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.

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.

I’ve been toying with the idea for a while and I finally decided that I’d launch a separate blog for my wargaming and miniature painting exploits. If you’re interested in that kind of thing then head on over to Stormy Teacups where you can keep up with my adventures at German and international wargaming tournaments as well as see my collection of painted miniatures grow very slowly indeed (unlike my collection of unpainted miniatures which grows at an alarming rate…).

I’ll still be updating this with all the clockwork regularity that you’ve come to expect but I figure splitting the wargames stuff off from the video games industry waffle was a good move. Comments and feedback are much appreciated on either site!

For various reasons I’m really not interested in talking too much about the circumstances of my leaving GOA, I will say that I’m going to be sad to leave some really awesome people behind and that I will be taking a lot of very good memories away with me. Anything beyond that is a matter for my exit interview and some carefully written parting emails. I will have been here nearly five years when I leave and it’s been a valuable experience every day. Not always good times but I don’t regret any of my time here.

Finally in my last blog post Belsameth asked if I had more pictures of my Grumlok miniature in progress. I forgot to upload them for ages but I finally got around to it today so here’s a gallery of all the pictures. The darker ones were taken with my digital camera at home while the brighter ones were taken by our studio A/V guy here hence the stark difference in quality between them.

Things are happening, there are bright things on the horizon and some exciting changes on the way which I’ll expand on in time. Meanwhile, read my Grumlok painting guide. I had fun writing it and I hope that people will link me up with pictures of their completed work too.

A proper update coming soon, in the meantime, I’m not dead and I still have opinions to share.

So at the weekend I was over in the UK indulging in my secret vice which happens to take place somewhere between Nottingham and Derby. Many years ago I lived in Nottingham and so I like to visit friends and my favourite stores whilst I’m there and so it was that as I was killing an afternoon before the flight home, I found myself in the Friar Lane Games Workshop store. Had a bit of a chat with the staff as you do then I browsed the books for a while. Not long after, another chap walked in and the staff did their customary greeting and sizing up routine to determine if he was a true believer or simply a confused passer-by. As it happened it was Jake Thornton – former White Dwarf editor, games developer, Fanatic Press manager and all round Nice Chap. If you cut him crossways you’ll probably find the letters of Warhammer going through him like a stick of rock. Needless to say the staff didn’t recognise him and so he and I had a bit of a reminisce and a general catching up with what had happened since I had left GW.

The accidental meeting however did remind me of possibly my favourite memory of my time in GW. We (being the games development team) had gone into Nottingham to buy reference books to use as source material. As it happened, the big Waterstones was right opposite the GW store on Friar lane in those days (this is when the Design Studio was still on Castle Boulevard and so it was only a short walk round the corner for us). On the way out we decided that we’d say hi to the guys in the store and so we crossed the road and wandered in. We had Andy Chambers, Nigel Stillman, Tuomas Pirinen, Gav Thorpe, Ian Pickstock, Warwick Kinrade, Andy Kettlewell and myself. Apart from me (who was still pretty new) all of these guys were featured multiple times with mugshots in every issue of White Dwarf, we barely had time to let the door close behind us before the over-eager red shirt came bounding up to us.

‘So’ he says, ‘Do you guys play the games then or are you looking to have a demo?’

Good times.

Don’t worry I’ll talk about computer games again soon.