Chapter 9: Hype and the Release of Information

One of the interesting questions about games is marketing. This is especially true in MMO games for two reasons. One: your beta test. This relatively public and often long test period will generate a massive amount of hype, good or bad, depending on how it goes. The second is the very nature of your audience. By definition every player has internet access. They know how to browse the web, and they know how to look for news. While they may not be advanced enough or interested enough to worry about third party programs and other stumbling blocks they most definitely are better informed than the fan base of any other genre.

What this means is that the flow of information must begin earlier and be more carefully monitored than in other genres. World of Warcraft and Everquest II are very interesting studies here as they have developed virtually in parallel. Gaffney addresses this:

"I think World of Warcraft is kind of winning the buzz war. They've had more and louder buzz for longer because they've let their NDA down. But at the end of the day I think that game quality is going to win out. I think if you have a good game you could announce it as early as possible and let the hype go as long as possible and people will expect you'll have more good stuff so even if they know a lot of your content when it launches I think game quality is far more important in what you do in terms of that particular regard."

"I think if your game goes to beta at poor quality you probably want to keep your vest tight. I think people might figure out that, hey, games that keep their vest tight for a long time are of poorer quality and they'll start assuming that. I don't think you should go to beta when you have that kind of issue. I think that's why you stay in closed beta unless you're forced to by some sort of fiscal year or some other silly thing like that."

There is a pitfall of course, one which many developers, even some of the best, have been caught by before. This pitfall has to do with what kinds of information you release to the community. Long and Strasz discuss it:

Long" "I think there's a larger question that's not related to just the NDA but your overall communication strategy. How soon do you start talking about stuff? The rule of thumb I like to operate on is only talk about stuff you already have working in game. I mean the real danger that a lot of games run into is they talk about their game designs before they actually implement. That's how you get the 'Oh, we're going to have Ents' the 'we're going to have necromancy in Ultima Online'. You talk about stuff while you're designing it not while you're implementing it. But if you wait and you only talk about stuff as you implement it or when it's already implemented than you have much less risk associated with building hype with the players that you can't fulfill."

Strasz: "I think that if we use single player games as an example than Fable's been a really good example of talking about design early on and then later having to deliver different stuff. But kind of thinking of things in terms of single player, and this is kind of unfortunate, but you don't have these kind of open giant beta tests for single player games so for something like Halo 2 there's a lot of secrecy and Half-Life 2 everyone is anticipating it. The buzz is huge. They want to see what the game's going to be like but you don't get that luxury with large open beta tests, so that's also an interesting aspect to the NDA. It's not review day just when it gets into reviewer's hands."

For the reasons outlined above your release of information is extremely important. Play your cards too tight and you can kill your own buzz or, worse yet, give a false impression that you have something to hide. Go a bit too fast and loose and you risk digging yourself a hole you can't climb out of without disappointing a lot of people.

Fable is an excellent example, online or not. Fable was a good game that received harsh criticism, unnecessarily in some ways, because it had build some of the biggest hype in gaming history thanks to all the things that were announced very early in development. These unfulfilled promises hurt an otherwise quality title and cost Fable more than they gained to the point where Peter Molyneux issued a public apology for the hype verses the reality of Fable.

It's hard. Most developers are necessarily fanatical. When you're really excited about something it's natural to want to talk about it. Despite that there is a general guideline here if not an actual rule: Talk about things that are in your game. If you do that simple thing you avoid over inflated hype yet still generate buzz. As long as you don't shoot yourself in the foot, as Gaffney states, game quality will win out.

Chapter 10: Community, Putting the Massive in the Multiplayer

Community is something that a good game naturally develops. However, due to the continuous online existence of MMOGs, the community surrounding a game can literally become a tiny cottage industry all its own.

So how much, as a developer, do you want to interfere? How much manpower should you put on it? Should you take the reins or take a hands-off approach? What are the dangers and benefits of each? These are questions that aren't easy to answer and anticipate. Fortunately there are a few who have experience in this area.

As it turns out the first question is simpler than any of the above. Richard Weil and Valerie Massey explain:

Weil: "Community is such a catch all kind of word, you can talk about your active community, which are the ones on the message boards, you can talk about the general player base… I mean that's your community, everyone who subscribes to your game, that's your community. How do you reach them?

There are various ways of thinking. There are grass roots ways to do it. There are institutional ways to do it. You can pack 'em all into your official site or disperse them out to the small grassroots sites. There are a lot of things not to do, but I don't think that people have really solidly defined the things that are exactly the right thing to do every time.

A lot depends on what kind of player base you're going for. Look at the difference between Lineage II and City of Heroes. CoH is a PvE game and their community reflects that and Lineage II is definitely a PvP, cutthroat kind of game and their community kind of reflects that."

Massey: "Not only that but even the difference between the Asian Lineage II community and the North American Lineage II community. There are very distinct differences in those two."

So you have defined your target community and decided on an overall strategy. Now you have a community. How do you treat them? Gaffney professes:

"Communities are more mature than we give them credit for, in the sense that there are going to be people who scream no mater what you do. There's going to be a certain segment of communities who are very vocal and very unhappy with any change at all. But I think the silent majority and even the posting majority that's not squeaking as loud is really pretty stable.

There are a lot of rules to what you shouldn't do to communities. In City of Heroes we launched that community way before we should have. Cryptic launched their forums trying to attract a publisher by showing how many people had interest in their game. Two years before launch we had a forum going and we had to keep people happy and amused for a long period of time and we told them design stuff that we ended up totally changing. But despite all that I think that we had a vibrant community and a growing community and although people were annoyed the vast majority stayed interested and were rational. As long as you treat them like rational people then the core of your community which you care about the most, which I think is those silent people who aren't nuts and who aren't hyper-vocal and hyperventilating, will stay attached to your game regardless of what the screamers do."

Massey went into more detail:

"I think that that's a common mistake that a lot of development studios make when they want to attract a publisher. They slap up a website and they slap up some message boards and they get people to start talking. And then once they do have a publisher, and they've got money and they can start working on their game, they don't have anybody minding the store. Most of the time it does not work out well for them.

And then you've got to get somebody else to come in and clean that up and that's a hard job to pick up, when they've had this kind of total anarchy and you have to come in and get it back into shape and get them to be nice to one another and that sort of thing.

I have a kind of love/hate thing with message boards. They're very, very important for the community. I'm a big advocate of having your own message boards for your game, because when you have to do any kind of damage control or whatever that's where you want to do it. You don't want people to have to try to find you somewhere else.

At the same time the actual number of people who actively post on those message boards is so much smaller than the number of people who actually read them that it's not always a good representative slice. You know when you open the little flap on the bacon and there's the representative slice? That doesn't necessarily represent the rest of the package. You have to think about their motivations for why they want these changes to the game. You're going to see these groups: these people want PvP, these people don't want PvP, and you have to weigh out what's in it for them. You can't just take those things at face value. You have an extremely vocal minority that is speaking on behalf of the entire population and it's just not always accurate.

So, yeah, we need them and they're a very important part but I also like to see what they're saying on their own sites, on their own message boards. Things that they would never say on our site because they don't necessarily think you're reading somewhere else. That's very important to, to kind of keep an eye on things as a whole.

The thing about community is the game is a backdrop to their relationships and like we were talking about earlier, you have these groups, whether it's one or two guys, whether it's a group of twelve or a group of five hundred, they're going to go together, collectively, from one game to another. You would like for them to stay in your game so you want to give them tools so that they can enjoy each other's company, so that they can communicate easily, and they like the game.

That's the important thing about community and that's why we need to foster it. Because that's our retention. If we can keep those groups happy then that's how we can keep them subscribing to our game instead of moving onto another game that might have the tools and the nurturing that they need to be happy in that environment."

Sage did bring up the significant major problem with message boards however:

"The danger with our message boards is that it's like giving a megaphone to the complaints department at Foleys. Really I think we're all still kind of struggling with, is our site a marketing site? Or is our site a community site? And that's a real problem because anyone who comes in asking "Should I be playing this game?" can then read the boards and think "Clearly I should not."

So the power and importance of your community is clear. Unfortunately the tools are somewhat primitive. There's no real refined way to separate the wheat from the chaff and truly get past the screaming minority and to the actual pulse of your game. For those who do it it's a kind of learned voodoo and a careful social analysis of all the pieces of the community which comes up with very un-scientific answers.

If you treat your community with respect and if your game is good, the fortunate thing is that it's hard to really screw up. But, because the benefits are so great, any tools that can help determine that "true pulse" are extremely valuable. You really can't, reasonably, devote too much time or effort to developing your community as long as you can be sure that you're aiding your true audience.

But what of the out-of-game element: Spoiler sites and worse yet online auctions such as Ebay which have become an ever present concern in online gaming? One assaults your game design while the other assaults your community by taking the in-game out of game and into the real world. Once again Gaffney, Massey, and Weil respond:

Gaffney: "I think the short form on it is, as a pure game designer type, I'd love it if spoiler sites didn't exist period. Why? Because you can make a much cooler game if people didn't know what was around every corner ahead of them. It's a real game design challenge to make a game that's still going to be fun when people, as soon as they hit a roadblock, can go find out what the answer is. Richard [Garriott] was able to make much cooler games with the early Ultimas because those resources didn't exist. You had to think things out for yourself. I think that's a much more pure game design environment.

But that barn door's been opened and I don't think it's shutting in the near future, unless you start getting real clever with random content or really clever with crafted content per player. Because of that I think you have to embrace spoiler sites because they're going to exist and you can do certain things to work around them.

In the best of all worlds you can make a game that's fun enough to play that people don't need to go to them at all. I think City of Heroes is a good example. I played Everquest and the first thing I'd do is go off to all the spoiler sites and find out what quests I had to do, ditto Dark Age, ditto any of the early MMPs. For City of Heroes I'm biased, I've been around it a long time, but I never had to do that. I went from quest to quest to quest and they gave me good stuff and they all advanced me and they were all kind of cool and if I got stuck maybe I'd go to a site but at least I didn't have to do it to find out how to play the game.

I think we'll do that a little bit better in upcoming games. I think people are learning that lesson and we'll see it in the more polished EQ II's and the World of Warcraft's as well."

Massey: "Another trend is that Tabula Rasa certainly and City of Heroes both have casual gamers in mind to where you don't have to just do this grind, grind, grind to level up and to get things. You can hop in and play for thirty minutes to an hour and have a very satisfying game experience where you can feel like you accomplished something and you don't need to go to buy stuff on Ebay. You don't need to buy more gold so you can buy a better sword or whatever. And I think if that trend increases, and it will, than we won't see so many of the online auction sites.

Weil: "The key to that is not how to keep the City of Heroes and such out of the Ebay's it's how to keep the Lineage II's and the extremely competitive games - the person verses person games - out of Ebay because once you ratchet up the competition factor and you're competing against someone else it becomes much more cutthroat."

And then there is the most insidious exterior aspect of community: The third party program. Third party programs are pieces of software designed by independent parties (usually a single person) whose aim is to alter your MMOG. A few are meant to be good and helpful add-ons but most are either designed to give the user and advantage or are outright destructive. Sage sets the stage and everyone jumps in:

Sage: "I don't mind spoiler sites because I think that they're inevitable. Whether you ask your brother or you ask the internet you're going to find the answer. But third party programs…. That's where I draw the line, because they're taking food out of our mouths.

I'll say this for the public record: The UO Assist program was nothing but a big headache for us. It cost us money in the fact that if UO Assist stops working then people think it's the game that's stopped working and they call us. The programs end up costing the gamer money because we have to adjust our support costs appropriately and then anytime you have anything like gray shards then they're just taking food out of our mouths.

You know it's easy to look at us as faceless corporations but you know I don't have a yacht or any of that."

Weil: "I've met plenty of people who make third party programs and they just want to help. They do it out of love for the game. But it's just the first step down a very slippery slope and the next step we start getting into malicious things or things that give unfair advantages and so I am certainly a big proponent of search and destroy."

Long: "With UO we did have an attempt to embrace that. So there were officially sanctioned ones."

Sage: "There were two. UO Map and UO Assist. UO Map was fine and UO Assist was horrible. We had to review every submission and if you think about the amount of subscribers we had and you think that maybe he only got five percent of them well then he made an enormous, an absolutely enormous amount of cash."

Freese: "I think there are times when they can actually help the game out. I use to play Asheron's Call and there was some plug-in so that you could control your MP3 player, and look up creature stats, and sometimes even cheat somewhat…"

Gaffney: "Ah, the truth is starting to come out."

Freese: "You could look up how to create some of your spells. Because they had this absurd taper system that turned out to be not fun at all to do."

Gaffney: "But I consider that to be up to the development team to fix those sorts of things. I mean with Asheron's Call we had a live team of three doing those monthly updates so you know…"

Freese: "I think it actually helped their game because it kept people playing who might have otherwise stopped."

Gaffney: "Yeah, but in this day and age when we have thirty five people managing a live game and not three then I think it's your responsibility to make your game not suck."

Sage: "I understand why people want it and I understand that the need's there but it's far easier to make something better than it is to make something. I get the impetus for it and at the same time it really does hurt on a very significant level."

Massey: "Not only that but where do you draw the line when you have a EULA that very specifically says Do Not Do This and then you say, well, ok, we'll let it slide. What do you say to the next guy that comes along?"

There is a dark side and a light side to MMO communities. On one hand they are the life blood of the genre. The millions of people who make up the online communities are what truly bare these games forward upon their imaginations, their relationships, and their wallets. By and large they're a very positive and intelligent mass of people. Unfortunately you'll rarely ever hear from them.

The dark side is the worst of the online community. Best case they will scream and moan about everything you do. They will try their best to ruin other player's experiences and then call you Nazis when you find them and ban them from your service. Worst case they will actively subvert your game, either externally in auctions, or through programs designed to cause damage or gain unfair advantages.

And, tragically, you will never get rid of the later faction. Your mission, as a developer, is to find your core community, foster it, and insulate it from its own negative elements as much as possible. It's a delicate balance of social engineering and something that's a radical departure from most developers' comfort zones and experience. But with a solid strategy and good staff you can reap very tangible benefits.

In Conclusion

There is little to be said that has not already been said. And so I will allow the professionals who are the core of this article have the last word. In the words of Jeremy Gaffney:

"I think it's about to be a bumper couple of years for developers. Why is that? Right now as we're recording this, World of Warcraft hasn't come out, probably by the time anyone hears this it will have and I will be proven right or not, but I think World of Warcraft is really going to expand the genre and it's going to make a boatload of money for Vivendi and Blizzard. [Ed Note: Gaffney appears to be right. Blizzard has announced World of Warcraft as having the highest first day sales of any PC title ever.]

When that happens we're going to see lots of people go, 'Oh, I can take my IPs, dust them off and make MMPs out of them!' and we're going to see the same kind of mad money that led to the half a billion dollar EA.com debacle back in the days. I think we're going to see another influx of not very well invested money.

I actually think it's going to be a lot easier over the next few years to get a pitch done whereas, in the last year or two, it's been very hard because there haven't been very many new, successful MMPs to point to. In this year alone I think we'll be able to point to Everquest 2, point to City of Heroes, you'll be able to point to World of Warcraft and you'll be able to say, look, all these games succeeded! And everyone's going to forget your last article about how it's been a dark era and I think it's going to be a very positive era for that. But we'll see. I could be proven wrong."

About the Author

Rick is a former web designer and a published writer. Currently he studies Level Design at The Guildhall @ SMU

The Massive Growing Pains series will explore the growth and evolution of the MMO game through interviews with its leaders and pioneers in effort to bring an academic approach to the issues facing the industry's biggest "new" genre.