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.

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.

So the Jack Thompsons of this world get given their ten minutes of infamy to declaim on how things would be so much better if it weren’t for those damn video games. And the really messed up part? We give it to them. We the ‘gaming public’ validate them and give their viewpoints the exposure that they crave. I was prompted to write this when I saw a GU comic on the subject. Woody was linking to an initiative by the Videogame Voters Network to produce a Wall of Protest. Everytime I see something like this I grind my teeth. It’s not that I don’t approve of the sentiment, really I do but it seems all so superficial. What are the odds that any anti-gaming legislator is going to read the site and see the pictures and be scared off from a course of advocating strong censorship on videogames as a result? Practically none I’d warrant.

While I believe it’s important not to roll over and ignore rumblings from the legislature I do think it’s naive and somewhat patronising to ‘mobilise gamers’ as though we were some secret underground movement and not for example a multi billion dollar industry with professional lobby groups and very high powered political focus groups. The government isn’t going to take away video games for the same reasons it hasn’t taken away action movies or porn or gangsta rap. The people who make money from it are also the people who are dipping into their pockets for election campaigns. EA or SCEA or Ubisoft or Microsoft independently have enough clout to marginalise the lunatic fringe who pop up in opposition. Collectively they are a huge industrial juggernaut on the same level as Hollywood or Big Tobacco. Nobody who is sane seriously believes that playing video games makes you a monster. Those who profess that they do, are generally making noises to appease a loud minority safe in the knowledge that there is zero chance their proposals will even reach a debate let alone be signed into law. They are playing both sides and we are giving the opposition the validity they need. If we ignore them they will go away.

Frankly the sooner we stop giving column time to uninformed activists (on both sides of the debate) and more time to properly educating the public on how to look after their damn kids then the happier I shall be.

In my time as a CS manager I made sure I knew what my local scumbags were up to. I had accounts on exploit and grey trade forums, I spent considerable time and effort in tracing the activities of gold sellers from website to farming team and I had a long list of people I’d follow around ingame on superanon mode when things were quiet. I used a lot of different techniques to stay current with the hax du jour but the most powerful weapon in my armoury wasn’t the comprehensive and easily parsed logs, nor the cross searchable billing database, nor even the large number of honest and helpful players who diligently reported suspicious activity to me. It was human stupidity.

I didn’t truly expect to leave it all behind when I discarded my CS husk and emerged as a newly minted community butterfly, however I really wasn’t expecting so much to remain the same. The term I believe, amongst the learned of the interweb, is selfowned.

Now to me, MMQuake seems a poor model for a subscription based game, let alone one which has a rich backstory and many years of established lore behind it. However that being said there are a lot of content light MMOs which are doing quite well. Mostly though these revolve around way to allow players to carve out their own fiefdom and essentially create their own content – Eve and Guild Wars are the examples that come to mind here. Content then seems to be pretty much integral to an MMO, whether the players are intended to provide their own or the developers have laid it out for them in advance. Gameplay is not the same thing as content, there is a potentially infinite amount of gameplay in Tetris but there’s little actual content to it.

So can you and should you concentrate on game play over content and can you then charge a monthly fee for it successfully?