AGC Rant Panel: 6 Devs Enter…er…6 Devs Leave. Dammit.
The AGC "MMO Rant Session" is traditionally, well, a rant session. A place to loosen ties (if game devs wore ties) and make with the yacking about what's wrong with the MMO industry. Yesterday's rant session sounds like it was a good one.
From the Gamespot article,
NCSoft's Scott Jennings on customer service:
"WOW just had a patch a few weeks ago," Jennings noted. "As usual, their patch distribution completely failed. That may be because their patch distribution system is best described as 'Let's make something so frustrating people will just host the damn patches for us.' [laughter, hollers from the audience] It's unacceptable. It amazes me that WOW's peer-to-peer distribution has become accepted practice. Why are you people putting up with it? Part of our core business as an MMO provider is providing the damn MMO."
and on in-game advertising:
[A new Acclaim project] will include in-game classified ads on the screen. They can be turned off, but players won't level up as quickly if they choose to play without them, a point that drew a chorus of boos from the assembled audience. [Jennings] also suggested facetiously embracing a "wonderland of consumerism," with Coca-Cola-sponsored magic swords, Kobalds [sic] corpses that hold Skittles, and a Jet Blue dragon to fly players around.
"When you totally disrespect your consumers like that, I can assure you of one thing: your project will fail," Jennings said. "And deservedly so."
Sony Online Entertainment's Lorin Jameson:
"I feel like in many ways, people are copying WoW, but they're learning the wrong lessons," Jameson said. "The problem is, from a feature set perspective, WoW is not an innovative game. It didn't do anything particularly new. The major innovation they did was they executed in a high quality fashion and released with a depth of quality content that was not broken."
Jameson said there was no other company that would have conceived of spending as much money making the game (he estimated it cost more than $50 million to produce), spending as much time in beta, or making the sort of substantial changes to the game Blizzard made during that extended testing.
"But that is the feature you need to copy," Jameson said. "I don't care about innovation. I would like us to execute well on our non-innovative games. We can copy games and many people are. But if we're going to copy games, we should copy them really well and make sure the product is of a really high quality."
Ultra Mega Games founder (and former Mythic producer) Matt Firor on shipping games that aren't ready:
…Mythic's decision to ship Dark Age of Camelot was made because the company had run out of money.
"It was an easy decision to make," Firor said. "We weren't thinking about some grand overarching scheme hoping we were sitting around a game development conference in five years and people love us. It was more like, 'We've got wives and kids to [feed], so we're going to ship the game and make some money."
My take:
Amber on customer service: Whoever thought distributing patches via Kazaa was a good idea clearly only considered the short term gains. Yeah, it saves on bandwidth, but it sure pisses your customers off. I have to wonder how much long the player community is going to tolerate this.
And speaking of customer service, when your game doesn't run on my machine, I shouldn't have to wait on hold for 30 minutes, or 24 hours for an email, every time you give me something new to try. Charge me an extra $2 for that month if I use customer support, I don't mind. Charge people who abuse the system more, that's fine too. But the current system is very, very broken across just about every game. Fix it.
Amber on in-game advertising: It's immersion breaking, and I hate it. I don't care if you make your game cheaper, or even free, I simply won't play your game if you treat me like a consumerist whore. And I sure as hell won't play your game if you penalize me for not wanting to watch ads while I play. I play games to get away from every square inch of the goddamned country being used to sell me something. I don't want it in my games. (And yes, I understand there's a whole demographic that doesn't mind ads in their games. That's fine, but target your game to that crowd. Trying to be all things to all communities is just going to spread your game too thin and wind up alienating players.)
Amber on copying WoW: Lorin's rant bears repeating: WoW doesn't succeed because it is revolutionary. It succeeds because it's a stable game with tons of content. Blizzard had the cash and brainpower to release their game when it was ready, and not a moment too soon. If you're going to copy Blizzard, copy that part.
Everquest 2 is another example of a game that isn't very revolutionary in terms of gameplay, but had a reasonably stable launch and a ton of content.
But if, like Mythic, you plan to run out of money before your game is ready to launch, there's a way to do it right. Those of us who played DAoC on day 1 know the meaning of the phrase "not enough content." We also know the meaning of the phrase "didn't we just fight a bunch of stuff that looks exactly like this bunch of stuff?" And yet we stuck with it, and had a damn good time doing it. Why? Because even though Mythic launched DAoC earlier than they should have, they took the time to focus on balance, gameplay, and stability first. It's no accident that DAoC had an incredibly successful and stable launch. They had a longer beta than most games, and when they realized they weren't going to be able to finish everything they wanted (anyone remember that each realm was supposed to have 2 major cities?), they dropped it and moved on to the important things. That's how you launch a game prematurely and still keep your players.
September 7th, 2006 at 10:38 am
re: in-game ads. I got outvoted. =(
September 7th, 2006 at 10:48 am
WoW uses bittorrent to patch. And that isn’t a bad thing, its actually a very good thing. You can get your patch WAY faster that way. I am downloading porn at 1200KB/s right now using bittorrent. The problem is bittorrent wasn’t as well known when WoW was made. Since then, consumer ISPs decided that their customers cannot use their internet connections for certain things, and throttle and/or filter bittorrent traffic. Your ISP is the problem, not WoW. They are claiming to give you internet access, and instead giving you limited access to just the protocols they would like you to use.
Blizzard should either make an effort to inform people that their ISPs are scamming them, and encourage and help their customers to file fraud charges against their ISPs, or they should give in and host the patches using something shitty like HTTP or http://FTP.
September 7th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Whether ISPs throttle Bittorrent or not isn’t really the issue. As Scott put it:
I pay roughly the same amount for my City of Heroes subscription as a WoW player pays Blizzard. Yet NCSoft sees to it that I can download my patches directly from them. Why can’t Blizzard?
September 7th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
My problem with Blizzard’s patch method is simple.. its broken. I have three computers I patch, 2 desktops and a laptop. I also bittorrent stuff on these computers. All my bittorrent programs work absolutely flawlessly with UPnP support and everything, fast downloads… Blizzard’s client always complains that I’m behind a firewall and chugs along at 1kbps. Wheee! 27 hours to patch! Of course I’m going to go somewhere else to get it… Blizzard just needs to take some of their WoW money and go buy one of these tiny bittorrent companies and steal their client.
September 7th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
even though I agree that Blizzard should be footing the bill for the patch bandwidth, I would like to see them push ISPs away from being able to throttle the bittorrent speeds for other things, ie linux ISOs, unlicensed fansubs, and patches for id games.
it really is scamming the customers and shouldn’t be tolerated.
September 8th, 2006 at 10:40 am
Does CoH still apply certain patches *after* you’ve logged off? I thought that was pretty clever. I need to dust off my empath, Dublin. Good times!
September 8th, 2006 at 10:40 am
“Why can’t Blizzard?”
They can, that was one of the options in my two options long list of options. Of course, they should still keep the torrent method as an option for those of us who have internet access.
They don’t do that because they want to make more money. They would need to cough up big bucks for hosting patches, because it gets massive traffic over a very short period of time, and then almost no traffic the rest of the time. Bean counters do not like this. Its quite possible that the Vivendi Universal bean counters won’t let them do this, since people are paying them for what they get now, why make less money for no reason? I think people need to get over the delusion that they are dealing with Blizzard, which does not exist, and realize they are dealing with a huge multinational media conglomerate. Game developers can’t make this choice, the management of a huge greedy corporation does. They choose more money instead of less money, this is not a suprise.
This is why I suggested they simply tell their users that its their ISPs fault. This doesn’t cost them money, so bean counters don’t care. Right now they just stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong. Getting those millions of customers to complain to their ISPs, and listing known good ISPs would probably solve the problem just as well, but is something they can actually do.
And Jason, if you have a firewall, then add a port redirect. Upnp is the dumbest thing ever, and nobody should support it. What good is a firewall that allows software to automatically bypass it?
September 8th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Syntax CoH still downloads large portions of upcoming pathes after play sessions. They tend to only do this for very large patches. After Issue 7 there was a very lagre fix for something or other that was broken by the patch. The fix was huge, but NCSoft was still able to get it to us in a timely manner.
September 8th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Because I’m lazy, and torrenting to one machine then copying it to the others requires too much effort. And using the port forwarding and switching it twice would be worse.
My point is, I don’t have a firewall. I have disabled all firewall stuff on my router because… I don’t need it. Since I’m not prone to opening emails I don’t know the sender of, nor following the internet surf into horrible websites, plus on top of that the fact I’ve been working with computers for twenty years, I don’t get spyware or viruses or any of that junk. I don’t need a firewall. My point is, I’m not behind a firewall (everything is disabled but the routing to share the IP from my ISP), but Blizzards crappy program always says I am and doesn’t work.
September 8th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Off-topic:
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but a firewall doesn’t help in either of these situations. Once you click on an unknown email, it’s already past your firewall. And the same goes for clicking on horrible websites. Kudos to you for being clueful about not clicking on bad emails/websites, but it doesn’t alleviate the need for a firewall.
What a firewall does for you, is prevent others from hitting your computer from the outside. If you have a more advanced firewall, it will also stop any malware on your internal network from getting out, but most consumer level firewalls only stop traffic from coming in from the internet. If you’re running Windows without a firewall, you’re a ticking timebomb just waiting for someone to exploit a hole that Microsoft’s known about for months but won’t actually fix it until enough of you who aren’t running firewalls are nailed.
Up until a few months ago, I owned and managed an ISP for about 8 years. I always recommended to even my most clueful users the use of a personal firewall (Zonealarm is a personal favorite because it’s easy to manage and mostly invisible to typical users). I consider myself *very* technically savvy, but I run Zonealarm on my Windows client at home.
On the topic of ISP’s throttling Kazaa and other filesharing traffic, there is only a small amount of truth to this. Yes, some fringe ISPs still do it, but all of the big name ISPs do not. If your ISP is a mom and pop operation run by people who are either greedy or incompetent, then yeah, throttling might be a problem for you. Otherwise, throttling is not the problem. Blizzard’s broken client is the problem.
September 8th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
I was setting up a mail server last week. Wasn’t even attached to a domain, though the SMTP port was open. I’d set it to only send mails from our LAN, which was a good thing, because I was still setting it up when I noticed that someone had already found the open port and was attempting to send spam through it - blocked because it came from the outside.
The Internet is a hostile place. Firewalls are a good idea.
September 9th, 2006 at 2:51 am
Hostile the internet may be, doesn’t change the fact that I’ve never had any problems on it. Since I don’t use port forwarding, any incoming attacks are going to attack my router. And since I haven’t heard of anyone being able to install and run software on Linksys routers from the outside (I’ve got remote admin turned off anyway), I’m safe. Port forwarding is actually a bad idea because it allows anything on that port to get directly to your PC, so you end up needing a firewall to protect you from the holes you poked in your firewall.
Firewalls are a great idea for businesses… home users, only need one if they insist on connecting their PC directly to the internet.
September 11th, 2006 at 6:05 am
Steve Jackson during the remarks and Q&A stood up from the first row, looked at the audience, and echoed the lack of innovation comments. But funny enough, no one took on Lum or pointed out that MattF was contradicting the panel in his rant.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:30 am
“My point is, I’m not behind a firewall (everything is disabled but the routing to share the IP from my ISP), but Blizzards crappy program always says I am and doesn’t work.”
Yes you are. Everything between the internet and you is blocked. You don’t even have routable IP address, so there is no way that anything on the internet can talk to you. Routers just route, you are using NAT, which is more than just routing. You *must* have a port forwarded to your windows machine in order for anything to initiate a connection to your windows machine. Upnp just makes it so software can automatically forward those ports for you.
If you forward the port permanently, it will have no effect unless something is listening on that port. And then, it will only be a problem if whatever is listening has a remote exploit. When you are not patching, nothing will be listening, so it doesn’t matter. If you use upnp, then you have no security at all, since any software can forward any ports it wants whenever it wants.
“On the topic of ISP’s throttling Kazaa and other filesharing traffic, there is only a small amount of truth to this. Yes, some fringe ISPs still do it, but all of the big name ISPs do not. If your ISP is a mom and pop operation run by people who are either greedy or incompetent, then yeah, throttling might be a problem for you. Otherwise, throttling is not the problem. Blizzard’s broken client is the problem.”
You might want to hop in your delorian and come to 2006 where the rest of us are. Almost all cable providers throttle bittorrent (in north america). Many big DSL providers do too. The mom and pop shops are the ones you want, they can’t afford tens of thousands of dollars for devices to inspect all their traffic for bittorrent and throttle it, so they just enforce their GB/month limit like they should (some don’t even do that). Check out an ISP discussion forum sometime, the big guys are the ones driving this nonsense, because they can get away with it since alot of people have no other options besides dial up.
September 11th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
From the inside, yeah… but since I’m not prone to running software I don’t understand, its not like hackers are out there opening ports to my computer willy-nilly. They’d have to do it from the inside, which they can’t do, because they are on the outside.
September 12th, 2006 at 10:08 am
“I’m not prone to running software I don’t understand”
Coming from someone running windows, I can only assume this is meant to be funny. Do you seriously whip out your disassembler and debugger and examine every executable and dll in a safe VM before you run anything? You run software that you don’t understand every time you use your computer. You could read a forum or blog with XSS vulnerabilities (not very rare sadly) and have someone open up your firewall for you through a browser exploit. And if you didn’t run anything you didn’t trust, you wouldn’t be worried about forwarding ports to your windows machine would you?