, race changes, character renames, whatever? Yeah, go ahead. In fact, please do more of it. I like these sort of options and I don’t mind paying a few bucks for them. You are not losing customers by adding a for-pay race-changing option. You just aren’t. It’s not a problem. I don’t know what Scott is smoking.

Conclusion: It’s The Business Model, Stupid

It’s tempting to say that these big-league MMOs are suffering primarily due to the economic downturn. But I have a hard time buying it. The Flash casual game market has really heated up this year; our FlashGameLicense.com brokerage site is showing huge monetary growth in terms of online games of all sorts: casual, hardcore, whatever. I’ll admit that no Flash product is as hardcore as “go to the store and buy a $50 box to play this game”. But DDO is apparently breathing new life into Turbine as a “freemium” downloadable game. Champions and Warhammer could be doing this, too. Why aren’t they?

The reason they don’t is that small MMO companies are venture-capital collection machines. They seem to exist to get venture capital. They do not exist to eke out a modest profit off of their games; they need to show HUGE (500%) return on investment in order to keep getting more venture capital. So what happens when their game isn’t a 500% ROI game? They don’t try to salvage it and turn a nice sum. They immediately go about desperately making another game, another gambit, another roll of the dice, maybe we can keep this boat afloat before the VCs shut us down, maybe they won’t strip us for parts if this next game/expansion/repackaging/acquisition is a hit!

VC’s are used to most of their bets not paying off. That’s why they demand such huge rewards from the ones that do. Would it be possible to take 5 million and make a game that returns 15 million in ten years? Yes, that’s not even that hard. But good luck getting only 5 mil in venture capital. You’ll need to set your sites bigger. You’ll need to go for the mega-game that jousts with WoW’s popularity in order to get venture capitalists excited.

It’s a dead-end dream for most companies. The thing Sandra and I have always wanted to do in the MMO world is take one of these modest games, these Champions or Warhammers or Asheron’s Calls or whatever, and run them, and turn a tidy profit for many years. That dream is hard to realize because these companies aren’t interested in turning a minor profit on a game. (With the very notable exception of SOE, who is happy to keep a game going as long as it’s in the black. Good on ‘em. Note that they aren’t a venture-capital company, though.) For most game companies, when a game goes out the door and flops on its face, it’s not time to repurpose the game and figure out how to make a profit — it’s time for a hail-mary pass with the entire company.

In other words, yeah, these 2009 MMOs sucked. But not really. If the stakes weren’t so high, these would all be little success stories. They “suck” because they threw millions and millions at a product, scrambled as hard as they could for a few years, and then rolled the dice to see if they got rich instantly. They didn’t. So, bam. They suck by fiat.

I think we’re seeing that infusing game companies with fifty million in venture capital is not a reliable way to make or run a game. But we’re at a dead spot right now, where MMO’s are still too hard for a small privately-funded team to make, but not profitable enough for a VC firm to get rich off of. So the games keep imploding, the same sad story over and over. And yes, there will be more of the same for 2010, but we’re going to start seeing more of the small companies making names for themselves, showing reasonable profits and carving into the mainstream gaming audience. 2011 is when the flood-gates will finally burst.

Conclusion Part 2:

To be clear: I don’t mean to be picking on Scott Jennings. It does seem like I am, but this is just what happens when you single-source your vitriol-post. Scott’s a good guy who knows what he’s talking about, he won’t mind.

So, yeah, this is why I try not to share my random game opinions on the blog unless there’s something constructive to add. But I guess I’m averaging one hate-post a year, which isn’t too bad.

So yeah… I’ll see you later, when I finally manage to get the next of those Psychology for Designers articles completed!

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