…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…
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.
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.
There’s an interesting debate going around about designers and scripting.
Those who are good at it like it. People who have cleaned up after those who are bad at it try to keep it out of their projects at all costs.
In other breaking news, the sky is blue, pie is tasty, and the cake is a lie.
For those who want additional context, allow me to take a crack at a definition.
(tr.v.) Scripting:
1. non-programmers writing programs in substandard programming environments
1a. …leading to debugging said programs with tools that would have sucked in the early 1980’s
2. an amazingly powerful and useful prototyping and development tool when wielded in the right hands
3. a painful and frustrating experience for all parties, not entirely unlike having intimate relations with a capascin-coated cheese grater when the wrong hands are forced to wield it
4. a terrible idea that can destroy the future of entire projects by making them infinitely less maintainable and extendable
5. the performance killer that you wish you never met
6. a fantastic idea that can make the difference between getting the project done right and not getting it done at all
7. a tool that people ask for when they don’t know what tools they need to complete a given job
7b. …or aren’t yet sure what the job is in the first place, but are positive they’ll need to be able to do everything
8. a great way of helping your staff grow into becoming better, more creative, more expressive developers
Pick as many as you like. They can all been true. Sometimes even on the same project.
Those results above are a small sample of permutations of answers to the following questions:
1) What project objective(s) are you using it for?
2) Who’s using it?
3) Do they need to use it, or do they have alternatives?
4) Which language is it?
5) In what ways can that language interact with your particular system?
There are far too many dimensions of “Scripting” for it to boil down into a simple good vs. bad argument. I’m busy as hell at work this week, but I’ll try to argue some of them tomorrow, and probably end up disagreeing with myself in the process.
Update of the day:
Still safe here. Haven’t been evacuated and betting that we’re not going to be. The Witch Creek fire’s about 5 miles north of here, but blowing west toward the water, not south.
Work remains shut down, since we’re all conserving power and keeping people off the streets.
We’ve got some folks doing remote work, but the events here are playing merry hell with our beta update schedule (entirely on hold) and the remaining dev time for the expansion. The added stress definitely doesn’t help.
As for the fire, it’s hard to track what we see from here with the reality of what’s going on. If you were over here without watching the news, you’d think that Sunday was the worst day and that it’s been getting better since. Exactly the opposite of what’s been happening.
Sunday, we had the smoke blowing this way and the coat of ash-snow on everything. If you’ve never seen it, picture standing about 30 feet downwind from a campfire. Same exact smell and effect. Two days later with the fires expanded, thanks to the wind shift it’s been reasonably calm.
I’ll take that luck. Here’s hoping it stays that way.
As Craig, Tami, Alan and Raph mentioned, we’ve got some wildfires down here today. There are about 100k acres already gone so far, and everyone’s been asked to stay off the roads and cell phones. A pretty huge swath of neighborhoods have already been evacuated.
At work, SOE games will only be having limited services available until this clears up. To Smed’s credit, he’s never been the kind of guy to fuck around when it comes to the occasional local emergency, always trying to get the word out as early as possible that people should stay home and take care of their families.
As for me, everything’s perfectly all right down this direction. To those who’ve checked in already, thanks for asking.
Some smoke and ash, and a whole lot of wind, but the fires are still far enough north to where there’s no immediate problem.
Have a few friends and pets over, and we’re making the best of it while being glued to the TV.
Any other friends who got booted from their place and need somewhere to hang out a while, you know how to find me.
Be safe, all.
I’ve been sitting on this draft for a couple weeks, but seeing this article come up in Google Alerts pushed me into sending it out. I tend to not post unless I have a completely formed thought to communicate. This time, no such luck.
It’s no secret that people use software for all kinds of things other than what they’re originally intended to accomplish. Any coder who’s written a system for someone else’s use can tell you at least one tale of a horrific stretch of functionality that pushed a system far outside what it was ever meant to accomplish. Sometimes those attempts result in fantastic things, and other times they explode in new and exciting ways.
MMOs are great in that we get to see and hear firsthand what happens when people use our software for purposes that never occurred to us. It’s even better when that use is amazingly cool, useful in a very practical sense, and something we can help foster.
The third page of the article talks about how researchers at Northwestern University (namely, an enterprising grad student named Yolanda Rankin) began experimenting with using EverQuest II as a way to teach english as a second language. She’s been through one study with some interesting results you can read at the link, and is currently starting on a larger scale study also using our game.
When we were first discussing implementing character voices in the game, people using it this way wasn’t something that was on the radar. I’d call this one of the better unintended uses I’ve heard of, and hopefully it does turn into something fantastic for them.
What’s the amazing revelation here? There really isn’t one, other than to say that it’s exceptionally satisfying to be able to point out some of the more positive and socially redeeming aspects of gaming.
Why stop with ESL? If you ask me, education at all levels would be a lot better off if there were more compelling ways such as this to get people excited about, and keep people interested in, learning. Talk about an industry overdue for a revolution. I can only speak from my own experience with schools from kindergarten to college, but suffice it to say that I walked away feeling that the approved, traditional methods were something short of the most compelling way to spend sixteen years.
Here’s to hoping that this is one envelope that continues to get pushed in all the right directions.
A comment was raised on f13.net yesterday that I see a lot every time an MMO doesn’t make it all the way out the door. Emphasis is mine on the parts that caught my attention:
True, but I have to think that someone has managed to get people to collaborate in other venues… and so we are not talking about creating something completely new here. I am just having a hard time figuring out why skilled people (I assume some of the people making MMOs actually have the skill to work on other types of projects and just Chose an MMO) given a LOT of money (yea I still see 10’s of millions as a lot) cannot get through a successful design/production phase. It seems that there is something inherent in the MMO beast itself that kills the process.
There definitely is. And it’s a lot more than a single “something.” Some of the issues have to do with MMOs in particular, and others are compounded by the types of people who are most likely to attempt to develop them. Generally very sharp and motivated people.
My reply clipped from the same thread:
(Disclaimers: Personal opinions here only, unrelated to SOE. I haven’t even remotely been involved with G&H or Perpetual in any capacity and don’t know a thing about their game. My comments are speaking entirely in generalities. Dealerships negotiate their own prices. Beware of falling rock.)
A few observations from past MMOs:
#1: MMOs are still really young. To a lot of the people working on them, it very much is creating something entirely new. Compare to movies or single player games, for instance. It’s less of a challenge to staff those types of projects up with people who’ve worked on them before, in all of the right positions. Doing the same on a high-budget MMO remains next to impossible.
I don’t mean “key management” or “leads” like you see in studio announcements and press releases all the time. I mean everyone other than a small number of entry-level folks. Until you’ve done it once, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.
I don’t know of a single high-budget MMO that’s been staffed with that kind of experience throughout, simply because those people just plain don’t exist yet in sufficient numbers. We’re just now at the point where it’s starting to become possible to build teams like that.
Just a guess, but I’m betting that you don’t hear from the $100m movie set: “Yeah, Bob the Key Grip has done this once before, and he picked out some really sharp guys from a construction site downtown to do the rest. He’ll teach ‘em what to do.”
Leading to…
#2: The things that make for a great demo and pitch that get you funding, publishing deals, et al, are a much smaller part of making a great MMO than they are of making any other kind of game, and it’s easy to lose sight of that.
This is painful for MMOs in particular because of the unique (huge) number of critical, non-sexy things that you have to succeed at, where failing at any one of them can entirely sink your game:
- Pipelines
- Tools
- Infrastructure
- Stability (again, doubling the work - the client and all the servers)
- Scalability
- Stability
- Security (added this in for the blog post - Can’t trust that client)
- Performance (optimize both that client and all those server processes)
- Oh, and..StabilityIn any development effort that has a finite set of resources ($$$ + time), the more you invest in the flash elements, the less you can invest in the far less sexy parts. (Core files aren’t sexy.)
Which, in turn, leads to…
#3: Wild misscoping. It’s a common newbie (and overly-optimistic-veteran) mistake to scope far too optimistically, as the schedules end up based mostly on the flash elements and end user features.
If a person is new at making one of these (especially noted with people from non-MMO games backgrounds), they tend to be more likely to focus on scoping dev time out with more of an emphasis on the visible features than the budget will end up allowing, and not enough on the critical, non-visible features. Those, coincidentally, end up taking far longer than anyone ever predicts.
The team who scopes 80% of their time on the visible features and 20% on the rest is going to make a far different game than the one who scopes 25% features, 25% tools/pipelines, and 50% stability/scalability/infrastructure.
If your timeline has some elasticity, you can make up for misscoping by stretching the schedule, and still go on to make a great game. If you can’t, Bad Things happen.
There are plenty more things that go wrong, and from all different angles, but from the production “why can’t people seem to get these out the door?” angle, these are the ones that’ve been the first to jump out at me.
As for the things that go wrong from the other angles? Now that’s a subject for another post entirely.
Haven’t abandoned the blog - Typing original content with the busted wrist is a lot more difficult than it really should be. Three weeks to go!
In the meanwhile, here’s an Interview with Ten Ton Hammer that went up yesterday.
The game-neutral concept that’s touched on here is games adapting to their players.
The rules have changed a lot since the days of there only being a single online world choice at any given time. You’ve got to learn as much as you can about the audience that you have, and make sure you’re meeting their needs as best as you can.
Another “duh” concept that falls cleanly into the “more than just the right thing to do; it’s also good business” bucket.
Relevant clip from the interview:
Savanja: What prompted the decision to move nearly all of the heroic content from the overland zones?
Scott Hartsman: The fact that overland heroic content went largely unused was the biggest driver in this decision. It doesn’t take a long visit in any of the global level channels to infer that very few people go through the effort of grouping to adventure in an overland zone, and the logged combat data backed this up. Solo/Duo-capable outdoor content gets played; heroic content very seldom does.
It’s a case of the game adapting to the way people actually play, compared to how they were originally assumed to want to play. People don’t “group up, then wander around looking for something to do” in open-ended hour-after-hour six person play.
People are objective-based, generally conscious of how much time they have available to play, and tend to want to group with people whose goals for the moment match theirs. Taken as a whole, they form groups with the express purpose of going out to do something specific. Many also prefer to know ahead of time that they’re embarking on an adventure they have time to complete. In EQII, both of those specific attributes of grouping can best be addressed via dungeons and instances.
On top of all of that, the split between outdoor/indoor also reduces frustration on both ends and it sets an expectation that people can begin to rely on. Solo/duo folks can consistently enjoy their own play style by not encountering unattainable group content in the overlands. Those group folks who do play-by-wander won’t be frustrated by all of the ‘useless’ solo creatures there – They know to head indoors.
It’s a common misconception that people universally hate change. People only hate change that doesn’t make intuitive sense when they try to reconcile it with their own individual experience and, more importantly, their desires for their future in your world.
That’s the part that you really don’t want to screw up - Losing the trust of the people who actually do see themselves as having a future there. Those are the ones to foster.
The big-ego days are long gone, unless you’re interested in setting yourself up for a potentially painful fall. When you examine your motives for making online entertainment, if you don’t see yourself deep down as being the provider of a service (yes, on the development side), be ready to eventually lose out to someone who does.
(Tip of the hat to Chris Cao who was the first person I heard use the phrase “people are objective-based” in neatly summing up that concept in a lot fewer words than I’d ever been able to.)
- Scott
I build things. These things are usually related to online entertainment (MMOs) and social experiences.