I want my patch bottle and I want it now.

The other day I was jawing with a friend about MMO development, how it’s changed over the years, what are the significant changes, and how great Chinese takeout is (hey, why talk all business). The conversation was going pretty normally until he started talking about how bad developers had it, saying, “It must be real stressful dealing with all those players every day. They seem to want everything right away and are quick to complain if they don’t get it. Must suck.”

Why, whatever do you mean? I’m sure that developers have a great time working hours upon hours on their segment of the game, putting in blood, sweat and tears to crank out a good product, only to have it dumped on by RandomForumPoster3424. Mr. or Ms. Random probably plays it a grand total of 15 minutes before declaring abject and total failure. It is certainly not a blow to the morale, but rather, a challenge to improve.

I mean, if an armchair developer basically pees all over your product, it’s a motivator. Even if that motivator is “throttle the player through the monitor” it’s still something that gets the blood boiling, after all. Besides, realistic expectations are boring. Who wants to read pages and pages of mindless praise when you can be challenged by some Nostradamus out there who predicts that your product will fail within the week unless their specific problem is addressed?

The world needs more kindergarten teachers and nursery babysitters, anyway, so if a career as a developer doesn’t work out, there’s always that as a fallback. After all, the experience of dealing with a bunch of yelling, screaming, selfish people is easily transferred to dealing with the same group of people, only 5 times younger.

Hot chick on cover fails to deliver.

So, as many folks are reporting, the MMO Tabula Rasa, Richard Garriott’s latest foray into insanity, has officially been declared dead. Lots of reasons from a declining playerbase to game-breaking bugs, to short-sighted development, to Richard’s mental state have all been stated, but the important thing to say, is, another one bites the dust.

Along with Hellgate London, Tabula Rasa joins recent MMO casualties on a pile of what is commonly referred to as “epic fail”.

Not to worry though - there’s always a silver lining. Failed MMOs always bring with it a lot of depression, but isn’t it great to be free of the chains of monthly subscriptions and slogging through of content that is more buggy than under your kitchen sink? And what about all the forum posting? Aren’t you glad that even though all the hysterical people who declared the death of the game are suddenly and definitively correct, that you don’t have to go onto there to listen to them whine all day (or in this case, crow)? Surely your sanity, as a dedicated fanboi, is much better.

Losing an MMO is like losing a significant other. You might feel bad when it happens and you might even cry about it if you think no one else is looking. But eventually, you get over it, logging it into the mental list of “things you’ll never do…at least while sober”, and you can look forward to attaching yourself like a leech to the next big thing, because the next big thing is certainly and most definitely the answer and cure-all to all your problems, right? You can look forward to going to a new forum, or a new community and proving your blind, mad devotion to the game by typing in all caps and flaming the begeezus out of anyone who dares disagree with you.

Alternatively, if you’re the kind of crotchety poster who likes their MMOs with a bit of salt, just a little on the cooked side, with a temperature of 98.6 degrees and anything else is a ruined product and a failure of epic proportions, just replace all the stuff I said above for all the people who defend games with “bash them to hell while reveling in your armchair developer’s throne”.

And life goes on.

There's more people here - honest!

So in yet another shift on the forums for WAR for which I am a moderator, I came upon, among all the wonderfully positive threads declaring the death of the game, a thread regarding the mass exodus (”mass” being, certainly, the always reliable statistic of mass of forum posters”) of the game. In it was a quote from VP GM Mark Jacobs of Mythic Entertainment, WAR’s developer, about how if they aren’t adding servers six weeks in, they’re “not doing well”.

Obviously no servers have been added - in fact, they were added at the beginning of course, so all the doom and gloomers are having a field day.

Here’s the reply I posted below, which in short, is really - the game is neither doing hugely successful things nor is it completely failing. For right now, it’s pretty much right on tack with what I was thinking, which isn’t a bad thing. So pick up those chins, WAR players!

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MMO developers need to stop overpromising and underdelivering. They need to understate their goals to set realistic expectations for an increasingly impatient player base.

I would argue that “how an MMO works” has changed a hell of a damn lot since the release of the current gorilla in the market, WoW. And that’s not just because of WoW, but because of releases than came after it.

How an MMO works has been completely changed by the idea of success being “millions” of subscribers and a carrot on a stick grind to appeal to players (WoW).

How an MMO works has changed by having created the idea that players want things and want them right away, with little tolerance for downtime or bugs or “we’re working on it” awful launch issues (Vanguard).

How an MMO works has changed in that you can’t release something based solely upon equity built upon previous work - the “hey, we did x game, but we left and are doing it OUR way now” (Hellgate: London)

I could go on.

All of this stuff aggregates into current development and release philosophies for MMOs. The problem is, people’s memories are shorter than a kid looking at shiny toys in the store, and when comparing to other products on the market, can only compare to the current state of the product as opposed to the product when released. That’s a bit unfair, but totally understandable.

This all boils down to expectations. If you expected WAR to be something and it wasn’t, then of course there was disappointment, and sometimes anger. I close unproductive goodbye threads every day from people who say things that would make their mother wash their mouth out with soap and a detergent brand, if you could do that without being sued or arrested. They’re mad because they didn’t get what they thought they would.

Many people, mostly late adopters, who subscribed to WAR expected the “WoW killer”. WAR was never meant to be that game. A lot of people like to say that WAR tried to be “WoW lite with PvP”, but all that was done was something done in lots of MMOs - taking successful elements from other games and giving it your own flavor, something Blizzard does extremely well.

This only accounts for some of the people who left, but the real key is whether or not Mythic expected the loss they are experiencing. You’d have to be foolish to think Mythic didn’t know they were going to take a subscriber hit with WoTLK. The degree of that hit is unknown, but the real, true test is how WAR does through the next two or three months. If they can’t maintain the subscriber target they’ve set (a number we’ll never know), they will have real problems. But I don’t think they have unexpected issues regarding subscriptions now.

That being said, the article quoted is another in the long line of developer quotes that later end up creating foot in mouth syndrome. I’m certain Mark knows this too, but as a developer or member of the development company, you need to only rarely introduce concrete statements or numbers unless you’re near 100% certain. The reason being, is that the community will crucify you for your words later if you don’t deliver. That quote, along with another quote regarding GOA’s level of service and the “deal is off” if it isn’t, are two such quotes.

Seeing that quote, however, you can see why the decision was made to open more servers. The game’s biggest issue in my eyes, its population spread, is the result of a decision made by the company to either have an awful launch with overpacked servers and long queues, or to launch with more than enough servers to handle the load but suffer problems from people leaving off of underpopulated servers, or leaving the game entirely due to no “massive multiplayer” in MMO. Clearly, with the bad history of launches like AoC and Vanguard had, the latter was chosen - totally understandable. But it created a problem that still exists now, and I’m curious to see how Mythic approaches it.

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So are you a basement dweller with aspirations to make some really great games, and of course, to make boatloads of money? Are you somehow cowed or otherwise intimidated by the fact that teams of developers make iconic titles like Halo 3, Half-Life, Final Fantasy, and other juggernauts? Concerned that your titles are just going to be awful sellers compared to those blockbusters?

Well worry not, because I found that even some of the most interesting and unique titles can make you tons of money. Take the game pictured on the right, for example. You have to wonder how much money the developers of this game made simply for depicting a stereotype over and over again in a party game format. You have to wonder how such a piece of valuable software such as this made it onto the market, though with all the bottle-opening, rifle-shooting fun it has to offer, it seems pretty obvious, right?

Lots of people like to call this stuff “shovelware”. I’d rather use the term “opportunity”, and by “opportunity”, I mean the chance to make a bunch of money for the kind of effort you would put into a bowel movement every day. I think that’s great, and a testament to the kind of effort that achieves dreams and moves mountains - well, mountains of crap, but mountains nonetheless.

I look forward to seeing your title in the bargain bin or subtly packaged with a more recognizable game in the very near future. Now get cracking, developers!

Be a badass like him - after 2000 DKP and 400 hours.

So marking yet another milestone in the war of PC gaming, it seems that Blizzard’s hugely successful World of Warcraft franchise has hit a new note, logging 2.8 million units sold in the first 24 hours, according to Gamespot.

Let me tell you that once, a while ago, this needle was firmly in my arm. Not only was I a subscriber, I was a raider, an officer, and a DKP counter, a trifecta of time-consuming borderline second jobs that eventually drove me more insane than I already am. So, like any other recovering addict, I look upon the former object of my time and money with a sort of plaintive regret, as the small portion of me that wants to re-subscribe gets repeatedly bitch-slapped by my common sense. I like having common sense. It’s less expensive.

Anyway, don’t make this seem like this is a big old hate post. We don’t do that at Overly Positive. In fact, I’m happy for the millions of people who have decided, once again, that even though that they have gotten to the pinnacle of geek fame by possessing the gear the sparkles the most, that it wasn’t enough. I’m glad for the fact that lots of people will decide, instead of crowding the places I tend to go to, like bars, restaurants, and theaters, to sit in front of a computer staring at the rear end of an avatar they have more than a passing attachment to.

I mean this is obviously the end, right? Ten more levels to 80 and a cool new class which is amazing simply for wearing black and wielded badass weapons. There can’t possibly be anything beyond this that keeps players hooked like crack whores, if you don’t count the shiny, the desperate need to be recognized, and the awesome ability to go to a forum and post “QQ moar” to the person who you beat in PvP. In fact, this could possibly be the greatest game ever. And by that, I mean the greatest game ever to make people do the same thing over and over and over again, wrapped in different packages every time. If only politicians and scam artists could learn from the methods of the MMO developer - they’d probably be as rich as Oprah.

So kudos to Blizzard, and the now-11 million subscribers of Crack of the Lich King, for smashing records and the social lives of gamers everywhere. I’m sure there will be plenty more people to hook out there.