Antipwn

I’ve seen this linked around a few forums and blogs that I read. I’ll give the props to Quarter to Three because that’s where I saw it first.

Now what we have here is a policy initiative by the Republican party in the US to collect policy suggestions. They launched the America Speaking Out website where anyone can suggest policy ideas over a wide range of different topics including energy, defence, American values and so forth. Before I go on, I’m going to say that this isn’t a political blog and I have no intention of making it one. I do have deeply held political views but they aren’t relevant here. This is me critiquing the concept as a community guy.

On the surface it appears to be a good idea – engage with the greater public in a big open forum to let people bring forwards ideas for consideration. No arguments there from me. The more that voters are challenged to think through the consequences of their opinions the less likely they are to hold bad ones. Additionally, the more that legislators engage with their electorate the more they should be in tune with their concerns and issues. When it comes to democracy and giving your target audience a stake in the larger process I’m all for that whether we are talking about the players of a game or the voters in a country.

The issue is in the execution (as it so often is). What we have here is basically a huge noise machine. You know that 500 page thread on the main forums that started with a blue response and now players use it as a ‘Will the devs ever do X?’ thread? This is that thread. What the GOP are finding (and as anyone who has ever been a part of any online community ever could have told them) is that there are a whole lot more bored people on the internet who will ride your idea down into terminal, blazing hilarity than there are earnest and conscientious posters who once had a good idea about something and would like you to consider it.  Naturally in this case given the target and the visibility, the site has become a magnet for either actual loons who want to deport the President, go back to using gold for currency and start enslaving black people again, bored trolls who are posting parody worthy of The Onion, or idealogues who want to tell the GOP how much they disagree with their platform and who somehow think that their incisive comment is going to shame the party into a 180º policy reversal.

As a community manager I know that feedback is only as useful as the filters you apply to it. If all you want is static, then this is a great way to generate that. If you want an actual debate and to have honest conversations on various topics then you need to set things up to produce that result. You must frame the question in advance, lay out all the relevant information and then ask your community to participate in that conversation. When it takes off you need to stay with it, keep it on track, prune out derails, unconstructive posts and actual misinformation so that the people who are involved get a higher quality of discourse and you get a higher quality of feedback. It’s like tending a garden – you won’t get much of anything unless you prepare the ground properly and care for your plants as they grow. A big online suggestion box basically fulfils the same purpose as an open field that you can yell in for a bit whenever you feel like yelling. This is why games often run focus tests in the mid beta period and why the best games are often the ones with the most closely managed beta programs. If you only rarely see your community manager on the beta forums and there’s no serious attempt to solicit specific feedback on critical topics then I’d be suspicious of the importance of the beta to the final launch.

I suspect that this will continue to be a theme as we move on.

It’s been some time since the last update. I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been frantically busy but really that’s not especially true. What has happened is that at the best of times I can be a little ADD and there was simply been a lot of shiny stuff distracting me over the past few months. Enough of the minutiae of my personal life however, let’s get on with the important stuff; namely my opinions and why you  should accept them as the golden nuggets of distilled wisdom that they are.

I’ve been playing a bunch of different games over the past few months and I think that the one that stands out as the most worthy of comment is The Void, a resource-management/RPG/strategy game from Russian based Ice Pick Lodge. This is a game that defies categorisation, Eurogamer tackled it as did Bit-Tech and neither of them found it easy to describe in terms that are meaningful to readers who have not experienced the game already. I’m not going to try and review the game here as much of what I’d say would simply be paraphrasing the Eurogamer article. I will underline the point that it is a very hard game, crushingly so. You can make choices in the tutorial that will mean your progress some hours later will become impossible, necessitating a restart. You also can’t take any of the information that the game gives you at face value, not even the most basic instruction dialogues from the tutorial. The game is not limited to the actual gameplay, an important part of the game is figuring out what the game actually is and what your win conditions are. This is at once refreshing and maddening. After all, in most games if the tutorial says that harvesting things for resources is a good idea, then it generally is. Not so in the Void. Each NPC gives you different information, not just about the world you are in but also about the game. Do you have to transcend, survive or rescue the Sisters? Are the Brothers nemeses to be feared or allies to be harnessed. How do your actions in simply staying alive matter to the complex factions? Decisions you make may have ramifications so much later in the game that it is impossible for you to predict them. In some cases you may not be aware that you did in fact make that decision.

Games like this are pretty rare, mostly players like to be told how to play the game then to go on and try to beat it on those terms. A difficult game is usually considered as one that has challenging encounters or overwhelming odds. A game where the gameplay is generally simple but the complexity comes from the metagame is unusual in single player games because players have been trained through pavlovian triggers to follow the breadcrumbs and defeat the game on it’s own terms. The closest parallels I can think of to The Void would be the original Myst trilogy, but that too is a poor comparison. Ice Pick Lodge have made a game for gamers, not for fans of video games.

Or at least I wish they were.

Today’s rumblings are inspired by a post made by Gav Thorpe on his blog about criticism. He’s specifically talking about criticism of his work as a writer and how he reacts to that but a lot of what he says is applicable to other fields and especially the field of community management.

In case you don’t know, Gav is a former Games Workshop games developer who is now a freelance author. While he was at GW he wrote Codex: Chaos Space Marines (an army supplement for one of the popular Warhammer 40,000 factions) which launched to mixed reactions amongst the notoriously passionate fans of Warhammer 40k. Nowadays he earns a crust by writing fiction for GW’s publishing imprint Black Library as well as for more mainstream publishers. His post on criticism is clearly a result of the huge amount of feedback readers of his blog decided to give him about the Chaos Space Marines.

So, what does this all have to do with computer games?

Well, firstly criticism is criticism. The kind of things that are useful for an author to hear about his work are also useful to a games designer. Collecting and analysing criticism is also a large part of the job of a community manager (a hat I wore for several years). Generally people are pretty bad at providing criticism for a variety of reasons, many people are also bad at receiving it for entirely different reasons. We’ll address those people later.

Giving criticism is something that a lot of people are not comfortable with. While they may have deeply held opinions, it can be hard to express those opinions without sounding hostile or rude, thus many people prefer to stay silent and keep what would otherwise be useful feedback to themselves. Not all opinions are negative of course, but the ones you hear almost always will be. This is because things that meet your expectations tend not to incite you to write about them. If things are simply ‘ok’ then we smile and move on, things have to be significantly outside of our expectation zone before we are moved to comment on them. This is usually manifested in gaming circles as a rule where, for every person posting in a 200 page threadnaught on your game forums, there are several hundred people playing the game quite happily oblivious to this apparently all consuming issue.

Another problem with criticism is that people are always right when they say what they do or don’t like but are usually almost always wrong when they try to describe it. This is because it’s easy to get hung up on symptoms without thinking through the issues to identify the actual problem causing them. A large part of being a successful community manager is listening to problems that are described by the players and trying to determine what it is that they are actually complaining about rather than what it is that they are saying.

Taking feedback can be difficult for other reasons. Gav mentions confirmation bias and that’s certainly a problem that needs to be confronted. It’s not always so much of a problem in games where a team is responsible rather than an individual but it certainly still exists. A bigger problem is enabling useful feedback at all. Most games companies run forums for fans to discuss the product, most have a community team to filter the useful nuggets from the vast seas of noise and most have some kind of feedback form or CS ticketing system for more direct contact. All of that by itself doesn’t make people want to tell you the things you need them to be saying though. Companies should be training their customers to give feedback effectively, the tools to do so should be seamless and it should be regularly solicited. If spamming customers sounds bad then incentivise it instead, reward those who tell you what they think and encourage quality over quantity. Ask people to think about your product and give you those thoughts, help them to frame them and give them the tools to do so easily.

In all the projects I’ve worked on, getting quality commentary has always been the hardest part of my job. I wish people would express their opinions more.

The latest WAR newsletter dropped into my gmail yesterday and I skimmed through it quickly as I usually do – I don’t play any more but I keep an eye on what’s going on. The stuff about the imminent patch and Halloween event was all pretty predictable but then I saw this:

WAR Free Trial

Very soon, you will be able to use our unlimited trial offer. Now you can enjoy the trial experience and New User Journey for as long as you like!

On the VN Boards Andy Belford, a Mythic CM confirmed that the newsletter was correct but declined to clarify what the limits of the ‘unlimited trial’ would be. Popular speculation is that the unlimited trial will restricted to tier 1 and capital cities as that is the current trial experience.

WAR is certainly hurting for subs and this may bring a few new people in but conversely a lot of current subscribers may decide to just roll the trial and replay the first few scenarios over and over. This is a popular playstyle in both DAoC and WAR and I’m certain that the number of people who’d downgrade from a paid account to the trial is a non-trivial number.

I’m going to start off with a couple of caveats. Firstly I’ve only got to level 20 and so I’ve not yet tasted PvP or any of the higher level content. Secondly this isn’t intended to be a review of Aion so much as a discussion of the design. I’m not going to tell you whether I think you should buy this game or not, there are plenty of places to look for that kind of advice if you don’t have the ability to figure it out for yourself.

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Firstly I’m going to start out by sending some props to Randolph Carter of Grinding to Valhalla. His mission is to interview as many MMO bloggers as possible and, last Friday he featured me. Many thanks to him for that and I found it all too easy to get lost in the archives of his site.

I was playing Aion over the weekend in the closed beta preview event. For what it’s worth I thought it was a very pretty game with a lot of promise (I only managed to get to level 10 and out of the newbie area so I never saw any of the higher level gameplay or any PvP). I felt that it was a very traditional MMO (in the context of a genre that’s still only a decade or so old) and that – flying aside – it didn’t seem to advance the genre at all. This seems to be a game that (graphical aspects aside) could have been designed ten years ago. I will almost certainly play it some more in the open beta and commercial release but I’m not sure how long the prettiness alone will keep me interested.

A lot of people have predicted that Aion will kill various other titles. The more excitable ones are saying it will kill WoW, others are saying that Aion’s release will be the deathblow for WAR. That got me thinking about ‘gamekillers’ and, to date I don’t think we’ve seen one. I remember working on DAoC when WoW was gearing up for release and the common wisdom held that WoW would kill our game. That didn’t happen and, if WoW can’t kill a game then I don’t think anything can. WoW didn’t even kill EQII which had the double misfortune of launching the week before WoW and of not being very good at launch. Even that one-two punch didn’t deliver a deathblow to the game and now, while EQII may not have been as huge as perhaps Sony hoped, there’s no doubt that it’s a very solid game that’s been turned around into a successful product.

Aion will certainly bleed some subscribers out of existing games and will take a chunk of the market share but I’m not going to predict any closures as a result.

The drama du jour is served up by the combination of Darkfall (srs bzns PvP MMO) and Eurogamer.net (mostly solid games news site). I’d imagine if you’re reading this that you are already likely acquainted with the affair but for those of you who may have missed it, the summary goes as follows:

• Eurogamer review Darkfall and give it a very unflattering review.
• Darkfall devs complain publicly about the quality of the review on their forum. Highlights of the complaint are that, according to their logs, the reviewer only spent 2 hours playing the game and most of that was in character creation.
• Eurogamer responds, standing by their reviewer and his review but offer to re-review it with a different staff member.
• Darkfall comes right back with another post in which they’re very clear that they don’t want insinuate that Eurogamer are lying but this is somewhat disingenuous as they all but state outright that they believe this to be the case.
• Finally, the whole event comes to a (temporary?) close when the Darkfall devs categorically refuse a re-review from Eurogamer. Their rationale seems to be a little patchy however, they claim they don’t want the game to be re-reviewed because the old review will stay up until the new review is complete, but of course if the game isn’t re-reviewed then the old review will stand regardless. It’s a puzzle.

The review, is of course very hostile and is apparently factually inaccurate in some areas, what’s interesting is that none of the meatier criticisms of the game are unique to this article. Tasos rails that the reviewer didn’t give it a fair shake of the stick and was clearly biased against the game, but there are no new things being said in this article that haven’t already been pointed out by other reviewers. While Tasos and the Darkfall fans are complaining about the minutiae, the takeaway from the article is hard to dispute. Is it accurate? Possibly not. Does it accurately convey Mr Zitron’s feelings about the game? Very probably.

Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about Darkfall particularly but rather the relationship between the gaming press and the industry they cover.

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