I did sound kind of formal and nervous in the first one, didn’t I. So I reverted to my actual tone in this one. The seven of you give awesome feedback 
It was hard to not go off on a tangent about leaderboards, and how the original Camelot leaderboards were pretty much entirely Scott Jennings going rogue and me going, “Ooh! Ooh! What about this?” and Scott saying please stop touching stuff on my desk.
Also, we crashed the game servers because we were complete effing n00bs.
But we had fun.
That last point about designing/building a back door into the system from the start… there aren’t many things in my career that I’d like to do over, believe it or not, but that point I’d take back in time and scream DO THIS! at myself at three different jobs.
Quite incredible there is no “backdoor”. Was it not possible to just go and ask the database guy “hello could you please DELETE FROM leaderBoard WHERE login=cheaterName”? (In case you need it: http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_delete.asp)
Oh, and looking at previous posts, there seems to be plenty more than 7 readers here
Suggestion for a next article: something about fame and CM (“Fuck me I’m famous”?): how do you (not) use it, player reactions, etc. Post it anywhere you want, as soon as you link it here
I could not find your mail on this site (hopefully?) so I just posted the suggestion here.
I know the Camelot community is a bit different, but one of the things that many..many of them claim ‘damaged’ the RvR community was the I Remain Standing score. I only have forum anecdotes to go on, but it did spark a question for me. Is there a point where rankings and leaderboards /do/ have a detrimental effect on communities themselves?
Sanya speaking of community Woody had a nice one today
http://www.gucomics.com/comic/?cdate=20100408
Very nice read.
That’s the kind of thoughts I feel game designers don’t put enough in their games. I will speak at Login next month and the topic is “service design”, all those things that need to be design in the online experience that studio put together at the last minute without actually designing them and putting thoughts there…
Anyhow, article bookmarked, I will very likely point to it…
I subscribe to the theory that in an RvR game, such as DAoC, you actually detract from the stated goal of the game for one Realm to dominate the other(s) when you bring individual stats out for everyone to flex their epeens over.
Rank the guild/alliance/realm stats, but not the individual ones…If you want masses of people to play a game, stop catering to the ego’s of the top 10
Okay so this is weird but the buzz word this year at the community college where I teach (I was actually doing something in 2001 besides camping Fins, yay me) is also Retention. We call it the R word due to its pervasiveness. I’ll be damned if some of these items oddly apply, but we would never, ever, ever be allowed to incorporate them in quite this way, obviously. I know this is odd and tangential, but you’ve got me thinking about the college classroom experience as mmo… I have success with an ingrained reward system that is not just simply a grade, but is a social reward or “skill boost” from publicly acknowledging student who perform well in class, or allowing students who complete projects in advance some set of free points. As per the back door, yes, I have those that try to beat the system. I don’t think I would be able to get a ranking system through administration, but you’ve definitely got me thinking about it.
Okay, so yeah this has nothing to do with game design, but think about it–it kinda fits, huh? Anyway, sorry for the hijack. As you were.
Another lesson about stats and standing that I learned. It has to be written in stone and then backed with the power of certain death that production has to deliver information in one predefined format for use in posting stats, standings, etc. If they change things on their end, it’s their duty to make sure the data continues arriving in the correct format. Not the duty of the web team to figure out when something changes, and nobody has told them, then hunt down the right person and make changes on their end. Recipe for fail.