MMO budgets and development times

[schild]

Hehehehehehe.

[stu]

That's cold.

[HaemishM]

Edit: Even if he did put ketchup on his sock. 

I just thought I'd say congrats to gehrig38 for not being in the news today.

Amen to that.

[Waldo]

Coincidentally, I wrote some things on this and decided I'd rather developers make small budget niche titles for me than big budget titles that only a bloated casual gaming market populated by apparent idiots can afford.

Just read your post, and one quote stood out...

Priority number one is to develop a game that is deep and artistically satisfying to that particular niche.

Totally agree with that.  I think too that you yourself have to be part of that niche if you want to do it right.  You can't make a niche gardening  MMO unless you are yourself a passionate gardener or can become one.

My theory is that the world has room for just a few AAA type MMOs, and there's a big queue outside to get in that room.  However there's another "room" that's big, huge and somewhat empty.  ATITD, RuneScape, and others are pretty happy in that room where you can hear yourself think and others speak.  Why would you want to be in the AAA room?

[Rendakor]

Why would you want to be in the AAA room?

Moneyhats.

[Waldo]

Why would you want to be in the AAA room?

Moneyhats.

Well yea that and the hoo - er escorts.

[Venkman]

Prestige, clout to get the IP you want, clout to get VC to do it yourself, general market exposure, etc. Stephen Spielberg didn't jump from a nobody to Schindler's List, for example.

Some companies are fine doing the exact thing they a) love to; and, b) are good at. ATITD comes to mind. Eve doesn't though, because CCP used their abilities and success to secure the WoD IP. Funcom is the same in that they used what they learned to create a compelling reason for the Conan IP holders to let them play with it. Blizzard, too, they've done nothing but stretch, by continually showing they can cap genres. I'd love thinking about what'd they do if they decided to go after straight-up RPGs and FPS games.

The larger point though is that there's always room for everyone from indies to public companies to play in a space. You just manage your expectations going in. And then you decide how you want to leverage your success if you have one (maintain vs grow vs stretch).

[waylander]

After reading all this stuff, and a very amusing dev cycle by Lum, I'm glad that I've remained in the player community.  I've had a few offers in recent years, but to me it doesn't seem like the gaming community is really connected with the players at the guild level.  Here we are making community based games where guilds are a major component to that community, and yet no gaming company seems to really care about the issues that make guilds come to or leave a game.

Instead we get grindy POS games that require massive amounts of time, people who can't keep up with their friends have to quit, and eventually the whole guild burns out and moves on mostly due to unfriendly game design that keeps forcing their friends to leave.

Guilds are no longer new to gaming, and many follow their guild from game to game. So when developers make these games a headache for guilds to thrive, the whole guild leaves.  If a game doesn't totally rock, the veteran guild will usually depart within 6 months. So take that $14.99 x 100 = your loss.

The counter argument here is that new guilds always form, and that is certainly true.  But new guilds face lots of challenges and drama, and that can turn people off to future games where it seems like you need a guild/clan to advance. To me its best to support guilds if you plan on making a game that requires a group to progress.

So my contribution to this argument is that dev companies should look at hiring experienced Guildmasters as consultants to a project because just hiring developers who happened to be a member of "x" guild just doesn't cut it. Anyone can be a guild member, but guild leadership can give you a good perspective on how your game design is going to effect guilds in your game.

[DarkSign]

I agree with that sentiment. Guild-level quests are a start, but even consulting with guild leaders, perhaps in a special forum, to help keep a game on track or adjust the rules.  If MMOs are going to improve it's not going to be from automation or technology. It's going to be getting back to community roots.

[Draegan]

Are there enough game-independant guilds out there that will make an MMO successful yet not spurn the casual/hardcore player that plays these games without being in one of those guilds?

For a person not in that situation they might feel spurned or left out or what have you when it comes to those games and they don't feel like they are being payed attention to.  Just look at all the wonderful hardcore/casual bickering that continues today that was pretty ugly during WOW 1.0

[waylander]

Are there enough game-independant guilds out there that will make an MMO successful yet not spurn the casual/hardcore player that plays these games without being in one of those guilds?

For a person not in that situation they might feel spurned or left out or what have you when it comes to those games and they don't feel like they are being payed attention to.  Just look at all the wonderful hardcore/casual bickering that continues today that was pretty ugly during WOW 1.0

I would say that guilds that are multi-gaming guilds are probably the best candidates.  Most multi-gaming guilds usually have hardcore, casual, and extreme casual gamers and they have to juggle the interests of all of them.  Over at Lords of the Dead we have a hardcore chapter, casual chapter, and sometimes an extreme casual chapter going.  All of our chapters are lead through a unified guild governance and oversight structure.

So I would say that a developer could probably look at what they feel the ideal group size is for advancing through the game (i.e. WoW 25 man raids), and then find a veteran guild or group of guilds large enough to have a good chance of progressing through their game.   Finding guilds that at least cater to hardcore and causal gamers is pretty important because you will get valuable insight from them about how they use the game mechanics, or how much crap they have to put up with to compensate for poor game mechanics.

As an experienced tester for over 10 years, I usually find that focus groups get dominated by a handful of hardcore guilds who drown out everyone else. So while I do think community feedback is important, I really think dev studios should consider a more professional link between established guilds and their company if they want to build a good game that will help the average guild thrive.

[Draegan]

I know a few games that do this with guilds on Test Realms for their respective game.  But during the development stage?  It would scare me away if the dev house was asking random internet gaming guilds for advice.

[Tige]

As an experienced tester for over 10 years, I usually find that focus groups get dominated by a handful of hardcore guilds who drown out everyone else. So while I do think community feedback is important, I really think dev studios should consider a more professional link between established guilds and their company if they want to build a good game that will help the average guild thrive.

It is time that 99.9% of the feedback from either guilds or individual players be summarily dismissed.  It only erodes what little innovation and originality a development team may come up with.     

[waylander]

I know a few games that do this with guilds on Test Realms for their respective game.  But during the development stage?  It would scare me away if the dev house was asking random internet gaming guilds for advice.

I never said ask random guilds. I said ask established guilds, as in the ones who have been around a long time and played multiple games.  And specifically I'm talking about Guild Leaders.  Put them under an NDA, maybe a consultant contract, etc.

By the time we get brought in now the "Dev vision" has already been coded, and there's no time to fix anything if the game has already been designed to be guild unfriendly. 

Or they can keep doing what they are doing now and making games that make guilds have to go way out of their way to thrive, and then continue to lose accounts in mass when the guilds won't put up with the BS any longer. But as I said before, the downside of that way of thinking is that people are getting a negative perception of guilds in games. So it makes more people think twice before even buying a game that looks like it requires a clan or organized group to progress.

In the end they are gonna do what they are gonna do, but we sit here and bitch all day about devs not thinking outside the box so I gave a suggestion.  No one in here but me ever talks about guilds and game design from the perspective of being an actual guild leader, and then they wonder why guilds end up hating on their game.

[Draegan]

So only the gaming Elite can do this?  Sounds snobbish to me.  I think the dev houses should build their game and ignore all the asshatery and forums.  If their ideas are flawed from the beginning there is no amount of fan suggestion that will make the game work.

And I put up that "thinking outside the box" tag line should never be used again when it comes to people saying things should improve and not put forth their own ideas.

[Venkman]

This is largely due to developers making games for individual players first, social groups second. Some might consider features for large connected groups of people (guild banks, guild houses, fighting over them, etc), but they expect that most players are not actually so closely connected in this way.

Many have probably run all sorts of metrics to prove it out. If I had to guess, I'd say 80% of all guilds out there have maybe 8-10 active players with a sum total of 20 characters or so. This is the typical size of a small-ish groups of friends that jump from game to game.

At the same time, the idea of bringing in the leaders of the groups could work. But only as long as you ensure you get a proper diversity of players. As part of a meta-game guild myself, they still aren't my only exclusive group because they tend to focus specifically on DIKU experiences, or at least end up spending the most time in them. That tends to narrow the scope of what they'd be most focused on advising to the developer. And down that path lies the whole VG/FoH thing. "We're making a game for you, and here's 2,000 word posts on why!".

I don't think meta-game leaders of DIKU-focused guilds are narrow-minded per se. Rather, they understand that, at heart, the best way to maintain social stability is to constantly have busy people. And the times people are the most busy are between level 1 and the cap, or are achievings at a good rate at the level cap. How many large guilds are praying WotLK comes out in the next few months? I'd bet quite a lot. Right now people are split between being able to raid and all and being cockblocked from doing it. And that split leads to boredom, which leads to drama.

As a result of this, and the ways players have been seen playing in general, we get games of raw achievements with off-focus features coming sometime later. And can we blame the devs? Every game that focused on getting cool crafting systems, music stuff and housing out as quick as possible has been anywhere from uninspired mediocrity to a trainwreck on the combat, questing and general adventuring side. And to a game they have all been of either minor success or on life support.

[DarkSign]

Horizons...never played it but it focused on crafting and people hated the combat, amirite?

[Lum]

So my contribution to this argument is that dev companies should look at hiring experienced Guildmasters as consultants to a project

We call those "beta testers".

[Soukyan]

So my contribution to this argument is that dev companies should look at hiring experienced Guildmasters as consultants to a project

We call those "beta testers".

[Lum]

As an experienced tester for over 10 years, I usually find that focus groups get dominated by a handful of hardcore guilds who drown out everyone else. So while I do think community feedback is important, I really think dev studios should consider a more professional link between established guilds and their company if they want to build a good game that will help the average guild thrive.

I'm sorry, but this just reads to me like "I really think dev studios should listen to me. And ideally, give me money."

You state (correctly) that betas that do guild invites often have hardcore testers drown out the feedback of everyone else. A good CM knows how to filter that, and get feedback from both the hardcore board warrior 5% (which - hey - that would be you, Gus), the somewhat hardcore 10-20% who post occasionally on boards but usually lurk, and the casual 75% that think MMO boards are cesspits.

Another problem is that most MMO dev teams have no lack of feedback. At all. The problem becomes how well that feedback can be implemented. Sadly there is no "make it more fun" dial. If there was I would jack that sucker up to 11. However there are other constraints, usually budgetary and/or time. Even the most hardcore of beta testers never understand that, and get (understandably) frustrated when the bug fixes and feature requests they demand are consistently ignored in favor of things they find unimportant. Because someone else (the producer, usually) is doing triage, and that triage is going to cut in places people don't like.

[Tige]

The equal and opposite reaction to waylander's post.

However there are other constraints, usually budgetary and/or time. Even the most hardcore of beta testers never understand that, and get (understandably) frustrated when the bug fixes and feature requests they demand are consistently ignored in favor of things they find unimportant. Because someone else (the producer, usually) is doing triage, and that triage is going to cut in places people don't like.

No time, no money and no understanding from the player base (understandably or not).  Turn, turn, turn.

[Draegan]

Lum's avatar almost induced a bout of epilepsy.

[Lum]

Lum's avatar almost induced a bout of epilepsy.

  LET'S YOGURTING!!! 

[Rendakor]

Lum's avatar almost induced a bout of epilepsy.

  LET'S YOGURTING!!! 

Well at least now I know where it's from. The weeaboo in me s her KAWAII-ness. Kill me now.

Edit: I fail at emoticons.

[waylander]

I'm sorry, but this just reads to me like "I really think dev studios should listen to me. And ideally, give me money."

No its not a give me money or a listen to me. Its pretty simple that you guys don't develop these social games in mind from the perspective of a guild leader, or look as a guild as one collective unit.   You design games based in individual players, and group/guild features are usually an afterthought.  As such guilds have to make mods, utilities, and other retarded work arounds just to enjoy your games. This happens because you devs usually have no dedicated feedback from guilds until its too far in the design phase to drastically alter your "Dev Vision", and Devs don't like players telling them that their wonderful concept sucks.

You state (correctly) that betas that do guild invites often have hardcore testers drown out the feedback of everyone else. A good CM knows how to filter that, and get feedback from both the hardcore board warrior 5% (which - hey - that would be you, Gus), the somewhat hardcore 10-20% who post occasionally on boards but usually lurk, and the casual 75% that think MMO boards are cesspits.

Community feedback is great post launch for future planned updates, but I was talking about much earlier in the process.  Making a game the devs think rocks, but their guild community things sucks because its a virtual job is a recipe for bad word of mouth. In case you missed the memo, MMO Release doesn't equal money hats anymore. More people are jaded these days.

Another problem is that most MMO dev teams have no lack of feedback. At all. The problem becomes how well that feedback can be implemented. Sadly there is no "make it more fun" dial. If there was I would jack that sucker up to 11. However there are other constraints, usually budgetary and/or time. Even the most hardcore of beta testers never understand that, and get (understandably) frustrated when the bug fixes and feature requests they demand are consistently ignored in favor of things they find unimportant. Because someone else (the producer, usually) is doing triage, and that triage is going to cut in places people don't like.

Once again by the time guilds or other players are brought into the scheme of things, the game is too far along to be altered based on feedback.  I will say that Warhammer did the right thing by delaying their game for a year and apparently listened to their players. Big studios can afford to do that, but smaller studios pretty much have to march blindly to their doom if they find out too late that people hate the "Dev Vision" for how people are supposed to progress/have fun in their game.

As I said before nearly everyone here is a dev, fansite rep, or somewhere inbetween. You guys have serious tunnel vision when it comes to forcing us into group based progression, and then continuing to handicap guilds (hardcore and casual) to make it a virtual job to play your games. 

So instead devs bake up the game, get community feedback, launch, and reverse engineer it until everyone is happy or their game goes down in flames. Instead they could have just gotten good feedback on their concept initially, and focused on game enhancement rather than reverse engineering.

I find it ironic that companies will go out and hire other so called consultants on game design, but tapping veteran guildmasters the same way for feedback on guild concepts is somehow nasty.  So instead the talking heads keep talking to one another, guilds keep being treated a a second rate entity in the game, and game developers wonder why their guild community goes to crap and negative word of mouth gets spread about their games.

GG Devs, you win while your customer loyalty and return rate goes to hell.

[Venkman]

I know my post got lost earlier, but I truly do believe this is because these games are designed for individuals first. If they band together, great! But the scale you're talking about is not a large percentage of the players.

[Lum]

No its not a give me money or a listen to me. Its pretty simple that you guys don't develop these social games in mind from the perspective of a guild leader, or look as a guild as one collective unit.   You design games based in individual players, and group/guild features are usually an afterthought.  As such guilds have to make mods, utilities, and other retarded work arounds just to enjoy your games. This happens because you devs usually have no dedicated feedback from guilds until its too far in the design phase to drastically alter your "Dev Vision", and Devs don't like players telling them that their wonderful concept sucks.

I like how you treat devs as some bizarre otherworldly species that come down from the Design Mountaintop with no contact with the outside world. That sort of rhetoric plays great on message boards, I'm sure, but has no relation to reality. In reality development teams actually mirror the rest of "gaming society", skewing somewhat more hardcore usually. Our design meetings here usually start with a breakdown of Game Whatver's latest patch, which is almost always far more jaded than anything seen on message boards.

Making a game the devs think rocks, but their guild community things sucks because its a virtual job

Once again by the time guilds or other players are brought into the scheme of things, the game is too far along to be altered based on feedback. 

Once again, great rhetoric ("IT'S A VIRTUAL JOB!!!1") but removed from reality -- at the early stages of development, there is no guild community because there is no community, because in large part there is no GAME. For the vast part of an MMO's development cycle, the "game" part *sucks* from the standpoint of the player, because what little content has been implemented is broken, unpolished, and likely to put out your eye. Talking about "guild community" at that point is laughable, unless the QA testers have formed their own guild or something.

There is a stage when people are brought in to comment on the early "fun factor" of the game - call it late alpha, early beta, whatever. That has to be handled very carefully, because, again, most of the game is at the poke-your-eye-out level, and an immature tester who's just in it for the free game can totally torpedo your game's success by getting on boards and telling everyone how much your game sucks (even though it's not done and said tester broke about 12 NDAs in expounding on their opinion).

The alpha/beta external tester who can give you an honest, unvarnished, non-ass-kissing evaluation of your game's fun factor while still being able to professionally deal with missing parts of the game itself is a rare and insanely treasured commodity. They are RARE. I have my own personal list that I treasure highly and most MMO devs have similar battle-won lists.

As I said before nearly everyone here is a dev, fansite rep, or somewhere inbetween. You guys have serious tunnel vision when it comes to forcing us into group based progression, and then continuing to handicap guilds (hardcore and casual) to make it a virtual job to play your games. 

So instead devs bake up the game, get community feedback, launch, and reverse engineer it until everyone is happy or their game goes down in flames. Instead they could have just gotten good feedback on their concept initially, and focused on game enhancement rather than reverse engineering.

I find it ironic that companies will go out and hire other so called consultants on game design, but tapping veteran guildmasters the same way for feedback on guild concepts is somehow nasty.  So instead the talking heads keep talking to one another, guilds keep being treated a a second rate entity in the game, and game developers wonder why their guild community goes to crap and negative word of mouth gets spread about their games.

GG Devs, you win while your customer loyalty and return rate goes to hell.

YEAH! FIGHT THE POWER! DOWN WITH THE MAN! Oh, sorry, rhetoric again.

What makes you think veteran guildmasters *aren't* tapped for feedback? Hell, I have about 10 on my contact list I plan to abuse at the earliest opportunity. It's not that the feedback isn't there. It's that you disagree with how it's used. Apparently you have this vision of a "guild game" with "guild progression" and "guild combat" and "guild insert other buzzword here" that no one has yet created out of the many guild-centric MMOs released to date. You may want to make a game pitch out of it, because it sounds like no one is going to do anything you're happy with until that happens. And that would certainly get you on the ground floor of being able to kibitz about the design features!

[Waldo]

waylander, what you're saying is that game developers don't know anything about games - only how to make them (and not very well).  The term "armchair quarterback" leaps to mind. 

Based on my own experience from a game that has my name on it, "Focus groups" (aka guilds, "forum vets", "I have been playing since Beta 2" people) in general suck as feedback sources because... 

• Any well organized "focus group" will bitch and moan to no end if you don't do it just as they wanted it - and they will let you know for YEARS  after the release that if you'd just done it like they told you to, it wouldn't suck
• They often can't agree on what they think is important
• They are a minority of the player base who talks the most
• They are in general pretty opinionated (good thing and bad)
• The ones that talk to you the most often are the more juvenile, moody and opinionated
• They rarely can see the flip side of the coin which is developer realities

It's a cop-out to say it as a developer, but some of them should just go make their own damned game and show us how it's done.

Which goes back to what I first posted -niche games made by members of a niche and aimed at the niche,  As a development approach, budget isn't necessarily a huge deal.  It's not the only way to do it, but it does work for some.   If I was going to make a game for the guild/organized player niche, I'd definitely want to be in or get in that scene and understand it.

[Rendakor]

Waylander, I'm genuinely curious as to what kind of "guild content" you want to see in a game that isn't currently there.

[UnSub]

MMOs may be designed for multiplayer experiences (including guilds) but the reality is that that vast majority of players are individuals. Solo play is also immensely popular. So while guilds may want to pretend that they are top dog, a game that forces guilding or rewards guilding excessively just ends up pushing away all those players who can't / don't want to commit to a guild. Individual players would certainly be a larger population group than those in organised guilds, so it would certainly seem wise to keep this larger, often silent group content rather than listening to every request made by the guilds.

That said, the only tangible complaint I saw in Waylander's comments were MMOs not allowing players of different levels to play together easily, thus making a guild's life more difficult. On that note, every single MMO released from this point forward should have a version of CoH/V's sidekick / exemplar system, where a characters of any level can team up with another character of any level and agree on what level content they are going to do (either by sidekicking someone up to the higher level or exemplaring the other character down). Some of the longer content (Task Forces / Raids / Zones) have lvl limits that sk'ing / exemp'ing doesn't get around, but for the most part, it removes this issue.

[WindupAtheist]

Well at least now I know where it's from. The weeaboo in me s her KAWAII-ness. Kill me now.

 

[MikeRozak]

The alpha/beta external tester who can give you an honest, unvarnished, non-ass-kissing evaluation of your game's fun factor while still being able to professionally deal with missing parts of the game itself is a rare and insanely treasured commodity. They are RARE. I have my own personal list that I treasure highly and most MMO devs have similar battle-won lists.

They are worth their weight in gold, and (I suspect) given "Do you want a job?" calls when openings occur.

[Margalis]

The alpha/beta external tester who can give you an honest, unvarnished, non-ass-kissing evaluation of your game's fun factor while still being able to professionally deal with missing parts of the game itself is a rare and insanely treasured commodity. They are RARE. I have my own personal list that I treasure highly and most MMO devs have similar battle-won lists.

Serious question: if these types of testers are so important, why does everything about the typical alpha/beta tesr actively discourage them from joining?

I don't feel like elaborating, I suppose I can if asked but we've talked about it before and it's farily self-evident IMO. From my perspective the process is geared to produce lousy results.

[Margalis]

I got a PM about this so I will elaborate. My comments were geared towards major offerings. Their alpha/beta usually have many of the following characteristics:

1. Pain in the ass to actually get the alpha/beta software, must be a paying member of Fileplanet or something similar.
2. Alpha/beta (I'll just say beta from now on) advertised mostly on fan sites as a way to play the game early. (Advertising)
3. Going a step further, alpha/beta being a literal contest of some sort to get into, based on how much of a fan you are.
4. General attitude is that developer is doing us a favor by letting the slobbering fans play the game early for free.
5. Must fill out annoyingly detailed system specs sheet.
6. Minimum system specs for beta often quite high, beta restricted to high-end machines.
7. Poor bug reporting tools.
8. Poor communication with the players about what is and isn't supposed to be working and what sort of feedback they are looking for or even how to report problems at all.
9. Beta not anywhere close to beta quality.

I am a good tester. I am a logically minded person, I develop software. I know how to report bugs properly. I am able to overlook placeholder functionality.

I do not want to enter a fucking contest for the incredible honor of playing your game. You are not doing me a favor, I am doing you a favor by helping you make your game better for free. (As opposed to my standard consulting rate which you can't afford)

I should not have to have hardware that is all less than 6-8 months old to test your game. If so you're doing something wrong or you specifically designed your game to be an utter failure. (Hello Vanguard)

If you give me something "beta" quality that has tons of undocumented but obvious problems I'm going to assume you don't actually care about the quality at all, and I'm going to assume that any issues I run into are issues you already know about and don't care to fix. Don't ask me to test drive a car then give me a rusty piece of shit with four flat tires. Or at least warn me about the tires in advance.

If you can't give me a good way to file bugs or don't even bother to tell me HOW to file bugs then I won't file them. Help me help you.

If you aim your beta testing at superfans you will get superfans, not people like me. Superfans are not good testers.

In a nutshell: take it seriously and professionally. If you can't do that then don't expect me to.
---

For a small company...it's tough. As Lum says getting good feedback is very hard, and for small companies without name recognition probably based on sheer luck and who you know. For a large company getting feedback is still hard but using your alpha/beta as a marketing fluff tool is going to assure poor results.

[Lum]

Most of your points are valid, with one huge, huge caveat - if you're downloading it from Fileplanet, it's not a real beta any more. Call it a stress test, marketing beta, what have you - but by that point features should be locked down and you are for better or for worse telling the world "yeah, this is pretty close to what we're coming out with". That is also why reporting bugs probably take little importance at that point - with tens of thousands of "testers" reporting the same crash bug QA was complaining about 3 weeks ago.

At that point you should be testing for whether or not the infrastructure can handle the concurrency you're planning for, and if the game itself is fun enough for people to play for free (much less pay for). The only bugs that usually surface new at that point are the ones that only happen with tons of people on at once - the easy ones everyone can find, well, were already found, tracked, and are sitting in some programmer's in-box.

System spec breakdown forms should be a thing of the past since most apps include profilers now.