Game Director’s Letter – May 2013

[Buffarse]

Allowing players options, choices and customizable content in all these fields will only save development work in the long run and give longterm player motivation.

Then, when you step away from your utopic imaginary ideal and come back to the realities of a run down, chronically underfunded, poorly managed (in the past at least) MMO none of that still holds.

I've said repeatedly that the intention and idea is perfectly good. Few, if any, would argue against a well implemented set of player housing if dev resources and effort were limitless. It ALWAYS comes back to the reality we ACTUALLY have right now though. I'm not going to repeat myself about this. I'll let you ponder this though.

Lets say I accept your posture that it could be implemented "easily" because most of the fundamental mechanisms are in place. I think therefore you can happily agree that its equally true for all the mechanisms being in place for creating raids. Accepting that, why is it that almost every single raid Funcom has ever released has been broken, bugged and in almost every case taken months or even years to fix? Some, arguably, still are broken even though the last raid was added 12 months ago. This was back when they had significantly more resources and significantly more knowledge and experience (by developer numbers, not necessarily by individual developer skill) too. Even if I were to accept the "it's all there" argument, it doesn't make the quality of the implementation suddenly better.

We're going round in circles though. You're arguing against me about something that I agree with you about (that player housing would be good if well implemented). What you're not discussing is the fact that Funcom's history shows they wouldn't implemented it well and would doom it to failure. My issue isn't with player housing as regardless of my personal belief that it's pointless I understand why others would like it and I'm ok with that. My issue is, was and always has been that Funcom would NOT implement it properly and would waste countless hours of priceless dev time on something that will be doomed to failure. This is directly because of their history that shows a tendency to have some brilliant ideas and them implement them sub optimally, never support or develop them further then letting them die a death (guild renoun being a very good example of that).

Now you can either look at this thread as being a dream list of things you'd like in a perfect world (I could add another 3 tiers of raiding, splitting PVP and PVE stats, equipment and resources utterly and completely, sorting out guild renoun, crafting and many other things to that wishlist) or you can look at it as a list of realistic small incremental changes and additions that have a chance of getting implemented. If you want to former, you're right on track. If you want the latter then I suggest you reign in your ideas to something smaller scale.

Buff

[Kurt2013]

I have heard the "realistic" and "idealistic world" argument too often as an excuse to take it seriously anymore. The "harsh world" and "tough business" rules are nothing but ideologic too.

In business there are very few cases where you can really pin down causal chains or truly have impossible things (too often you can replace "too expensive" or "impossible" with "too complicated for me" or "i don't want it"). Sure, the problems are more and it is tougher when you are low on budget, starting out or trying to survive....but this does not have to keep you from doing small steps or things that will not hurt.

I do agree that player housing is not that easily implemented as a whole, but since it can be done modular by implementing small changes at a time (starting with guild city placements, then customizeable instances before making it for everyone), i consider it different than raid or full pve instance development. With a complete raid you can not do this step by step as easily as with player customizeable content. The huge workload will always be the balancing and testing, if you want it properly done and especially when your game system does not offer adequate rules to do most of the work on paper and scratch.

But as you might have noticed i tried to break down the big step (player housing) into several substeps, that should be doable with small workload and manpower. Same approach can be done with other areas (pvp minigames, open world pvp, new gear, crafting etc.).

Sadly i fear i do agree with you about the way funcom works. They seem to lack the understanding of how decentralized development can work

You also maybe right about that what seems easy to me, does not need to be easy to them (be it because of work experience, editor quality, programming skills, creativity, documentation, management, etc.). So my evaluation that player housing could be done with existing resources must not totally be true. It might just appear so from my point of view. Just one person in management and decision making, who does not like it, a full database or a badly coded editor can work as factors making it close to impossible (though this would not affect only development in "player housing" i guess).

@Erock: Non linear power progression is for example gear not organized in tiers, but sets offering drawbacks. A tier 2 armor does NOT have to be better in every aspect than a tier 1 armor. Just give tier 2 armors more budget than tier 1 and more than one piece to choose from (good example are the last legion faction armors).
Giving players more choices and combinations.