Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

SWG Creative Director Goes Shotgun Crazy

I have been known to comment on Star Wars Galaxies.  It's fashionable to knock it, not least on cynic-fest funboard F13, but I did think it came very close to being a really fun, immersive and complex virtual world.

That said, it could hardly be said to have lacked for troubles.  It was rolled-out in a phase barely worthy of the term "Beta".  I don't release code to user-acceptance testing until I can't find bugs any more, and I'm thorough.  Beta-testers are there to find problems of scale, problems related to weird player behaviour, issues related to synchronisation and other such hard-to-predict scenarios.  SWG shipped with features that could never have been regression-tested because attempting them simply did nothing.

Blah, blah, usual SWG rant, broken, buggy, failed expectations, New Game Experience revamp, apparent designer/producer lunacy, tinfoil hats, demonisation, usual suspects etc etc...

The whole game has moved from under-achiever to absolute horror story for the last year or so, and has been an object lesson over its lifetime regarding bad development practises, unbelievably poor QA processes and the dangers of letting a senior developer run with a "really cool" idea (how the producer avoided being taken out and shot at dawn for allowing the NGE to occur eludes me, but I suspect he must know where Lucas Arts and Sony hide the bodies.

Anyway, a year ago a guy called ChrisCao [sic] joined as creative director.  He signed up in Q3 '06, when the NGE revamp was under way but being kept secret from the player base.  Here was a great opportunity to change the direction of the game.  To be involved in turning around a moribund product (maybe he should have asked why only this update was being kept hush-hush).  He posted an enthusiastic, content-lite string of cliches from the Raph Koster book of community management: "we're here, we're listening, we're answering".  The usual marketing weaselry.

And then he lived through nine months of arguably the biggest-scale community-relations disaster in virtual worlds history.  In March, at the very height of the debacle, he briefly tried to defend the changes, posting 18 of his 42 total posts in one day.  Since this was an impossible task, he shouldn't have felt too bad that he met a wall of hostility, but he dealt with it by removing himself for half a year, withdrawing from direct contact from the community for whom he was supposedly the creative driving force.

Then, last week, he snapped.  Something - perhaps a bad day at home, perhaps a particularly well-designed trolling post - made him post this.  If you don't know about Massively Multiplayer Online Game forums, it is worth noting that this is very stupid behaviour.  You do not post saying "if you disagree with me you are all t3h 5uxx0rs".  He is posting about the vehemence of the SWG boards (and accurately so, but he helped make them that way with his "creations").  Well, duh!  Do that and the flames are always going to be so fierce that you're lucky if you only lose your eyebrows.

What he said basically boiled down to: most of you people who regularly complain about the direction of the game are unimportant to us, and we ignore you.  This is either fallacious (why address those you ignore?), or unneccessary (why address those you ignore?).

If he really wanted to say what he said, he should have created a temporary account and flamed away.  Of course, he would have been ignored or laughed at as a shill of SOE (did I say the boards are dysfunctional, the heavily-beaten red-headed step-children of MMO gaming forums?).  But he wouldn't have forced everyone from the community relations folks (the embarrassingly-monickered Thunderheart) to the lead designer (Helios) to post "clarifications" in strangled tones.

The people who remain working on SWG and the players who keep playing it deserve each other.  But they do teach us some valuable life lessons.  If you are foolish enough to pay money for a horrible experience that you can't let go, that is dumb, and you deserve to get played like the junkies you are.  And if you are willing to work for customers who you hate, and who loathe you right back, then be smart enough to be professional about it!

Raph Koster, I believe, literally wrote the book for SOE community relations.  I have not read it, but I have read his other books, and I have seen his guidelines discussed.  He said, amongst other things, that the key is to marginalise the flamers through selectively responding to the positive posters.  Raph is a talented man, and I can't wait for him to design another world, but this dog-training approach to community relations won't work when the plurality of your paying subscribes actively believes that you no longer have their best interests at heart, and when many of the most vocal members of your community believe that you in fact wish to be rid of them.  Confirming this in a senior dev's post, however?  I would love to have seen some faces in the community relations team when they spotted that post glued to the top of the forums: "Erm, guys...?  There's something you, I mean, should um..."

I hope this drama never ends.  Sadly, I think the clock must be ticking, and rather loudly.