Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

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

One of the reasons that I let this site fall out of date is that somewhere along the line I fell into the habit of trying to “perfectly” compose my posts.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

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

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

What’s been going on?

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

IMGDC Micro-recap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other random bits from the show:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Scott

Richard Bartle has woken the periodic “Why is Fantasy the dominant MMO genre?” beast at TerraNova, and it demands to feed on our attention.

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?”

Reposted from the EQ2 forums:

December 2007 Producer’s Letter. Part 1: Coda

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

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

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

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

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

I will miss you all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time,

Scott Hartsman
Senior Producer Emeritus, EverQuest II

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

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

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

- Scott

To paraphrase a smart guy named Jake Smith:

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

Downsides:

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

Upside:

• This doesn’t happen.

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

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

- Scott

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Scott

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

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

And then there were thousands of Sarnaks running around.

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

I’ll take that as a win.

…than watching files go from place to place.

Watching files not go from place to place.

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

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

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

No pressure.

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

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

But everyone’s united in looking forward to tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

• Ogrebear has some seriously nice looking Kunark beta spoilage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you tomorrow morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besides, it has LOLvargs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good on ‘em.