No, We Just Can’t Have Nice Things, Can We?
This probably isn’t going to be a popular entry with some of you. But you know what? Some things just need to be said.\par
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So, checking my bloglines, Abalieno (the Hedda Hopper of MMOs) has some surprising and disturbing news: Jeff Freeman, a designer at SOE Austin, yanked his blog after yet another “OMG LOOK WHAT HE SAID!!1!” post on the SWG forums linked to it.\par
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Now, it quite obviously wasn’t corporate pressure that caused this - after all, SOE folks from John Smedley on down have plenty of blogs, and Raph Koster’s is probably the most visible in the industry. No, it was a feeling I’ve often felt after many an inopportune post - the feeling that your customers are using your words as a cudgel with which to beat your coworkers.\par
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And, let me tell you. That feeling SUCKS. Working on an MMO is (and I’m trying not to be overly dramatic here ) in some ways a lot like serving in a warship during battle. You get a lot of crazy stuff crossing your desk each day, and a lot of silly stuff, and you rage a lot at pretty much everyone within arms’ reach, but at the end of the day? You are crazily loyal to your shipmates. They’re right there with you, and you rely on them to get through each day without yet another ulcer, and they rely on you the same way. And don’t get me wrong - most of the time it’s worth every pain in the gut. I really, really like reading reactions to patch notes I helped bring about and watching people go “woah, cool”. It’s why I’m on this crazy train.\par
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And when you wax philisophic on your personal blog, as generally as you think possible, and it’s picked up and used as a stick to beat you and your coworkers with over Incredibly Important Issue #73075 on your game’s message board? That feeling SUCKS. You let your team down. They’re taking hits now and it is YOUR FAULT.\par
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In my time at Mythic, I’ve always had the ultimate cop-out - I don’t actually work on design. I’m a coder. I fix things. Don’t get me wrong - I can pick out a WHOLE RAFT of things our players are mad about that are directly, 100% my stupid fault (and no, I’m not going to actually TELL YOU which they are, because I still have a small shred of self-preservation active) but the game’s design issues aren’t on that list. And that’s what most game message board posters care about. (Although I still can’t get through 3 pages of the VN boards without wincing and going “oof, my bad”)\par
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So when a designer of an MMO has a blog, he’s going to take some hits just for being a designer. And when that game makes, by any measure whatever, some radical and controversial decisions about its future, that designer is going to be second- third- and fourth- guessed by players who want someone to string up and lynch for My World Gone Awry.\par
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And you know what? Lynching isn’t in anyone’s job description. Not even the community people - after a certain point the abuse goes past a point that even they’re paid to put up with. So, without exchanging a single word with Jeff in… well… ever, I can totally understand where he’s coming from. He doesn’t want to be the stick that’s used to beat his team with.\par
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And this is really unfortunate, because the industry NEEDS feedback, both from the players to the designers and from the designers back to the players. Hell, I’m a firm believer that the design of a game needs to be clearly communicated so that a player can actually come to the conclusion “I don’t want to be here”. I don’t want unhappy people in my game. If my game is not for you, I don’t want you to waste your time and money on something that will make you miserable. Yeah, millions of customers would be great, and yeah, it’s not the designer’s game but the players, and you know what? At the end of the day, if you’re not having fun, stop. I think I repeated that phrase 6 times in my book, and I say it two or three times every player gathering I go to. Because I believe it really strongly, and I think that the disconnect between “why am I here” and “why aren’t they listening to me” is one of the most toxic elements of any massively multiplayer community.\par
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But players don’t want to hear that. They want to hear “you are listening to me, and you agree with me, and you’re going to do what we think is best for the game, because we know the game better than you.” (Which, most of the time, is correct, I’ll grant you.) And when they hear something different, they go absolutely ballistic.\par
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So the next time you wonder why more MMO designers don’t have blogs, or post on message boards? Yeah. We can’t have nice things.\par
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(Before you think this is some kind of windup for me shutting down my own blog? Yeah, my co-workers only wish I were that smart.)
February 9, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Smart enough to avoid the need.\par
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Goe, boo.
February 9, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Don’t worry, I promise that the only person I will beat over the head with your words is you.
February 9, 2006 at 9:52 pm
I think the reason you see so many players whine forever without stopping is because unlike any other game, MMOs are a relationship. A bona fide sorta-kinda-just-like-in-the-real-world relationship. So what you see on a lot of chat boards is a relationship gone wrong. Sometimes it’s the game. More often it’s the player. They don’t understand that the game has other needs (mainly, to keep all players mostly happy), they only care about their own needs being met. These players feel like their other half isn’t responding to their needs, and they lash out. It’s a classic case of “baby why you gotta make me hit you?” And I suppose the outcomes are just as predictable.\par
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Hmm…anyone care to start a MMO “couples” therapy business? (”now Mythic, I think what Uberkungfuguy is saying, is that he felt that you weren’t respecting his boundaries when you nerfed his Monk…”)\par
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Amber
February 9, 2006 at 10:20 pm
I don’t think its really accurate to frame it as you have. The circumstances, we hope, are unique.\par
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I have never said a (very) unkind word to any of you. Jeff included.\par
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But SOE’s decisions about SWG were really close to a bait and switch. An unethical business practice at the least.\par
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Now, it’s pretty easy to see that Jeff wasn’t responcible for of those business decisions but as long as he is in the public eye, he is a face of the company. And people will focus on that. Hell just look at the shit Schild has taken over it, and he was only looked at it.\par
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I have a lot of sympathy for the (remaining) folks who are now being pushed out in front of the customers again, to face thier disapproval. But really, is it that hard to see what those customer reactions are going to be?\par
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My suggestion to Jeff is, put your head down, do your job, hope for the best. Closing the blog was a good idea.. probably should have happened sooner.\par
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And my advice to you Scott, would be to do the same thing should Mythic ever do the same kind of bone head shit that SOE pulled. Fortunately, I think all of us believe that is unlikely.
February 9, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Now that’s the Lum I remember!\par
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I’ll wholeheartedly agree that people don’t know when to let go - if the game isn’t making them happy anymore, then maybe it’s time to leave it and find something else that they do enjoy. But of course, they don’t want to do that, and lose the character and virtual property that they’ve invested so much of themselves in. Much like Amber said up above about relationships - “I’ve invested so much of myself in this relationship - I can’t bail out now!”\par
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For what it’s worth, I’m glad for the game design types to speak up anyways in their blogs and such, outside of the sanitized PR-speak crap that comes out in mainstream game articles. I guess one thing to think about is how other creative types deal with having their words flung back at themselves - one could have a meltdown on Amazon.com like Anne Rice, or ignore the haters and swim in the money bin like George Lucas. *shrug*\par
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But yeah, for the most part, we can’t have nice things.
February 9, 2006 at 10:45 pm
The mitigating issue in this is that it was a SWG designer. At this stage I feel little sympathy for any hits they take. I feel they brought that pain on themselves.\par
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In the bigger picture its really about choice. You can be no-name cogs in the machine, unseen, unheard or you can be famous. Each has their gains and losses. You won’t get the benefits without taking the pain.\par
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At least your line of work even offers you the choice of which to be. In mine nobody outside of its very tight knit world will ever know about until one day it might get declassified.\par
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You have many many people who read your words, listen to you at conferences and you openly shape your industry in way that non insiders could see and note. For that freedom you take critisim, constructive and non.\par
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Also you don’t see people just stop your games because that is how you designed it. You get them to form communities, bonds with people. Its not the game you’re telling them they have to leave, its their friends. Little wonder when they don’t take it very well. If you don’t want them to hang around when they aren’t having fun, don’t design the system to act as a social glue.
February 9, 2006 at 11:26 pm
So, why aren’t developers doing what the players tell them?\par
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Seems like such an obvious solution. Bend over backwards to get popularly supported ideas into your game, and they won’t go ballistic.
February 9, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Because their ideas suck (except for mine, which are l33t). :p\par
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While I’d like to believe it was the suits and not the devs doing, I agree with the bait-and-switch thing: from what I understand, they implemented NGE right after people paid for an expansion (which NGE basically made null and void). I’d be upset. Well, I would be, if I was ever stupid enough to play another SOE game. Fool me once, and all that…\par
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So Lum, what did you screw up in DAoC? I promise not to tell anyone.
February 10, 2006 at 12:33 am
Don’t worry Lum, we still love you. >
February 10, 2006 at 12:35 am
Politicians = game designers
February 10, 2006 at 12:40 am
[...] Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys posts about the sad news that Jeff Freeman has taken down his blog. Essentially, idiots in the SWG forums were using his blog posts to beat him and his cohorts over the head about the NGE. [...]
February 10, 2006 at 12:55 am
“So, why aren\’e2\’80\’99t developers doing what the players tell them?\par
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Seems like such an obvious solution. Bend over backwards to get popularly supported ideas into your game, and they won\’e2\’80\’99t go ballistic. “\par
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There’s a good deal of once-SWG-players (myself included) that believe such ideas lead to the decline of the game. (various concessions for the jedi wannabees in the game). Popular is often not right, but there are good ideas to be found in the playerbase, just hard to weed out from the thousands of others posting their wants.\par
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Even though SWG became unfun for me (so I left), I could still separate that and enjoy Jeff’s blog. His posts will be missed (especially since even his history of posts is gone now, don’t suppose anyone saved anything like say the “Love Story”?). Unfortunately there are too many out there that have to use every avenue to get THEIR issues to the devs even if that means intruding on a personal area set aside for a different outlet than their main job (see Raph’s blog comments the last few weeks).
February 10, 2006 at 12:58 am
So what if their ideas suck in your opinion? They just might be the fun element everyone’s been looking for.\par
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Considering most MMO developer ideas turn to shit after a while, and that player ideas haven’t been seen in an MMO except A Tale In The Desert (and that’s mostly political stuff, no balance changes allowed), I think someone needs to step up to the plate and try them out.
February 10, 2006 at 1:06 am
ok, I missed Trin’s post while writing that out. I didn’t play SWG, but the idea of changing jedis seem to kept the playerbase they had IMO.However, that didn’t look like something literally suggested by players, but a last minute appeal to a crowd who were used to keeping their stuff from previous MMOs.
February 10, 2006 at 1:12 am
Not interested in discussing SWG here, but I wasn’t referring to what happened with NGE, but a time much earlier in SWG’s lifecycle (the christmas holocron and months following).
February 10, 2006 at 1:13 am
this, is my opinion, is your best post ever.
February 10, 2006 at 1:55 am
This was awesome and 100% accurate.\par
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When I started as Asheron’s Call OCR, I spent several hours taking every single post on my LJ and locking it friends-only. Not because I was going to say anything about game design or community management or the like, but because I really, really didn’t want a post like this to come up on the official boards: “Hey Ibn, I read in your LJ that you were out with friends last night, is that why you haven’t commented on my PvP balance complaint?!!!”
February 10, 2006 at 1:59 am
Well, since this is Jeff Freeman’s blog under discussion, i think i have 2 things to say.\par
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1. Jeff only actually posted one article relevant to his revolution at SWG and the rest were mostly trackbacks and one-off comments. Loos of a communication channel is always bad, but in this case it wasn’t doing much communicating.\par
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2. SOE (as Trin says) really did bend over backwards for a certain large and extremely whiny portion of the playerbase. They got everything they asked for and still cried for more until the NGE happened. It got to the point where the GCW Correspondant (all correspondants were pretty much ignored but i really think that one of all of them was the single most vital channel of data) got sacked and banned from the SWG forums for repeatedly stating that the number 1 issue in PvP was a deliberate alpha-class which could and did annihilate all non-alpha players.\par
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It seems to me that bending over for the majority of the forum-yellers while ignoring the broken parts of your product is terrible policy. I can only suspect LucasArts as the driving force, since they don’t do this with any other title.\par
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In any case, the point remains - this abandoning of vision and theme in your ongoing game is always going to be a mistake.\par
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Ignore the forums.
February 10, 2006 at 3:22 am
Ibn also has a good point - MMO players are scarily-obsessive, and will stalk anyone who they even *think* works on their game.\par
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A coworker of mine mentioned receiving death threats from players, and the company itself removed most of the signs on their exterior, along with getting their physical address/site blocked from the mapping sites out there. Some fans also took the time and trouble to find a stray Livejournal entry of one of these employees and barraged them with IMs wondering why such-and-such was happening.\par
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The fact that the people making games are just people who need time away from their work and such isn’t clear for some out there.
February 10, 2006 at 5:29 am
\’e2\’80\’9cSo, why aren\’e2\’80\’99t developers doing what the players tell them?\par
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Seems like such an obvious solution. Bend over backwards to get popularly supported ideas into your game, and they won\’e2\’80\’99t go ballistic. \’e2\’80\’9d\par
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What do you do when part of “the players” says one thing, and another part of “the players” says something diametrically opposed?\par
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You can’t please all the people all the time. Design is choosing how to fail. Witty aphorism #583. In short, you NEED a Vision, and there’s going to be at least one forum loudmouth who doesn’t like at least one part of it.\par
The question is how you deal with it.
February 10, 2006 at 7:19 am
[...] I highly recommend gleaning Scott Jenning’s opinion as he can relate more to the matter being a astute and popular blogger and of course working for Mythic Entertainment. Should game developers have the right to speak their minds and share their opinions on generalized design topics on non-official outlets? I think so, and I believe the playerbase needs to do a better job of supporting the developers that do. Of course this will never happen, unless we have a mmo with a small group of people, say like 10 at the most. Okay, I think I’ll go attack Raph on his blog now for not implementating that end game scenario of throwing him down the core off the Death Star completing the final quest to become Masterous Jedi. [link] [...]
February 10, 2006 at 10:58 am
We’ve had this conversation before on this blog. As I recall, it boiled down to “Your twelve bucks a month does not entitle you to talk shit about my mother” versus “You need to get a thicker skin and accept being threatened with rape over a video game.” /shrug\par
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I’ll openly admit I regularly give Scott crap about this blog, but not for the reasons you might think. He has only rarely posted things that will make my job harder. The issue at hand is that he has no sense of self-preservation. The only thing that saves him, I think, is that once upon a time he was famous in a creepy internet way. If he were anyone else he’d have been crucified long ago, both internally and externally. I can’t decide which is more pathetic.\par
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Our tell all books are going to be AWESOME.
February 10, 2006 at 11:02 am
Don’t like the heat, stay out of the kitchen. It goes both ways you know, players should leave and designers should leave the blog world if they can’t handle things.\par
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If you want open communication then you have to accept it’s not going to be all rosey. As game devs (and Mythic is no better) fail to engage their side of the conversation, it is only to be expected the other side will become more bitter and hostile.\par
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Devs fail to understand that popular is almost always right, but popular is not always the most vocal. Sometimes they stop listening all together, sometimes they give control of design to the marketing people (we can sell and expansion if you raise the level cap, so raise it and rebalance), and sometimes they try and chase the vocal needs and never understand the popular view.\par
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Mythic had a great idea in the start with team leads. In the first months of the game, the TL reports were awesome as TLs rejected the vocal and went with the popular. But Mythic failed in communication. They wouldn’t comment on a TL report, they wouldn’t talk of an issue. Patches came and went and we had no idea if the reports were even read. After a while you feel the TL’s are just scam to keep us off devs.\par
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Why is this such a hard thing? Are you unable to find people who know how to interact with a community? Look to the large open source projects then, like firefox, and see how they deal with everything in the open. It’s not that you say something and don’t do it, there will always be the vocal who will call out that. The majority are smarter and want to know why things changed, what changed, etc. They will unstand if you have good reasons (a problem if you don’t have good reasons, as it should be).\par
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Right now I don’t think things are going to change a whole lot as long as the market is in high demand as it is now. Really, there are not that many options for the size of the player base and that means companies can continue to stay tight lipped without a loss to player base. Games don’t loose (many) players over issues, they loose them when a new game comes out.\par
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Anyway, with the way things are you can’t hardly blame the players for being “hostile” with dev blogs, all other forms of communication are shut down. Just for the record I am one who “stopped” but I miss the people I played with and at least once a week consider starting back up just to get intouch with them again - and that is why you have your people who play while they hate the game, and why this issue isn’t going away.
February 10, 2006 at 12:24 pm
All I’ve ever wanted from a game developer was an honest answer and an honest philosophy of game design. Say what you believe, tell the truth about game mechanics and don\’e2\’80\’99t apologize for it.\par
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What so often happens now days? Namby-pamby, bullshit marketing strategies that are in reality pseudo-design philosophies, all about making everyone happy and attempting to appeal to everyone. These marketing peudo-design philosophies (I blame Raph) are bad. These marketing decisions just lead to deceiving the customer and ferment hate among those who pay the salaries.
February 10, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Quoting Freakazoid : “So, why aren\’e2\’80\’99t developers doing what the players tell them?\par
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Seems like such an obvious solution. Bend over backwards to get popularly supported ideas into your game, and they won\’e2\’80\’99t go ballistic.”\par
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Basically: Are you fucking crazy ???\par
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Anyone who think the players as a whole, not individual mind you, should be the one in charge should immediately remove himself from the gene pool.\par
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Nothing is stupider than a playerbase (check out any MMORPG forum for sanity’s sake).NOTHING.
February 10, 2006 at 12:28 pm
I can’t clarify my blog postings on the official forums. Clarifying on my own blog, once it made it to the forums - read by a lot more people than ever read my blog - wouldn’t have done any good.\par
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There can’t be a concept of “my personal website” and “the official forums” if everything game-related that I post winds up on the official forums. This puts me in the position of never posting anything on my personal website that I wouldn’t post on the official forums (and if it’s something I can post on the official forums, then I should just do that).\par
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So there are pros and cons to blogging. The pros were that I could throw out half-baked ideas and get challenged via comments and trackbacks to finish baking the idea. And of course, the ego thing. That’s great.\par
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The cons outweigh the pros though, so this wasn’t a difficult decision on my part.
February 10, 2006 at 12:37 pm
I hated to see the shit hit the fan over on the SWG forums Jeff, I enjoyed reading your blog and I’m sorry to see it go.
February 10, 2006 at 1:04 pm
There’s always a fine line about this stuff. There’s generally 3 players involved in MMO development\par
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1. The Devs (not counting coders, entirely different animal)\par
2. The Players\par
3. “The Man” (as Jedi put so eloquently)\par
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Players are the diverse group. Geniouses and fools thrown into one swarming mass. They know the game backwards and forwards and find each and every little thing out about this world the Devs have made. They can do this because they have fools, who, as any coder can attest to, are some of the most ingenious people on the planet. I’m certain most coders would have “How the HELL did you do that?” tattooed on their foreheads if it wouldn’t scare women away.\par
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Devs are the dreamers. They are paid to dream up the things you do over and over (and over and over) without you realizing you’re doing the same thing over and over. They have this little vision in their head of how things should work. Unless they are steeped in player feedback they tend to build this idea and throw it out there and leave it to players to figure out how it works, regardless of how much or little it makes sense.\par
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The Man is the guy who takes the money from the players and determines how best to invest it. Capitolism 101 tells you that if people are paying you lots of money for X and you want more money then you take some of that money and you invest it in things to make you even MORE money. So The Man is the person who gets more devs, servers, bandwidth, etc. Typically, however, he also is on a leash himself to the behind the scenes people (hidden player #4) who typically own some percentage and want a return on the money they’ve given to The Man.\par
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And thus the dance begins.\par
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When The Man begins to think he can replace a dev or set policy you have disaster. The Man does not know what players want, he only knows money because, for the most part, that is his job. The Man can sometimes relate to players but seldom he even play this game he is responsible for. He is too busy being management. If you need proof of this folly then look at the EQ expansion Gates of Discord (never was an expansion so aptly named).\par
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The Devs run amuck when they lose sight of what players want. See early EQ development. Things were done in a vacuum with little or no player input and the results were players stuck in a world where it was the Devs way or the highway. Devs, even with input, sometimes still come up with bad ideas.\par
Which comes to…\par
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Players are too diverse to please universally. If it were said that “Dev X wants to put in a rainbow” you’d have people jump down his throat for any number of reasons ranging from “I hate rainbows” to “We don’t need rainbows, we need more X”. Players like this always exist just like there’s always players saying “Oh, YES! I love your game! More rainbows! Can I have your children?”. The reason you don’t see them is they are typically drowned out by people screaming profanities telling you how bad things are, etc, etc. These are your culprits holding various blunt instruments wrapped in your words.\par
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Players are best read when you find those few people in the community who are level headed and not prone to profanity riddled posts but actually give you that rarest of the rare post: the logical rant. Suddenly the concerns become clear and can be addressed, win lose or draw.\par
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I would have to say that, in this case, the dev in question needs some more battle experience. Players will always twist your words. This is nothing unusual (see politics, Supreme Court nominations hearings, etc) because, as stated previously, Devs dream the world they play in and if the player doesn’t like it they feel as if they were ignored. Thus, from perceived ignorance comes anger and from anger malice (see Unknown Jedi comment). I don’t think he let his team down, I think he let himself down.\par
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What he needs to understand is that he, too, is human. Perhaps his comments were ill advised but that’s why you need discourse. Not everyone will villify you for a mistake and people need to know that, yes, you can admit when you made a mistake. More often than not, admitting a mistake was made and apologizing will go a long way with the players. Furthermore, it means you make sure that everyone understands the point you were trying to make. From here it looks like he just gave up rather than continue the dance. That is the real tragedy here.
February 10, 2006 at 1:14 pm
I think in many ways this is the result of poor SOE PR - the management/marketing/PR handling of the SWG changes has been outrageously appalling.\par
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Everything any of the Devs writes is viewed through the twisted lense this ill-judged nonsense has created. Stupid, stupid remarks about ‘less reading’ that are grist to the mill of everyone on the forums keen to churn up more trouble.\par
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Well, there are plenty of coding/design/production values problems that make it worse, but it’s the PR foul-ups that really set the original tone.\par
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Disclaimer: I play SWG, sort-of-like the combat mechanism changes, but on the whole find the game less engaging at the moment.
February 10, 2006 at 3:17 pm
the sad thing is, while players say they want better feedback, I really don’t believe they do - while yes, they do want to be told their issue of the moment is being worked on and stuff for them is being added, that’s not really feedback, because they don’t want real feedback.\par
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I believe there are certain universal conversations amongst development teams, like when a system needs to be dumbed down, which players are more important than others, how to exploit player psychology, or what can be done to draw out a subscription as long as possible so even the player that hates your game will continue to pay month after month. These are the types of conversations that whenever players get wind of it they throw huge fits, because nobody wants to be told that a system had to be dumbed down for them, or that a system was designed to be nothing more than a skinner box with the player as the rat, or that their feedback is less important than another player group, but these are the types of conversations that I really think devs need to have.\par
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anyway, I don’t really know where I’m going with this, I guess I just don’t see the purpose of a design blog when the ‘design’ parts are self-censored for the sake of the players, as much of a shame as that is.
February 10, 2006 at 3:41 pm
This is a warning.\par
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This is NOT an appropriate venue for the discussion of SOE’s decisions regarding SWG. I do not work for SOE. I’m pretty sure SOE as a corporate entity doesn’t even like me very much (working for the competition and all that). I am not going to turn my blog over to disenchanted SOE customers who see this as a bully pulpit on the offhand chance someone at SOE may read it.\par
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Further SWG-specific posts will be deleted.\par
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Thank you and drive safely.
February 10, 2006 at 3:45 pm
anyway, I don\’e2\’80\’99t really know where I\’e2\’80\’99m going with this, I guess I just don\’e2\’80\’99t see the purpose of a design blog when the \’e2\’80\’98design\’e2\’80\’99 parts are self-censored for the sake of the players, as much of a shame as that is.\par
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Speaking personally, I don’t particularly filter my opinions based on how the players would take them. I do try to avoid specific games whereever possible (because trust me, that way lies madness) but that leaves an awful lot of leeway and ways to anger people. Angering people I’m OK with!
February 10, 2006 at 4:00 pm
“Anyone who think the players as a whole, not individual mind you, should be the one in charge should immediately remove himself from the gene pool.”\par
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I’m not asking them to be the ones in charge. I’m asking that the devs try a few of the most popular ideas. If they dont’ want to, then at least offer them a reason why.\par
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There are plenty of examples right now of small things in MMOs that would make people happy. Paladins in WoW wanted an option to do more damage while sacrificing healing and defense, but they never got it because it went against The Vision (nevermind that Priests have that option). Armsmen in DAoC wanted an option to make crossbows a competative spec and wasen’t given a reason other than “they don’t want to”. Bow users in DDO just want a reason why ranged is so gimpy compared to melee and spells, and they aren’t getting one.\par
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It’s when all these small things compound on eachother that people get irritated. And when you don’t fix them for months at a time, that irritation can turn to explosive rage.\par
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I’m not asking that developers bend-over for big changes like eliminating permadeath from jedis and whatnot. The big, fundamental changes developers can keep (although that could still be the problem, but I’ll leave that up to the dev to figure out). The smart players only ask for an even field of play with a solution they think works.
February 10, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Since my original post got deleted, i’ll sum it up.\par
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If a dev uses a blog to let everyone know just how little thought and regard for his existing player base goes into the changes they make to a live game, then ya, they are going to get flamed to hell for it.
February 10, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Great post, Lum.\par
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And Jeff, you should’ve known the forums were going to take anything you posted that was remotely game related and use it against you. Those forums have always been bad, and they seem to have gotten even worse in the time since I stopped going there(not that my absence is in any way related to that).\par
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Maybe whenever you move on you can bring back the blog. Was usually a few interesting posts there. Gonna miss those.
February 10, 2006 at 7:17 pm
If I bring it back, there won’t be any game discussion on it.\par
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I don’t think I have enough to talk about to have a blog without talking about game design, though.\par
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I’m sort of a boring person, you see.
February 10, 2006 at 10:02 pm
My personal blog only talks about online poker.\par
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In intimate boring excruciating detail.\par
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-Walt
February 11, 2006 at 4:03 am
Or bring it back ‘anonymously’, if such a thing is possible. Which… yeah, probably not with the intarweb.
February 11, 2006 at 5:32 am
I think it’s sometimes an issue with communicating ‘The Vision’. Ultimately the vision is very often no more than ‘it should make a profit, preferably because people are having fun’.\par
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When you do have a strong vision, and when the players take on parts of that vision and buy in like the rabid semi-sane obsessives that we .. I mean they are and then the Vision gets tweak.. The designers will get called on ‘violating the vision’. If they then post on their private blog something that can be read to imply their own tastes are not entirely in-line with what the perception of the new improved vision is. Bad stuff is going to happen.\par
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Jeff was probably in error posting those both the ‘arcane’ comment and the ’shenanigans’ comment - free speech is good, obvious troll-fodder blog posts not so good.\par
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I can appreciate the problem though - if I had a blog where I expressed what I really thought about the sort of technology I work on, and someone discovered it, I’d probably be looking for a new job. Even if I edited myself and my opinions mercilessly I’d leave myself open. When there’s a few hundred or even thousand people actively looking for an open wound to exploit.. you’re doomed.\par
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But, I even if I had anything intelligent to say, I’m so wrapped up in confidentiality agreements that I wouldn’t really be able to say it anyway. So not being allowed nice things isn’t a particularly special position to be in.\par
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Luckily I can still opine on stuff I know nothing about..
February 11, 2006 at 7:57 am
Ah, I noticed Jeff’s blog was gone when I was going through my own links lately. :/ Too bad. Sad to think that eventually all dev blogs will go away if this keeps up. It’s obviously more important for people to grind their personal axe than to let devs share ideas and attempt to move the industry forward.\par
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The internet isn’t a kiddie pool, indeed.
February 11, 2006 at 9:53 am
I went to a restaurant the other day where I was served cold food.\par
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I tried ask them about it there but there is this huge ‘no complaints’ sign and some kind of device prevents any direct interaction with any of the managers or anyone with enough authority to actually do anything about it. So I called their company hotline and was told ‘tough shit, you ate it cold didn’t you?’.\par
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So when I saw one of the managers walking down the street the other day, outside of the restaurant, I stopped him asked about the cold food and what he intended to do about it.\par
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He told me he didn’t want to talk about it, it was company policy not to, and then went inside his house.\par
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That a fair analogy? He is certainly agrieved to be put in that situation but I honestly don’t think I’m the one that did it. I just want what I paid for.\par
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So yes Brian, my fair treatment as a customer is more important to me then that restraurant’s expansion of their menu selection. Sorry, it’s just business. I don’t ‘owe’ the ‘industry’ a thing.
February 11, 2006 at 12:19 pm
It’s close. A fairer analogy would be that the Restaurant was a McDonalds and your complaint was the bathrooms are too far from the counter and should be painted in Pastel Sandstone instead of Yellow.
February 11, 2006 at 1:29 pm
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I don’t believe it is possible. That’s why I stopped even using a psuedonym years ago, and blog under my own name. I don’t ever want to get it in my head that the things I’m posting are in any way anonymous…\par
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‘Just seems safer that way.
February 11, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Freakazoid:\par
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I have never seen a game bend over for players MORE than SWG.\par
You know when it started? Just around the time they took out the hologrind for Jedi, and put in a quest series. There are countless examples of SWG bending over for the players. In fact, thats one of the larger complaints out there right now..\par
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One of the largest problems with listening to the players too much (with all games), is that you can’t listen to all of them. And when you can’t listen to all of them, the others feel slighted, and they get louder. Then when they get loud enough they get their attention too. Then you end up with this constant inbalance of different players yelling about different things.\par
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When you don’t listen, they yell. And when you do listen, they yell louder.\par
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Honestly, it is the nature of the beast. And unless you remove the “community” from which these games depend on, you are always going to have that push and pull.
February 11, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Hey Slog. Making it clever in an F13 kinda way doesn’t make it more correct then mine. Multiple months of money were prepaid by many customers, who were unable to play the game in a way anything close to what they had previously enjoyed on almost no notice. They were offered no options, refunds, or methods to ‘opt out’ as Scott suggests we should do.\par
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That is why this situation is unique, why so many customers are angry.
February 11, 2006 at 4:41 pm
The point went over your head Nyght.
February 11, 2006 at 5:31 pm
In this specific case the analogy would be closer if it was a whole horde of irate customers chasing the manager down the street with a variety of improvised weapons after someone thought they overheard him saying how, personally, he preferred his food nice and hot.\par
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Also, there would probably have to be some confusion over whether the food in question was tomato or gazpacho soup.
February 11, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Scott’s blogging advantage is that he lost all his sanity points years ago in encounters with Azathoth, idiot god of chaos, whose modern incarnation is the internet.\par
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Sorry to hear about Jeff’s blog. The reasons for taking it down are obvious and inarguable, but I can’t help feeling it’s a loss. (Even though I only stopped by every few weeks.)
February 11, 2006 at 6:39 pm
If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.\par
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One must be prepared to deal with criticism when in such a prominent position, or they should just keep their head buried in the sand. No matter how good you are, or how many folks you please, there’s always going to be a chorus of hate mail and zingers directed your way, no matter the righteousness (or lack of righteousness)\’e2\’80\’a6
February 11, 2006 at 6:57 pm
“If you can\’e2\’80\’99t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”\par
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By that theory, the only people to do with gaming who should be communicating with the public are jackasses and the insanely narcissistic. (I’m assuming Buddha doesn’t work at a game company, he’d be slightly out of touch with what gamers usually want.)\par
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Dunno about you, but I prefer to occasionally encounter the ideas of people who don’t sound like they’re one of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s alternate personalities.
February 11, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Nyght wrote:\par
That a fair analogy?\par
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Sure. But, you know what the ultimate answer is? Don’t eat at that restaurant again. (Or, for the slow kids out there: Stop playing the game if you hate it so much.) Simple, eh? The answer isn’t to go to the manager’s house and spray paint “COLD FOOD SUCKS” all over it. If you keep going back to the same restaurant paying for and eating the same cold food (and, of course, repeating the same complaints), it should come as no surprise that nobody takes your complaints seriously.\par
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However, if you feel the company has truly engaged in fraud, then find a lawyer and file a class action lawsuit to get everyone’s money back. Stomping your feet and holding your break and spewing stupidity on someone’s blog is not the answer. Until you’re ready to do something about the situation instead of just whine, nothing is going to change.\par
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I don\’e2\’80\’99t \’e2\’80\’98owe\’e2\’80\’99 the \’e2\’80\’98industry\’e2\’80\’99 a thing.\par
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Likewise, you should then realize that the ‘industry’ doesn’t owe you anything in particular. Specific companies usually outline their responsibilities in the license you agreed to when you got the game. If you feel you were defrauded, there are a lot more effective ways of seeking recourse than harassing a particular individual trying to discuss general game design issues in a public forum.\par
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Realize that the more you restrict our ability to discuss between ourselves, the less advancement the industry will have as a whole. Things progress much faster when we can all discuss issues and think “deep thoughts” about the issues at hand. As a concrete example, a post on Jeff’s blog got me thinking about random numbers. Because of that, I implemented some random number generation code that generates random numbers without replacement and shared it with others. Yeah, it’s just a small step forward, but it was a step forward.\par
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So much for enlightened self-interest, eh?
February 11, 2006 at 7:49 pm
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It’s not an issue of “dealing with criticism”.\par
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The issue is that we cannot have philosophical design discussions on the game’s official forums. Since anything I post about game design on my blog is the same thing as posting on the official forums (since it winds up there almost immediately anyway), I can no longer post those things on my blog either.\par
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And since that’s pretty much why I had a blog to begin with, it just doesn’t make sense to me to keep it up.
February 11, 2006 at 8:05 pm
What you are saying is true Brian. I wasn’t trying to justify it. I was trying to explain what happened and why it happened and why THIS CASE is different then generic forum rage.\par
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I didn’t say it was right only that: THATS HOW IT IS in this case. Don’t personalize this to me. I didn’t do it.\par
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The final point being, if you don’t treat your customers fairly, there is a good chance they won’t treat you fairly either. Why doesn’t this apply to you and Scott? Goe said it first thing:\par
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“Smart enough to avoid the need.”
February 11, 2006 at 8:10 pm
Come on guys. The answer to this is not hard. Make a private board and vet the participants. A Terra Nova with limited responce.
February 11, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Brian beat me to the punch, fucker; indeed… there is only so much a company /will/ do in sole regard to self-interest. Letting themselves be run over by greedy, abusive customers is almost never one of them. And if the loudest players only act on selfish motives, why the fuck shouldn’t the people providing the game service???\par
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Nyght, again you miss the point. You don’t reward bastard stepchilderen for proper behavior that should come without bribe…. likewise as aufero hinted at, you don’t invoke changes on gameplay simply because a few neurotics hopelessly addicted to your game also happen to be screaming the loudest and most obnoxiously. Of course, because we have such wonderful pillars of charming self-expression and assertive communication voicing their concerns over gameplay issue #20817334, problems effecting the aphony gamers (usually the majority) tend to not get noticed.\par
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Also, have you ever considered the type of person that would piss on Jeff’s face enough for him to shutdown his personal website isn’t in any way unique to SWG? O, I get it… people who develope and produce games with major customer relations fuck-ups shouldn’t be allowed to have personal websites/pages?\par
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“I didn\’e2\’80\’99t say it was right only that: THATS HOW IT IS in this case. Don\’e2\’80\’99t personalize this to me. I didn\’e2\’80\’99t do it.”\par
Sounds like endless apologetics to me. Is there some incidental player-bias going on here that you haven’t spoken about yet?\par
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(A shame Brian Green got to the obvious counterexample to the crap ‘anology’ first. I wanted to declare World War III on you for such poorly hidden, blatant double-standards, so to speak.)\par
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Another thing… what the fuck does Jeff’s blog have to do with Scott shutting down his own blog? Why should scott have to be silent because a few shitheads can’t behave themselves in such an anonymous enviroment? Once again, [b]you’re right[/b], FUCK true accountability. They “can’t have nice things”.\par
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Dasshole.
February 11, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Alright. I surrender.\par
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Once you figure out how to get accountability on the internet, I’m sure this will all be solved. In the mean time I guess you can’t have nice things. Blame me if it makes you feel better.
February 12, 2006 at 1:30 am
Doesn’t even have to be your own game; the one time I commented on Jeff’s blog, I came back to find that instead of opening a discourse, a bunch of forumites had turned it into a dung fight, and shortly afterwards he yanked all the comments. Kinda like throwing water on a fire to discover its an electrical fire =/ Taken me a long while to recover any enthusiasm for blogging or blogs in general.\par
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Really sorry to see the end of your blog, Jeff, and thanks for sticking it out so long.
February 12, 2006 at 8:49 am
Hey Scott!\par
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Close the comments, this is getting silly.
February 12, 2006 at 8:57 am
It was basically nailed in comment 3 anyway. A dysfunctional relationship with a serious power imbalance, both sides convinced they are the victims.\par
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Which is probably a twisted sign that the non-gameplay stuff: communities, guilds, etc. are working too well at times. People want to leave the games but are trapped in guild-relationships where they don’t want to betray their friends by leaving. Ah.. mammal herd/pack instincts rule again.
February 12, 2006 at 1:33 pm
MMORPG’s are like love.\par
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When leaving the first love in your life you are suffering trauma. After the second you are cautious. After the third you think “there are plenty more in the world if this one doesn’t work out”. After the fourth you will hop into bed with just about anybody…..including going back to old relationships just to make sure you made the right decision.\par
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SWG was my first. Since then…AO, Horizons, EQ2, COH,WOW, and COV.\par
I’m at the point where I will “hop into bed” with any MMO. Like I have done with real love, I am very careful about emotional investment, because the games (like people) evolve over time into something different than what you were first attracted to.
February 12, 2006 at 3:23 pm
I agree Mick. You also learn not to pay 6 months in advance…
February 14, 2006 at 12:55 am
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You represent the company you work for. Of course, naturally, it’s going to spill over from one venue to the other, despite any boundaries you would wish to impose.\par
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Welcome to real life.
February 14, 2006 at 8:27 am
http://www.damnedvulpine.com/archives/004488.html\par
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Happy V-Day.
February 14, 2006 at 7:12 pm
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You say that as though I am implying it shouldn’t be this way.\par
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I mean, it wasn’t for a couple of years, but now that it is that way, well, yeah, that’s just the way it is.\par
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I haven’t shed any tears over it.
February 15, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Everyone can say ‘listen to the players’ but that’s harder to do than you think. Even when you listen to the players they all don’t always know what they want. They argue alot among themselves and sometimes aren’t aware of some of the limitations in design and implementation to be able to give an idea that will work well.\par
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I’ve learned after being in front of the community in one way or another over the years to be pretty guarded about what I say even to my close friends. I think it’s a shame though that people end up having to shut down inciteful and interesting blogs just because they’re getting heat from players for it. No one deserves that no matter who they work for unless we’re talking about a government scandal or something. In this case we’re talking about a game that at anytime people can hit ‘cancel’ on their account manager for and be done with it. Like Scott says, sometimes you need to learn when it’s time to walk away. If it’s no fun, then stop. Take a break. If you go back to it, then great. If you stay away from it, great. It’s a game meant for entertainment and shouldn’t be your life. It’s just harder for MMO players because when you divorce from the game you are often leaving friends behind but sometimes it’s a sacrifice you need to make for sanity’s sake.
February 15, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Players never know what they want.\par
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Never, never, never. Only don’t argue that they don’t. Not with them, anyway.\par
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If players knew what they wanted they’d have jobs making their own games.
February 21, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Game designers can have nice things (among them blogs on which they discuss their abstract ideas of game design).\par
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I read Jeffs blog pretty regularly, and it had some nice food for thought in it (especially in the essays section - girls cheating when playing jump rope, permadeath, advancement through quest progression, …).\par
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I think a few factors played together to cause the recent uproar at the SWG boards about Jeff’s blog.\par
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In an entry labeled “Shenanigans” Jeff talked about Star Wars Galaxies and his role in the design of the NGE (albeit as far as I remember the words “SWG” or “NGE” were never used). The basic statements were that he is not the only one responsible for the NGE design, but that he had his part in it (he did not state which parts were his ideas and which parts he didnt like, if any). This was the first time his blog got dragged to the official SWG forums, as far as I know.\par
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In his last update before he took his blog down, he specifically stated that “MMOs need complexity”. The problem with this statement was that the NGE is widely perceived as a dumbing-down of the game, a perception that was underlined by SOE and LA public relations (”kill, get treasure, repeat”, to quote Nancy McIntyre of NYT fame).\par
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A large part of the player base still playing SWG at that time was not interested in a dumbed-down game, though (the players wanting a less complex game already left for other games), and talking about games needing complexity after taking part-responsibility for dumbing down the very game he is the Lead Gameplay Designer for made no sense at all - philosophing one way and designing another way. That is the main reason he got torn apart on the SWG forums for this particular blog entry - the players liked his vision more than what actually ended up in the game.\par
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Should game designers blog their ideas to encourage discussion with other designers? Absolutely. Can I understand Jeff taking down his blog? Absolutely - the question of his ideas being different to the SWG implementation is opening a can of worms nobody wants to get into. Is Jeff right when he says he cannot discuss anything on his blog anymore since it will be dragged to the official boards? Absolutely.\par
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Having said that, I think it is a pity that the blog is no more, as I enjoyed reading it (although I didnt take part in discussing things). Its also a pity that some forum trolls are not able to formulate their criticism in a respecting way and need to resort to flames.\par
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On another topic I read here:\par
If people are not satisfied with a game anymore, they can just pack up and leave - no need to argue over it, take it as it is and enjoy it, or simply leave.\par
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This statement is oversimplifying when talking about MMOs in my opinion. An MMO is more than a game to the players, and an MMO is designed to be that way (some more, some less).\par
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Raph Koster believes in two things when it comes to MMOs: Building communities with strong ties and creating a sense of ownership. There are several effects caused by those two (as Koster explains in more detail), but I will focus on the effects that keep players playing the game.\par
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Koster points out that building a strong community is important, since a strong community will keep individual players from leaving the game - there are other players in the game who depend on them, hence they have responsibility for those other players, and holding responsibility for others always means it is harder to just leave. This design idea can directly be seen in SWG, with player cities and the inter-profession-dependencies of the original ones being the most obvious ones.\par
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Creating a sense of ownership also focusses on the individual player, but also on whole groups of players. Koster says that in order to keep a player playing the game, the want for him to possess something in the game needs to be created, and that he cannot take his possession with him if he leaves that game. Legendary items fall into this category, player achievements (successful crafter businesses, for example), and most noteworthy player cities also fall into this category (”This is our city, a city that we built together and a sign of our community, friendship and common beliefs we share”).\par
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I will get SWG-specific one last time here (I know this blog is not related to SWG, but SWG is a good example): SWG was successful in both points I mentioned above.\par
The original SWG had a lot of community-encouraging concepts: The crafters needed the combat players, the entertainers needed the crafters, the combat players needed the crafter and the entertainers. Also, there was no way for an avatar to become a good crafter, entertainer and combat player at the same time - people needed to choose which role they wanted to fill, and they could only have one toon per server to play with their friends (although changing professions was a matter of days). People could band together and found player cities, and every single individual could have an important role in that player city.\par
Also, SWG created a strong sense of ownership - it was hard to become a good crafter, but running a successful virtual crafting business in SWG was considered an achievement one could be proud of. The same is true for PvPers defending their hometown and faction base, they could become well-respected by the community. The same is true for PvE players - there were rare loots, and possessing them was something to be proud of, also.\par
I wont even talk about the achievement and reward that was unlocking the alpha class (whole different topic on its own).\par
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That those concepts held SWG together in its foundation can be seen by reading the comments of current and former SWG players:\par
“Our guild left overnight” or “I am only subscribing because of the friends I can talk to on the forums”: strong community bonds, whole guilds voted on a game to play next to see each other in that game again.\par
“I lost millions worth of resources in the CU / NGE” or “Its sad to see our player city become deserted” or “Unbelievable to think of the effort I put into becoming a Jedi Knight when now it is available as a starter profession”.\par
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Because of all of this, the statement “Just leave if you dont enjoy the game anymore” is unfair since MMORPGs are designed not to be “just another game”.
May 24, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Wake Up Mr. Freeman…\par
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Update: He’s back! Mr. Freeman appears to be reposting some of his material from the old blog. I hope he has the opportunity to do new writing as well.\par
Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys posts about the sad news that Jeff Freeman has taken down h…