SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown
- Thread starter Laerazi_sl
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Evernothing
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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yerm
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I feel bad for Sam. Nowadays half of you autists box way more than he did, and he was being mocked for buying hookers while others WERE hookers. He was just a man ahead of his time.
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Evernothing
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Legacy code is a swear word in every computer industry field. Every. Single. One.
Before my stint in MMOs in the 2000s (worked on Ryzom), I worked in telco. Now, for legacy code, imagine that you are going to deploy systems, and you will have a 20-year maintenance contract (which was the standard in those days). For 20 years, we would need to provide support and patches if this or that teleco transport switch had a bug. So not only was every single fucking line of code documented, but we even kept copies of the compiler used to build it. Because we knew we'd have to pull the code, fix a bug, and provide the binary, and we couldn't afford to have a compiler behavior changing on us.
I got a dressing down by my manager for having a bad comment to code ratio. If you had less than 1 line of comment per line of code, you were doing it wrong. And no, if you put comments like "increment array index by 1", your code review would bounce.
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Denaut
Trump's Staff
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If you are interested, and the details make sense, I would be happy to talk to your class. Keep in mind I am just a game designer who tries to fly under the RADAR as much as possible, so by name I am a nobody. However, I have been working with online games since 2005 and have filled in occasionally in the Game Design program at a local private university.
I live in Europe, so the time zone difference may be helpful. Late in the school day in the US is after work my time. PM me if you want to discuss the possibility further.
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Muligan
Trakanon Raider
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Appreciate it! If I am not moved into an administrative role next year, we'll definitely work on that. We are in our remaining last couple of weeks but assuming we have the program and i'm still involved in some way, i'll definitely try to line something up. We typically have 3-4 guest speakers per year within our program so i'll circle back around with you for the Fall semester.
I'm not worried about the name, if it's not Jeff Kaplan or Notch they don't recognize many anyway, but if you have experience and some industry insight, it will be of value. Thanks for offering and again, i'll make a note to drop you a pm.
Siddar
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Partially correct. Often times designers do what they feel is best for the game, and sometimes that doesn't equal what players want. More often than not, players want rather insane things to make their class better without considering the overall balance of the game. The other, more likely scenario for this too, is that often players want things to game simply can't do. A perfect example happened at the last Fan Faire we had.. In one of our panels, someone seriously asked one of the programmers, "When the game crashes, it generates a crash message that we see. Can't you sense that crash coming, and put in code to just tell the game client to not crash?"
As for any of those designers ignoring you, it's pretty simple.. They don't have time to respond to every PM they get. An AVERAGE day for me was 80-100 PMs. If we responded to all of them, we'd get nothing done. I won't like though, there are certain players who we just stopped reading, because they were just sending useless information or requests, but that was definitely not the norm.
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Dandai
<WoW Guild Officer>
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Back when I was a game design student we had a guest speaker talking to us about the importance of play testing and user feedback. He told us a story about when they were play testing a racing game and almost all of the testers were saying that their vehicles moved too slow. Naturally they offered unsolicited advice on how to make the gameplay better, but the team had a vision for their game and knew that simply increasing the speed of the vehicle would break it. That left them at a bit of impasse because the feedback was clearly, “we’re not having fun driving in your racing game.” So they had to get creative.
What they came up with was tweaking and adjusting the textures and colors on the track and vehicle. Surprisingly, after the next round of playtesting none of the testers mentioned vehicle speed at all. According to the designer all they’d effectively done was changed the paintjob from a dark color to a bright red. They didn’t change the actual speed of the vehicle at all.
The takeaway was that we should absolutely listen to players to identify common themes and trends in their feedback, but we should never accept the feedback at face value. The root cause (and solution) is likely deeper and less obvious.
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Fight
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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No doubt, some people just have an unrealistic expectation of "I'm the customer, I am always right, fix my shit now" or an over-inflated ego that somehow makes them think their constant "feedback" and nagging is actually a good thing. I can only imagine the metric-fuckton of autistic rubbish the feedback on EQ must have been.
I love your story Dandai, because it was feedback that was consistent and could be narrowed down to "game is too slow". Sometimes you need a QA department that can funnel many ideas into singular and actionable item. Cool example.
I love your story Dandai, because it was feedback that was consistent and could be narrowed down to "game is too slow". Sometimes you need a QA department that can funnel many ideas into singular and actionable item. Cool example.
tyen
EQ in a browser wait time: ____
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People cry about everything, I mean jesus now its the bathezid ring prior to kunark launch on coirnav. Everyone just expects everything to be handed to them easy mode respawn in 1 minute. I can respect the idea that not everyone had a SWC during original EQ and not everyone will on coirnav.
