Eating Bees

Last Column (For Now) At MMORPG

Jun 29 2012

The last column for awhile is up. Not that I wasn’t allowed to keep writing them, I just had a feeling that I wouldn’t have the bandwidth for the column.

It’s nice to be right occasionally. The last thing I have is bandwidth, but I could not be happier. Thanks to those of you lurking around the edges – it’s like singing in a concert with an audience full of strangers, and then noticing that the second row is full of your friends.

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But While I’m Between Jobs

Jun 18 2012

I did promise to give the brief version of “what happened” at the last gig. Let’s see if I can manage “brief” for the first time in my life.

Unfortunately for my more gossip-oriented readers, there aren’t really any really juicy details worth sharing. It came down to bad planning, inexperience, and bad luck.

Here are some general things that apply to lots of companies.

- If I’m going to be one of the most experienced people on the team, and the investors don’t think they need to meet with me before I’m hired, and after I’m hired they don’t ask what I think of the budget or the schedule, I’m going to need to know what their background in games is.

- No, really, “played lots of games” is not an asset in any role except design, and even then, it’s an asset, not a sine qua non.

- You’d think I’d know this one by now, being as it has now bitten me in the unspeakables four times, but… if anyone tells me that I’m not allowed to talk to the Extremely Sensitive [major figure], there are shenanigans afoot and it’s going to end in tears. My tears.

- Third party tools are for prototyping and demo building. Not MMO production. Anyone claiming otherwise needs to show me a shipped product or an entire team of programmers. Preferably both.

- Hard work isn’t enough unless it’s focused by an experienced project manager with solid goals and a long range view.

Odds and ends specific to the gig in question: Some key hires (project manager, server programmer) were just made too late in the game to make the kind of progress we needed to make in order to get something playable in front of… anyone, really.

(Not that hiring the project manager earlier would have been a guarantee. A project manager with ten years of experience herding MMO cats and an empty suit who’s been failing upwards for ten years? They look exactly the same from the outside. You just can’t know which is which until you’ve stood in knee deep, er, mud with one of them. I say with gratitude and pride that at my last gig, I got to work with one of the best MMO leaders ever…who was never officially announced due to coming on just a few months before the end. Someday I will be able to thank this person publicly, with trumpets and bells.)

The concept was awesome enough that if we could have gotten something playable in front of y’all, I think we could have generated enough excitement to land more investment. As it was, though, we never managed to get the (third party) patcher to work, on top of other ground-level issues.

Finally, quite aside from the other issues, luck played a role. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Everything that worked wonderfully on the internal server would just fall apart when exposed to air. A working patch would stop working at the exact moment when we needed things to go smoothly. I’d be literally mid-sentence announcing something that had been stable for hours when it would crash. Man, I started taking that shit personally after awhile.

But I’d say, at the end of the day, what we mainly needed was more experience (and more willingness to leverage the experience we had, as opposed to wheel-inventing strategies). People point to Mythic as an example of a bunch of crazy kids making a dream come true, but as the saying goes, Mythic was an overnight success that was years in the making.

I came to that party relatively late, in mid-2001. The existing company had already made something like half a dozen games, one of which formed some of the underlying structure of DAOC. The team might not have had any AAA MMO experience (mainly because back then the only AAA MMOs were UO, AC, and EQ) but they had plenty of experience making multiplayer games for the PC. Mythic had some lucky breaks, some good timing, my guild leaders, and a market new enough that we were setting some of the expectations as opposed to the modern problem of trying to meet expectations…but even with all that, success had a lot to do with the team’s leadership and experience.

I believe the concept of Dominus was brilliant, and some of the people I was working with were truly gifted. No team could have tried harder, either. The support of the community was amazing to see and feel, and I think the ideas the community brought to the table would have augmented the design in a way that would have created one of the most phenomenal MMO experiences yet.

I guess that’s the worst of it, for me. The community really kicked ass. Even my ever-so-slightly cranky people were major contributors to a degree I have only rarely seen before. I knew, KNEW that the game was going to scratch a major itch for my favorite kind of player. It’s never fun to see a dream die, but this one was the hardest to let go.

May we all eventually meet again. Again.

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Dominus, and Other Things

May 31 2012

I sat down to write the “what the hell happened” post for my last gig three times this month.

The first time, I raised my hands to type and let them fall back into my lap. I had an MMORPG column due that same week, and in the intro, I said “My mentors over the years have taught me that you never draw to an inside straight, you never pee outside on a windy day, and you never write a post-mortem until the body is cold.”

Part of that is professional – you need distance to write up something that will be useful to other people. Part of that is personal – you have no perspective right after the disaster, and the things that inspire you to write when you’re still reeling may not be the things that really matter. Part of that is pure blind hope and optimism, two things that video game people always have in abundance. No one wants to write a post-mortem when there’s any chance of the project being revived or saved.

The second time I sat down to write a blog post, I typed out a bunch of paragraphs and realized they were totally unrelated. One of them was the beginning of a pretty good article on red flags and how to spot them. Another was just a rant on due diligence. Another looked related to due diligence, until I realized it was not about my last job but a job from years ago. I’m long since over it on a personal level, but the perpetrator of that disaster is still somehow acquiring venture capital and pissing it away while posting snotty little comments all over Facebook and LinkedIn about other people’s poor management. The fact that this slimeweasel is on his way to his Nth failure because he has the attention span of a fruit fly and the management acumen of a dog rooting through a litter box, when I know dozens of brilliant people with actual ideas and follow-through ability, and meanwhile VCs lap up his buzzword-laden powerpoints and never once do any research that might turn up an incredibly consistent pattern… well, it’s enraging, but it doesn’t have any place in a post-mortem of a game. Also, I’m getting old and these blood pressure spikes can’t be good for me.

The third time, I was finally ready. The words just starting coming. The problem was they didn’t stop, and I now have the rough draft of an ebook, not a blog post. Also, it’s less to do with Dominus than with everything I’ve learned in the last decade about how things go wrong.

Now I’m pondering what to do with it. On one hand, it’s good information. On the other hands, it’s all rather obvious truth. So, yeah, I’m still making up my mind.

I am still trying to come up with a short version for those of you who had faith in the game just because I did. I feel a huge responsibility to you, and I can’t thank you enough for coming along on the ride. I always want to know “what happened,” and telling you seems like the least I can do.

Funny, but a lot of what went wrong, I’m seeing echoed this week on a much larger scale. Maybe my book of obvious truth does need to be published!

30 responses so far

Take A Minute

May 27 2012

Just a quick note – the 3 PM minute tomorrow is kind of a big deal. My players who have served in the armed forces are very dear to me. The ones I’ve lost were brave and good and honorable, and they were a loss to everyone. Please remember them.

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The Thing About Writing For Pay

Apr 30 2012

…is that your own blog lies fallow when you do.

Whenever I have a halfway decent idea for a professional blog post, I’ve been saving it for MMORPG. Generally speaking I’ve been dumping a lot of words into various projects for clients and publishers, not to mention my own side projects. I’m just wrung dry of complete sentences by the time I remember the blog. But I’m still alive.

Oh, and I approved a medium sized backlog of comments. The notification setting was borked and I didn’t realize people had been posting. Hi, TERA people!

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Things I Should Not Have To Explain

Apr 09 2012

As a community person, you will pose for photos with many, many players. After awhile, you grow weary of a simple smile. You think, hey, I’ll spice this up with a gesture.

Peace sign, fine.

The sign for “I love you” is also fine. A little girly, but fine.

Devil horns are okay if you’re on a PVP game.

Heck, if you can pull it off, go for that Hawaiian pinky and thumb thing. Mind you, that works better on video; in a still frame it looks like you’re saying “Call me, baby.” But hey, knock yourself out.

In general it helps to remember that the picture will be taken out of context. Once I made a W for a picture while hugging a player flashing an E. Gang signs? No. I was from the west end of a white bread suburb, and the player was from the east end. One of those funny coincidences, that’s all. But anyone just seeing the image might not realize the people in the picture had the same hometown. A silly, harmless picture? Sure. But community managers aren’t private citizens when they’re at a player event, and need to remember that the context, mood, and tone of the photo won’t be visible to third parties.

I’m still sad that I have to say this next part. When you are posing for pictures, do not under any circumstances use your thumb to hold down your ring finger, or you will be in every sig file known to mankind with bitter captions like “What [Company] Really Wants To Do To Us.” You will be mocked and you will deserve it. Jeez. There’s forgetting that the context will evaporate, and there’s just too stupid to live.

If you’re not pre-broken by a life spent online, you might not know what this sign means. I sincerely apologize for implying you’re too stupid to live when you’re actually in an enviable state of innocence.

So, seriously, if you don’t know what a sign means, don’t do it.

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Beware of Hotel California

Apr 04 2012

When someone posts a long list of “goodies” that their company provides, don’t be jealous. If you get an offer from that company, make sure the money is awesome. I mean, take your usual salary and add twenty grand.

Why? Why would I be warning you away from a company that feeds you three meals a day, free snacks, free drinks, kickball tournaments during lunch, backcountry camping trips on weekends, movie nights, make your own sundae bars, and gives every employee an iPhone AND an iPad?

Two reasons. One, who’s paying for all that stuff? The answer isn’t the company – it’s you. You’re paying for it. Maybe not you-you if you’re in management, but someone’s paying for it, and it’s probably one of the hundreds of “contract” workers who is eating a crap cupcake and pretending to like it in hopes of being hired full time.

But there may be exceptions. Maybe everyone at the company is a fairly-paid, full-time salaried employee with excellent benefits and a golden parachute. Awesome! That means this other reason applies.

Welcome to the Hotel California, where you can check out any time you like. You can just… never leave.

All that stuff is there to distract you from insane, impossible hours and expectations. They’ve transferred all the social life stuff normal people expect (and need, in order to recharge and function creatively and efficiently) inside the company walls to hide from you the fact that you’re always at work. If your boss is bowling with you and treating you to drinks, you won’t notice that your boss knows where you are 24/7. The free gadgets come with the expectation that no matter where you are or what time it is, you will answer work email and phone calls. And frankly, it’s done to give you the feeling that you OWE them more than just your best efforts during the work day. Don’t take vacations, don’t take sick days, and definitely don’t create anything outside the company, because gosh darn it, they’ve given you so much.

Sometimes these jobs are still awesome. You’ll meet great people. You’ll make money. You’ll have a hell of a lot of fun. Just don’t lose that job, because you’ll realize too late that it was your whole life and now you’re starting over in every possible way – professionally, socially, and personally.

TANSTAAFL.

18 responses so far

Can’t Have It Both Ways

Mar 20 2012

I touched on this topic in my last column for MMORPG (the which came across as comedy, I hope, but I meant every word), but this morning I’ve read two stories where fairly large companies were just Not Getting It. So I thought I’d growl a little more.

At MMORPG, I said: “Some are very casual, and take a “we’re all just players together” approach. Others are very formal, with a top down approach. That’s not the same as bad communication, mind you. It’s really an issue of tone. I tell clients and employers that they can choose whatever tone they want, and that there are pros and cons to both. The only bad choice is to try and blend the two.”

The reason it’s a bad choice is because you can’t have it both ways. You’re screwing with people’s expectations when you do that, and that goes to the heart of what good community management is all about.

The top-down communication style is just that, a style. You can have very good communication with that style, with regular (predictable) updates and lots of accurate and timely information. You don’t build a lot of relationships that way, and some players (especially those trained by other companies to feel entitled to more direct involvement) will hate you. Not to put TOO fine a point on that, but… so? Most players have relationships with their families, their friends, and their cats. They don’t want one with you, and they think the people who do are weird. As long as you communicate clearly, often, and with basic respect for their intelligence, most players will just accept it as how you do business.

And when you say “here is the decision we’ve made, the end,” people will for the most part accept it. Unless it’s really stupid, in which case they’ll leave – but without the same levels of argument and internet drama as a more involved community.

So, yeah, I see the advantages to the top down approach. I see why managers, particularly the autocratic types, adore it. I just don’t like it. It goes contrary to my entire philosophy of community building, which is focused on relationship building.

Most players aren’t looking for a relationship, and as I’ve said before, my duty to them is to keep from screwing up my game to cater to the vocal minority. The players who DO want to feel like they’re part of things are influencers and evangelizers. This is why my style tends to take me to startups. Without a pile of hundred dollar bills filling my spare Olympic swimming pool to fund my outreach campaign, the company needs the connections to these key customers.

I also believe that a virtual world is not a product in the sense that a single player game is a product. It’s an experience, one shaped largely by the community. The relationships I build aren’t just between the company and the players, but between the players themselves. Without a sense of investment, people play an MMO and drift away. Relationships equal retention.

But the downside is the sense of personal investment leads people to want more decision making authority than they have. At the end of the day, a small handful of people make the decisions. At a company that values their community relationships, I’m usually consulted… but I’ve never been the one to make the final call. I tell employers they need to make decisions based on community, CS, and metrics (“what people are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they are doing”).

Anyway, a community that feels invested is much more prone to uproar than a community that is used to being told what they’re going to get. If you want the good things about relationship-based community management, you accept the inevitable uproar and you find ways to make that work in your favor (hint – lots of energy to be harnessed, there).

If you emphasize the community building, or give the impression that the community is central to your strategy, you have no right to expect that community to roll over and accept your pronouncements – and you write your announcements with a lot of thought put into the tone.

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