Related To Work I’m Doing

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But While I’m Between Jobs

Jun 18 2012 Published by Sanya Weathers under Related To Work I'm Doing, Tales

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.

5 responses so far

LFG? Call Me

Jul 26 2011 Published by Sanya Weathers under Related To Work I'm Doing

I just realized I didn’t post here, even though I posted this on Twitter, FB, and G+. Doh!

If you saw the tweet or the post, you know I’m looking for CSRs and that remote is okay for those spots. But there’s one position my company is hiring for that is not remote – and that’s the CS Manager/Director (which it is depends on the candidate ). I need someone who:

- Will relocate to Chandler, Arizona. (This is a suburb of Phoenix, which is basically like a normal city but in a place where it’s always sunny.)

- Has management experience in customer service. That means you managed a team of customer service people. A shift, a whole pit, a special strike team, whatever, that’s fine, but you actually need to have been someone’s boss.

- Has experience doing customer service in an MMO.***

Ideally, the management experience was in the CS pit of an MMO, but as long as you can check off both boxes, we want to talk to you.

Bonus points for (in no particular order):

- Being able to relocate immediately

- Being able to write clearly

- Having done MMO customer service for a PVP title

- Not secretly hoping to be a developer/designer

- Being fun under pressure

- A history of managing down, not up

- Experience managing remote employees (there are some great resumes coming in, but those people won’t be in AZ)

If you meet the top three criteria (and there is no number of bonus points that can be combined to substitute for one of the top three), please email me right away at my work addy – sanya AT pitchblackgames DOT com.

Just a few side notes – some of the resumes I’m getting are breaking my heart, because the senders (and I know many of you) are brilliant, thoughtful, interesting, and I know you could learn this job. I KNOW you could. But this is a startup MMO team. The initial CS group (the one that gets paid out of financing, not income) is going to be small and lean. Even the front liners are going to be contributing to policy writing and standard setting. At the outset, we can only use people who have done this before.

*I* do not count as having done this before in a CS sense. (Okay, I did, but it was 1999.) I have said many times that I could not have been a good community weenie without top flight CS people as colleagues, and so yeah, I’ve worked closely with some of the best. As such, I can write policy and do planning, but I am still not qualified to lead the team.

Also, related customer service experience is only relevant to a point. If you managed a call center, or ran a team doing live product support, I’d be excited – but I’d still want to see some evidence that you understand and respect the needs of MMO customers.

These customers are my players. I feel a responsibility for them that you cannot understand unless you also do community. The person who gets this job is going to be my colleague and partner in doing right by people.

***Lots of people have been asking if volunteer CS counts. Since that is how I started… okay, seriously. If you took tickets, answered appeals, handled low level problems, escalated big problems without making them worse, then yeah, it counts. If you hung around in a chat channel answering newbie questions, no, it doesn’t. Those things are related but not the same.

If you are applying for the boss job, and your only MMO experience is as a volunteer, your other CS experience would have to be pretty amazing. But yes, it would get you in.

18 responses so far

Somewhat Paraphrased

Jun 20 2011 Published by Sanya Weathers under Related To Work I'm Doing, Tales

The press release finally went out, and therefore it’s official. I’m working for an MMO startup called Pitchblack Games. I didn’t exactly let the cat out of the bag last week, but it was meowing loudly. I’m the admin on the FB page, the contact on the Twitter feed – heck, on my own Twitter, I had it in my bio for a couple days. I always switch my Twitter bio to a disclaimer whenever I’m under contract, and just spaced on the fact that it was a SEKRIT.

So, to answer the usual “what made you take this job” question, I thought I would post a paraphrased version of the phone call I got from Pitchblack:

Them: We were wondering if you’d be interested in working with us.

Me: Great! So what can I do for you?

Them: (request for information)

Me: (standard explanation of what I can do, what I love to do, what I want to do)

Them: (sales pitch about company, word “amazing” crops up more often than is really normal)

Me: (trying to repress cynicism after five years of hearing this kind of thing and failing)

Them: (sincere description of the team and the game they’re making)

Me: (getting flashbacks to another startup I loved) So… what’s the idea behind the game?

Them: A three faction PVP MMO. In space.

Me: (The flashbacks are getting stronger, plus bonus points for sci-fi) Really?

Them: Earth was invaded by an overwhelmingly strong alien race, the Rodon, and humanity only survived because the alien race that kind of sort of created the Rodon intervened. Those guys, the Salent, are playing a very deep game. Anyway, there’s one element in the whole galaxy required for technical advancement, inventions, good gear, defense, and other stuff that players invent and make, and it’s mostly found on one planet called Dominus. The faction that controls Dominus has a major advantage.

Me: (Whoa.) Anything else?

Them: (List of things on which a big budget project simply can’t take a chance.)

Me: (weakly trying to be cool) That’s all?

Them: Well, there are jetpacks.

28 responses so far

Indie Development

Jun 07 2011 Published by Sanya Weathers under Just Thinking, Related To Work I'm Doing

When discussing a topic, it’s helpful if everyone agrees on definitions for key concepts at the start. The problem with a definition comes when the resident smartass finds an example that perfectly meets the definition but violates the spirit of the discussion.

This, by the way, is why some engineers hate talking to those of us who majored in the fuzzier subjects. We’re slippery. We can change an entire conversation with a single adjective. A noun is a noun until we use it as a verb. A word can mean its definition or its exact opposite. We can take something that should be binary, either on or off, something or nothing, and warp it with sarcasm and context and inflection and holy crap, how can we talk to you when we don’t even know what you’re saying!?

If it’s any comfort, engineers, we drive you crazy but you frighten us. People are all about optimism and false predictions and rationalizing. The human brain may be a computer, but it’s stewing in a bath of hormones and performs differently depending on the last substance consumed. Using that squishy system to interface with machine logic defies reason, and makes me suspect some kind of cyborg implant is involved. An implant you only get in engineering school.

This is why engineers who write novels will eventually rule the world.

Anyway, trying to discuss indie game development always seems to end up at an impasse because we can’t communicate what it means. The problem is the word “indie,” short for “independent,” meaning “stands alone without support.” That definition has few of the connotations of “indie” development, even though they’re the same word.

This is where I start sympathizing with engineers.

When I say indie, *I* mean:

No parent studio – that means no game resources except what is within the company itself.
No big budget – lots of money means you can hire outsourcers, consultants, temps, and PR to simulate the resources of a big company. You can also have endless amounts of time to tinker and polish. A real indie doesn’t have that kind of cash.
Small – A hundred people is not indie. When you’re at a point where you need a full time HR manager, welcome to the establishment, man.
No hyperspecialization – if you have someone on staff who can spend their days monitoring third party websites and nothing else, you are not indie.

Notice I said nothing about quality. Being indie is not a free pass to suck. But an indie project does need help from the community, if not in money (a la Kickstarter) then in time.

If you can fog a mirror, you’ve figured out that this is a communication challenge I’m facing right now. I’ve faced it before, but ten years ago, no one expected much from an MMO that had a budget, let alone an MMO from a company no one had heard of. I’ve got some ideas, but I could use more. If you’ve worked on a true indie, or if you have something to add/subtract from my definitions, please toss something into the comments.

19 responses so far

Where I Want To Be

May 31 2011 Published by Sanya Weathers under Just Thinking, Related To Work I'm Doing

As the seven of you know, I’m a show tunes junkie. Love ‘em. One of my favorite soundtracks is a show called Chess. You pretty much have to have personal memories of the Cold War to even get the show, and it doesn’t hurt to have some appreciation for the musical stylings of ABBA, since those dudes wrote the show. Aaaaaanyway, there’s a line from the show that goes “Now I’m where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven’t won at all.” I felt like that a few years ago, sitting at basically the highest point a community weenie can go without switching to production or marketing. I was finally a real director with a great team, and I was doing important stuff and invited to important meetings. (Oh, god, the meetings.) Heck, I was even important enough to bribe with sample packages of swag.

It wasn’t as much fun as I had thought it would be. And it… ended.

The last couple years have been quite a ride. I enjoy consulting, and setting up communities, and I even like writing white papers. But thanks to the economy going tits up, the consulting pickings have grown slim, unless you’re willing to gladhand and live on the road in order to get those pickings.

That was even less fun than I thought it would be, and I already had that pegged as “less fun than sporking out my own eyes.”

Fortunately, I’ve really been having fun at Metaverse, which has given me a variety of things to do. But the absolute most fun I’ve had in… oh, more than five years, at least… has been a plain old forum gig.

I had one of those falling off the toilet moments, and realized I need the equivalent of plutonium in order to function. I need a few hundred crazed MMO fans to interact with, inform, organize, and mock with lolcats. I have always known that I recharge my energy for this job by attending cons, player gatherings, and tradeshows. I just didn’t know how miserable I really was without that player interaction.

I also realized that I want to stay with MMOs. Real ones. I’ve got a couple of “social media” games under my belt, and I did the sports thing for awhile, but while those players are great, there’s just nothing like an old school MMO for attracting, well, my kind of nerd. I make D&D jokes…from experience. I have Magic cards. I can quote ad nauseum from Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Spaceballs, and Princess Bride. There are more than two thousand books in my house, and I’ve worn out more library cards than I have credit cards. I have six alts in LOTRO, five of which were created so I wouldn’t have to “waste” craft materials and recipes. I wept over Challenger and Columbia. That’s who *I* am, and for better and usually for worse, I’m probably not capable of changing.

All seven of you, and the three lurkers, nodded in recognition at nearly every point. Maybe you don’t match me exactly, but I’ll bet you’ve still got painted miniatures in your closet and the lyrics to Code Monkey memorized.

Finally, I have come to realize that while my PVP skills get worse every year as my reflexes dull to the point that I can’t fend off attacks from elderly beagles, my favorite kind of communities are around games with a PVP element. I don’t know what it is, and it’s definitely not the calm reason and dulcet tones with which you people conduct your arguments, but I love the energy and passion and fun.

So, that’s the what. The where is more complicated, but all things being equal, I’m happier at a startup. I love the can-do spirit, the energy, the risk taking, and the excitement. I’m not a microspecialist, mainly, though goodness knows there are other issues. One of them, oddly, is that I’m not very good at coming up with ideas when I have a big budget. I’m actually more creative when I’ve got to make something work with nothing but rubber bands and Excel.

That’s where I want to be, and I think that’s where I’m going. I’m gonna have some news in a couple days. Knock wood for me.

28 responses so far

Derivative Trash

Sep 15 2010 Published by Sanya Weathers under Just Thinking, Related To Work I'm Doing

I put up a post on the Mod Squad blog, saying that it’s a hell of a lot easier to retain your own audience than to retain someone else’s. I thought the seven of you would get a kick out of knowing that the column grew out of a rant that I nearly put up on a message board. Here was the post I deleted:

Or maybe [this game] should go after its own customers. Going after the “WoW market” or the “EVE market” or anyone else’s “market” is self-limiting and the cause of a whole lot of derivative garbage.

What the hell does “the XYZ market” even mean in this context? If you think everyone playing an MMO… a virtual freaking WORLD… is there for the same reasons, or even the same reasons every day, you are either ignorant or… no, you’re just ignorant. Because assuming any market is homogeneous is ignorant, and flat out dangerous for those of us who are trying to create worlds.

We’re not going to get “X market” anyway. That group is happy playing X. We should be looking for people who want something different from X, or tired of X, or never really liked X in the first place but their guild leader did, because they are the only ones likely to come over to us and stay there. (If you’re here because you’re so happy playing X, well, you sure bitch a lot about it.) I can see including [design element], but only because there’s no point in reinventing the wheel, not because X has the final word on what makes a great game.

To your other suggestion, “X Game in Y setting” is stupid. People playing X like that particular setting. Just because the underlying code mechanics of a video game laser are similar to a video game crossbow doesn’t mean that you’re going to convince all the Renn Faire people that they’ve secretly been longing to fly spaceships. Go ahead. Come to the Maryland RennFest with me next weekend and ask the guy in the period-perfect Tudor outfit how he feels about the jackass in the Star Wars costume and Slave Leia companion.

You seven see why I deleted it, and moved it here. Someone asked me recently what I’ve learned in the last decade. Well, here it is. I’ve mainly learned that I can’t post the right thing in the wrong place.

22 responses so far

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