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.

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.

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.

This made the rounds today.  I enjoyed it muchly.

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. 

I started looking around for those studies I’d remembered hearing about or reading about.  I wanted to see what the actual facts said.  What I found was surprising to me – not the facts themselves, but the fact that I don’t recall seeing much written about these studies when they came out:

PARC Researchers Seek to Boost the Gaming Experience at PC World
Today @ PC World PARC Researchers Seek to Boost the Gaming Experience

“Another concern for the game owners, who want to keep getting their fees, is how to keep top level players in the game. One important reason for gamers to stay is the social network built up within a guild. Guild kinship, according to Parc, keeps people around. And there are special activities for characters reaching the top level. But researchers tell that game owners seek for even more ways to keep top players longer in the game.”

“Alone together?”: exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games
“Alone together?”

“Guilds are often cited as another important factor contributing toMMORPG’s popularity. They are the place where most of a player’s important relationships are formed and frame a player’s social experience in the game [9, 17, 24]. “

“Our data shows that, overall, 66% of WoW’s characters are in a guild. Moreover, this number increases to 90% for characters level 43 and above. This last number is quiteclose to data obtained from earlier games [24]. “

“Plotting playing time against level by guild involvement shows another interesting trend: playing time is more stable after level 40 for guilded players and fluctuates more fornon-guilded ones (Figure 7).”

“For example, between levels 41-60, characters in a guild are in a group about 43% more often than characters not in a guild, after playing time has been controlled for. Ittherefore seems that being in a guild facilitates finding and forming an ad-hoc quest group.”

“Our observations show that an overwhelming majority ofguilds have 35 members or less (90thpercentile), with a mean of 14.5. The “churn rate” is high, with many members leaving regularly to be replaced by new faces. Moreover,only a small fraction of each guild’s population (about10%) truly engages in joint activities. Overall our data gives the impression that growing a guild to a significant size and sustaining it over time is a difficult task, perhaps more sothan managing groups in other contexts. From a game producer’s standpoint this is clearly problematic since, aswe have seen earlier, guild membership encourages playersto play more and to group more.”

“Considering the above, it is clear that players need more tools to help insure that their guild survive and prosper.”

How Much Do Guilds Matter? by Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA
How much do guilds matter? – Massively

“Still, I found that players in guilds that had regular events, strong communication outside the game, and charismatic leadership typically subscribed for six months longer than players who did not boast such social connections.”

“It’s not just anecdotal evidence, anymore. In WoW, and I think any game built with similar mechanics (which is practically freaking everyone coming down the pike) any guild membership at all increases engagement as measured by time played per week, levels achieved, and leveling speed.”

Read the linked articles.  Dig into them.  The more I rooted about, the more I felt as if my eyes were opening wider to a great untapped resource.  Suddenly, I wasn’t even as concerned about the discussion I’d previously been involved in.  Now, I was actually finding myself incredulous as I realized how little actual guild support is out there in most MMOs.

In short, I realized very quickly that these studies showed that for all intents and purposes, guilds equal money…and apparently lots of it. 

Why aren’t more studios catching on?  Why aren’t we seeing more guild support then we already are?

As more games release, I believe we’ll see guilds becoming even more dominant as the social hubs for players.  We’ll see more guilds straddling multiple games and we’ll see more demand for guild related services – both in-game and out.  There’s a distinct market here for the studios or entreprenuers looking to capitalize on it.

I think on some of the things I’d love to see as a guildmaster and I have to wonder why we’re not seeing some of these things. 

For example, why am I still collecting real world donations for my guildsite through Paypal to cover the expenses on my web hosting, url fee, forum support, etc. Why hasn’t anyone provided a close enough alternative to these things?  Sure, SOE has their various EQ2players type sites, but the forums on those sites are horrid and the site itself tends to be painfully slow and cluttered. 

To be fair to SOE, they have provided more guild functionality than anyone else out there (likely a very large part of the reason my guild is still in Everquest II right now).  Other games continue to launch which seem to treat guilds as a secondary afterthought – a requirement to appease players who like guilding (“See, we’ve got a guild system…what more do you want?”).  The notable exception recently was Warhammer Online with their “living guild” idea.  Age of Conan didn’t even pretend to like guilds at launch  - you were practically punished for daring to try to form a guild. 

Part of me admits that no system will ever live up to my ever rising expectations of what I want from a game regarding guild mechanics.  However, I still don’t think that’s a excuse for studios to phone it in regarding guild systems.  The world is changing and customers are becoming more saavy every day. 

Studios need to fight to keep the customers they already have since monthly churn can be so punishing.  The studies show that players who stick around at least two months have the best chances at converting into longer term subscribers and that guilds account for a dramatic percentage of all players above certain levels within the games. 

Regardless of the business model, studios want to keep customers in their worlds playing and subscribing and buying widgets from their virtual token stores.  The more we play, the more we pay and the studies show that guilded players play more often and longer than unguilded players. 

For studios, the question shouldn’t be whether or not including guild support is important.  The only real question is how best to encourage the guilds to maintain a presence within one game over another. 

Guild tools are one method.  Really, this should be the given.  It shouldn’t take years to implement such basic amenities as points tracking, attendance tracking, custom ranks, custom heraldry/uniforms, guild rewards, guild halls, guild banks, guild calendars, etc.  Most importantly should be basic guild recruiting/matching tools, though.

New players should be exposed to the guild systems early on.  Mention guilds in opening tutorials.  Present guild halls right off in starting towns and cities.  Give guilds more than a name over their heads and let them put heraldry and iconography on their shields, cloaks, tabards, mount barding, banners – you name it.  People should be excited and curious about guilds right away in the first 20 minutes of a game…and they should be presented with an intuitive way to find a guild that matches their needs right then.

It should be as easy to find a guild to match your wants and needs as it is to find a resturaunt on City Search. 

Seriously, I want a method by which a player, such as yourself, can open a UI window and check off boxes to indicate your preferred guild features. Maybe you’re not quite interested in raiding, so you leave that box unchecked. You are interested in regular groups, so you check that. You’re interested in questing, but not tradeskilling, so you make sure to note that. In the appropriate areas, you point out that you’re looking for a guild with a more open guildchat (as opposed to strictly family friendly), that roleplaying isn’t necessarily important to you, and that you’re based in the GMT-5 time zone. The game automatically notes that you’re a level 60 rogue.
When you click the “find a guild” button, the system automatically filters through the heavy roleplay guilds, the heavy raiding guilds, the guilds which have minimum level requirements you don’t meet, and the guilds which aren’t looking for rogues. It sorts out the remaining selections in order of relevance for you, and let’s you look through some relevant stats that include everything from total guild size, average nightly activity levels, most active nights, least active nights, rosters, leaderboards – you name it.

From a guild standpoint, guild leaders have set up similar filters on their end to help weed through potential applicants who might be looking for a guild in the first place. Generally speaking, the system is set up in such a way to allow players looking for guilds and guilds open to new players a way to find each other in the first place. From there, an actual application window might open up (which has its own system/criteria backing it).

How would players know about such a system? Because they’re exposed to it during the game’s tutorial…as well as being exposed to how to create a guild, the benefits (and some common pitfalls) of guilding, and any specific features of this particular game that revolve around guilding (guild halls, keeps, etc.)

Newer players in good guilds will be exposed to self-perpetuating activity/social hubs.  They’ll find more groups this way (especially if there’s some in-game benefit to grouping with younger members).  They’ll find more active players this way.  They’ll be included in an existing community right off this way.  They’ll begin investing and growing within the game faster this way.  Having newer members joining guilds is a way of increasing their chances at hitting that all important 2 month mark. 

Beyond recruiting, modern guilds are going to want to see more benefits outside of games as well.  As more games start to offer up free or freemium benefits, more guilds are going to spread out across multiple games.  For companies like SOE or NCSoft, cross game chat and organization systems should be considered.   Offline tools to create guild logos or heraldry should be looked into.  Robust forum/website tools should be researched. 

The benefits are tangible.  The money is there on the table just waiting to be grabbed.  Guilds equate to money…and lots of it.  The studios that realize this will reap the rewards.

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.

 ;)

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?