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.

Another one of the more interesting sessions at IMGDC was (coincidentally) also put on by Dr. Bartle: “Government Interference: How much [pain] can you take?”

The session presented a number of hypothetical situations, some more potentially possible than others, aimed at finding out at exactly what levels of “involvement” would cause us to make the call to just plain throw in the towel.

His initial posting is linked below and my reply is inlined.

Link: TerraNova: The Point Of No Return

This was a great talk. Scary, but an interesting (I hope) intellectual exercise.

MMO developers have to be at least part masochist in order to thrive in the unique challenges of our chosen environments: business, technical, operational, and across nearly every other axis related to MMO development.

Devs are sometimes perceived as simply not wanting to give up any amount of control, or as people who enjoy screwing with others’ experiences as little tin gods of their own worlds, and so on, which is a view that’s both unfortunate and simplistic.

The big threshhold for me wasn’t related to anything like that. Bring on new ways of thinking, as long as the net effect is an added value to the customer experience as a whole.

However, in the hypothetical world where:

• Virtual goods have real world value.
• Players own the virtual goods, instead of having rights to use them
  • …causing volumes of property law to come into play
• Where I am liable for changes in value in a customer’s now-owned, real-world-valued item
• In which I can not alter the game in any meaningful way that affects said goods’ value
  • Whether that’s via releasing an expansion, or buffs/nerfs, or an unfortunately introduced dupe bug.
    • It’s not just “nerfs” - Improving item/class A causes an implicit devaluation of items/classes B-Z.
• That takes place in a world where value now implies that item-drops, xp rewards, et al, are gambling
  • …making us subject to gambling regulations as well
• Where I can’t push the liability for potential changes in value downstream

I might as well be in the business of making securities trading software on Wall St. or slot machine software in Nevada, both of which when taken individually, are regulated far less than the Worst Of Both Worlds hypothetical above.

Practically speaking, there are plenty of places in which a developer can build either of those, make quite a bit more money in the process, and work far more sane hours.

Of course, in our spare time, I imagine many of us would still make online games, just because the act of making them remains fun.

We just couldn’t let anyone else play them.

Yeah. Let’s not go there.

I don’t necessarily see this worst-of-both-worlds scenario actually happening, but this wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve been accused of having a hair too much faith in humanity, as is the case with so many developers - We just want to entertain.

The conversation was all over the map and has some info on how we’ve been spending the last few months.

Cameron did a great job cleaning up an hour’s worth of empassioned tangents.

One thing that I either said wrong or got lost in translation: At the time we left our previous jobs, we did have a specific direction in mind and began heading there straight away. Some of our seemingly random experimentation has been a result of confirming or discarding parts of a larger plan. Others have been entirely random: “Hey! This Looks Neat…”

If you want to play with the Facebook app/game/toy/thing that’s mentioned in the article, you can find it here. It’ll happily generate either positive or insulting messages to send your friends.

The theory went: Given that people’s first experience with an MMO tends to frame how they view everything else from then on, if we introduce future players to the space with too much to sell them in worlds that don’t have enough depth to them, are we risking them not finding the experiences as intriguing as they are those of us who occupy those spaces in this generation, and have enjoyed them thoroughly in the past?

The old-guard developer in me nods emphatically at that thought, but after thinking about it on returning home, I’m not as sure.

While I was in the middle of assisting another progress bar in its epic journey from Left to Right yesterday, a friend and I found ourselves laughing at a subtle, modern reference on an item description that neither one of us had stopped to read before. (For the record it was: “This is my booterang. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”)

That example is a far cry from (say) a 2d, commerce-specific world like a Habbo Hotel, of course, but I realized that moments like that are what I play these games for now - If we can both laugh about something like that from 2000 miles away, and I find the experience now just as entertaining as I did back in the old days, is it any less of an experience?

It is a different one, for certain, but in a way it seems even more personal, since sharing that humor also implies a real-life connection to knowing where this friend and I both heard that quote, on top of the shared world-specific knowledge.

That’s an element of humor that likely wouldn’t have existed in MMOs ten or even five years ago. In ways such as that, the MMOs that we have today are already considerably lighter than the ones that I started out with.

Did I trade one indescribable thing for one that’s a little more describable?

As long as I’m entertained by the experience, having fun with friends, does it matter?

What do you think? What is the indescribable “thing” that attracts you to MMOs? Has it changed over the time you’ve played?

Do you feel like you’ve actively lost something in the process, or do you feel that you’ve seen your tastes evolve a little?

As for me, I’m still not sure, but it’s something that I’m going to be keeping a closer eye on now.

Thanks, Richard.

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

It’s prompted a number of replies and other posts that bring up some good points:

• Risk-averse development
• Convenience of having ‘magic’ to explain things
• The existence of Tolkein
• The existence of AD&D
• Likeliness of appealing to both genders
• …and others…

I think that all of those arguments have some degree of merit - There are aspects of each that are very true. There are also great replies from Damion Schubert and Michael Scoggin there in the TN thread.

Michael’s point that “…humans have more universal reaction to organic stimulus.” is the closest to the answer that I’ve always given.  It’s great to see someone actually having studied this.

As for my take, even before you get into development risk, or D&D, or Tolkein, or any of the rest of the above:

Fantasy resonates primarily for three reasons:

1. We (humans, both men and women) are just plain wired to be instinctively affected by it in a way that other genres don’t cause, and…
2. For the majority of the (US/EU) playing audience of both genders, that wiring is initially built upon by the fact that it’s the first fiction we’re ever exposed to, which is when most of our fondest/strongest memories are formed, and..
3. …there’s a good chance that it’s most likely the genre that woke our imaginations in the first place.

Pick a subject at random.  What’s the first thing that you think of?

I’ll pick “winter.”  The strongest/fondest/first memory is a blizzard from when I was about 7, building snow forts with my friends Lee and Tony in giant 12 foot drifts up against the cinder-block walls of a garage, with a shiny red aluminum snowshovel while wearing a yellow winter jacket and dark blue mittens.

Or I could pick “music.” The first flash of a memory that makes me smile is my mother playing singalong-type folk songs on her classical acoustic, sitting next to the heavy coffee table on the floor in our living room in the house we lived in when I was 5, taping us singing along on an ancient cassette recorder.

My point is: Early memories are sticky. 

…and the early memories that first woke your imagination are sticky beyond ever being dislodged.

When it comes to fictional attachment, forget about Tolkein or AD&D, I’m talking even earlier:

• Snow White
• Jack and the Beanstalk
• Cinderella
• Hansel and Gretel

Just from four stories at random, you have fantasy concepts burned in: Dwarves, Witches, Princesses, Heroes, Poison, Castles*, Giants, underdogs triumphing over stronger evil…and lots and lots of Magic.

([*] Sorry, Richard - To a lot of us “castles” are a fantasy element, not something you can wander down the road a ways to see.

You don’t need to have been exposed to all of them.  As long as you’ve been exposed to enough of these tales, you already have a solid foundation.

To paraphrase Raph (and I’ll apologize in advance for mangling the concept) one part of Fun is the idea of building on things that we already know, by learning more about them and being rewarded for it.

In most of us, there’s already this functional, working base of Fantasy bits there just waiting to be awoken and built upon.  That’s what drives us to Tolkein, to AD&D, and to Fantasy worlds that reward us for building on this pre-existing knowledge.

Things that we enjoy later are (relatively speaking) acquired tastes.  I enjoy Sci Fi worlds a lot now, but I enjoy them for what they are - Crafted places of varying degrees of quality and fun - They don’t have the same kind of difficult-to-define resonance that Fantasy does.  They take effort to get “lost” in.

Like I said in the subject, I’d definitely love to be wrong on this one, because I do agree that it’s limiting us.  I’d love to see the market more open to first-timer success in other interesting directions.

(When I say first-timer, I mean that we’re not going to be able to count, for example, Blizzard’s eventual World of Star-iablo’s success here - That will be a victory built on the strength of a brand, not a victory for genre diversity.)

Even if I am right, I don’t believe for a moment that all is lost. 

As the market continues to grow, which it’s going to do in all forms of online entertainment, even if 50-70% of the experiences out there remain fantasy based, there are plenty of chances for success in other genres.

As the whole pie grows, the non-fantasy slice will grow along with it.  The majority may continue to cut their teeth on Fantasy, then they’ll acquire tastes for other worlds.  And so the cycle continues.

Compounding that, as time goes on and tools improve, it’s going to become more and more possible to make compelling worlds for less money.  The days when “success = 250,000+ paying customers” are not just going away, they’re already long behind us.

As it stands right now, as many other games have proven, you don’t even need six figures of users to make your development money back, turn a profit,  continue to build a healthy business, a solid brand, and be able to do good by your customers.  Those stories just don’t make nearly as interesting of headlines as “WoW scores its 15,000,000th user!”

The presence of the juggernaut has changed the average observer’s perspective of what “success” is by a fair bit, but it hasn’t changed the reality.  On the contrary.  It’s actually created a lot of interesting opportunities.

In that light, I think that “Why Fantasy?” isn’t really the most interesting question to ask.

The more interesting one is: “Okay.  It’s Fantasy.  We accept that.  How do we best expand from here?”

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