Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

Had a conversation with Calthine about betas, including a little bit of beta strategy explanation that turned into the second half of this article over on Allakhazam: All A-Buzz About Beta

Other than the actual launch, beta is my favorite part of the dev cycle.  It’s when all the excitement happens.  It’s the first transition point where the plans meet the chaos.

You also get a much better handle on the surprises that may lie in store.  Nothing crystallizes a set of remaining priorities quite like seeing first-hand the impact they could have on real people.

Assuming that your game is inviting people at the correct stage of development, you finally get to see people playing and having fun.  On top of that, if you pick the wrong people, and beta’s either bad or nothing special.   Invite the right people, and the tone of a good beta community is just unmatched.

It’s also great being there to see people who’ve been “beta friends” through other test cycles, or are long time friends from the boards, get a chance to hang out with each other in-game.

Even though (or maybe because?) they’re playing on disposable characters, there’s a time when everyone’s on their best behavior, genuinely at their most helpful, and the overall feeling is a server full of extra-cooperative folks truly banded together against the world.

Yep.  I like beta.

Tami figured out the secret. The best way to get me to do something is to tell me I either can’t or won’t. Mutter.

Four jobs I have had in my life (not including your current job):

1. Want fries with that?
2. Tutored some math and physics at MSOE
3. Ran a skate rental shop. Gave lessons. That was a lot of fun.
4. Acted (Tripped and fell into a few tiny paid things - I was my friend’s ride to an audition. Got called up and cast.)

Four Movies I have watched over and over:

1. Princess Bride
2. Scent of a Woman
3. Serenity
4. Fletch

Four places I have lived:

1. Milwaukee, WI
2. Irvine, CA
3. Costa Mesa, CA
4. San Diego, CA

My family is half afraid that if I keep up this trend, my next move will have me living over the border in Mexico

Four Shows I love to watch:

1. House
2. Heroes
3. Rescue Me
4. Daily Show

Hm. I notice a misfit theme…

Four Places I have been on vacation:

1. Orlando
2. Acapulco
3. NYC
4. One trip hitting as many places to ski in Colorado as we could fit in

Four of my favorite foods:

1. Chipotle
2. CPK - Chopped salad. (Read: Meat, cheese, and just enough lettuce to where they can use the word “salad” without openly laughing.)
3. Most any beef that lands on a grill
4. …or misses it entirely, come to think of it. (Ruth’s Chris‘ carpaccio. Not on the menu, and not all will serve it. A much food-wiser friend taught me that and made me try it. If she reads this: Thanks!)

Four favorite drinks:

1. Diet Dr. Pepper
2. …with Malibu. Failing that, some other rum + diet brown mix.
3. Don Francisco’s Vanilla Nut coffee. Grind it yourself-style.
4. You really only need those three to subsist very comfortably.

Four places I would rather be right now:

I’m really not a places person. It’s less about where you are than who you’re there with. Any old place can be awesome.

Four People I Command to do This:

…they’ll all have been sufficiently commanded by now…

Steve’s got a post up this morning making a good point about talking a good game vs. being able to back it up using “why there aren’t there more WoWs,” as an example.

There’s many reasons, and the overall point he makes is an excellent example of one of them.

Moorgard.com: It Ain’t the Recipe - It’s the Chef

- Scott

(This does refer to something in EQ2, but I’m trying to abstract it as much as possible. The specific thing isn’t really relevant.)

There’s a feature we just released. On the whole, people really like it. I think it’s going to do good things for the game, largely in terms of fostering character attachment and emergent play — Two important long term goals for us.

Here’s a dirty little secret: From the time it was proposed, until a couple weeks before it went live, I hated it. It felt wrong to me. It masked an element of worldly coolness that I had personally been attached to. Just wrong. No way. Never going in.

Its okay to be wrong, you know. No matter who you are, you’re going to be wrong a lot.

It’s how you handle it when you are that counts.

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When I got my first computer, the games were cool and all, but the even better part was going online.

I’ve been a part of online communities ever since. My second job involved community management by default, long before there was any weight being given to it as an important part of game development. A lot of my thoughts on how best to work in those communities from the development side boiled down to knowing how I’d want to be treated, and then trying to do exactly that.

After getting into the larger scale MMOs, that sense grew into a sincere belief that keeping intangibles (such as “the relationship with your community”) as positive as you can is more than just the right thing to do — it’s also one of the best things you can do for your bottom line.

Since we were trying to maintain a highly dev-interactive beta community on EQ2, and had a reasonable number of developers who’d yet to interact with Real Live (future) Customers, I wrote these down.

These were never an official document and have long since been obsoleted by the fact that the game isn’t in beta anymore, and that we now have a full on Community Relations department. The industry has evolved quite a bit in even the past three years, and it’s all right if professional community folk find things to laugh at in here. I get asked about them every now and again, usually by people who tilt their heads to the side and appear highly perplexed that developers could possibly have interests in this direction.

On reflection, a lot of them really can be summarized as: “Genuinely give a damn about people, and don’t even come close to sounding like a patronizing know-it-all.”

A couple current comments are inlined below in italics. Here’s the post:

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From the Previous Post:

I expect that my batting average will last precisely two weeks. Possibly longer if Coach Joe and Coach Ed can be talked into not playing me at all for the rest of the season. Hmm…

Mission accomplished!

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Literally. I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

I joined a softball team with folks from work this fall. Tonight was the first game. For my part, I was pretty happy I remembered which hand the glove went on.

Since we have a bye next week, I expect that my batting average will last precisely two weeks. Possibly longer if Coach Joe and Coach Ed can be talked into not playing me at all for the rest of the season. Hmm…

What’s this have to do with games?

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What better place to put a TODO list than right here?

• AGDC impressions and comments before AGDC gets too far into the past.
• Comment on The Legend of The Syndicate. Summary: It’s great to see a guild’s history and strategy get made into a real, live, purchaseable book. Hmm. Maybe I won’t need to write a full article about it now. Whatever I say will likely be that, with more words.
• Replace the About Me graphic with something less generic.
• Dig up the original community guidelines post I made for EQ2. I keep losing track of it through mail and board wipes. It needs a real home.
• List of the things I’ve worked on and when they all happened. People occasionally ask. I consistently forget a few.
• Looking at this Sage list on the left side of my browser, there’s at least a couple dozen active people who’ve kept my RSS-reading life interesting over the past few years. I should link them and say thanks.
• Figure out what to put in the Resources links down there at the bottom.
• Archive the producers’ letters and other assorted important posts. Whenever I want to find one, I have to hunt. Hard to think about the future without having the past handy.
• Find an old argument with Rich Vogel about the long term ROI of procedural vs. handcrafted content, and the effects on player attachment of both. (I think I won that one. He and Gordon now both argue “my” side better than I probably did. A belated welcome to the light side, gents. ;).  Oops.  Looks like it was an old argument with Raph.

Anyone in the formidable audience of “you three” have suggestions? If I’m forgetting anything you want to hear about, let me know.

- S.

…that makes me want to start a blog. It always happens. Just returned home from AGDC ‘07 and there it is again.

So far, I’ve resisted the urge due to the commitment that a blog has always implied to me. The fear that it would become some kind of unwelcome chore, in a life already too busy with Other Things. (I do have a ton of respect for Busy People with Real Jobs who manage to excel in their careers as well as keep blogs up to date, but that’s a subject for another post entirely.)

Then it occurred to me. Why would I be doing this in the first place? Largely because there are thoughts that I wish I’d have written down somewhere, or posts I’ve made in assorted corners of the internet, and I’ve always wanted a place to keep track of them. I tend to lose them as computers come and go, and the net has proven much more durable than any individual PC I’ve owned.

This is a place where I plan on posting things I don’t want to lose track of. As of the instant I’m writing this, I’m not seeing it as a place where I want to shout opinions and analysis from the rooftops.

If anyone else finds them interesting or wants or comment on them? All the better. Hi. Welcome. Stay as long as you like.

- Scott