Comments on: MMO Development Lesson #28

By: sacremon

sacremon — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:23:08 +0000

I’m not asking for them to play every option, but a set of typical ones would be nice. That way perhaps some significant imbalances would have been seen before it hit the servers and caused an uproar in one class community or another. Just ask someone who plays a high level ranger in EQ2 about arrows (NB: I don’t play one, but I have heard plenty about it). If one class is being abandoned or betrayed (if the game has that mechanism) to another class more than the opposite direction, the developers should be asking themselves why that is, and test out the classes for themselves.

By: Adele

Adele — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:58:53 +0000

Completely agree. I know there is one company out there that some of the classes are very screwed up and I can almost bet that not one of the devs has played those classes to the max level, and it shows! I think it should be a requirement that the developers actually play the game they are making.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:50:15 +0000

What you really need is to work at one company that is developing 2 MMOs… then make a friend on the other dev team, you play his game and have him play yours.

By: Ryan Shwayder

Ryan Shwayder — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:13:42 +0000

Playing the game as players do doesn’t mean “legitimately play the game as every option.” It means you have to play the game with no developer commands to know how everything works in practice. If an issue specifically comes up that you haven’t personally tested “as a player,” you have at least the following options:

1) Find another dev that plays that class and talk to them. 2) Observe how it plays out while grouped (you can generally tell things are screwed up when grouped with someone). 3) Use your hax0r dev commands and specifically test the perceived problem. 4) Talk to trusted class players within the community.

The real idea is that playing your game as a player gives you a much better idea of the state of things than just reading the forums or /feedback.

To Darniaq’s point: Yeah, it is hard to play the game as a player. At the very least, you need to play it while at work. If your company doesn’t let you play your game at work at least several hours a week, it’s a dumbass company that doesn’t know what’s good for it.

By: sacremon

sacremon — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:35:11 +0000

The more options there are for character generation/development, the less chance that a developer, even a team of developers, can play the game as the players do. Imagine trying to do that in EQ2, where there are 24 classes, then Achievement Ability builds that modify those. It would be difficult, imo, for a developer to really test out how more than perhaps 4-6 classes operate in solo/group/raid situations well enough to have a grasp on the classes ‘perceived reality’.

By: JuJutsu

JuJutsu — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:53:34 +0000

Would it really help for developers to play the game? A quick trip to any game’s forum makes it clear that devs only play the uber unbalanced classes

By: Roleplay

Roleplay — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:52:00 +0000

“Perception is reality.” - you couldn’t have said this any more accurately.

By: Darniaq

Darniaq — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:52:48 +0000

Great advice; however, playing one’s own game is hard enough as it is unfortunately The best way to burn out is to work all day and then play that game all night.

That’s why as you say, listening to your actual players is hugely important. You just gotta know when to, and not constantly be chasing the last thing that everyone said on your forums. We have ample examples of both ends of the spectrum, from blind-eye ignorance to too much pandering.

By: Ryan Shwayder

Ryan Shwayder — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:31:25 +0000

Yep. Even if you’re sure players are wrong, you have to listen to what they’re saying and check it out for yourselves. There are times when players are entirely right about the facts and not just the perception, You may realize that something is looping too many times, an unexpected calculation is being run, a table in the database has been modified, or something else is different than you (the developer) thought.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:56:10 +0000

Arg follow up post.

Here’s actually one story from Day of Defeat where perception was actually based on fact. After we ported the game to Source, a lot of people (or loud minority) complained it didn’t feel right, shot accuracy wasn’t as good, etc. Ends up that in fact in the HL1 (goldsrc) based version, the code was doing a weighted shot cone - where more bullets hit towards the center of the shot location than the edges. However in the Source version, the code got changed unintentionally to a completely random system where the bullet patterns were totally random with no weighting. Some enterprising players actually made a modification (server side) to implement the weighted shot cone.

So in this case, perception (and a lot of bitching on the forums about nerfing) actually was based on reality, and for a long time it was simply ignored as being in the player’s heads. So my advice is to not totally ignore what people are perceiving unless you implicitly know it is a fact they are “wrong” (in quotes).

Writeup on the shot cone thing and some replacement code (with comments FFS!) I wrote at http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/CShotManipulator