It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows my background that I am extremely interested in this system, both as a keen player of Eve Online and also as an industry professional who has worked in community and evangelises for community involvement in games design. For the last two sessions, I’ve been an alternate – a stand-in delegate who is allowed to take part in the discussions, is privy to the internal workings but doesn’t get to raise proposals directly nor to travel to Reykjavik for the regular developer summits (as it happens I was at the last summit but only because a full delegate couldn’t make the trip).

This time around, I am pitching for a third term and hopefully as a full delegate. If you are an Eve player with an account over 30 days old I would appreciate your vote for Helen Highwater, my main character in the game.

Take for example this interview from Computer and Video Games on July 1st:

Speaking at E3 this month, Bilson said that the Vigil-developed online game is “very friendly to the WoW player” and even he as a WoW fanatic will be switching games.

“Have you seen it? The movie? I think it speaks for itself,” Bilson told CVG. “I’m a diehard MMO player myself – going back to EverQuest. I’ve spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I’m going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It’s very friendly to the WoW player.”

“The brand is fantastic – it’s so deep and so wonderful,” he said. “There’s just so much for us to play with. There’s more vehicles in our thing [than WoW], the combat’s completely different; you can get four guys in a tank and go.

“[40K] is stunning. It’s going to be a masterpiece. It’s been in development for three-and-a-half years already. It’s got two more to go. Look at it.” Go on then: Look at it.

“It’s sensational. I believe within the next six months we’re going to be showing playable sections of the game, not just a movie.” According to the THQ exec, the online game only needs to poach “a million” World of WarCraft players to be successful.

“They’ve got 14 million players! Gimme a million and I’m good! We’re real good at a million, right?” He added: “We don’t need everybody to migrate. We just need some of them – and I’m full confident we’re going to get them.

Two things that strikes me about that interview. Firstly I’m gong to be generous to him and assume that the ‘we only need a million players’ line was just playful banter that he didn’t actually mean. The history of such claims for other games is an unhappy one. Secondly, I couldn’t help but notice that he mentioned WoW a lot more than he mentioned his own product. Which is an unusual marketing tactic by any standards. I thought this was a one-off and perhaps reflected a certain single-mindedness on the journalist – I certainly remember talking about WAR to press who were basically only interested in framing the interview in terms of how that game stacked up to WoW. This week however at the Gamescom in Cologne, Mr Bilson was at it again, this time talking to Eurogamer.

Eurogamer: I’ve been excited about the Warhammer 40K MMO for a long time. When will it be out?

Danny Bilson: A couple more years. It really is about two years out.

Look, there is an 800 pound gorilla out there called World of Warcraft, which is a fantastic MMO that’s going to get updated with Cataclysm soon and drive a lot of people including myself back into it.

I’m a big MMO fan and player. I’ve played EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, I’ve got a few level 80 characters in WOW. Now, imagine that the people making Dark Millennium Online are all a bunch of guys like me, who love WOW and the expansions it’s had along the way.

We all say to ourselves, ‘We’re not going to get all the WOW players to move to 40K.’ 40K has its own unique coolness and edge. And that edge and glorious gore is not going to appeal to everybody. It appeals to you and I.

But what I know about our 40K game is that if you’ve played WOW you’ll be able to pick up and play this instantly, and you’ll find all these things that feel like upgrades, in a way.

Wait.  WoW again? Sure I guess it’s a reference point for the industry and he’s certainly right to describe it as the ’800 pound gorilla’ of the scene but really, could you, y’know, talk a bit about 40k online rather than WoW for a change?

It has a lot of the same qualities of WOW in terms of ease of use and how the interface is. I want to say that if you play WOW, you’ll be able to jump into Dark Millennium Online really easy.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe. The road there is a great road, and they are in the game.

WoW once again. Man can this guy stop talking about the competition. Seriously Activision Blizzard can afford their own PR guys and.. hold on for just one moment. Run that past me again.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe.

In a Warhammer 40k game ‘you won’t be able to be a Space Marine’ straight away? What the hell? The single most iconic thing about the IP, the poster-child for the entire setting, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when you say Warhammer 40k isn’t going to be playable at launch?

Scott Jennings said it best so I’ll just point you at his rant here.

Dear THQ, please don’t make this suck. Also please stop talking about WoW and tell us about your game instead.

Freeshards aren’t new of course and neither for that matter is Blizzard’ s itchy legal triggerfinger. When I was working for Dark Age of Camelot, there were many unofficial servers that I was aware of for that game that all changed the game in fundamental ways according to the whims and technical ability of their owners. The usual claim is that the server code is reverse engineered rather than being copied thus there is no copyright infringement, having seen how complex and expansive the code for an AAA MMO is I’m not convinced that this is possible within the timescales that these servers generally begin to pop up. I think there probably is some reverse engineering going on, but I’d be prepared to bet that the first wave of freeshards for a game are accomplished with leaked code. That would be piracy which I am fairly heavily against.

Most of these freehsards of course aren’t making anyone any money Ms Reeves on the other hand netted 3 million dollars or so from her private server which rather changes the terrain a bit and makes it a hard sell to defend her as a figurehead for how code wants to be free.

My talk is going to be all about how community experience can be an asset in other areas of the games industry – either for community managers who want to move on to new roles or those who simply want to expand the scope of their current position. This is something I feel pretty qualified to talk about as I’ve worn quite a few hats over the past few years and ‘community’ has been at the core of nearly all of them. In fact, in my current role as a games designer I’m mostly responsible for creating social and retention systems. These are clearly areas where a strong understanding of player dynamics are essential.

Plenty of notable CMs will be there too, I’ll be in such august company as Donna Prior, Jörg Koonen, Sean Kaupinnen, Martin Rabl and a former colleague of mine, Fabien Alexandre. This is the first event of its kind in Europe and hopefully will become a fixture in the industry calendar – there’s certainly been a lot of lively discussion on the main CM industry forum and it looks as though Two Pi Team who are organising it intend to build on it for the future. For me it will be a nice change to be at the GC without needing to be on my feet for 14 hours a day and to be able to wander round and chat without feeling guilty.

There’s also a strong possibility that a Warmachine game between myself and Donna Prior may happen at the event. Should such a titanic struggle come to pass then it will of course be properly chronicled over on my other blog.

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.

You’ll find my official campaign thread on the Eve forums here and my general campaign site is here.

Vote early, vote often and tell your friends. Voting is open from today through to the 19th of May.

Thank you for your support.

For a variety of reasons I can’t really comment on this. I just thought it was too awesome not to share.

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.