How To Fix Everything!

“…meaningful PvP that shapes the world AND challenging PvE raids AND an incredible beautiful 3D engine AND a unicorn AND crafting AND player housing AND a pony.”

I am stunned that you forgot to include “fetapults” in that list.

Stunned, sir.

Definatly, enjoyed the egomaniacal writings! You should do them more often.

Has anyone ever tried doing the planning for an MMO i public? Maybe we can make an ‘MMO Tycoon’ game of making a game… set the time / budget constraints and see what we can reasonably fit in there.

Who knows, maybe it would be educational to the players and the dev teams at the same time.

Yeah, right! More like “design by committee” and that almost never works.

Don’t need to fix everything, but you could fix the lag in Aion. It’s a bit silly to have 5-10s lag spikes and pings up to 800ms.

Being able to drop a petition 24/7 would be good too.

I think this is a pretty realistic scope.

“Scope” definitely would be the over all theme for the failure of WAR, in my opinion.

They had the opportunity to make a kick ass world PvP driven game, and instead they wasted a huge portion of their resources on dungeons and raids that aren’t part of that scope.

Failure to understand that you can’t launch a better version of WoW when you have a fraction of the budget for WoW is failure.

“A game that fails due to over-ambition is still better than one that fails because it’s [...] committee-designed sludge…”

- Yahtzee, this week’s review of Dark Void

Great read! One can feel the experience that is behind each of these admonitions – and the parts that you left unsaid for good reasons .

@ethereal.wolf

I wonder which elements of PP you are referring to, exactly. I know they added some features after I left, but it didn’t solve any of my particular concerns with that game. I wonder if we’re thinking about the same things.

@Vaxhacker and Geldon

I’m not a designer, but even as just an ordinary player I found some of Scott’s points this week definitely ventured in Captain Obvious territory. I don’t think there is a single developer who would disagree with his points, but whether what that developer is doing is running afoul of what Scott wrote. And the bean-counters on top of them just don’t bother with such considerations to begin with; they would sooner have a bad game that makes gazillions of dollars than a revolutionary one that fails.

What also didn’t help is that despite the contents of the first article, I see little that could connect part two to part one. Part one gave specific examples of MMO failure, brief, concise, almost bullet-point, all condensed to fit into a single article, but you saw what he was getting to. Part two, on the other hand, never so much as mentions a single game to serve as an example of the various points. In some places, like that section on technology, you can easily fill in the blanks: Inadequate server capacity gets you Darkfall at launch, “hubris” should get a portrait of Gaute Godager or Paul Barnett. Why not mention Gaute’s “steak” remark, then?

In the case of “scope”, though, I get the exact opposite problem: I can’t think of a single example that would fit here. The entire lesson seems to be: “if you’re a garage-league studio, don’t try to make World of Warcraft”. Except that the most egregious example of WoW copycatting I can think of was Warhammer Online, and that its problem was not exactly scope. And the other example I can think of, Age of Conan, actually pulled it off as far as the scope was concerned, though it didn’t seem to be that way at launch. So that entire section on scope would have been improved with some examples.

What’s interesting is that there is now another MMORPG.com article that details some of those annoying things in MMO’s that developers just can’t get rid of, even though we’re sick of them. That whole “Kill ten rats” and FedEx approach to questing. The Holy Trinity of tank, ranged, healer. Nothing that hasn’t been said before, but that, if left unchecked, may end up killing MMO’s. But here the real problem is that the list amounts more or less to wishful thinking, like eradicating world poverty.

Vetarnias :@ethereal.wolf
And the bean-counters on top of them just don’t bother with such considerations to begin with; they would sooner have a bad game that makes gazillions of dollars than a revolutionary one that fails

If it’s making gazillions of dollars, it’s hard to characterise a game as “bad” – by definition, there would be a lot of people who think it’s “good” enough to part with their money for. It might be a “dumbed down, mass market” game, it might not be the game YOU want to play, but a game that is providing a lot of people with entertainment that they manifestly enjoy is doing just what a game should be – so how is it a “bad” game?

Contrariwise – if a game is a dull, unplayable POS that makes me wish I’d spent the last few hours helping my girlfriend with her clothes shopping instead – that’s a bad game. I don’t care how noble the developer’s intentions were to create the next step in the evolution of MMOs, the result should be something that I enjoy playing.

I’m not a designer, but even as just an ordinary player I found some of Scott’s points this week definitely ventured in Captain Obvious territory.

The tricky thing about game development is that, in attempting to push the envelope, what was previously Captain Obvious territory rapidly becomes a forgotten prologue. Even a pipe dream atop all the other demands you attempt to meet.

As I said, Lum’s article was relatively irrefutably correct via abstraction/choice of scope. He didn’t get into the gritty details, just laid down the easily forgotten guidelines. He had some good reasons for this:

First, because the gritty details will vary heavily from project to project, and nobody has the necessary omniscience to imagine every little individuality.

Second, because this is an article on MMORPG.com, not a comprehensive designer website. He’s explaining things that might be useful for a newbie designer, but are primarily aimed at MMORPG players who want to know where things went wrong.

So, yes, I could point out there are obvious shortcomings to the message, but this would be very shortsighted of me: looking deeper, it was a good choice of document depth.

I sure hope I don’t completely ruin the tags on this post. Preview? Edit?

UnsGub :
“Part two, on the other hand, never so much as mentions a single game to serve as an example of the various points.”
No need to be specific with examples. Any large software project deals with these issues on a daily bases some successfully and some not.

That’s an [i]un[/i]reason. If any large development project runs into these problems regularly, and there’s no need for examples because everyone is familiar with them, why even bother writing the article?

geldonyetich :
First, because the gritty details will vary heavily from project to project, and nobody has the necessary omniscience to imagine every little individuality.
Then why bother mentioning the examples of failure in the first article? As you’ll remember, this was a two-part series, which implies some sort of connection, and the conclusion of the first article was “Conclusions, And How To Fix All Of This Mess.”

Second, because this is an article on MMORPG.com, not a comprehensive designer website. He’s explaining things that might be useful for a newbie designer, but are primarily aimed at MMORPG players who want to know where things went wrong.

But that’s precisely what wasn’t addressed. “Here are some very specific spectacular failures, and on an only somewhat related note, here are reasons some games sometimes fail.” Connect the two, or don’t bother linking the articles in the first place.

As I was taught back in high school, or hell, maybe even grade school, providing examples to illustrate your theories always bolsters your point, and this is no exception. I also learned in high school Geometry and Trigonometry that “it’s obvious” is in fact not an acceptable proof.

I completely disagree with you two and agree with Vetarnias on this one. I enjoyed both articles, and both were well written. The conclusion does not address the introduction, though. I would have liked to have a seen a re-visitation of each failure from the first article along with a brief blurb of why it failed. As it is, I’m going to try and do it myself, and I’m going to fail, which further leads me to question how the two articles are related:

Ultima Online
Problem: Rampant mean-spirited non-consensual PVP
Failed due to:
Scope: Not being big enough to include a PVP flag at first, contrary to the article highlighting creeping scope as an issue?
Tech: I don’t think so, unless you want to consider that flag tech, when it was really a design choice.
Customer Service: No?
Fun: Maybe the devs didn’t try enduring being PKed?

Hellgate: London
Problem: Wanted to charge like an MMO without being one
Failed due to:
Scope: No?
Tech: No?
Customer Service: No?
Fun: No?

EQ2
Problem: Wasn’t enough like its predecessor?
Failed due to:
Scope: No?
Tech: No?
Customer Service: No?
Fun: No?

Auto Assault
Problem: Weird game with no clear market
Failed due to:
Scope: No?
Tech: No?
Customer Service: No?
Fun: No?

SWG
Problem: Expansion pack completely changed game, pissing off loyal customers without gaining any new ones
Failed due to:
Scope: No?
Tech: No?
Customer Service: Maybe? Not really customer service so much as neglecting to consider your current customer base’s interests.
Fun: Maybe? Whether or not the new expansion was fun is really beside the point, though.

I mean, hey, the failures were fun to reminisce about and make fun of, and the tips and pitfalls are all relevant and well worded. The two are not connected, though, despite the fact that the articles are. I’d have much preferred a little connection and resolution.

@Tremayne

The distinction is perhaps more difficult to make for video games – if you have fun, you have fun. Compare that to movies: James Cameron still can’t write a screenplay, and Avatar, $600 million later, will inevitably win for Best Picture. The problem is that I’m constantly having run-ins with WoW fanboys who insist that WoW is teh bestest game of all time, in everything, because it has 11 million players to prove it. Any criticism is futile, because if it were bad, it wouldn’t be played.

@Geldon

I see what you mean, though I don’t think it will change much for MMORPG players. You know they will complain nonetheless at the next game, and may even look upon Scott’s article as an excuse for developers.

Beyond that, I’m puzzled by Scott’s use of pronouns in the article. “You”, for instance, is aimed not at players, but at developers. Sample: “You will have to convince your stakeholders, your team members, and your prospective players…”. Players themselves are referred to in the third person, even though they are assumed to be the intended readers. I suspect it’s a style decision to make player-readers feel they are eavesdropping on a confidential discussion between two developers; but you need something confidential being said to maintain the illusion. If Donald Trump were giving financial advice to a (nonexistent, purely for narrative purposes) business rookie in front of a middle-class audience, wouldn’t you expect something a little less obvious than “buy low, sell high”?

Furthermore, Cymbaline’s post also demonstrated (I’ll have to rely on her judgement, as I haven’t played some – most, actually – of the games on that list) that some of the failures mentioned in the first part can’t be explained by the contents of the second part, even though they are so vague as to be stretched almost to infinity. And really, is “had no market for it” (as with Auto Assault) a design flaw?

Scott is an intelligent and lively writer, but I think he dropped the ball on this one. I’m not sure why, but I would have liked to see him discuss some recent or ongoing failures (according to him), except Aion, which is, as we all know, perfect.

I’ve said it a couple of times on this blog and I say it again: I disagree that “your team will have to come up with everything from scratch” , the technology is there, people just don’t know, they prefer to burn their money on Gamebryo.

@Scott Jennings

Perhaps you consider adding specific examples as “pointing at car wrecks” (and, given where that article was published, you are probably right in fearing that it will be viewed as such and consequently enjoyed for the number of dead bodies it leaves in its wake), but I would rather see the use of specific examples as a more clinical process, in this case an autopsy or something close to it. The purpose isn’t so much to poke fun at their failures, but to learn from them. Perhaps the average MMORPG.com reader isn’t interested in that, so I understand your restraint, but I think it would have made for a superior article if you had attached specific games for each of your parts.

@ethereal.wolf

I was on Hunter, and it was fast becoming the same thing when I left. As a so-so battle navigator, I had given up on trying to hold pillages, even on a sloop (not to mention that I rarely if ever broke even), because it was impossible to find someone who would stay after even one defeat; I was much better off selling my services as a sailor to others, but it gets tiresome after a while. By the time I quit the game, we had decided to call our small flag “Instant Gratification” out of desperation at this very problem.

I’m not sure that adding bots would be the solution to that, though. Sounds more like skirting the problem and removing one of the “MMO” aspects of Puzzle Pirates in the process.

@vetarnias: there was some excellent discussion in the extra swabbies thread about how enabling more autonomy does not necessarily reduce socialization. i also think clinging to rigid ideas of what an “mmo” should be is the reason the problem continues to fester and hasn’t been properly fixed. even a reduction to partial dependance on humans is better than the complete dependance they have now. as you pointed out yourself, the current arrangement makes for a shitty game experience.

@Cymbaline

[If mentioning the gritty details requires the omniescence mortal existence lacks] Then why bother mentioning the examples of failure in the first article? As you’ll remember, this was a two-part series, which implies some sort of connection, and the conclusion of the first article was “Conclusions, And How To Fix All Of This Mess.”

What you are objecting to is the means Lum went about it. You wanted him to take each given example and point out how he would have done this or that differently. Instead, he chose give the general reasons that would have brought about each flaw.

I can imagine several good reasons why he chose the later approach over the former besides that (as he said) pointing at carwrecks isn’t particularly productive. For example, because hindsight is 20/20 and it’s somewhat unscrupulous to claim you would have been able to learn from these mistakes before they were made.

As it is, I’m going to try and do it myself, and I’m going to fail, which further leads me to question how the two articles are related:

You can only blame yourself there. Because the approach chosen by Lum here was to go for the abstract reasons why mistakes are typically made, I can actually look at many of your examples where you wrote “No?” and come up with many, many examples of how those reasons could apply to each.

For example:

Hellgate: London
Problem: Wanted to charge like an MMO without being one
Failed due to:
Scope: By definition, yes. Considering their chosen scope was incompatible with the MMORPg that the wanted to be. If they had decided upon this scope originally and planned appropriately, they likely would have reached that goal.

Tech: Of course, one of the main reasons why Hellgate: London failed was because their tech was not quite up to the task of providing the experience that players would have interpretted as an MMORPG. Flagship learned the hard way that the demand behind a MMORPG is hard – at least hard-enough that you can’t easily shoehorn your 3D Diablo into being one. The heavily instanced compromise did not satsify.

Customer Service: It’s interesting to consider that, from the start, the players were telling Flagship that they were not particularly interested in seeing a subscription fee applied to the game in any form. Who, might you wonder, is responsible for disseminating the information from their userbase in time?

Fun: Of course, as almost anyone who has actually purchased Hellgate would tell you, the main reason why they’re not still playing it was because the game was a badly balanced travesty. They were tweaking and tweaking all the way up until the end, but they did not realize one important thing. The fun, stupid. It seems that, like an article you my have recently read would have warned you, the fun was lost by the sidelines until it was too late to do anything about it. (Those last 9 words being related to scope.)

@Vetarnias

Beyond that, I’m puzzled by Scott’s use of pronouns in the article. “You”, for instance, is aimed not at players, but at developers. Sample: “You will have to convince your stakeholders, your team members, and your prospective players…”.

“You” is a tricky habit that I often fall into as well. It’s common in American dialogue to refer to a hypothetical you in a hypothetical situation (often being described in a “you would have had to have been there” reference to the writer). However, when read, it’s often taken very personally.

I wouldn’t get too hung up on it. I don’t need to prove that the article was intended for the average slub on MMORPG.com to enjoy. This is because this is self-evident by the fact it was posted to MMORPG.com.

@Cymbaline

You wrote an awful lot of “No?”s for things that had valid Yes’s, even YESS!!!’s. Auto Assault was considered fun? Doesn’t your given problem for Hellgate point directly to a scope problem? (“Wanted to charge like an MMO without being one” sounds very much like a scope problem.) Ultima Online “failed”? It sure lasted a while! Isn’t SWG fundamentally changing the universe’s mechanics a simultaneous scope change and fun-source change, which would jar anyone used to the old fun-source and scope? And weren’t there many complaints about bugs in SWG?

Or did you frame those as each having only one problem, and asking whether that one problem you chose fit the categories given? Because I’m sure there’s was more than one problem for each.

geldonyetich :
What you are objecting to is the means Lum went about it. You wanted him to take each given example and point out how he would have done this or that differently. Instead, he chose give the general reasons that would have brought about each flaw.

No, I didn’t, and no, he didn’t. I don’t want him to say what he would have done differently, I want him to point out where it went wrong. “EQ’s 72 hour wait queues for bosses is a failure of fun. Had the developers actually tried playing through such encounters on a real server populated by lots of people where they’re just another face in the crowd and not someone with debugging powers, they would have found it a bit less fun.” He did choose to give general reasons, but I’m having a hard time connecting them to the examples he gave in the first part, and, as the author, I think he should have done that for us, and not left it to us to guess.
Further, I disagree with Scott in that I don’t think that saying “this failed because it wasn’t fun” is pointing fingers. I think it’s illustrating your point with a concrete example, and I think that’s always helpful in making your case. To be fair, I don’t know who designed EQ, and they don’t know me, so I’m not really even capable of pointing fingers or offending people (anymore than some random guy on the internet screaming “you suck!” can offend a designer). Maybe I would feel differently if I were in the industry and could actually piss people off and burn some bridges.
Also, I love charts. And video game car-wrecks.

You can only blame yourself there. Because the approach chosen by Lum here was to go for the abstract reasons why mistakes are typically made, I can actually look at many of your examples where you wrote “No?” and come up with many, many examples of how those reasons could apply to each.

No, I can blame Scott – and I did. When you’re writing a paper on what is broken and why, it is standard procedure to connect the two.
Regarding your example of Hellgate, I completely disagree with your scope reasoning. They didn’t want to be an MMORPG, and they weren’t trying to be. They just wanted to charge like one. They weren’t a victim of scope creep or scope failure in general. As far as tech, the “failure” that Scott sited in the article (not one that you think the game had, because that’s not what we’re arguing) was charging like an MMORPG without being one. That’s not a tech issue. Your customer service issue I might buy. And again, your fun issue addresses what you think is wrong with the game, not what Scott pointed out as the failure in article 1.
My whole point is: don’t leave me to guess at what you meant – say it!

Guy :
Or did you frame those as each having only one problem, and asking whether that one problem you chose fit the categories given? Because I’m sure there’s was more than one problem for each.

This is really the same thing that I just mentioned to Geldon, but yes, I’m framing them as each having one particular “failure” (note, that they had a failure, not that they failed, which is a crucial distinction that many commenters on MMORPG.com failed to make in article 1, as EQ and UO certainly didn’t fail) because that’s what Scott did in the original article. As per one of your points, he didn’t state that Auto Assault wasn’t fun, he stated that it had a very small, strange niche and a poorly defined target market. He didn’t mention the bugs in SWG, he mentioned that they yanked the table cloth out from underneath their existing player base.

I’m planning a car trip from Seattle to New York. I need to be there in 7 days.

My planned route takes me through the Dakotas and the Midwest. A few hours into my drive, I decide that I want to stop at Mt. Rushmore.

It’s not on my planned route, but I have enough flexibility in my schedule that I can make the adjustment and still get to New York in 7 days.

I couldn’t, say, suddenly decide I wanted to go stop at Dallas, Texas. Not if I wanted to reach New York in 7 days for that job.

MMO devs do the equivalent of deciding to stop in Dallas and then end the trip in Kentucky because they couldn’t make it all the way to New York.

Flexibility is all well and good but at some point you need to a) have a plan and b) stick to that plan.

Our milestones are the baby goals along that path. Areas where we can check in and assess how we are performing against that plan.

If the plan is not going well, then obviously you are going to need to adapt. But that doesn’t detract from the virtue of having that plan in the first place.

geldonyetich :
Not an undertaking I’d be in a hurry to undergo. MMORPGs were epic endeavors involving hundreds of thousands of players. With this, there are hundreds of thousands of perspectives of perceived faults. I wouldn’t pretend I could cataloger every imagined sleight.

You’re either not reading what I write, or not understanding it. I don’t want a laundry list of everything that every player thought was wrong with EQ. I want the two articles connected. I want the problem (singular) pointed out in article 1 (in the case of EQ, 72 hour timers on bosses, to be concise) linked with the causes of failure in article 2.

Maybe you should try writing your own “here’s how I’d fix what was wrong with the games I wrote about” document from the perspective of Lum’s first document and see if you end up with something all that different.

Again, this is not about “here’s how I would fix it.” This is about connecting the two articles. Column A lists a game and a specific failure. Column B lists four causes of failure in MMORPGs. Draw lines between the two where relevant, with the necessary explanation to make those lines make sense.

Work with me a little here. Is it really that hard for you to connect that reason why they couldn’t get away with charging to be an MMORPG is because the necessary features to be considered an MMORPG were not in their choice of scope? That’s what I wrote, I just assumed you could make that leap.

No, I can’t make that leap, because I don’t agree with it. Again, you’re not listening to me. One of our four items in Column B was “Failure due to not keeping scope in check.” What you’re saying is more like “Failure due to not keeping pricing in check relative to scope.” They both touch on scope, but they are, in fact, different things.

No, from your very first comment, your mind has been in “find something to disagree with” mode. I’ve been there. It’s not hard to find something to do disagree with until the end of time, but it requires a suspension of your attempt to truly understand what was written.

The irony, it smells like melted glue and slightly overcooked pancakes. I understand the two articles. I don’t think they were adequately linked. I understand that you think that Hellgate’s failure was attributable to scope. I disagree, to the extent that I don’t think it was attributable to the kind of scope problems that Scott mentioned in his second article, which leads us back to the sentence two periods prior to this one. Addressing the irony, I think it’s you who is having difficulty understanding what is written. I’m not. Scott understood what I was bitching about, and disagreed (and I disagree with his disagreement). Fine. That’s gravy. You and I are not disagreeing – you’re failing to understand me, and trying to tell me I’m wrong because of things I never said.

Sigh..

That second quote was intended to be:

No, I can’t make that leap, because I don’t agree with it

[quote]No, I can’t make that leap, because I don’t agree with it. Again, you’re not listening to me. One of our four items in Column B was “Failure due to not keeping scope in check.” What you’re saying is more like “Failure due to not keeping pricing in check relative to scope.” They both touch on scope, but they are, in fact, different things.[/quote]

Technically, scope is inclusive of everything but in the context of these articles, you are right.

I would argue that any ‘pricing’ dispute is really more of a reflection on “Service” in that it’s a customer relations issue.

The four areas that Scott lists (Scope, Technical, Design, Service) are VERY broad areas in which just about any failure could be defined.

I think part of your problem is that you are more narrowly defining these categories than Scott.

Isn’t saying that a game has too small a niche or market the same as saying it’s not enough fun for enough people? These are issues that blend into one another.

There’s a slight difference. A game might be fun (meaning: enjoyable to play) for a lot of people, but if it has a very niche market, very few will actually try it.

While there’s a difference, niche and fun aren’t exclusive categories.

In Auto Assault’s case, they had a shot at a whole new niche. It’s not like there’s a whole lot of car war MMORPG alternatives.

However, the bottom line of any game is that games are entertainment. If a game isn’t fun, don’t expect people to hang around.

You could get away with just selling a brand slapped on a crappy game if you’re just selling to ride the box sales. For example, the average movie tie in game. However, a MMORPG with a monthly subscription model require longevity to survive.

Not that selling crap to a starved niche was their goal. I was in Auto Assault beta towards the last few months. There was a reason why scope was at the head of Lum’s list. They simply ran out of time finish the game. It happens to most MMORPGs, really – that lack of polish can kill the fun. WoW finished their game a year before it was released, and spent the rest of the time just polishing.

This is IT project management 101 material. Do people in your industry really not understand how critical scope control is to a successful project? Have you thought about outsourcing project management to people who do this for a living?

A good PMO will make your job easier, not harder – that’s how you tell the good ones from the bad ones. If all your developers hate the project manager, or all he does is ask for status and adds no value, then he’s a bad one.

The second half of the article reads like an Agile primer. Tackle big projects in small bites, get user feedback early and often, and use that feedback to modify your design concepts.

Geldonyetich needs to Get. A. Life.