Community building July 19th, 2006 (Visited 11317 times) Tags:

Business Week Online just published an article on new media and community that’s an excerpt from Henry Jenkins‘ new book. Edit: Looks like it came originally from Next Generation. It heavily references the work that we did early on in SWG in building community.

These days, it sure seems like there’s a mixed reaction to how the community is handled, but I do think we did a pretty good job back then, and at the time it was widely referenced as a model.

The premises under which we operated were:

• Be open to the players: both in terms of telling them what you are doing, and in terms of listening to what they want
• Communicate daily
• Communicate honestly
• If things change, tell them why — they’re smart people, they will understand
• Have weekly events of info release so that there’s a reason to come back regularly
• Ask questions, and listen to the answers
• Celebrate and highlight the best contributors

Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG. I am not sure I agree. If anything, I think that many subsequent problems came from not listening enough, or not asking questions in advance of changes. Walking a mile in the players’ shoes is a difficult trick to pull off even if you have the best of intentions.

The tensest and most difficult moments in SWG’s development — and they came often — were when we had to remove something that players really liked. Usually, it was against our own wishes, because of time constraints or (rarely) orders from on high. But we couldn’t tell the players the real reasons sometimes. That sucked, frankly, because the open relationship really did matter. As often as we could, we laid everything bare.

These days, it’s accepted wisdom that you don’t reveal a feature until it’s done, so as to guarantee that you never let the players down. Of course, even finished features sometimes fall out for one reason or another…

In any case, I think I don’t agree with that philosophy. I’d rather have prospective players on a journey with the team, than have them be a passive group marketed to. Yes, they will suffer the ups and downs, and see the making of the sausage… but these days, that’s getting to be an accepted thing in creative fields. There’s not much to gain, to my mind, in having the creators sitting off on a pedestal somewhere — people fall from pedestals, and pedestals certainly will not survive contact with Live operation of a virtual world.

Instead, I’d rather the customers know the creators as people who make mistakes, so that when one happens, they are more likely to be forgiven or understood.

How did the experiment work out? Well, bottom line in SWG’s case is that we certainly overpromised and underdelivered. But the curve for active community users was an exponential one aiming at the moon, and until the day when I had to go out there and tell them that the game was being released, they were working with us — contentiously, but all pulling in one direction. And the result was that registrants to the game on the first weekend was exactly equal to the number of active community users, and the sales curve simply continued that trend over time.

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144 Responses to “Community building”

1. memor.ia blog wrote on July 19th, 2006 at 8:19 pm:

   [...] memori.us games) No Comments so far Leave a comment [...]

2. Faith wrote on July 20th, 2006 at 4:40 am:

   [...] Comments [...]

3. MMORPG.COM - MMORPG Gaming Forums - Everquest, Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft & More! wrote on July 20th, 2006 at 6:22 am:

   [...] Interesting new Raph article, he seems to be very SWG talkative lately. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-building/ [...]

4. Raph Words on Community - Wanderhomies Forums wrote on July 20th, 2006 at 2:05 pm:

   [...] Cited from his blog Raphs BlogHe talks about Community BuildingBusiness Week Online just published an article on new media and community that’s an excerpt from Henry Jenkins‘ new book. Edit: Looks like it came originally from Next Generation. It heavily references the work that we did early on in SWG in building community.These days, it sure seems like there’s a mixed reaction to how the community is handled, but I do think we did a pretty good job back then, and at the time it was widely referenced as a model.The premises under which we operated were: * Be open to the players: both in terms of telling them what you are doing, and in terms of listening to what they want * Communicate daily * Communicate honestly * If things change, tell them why — they’re smart people, they will understand * Have weekly events of info release so that there’s a reason to come back regularly * Ask questions, and listen to the answers * Celebrate and highlight the best contributors Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG. I am not sure I agree. If anything, I think that many subsequent problems came from not listening enough, or not asking questions in advance of changes. Walking a mile in the players’ shoes is a difficult trick to pull off even if you have the best of intentions.The tensest and most difficult moments in SWG’s development — and they came often — were when we had to remove something that players really liked. Usually, it was against our own wishes, because of time constraints or (rarely) orders from on high. But we couldn’t tell the players the real reasons sometimes. That sucked, frankly, because the open relationship really did matter. As often as we could, we laid everything bare.These days, it’s accepted wisdom that you don’t reveal a feature until it’s done, so as to guarantee that you never let the players down. Of course, even finished features sometimes fall out for one reason or another…In any case, I think I don’t agree with that philosophy. I’d rather have prospective players on a journey with the team, than have them be a passive group marketed to. Yes, they will suffer the ups and downs, and see the making of the sausage… but these days, that’s getting to be an accepted thing in creative fields. There’s not much to gain, to my mind, in having the creators sitting off on a pedestal somewhere — people fall from pedestals, and pedestals certainly will not survive contact with Live operation of a virtual world.Instead, I’d rather the customers know the creators as people who make mistakes, so that when one happens, they are more likely to be forgiven or understood.How did the experiment work out? Well, bottom line in SWG’s case is that we certainly overpromised and underdelivered. But the curve for active community users was an exponential one aiming at the moon, and until the day when I had to go out there and tell them that the game was being released, they were working with us — contentiously, but all pulling in one direction. And the result was that registrants to the game on the first weekend was exactly equal to the number of active community users, and the sales curve simply continued that trend over time. ——————– [...]

5. Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies? wrote on July 20th, 2006 at 6:48 pm:

   [...] Earlier this week, Next Generation published a short excerpt from my much longer discussion of Star Wars Gallaxies and user-generated content in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The publication seems to have prompted game designer and theorist Raph Koster to blog about what he learned by adopting a more collaborationist approach to his fans. Here’s some of what he had to say: Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG. I am not sure I agree. If anything, I think that many subsequent problems came from not listening enough, or not asking questions in advance of changes. Walking a mile in the players’ shoes is a difficult trick to pull off even if you have the best of intentions. [...]

6. DnL Forums - Community Building wrote on July 21st, 2006 at 1:12 am:

   [...] Community Building I thought the Dark and Light crew might glean some knowledge from one of the masters of making and managing MMORPG’s Raplh Koster. Below is a link to an article on his website ill also include some of the most vital points you guys need to brush up on if or when u decide to seriously make a MMORPG that will compete with the big boys. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/1…unity-building/ Quote: [...]

7. MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies? wrote on July 24th, 2006 at 6:53 am:

   [...] Earlier this week, Next Generation published a short excerpt from my much longer discussion of Star Wars Galaxies and user-generated content in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The publication seems to have prompted game designer and theorist Raph Koster to blog about what he learned by adopting a more collaborationist approach to his fans. Here’s some of what he had to say: [...]

8. MMORPG.COM - MMORPG Gaming Forums - Everquest, Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft & More! wrote on July 24th, 2006 at 5:34 pm:

   [...] Read his blog here.Most interesting thing I saw in the comments;Raph said, "In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea, but it was done anyway. I am not sure what else I can say, really. It certainly was a major contributing factor — even a decisive factor — in my decision to move on.The simple fact is that I was barely involved with SWG from around October of 2003. There were some periods where I was pulled back in a little more, but by and large, I was apart from it. Almost none of my “creative consultancy” involved Live games — it was all about new games, many of which did not survive pitch stage. " [...]

9. Raph lays it out - The Other Guild wrote on July 25th, 2006 at 7:01 am:

   [...] QUOTE"In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea, but it was done anyway. I am not sure what else I can say, really. It certainly was a major contributing factor — even a decisive factor — in my decision to move on." - Raph Koster talking about NGE on his blog at raphkoster.com From his Blog(Suprised not Suprosed) [...]

10. PureSWG: Forums / Off-Topic / Raph Koster left SOE in part due to the NGE wrote on July 25th, 2006 at 4:34 pm:

    [...] This link was just emailed to me. This is the first very negative anti-NGE sentiment I’ve seen from someone associated with SWG. For anyone who doesn’t know I’ve been told Raph is an MMO genius and was the “main man” behind PreCU. Maybe someone else can elaborate as I’m not too familiar with him. If you scroll down to post number 61 Raphs says:In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea, but it was done anyway. I am not sure what else I can say, really. It certainly was a major contributing factor — even a decisive factor — in my decision to move on.The simple fact is that I was barely involved with SWG from around October of 2003. There were some periods where I was pulled back in a little more, but by and large, I was apart from it. Almost none of my “creative consultancy” involved Live games — it was all about new games, many of which did not survive pitch stage. ClickyIt’s nice to see some of the SOE staff standing up for what they believe in. Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work. [...]

11. Interesting what Raph says about NGE: - Bria Reborn wrote on July 25th, 2006 at 6:04 pm:

    [...] In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea, but it was done anyway. I am not sure what else I can say, really. It certainly was a major contributing factor — even a decisive factor — in my decision to move on. The simple fact is that I was barely involved with SWG from around October of 2003. There were some periods where I was pulled back in a little more, but by and large, I was apart from it. Almost none of my “creative consultancy” involved Live games — it was all about new games, many of which did not survive pitch stage. More to find here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19…#comment-11273 __________________ Pfeiffer Dirk - Rebel, Jedi Knight Krid - Rebel, Master Bountyhunter Kooltec - Rebel, Master Doctor, Master Merchant _______________________________________ Reality is something for noobs who can’t handle Computergames! [...]

12. SWGwYaMB - Raph opens up... wrote on July 25th, 2006 at 7:20 pm:

    [...] Raph opens up… It seems that Raph Koster has been opening up a bit more in regards to what has happened with SWG. Here are a few long but very intersting excerpts. Check out this link if you want to read more: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-building/ (read the comments section as well) (p.s. Almagill you forgot to say how cool YaMB are in your comment! ) Raph said on July 24th, 2006 at 1:59 pm: In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea, but it was done anyway. I am not sure what else I can say, really. It certainly was a major contributing factor — even a decisive factor — in my decision to move on. The simple fact is that I was barely involved with SWG from around October of 2003. There were some periods where I was pulled back in a little more, but by and large, I was apart from it. Almost none of my “creative consultancy” involved Live games — it was all about new games, many of which did not survive pitch stage. Raph said on July 19th, 2006 at 1:14 pm: As a side note, was the entire profession of people who did hair styles/face changes/etc really only included because of the inital bold statement of “You can do anything from wookie hair grooming to …”? I mean… you didn’t actually think that was a fun idea for a class did you? Heh, thereby hangs a tale. The original plan for the skill trees was not the skill onion. Picture the onions you had, but chop off the bottom novice skills. Imagine that when you came into the game, it worked like UO: you could either pick a “package” that gave you three or four skills that fit that chosen profession, or you could go “advanced” and pick ANY three or four. Now, imagine that trees were simple — hairdressing, a total of four skills in the whole game. Crafting, dozens and dozens of skill lines. Master boxes were not atop onions. Instead, they sat atop a set of skill lines. Two different master boxes might require the same skill lines — for example, you might need to have four skills worth of Engineering for any of the engineering based professions — kind of like the required classes in school. Or you might need to have tumbling, basic self-defense, and so on for any of the weapons skills. Some lines would be deep, and branch — like basic self-defense would turn into something you could keep going in, and eventually learn Teras Kasi. Some Master boxes would be easy to get, others harder because they required a lot of study of different areas. And there’d be TONS of Master boxes, because we’d try to find every interesting combination of skill lines and give it a name. Tumbling + some of the performance effect stuff? Cool, we call you a gymnast. Tumbling + stealth + maybe knives, and you have a start at a commando (who’d need to also pick up skill lines in various more weapons) or a start at a ninja sort, perhaps. As you can see if you try to diagram what this would look like, you need a 3d diagram; on the other hand, if you just list out “required courses” for each cool title you can get, you give a nice easy recipe for players to follow to make what they want. And if players combine some skill lines you never thought of, you can sneak in a new master skill box in there, and maybe add one special ability, and boom, you added a profession. The first designer who tried a whack at this failed to produce diagrams and specs, over the course of weeks. Then he left. The second one tried and also didn’t succeed. Finally, the producer stepped in and said “look, this is simpler,” and pushed onions on us because we were simply out of time. I asked for a third chance and to let me just do it, because it just wasn’t that complicated. But we really were out of time. The upshot was that things that should have been just one skill line, four skill boxes, had to be turned into huge onions and padded out. To standardize data formats, we couldn’t have different size and shape onions. Bleah. Lastly, hairdressing was just plain easy to do, which means that in a failure of prioritization and to show some progress, it got done. Heck, basic hairdressing was actually in the pre-alpha demo to prove the scripting system worked, it was so trivial to do. why couldn’t you tell them the reason why you had to take something out? We did, unless we were not allowed to by corporate masters (such as “we can’t do this system this way because in the next movie which isn’t out yet, it’s revealed that things are actually this other way” — happened with cloning, players playing Stormtroopers, and a few other things). And the reason “because we don’t have time and we are rushing the product” was never deemed acceptable. We want one vote, one 16m2 square of rented server space. Our World, Our Representation. In a purely user-driven world, I’d agree with you. But in the case of a game system design, you wouldn’t want everyone voting on the rules anymore than you’d want an author to take votes on what happens in the next chapter. Part of why you are there is to be taken on the entertainment ride.       [...]

13. digg / Gaming / Upcoming wrote on July 26th, 2006 at 2:35 am:

    [...] Former Star Wars Galaxies Designer blasts Sony’s New Game Enhancements [...]

14. Sterling Order of Knights :: View topic - Raph Koster on SW:G: "NGE was a very bad idea" wrote on July 26th, 2006 at 3:24 am:

    [...] In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea, but it was done anyway. I am not sure what else I can say, really. It certainly was a major contributing factor — even a decisive factor — in my decision to move on. The simple fact is that I was barely involved with SWG from around October of 2003. There were some periods where I was pulled back in a little more, but by and large, I was apart from it. Almost none of my “creative consultancy” involved Live games — it was all about new games, many of which did not survive pitch stage. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-building/ [...]

15. digg / All / Upcoming wrote on July 26th, 2006 at 4:16 am:

    [...] Former Star Wars Galaxies Designer blasts Sony’s New Game Enhancements [...]

16. GamingGroove 2.0 wrote on July 26th, 2006 at 5:48 am:

    [...] LOGON CREATE ACCOUNT Welcome! Sign-up or logon to post comments. news Raph on SWG (Wed, Jul 26, 2006 8:26AM)  by Dirk ‘Magikahn’ Wheeler It seems that many fans of Star Wars Galaxies threw up all over the new version of the MMORPG. Raph Koster, the original designer of the game, recently was found over on his website blasting SOE for the changes (source) he basically didn’t approve. In the following blog, you’ll see that the change was one of the reasons why he left the project:In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea, but it was done anyway. I am not sure what else I can say, really. It certainly was a major contributing factor - even a decisive factor - in my decision to move on. The simple fact is that I was barely involved with SWG from around October of 2003. There were some periods where I was pulled back in a little more, but by and large, I was apart from it. Almost none of my "creative consultancy" involved Live games - it was all about new games, many of which did not survive pitch stage.I don’t blame him for hitting the road. If some company went in and utterly changed everything I had, turning it into crap, I’d hit the road too. Screenwriters must really hate Hollywood sometimes. Thanks Christian! [ Headlines ] [ Home ] No comments Want to be heard? Logon or sign-up for a user account! [...]

17. Trinity Republic :: View topic - Former SoE Creative Director speaks out on his blog wrote on July 26th, 2006 at 6:48 am:

    [...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-building/#comment-11273_________________ [...]

18. Timbre of Tempests wrote on July 31st, 2006 at 4:09 pm:

    [...] 30th July, 2006. 1:47 am. Blame? No. Resolution. ( Read more… )If something is broken, don’t ask who broke it. Fix it. If you can’t fix it, inform those who can and make sure you’re out of their way. If they won’t fix it, find someone else, repeat. If you can’t find anyone else, don’t use it. If you must use it, learn how to fix it yourself.http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-building/#comment-11807 [...]

19. Kent - MySpace Blog wrote on August 9th, 2006 at 8:30 pm:

    Acquiring certain skills will open up what your character is capable of. It could be advanced combat, reconnaissance, crafting, etc. Since skills are such an important part of the game, great care should be put into it. Raph Koster described the skill system in the first version of Star Wars Galaxies as a skill onion. The original plan for the skill trees was not the skill onion. Picture the onions you had, but chop off the bottom novice skills.

20. The Soul of the Stream « Virtually Speaking wrote on November 16th, 2006 at 8:47 am:

    [...] Raph doesn’t bear all of the responsibility for that - in fact, he condemns what happened on his own blog.  His condemnation includes these pearls of wisdom: Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG. I am not sure I agree. If anything, I think that many subsequent problems came from not listening enough, or not asking questions in advance of changes. Walking a mile in the players’ shoes is a difficult trick to pull off even if you have the best of intentions. [...]

21. So What Happen to Star Wars Galaxies? wrote on March 23rd, 2007 at 4:05 pm:

    [...] New Media Collide. The publication seems to have prompted game designer and theorist Raph Koster to blog about what he learned by adopting a more collaborationist approach to his fans. Here's some of [...]

1. tuebit said on July 19th, 2006 at 11:27 am:

   From the Business Week article:
   

   The game that the designers promised and the community expected was largely player-driven. … Cities’ mayors and council leaders would devise missions and quests for other players. The Galactic Civil War (the struggle between rebels and imperials) would frame the game play, but players would create their own missions as they enacted the Star Wars saga.

   Wow. Wish it had only turned out that way! Player created missions would have been an amazing feature.

2. tuebit said on July 19th, 2006 at 11:28 am:

   Sorry to double post, but I would also like to say that I admire the premise under which you tried to run communication.

3. Matt Mihaly said on July 19th, 2006 at 11:29 am:

   Raph wrote:
   
   In any case, I think I don’t agree with that philosophy. I’d rather have prospective players on a journey with the team, than have them be a passive group marketed to. Yes, they will suffer the ups and downs, and see the making of the sausage… but these days, that’s getting to be an accepted thing in creative fields. There’s not much to gain, to my mind, in having the creators sitting off on a pedestal somewhere — people fall from pedestals, and pedestals certainly will not survive contact with Live operation of a virtual world.
   

   Couldn’t agree more, Raph.

   –matt

4. damijin said on July 19th, 2006 at 12:25 pm:

   I was a fairly active member of the SWG development boards, so I’d just like to throw a short story in here.

   I had never really participated in a serious beta before, nor had I really ever heard what it was like behind the scenes of a game in development. In that sense, the development of SWG was really new and amazing to me. Having Holocron show up on the boards and talk to the players about what was going on, what was planned, etc, was always really cool. I did feel like I knew what the meetings at SOE were about and what the game would be like. More importantly I felt like I could have an impact on that design.

   I really enjoyed reading every piece of possible information that was known about the game (since I was a huge Star Wars fan and a casual Everquest/Star Wars MUD player), and trying to understand how certain systems (being outcast from a city for PKing for instance) would work.

   Then dark times came.

   Everyone knew that development was taking too long. The game was extremely hyped and had very little to show for it. As release came nearer and nearer, some key features quietly slipped off the chart (unique jedi “quests”, what?). It was pretty obvious that the game I had envisioned in my head was not the same game as the one that would be released. In the end, I played for about 2 months. I picked it up in July (I think it launched in April?), and played until the end of the summer.

   I never figured out if it was my fault for thinking about the game too much, or the devs fault for cutting the features. I thought the game looked really nice, it just wasn’t enough for some reason. Even today I would rather play a SWR (SMAUG/Diku based Star Wars Reality) code base MUD than SWG.

   As a side note, was the entire profession of people who did hair styles/face changes/etc really only included because of the inital bold statement of “You can do anything from wookie hair grooming to …”?

   I mean… you didn’t actually think that was a fun idea for a class did you?

5. Prokofy Neva said on July 19th, 2006 at 12:28 pm:

   Raph, you’re the most enlightened of game gods, so we honour Thee (touches finger to forehead, lips, heart).

   However…why couldn’t you tell them the reason why you had to take something out?

   Plus, this is all a sop, this stuff like “we communicate once a week” or “we let them know how we’re making our sausage”. A more interactive and more enlightened sop then merely the usual push media of “oh, shiny” but…a sop none the lest.

   We want one vote, one 16m2 square of rented server space. Our World, Our Representation.

6. Jythri said on July 19th, 2006 at 12:44 pm:

   Raph, I was always a big fan of how you guys handled the community. The fact that we had over 2000 accounts registered on Vagabond’s Rest and somewhere over 3000 on the SWG-RP group was a testament to how exciting the pre-game community felt.

   Personally, I suppose I’ve always been able to look at things from a dev perspective and was able to be a bit understanding that some features (even ones you really, really want) have to get cut to get the thing out the door. Sure, there were things that were very disappointing to see cut out of final, but I don’t think that anyone active in the community could say that you guys overpromised. At least people who would entertain RATIONAL thought…

   Our Vagabond’s Rest community tracked “possible features” on a daily basis on our site, carefully keeping our in-game plans in line with what (and when) we expected certain things to go out. With all that attention, the only people I remember being really and thoroughly disappointed were those people who couldn’t reconcile their early perceptions of developer comments with adjustments that were made based on the realities of development.

   I haven’t read back on those threads in a long time, but I seem to remember a LOT of “grain of salt” disclaimers with the early FAQ and development chatter. For me, the effect that had was to give me an idea of what you guys wanted the game to be, which I could then compare with what they became. As a player, active in the community, I remember really enjoying the updates…even the speculative ones. I lived for Friday updates, during the two years I followed development.

   So, here’s a vote (and a hope) for continued developer openness, and some other project that is as exciting to me as SWG was in the community. My fondest memories of -ANY- MMO to date (and I’ve played most of them) all lie around those months on either side of the SWG “live” date.

   Do it again, Raph, and I’ll be there!

7. David said on July 19th, 2006 at 1:00 pm:

   Speaking as an SWG player, I really appreciated the developer communication before and during beta and into the Live game, and had it continued I believe that the game would be in a much better state now than it currently is. I hope that in any future projects you work on, that happens again.

   The problem isn’t necessarily the frequency of communication, but rather the tone and nature of communication. Players in game communites want the developers to engage them in discussion about changes and features. We want them to have conversations for us about their vision for the game and our vision for the game and how it all fits together. We don’t want canned announcements, PR-speak, and structured feedback threads. When a developer makes a post about something they’re thinking about doing, we want them to reference community feedback on that particular thing.

   This is what’s not happening with the SWG community today and it’s one reason why the community continues to be very nervous about the current development team and to ultimately not trust anything that they try to do. The overall attitude among the community is that the current development team destroyed the game that the first team created - even though most of us will admit that their were flaws in that original game, we almost all preferred that original game where we felt that we had somewhat of a voice, to the one that we have now where changes are forced upon us without any apparent consideration as to the impact they’ll have on the game or the community.

   Much of this could have been avoided if that original level of communication was still there.

8. Trucegore said on July 19th, 2006 at 1:02 pm:

   “As a side note, was the entire profession of people who did hair styles/face changes/etc really only included because of the initial bold statement of “You can do anything from wookie hair grooming to …”?

   I mean… you didn’t actually think that was a fun idea for a class did you? ”

   Judging from how many people were of that profession, and how many screamed that its was all but removed.

   Yes.

   If you did play SWG you would have seen the social engineering that was happening from the social classes, like musician, dancer, chef, and yes, image designers.

   It was one of the professions and abilities that made the game, with out it…well.. Go have a look at the boards now and see the aftermath of marginalizing the social trades.

   Community is dead in game and out… nothing but !!! and ??? and hate now..

   There was once a deep and rich “life” to that game.

9. Raph said on July 19th, 2006 at 1:14 pm:

   As a side note, was the entire profession of people who did hair styles/face changes/etc really only included because of the inital bold statement of “You can do anything from wookie hair grooming to …”?

   I mean… you didn’t actually think that was a fun idea for a class did you?

   Heh, thereby hangs a tale.

   The original plan for the skill trees was not the skill onion. Picture the onions you had, but chop off the bottom novice skills. Imagine that when you came into the game, it worked like UO: you could either pick a “package” that gave you three or four skills that fit that chosen profession, or you could go “advanced” and pick ANY three or four.

   Now, imagine that trees were simple — hairdressing, a total of four skills in the whole game. Crafting, dozens and dozens of skill lines.

   Master boxes were not atop onions. Instead, they sat atop a set of skill lines. Two different master boxes might require the same skill lines — for example, you might need to have four skills worth of Engineering for any of the engineering based professions — kind of like the required classes in school. Or you might need to have tumbling, basic self-defense, and so on for any of the weapons skills.

   Some lines would be deep, and branch — like basic self-defense would turn into something you could keep going in, and eventually learn Teras Kasi. Some Master boxes would be easy to get, others harder because they required a lot of study of different areas.

   And there’d be TONS of Master boxes, because we’d try to find every interesting combination of skill lines and give it a name. Tumbling + some of the performance effect stuff? Cool, we call you a gymnast. Tumbling + stealth + maybe knives, and you have a start at a commando (who’d need to also pick up skill lines in various more weapons) or a start at a ninja sort, perhaps.

   As you can see if you try to diagram what this would look like, you need a 3d diagram; on the other hand, if you just list out “required courses” for each cool title you can get, you give a nice easy recipe for players to follow to make what they want. And if players combine some skill lines you never thought of, you can sneak in a new master skill box in there, and maybe add one special ability, and boom, you added a profession.

   The first designer who tried a whack at this failed to produce diagrams and specs, over the course of weeks. Then he left. The second one tried and also didn’t succeed. Finally, the producer stepped in and said “look, this is simpler,” and pushed onions on us because we were simply out of time. I asked for a third chance and to let me just do it, because it just wasn’t that complicated. But we really were out of time.

   The upshot was that things that should have been just one skill line, four skill boxes, had to be turned into huge onions and padded out. To standardize data formats, we couldn’t have different size and shape onions. Bleah.

   Lastly, hairdressing was just plain easy to do, which means that in a failure of prioritization and to show some progress, it got done. Heck, basic hairdressing was actually in the pre-alpha demo to prove the scripting system worked, it was so trivial to do.

   why couldn’t you tell them the reason why you had to take something out?

   We did, unless we were not allowed to by corporate masters (such as “we can’t do this system this way because in the next movie which isn’t out yet, it’s revealed that things are actually this other way” — happened with cloning, players playing Stormtroopers, and a few other things). And the reason “because we don’t have time and we are rushing the product” was never deemed acceptable.

   We want one vote, one 16m2 square of rented server space. Our World, Our Representation.

   In a purely user-driven world, I’d agree with you. But in the case of a game system design, you wouldn’t want everyone voting on the rules anymore than you’d want an author to take votes on what happens in the next chapter. Part of why you are there is to be taken on the entertainment ride.

10. Wilfried said on July 19th, 2006 at 1:29 pm:

    The community work in SWG was very good. Actualy I had very much more fun in the years before the SWG release than after it. From a players perspective, the project went south the day the release date was announced to the beta players. What was a promising begining of a top IP MMORPG turned into a not even half finished, lifeless nightmare this single day. If there realy was a moment where you failed to listen to the players, it was on this day.

    When I compare SWG to WoW, the mess was not in community work. If someone would have asked me 4 years ago where to invest my money, in a Star Wars MMORPG or a Warcraft MMORPG, I would have put all money into the Star Wars IP without question.

    What you did right in community work was exactly what you completely missed with the game. There was no story, no content, no Star Wars. Prerelease these points were all met with your community work. Hunting stories, locations, pictures and screesnhots with a story about them, even directed movies etc. You obviously knew yourself that these points are important in community work and made a lot fun. Why did you cancel the exact same things in the game? You should have changed the game to be on par with the community work, the other way around would have been an even bigger mistake.

    You have to talk about things that aren’t in the game yet. Else you can’t talk about anything at all. (Some poeple say you can’t talk about anything at all in SWG community work even today — because there still is nothing in it to talk about)

    I highly doubt that you could have done anything better in the community work. Being honest to the players and telling them there won’t be a story, there won’t be quests, there won’t be content, there won’t be events, neither Lord Vader nor Han Solo will ever move or being involved in any action and it’s just a Star Wars stage where there will never be a play, would not have helped to make SWG any better. Not everything is about “managing expectations”. Much more is about delivering anything at all.

    Back in these days I’ve always asked myself and had looooong discussions in the German SWG community, if any of the devs had ever played their own MMORPG. The missing of any Star Wars action, Story and immersion was so obvious, there was realy no need to ever listen to any of the players for knowing that.

    Well, maybe it would have been more honest if you had left out everything that was fun in prerelease community work — but I doubt that would have helped in any way

    So if you ask me, no, there was nothing wrong at all with listening to players or community work as a whole. The only thing that was wrong was the game. I know that wasn’t your fault (not alone at least). What I realy blame on the whole SWG team is that all at SOE/LA greatly underestimated the consequences of what you had to leave out.

    I know that SOE did not want to make SWG anything close to EQ to steal their own customers. I remember your “community work” repeating “SWG is not EQ in space” over and over again. The players loved these words back then. But somebody at SOE might have taken this too wordly Not everything in EQ was bad. “Dynamic” was another term you used very often. But you left everything “dynamic” out of SWG that was fun and dynamic already in EQ (dynamic NPCs, dynamic encounters on the roads, dynamic world events) and turned everything dynamic that was fun when it was static (SWG is the reason why nowadays every developer underlines “handmade” content and zone design). “SWG is not EQ in space” and “dynamic world” lead you in the wrong directions with your decisions what to leave out and what not, to get your database issues under control.

    Just look at WoW and imagine what tremendous chance you had with SWG. Not that I’m a big WoW fan, but I don’t think WoW would do any better if you take out all of its content. I don’t think you need players to tell you that. And I don’t think you could make that any better with community work. If you would have taken the time to rework SWG, it might have been SWG with the 6 mio. players up in the charts.

    So what completely failed in SWG was the management. Not community work, not the design, not the development, not listening to players or changing anything according to them. Whoever decided that you don’t have the time to make SWG into a realy great game is to blame. You had much more time that you might have thought, you would have had even the time to completely trash it and go back to the design. 6+ mio. players would have payed for a lot of expenses.

    Even if you wanted to listen more to the players. You couldn’t. You couldn’t even after the release. The Space Expansion was already set in stone. There was no way to cancel that and go back to finish all that what went wrong with the game itself. No way to fix all the issues that kept you from puting real content in. You did not even have any tools for making content — and you could not even make them, they would not have worked with all the issues of database etc. Again, this was a wrong decision in the management. It costs a lot of money to try selling an expansion and not to make a great game instead that everybody would love to play and pay for in the first place. Management is about making money — these decisions did burn it, not make it.

    There were so many mistakes in SWG I could write a book about counting them alone However, I wouldn’t blame any single person for that and your community work is realy the last to blame. We know a lot more about MMORPGs now than we did when all the SWG decisions were made. That’s not so much about design and nothing at all about community work — but a lot more about the production and the money you fail to make with wrong decisions in AAA projects with such stong IPs. While I don’t blame them for not knowing better — at least to some degree — it still was a huge management mistake.

    I doubt we will see such a great opportunity SWG had again any time soon.

11. Mike said on July 19th, 2006 at 2:32 pm:

    SWG was the best video game I ever played.

    Hands down. I loved every aspect of it from the silly skills like image design and dancing to the combat roles and skills we could mix and match to our own design.

    I started during late beta and became a total addict. I played as long as I could every day I could. The community was the best I had ever been a part of in any online media.

    It still amazes me that SOE managed to kill it. Go read the boards there, or better log into the game and take a look for yourself… The once vibrant and creative communities are gone and replaced with only a few bickering and angry zealots who refuse to believe that SOE isn’t going to somehow put it all back to how it was or release some magical patch that will fix everything they dislike about the game.

    The world builders and dreamers are now cynics and diehards.

12. Allen Sligar said on July 19th, 2006 at 3:06 pm:

    Its interesting that at the end of the day it is not the individual creators who support an open communication line with {thier player} base who are damaged by mistreating {thier} paying consumers, but companies.

    I’ve harped on maintaining “economic goodwill” (read transparency/communication) here before, mainly as an advocate for efficiancy but also for cunsumers for this reason.

    The long term effects of failure to ignore this is a failure to capture market share, people dont buy games (or anything for that matter) from people/companies they dont trust.

    The fact is there is a certain consumer segment (population) of the MMO market that SOE will never recapture, no amount of damage control will ever be enough, no amount of marketing will work and thats a rough pill to swallow. But thats the consequence of abusive practices, the market decides your fate rather than you.

    But heres the rub going forward: As a company in any market gets a reputation for bad product it gets more difficult to attract and retain the people you need to make better products. Which cause other exponential consequences….

    Anyhow I think most people who played SWG (especially early ones) are willing to say “no harm, no foul, I’ll play your next game” to the producers/devs of SWG, I cant say all of them will be saying the same thing about new SOE titles.

    I wish it were otherwise, SOE innovated much of the MMO space players enjoy today, and they have the resources to do great things, but such is the price of hubris

13. Wanxi Brodo said on July 19th, 2006 at 4:28 pm:

    We captured lightning in a bottle on the prebeta boards. Nothing will ever compare to our community. It was magic. I can say that my experience in the actual testing wasn’t as exciting as the discussions we had on the forums. That would be a textbook example of a great community where the signal to noise ratio was fantastic. Raph, I even have some of those early design docs printed out in a binder and it’s trippy to go back and read em. Outcasting, anyone? Leia4Loot. Blade. Ah, good times, good times.

    Sometimes, peeking behind the curtain is a real letdown. So be careful what you ask for because getting it can hurt.

14. Evangolis said on July 19th, 2006 at 5:08 pm:

    All games are better in beta, because in beta there is always more possibility, more hope that special feature really will work, and it is always easier to fix the code before release. People make cynical remarks about ‘paid betas’, but really, I think the value in beta might actually be better than in live.

15. Frank Mitchell said on July 19th, 2006 at 7:38 pm:

    I have to say, like many other people, I too loved following SWG through it’s development. I felt it was really my first glimpse at the inside of game development and was a major factor in leading me to a career in the video game industry. The direct access to the devs and the amazing community created an environment which I have not seen in a long time, I remember many a night I would spend reading thesis level dissertation on various mechanics published by the community it’s self. However as interesting as it was for me to watch the game take shape when it was finally released, I did feel that it took away from the game some. I couldn’t help thinking of what could have been as I played the game. Most notably the Jedi system; I remember Kevin O’Hare waxing and waning about how they would implement this organic system to select the force sensitive among us. I played the game for about a year. When the holocrons came out and the systems bare bones were revealed, that was the last straw and I quit. Like many people have said I really think holocrons help drive the final nail into the proverbial coffin. The openness of the SWG devs and the amazing insight of the community really made it a special place but at the same time, I think it did damage the game for me, some.

    I will say that I have followed the development of many games since SWG, but none of them have had anything close to SWG community except Pirates of the Burning Sea. The community and devs at Flying Lab remind me a lot of the SWG boards before launch. The same openness and expertise not only of the devs but also the rank and file fans; I can’t remember the last time I’ve so few trolls (and trolls bating!) on any internet forum. I would actually say it’s a better environment than SWG was. I feel a lot of that is due the small size of Flying Labs and the fact that they are developing the IP from the ground up and don’t have the corporate over head SWG operated under. (Also I got to meet a lot of the devs at E3, which I’m sure helped foster that feeling of community a lot.)

16. Jim said on July 19th, 2006 at 8:23 pm:

    Sometimes I get the feeling there is a fundamental difference between the scale of text-based online games and the scale of mass-market (AAA) online games.

    In the case of the MUD or MOO, it’s a smaller community, it’s easier to have a more human scale of contact with, and give feedback to, a much larger percentage of it. In a AAA game nowadays, where the community size is expected to be in six (if not seven) digits, it becomes much more faceless. There isn’t time to do justice to everyone — to anyone, really. Smalltown vs. New York, and all that.

    Not only that, but with the introduction of the massmarket, you get players who expect things to be a bit more faceless, who figure this all pops out of machines instead of by the hard work of fallible people. They expect things to be much higher quality, like what they see in other more polished disciplines (videorealism, anyone?) and they’re less forgiving of mistakes — as opposed to just devs, you get people calling them “game gods” and expecting the world of them.

    Sometimes I think the world of the small-feeling MMO being the New Big Thing is gone.

17. Stormgaard said on July 20th, 2006 at 4:24 am:

    A few quick thoughts:

    1.) Raph is very good at what he does. He’s the guy you go to when you want to explore all the different posibilities available.

    Only Raph sees exploring all possibilities as the end goal in and of itself - not simply a means to an end, which is what it should be in most cases. A finished product needs to be presented to the customer. Raph will show you all the different types of products you can present to the customer, but he’ll never settle on one himself, and he’ll argue that whatever he’s presented you with should be changed again, and again, and again.

    He has a point that MMO’s change over time - but not to the degree he’s suggesting. Or if they DO it winds up being the confused wreck that SWG was.

    2.) Raph’s idea of including the gaming community in on the design process would be great - if you were willing to PAY the community to do it.

    In a world of infinite time and money sure, Raph’s approach would be the way to do things. But almost everyone games for entertainment’s sake. Game companies provide a product and a service. When you want to involve the gaming community in the design process to the degree Raph wants to you’re really just having them do the work for you. Sure you can call it “The ups and downs” if you want to put a romantic spin on it, but you’re really just putting perfume on a turd. Not bashing here, just being colorful.

    If I was independently wealthy and didn’t have to have a real job and real life responsibilities - sure I’d love to be part of the “Ups and Downs” - but I’m not and I don’t. I need a finished product at the end of the day. Most gamers need a finished product at the end of the day.

    3.) Generally speaking Raph makes the classic mistake of confusing what he wants and needs with what the customer wants and needs. When he talks about being “on a journey with the team, (rather) than have them be a passive group marketed to.” he’s really only talking about what he wishes someone would do for him. Which is quite conveintient in that he has managed to get paid to do just that.

    Must be nice!

18. Almagill said on July 20th, 2006 at 5:58 am:

    Now, I’m going to be good and not get all ranty… (Oh I’m so going to try).

    The difference between what Raph envisioned way back, what was implemented at Launch and what we have now (just referring to dev:player communication) would, if plotted on a graph, not be a slow descent so much as a precipitous drop that starts as a steep decline at the time of the CU and, now, is in freefall.

    The UI designer was asked if it would be possible to make some changes to the postCU UI to allow players to have a little control over customisation. Simple things like letting us rescale the radar as we had done preCU. His response? I can quote it in full from memory. “NO”.

    No explanation, no discussion, just a fiat and some random waving of his hand in the direction of his PhD.

    A few lines of explanation as to ‘why’ it couldn’t have been done would have got a number of players onside. They in turn would have dealt with later calls on the forums to have the UI customisable by relaying that explanation. But “No” simply bred resentment and frustration.

    In most management roles I’ve filled it has always been better to explain change to people in such a way that thay can see that, even when it’s unpopular, there’s a solid reason for it and not just some random whim. Heck, even when it IS a random whim, explaining that in the right way can get people going “Okay, sounds daft but it might ‘just’ work…” and looking for ways to move the project forward rather than seeking reasons for it to fail.

    /sal Holocron

19. Distiler said on July 20th, 2006 at 6:25 am:

    I’ve tried to re-enter SWG up to 3 times after NGE but I failed to stay for more than 15 days. Why? well, mini society where I lived in planet Lok was killed. My daily things, like relations, buying goods, going to cantina, etc were killed because the actors were changed. I just doesen’t feel like making new friends and relations. And this game as “solo” doesen’t deliver any expectation.

    NGE can cough evolve cough but it will be dificult to re-do those societies without veterans around.

    It’s like one day you wake up and 90% of you neightbours are other people.

20. David said on July 20th, 2006 at 7:03 am:

    We should distinguish between in-game communities (player/player interaction) and out-of-game communities (player/player/dev interaction). The former does not often cross into the latter - indeed the out-of-game community is a completely separate animal.

    One conclusion I have come to after years of playing MMORPGs is that the out-of-game community starts with the attitude of the producers and lead developers. If you regard your out-of-game community as a group to be marketed to, then you are destined to, at best, have a a bunch of fansites that your PR and marketing departments can send press releases to. However, if you treat your out-of-game community as a barometer of player satisfaction with the game, and as a sounding board for concepts and ideas, then you will have better luck. As Almagill mentioned, the most important thing any developer can do when presenting a change to the community is explain the why. Even if players don’t necessarily like the change, most of us will be more willing to accept it and give it a shot if we are presented with the reasoning behind it. Not only that, but allowing the community to poke holes in your logic can sometimes save on having to revisit the issue later when it turns out that your change didn’t quite work out the way you thought it would.

    One very important key to remember is that the out-of-game community is where the vast majority of your word-of-mouth advertising comes from. And let’s be honest here, word-of-mouth is a huge factor in marketing your game, regardless of the strength of your IP, as SWG has proven. Would it have really hurt SOE and LucasArts to hold the release of SWG another six months to allow some of the things that were being pointed out during beta to be addressed? All communication problems aside, I think one of the things that hamstrung SWG was the idea that it had to make money right away. Any MMO publisher should be looking at making a game that continues to thrive for years, and not short-term profits. Not that WoW has helped any with that. I have a feeling that over the next 5 years a lot of MMOs are going to fold within their first 2 years when they can’t duplicate WoW’s success.

    Regardless, communication is a hugely important aspect of maintaining an out-of-game community.

    In-game community is an entirely different animal, and while it’s influenced by out-of-game community, it mainly grows because of player interaction inside the game. To grow in-game community, your game needs to encourage player interdependence and interaction through content and mechanics that encourage players to group up and work together. One of the reasons that SWG’s in-game community hasn’t rebounded at all from the NGE, even though players are still playing, is that nearly everything in the game is soloable, and no one really needs anyone else to accomplish much of anything anymore. Because players aren’t being forced by the game’s content and mechanics to rely on each other, they’re not really forming new friendships and communities. There’s a lot more contributing to it, including the “ghost town” feel of the old player cities, but even were all of that out of the way, in-game communities still would not form and grow quickly or well.

21. Michael Chui said on July 20th, 2006 at 7:13 am:

    All games are better in beta, because in beta there is always more possibility, more hope that special feature really will work, and it is always easier to fix the code before release. People make cynical remarks about ‘paid betas’, but really, I think the value in beta might actually be better than in live.

    Maybe there’s something to learn, after all, from Web 2.0’s “Perpetual Beta”.

22. Medusa said on July 20th, 2006 at 7:20 am:

    Ralph, milord, I forgive thee.

    Can’t say the same about SWG, since CH was removed, but at least if I read you are developing a new game, under other rules set, I will trust your work. Great job on the early game, it will be very hard to forget it, and a big thank you for the good moments provided to us. Wish you could bring it back to it’s glory, but when most don’t want, one can’t do alone.

23. Kylrathin said on July 20th, 2006 at 7:22 am:

    The fact is there is a certain consumer segment (population) of the MMO market that SOE will never recapture, no amount of damage control will ever be enough, no amount of marketing will work and thats a rough pill to swallow. But thats the consequence of abusive practices, the market decides your fate rather than you.

    This describes me to a T. SOE (and Sony as well) has lost my business permanently due to their decision to alienate their playerbase, of which I was once a very active member. SWG was my first MMORPG, and while it did have all of the problems mentioned above, not the least of which was total lack of Star Wars content, it was nevertheless very immersive.

    In a world of infinite time and money sure, Raph’s approach would be the way to do things. But almost everyone games for entertainment’s sake…. I need a finished product at the end of the day. Most gamers need a finished product at the end of the day.

    In 99% of cases, this is absolutely true. The difference with SWG is, it’s Star Wars. To many people, especially many of the people excited about the game since before launch, Star Wars Galaxies wasn’t just supposed to be a game, it was their opportunity to live their dream. Raph talks frequently about lofty goals and high expectations during initial development that were never met, but quite honestly, I doubt any company could have met them in the time frame allotted. I know they went back and forth on a lot of design issues which cost them time, but Star Wars means so many different things to so many different people, it would have been a monumental effort to meet those expectations. The joy of being a gamer in this situation, at least to me, was the ongoing development. The fact that it may have never become a finished product WAS the draw.

    The framework was in place for people to have their own Star Wars fantasy, and to customize their experience based on their own interpretations. The skeleton was there. They needed to focus on adding the Star Wars elements, beyond dropping Stormtroopers in cities and sticking the “iconic” (God I hate that word now) characters in static, buried locations. Player-driven content is great, but Star Wars-driven content is vital. Which brings me to my last point…

    Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG.

    The only point I’ve ever heard players make in relation to this comment is that the developers seemed to spend far, far too much time balancing the game for 1 on 1 PvP battles. And everyone who yelled about this was right. Part of it was a flaw in design… putting so much focus on the BH vs Jedi aspect, just by creating that content, caused exactly the types of problems you’d expect. If the devs had only focused their time on fixing bugs and adding content, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel over and over and only pleasing a microcosm of their playerbase, those of us who had cancelled would still be there, and SWG might have at least approached Lineage’s numbers at this point.

24. PreCU FTW said on July 20th, 2006 at 8:04 am:

    Sir You Must be the president of SOE.

25. Mike said on July 20th, 2006 at 8:11 am:

    Interesting thread on SOE’s SWG board dealing with this very issue…

    Click here for your reading pleasure!

26. Mike G (Gla D'a'tir) said on July 20th, 2006 at 9:16 am:

    I started playing SWG when one of my friends had started playing and loved it (first half of 2004) I had a lot of fun at first just doing things on my own. After a while I helped start a guild and had a lot of fun playing with friends, some I even met in person. I played through to last month when my friends list finally stood empty, and the game just felt like a game and not a community. That was what was taken away with the diminishing of the entertainer professions. I met a lot of people just sitting in a Cantina getting rid of Battle Fatigue. I admit it was a pain in the butt, but in reetrospect, it was a pretty cool time out and seemed to make sense….after a week in the field, hit a bar for some downtime.
    The higher ups never seemed to understand that communication with the populace was not more important than meeting some deadline to correspond to a movie premier. I honestly believe that if SWG had been out AFTER the prequels were over, it would have been better because then we wouldn’t have some imaginary constraint like making sure Trials of Obiwan were out before SW3 made it to DVD. And when players say they didn’t like changes coming out, the higher ups acted like parents saying they know whats best for us. THAT is why SWG failed. Deadlines mattered more than providing a fun experience. I gave the NGE 6 months to convince me it was fine…. I had finally had enough because the feeling that players could help shape the direction of the game was gone when they decided Test Center was just for previews of upcoming publishes and not real testing….seeing as their internal testers did such an awesome job testing ToOW and NGE, I felt down was the only direction left to go in.

27. Raph said on July 20th, 2006 at 9:56 am:

    Interesting thread on SOE’s SWG board dealing with this very issue…

    Boy, Wepps really hates my guts. I take some comfort in the fact that he seems to continually get confused about what I actually said and did.

    I know they went back and forth on a lot of design issues which cost them time

    Actually, I don’t know that we did more so than most projects. Most things were removals.

    Would it have really hurt SOE and LucasArts to hold the release of SWG another six months to allow some of the things that were being pointed out during beta to be addressed?

    The answer to this is a definite “yes,” to the tune of millions of dollars on paper. You have to include not only the cost of ongoing development, but also the cost of slippage for things like booked marketing and the like, and most importantly, from an acconting point of view, it is was budgeted to come out in a given quarter, you have to account for all the revenue that was expected to appear in that quarter but didn’t. The missed projection would be a massive hole in any company’s financials.

    Granted, this is only a “paper” loss, but companies, and companies’ parents, take it very seriously.

28. damijin said on July 20th, 2006 at 11:41 am:

    Budget and time realities sound very

    Your new project is beyond concepts like those right?

    NEW FROM RAPH KOSTER IN 2007 2009 2013:
    THE METAVERSE KOSTERVERSE REAL WORLD.

29. Allen Sligar said on July 20th, 2006 at 12:33 pm:

    I have a feeling that over the next 5 years a lot of MMOs are going to fold within their first 2 years when they can’t duplicate WoW’s success.

    Are there expectations about releasing a game and duplicating WOW’s success(?) (by investors, by studios, by companies?) Im thinking there must be as much as Ive seen this sentiment in various places. Does this have any basis in reality? I dont think so, WOW while excellent in design benifitted as much from externalities having to do with rational choice and market timing as anything else (this is known to some as “luck” on when they released and how consumers make a choice to buy it). Duplicating WOW is unrealistic, you might as well launch your own search engine with the goal of “duplicating Google”……

    So you may be right, maybe a lot of games will fold, and a lot of good money will be thrown after bad money before market correction occurs.

30. Michael Chui said on July 20th, 2006 at 2:01 pm:

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t (pre-WoW) Blizzard famous for missing release dates due to extended betas and extra-rigorous launch? I don’t hear about that much anymore, but I have also heard that that’s why the Blizzard RTSes were so awesome. I still play WC3 every now and then.

    In any case, turning a game into a business is still frowned upon, in my book. Too bad no one reads said non-existent book.

31. Raph said on July 20th, 2006 at 8:05 pm:
    Henry says more.
32. Prokofy Neva said on July 20th, 2006 at 8:25 pm:

    >In a purely user-driven world, I’d agree with you. But in the case of a game system design, you wouldn’t want everyone voting on the rules anymore than you’d want an author to take votes on what happens in the next chapter. Part of why you are there is to be taken on the entertainment ride.

    Dude, that is like, so “old media”. We’re the ones writing the next chapter, not them. All they do is put out tablets to write on.

    I’m not on some “entertainment ride” (!), I’m the Tilt O’ Whirl guy myself. I thought you knew that.

33. Raph said on July 20th, 2006 at 9:05 pm:
    New media isn’t going to replace old media. And an awful lot of new media is accretions around a piece of old media, if you know what I mean.

    In other words, even if you yourself aren’t on the entertainment ride, a heck of a lot of people are. Most games cater to them.

34. Rik said on July 20th, 2006 at 10:46 pm:

    Duplicating WOW is unrealistic …

    Even more ironic is that most people trying to duplicate Blizard’s success seem to be doing it with a WoW-clone. As if you could reinvent the wheel and then sell it as if the old wheel wasn’t there anymore.

35. David said on July 21st, 2006 at 3:31 am:

    I’m of the opinion that to be successful, a game has to have a clear-cut vision and a well-developed setting. That has to come from the design team, the players can’t really create it for you. They can influence it, sure, but only by reacting to your initial vision.

    Where the players come in is when you start talking about mechanics and features. As a designer, your role is to provide a framework in addition to a setting. When the players see your framework, they’ll comment on it, make suggestions, point out possible problems. You can then revise the framework and repeat the process until it’s ready to go. The players aren’t designing for you (although some freaks like me might throw together huge posts suggesting systems on the forums), but they are a sounding board for your concepts, and they help you find things you might otherwise have missed.

    As far as setting goes, it’s important to remember that a lot of people come to a game expecting to play a game, not to have to make up a game to play. So providing lots of content to do is mandatory. But you should also provide players the tools to create their own content as well. Because eventually, your players will eat up all the content you’ve set in front of them. Players always move faster than designers can write, it’s like a universal law. However, as they do so, more and more of them will use the tools that you have provided to help create their own content. For example, if players are able to open up their own trading companies in your game and transport goods from one city to another, they’ll be more inclined to stick around after they’ve defeated the bandit king. Even more so if those cities are made up of players themselves and trade helps the various cities thrive and grow.

    Ideally every MMORPG should start off as a game early in the design process, and then become a virtual world by the end of it, through the addition of tools to allow players to create their own content after they’ve exhausted the game-generated content.

36. Mike said on July 21st, 2006 at 7:21 am:

    For me, a game that works best is one that has a very open world. An almost blank slate. In that world there should be some set rules on what a player can and can’t do and a few game generated obsticles. Players should then be given some tools to create their own competition. The basic physics of the world combined with the few existing obsticles will give the players some ideas about what the competitions can be and then you set us loose.

    That is what we had with SWG when it launched. That is what was taken away over time as more and more changes were thrown at the game to drive it in a direction that changed the open world into a maze where you get cheese at the end.

    Now, I know a lot of people did not like that kind of game where content came from players creating their own competitions. Those folks were the first to leave in the first months of the game, but the ones I saw leave after were the ones who had their unique competitions completely dumbed down and or removed. Entire ways of playing started when the game was in beta ceased to be viable by changes that were unannounced and unwanted by thousands of happy players.

    With an open ended game like that when players are clamoring for more content we don’t mean “give us a maze we can finish one time!” We are asking for more tools to help us with the competitions we have found for ourselves.

    If you look at SWG now and compare it to the one we had at launch you’ll clearly see it has no where near the content it had at launch even though all they have been doing for the past year is adding in “quests”.

    Here is what I and many of my friends wanted from the developers….

    We wanted a more accurate timeline. We wanted our PvP tools to work properly and to be balanced so that our battles could have fair results. We wanted our crafting to be retooled so that our items wouldn’t create unfair game play. We wanted our entertainer tools to work correctly. We wanted new tools to be added that gave us more ways to compete against each other fairly.

    Instead, we had our tools removed. We had developers tell us that our content sucked and had to be removed. We had SOE and LA executives call us idiots who don’t like to read and can’t figure out how to play with a game as open as we had. We had our characters and their tools completely changed against our wants. We had our community flushed down the toilet patch by patch.

37. Mnemon said on July 21st, 2006 at 9:38 am:

    Personally, I enjoyed SWG very much up until the NGE and always appreciated the community aspect being pushed by the developers. For many of us SWG vets (especially those that hadn’t played another MMO before SWG) community is what is lacking on almost every other MMO title out there now (WoW especially).

    With that said, I always disagreed with two things …

    1 - Listening to the community is fine. And a great gesture. But some where along the road there needed to be some kind of mission, goal or strategy outlined to keep things in perspective. This was rarely done and when we did get grand road maps from the developers, things would inevitably change drastically.

    There are two great examples of this lacking. The first was Jedi. Over several months jedi went from “powerful characters nobody knew how to get” to “here’s a holocron so jedi aren’t secret any more” to “we’re getting rid of holocrons and making a new system - more people will get jedi now so they can’t be as powerful” to “we’re changing all of combat and now jedi are going to be very easy to get, and even less powerful” to “sign up - get a jedi - but you’re just like everybody else.”

    The second was the combat system. Many liked the original system flaws and all and were just waiting for things to be balanced out. Again the goals, ideas and principles of this balancing was every shifting. First, it was just fixing stuff. Then they got a little more involved with some professions being completely revamped. Then we ended up getting information about what became the Combat Upgrade - a very different system that took just about everything from the old system and threw it out the door. Then they were going to rebalance the CU elements (squad leader, CH, Ranger, etc.) until finally we had the NGE thrown at us. I haven’t played since the NGE came out (I cancelled the night it was announced), but it sounds ilke more of the same. Now there’s hotkey specials again. Tab targeting. Going to an expertise system (basically just a nerf - taking a professions skills and then letting you pick which 80 percent you want back). And i’m sure there’ll be more and more.

    You can make similar claims about a ton of other elements in the game from crafting to even the planets themselves (going from wide open terrains to Kashyyk which is basically a series of instances).

    In all of these cases not having even a fundamental, unchangable theory and mission to hang your hat on was a disservice to the game and the community. While MMOs are about change, you need at least SOMETHING that defines what you’re doing that players can hold constant.

    2 - While wanting to interact with the community is certainly admirable, those who regularly post on the official forums aren’t “the community.” The community is instead those people actually playing in the game.

    People who spend a lot of time in the forums are usually at the extreme ends of the bell curve. The vocal minority if you will. And the aren’t always an accurate cross-section of your player base because of this.

    As a result, forum posters reputations didn’t always mesh with their reputation in game. This was especially true on profession and other boards where you could have guys playing Eddie Haskell - playing nicey nice in front of the devs but total tools in game.

    There’s one great example of this going very horribly wrong. Before the CU a long time Jedi Correspondent stepped down and another was picked from a pool of applicants. Now if you looked at what he had posted in the forums over the course of several months he looked like a good enough selection - level headed, maybe even smart, a jedi advocate, etc.

    The only problem was he was a well known ringleader of “fight clubs” on his server and those who played with him general considered him the ipitomy of everything wrong with jedi in the game (for those of you who aren’t SWG heads, fight clubs were basically getting jedi together to kill each other for experience, cirumventing a ranking system and letting them achieve high levels in a jedi ranking system).

    To have a community between developers and gamers, and to have it work, you need to figure out a way to have those in the actual game world being the ones accounted for, not the fringe players in the forums.

    IMO having developers in the game is a great thing anyway. While playing SWG it became clear again and again that many of the developers just had no idea how we were actually playing the game they were designing.

38. Michael Chui said on July 21st, 2006 at 10:09 am:

    although some freaks like me might throw together huge posts suggesting systems on the forums

    Come now. The proper term is “rarity”. You haven’t sunk to my level yet, though: I created a Livejournal for the express purpose of designing a major system for the game I play. It’s only half-done, but it’s there. =P

39. David said on July 21st, 2006 at 10:32 am:

    Come now. The proper term is “rarity”. You haven’t sunk to my level yet, though: I created a Livejournal for the express purpose of designing a major system for the game I play. It’s only half-done, but it’s there. =P

    I’m no quite that organized but I have come close sometimes I keep an old guild website active that I occasionally come back and dump various ideas and systems on. Most of my posting gets done on the forums of games I currently play however.

    Here’s my latest major thread if anyone is bored (and yes, it’s SWG, though that is only one of several now).

40. Iakimo said on July 21st, 2006 at 3:20 pm:

    Actually, Mnemon, it wasn’t the Jedi correspondent that was the fight clubber. SonGouki stuck with his post for a long time, and didn’t throw in the towel until the NGE went live. The correspondent in question was in charge of a different section, and… well, let’s just say I know who you have in mind. But SonG. was one of the finest correspondents the SWG Forum had in it’s pre-NGE heyday, spending endless hours posting highly-informative how-to guides explaining the Hidden Village’s Force Sensitive professions and the Jedi system.

41. Iakimo said on July 21st, 2006 at 4:19 pm:

    Raph, you and the dev team deserve the kudos you received for making the SWG Forum such a strong tool:

    How did the experiment work out? Well, bottom line in SWG’s case is that we certainly overpromised and underdelivered. But the curve for active community users was an exponential one aiming at the moon, and until the day when I had to go out there and tell them that the game was being released, they were working with us — contentiously, but all pulling in one direction. And the result was that registrants to the game on the first weekend was exactly equal to the number of active community users, and the sales curve simply continued that trend over time.

    I sometimes wonder if some of the ideas I tossed into the mix wound up being seen by the devs and implemented, or were simply examples of parallel thinking, such as the implementation of cybernetic limbs (suggested in Feb. 2005 as part of a post I created suggesting enhancemepts to the Bounty Hunter profession prior to the Combat Upgrade) or the destruction of Restuss (one of the last things I suggested prior to my account expiring, as a way to get attention of/when the devs ever got the game to a state worth playing again). Probably parallel thinking, but the nature of the Forum does lend itself to the notion that a good idea from an average schmoe could come to a dev’s attention.

42. Michael Chui said on July 21st, 2006 at 6:41 pm:

    Probably parallel thinking

    There’s also the nature of idea spread. A friend of mine never expects his ideas to be accepted by the people he presents them to. Instead, he expects them to eventually come up with it on their own, after having him talk about them. While there’s no psychology I’m aware of that backs this up, I feel he’s hit on something and have worked to adopt that mindset. I often catch myself coming up with “original” thoughts that were first brought up in a conversation. (And I have a good memory, so I usually realize it soon after. But not always.)

    So I’d recommend that you don’t dwell on idea ownership. Just remember that your idea was a good one, and obviously so, since a reasonably similar one was implemented. Which is reason enough to continue.

43. Iakimo said on July 21st, 2006 at 9:20 pm:

    Heh… now if we can only make the technique 100 percent reliable, Michael Chui.

    (Iakimo closes his eyes and channels the thought, “BringBackCreatureHandlers… BringBackCreatureHandlers…Br…”)

    Actually, I’m grateful for this thread, Raph. I’ve been waiting for you to offer a peek behind the curtain and let us see some of the thought processes behind the push to Launch. The post about the profession lines and the decision to go with the “onion” structure as a last-minute fix was particularly illuminating. I’d always had nagging questions about certain professions, such as the entertainer clusters and the Scout/Ranger lines (such as, why didn’t the Rangers have any weapon certs? Makes more sense if it and the Entertainer line were originally slated to be much smaller at first). Makes me want to give Ultima Online a whirl, just to see how it’s asymmetrical profession structure works. Or is it now a ghost of it’s former self?

    I now have two questions for you: First: