I happened back to LinkedIn today for the first time in a couple months to 40+ recommendation requests.

Requests for LinkedIn recommendations are a pretty frequent occurrence.  I do explain to people who ask me for them why I won’t be recommending them, but that ends up not happening more often than it does.

I genuinely do like most of the people that I’ve worked with in the past, and would work with many of them again.  Whether it’s with me or not, the vast majority have a realistic position out there they’d be a perfect fit for.  Nothing would make me happier than to see them find their perfect job.

To those with whom I haven’t had this conversation: In my mind, I’m actually doing you a favor.  I wrote a few recommendations in the past, and I did mean every word that I typed.  Then I realized how I was making use of the site after mapping hires (of both mine and others) to their recommendations - LinkedIn turned into a filter of which pieces of information to discard instead of what to take seriously, especially after seeing how many recommendations were mutual.

Skill at the social game that is LinkedIn does not map to utility in the workplace.

This is doubly so when there’s a mutual recommendation in place.  A LinkedIn recommendation swap doesn’t have any value - It’s two people agreeing to say nice things about each other, true or not, to increase an artifical count.  Whether intended or not, that’s what the system has turned into.

Make no mistake - LinkedIn is an online, social game.  The domain just happens to be people and their careers instead of avatars with swords, sorcery, or spaceships.

As a hiring manager/team builder I have a simple rule about LinkedIn recommendations:  If you give me a reference who is also recommending you there, I’m not going to call them.  I’m going to look for someone else who might say something that I can’t already read in public.  Someone you’ve worked for or someone who’s worked for you, or ideally both.  The fact that the games industry is as connected as it is tends to make this a fairly trivial exercise.  This is the backchannel reference.

If I’m the one doing the evaluating (assuming you’re not still employed, since I would never knowingly break someone’s “cover” - confidence remains crucially important), I know that those are infinitely more useful in making sure that we’re a good match than what someone is willing to scream from the hilltops about you.

That’s the real goal here - Ensuring that any relationship that occurs from here forward is genuinely mutually beneficial.  If we aren’t going to be, in skill set or personality, it’s best if we both know that ahead of time so no one ends up with a disappointing career step as a result.

If you’re applying with me, I might just know someone else who has something you’d be perfect for — I’m always happy to make connections for people that way as well.

I have to assume that other hiring managers are as smart as me, or moreso.

Given that, by not putting up a public recommendation I’m increasing the chances that a smart potential hiring manager (the kind you probably want to work for in the first place) will get in touch with me to hear about you.  Further, I can think of at least half a dozen nice things to say about any given person that I’ve worked with.

So far, this has proven out.  It’s resulted in a number of highly positive, long-term placements with people who are thrilled in their new positions.

It seems like the smart way to play it.

If we worked together in the past, you’re trying to get a job somewhere, and want me to say the nicest things that I can - Let’s talk.  Let me know.  We can talk positives and negatives, and use me as a reference.

Or let me know where you’re aiming to go.  As quite a few people can attest to, I’m happy to make phone calls and say genuinely nice things ahead of time for people who’ve done well in the past.

In terms of not recommending you — If I like you, I still believe I’m doing you a favor by abstaining from the game.  Please don’t take it as an insult.

Instead, let’s talk.

In online spaces, emergent play is as important as social play.

Emergent gameplay behaviors (”unforeseen interactions outside of the original intent, which frequently provide an unexpected result”) can exist between players and the system, between the players and the AIs, between AIs and AIs, and so on.

They can exist between anything that interacts with anything else.

A game system that fosters emergent behaviors is more likely to give users the ability to entertain themselves in your 3d world/2d interactive environment/web based spreadsheet game for many more minutes/hours/weeks/months than you’ll be able to create content to keep them engaged in a way that’s mutually beneficial.

Emergent play lets people experiment “harmlessly” with pushing the boundaries in a way that the same behaviors in social play would be unacceptable or detrimental.  (e.g. NPCs don’t walk away from a product or brand with a negative impression when they’re “experimented upon” by curious players.)

Degenerate gameplay is generally undesirable.  I use that in a literal (not moral) sense: “A strategy/path of action/combination of resources or interactions that is both unforseen and so beneficial that it becomes the sole way to play.  Not partaking in that specific, narrow path of activity either outright precludes “success” in an environment, or drastically reduces the amount of fun a person can derive from an experience.”

Degenerate gameplay is a small subset of emergent gameplay.

Given this relationship, attempts to systemically pre-empt degenerate gameplay frequently have the unfortunate side effect of outright preventing beneficial emergent behaviors.  In a multi-player online environment, this can be a significant contributor to a failure to thrive.

It’s important to address the worst of the worst ahead of time — That’s one place where knowing where to strike a balance comes in — but with targeted solutions, despite the fact that targeted solutions frequently require more effort over time, both in maintaining an awareness and and being able to address the correct problem.  However, that cost is variable, and never guaranteed to occur.

The other place balance comes into play is having a good sense of which potential problems are safe enough to address if and only if they become real problems.  Fixing some problems before they actually exist often comes with an immediate cost that’s best left unpaid until (and if) you need to.

In short - Creating an environment that maximizes its potential to succeed as a whole is far more important than creating one in which all potential for degenerate play is pre-emptively stamped out.

Plastic tables from office depot in a spare bedroom for half of a year.  A house strewn in network cables across two floors.  Moving across a state to work with new friends.  Building a new home for all of us from scratch and spare parts.  Integrating even more new friends into a team, watching them develop into far more than the sum of their parts.

Observing brilliant people develop products amazingly well. Seeing (and occasionally helping) people deliver beyond what they thought was their best.  Being able to identify a problem in the morning and have it dealt with by the afternoon.  Figuring out creative ways to push forward that don’t break the bank.  Finding yet more people, from across the globe, to help us do what we need to do.  Conceiving of ways to balance the old and the new to create something truly special.

Meeting a new community of enthusiastic and friendly players.  Witnessing them interact with a new kind of truly engaging, social entertainment for the first time.

Best of all, being there to observe the first “lightbulb” moments as they exclaim: “This is FUN!”

Seems like a natural time to grab on and hold tight forever.

As counterintuitive as it might sound, once you get it running, sometimes the best thing you can do is step down and make way for a vision for where it goes next.

I don’t make decisions like this lightly.  When a company’s doing well, I stay in one place for years.  When it doesn’t work out, I’ve been the last one to turn out the lights.  This is an entirely new kind of decision for me.  It’s of course painful and difficult, but it’s the right one.

Never in my career have I seen such a small group of people accomplish so much, so quickly in this space.  Products, pipelines, systems, processes, relationships — you name it.  I remain entirely in awe in many different ways.  I’m extremely proud to have played my role in building it up from nothing, and value the new friendships that have been made in the process more than I can say.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for the people who’ve consistently overdelivered and continue to go beyond giving their all, day in and day out, revolutionizing what online games are and how they’re made.

There’s a huge success story ready to burst out there, and I look forward to seeing it happen.  Give ‘em hell, ohai!

What’s next?

This is a great time for online entertainment.  Every day there are more people online looking to have fun with their friends and make new ones in the process.

There’s an ever-widening spectrum of exciting things waiting to be built.   Some of them are games in the classic sense, others are purely social devices, and a massive range of opportunities lie between them.

At the end of the day, they all have the same goal in mind - Bringing people together.

Time to figure out which one sounds like the most fun to build next.

We all know that professional video game designers who blog are a freaking dime a dozen on the internet. Often times, game design bloggers are the most prevalent in the industry among fans. They often have a lot of respect in social circles and game development conferences and are the ones you think of when you think of “famous designers”. It seems like a decent amount of people who design games for a living want to blog and share that knowledge with others.

My question is: Do they know what they’re talking about? Are they even good designers?

Which she later clarified to actually mean this:

What I wanted to say was - design bloggers….you’re all full of shit, and relevant people in the industry making kick ass content aren’t reading a word of what you say (and if they are, they’re laughing).

I wanted to add a couple more thoughts to my own reply on Lum’s blog, but the edit timer’s up, so I’ll do it here.

And before blogging existed, from the point of view of the people who needed to do hardcore implementation, instead of the target being “bloggers” it was “people who had enough free time to go to conventions and give speeches about what good work looks like, instead of actually doing good work.”

There is a certain symbiosis that occurs, though - All the greatest implementation in the world isn’t going to be useful without a good vision, and the best vision in the world is useless when it doesn’t have a viable implementation.

There’s good and bad in people of both types. You just need far more good implementers than you need good visionaries to succeed.

On top of that, it’s far more difficult to tell a high quality bloviator (someone who has good, *implementable* ideas) from a low quality one (someone who has amazing ideas that are completely impractical) than it is to make the same comparison with those doing the implementation.

The quality of a given *implementation* is evident to all but the most casual observer, and compounding the problem, the implementers frequently end up taking the blame for the low quality bloviators.

Since the only part that’s visible is the implementation, the implementation is what all but the most experienced observers will be able to discern as being the problem.

Rarely do you hear about a product: “That game was bad; Those poor guys making it were given (an incomprehensible vision | an unsolvable problem | unrealistic timelines).”

What you hear about are the end-user and reviewer-visible symptoms.   “That game was bad, (it crashed a lot | it didn’t feel like it was finished | it was totally unpolished),” which are more frequently problems of vision, scope, and implementability than they are of actual implementation skill.

This is why the people who do the implementation tend to be bitter about the (now) bloggers and, in past generation, the conventioneers.

Getting back to the original question -

Does being an interesting design blogger mean that you know anything about practical game design?   

No.

Being a design blogger, like any other means of recreational communication, (since no one that I am aware of is being paid to blog about game design - Whether design is the day job they also happen to have or not, it’s recreation, period.) means that they can can communicate on aspects of game design in a sufficiently entertaining manner, which is a very poor proxy for determining whether or not a given person is a good designer.

The converse is likewise not true.

Being a good blogger does not make one a bad practical designer.

The one designer I’ve worked closely with out of the currently active blogger set, this guy, who does happen to be a rockstar with narrative, structure, consistency, and about 10 other nouns I could name.

Are the other active designer-bloggers any good?  No idea.  I’m sure some are fantastic.  I’m sure others aren’t.

The only thing that being a blogger gives you is visibility, and people are more likely to have an affinity for, and attribute positive aspects to, names they are familiar with, whether said names are deserving of positive aspects or not.  (Note: This includes me.)

That’s it. Period.

Utility to a product and activity on the blogs are two totally separate entities.

The only thing you can be 100% positive of is that during the time when a person is writing a blog entry, they are not actively implementing anything on a project.

That’s a useful proxy for just about nothing, other than how they spent 20 minutes that day.

Hope that helps clear things up.

Clip from the article:

 For the AAA, eight- and nine- figure budget extravaganzas, big betas aren’t going away any time soon.  What companies get out of them has shifted over time, but they remain an important part of getting a game out the door.

As product cost and complexity have increased, the emphasis of beta has indeed shifted toward toward marketing and load testing both your gameplay and operational systems.  However, those are still critical activities in the high-budget, launch-big-or-die model.   (That model has many weaknesses, but that’s an entire topic in itself.)

The reason this happened is simple - It’s about the money.  Let’s say you’re a AAA game with 3-4 years of time and money invested, enough money to support a large team having worked on it for that long.  Games like this frequently need to go for years before enough pieces come together before you can start making decisions about what’s fun and what isn’t.

By the time beta begins, you’ve made decision after decision that have compounded on each other.  Your assumptions’ assumptions’ have assumptions about what your game is.  The whole product, systems, content, operations, marketing, PR, community ramp, you name it — is built upon them.  Changing core assumptions about the product itself is unlikely to be possible without significant delays, costing progressively more money per month.  (Remember, the months toward the end of the dev cycle are the most expensive ones by far.)

The game is, for the most part, what it is.  You’re capable of making shifts, but the more complex the game, the more minor the shifts you can make with any confidence.  If assumptions that you made years ago turn out to be wrong, you’re left to scramble, or in most cases, do your best to ameliorate the now-certain fallout.

If you haven’t verified your gameplay at the point of having a beta, you’ve already left your fate to chance.  (This is, of course, all presuming that your game has passed the technical bar in terms of stability, which is all too often not the case.  And, again, is another flaw with the launch-big-or-die model.)

As budgets go up and schedules get longer, the model is growing more and more analogous to movies.  If anything, people can see what goes on with blockbuster movie releases and draw certain comparisons.

No big beta?  With a quality product at this stage in the industry’s evolution the negatives almost never outweigh the positives.

Unlike movies, seldom are there a half dozen launches competing for attention in the same month, much less the same week, where movies might have some competitive advantage to keeping secrets this late in the game.  MMOs differ from movies in that they’re a long term time investment.  The pattern of hype generation is different.

The way MMOs are most similar to movies, exploding costs aside, is that if you don’t see an advance reviewer screening for a movie:  Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong.  Bad news is being kept out of the market in hopes of keeping day-one sales high.

The same can be said for lack of betas, repeatedly late betas, or overly-restrictive betas for MMOs.

The company knows that early sales are now where the bulk of the money is going to come from, instead of huge usage numbers over time, and it’s doing what it needs to — preserving those precious day one revenues, since it could well need that money to survive.

The biggest underlying assumption that’s changed over time, largely thanks to World of Warcraft is that the dominant thinking used to be that “Getting too many people in before launch is going to hurt sales and subscriptions.”

After all - People made characters, levelled them up, got some loot, had their fun…just to get wiped at the end of beta. “The more people we do that to, the less who’ll want to buy the game, then come back to start all over at launch” — right?

WoW proved this to be a fallacy.  For a good game, it turns out that there’s not just a higher tolerance for starting over than anyone imagined, but many people are actively interested in repeating their progress once a beta is over.  Counterintuitive at first, but it does make a lot of sense.  To a significant part of the core MMO audience…

Starting over feels like cheating.

One of the best things you can do in a game is to give people opportunities to feel like they’re cheating, or at least getting away with something, in a way that doesn’t make them feel guilty for doing it.  Feeling like you’re pulling one over on the system is a good motivator.

It’s smart of developers to give people “safe” ways to derive that feeling from playing the game.  Better they’re “cheating” by zooming through something they know than by becoming destructive cheaters - botters, hackers, and the like.

Given that, an outside observer can treat the size of the final beta as a referendum on the developer/publisher’s confidence in the game itself.  That’s what I meant in the clip above referring to movie analogies.

It’s not a 100% correlation - But in general, the bigger the beta, the more confidence.  The later and smaller the beta, the less confidence, and the higher internal pressure (usually driven by the cost) to get something, anything out the door, as a hail mary.

By now most of the core audience realizes…

The Miracle Patch doesn’t exist, and it never has.

Smart developers know that (enough of) their audience knows this, and are planning their beta’s progress accordingly.  If you’re operating in the launch-big-or-die model, and you put an un-fun or unstable beta out on promises of a future patch coming out to Make Everything Awesome, people will see right through it, and you’ve just shot yourself in the foot.

If developers are so smart, why do un-fun betas still happen?

This is a tangent I wasn’t planning on getting into.  Akil Hooper, who I worked with at SOE for a good many years, described one reason really well:

I think that one of the problems that MMOs have kind of inherent to the system is the length of development of tech. So many MMOs develop on new or untested/unproven tech that a lot of time and money is spent building a foundation that could very well be faulty.

By the time that beta comes around the meat and potatoes of the game hasn’t had enough time to marinate in the juices of fun, but the stock took so long to cool that you can’t throw it away. (Man, do I love metaphors)

Lots of non-MMO teams (maybe some MMO teams too for all I know) are working toward rapid iteration styles of development, instead of standard long pre-production and short final production cycles. This allows for them to taste the soup earlier and still have some time to change some of the basic flavors without ruining the broth too much.…

Expressed another way, one of the biggest reasons for un-fun betas is that there’s traditionally been far too much effort required from many other people until “fun” is even able to be evaluated at its most basic level.

The classic problem is compounded by the fact that designers are forced to continue progressively building more and more (on paper) upon unproven hypotheses (also on paper), until they end up with a 1,000+ page document of “Here’s the game we’re going to make once the architecture is in place.”

The risk of potential wasted effort increases geometrically the longer it takes to get to iteration.

Looking at who’s doing what in making a game…

Artists - Get to do some useful concepting, color keys, planning, before their production and (hopefully) continuous iteration, unless they’re being asked to make far too many assets in too little time.  Most of their time spent is useful in the end.

Engineers - Also very likely that their earliest work will be useful, and will be the practical foundation for the product.  Ends up being what a lot of the iteration point depends on.

Designers - Get “the time at the end” to find out if anything they’ve been planning is useful, usable, or fun.  Frequently, “the end” is a fixed date on a calendar.  Not to understate, but: This is a problem.

Smart teams making games all over realize this and are doing everything they can to push the iteration start point as early as possible in a game’s development cycle.

We’ve still got some distance to go until we’re entirely out of the Bad Old Days, but as Akil points out, it is getting better.

An interesting example of poor mechanics design struck there tonight.

It wasn’t until later, when she checked the board again, that Liukin realized that she and He were tied. “I thought, am I that tired?” she said. “I know it’s been a long week, but there’s a 1 next to her name and a 2 next to mine. I said, Dad, we got the same score.”

For those who weren’t watching:

• In the women’s uneven parallel bars, the US’ Nastia Liukin scores  16.725, moving into first place.

• China’s He Kexin follows her, also scoring 16.725 (the same score), taking over 1st place, pushing the US down to #2.

• The above ranking was produced courtesy of a software-generated tiebreaker, throwing out next-lowest judge scores behind the scenes until said tie is broke, in a way that is entirely hidden to everyone other than the judges.

• This appears to make less sense to the people on TV than it does to me (namely, the athletes), so I’m at least in reasonably knowledgeable company.

Design tenets reinforced:

• Any system can only ever be as good as its interface.  It can never be better, only worse.  (The interface for this one, plainly, is pretty terrible.)

• Before you add extra complexity to solve the problem, make damn sure that it’s a problem that actually needs solving.  (Not that I know a thing about gymnastics, but what sane reason is there for not awarding them both the gold?)

Congratulations on the medal, Nastia.  Sorry it’s not the color you earned.

• Edit: I got the order they went in backward, but I’m leaving it as is since the point’s the same either way.  Tip of the hat to Danuser and Shwayder, closet womens’ gymnastics fiends and co-presidents of the Nastia Liukin Fan Club, Northeast Division.

It’s Okay to Grow Up

Whether or not everyone agrees with it, I imagine that it will resonate with people on both sides of the issue:  Players who’ve outgrown a given MMO, and developers who feel pressure to evolve, evolve, evolve to keep the same audience engaged for “One More Cycle” (in perpetuity) at the expense of potential for acquiring new users.

Steve - Get out while you can.  I’m sure the Internet Police are on their way already.

I’ve been collecting up notes from conversations to try to turn them into another tl;dr treatise on the subject, but instead I’m going to just post them as fragments as they come up.

This has the added benefit of making them infinitely more likely to see the light of day where they might be able to help someone.

One for now:

1) Age.  This one comes up most frequently with people who have significant experience in other industries and are trying to break in to games.

“My age.  I’m not a 20 year old.  I’m old enough to be your (mother/father).  Does that mean I’ll never get a job as a first timer?”

Emphatically: No.  

The reality:  If you’re asking this question, somewhere deep down you already know this.  Hearing it from someone on the inside can help, so I’ll repeat it out loud:

If it does matter to someone, you don’t want to work there in the first place.

Most modern industries aren’t expecting a 20 or 30 year commitment.  If you can come in and do good work for 3, 4, 5 years, you’d be considered a solid find.

You don’t need 20 years left of career to be considered viable.  You need to be passionate, smart, and able to do solid work.

The hack:  Bigger companies, especially, are (justifiably) paranoid about even the appearance of age discrimination.  Chances are that everyone you’ll encounter during any interview process has gone to liability-insurance-mandated (and therefore employer-mandated) discrimination training.

They’re also more likely to be willing to take on people who may need more coaching, due solely to their size. On larger teams there are greater numbers of more experienced people who can mentor, instead of, say, at a scrappy 10 person startup where everyone needs to be moderate-to-expert in 2 or 3 distinct jobs.

They’re also sometimes more suitable from the employee point of view since they’re traditionally more stable and have more comprehensive benefits.

You’re not going to become a millionaire on stock options there, but if you’re trying to get started and get some valuable experience under your belt, that should be the furthest thing from your mind.

More later.

Feel free to let me know via comments or mail if there are things you’d like me to call out - I have enough fodder for another half dozen of these as time permits.

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.

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.”

(Edit: That was fast.)

What I thought I was getting into:  “Don’t worry - No kiss and tell about your time on EQ2.  Just bring yourself and some wit.  Just generally chat.  I’m sure we’ll end up bringing some EQ2 topics up though.”

Perfect.

What actually happened:  “Hi! I’m Michael Zenke, and welcome to Massively Speaking episode #13!  Today we’ve got a rare treat - We’ll be talking to Scott Hartsman about his time as the Senior Producer of EverQuest II.”

Thanks, Michael.

(In all fairness, I’m sure I misheard more than he mis-asked.)

Still, it was fun.  I actually like talking about that kind of thing quite a bit still and everyone asked good questions, though there were definitely a few topics that I’d have liked to explain a little more coherently.

If nothing else, it’s fun to talk about some of the more extreme thoughts I’d had about what we could’ve done to EQ2, now that it’s safe and there’s no need for anyone to worry that I might actually do them and screw up the game they love.

What I remembered about halfway through: I’m sure that I sound a lot better in print when I can edit myself for length.

(Not that I actually do that much either, but…yeah.)

Just a collection of opinions.  Please don’t expect a story, plot, clean ending, or too many revelations.

[09:31] Qhue: Here’s a thought: Given that MMOs seem stuck in a bimodal arrangement (Leveling / Endgame) why not scramble that a bit and mix the Endgame and Leveling portions of the game?

[09:32] Gallenite: You mean by having traditional “endgame” stuff also occurring while in the general “levelling” phase?

[09:33] Qhue: Yes, or to steal some concepts from the new D&D:  Have endgame plateaus that both serve to slow things down but retain forward momentum.

[09:35] Qhue: Have a 1-20 experience which is largely a solo story-based introduction to the game and gaming concepts. At the end of which you have a portion of ‘endgame’ content.  Be that grouping dungeons that need to be progressed through or PVP activities etc which continue to grow the character but which put a stop to traditional levelling for a time

[09:35] Gallenite: Assuming that we’re talking about an MMO in the current Achiever model, the problem is that most people’s goal-orientation overrides most everything else, which makes sense.  Taken as a whole, they don’t enjoy expending undue effort on transitory (mid-level) rewards.

[09:36] Gallenite: Since the shiny you get at the “endgame” phase is going to be light years better than anything you get during the “levelling” phase, again on the whole, people view attempts to force them into expending said effort as impediments more than satisfying challenges, even if you give them great rewards for doing so.

[09:36] Qhue: Exactly.  Everyone wants to “rush to 60/70/80/255″ but then after they rush there and bypass content you busted yer balls making they get immediately bored because there is nothing to do.

[09:36] Gallenite: The corollary to that is: So why not make things that are just that good early on, so they’re useful later too?

[09:37] Qhue: Precisely.  Put in elements of the game that are distinct and shiny that need to be experienced at a certain point so that a blind rush is hollow compared to taking the scenic route.

[09:37] Gallenite: Aside from the inherent effort/reward imbalance, you get into (effectively) content-gated progression… which is a logistical nightmare in both implementation and maintenance.  Given that it’s a feature of arguable merit in the first place to a large chunk of the audience, it’s not the wisest investment of all that extra effort.

[09:37] Gallenite: If you’re going to spend 3-4x the effort on a given piece of content, in perpetuity, you need to make sure it’s something that’s going to give you a competitive advantage.

[09:37] Gallenite: Content-gated progression is very definitely Not That.

[09:38] Gallenite: Especially if you make it require….”Other People”

[09:39] Qhue: Right.  Even though a game is a MMO people really dont seem to want to be bothered with anyone else
[09:39] Gallenite: Kind of.  By doing that, you’re saying that base enjoyment of your product requires Other People.  Since we as developers cannot guarantee the presence of Other People at the time you’re looking to play, requiring their presence in order for an arbitrary customer to take part in the base experience turns out to be a very poor idea in practice.

[09:40] Gallenite: There are many reasons that people “don’t seem to want to be bothered” - Everything from the literal one you just described, to “not having a playstyle that is compatible with it.”

[09:40] In my time playing EQ2, for instance, since I was constantly being interrupted by RL, work, you name it.  I very seldom (until high level) went on any dungeon crawls.  Why? I didn’t want to be That Guy - The one who’s always afk, interrupting the flow, etc.  More of a point of common courtesy than anything else.

[09:41] As the audience widens to include more types of RL people (by definition, that means more people with that issue), you’re essentially telling them that they’re not welcome.

[09:41] Qhue: That same argument comes up with respect to all “endgame content.”  People get to the end and then are ticked if they need X more people to ‘raid’ or Y more people to make a PVP ‘team’ and really there is no getting around that except to say “GO PLAY ZELDA YOU ANTISOCIAL BASTARD”

[09:42] Gallenite: By then, however, they’ve enjoyed “Enough” of the game to where most feel that they’ve at least gotten their money’s worth out of the experience.

[09:42] Gallenite: They have the option to try new things, make alts, and so on - Which is a perfectly acceptable path.

[09:42] Gallenite: And yes, some will bitch about it.

[09:42] Gallenite: However, the bitching is largely irrelevant at that point, provided sufficient numbers of people are finding sufficient ways to remain engaged.

[09:42] Qhue: True

[09:43] Gallenite: Some problems are worth solving, others aren’t.  That one very definitely isn’t.

[09:43] Gallenite: That’s not to say you shouldn’t find more ways to keep people engaged at the high end.  You very much should.  It’s more that you can’t have a one-size-fits-all endgame, nor should you try to get to one.

[09:43] Gallenite: That doesn’t serve anyone well.

[09:44] Qhue: But consider this : If we think about the rewards of playing at max level as being directly scaled versions of the rewards at say half-max level then yeah it makes sense to rise to the top and then bitch.

[09:44] Gallenite: Of course.  I would say to that: If the rewards of playing at max level are directly scaled version of the rewards at half-max, you have a somewhat uninspired endgame design.”

[09:44] Qhue: But what if we’re not talking about the same thing?  What if instead of a linear rise of ‘level’ its more generic and less directly gated.

[09:45] Qhue: Well lets be honest here, every game published to date has had an uninspired endgame design by that measure

[09:45] Gallenite: I disagree, a lot, actually.  Subtle tweaks and introduction of new, more advanced mechanics is fairly standard.  I don’t think anyone is making games that are 100% “same stuff, bigger numbers.”  Some games do high end diversity better than others, of course, but it’s there in most games to at least some extent.

[09:45] Gallenite: I think the current set [of games] is much better than the previous set.

[09:46] Gallenite: The changes don’t have to be earthshaking to have an effect when you have a person who’s already engaged heavily in a product and interested in delving into the nuances of their character.

[09:46] Gallenite: Subtle changes can be good enough.  Examples (using WoW since, well, everyone speaks it):

[09:46] Gallenite: - PvP gear, Resilience - Good/bad/whatever your opinion is - It’s different, its pursuit continues to engage a good number of  people, and has for quite some time

[09:46] Gallenite: - Alterac Valley - Competition PvE, a different way to play, available only higher-end (at the time)

[09:47] Gallenite: - Dungeon/Raid events - Many more of them are puzzles moreso than they are classic MMO-style “fights.” Netherspite is not a fight, it’s a puzzle.  Chess doesn’t need explanation.  Al’ar is a choreography minigame.  Vashj is an exercise in chaos management, via both serial and parallel minigames, Zul’jin is a series of minigames (one alters the parts of your class you “can” play, a couple add an environmental awareness requirement).  And so on.

[09:47] Gallenite: Things that fit the style of what I’d call a classic MMO “fight” are the ones that that get called “gear checks” these days.

[09:47] Qhue: It’s still dependent on the idea of rush to the top and then asymptotically struggle for shinies

[09:47] Gallenite: Sure, you’re still there to get shinies, no argument.  But, what you’re doing to get them has evolved in enough ways to where the pursuit continues to be interesting.

[09:47] Qhue: Actually competition PvE before the PVP arena was more active in the mid levels than it was at max level.. because it was a different sort of game then than at max

[09:48] Gallenite: Sure, I’m just citing “AV” as a specific example of a novel type of gameplay: Competition PvE in an enclosed container that is vaguely PvP shaped.

[09:48] Gallenite: Which lends itself well to the WoW PvE audience, much moreso than do the rest of the BGs - I’m actually surprised they haven’t expanded on it.  […as it fills a need that isn’t met by the others.]

[09:49] Gallenite: (Trivia: EQ:LDoN’s original spec had the idea of Competition PvE in its instances, via countermissions and delayed starts, exactly like a BG, but there was no way we could have done it justice in the time we had.)

[09:48] Qhue: The market is changing however and the population has matured… very noticeably over the last few months

[09:49] Qhue: To whit: WoW and its latest endgame content.  People look at it as another silly asymptote that is going to be blown away when the level cap is raised in a few months and they react by saying “No… you fooled me once and yer not doing it again” and they leave.

[09:50] Gallenite: I disagree with that.  If that actually were the case, no one would stick with any MMO beyond its first expansion.

[09:50] Gallenite: The only thing that actually occurs during that phase is some amount of handwringing, before people dive on in to see what the new areas have to offer.

[09:51] Gallenite: I think it can be overdone (e.g. EQ, EQ2’s former 6mo expansions), but I also think that Blizzard’s rate of doing it is far from overdone.

[09:51] Qhue: AOC has featured people who shot to 80 as fast as humanly possible and comlpetely and totally bypassed a good 50-70% of the work that Funcom did on the game restricting the experienced areas to a small selection of what they worked on.. and once they hit 80 they realized there was nothign to do and dropped the game… much faster now than any other game before

[09:51] Gallenite: That’s more of a comment on AoC than the market as a whole, though.

[09:52] Gallenite: All that says is: “You can’t go after a WoW audience without at least meeting the WoW level of endgame expectation,” which is nearly impossible for any new retail sub based MMO at this point.

[09:52] Gallenite: To which I say, “Well, duh.”

[09:52] Gallenite: Trying to do that is foolish in the extreme, unless you’re the rare company who can compete on ability to execute in online at quality, and have the financial muscle to match.  Right now, that company has not yet proven itself to exist.  It might, but it hasn’t happened yet.

[09:52] Qhue: I think people will come back for the next WoW expansion yes.  But I think with each one their desire to maintain playing once they ‘finish’ an expansion will dwindle.  It will become episodic gaming

[09:53] Gallenite: What you described is nothing more than “The MMO Lifecycle As We Know It Today.”

[09:53] Gallenite: That’s been the case since EQ.   Show me an expansion-supported MMO’s launch trajectory in terms of simultaneous usage and subscriptions, and I can tell you how its subscribers will trend month by month through infinity - And so can every exec at every MMO company.

[09:53] Qhue: The lifecycle seems to be accelerating though.  Initially people were very forgiving because they just wanted to be part of that alternate world.  With each generational iteration the tolerance for things seems to erode.

[09:54] Gallenite: Disagree - WoW has managed to extend that lifecycle significantly. (Assuming that you count WoW as part of the current “generation,” which I do.)

[09:54] Gallenite: Compared to the EQ generation.

[09:55] Qhue: WoW did a bunch of things differently, but it also was for many people their “EQ” and the first taste they had of such a thing.

[09:55] Gallenite: Yes - And I would bet that it’s retained larger numbers of its first-time users much longer than EQ did.

[09:56] Qhue: I dont think that can be seen as anything more than a one-time event.

[09:56] Gallenite: I don’t think you’re wrong - If by that you’re saying: They’ve taken this model as close to perfection as it can likely get.

[09:56] Gallenite: In which case, I totally agree.  They have.

[09:57] Gallenite: That’s one of the multitude of reasons that pursuing chunks of “People who have enjoyed WoW” as your audience is going to remain fairly futile, in the same model.

[09:57] Qhue: They also made “MMORPG” into a household name in a way that hadn’t been done before.

[09:57] Gallenite: Yep.

[09:57] Qhue: If you enjoy gaming at any level you know about WoW.

[09:58] Qhue: I think though that the model of levelling with an endgame is just fundamentally a flawed concept

[09:58] Gallenite: I gathered.

[09:59] Qhue: You’d probably be better off starting off with the Endgame and bypassing the idea of levelling entirely

[09:59] Gallenite: Empirically, I would say that a significant number of people would appear to disagree

[09:59] Gallenite: I don’t think you can short circuit the learning that occurs during that phase, nor undervalue the vital attachment-building that occurs: player-to-character, player-to-world, and player-to-community.

[10:00] Gallenite: Without those, skipping straight to the end game has no context and ends up meaningless.

[10:00] Gallenite: Well, “meaningless” inasmuch as meaning exists in the mind of the one doing the playing, which is the only place the word really has relevance.

[10:01] Qhue: How about this:  Instead of a linear increase to a particular endpoint and then an asymptotic mode of growth afterwards you quickly reach a certain base and then have LOTS of asymptotic growth?

[10:03] Gallenite: I’d say that’s more of a question of suitability to a particular audience than it is anything else.  To which audience does that kind of progression make sense/”feel right”?  What levels and types of increases are you talking about?  We already know, for instance, that “Just Making The Numbers Obscenely Huge” acts as more of a detriment than anything else.

[10:03] Qhue: The singular greatest idea that EQ had was the bloody AA [Alternate Advancement] system because it kept people actually online and doing stuff that they saw as meangful

[10:04] Gallenite: And I totally agree with that.  AAs were the best thing for EQ’s ability to retain.  Right up until content had to be created on the assumption that “everyone has everything,” in order to present any challenge, at which point the retention goals are placed directly at odds with the game’s ability to acquire new users.

[10:05] Gallenite: EQ2 did something similar, but tweaked it in a way that I liked: Over time, earlier Achievement points became far easier to get than later ones, so we could assume in a much less painful manner that you had “enough” of them to take part in the high end of the day.  EQ did the same to theirs as well.

[10:06] Gallenite: Similar to what we did each EQ2 expansion with lower-end experience tables (which even Blizzard adopted later on), to help people get to the place that we knew they wanted to be in the first place.  They just got a lot more coverage for it.

[10:06] Qhue: I like the idea of scalable content that takes into consideration the overall ability of the players and rewards them appropriately… but done in such a way that the reward is meaningful for everyone and not a token piece of crap for everyone except those at the pinnacle

[10:06] Qhue: WoW will be a test of that with the same raids for 10 and 25 man events

[10:07] Qhue: So you can beat Arthas in a 10 man group or a 25 man… but how do you make that effort meaningful for the two groups?

[10:07] Gallenite: Yep - The answer to that is, “You do twice the work in delivering that content.”

[10:08] Qhue: In AoC they thought they addressed these things by having an apprentice system whereby you could be levelled to match your buddies and enable you all to enjoy content… but in practice it was a disaster

[10:08] Gallenite: There’s no sane way that a machine can make appropriately challenging and rewarding content like that at two levels - Thye’re different enough to where you’d have to redo significant content by hand.  Which works for Blizzard, because if there’s one thing they can do amazingly well, it’s “create compelling content by hand.”

[10:09] Qhue: Well look at City of Heroes.  It’s an ancient game now but it did the autoscaling thing quite well.

[10:11] Qhue: Note that it also manages to reinvent itself continuously and yet has never had proper “endgame” content in the same vein as WoW or EQ

[10:12] Gallenite: Autoscaling 1-6 man, largely procedural content has almost nothing in common with “autoscaling the kind of 10 and 25 man content that Blizzard is known for.”

[10:12] Gallenite: “Just add more mobs” cuts it with single group stuff among a largely casual audience.

[10:13] Gallenite: “Just add more mobs” does not scale 10man - 25man among an inherently more discerning audience.

[10:13] Qhue: Funny, thats exactly what they’ve done heh

[10:13] Gallenite: Then they will end up with a disappointed audience.

[10:13] Qhue: Well they added more mobs and they raised the effective level of the critters

[10:14] Qhue: Just as they did in the Normal vs. Heroic dungeons

[10:15] Gallenite: And look how well those scale?  Even in the heroic dungeons, there’s a good number of them that just don’t make a lot of sense.

[10:15] Qhue: They don’t scale for shit.  Its obvious which dungeons were going to be 10 and are now upscaled to 25 and which were going to be 25 and have been downscaled to 10.

[10:16] Gallenite: It’s highly counterintuitive, for instance, that OHB [Old Hillsbrad] should be the hardest heroic.  Yet, it is.  Why?  It was just simple-scaled.  To make it work “right” it needed to be upscaled by hand and retested as if it were new content.  As it stands, it’s a black mark on the rest of the experience because the risk vs reward is so out of whack.

[10:16] If anyone proved it, Blizzard showed that we don’t need to have flawed content in our games just to make the good parts look even better.  (What I used to call the Bad Girlfriend theory of game design.

[10:16] Qhue: Most of the people playing WoW are playing it in the CoH style: levelling up alt number 15 with a few friends and maybe PVPing

[10:17] Gallenite: I would assume that Blizzard is smart enough to not release WotLK until both the 10 and 25 man versions meet a sufficient amount of “compelling,” even if that means redoing the perceptively-broken (e.g. Heroic OHB, Sethekk, et al) ones by hand.

[10:18] Gallenite: You’ll get some that just magically work, or can be tweaked easily to work, but most won’t.

[10:18] Gallenite: I doubt they’ll risk their audience on a gamble when they have the ability to take longer to do it right, which by all reports they still do under the new ownership structure.

[10:18] Qhue: Oh they have pretty much forever.  Its a very rabid fanbase and even if people drop the game now they will run right back when it is released… meanwhile they have PVP to keep the hoi paloi occupado

[10:19] Qhue: Not to say you dont need end game because nearly all of those people dream about being on a team doing the high end stuff.  But I dont think the raiding stuff really is their bread and butter.  They know they want to make the elite stuff more accessible and hence are doing the 10-man bit… but how successful will that be?

[10:19] Gallenite: I don’t think it’s their bread and butter, but I think that continuing in that vein is required for that game to retain its current level of audience engagement.

[10:20] Gallenite: The last thing that Blizzard wants to do is create an opening for another game to take over - Even if it’s one they make themselves. There’s no guarantee that sufficient numbers of your own customers will cross over into “your” next new product.  They’ll cross over to someone’s, all right, and yours may well be it, but why gamble that if you don’t need to?

[10:21] Qhue: I really dont think Lich King will ship this year.

[10:21] Qhue: I do think that people have grown bored which is why AoC managed to sell 700k copies

[10:22] Gallenite: Some people have definitely grown bored - There’s no argument there.  But until there’s some compelling destination for them, boredom is (unfortunately) largely irrelevant.

[10:22] Qhue: Funcom could probably write a textbook now on how to take a good opportunity and completely ruin it

[10:23] Gallenite: Funcom is an interesting beast.  I’ve always really been pulling for them.  Loved AO.  Have friends who work there.  Played EQ with a handful of really stellar people from there too.  They’re really the kind of people that once you spend time with them, you just can’t help but hope that they do well.

[10:23] Gallenite: As a niche game AO was really enjoyable, warts and all, in a way that was different-enough from EQ to me.

[10:23] Qhue: They had a solid rendering engine and amazing artwork but that just wasnt enough.  The game system is just plain awful and awful in a way that almost defies logic.  Awful in a way that a freshman making a MUD would recognize as just not right.

[10:24] Gallenite: I didn’t make it that far - I made it as far as seeing my FPS go south of EQ2 territory, which was about 5 minutes in.  I just can’t play games that do that anymore.

[10:24] Gallenite: I think it’s silly to make anything that way.

[10:24] Qhue: Really you had low FPS?

[10:24] Qhue: Much much higher FPS for me in AOC than EQ2

[10:24] Gallenite: These days, there’s no reason for any MMO to deliver anything less than 30fps.

[10:25] Gallenite: Anything less than that, to me, just now plain feels wrong.

[10:25] Gallenite: And the game gets shut down.

[10:25] Gallenite: The Luclin days of the 10fps target spec in a crowded scene are very 10 years ago, and I’d like to keep them there.

[10:25] Qhue: I play AoC with everything set to max and never drop below 40 except in the presense of lots of fires and then its down to 30ish

[10:25] Gallenite: I know there are computers like that out there - However, my dual 7800 quad core box is not one of them.

[10:26] Gallenite: And if this computer can’t play a new game at a 20-30 fps floor, there is something wrong with either the client or (more likely) the weight of the assets.

[10:26] Qhue: EQ2 I could never get anywhere close to that on the same machine.  Had things set to Med and didnt get 30 fps

[10:27] Gallenite: I’m not saying that EQ2 is better than AoC in terms of framerate - I’m saying that for me personally, playing at low framerates is just not something that I perceive as “fun” anymore.

[10:27] Qhue: In AoC I could look out across a pristine scene and see tons of characters far away in little fights and spells going off and a large temple thing in the distance and it was just jaw dropping

[10:27] Qhue: I agree completely

[10:28] Qhue: and the mechanics are there for AoC as well…the base concepts are solid… but what they did in terms of game design using the tools they had are just criminally bad

[10:28] Gallenite: That I will have to take your word on — Like I said, I didn’t make it that far.

[10:29] Qhue: We’re talking abilities that dont do anything… at all… nada.  Classes that are so overpowered that people make gentleman’s agreements in PVP battles not to use them.  Tradeskills that dont function 4+ weeks after the launch of the game with no explanation. etc

[10:30] Qhue: Most of the problems are of the nature that you cant imagine it would take a day to fix much less a few months and yet…

[10:31] Qhue: and so people who I’ve seen commit to games and play them religiously are just dropping the title like mad because of lacking / buggy content and yet many of these people admittedly skipped most of the stuff that was done.

[10:37] Gallenite: I wish I could say that surprised me - But those are the challenges that anyone trying to make a AAA title in this space are going to come up against.  It’s just a matter of whether or not they have the time to get those problems ironed out before they open the doors.

[10:38] Qhue: Right because anyone who isnt Blizzard or someone with equally deep pockets just doesnt have that kind of time.  And a large scale public which is used to things being done at release isn’t at all forgiving of mistakes at launch

[10:38] Gallenite: Bingo.

[10:39] Gallenite: It’s a symptom of having to cram too much into The Box in order to meet the minimum audience expectation for what they would call a successful, large-scale MMO in that model.

[10:40] Gallenite: All those things in The Box (classes, races, features, etc) play off each other in ways you can’t possibly forsee.  The only way to deal with them is time.  More elements playing off of each other causes an exponential rise in the number of cross-impacting elements that you didn’t possibly forsee.

[10:41] Qhue: Here’s a question: Can you make a AAA title without a public and highly visible beta test that “spoils” the whole thing?

[10:41] Gallenite: I’d argue that “spoiling” is irrelevant these days.  In a world where the majority prefer their encounters to come documented with strats and loot lists, “spoiling” has proven to be beneficial when done correctly.  (wowhead, wowwiki, eq2i, QuestHelper, LightHeaded, et al — all of which go far beyond the spoilage of old.)  Those who like blazing the new ground themselves are by far the minority.

[10:41] Qhue: Perhaps then the game is just too complex coming out of the box?  Reduce the number of initial factors?  Although those very same factors are seen as the value adding part of what your Box offers

[10:41] Qhue: Like AoC had player made cities as a Box thing and they are there but lord god its pointless

[10:42] Gallenite: This is one of the many reasons that the Big Box model is very much not compatible with online game development.   As games get more and more complex, it becomes more and more obvious.  I’d say that the model itself is what’s broken, and it’s what’s causing games to continue to go out broken.

[10:42] Qhue: Well the only negative thing about the spoiling in this case is that it just hastens the consumption of the base “levelling” content.  People rush to max level even faster and then have nothing to do.

[10:43] Gallenite: This is why making classes with divergent playstyle is so important - A lot of your retention comes in terms of replay value.

[10:44] Gallenite: That’s precisely why I always argued against the Archetype/Class/Subclass system in EQ2, even before I was in charge.  If I can’t play an Enchanter alt on day one, for instance, I’m never going to roll a second caster to find out if they’re any fun.

[10:45] Qhue: Yup it was a flawed concept for sure

[10:45] Qhue: Turned me off the whole thing

[10:45] Gallenite: And I was really sad to see that the content flaw of it got extended out through AoC — Same experience, single player, 1-20?

[10:46] Qhue: AoC did have people hit 80 and reroll new alts… but lord help them they took their level 5 alts, snuck off the newbie island using a bug and then got them apprenticed to level 79 to join AOE grinding groups….

[10:46] Gallenite: Whether through intentional planning or lucky intuition, WoW happened upon the correct happy medium - There’s multiple areas, some share, so when you replay, you can end up with 10-20 hours of purely 100% brand new game experience.  More if you try out the other alignment.  It was very smart.

[10:47] Qhue: Actually AoC 1-20 is lots of fun the first time around and if you pick a different archetype you actually get a different single-player part of the game 1-20 the second time around.  they had 4 different 1-20 storylines that interrelated

[10:47] Gallenite: Are you staring at the same geometry the whole time?

[10:47] Qhue: You are and thats a sucky part, but the 1-20 region has 5-6 different zones all of which are very different in geographical context

[10:47] * Gallenite nods

[10:48] Gallenite: But that still goes to my point - It’s great they did that with stories, but so much of the MMO experience is visual.  Replaying inside the same visuals simply doesn’t have the same effect on user engagement.

[10:48] Qhue: So the 1-20 game is actually like a fairly decent single player game and quite polished on its own

[10:49] Qhue: If they had 4 different starting areas and accompanying storylines then the replayability of 1-20 would be enhanced

[10:49] Gallenite: Yep, however, thanks to The Box, they didn’t have time to do any such thing - They couldn’t roll them out over time in a meaningful way if they chose, for instance. The demands of The Box required that all those races and classes be there on day one, so into the same newbie visuals bucket they go.

[10:49] Gallenite: “Flawed model driving broken games” rears its ugly head again.

[10:49] Qhue: They seem to have had the idea of having 20-40 be three seperate quest / dungeon / overland areas that you could interchange but ran out of steam.

[10:50] Qhue: I tried to do all of 20-40 in my “homeland” so I could go and do the other 2 with alts… but I just ran out of content before I got to the requisite level

[10:50] * Gallenite nods

[10:51] Qhue: Ended up doing every quest in the whole freaking game (especially the grey ones) just for exp / something to do because you got full exp credit even for grey quests

[10:51] Gallenite: Balancing consumption time of a given area of content is definitely one of the more time intensive efforts a team can take - And since it takes so long, it tends to not be able to get done correctly.

[10:51] Qhue: Most people just ignored quests even the first time around and just did AoE grinding in one spot from 20-80 or even from 5-80

[10:52] Qhue: I would have shot myself… I still did the AoE thing myself in those same groups just because I was bored to tears and out of content to do…but I hated it

[10:53] Qhue: They even fell back on the “daily quest” thing and created 4 little solo mini dungeons you can do each day that scale automatically to your level.  After the 15th time of doing the exact same little mini dungeon by yourself you want to just stop.

[10:55] Gallenite: Yep.  The tolerance for that kind of thing is likely pretty low, unless the rewards are on the high end of the scale for going through it.  (WoW example again: People grind heroics not because they love heroics, but because they love badges and how overpowering the rewards are for the time spent.)

[10:55] Qhue: The sad part is that when I was 40 I had people tell me “quick level up to 50 so we can do this dungeon!” and then when I got to 50 it was “level up to 60 so we can do this dungeon!” and in fact I never went to any of those places

[10:56] Gallenite: Yep.  That’s the unfortunate fate of the effort invested in developing mid-level dungeons.  They’re very transitory.

[10:56] Qhue: They did implement the shared dungeon concept ALA Guk that people have been claiming was a classic element that needed to be ressurected and just as in Vanguard it was a horrible unmitigated disaster

[10:57] Gallenite: Shared instances are for people who have a fondness for the past.  I enjoyed the hell out of them, but they’re just not viable content at this point.

[10:58] Qhue: I could see pseudo-shared instances.  An instance that is linked to a guildtag or is semi-private.  So you could have a few groups in the place and socializing but not truly public

[10:59] Gallenite: Yep - I could see that as having some good Fun potential.

[11:00] Qhue: That way you can have the fun social aspect and shared experience in a way that you dont get if yer not physically in the same place.   Hearing battles in shout or whatever… going to rescue friends etc.

[11:00] Gallenite: Yep.

[11:01] Gallenite: However, do it the wrong way, and it just becomes a new type of raiding.  ;)  It’d be a fine line to walk.

• 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.

In the meanwhile, a sign that I may have spent some part of the last few years losing touch with reality:

We have a pretty nice looking Dodge-somethingorother rental car up here.  Nothing extravagant, just enough to get from point A to B a few times this week.

Revelation while parking it earlier:  I didn’t even know they made cars without power locks anymore.

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.)

Sites that use “click here to read the rest” get on my nerves, too.

I’d only ever proofed it in Sage before. Bluntly, I didn’t even know the “/feed” url existed.

(This is the kind of professional blogger I am: I unpack a tarball, assume that Wordpress isn’t actually using my host to support terrorism,  periodically pound my head into the keyboard, and every three months accidentally hit the Publish button bringing you the valuable content that you see before you now.)

For the elite six of you who read this: Let me know if it’s broken or not for your reader - Happy to look into fixing it if it’s annoying anyone.

I can tell whenever one of them starts out in their first C++ classes, because I start getting asked questions about iostreams, and the questions are almost always about use of esoteric manipulators.

People are intimidated that they’re never going to be able to understand all of the arcane complexities of this built-in system that’s taught to them on day one, which they assume their future livelihood may depend on.

A line and a half of code from one of our servers jumped out at me just now.

They’re reasonably indicative of all of the professionally-created C++ projects I’ve ever worked around.

Here you go:

    // iostreams can suck it
    FILE* fp = fopen( ...

To anyone who asks in the future: You’re safe, guys. Just make it through the class.

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.