(Original story) (Cached version because it’s very popular and is hammering their server)

You didn’t read it, did you. Sigh. Fine, I’ll paraphrase a bit. Ryan from Untold Entertainment went to one of those dumb GDC “rant sessions” where you hear industry bigwigs rant for a while and then leave. (You usually don’t even get to comment back to them: it’s worse than even a blog! And you pay a lot for the privilege! Ugh.)

But anyway, as people shuffled in, they were given a coin. A projector slide explained:

The person who collected the most coins from the other players in the room by the halfway point of the session would be invited to the front to do a “guest rant” on social games.

So what did Ryan do? He went back to the entrance, lied to the volunteer giving out coins, and took the entire coin bag. Most people didn’t even get coins, and had no idea what the overhead projector was talking about.

So when the voting was tallied, he was the winner… by, uh, a very large margin. The panel vetoed his win. (But the moderator let him do a mini-rant later anyway, which he overstepped the bounds of also.)

It’s a funny story, and I’m leaving out the funniest bits, so if you haven’t read it, you won’t understand why I was laughing at the end of it. When (top-tier indie developer) Evan Miller commented that the panel should be ashamed of disallowing his win, I nodded along.

But the next day I read it again, and realized I’d been duped by his funny writing into not seeing the full picture. Ryan presented his story as one of sticking it to the big guys, breaking the rules that the industry giants arbitrarily made. It’s a good David and Goliath story. But it’s a terrible story to read much into.

Griefers are Griefers

Ryan was a griefer. The definition of a griefer is someone who keeps a significant number of other people from enjoying your game, and does so intentionally. Griefers are griefers regardless of whether they are “playing within the rules” or not. When you have a griefer, you have to take stock of your game: is your game designed for griefers?

Sometimes it is. EVE is a griefing hellhole whose other fun mechanics cannot redeem it. (Yes, that’s just my opinion. But guys, I sure would like to play a non-hellhole space-trading game like we had on BBSes… won’t somebody make that MMO?)

Even World of Warcraft had features that were intentionally designed to let you grief others. (Killing NPCs of other factions.) But this is widely seen as a mistake by the players I game with — and you can tell even WoW is backing away from the design in the newer expansions.

In general, if your game is about griefing, then your game is full of adolescents (and mental adolescents) who are happy to harm others in order to be clever, funny, or sadistic. There’s an audience for that. But sadly, griefers aren’t satisfied to stay in those sorts of games: the competition is too high. Griefers need suckers, because griefing other griefers is hard. So griefers show up everywhere. As a developer, they are a significant threat to your game’s lifespan. Unless your game is designed specifically for griefing (in which case, ugh!), you need to wipe them out.

Don’t Let Griefers Hide Behind Rules

Griefers mustn’t be allowed to profit from their behavior, or they’ll multiply. It doesn’t matter if they found a loophole in your game’s rules or not: if they are intentionally ruining the game for others, and they broke an implicit rule that your target audience should already know, then kick them out.

Don’t make the newb mistake of thinking you can say “ha ha, very cute, never do that again.” That never works. Even if the original person doesn’t do it again, others will. And you’ve set a precedent. You’re just making things worse by letting even one obvious manipulation of your game go by.

Just kick them out and never look back. It sounds draconian, because it is: it is also the only policy that works. You are a small team (at best) — your chances of writing a perfect set of rules for your game are pretty much nil, especially when a vast number of people are actively looking for loopholes. So unless you fancy being a lawyer instead of a game developer (or if you’re running money-based games where the other guy might be a lawyer), you simply have to kick the people out when they are obviously abusing the spirit of the game.

And not just games: any social system. These days I adamantly refuse to put up long lists of exact rules for forums or chatrooms or whatever. “Thou shalt not call people names or spit on them or make them feel uncomfortable or…” for chrissakes, if I have to spell this stuff out to you, I know you’re immature and I don’t want you around. And the only thing that happens if I list all those rules? People revel in finding where I failed to specify things exactly. “I said he should take the sticks out of his mangina. That’s not on the swear list and it’s not ‘making fun of gays’ because I was making fun of hermaphrodites, which are not listed in the rules! You can’t punish me!” Augh! Get out of here, griefer! (Admittedly, I’ve successfully avoided ever making or running games for 13 year old boys. Some audiences are going to be more miserable than others.)

Obvious versus Not-So-Obvious Rules

On the FGL forums, the discussion of this story boiled down to the key distinction of whether Ryan broke the “rules” or broke the “obvious social conventions” of the game. Most people said that he didn’t break the rules. (Although personally I think he did: the rules were to get as many coins as possible from other players; he didn’t do this. The coin-giver was not a player.) But for the sake of argument, let’s say he didn’t break the rules: he just broke the implicit conventions that anybody at the conference would have made.

But the thing is, you shouldn’t have to list every possible social norm that your game rules operate under. If you’re a big company, your lawyers will handle the key ones. Trust me, though: you do not want lawyers writing all the rules for your game. Players don’t want this, either. They just want to be asshats and get away with it.

But sometimes you do need to write out some rules. If your game has a lot of PvP, then it can be confusing what “griefing” is, exactly, and you’ll need to give some guidelines. The worst case scenario is when players who aren’t griefing are afraid of doing anything new because they don’t understand what is bannable or not. But in practice, this is not a hard line to find. (Normally when it seems like a gray area, it’s because the live team is intentionally muddying the line to keep people scared. I don’t think that’s a good long-term policy.) If your target demographic really won’t understand the rules you want them to abide by, you have to give them guidelines.

I also want to distinguish between banning “griefers” and banning people who cheat in a non-griefing way. Personally I’m much more lenient on the latter, because they don’t make other people’s experience miserable. You can patch things up, spank the player if they were obviously being jerks, and go on with life. I don’t want to give the impression that I think all things should be bannable offenses. Just the ones that affect other players significantly.

They’re Always There

No matter what sort of game it is, there’s always rules lawyers. There’s always griefers. These groups often overlap, and cause much misery. So Ryan’s behavior is a very useful lesson to developers: you will have these sorts of players and they will abuse your system and they will act holier-than-thou when you ban their ass, and lots of people will take their side because “he didn’t break the rules!”

That doesn’t mean you should let him get away with it: you just have to take the PR hit for banning him. It’s the less-expensive evil.

Indies are Bad Seeds?

In this story, the “social game” was pretty un-fun. (A popularity contest among nerdy game developers? Oh boy oh boy, sign me up!) So it can be hard to see Ryan’s activity as wrong. But the fact is he committed several misdemeanor crimes. If he’d stolen, say, coins for an arcade game, or something else the audience valued even a little bit, there would be a lot less sympathy for him. But in this case, yeah, who cares, stupid game, funny story. (Is it even griefing if the people you grief didn’t know they were playing the game?)

I think his behavior is eminently “indie”, and I don’t begrudge him being a jerk in order to try to get ahead in a game with stakes this low. But I also don’t begrudge the panel for disallowing his behavior.

In the end, I don’t care about the game per se, I’m just wary of Ryan’s takeaway lesson, which is “in short: break the rules, get the coins.”

Ryan is saying that as a small developer, you need to break existing conventions in order to make room for yourself: a lot of those conventions are there to make it harder for you to succeed. I completely agree with that. But if the end result means that everybody has to be a griefer, we’re setting ourselves up for an even worse industry than we have now: when everybody griefs, nobody wins.

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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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Because it’s wrong, and you guys are shit, that’s why.

First, take a look at this. Just a brief look. See the date at the top? September 12, 2003. Now take a look at this. Note the date it was filed? November 9, 2004.

This is relevant because the patent is a super-broad one — it patents the entire generalized idea explained in my article, and every obvious permutation they could think of. They actually have three different patents now, covering various elements of my meta-language idea.

The Boring Details

What does this mean? What’s the patent all about? In very simple terms, it makes translating games easier — in fact, it makes any grammatical construction easier — by abstracting away conjugations and different spellings of words.

Words have lots of conjugations. In English, a noun might have one form for singular and one for plural, e.g. “monster” versus “monsters”. Some nouns have gender, so they should be referred to as “he” or “she” or maybe “it”. And there’s always tons of crazy special cases. Suppose your game has a pair of sentient blue jeans… do you use “he” or “she” or “it”? No, you’d use “they”: “The pants come to life and start running! They flee to the north!” Great, that’s yet another weird special case. Getting all the possible special cases is hard.

The solution I described on GamaSutra simply makes all those details data-driven: you embed the various parts of speech right into your string tables, so that you don’t have to manually code all the different permutations in your game. A separate string-table-manager module can figure out how to conjugate entire sentences just by looking at the tags built into the various strings. The data is embedded via special characters and codes stuck into the strings.

This is really important when you want to support many languages with the same executable… you sure don’t want to have to write hundreds of C if-statements for all the different ways things can be put together in all the different languages you support! Putting this into data also makes it easier for the translators to do their job separately from your game coders… no game coder likes to take time away from their AI coding to add some more pronouns for the Italian version of the game. It’s a waste of time.

Yes, Yes, They Reworded It, Very Clever

Taking a look through the article and the patent papers, the similarities are quite striking. For instance, here’s my example set of meta-characters:

And here’s SOE’s example:

$: name (Bob) or base text
^: A proper possessive (Bob’s)
%: subject pronoun (I-you-he/she/it-we-you-they)
#: object pronoun (me-you-him/her/it-us-you-them)
&: possessive pronoun (my-your-his/her/its-our-your-their)
=: direct address (sir/sire/milord-madame/madam/milady)
+: count/number of the objects
<: indefinite article (a/an/some)
>: definite article (the)
*: used for locales other than the source locale
.about.: used for locales other than the source locale

Well I’m glad you went to the trouble of changing the example parts of speech and the little symbols, you thieving bastards. It makes all the difference in the world. No it doesn’t. You’re thieves.

The patent document certainly does go into more laborious detail than I did in the article. It points out all the obvious extrapolations: that a meta-language could store the permutations of speech in the noun strings rather than the final presentation strings, as my example setup did. The patent also drones on and on about every different configuration they could brainstorm, to make sure it covers everything in the known universe. But at its core, it’s theft. They stole it from my publication.

I know at least some people at SOE read my article because when I interviewed there years later for a contract gig, I mentioned it, and the people that interviewed me recalled it. (My wife Sandra actually worked for them for a year as a game producer, but I never did. And my wife never heard anything about the patenting of this idea while she was there… SOE’s a big company.) And really, why wouldn’t they have seen this article? It was back in 2003 and GamaSutra was king; everybody in the MMO industry checked GamaSutra religiously. It seems like it was the only industry source that people quoted back then.

The real question is, why wouldn’t their MMOG localization team have read my article, entitled “Localizing MMOGs”?

But SOE Didn’t Invent It

So here’s the thing, guys, this is prior art. My article describes this technique, which I had already successfully used on a published game prior to the article. I know the patent laws in the US are very squirrelly, and I’m not even remotely close to being a lawyer, but I don’t see how this patent could hold up.

The weirdest part of this patent is that it’s not even entirely my prior art. I solidified it, extrapolated a bit, and devised tools and techniques to work with it in a uniform way. But the underlying idea (of using meta-characters in strings to assist in string generation) is quite old… antique even. Whenever engineers have needed to solve this problem, they inevitably come up with this solution. It’s the only way to solve this problem. Hence the problem with SOE “owning” it.

I may have been the first to publicly describe this idea in English, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this was described in another language, since so many of the best translation companies are in Europe. When I explained this system to the company that translated Asheron’s Call 2, they already knew the basic idea. They said they had already worked on several other applications (some games, some not) that used similar techniques. I don’t remember most of the examples they mentioned, but one concrete example was Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games in 2000. That game used a primitive meta-language for their randomly-generated treasure items.

This is What SOE Does

What evidence do I have that SOE would steal this? Maybe they invented it at around the same time and just didn’t do any research, or they forgot that I had already described it a year earlier, and literally think they invented it. Weirder mistakes happen. I would like to assume they aren’t intentionally stealing my idea. But it is in fact their MO: whenever possible, they seem to use their  lawyers to screw over their competition.

I remember back in the day when Turbine and SOE were competing: Asheron’s Call 1 versus EverQuest 1. SOE did every dirty legal trick they could think of. Here’s one that haunted us years later:

http://www.trademarkia.com/empyrean-78069007.html

What’s that? Oh, just a trademark on the word “Empyrean.” What’s that for? Well it wasn’t intended to be used by SOE… it was just to screw over their competition. Asheron’s Call’s backstory had a progenitor race called the Empyreans. As soon as SOE found out about that, they [rightly] presumed Turbine would want to make an expansion pack with that word in it. So they trademarked it. They actually trademarked a lot of different words that Turbine might want to use. Trademarks are cheap, like $1000. So they just bought them up like candy.

This example had a somewhat ironic ending because by the time Turbine wanted to make an AC2 expansion pack, Turbine actually used SOE as their publisher! But even though SOE was publishing the game, Turbine still couldn’t use those words. Too much lawyer hassle to get the paperwork through. Ugh.

SOE, please. Come clean here. Do the right thing on these patents. I don’t even know what the “right thing” would be in this case. But do something. Don’t just be evil.

This is What Is Wrong With Everything

I know SOE isn’t the only big company that uses their lawyers for evil. And yes, I’m quite familiar with the old “we have to collect these patents in order to have leverage against other people’s patents” tripe. But it’s all tripe. It crushes indies’ hopes and dreams, and it’s not fair. I wish I knew how to help solve the problem. Over the years I’ve donated a fair amount to organizations like the EFF that sometimes go after overzealous patent trolls. But nothing has fundamentally changed despite a lot of donating and a lot of letters-to-my-congressperson. I feel completely helpless against this.

These SOE patents are horrible. Now I can no longer use the simple techniques I’ve known for a decade? Even though I was the first to formally describe it, publicly, well before SOE used the technique in a game or submitted a patent? This is terrible. Humiliating. Depressing.

Apparently Robert McEntee (who is listed on the patent) talked about this idea at GDC this year, calling it “his idea” and claiming to have invented it. I don’t even care about that. He can be the official owner forever for all I care. I just want to be able to use my technique.

I mean yeah, maybe the fact that it’s covered by my prior art means SOE couldn’t win a lawsuit against my use of the idea. But it would take a lawsuit to find out, which of course I can’t afford. And even if SOE wouldn’t bother to sue me, given that I have no money, it’s still a huge chilling effect. Now I can’t use this technique when I take contract gigs to set up localization for other people. What would I tell them? “Yeah, SOE patented this last year, but don’t worry, if they sue the bejeezus out of you, just point to this prior art.” No… those contract gigs are gone now. Oh, and the lengthy chapter I authored in the 2006 book Perspectives on Localization, which expanded on the ideas of the GamaSutra article? Yeah, don’t use that either, it was patented retroactively. I was quite proud of that article.

Worst of all? I was informed about this by a translation company who was distraught by the news. Variations of this technique are in common usage all over the world, and SOE now owns the rights to it in the US, somehow. Where does that put everyone else? Nobody knows; everybody’s worried.

I just wish there was a way to fix patents. I wish I could do something useful besides call SOE names and rant on a blog like a petulant child. But I can’t.

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Wizards of the Coast has decided to rewrite their popular Character Builder program for making pen-and-paper D&D characters. The new version will be web-based and will only store characters online — that is, on their servers — requiring a monthly $10 subscription. (The existing program theoretically requires a subscription already, but many users pirate the app, or else they sign up for a month, get the app, then unsubscribe. The change is obviously an attempt to fix this.)

The presentation of the new version has been abysmal, however. The only solid new feature is that the new version has Macintosh support (since it’s written in Silverlight). That may help them get more customers in the future, but their existing customers obviously aren’t using Macs now, so they don’t care much.

But worse: it soon became clear that the new version has significantly reduced functionality. It doesn’t have a way to export characters for sharing, which is a crucial feature for many players. Even worse? It’s capped at 20 characters per account, when the old version had infinite local characters. Many users (myself included) make dozens of copies of their characters, trying out all sorts of different ideas. 20 character saves is a very small number!

Developer Post With Math Quiz

A change this drastic requires some planning in the presentation, and WoTC has presented it very poorly, letting players perceive this as a downgrade in functionality. Doh! But even worse is when a developer stopped by to fan the anger with unsupportable gibberish:

I shouldn’t do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.

I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.

Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?

Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.

Well, first off, we can’t answer his math quiz because we have no idea how big the character files are in the new version. In the existing version, though, a level 20 character might take 256 kb, or a quarter of a megabyte. This is obscenely bloated, by the way, given that it’s just a bunch of indexes into an ability database. One would hope they’d have taken this chance to make the save files smaller. But let’s assume that the new version is just as bloated as ever.

So if he runs 20 machines making a character every 10 seconds, he’ll need 8640 * 20 * .25 = 43,200 mb per day. How long will it take to fill up 1TB? About 22 days. How long for 40 TB? About 2.5 years. Yawn… you call that a lot? Has this guy even researched how cheap storage is for large companies? Doesn’t seem like it.

This whole angle is just a terrible one to use, because he’s encouraged me to look at the financial realities of what I’m buying. Now I see that WoTC is charging me $10 a month for just 5 mb of storage. Compare this to other services such as Dropbox, which offers 50 GIGABYTES for the same price — that’s ten thousand times more! Or look at Gmail, which offers 7,516 MB with every free account, and it’s easy to have as many free accounts as you want.

So no, as a customer I can’t fathom why WIZARDS OF THE FUCKING COAST can’t afford to give more than 5 mb of storage to each person who pays them $10 for the privilege. This forum post just hammered home how inept and/or greedy WoTC is. Nice messaging!

“I Really Shouldn’t Be Posting This… [Because I Can't Explain All The Inside Details]“

Of course, the D&D Insider service isn’t about storage space at all — it’s about making your D&D game more fun. So letting people compare your product to other products that do entirely different things is a terrible idea.

Why did he post this? Because, to him, the design makes total sense: it meets design goals to the best of the engineers’ ability. Yes, they are under the umbrella of Wizards of the Coast, but I’m sure the D&D Insider service itself has a very limited budget that needs to last a long time. Given the realities of their situation, I assume the limitation is wisely conservative.

This engineer feels compelled to defend his decisions, because to him the decisions are quite logical. WRONG. STUPID. STOP POSTING.

Players will see this as a problem WoTC created for itself by wanting to store all characters online. Players didn’t even ask for this functionality. So the explanation boils down to “We had to do this because our really greedy redesign required it!” That’s… uh, that’s not good spin, guys.

Making Your Product Worse? No You’re Not. Think Harder.

Is there a way to sell this change to users? Of course! This one is actually quite easy because there’s a lot of ways this change could be beneficial. Only the daftest of companies would allow customers to think that their product is literally getting worse like WoTC is doing. (Seriously, guys, what the hell are you thinking? Do you need a consultant to help you position your web services? Call me, I know some people.)

When you need to make a major change to your product, your first job is to figure out why it’s beneficial to your users. And then you give them those benefits! Just off the top of my head, they could have said:

• Never lose your character file again!
• Access your character sheets from Windows Mobile 7 Phones [because the new client is written in Silverlight]
• WoTC could easily provide a new “Armory”-style feature that lets players show off their characters.
• How about an errata notifier? Since all your characters are stored online, WoTC could detect whenever an errata change to the rules affects your character, and send you an email.

That’s my five-second brainstorm. I’m sure there’s a million more ways this could be beneficial with very little coding effort. So create a list of all the cool new features you’re bringing to the table. Give customers a reason to be pleased with the change and excited about the future.

And that engineer’s post? He shouldn’t be allowed to post on such a sensitive topic at all, but if he did, the entirety of his post should have been a rephrasing of his last paragraph. This is all he needed to say:

20 characters is just our initial limit; we’ll monitor the situation and we can ramp that up as needed.

Done. Problem solved for the majority of your users. And you didn’t make your company look greedy or inept in the meantime.

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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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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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Option 1: Everything is perfectly fine, citizen. Move along now.

I’ve been playing Aion for a while now, and it’s a fascinating game. I’ve never been on the crap end of a localized game before, and I have to say it sucks. Instead of being responsive to my needs, I’m treated like a second-class citizen. This must be how the Korean AC2 players felt, or how the foreign-language EQ2 players feel now. Poor bastards.

Through no fault of their own, the English language team for Aion doesn’t have as much control over the game as they’d like. They get new game updates from the home office, as determined by their schedule, not what the English team wants. And then they have to get all new text translated, and then re-QA it… it takes time. They aren’t nearly as reactive as they would no doubt like to be.

So what are their comunication options? They can constantly say, “We told the Koreans, but they haven’t gotten around to caring yet,” or they can lie and say “We are fixing that right this second.” Aion uses the third option: don’t respond at all, or insinuate that there’s not even a problem. They subtly suggest that bugs aren’t really bugs. This is brilliant. When that doesn’t work, they use the “we are totally fixing that now” routine.

Some examples?

• The game sticks to its guns about everything. It never says “I don’t know.” Try using the /where command with random gibberish.

  Type this: “/Where is my ass”
  You’ll get back this: “It is at a hard to find location.”

  That’s the error message for any invalid location. Brilliant, isn’t it? They never admit they are wrong. Sometimes important items in the game can’t be found with the hyperlink-based lookup feature. That’s where you see this error message more often. The items aren’t “hard to find” at all… there are just bugs in looking up some items. But you can’t prove there’s a bug, can you? Maybe the developer meant for that guy to be hard-to-find, to encourage me to explore the world. There’s always a tiny seed of doubt: it’s possible that there’s a rogue developer who refuses to make his quest items locatable with the game’s locator feature. And then they get fixed  in later patches when we complain about this “feature”. That could be what’s happening. It isn’t. Yet… you can’t really be 100% sure it’s a bug.

• Many quests are buggy. (Gasp! Real shocker there. All games have buggy quests.) The Asmodians have a main-line story quest to collect some baubles from mole people and cat people. But the game tells you to kill the wrong ones! This would be treated as a simple bug in some games, and players in game would say “Oh that’s bugged.” Here, players will tell you things like, “Oh it’s just tuned for Korean sensibilities. It’s a rare drop!” That’s even what Google told me while I tried to complete this quest. Right. This one quest out of hundreds has a 1% drop-rate but no other quests do. That would be retardedly bad design. But what else could I do? So I killed 200 of the buggers and never found anything. Actually, it turns out it drops almost every time from the mole people 100 yards away, the “farmer” moles who had absolutely nothing to do with the quest plot. It’s just a bug. But nobody wanted to believe that. They gave the game the benefit of the doubt.

• There appear to be some population imbalances between the two races, which can be quite problematic in a PvP game. I don’t have first-hand experience with it because I’m still relatively low-level, but Asmodians on my server are often talking about how they’re outnumbered in battles, and frankly the Asmodians aren’t as attractive as the angelic Elyos, so I would be pretty surprised if they were played in the same numbers. That’s why it’s so interesting that there’s nearly a 1-to-1 correlation of races according to the Aion website. Almost every world says it’s 49% Asmodian and 51% Elyos. I know they balance the server loads by selectively allowing people to sign into realms, but really? That means that overall, Elyos are precisely 1% more popular than Asmodians. That seems pretty fishy. But I can’t prove anything. I too give them the benefit of the doubt. Now, if they had come right out and said “Yes there are some imbalances, and we’re working on it,” I’d be a lot more worried about this problem. But if they’re lying, they’re doing it whole-heartedly.

• When I first logged in, I was flabbergasted by the amount of gold spam in chat. It made chat unusable unless you spent a lot of time manually blocking every spammer. The developers said, “We currently have Game Masters monitoring all our servers. They track chat channels closely and have been banning thousands of spammers every day.“ In reality, spammers stuck around for about two hours before they got banned. Even one customer-service person looking over all the 14 worlds would have done a better job finding spammers than that. (The spammers are not subtle. They literally spam as fast as the chat system will let them, which is once every two seconds.) What was REALLY happening was that the system was auto-flagging users when they got blocked by too many people. They lied to us. Didn’t they? Maybe they’re just really incompetent customer service people…

And so on. The game has its share of problems (like the most flagrant and embarrassing combat-macroing problem I’ve ever seen), and they try to fix them. In the mean time they ignore it, or else they spin spin spin. There are no developer interactions with players. Players yell into a vacuum and then one day they get a new patch, which rarely (but occasionally) addresses their concerns. Because of this reality, the team comes off as aloof and distant, but we give them trust they didn’t earn. Being generally optimistic human beings, we like to assume that the game is in good hands. If a quest acts weird, hey, it’s probably just because of some design decision we don’t understand.

Where this breaks down is in the case of things like spammers and botters. It’s much too big a problem to assume the devs know what they’re doing. Seriously: on my server there are a half-dozen botters standing a few feet outside of town, right in the road. It’s the worst botting problem I’ve ever seen by leaps and bounds. If they had a reasonable number of GMs they could get this problem under control, but they don’t. They also don’t have a code solution ready to go soon. Know how you can tell? They’re spinning. They ban a few each day, and they play it off like it’s not the most egregious case of botting in a decade.

Really, if you were the poor community manager, what would you say? The English team probably has a minimal set of GMs, or nearly so… that’d be 9 people, 3 for each of three shifts. They probably have full workloads for most of their shift, but when they do have free time I’m sure they tackle some of the botters. But unless the game adds more staff, they won’t be able to tackle it robustly. They’re being cheapskates and waiting for a tech solution so that their bottom line doesn’t get hurt. This, again, is a tried-and-true approach that most every MMO uses at one point or another. But in the meantime, the community manager has to basically fabricate a story to keep people calm.

Aion is hardly the only company to use this basic method of communication. EverQuest 1 was infamous for it, back in the day. Other teams have tried it to various degrees. The thing about this approach is that you need to really embrace it and you need to tightly control your message, like Aion does. If a few people spout off details they shouldn’t, your whole elaborate facade crumbles.

Option 2: We suck and you know it, please bear with us

The other commonly successful strategy is to be open and earnest and to trust players to see things your way. Champions Online uses this approach. Their developers engage users on the forums, talk about specifics, explain what they are trying to do to fix things, and sometimes (rarely, but occasionally) change their plans based on feedback from forum-goers. Here’s the sort of hands-on specific details I mean: here a developer explains why they don’t routinely let players become 50 feet tall (which was a bug that a low-level item caused for a while):

when we can do the growth effect without any of the bugs that the massive size caused, we’ll add stuff that uses it for sure. But until we can do it without causing all sorts of awful graphical glitches, camera issues, exploits and client breakage, we’re not going to have it. Regardless, a rare drop for fun off a lvl 9 quest mob is not where an effect that level 40s want to farm for will get hooked up, once we can safely do it, expect to see it on something more appropriate that doesn’t mess up missions being done by low level players.

Nothing earth-shattering, but the developer acknowledged that the existing item was hella broken, and that someday they hope to fix it and use the technology on purpose… if they can make it work. Some day. This is not something you would ever see Aion say.

Moreover, they have a blog that address major game issues and explains what they intend to do about it. (This one is a bit old, but a good example.)

This is completely the right approach for Champions to take. The game is not nearly as polished as Aion; they couldn’t possibly convince us that the serious bugs in the game were intentional. (Anyone who experienced the 50-foot-tall bug knew full well it was seriously buggy.) Instead, they play to the crowd, giving them insider tidbits about how stuff is going, explaining their motivations, and basically feeding the forum trolls to keep them relatively sedated.

This approach is a common one. AC2 used this approach because our game, too, was far too buggy to pull off the “we know what we’re doing” trick. We also had a developer who was eager to spill the beans about everything (that’d be… uh, me, actually…), so this communication style was a good fit for the team. The Champions designers are in a similar boat and obviously enjoy talking about their game. They seem to be relatively good at not feeding the forum trolls, either, and staying on target.

This approach works well when you have small bugs that you need forgiveness for. ‘Fessing up right away and telling players you’ll fix it next week works. Actually, it works great for retention: players really like it when you respect them enough to really tell them what’s going on. When you trust players, they will often surprise you by trusting you back. That is, as long as you actually fix the problem, and quickly. (Aion couldn’t do this style if they wanted to, because the English-language team obviously has little insight into when bug-fixes will really arrive.)

This communication style fails when you have to admit that serious issues are broken and that you can’t fix them quickly. A common theme on the Champions forums is that the game doesn’t have enough content. There’s not a damned thing the developers can say about that to make people shut up. They can’t add content quickly enough to make people happy. Contrast this to Aion, which also is missing content in several level ranges: Aion just doesn’t say anything, and they delete threads that are too complainy. When Aion users rage about the lack of content, they tend to rage in a vacuum, unable to commiserate with other players. I believe this causes players to “grind through” Aion longer than they do in Champions, because they aren’t sure that the game is in the wrong. Maybe they’re just playing it incorrectly…

Screwing It Up

Both of these communication styles have pros and cons. But the biggest danger is that developers can easily screw it up by saying inappropriate things.

I remember when DAoC revealed too much info, causing their facade of “we totally know what we’re doing” to disintegrate for a while. EQ1 had its moments, too. Unfortunately those forums are long gone and even the wayback machine isn’t helping me find the examples I vaguely remember. Sigh. So back to picking on WoW, then…

Now, WoW is an interesting example because they started out with option #1. Aside from some hand-wringing when the game launched (and was unplayable), they generally played the “we know better than you” card really well for years. This changed when the design team switched hands. The new designers, mainly the lead systems designer, Greg Street aka “Ghostcrawler”, love to talk about their stuff. So they suddenly became an option #2 game. (I may have done the same thing… their aloofness was no longer particularly productive.) Okay, there are some big tradeoffs made there, but it’s not inherently a bad decision.

Except that Ghostcrawler posts like 20 times a day. Poor guy is totally addicted to the forum game. At first it looks really helpful:

If you ignore combo points (which we aren’t planning on adding to hunters), then the biggest decision energy-users face is whether to use a single 60 energy attack or two 30 energy attacks. The answer depends on a lot of variables, including which does more damage, what is on cooldown, the synergy between the abilities, etc.

If you consider the cat druid (because it’s slightly simpler) and ignore finishing moves, then the druid rotation would look something like getting up a +bleed attack, applying a bleed dot, getting up a +damage buff, and then doing the actual damage. You could imagine something similar like that for hunters. I don’t mean hunters are going to be a +bleed class, but more that the choice of what attack to push next should have some decision behind it. It won’t just be Serpent Sting x 1, Chimera Shot x 1000. Repeat.

But if you keep reading, you see that most of what Ghostcrawler does is literally moderating the forums, and bitching about it, to boot.

Dear OP,

Bye.

Hugs,

GC

(He edited his original angry post, but if you follow the link, you’ll see some of his very angry justification text. His anger is completely justified! But his public reaction is not useful.)

If you use the dev-tracker on their forums, you will find that it’s full of Ghostcrawler saying things like “You’re banned” over and over. Why is this a problem? Somebody has to do it, right? Yes, and that person needs to be the forum moderator. Forum mods can occasionally pull stunts like telling users to die in a fire, and get away with it. That’s because forum-goers treat moderators like “one of us” instead of “one of the dev team”. But when developers are constantly moderating the boards, they lose the last bit of distance from the players. Suddenly Ghostcrawler’s opinion isn’t more valuable than Joe the player’s opinion. Ghostcrawler doesn’t get any respect anymore and has to spend more and more time defending himself. He’s playing the forum game and losing. (He should at least make a fake moderator account for this stuff! But he’s not really thinking objectively about this anyway.)

There is an easy fix for this: Ghostcrawler should be banned from the forums. Instead, set up a Developer Blog and tell him to go crazy. Let him reference things on the forums and reply to them. Several posts a day? That’s okay! But it’s separate from the forums. And it will cut the stupid forum crap out, too.

In fact, I recommend this for all development teams now. If you are going to spend time communicating with players, don’t do it in the forums, because only a fraction of your population reads the forums. (Thank god!) Instead, take a play from Aion’s book.

The best thing about Aion’s community is a very trivial thing: when you quit playing for the night, it automatically opens up a web page to their community site. You instantly see the headlines and can read the dev blogs, look at your character, whatever. This is brilliant. Most games offer this before you log in. I never want to do this before I log in… but I often want to spend a few minutes winding down after I have finished playing.

WoW (and every other game) should do the same. Ghostcrawler should have his own blog link on that community site, where he and other developers can post technical details to their hearts content… and players can easily find it. This isn’t brain science. It’s just using the right tool for the job you’re trying to do.

Advice For All Community Management Types

If you’re an Option #1 game, you need to keep your developers away from the forums and blogs. You can’t have a distant and aloof ivory tower development team that occasionally stops in to chat about game innards. That just makes everybody look stupid. Their message gets taken as having far more significance than intended (because it’s so rare that they get information), and people will be confused and upset about why devs took time to talk about this one issue and not the 500 other issues people are concerned about.

If you’re an Option #2 game, you have to expend significant amounts of developer-time communicating with your audience. If you stop, people will freak out. “They stopped caring!” is what they will hear. If you only have one developer posting on the forums, you can actually expect your forums to get nastier when this developer goes on vacation. It’s that sensitive. You need to allocate significant resources towards communication, and that means maybe 20% of four or five developers’ time. Really. (This is also why a blog is a better choice for developers to post on. You can queue up little tidbits and release them one a day, requiring less posting overall to get the same feeling of participation.)

Whatever you do, you have to stick to your guns. Explicitly decide what your community plan is, and detail it, and write it down, and make sure the people who matter agree with it. (That does not mean getting the whole company on board. It means getting the key people on board.)

Now, you can completely change your community approach. This is often useful for older games where the circumstances have changed since launch. It is quite possible to go from an Option #1 company to an Option #2 company. It is harder, but also possible, to go from being Option #2 to Option #1. (It will take about six months for that transition to stick, however, so be prepared for stress.) What is not possible is to become a hybrid company, sometimes aloof and sometimes chummy, accessible today but invisible the next. You’ll get eaten alive.

So plan it out. Decide why and how you’re interacting with the audience. I’m sure there are some other communication styles I missed here that work for different situations. The key is just to have consistency with whatever you decide.

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You can buy:

• Cosmetic armor that doesn’t do anything (you put it in EQ2′s special “appearance” slots, so it looks cool without affecting your stats)
• Pets you can let run around in your house
• Potions that boost your earned XP (in various flavors) for a few hours

However, EQ2 was really just following WoW’s lead. WoW, of course, handled their payola scheme much more elegantly. They called it a “refer-a-friend” service, and supposedly it’s to help you get your friends hooked. But most of the WoW players I know bought a second account for themselves in order to take advantage of refer-a-friend. And who wouldn’t? You get:

• 30 free levels to grant to another character, after you level the first one to 60
• The ability to teleport all around every hour
• A free unicorn-zebra mount
• If you dual box (or actually have a friend) you also earn triple XP! up to level 60

I loved this. It was the most fun I’ve had in WoW by a long shot! If I could pay another $50 or whatever in order to have that much fun in WoW for the rest of the levels, I totally would.

Of course, the old-school hardcore WoW players were angered by this. (The “sanctity of leveling”? Tee hee… super-invested gamers, you gotta love ‘em.) But Blizzard has finally realized that their old-school hardcore demographic is tiny compared to everybody else — the silent majority, people who would never imagine logging into a forum, but who play weekly or monthly just the same.

I give WoW credit for spinning a good pitch — the whole “refer a friend” thing is very clever, even though most people I know used it just to power up alts. In contrast, EQ2′s bald-faced “give us money to spruce up your character” plan is pretty meager.

EQ2 really needs to go further. Almost everything that’s for sale is cosmetic! I like cosmetic items, but I also like things that make me better. I don’t care about the sanctity of leveling, I want to have fun. Only the potions give you any sort of power boost. The best one gives you a 50% earned-XP boost for 2 hours. Sounds cool, but there’s a catch: it only boosts the XP you get from killing monsters, not from questing. Contrast that to WoW’s deal which gives you a 300% boost if you dual-box — and also boosts quest XP, not just monsters. I’m sorry guys, but that’s small potatoes compared to what WoW sold me. On the other hand, there’s no level cap on these potions, and I don’t have to dual-box, which I found a bit tedious. So I’ve purchased several of these potions for different effects and I’ve been happy with the purchases. The payment system is really very well done, too.

Since EQ2 doesn’t feel it can afford to consolidate servers, this is a nice way to help players through the doldrum levels so they can reach the place where the other players are. (They’ve made a lot of other concerted moves to push people to high level, so I know it’s on their minds. Which is good.) And hey, guys, if you sold a Give You Two Free Levels For $30 potion, I’d be mighty tempted. The market’s wide open. You pushed through the imaginary microtransaction barrier. Don’t stop now!

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Hey guys. I was frustrated after killing 60 or so patriachs and matriach and not having a single drop. Then it hit me. “No beat up or broken horns, please!” said the quest log. I’m was playing a warrior and I’ve been Executing every single one of them. So I tried letting my auto-attack do the killing.

1st try: horn dropped
2nd try: auto attack kill but no drop
3rd try: accidentally executed
4th try: horn dropped

Anyway, I have no idea with classes that relies on spells like mages and priests, etc but can anyone try this method and support my claim?

Now, there’s no way that WoW has implemented this quest in such a way that you need to use only auto-attacks to kill monsters in order to get their loot. WoW is famous for its clear quest direction, and when it fails at clarity, it’s due to errors of omission, not outright hidden mechanics. And even if they did have this weird mechanic, wouldn’t it be a 100% success rate if you followed their weird secret rule? If you search around, you’ll find people saying that this worked for them… it only took 20 kills to get the two horns. That’s not a trick, that’s just random.

But wait! There are other competing theories!

I think people are seriously right about that magic theory. I’ve killed over 40 of these mobs and the one where I decide to stay in human form and cast magic (I’ve been using bearform for Druids) I get the horn.

So now you’ve got to use magic to get the horns? That doesn’t sit very well with “you have to use auto-attacks”, does it? And if you search, you will find more and more of these theories for the quest. Most of them conflict dramatically with each other, but all of them have one or two other people who vouch for how effective they are.

And this is hardly the only occurrence of players being superstitious.

“There’s something wrong with the attack calculations!”

City of Heroes went to great lengths to remove “streakiness” from their attack rolls. Players complained when their attacks missed many times in a row, even though this is a reasonably likely occurrence given a true random number generator (and CoH’s rather low chances to hit). It was not possible for the developers to convince players that this was just randomness (and anyway, everyone agreed that it was frustrating), so they added hacks to keep the streaks from getting too long. If you miss too many times in a row, the game will cheat and help you hit.

“My tapers are burning faster!”

In Asheron’s Call, mages use “tapers” as material components for their spells. These tapers have a small random chance of “burning up” whenever a spell is cast, so players tend to carry hundreds of them at once. Then something weird started happening: players became convinced that their tapers were burning at a faster rate than before. This became a trend: “hey, you’re right, I think they are burning faster!” and so on, until the developers were compelled to get a log of the actual random rolls to make sure everything was fine. It was… but some players could never really be convinced of this. They had noticed a pattern, and they were 100% convinced it was really there.

The amusing part is that after every update, players would insist that the new update had made tapers burn even faster. If this had been true, by about the 50th game update, the change should have been pretty noticeable…

Even to this day, some wise-ass players will say “my tapers are burning faster!” which means “you’re imagining patterns that aren’t really there.” The more modern version is ”Onyxia is deep breathing more!“, which is the equivalent scenario from World of Warcraft.

What’s going on here?

Human beings don’t deal well with randomness in general. Our brains are powerful pattern-matching machines, and we will see patterns no matter what it takes… even if the patterns are fake. It’s hard to convey randomness in a way that doesn’t cause our brains to tick into overdrive in order to “figure it out.”

Does it really hurt your game if players are making up crazy theories about how it works? Well, it’s not ideal. This misinformation gets propagated until it becomes “common knowledge”, at which point it can literally become impossible to convince players that it isn’t true. This, in turn, can lead players to do weird things that are frustrating for all involved, and to blame you for having to do it.

The cure for this is communication. If the quest actually said “Yetis drop pristine horns 5% of the time,” we’d have far fewer crazy theories running around. Then again, players would have just avoided the quest entirely because they would instantly know it’s not worth their time… which points out the flaw. This quest really wasn’t worth doing at a 5% drop rate. There are better ways to spend your time in World of Warcraft. Obscuring this percentage didn’t make the quest better, it just made it harder for people to realize that it was sub-par, thus delaying how long it took developers to get around to fixing it.

Another cure for it is to remove randomness entirely. I’ll get into that more next time!

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It’s a frustrating problem for developers because so few of your users are actually using your forums. On Asheron’s Call 2, we determined that about 10% of the playing audience read our website or forums (it spiked on patch days, to a whopping 15%).

This small percentage of people are not randomly pulled from your userbase. They tend to be very similar to each other and not very representative of the rest of your player base. That means you can’t use them to judge the quality or merit of ideas or implementations. But of course, the ones who do post are your most vocal users, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Every product in the world has forum issues, but MMOs have it worse than usual because forum-goers are often playing “the forum game”: they like the game so much that they want to keep interacting with the game even when they’re not playing. The forum game is so fun for some people that they keep playing it long after they’ve quit playing the real game. Part of this is because of the community of like-minded people. Part of it is caused by the relatively close level of developer interaction on most MMO forums. Whenever a developer posts something, it means the dev is reading what they say! That means they have sway over the developer, and they use it by complaining. Complaining is also fun because other people will join in, either to commiserate or to rebut them. Either way, it’s all content for the forum game.

Let’s go over some classic problem scenarios and talk about how to deal with them.

The Classic Scenarios

The Outrage Escalation: “This new improved quest reward is a slap in the face to the thousands of players who completed the quest last month but aren’t retroactively getting extra compensation!”

When players make comments like this, they aren’t being rational human beings. They are legitimately outraged, but they are so close to the problem that they can’t be reasoned with. Instead, their rhetoric grows and grows until eventually somebody likens the developers to Hitler, and the forum thread is closed.

This tends to make developers nervous, and rightfully so. The first time a player suggests you’re worse than a murderer you laugh it off, but the first time somebody threatens to find where you live and ”teach you a lesson,” it makes you think twice about your choice of occupation.

The key here is to keep things from getting overblown in the first place. A well-trained forum moderator knows when a thread is starting to get out of hand and closes it. That’s the right thing to do. Don’t let people get frothy with outrage. Don’t feed the fire, either, with snappy comebacks or even well-nuanced explanations. Save your posts for another place or time: never post them in an outrage thread.

The pretend quitting: “This is the last straw. The new updates on the test server are a mockery of everything this game was supposed to be about. If this change goes live, I will be forced to cancel all three of my accounts forever. Since I am guild treasurer, I’m sure most of my guild will quit too, and we’re the only decent PvP guild on our server, so PvP on our server will entirely die out. I wish I didn’t have to do this, but they’ve forced my hand.”

This is a classic. On AC2, I did my best to correlate people who said they were quitting to people who actually quit. Almost nobody who said they were quitting actually quit, and the few who did didn’t stay gone long: they entered a rebound cycle and came back pretty quickly. Most often, they didn’t leave at all.

Here players are using the last ace up their sleeve: they are trying to appeal to the developers’ wallets. But developers aren’t in danger of falling for this gambit. After six months of somebody saying they’re quitting but never leaving, devs learn not to believe anybody who says that. And it’s not like most developers are involved with the money-making operations of the company anyway. The CFO does not read the message boards.

But this is noteworthy because it is a desperate act by a frustrated player. They feel like they have no sway over their game and they care about the game SO MUCH that it’s infuriating. (Most people who quit will just quit. The majority of them don’t even care enough about the game to fill out a “why are you quitting” questionnaire, so they certainly aren’t going to go to the forums to post this information.)

Treat these people as angry customers. Do your best McDonald’s manager impersonation. Give them small things if you can, or just be sympathetic if you can’t. Don’t encourage these people to “Go ahead and quit,” and don’t taunt them when they inevitably come back, either. Basically, you need to just ignore that they said that at all. Often times they have a legitimate complaint, and you should handle it just as if they hadn’t suggested that the game will crumble if they leave.

The unhelpful fanboy: “Yes it’s a slap in the face. I understand your pain — there’s no way that Feral Intendants are going to be any fun now that they’ve been nerfed by 6% of their damage output. But look at it this way: Turbine knows what it’s doing. This is for the good of the game! You’ve got to trust that they know more than you do.”

These posts are pro-developer, so developers automatically give these words more weight. But these fanboys are just as myopic as the people they’re responding to. In many cases, siding with them is going the wrong way, because they’re still pushing a devs-versus-players mentality… they’re just on the dev’s side. But falling into thinking about things in terms of devs versus players is a trap.

Forum moderators will rightly treat these as flame-bait. The thread will get locked and things will cool off. But the danger here is that developers will start to think in terms of black and white. We’ve all met devs who are “out to get” players. They’ve lost their direction. Fanboys like this help reinforce this stupid world view. A random suggestion: tell developers not to read locked threads. Maybe that would help. Aside from that, just be aware of the danger of turning players, who are paying customers, into your adversaries.

The burned out moderator: “Okay, if anybody else posts ANYTHING about the rogue changes, I am deleting the thread and banning their account!”

Being exposed to the forums causes real damage to developers and moderators. For instance, the QA employee in charge of WoW’s test-server forums is so badly burned out that he routinely deletes threads full of information and bug reports because users just sicken him. It’s obvious that he needs a vacation from forums. This one person seriously lowers the value of the WoW test server. I’ve watched as Sandra will spend hours testing and gathering data about a bug for them — basically doing their QA work for them for free, which is the secret goal of any test server – and then Hortus will delete the thread because he’s in a bad mood. I find it pretty funny, but Sandra tends to think it’s less funny…

Moderators face the most severe form of burnout in the game industry, so they must not be exposed to the toxic hell of the message boards too long. In fact, this is why most forums are a failure: the moderators are burned out.

In order to ensure they can sustain a long career as a moderator, they need to take on additional tasks part-time — for instance, updating web pages, proofreading game text, speaking at public schools about getting into the game industry. Obviously what they do needs to be tailored to their skills and interests. (Be wary of letting them create game content, because they may lose the last shreds of detachment they could previously muster. If they make content, it needs to be full-time: maybe a six month stint as content creator without any forum interaction at all.)

Don’t let moderators burn out. They will cause more damage than having no moderation at all.

Plummeting team morale: “Sometimes I just don’t know why we bother …”

The trouble with forums is that there is just enough actual value for developers that they can’t quit reading them. Somebody will post a really interesting bug, or give a really insightful view on balance, or post about a clever way to beat a quest that nobody on the team had thought of. But those are the gems in the big forum cesspit. The rest of the cesspit is full of cess.

If your developers read your official forums, encourage them to also read forums elsewhere. Players tend to whine and moan most loudly on the game’s official forums, because they are putting on a show to try to convince developers to change things. Behind closed doors in guild forums or fansite forums, posters tend to be considerably more upbeat. It’s very surprising to see the change of tone. It helps put things in perspective.

Don’t force your developers to read the forums. Instead, have the community send a weekly digest of posts to the team. Make sure the digest has as many upbeat or informational posts as it has complaints (even if the actual ratio on the forums is much different). Remember that forums are not representative of the user base so there’s no reason to expose developers to all the hate and anguish there. A taste is enough to get the idea.

The inappropriate dev post: “I see what you mean, TrollSlayer471, but you obviously didn’t read my explanation about WHY this change was necessary. I countered every one of your points in my first post, and if you can’t be bothered to read it, I can’t be bothered to keep responding.”

Most of your developers were not hired because of their amazing writing and speaking skills. You didn’t pick your engineers because they could moderate forums. You don’t expect your artists to have to deal with customers. But they probably think they’re pretty good at all these things. They are probably wrong. The most common problem is that developers will start playing the forum game themselves, responding emotionally or taking troll bait.

I don’t recommend banning all devs from posting, because the community interaction has many benefits. It can help keep the community happy, it has obvious PR benefits if done well, and it can make your developers feel like celebrities, which is an important perk of the job. But developers need training before they can be expected to post well. Have your community moderator run a course for all employees, veteran and newbie alike. Teach them the basics, and lay out ground rules. Among other things, it should include all of these rules of thumb:

• Never post while angry
• Never post when distracted
• Never post when a user dares you to respond to them
• Never post while drunk
• Never post when you don’t have all the facts
• If you have nothing insightful to say, don’t post at all — it’s better to be silent. (The only person who should post just to calm things down is the forum mod… not the developers directly.)
• If in doubt, mark the thread and wait 24 hours before responding. Odds are you’ll have a completely different response.
• Remember that your words will be taken out of context and posted on other forums, fansite news boards, and repeated in game chat. Act like you’re representing the company at all times.
• Make sure each post stands alone and tells a complete story, rather than being part of a thread’s conversation. (When your post gets copied to some guild forum, people will misunderstand what you said if you left out crucial details that seemed obvious to you at the time.)

Producers need to enforce these rules by removing developer’s posting privileges if they post poorly. Posts by devs are candy that feed the “forum game” players. It makes users feel special and loved, which makes devs feel useful and loved. But when developers get caught up in playing the forum game themselves, they aren’t representing your company well. Don’t let them become an embarrassment.

The Value of Forums

The early AC/AC2 forum moderators at Turbine had a drinking game they’d play sometimes when reading forums late in the evening: drink a shot for anybody who says “slap in the face”, chug if someone says their guild is quitting, and if somebody predicts the game will be dead in a month, the whole room has to drink. I’m sure versions of this game exist at many companies.

So if your forums are a cesspit, what’s the point of keeping them? Indeed, many game teams have come to the conclusion that it’s not worthwhile, and have shut down their forums for months or years at a time, hoping to “reboot” them into something more useful. This sometimes works, but it doesn’t look good to new players: “The forums are gone because people said too many bad things? I’m not playing this game!” So don’t close your forums.

The most valuable role a forum can serve is to let players get advice amongst themselves. It’s best to try to foster this sort of interaction. There’s a very strong temptation to use forums to gather information about your game, but you have to remember that forums are dramatically non-representative. Certainly you can spot trends in posts that can help you improve the game: forums are a great way to bring problems to light. But they are not a good way to tell how big a problem is. Even the most vitriolic topic may really only be affecting 10% of your player base, with the rest blissfully unaware of that issue. Reading too much into forums is dangerous.

A very skilled moderator can dramatically improve the value of a forum by plugging the spigots of vitriol, collecting the new ideas and complaints, and encouraging players to be helpful amongst themselves, rather than making every post an “I want this feature changed!” post. However, an unskilled or burned out moderator will make things worse, so be very vigilant about that.

Conclusion

Forums are dangerous because a tiny percentage of the player population uses them, and many of them use posts as a way to change the game in their favor or to get other people to react to them. It is easy to understand this on a conceptual level, but it’s much harder to keep this in mind when somebody says the new quest you made ruined the game and you ought to be drawn and quartered.

Treat forums with a healthy respect, like you would a tiger.

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