Developer blogs

Abalieno reports that Jeff Freeman from SOE, one of the SWG developers, pulled the plug on his blog because comments he made on general game design on his blog were used against him on the official SWG forums. Comments from Scott Jennings (aka Lum the not-so-mad-any-more) are found here, stating how unfortunate it is that players haunt developers off the internet, and that feedback is so important.

Now in some points the developers complaining about unreasonable players are certainly right. The average official game forum is full of hysterics, foul language, and totally unreasonable demands. And often the complaints hit the wrong person, the visual face of the company instead of the guy who actually made the decision in question.

But on the other side the players *need* to have a way to complain, a way where somebody actually listens to them, and responds to their concerns. You often hear the stupid "if you don't like this game, play something else" argument. Unfortunately that isn't that easy, because players invest a lot of time and effort in their characters, and can't take their characters with them if they switch. It is a bit as if you were allowed to switch your bank, but the old bank would keep the money you invested there, and you weren't allowed to transfer it.

Star Wars Galaxies is a very particular case. We are not talking about unreasonable complaints by a small minority of thick-headed players on minor issues of game balance. SWG is a game in which the basic gameplay has been completely redesigned. The game was on a slow decline before the changes, and now moved onto a steep decline trajectory. The developers consciously went for a strategy designed to attract new players, at the expense of losing loyal player who played the game because they liked the previous design. And of course the new players never came, who buys an old MMORPG with bad press? And thus SWG is in the process of imploding, I wouldn't be surprised if it was cancelled before the end of 2006, and the masses of angry players certainly have a point in complaining about it.

And the implosion was clearly foreseeable with a minimum of common sense. A *much* better strategy would have been to let SWG continue as it is, and develop SWG2 in parallel, with the new game having all the easy accessibility for the casual customer that the NGE changes were supposed to bring to the old game. In spite of not being as big as WoW, EQ2 was nevertheless a success that basically doubled the number of customers of SOE. The sequel strategy is much better than the complete redesign strategy.

Now I don't think that Jeff Freeman decided the NGE changes, and it is somewhat unfortunate that he gets all the heat. But that is the same for all public representatives in every other company. If there is a major disaster, like the Ford-Firestone tire recall, there will be lots of hapless customer service representatives getting an earful of abuse from angry customers, while the manager actually responsible for the bad decision is relatively well shielded. That comes with the customer service job description, who ever called them to say that the companies product works just fine? And Jeff, as developer, is at least closer to the NGE decision than somebody just paid to work in a call center.

MMORPG are basically not a good, but a service. If I buy an offline, single-player computer game, and I don't like the changes applied in some patch, I can decide not to apply that patch, and live with the bugs the game had before instead. With online games I don't have that choice. And with MMORPG I have the additional problem that I am captive, because of the attachment I have to my characters. The choice is not between SWG and lets say WoW, but between a maxed out jedi character with a network of friends and a lonely level 1 human paladin killing kobolds in Elwynn Forest. It is only understandable that the SWG players are upset. And if the guy who made that decision at SOE isn't taking the flak, then other people at SOE in public view will. You can't expect your customers to stop complaining just because you won't tell them who is responsible.