Broken Toys

I agree that you need a community team, because while, some guy from QA telling me that, “Hmm good, but to get any real testing on Accuracy, I’d need to see data for a couple 100 to a 1000 trials. Interesting results, but your sample size is just too small to be conclusive about anything (or contradict the in-house testing I just did *here*).” That’s AWESOME for me, I even take it as a dare sometimes (strong is the explorer in me).

Everyone else though… “ZOMGZ the Devs hate us, they obviously don’t see the sky is chartreuse!!one1!”

While getting to talk to someone that well, actually has first-hand knowledge about what they’re talking about is really nice (although I normally get by with PMs when doing research about X topic), you do need that community team to a) get paid for dealing with the retards, and b) get paid to translate “Dev Speak” into your local dialect “Retardese”.

Else, as soon as people see some math that shows that they’re indeed wrong and they’re having errors in perception (or are whining gits themselves), they go into “ZOMGZ the Devs suck” mode and then said Dev begins drinking heavily (well… more so).

That and well… not letting the three baggers get out at all, since rabid player-bases get kinda clingy with those things for some reason. Especially when there are massive disclaimers that people conveniently ignore before, multiple times during, and after said multiple bag idea.

Riprend’s got it.

And just in case anyone forgot,

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20040319h.jpg

^ is the # 1 reason IGN should be hosting WoWs forums.

And no, I’m not a shill.

I disagree, WoW does not need a Sanya.

First, let assume a dev can see the difference from a rant and a flame. If they are smart enough to be a dev of an MMO, then they should understand some will love everything the devs do, some will hate everything.

Now if a dev crys himself to sleep because of an internet forum, let him go work on console games. Lead developers should be highly involved in the forums, and not have the Mythic-style PR filter involved. Your non-lead devs don’t need to be spending time on the forums, and shouldn’t really post – they code, text, etc.

The problem with the Mythic/Sanya PR game is it comes off as fake (no matter what the truth is). All those posts of Sanya “tracking down the devs” for an answer just reek that she has no more importance than the ignored player base. The rules need to be relaxed – Mythic is afraid of posting something wrong they opt to post nothing of value.

When DAoC started, TL’s seemed like a perfect answer. Selected community members got to converse with real devs. TL’s took pride, and having been with the Cabalists and Mercs form the start (to very weak classes at launch) I can say that the TL reports reflected almost perfectly the consensus of the players – and the were reasonable.

Much went into those reports. We tested things. We gathered data to prove bugs, hit ratios, damage rates and verified those numbers. We debated various way to fix the problems taking balance into account. We got nothing from Mythic but silence.

TLs, if they did get a message from a dev, couldn’t repeat it. “It’s being looked at is all I can say.” 6 months of that and it’s no wonder things got hostile. Fixes would come that were no where in TL reports, and no reasons behind them. Mythic could have taken a few hours of their time to do a point by point reply to the TL reports (which, for all the effort invested in that report, they owed the TLs that much) but nothing was ever done close to hat, so after a while TLs were seen a puppets to keep Mythic from having to deal with the player base.

MMOs could do more to have better documentation. I don’t mean “press A to go to attack stance” i mean design intent. “The Merc is a light fighter class, trading defense for high offensive power. A well played merc will have trouble surviving against an armored fighter, but will be devastating against a magic user or the unlucky rogue caught in the open.” At least then we would know what the class was supposed to be, and can better understand what changes may be made to fix problems. Mercs would never get more armour or better evade, but may get a speed increase coupled with a mez breaker.

AC I’ve always though has done the best job so far. Regular notes from dev, explaining code changes and how they relate to game lore. I’m not saying they made the best choices, but they had the best dev to player communication. These other games, which take a father-knows-best approach no longer hold my interest. If you have a visionary with a clear picture leading the show, like a Garriott, i may be willing to give you a chance, but I don’t hold much hope that it still won’t degrade into the mess of devs hating players, players hating devs because one side doesn’t listen to the other.

The real problem is we don’t have enough good MMOs out there. Supply is way under demand, so there is no need for world class customer service. Moore’s law is behind the MMO tech at the moment, and needs some time to catch up. Once caught up, the barrier to entry will be lower – you won’t need devs who can squeeze every last bit of bandwidth from his code, hardware will take up some slack. Then we might see faster time to market, and more games – which equals more competition.

And I think that is WoW’s real contribution to the genre. Companies under stand money, and it’s now been proven there is real money, enough it’s worth the risk. Copy cats will begin to try and pick apart Blizzard’s success, and copy those parts. Some bean counter will realize they can hit big by having a few MMOs with different targets share the same engine. They will start stealing away Blizzard devs for their knowledge, speading the skills around. Once we get more supply of real MMO options than demand, customer service will go up wether devs like it or not.

Now, if any of the games will be albe to create a game beyond the simple level grinds of today, remains to be seen.

I’m a player who wants to be a dev. I’ve worked in-game support on a volunteer basis for a small MMORPG, one of the earliest, on a level that approached assistant dev (event creation, etc.) I’ve been to GDC a couple of times. I’ve been a board moderator for several game forums. While I can’t claim extensive experience at any one thing, I’ve had at least a taste of a lot of different points of view. I’ve also played DAoC, WoW, Shadowbane, AutoAssault, and a few other odds and ends.

The classic “mud wimping” essay was very right on one thing, at least, and that is how players break down into groups. Most important to this discussion, some of them will take issue with anything you do — and if you don’t do anything, they’ll complain about that — and others will kiss your ass no matter what you do, and flame anyone who doesn’t worship the devs as gods, even if the complaint is about a bug that breaks a major game system or a massive nerf that totally cripples a class. Those two groups you have to deal with, but you don’t have to listen to. One will always hate you, one will always love you, and little if anything you can do will change that.

It’s the rest of the players that you really need to worry about. They’re the ones your community relations people need to be dealing with. Some of them are like me, the vocal and sometimes belligerent on the boards; the majority are like the other dozen or so people in my WoW guild who quit, silently, without a word, because they all felt the same things I was posting about.

Despite what the game management who seems to assume, and thereby create, an adversarial relationship with their players might believe, players are not in fact stupid. Sure, some are blithering idiots, but by and large we are of average or above-average intelligence. Nor are we the enemy. We want the game to be fun, and while a vocal minority defines ‘fun’ as ‘I get it all’, most of us want a balanced, challenging, interesting game. There’s a saying: There is no one so foolish they have nothing to teach, nor anyone so wise they have nothing to learn. We are not mindless herds of cattle; we are human beings, we are customers, and we do actually know what’s happening to us, to our game experience, and to our little world.

What the players hate the most, though, is seeing the contempt that the game management holds us in. You think we don’t see it? You think we don’t feel it? Trust me, it comes straight through the text. (in some of the posts here and elsewhere, it’s explicit) If you’ve ever worked sales, you know that one of the important aspects of any sale is making the customer think that for you, for right now, they are the most important person in the world. That’s what’s behind slogans like “we do it all for you” and “the customer is always right.” No customer really believes those slogans, but they’re a part of the conventional politeness of a business transaction, like those old-fashioned letters signed “Your obedient servant, so-and-so.” It’s a matter of politeness. When that conventional politeness isn’t forthcoming from the business side, then the customer reacts accordingly. Some people may be asses in a brick-and-mortar store in any event (I managed one long enough to know that for a fact) but if the staff is rude, if they act like the customers are an inconvenient interference with their all-important coffee breaks and gossip, if they treat the customers with contempt, those customers will almost all be asses, and some of them will go totally over the top.

Could Blizzard recover their forums by starting to treat the players as valued customers instead of mortal enemies? No. It’s gone too far, for too long. They’ve lost their forums.

But for any company preparing to launch, it’s something critical to look at. Yes, you need a dedicated community manager, or several, to handle the forums and other out-of-game communites. But that person has to be a genuine liaison between the players and the company, someone who can and does have an effect on what goes on in the game. That person has to treat the players with respect from day one. This doesn’t mean they have to tolerate flaming or abuse on the boards; exactly the opposite, they need to prevent that at all costs. But it does mean that they have to be open, honest, and forthright with the players. Customers will forgive you for anything but lying to them. That, they will never forgive.

There is a phrase I used often, back in my in-game support days. It is the reason that the players in that game trusted me above all others, above even the game admin himself: “I will never lie to you. There may be questions I’m not allowed to answer, but if there are, I will tell you so, not make something up.”

Such a simple statement. I will never lie to you. That shouldn’t be hard, should it?

Yet so many games don’t seem to get the point. They have CM people who waffle, and prevaricate, and make stuff up. They make promises they never keep, even just to say “I talked to the devs and they told me I can’t tell you what they’re doing about that.” They act like their job is to keep the cattle quiet, and forget they’re not dealing with cattle, they’re dealing with intelligent human beings with finely-tuned bullshit detectors that are bent around the peg. Then they wonder why the people they treat with disdain and contempt treat them likewise.

Yes, the devs should talk to the players. Not all the time. Not as their primary contact. But they should, at least some of the time. So they’ll be bitchy and irritable and acting like they just spent the past three days sleeping on the floor of their cube because, well, they did. Trust me, we can take bitchy and irritable; nobody could come close to my old guildleader after an Emain run got wiped right out of the keep. What we can’t take is bullshit. Why should the devs be talking to the players? Because it’s important for them to remember they’re not dealing with numbers, not charts, not reports, but living, breathing, thinking human beings who are paying to play this game they’ve built. It’s the same reason that every retail business owner or manager should wait on customers once in a while — and why very many of them do. As Harvey Mackay put it, “…the absolutely best business information you can get is never found in a report or other secondhand information. It’ a steady diet of nose-to-nose, constant, immediate, unfiltered feedback from your customers and employees.” I might not have much in the way of credentials, but I think Mr. Mackay does.

Sure, some devs might find that intimidating. They’re software people, design people, not people people. Two words: Tough noogies. And the second word isn’t noogies. You can’t do a job that involves entertaining people if you don’t actually interact with the people.

Courtesy. Fair treatment. Honesty. Interaction. All pretty common in any business but MMORPGs. All nearly totally lacking in MMORPGs.

Great community relations won’t make people come play your game. But lousy community relations will make them leave. It’s one of the reasons I left WoW. And remember, customers are like any other business commodity, like paperclips and office furniture: if you throw away the ones you have, you have to buy new ones. They get more and more expensive to buy with each new batch, and the supply is finite. So it makes more economic sense not to throw away the ones you already have.

I rose from my seat and gave you a standing ovation IRL, Wanderer.

I don’t think MMO game people should talk to players at all, not even through a customer relations person. They should listen, and consider, but never talk to players. It’s only trouble, no matter who it is, no matter what.

If they want to communicate something to the players they can do so through the web site with articles. More frequent use of “We hear you, and this is where we are” type articles would suffice.

As far as customer service, you aren’t going to do that through a message board. Git ‘er done, and let the players see it for themselves.

I’ve been saying it for years, and I still swear by it: no MMOG will ever have and maintain good relations without specifically slitting their team into two distinct groups, the good cops and the bad cops.

It goes back to the classic guards/prisioners psychological experiment from way back when. If you put someone in charge of the teaming horde of players and make them try to be nice and professional and courtious to the “good” players and also be abrupt and firm with the “bad” ones, they can’t help but eventually come to hate them all. Instead you need to have one set that gets to be the good guys and help the players and be their friends and make things better for them, and a completely seperate team that hunts down the exploiters and takes care of the harassers and that sort of thing. Don’t ever let these two groups interact directly, because one is going to be barely able to keep their positive outlook in place and the other will be a seething pit of cynicism. But seperately they can fullfill all the roles your CSR staff needs to fill without letting the cynicism bleed over into the Polyanna.

Game companies should not run their own message boards. While Stratics (and others like them) has a long list of issues, I would much rather see an independent third party be the home for the game community. When companies run their own board open discussion dies.

Marketting monkeys, scared project leads and other power that be always try to chain down their CMs and that’s usually the problem.

If you have a CM, he’s supposed to be with the crowd, not behind walls telling half-lies to keep the community quiet and only sneaking out sometimes to really do his job because he’s gonna get fired otherwise.

You wouldn’t believe the shit some CMs have to go through to even do something like “Hey guys. Yea, servers are down, I’m trying to get some more info about that, bear with me for a bit”. As usual for the “We got the power!” mofos, they hide from the problems and hope to dodge the fruits then, bit a week later, come back out smiling with a fancy PR and are 100% sure that everything is alright because that PR was damn good!

I used to pity the CMs at Blizzard when I was there, poor guys really, hope things are better now. DAoC was better, more freedom, probably because we didn’t have a too ass-tight structure. Hard to reach everyone though and some times, things just go “poo”.

Comes down to respect in a way. Do you respect your players and want to have fun with them, or do you just want to milk and go back home. It’s not just the CM, it’s often NOT the CM, but good luck saying anything without your Marketting dpt and Imtheprojectmasta ordering you to either shut up or spread lies about whatever problem is currently happening…

Ah well, were great times but glad to be out of it now

WTF I have friggin sweet people skills, just so long as the people are actual people and not retarded butt-dwelling monkeys! Those are the ones that get my back up and, I think, I do the entire planet a service by leaping at the opportunity to stab at their eyes with bile spilling spleen explosions!

We seem to get away with dog food consumption, because our handles are seen relatively frequently in-game and our players know that they both play alongside us and against us on a fairly even basis.

I don’t know that we’d have survived as long without eating the dog food. Our player’s most erzatzt of inclinations tend to vaporize somewhat when they see us on their side of the gun.

Then again, it could be argued that our take on PR is a throw back to the “WarBirds” days that mark our game’s origins; or one of many indicators that we never really quite shifted gear out of MP all the way up to MMO.

Derail inc.

Joe sez: “There are exceptions of course, which is why you see technically brilliant games like the entire quake/doom series. “

I expected the same kind of thing coming to work on the Doom3 tech and was very, very disappointed. There are points of the engine that are quite good but overall it is quite poor. This is not to say that I don’t understand why it is the way it is, just that it wasn’t what I expected from my id idolizing fanboi days (and believe me when I say that maintaining and extending the thing is a goddamn nightmare).

/end derail

Somewhat back on topic: the only people who have any RIGHT to say what a game is or isn’t is the devs. The players can and should feel free to make suggestions but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to be sane, meaningful, feasible, or even polite. Players who feel that they have a right to the inner workings of the game development process should take that as a challenge to get into the industry and see what it’s like from the inside (hint: the grass is not always greener).

I would personally lean towards transparency but I also understand how that can go awry. Anything you say as a dev will be a) completely ignored as it suits the given argument, b) written in stone as it suits the given argument, c) conjectured about to prove something as it suits the given argument, or d) completely misunderstood/rehashed/requoted in and out of context as it suits the given argument. Astute readers might notice a common trend in that last sentence. Sometimes saying nothing at all is the least of evils even if your players don’t understand.

Luckily for me, the folks who hung around at the UI boards on the Pendragon forums were a pretty reasonable bunch.

As another former TL, I can attest to most of Oz’s post, except for the pretending to be 3 TLs part. I was one of the older TLs, and I saw the good and the bad.

The good – The TLs were the perfect appeasement to the community. They were players, and many of us were pretty noble and attentive when it came to our task of interfacing the dev team and the players.

There were definite drawbacks though. I think the higher ups really didnt understand how useful we were, and then after a while, some less than noble people got into the program, and the TL boards themselves became so much noise and “coffee club” that the DEVs just ended up writing us off completely.

I don’t know if lightning could ever strike twice with a design like that though. You have to have the right people on both sides.

Три Гадалки-портал про гадания.Молитвы древней Руси.Инструкции магических обрядов.Гороскопы, обычаи,а так же всё о том,как снять порчу и сглаз.

Блог с порно зоофилия, порно с животными. Фистинг лесбиянок, бесплатное видео анального секса, бесплатное порно смотреть.