Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

My main computer died about a week ago, which is the reason for the lack of posting. For the record, it’s a Dell.

I’ve been using them for hardware fairly exclusively over the past ten years, ever since switching from Gateway back in the late ’90s.

At the moment, the building that I’m in has no fewer than eight systems with Dell logos on them. The last startup that I did was also Dell-powered, as was the last large-company job that I had.

In dealing with a number of large technology companies over the past years, a predictable pattern emerges:

1. If they consistently do well by me, I eventually become a huge fan of whatever service it is they’re providing. Back in the early Gateway days, I even had a Gateway-gamers community help mini-site that I ran on the side. (Hey, everyone needs a hobby.)

2. As do many other people. The company succeeds and ends up expanding considerably. Fans rejoice.

3. As a result, they end up needing to do That Thing They’re Good At on a much larger scale.

4. Eventually, they grow so large to where they can leverage their dominance by exploring new ways of maximizing shareholder value. Tragically, most choose to do so in ways that are harmful to consumers:

• incomprehensible telephone contact systems
• gimmicky partnerships that have a net negative effect on the customer
• decreasing value of warranty support
• lower overall quality of company support (never the fault of the people who actually talk to customers for a living - these people generally deserve unfailing politeness, regardless of how poor/frustrating the overall experience becomes - It’s the organization that’s failing them as well, hence this article’s title)
• shipping used products and components to unwary or unknowing consumers
• comically bad upsells
  • I just gave you a chunk of money for a warranty extension and am paying you another chunk of money for a replacement part that will arrive in worse shape than the one I’m replacing. It has taken me three hours and seven department transfers to do so.
  • No, I do not wish to buy a new stick of RAM, a larger hard disk, or upgrade to Vista right now. (At least we both found it hilarious that you had to ask those questions.)

5. People still use said service, but do so more out of habit, until Something happens that incenses them enough to find a replacement

• (Wonder what that could be…)

6. People find a new service to replace the old one, and the cycle continues.

Extending it out past technology, is this the fate of all organizations that have “won” their corner of the game?

I don’t think it has to be, but it seems to be a common sign of anyone operating a large scale business in the 21st century who has wholly failed to transition from a product company to a service company.

If I had one thing to say to any of them, in any industry, it would be this.

• Your product is, or will become, a commodity. It’s the service, stupid.

After having Dell screw up the fourth thing with regards to this particular repair, it occured to me that I’m at the same point with them that I was at with Gateway so many years ago.

Dear Dell,

Glad I could help make you a huge success in whatever microscopic way that I was able to. I did thoroughly enjoy evangelizing some of the cooler things you’ve done over the past years. Alas, it’s time we went our separate ways.

It’s not me — It’s you.

- Scott

Any suggestions for where to go next? Is anyone happy with the systems they buy, or are we down to buy-from-the-hugest, or build-it-yourself as the only remaining options?

Mac folks: I promise that I will try one just as soon as they give me the option to press keys like Alt-F to activate the File menu, and have accelerator support built in by default, or at least as something I can enable, system-wide. To some of us, saving files is hardwired as: Alt-F, S, and so on.

(Yes, my Mac-converted friends all laugh at me for this. You are more than welcome join them in doing so in the comments below.)

…and got a number of truly terrible grades, while at the same time learning programming on my own and succeeding.

The motive to do that? Tearing apart and tweaking with computer games.

via MetaFilter: A Mathematician’s Lament

“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

The .pdf in the giant link is long, but the story on its first page is worth a read in itself. I bet it rings profoundly true with more than just me.

I eventually did enjoy math. But as in the story, that came much later in college. The enjoyment definitely occurred despite all of my previous education — Not because of it.

PowerPoint deserves its own private little roped-off area of hell, right next to Project.

A friend that I haven’t heard from in a good number of years stumbled on this site the other week and referred to it as “my possibly dead blog.” While I’m definitely glad that people I’ve lost touch with are still able to find me, between that and the emailed checks-for-a-pulse that I’ve gotten recently, I should probably at least make some effort to keep it up to date.

One of the reasons that I let this site fall out of date is that somewhere along the line I fell into the habit of trying to “perfectly” compose my posts. I’m never happy with what I write at first, and usually post about the third or fourth time over them.

This takes an embarrassing amount of time and makes the whole effort feel like a lot more work than it really needs to be. This time I’m not doing that. I have exactly a half hour, I’m going to compose a little, and just stream past that.

I figure that the four of you who will read this likely don’t care that much about any level of polish anyway.

What’s been going on?

Still can’t talk too much about what’s been going on with the new business, but suffice it to say, we’re building things, experimenting, planning, and having a lot of fun. I talked with Michael from MMOGNation and Cameron from Ten Ton Hammer here at the show (more on that later) and gave them some general impressions that I have of the online games business, where it’s headed, and some of the critical problems that I think are worth solving. I suspect those’ll show up online sooner rather than later.

IMGDC Micro-recap

I’m in Minneapolis this weekend for IMGDC, the indie MMO game developers’ conference. I wasn’t able to come out last year, but I’m glad I was able to this time around.

Thank you for not having a ton of snow this weekend, by the way.

I can’t remember the last time I was at a conference this small and focused. Big enough to feel valuable, but small enough to where you can get familiar with everyone and recognize most faces as you wander from session to session. It also surprised me that there ended up being quite a few sessions in which I wanted to go to more than one thing going on. For as many things as I appreciated seeing, there’s an equal number that I was sorry to have missed.

For my part, I was here to run a roundtable on gameplay data models and be on two panels. The roundtable was a riff on the debate last year that Joe Ludwig kicked off with his opinion on how his team chose to not implement scripting in their MMO.

It’s a topic that I hold near and dear, and thought it would make a good one for people to be able to explore a bit more in-depth in a more interactive environment than dueling blog entries on the internet. For the record, my position on the subject is that there is no universal absolute, and the right answer for any given product depends on a lot of things – no two teams, products, staffing capabilities, skillsets, schedules, budgets, and hiring plans are identical. I’d hoped to delve into more of the specific factors above, and explore how they can impact the decision, but the conversation was plenty lively without it. I hope everyone there got as much out of the exchange as I did.

The panels were on community building (with Ron Meiners and Tami Baribeau) and newbie experiences in MMOs (with Brian Green, Kelly Heckman, and Jason Murdick). Everyone genuinely tried to share from their own past experience, and personally, I tried to steer my answers toward practical, useful advice and a minimal amount of navel gazing, and I think I was at least a little successful there. Again, sincerely hope people found them useful.

And to anyone who was at any of the panels or the RT – If you have questions that you didn’t get answered, my email is right off the About tab on this page. Mail to your heart’s content. It was great meeting all of you.

One thing that I said that surprised people was that I actually got into engineering and development precisely because of my attachment to the communities surrounding the first games that I worked on, as opposed to having any particular technical bent or hardcore bit-tweaking desires as is the more typical route into programming.

Back in the days of the first text games that I was involved in (Scepter, GemStone), the communities and finding ways to entertain them were what pushed me forward, and in those days “forward” meant “learning to program.” It’s a good thing I happened to enjoy that too, but I’ve always been a “technology-as-means-to-an-end” type a lot more than a “technology-for-technology’s-sake” person.

Other random bits from the show:

* Both of Dr. Bartle’s talks were as educational and entertaining as always. His keynote, a hypothetical “ten year retrospective” view of MMOs from the year 2018 was alternately chilling, depressing, and then finally, triumphant.  (Edit: The slides are up now.  Go read them - You’ll laugh at least once.)

* Gordon Walton’s talk on the future of indie MMO development was surprisingly shocking, even for his usual, outspoken self. It’s really no wonder the PR types always want to try to keep him under wraps. Whew. Hope he’s all right once the journalists in attendance let loose with their transcripts.

* Either one of those two were worth the price of admission by themselves.

* Peter Freese gave a solid talk on 10 things you can do to torpedo your own development efforts by sharing examples of things that went less-than-perfectly in the past in a talk called “How Online Game Projects Fail.” It’s good for newer folks to hear about these things. Failing is painful, but it’s something that everyone goes through, and it is entirely survivable. Serious props to Peter for sharing both past and current difficulties. Anyone can brag when things are going great – What he talked about takes guts.

* Nick Fortugno from Rebel Monkey impressed me a lot in that he arrived with one presentation, then after spending a day around the crowd and the kinds of things that were being discussed, hacked it into something entirely new that was a better fit, and really well done – (to paraphrase) How The Casual World Views MMOs. It was a great talk, and based on the time I’ve spent around developers from all worlds in the last few months, dead on.

There were a lot more people that I wanted to talk about, but I appear to only be able to hold today in my head, and my half hour’s up. Time to head to the airport.

I’ll update again before three more months go by. Promise.

- Scott

Reposted from the EQ2 forums:

December 2007 Producer’s Letter. Part 1: Coda

I’ve never been a fan of saying goodbye, but it’s time. Today is my last day here at SOE.

In addition, I’d like to say thank you.

Thank you all for playing in these worlds that I’ve had the chance to touch over the past years.

Thank you for your boundless dedication and passion to what it is that we’ve all created here.

To many of you, thank you for your friendship. A lot of you have been nothing short of an extended family over the past years.

I will miss you all.

The years of working on EverQuest and EverQuest II have been the highlight of my career, and have led to a significant personal milestone as well.

The release of EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark marks the 30^th online games product that I’ve been fortunate enough to ship. I sincerely hope that you’ve enjoyed what I was able to contribute to this amazing franchise as much as I’ve enjoyed being a part of it.

When asked what exactly I do for a living, I’ve referred to it many times as “having the greatest job working on the best teams in the world.”

That’s still true today. It’s possible for that to be true as well as to know that I’ve done the best work that I can on a world, and that it’s time to hand the reins over to others whose best is still ahead of them.

It’s time for me to see what else is out there waiting to be built. It might even end up being something involving SOE. Regardless, I’m sure we’ll get a chance to meet up again, whether I’m making new MMOs, continuing to play them, or talking about them on the internet.

I wouldn’t be leaving SOE if I wasn’t positive that the responsibility for EQ2 was being left in the right hands.

Taking over for me is Bruce “Froech” Ferguson. Some of you will remember his name from EQ2 beta, others of you may have met him at Fan Faires. If you have met him, you know he’s one of the most straightforward guys you’ll ever be lucky enough to meet.

A few important things to know about Bruce and why I think SOE made the perfect call here:

• Up until shortly after launch, he was EQ2’s live producer. This move is more of an overdue homecoming than anything else.
• Before his production days, his background is also originally in working very closely with online communities as far back as text MUDs. This community deserves nothing less.
• He knows that with respecting communities comes respecting the worlds they’ve grown to love. He’s not the kind of person who’s going to come in and start re-envisioning the game wholesale.
• He has long standing relationships with all of the leads and production staff on EQ2. In a number of cases, even longer than mine.

In short, Bruce is the perfect person to help this team continue to succeed in their mission of producing what we all know is the best MMO out there.

For my part, know that I count myself exceptionally fortunate to have been a part of such great endeavors, and I remain thankful for having been given the opportunity.

Until next time,

Scott Hartsman
Senior Producer Emeritus, EverQuest II

I’ve worked with some of the brightest, most dedicated people that I’ve encountered in my entire career in my time at SOE. I sincerely wish them all the best of luck in the future.

It’s definitely a bittersweet day, but an exciting one as well.

As for what the future holds, if you’d like a heads up when we have something to talk about, add your email address to the Keep In Touch box over there on the right and we’ll make sure you hear about it.

- Scott

…multiple times since moving to California. More in LA and Orange County than here in San Diego.

From: http://www.rinkworks.com/said/tourism.shtml

• Him: “Well, welcome Samantha. You’re from Minnesota, right?”
• Me: “No, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “So you’re from…Chicago?”
• Me: “No, sir, that is in Illinois.”
• Him: “Oh, and you’re from Michigan!”
• Me: “No, sir, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Well, why didn’t you say so earlier?”
• Me: “I don’t know, sir.”
• Him: “So there’s a lot of cheese there right?”
• Me: “Some, sir.”
• Him: “And y’all’s football team is the Cubs, right?”
• Me: “No sir, that’s Illinois.”
• Him: “Vikings?”
• Me: “No. That’s Minnesota.”
• Him: “But I thought you’re from Minnesota.”
• Me: “No sir, I’m from Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Oh…so you don’t have a football team there!”
• Me: “No sir, the Green Bay Packers are very popular there.”
• Him: “But that’s a Michigan team.”
• Me: “No sir, Green Bay is in Wisconsin.”
• Him: “But I thought you were from Illinois.”
• Me: “No sir, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Oh. So you just have hockey there, huh?”
• Me: “Not any professional teams, sir.”
• Him: “Well, I thought the Stars were from up there.”
• Me: “From Minnesota sir, but now they play for Dallas.”
• Him: “Do they really? I didn’t know that.”
• Me: “Yes, sir, they do.”
• Him: “Well, anyway. Welcome, Samantha from Michigan.”
• Me: “Wisconsin.”

Other than the part about people calling me Samantha. Knock on wood, but so far that one’s never happened.

It’s nice to see I’m not alone. Happy thanksgiving.

(and go Pack! …who won already…so..er…went Pack!)

- Scott

Josh has a good summary up of how the morning went.  A couple entitlement snags being worked out, a patcher having one wrong file for an hour caused a boat to disappear, and extremely heavy patch load for the first couple hours.

In terms of the game itself?  Amazingly uneventful.  Everything passed on the first try.

And then there were thousands of Sarnaks running around.

I got to play quite a bit tonight and enjoyed every second of it.

I’ll take that as a win.

…than watching files go from place to place.

Watching files not go from place to place.

(While an anonymous associate producer invents a new verb conjugation form, hereafter to be referred to as “rhetorical emo subjunctive abstract.”)

The only thing that’s more fun than a launch day is the day before launch day.

It’s tense, but in a good way. It’s going out tomorrow, there’s no doubting that. The launch is a concrete event of its own, marked by an unmoving (and unmovable) point on a time line, and the clock ticks between now and then can get louder and louder in your own head if you let them.

No pressure.

There are huge flurries of activity. Then if you’re lucky like we are this time, there are occasional pauses. Then flurries again.

At this point, people are still getting useful work done. Some are scouring boards for things we’ve missed. Others are on beta chatting with testers, or possessing people’s pets and running off with them. Others are working on upcoming live events or tweaks for the first hotfix. (At least one of us is scribbling down random thoughts between emails, IMs, and people wandering in and out of his office.) Yet others are experimenting with changes for the future.

But everyone’s united in looking forward to tomorrow.

(At least that’s what I think “More items in update 41? I will f—ing cut you,” means. I could have misunderstood him.)

Regardless, it seems that EQ2 and ROK are on the minds of a few others folks too.

If you’re looking for EQ2-related ways to pass the time between now and launch, here are a few suggestions…

• Brandon Reinhardt had some very nice things to say about EQ2, wrapped up in a thoughtful analysis about the state of the game and some of the things we’re doing well. If you’re ever up this way, sir, I owe you a drink. Glad you think we’re doing good work up here.

• Her royal Cuppiness, the ultimate MMO dilettante, likes to give EQ2 some love from time to time.

• Ogrebear has some seriously nice looking Kunark beta spoilage.

• The folks at the shiny, new Massively have been doing their part and then some in getting the word out. Furniture? Giveaways? Video? Love for EQ2Traders? Birthday wishes? Beta Tour? They pretty much have it all.

• The inimitable Kendricke chimes in with his take on why right now is a great time to pick up EQ2.

• The equally inimitable (in an entirely different way) Winwin talks about her time poking around the beta, kicking its tires, then painting them pink.

• Yet more Kunark anticipation over in the direction of The Server Is Down…

• Darren of The Common Sense Gamer talking about something that I talked about, so now the cycle of my talking about his talking about my talking is complete. (I do apologize for any tears in the time-space continuum that may occur as a result of my pressing Publish.)

• Our own unique humorist Coyote has his take on the night before launch.

• If general gameplay is more your thing, over at The Lost Souls, George has a new article up about aggro management in EQ2.

• …and a bunch of other folks blogging about their own anticipation.

If you’re looking forward to Kunark too, know that you’re in good company.

See you tomorrow morning.

One of our internal patcher boxes exploded magnificently last night, so I have a few minutes to write while it gets replaced.

Since Rise of Kunark is the only thing that’s been on my brain for the past few weeks, it’s time for an exception to “I won’t talk much about work…”

The expansion’s almost out the door. I’m really happy about this one.

The end of this dev cycle has had more unpredictable events than anything I think I’ve ever worked on. Wildfires, internal server death, and another internal software explosion last week. All surprise hurdles, all cleaned up well. It’s really a testament to everyone’s dedication that it’s going as amazingly as it is.

The beta NDA came down late last week. We took a little longer than usual to do so this time, and there were the standard predictions of both doom and gloom. The reason for the delay was pretty simple - For Kunark, I wanted the beta’s open issue count to be lower than any of our previous released products before the NDA came down. We blew past that mark to a record low count of open issues, then we opened the NDA.

Based on the tone of the comments about the expansion’s quality, that seems to have been the right call. MMOs being a long term venture, I’d rather we have an overall smaller number of comments living on the Internet forever and have them be more positive, as opposed to a deluge of the new standard “It Has Potential But Will It Be Done In Time?!”

Besides, it has LOLvargs.

Last week was also EQ2’s third birthday. There really was cake.

IGN has a new EQ2 restrospective video up, in which you can see a real, live developer cry.

I don’t feel bad about pointing that out, because she did this to my office on Halloween. Although I have to hand it to her - If there’s anyone who could make packing peanuts cute, it would be Tracy, our resident fae.

We give out 90 days Veteran Reward credit for each expansion that a person owns. That means that the day Kunark launches, it’ll be time for the 4 Year Veteran Rewards already. We also announced what those look like.

Rise of Kunark is also going to be on the cover of Massive Online Gamer this month.  That’s sweet.

Let’s see, what else is going on… We’re also in the middle of our last pre-launch Race to Kunark bonus XP sunday, which a large pile of folks have been taking advantage of.

I did an interview that appears to be the very definition of “tl;dr” with Michael at MMOGNation last week. Reading a transcript of an hour long phone call is an illuminating experience. Some people have an innate talent for speaking in brief, cogent sentences. I am not one of those people. (I pace around the room, gesturing wildly, while speaking what appears to be entire chapters.)

There are a number of more features coming up this week that we talked about in the most recent SOE Podcast (#25), but with all the attention on Kunark sometimes these equally cool things get overlooked.

• Some really handy usability improvements to the in-game maps. Zooming, panning, stretching, converting to a minimap…
• The long-awaited revamp to racial abilities, making them into things more people will actually find useful
• A new UI for all of those racial and special class abilities that people gain every couple levels
• Debumping(tm), smoothing, and otherwise improving the feel of the level 20-70 experience progression after all of the feedback from the last cycles.
• The tradeskill UI getting built-in reaction buttons and becoming a lot easier to use in general.
• And more things that I’m forgetting about.

Okay. This post has officially stopped looking like a list of random cool things about this release, and appears to have transitioned into patch notes. Time to stop.

Check that timing out! The internal patcher just returned. Back to work.