Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Gnome Eater said:

I am sorry, but while it might be nice to think this, this is probably incorrect.

During the StarCraft beta, several players were much better and knew a lot more about StarCraft than developers. Blacklizard was the first player who famously used to crush blizzard developers at their own game, while it was in beta.

Developers might have the benefit of a more holistic vision, but just a quick browsing of EJ will show you that there are people who can write several page essays about incredibly technical details of how certain spells work.

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I think we are talking about two different things here. You guys are talking about being better players than the devs, which I am not.

The hard part, even for me, is understanding not who"s feedback to listen to, or what feedback to listen to, the hard part is players grasping how feedback is processed.

I am not here to provide answers because I"ve never done it on this side, and won"t, but a quick glance at any forum that elicits feedback will show you the reason it"s hard for it to ever be a win when 90% of the people submit "errors" and 45 minutes later follow up with "WHY IS MY BUG NOT FIXED YET!!"

It"s the industries fault, very simply put. It got away from what it was intended to be, and they let it happen. Same with patching. What was thought to be a cool, unique and new way to fix games, turned into a tech tool that allowed games to be shipped half assed and not done.

Players aren"t stupid, and it"s amazing how the industry, well some, much less actually, still prey on that and rely on that to cover their butts. The internet and velocity with which information travels turned from the best tool to the worst weapon in many cases.

At the end of the day, and I know this will sound cliche and possibly dumb, it comes back to honesty. Stay true to your company, your people and your vision, and beyond that don"t lie to your customers.

Ngruk said:

One of the ironies I have found in the past here is the willingness to create "entry level" positions in what I think is arguably the most crucial area of a companies business, CS!

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The problem as I see it is that most of these CS people don"t know what the hell to say: they face questions about bugs, exploits, harassement and what have you and the players at best get canned answers to make them feel good they actually did a /report. Then nothing happens.

If I report a bot, I understand there may be some time investigating beforehand, if I report a bug of serious nature, I"d expect to see it fixed yeah, but I"d also expect the CS/GM to have a clue of what I"m talking about and maybe, just maybe, spend a few minutes with me to see if it"s reproduceable.

Talking to brainless CS monkeys doesn"t make me happy in the least, it just shows the company doesn"t really give a damn about this aspect aside from hiring a few poor sobs to answer petitions with canned replies.

At one point I kinda appreciated Blizzard in this field: most unimportant petitions or bug reports of fluff nature (including typos in quests text) were just obtaining a canned email response as a result, while more serious stuff I personally reported were handled in a totally different manner:
I had a chat with what I believe was at least a senior GM about a serious game exploit I found, we spent about 20-30 minutes ironing it out and reproducing it. I have been thanked for my submission and told they"d immediately work on it.
One week later the "feature" wasn"t working anymore (the delay has to be because I played on EU servers I believe or just double testing on their side etc.).

It"s not that Blizzard has a stellar CS department, but at least they cared to read what I wrote.
It"s funny on the other hand, how I submitted a ticket about a certain group of exploiters in EQ2 a few times, but it was only after using the batphone that these guys were banned and the exploit suddenly fixed.

On the other hand, weeding out serious tickets from fluff or even pointless ones is the real work, you can"t rely on outsourced work there.

TLDR: I agree, CS is a very important aspect of your game.

Ngruk said:

I think we are talking about two different things here. You guys are talking about being better players than the devs, which I am not.

The hard part, even for me, is understanding not who"s feedback to listen to, or what feedback to listen to, the hard part is players grasping how feedback is processed.

I am not here to provide answers because I"ve never done it on this side, and won"t, but a quick glance at any forum that elicits feedback will show you the reason it"s hard for it to ever be a win when 90% of the people submit "errors" and 45 minutes later follow up with "WHY IS MY BUG NOT FIXED YET!!"

It"s the industries fault, very simply put. It got away from what it was intended to be, and they let it happen. Same with patching. What was thought to be a cool, unique and new way to fix games, turned into a tech tool that allowed games to be shipped half assed and not done.

Players aren"t stupid, and it"s amazing how the industry, well some, much less actually, still prey on that and rely on that to cover their butts. The internet and velocity with which information travels turned from the best tool to the worst weapon in many cases.

At the end of the day, and I know this will sound cliche and possibly dumb, it comes back to honesty. Stay true to your company, your people and your vision, and beyond that don"t lie to your customers.

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I understand what you"re saying, but there needs to be either tools for people to track the bugs that they"ve reported (via incident numbers typed into a bug tracker or what have you), or the CS needs to give a shit to look it up.

For minor bugs, yeah, I can understand the canned response. However, when beta testing a certain unnamed game, I found a VERY reproduceable method to duplicate currency, essentially. (buy X item from vendors "unlimited" inventory as many times as you could afford, sell back for fairly slim profit. Rinse Repeate until you could fill entire inventory each transaction. Oh, and the item stacked; I honestly wasn"t even looking for it, stumbled on it by mistake when I bought the wrong item and decided to sell it back. Figured i could atleast get 20-70% of what I paid back)..Yet, when I filled out the bug report, I expected it to be fixed pretty quickly. It wasn"t fixed within a couple of weeks of near-daily patches. I figured this was a BIG problem and needed to be addressed; So I contacted a GM on the issue.


What did the GM do? Tell me that if it was true, I shouldn"t check on it anymore; Because if I was caught doing so, I"d be banned from the beta process of that game and any other.

Now, what did the GM do wrong?

1. He refused to verify the bug, via in game means or checking on whatever tools they have to verify bugs internally.

2. He told a tester who was doing their job to stop checking on a bug after each patch. NOTE: I bought the item, and sold it back once. Yes, this raised a bit of extra cash, but the exploitability of the bug was due to the fact that you could buy stacks and stacks and stacks. It was something to the tune of 1 gold/plat/etc per item. Not much given the game, however it adds up when you can repeat this 1000"s of times within an hour.

3. He actually threatened me about being banned from beta for checking on a potentially economy destroying bug.


Now, I did go above his head, and ended up finding my way directly to the guy "in charge of fixing bugs" via the bat phone. It was fixed post-haste.

This, however, was in there for 2 weeks and I believe had I not gone over his head, the damn thing woulda been there today, still.

Ngruk said:

I think we are talking about two different things here. You guys are talking about being better players than the devs, which I am not.

The hard part, even for me, is understanding not who"s feedback to listen to, or what feedback to listen to, the hard part is players grasping how feedback is processed.

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But why is someone a better player than a developer? A small part of it might be reflexes/technical gaming skill, but starcraft back in beta (god that was ages ago) wasn"t a particularly fast paced game, and something like wow is most absolutely not fast paced.

If a player can beat a developer at a game before the game is fully solved, and as long as the apm threshold isn"t too high, usually it is because they understand some hidden synergies better than developers.

This does NOT mean that great players necessarily have good intuition for how to balance a game, or how to design a clever mechanic - but if a spectacular player tells you that soandso is overpowered or that suchandsuch mechanic is overpowered, usually he is right.

tl;dr version: 1% of your playerbase will be better then you at designing your game. Good luck finding them though out of the 99% of the playerbase asking for their class to get a deathtouch ability on a 3 second cooldown because a rogue ganked them.

Ngruk said:

I am not here to provide answers because I"ve never done it on this side, and won"t, but a quick glance at any forum that elicits feedback will show you the reason it"s hard for it to ever be a win when 90% of the people submit "errors" and 45 minutes later follow up with "WHY IS MY BUG NOT FIXED YET!!"

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That"s ultimately the crux of the issue. The signal to noise ratio is exceedingly high in this field and unfortunately those who have a deep appreciation for the big picture when it comes to a game tend to not be annoying enough to be heard.

It depends on how late into the beta you are though and how many people you let it. During early alpha builds, hopefully you aren"t bringing in people this stupid and if they do manage to get in, you"re getting rid of them. The problem of mouth-breathers submitting bug reports should only be a problem once you put out the demo for your game (IE: open beta).

We discussed it before, briefly, about micro vs. macro views of the game. Developers are constantly looking at the macro aspect of the game. How does Y feature fit into the vision I have set forth for the game. By contrast, players are typically micro oriented. How can I use/abuse Y feature to my benefit?

This is why players typically are smarter when it comes to fixing abilities, finding bugs, finding exploits. But when it comes to creating new abilities, new features, developers tend to lead off on the right foot.

It"s also possible that there are players who are smarter then any given developer. There are millions of people who play WoW. The chances that random developer is better then every single last one of them? Slim to none. However, the chances that random developer is smarter then at least 98% of them and has a much larger vested interest in the health of the game? Pretty damn good.

History is replete with examples. Developers clinging to terrible game mechanics because it fits more inline with their vision for the game. I"ve said many nasty things about Tigole over this very issue. I"m sure he just loves the game and wants what"s best for it. But he can still and has been wrong about certain issues. But he helped create a game I now immensely enjoy despite it"s many faults and for that, I can"t help but thank him even as I curse his name every trash mob we kill for being a "good pacing mechanic".

Conversely, one only needs to look at (insert class X here) whenever (insert overpowered ability Y here) gets nerfed and see the thousands upon thousands of players outraged that developers would dare to nerf such a crucial ability and now they have to quit because the game simply won"t be fun anymore.

At the end of the day no amount of good bug tracking (which you shouldn"t skimp on) is going to help you when little Timmy reports it as a bug when a hunter ganks him. Or he gives feedback saying that he thinks an ability called shred should instantly kill the target if it"s made of paper.

Little timmy is a retard.

There are stupid people on both sides of the fence. Curt"s job, and I do not envy him for it, is finding the various non-stupid people out there.

P.S.:

<---Not stupid...and available! HINT HINT.

Actually Zehn, I wonder if there is a way to "filter out" the retards. In the past, they had beta-boards that were available more or less to people who didn"t prove to be retarded and shined during raid-beta testing, but not sure how viable that set up is.

Trash mobs do serve a purpose, though, and it"s not always boring. Well, at least it doesn"t have to always be boring. I"m not sure what the alternative would be, a series of jumping puzzles before each boss ala Mario? A gauntlet of a hundred thousand post-Patchwerk slimes? Well, that would be pretty fucking intense, actually. Add that one in some game, chop chop.

Did somebody say Little Timmy?!

I saw that on MMO Champion this morning and thought it was probably the worst comic ever made.

James said:

I saw that on MMO Champion this morning and thought it was probably the worst comic ever made.

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heh, you didn"t click on the artists religious shit then.

A little trash is fine just to give the illusion of minions and the like. The interview in question was out around the SSC bullshit trash days I believe. Naxx was a little trash heavy but it didn"t matter since you could usually pull 2+ packs and AE. The trash in Ulduar isn"t too bad though they could get rid of a pack or two before Ignis/Hodir and Freya.

But yeah, I"m a little shocked there isn"t a jumping style puzzle in Ulduar. Find other ways to pace players, mix it up a bit. You have this huge visual 3D medium to play with and the best you can think up is throw in some mobs that hit for 10k and have some random ass AE?

Anyways...

I"ve been in enough alpha"s and early closed beta"s to know that dev/player communication is typically top notch in those stages. Getting back to the topic that spawned this entire conversation, open beta is when the problem starts.

I just think most companies, in fact pretty much all of them, simply aren"t prepared to deal with open beta. They"re going to get an absolute metric fuckton of data in such a short amount of time, I don"t think many if any are equipped to process it all.

And I know I"m repeating myself, but the term open beta is a misnomer to begin with. Open beta implies that we will get the miracle patch before release that fixes those hitching issues, stops our sound card from looping sound when we kill a halfling (or is that just me cackling?) and adds content for the last 20 levels because we ran out of money two months ago and half my programmers are about to get evicted.

Gnome Eater said:

Actually Zehn, I wonder if there is a way to "filter out" the retards. In the past, they had beta-boards that were available more or less to people who didn"t prove to be retarded and shined during raid-beta testing, but not sure how viable that set up is.

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In my experience, most MMO betas still have that sort of filter, it"s just generally not as structured. Usually, the devs will keep track of the beta players who do a good job of bug reporting and are always trying out the new content or pushing the envelope. A dialogue will then open up between those players and a few developers, a lot of that noise gets cut out and a lot more actual productive work gets done. It"s also a lot more satisfying for the player to be able to request a change or give a bug report directly to the people responsible for that stuff and then see that change or fix made within a few days.

Zehn - Vhex said:

And I know I"m repeating myself, but the term open beta is a misnomer to begin with. Open beta implies that we will get the miracle patch before release that fixes those hitching issues, stops our sound card from looping sound when we kill a halfling (or is that just me cackling?) and adds content for the last 20 levels because we ran out of money two months ago and half my programmers are about to get evicted.

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I"ve always seen open beta as nothing more then a stress test for the game. Finding out if your server infrastructure can handle peak loads, etc. I wouldn"t expect any real bug fixing to be done when a game gets to open beta stage except for the serious ones like crashes.

I wonder how feasible it would be to have a public bugtracking system. If only to make it easier on the testers that DO check if something has been reported before.

PeonPower said:

I"ve always seen open beta as nothing more then a stress test for the game. Finding out if your server infrastructure can handle peak loads, etc. I wouldn"t expect any real bug fixing to be done when a game gets to open beta stage except for the serious ones like crashes.

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Well, one thing that companies seem to forget is that the beta testers are also representative of the future customer base. So if that representative base starts screaming about something the company should listen.

James said:

I saw that on MMO Champion this morning and thought it was probably the worst comic ever made.

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In nearly 4 and a half years of playing WoW and probably nearly that again following the game pre-release, I"ve yet to actually see a WoW comic that has made me actually laugh.

If you"re letting in a large number of the public into a closed/open beta, your game better be pretty close to being complete. Please take note that of the "large number" you"re inviting. Small closed beta"s are usually beneficial. But you need larger groups of people to test out your leveling curve, content transition speed for different types of players etc. So your content should be close to perfect as you can get it.

Oh and fwiw, coolest Beta "thing" I"ve ever seen? WAR giving players free beta keys for turning in ANYONE violating NDA rules during BETA, frickin" GENIUS!

Ngruk said:

Oh and fwiw, coolest Beta "thing" I"ve ever seen? WAR giving players free beta keys for turning in ANYONE violating NDA rules during BETA, frickin" GENIUS!

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I"d put WOW"s forums during beta at the top of the list, personally..

A few people have referred to vanilla WoW beta. To put that into perspective I"m going to re-post the following numbers :

I keep a record of all sorts of stuff. This is my personal record of how many players there were, by class and side in WoW beta shortly before it was unleashed on the world.


Following lists are class followed by the number playing them, first number Alliance and second number Horde.

Friday 08/10/04 Peak

Warrior ..189.....124
Warlock ..59......73
Mage .....119......51
Rogue .....88......38
Hunter ...152.....60
Priest .....58.......19
Druid .....101......37
Pal/Sham 163.....67


Sat 09/10/04 Off Peak

Warrior ...28......14
Warlock ..14......10
Mage ......22.......2
Rogue ....17.......6
Hunter ....31.......10
Priest .....10........0 (zero)
Druid ......16.......1
Pal/Sham 23.......8