Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

Woke up to a few IM windows with links to the latest Warhammer news.  They’re trimming the launch feature set by a few classes and a number of cities.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?FEATURE=2041&GAME=239&PAGE=3&bhcp=1

http://www.massively.com/2008/07/11/mark-jacobs-announces-major-features-cut-from-warhammer-online/

This isn’t good news, of course, but it also isn’t a terrible thing.

Customers are orders of magnitude more forgiving about absent than they are about suck.

In surfing over lunch, this one struck me as inadvertently hilarious.  (With all due apologies to Mr. Warner and Mr. Stropp, as this is both unfair and taken out of context.)  Emphasis is mine.

Source

Stropp, an MMOG blogger, remains optimistic in his post entitled “Why Age of Conan Will Succeed“ and points out all the advantages that Age of Conan and Funcom possess. While Stropp did cancel his Age of Conan account he believes the game will not die anytime soon and projects long-term success.

There aren’t many completely black-and-white issues in MMOs.  This, however, is one them.

A pessimistic subscriber is worth infinitely more than an optimistic cancellation.

On the customer end, it’s called “voting with your wallet.”   On the development end, it’s called “focusing on what people do, more than what they say.”

In the process of getting from A to B, no matter how brilliant, insightful, or experienced you are:

• Netted out across all tasks, everything takes at least twice as long as anyone thought it would.
• You didn’t think of half the things you’re actually going to need to get done to get to the finish line.
• Whether you succeed or fail will depend in large part on how much breathing room you are able to give yourself to deal with this along the way, and your judgment how to best use that time as new situations evolve.

To paraphrase a smart guy named Jake Smith:

“The act of moving files from Point A to Point B, where Point B is your live environment, is a process that merits being QA’ed all on its own. Twice.”

Downsides:

• If you’ve set up your environments in a way where this is as hands-off, just-push-a-button as it can possibly be, this can still result in an hour or four of extra time spent for every single update.
• Maintaining a dedicated environment in which to do this redundantly costs money in hardware, and in people’s time, in perpetuity.
• Those hours are frequently very boring for everyone involved.
• It’s very seldom that anything actually goes wrong.
• The temptation to skip doing it can be unbearable when you’ve promised that your game will be available at a certain time. Especially when you easily can do the math in your head and know that doing this will push you past that time. No one wants to disappoint their customers by being late.

Upside:

• This doesn’t happen.

I have no idea if this is actually what happened in this situation, but this is another one of those pieces of information that I’d like to make sure I never forget about.

My sympathies to the folks on both sides of it here. Good luck in getting it all worked out.

- Scott

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.