Mythic cuts four classes and four cities from Warhammer Online. Hellgate: London debuts to poor response. Pirates of the Burning Sea needed a better integration of its elements and some changes to pacing. Vanguard was released too early. Age of Conan has a bunch of bugs and its end game is not as stable as was hoped.
ALL these games had incredible fan euphoria leading up to their release. And those that have been released have all been hit with fan backlash because they didn’t live up to their dreams, and because these really incredibly complex pieces of software had bugs.
There has never been a piece of software shipped without bugs. Everyone always says about any software product — never buy the 1.0 version and never expect it to be bug free. Games are no different.
If we, the MMO players, want game companies to innovate, then we have to follow a couple of really easy rules.
Don’t believe the hype. It’s the marketing department’s JOB to hype a game to you, promise everything, say whatever they can think of to get you to buy the box. That’s their job. YOUR job is to ignore it. Unless the new MMO is your first, you likely have plenty of experience with the difference between hype and reality. Don’t get suckered in.
Never buy v1.0. Wait three months or so before buying a new MMO. Your play experience will be a lot better after they get the inevitable launch bugs out. Between launch and when you buy it, ignore the shrill screams of betrayal from the mega-fans who somehow thought that THIS particular million-line-of-code piece of software would be the first one in the world ever to be without serious bugs. Yeah, the PR hype machine will want you to wait in line and buy it at midnight, but you don’t get drawn in by that sort of manipulation, right?
Believe the developers. People in the game industry are probably making less money than you, but working longer hours, and unless they are executives or PR folk, likely getting almost no recognition. Even if a game is successful, they could still find themselves out on the street after their game is released because game development takes more people than game maintenance. Their reward for low pay and low job security is the chance that they may be part of creating a game that they would themselves love to play.
Believe in the game. If you really want Age of Conan to work, give Funcom the chance to put things right. Same for all the other games. If you were excited about the premise but disappointed in the execution, then stand by them and you will eventually get all you wanted. If you were shocked and dismayed that Mythic is cutting the scope for Warhammer Online, then simply wait until they patch the other four cities in before you play.
Innovation is painful and hardly ever rewarding for the developer. Usually, someone swoops in, takes all their best ideas and runs with them. But without innovators, all we ever get is the same old game. If you loved the game before release when it was all dreams, smoke and mirrors, than is it so hard to love it after, once you see it for real?
It’s no secret I am really looking forward to The Chronicles of Spellborn. I want that to be my “1 year” game — the game I play to the exclusion of any other MMO for a full year, good or bad. It will almost certainly not live up to its hype, and it hasn’t even HAD very much hype. Still, it won’t live up to it. It will be buggy. Major stuff won’t work. My class will be unbalanced and nerfed several times. Many quests won’t be completable. But I will pay for it and play it (assuming it even comes out in North America) because I believe in their vision.
Because players like you and me are part of the game’s team. We have to be the fanboys and fangirls for our games, even when, or especially when, they have bugs. It’s EASY to tear something down. You get no credit for me for trashing something. If you loved the game before launch, then love it after, warts and all, just like any relationship. Support the game and you will get the game you want, eventually. People who take glee in the misfortunes of Perpetual Entertainment or Sigil Games or Flagship Studios are really the lowest form of scum. All those people wanted to do was make the best game ever.
18 thoughts on “Fanboys, your game needs you.”
Comments are closed.
I had made a post before basing my AoC experiences off of the way I handle restaurants.
If I go in to that restaurant and I am quite pleased on that first visit, expect me to return.
But, all restaurants get the infamous “3 Strikes and you’re out” system.
I go in and eat, and say the food is good, but service is poor…ok strike one
I go in again, food is bad but service is good..ok…strike two
I go in again, and if either of those issues exists, strike three!
All that had to be done during those 3 strikes was to fix one of the problems…fix the service and serve me good food…simple. Then it would have reset to strike one.
AoC
Strike 1 – Trader bugged…no problem, as my initial visit was awesome. The taste was great
Strike 2 – Patch comes out, has some good stuff (you guys added grilled asparagus, yum), but now you broke a bunch more stuff (but my steak was not done right). But, hey you send me a letter stating we will so make it better (Manager apologizes, says the new menu items are coming, it will rock)
Strike 3 – These new “menu items” you promised are not quite ready…ok, I understand, but then you serve me a Steak, with some clumps of dirt on it (a ton of gamebreakers), and forgot my asparagus, and then rudely tell me too bad (delete any post on the forums, and then send a developer in who throws a hissy fit, and says they would prefer another forum and will ignore yours for the day)…But, the manager sends me a new letter saying that they felt the steak is great and that those new menu items should be out within a year!!
What would you do with that restaurant? Keep going?
I had a restaurant locally that was like that in real life…luckily after 6 months I went back and it was all better.
AoC sounds to me just like that restaurant. 6 months also sounds about right to maybe check them out again.
Well I don’t go to restaurants the day they open. Crowded, hard to get a seat, expectations are so high… I’d wait for awhile. I don’t mind waiting. I waited two months before I started EQ, even though I wanted to play so much. I waited a year with WoW. By the time I got to the games, they were in a lot better shape 🙂 In a year or so, I might try AoC. In two or three years, maybe WAR.
@Tipa
LoL…2 to 3 years for WAR?…so harsh. Have you played DAoC?
I will say this much, I was not disappointed over the box price for AoC. It was worth every penny. I got 89 hours of play for 30 days. That is considerably more than Halo 3 (beat main game in 9 hours), Gears of War (5 hours), etc.
For a single player game, AoC is top notch for levels 1-20, even a little more.
Cheers
Brilliant write-up Tipa! Honestly, this should be on the front page of Massively as well.
They have columnists for that 🙂 My job at Massively is much more fun — to find new games for players that they may not have heard of with all the news and noise about the big players, and to write about the news of the day so we’re the place people can go and know that they are getting all the worthwhile news written by people who love MMOs, as opposed to some game sites that cut and paste from press releases. I won’t name names. It’s obvious in any case. I love working for Massively so much 🙂
Excellent topic Tipa, I agree with everything you said here. I’m actually really enjoying AoC and standing by the game, amongst a deluge of negative posts. But then, I haven’t experienced that many problems with it.
Wow! Very nice post! I totally agree with you. If you’re a fan of a particular game then do what you can to help it improve.
Dont think I can agree with you on this one Tipa. If marketing is being deceptive and the people in charge are okay with complete BS then that’s not a game you want to buy period. Secondly, if everyone waited for several months before playing, the game will be in skeleton mode and the missing features wont ever be worked on because they’re not seeing the subscribing population needed to support the game. This pretty much means that someone (players) are being expected to pay and subscribe to an unfinished game and that’s not cool.
I’m a consumer not a benefactor. If you’ve promised something you can’t deliver, then you need to come clean like EA Mythic has with Warhammer. That’s called taking responsibility for your product. Now if you tell me these list of things aren’t going to be there although they were intended to at launch, then I, as the consumer, get to make an INFORMED choice. When they conceal the facts, then they are making the choice that I should buy something incomplete for full price. Companies that do that should not be rewarded with subscription dollars.
If you want to compare it to a relationship then you have to compare it to having met someone who lied about who and what they really are and under those circumstances you’re not obligated to support that person because they are not the person you thought they were. Besides which, I don’t pay for people – don’t buy them. I guess I don’t get why games are supposed to be above honoring the consumer relationship by providing what was being paid for the day it was purchased? I don’t expect perfect code. However, I also don’t expect whole feature sets missing, broken or nearly worthless at launch either.
These are games so they are about fun. However, the ones that cost money are about business not friendships. If I lie on my resume, show up at a job and can’t perform that job because I lied about my experience, I’m not entitled to that job. That job should go to a qualified person not me. This is no different. These companies have options before shipping a very buggy or incomplete game. Let them exercise some creative thoughts other than hype. The game could be sold initially at a reduced price, the subscription could be lowered until things settle down, they could offer a few unique in game rewards for the people who play while they fix it, etc. They have many options other than simply shipping it as is and at full price.
You wouldn’t buy the v1.0 of a spreadsheet or a word processor or a database or any other software product you expected to do valuable work. Why would anyone expect a game to be any better than Vista, an OS developed by one of the top software companies in the world for seven years and with an almost unlimited budget and thousands of people working on it?
Smart consumers never buy the first rev of anything. Look at, say, the iPhone. In a year they have added features and compatibility, a zillion apps and all sorts of stuff.
If people persist in wanting to be early adopters, then they should expect bugs and missing features and instead of bitching about what is inevitable, enjoy the game for what it is and support the devs as they finish making the game they wanted to make.
Every complex piece of software ships as a buggy mess, game or no game.
I don’t want to debate someone on their own blog but you’re talking as though the development company has no choices other than to ship it incomplete and at full price, when they have a zillion different options open to them other than settling for that route. Mythic just showed an option – take the stuff out and communicate it versus things like leaving it in and praying players don’t reach the content before it can be fixed. The decision now rests with the consumers who can decide if they still want to buy now or if they want to wait.
But why wouldn’t you buy version 1.0 of a spreadsheet? If you release a product, any product, and ask for money then the consumer has the right to expect that product to function correctly. Y’know, Microsoft recently released a Service Pack for one of their Beta products (the .Net framework), Funcom has twice released MMOs that are reported to be incomplete or badly tested, Vanguard was forced to release before it was ready – the list goes on. There seems to be attitude of using paying customers as bug-testers in the industry right now and it’s a shockingly bad thing to do. Why should the customer pay for the privilege of testing?
A quick look at the Funcom forums makes for interesting reading. It’s full of angry customers complaining about broken functionality and content, hardly the impression any game would want to give to it’s customers. And it’s not the first time that this company has released a game to such a critical mauling and any of you that were unfortunate enough to play Anarchy Online in it’s first few months probably still wake up in the night screaming :). I was one of those poor souls.
Software is complicated and the bigger games get the more likely it is that things will go wrong. No-one expects a game to be bug-free (and one of the first things I learned as a programmer was that there’s no such thing as bug-free software) but there’s a massive difference between an NPC appearing in the wrong place and whole sets of functionality missing from the final release.
I wouldn’t buy v1.0 of anything because I am a software engineer by trade, though currently doing web design work. EVERY product gets rushed out the door. Usually consumer software comes with an EULA that disclaims any fitness for the software to do any particular job and absolves them of all responsibility. Corporate software usually comes with a service plan and certain guarantees, but we don’t buy corporate software, right?
It’s not that the devs want to ship crap to their customers, it’s that they have no choice, they either need the money or need to make an important milestone. Even companies with infinite money, like Blizzard, have a point they cannot go beyond. They have to be able to forecast their revenue, and those dates for release can’t be “whenever”. They may say “whenever” to you and I, but internally, there is a date, count on it. And they will ship on that date.
And anyway, the whole point of the post wasn’t that games companies release buggy software. It was to trust the company’s vision, and trust them to fix their game after release and to give them the support and time they need to do that. Because all this “Oh, AoC is the best game EVER! I LOVE THE CONAN IP! EVERYONE ROCKS! GAME SO GOOD! MORE NIPPLESSSSSS!” and sudden “Oh, AoC is the worst game EVER! THEY RUINED THE CONAN IP! EVERYONE SUCKS! GAME SO AWFUL! WRU NIPPPPLLLLESSSSS!” just makes us MMO fans look like idiots, absolutely fickle people who believe that every game should cater entirely to them, and that there are vast conspiracies which are in reality just people trying to do the best game they can given the pressures of finishing a multi-year, multi-million-dollar multiuser, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of users, software development project before the company runs out of money and everyone loses their jobs.
Just think of all the MMOs Microsoft has pulled the plug on.
I’m in the telecommunications side of software development having come from other types of commercial release software. I know what happens between the dream, design, build, test, marketing and release. Our company went into a lull of feeling its own fame and got sloppy. We shipped stuff late and it wasn’t good quality. In the end, we paid for it – lost revenue, jobs, market share and plummeting stock prices. That is the cost of selling inferior products. Consumers will and do lash back, as they should.
No one wants to build crap. Most people want to feel pride in their work. I just can’t be okay with incomplete games being sold to consumers, when I’m a consumer of those games. Bug free is never an expectation but there is an appropriate and reasonable point between shipping everything as marketed and not saying what’s wrong and still shipping it. I agree that some gamers are flipping from one extreme to the other and that’s not good either. It’s more along the lines of throwing a fit over it and that’s not helpful constructive behavior.
I don’t worry so much about the avid gamer who is screaming now. They will pony up for the next big game regardless. However, if a casual gamer purchases and subs to a game like what I’m describing (incomplete, missing features on the box, serious bugs in core features) they are less likely to buy the next game. If/when that happens it doesn’t just hurt that one company it hurts the industry as a whole and that’s just not right.
I hope you’re not offended by the continued discourse. This is your blog so I want to respect that and I think this is the first time I’ve seriously disagreed with someone on their blog and bothered to comment. But since I read yours regularly I figured I’d chime in.
@saylah
“If you want to compare it to a relationship then you have to compare it to having met someone who lied about who and what they really are and under those circumstances you’re not obligated to support that person because they are not the person you thought they were.”
Wow, you put it so perfectly. Very wise words – it makes a lot of sense both in and out of context.
@Saylah — oh heck no, I love arguing with folks 🙂 I’ve made a lot of friends via violently disagreeing with them on their blogs 😛 Truly!
Cool. I’m all talked out on this one but glad to know you’re okay with the dialogue!
I’m a little late with my comment here (in Vegas last week for work), but I’m absolutely not worried about the Mythic announcements. The classes were cut because of player feedback, and I’m glad Mythic listened. The areas were cut because they were too ambitious, and they decided to go another route instead of trying to do too much at launch and have it stink.
I’d so much rather have a company doing this in beta, before launch, and being up front about it, instead of crossing their fingers and tossing out crap and claiming that they have more content than they really do.
The beta testing has been really tight, the best beta I’ve ever participated in (and I’ve been in lots). The gameplay is tight as well, they have a really good idea what they want to accomplish, and what they want players to experience.
I think their whole development process has been a balance between *everything* they’d dream of accomplishing, and what’s actually feasible. I think the cuts are a result of being honest about exactly how much they can release, in acceptable form, in the next few months. I wish more MMO’s evaluated their game this honestly, and I wish all MMO’s also had a plan that allows them alternatives when they decide a feature isn’t yet up to snuff.
Call me a fanboy if you want…I was a huge DAoC fan, and I think they’re taking everything that worked well in DAoC and distilling it into a focused MMO experience…but WAR is one MMO that I’ll be buying on Day One because I think it’s going to be that much fun. And I’m normally someone who advocates waiting.