Do Not Adjust Your Screen

Nothing much to see here.  I just changed up the woefully out of date theme.  Hopefully this fits a bit more now.

Hundreds of People Made this Blog Post Possible

Like tens of thousands of Americans, I flew home for the Thanksgiving holiday.  However, unlike most of those travellers, I decided not to tell my wife.  I was able to surprise her with a sudden appearance in Minnesota after being in San Francisco apart for more than two months.

I was able to do this because hundreds of people worked over the holiday – pilots, flight attendants, airport ground crews, TSA security, police, parking attendants, etc.   Even though most of America was able to take a few days off of work and enjoy the holiday with their families, this was possible only because a large segment of our population put in hours of work throughout the past several days.  On “Black Friday”, shoppers got up early and filled the stores which were open because retail staffers got up even earlier and made sure the shelves were stocked and the cashiers were ready.  In call centers around the country and beyond, customer service representatives and tech support staff worked around the clock to make sure the stores were open, problems were resolved, and issues were handled.  When I took my wife out for breakfast on Friday morning for the first time in 9 weeks, it was only because the cooks and wait staff were there to greet us and cook for us.

Of course, over the past four days, we also ran our first Nemesis Tournament in Battlestar Galactica Online.  Also, across all the servers, we ran a double experience weekend.  We also rotated multiple offers in our game for ships and munitions packages, each of which had to be manually turned on and off.   The only reason we were able to provide all of these functions over the weekend was because a segment of our development team and support staff remained available and working throughout the holiday.  While the rest of the team slept, our IT staff and support engineers were maintaining the servers, following up on alerts regarding anything which could possible impede performance.  Our QA leads were playing the game from home throughout the tournament and tracking suspicious tournament points totals.  Our Community team kept reading our forums and in-game chat throughout the weekend and made sure that team leadership was kept updated on any potential issues that players were raising.  Dozens of BSGO team members continued checking email, logging into our game, and reading our forums throughout the entire holiday.

It’s easy to overlook such care and passion from a player’s perspective.  I don’t blame our players who only point out issues.  They’re our customers.  They get to point out problems.  They don’t have to understand the amount of work that goes into fixing each problem – nor should they have to.  However, from a project manager’s perspective, I couldn’t be more proud of the team I’m on.  Though I was absolutely thrilled to get the chance to fly back to Minnesota for a weekend to see my wife, I was at least as proud of the people here at Bigpoint who spent at least part of their well earned holiday making sure that our players could keep fragging each other for days on end.

Thanks, guys.  I appreciate it.

An Update: From Ohai to Bigpoint

An Update:

When I last posted, I had taken a position at ohai in San Francisco and was excited about my future and the future of the company.  I was mostly right.  At Ohai, we did launch our game, Unicorn Parade.  It even pulled in a couple of generous articles in the press (like this one).  Shortly after launch, the studio was sold.

I miss the old ohais.  I had a lot of fun working in our studio up on 2nd and Bryant.  I spent several late nights there – not because I was forced to, but because I genuinely loved what I was doing.

And so while one door shuts…another one opens.  So, I’ve been here at Bigpoint San Francisco for the past few months.  I’m the new Project Manager on Battlestar Galactica Online (BSGO).  Instead of just complaining about the things I don’t like, I get to be part of the solution toward making a better game for our players.  In fact, as I write this, I’m in the middle of creating the first part of a concept document for a new system expansion in our game that I hope our designers can work from.  It’s an area of the game that could use some love and I’m pretty excited that we’re able to put some resources into this.

So, as I finally get around to dusting out the cobwebs around here, those of you who somehow manage to check this site out will see a shift toward discussions of BSGO and general development process as opposed to player-side guild dynamics (though I still play and still lead my guild…albeit with a much larger focus on delegation to a great crew of officers these days).

So, here’s hoping I can make put my money where my mouth is and just help put out a better game.  I know the players have high expectations.  It’s interesting to be on this side of the forums, at least.

Gold in them thar hills

It’s been some time, but I’ve finally got the time to start writing again, it seems.  What’s been going on?

In February, after two exciting, grueling, incredible, exhausting years at Activision, I took a position as a producer at ohai, a start up in San Francisco.  I get to work with people I’ve respected for years, working as part of a small, passionate development team putting together MMOs for Facebook.

I’ve certainly taken my fair share of potshots at Facebook games over the years (my previous post, for example), but I’m hoping that perhaps I can take some of that sneering contempt and attempt to bring a traditional gamer’s perspective to more casual titles.

So far, ohai’s been a great home, just as Activision was for quite some time.  I learned a lot at the Big A, and certainly miss a lot of my former coworkers.  A few of the more senior producers there have been unbelievably generous mentors to me over the years and though I’ll still ping them from time to time for advice, I’ll miss our 11 PM beer sessions after work.  I put a lot of my heart and soul into the games we built there and I’m still proud to walk into a GameStop or Target and see one of my games on the shelf.  These may not have been AAA MMOs, but the amount of sweat and tears that went into them was not lessened because the budgets or timeframes weren’t as large.

Anyway, it seems I’ll have a bit more time to talk games.  Certainly I’ve had more time to actually play and enjoy games in the past few months.  My guild is still doing strong in spite of the inactivity I’ve inflicted upon them over the past two years, in no small part to the efforts of the extraordinary officers currently leading our Everquest II and Rift chapters.

It feels good to be back to writing.  Hopefully I can start doing a bit more of that over the coming weeks and months.

Are You Tired of Games that Are Fun?

Avatar Love

This made the rounds today.  I enjoyed it muchly.

Do Guilds Bring in More Money?

For years, I’ve always instinctively felt that MMO players who joined guilds tended to stick around in games longer than those who did not.  Oh sure, I track my own membership numbers, but that only tells me a small part of the overall story.  I never really know what’s going on with other guilds or whether or not players who don’t join a guild are more or less likely to stick around.

So, for years, I’ve rigidly stuck to my assumptions because I could remember hearing about studies that showed guilds were beneficial.  I could recall discussions at conferences and conventions which supported that position.  I could recall seeing occasional posts about the subject.  Sure, it feels logical to me that a player would stay in a game longer if they feel that additional investment to a guild, but that’s not really a fact I can point at with any degree of confidence, now is it?  In any event, it wasn’t something I thought about a great deal during any given week. 

Certainly, MMO studios have likely parsed the millions and millions and lines of logs they have access to to glean the data on whether or not guilds bring in the money, but they’re not likely to share that information publically.  As players, we can only guess at their conclusions when we see games releasing with more and greater guild functions included and when we see existing live games introducing more guild features over time.  However, that’s still largely conjecture as opposed to fact. 

Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who’d wondered about this topic, but it wasn’t till recently when I found out exactly who else was doing the wondering.  It was only this week when I became involved in a rather impassioned discussion regarding whether or not guilds should be better supported in 38 Studios’ eventual Project Copernicus MMO.  At one point in the conversation, one of the participants actually stated:  “The truth is that a more robust guild system is probably a bad target for developer resources…”  Well, that statement really got me to thinking. 

The Server of Greener Pastures

Throughout the forums (official or otherwise) players and even guilds have uprooted and moved to the Antonia Bayle server.  Everywhere I turn, a new blogger has packed up a truck and then moved to Bev-er-ly…Bayle that is.

Why not?  Isn’t Antonia Bayle the server where dreams come true?  It’s the virtual land of milk, honey, and perfect roleplaying.  Every street is paved in gold and every LFG is answered within seconds by the nicest group of strangers you’ve ever had to chance to group with.  On Antonia Bayle, levels do not matter because a veritable army of level 80′s stands at the ready just waiting for a call to Mentor your level 12 through Blackburrow.  The channels are filled with the most helpful and thoughtful voices you’ve ever heard – this must be what angels sound like, right.

The reality is that Antonia Bayle is bursting at the seams, apparantly.  Common complaints seem to indicate that server lag of 5-6 seconds is widespread.  That means that it probably took longer for your heal spell to actually start casting after you pressed the button than it did to read this sentence.  Other repeated complaints indicate that entire chunks of guild rosters are being kicked out of the game regularly as Guildhalls crash or take to long to load.  Other players are upset that they’re unable to actually log into the server in the first place.

Me?  I’m back here on Guk with my guild.  Jaye‘s here with her guild, too.  We didn’t follow Cuppycake, Tipa, or Stargrace to those “greener pastures”.  We’re doing just fine where we’re at.  Feel free to come visit us over here on Guk…just not all at once.  We’d prefer it if you kept your dirty lag out of our clean server, thank you very much.

 ;)

Who Owns Furst? Wuut’s a Secondary of Which Player?

Most guilds tend to track player characters differently depending on whether or not it’s a main or an alt (in my guild, we refer to these as “primaries” and “secondaries”…because, well, we like to complicate things).  For many guilds, mains are treated differently than alts – voting rights, loot rights, guildhall rights.  If someone leaves or is removed from a guild, then an officer typically has to go through the entire guild listing to hunt down all of the different characters that belong to a particular player in order to keep the roster clean. 

I’ve had to do this function in multiple games and I can say that within Everquest II, this is a pain. In Everquest II there is no indication of which character is a main or alt.  This in itself isn’t really an issue since no games I know of actually make this distinction.  So long as there is a notes function that I can sort by, I can set up the roster to take care of this concern for me. 

In Everquest II there are notes, but these are a function within the same column as character names.  We cannot actually sort by these notes.

Ideally, Everquest II could have mimicked the old Everquest method which had a separate column for “Notes” in the guild window which could be filled in by officers.  Since you could actually sort the entire list by just the Notes column, it was very easy to enter “Kendricke Primary” or “Kendricke Secondary” in the Notes column to very, very quickly identify all characters for the same player. 

Even if such a thing were not something SOE would want to include as separate column, I think there could be tremendous value in something as simple as allowing the current guild window to be sorted by the “Notes” and “Officer Notes” fields. 

What other features could be implemented to help players track their rosters a bit easier?

Guild LFM

If you’re interested in trying out a different kind of guild experience, let me know.  On Guk server in Everquest II, the Legion is currently recruiting both casual and more serious players.  Anyone who’s read this site for any amount of time understands that we try to balance time limitations with a more dedicated internal raid force.  If it sounds like something you’d be interested in trying out, let me know.