Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

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.

The local news came by our humble little studio a few weeks ago to show the rest of San Diego what kind of scary, bizarre things go on at this place where insane people make these things called “MMOs” day in and day out…

Video: http://www.kusi.com/home/10989121.html

I give those guys credit. As far as mainstream news pieces go, this one wasn’t winceworthy in the least and actually showed a few cool things from around here.

Good on ‘em.

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.

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!

Read the rest of this entry »