Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

Update of the day:

Still safe here.  Haven’t been evacuated and betting that we’re not going to be.  The Witch Creek fire’s about 5 miles north of here, but blowing west toward the water, not south.

Work remains shut down, since we’re all conserving power and keeping people off the streets.

We’ve got some folks doing remote work, but the events here are playing merry hell with our beta update schedule (entirely on hold) and the remaining dev time for the expansion.  The added stress definitely doesn’t help.

As for the fire, it’s hard to track what we see from here with the reality of what’s going on.  If you were over here without watching the news, you’d think that Sunday was the worst day and that it’s been getting better since.  Exactly the opposite of what’s been happening.

Sunday, we had the smoke blowing this way and the coat of ash-snow on everything.  If you’ve never seen it, picture standing about 30 feet downwind from a campfire.  Same exact smell and effect.  Two days later with the fires expanded, thanks to the wind shift it’s been reasonably calm.

I’ll take that luck.  Here’s hoping it stays that way.

As Craig, Tami, Alan and Raph mentioned, we’ve got some wildfires down here today. There are about 100k acres already gone so far, and everyone’s been asked to stay off the roads and cell phones. A pretty huge swath of neighborhoods have already been evacuated.

At work, SOE games will only be having limited services available until this clears up. To Smed’s credit, he’s never been the kind of guy to fuck around when it comes to the occasional local emergency, always trying to get the word out as early as possible that people should stay home and take care of their families.

As for me, everything’s perfectly all right down this direction. To those who’ve checked in already, thanks for asking.

Some smoke and ash, and a whole lot of wind, but the fires are still far enough north to where there’s no immediate problem.

Have a few friends and pets over, and we’re making the best of it while being glued to the TV.

Any other friends who got booted from their place and need somewhere to hang out a while, you know how to find me.

Be safe, all.

I’ve been sitting on this draft for a couple weeks, but seeing this article come up in Google Alerts pushed me into sending it out. I tend to not post unless I have a completely formed thought to communicate. This time, no such luck.

It’s no secret that people use software for all kinds of things other than what they’re originally intended to accomplish. Any coder who’s written a system for someone else’s use can tell you at least one tale of a horrific stretch of functionality that pushed a system far outside what it was ever meant to accomplish. Sometimes those attempts result in fantastic things, and other times they explode in new and exciting ways.

MMOs are great in that we get to see and hear firsthand what happens when people use our software for purposes that never occurred to us. It’s even better when that use is amazingly cool, useful in a very practical sense, and something we can help foster.

The third page of the article talks about how researchers at Northwestern University (namely, an enterprising grad student named Yolanda Rankin) began experimenting with using EverQuest II as a way to teach english as a second language. She’s been through one study with some interesting results you can read at the link, and is currently starting on a larger scale study also using our game.

When we were first discussing implementing character voices in the game, people using it this way wasn’t something that was on the radar. I’d call this one of the better unintended uses I’ve heard of, and hopefully it does turn into something fantastic for them.

What’s the amazing revelation here? There really isn’t one, other than to say that it’s exceptionally satisfying to be able to point out some of the more positive and socially redeeming aspects of gaming.

Why stop with ESL? If you ask me, education at all levels would be a lot better off if there were more compelling ways such as this to get people excited about, and keep people interested in, learning. Talk about an industry overdue for a revolution. I can only speak from my own experience with schools from kindergarten to college, but suffice it to say that I walked away feeling that the approved, traditional methods were something short of the most compelling way to spend sixteen years.

Here’s to hoping that this is one envelope that continues to get pushed in all the right directions.

A comment was raised on f13.net yesterday that I see a lot every time an MMO doesn’t make it all the way out the door. Emphasis is mine on the parts that caught my attention:

True, but I have to think that someone has managed to get people to collaborate in other venues… and so we are not talking about creating something completely new here. I am just having a hard time figuring out why skilled people (I assume some of the people making MMOs actually have the skill to work on other types of projects and just Chose an MMO) given a LOT of money (yea I still see 10’s of millions as a lot) cannot get through a successful design/production phase. It seems that there is something inherent in the MMO beast itself that kills the process.

There definitely is. And it’s a lot more than a single “something.” Some of the issues have to do with MMOs in particular, and others are compounded by the types of people who are most likely to attempt to develop them. Generally very sharp and motivated people.

My reply clipped from the same thread:

(Disclaimers: Personal opinions here only, unrelated to SOE. I haven’t even remotely been involved with G&H or Perpetual in any capacity and don’t know a thing about their game. My comments are speaking entirely in generalities. Dealerships negotiate their own prices. Beware of falling rock.)

A few observations from past MMOs:

#1: MMOs are still really young. To a lot of the people working on them, it very much is creating something entirely new. Compare to movies or single player games, for instance. It’s less of a challenge to staff those types of projects up with people who’ve worked on them before, in all of the right positions. Doing the same on a high-budget MMO remains next to impossible.

I don’t mean “key management” or “leads” like you see in studio announcements and press releases all the time. I mean everyone other than a small number of entry-level folks. Until you’ve done it once, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.

I don’t know of a single high-budget MMO that’s been staffed with that kind of experience throughout, simply because those people just plain don’t exist yet in sufficient numbers. We’re just now at the point where it’s starting to become possible to build teams like that.

Just a guess, but I’m betting that you don’t hear from the $100m movie set: “Yeah, Bob the Key Grip has done this once before, and he picked out some really sharp guys from a construction site downtown to do the rest. He’ll teach ‘em what to do.”

Leading to…

#2: The things that make for a great demo and pitch that get you funding, publishing deals, et al, are a much smaller part of making a great MMO than they are of making any other kind of game, and it’s easy to lose sight of that.

This is painful for MMOs in particular because of the unique (huge) number of critical, non-sexy things that you have to succeed at, where failing at any one of them can entirely sink your game:

- Pipelines
- Tools
- Infrastructure
- Stability (again, doubling the work - the client and all the servers)
- Scalability
- Stability
- Security (added this in for the blog post - Can’t trust that client)
- Performance (optimize both that client and all those server processes)
- Oh, and..Stability

In any development effort that has a finite set of resources ($$$ + time), the more you invest in the flash elements, the less you can invest in the far less sexy parts. (Core files aren’t sexy.)

Which, in turn, leads to…

#3: Wild misscoping. It’s a common newbie (and overly-optimistic-veteran) mistake to scope far too optimistically, as the schedules end up based mostly on the flash elements and end user features.

If a person is new at making one of these (especially noted with people from non-MMO games backgrounds), they tend to be more likely to focus on scoping dev time out with more of an emphasis on the visible features than the budget will end up allowing, and not enough on the critical, non-visible features. Those, coincidentally, end up taking far longer than anyone ever predicts.

The team who scopes 80% of their time on the visible features and 20% on the rest is going to make a far different game than the one who scopes 25% features, 25% tools/pipelines, and 50% stability/scalability/infrastructure.

If your timeline has some elasticity, you can make up for misscoping by stretching the schedule, and still go on to make a great game. If you can’t, Bad Things happen.

There are plenty more things that go wrong, and from all different angles, but from the production “why can’t people seem to get these out the door?” angle, these are the ones that’ve been the first to jump out at me.

As for the things that go wrong from the other angles? Now that’s a subject for another post entirely.

Haven’t abandoned the blog - Typing original content with the busted wrist is a lot more difficult than it really should be. Three weeks to go!

In the meanwhile, here’s an Interview with Ten Ton Hammer that went up yesterday.

The game-neutral concept that’s touched on here is games adapting to their players.

The rules have changed a lot since the days of there only being a single online world choice at any given time. You’ve got to learn as much as you can about the audience that you have, and make sure you’re meeting their needs as best as you can.

Another “duh” concept that falls cleanly into the “more than just the right thing to do; it’s also good business” bucket.

Relevant clip from the interview:

Savanja: What prompted the decision to move nearly all of the heroic content from the overland zones?

Scott Hartsman: The fact that overland heroic content went largely unused was the biggest driver in this decision. It doesn’t take a long visit in any of the global level channels to infer that very few people go through the effort of grouping to adventure in an overland zone, and the logged combat data backed this up. Solo/Duo-capable outdoor content gets played; heroic content very seldom does.

It’s a case of the game adapting to the way people actually play, compared to how they were originally assumed to want to play. People don’t “group up, then wander around looking for something to do” in open-ended hour-after-hour six person play.

People are objective-based, generally conscious of how much time they have available to play, and tend to want to group with people whose goals for the moment match theirs. Taken as a whole, they form groups with the express purpose of going out to do something specific. Many also prefer to know ahead of time that they’re embarking on an adventure they have time to complete. In EQII, both of those specific attributes of grouping can best be addressed via dungeons and instances.

On top of all of that, the split between outdoor/indoor also reduces frustration on both ends and it sets an expectation that people can begin to rely on. Solo/duo folks can consistently enjoy their own play style by not encountering unattainable group content in the overlands. Those group folks who do play-by-wander won’t be frustrated by all of the ‘useless’ solo creatures there – They know to head indoors.

It’s a common misconception that people universally hate change. People only hate change that doesn’t make intuitive sense when they try to reconcile it with their own individual experience and, more importantly, their desires for their future in your world.

That’s the part that you really don’t want to screw up - Losing the trust of the people who actually do see themselves as having a future there. Those are the ones to foster.

The big-ego days are long gone, unless you’re interested in setting yourself up for a potentially painful fall. When you examine your motives for making online entertainment, if you don’t see yourself deep down as being the provider of a service (yes, on the development side), be ready to eventually lose out to someone who does.

(Tip of the hat to Chris Cao who was the first person I heard use the phrase “people are objective-based” in neatly summing up that concept in a lot fewer words than I’d ever been able to.)

- Scott