Editorial: On the Other Hand…

By Jeffrey Philipp | October 6, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: Editorials, online games

Hello again gaming world,

Today I feel like playing devil’s advocate to myself.

While I still maintain that we game players, as a group, aren’t capable of discerning our rears from that joint in the middle of our arm, I want to take some time to ruminate on how much slack developers really do deserve.

I’ve been toying about with Champions recently, even wrote me a fancy little review outlining some of the pros and cons of it. During that review I did happen to mention a rather game changing patch that went through on the first day. At the time I mentioned that I was slightly miffed, but that balance is important despite the overwhelming opinion of players that they should be allowed to steamroll content without working fingers.

Of course all that happened before another slightly more recent patch. The goal of this patch was to make some changes to the difficulty, namely making things slightly easier in response to a rather harsh increase in difficulty recently, as well as make some changes to the economy of the game. Now this would be all well and good if things had gone quite as planned. Needless to say they didn’t.

Now, having spent myself into a rather impressive hole financially educating myself in the finer points of code, I have at least a small degree of familiarity with the mercurial nature of the magical world of ones and zeroes. When it comes to programming bugs are inevitable, and the law of unintended consequences gets kicked into overdrive. It’s true these things happen, and they should be expected, and should obviously be fixed. That said there are things that one can do to avoid them.

One possible solution is to provide a testing environment for new changes. This can be either internal or provided in a limited fashion to your users. In the case of online games, the latter is actually a common solution. It is also worth noting that a public test environment was actually provided by the Cryptic team for the players to experiment with new changes.

There is only one caveat in making that solution useful, you actually have to pay attention to the data you’re getting out of it. Now my detective skills are hardly top notch, in fact I’m far too lazy to go searching for anything that’s even slightly occluded from the public view. Now with that said, when even I happen to be aware of some rather game breaking bugs, bugs that happen to have the direct opposite effect of what you’re intending, it stands to reason that these bugs might be worth noting.

Before I get too filled with hate and rage against developers there is one thing I have to say in thier defense. “Onyxia deep breaths more”. WoW vets will know exactly what I’m referring to by that, but for people who haven’t taken that particular plunge I shall explain. Players have a unique propensity to invent things and concoct wild theories in an effort to justify their vitriol. For that reason I understand the difficulty developers might have discerning signal from noise, but the last Champions patch proves that occasionally the players might be right.

Before I leap right into the recriminations I would also like to mention one other possibility that I, in my humble opinion, believe may be at play here. Despite the howling of the forums that “They obviously don’t pay attention to us”, and the fact that I find myself shaking my head and laughing at the sheer volume of game design experts with provably bad ideas claiming that they could easily “Fix your game for you”, I would like to posit that the people in charge of the game, who monitor and create and play it for a living, might perhaps have been aware of the very problem. The bug on the test server need not necessarily be the same bug that has been pushed to live even though they function nearly, or even exactly the same. Anyone familiar with the silliness of computers knows that bugs are finicky and sneaky. My personal theory is that the bug was identified, assigned, and thought to be fixed. But now we’re going to get to the root of the problem.

At the point something makes it to live, and your software has been introduced into the wild, it’s not just a matter of software engineering anymore. At that point, you’re dealing with PR. I’ll be honest and say that I’m much more forgiving than most about games, especially online ones, because of my education and lack of faith in the general populace. That said, I’m a member of a very small minority, and that group can’t be counted on for a huge amount of revenue, and as such damage control is hugely important. For that reason, testing is not just something that you should do, it’s something that you must do, on pain of death or bankruptcy.

In this case a patch was pushed through that was categorically incomplete, in that it did not function as advertised. As I said above, perhaps they thought they had caught and fixed the bugs, but in the end thinking that it’s done is not quite good enough when there’s any chance that it might not be finished. The only way to be sure that it is finished is to make sure you test EVERY change, like I said before, because your job isn’t only to make sure that it eventually works at this point, it’s also to make sure that you don’t put a great big dent in your reputation.

I’d be willing to wager that fully half of a games success can be attributed to the reputation of the team creating it. For that reason making sure that people don’t see the inner workings of your product is very important. It is also for that reason that some games continue to be successful while making unpleasant yet necessary changes, while others may flounder for making those very same changes. This is the sort of situation where one mistake can truly undo a whole product.

Moving away from the specific patch I’m going to say a few things about MMO PR and damage control in general. I think it’s safe to say that the communities of many online games are unforgiving in many ways. Beyond the unceasing hostility between the “fanbois” and “haters”, to use the vernacular, communities are not very forgiving of changes that reduce their power and abilities. If these changes are the best thing for the game, the flames usually burn themselves out before too long, but on the rare occasions that errors, either in judgement, communication, or coding occur developers can for the most part assume that the date such a patch is pushed live will be trotted out before them every time they make an unpleasant change.

In cases where errors are rare, I would call this an unfortunate side effect of a public with a high standard of quality, and this is a good thing. If we are unwilling to accept mediocre products then the average quality will remain high. In this situation all is well, and as it should be. There are rare occasions though, where regular errors are made and pushed with shocking regularity, and in these situations I do find myself siding, at least in theory, with the “haters”.