Punditry is dumb. Switching to developer mode!

June 18, 2011 by Eric | 18 Comments »

Tired of Punditry

Sandra and I have run out of steam as MMO pundits. Again. The problems are that 1) MMO punditry is basically saying the same things over and over, but, 2) nobody really knows the secret to making super amazing awesome games.

I recommend reading “Everything is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer”. It’s a great read about why pundits are so often wrong, and why blogging about common-sense things has serious flaws.

WoW Should Have Died

Let me put it another way: our industry’s “common sense” tells us that WoW should have flopped when it launched. It was the most expensive launch fiasco we’d ever seen!

Common sense says you don’t recover from mega-sized technical disasters. As evidence, we have a long slew of failed games before and after WoW, which we write off as “Oh, of course they failed, their launch was poor.” We still believe that getting the launch right is critically important to a AAA-level MMO’s success.

But WoW’s launch was horrible. Their server tech was a failure. An utter failure that got worse with every box they sold. Even six months after launch, more people were complaining about the game than enjoying it. It was hemorrhaging money and players and good will. Perhaps you remember when Penny-Arcade rescinded their Game of the Year award due to all of WoW’s technical problems and server instability?

The point is this: if WoW had died right there, we, the MMO industry would have just nodded and said, “Well of course it died! You can’t flub your launch! That’s just common knowledge.”

But WoW got better.

And now of course we nod and say “Well of course it did! That game was so well-polished, and the company was so well-respected, that players put up with even large amounts of failure!”

So hey, great. Guess what? We have a common-sense answer for anything that happens. Whether WoW flops or it succeeds, we can just nod our heads and give some reason why it happened. No matter what happens in the industry, we have a quick common-sense explanation as to why. We aren’t learning anything.

We Learn So Poorly

But make no mistake, WoW did in fact change our way of thinking about MMOs: the industry went “holy crap, everything we knew must be wrong, because look how successful WoW is!” Remember when the creative director of Warhammer Online got into a bit of punditry of his own?

“I can’t tell what is flaw and what is genius in WoW, so I don’t want to get sucked into copying things in case I get the wrong one,” the amusing Barnett continued. “‘No one’s going to play our game unless it also had elephants!’ No. Don’t be swayed. And stop playing World Of Warcraft.”

His answer was that we should largely ignore WoW because we don’t understand why it’s so successful. We MMO developers already know how to make successful MMOs, in our heart of hearts. Trust our instincts! Use the Force!

This common-sense advice was fairly widespread, but there was a different common-sense reaction that was even more common: all old MMOs are irrelevant now, so start your design by cloning WoW, then go from there if you have time left over.

Sadly, neither ignoring nor copying WoW has led to much success. And yet those were the common sense answers to what to do about WoW.

It seems that if we bother to learn anything from new information, we change too far: we flip from one truism to another, unable to see the gray in between. Before WoW happened, we believed that players needed to be forced into groups — that without hardcore group mechanisms, players wouldn’t create the strong social ties that kept them paying. After WoW launched, we completely threw that out. Baby, bathwater, sink, and house. Grouping went from a necessary evil to “wait, you’re making it easier to level in a group than to level by soloing? What the hell is wrong with you?!”

We made a complete reversal. And it was all “common sense.” It just seemed so obvious that we should do that, given what we saw in early WoW.

So Tired of Common Sense

Common sense, it turns out, is like those old aphorisms: we have “Look Before You Leap” and also “The Early Bird Gets The Worm”. These contradictory bits of truth can apply to anything we want. So no matter what we think, we can always convince ourselves that our decision is based on good solid common sense. Doh.

I’ve railed against a lot of these “common sense” answers for years. I like to think that my analyses are a little less lopsided than average. But do I really know that? No. And I’m sure my beliefs are riddled with different flaws.

So on the one hand, I’m confident that I know more about making MMOs than some random gamer, or even a newbie MMO developer. But I’m not confident I know so much about making MMOs that my advice is foolproof. I don’t believe there is anyone alive whose expertise with MMOs is foolproof. We do not have a Van Gogh of MMO making. Actually, if you use painting as a metaphor, we’re still figuring out the damned color spectrum. We don’t even have a full palette of paints!

I would encourage you to read that book — it’s very interesting stuff, if a little depressing. I think that book is what tipped us over the edge — we’d been only reluctantly punditizing for a long time, and this kind of made us go, “Our opinions are not really so valuable that we should feel obligated to push them on other people.”

And when you don’t think your opinions need to be shouted from the mountaintop, it kinda puts a slump in your punditry activities.

Punditry Mode Is Stop

So we’re taking a hiatus from long articles about how other games work and why they are so wrong. Oh, I’m sure there will be some snide remarks here and there, but <yawn> WoW did this blah blah blah Lotro did that, they’re so dumb blah blah blah. Let’s not do that anymore, okay?

However, I still want to talk about MMOs. Writing about MMOs helps me figure out what I actually think. And in fact, I have a lot to say about MMO design and coding right now because I’m making one from scratch. So Elder Game is now going to be a blog about my new indie MMO, currently code-named Project Gorgon.

This is bad news if you think Elder Game is at its best when talking about what WoW did  right and what ST:O did wrong. However, if you’ve liked the in-depth analyses of specific game systems, you’re in luck, because there’ll be lots of those, plus high-level discussions of coding pipelines, tools, and processes.

Developer Mode Is Go

Over the past four years, Sandra and I have actually prototyped quite a few MMOs and MMO-like entities. They all had the same pattern: we’d start them during a lull in our contracting, then we’d get a juicy game contract, and when the contract was over, the project had gotten cold. So we’d wait a while, then start a new project. Rinse, repeat.

Why did they die? Because when we got back to them, we realized they kinda sucked. Taking time away from them made it easy to see the major flaws. That is, up until the last one: it didn’t seem majorly flawed when we got back to it.

This last prototype, code-named Frontier, is the MMO we talked about on the blog before. Even after a long hiatus, it still feels fresh and interesting.

Gorgon!

So the Gorgon project picks up right where Frontier left off: it is still a 3D MMO with a Unity client and a Java server. (But it has enough differences in scope and design that it didn’t make sense to keep calling it by the same project name.)

What makes this one different? Why won’t “Gorgon” get mothballed like the other MMOs we’ve attempted in the past? Well, the number one reason is that this is no longer a side project to do while I’m bored. I’m now dedicating a full 50% of my time to this MMO, and I’m not taking any extra contracts on the side. (I’m still deeply involved with FlashGameLicense.com, though, which is why I’m only doing it half-time.)

Sandra’s Hiatus

My guess is that Sandra won’t be showing up on the blog for a while. She’s as tired of punditry as I am, and she’s only going to be occasionally helping out with the Gorgon code base. Gorgon is really my baby, because Sandra has her own insanely aggressive projects she’s focused on. (They tend not to be directly MMO-centric, so she doesn’t want to blog about them here.)

See You Friday…

So the plan is to have a new post each Friday about Gorgon — the design, the tools, the process, the hurdles, the anguish. Oh, the anguish. And I’m kinda keeping some of the financial details in the dark while they’re getting hammered out. But let’s just say I have many surprises planned.

The first Gorgon post will be on Friday, and will discuss what sort of game Project Gorgon is. (Hint: it does not contain any gorgons.)

Posted in Design | 18 Comments

You Can’t Bolster Your Newbie Hose With Self-Indulgence

May 10, 2011 by Eric | 23 Comments »

The latest numbers are in for World of Warcraft, and as of March 1st they were down 600k subscribers. That would ruin any other subscription MMO on this continent, but for them it’s just a few percent.

That article goes on to talk about how their player base doesn’t rise and fall linearly. They’re referring to the rebound cycle: your hardest-core players leave periodically, and then come back later. But there’s something missing from this picture.

World of Warcraft has always had a huge newbie hose: a constant stream of brand new players that flood into the game every day. This stream appears to be dwindling — or at least getting more expensive to maintain.

I’m still incredibly impressed with their newbie hose. Can you imagine if your favorite non-WoW game got newbies at the same percentage as WoW has? What if multiplayer console games just kept getting huge waves of new players every week, for year after year, so you never had to keep playing against the same old people? A newbie hose is incredibly valuable — all those newbies make the game more fun for existing players, and when everybody’s having fun, the newbies are more likely to stick around, too. When a game’s newbie hose drops off, its overall retention rates can drop too. So getting new blood in is extremely valuable.

And most games fail at it, or don’t even try. Most MMOs that have been around a few years have basically no newbies coming in, and they are slowly, quietly shrinking.

As an MMO shrinks, the dynamics of its game systems change. For instance, the economy of WoW is just like most other MMO economies: it’s designed around the newbie hose. As long as a constant influx of new characters show up, there’s always going to be people to buy your herbs. But when the newbie hose runs dry, and everybody finally gets all the alts they want, suddenly the bottom falls out of the auction house. This is par for the course for pretty much every other MMO in existence.

Every other MMO has to constantly and aggressively address problems like this one. (For instance, by making herbs do an ever-larger and more valuable array of things, so that people keep buying them.) So one way to get a feel for how many newbies WoW is getting is to watch for changes like this. When fishing becomes a more and more valuable skill in order to keep the value of rare fish from dropping to 1 copper, that’s what you’re seeing: the newbie hose dwindling.

Now, to repeat, I’m not saying their newbie hose is even close to dry yet! But I do think it’s slowing down, and unless they do something really magical, it will continue to dwindle. That would mean a slow death by attrition, which I calculate will take… lesee… holy… well my guess is it will take about 9 years before it’s under a half-million subscribers. So unless they do something stupid (like stop making expansions, or stop advertising hard), they can keep this baby going for another decade. And if they change the game in some innovative new way, they can bring the newbies back too.

But while they aren’t in danger, they’re certainly very aware of their newbie hose.

Cataclysm’s Newbie Experience: Self-Indulgence

It seems like Cataclysm was designed specifically to revitalize the newbie hose. At least, I’m sure that’s how the live team pitched it to upper management. “By improving such-and-such areas, we’ll convert x% more newbies.”

But really, this was a self-indulgent move by the live team. What live team hasn’t wanted to just fix everything? And that urge isn’t unique to games… ask anybody who has to maintain something for years and years. Who wouldn’t want to start over, to apply the lessons they’ve learned?

Can you imagine a city planner that got a chance to completely re-design their city? Tighten the zoning, bolster the transportation structure, maybe get some high speed rail into downtown… sure, it means destroying everything that’s there, but the new stuff will be so much better! Who could resist such an opportunity?

The urge is near-universal, but it rarely makes sense to completely rewrite everything. While you’re busy rewriting things to make them 25% better, you could have been adding new content and features that made the game 35% better instead. Adding new stuff is usually just a lot more efficient. And rewriting stuff has its own dangers. Everybody makes mistakes, and nothing’s perfect the first time. So you’re inevitably going to throw out some time-tested stuff and introduce new stuff that has unforeseeable problems in it.

So gigantic rewrites are only worthwhile to the bottom line if they cause a tremendous amount of expansion when they’re done. Cataclysm’s re-envisioning of the old world did not accomplish that.

I’m not saying they should never change their old world. But most of the time they should be improving it incrementally. EQ2 did this pretty well, I think: some of their original zones were so bad that they actively caused players to quit. (Seriously.) So the live team redid all of those zones. But by “redid” I mean they refactored all the quests and adjusted monster placement. They left the terrain itself unchanged! And these were some very ugly zones. Let’s just say they could have stood a revamp. (If you contrast them to the later EQ2 zones, you won’t believe they’re in the same game.)

But SOE’s product-driven mindset protected them from falling into that trap. By default, SOE assumes “new” is always more valuable than “improved”, because “new” goes on store shelves. This might be short-sighted in today’s digital-download environment, but at least this mindset stopped EQ2′s live team from going overboard here. The EQ2 artists were so busy making new areas for expansion packs that they couldn’t take the time to redo old areas. Old stuff isn’t sexy, it doesn’t sell boxes. I’m sure the designers would have loved to do it, but the people with money kept them in check.

Nobody keeps WoW’s live team in check very much. So they went ahead with a total universe-wipe. This meant that vast chunks of everybody’s knowledge about Azeroth, their shared experiences, were wiped out.

Now you have to ask yourself two things:

Question #1: If I’m a new player, will this revised world make me significantly more likely to stick around?

Well, in the past, an amazing 30% of WoW free-trial players stuck with the game. This is so much higher than any other long-running MMO that it is frankly hard to take seriously. But of course they are interested in getting that number much higher.

To make this number go up, we’ve watched the WoW live team tighten their newbie experience dramatically over the past several years. They’ve said that if players got past level 10 in their free trial, those players were likely to stick around. So it made a ton of sense to make the first part of the game more fun and a bit shorter.

But before Cataclysm, they did this by iteratively tweaking and refining. Cataclysm let them completely redo the newbie experiences. So… the question remains: does Cataclysm’s newbie experience significantly increase the number of newbies that sign up?

I dunno that. But I do know that the new newbie zones are so graphically complex that old PCs can’t play them anymore, and many of the new zones are also over so quickly that some of the elements of “sense of place” are lost from the experience. Those problems are countered by tighter quests with more diverse and engaging activities, so for the most part it’s hard to argue that the new zones are worse. But how much better are they, really?

More specifically, in how many zones was the old content so clumsy, and/or the new content so amazing, that players will sign up when they would have quit before? There were some stinkers, but I suspect most zones could have just been revised, not rewritten.

And even if the content is amazing, WoW’s sign-up rate can only get so high from content alone. Sign-ups are affected by a million factors, from hardware requirements to how many of their friends are playing to whether the game seems popular, stigmatized, or the underdog. Different people want different things. There’s no way to get your acquisition rate up to 100% — that would mean that everybody who tries WoW likes it. No video game is that good.

So my guess is their newbie hose was improved, but only for a while. On the other hand…

Question #2: If I’m a returning player, will this revised world make me significantly more likely to stick around for a few months?

No. Simply put, no. It boils down to one thing: leveling has been sped way the heck up.

Leveling has been sped up, which means you don’t spend nearly as much time in these brand new areas as you did in the old areas you remember. You don’t have time to replace your old memories with new memories. Everything just seems like a blur: oh weird, the mailbox moved. Where was the bank again? Hmm, the whole city’s been redone…

If leveling took as long as it did five years ago, this would have worked a lot better. As it is, it just makes a jumble in returning players’ heads.

Mixed Messages

WoW seems to be mixing their messages here. On the one hand, they rewrote the entire first half of the game so that it would be stickier for new players and interesting to returning players.

But on the other hand, they sped the first half up so much that you fly right through it, right to the latter half, which is not better than before (and some argue is worse).

What was the point of rewriting the content if you’re going to reach level 10 in 2 hours? Why not just speed up leveling and be done with it?

Why? Oh yeah: because the live team really wanted to do it. And I don’t blame ‘em one bit. I would have tried to get to do that, too. It musta driven them crazy, knowing that players couldn’t fly in the old world, and not being able to fix it.

I don’t know how effective it really was, but from an outsider’s viewpoint, it didn’t seem to make the game a lot stickier.

Live teams have their own agendas, and those agendas aren’t always the best way to make money.

Newbie Hose vs. Holding On To Rebounding Players

You can now get a lot further in WoW in your 10-day trial than ever before, yet clearly this has not spiked their newbie acquisition rates to dizzying heights. I’m not saying there’s definitely a causal link here — for all I know, their newbie hose had dropped to 0% and now it’s back up to 30%. I’m just a stupid blogger.

But I just have to ask this: what if, instead of completely redoing twenty newbie zones, they had added twenty new zones to the end of the game? Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m sure that would have been a much bigger win for their retention.

Posted in Business, Design | 23 Comments

Evolving Quests

March 21, 2011 by Eric | 19 Comments »

Side-quests are a classic game mechanic, as ancient as roleplaying. When playing D&D with friends, we’ll stumble upon a traveler being mauled by a bear and we’ll take swift action — if we’re a band of do-gooders, at least — because that’s what do-gooders do.

And if there was actually a “quest” to save the traveler, some guy down the road who begs us to save his bear-bitten daughter, perhaps, well, that’s fine. The game master will give us the reward whether we talk to him first or talk to him after we save the daughter. In fact, when we do it second, it feels a lot more heroic, and we feel a lot more clever.

We didn’t capture that experience in early MMORPGs like Asheron’s Call 2 because the quests needed to be repeatable. Every week you’d stop by and redo the handful of available quests. In the mean time, you’d just bash monsters for the fun of it. If we counted those monster-bashing activities toward the quests, you’d never have a directed experience at all.

WoW changed the thinking here. For the most part, it never even occurred to us in the MMO industry that it might be possible to create so much content that players could level entirely through quests and never repeat a single one. That was an inconceivable amount of work. It was a lack of vision, and it took Blizzard to show that it was possible. Blizzard evolved what had come before, and much for the better.

Players may talk disparagingly about a “theme park mentality” in WoW, but they never saw the theme parks of the past, where your hero would line up every week to save the same animatronic damsel. There’s degrees of “theme park”, and WoW upped the quality bar.

But if quests aren’t repeatable, there’s a lot less reason to make you talk to the quest-giver before you do the heroic deed. And there’s a neat psychological effect if you are able to do it the other way — it lets you be heroic for the sake of being heroic.

Are you evolving?

Well, WoW did its part: it evolved MMO game mechanics for the better. What’s your game doing to up the quality bar?

In the case of letting players complete quests in the wrong order, you might argue against me. You could show that there’s lots of good to be had in making players talk to an NPC before they do the quest. I would counter-argue about the fun of doing things in the other order, but that’s really beside the point, at the end of the day.

The fact that we’d have this conversation about the game mechanic, weighing the pros and cons: that is the point. That is what it means to be a system designer. A designer that doesn’t consciously consider the various facets of what they’re designing is just a muppet-like parody of a designer.

Imagine a surgeon who just mimics a training video exactly and can’t deviate from what they’ve seen. Would you want that surgeon, even if the video was very good, and they could mimic the video precisely? My guess is no. Every surgery will be different, so perfect mimicry doesn’t sound like a very safe plan for a surgeon. There’s some skill in mimicry, but that’s not what the word “surgeon” means. (Or the words “game designer”.)

For a few painful years, MMO companies were paralyzed by WoW. They were afraid to analyze it, because they suspected that WoW’s precise gameplay formula was the secret alchemy needed to get infinite players. There was no use arguing any mechanics changes, because game producers couldn’t hear your words over the imagined sound of millions of players thronging to their perfect replica of WoW.

That has not happened, and will not happen, and finally people are getting it through their thick skulls that WoW’s design can and must be improved. Yes! Finally, we can get back to evolving the state of the art.

So keep examining things, considering your choices. Keep improving things. A bunch of small improvements make the world of difference to your players, and to the art of MMO creation. And it’s not hard to find tons of things to improve: this is a genre that can and will still see dramatic evolution. It just takes thought and attention.

Do your part. This is the quest I give you. And if you’ve already been doing it, well, then you’ve already been getting your reward.

Posted in Design | 19 Comments

The Griefer With The Coin Bag

March 8, 2011 by Eric | 41 Comments »

Got back from GDC week and still trying to get back into the swing of things… and here comes a funny story straight from GDC! Go ahead and read it, it’s pretty funny.

(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.

Posted in Community, Design | 41 Comments

Please vote my game back up!

February 17, 2011 by Eric | 9 Comments »

The first round of judging in the Kongregate/Unity game contest is by user rating — the 25 highest-rated games go on to the second round of judging. My game used to be very highly rated, but today it went plummeting down to 31st place — below the cutoff point.

It appears that other contestants are asking their friends to down-rate all the other games. This is incredibly lame. Please don’t artificially down-rate games! But, please do rate my game back up! :)

I would really appreciate it if you did so. It requires making a Kongregate account, but it’s pretty painless.

Play it here!

Here are some screenshots of the game. You can finish it in a lunch hour, so it’s not super long, but it’s got a lot of fun stuff packed into it.



Posted in News | 9 Comments

Try My New Game

February 14, 2011 by Eric | 4 Comments »

If you like adventure games or survival-horror games, you might like The Premature Death of Christopher Combe. It’s a completely free indie title written in Unity. (So you will be prompted to download the Unity plug in to play it in your browser.)

I made this game for the Kongregate Unity Game Contest. It’s been a long time since I created something just for the fun of doing it, and it’s been a great reminder about what the point of making games is all about. I’ll have to make more time for crazy solo projects, even if it’s just short-form single player games like this one.
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Posted in News | 4 Comments

“The Dev Team” Footprint

February 10, 2011 by Sandra | 3 Comments »

Sanya Weathers at Eating Bees posted last month about “Things That Make Me /Facepalm When I See Them From Moderators“.

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.
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Posted in Community | 3 Comments

Proximity Breeds Endearment

February 7, 2011 by Eric | 3 Comments »

Here’s another example of where our brains trick us into enjoying things in spite of ourselves.

I was reading a book of folk tales and I got to the story of The Snow Queen. It is about two innocent children who have adventures and then grow up. It ends this way:

Gerta and Kay went home hand in hand. There they found the grandmother and everything just as it had been, but when they went through the doorway they found they were grown-up.

There were roses on the leads; it was summer, warm, glorious summer.

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Posted in Design | 3 Comments

Who’s In Charge of Quality?

February 3, 2011 by Sandra | 3 Comments »

Who gets to say when an MMO patch is ‘done’? Does QA answer to the live producer? Can QA stop the launch of a patch or does the producer alone have that responsibility?

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.

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Posted in Production | 3 Comments

Retention and Rebound

January 31, 2011 by Eric | 7 Comments »

Rage-Quit vs. Yawn-Quit

Long ago, when my friends and I were playing EverQuest, one of our party members decided to do some soloing after everybody else had gone to bed. He fell into a pit and died. In EverQuest, you lost everything you owned when you died, so all of his gear was now at the bottom of a pit. He then (foolishly) tried to get his gear back by himself, and subsequently lost all his backup belongings. The next day we offered to help him get his stuff back, but it was too late: he’d already rage-quit. He never came back.

If your last memories of the game are anger, then it’s much less likely that you’ll ever be back. But you might also quit just because you got bored, or some fancy new game caught your attention, or because you ran into money problems. In these cases, you may very well come back later.

No game will keep all their players forever, but when players do quit, you want to make it likely that they’ll come back again later.

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Posted in Design, Production | 7 Comments