The right way

I'm always slightly confused when people tell me how to do something the right way. That confusion does not extend to manual things, like how to fasten a screw on a machine that might kill me if I don't do it right. But as soon as you start building something more abstract, an MMO for example, then things get hellish confusing.

The problem is not that there are no right ways. The problem is that there are too many. And they oppose each other more often than not.

Yes this is another one of those confusing posts.



Now imagine you are at the blank slate start of a project. You can do anything and everything you want. Fantastic possibilities. A MMOFPS set in space? A fantasy MMO set in a victorian steam area?  Ummm.. something something something?

You might realize quickly, your space is limited. Not by the possibilities, but by the market, which again rules how much money you can get for what. The indie MMO (good luck guys, all of you) is a niche and will stay that way for a long time to come. So if you want the big bucks you either have a franchise behind you (Star Wars, Star Trek) to pull off the space thing, or you do what everyone else does: Fantasy.

And now I hear people scream at me over the Internet. Amazing what technology can do.

See this is an example of too many right ways. You can make an MMO about a lot of things, but when people tell you, to make a fantasy MMO, it's not that this is the best thing to do, the only thing to do, but a thing that is right to do, because it's proven to work. Put down that pitchfork and let's continue.

Now we know it's that fantasy thang, you want (should, have to) do. So where to go from here? There is a rich history of RPG games to look back on. From text only dungeon crawlers, to the 3D extravaganza you see in today's games. They copied heavy from each other, which is to be expected, hence the incest pool is where the wisdom is drawn from.

And that's also what makes it confusing. Let's look at the big boy to get a better sense of how strange the world works in terms of MMO and crystal balling.

World of Warcraft pushes over 10 Million players a month at this very moment in time. If they all play at least once a month, if they all pay the same, that's irrelevant. Fact is, 10 Million people (which is a lot) are currently more or less active on World of Warcraft. With that, it pretty much owns half the subscription based MMO market (rounded down for simplicity).

What does pretty much everyone do now, naturally? Analyze the living daylights out of World of Warcraft.

I adhere to this day that the good folks over at Blizzard make very nicely polished games but that they should really consider upgrading their network coding team and bring them in sync with their infrastructure guys. The launch of World of Warcraft was abysmal. Wait, so was Diablo, where you hardly could connect to Battle net and you were booted off randomly. In Warcraft 2 you pretty much used KALI an external tool to hook up with other players, because the internal way sucked so bad. And all of these three titles were stunning successes!

So you see what do the good people in other companies do? Copy everything else. And then still fail at the things World of Warcraft did poorly. Or a crass opposite, avoid copying anything in fears of maybe copying something bad instead of something good.

We stumbled blindly through the world as an industry. Relax, the music and movie industry isn't off any better. We have surpassed them already, but for all their own research they do, each venture is a gamble again. So it is with games.

But we have actual tools, at least in the MMO world to get a lot more feedback. We actually know every single one of our customers, as opposed to a band performing or a movie studio showing a movie. We have their name, address and even their credit card details. How more intimate can we get? We have a unique way of getting to know them, a very direct feedback which we could use.

Knowing what every single one of your customer thinks, that's a dream of any company. And suddenly you know a lot better what to do next in your game to keep a lot of people happy.

Back to the right stuff. Oh wait, we were just there.

You can read a lot about what bloggers and game companies think is right. There are even a lot of professional pundits you can listen to.

The things you should always listen to carefully are things where someone, in detail and with sound reasoning, analyzes where something went wrong. We learn a lot more from car and plane crashes than from the million of hours everything went just peachy.

When you get into a "This is right" reading, you have to be careful. You don't know every single thing about the situation, so your crystal ball is (almost) as good as that of any other person. A lot of rationals make sense, in a deceptive common sense way. Of course it's good, because it's so polished. The technical turd it made when starting, ah well, that was clear they could over come that (even though that wasn't the case at that time).Things go on and on like this. We rationalize a lot.

There are a lot of things you can question. And there are a lot of things you can just copy paste, because you won't find a much better way that is more intuitive how text entry works for example.

Learn from others mistakes. Take what you know and everyone else does, that it just simply works (and is simple enough as well). Everything else, question it, put it on it's head, shake it really hard and see if you can find a better way, one where the player actually enjoys it more. If you end up with the same in the end, you might have found something that actually works and is just right, in your game and your circumstances.