Over the last 12 years, our tight 4 person guild has played 7 different MMOs.
In three of them, well intentioned and seemingly incremental changes by the live team in fact took away what most players had come to the game for and enjoyed most. While it took a year to play out, in each of those three cases the number of people paying to play the game declined significantly after those changes.
In each of those three cases, beta testers strongly recommeded that an expansion or patch they were testing be scrapped rather than be released. In each of those three cases I believe the company which owned the game would have been more profitable scrapping the expansion or patch, rather than dealing with the attrition (reduced revenue) it caused.
Since understanding your customers, and knowing how they will respond to a change, is a business basic, I am struggling to understand what breakdown is occurring in the management chains of game after game causing this alienation of players. I’d like to offer two hypotheses, and am genuinely interested in feedback as to which is more likely:
1. After release, the bean counters don’t understand that the game is focused on a subset of players, and while it’s financially interesting to know how many boxes sold, half of the players are guaranteed to attrit because they just bought the box to explore a game that doesn’t fit them. So when half the people who bought the game attrit after a few weeks, the bean counters panic, collect data on why people left, and tell the live team to change the game so it would have kept them. This would give us RIFT, which was about open world events that were hard and characters that were hard to spec — and was sold as an anti-WoW — suddenly nerfing the open world events and following WoW into trivializing character creation/speccing.
2. Until release, the game is in the hands of a lead developer who has in their head the target customers of the game and a set of principles — the contract with the players, as it were — and in a hands on way imposes that on the entire development process. At release the game is handed to a live team which, not having had enough contact with the original lead dev (or worse thinking he acted out of ego) have not internalized who the customers are that must be retained, and what principles must never be violated if those customers’ trust is to be maintained. External forces (those bean counters again) make suggestions to the live team, which makes intuitive changes to the very complex system of the game. For example, when DAoC was handed off to Mackey to develop the Trials of Atlantis expansion, Mackey did not understand that the gear based stat inflation he was putting in the game would break the ability of players to RvR for about 6 months, taking away the thing people loved about DAoC.
In recent days I have seen the GW2 live team attempt to introduce a feature which was likely well intentioned, to give big guilds something to do together and strive for. In the process, I’ve seen the unintended consequence where the social fabric of small guilds is now at risk of being torn apart the way the exclusive raid endgame of WoW tended to destroy guilds whose members wanted to raid. Yes, social fabrics which keep people in the game and make this home are being destroyed, as a side effect of an attempt to do something good.
Because the process broke down, or GW2 is too big to fit in someone’s head any more, or because the live team doesn’t have the level of ability the original dev team did. Oh, and this is about the fourth release in a row where this has happened in one way or another.
So:
Any guesses on my hypotheses?
and
Is ArenaNet better off with developers on the live team, or redirecting those resources elsewhere and not doing further damage to the game and its player community?
My vote is stop doing development until this is fixed.
Oh, and 25 years ago I took some training called “QFD” (the word by word translation from Japanese is Quality Function Deployment), from the auto industry. I highly recommend it.
