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.

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.

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.

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.

So, Aion then. A game that has the luxury of being a newly released game without many of the normal problems that plague newly launched software. No inexplicable crash bugs, no memory leak that the dev team swear they fixed in beta, no unforeseen balance changes in the live patch and so on.  Let’s start at the beginning.

Character creation is comprehensive in the extreme. Although there are only two races, the diversity of characters makes it seem a lot more varied than that. You can play about with an almost ridiculous number of sliders, presets and tone palettes. Customisation is a theme throughout the game that is taken very seriously. Most gear can be customised in a variety of ways. Not only do you have the usual dye options that other games allow but you also have a morph option that allows you to use the stats from one item and the art from a different one. Which is a superb idea. You can also tweak stats to a limited extent through socketing manastones into armour and weapons. Control over the appearance of a character is an important part of any RPG and NCSoft have clearly taken the decision to give the player as many tools as possible to handle that. Aion is a very visual game and the character is at the literal and figurative centre of that experience.

If the visuals are cutting edge then the gameplay is definitely not. There is some nice use of cut-scenes to introduce character story and to communicate background. A few quests also use cut-scenes for dramatic effect which is nice. However almost all of the quests you’ll get are very simple ‘kill ten [things] and bring me their [body part]‘ or simple fedex quests. Questing is thus very repetitive indeed. Combat is identical to every other DIKU variant out there, mash buttons until one of you runs out of hit points. Aggro ranges are typically very small and monsters give up chasing after a relatively short time so kiting is hard. Abilities come slowly as is generally the case and you’ll find that it will be a while before your combo chains are viable or you get access to pretty vital tools like roots, stuns etc.

Abilities are learned from books as you go up levels, you don’t automatically gain new skills when you level up. Your existing skills do get better but you need to purchase a skill book for any new skills you might be able to learn. This is good in a way because it means you can purchase the skill books in advance and carry them with you, thus saving you a trip back to town and interrupting whatever you might be doing at the time, on the other hand of course it means that if you’re broke, you can’t gain new skills until you’ve earnt some more cash.

Cash is an area that seems to suffer from some schizophrenic design. A player will earn a lot of money from questing and looting, however the game monetises everything. Your inventory and vault are laughably small to begin with and expanding those costs money. Learning a craft costs money, learning skills or spells costs money, transport around the world costs money and then of course there are costs for consumables, gear upgrades and other NPC services. Crafting is a huge cash sink until the very highest levels. Gold sellers will make a fortune out of this game. There are other economic decisions that don’t seem to make sense, you can have a private store for example where you sell items to passing players. This effectively turns your character into a stationary merchant, thus interrupting your play while your store is open. There is an auction house system too but I’m not convinced that forcing players to afk while selling is a good idea.

For a game that has wings as one of its USPs, the number of places that don’t allow flight is disconcertingly large.  Gliding is a fun mini-game in it’s own right but there are too many places early on where flying is prevented.

Crafting is another AFK activity. While crafting your UI is largely disabled apart from chat functions, you simply queue up your jobs and go and make a cup of tea or something. If you enjoyed copying Amiga games back in the day and love to watch bars moving across the screen then crafting is engrossing and fulfilling, for the rest of us, not so much. All crafting is recipe based (and guess what? You need to buy recipes!) and there are usually several levels of production to go through before you can turn raw materials into actual useful items. This is an idea that DAoC had in the original crafting system and wisely scrapped after a while. Let me say that again; a terrible crafting system dropped this feature because it was a bad idea. There is no good reason why anyone should be copying anything from that system, let alone a feature that was dropped because it was too horrible even for DAoC crafting.

The game is visually stunning, uses current technology well and yet, it could have been designed back in 1999 as far as the game mechanics are concerned.

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.

• 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.

As the ‘Gerstmanngate’ affair brought home to many gamers, the relationship between the journalists and the industry is a complex one. Both parties have a different brand of sweet, sweet candy that the other can’t do without. The usual balance is to indulge in some quid pro quo where marketing visibility is traded for marketing dollars. It’s not always quite as blatant as that, some places do hold their integrity in the face of some not-so-subtle persuasion from publishers to be more gushing, but at the end of the day, the publishers pay the meal ticket and integrity doesn’t taste very nice with ramen.

On the other side of the aisle, the publishers obviously have a strong interest in only seeing positive press for their product, a lot of money and a lot of people’s jobs can be on the line and one punk writer who wants to parade his rebel credentials can make a big mess of a carefully stage-managed launch. Because, as we’ve seen with the Eurogamer incident, this is news. Games sites aren’t talking about Darkfall right now, they’re talking about the 2/10 review and that’s not the context any developer wants their work framed in.

If I’ve given the impression that the gaming press is a bunch of craven hacks who can mostly be relied on to fellate publishers on demand, that’s not entirely fair. There are sites like that and for the most part you can spot them quite easily. Their news pages are entirely cut and paste jobs from press releases and no game gets less than an 8/10 except for easy targets from publishers who couldn’t afford mainstream advertising anyway. The rest of the industry however has to live with the uncomfortable truth that publishers spend more money on sites that they like and you can make publishers like you by writing nice things about their games. I’m sure that you, the astute reader, can spot the potential for a certain ambiguity of purpose in that.

Even when you go beyond the crass conversion of marketing budget to review scores, the publisher still has some aces up their sleeve. The gaming press is a very competitive business, there are hundreds of sites in all languages that are all serving much the same fare. For your site to stand out you want to have special things. You need access to publisher junkets, face time with devs, freebies to give away to your readership, exclusives etc because otherwise you’re republishing other people’s press releases and writing words into the internet that no-one has much reason to pay attention to. Whether you’re a huge portal like TenTonHammer or a tiny startup, you still need to compete with the entire rest of the internet for eyeballs. Again, as an editor, you get these perks by having a good relationship with the publishers and you get that good relationship…. by making sure that no-one in the publisher’s marketing dept is going to get a call from the CEO asking why his game got slammed on your site.

It’s why gaming editors all die at 35 years old.

So what does all of this have to do with Darkfall? Just that a hostile review is a newsworthy occurrence in itself. For Ed Zitron to have written the review and for Eurogamer to have published it, represents a rare conjunction in the symbiotic world of games journalism. Cheer on reviewers like Ed Zitron if you like the idea of integrity and impartiality in your games press – even if you disagree with his views on Darkfall.

So, what do we have for you today?

I’ve been following (and sticking my oar into) a debate on Broken Toys about the rights of players ingame. It didn’t start out that way but somehow the to-ing and fro-ing over Blizzard’s new mod policy devolved into an argument about how much control players should have over the game they play.

Now I’d be the first to argue that players should have as much control as possible over the environment they play in but here we are talking about not just the ingame and meta game experience but the way that the game is operated.  And the answer to that is somewhere close to ‘none at all’.

Oh, sure you can have robust community feedback that informs design and production, you can give the players a platform to make their case and that’s all fine and laudable however the operator needs to have the casting vote. Sometimes it’s necessary to do things that your players won’t like for reasons that you can’t adequately explain in public. Sometimes your players are simply wrong and you need to give them what the game needs not what the players say they want.

MMOs foster a strong sense of investment in players by their very nature. Not just the ‘I pay you 15$ a month so you’d better listen to me’ type of stuff but also a deeper level of belonging that comes from fostering a strong community. People feel attached to the game and the communitythey play with and that sense of attachment leads naturally to a sense of obligation regarding the same. Between this investment and sense of belonging, perspectives are often lost. Worse, the situation can devolve to the point where the players feel the game owes them something.

The reality is one that companies are usually unwilling to point out. For the player it’s a game, for the operator it’s a livelihood. No matter how invested the player believes himself to be, ultimately he can walk away whenever he chooses and be no worse off. So, when a developer makes a decision, the only party that can really win or lose is the company itself.

Very often I’ve had to be the person who had to front bad news to a community. For a lot of those times there were very good reasons as to why that bad news had to happen. In almost none of those instances was it possible to properly explain the situation. Many times the decision was better for the game but worse in the short term for the players. You can’t ask people to lay aside their self-interest and do what’s right because 90% of the time they’ll pick the wrong option (the other 10% of the time is when they pick the right path entirely by accident).

I’ve said it before but people are generally bad at expressing what they want. They will point at a symptom and ask for that to be fixed without thinking about the underlying cause. Or they’ll work backwards from a premise to reach a faulty basis and insist on that. Or they’ll simply assume that their own short term self-interest is in the long-term interest of everyone.

This is why you should never listen to what people are suggesting but instead look closely at what they are actually saying.

Jeremy’s post is mostly a critique of some points that Ryan Schwayder made on the pros and cons of official forums, but amongst all of that she makes some very interesting points on community scalability.  Communities, it is very clear work best when they are small. How small? Jeremy brings up Dunbar’s Number as a possible limit but in reality I think the answer is mutable. For a game community, a single server is probably too big to be considered a single community, an alliance or a guild is a better basic unit of community and those tend not to exceed a few hundred. If your alliance exceeds that number then the chances are you have several communities within that umbrella that can be said to be independant of each other as discrete communities. For all that we might talk about ‘the community’ on a particular server, the reality on the ground is a lot grainier than that. Just because we might end up fighting the same battle, we aren’t necessarily part of the same community. It isn’t necessarily limited to the number of simultaneous relationships any one member can sustain – hence why I don’t think Dunbar’s Number applies – but once you start going beyond second degree associations then I think you can start to define a boundary. The smaller a community is (above a certain sustainability threshold) the more tightly knit it tends to be,  this is something we see in every aspect of life from geographic location through to international associations.

The basic point of Ms Dalberg’s post is correct. However we are measuring the cohesiveness of a community, 5 million is way too many to be considered as a single entity. That’s crazy talk and is akin to assuming that putting the entire population of Belgium in a room to chat to each other and then trying to manage that would be in some way productive.

So how do you manage a 5 million member community? You don’t. You chop it up and manage a few hundred smaller ones.

By now the latest EvE dramaquake is old news but the discussions are still happening. Scott Jennings gives a pretty flippant account which then turns into a threadnought in the comments as is usual. The actual story is pretty simple once all the extraneous bits are trimmed away – guy gets fed up with life in one gigantic power bloc, defects to different gigantic power bloc and turns the lights out as he leaves the building.

People have argued the morality of the issue and whether or not that should be cheating but I’d like to concentrate solely on the question of how much power should a game invest in a single player?

EvE is something of a contradiction to established MMO wisdom. Players are very much in the driving seat when it comes to the big political movements in the game. Because of the almost complete freedom for players to interact with each other, players have a lot of individual power and, the more players they are associated with, the greater the scope for issues. Add to this CCPs very hands-off stance on intervention in player interactions and the stage is set for some industrial grade drama. Some people hold the belief that CCP actively encourages this kind of thing, personally I believe it’s simple pragmatism that drawing a line and upholding it is hard work and open to misinterpretation. In any case, it is possible for EvE players to amass a staggering amount of ingame power and responsibility – which translates into a gold plated opportunity to shaft a huge number of people at once.

For many EvE players (myself included), this freedom is precisely what attracts us to EvE in the first place and thus any attempt to restrict player power needs to be approached carefully by CCP in order not to alienate a very large chunk of the playerbase. This very open and abusable framework is not found in other games, limits are placed to prevent the damage that a single player can do to his ‘friends’.

I’ve advocated before for greater freedom in player interactions, I’ve also been fairly open in my conviction that players cannot be trusted to run important parts of the game so where is the happy medium?

For EvE, I don’t think there is one. Checks and balances can be put in place to prevent this particular issue from arising again, but enterprising players will always find ways around them or entirely new ways to be jerks to each other. For a hypothetical new game though, I think this should underline why community systems and player accountability should be at the core of the design and not simply a fancy LFG UI and some chat tabs.