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(02:26:34) srand: You should post that.

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You should read and embrace the post in its entirely. But I wanted to expand on one of her points. Sanya posted:

The community does not, on an emotional level, differentiate between your red name and say, the creative director’s red name. So, even if your actual role at the company is mailboy or cube warrior or producer’s bitch, you still have the footprint of the most senior producer.

This is something that I have been struggling with – and trying to educate my teams about – for a decade.

We’re All the Same

It’s not just that a post from the intern has the same importance as a post from the producer, but that from the viewpoint of most players they are the same entity.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the way a company might want to maintain some sort of global corporate persona. I’m talking about how players see us.

Example: Your live MMO team  just put out a content update. Half the team hates the new content, some because it’s too easy and some because it’s too hard. A third of the team thinks it ruins PvP; a quarter thinks it overbalances PvE. And the entire team is pissed about the stupid guild thing the CEO forced them to do.

None of this matters to your players. They don’t see a fractious group of individuals who fight over every nuance of every update (and yet, to be fair, still manage boatloads of quality content on time way more often than not).

No, what your players see is “the dev team” – a single monolithic entity that includes everyone from the CEO to the forum moderator. Their impression of “the dev team” comes from two places: the game itself and what “the dev team” says.

Hopefully you’ve got a decent handle on your game. But you also need a handle on what “the dev team” says. Because what any one of those people says – from an interview with the CEO to a throw-away opinion post by an intern designer – represents the opinion and knowledge level of the whole team. Worse, it represents the official intentions for the game as a whole.

Yes, the CEO’s interview in Business Weekly represents your level of raid knowledge. And yes, the design intern’s post on the quest forum about how he hates PvP represents your intentions for the future.

(I’ll give you a moment to shudder.)

Players aren’t stupid. They have some notion of the relative hierarchy here. But they are here to play, not to analyze industry. When they see a statement by ‘Company Employee’, they see a statement by ‘Company’.

The solution seems simple enough: Together, the producer and the community manager can iron out what they want “the dev team” to say and then work with people until everyone gets the message. It isn’t hard … unless you ignore the problem.

Even Producers

But there is another aspect to this that I as a producer find particularly painful.

No matter how much you may want to explain that the reason “the dev team” did the stupid guild thing was that the CEO insisted on it even though everyone else on the team knew it was stupid, you can’t do that.

And not just because it would get you fired. Even if you go rogue and explain the whole thing – the internal politics, the trade-offs, the business deals - it won’t help. You can’t tell your players that your team knows what it’s doing even if the CEO doesn’t because on an emotional level you and the CEO are the same entity: “the dev team”.

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Every live MMO team I’ve been on has had this debate at one time or another, and with some of them it’s an ongoing power struggle that ripples out and affects development in a huge way.

A head QA honcho that I worked with once told me that my job as producer was to produce — to push the product as spec’d out the door on time. And his job as QA was to make sure that the product I pushed out was acceptable and didn’t reflect badly on the company. That meant that the final call on pushing a patch was his responsibility, he said. He could stop the patch if he felt it was unacceptable.

But while that model of control may work perfectly well for a pre-launch MMO or a one-shot boxed game, it doesn’t make any sense for a live MMO – especially not one with a constant (and regular) content update schedule.

The producer of a live MMO is different from the producer of a pre-launch product. We have different responsibilities and goals. We answer much more directly to the customers. Our bottom line rests less on development costs and more on customer retention.

While the live producer is still in charge of scope and schedule, both the scope and schedule of a live MMO are much more flexible in the short term than those of a pre-launch product. Whether you are patching once a month or every three months, there will be another patch. If you have to, you can slip content or push your patch a week without screwing up a multi-million dollar advertising budget.

As producer, I used QA as a resource (one of the my most valuable resources – no argument there!) to tell me the state of the patch. I used that information to decide what was ready to go and what needed to slip to the next patch. And yeah, I pushed without QA sign-off once or twice. After gathering all the information and balancing all the requirements, that was the action I decided was necessary.

The live producer needs to sit down with the people who are invested in the patch – QA, CS, etc. – to work out any difficulties. But giving one of those groups a flat out veto? Not useful. Not in the live MMO world.

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Your players think a graphical upgrade would help you recruit new players. They tell you how embarrassed they are to be seen playing you and how easily they could convince all their friends to play too if you just looked a little nicer.

Your bosses think a new graphics engine should form the core of your next expansion. They tell you how important looks are to getting new players and how much reviewers like shiny graphics.

Your team members think a graphical upgrade, especially a new graphics engine, would be great. You’d get new players, maybe some more marketing money, and it wouldn’t even affect content creation all that much because graphics is all code.

Let me give you some advice: Don’t do it!

You will never be the prettiest. That boat has sailed.

Your players are fooling themselves. If they haven’t convinced their friends to give you a try based on their stirring recitations of your game systems, some shiny art isn’t going to help.

(And it’s not like they’re going to quit out of embarrassment. When they do quit, it will be because they need a break from your gameplay.)

Your bosses are fooling themselves. You’re an older MMO. You will never be an impulse buy for a new player looking for something shiny. You’ll be lucky to get a cursory look and half a column from major reviewers.

(Online reviews will be happy to dissect the intricacies of your game systems at length. If they mention your graphics at all it will probably be in the context of how they really aren’t that bad. Really!)

Your team members are fooling themselves. Graphical upgrades will drain time from new features and game systems, from new art, and from QA. And all of those things will have a fundamental impact on the ability to add more content.

Worse, a graphical upgrade may well slow down your art pipeline – and therefore your content development – in the future.

No matter what you do, be very, very careful about affecting your system requirements. Raising system requirements on a live game doesn’t just throw away existing players – it throws them away with extreme prejudice.

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1. Women gamers are a vast untapped market.
2. If we can tap into that market we can make lots of money.
3. So we better hire some women developers.

Magical Woman Knowledge

The logical connection between the first two points is pretty clear. But where does #3 comes from?

Magical woman knowledge.

There is an unspoken assumption that women devs – and all women, in fact – have magical knowledge about women that can help us tap into the market of women gamers. (You knew about that, right? It’s a back-of-the-box bullet.)

This is very useful because as game developers we don’t have to time to think about these things, especially when we’re trying to get a game out the door. Goodness knows we don’t have time to think about non-traditional audiences while we’re designing the game.

Okay – I’m getting a little snarky now. But I’m also being serious.

A lot of developers – of all genders – seem to think that being a woman in game development is an automatic ticket to understanding what women want in a game.

Lived Experience

Women devs do bring something special to the development table: lived experience.

That sentence is a bit of a cheat, though, because all developers – all people – bring their own lived experience to their work.

Each bundle of experience is different. No one has the prototypical man gamer experience any more than the prototypical working class gamer experience or the prototypical Jewish gamer experience.

But you pile enough of those bundles of different experience up together, you have a team experience pool that can help guide your development.

Piling up enough lived experience from women gamers is especially important if you want to tap into the woman gamer market because gamer culture sits in a matrix of subtle sexism that can – and does – tend to alienate women. (Yes, even women gamers.)

Subtle sexism is subtle. Neither experiencing it nor recognizing it are limited to women. But on average, women probably have more personal lived experiences that help make them a tiny bit more cognizant of subtle sexism. Sometimes. Not always.

How to Tap Into Women Gamers

If you are serious about tapping into the market of women gamers, I have two suggestions:

1. Hire a bunch of women developers to add their experiences to the experience pool of your team.
2. Do some research on women gamers instead of expecting one magical hire to bring knowledge to your door, you lazy bastard.

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The bit that really caught my eye, though, was his discussion of the impact of BioWare’s SWTOR (which I still call KOTORO in my head, accompanied by a mental imago of Goro).

Allow me to quote two small pieces:

But all the same, I hope The Old Republic is a massive hit, with millions of subscribers, enough to make back its development costs and then some. [...] Because Austin needs studio that has a successful MMO shipped within the past decade. Because a lot of my friends work there and I’m pulling for them. [...]

And because in 2012, the Old Republic development team may get some sleep.

(I’ve clipped the bits that deserve another, rather longer post.)

If it succeeds, it will show that the “big iron” still works – throw as much meat as you can at the machine, and crank out a huge project, and spend your way to greatness. [...] And everyone will breath a sigh of relief. The old gods still listen to our prayers, now shut up and find more virgins, we have to get the sacrifices ready for the next expansion pack.

I know where Scott is coming from when he hopes that SWTOR is a massive hit. I have friends in Austin and at BioWare as well. I don’t want to see them unemployed or have their last four years of blood and effort go down the drain.

But I also don’t want to see another decade of $50+ million meat-grinder projects. I want my friends to be able to sleep more than once every four years. I want MMOs to improve through a better understanding of target audience and design*, not through luck and blood sacrifice to the old gods.

And one day, I want to be able to consider getting back into the corporate side of the MMO industry again. I miss my teams. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sacrifice my health and sanity for someone else’s minuscule chance of profit.

* You think SWTOR will succeed because BioWare does have a better understanding of target audience and game design? It’s possible … but right now I’m not seeing it. Let’s talk more when I’ve actually seen the game.

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At some point or other, most live MMO teams with declining player bases (which is almost everyone) are handed a mandate to increase conversion of new players.

Usually this involves someone higher up in the company looking at the number of free client downloads and comparing it to the number of new subscriptions each month.

(You do have a free client download, right?)

Once the mandate comes down, the live team kicks into gear. Since they are usually limited to working with in-game content, the live team concentrates on character creation, starter areas, the in-game newbie experience, low level quests, level 1-10 socialization, etc.

What the live team almost never does though, because often it isn’t in their purview at all, is fix the gawd-awful process that a new player goes through between the download and character creation.

Like navigating the cluttered sales-speak website to find the technical support link when the install doesn’t

• … and then getting a 404.

Like filling out a massive web form to sign up an account

• … half of which it turns out is market research anyway
• … and doing it three times because each account name you choose is already in use and the form doesn’t save your entries
• … and then doing it twice more because you also need a separate forum name
• … only to have the verification e-mail go missing three times in a row.

(And do you know how many older games still require credit card information for their free trial? Egad!)

The best the live team may be able to do is bug the installer team for a fresh client download, bug the customer service team for some knowledge base updates, and bug the web team for some link fixes.

Of course, all that assumes that the installer team still knows how to build a fresh client, that the CS team still knows how to use the old knowledge base software package that the rest of the company switched away from three years ago, and that the web team isn’t tied up for the next three months building a site for the game in development - all of which, I shudder to say, is not always the case.

(And I’m not even going to mention the games that hide the link to the client download off some back page – or worse, a post in the forums! That’s outside the scope of this post. But suffice it to say that if you have to Google for the client download, you have failed.)

That’s not to say that improving your low level content is a waste – far from it! But if your goal is conversion, even character creation may well be too late.

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Well, you probably did – you are reading it after all.

Anyway, we’ve been posting here for over three years now. Our posting rate has never been astronomical … and it’s slowed down over time.

Ironically, despite our pride in our live team experience, we’ve fallen into a typical development trap: We’re reluctant to publish any post until we’ve not only polished the hell out of it but also smoothed every corner, addressed every edge case, and marshaled answers for every potential question or comment we can think of.

This leads to massive overblown posts that take us ages to write. Often they aren’t a lot of fun to write, so we put them off … and off … and off. Worse, those posts don’t leave a lot of room for discussion. Without discussion we might as well be publishing a static web page instead of writing a blog.

So we’re going to try something different starting now. We’re going to deliberately post shorter, less polished, less complete posts. We’re aiming to post more often and we’re hoping for more discussion from you, our four loyal readers.

And like a good live team, if our work doesn’t help us towards our goals then we’ll analyze the data we’ve collected and try something else.

Happy 2011, and thank you for reading!

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Since Cataclysm launch, I have played through three of the new 80+ zones in their entirety on my newly undead hunter. (I also played through a lot of quests in beta, but this post comes from my post-launch experiences since content may have changed since then.) Overall I’d say that the Blizzard Cataclysm team did a good job working out a lot of the kinks in content design, especially quests and zone flow.

But in the process, the designers subverted two long-running WoW conventions and the results have left me puzzled and sometimes downright angry.

Elite? No More!

Elite enemies in WoW are more difficult to kill than regular enemies. They are usually found in dungeons and sometimes at the end of long quest chains. Elite enemies are indicated two ways: with a golden dragon around their portrait and with the word Elite in their tooltip.

In original Classic WoW and in the Burning Crusade expansion, a quest that involved an elite enemy was usually intended as a group quest (even if a knowledgeable player could solo it without any trouble).

Starting with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, two things happened. First, the quest text for a group quest changed to indicated how many players Blizzard thought you might need. (Unfortunately they missed some quests so this was a little inconsistent.)

Secondly, the designers added a number of fake-out elites to the end of quest chains. The fake-out elite enemies looked elite and had elite stats – until you used the special magic powder that the quest-giver provided to shrink them down to non-elite size so you could kill them solo.

So the convention evolved from ‘Elites need a group’ to ‘Elites probably need a group unless the quest doesn’t mention it and the quest-giver gives you some magical doodad to de-elite the enemy’. A little more complicated, but still understandable.

In the Cataclysm expansion, however, the designers threw this convention out the window. Solo quests constantly pit players against elite enemies that are elite in name (and dragon portrait) only. “Go kill this amazingly powerful boss that you might think takes a bunch of people but whom you can defeat all by your lonesome!”

Why? I assume because it feels more epic. (*shudder* I’m having flashbacks to AC2 development as I type this.)

But epic or not, it means that I as a player have no idea which quests require a group and which don’t. Presumably the quest text should still tell me … except that the couple of group quests I’ve encountered so far in Cataclysm haven’t.

Color me confused. Epic, but confused.

Tag – You’re It!

The other broken convention in Cataclysm involves tagging, also known as tapping. This is a familiar convention used in a lot of multi-player games. In WoW, the health bar of an enemy turns grey (instead of red) when another player or another group attacks the enemy before you do. Once that happens, you won’t get any experience, loot, or quest credit by killing that enemy.

There are some minor exceptions to this convention, mostly enemies who spawn quest objects when they die. In that case, the enemy tags as normal but everyone in the area can usually use the quest object.

Tagging has two very useful effects. First, it lets you know when you aren’t going to get anything from a kill. But more than that, it lets you know when you can safely step in and help without stealing a kill from someone else. Despite common belief, most players don’t actually want to be asses and steal quest credit. Most of them just want to hurry up your kill so the enemy respawns faster and they can get to their own kill.

Anyway. Tagging, well known convention, subverted in Cataclysm. Yes, there are several different fights I can name off the top of my head, including at least two daily quests, where the health bar of the enemy doesn’t turn grey when someone else attacks the enemy first – even though only one person or group can get quest credit.

Why? This one is harder for me to figure out. I suspect it has something to do with the mechanics behind these fights, since at least some of them seem to hinge on triggering little mini-events. But these quests are causing so much confusion among the players that I can’t imagine why Blizzard left them this way.

So?

I’ve outlined a couple of long-standing conventions that Blizzard subverted in the Cataclysm expansion not just because I wanted to rant about them, but to start a discussion on when breaking your conventions is appropriate.

To compare, other content traditions that Cataclysm broke include: quests to collect items with a 10% drop rate, sending players across three continents to finish one FedEx quest, and NPCs who start quests in one dungeon scattered across six cities.

So how do you tell the good conventions from the bad traditions? It’s not that hard. Just ask: Is this something that will make life easier for the players? Or is this something that the content designers are really excited about because it let’s them do something more exciting for them, regardless of how it affects the players?

Contest designers are fine people. But the stuff they get excited about? Often not the best thing for your players.

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