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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Polishing the Brass

From Sakkarah’s latest post from her blog at The End Game -

You’ll ask but what about the bugs that really wouldn’t take a whole lot of time to fix, that wouldn’t create notable imbalances and that have been sitting around for years? Well, that’s when you start looking at point 6: how many players are impacted by this issue. And unfortunately, the good of the many does outweigh the needs of the few. It’s like going to the ER. You’ve been waiting for 10 hours, the whole time watching people that came long after you go right in long before you do. And you’re like WTF?! You are no less important than the next guy. Your pain is no less real. Is it fair for you to suffer much longer than needed just because your injury isn’t as critical? Absolutely not. But when push comes to shove, the critically wounded won’t survive if made to wait, you will.

The analogy hits home, but I don’t quite think the mental state of UO’s vociferous community has quite been grasped.  Prioritization is a wonderful thing, and a necessary thing in any development and on any project.  It keeps the stupid stuff off the plates of the devs and keeps focus from flailing wildly.  There are truly only so many man-hours in a given day that can be dedicated to work on a project.

But the UO playerbase has been around for a long, long, loooooong time.  It is seasoned, jaded, shaken-up, stirred, Trammelized, soul-crushed and lingoed out.  It is literally the oldest consistent MMO player population in existence.  Many of its constituents are fully aware of the intracacies of development team machinations, and have a laundry list of entitlements.  It has been almost 12 years, and a lot of the players have been UOers longer than MOST of the dev team have been working on UO.  Hell, many of the gang I ran with on Atlantic’s RP scene went on to make MMOs of their own in various capacities.  I’m working on one at the moment, integrating lessons hard-learned from years playing the grand-daddy of virtual worlds.

But, the thing is, players aren’t upset that a designer might opt to prioritize the fix for one obvious flaw over another.  Players are upset that a designer might opt to work on refining the KR client while the Virtue system remains half done, a relic of the Renaissance expansion.  Players might be miffled at the huge expenditure it took to “update” and “upgrade” the UO client when, say, Forensic Evaluation, Item Identification, Taste Identification and Camping are skills in the game with no applicable purpose or use.  Tamers for some reason have gotten new tamables in nearly every expansion, while Magery hasn’t seen a new spell since the game went gold.  Mages, in fact, walk around heavily clad in armor from the tops of their heads to their toenails.  Maybe I’m old school, but shouldn’t mages wear robes?

The problem is, many of the issues which are considered legacy, and many of the content desires the aged community has will not be met in any major content push or expansion.  No one seriously expects a wealth of new content with Stygian Abyss.  These are UOers you are talking about.  We’ve had expansions like “Age of Shadows” where the greatest secret to the land was literally that you could drop a rune into a randomly located pouch and gain access to otherwise unaccessable areas.  How spirit-destroyingly underwhelming is THAT?  We’ve had launches like Third Dawn - I don’t even have to go into that one.  A vast new landmass to explore…with not a damned thing to do.  Stop making new clients, by the way, would you? 

The point players have been trying to get across for what on the internet qualifies as centuries is that it is COMPLETED content that is desired, not bug-ridden new methods of looking at it.  How about instead of a new trailer park landmass for housing brokers to plop down their hideously designed 18×18’s you spend an hour or two on boats?  Why not give cooks and beggars a reason to exist beyond the eccentric?  The rage happens because it looks like there are two fronts where designers are concerned.  A) The Latest Expansion and B) Fixing Easy Bugs.  In the mind of the player, it is interpretted that perhaps 60% of development energy is invested in piling new features (loaded with bugs) into the expansion (which will consist of 80% things players have not asked for but that you think are neat).  40% is perceived as being spent on things like fine-tuning the BOD turn-in percentages, adjusting the swing speed modifiers on Nox Ranger crossbows and reducing gold returns on escort quests.  Ultimately pointless minutia. 

Only occasionally does a beacon of light shine through in terms of new content or features, likely punched through by sheer force of will past the tunnel-visioned troglodytes that soak up the rest of the design team’s resources.  New plants, new potions, new craftables - yay!  MORE PLEASE.  No, don’t stop.  That was delicious, refreshing pure water and we’ve been dying in the desert for years.  More, for the love of GOD, MORE! 

But you do stop, because the range on that one thing needs its range adjusted, and between that and figuring out how to keep new gargoyle player characters from mounting an ethereal steed, there just isn’t time.  At this point, from this perspective, the emergency room triage is not so much the metaphor.  More like polishing the brass on the Titanic.  Sure, holistically you’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time on two mostly useless 3D clients with minimal adopt rate, the expansions have been a never-ending march of mild content additions absent any lore or in-game justification for them, and UO’s population has aged to the point where there are more 6-8 year veterans than there are 1 year players, but let’s focus our energies on the Lieutenant Guard Sash drop rate on Lord Oaks.  That’s totally important in the grand scheme of th..*blub blub blub*.