Massively^™

Quick comment about folks complaining that the Age of Conan community reps are pulling a "Baghdad Bob" on the community and spinning things in a positive direction...

That's their job. For every cranky snowflake who gets on the forums and complains, there needs to be someone trying to present things in the best light possible. That's what community relations reps do. Their job is to foster a "vibe" that says "Our game is the place to be. We're the best, and you don't need to go anywhere else to have a good time."

I'd be more worried if the community reps WEREN'T spinning things in that direction. No matter how bad a bug is, or how big a problem a game is having, nothing will panic players more than a panicky community rep. Reps should always present the point of view that "We've got things under control, and if we haven't already fixed something, we're going to get to it soon."

Sure, most players know better than to buy into the company line. However, if reps are panicky, or worse, you have a "Tweety Rant" situation (see: http://tweety.bowlofmice.com/tweety/try_being_a_guide.html for some historical context on that reference) from someone who is representing your game, then you have much bigger problems.

The biggest thing that CR's can do to help their game be successful is to remain positive, and deal with issues honestly, but cheerfully. If your reps are showing frustration or attitude, that is a sure sign that a game's problems are spinning out of control.

Everyone has problems, but being in control of those problems separates the successful from the also-rans.

-K

Oops.. dead link.. try this instead

http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/the-wayback-machine/try-being-a-guide-you/

-K

yes Ofc its there job aswell as baghdad Bobs job where to spew out everything is peachy comments.
But the problem still remains When the dev´s know that the game are in problems with alot off unfinished content and none working core features yes the safest way is to keep quiet and hope for the costumers dont notice it .
But when costumers notice some things are not working and adressing it on the main forums without an answer for 1-2 weeks
getting the thread up to 50 pages with rants bitching flaming conspiracy .
Things gets out off hand very quick
damn i think FC would have defused alot off whining posts about
lets say
Traders/attack bug/charge/crashing/Riding/latency/stats/feats
by just a simple we are aware off the problem
Then ppl know that they actually care about the game remember just because you work in a company doesnt mean youre comitted to the company and want it to succeed.
but when core fetaures is broken in a game and no one in charge are answering it quickly becomes a growing ground for whining

That's a good analogy, but the problem with software development is that you can have the best architects in the business, but if your coders stink, you'll have a bad product. If you have great coders, but a lousy architecture, it doesn't matter how great they are, the product will still stink.

You can't rely on QA to find all of the bugs before a release because of the nearly infinite number of "use cases" in a product like an MMO. Beta testing (as you may have heard me mention in a previous column) is more of a marketing device than a serious methodology for testing. Any bug hunting that is accomplished there is strictly a function of the cooperation of your beta players.

Given the wide variations in hardware, it is nearly impossible to test every configuration.

With that in mind, an MMO architect needs to:

1) Design the game in small, easy to test chunks that can be thoroughly and automatedly tested apart from the rest of the product. (You might hear the term "unit testing" associated with this)

2) Make sure that your internal interfaces (API's, procedure calls, whatever you want to call them) account for ALL possible input values. For example, instead of identifying "bad" cases, have a list of allowable values and reject EVERYTHING else that is not on that list.

If we applied this to firewalls, for example...

Instead of a "Deny" list, where you list hosts that are blocked, create an "Allow" list and block everyone that isn't on it.

What does this get you if you are a game developer?

It is far easier to plan for user actions that you want to allow than it is to plan for every conceivable action that a user could make that you might not want to allow. AoC appears to have this issue with some of their quest lines. If certain quests are done "out of order", the game doesn't respond properly.

oh.. and one last thing...

Just as a guess, I would wager that software developers who work in the game industry are, in general, less experienced than professional developers in other software industries. Many companies decide to spend lots of money on architects and designers (and rightfully so), but outsource their coders offshore or to "lowest bidder" shops.

You get what you pay for.

I'd rather have two coders each making 150,000 dollars per year on my staff than have 10 coders making 30,000 dollars each. A developer that understands good programing principles and doesn't just chunk out code like a community college programming student is worth far more than someone who is willing to work cheap and can only understand a software design document well enough to scratch together buggy code. At the companies I have worked for, our developers were paid VERY well, and it showed in the quality of our products. The shops where I worked where development was outsourced to "cheap" development houses wound up spending a lot of time and money fixing broken code and bug hunting.

I'm going to stop here so I don't make this into another column. It is enough to say that there is an annoying tendency in the gaming industry to hire "cheap" talent who is just thrilled to work in the gaming industry. That tendency tends to result in sloppy code and buggy releases. Spend the money and time, hire and KEEP talented programmers. You'll save money in the long run.

-K

That's very interesting. It's refreshing to see this perspective about an industry usually so full of hyperbole. My own experience in more mainstream software development organisations is that:
1. Any decent architect working with poor coders won't hang around very long in such an organisation;

2. The term 'architect' is much abused and I believe the games industry (and the new found cult of celebrity bestowed on the development teams) has cheapened the role - many architects are just 'doing design' but are still called architects - kind of like every manager in US firms being called Vice Presidents - the term is rapidly becoming meaningless;

3. If you have decent architects you are more likely (but I admit, not always) going to have a semi-decent development process in place, which can mitigate some of the 'bad coder' behaviour (e.g. peer reviews, buddy development, even test driven development) - but I come back to point 1 - organisations full of bad coders rarely attract or keep good architects - they rarely co-exist well. The reason you have a decent process is because real architects demand that it is put in place - it's part of what they need to do their jobs properly;

4. I like your idea of beta as a marketing device - although to my mind it's more akin to a watered-down User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase.

Finally, on your tips on how architects should drive design and testing - trouble is they can still deliver a technically proficient product without delivering something compelling, which comes back to my original analogy of a story whose spelling is perfect but the plot is totally boring. This is the old difference between verification ('Did we build the product right?') and validation ('Did we build the right product?') - your QA team verifies, your end-users validate - it's just with MMOs, once you're live, they're validating till the day you close down. Trouble is, if your idea was crap to start with (i.e. you failed in the initial conceptual design stages) you can verify all you like, your users will not validate.

Anyway you're right, plenty of material for another column :)

Accountability for game companies?

That's easy. Don't buy them. Vote with your dollars. The fact that Blizzard spends as much time as they do polishing their games is one of the biggest reasons that WoW is the big dog on the block, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Asking companies to not release product before it's ready? Again, I've been in those trenches, and I've been in literal screaming matches with product management about when we should be shipping a title. Developers almost never have any control over shipping dates. Marketing and management (often the same) determine that.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that software companies have a goal to produce the best software they can create. They aren't artists. They exist to make money, and they will ship a product only when it is in the position to make the most money. If it isn't quite perfect by then, well that's what they have patches for.

I agree, it is galling, particularly to someone who actually creates software for a living, but that's how the business works. (I blame Microsoft for this model... particularly Internet Exploder) If I had the kind of budget that Blizzard brings to bear on their games, my software wouldn't ship until it was "damn good and ready".

There's that "Quick, cheap, or good... pick two" thing again. My choice would be to spend the money necessary to pick the other two. Spend a little more, take a little more time, but release the best product that you can with the understanding that it won't be perfect, but it will be damn close.

Your job as a player is to determine what you can "live with" in a game. No game is perfect, and there will never be a perfect game. Decide which flaws you are prepared to accept, and vote with your wallet. The MMO Graveyard is strewn with the corpses (some aren't dead yet, they're just taking a long time to die) of failed titles that weren't "good enough to ship" and paid for it in the marketplace.

I don't think AoC will be one of them, but only if they are paying attention to what folks are complaining about the most and only if they work their asses off to fix things as fast as they can.

I wouldn't want to be a developer or QA engineer at Funcom right now. I'm guessing that they're running some seriously long hours. I've been there too, and you don't pull hours like that on a software release unless you really believe in what the company is trying to do. Again, time will tell.

-K

There's an old saying in software - never confuse sales with delivery...

So as Kevin says, vote with your dollar. It's the only thing businesses understand.