Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[sam, an eggplant]

Well, sure. The games are monetized differently; subscription MMOs want to grow the userbase and retain players, while facebook and mobile games want to spread like a virus and drain money from their customers arteries. Subscription MMOs naturally think long-term.

[Paelos]

On the other hand, the player's eye is ALWAYS blind. They never have a distant view of the whole, ever. Even the most jaundiced, impartial critic, someone who maybe gets all the big issues right, simply doesn't have a way to know what's affecting the situation, the *why* things are the way they are. More typically, they're simply focused on their own personal QOL without caring how it affects any other's QOL.

Love ya Raph, but I'm calling out your horseshit here. The players are your customers. They aren't blind. They are using your product and then giving you feedback on the product that you are building for them. You are SERVING them. You are in a service industry.

That's where these things get so fucked up when I'm talking about business mistakes. You are a vision guy, so I understand that you want to create the system you think people will like. But when feedback comes in that people overwhelmingly dislike something, your job is to change it unless it's going to break the game. And if it's going to break the game, your job is to communicate why that is to the customer instead of hiding behind a veil of ivory tower distance.

The funny thing to me is that the customers already guessed basically everything that you've pointed out in your articles, because the failures were common sense. The players weren't blind. They saw what was happening and accurately guessed why.

One of the two biggest failures I see in the industry right now is greed and communication. People in the industry don't like to communicate that they were wrong, or that they made a mistake, or the real reason behind a decision. They treat their customers with disdain. And that's not how you operate a business with a service component. It just isn't. And it's why so many of them fail, and people get shuffled around. They don't respect their customers and they don't respect their employees.

If you want to continue to mend errors from the past, I like your approach of communicating. Continue that in the new efforts. Be open with your customers. Don't think of them as blind, think of them as seeing things from a different and very necessary POV that the game creators need to internalize.

[IainC]

You misunderstand what Raph is saying Paelos. He's not saying that players are wrong when they say 'I do (or don't) like X', that would be pretty dumb. What he's saying - and it's my experience too - is that players are rarely able to separate what is actually wrong from their subjective feeling of what they do or don't like and that often the fixes they suggest would have unacceptable consequences outside of that particular player's monkeysphere. In addition, the player doesn't have the background knowledge of the design compromises that led to one design choice over another or the resource limitations that precluded a richer system. Sometimes the answer is 'We had to do it that way because our animator got ht by a bus and we couldn't add new content', sometimes it's 'We are doing this because these other systems are tightly integrated to the bit you don't like and we aren't going to redesign and re-engineer the whole game to fix it'. And sometimes it's 'This is a deliberate design choice that we aren't going to change because we believe that the general utility other players get outweighs your specific frustration'.

As a designer, when a player says "I hate X, you should do Y to fix it." my first instinct is to record the "I hate X" as a data point and then to look at what the actual problem is that the player is experiencing. Almost always it's not the same as the one the player thinks they have.

[Viin]

Love ya Raph, but I'm calling out your horseshit here. The players are your customers. They aren't blind. They are using your product and then giving you feedback on the product that you are building for them. You are SERVING them. You are in a service industry.

Unless you've done product development, you probably don't realize that people really don't know what they want. Customers or not, they always look at the next immediate need without being able to look at the whole picture and how it all comes together in a better experience. Of course your product has to serve a need, but *how* it serves the need is not for the customers to decide - though of course they will vote on it's effectiveness with their feet and/or dollars!

[Riggswolfe]

Love ya Raph, but I'm calling out your horseshit here. The players are your customers. They aren't blind. They are using your product and then giving you feedback on the product that you are building for them. You are SERVING them. You are in a service industry.

Unless you've done product development, you probably don't realize that people really don't know what they want. Customers or not, they always look at the next immediate need without being able to look at the whole picture and how it all comes together in a better experience. Of course your product has to serve a need, but *how* it serves the need is not for the customers to decide - though of course they will vote on it's effectiveness with their feet and/or dollars!

As a computer programmer I very much appreciate this as it has been my general experience. However, I will say that there is a reason we see this pattern repeated over and oever:

Beta: Players complain about system X. They say they don't like it and that it hampers their fun. Devs tell the players it'll be alright that the system will work and they just need to trust them.
Live: Game goes live. Players buy the game, play for a month and then quit, often citing system X. Devs scramble over several months to change it.

Now, I know a big part of this is, bluntly, time. The devs probably know as well as the players that some things are broken, don't work right, or simply hamper enjoyment/QoL. But they just don't have time to fix it before the game goes live. They have to concentrate on things like stomping out as many bugs as possible. I get it. But sometimes you have to wonder how any of this even gets as far as beta.

I know I've focused in one that one line from the Jedi blog where Raph said (paraphrasing) "players would like it more but we didn't do it because lore/they were wrong." But I really see that as a good statement of what goes wrong in these games. So many decisions are made that fail to take into account "Does this make the game more fun?" Take Wildstar and its ground effects. Did that make the game more fun or just make it spastic? I think the general consensus is, it made it more spastic.

I think, clearly, we need to kickstart funding for Raph to work on SWGEmu and help them get the game to the state he originally envisioned it as so we can try the game as originally intended and answer these questions about SWG once and for all.

[sam, an eggplant]

Unless you've done product development, you probably don't realize that people really don't know what they want. Customers or not, they always look at the next immediate need without being able to look at the whole picture and how it all comes together in a better experience.

This is clearly true for the vast majority of customers, but MMOs are unique in that each and every one has a core of dedicated players who know more than the designers. Usually these players are specialized in one little corner of the game, one particular class, or one segment of PvP, or a specific tradeskill. Those players should get a seat at the table. Not a vote, obviously, just a seat.

Even those players have no insight into developmental/technical or resourcing constraints, of course. Their suggestions will usually be the best possible solution to a specific problem, but that solution may not be feasible, or may have implications outside of their relatively narrow area of subject matter expertise. And that's fine, that's why they're at the table, to discuss such things. Even when their suggestions aren't actionable, they can locate those pain points.

For example, back in the everquest days, I played a shaman with tons of stat buffs, and an exclusive tradeskill making stat buff potions, and I was the guy that figured out stats didn't actually do anything. Seems like something players would immediately discover these days, but back then actually fact-checking what the developers told us was revelatory. I absolutely knew more than the developers about my class. Without question.

[Paelos]

You misunderstand what Raph is saying Paelos. He's not saying that players are wrong when they say 'I do (or don't) like X', that would be pretty dumb. What he's saying - and it's my experience too - is that players are rarely able to separate what is actually wrong from their subjective feeling of what they do or don't like and that often the fixes they suggest would have unacceptable consequences outside of that particular player's monkeysphere. In addition, the player doesn't have the background knowledge of the design compromises that led to one design choice over another or the resource limitations that precluded a richer system. Sometimes the answer is 'We had to do it that way because our animator got ht by a bus and we couldn't add new content', sometimes it's 'We are doing this because these other systems are tightly integrated to the bit you don't like and we aren't going to redesign and re-engineer the whole game to fix it'. And sometimes it's 'This is a deliberate design choice that we aren't going to change because we believe that the general utility other players get outweighs your specific frustration'.

As a designer, when a player says "I hate X, you should do Y to fix it." my first instinct is to record the "I hate X" as a data point and then to look at what the actual problem is that the player is experiencing. Almost always it's not the same as the one the player thinks they have.

I'm saying that when you know certain system is in effect because to remove it breaks other things, you tell the players. You have communication with them. The reason players don't understand this stuff is because the people inside don't spend time explaining trade-offs, and spend way too much time hyping bullshit. The fanbase wants to be educated about the process. They watch stupid videos about the process. The more you include them, the better they understand.

Maybe 20 years ago people didn't want to know how sausage was made. Now there are entire networks built on showing you how and what goes into your sausage, while having people go there and eat it, and rate it. Gaming isn't small business anymore. There are more people involved and buying than ever, and they thrive on getting information.

[Viin]

This is clearly true for the vast majority of customers, but MMOs are unique in that each and every one has a core of dedicated players who know more than the designers. Usually these players are specialized in one little corner of the game, one particular class, or one segment of PvP, or a specific tradeskill. Those players should get a seat at the table. Not a vote, obviously, just a seat.

You and Riggswolfe are aren't wrong. But I would argue that this situation isn't as unique as you think. The trouble is one of exceptions of the development team (by management): developing a product that really resonates with the intended audience takes time and effort. This means talking to a lot of potential players, actual players if you are in beta, and adjusting your assumptions. Then you can start to improve the core design (assuming its not flawed to begin with!) to adjust to those learnings. Game development is immature in this regard. In other industries, you have whole departments dedicated to understanding the customer and their wants/desires and people who's job it is to interface with those customers/potential customers on a regular basis.

Back in the early days of SWG, it was the traditional 'document the whole thing, build it for 2 years, launch it, see if it works'. Doesn't give you a lot of leeway to recover from any fundamental mistakes, and games, being consumers, quickly either live with it or leave. (Unlike an enterprise system which is almost never scrapped, but rather lived with because it cost so much money!)

Edit to add: And the above doesn't even cover the issues you run into with resource management. Time, Quality, Scope: pick the two you want to control! (Almost always time aka money)

[HaemishM]

This is clearly true for the vast majority of customers, but MMOs are unique in that each and every one has a core of dedicated players who know more than the designers. Usually these players are specialized in one little corner of the game, one particular class, or one segment of PvP, or a specific tradeskill. Those players should get a seat at the table. Not a vote, obviously, just a seat.

Dark Age of Camelot had player class reps (or whatever they were called). It didn't make that game any better.

[sam, an eggplant]

DAoC's player councils are my model for the right way to do it, actually, yes. It had much deeper PvE problems than simply poor communication with players.

[Paelos]

DAoC's player councils are my model for the right way to do it, actually, yes. It had much deeper PvE problems than simply poor communication with players.

If you have a player council though, you have to tell them the truth as a development team. You can't have them just be another arm of your PR bullshit.

The problem is that these game-makers think that they have to treat their customers like morons in order to fool them. That's a really cynical way of doing business, and in an entertainment field it doesn't have to be that way. Yes, you can hype your product. Yes, you can talk about features. But engaging the player and making them feel like their concerns are not only heard, but valid and acted upon? That creates more retainage than the pump and dump lying method.

[sam, an eggplant]

I didn't play DaOC past beta myself, but from what I heard, Sanya and posse did listen to them. Whether what they said made it into the game is another question entirely.

[taolurker]

Such a shame that this past page and a half of discussion about players, community and collaborating (vs blindness/understanding) draws so many parallels to what is actually happening with Landmark & Daybreak(SOE) at this very moment. There's so many ways to fail the community or playerbase, and half of the posts regarding this SWG flashback are things that Landmark and Daybreak (SOE) are still failing at. I'd tell Raph to get in touch with Smed, but I also doubt even that would make a difference (Although Raph you could probably squeeze another consultant paycheck out of them LOL).

Unless you've done product development, you probably don't realize that people really don't know what they want. Customers or not, they always look at the next immediate need without being able to look at the whole picture and how it all comes together in a better experience.

It's not always about the people not knowing what they want, and often players have a clear experience each of them is individually looking for, the major issue is that these often conflict with the developers or aren't even looked at from the perspective of the players. This is why Community Relations is huge in the Massively Multiplayer gaming world, even for games not of this genre. The failures of Community relations also usually involves treating it more as PR instead of "communication".

This is clearly true for the vast majority of customers, but MMOs are unique in that each and every one has a core of dedicated players who know more than the designers. Usually these players are specialized in one little corner of the game, one particular class, or one segment of PvP, or a specific tradeskill. Those players should get a seat at the table. Not a vote, obviously, just a seat.

This is SOOOooo true.. Especially for Landmark at this very moment. Landmark Devs/Daybreak are making stupid irrational decisions that aren't informed like they actually KNOW their own game, and also seem more likely to result in worse image and customer retention & loyalty. It also all resulted in them not valuing feedback or keeping players involved, with changing their pay items multiple times, while treating it constantly as "we know better" (when the informed player base actually sees everything different and would solve it completely different).

I understand the way development works enough to know that player involvement and decisions behind things are often handed down by powers even higher than just coders and Dev teams, but even a minor amount of teamwork with your eventual customers is not the same as eliminating it altogether. I actually think this is one of the things that endeared many players to SWG, because it did always seem like the community was involved, even if they didn't have a vote, and their mood/perspective did matter (at least initially).

[Fordel]

DaoC's Team Leads were just PR horse shit that were ignored by Mythic.


The only reason Mythic/DaoC isn't heralded as the worst disaster in Dev's not understanding their own game is because SWG/NGE existed.

[IainC]

I had some experience with DAoC class leads and their feedback from the publisher side. For a time I was also in a guild on a US server with a couple. Some of them were good, knowledgable people, others were unbelievably entitled shitlords who barely knew how to even play their class. I was on Eve Online's version of the same thing, the Council of Stellar Management for a couple of years. I managed the European beta of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, and on top of all that I've also run betas of games I designed myself. I think I have a pretty good handle on player feedback pipelines. It's still not as easy as 'just tell them the truth and things will be peachy'. There are times when even the expert players are wrong, when there are commercially sensitive reasons why you can't be entirely open with people who don't work for your company, when there are significant problems that will take a long time to fix but a bunch of low-hanging fruit that can be in the next build and an exec producer who wants more bullet points in the patch notes and then there are just some times when the subjective feedback you are getting from forums, player advocates etc is 180° from what your metrics are telling you. Listening to your players isn't wrong and it's true that most companies don't do enough of it but it's only a part of the total feedback set that developers are working with and players don't like being told that they are wrong.

Game development is immature in this regard. In other industries, you have whole departments dedicated to understanding the customer and their wants/desires and people who's job it is to interface with those customers/potential customers on a regular basis.

Game design is different to a lot of other software development. For one it's a creative endeavour and that makes more of a difference than you might think. For another when you are developing for a client, you make the product they want. You don't care if it sucks as long as it is stable and meets their requirement list. If they ask you to change your clean UI for a shittier version, you do that. if they ask you to disable all the security checks and make it send credit card data in plaintext over a javascript popup then you do that too. If you're developing commercial software, you want to stick to what the industry standards are for usability, you want to iterate on your previous products in the same line rather than be transformative. You want to make a serious product that serious people will be able to transition into with minimum fuss. No one cares about fun or subjective feelings. You can't make a good game that way. Raph is the guy to ask about fun I guess but you can't just put something out that works and doesn't make your player's eyes bleed, you also need to hit a bunch of subjective tick-boxes and everyone has a different set of calibrations for where those boxes are. That's why a dev process gets rebooted multiple times before beta, why hail mary launch day miracle patches exist, why there's a push to cram in new features and more content rather than nail down stability issues even while the gold master build is days away from being locked down. It's inherently harder because your conditions for success are often very nebulous right up until the beta starts and nobody, nobody wants to have to go back to the drawing board on core gameplay once the beta starts.

[Ingmar]

This is clearly true for the vast majority of customers, but MMOs are unique in that each and every one has a core of dedicated players who know more than the designers. Usually these players are specialized in one little corner of the game, one particular class, or one segment of PvP, or a specific tradeskill. Those players should get a seat at the table. Not a vote, obviously, just a seat.

Dark Age of Camelot had player class reps (or whatever they were called). It didn't make that game any better.

They didn't really use that system the way they could have, though, and when they got good reps it was because they lucked into them rather than made a real effort to ensure they were getting good people. I think the only conclusion that you can draw from the DAOC class rep system is that if you half-ass it it won't help you.

[Fordel]

Where is my fucking style review, WHERE IS IT I ASK!

[Raph]

On the other hand, the player's eye is ALWAYS blind. They never have a distant view of the whole, ever. Even the most jaundiced, impartial critic, someone who maybe gets all the big issues right, simply doesn't have a way to know what's affecting the situation, the *why* things are the way they are. More typically, they're simply focused on their own personal QOL without caring how it affects any other's QOL.

Love ya Raph, but I'm calling out your horseshit here. The players are your customers. They aren't blind. They are using your product and then giving you feedback on the product that you are building for them. You are SERVING them. You are in a service industry.

You have misunderstood my post.

Customers can absolutely be right about the fact that they hate something.

They are wrong *all the frickin' time* about whether everyone else hates it too, whether they know why it is the way it is, and so on. Cmon, we're on an MMO forum here. You KNOW this. :)

when feedback comes in that people overwhelmingly dislike something, your job is to change it unless it's going to break the game. And if it's going to break the game, your job is to communicate why that is to the customer instead of hiding behind a veil of ivory tower distance.

Agreed! So for example, combat was broken. It neeed changed. The players were mostly wrong about why (they weren't screaming for buffs to be fixed, in terms of raw numbers. Some were, but not an overwhelming majority. As it happens, the devs were wrong about why too.

The funny thing to me is that the customers already guessed basically everything that you've pointed out in your articles, because the failures were common sense. The players weren't blind. They saw what was happening and accurately guessed why.

Uh, actually, the reason why I told the stories i did in the post is because they were, every single one, things where the popular player consensus was WRONG. People are WRONG about whether the game failed in the market, WRONG about why it eventually died, WRONG about the impact of auction houses, wrong about why certain decision were made, etc etc etc. This happens all the time. And I took pains to point out the devs were wrong too, and *I* was wrong too, on all too frequent occasion.

"Customers" did not all individually guess everything in my articles. Hell, you know what was a major contributing factor to the NGE happening? LucasArts did focus groups with current and former SWG players, and the focus groups told them to do the NGE!

One of the two biggest failures I see in the industry right now is greed and communication. People in the industry don't like to communicate that they were wrong, or that they made a mistake, or the real reason behind a decision. They treat their customers with disdain. And that's not how you operate a business with a service component. It just isn't. And it's why so many of them fail, and people get shuffled around. They don't respect their customers and they don't respect their employees.

If you want to continue to mend errors from the past, I like your approach of communicating. Continue that in the new efforts. Be open with your customers. Don't think of them as blind, think of them as seeing things from a different and very necessary POV that the game creators need to internalize.

SWG had, by far, the most open development and frank discussion with future customers of any MMO I have seen.In fact, customer consensus (!) is that it was overcollaborative and caved too much to special interests within the playerbase. ;) (I still get asked "why did you listen to Caella??")

[Viin]

Game design is different to a lot of other software development. For one it's a creative endeavour and that makes more of a difference than you might think. For another when you are developing for a client, you make the product they want. You don't care if it sucks as long as it is stable and meets their requirement list. If they ask you to change your clean UI for a shittier version, you do that. if they ask you to disable all the security checks and make it send credit card data in plaintext over a javascript popup then you do that too. If you're developing commercial software, you want to stick to what the industry standards are for usability, you want to iterate on your previous products in the same line rather than be transformative. You want to make a serious product that serious people will be able to transition into with minimum fuss. No one cares about fun or subjective feelings. You can't make a good game that way. Raph is the guy to ask about fun I guess but you can't just put something out that works and doesn't make your player's eyes bleed, you also need to hit a bunch of subjective tick-boxes and everyone has a different set of calibrations for where those boxes are. That's why a dev process gets rebooted multiple times before beta, why hail mary launch day miracle patches exist, why there's a push to cram in new features and more content rather than nail down stability issues even while the gold master build is days away from being locked down. It's inherently harder because your conditions for success are often very nebulous right up until the beta starts and nobody, nobody wants to have to go back to the drawing board on core gameplay once the beta starts.

I mentioned product development because it is not the same as doing client work - which is very easy because you get to check off the boxes and you win. That's not a product, that's a project. Product development is much more nebulous and is usually on the bleeding edge of innovation. Think of the effort it took to develop the first iPhone. There was no check list. Not one of your customers would be able to tell you to build that. Game development has the same trappings.  This isn't to marginalize it. Developing innovative products is /hard/. Most companies suck at it. My point was that other industries have solved this to some degree, but by no means do they do it right a even 50% of the time! The innovative companies you know and love generally have.

(Development used in the broader term here, not as software development. See: New Product Development).

[Raph]

Re player councils... SWG did have a player council equivalent too, the correspondent program -- put in place almost two years befoer the game even launched. Many of the core design docs were posted to the entire playerbase during development...

[Paelos]

Fair enough Raph, I take back the part about customers knowing why things went wrong. That was a reach.

[sam, an eggplant]

We guessed many of the factors leading to SWG's ultimate collapse, but Raph's posts exposed a ton of behind the scenes info. We didn't know acquiring holocrons was originally more ambitious and less grindy, or that their hardware was underprovisioned from old Everquest servers, or certainly the original combat system. That was all brand new.

[Lantyssa]

Re player councils... SWG did have a player council equivalent too, the correspondent program -- put in place almost two years befoer the game even launched. Many of the core design docs were posted to the entire playerbase during development...

Yep.  And the reps were really involved.  I did a lot of work with the Scout, Ranger, CH, and BE reps.

They were also consulted about things such as the Combat Revamp (later scrapped during stage 1 of 3) and the less drastic CU which was likewise altered drastically from what they were shown and commented on.

[Typhon]

DAoC's player councils are my model for the right way to do it, actually, yes. It had much deeper PvE problems than simply poor communication with players.

FUCKING THANES SUCKED FOR THE REST OF THE TIME THE GAME WAS LIVE AFTER THE INITIAL HAMMER OF DEATH + PERMA STUN CLUSTER FUCK.  In large part because the Thane class rep simply couldn't suck enough dev cock.

Zerker was broken-good for a demented long period of time.

...

but I've moved on.  I've left it behind me. 

Yeah, let's make the class that throws lightening a defensive class.  Fucking retarded.   

[Fordel]

You could always try to EVADE things. 

[Ingmar]

You could always try to EVADE things. 

[Surlyboi]

SWG had, by far, the most open development and frank discussion with future customers of any MMO I have seen.In fact, customer consensus (!) is that it was overcollaborative and caved too much to special interests within the playerbase. ;) (I still get asked "why did you listen to Caella??")

Because the alternative was listening to Leia4Looot?

[Merusk]

Most amusing remains that they listened so much to Caella and then that person said, "fuck it this isn't a game I want to play" inside of a few weeks of playing.

Maybe the person was legit in their concerns, but it feels like the dev team got trolled hard.

[Lantyssa]

No one remembers poor Seiryuu.

[Tmon]

Most amusing remains that they listened so much to Caella and then that person said, "fuck it this isn't a game I want to play" inside of a few weeks of playing.

Maybe the person was legit in their concerns, but it feels like the dev team got trolled hard.

I thought Caella had left before the game launched.  I remember lots of increasingly bitter posts, as I recall any form of PVP was a particular trigger.

[Lantyssa]

I want to say she left once she hit the beta servers, but it was long ago and I didn't follow her that closely.  I just know she posted in the Dev forum like a lot of us.

[Merusk]

Yeah I meant a few weeks of beta, not live. It was one of the biggest red flags for me that the person who had been so vocal said "naaaahh" when they saw it live.

Still suckered me in for 6 months, but that was always in the back of my head.

[Lantyssa]

I think it was a case of hyping herself up too much, or just realizing that she didn't care about the game so much as the interaction and attention that being the face of the carebear crowd provided.

[WayAbvPar]

She was a projection of my mind. That is why she disappeared. That is the only explanation for her being on the exact opposite side of literally every issue ever discussed in the beta forums. It was uncanny how completely and utterly wrong she was on EVERYTHING. It was like performance art.

[Merusk]

Which is why I said after the fact it felt like just one long elaborate trolling session. 

Maybe Caella was really a Mark Jacobs gimmick account!