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So, what do we have for you today?

I’ve been following (and sticking my oar into) a debate on Broken Toys about the rights of players ingame. It didn’t start out that way but somehow the to-ing and fro-ing over Blizzard’s new mod policy devolved into an argument about how much control players should have over the game they play.

Now I’d be the first to argue that players should have as much control as possible over the environment they play in but here we are talking about not just the ingame and meta game experience but the way that the game is operated.  And the answer to that is somewhere close to ‘none at all’.

Oh, sure you can have robust community feedback that informs design and production, you can give the players a platform to make their case and that’s all fine and laudable however the operator needs to have the casting vote. Sometimes it’s necessary to do things that your players won’t like for reasons that you can’t adequately explain in public. Sometimes your players are simply wrong and you need to give them what the game needs not what the players say they want.

MMOs foster a strong sense of investment in players by their very nature. Not just the ‘I pay you 15$ a month so you’d better listen to me’ type of stuff but also a deeper level of belonging that comes from fostering a strong community. People feel attached to the game and the communitythey play with and that sense of attachment leads naturally to a sense of obligation regarding the same. Between this investment and sense of belonging, perspectives are often lost. Worse, the situation can devolve to the point where the players feel the game owes them something.

The reality is one that companies are usually unwilling to point out. For the player it’s a game, for the operator it’s a livelihood. No matter how invested the player believes himself to be, ultimately he can walk away whenever he chooses and be no worse off. So, when a developer makes a decision, the only party that can really win or lose is the company itself.

Very often I’ve had to be the person who had to front bad news to a community. For a lot of those times there were very good reasons as to why that bad news had to happen. In almost none of those instances was it possible to properly explain the situation. Many times the decision was better for the game but worse in the short term for the players. You can’t ask people to lay aside their self-interest and do what’s right because 90% of the time they’ll pick the wrong option (the other 10% of the time is when they pick the right path entirely by accident).

I’ve said it before but people are generally bad at expressing what they want. They will point at a symptom and ask for that to be fixed without thinking about the underlying cause. Or they’ll work backwards from a premise to reach a faulty basis and insist on that. Or they’ll simply assume that their own short term self-interest is in the long-term interest of everyone.

This is why you should never listen to what people are suggesting but instead look closely at what they are actually saying.

Jeremy’s post is mostly a critique of some points that Ryan Schwayder made on the pros and cons of official forums, but amongst all of that she makes some very interesting points on community scalability.  Communities, it is very clear work best when they are small. How small? Jeremy brings up Dunbar’s Number as a possible limit but in reality I think the answer is mutable. For a game community, a single server is probably too big to be considered a single community, an alliance or a guild is a better basic unit of community and those tend not to exceed a few hundred. If your alliance exceeds that number then the chances are you have several communities within that umbrella that can be said to be independant of each other as discrete communities. For all that we might talk about ‘the community’ on a particular server, the reality on the ground is a lot grainier than that. Just because we might end up fighting the same battle, we aren’t necessarily part of the same community. It isn’t necessarily limited to the number of simultaneous relationships any one member can sustain – hence why I don’t think Dunbar’s Number applies – but once you start going beyond second degree associations then I think you can start to define a boundary. The smaller a community is (above a certain sustainability threshold) the more tightly knit it tends to be,  this is something we see in every aspect of life from geographic location through to international associations.

The basic point of Ms Dalberg’s post is correct. However we are measuring the cohesiveness of a community, 5 million is way too many to be considered as a single entity. That’s crazy talk and is akin to assuming that putting the entire population of Belgium in a room to chat to each other and then trying to manage that would be in some way productive.

So how do you manage a 5 million member community? You don’t. You chop it up and manage a few hundred smaller ones.

By now the latest EvE dramaquake is old news but the discussions are still happening. Scott Jennings gives a pretty flippant account which then turns into a threadnought in the comments as is usual. The actual story is pretty simple once all the extraneous bits are trimmed away – guy gets fed up with life in one gigantic power bloc, defects to different gigantic power bloc and turns the lights out as he leaves the building.

People have argued the morality of the issue and whether or not that should be cheating but I’d like to concentrate solely on the question of how much power should a game invest in a single player?

EvE is something of a contradiction to established MMO wisdom. Players are very much in the driving seat when it comes to the big political movements in the game. Because of the almost complete freedom for players to interact with each other, players have a lot of individual power and, the more players they are associated with, the greater the scope for issues. Add to this CCPs very hands-off stance on intervention in player interactions and the stage is set for some industrial grade drama. Some people hold the belief that CCP actively encourages this kind of thing, personally I believe it’s simple pragmatism that drawing a line and upholding it is hard work and open to misinterpretation. In any case, it is possible for EvE players to amass a staggering amount of ingame power and responsibility – which translates into a gold plated opportunity to shaft a huge number of people at once.

For many EvE players (myself included), this freedom is precisely what attracts us to EvE in the first place and thus any attempt to restrict player power needs to be approached carefully by CCP in order not to alienate a very large chunk of the playerbase. This very open and abusable framework is not found in other games, limits are placed to prevent the damage that a single player can do to his ‘friends’.

I’ve advocated before for greater freedom in player interactions, I’ve also been fairly open in my conviction that players cannot be trusted to run important parts of the game so where is the happy medium?

For EvE, I don’t think there is one. Checks and balances can be put in place to prevent this particular issue from arising again, but enterprising players will always find ways around them or entirely new ways to be jerks to each other. For a hypothetical new game though, I think this should underline why community systems and player accountability should be at the core of the design and not simply a fancy LFG UI and some chat tabs.

So as you all know by now, I’m off to pastures new. I’ll be leaving GOA on Friday and getting everything packed up to go to Germany next week. Over the past five years at GOA, I’ve filled a variety of roles and experienced some real highs and lows along the way. There have been disasters and triumphs and each of them has taught me something new and important. I would have learned a lot of those lessons in a different way if I’d had the choice but, you take what you’re given and make the best of it.

A lot of people have asked me for inside dirt and, while there are a lot of bodies buried in the past, I’m going to leave them there. There are times and places for that kind of thing and unless you’re buying the drinks you probably won’t get to hear about it.

There is something that I do want to air in public however and that is a heartfelt shout-out to some of the people who really deserve a lot of credit for the roles they played in the communities of both DAoC and WAR. All of these people made my job either easier or significantly more pleasant. I’m not going to include my colleagues at GOA or comrades-in-arms over at Mythic in this (although there are certainly a lot of those who deserve just as much credit) as this is mostly about the players and the guys within the community, I’m also going to apologise in advance if I missed anyone out, my memory is notoriously leaky and is mostly filled with useless facts rather than actually important stuff. So here they are in no particular order, my community heroes:

• Garthilk of WHA, could not have tried harder to help us out in building the community for WAR, right from the start of the beta.
• Jupitus of Freddyshouse. As a guild leader of Phoenix Legion and then an admin on FH, he has been a part of our community efforts from the early days of DAoC. The help he has given us is literally incalculable.
• Morg from Only-WAR. A very enthusiastic fansite admin, even though the EU wasn’t really represented in his users, he still came through for us a few times.
• Beibhinn from the VN boards. <3 <3 <3!
• Fahran and Cranmer from WAR-RVR. Both of these guys worked hard with us to shape the community for WAR, Fahran in particular was always willing to help out with collaborations.
• Flimgoblin. As a DAoC E&E, then as one of the most enthusiastic beta testers for WAR, his feedback has been instrumental.
• Nate. A DAoC veteran who did a lot of excellent and much appreciated work in the WAR beta, organising events, presenting detailed feedback and generally being a great commentator.
• Arbitrary. Admin of the Book of Grudges blog (which is now being updated again, yay!) Someone who was one of the first bloggers to run an EU centric WAR site and helped a lot with raising the profile of our community work.
• Mehuge, Kroy, Esraymuk and Roo for being major points of feedback in the WAR beta as well as pivotal leaders in the community both before and after launch.
• Svartmetall, Bahumat, Chodax and the rest of the FHOT crew for keeping me smiling.

All of these people and many more that I have inevitably missed through being rubbish deserve my gratitude and a lot of kudos for all that they did and in most cases continue to do.

So one more piece of self indulgence for me for today, we published my Archmage painting guide today on the main site and, jsut as before I have a bunch of photos left over. You can see the rest on my Flickr page.

For various reasons I’m really not interested in talking too much about the circumstances of my leaving GOA, I will say that I’m going to be sad to leave some really awesome people behind and that I will be taking a lot of very good memories away with me. Anything beyond that is a matter for my exit interview and some carefully written parting emails. I will have been here nearly five years when I leave and it’s been a valuable experience every day. Not always good times but I don’t regret any of my time here.

Finally in my last blog post Belsameth asked if I had more pictures of my Grumlok miniature in progress. I forgot to upload them for ages but I finally got around to it today so here’s a gallery of all the pictures. The darker ones were taken with my digital camera at home while the brighter ones were taken by our studio A/V guy here hence the stark difference in quality between them.

Things are happening, there are bright things on the horizon and some exciting changes on the way which I’ll expand on in time. Meanwhile, read my Grumlok painting guide. I had fun writing it and I hope that people will link me up with pictures of their completed work too.

A proper update coming soon, in the meantime, I’m not dead and I still have opinions to share.

We had an awesome booth and a fantastic crew, Mythic sent a sizeable contingent across too and over the week, we had about 7,500 people play the game on our stand. Pretty awesome!

I got to meet some of my fellow CMs and hang out with some of the coolest people in this industry which is always ace.

Here are my pictures, I’ll go through them over the next day or so to give them titles and descriptions. Have fun browsing!

There are two things you should know about Southern Spain. One is that it is very brown indeed, the other is that it is very hot. Crazy hot in fact. I stepped off the aeroplane and, by the time I’d struggled across the baking tarmac to the immigration office I already needed a shower. This was at 9pm, It boded poorly for the midday conditions.

The Campus Party itself is a 7 day long LAN party which is held in a massive convention centre. People camp on the ground floor (there were literally halls full of tents) and set their PCs up in the halls on the top floor which is also where all the exhibitors are.

I took some notes during the event along with loads of pictures. I started trying to write this up as an amusing travelogue but eventually realised that teh funny was not to be found and so I’m just going to give you my raw notes. Stream of consciousness, GOOOOO!!!!

Day 1

Damn it’s hot! Wave of heat as I stepped off the aircraft. Hotel is miles from anywhere but pleasant in an anonymous business hotel kind of way. Spain is mostly brown. Trees are prettier here.

Feria is a huge and cool hall with air conditioning (yay!). We are next to the Spanish Navy, Wii Fit and all the food. English is not universal here, Segways are however. We are also close to the Rockband stage. I doubt I will grow fond of this. Had hachata which was delicious in a nut flavoured milkshake kind of way.

Day 2

Marta says that Valencians only eat paella for lunch so we decided to be tourists and eat it for dinner instead. Yum!

Day 3

Moved to a nicer hotel in the centre of Valencia. The old one was in an industrial estate, the new one is in a beautiful city plaza.

Went looking for cocktails at 2am. Failed. Ended up in a flamenco bar *with no flamenco) where the barman didn’t know how to mix a bloody mary. By that time though it didn’t matter, enough wine, beer and cider had been consumed to make further alcohol irrelevant.

Day 4

Today I have mostly been giving t-shirts to the Spanish military. I do have a decent haul of swag in return however – my favourite loot so far is the LED soap bar. I also got to play in a djembe circle with the same group that initiated me into their capoeira band yesterday.

We said goodbye to Marta in the morning and hello to David and Pedro in the evening. The stand was busy all day and the Spanish kids are really excited about WAR. So was the Dutch guy from Antec. I got a henna tattoo of the WAR symbol which looks hella cool.

In the evening we went to the cathedral square  and had tapas, paella and a huge fish skewer. I love the food here.

Day 5

Rahim popped in for a flying visit this afternoon. He was around for a quick interview then he had to go again.

Saturday is the last real day of the LAN party. On Sunday everyone packs up and goes home, we will also be packing but we don’t go home till Monday.

Team WAR rocked the joint on the last evening. I was on drums, Lionel pushed out some sweet bass sounds while Jose laid out the riffs on Gimme Shelter. Much fun ensued and we got a respectable score despite our noobness.