f13.net

I debated putting this in the current EA / Mythic thread, but I didn't wanna derail that one. Trip, Schild etc. will move this and call me a douchebag if necessary I'm sure..

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/09/02/mythic-vp-on-hellgate-and-age-of-conan/

Mythic VP and lead “Warhammer Online” designer Mark Jacobs told me some of the things needed to make a successful MMO. But he also said if you’re looking to make an online game nowadays, the odds are against you.

“If you look at the numbers, MMOs have the highest failure rates of any entertainment product,” Jacobs said. Going all the way back 11 years to the release of “Ultima Online,” the first MMO to reach 100,000 subscribers, he said that there have only a been handful of successful MMOs compared to the number of them being developed.

I mentioned how the measure of success nowadays might be if your game still exists in a year. “It does seem that way,” he said, “and it is just tremendously sad when you look at the amount of money and effort that goes into MMOs.”

In our recent conversation about the state of online games, we also touched on why last year’s “Hellgate: London” went under, and what the troubled “Age of Conan” can do to prevent the same fate.


First, we discussed “Hellgate: London,” the online action-RPG was made by Jacobs’ long-time friend Bill Roper. Though Roper had experience as VP of Blizzard North working on the “Diablo” series, his company Flagship Studios recently closed its doors following the release of “Hellgate,” its first title, last October. So what went wrong?

“I know for a fact that sometimes just having talent is not enough,” Jacobs said after a long sigh. “You need leadership and you need patience. And what’s most important — something that so many developers forget — is you also need to deflate the ego a little bit. You really have to remember that as good as you were then — ‘Diablo’ was a great game — you’re not always going to be right… I think for ‘Hellgate,’ that was part of the problem.”

He also said that no matter how great you think your game is, developers must listen to the community. “It doesn’t mean you have to follow what they say, but you always have to listen,” he said. “The test of greatness is to know how to look at it and either incorporate it or learn from it. We might listen to the wrong advice, but we always listen. That’s how I think all developers have to be because nobody is that smart and nobody is right all the time.”

On the topic of the listening to the community, I wondered what Jacobs thought about Funcom’s May-released MMO “Age of Conan” and the trouble the company has had in terms of delivering promises to its fanbase. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime recently said that 40 percent of “WoW” players who left for “Conan” have since returned.

“If I was a ‘WoW’ subscriber, and I played another game hoping it would be great and it wasn’t, of course I would come back,” he said. “I’m not saying ‘Conan’ sucks but obviously the people who left it thought it sucked, otherwise they wouldn’t have left it. And the same thing may happen to us… ‘Conan’ had great sales initially, but then [Funcom] failed to follow up with continued great sales. If you’re not selling boxes anymore, if players aren’t talking about how good your game is, then obviously people are not happy with it.”

With Jacobs having played the game and having read fan postings on both the “Warhammer” and “Age of Conan” forums, he thought that Funcom should have delayed the game. “I think that the greatest mistake that they made was not listening and not learning from what had gone before,” Jacobs said, referring to the launch issues of Funcom’s “Anarchy Online” in 2001. “When they looked at ['Age of Conan'] when they were ready to launch, I can’t imagine how they didn’t see the issues that other people saw. According to their annual reports, they had plenty of money. They should’ve looked at it and said, ‘We need to delay this game.’ There are probably reasons I’m not aware of… but I think that’s their biggest sin.”

Jacobs said not all was lost for “Conan,” but with “Warhammer” and another “WoW” expansion on the way, they’ve now lost their head start. “If they’re willing to spend the time and the money to fix the things that — according to the players — are broken, and put in the things that players say they didn’t put in, they can turn it around,” he said. “But now they’re going to have to leapfrog over us and then leapfrog over Blizzard in order to bring back a ton of players — that’s going to be tough. They won’t be what they could’ve been.”

Though “Age of Conan” is competition, Jacobs told me he actually wanted the game to do well. “At some level I wanted ‘Conan’ to succeed because for the last few years people have been saying it’s all Blizzard and nobody else can do it,” he said. “‘Only Blizzard can get those kind of numbers,’ and so far they’ve been right. But now it’s our turn.”

He added, “If we don’t succeed with EA behind us, the ‘Warhammer’ IP behind us, with one of the most experienced teams in the industry, that’s not going to be good for the industry. We need to show the world that it’s not just Blizzard who can make a great game, and that the audience is absolutely willing to try new things and to play a game other than ‘WoW.’”

He's talking alot of smack lately. I guess he's confident WAR can back it up.

Just a gut feeling, but I don't think WAR will do any better than AoC.

I agree.  Remember your first MMO.  Remember how fun it was OMG playing with other people on-line, killing monsters and getting treasure.  Remember the challenge?  Now think back to your second MMO - same stuff but you know what? That MMO gameplay is really quite boring.

I sure hope it does, so everyone can be stuck playing Blizzard's games for the next 20 years.  That will fucking rule. 

I disagree. Assuming a technically proficient launch (got to have that caveat in there), I reckon WAR will drag slightly behind conan with ~500-650k initial box sales in the first month but hold momentum and continue to steadily grow subscriptions over time, the sign of a healthy game. It'll never scare WoW, but will manage to retain around 800k-1.2m sustained subscribers in the west with potentially much more if they properly leverage asia.

I dunno about you guys, but I was pretty deeply surprised by AoC's initial success, and I'm revising all my predictions upwards. It's safe to say that while WAR is in many ways less ambitious than AoC, it does work, it's polished for a MMO, and is just overall a better game.

I'm still thinking this game is going to be around the 500k mark.  It's just not offering up anything all that novel to the market.  The best thing it has going for it right now is that, other than WoW, there's really nothing else MMO'ish worth playing. 

NOTE: I'm talking North American numbers.  Europe may buoy this title up a bit. 

WAR will be another flop that can't surpass peak EQ1 numbers, and the failure of the non-Blizzard subscription MMO industry will be complete.  They will all kneel before Zod and fuck off to make browser games and pretend that's "really the future".

So don't try, biatches!  :why_so_serious:


Bolded part is true... if you ignore the movie industry (which can spend 3x what the most expensive MMOs cost to make over the same time period and flop, and which release numerous titles per year) and the music industry (which has literally thousands of releases per year, so your individual chance of success isn't great).

In actuality, it appears if you can get your MMO out the door and launch, it is likely to survive for a bit. There are some notable exceptions - the pseudo-MMO HG:L, Motor City Online, and so on - but a MMO appears a lot more likely to die its death in development than release.

Of course, if 'success' is defined as 'money hats for even the janitor', then yes, success is indeed an elusive fellow.


Can someone please link me to the WAR official forums plz? Oh, that's right, Jacobs doesn't believe in forums (http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?p=216182). Which has to include the unofficial ones as well. So where does this 'listen to the community' actually fit in?



Irony. If WAR doesn't succeed, MMOs are in trouble, but we are humble people.

I know I'm being a bit :uhrr: about this interview, but the spin on it sticks in my craw.

Thousand of beta testers will provide more feedback, just from the in game UI alone, then they can process.

Listening in not the challenge but rather making actionable items from the sea of opinion.

Why is all the tech and management behind MMOs missing from discussions.  Managing large teams, billing systems, support, server farms, build systems, test systems, software deploys, and 24/7 services is not trivial and is a large part of the equation to successfull running an MMO.

Not so much.  It's been a long dry spell since WoW.  Last time we saw flop after flop, people were telling the investment community MMO's were destined to be a minor and unimportant internet fad.  It was DAoC that broke that one, and many circumstances have lined up the same way this time.

If WAR goes down in flames, what's the Next Big Thing?  How many projects will fail to get additional funding?  How many won't get even initial funding?


--Dave

But that stops at the end of beta and every patch from now on reduces the relevancy of anything taken out of beta. Also, beta isn't the live environment, which is a whole different animal.

... also, it now looks like I'm talking to myself unless you pay close attention to the names.  :grin:

When WotLK launches and sells 8 million copies, people will forget a little bit about what happens with WAR. They will remember AoC selling 800k box copies (and I expect WAR will sell similar numbers) as well. It says the market is hungry for an alternative, but the alternative has to be good.

And if another "everything we know about MMOs we learned from WoW" MMO fails to launch, then is it really a bad thing? Or another high fantasy, elves vs orcs extravaganza doesn't make it off design documents, is the MMO industry really worse off?

As for the Next Big Thing: Darkfall.  :grin: :drill: :grin:

The incestuous little "spawn of everquest" MMO industry fails, and meets it's deserved death at the hands of Blizzard.  I can't wait.

No, this isn't supposed to be in green.

I've tried a lot of MMOs, and I have actually recaptured this feeling, albeit only a couple times. Once was WoW. CoH came close. Once, to my great and everlasting surprise, was WAR on preview weekend.

Ok since ya nailed this one Sub, I won't go into that tasteless Darkfall comment above me.

You cannot come off as serious about community when you refuse to create one yourself.

That has always been my #1 complaint about Mythic. They absolutely *suck* at communicating with their customers, no matter how many people inexplicably pat Sanya on the back for her condescending grab bags. I had hoped that with her out of the decision process Mythic might join the real world and host, moderate, and God forbid, participate on their own forums, but apparently the directive came from on high.

Compare Blizzard's feedback on the WotLK beta forums to what Mythic gave back even to their own hand-picked Pendragon testers on the forum they *did* host... ok, no, there's no comparison. Turbine and Cryptic also easily beat Mythic at this game.

I liked DAoC, but everything I've heard about WAR leads me to believe that it's DAoC 2.0. And why should such a game break even double DAoC's numbers? (I predict it will do about the same. Gonna put a pretend internet fiver on that one.)

I'll be glad to be proven wrong. When WAR launches and either I get a free trial, or the unwashed internet masses start crowing about how it is indeed something different.

Till then, not interested.

Some day a developer will actually finish an mmo before they release it... then all will wonder "What was their magic? How did they get all those subscribers?!?" Friggin morons.

Physician, heal thyself.

What do we have that could be considered a spawn of UO (and UO being a success in its own right, still making money after all these years) ? Eve is the only one I can think of. They are making great cash even after a rough start.

I think another sandbox PVP type game could come along and pull very similar numbers or better. Just be different. Make it a post-apoc setting, or cyber-punk....hell, a Battletech/Mechwarrior setting.

Just do something besides elves, swords, and FUCKING diku.

I agree with the lack of non-medieval fantasy MMO that is successful. I never gave SWG / Tabula Rasa a shot but a new setting would definitely feel more 'fresh' than the same elves in different places. I just can't get excited over Warhammer after playing WoW for so long.

With the heavy focus on Battlegrounds it'd only be a matter of time I'll feel like I'm grinding on AV stage 1, 2 ,3 ,4 ,5 ,and 6

Totally agree that Jacobs is full of shit on the "listen to customers" thing, given that this has always been a problem that Mythic has had AND that Jacobs has decided to not run forums because, well, he doesn't want to listen to customers. Oh, sorry, I mean that they have a "magic method" for getting real customer feedback as opposed to those unrepresentative forums which as we know having nothing to do with how people feel. Which raises questions about Jacobs knows about customer reactions to Age of Conan, presumably, since he doesn't believe in and doesn't bother with forums, given that they return no valuable or important information about customer reaction.

Come on. Warhammer has no official forums because if things *do* go wrong in any way, he's hoping that will dampen the reaction and keep the news from spreading too widely. WTG on the "listen to your customers" idea.

Yes the listen to customers but no official forums stance is just retarded.

I played DAoC for 5+ years.  I can assure you that WAR is NOT DAoC 2.  If it were, I'd be more excited about it.  

Like I said, all I've got to go on is that it's got PvE and RvR. And classes and levels. And Waaaargh! (Whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.)

And considering that I liked DAoC, but didn't love it...

It's WoW battlegrounds plus keep tag. It didn't seem very innovative to me. In fact I was bored after a day. If it has more subscribers than LOTRO six months from now I will be surprised.

That's pretty accurate.  The thing that helps WAR is that it's a more accessible PvP experience than either DAoC or WoW, particularly for those that have avoided pvp in the past.  I think it's a decent attempt to mass market a larger scale PvP or RvR game to the average MMO enthusiast.   Sadly, new players haven't discovered that they exist solely to provide targets for people that take their PvP seriously.   

your personal dislike of the genre is influencing your predictions.  at this poing I should be sayin all the "if you hate mmo's why do you post about them" and all that crap.  Then you reply with something about how you like the games, just not how tehy are made and it goes on and on and on.

Cevik is right though.  Most the folks here don't like MMORPGs, and you want them to fail

I'm getting to that point, yeah.

Lack of imagination and balls from all these companies is taking its toll. It's cool though, in another 5 years and 5 more clone failures someone MIGHT try something different.

Rubbish.  Most people here enjoy playing games, including MMOs.  We're all just disappointed that some VERY creative people with 50 million dollar budgets continue to produce the same old derivative stuff.

Never ever ever, combine these words.

If WAR goes down in flames, then the funding dries up, everyone with cash chalks WoW up to a big giant fluke and the guys responsible for making all the shitty games out there are finally out of a job (or, hopefully, will get jobs in other industries where they can do me no harm but still have money and health insurance for their wives and kids).

Then World of Starcraft comes out, sells 15 million copies in the first nanosecond, we strip the world dry of resources just to make enough boxes to sell the game for the first year, and suddenly funding explodes for the mmog market again because WoS (STAR?) has proven that mmogs are capable of selling a bazillion copies if made by a competent group of people.  We get an influx of fresh new developers into the mmog genre because all the old guard got culled in this iteration and suddenly we start to see fresh and innovative ideas that are worth playing.

Hey, I can dream.

EDIT:  More importantly than fresh and innovative ideas (though you'd never guess it by looking at the industry today) is competently created ideas.  Fuck we just want something that works, half the time it doesn't even have to be fun.

WoW needs competition.  Competition drives change and innovation.  When all competition fails in the wake of WoW, we all lose. 

Granted, the massive succes could produce one fabulous outcome: That you can stay niche and still be profitable, just on a smaller scale.  I'd love to see development of a host fo niche titles that all generated modest profit.  It's not a homerun, but it certainly could generate an existence for some very good designers. 

MMORPGS are derivative.  Millions of people like this.

Competition just for the sake of competition isn't good enough.  WoW may need competition, but people creating shitty games like WAR should not be rewarded just because WoW needs competition, it sends the wrong signals.

While true, that has little to do with the comment I made.  MMOG's ARE derivative. They don't have to be.  

Of course... I didn't suggest anything else. Unfortunately, fun is subjective.  In a subjective market one man's "good" is another man's 'crap".  Right now the only metric we have for "fun" is financial success.  I'm not convinced that financial success = fun.  Blizzard is successful for many more reasons than just the mechanics of their game. 

I'm on dangerous ground here so I'll tread carefully. Firstly I am clearly not Mark Jacobs, just in case anyone wants to try projecting my opinions on him or Mythic. Secondly I don't work for Mythic nor do I have any special insight into the corporate culture there. All of the following is from stuff that's been around, conversations and interviews with Mythic people and my own experience. For the record I don't believe that Mark has ever said he doesn't think forums are a good idea. All the quotes I can find from him on the subject are generally pro forums but anti official ones.

Feedback.
This is basically my job and I guess that Mythic's CM team have a similar brief. You don't need official forums for that, you can take the community's temperature over a broad range of external sites just as easily as you can from one monstrous self hosted forum. For subjective stuff this is pretty trivial to do, you surf around, take notes, copy a few pertinent points from particularly insightful posts and go for it. It's not rocket surgery.
For more specific and objective feedback then forums are not your main data point anyway. This is why you have server metrics and stats tools. Jeff gave a pretty detailed answer to this at our Paris press event (there's a video floating around of this interview if you care to hunt for it) where he explains that for things like balancing they have so many data points to work from, they can pull stats on almost everything that happens in the game to determine exactly what the true state of balance is. How many times a particular class dies vs another class, average damage dealt by specific abilities, killing blows dealt by a career all of that kind of stuff. The data set is huge and can be parsed in all kinds of fun ways.

Outward communication.
Again this is partly my job and I have a number of tools to do that. Firstly I am active on all the main forums. Anyone who would have been part of the community on an official forum will be active on at least one of the big community sites. I have no fear that people will get left by the wayside as a result. Secondly we have the official sites where we can publish news and general info that we want large numbers of our players to be aware of. If people somehow manage to miss all of that then the chances are they would have missed it if we had official forums as well.

You don't need official forums to have a thriving community. There are good reasons to have them and good reasons not to, it's not an automatic choice.

The derivative nature of mmogs is far from the problem.  The problem has a lot more to do with competence in the creation of new mmogs.  WoW was a huge success because they just took everyone's ideas and did them right.  The first few months were full of "ohhh, this is what [insert game here] would have been like if they had done it the right way!"

I hear lots of talk that Blizzard happened upon a succesful game on accident, that it's not really fun and that they are somehow our giant robotic overlords who are forcing random asian kids to subscribe to bolster their numbers (or whatever), yet I never encounter anyone in game that isn't enjoying themselves.  Everyone I know that plays WoW plays it because they have fun playing it.

You also have to credit the players for some of WoW's success.  Player-generated UI elements did a lot to overcome the deficiencies that WoW released with.  

As for "doing things right", I take issue with that.  Wal Mart is very financially successful and has one of the most streamlined processes in the business world.  Many people argue that Wal Mart is Sears done right.  While pandering to the masses can make you rich, it doesn't make you good.   Blizzard did well to mainstream the MMO genre.  Was this a good thing from a gaming/creative standpoint?  I'm not so certain.  They certainly did demonstrate what a large number of inexperienced gamers were looking for.  I applaud them for that.  

I think the WAR folks are looking to grab a few of those people who look at WoW and say, "Hmm, I wonder what it would look like if they did Real World PvP the right way?"  There might only be a handful of people who care because the rest are happy with BGs and Raids all day.  To me WoW has created a near perfect example of the Massive Single-Player online game.  I love the single player experience, whether it is PvE or PvP.  The movement, the gameplay, the visuals... they all work.  And, it is easy to jump in, do some quick killing, and jump out.  I will play WoTLK when it comes out, and probably stick for 2 months... until I get hit with the raid grind.  THat is, unless they learn some tricks from WAR and figure out how to do Real World PvP that... matters somehow.  Right now WAR is the kind of game I will keep on my computer just because it has a greater chance to deliver the kind of gaming experience I am looking for than any other game.  They have also done something unique.  They have actually done something that Blizzard has attempted (open world PvP)... and WAR did it better.  I have full faith that Blizzard will watch, learn, and improve.  But, at least the WAR guys have a decent starting place from which to make their own improvements.

But this is just one of the things that Blizzard did right.  We had always ASKED to be allowed to create our own UI elements with a toolset as rich as what Blizzard provided, but until WoW released we were always told "no no, if we let you do these things, then the dirty evil players will cheat.. CHEAT I TELL YOU."

No one before or since has allowed UI modding to the degree that WoW has, and it's a big part of their success.

Of course it takes a lot of effort too, there were "cheats" created by the UI (fear trinket macros bound to movement keys being a big one I remember), but instead of blaming the players, Blizzard closes those holes as they appear and apologizes for ever allowing them in the first place.

And had WAR been a solid game that did World PvP the right way they would have had a chance.  I know that PvP being my primary interest in mmogs, I was really looking forward to WAR for quite some time, but it just isn't a good PvP game.  I've listed my big complaints in other threads though so no need for me to repeat them here.. :)

I guess the thing that I'm most frightened of when it comes to WAR is that when it's not hugely successful, everyone is going to blame PvP.  The good news is, WAR appears to be forcing some changes back on to Blizzard when it comes to PvP, so I'll keep my hopes up for WotLK.

Cevik... I have read your complaints, and honestly I think we must have played different games.  I have been in the beta a good while, still am actually though its still under some wierd BTA, and did not experience 1/10 of the issues you had.  All in all WAR combat feels almost EXACTLY like WoW combat to me (yea I have my WoW years of experience...) except that WAR added friendly targets.  The class skills all play out in their own way of course, but that is true anywhere.  The Difference comes in the world design.  There IS NO open-world PvP in WoW outside of random gankfest/guard aggro locations.  It just does not exist.  In that regards... WAR is better.

Also, I think it is a bit too early to talk about WAR in the past tense.  We should at least give them a week into launch maybe?

I think Mythic does listen to the customer.  But for whatever reason, Mythic steers like the Titaniac.  They usually hit the ice burg.  By the time they change course many users have already abandoned ship already.  This whole combat responsiveness issue is their first test to see if they can do better in WAR.

Out of curiosity, do you use the mouse or keybindings?

Please to speak for yourself. I'd like MMORPG's just fine if I could tell most of them apart without looking at the title. They've become like web browsers - minor cosmetic differences wrapping the same inherent gameplay. We've all said that WoW is just Everquest with less suck, but that statement would be true for all but a handful of the MMORPG's out there, both successes and failures. Planetside and Eve are about the only things that are truly distinguishable anymore from the standard MMOG formula.

I love the MMORPG medium. I just think it's stuck in a creative rut of genre-rehashing and needs a good culling. As for wanting MMOG's to fail, if that's what it takes for someone to grow some fucking balls and go against the grain, so be it. Also, just going against the grain isn't enough, you still have to make the game work.

I read this as "I'd like MMORPGS if they were something else entirely than what they are."

no kidding.

Reading is unfair to some.

I'd like the MMOG medium better if there was some fucking variety. I love me some steak, but if I had to eat the same steak every single day, I'd be bitchy about steak after awhile. 90% of the MMOG's in release today are one particular cut of steak, with the only differences being how large the steak is.

MMOG developers seem happy to treat MMOG's as a genre instead of a medium.

Haemish put it down better than I could have, but I agree with everything he posted there.

The biggest problem these days is we are served shit-filled steaks. Looks good on the outside, once you cut to the meat of the game .... oh you get the point.

That isn't really based on anything but presumption, is it? I mean, is there any data how many of 10 mil WoW players actually utilize these customizations to any extent, let alone consider it "success factor"?

It's of course equally a presumption on my part, it's just the average "battlenet barrens mouthbreather" doesn't strike me as type who'd want to fiddle with scripts and all that geeky stuff...

The comments I've seen on the matter generally amount to "let someone else deal with the hassle and abuse (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showpost.php?p=717565&postcount=38)".


Your insightful posts are spread across 18 threads on 5 sites and may be deleted by forum mods who don't agree with them, so 'just as easily' overstates it a tad. It might be easy now (beta forums and internal forums and all that), but if a fan site or two chooses to turn on WAR for nerfing Marauders or something, collecting this feedback becomes a bit more complex. Also, you don't get the same melting pot of ideas that larger forums bring to the table (unless one fan forum has become the unofficial official forum).

As for listening to the data as the 'main' source of objective information / balancing, there is a reason why the phrase 'working as intended' is a joke. If there is a problem with the underlying system then you need the community to be telling you that things aren't adding up. Yes, I know, the signal-to-noise ratio is bad, but it's even worse when you have to trawl 5 different sites that you don't have any control over to find something.


Most outward communication has very little to do with listening to your community.


No, you don't need an official forums to have a thriving community. It's just that those MMOs that don't have official forums - TR being the most notable - have tended to show weaker communities around the game. Will it happen to WAR? We'll find out soon enough.

But the point wasn't about building a thriving community - it was about listening to your community. Which you've just said is a trivial task and favour checking the data. If it's trivial to get the subjective material from fansites, why not have the official forum and keep it central?

Believe it or not, I do understand that forums are generally full of the self-interested (and sometimes that self-interest is trolling / abuse) but this goes for all forums. Avoiding the creation of an official forum on the grounds it will be full of abusive posts ignores the facts that unofficial forums will be just as bad, if not worse, because the company has no control over what is said there.

EDIT - cause it's 1am and correctly closing tags is hard.

I may be showing my biases here a bit, but I disagree. DAoC had no official forums, but as far as online gaming that I participated in went, that one had the closest knit community. I STILL talk to people that played on my server, but were in a different realm and can name many guilds and players from my brief stint in that game (release to slightly after ToA). No other online game I've played has approached that for me.

I think you need a happy medium between strictly focusing on official boards (as WoW seems to be doing) and not having ANYTHING official.

While I suspect there are a large number of mod users, I'm sure you are right that there are very few mod creators.  But you don't have to fiddle with scripts to get mods running.  In fact, in the most basic sense you've been able to get hundreds of mods running by just executing an application locally, like cosmos ui back in the day (which is the first mod everyone I know used) to AceUpdater and Curse Updater (which are being combined as we speak), so you don't need to do anything but click one button to have mods.  

As far as mod usage goes, I know that I've never been in a raid that didn't require CT_RaidAssist back pre-TBC and now DeadlyBossMods or some equivalent, and those types of mods typically have a way of checking to make sure everyone is using them (and thus people will be booted if they aren't).  Perhaps the groups I run with are more strict than most, but when you consider that pre-TBC some large percentage (I seem to recall something like 75%?) of the population had raided (according to Blizzard), and now post TBC I bed that number is much higher with easy entry level raids like Kara (and hell, even ZA is a million times easier than ZG was).  

But now I must digress, because the original statement from me was typed too fast, what I really meant by the sentence is:  No one before or since has allowed UI modding to the degree that WoW has, and it's a big part of their success [that they are willing to do things that everyone else said couldn't be done because the dirty cheating players would take advantage of it].

I don't know if UI mods themselves play to the success of Blizzard, but I do think that Blizzard has taken that "ohh, it can't be done, can it?  Well try this!" stance with a ton of things.

Disagree.  http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php (http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php) has all that is needed for Designers to understand the problems and learn about possible solutions.  Signal to noise is too high on Blizzards own forums for meaningful feedback and actionable items.

Mouse to move (left and right) keybindings to fire all spells/abilities.  I am an old RTSer, so I have every possible combination of keybindings attached to any ability I might need.  My mouse just helps me turn and every so often it clicks on an enemy if my [tab] (or whatever) does not properly select it.

Then we must have been playing different games, because that's exactly how I play (all keybindings, never click on the interface) and it was way to mushy for me.  The responsiveness of my spell casting when compared to what I expected out of it was just too far off to ever be reasonable in pvp for me.  I was hoping perhaps it was a key binding issue that could be fixed (and thus why I asked if you clicked), but if that's the way the game plays throughout, I just can't imagine it being reactive enough for any real meaningful pvp.

I'll just felt like ever battle I lost it was because the timing of the key press had so much slack that I couldn't time my spells correctly.

So far the old guard has utterly failed to meet the raising of the bar set by Blizzard.  This first real post-WoW wave of releases haven't even amounted to a speedbump, haven't even had a game that surpassed peak EQ1 numbers.  They came talking about the lessons of WoW, development teams filled with experienced people who had worked on multiple MMOs, armed with IPs like Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons, and all they did was splatter against WoW like bugs on a windshield.

And now DAOC 2.0 is supposed to be the Great White Hope?  Because it's got some hardcore nerd tabletop wargaming IP going for it?  Get the fuck out.

No, WAR will do better because it is a fundamentally better game than LotRO, D&DO, TR, and Vanguard.  Will it do WoW numbers... no.  Will it surpass everything to date save AoC's first month? I suspect it will.  I don't think WAR will pump the boxes out like AoC did, but I do believe that we'll be hearing about it (and possibly talking about it) for far longer.

I think you're overstating the value of listening to the community. Or having any direct interaction with them at all.

I have yet to see a forum for a MMOG, either official or otherwise, where the signal to noise ratio wasn't so low as to be practically unmeasurable.

Forums cost money to run. Hiring staff to monitor and moderate them costs money. They're full of trolls and illiterates and other wastes of time.

What are the offsetting benefits? You will very occasionally trip over a useful post from a player. You will be able to set the tone of the boards, in terms of moderation. Do these even come close to offsetting the costs?

As far as I'm concerned, Jacobs is onto something here.

It helps that DaoC, for all the pratfalls, was a pretty good game. Not my cup of tea, but a lot of people enjoyed it. Warhammer, if one believes the buzz, is also going to be pretty good. The point being, if you have a good game, there's less to fear from people creating negative buzz on the un-official boards. The game will speak for itself. Six months down the road, if you've got subscriber numbers that you're happy with, you don't need to worry about the "community".

No MMOG so far has crashed and burned because of the "community". I've never quit a game because of something I read on the official web site. I quit games because they get boring. I'm (obviously) only speaking for myself here, but the official forums don't have any input to how much fun the game is.

Mythic was so in touch with their playerbase they made ToA and drove them away.

Lots of armchair CEOs up in here.  Keep up the good work. 

Nearly every technical problem I've ever had with a mmog has been fixed due to forum posts by people who have had the exact same problem and found a fix for it and posted.

There are often great amounts of fun and interesting theorycrafting about every class ever on official forums.

The server communities on official forums usually thrive and give a lot of reasons for people to continue playing the game.

While I'll agree that the "general discussion" part of the official forums usually has a poor signal to noise ratio, I think as a whole, official forums are an excellent way (and usually the only real way) for a new player to get excellent information about a variety of things that they will likely need to know to become acquainted to the game.

So what is a player to think when he has some sort of question he wants answered, goes to the Mythic website, and finds no direction on where to look for information? I actually had this happen with a friend just today. He bought the preorder box, went to sign up for the forums so he could start reading about things, and was baffled by their lack of existence. Failure to have official forums is, no matter what, going to result in losing a certain amount of your newbies right off the bat to experiences like that.

It also sends a message to some players, and that message is 'we don't care enough about you to put any real resources into this.' Instead we get left in the hands of 3rd party boards with amateur moderation (this is the worst thing of all) and no organizational interest in facilitating  any actual dialogue between players and the company. A community the size of F13 (a couple thousand registered accounts) is fine to manage this way, but VN, with its teeming thousands, was a goddamn hellhole - to the point where, I seem to recall, the general forum for DAOC was actually shut down and Mythic people refused to post there. It was 100x worse than the WoW General forums ever have been, and the blame for that can rest squarely on the fact that the people in charge of moderating it were volunteer community people with no corporate interest in keeping things under control. People who aren't getting a paycheck burn out much faster with this sort of thing. Yeah, you do get your occasional Tserics even with official forums, but my server forum on VN went through more moderators during DAOC's run than Blizzard has had CMs working for them ever.

Also, let me point again to the WoW beta forums. There is an actual dialog going on there with WoW devs, and anyone who plays the game can drop in and read it. This makes players better-informed, and makes them feel empowered, like they have a role in the game themselves. The same thing happened with CoH (maybe it still does). Mythic's model for DAOC, where they would occasionally talk only to people on a private board who were locked up with an NDA, was incredibly frustrating for a lot of players, and I say this as someone who *had* access to said board. (Let's not even get into the failure of the TL program as a communication device, as I think there are really just a couple specific people who should take the blame for that.)

I want to requote the line I think is where Mythic really goes wrong here:


This just isn't true, especially in a post-WoW world. Players are pretty well conditioned to expect official forums now. Of all the MMOs I've played, DAOC (and now WAR) are the only ones I can think of that don't have them. Like it or not, this is now a big missing bullet point on WAR's feature list, and even though the game is fun I think you can expect a slightly lower player retention rate over the years because of it.

Case in point. When vanguard also did this, i was trying to find an answer to an issue. I went to 5 diffrent sites. Got 5 diffrent answers, And 3 of those were from 3 diffrent Vanguard developers. 0 worked.

Then you haven't been looking. Even WoW's are manageable, particularly the class specific forums, the raids & dungeons forum, etc. CoX did a *wonderful* job with this.

Except in a way, they are. Most games go through this. FPS and RTS are all inherently the same with tiny little tweaks here and there to change things up. No one has made a major change to either genre in how long? I think expecting MMOs to make major changes is akin to expecting the next FPS to be revolutionary and different from its predecessors. The best you can hope for is a Deux Ex out of the same old, same old, and even that game wasn't that different from all the others out there.

I was actually thinking of City of Heroes. The moderation there has clamped down some in the past year, but there used to be a godawful amount of trolling and otherwise useless posting. And I'm not even talking about the "general" board (does CoH even have one?). I'm thinking specifically of the Suggestions board, or whatever it was titled. You know, the kind of board where a dev might go to look for feedback from the playerbase. An anthropologist would have had a life's work in there, figuring out the social power structures. Classical primate usenet behavior. Shouting down ideas you don't like. Flinging poo. Banding together to call on the tribe's great warriors to come drive out the newcomers. A massive fucking echo chamber, with the gestalt purpose of trying to keep anything from actually changing. Especially if a suggestion flies in the face of some documented "we can't do that" three-year-old post that a dev made. Self appointed moderators. I hated it, and I never even made a post there. God help the newb who came in there thinking they had a good idea. I was glad when the mods came in and took it down.

I agree that the AT boards and some of the other specific boards there (Player Guides in particular) are quite helpful. I disagree with the idea that none of these things would have been possible on an unofficial board.

Except FPS and RTS are GENRE of games. MMOG's should be considered a MEDIUM, not a genre. Massively-multiplayer online games as a catchall phrase should transcend genre, because you can do many different genres within the framework of an online game with many players. You don't have to do fantasy diku to be an MMOG - after all, Tabula Rasa and Eve are examples of non-fantasy MMOG's. You don't even have to do RPG's (see Planetside). Confining what an MMOG is to fantasy diku is confining it to a limited genre, a genre that has been played out and has almost no one doing anything to innovate. They are treating it like a genre, shitting out useless clone after useless clone.

I think there is a seperation here that we're ignoring.  Not all MMOGs are MMORPGs, but all MMORPGs are MMOGs.  MMORPGs are a genre, MMOG is a medium.

You are talking about the Suggestions forum where there were massive sticky posts from developers looking for feedback on specific topics? Where you'd often see Statesman pipe up 20 pages into the discussion? I think you are significantly understating the amount of use Cryptic got out of those threads.

I didn't say that listening to the community was trivial, I said that the process of collecting feedback for any given subject is trivial. Continually collecting, collating and presenting feedback is a massive task for any decently sized community but it's not especially difficult regardless of whether you're pulling it from one forum or many. Personally I like the different slants we get on similar topics from different forums. Even though there is a lot of subscriber overlap, each forum has a distinct flavour and the feedback direction will be different from each. That's far more valuable to me than having one huge echo chamber where the same people are hectoring their personal hobby horses and drowning out alternate points of view.

 Checking raw data is the best line for some things but not for others, it's also a good way to sanity check your subjective and soft data points. You always want to have multiple data points where possible and player perception is always going to be one of the biggest, it should never be the only one however.

But not all MMORPG's need to have the diku at their core, yet all but Eve and UO do. There's a ton of difference between Oblivion and Fallout 1, though they are both RPG's. There is a whole helluva lot less difference between EQ1 and WAR than between Oblivion and Fallout 1.

Sure, if you're making a game for, well, elitist jerks.

All MMO makers target elitist jerks. They pay the bills.

That's why they put in shit like this.

(http://elitistjerks.com/attachments/f14/a2173d1205298844-authorization/yaywarglaives.jpg)

And why most times, things like that take more time than is healthy in one sitting to get, so you can be l33t (and pay the bills).

"Sells to vendor for 24.31g"   :why_so_serious:

I think you are dreaming.  This is it.  MMORPGS, MMOGs, oranges, whatever.  What we have right now is all this genre is going to be for the next 20 years.  In 1999, I was playing a Troll SK at EQ launch. Well, it's 9.5 years later and we have slightly prettier graphics and some refinements.  That's it.  

There is no magic dev company that's going to come along and change how this Genre works.  There is just too much money on the table when you make one of these things to risk REAL INNOVATION.

Man, WoW is ugly.

and people call me the Charon of MMORPGs because i like to watch the indi games, where this normally happens.   :why_so_serious:

You can mine "objective" data all the live long day and you are not going to find out what you need to know about how customers regard your game, whether they're having fun, what your likely long-term retention is, what the really serious bugs and feature problems are, what kind of subjective experiences are constructing the culture of your world. I guarantee that every failed MMOG has had absolutely fine data-mining processes.

Being afraid of running your own forums is being afraid of your customers, your game, and your responsibilities as a service company. It's not even as good as outsourcing customer service to Bangladesh. It's giving yourself a license to stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud every time you hear something you don't like or don't want to hear, because it's not in your forums and not your employees listening and you don't have to care. It's not even a cost-saving measure: it's an alibi, prepared in advance as carefully as any murderer on Columbo ever did.

Ahh; i see then, yup this extended version certainly sounds reasonable. No disagreement with it here.

Holy shit. That's one way to draw attention away from shoulders, i guess.

(http://img54.imageshack.us/img54/2065/25249944cw8.jpg)

You'll find that nothing I have said is in disagreement with this.



Why is it less important if it is on an external forum? If the community is in uproar about something or a measure is unpopular, why would the fact that the players are having their revolt somewhere external make it any easier to write off? We have people who spend all day listening to the playerbase (that would be me and my colleagues for the slower ones on the page), why should we somehow inherit a worse work ethic just becasue we aren't hosting the forums ourselves? Seriously, stop with the projecting and hyperbole.

Oh and by the way, it totally is a cost saving measure. It may not be the primary reason for not having official forums but one of the more obvious benefits is right there on the balance sheet.

In selected games yes. For Blizzard, the causal crowd is the one paying the big bills. Blizzards introduction of heroics, dailys, honor PvP gear and instances like karazhan is whats keeping recurring subs and bringing new ones. Availability of purples that is.

It's like having the customer bitch at your service while in your store vs them doing the same in some random pub out there in the wide world. Reasonably enough most companies do care more about the former than they do about the latter.

Also, if you have a number of external forums, then the potential [official] forum base gets fractured between these. That again makes it easier to write things off as "just few nerds going through a rage while most of the playerbase happily keeps playing"

In that case then you have a community team not doing their jobs. My company knows how much of an issue any particular topic might be because I tell them, they invest in me a certain amount of responsibility to filter things honestly and to give them the unvarnished truth. If a Big Thing is being written off as a storm in a teacup then either I've failed to analyse it properly or I've failed to communicate it clearly.

The fracturing point is moot because even in games with official forums, you often have third party sites where just as much (if not more) useful discussion goes on. Unless your game community is tiny, it is necessarily going to be fractured. The bigger communities become, the less homogenous they tend to be.

And given this is MMO industry i can respond to that with "Yes, and?" That is, people not doing their job seem to happen frequent enough that it's almost par for the course...

I don't quite see how it makes the point moot -- as the point was smaller-sized forums are easier to ignore due to their size and (somewhat consequently) amount of data sharing going on. To use this very thread as example? You have one external WoW forum cited as "everything that Designers would need"... that's the natural tendency to try and filter input sources. Things (and forums) are being mentally catalogued as potentially more or less useful and from that it's very small step to ignoring some of them (and hence part of the playerbase that happens to post there) altogether.

Again, if it's external, you can cherry-pick as your ego and your conflict-avoidance impulses allow you to do. Don't like what they're saying at one external forum? Go read one that's maintained by sycophants. Don't want the bad press of having your own forum mods crush the living shit out any dissent of any kind? Find a desperate third-party site, agree to occasionally have some dev chats there to help them build traffic, and make it clear that if the forums are too negative, you're gone. Watch what happens when the modding equivalent of a mildly retarded crossing-guard is given unrestricted authority over the forum and is told to get rid of anything too negative. Again, live management for the game keeps their hands clean: they're not the ones doing that, it's just those guys over there at that place. And so on.

Yes, yes, all asynchronous forums have an unfavorable noise-to-signal ratio, lots of forum posters are mental defectives, and so on. But saying that you're just going to put your ear to the ground and listen to the chatter is turning your back on a basic responsibility you have as a live management team. Live management is service work AND it's about being responsible rulers or owners of a world where people carry out all sorts of social and cultural activities that go well beyond whacking the foozles you've provided. Players want to know where the game is going and what kind of stewards the developers are, and they want to be in a conversation with the developers, however half-assed and filtered through community management that conversation might be. When the developers have less than zero responsibility to be anywhere that talk is happening and total deniability about whether or not they know or care about common issues or criticisms, when the developers never have to man up and be responsible to their players in a forum designed for that purpose, when the developers believe that communication is optional--and that's what not having forums means--the developers really don't get it.  None of this prevents Warhammer from being a good game at first, but I do think it is a terrible sign for whether the live management team are going to be good stewards for the product that makes it to marketplace.

Wuh? UO to EQ1 to AC to AO to DAoC. The only "flop" in there was AO as the first three were the Big three. It was well after that, in the 2003 time frame through the launch of EQ2 when the flops were rolling in. After DAoC made it's most notable achievement (launching playable on day one), it was EQ1 that continued the March into half a million, Curt Schilling, Shawn Woolley and what people considered "MMO" at the time.


That's why MMOs are a genre and not a medium. A few years ago we were headed towards broader definition, but WoW kiboshed that. Like EQ1 before it, the "genre" was defined by the big hit that the money people (VC, management, publishers) thought of when people talked about "MMOs". Nobody says to the uninformed: "We want to make a massively multiplayer online game" without the suffix "like EQ1|WoW|Club Penguin". And I throw in CP because while it isn't on the radar of the core MMO player, it's still the biggest one for people targeting tweens with browser-based MMOs.

It isn't technically right, but it's the reality that affects almost any topic, and for the same reason: the people responsible for giving the money are not accountable to the execution, so they don't need to be deeply invested in all things on a topic. By extension, they don't even need to ignore the history they don't know. To them, the genre began with WoW, and while the informed would laugh, they're either so far out of the discussion to not be heard, or not going to laugh because they want the money for their project  :grin:

This doesn't even make any sense. "Western," "Sci-Fi," and "Fantasy" are genres. If "MMO" was a genre, then we'd have MMO-themed plays and music and novels. And before we even go there, "Cycle of Hatred" is not an MMO-themed novel. It's a fantasy novel based on a world expressed in an MMO. I don't know if I'd call it a "medium." Sure, why not. But it's not a genre.

This is where language breaks down. For example: Ray Bradbury is a genre writer. How can he possibly write in the MMO genre? That very sentence looks like I'm asking Ray Bradbury to write text for an MMO. But it's not; or at least that wasn't my intent. It's defining a novel as not "sci-fi" nor "horror" but "MMO," and asking Ray Bradbury to write that novel.

Ugly all the way to the bank! Amirite?

...

 :oh_i_see:

Zubaz pants made the creator a good deal of money also.

It got some attention sounds like a good reward to give a player.  Uniqueness is often valued more then looking good or bad.

The community is worth the resources invested into it.

Since community can make or break an MMO, it's really not an area to skimp on.

They aren't your forums. If things turn hostile - like EQ2Flames, for instance - you can just write them off as someone else's problem. So if EQ2Flames gets in a bunch about something that might be correct, you can still write them off (or even officially blacklist them and tell devs / CMs not to post there).

I don't get people can say that official forums are hives of scum and villainy, but unofficial forums are a great way of obtaining player feedback. The unofficial forums I've seen have generally been worse run and allowed a lot more bad behaviour than the official ones ever would. So your newb player experience on the 'main' forums can be a lot more hostile than it needs to be. Someone else already mentioned DAOC's VN forums - is this not a lesson for why unofficial forums have major downsides?

The two key issues are 1) control and 2) scale. You have control over official forums, for better or worse. Unofficial forums are admined by the kind of people who WAR would apparently fear on an official forum. Personally I think official forums should hold people to higher standards and be more liberal with the banhammer than some have been (and also force people to post under real names or close to it, but that's another story). Centralisation means you have a greater scale to play with, so that the majority of players come to one place and discuss everything, which means you might get a maths nerd reading a post from a casual RPer that means something clicks and they can solve a problem that the MMO may face.

Also, from experience, official forums are a great place to go and ask about a technical problem and get a quick response. Going through official channels ends up being a lot slower and often starts with a form letter despite me telling them that yes, I've already updated my drivers and every other step doesn't work because I already tried that. Unofficial forums generally don't have the technical people (or enough people cruising the technical forums) to provide that kind of service.

And I won't even get into what devs / CMs posting on one set of fan forums over another does to how forums behave, but that is a major issue too.

I'm not meaning to challenge how you do your job IainC, but I can't see how unofficial forums are better than official ones most of the time. Jacobs' "they called us names" defence is a weak one and suggests that he shouldn't be reading the official forums, not that his titles shouldn't have official forums.


I can accept that. But don't then pretend that building community is important when you expect a bunch of volunteers to provide your key infrastructure in this area.

Thus far, DAOC, Tabula Rasa and Vangard appear to have been the major MMOs not to have official forums. Two of those names aren't synonymous with success and had trouble building any kind of community around their games. Not having official forums probably didn't help.

MMO gaming is a service industry and you have customers expecting this sort of service as a baseline.  An official forum’s purpose isn’t to get coherent feedback from your community.  It’s about making them feel important. 

Forcing someone to run around to various fansites for official responses to customer concerns is some serious bush league support.  Developer letters or Herald style diatribes don’t have nearly the same tone or turn around as regular forum posts.
 

In short, someone didn't want to pony up the money for forums. Jesus people, do you even CARE about being competitive? It smacks of amateur hour, FFS dozens of NON mmo's have official forums to provide player support, hell my local power company has official forums. I don't understand how you can have an online company and NOT have forums, this actually annoys me more than the minor stuff in warhammer.

Absolutely.

In 1998, there could be (I still would disagree) a valid counterargument.

Not in 2008.

Any business should have a forum and/or wikl.

How well have y'all localized in Europe; that is, have y'all translated text completely, support Unicode, combo of both, etc...? I'm not attempting to call the game into question (have already pre-ordered), I'm just curious regarding potential customers and all :) 

If you feel offended, realize that I could never convince VG co-workers to spend the time to, at the very least, support Unicode so I really have no room to talk  :ye_gods:

Edit: I apologize if I missed the answer already or if it's readily available...saw the Euro tag and figured that it'd be easy to ask.

Since we're predicting numbers over in another thread, here's another prediction.

If there turn out to be serious issues with Warhammer that Mythic has trouble managing, the lack of official forums will hurt their retention worse than if they had them. Because the players who aren't forum rats who want to find out what's going on when their character class doesn't seem to be working or want to ask about why Chaos is so underplayed on their server or talk about whether other people find that combat seems laggy and unresponsive will get even more frustrated when they don't even know where to go to find some basic information.

Anybody who bought the 4th edition of D&D recently might have seen an interesting case of this, and that's *with* official forums of a sort. WOTC advertised the living shit out of their online, digital toolkit in the product, but it wasn't and still isn't available. But finding that out took going off to a buggy, badly run forum, digging down to find out the correct area where the information of non-availability was visible, and registering to use the forum if there were any questions about non-availability. For about four weeks, there was a constant dribble of people who'd bought the D&D books, were excited about the digital content advertised, and were posting their first post in the official forums to ask, "Um, where are the tools? I can't find them." There's your average player: not a forum rat, but needing forums when they have issues.

So prediction #1: if Warhammer struggles technically, with design problems, with live management crises, they will lose more money from non-retained subscribers than they would have spent having and managing official forums.

Prediction #2: If there are issues, Mark Jacobs' official communications about those issues on the website will increasingly follow what I think of as the "Smedley cycle": prolonged silence followed by evasive manager-speak bullshit followed by semi-detailed agreement that the problem exists followed by fulsome apology and promise to improve. All of which will be aggravated by the lack of official forums.

Prediction #3: If there are issues, at some point one of the fulsome apologies/promises to improve will include a commitment to set up offical forums. Since that wasn't something they budgeted for or planned for, they'll do it badly if they get around to it.

Just about all of the big publishers, including at first Blizzard, continue to think of service and communication as an afterthought. They still think of MMOGs AS published products. I don't know what makes it so hard to break out of that misconception, but it has caused them all grief at some time or another, and in many cases, probably played a big role in killing their product off or at least in its major underperformance.

Matt's WWW security riddled, bug infested, 1990s Perl script forum software would be an improvement over WOTC abomination…

I agree, people who go to non-official forums are a small niche segment of the entire MMOG population.  Depending on non-official forums as a means to communicate with your player base means that you'll only be communicating with a small segment of your player base.  That will make your product a niche product.

MMOGs are such complex beasts that you need a lot of communication with your player base to really pull them off well.  MoTD type popups and patch notes, while useful, do not fulfill that need for communication (nor do they come close).  If players do not have an officially sanctioned place to go to get real communication lines with other players and the developers, the communication will be so spread out that it will not be easy to find nor easy to use, with the end result being that you have a worse product because of it.

Funny thing to me about this whole "OMG you don't have your own forums" thing is... the people who are making the decision are probably the only ones with REAL data on the issue.  As far as I know Mythic has already launched a game, seen it bring in subscirbers, watched its lifespan, and measured those things.  Now they are doing it again and with said data are saying, "We think it is better for us NOT to have our own forums."

I suppose I can see the "It is unprofessional" argument, though again... I wonder why they would listen to us and our lack of data instead of themselves and their greater amounts of data.

The argument that is truly laughable is the "You can IGNORE things if they happen on Other forums!"  You are basically saying here that a team that would be competent running their own forums is now going to be incompetent watching other people's forums.  That just does not make sense.  The team is either competent or not... where the information comes from has little to do with anything in that matter.

On a side note... its been a while so I don't remember for sure, but I seem to recall the main DAoC webpage listing several different forums in different languages right there on the front page.  I was an internet noob at the time and did not even realize those forums were not "official".  Go figure.

A vast majority of the posters here have never worked on or seen the internal workings of a mmog.  If the criteria for having an opinion is such that you need relevant internal data in order to make a post, then you'll see this place dead within an hour.

Having said that, Mythic doesn't have any relevant internal data either, since they've never released a game with an official forum.  So I'd say Mark and I are just about the same level of qualified to talk about it.

Just because the execution of entrants in the medium is shitty, derivative schlock peddled on the ass of a bump-mapped skank whore doesn't mean MMOG's aren't a medium. Massively-multiplayer online games can be any type of game, it's just that most developers are anus-spelunking retards obsessed with making a better D&D in their oh-so-cool-campaign-world-I-totally-created-myself-in-high-school-when-girls-wouldn't-talk-to-me.

Games like Planetside, Eve and Jumpgate show the medium has lots of potential without resorting to the same bland formula, just like television as a medium can have lots of genres as well. For all its shittiness and sensationalism, reality TV was an innovation, and that same kind of out-there thinking should inform MMOG development. But again, anus-spelunkers and navel-gazers.

One more little thing I forgot in the list of all the other reasons it is dumb not to run your own forums:

Accountability for forum behavior. If I want to be an anonymous retard and post a bunch of ASCII porn or whatever on VN, it costs me absolutely nothing but my forum account. Big deal, go make another one, continue being an asshole. If I do it on an official forum with my login associated with a game account, suddenly I can suffer real consequences for being a dick. Part of the reason VN (DAOC's 'official' unofficial forums) was such a god-awful hellhole was there was no real accountability for people lobbing whatever vile calumnies they felt like. Companies that run their own forums provide a much more pleasant environment for their new users, their people who need tech support, etc.

People who talk about how terrible the WoW and CoH forums are must never have seen the DAOC General forum on VN at the height of its "power". (Thinking about it, I'm not sure the CoX forums were even account-linked, but if they weren't that was a mistake.)

Point 1.  Granted, express an opinion.  But, I am just wondering how smart it would be for them to listen to our opinions in this matter.  Fact is I have never managed a forum for ANY product I have released.  I HAVE played several MMOs over the last decade or so and seen their subscription numbers and other data.

Point 2.  But, they Have released a game w/o an official forum... and felt good enough about it that they have decided to do it again.  What they are saying be default is, "we are happy with the results we got the first time and hope to have similar results this time."  In order for them to host their own forums they would need their data to have said, "Lack of official forums was a major factor in the long-term success of the game... don't do this next time."

There's no way to know how much BETTER their game could have done with official forums. On that train of logic I also own a rock that protects me from tigers, I've never been attacked by a tiger so therefore it must work.

"we are happy with the results we got the first time and hope to have similar results this time." -  This isn't a good thing.

First off, don't assume about people posting here or anywhere. You may have no information, but you don't have any idea about what the  rest of us know or don't know.

Second, this basic kind of argument about any cultural product always annoys the crap out of me, because it asserts that audiences and customers are fundamentally incapable of knowing what is good business practice, what is good technical work, what functions and doesn't function. This is the same sort of retarded argument that pops up when some fan of a movie gets pissed off at people who are critical of a film: "You can't criticize this film unless you've made a film yourself, you have no idea what's involved, yadda yadda yadda". Please. Give me a break. People who consume a great deal of any kind of cultural work gain a lot of quite specific knowledge of that work simply through the act of viewing, reading, playing. Beyond that, many critics become pretty acute at knowing how and why something works or doesn't work. It may not mean that they could make a work of that kind themselves, but it doesn't mean that their knowledge is without value.

Yes, there are things that people involved in producing cultural work know that people who haven't done it don't know. One thing that I've often pointed out at academic game studies conferences is that academic critics are overprone to asserting that particular styles or modes of presentation in video games are meant to create a particular mood or feeling in the player, when in some cases, the choice of those styles is simply a technical necessity, that there wasn't any other way to do it given the capability of processors, the graphical engine used in the game, the code libraries being relied upon, etc.  There are things you learn by doing that are unique, and some of them are very hard to communicate to anyone who hasn't done it.

But the very fact that most MMOGs do have official forums is sufficient to raise questions about the wisdom of foregoing them. No specialist knowledge is required.



Seriously, bite me. I'm arguing that the decision to rely on external forums is a revealed preference against listening to the players, which I take to be a form of incompetence. Having your own forums is not a guarantee of competency at doing the same: you have to do it right. I am saying that in all likelihood, you cannot do it right without your own forums, and that it makes it vastly easier to do it wrong, maybe even without specifically intending to do so. If you have a community manager who is maintaining an official forum who reports weekly to the live management team about threads that he or she has had to directly manage and process, that vastly increases the odds that you won't be able to ignore bad news that you'd rather not hear. It doesn't guarantee it: there are past and existing MMOGs where the dev team clearly either did not listen to what their own community managers told them or didn't understand what they were being told. But if you hire somebody and say, "Go listen to the Internets, and tell us what you hear", the probability that this someone will use a very selective heuristic that ignores uncomfortable information goes way up, especially if that person's bosses on the live management team don't want to hear the bad news. It is simply easier to mentally filter an entire site for which you have no responsibility than it is to refuse to  hear one's own paying customers. If it's your forums and you require forum participants to be subscribers, those ARE your customers. If it's some external site, and you have no idea who people are, it's a lot easier to shrug and say, "It's just a bunch of WoW fanbois over there, I'm not even going to bother reporting on the threads there".

You're skipping over a lot there.  WW2O, MCO, TSO, E&B, Majestic, UWOO (UO2), I think there were one or two more, not to mention a rash that got cancelled  in the summer before our launch but after those.

--Dave

Most of the contents in the last two pages are fairly humorous.


From DAoC:

- The Herald had stats programs, regular announcements and a "knowledge database" tool that you could search for in game issues and/or technical issues.

The Herald was regularly referenced in game.

The few times I had technical problems, I got fixes on the Herald.

- The Vault was the Official Unofficial Board.  The General Forum was mostly outrageous bitching and post farming, but it was viewed regularly by the Community Management staff.

An ongoing joke was made of how they would pop in,  post something like "I'll forward this info to the appropriate staff" and pop out.

The Class Boards were pretty solid, usually with very good presence by a TL or the TL Team who would chime in with regular testing and comments on the class.

The Server Boards were pretty fun, as well.

Unique features:

- The TL Program:  Depended on the TL,  but was mostly pretty good with some being excellent.  The TLs wrangled the community, sought and kept track of opinions on the classes, had regular reports to Mythic on class issues,  and sometimes had their own specialist forums to focus on class specific issues.  

Specifically,  I remember finding the Champion TL and the Friar TL very good though on the other end I seem to remember a couple of classes having AWOL TLs for extended periods of time.

- Log in polls:  Mythic regularly did polls at character log in,  especially about large or long term directions ("which server type would you like next?"  was an interesting one)

- Fan Roundtables:  Mythic did alot of fan get together type deals.  

______________________

I am MASSIVELY in favor of not having official forums.  I just feel that they tend to reward the type of player who is a forum warrior rather than the majority of players who play casually, for fun, and who tend not to enter the forum cesspool.

The TL program was a massive failure for most of its existence. Filtering all player feedback through a single player who was not thoroughly vetted for competence (Los Ortiz anyone) and who might leave out your feedback if he disagreed with it is an iffy start but could still have been useful, but for the most part they pretty much just ignored TL feedback anyway. Worse, they didn't even give real answers as to why a given suggestion wouldn't work. It was just 500 lines of a TL report and then a few one-word replies from Mythic saying "No."

I note that recently (not really that recently, but post-WoW when the big crowds have already left) there are tons of changes to spell and skill lines that were mentioned in TL reports years ago and ignored or denied; I guess maybe the roadblocking Mythic folks are all gone? A bit of hope for WAR there.

Right, right, so this is why TOA came along. No forums = pure win! I'm not even going to talk about a lot of other examples of unresponsiveness since that one is so paramount. But as I said, having forums is no guarantee that you'll be involved in a productive relationship to the players. It's just an important declaration that you intend to be.

Just because I'm feeling contrary, I'll point out that before TOA was released a huge number of players on many forums were all complaining that the game needed a lot mor ehigh end PvE content. Up to that point the challenging level 50 content consisted of a dragon and an epic dungeon per realm plus a few encounters in an RvR dungeon that you didn't always have access to. In many ways TOA was what the players were asking for.

It certainly was never a priority complaint on our server forum. I don't remember it ever coming up much, and then getting thoroughly mocked when the expansion was announced. "Civilization... failing... must... build... obstacle course!"

Huh? 

1.  All player feedback DIDN'T go through the TLs.  The TLs were one of a bunch of different programs,  YOU KNOW, LIKE THE PILE OF ITEMS I MENTIONED IN THE PREVIOUS POST.   

2.  You're making a broad statement that the TL program was a failure despite the fact that,  you know, I specifically mentioned a couple TLs that did a bang up job.  Jubal,  the friar TL who ran "The Drunken Friar" website, etc. 

3.  So....  a format where the player community could submit ideas to the Devs on where there class should be in a structured manner, and the Devs would respond on the items, is bad?

**Every major point had a response.  Every one.  Sometimes the responses were "Not at this time".  Sometimes the responses were "We'll be looking this in an upcoming patch"  or "Looks interesting.  Could you flesh this out"

I specifically saw a bunch of champion improvements made because the TL treated the process seriously, provided logs and testing,  and proposed reasonable solutions.

4.  Los Ortiz was a dipshit.  He was also a TL for less than a month?

That was also the case where a notoriously vociferous Vault Troll who demanded he should be considered as a TL was made a TL,  and he massively embarrassed himself.


The changes were ongoing the whole time.  This is just inaccurate.

I bolded the relevant part.

If login polls proved anything,  it was that the consensus of the forum warriors was different from what the non-forum population wanted.  Server forums tended to revolve around RvR smack talking,  as well.

I knew far, far more people that talked about sending questions in to grab bag,  or sending in feedback on the Herald, than I ever saw post on the Vault.

Shit,  I never posted on the Vault.  Large scale game forums are lowest common denominator meta-social hegemony games that never particularly interested me.

All I can say is my multi-year experience with DAOC left me with a far, far different impression than yours. Many, many classes had great, committed TLs who were good at collecting and summarizing information and providing useful suggestions, and they were completely blown off for years. One that comes to mind in particular was the wizard TL, who did a fantastic job and was constantly ignored. (It is getting to be long enough ago for me that I can't remember the names of most of the people involved anymore, and no, I didn't play a wizard nor was I even an Alb.) Several had really crappy absentee TLs who lingered for months being useless or worse than useless (quickness helps run speed!)

Its not like I'm coming to this conclusion based on being some my-server-only VN troll (though I'll admit to probably more than my share of that), I was a beta tester on two or three expansions and a Pendragon board guy for a while. The feedback process for DAOC was fundamentally broken, because a) it was for insiders only, and b) even for them it was pretty much a uni-directional conversation. The sum total of Mythic's communication with their normal everyday players was basically the grab bag. The only dev who communicated with even the internal private board testers on a regular basis and gave any kind of real feedback was the woman in charge of items - she was awesome (once again more name remembering failure). If they'd had more devs like her back then, and less Mackeys, they might even have been able to save TOA. I remember seeing a few Lum posts and a few from Copper but I don't think either of them were in a position at the time to give people what they really wanted as far as that interaction goes anyway.

All those changes I'm talking about that I can go to and look at on the Herald, happened somewhere post-Catacombs, when it was already too late.

(I just wish I'd realized all this stuff at the time instead of only through hindsight.)

I remember being told ToA wouldn't effect RvR balance.

I also remember being told the Relic and Master level grind in ToA was so we could "smell the roses".


 :awesome_for_real:

You needed something to do while you were waiting for the style review anyway.

Great post.  

I don't think your argument is what you think it is,  though.  The previous argument was that Mythic never even got the feedback it needed, because of no official forums or what have you.

They obviously got it.  They just kept their comments on it to a minimum.


The real argument is that people like to feel like someone is holding their hands,  that the bosses care.  It's the special snowflake argument,  really.

We love it when the Red Name swoops in to a thread,  posts something like  "Good to know!  We'll get right on this problem!"
and swoops out.  Maybe posts an update in 2 months about how it's "in process".  Shit,  look at all the love that Sanya got for popping in and posting a couple lines (except for the Guin server LA nerf fiasco).

We eat that shit up.

Official Forums means there's a place we can go, where hope of hopes,  the folks that run the game we enjoy playing will wander in and address us specifically.

Hell,  I'm the same way.  One of my favorite gaming moments is, right after the release of Avara by Ambrosia Software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_software), I got to play a bunch of games against Andrew Welch and bullshit with him about his games.  (He kicked my ass,  I tried to convince him he needed to add a gambling plugin to his game so you could bet on matches.)

And it's really the same thing as the old Grab Bag.  Literally?  People were PUMPED when their question came up in the Grab Bag.


And those same people?  They wanted fucking HATS.  Shit ya.

Well, what I'm asking for personally is a little more than that. I don't just want "we'll look into it" from a red (or blue) name. I want stuff like we're getting on the WotLK beta forums, where, say, Ghostcrawler shows up and says, 'here is this change we are thinking of making and this is why, <goes on to provide some actual crunch>.' It isn't just the 'special snowflake' issue (at least not for everyone), I think people don't want to feel like they're just shouting into an empty void when they give their feedback.

It is the difference between being talked to like you're an 8 year old, which the Grab Bag too often felt like to me, or being treated like an adult with something to contribute. And it is pretty nice that Blizzard (and Cryptic before them, and from my more limited experience, Turbine as well) is not only willing to do that, but they're willing to do it without the protection of an NDA.

As I've said before, I think official forums are warranted due to 1) control and 2) scale. Mythic got feedback regarding DAOC, sure, but as far as "listening to the community" went, it was a limited attempt*. But I find it interesting that quite a few reasons used to justify both having and not having official forums appears to treat players who post on each forums and nearly mutually exclusive.

1) Players post nasty things on an official forum and complain. They do the same things on unofficial forums too, just with 1MB animated avatars and half a page of sig files.

2) That official forums aren't representative of the player base as a whole. This is true. It also applies to those who post on fansites too. Forums are the voice of the self-interested and / or the self-important.

3) That official forums only attract forum warriors looking for redname approval. That's a draw card too. But a fansite that gets a red name visit is a huge thing that the members all gush over. And fansites that don't get blessed by the Pope visited by rednames tend to get pissy about it.

I agree with Khaldun's predictions. IF (big if) WAR has some factors that hinder its game play, not having an official forum will likely hurt retention to some extent. Will it hurt a lot? A little? Don't know. The problem is that MMOs that have been launched lacking official forums - TR and Vangard - suffered other problems that meant players didn't stick around.

I think DAOC got away with it because it was launched at the right time. It will be interesting to see what happens to WAR.

* In all seriousness, if DAOC really wanted to "listen to the community", they'd be randomly asking members of their player base every month their reaction to some core systems and recent issues. That'd be a better way to gauge community opinion since you'd get your hardcore mixed with casual, your 'post every day' forum warriors and those who never looked at a forums in their lives. Forums aren't the best way of gauging overall community opinion, but they are a great way of evaluating the stronger opinions / voices in the community.

With non-official boards you also keep them divided, to a point. There are no huge threads about how "my class sucks, and I've done the math! I'll sue!" posted every week by the same crowd of pinheads who have to have a red-named response RIGHT NOW!oneone! With all the popularity contests and cults of personality. And the magnifying effect of having them all in the same place flinging poo at each other.  :uhrr:

Instead they eat each other on non-official boards, like Stratics. It's like the sink trap of forums.  :drill:

UnSub is certainly correct that if you really wanted to know some of the things that you can't find out through mining lots of quantitative data about gameplay, what you'd do somewhat systematically is basically an ongoing anthropology of your player communities. E.g., not read forums, but go out there in the game and talk to people a lot, get your own dev people playing in a context where they are playing in order to understand the game and its communities, collect survey data regularly (not unlike the fairly well-designed Beta questionaires that Mythic has been using in Warhammer, but more detailed and subtle in the information you were collecting). That might be even better than forums as far as getting to know what's really going on in the game and among the players. For those of you who are going to claim that live management teams for MMOGs routinely do this anyway, I would say that most who claim to do it do in a very non-systematic, often careless way.

In the absence of that kind of research, forums can provide you a lot of information if you know how to scan over them quickly and ignore all the useless stuff. Reading the forums for SWG in the six months after launch, I could get a very systematic knowledge of: 1) skills that were not at all implemented; 2) skills that weren't working as intended; 3) systems that were badly thought out such as the early PvP between flagged Rebels and Imperials; 4) major bugs and exploits. I was never clear whether the devs knew about a lot of this stuff. At least some of the exploits that most players knew about seemed to catch them by surprise (say, the way that some early weaponsmiths levelled up very rapidly using factories.)

But forums, official and otherwise, are not just about information. They're about communication, and not just the static, mute, one-way kind that you do through a MOTD. I don't think it's even about the ego-gratification of a red name replying to a player. An official forum reassures even players who don't typically read it or use it that the developers are involved in a two-way conversation with the players about the future and fate of the game. Some developers breach that implied covenant when they introduce poorly thought-out changes or ignore what they're hearing from players: an official forum is no guarantee that this will all work. But it's a declaration of intent, a recognition that a live management team isn't just the utility company that turns on your service and turns it off again, but are the gods and rulers of a world that you play in and socialize in and invest time in. An official forum is like having the Oracle of Delphi, an approved place where the citizens and worshippers of your world can come and sacrifice to the gods, and perhaps hear hints of what is to come. When you turn your back on that,  you aren't serious about what Jacobs says he's learned as the main lesson of this business. Hence my skepticism about whether he's actually learned that lesson at all.

Yea, VN really prevented that from happening  :awesome_for_real:


The fact ToA even existed, shows whatever means of feedback they were supposedly using were either ignored and/or horribly flawed.


How did the plea of
"Please oh please make PvE suck less, I just want to hit 50 already"
turn into
"Hey, please disrupt the entire balance of the game by mandatory mass PvE raids that break all the previous limitations put in place and do nothing to improve said shitty PvE at all!"

</HRose>

We have some points about games without official forums possibly suffering because of that (TR/Vanguard).  What we don't have is any causal evidence suggesting that these games would have done better had they chosen to have official forums.

We also have One successful MMO that does have official forums (I am talking about WoW here.  I know EVE has forums too, but most people would not consider WAR successful if it ended with 250k subscribers).  So, it seems that some interesting numbers would be:

1. How many subscribers have visited the official forums at any time.

2. How many times/(day, week, month) does the average subscriber visit the forums.

I think in my 2.5 years in WoW I visited the forums maybe... 10 times?  That was generally if they were linked from my guilds forums in some discussion we had that someone else was following.  I realize that forums can be a good place to get answers from questions and such, but at that point they become secondary to the real issue, which is a Game Breaking problem that I cannot fix without leaving the game and searching for information elsewhere.

I don't suppose Blizzard publishes records of their forum user numbers?  But, they seem to be about the only real test-case that I would be interested in were I Mythic.

Again, it's not just use: it's what the existence of official forums says to players who may rarely or never use or post in a forum, or who may only go there if they have a problem. You'd have to find a way to measure that subtle but crucial difference in mindset to really understand what it means to not have a forum. For some players, an official forum is like a fire alarm. You may never use it, may never want to use it, but you'd get nervous being in a building that didn't have one, where the building owner told you, "Don't worry, there are phones and the fire department is only half a mile away".

Testers, that are paid to test, typically have 50% of their bugs result in a change.  The other 50% are not ignored but it could be viewed by some as being ignored since no change was made.  Dupe, No Repro, Works for Me, Already fixed, 3rd Party, Postponed, By Design, etc. just do not have visibility outside of the organization.  The speed of the feedback loop is also important.  Do bugs sit for 7 months, 7 days, 7 hours, or 7 minutes?  There are software service that do have minutes to hours turn around on issues and released to production\customers, just most companies are not there yet.  There is a movement to make all software products document all known issues at the time of each release but the industry is resisting.

O forums are a waste, and it gets worse with every new MMO released.  The signal to noise ratio is just too damn high these days.  If it's not lolcats, it's "L2play n00b" or some variation.  It degenerates to everyone trying to one up the person that posted previous to them.  Plus, that "community feeling" is overrated.  I don't think anyone would argue that WoWs forum community is shit; it just takes a good game to overcome it.

I would love to just see a blog or something similar updated as need be with new or upcoming stuff.  If the studio needs feedback, then have in-game polls with the options they are considering or whatever.  Let the CMs float to whatever the biggest / best player run forums are.  Devs aren't community people, they aren't trained in community management, and they shouldn't ever have to go to the boards to begin with, IMHO.  They generally develop a habit of responding to a handful of 'normal' people that alienates the others (ZOMG U HATE ME AND MY CLASS AND U ALWAYS IGNORE WUT I SAY!!!). 

Better in game Guild, LFG, and knowledge base tools via an ingame browser of sorts would go a loooong way towards solving the aforementioned 'community is overrated' problem.

Sup? Felt like quoting your post there.

I like to work, and thus make no comments.

The magnifying effect applies to the useful feedback, too. With the ratio of useful and dumb people being steady when you have them divided you wind up with few reasonable voices on each smaller forum, and they have limited ability to exchange opinions and/or come to useful conclusions on their own that way.

I've said this before, but I wonder (highly suspect) if in-game gathered metrics (how many times did people do this quest?) are much more valuable than even well thought out message board posts.

My experience with DAOC was that people did exactly that, but substituted the Team Lead (who often agreed with them) for the Red Name.

Which might explain why every class lead I can think of quit the game while they were TL.

Can't really make mind about that one tbh; i suspect the metrics can be of great use yes, but on the other hand have to keep in mind the 90% idiots rule -- that is going to have some impact on the metrics results, i'd imagine. It has of course effect on the forums posts too, but i suspect the brighter posts stand out better on the forums than the brighter players stand out in the bulk-based metrics...

In short, metrics to check the players' practices, the forums for the analysis "why" but also for the insight that potentially goes beyond what the majority of playerbase has caught up with, yet.

The problem is metrics without context are just as useless as context without metrics. If you know that 80% of the players do quest A but not quest B, you still have to know WHY that is the case. It could be that quest A is better written, it could be that it gives better loot, or it could be that quest B is just hard to find but is actually the better quest. If you don't know that and you just assume that players prefer quest A, you could start creating quests that they actually don't like. Without the context it's very easy to misinterpret the metrics. The only way to get the context is to ask people.

So basically, you need both.

Have the devs actually play the quest and they'll probably figure it out.  Does Quest A take 30 minutes and give 5K xp, does Quest B take 5 minutes and give 4K xp?  Is the item reward for Quest A crap compared to Quest B?  Is it broken?  Does it just flat out suck as a quest to begin with? 

Don't need too much in metrics to determine that...

That only works if your devs have the same opinions on the game as your players, play the game the same way as the players, and know the game as intimately as the entire playerbase combined. When you have maybe 50 developers and 100s of 1000s of players, that's almost never the case.

Wouldn't a poll at log in get just as much feedback as digging through the forums?  Set it up so the player can skip it if they want but give a small reward or something if they take the poll.  I suppose you could even add a comments section and use that to identify players that give consistently well thought out feedback who could then be included in more in depth polls or what not.

Not to be argumentative, but no. :)  Polls can be a good tool at times, but like metrics they are only one tool of many. Polls only work if you know that the answer is one of X number of issues. If you don't know the issue, then the poll won't help. I personally hate polls as a means of gathering feedback. They're like the pun (lowest form of humor) of community tools imo.

Honestly, message boards aren't that hard. You just have to commit to doing it and hire the right people. Also, message boards are about a lot more than just gathering feedback, there are messaging and community building benefits too.

Keep in mind, none of my comments so far are for or against official forums. What I've written so far holds true regardless of whether you host forums or not. If you are genuinely interested in what your players think and how they are playing the game, you have to talk to them.

That's what QA is for.  :grin:

But Calandryll's point, and it's a good one, is that QA will never (no matter how good they are) ever get the coverage of 100,000 eyes looking at it.

Polls and surveys can never tell you what some version of qualitative social science can tell you: how things feel, what experience is like, what the general attitude is, how players are communicating with each other about the game's character. If your MMOG is doing well for the moment, polls, surveys and hard quantitative data are only going to tell you what people are commonly doing, not what exactly about what they're doing is making them satisfied. If your MMOG is bleeding customers, none of that data will tell you why exactly that's happening, only perhaps what people are and are not doing in the game. When you have to decide what systems of your game to build up or use as your foundation, or which failures are costing you precious legitimacy among your potential customers, good luck using polls, surveys and hard metrics to understand that.

Polls also only give you answers to the questions you actually asked. There is a good chance that the questions you are asking when you set up a poll aren't the ones you really need to know the answers to.

Take it a step further - QA (and for that matter developers) won't even know what to look for all the time. Players will play the game in ways we never expected or intended. That's the nature of the beast and it's what makes these games so much fun. The only way to know how they are playing the game, outside of the intended mechanics, is to talk to them.

A quick example:

Years ago when I was OCR manager for UO, we decided to make a change to Runebooks. I forget what the change was, but it was a good one and if I recall, one that also fixed a bug. We designed it out and then posted the change for feedback. Everyone liked it. A day or two later another player, (I think his name was Goodman) posted that the change would ruin Rune Libraries. Now, this was not long after Runebooks had been released, we had never heard of Rune Libraries before. There were probably less than 10 of them across all servers. Most of us played UO a lot at the time and we still hadn't heard of them. They were a new idea. So our response was "what the hell is that?" to which Goodman replied telling us what they were. Our response was "wow, that's a great use of Runebooks, we'll change our design so we don't ruin that" - and we changed it. It wasn't a major change, probably took the designer less than an hour to do it. A few months later there were hundreds of Rune Libraries all over Britannia on every shard.

No poll or metric or survey on the planet would have allowed us to know about Rune Libraries at that time. The only way we found out was because we were talking to our players.

That may seem like a small thing, and maybe it is, but I can give you dozens of examples like that and they all add up. :)

You might get the feedback if there's a reward, but how will you know this feedback is actually any good? Because when i want to play the game (or quit the game for the day) and the obstacle pops up, i'll just click through any random option just so i get my reward for 'participating', and be done with it... i want it to go away as fast as i can make it and go on with my fun, not sit and read questions and/or ponder answers.

And yet having 20 million eyes on a problem doesn't mean much if none of them see to the heart of the problem.

(Sorry if that came across as pretentious. I really had trouble putting that thought down right. Probably failed.  :uhrr:)

 

This I can't argue with. I mean, if you get some good feedback from any source, of course you're going to be grateful for it.

Yeah, I don't know about that. All I've heard is that they have some group quests with an automatic joining mechanism. Perhaps that's the endgame.

My personal favorite was proving the correct values of BE tissues in SWG.

Yes, I could have bugged that it was broken, however it took a long analysis involving linear algebra to show the results weren't matching the expected data and why.  It was laid out all nice an neat so any dev could come by, look it over, and go, *tweak* *tweak* "Done!"

Otherwise they would have needed to first believe something was broken, without any supporting evidence beyond "trust me, your math is wrong", dedicate someone to analyzing it who was actually capable of doing so, then impliment the fix.

I don't know if they relied upon it when it was fixed, however it most likely did lead to it in some fashion as the BE community kept it as one of their top five to fix until it happened with the CU.

IF Ing is refering to Therrik (Wiz TL) then the issue wasn't just non-transparency.

Wizards were like most casters in DaoC, except they had no real utility. Just nukes and more nukes. Therrik asked for utility for a long, long time. He would show why they needed it, he would show how they were inferior with out it, would even suggest entirely reasonable things to provide it. The people reading the feedback would constantly tell him 'no, Wizards dont get utility, just pure damage'. Of course this was entirely flawed, since Mythic wouldn't/couldn't give *any* casters any kind of DPS upgrade, let alone give Wizards enough of a upgrade to 'define' them or counter their lack of utility. So Therrik, for a long time tried to find non-overpowered ways to improve the 'damage' aspect of wizards, without actually increasing their DPS OR giving them utility, all the while pleading for someone to see reason as to why this wouldn't work.

This is a time frame of YEARS mind you, not weeks or months, YEARS of reports and player feedback being eaten by a logic loop. *Error can't give damage, Error can't give utility, further suggestions required* Just flat out told him "No, no utility, stop asking for it/commenting on it/suggesting it etc."

Then finally, one day after years of Wizard community brainstorming they actually did come up with a way to make wizard DPS... 'wide' instead of a flat increase. Clever ways to do more damage, without giving utility spells and keeping within the wizard theme. The response to that?

"No, try suggesting some ideas revolving around utility."

 :why_so_serious:

Yeah, Therrik, that was his name. And that's the cycle I was talking about. There were other classes that went through that too (I PLAYED A THANE, PLEASED TO MEET YOU) but the wizard one is the best example because of how long it went on and how obvious the problem was.

Hero's didn't eve have a TL most of the time. The Warrior TL would just copy/paste his report for us too, since 98% of our issues were identical.

Two days away from the thread... unleash the SBing! :-)

Those are settings. Videos game genres are about the experiences. FPS, RPG, RTS, Sports Sim, and so on for however long a list your particular publication/marketing group needs it to be. Within this comparison, "MMO" as a term doesn't work well imho. Because you can't just say "MMO". In any substantive conversation, you have to say "MMO like <game>", where "game" defines the actual genre (WoW for RPG, Saga for RTS, Planetside for FPS, etc). MMO by itself is just another way of saying "24/7 persistent state world", which is a technical foundation not unlike "canvas" or "film". Ergo: medium.

I know that (per my prior post, and above). But the MMO medium is still young, and still overly defined by one playstyle. Heck, how long did it take the world to go from "Castle Wolfenstein 3D" to actual coining of the term "First Person Shooter"? We know that MMOs existed before "MMORPG" was coined (though there's still apparently some debate on who coined it and when).

Point taken about WWIIO, as that launched near AO and had big technical problems as well. However, MCO launched in the same month as DAoC, TSO and E&B launched a year later, UO2 never launched at all and Majestic was not an MMO (more an ARG/service 'til they gave up and packaged it).

DAoC deserves its slot in history as having proven you CAN launch a game that CAN be played on day one. But I don't recall it doing much to turn investor's heads to this genre in general. And things only got worse after that through the subsequent flops of "how can anything go wrong" titles like TSO and SWG.

I always called them 'Doom Clones'  :oh_i_see:

True, but that is outside the scope of QA\Testing unless you hire 100,000 and tell them to cover it like 100,000.

There are different types of feedback systems depending on what you want, automation, manual, feesability, usability, focus groups, customers, publisher, press, peers, legal, management, ESRB, etc.  Each generates different types of feedback and require different expertise to collect and turn into action.  Most places are not setup to even collect it so it is no surprise it comes across as ignore and no action.  Fortunately there is lots of room improvement just by collecting it all rather then some and also in refinement to each of the feedback systems.  There is all high level stuff determine by management way before people actually make and use feedback systems, which is hard in itself.  The most common mistake on execution has nothing to do collection, processing, or even determining actionable items.  Its finding the time for people to actually do that changes in the time available, if any.

Polls are only as good as the options provided. If it is a clear cut issue (e.g. Yes / No, Option A through Option E, etc) then they have a place. However, I've seen so many bad polls (and every poll with a comedic option is of extremely questionable value) that it is obvious they are poorly thought out and probably mis-used.

Often top level poll data is used as a bludgeon against anyone who might disagree, but (unless the response is account linked) you can't work out the type of respondents who answered the poll - is it the hardcore PvP community who are anti the change while everyone else seems positive? Are players who log on less than 5 times a week even answering the poll?

If you want less biased community feedback, you need to random sample your player base. However, it will only give you answers to questions you ask, not raise and explore issues unthought of by the devs - that is what forums can do (and I believe centralised community in official forums can do it better than a split community over several fansites).

Basically, that's it: a forum can produce discussions of issues and knowledge about feelings or experiences that the developers cannot ask about in a poll and survey because they themselves may not know about or anticipate those reactions. It doesn't matter that this will be surrounded by a lot of noise, or that it it coming from a probable minority, maybe even an unrepresentative minority, of players. It is a place to start, it is something new, it is information. Given that all commercial MMOGs to date have struggled badly at times, visibly, because the developers clearly did NOT know something vital about the experiences, feelings or problems that players were having, what developer would scorn or sideline a source of information like that, unless they had a very systematic alternative plan for obtaining even better high-value information (e.g., systematic qualitative research on players and their experience).

It's true. All these metrics we keep harping on generally don't mean anything because they don't have clearly defined objectives.

I think it ironic that the more I read about instructional design, the more I find it applies to fields other than training.

So basically what we're saying is that 'multiple data points are good' and 'forums are a valuable data point'? Which is what we had 4 pages ago.

Video game user experiences can be broken down into three main categories: Learning, Practice, and Mastery. You could throw grokking in there between Practice and Mastery depending on the system. The first part of all of the (good) games in the last two decades is instructional design. Some could argue that includes the instruction manual, but who reads those? :wink:

Well, Iain, there have been some other points about why it's important to have an official forum, for a MMOG live management team regard forums as important (commitment to open-ended communication, sign of respect for the players, multiple weaknesses of external forums as a source of information and communication). But yeah, we had the "multiple data points are good" four pages ago, and hence, when Jacobs says, "Listen to your customers, gather data on what they're feeling" and "Forums suck", many of us said, "Those don't go together at a really basic level".

See, when you just skim one fan forum because you've got 5 others to check, you miss the real meat of the discussion.  :grin:

The issue came up if forums had any value at all compared to compiled system data. It does, because forums + compiled system data end up providing both qualitative (deep exploratory information, but not from a wide group of people so it may not be representative) and quantitative data (shallow exploratory information, but from a wide group of people so it is probably representative). Both are important and provide both sides of the picture. Forums may overstate the importance of something, or hold a perception that is incorrect. Compiled system data won't throw up issues if a system isn't working as it should or sometimes masks a system that is working correctly but 'feels' wrong to players.

I'm not going to pretend that forums are automatically bastions of wisdom even if they are official. In reality they are groups of people standing around a common point of interest, often with a complaint to make or issue to raise. But Jacobs going, "We think listening to our community is important" was pure spin compared to how he actually feels about about forums and because Mythic is the exception in terms of how they try to actually "listen". If Mythic did something exceptionally different - and I don't think the Herald is really that exceptional from what I've seen - then I wouldn't have as many issues with Jacob's original point.

Getting to the point is overrated. Bullshitting over a cooler full of beer is more fun.

I think forums can be a valuable source of data, but I don't think they're intregal and necessary to the success of an MMOG.

I think that means I agree with Mark Jacobs. Does that make me a sychophant?  :ye_gods:

I'd guess it's like most of other game components/systems -- while not absolutely necessary, the lack can lead/add to negative impression. On its own that might not be enough to make people quit, but give enough problems (something that every MMO has) and it can become the proverbial straw. At the bottom of it, it's adding some extra risk to game well-being to save some money ... but given the game is already investment measured in millions, are these savings really worth the risk?

They can also turn out to be a huge liability. Some thread on rpg.net, a fellow was talking about how much distaste he had for the posts on message boards after visiting the offical boards for Mercs 2. A game he was having a blast with, and then saw the barrage of armchair developers bitching about every nuance of the game.

One of the reasons I stopped visiting offical message boards is because while I was having fun playing the game, the tone and content of most posts were so negative, they made me question wether I was having fun "The right way".

I must say, my gaming is much "happier" now that I limit my visits to those boards. (Unless there's some really juicy drama or teh funnays going on.)

This.

Also, I find the less aware I am of bug #127836 for some class or quest or item that I will never play and will never affect me, the happier I am. 

And even though I'm taking part in my last beta (unless something really freaking cool comes around - which is unlikely), beta forums are a bit different.  But I do restrict my reading to bug reports (so that I don't double up on it) and developer comments/posts.  Everyone else is on ignore.  Besides, I'm not looking for friends in the social community forums space.  I've got my handful of friends that I game with, and that's all I need.

It's been noted that betas tend to be a bit more productive, a bit more tight knit, than a post-launch community.

Doesn't this apply then to reading anything about games? Wouldn't gameplaying be enhanced if you knew nothing about the games industry, games production, the reputation of specific games, or debates about whether or not there should be forums? I'm curious about when not knowing stops paying dividends of fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

If I knew anything about Prey before playing it, I would have thought it boring. As it was, I went in knowing nothing about it, other than the title. I thought it was awesome. WoW was a freaking blast with my first three characters; NE rogue, human mage, tauren druid. Now it's the most boring game I own.

I'm replaying Bard's Tale right now, and I'm really bored with it because I know where to go and what to do. I replayed Ultima 3 a while ago, was a bit bored with it, then decided to get all the treasure from all the dungeons; something I never did before. I went into them with spoilers and maps at hand, and I had a bit of fun doing that. Before that, I replayed Ultima 2 and went dungeon delving, without the maps. I got stuck a lot, and sometimes I had to restart the whole game because I died. I had a lot of fun doing that.

Yeah, it's different degrees, but I'd say it depends on the person. I'm sure there's only a handful of people who think dying in a dungeon and restarting the game is "freaking awesome." It depends on who you are, and why you play games.

Depends on how well the game is designed. The mass market successes out there ARE that way because they have hit a segment of the market that a) found it fun, b) found it fun unto itself; and, c) probably didn't visit a single forum nor metacritic nor maybe even didn't read about the game itself.

That combination of success factors is as rare as WoW is to MMOs. Very few can rely on making a good game that is so intuitive as to not require any pre-knowledge nor research while at the same time providing an ongoing enriching experience players continually seek without feeling the need to research better ways of playing it.

I wish devs would STOP talking on message boards, and games STOP posting release notes, both take all the mystery out of these games.  I thought the whole point of RPGs is to 'figure things out', yet message board postings and release notes explain it all.  The only comment a dev should make is 'not a bug' or 'its a bug' and stop there if a big issue comes up.

Devs can't stop players talking between themselves out of game, but they don't have to join in, but they can 'listen'.

RPGs should not be 'chess' where the rules are fixed and known - its part of the game not to know the rules - but to figure them out, and realize they could, and will, change.

That's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.

It's not an RPG.

I thought it's to play a role in environment simulated with defined mechanics. That's why these games used to come with manuals explaining how to go about it and how the mechanics work... since the pen and paper days.

I'm don't mean basic mechanics (Press A to Attack, ooh after this patch its now Press B!), but things like new dungeons / mobs being added, or drop rates changes or DPS adjustments.   Those things should be noticed or discovered during play, not reading release notes.

Stealth nerfs are wonderful, magic things. They make forums (official and unofficial) melt.

Uh, no.

It's part of the game to know the rules, because the rules are part of the game.

A game is a series of meaningful decisions. If you don't know the rules, then you don't know what your decisions mean. I mean, would you rather wear armor with 500 AC or 450 AC and 0.02% slashing invulnerability? If you don't know what slashing invulnerability is or does then that decision doesn't mean anything. And so it goes.

What Glazius said. 

Why do you think so many people are making UI mods for WoW?  They want more information.  More information = better understanding of game mechanics.  Better understanding = better decision making.  Better decision making = more meaningful gameplay. 

That goes both ways.

The more information I get about a game, the less I want to play it. Why do you think I spend so little time in betas or looking up MMORPG information before a release. I don't want to see the endgame armor and weapons. I don't want to see how much damage I *could* be doing if I "Did it Right." These things aren't fun. They make games a second job and suck all the mystery out of gameplay. Knowing everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen is not what games are about. To some people they might be, but all those motherfuckers play munchkins in tabletop games also.

Feel free to tell me I'm doing it wrong, but when it comes to games, ignorance is bliss.

Spending 5 minutes reading Elitist Jerks is enough to suck any thought I might have about resubbing to WoW. Revealing all the details of how the game works certainly allows for better gameplay decisions but it sure doesn't make the game more fun.

I agree with you both.  I like ambiguity in my gameplay.  I use experimentation to figure stuff out rather than install a UI-mod to do it all for me.  I guess this is why I was so fond of ATitD.  It allowed me to solve the game mechanics puzzles as I worked through other aspects of the game.  UI mods really do dumb-down games and take away a lot of the fun for me... with the exception of the few mods that streamline the existing UI.  Anything that focuses me more on the game and less on the numbers embedded within the game is a good thing.

Interesting, I spend more time reading Elitist Jerks than I do trolling you guys here (which is saying a lot!).  I have Leulier's dps spreadsheet saved to my dropbox so I can edit it from any computer I access.  I have every gear drop/badge reward that is an upgrade memorized so that I know at any given time how much any upgrade is worth and what the perfect buy order is in %dps increase/# badges.

But then again, that's how I have fun playing games! :)

Seek Help.

I love the idea of ambiguity in my gameplay, but for that to be truly satisfying, the game mechanics need to have ambiguity built in, to construct a world or a platform that has deliberate mystery, to allow for improvisation and discovery.

Any game with a deep, complex physics engine, for example, can reward ambiguous gameplay because the player can improvise or act spontaneously within the game and see novel results, like discovering that you can launch yourself with rockets, etc. Ideally you want developers who do not *plan* for this kind of discovery (e.g., design so that it is mandatory) but neither do they forbid it. (e.g., designing a topography where there is nowhere for a rocket jumper to go).

Most developers don't want to allow that space for improvisation because it can to things that bork the game: players getting stuck in terrain, players undermining a set progression scheme, and so on. But my preference is definitely for games where there are possibilities for unexpected interactions between game subsystems and where there is no need or obligation to uncover all those interactions in order to compete or achieve progression.

However. That is really not most MMOGs, which is too bad, World of Warcraft least of all. The more rollercoasterish something is, the less mystery it necessarily possesses. Under those circumstances, not only do I expect devs to be explicit about the game mechanics, I don't blame players for being interested in the same.

Someone who insists on making an unambiguous design into something ambiguous is just going to end up frustrated. It's like playing the latest Sam & Max adventure game and getting angry because the solution to puzzles isn't intuitive or doesn't arise from the intrinsic properties of objects in the environment. It just isn't that kind of game.

Also, to some extent, most of us have had a nightmare experience or two with a game of progression that we tried to treat as an improvisational, spontaneous experience, and in so doing, seriously fucked up an early quest or didn't pick up an important item or something of that kind. Which was not and is not our fault: it's the fault of designers, and most designers have learned not to build games that way. But even a couple of experiences like that is enough to send you furtively to a walk-through every time you're a bit puzzled about something, because you really do not want to spend hours only to find out that you needed to pick up Grandma's Old Diaphragm back in the first part of the game, etc.

I don't need any help, with the tools currently available I already win the DPS mini-game in nearly every raid.  More help would make me unstoppable.

I hate that MMORPG has become all about THIS, spreadsheet analysis to tweak for optimal play efficiency. It's a circular theme that has infested the gameplay mechanics now that this is factored in… …not that understanding about the mechanics is totally wrong, it's just that when you have to plot and plan to play a game, something's a tad askew…

Learning the game is a big part of the enjoyment, as Raph has written about many times, and it seems to me that element is shrinking as time goes on.

I recall the first time I played a moderated Squad Leader game at a tournament (many moons ago), where we didn't know the opponents forces nor victory conditions.  At first I was WTF is this?!?!  But the fun level was 10x instead of doing Game Algebra to compute exactly what to do, one had to scout and try to guess, if you were supposed to attack or run away!  

Of course the basic rules were known, but the 'next level' of wasn't.

Like early days Asheron's Call, you could look at those Steel Leggings and read "Lightning Protection Low" on them, but what did that mean? The first time you ran into Silver Rats you learned the hard way!  

With both situations you had a clue to be careful or to try different tactics, or the first time fighting a new mob try to get it 1 v 1 in a safe spot, etc, it wasn't 'flip a coin - tails you die'.

Hook shot.

A lot of the items and weapons in the Zelda games have at least two uses. Lighting stuff on fire, hitting enemies, retreiving stuff from across the map.

That's why I was so jazzed to find the buzzsaw gun in Hellgate London. It was fun to bounce buzzsaw blades around corners, even if it wasn't quite as effective as shooting an enemy square in the chest.

Most of the instances and especially the end game raids in WoW nowadays are about doing thing besides "Tank & Spank". touching blocks, kiting enemies onto explosive eggs, etc...

Unless you enjoy plotting and planning.

And it's not like you HAVE to plot and plan to play the games, hell a mentally retarded monkey rolling his face across a keyboard can still get pretty decent dps in WoW.  You can choose to over analyze it, if that's your thing, but you don't have to.

I think plotting and planning is cool and wish there was more of it - with one caveat, that the information used is based on knowledge gained in game, not by reading the web.   However, that bird has long flown with 3rd party sites, but at least the Dev's don't have to contribute to the spoilers!

This kind of thing actually isn't what I'm talking about. You don't need to know how awesome the endgame gear is to play the game.

You don't even need to know how awesome the endgame gear is to go on the raid to get the endgame gear.

If you know how awesome the endgame gear is, all that happens is that you want it.

So there's a distinction to be drawn here, between knowledge of the game that helps you form goals, and knowledge of the game that helps you attain them. I would argue that while you are sometimes better off not knowing things that help you form goals, you are never better off not knowing things that would help you attain them.

All that happens is I no longer want to play the game. The moment I know what everyone is chasing after, all the allure goes right out the fucking window.

Why keep playing if there's nothing left to discover?

It's great that WoW has expanded the MMO playerbase. Unfortunately this means that millions of people haven't had the opportunity or incentive to learn from past mistakes.

Everquest tried to obscure game mechanics as much as possible. They didn't tell players what effect stats had on gameplay, how speed impacted melee damage, or even how much XP it took to level. Players then sat down and laboriously calculated all this information, and found that stats were functionally meaningless (these tests were actually done by me), speed was king and slow weapons worthless, and that humans leveled slower than halflings with no racial advantages while halflings had night vision. It was a debacle, and one that is unlikely to be repeated. And rightfully so.

Game mechanics must be transparent and intuitive.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed history. This is the first time a Squad Leader player has ever argued against having rules for something. In fact I'm pretty sure ASL has a rule against things that aren't covered by rules.

You're essentially arguing against spoilers though, and I don't think anyone has a problem with people who don't want spoilers. Knowing the mechanics of how my Stab #32 attack works, what kinds of stats are beneficial for it and in what proportion, etc., is not really spoiler information, especially if it becomes relevant to, say, irreversible spec decisions I have to make like in Diablo 2 or DAOC before they had respec stones. You can't hide that kind of thing from players and expect many of them to be happy about it.

Okay, but look back up. "This is the endgame gear" is a piece of knowledge that doesn't help you play the game at all, only to form goals within the game. It's not always useful, so in some cases knowing it can be counterproductive.

It's like how Watson told Holmes that the moon revolved around the Earth and Holmes was all "Yeah, that's gonna come in real handy when Moriarity goes to his secret moon base- OH WAIT. Now I have to forget that so it doesn't block out something that would actually HELP ME SOLVE CRIMES. Thanks a lot, dipwad." Not useful knowledge. Counterproductive.

I'm not against mystery, I'm against... well.


I'm against... obscurity? Opacity? Bullshit number goofery?

It's the difference between knowing the answer to "I want to do more damage: which weapon does the most damage?" and "I want to do more damage: which of these weapons in my backpack deals more damage?"

Knowing the answer to the first question is something that it's okay to discover for yourself on your own terms. But there's no case where it would be appropriate not to know the answer to the second question.

I never did read the ASL rulebook, I had moved away when that came out but bought it for fun.  This was with the original Squad Leader, back in 1977, at a tournament in Indiana hosted partially by John Hill himself.  (Mr. Burns voice: Yes, I'm old). 

But again, I'm not saying don't know the basic rules, but don't give away the situation where you have to use those rules.  Like Steel Panther scenario's, I can't play them more than once, since after that I know the enemy setup, its just not as much fun.

I like to know what I'm going for. Say there's an awesome hat that makes me immune to fire. I want it, so I go on an adventure to get it. What sucks is if the game tells you how to get it, every step of the way. But it's cool if the players figure it out, make a wiki, and tell all the secrets there. In one case, the developers are playing the game for you. In the other case, you're getting information from other people in the community. But you don't have to get it; you could just go blind through the whole thing.

Is that kind of like how no one played Diablo/Diablo 2 after beating it on Normal mode because they'd already mastered the gameplay?

Don't care if it's green, you missed the point. Diablo has an infinite horizon. It is in fact created and designed in a way to AVOID the problems I mentioned.

Bullshit. Once you beat the first act in Diablo 2, you've mastered the basic gameplay. Once you've beaten Baal on Normal mode, you've seen everything the game has to offer. All Nightmare and Hell modes offer is bigger numbers.

Oh. I see. You're not playing for the loot.

Doing Diablo wrong, itt.

I was the same way.. the game wasn't enjoyable enough for me to play through it over and over again just for loot.

Games where decisions cannot be easily reversed, or which focus extensively on one mechanic as a means to an end, do not lend themselves well to hidden rules.  I'm thinking talent trees, DPS, and such, although it's applicable to many systems.  If players are allowed to change things up, or there's more than one way to beat encounters, then having hidden features and rules aren't as bad.

I was in a progression WoW guild twice over the past ~4 years and I may have finally learned my lesson.  First time, we put MC on farm and started BWL.  My dps wasn't high enough and people started bitching.  Finally I said fuck it, and quit.  I came back for BC, made top hunter in our guild this time.  We put Kharazan/Mags/Gruul on farm, pushed through TK/SSC and then realized I was telling someone in the guild that their dps wasn't high enough and they couldn't come with us until they fixed their shit.  I quit then and there, after realizing what I was doing.  I realize you don't want to play with retards, but *I* don't want to play with actuarialists.   

Looking back on the 'fun' that was WoW raiding:  What rotation maximizes dps?  What gems do I use?  What gear is best?  What enchants?  What potions/elixirs/flasks?  What spec?  Blah fucking blah blah. 

No part of that is fun to me.  Schild's right on this one about knowing the endgame before getting there.

Schild you are confusing me.

You are saying diablo lends well to several playthroughs yet the game is the same except for the loot.

You are also saying playing because of the loot is play diablo wrong?

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here, the only difference in diablo playthroughs is mobs hit harder so you get higher stats from loot to kill harder mobs, wash rinse, repeat ad nauseum.

Also maybe i'm in the spreadhseet category but rpg's where you miss picking a blue flower in the first zone and therefore can't give it to the princess to get the good ending where you have many children and the only way you would have known to keep that flower was in a strategy guide....those games piss me right the fuck off. I enjoy some mystery in games but i dislike artificial cockblocks as ways to introduce replay value to a game. if your game is fun enough to replay i will, don't make me do it so i can get the 100% super seekret ending with a happy ending included.

also :mmo's are not rpg's

What? No, that's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. Random layout + the infinite horizon of loot is why you replay it. Why it fulfills that inner slot machine trashy whore everyone has inside them. MMOGs, thus far, don't really have that and the ones that do have done it POORLY. As such, I hate knowing what's coming. Even if it's just skills. I don't look that far up the tree unless it's for a purpose (like Bazooko's Circus).

That rhymed, my bad.

They don't just hit harder, they hit much harder and have immunities, so that you're forced to exploit various tactical abilities of your character that weren't required and are generally ignored on lower difficulties. There are substantial gameplay changes on higher difficulty levels. They aren't exactly rocket science though, and a great deal of it is just "be much more careful". It's really about the acquisition of sweet, sweet loot.

I disagree about the skill trees. Character building is a great deal of the attraction of diablo. Each class had various ways to specialize; amazons could be bowazons, javazons, poisonazons, etc. I liked that stuff, and it translated perfectly to WoW.

Yup, that pretty much covers what I think is fun about WoW raiding.  I have a blast obsessing over that stuff.

Fuck after every raid, I spend 2 hours the next morning pouring over the WWS and comparing it to last weeks.

Speaking of which, I grabbed a Timbal's Focusing Crystal the other day because I still do not have a Hex Shrunken Head.  So I go to the first raid and I feel like my DPS has increased, but then I look at WWS the next day and I find that my average Shadow Bolt had decreased significantly.  We didn't have a Shadow Priest with us, so I chalked some of the decrease up to that, but it was WAY more than a 15% decrease in average Shadow Bolt power.

So I go about obsessing about it the next day trying to figure it out, when I'm running Heroic Ramparts or some silly thing and I notice my Timbal trinket go off.  So I look back through the logs at the Timbals crystal and low and behold, the proc from Timbal is logged as "Shadow Bolt".  So it turns out enough Timbals procs had gone off to drastically reduce my average "Shadow Bolt" in WWS, because it averages Timbals procs in the mix.

Whew.

Anyways, see that's the life of a min/maxer for ya.  Full of fun times with lots of math!

"WWS"?

I think Cevik is exhibiting a highly advanced form of Autism.

http://wowwebstats.com/

The layouts aren't that random, and the horizon for loot is level 99.

The functional difference between Diablo 2 and WoW is that WoW has 3-D gameplay instead of sprites, and the holy trinity of Healer/Tank/DPS.

Keep thinking that.

(http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p275/DarkHorsePinoso/SimpsonPulpFiction2.jpg)

I will! Thanks!  :heart:

Fixed that for ya.

Schild, you would have bailed on WoW as soon as you found out the best gear in the game came from and only from 25-man raids with four progression steps, no matter what that best gear was. It wouldn't matter if it was partially junctioned to infinity.

You're still clicking on loot pinatas until they pop. WoW could emulate Diablo 2 by putting all their loot on a global random table, and Diablo 3 just may wind up having class specific gear. Moreso than Diablo 2 anyway. They're not that far seperated in gameplay.

You're playing for loot. They're playing for loot. The big difference is that you don't know exactly what you could get. But the underlying ability to get it at all is based on the same core concept of stat adjusted abilities. So they're shades of the same thing, not radically different. Which is why Diablo2 gets slapped with an "MMO" label sometimes :-)

Knowing which mob to farm to get x piece of loot and knowing where to get the best pieces of loot is a radical change from everything having varying degrees of possibility in dropping y.

The only shade here is that both games are fully itemized. The actual itemization is completely different though.

Pindleskin was a step in that direction, but nowhere near what WoW did.

(http://www.mmonotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/larp.jpg)

Dude, you posted a shot of your LARP group! Which one are you?   :awesome_for_real:

The min/maxer with the spreadsheet and the digital camera.

IIRC you are the ghey elf that bitches about how we all need to roleplay more.  Which one exactly are you?  I'm not sure you fuckers all look alike to me.

Is the guy in the center tv's frank?

You can't catch me on camera! I'm the ghost of Middle Earth past…  :heartbreak:

I tried LARP once, but someone hit me in the eye with a throwing star!

(http://www.ugo.com/movies/oj-simpsons-criminal-masterminds/images/prof-chaos.jpg)

I don't understand why this argument is occurring (beside the obivous fact its the internet, and thus people are wrong).  Some people are spreadsheet hugging min/maxers.  Some people love exploring and discovering the unknown.  Some people hate having the 4th wall when it comes to mmorpgs just being collections of numbers, and some people love it.  So?  Different people like different things, news at 11 etc etc.

Someone mentioned how its a pity developers have squeezed the experimentation out of mmorpgs, and I do agree with that.  I really liked that Quad kiting, and fear kiting, and dual wielding skelly pets, and monk feign pulling and all that crap came out of EQ without the devs plan, due to players just learning how to do shit.  Its a pity someone decided that mmorpgs shouldn't be so sandboxy (heh, never thought Id say EQ was sandboxy), and instead everyone has a clearly defined path/role.

and then there was something about diablo.

Agreed.  Just look at the blog by Tobold, and his reaction to various games.  Judging by the immense popularity of his blog, he is not alone in asking for the same hit-things/get stuff/level/hit bigger things harder/get better stuff/level etc experience.  He loves it, and so do all his little minions, and when a certain cantankerous Essex-based academic criticises that nice, safe reskinning of each others' games  they go raj...

Yeah, that's basically what I was trying to say above.  To each their own.

One of my biggest beefs with Everquest was that any time a player came up with a non-standard way of approaching an encounter, it was slapped down as an exploit. Once their party paradigm was in place, all gameplay was to be in "the box" and the box was pretty damn small.


It's always about Diablo.

You can't have evolution without questioning the establishment. Because otherwise all you have is an industry dominated by the rules mastered by the one or two elite titles out there. And that only works for the elite titles.

WoW is fine for a min/maxer fantasy diku-inspired market. Other companies will only be able to compete for their limited share of that pie if they spend even more money with an even better IP. So that leaves recreating the rules for success, or ignoring the min/maxer fantasy diku-inspired market altogether to chase a different demographic.

That's fine as long as people like us are happy playing WoW until the universe collapses (or the LHC black holes us... :wink: )

You don't evolve industries on the backs of the masters of the current one. This is the lesson SOE (hopefully) learned when they opened early beta of their "casual EQ1 followup" to their hardest core EQ1 players (the folks paying $39.99/mo for the min/maxer dreamteam server).

From my perspective, this argument is occurring because it's an argument over what kinds of information the game should present to the player versus what kinds of information should be compiled and distributed outside the game and its official channels.

Spoilers for content: outside the game.
Transparency of mechanics: within the game.

So, for example:

The most epic of epic axes and its stats, including attack power: better off compiled and distributed outside the game.
How attack power influences the damage you do: ideally in-game as help text, a short explanatory video, or both; if not in game, then through an official channel.

And here i am, a fan of the White wolf Dot system (http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Dot).

As long as the dots that directly impact rolling dice draw from a different build pool than the dots that don't (though universal XP is still okay) dots are fine. They affect the outcome of random tests in simple, easy-to-understand ways.

And when you put them into things like "property" or "wealth" or "connections" you put them in there with the understanding that it conveys to your Storyteller your relative emphasis on each of those factors, keyed to references you agree on when you start playing, and if you can't trust him not to dick you over WRT those "fuzzy dots" why the hell are you letting him CONTROL YOUR WORLD?

With the Dot system, you pretty much know the mechanics of the system.  Have a Dot, get a Die.  Nothing is directly hidden, so the player is informed.  What they don't know, until the GM tells them to roll, is their difficulty, which the GM can keep secret if necessary.  It's the best balance between the player being informed and the unknown possibilities before attempting a task.

Well, except for the things thay left in:

FD pulling
Kiting
Fear Kiting
Bard-twist Kiting


Also. Alchemy is Working As Intended.  :awesome_for_real:

In this way, it's like every other PnP RPG.  Roll a die and add your skill number.  Roll three dice under your skill number.  It's all the same.