Antipwn

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.

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.

How much power is too much to give to your players?

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.

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So we have these games and they’re called MMOs and the first two Ms stand for Massively Multiplayer. This is cool because it means that we can play a game with thousands of other people simultaneously and we’re all sharing in the same experience, we can team up, we can fight each other, we can chat and talk about the football or roleplay or we can validate our deeply held opinions on the narcotics habits of games developers. Or whatever.

Basically there are people who aren’t us in our game. Sometimes they’re annoying and we want to smack them. Sometimes they’re awesome and we laugh and laugh until our eyes are red, there’s bizarre white goo coming out of our nose and the wife has wandered in to make sure we aren’t having some kind of seizure. Mostly though they’re background, they are an ever changing tapestry of additional content that we can sample and pick through as we like.

Still though we increasingly tend to play by ourselves.

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Looks at date.

Looks at datestamp for the last post here.

Yeah I know.

Anyhow, I’ve been super busy and in fact still am super busy. I’m off to Dreamhack tomorrow which will be fun in new and exhausting ways. Then I’m back in the office for a couple of days before gadding off again, this time to a field near Derby where I’ll be on holiday doing much the same thing that I do at work but with fewer creature comforts and without the whole ‘online’ thing.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk today about something I read in a magazine recently.

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I know I said I wouldn’t talk about WAR here but this is too cool to share. I’m home sick today but last night we were given a press brief to distribute from today. I hope I’m not pre-empting anything here. The brief is from the EA Mythic studio manager April de Poisson and it’s about the patch system for WAR.

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