Interesting comments on an interesting invention.
I appreciate the ability to set an alarm in game. I don’t remember if the “send me an alert at a given time” feature in Star Wars Galaxies always helped me get to bed on time, but I always used it. Everquest 2 has the same feature.
WoW has parental controls, where you can set the exact hours that an account will be available. “Note that if a player is logged in during a timeslot that has now been restricted, he or she will be automatically logged out when the schedule goes into effect.” THANKS, MOM.
Raph discusses Lord of the Rings Online’s plans to have official character blogs and such:
A lot of the current thinking on community relations has been about moving all this stuff off of the official site. But the datamining value of hosting all this stuff is probably worth it just on its own.
I mentioned this for forums a couple of weeks ago. The ability to data mine information requests is incredible, too — just think of looking at the hits for the quests in Thottbot’s database. Content that people have to solve with out-of-game tools is content that’s broken, and there’s no way to know that they’re doing it unless you control the information sources.
The community managers out there can chime in and talk about the difficulties of maintaining a public wiki — it sounds like a tough problem to me — but I lust for the data.
Currently, deep statistical analysis of your forums requires hiring a research company to do intelligence gathering — and they’d get the data via crawls.
Good math-major information probably does require professionals, but it can’t be that difficult to do basic usage metrics. It just takes some initiative. That’s certainly been my experience with gameplay.
Not funny.
Okay, the film school treatment is kind of funny.
Otherwise, really, not funny. Bordering on offensive. The closure of a social space is a sad time, and their mourning is legitimate.
In the Slashdot thread for the aforementioned Gamasutra statistics articles, somebody pointed out Dystopia, a Half-Life 2 mod that used beta test metrics to balance weapon DPS. There’s an audio interview on the game’s website; I listened to a bit of it and I’m still intensely curious as to how they corrected for player skill bias in accuracy.
This is the first public word I’ve seen on FPS weapon balancing with metrics.
There’s very little out there on FPS balancing in general. Here’s a conversational article at Unreal Wiki, where the writers argue that math doesn’t really have a place in it. Maybe that’s why no one talks about methodology. When you say “I made some shit up and iterated until it felt right,” people tend to think that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I have a notebook full of full-featured, college lecture-style notes from game conferences: GDC 2004, AGC 2004, GDC 2005, AGC 2005, and AGC 2006. It’s fun to see the exclamation points, where I realized I’d just learned something really important and wanted to be sure I’d remember it. I like the notes I took on Larry Mellon’s 2004 talk about his metrics system in the Sims Online, which ultimately influenced my career quite a bit.
During the same conference, I saw Gordon Walton speak about “Nine Things to Look For in the Next Generation of MMOGs” — GDC 2004, Friday, 9-10.
One of the nine things:
Accessibility
- topic selection — most of current “totally catered to hardcore gamers”
- hardware and software specifications — limits market because “real people don’t have machines like gamers have”
- compatibility
- ease of use/interface
- learning curve — “hard to learn, easy to use” is current norm
I really like that. “Hard to learn, easy to use.” Hasn’t changed yet, has it?
Check out Tyler Sigman’s series on MATH AND YOU at Gamasutra.
Great stuff.
It’s interesting to see a discussion of metrics in console titles, since I wasn’t aware that there was a whole lot going on. (To be fair, I’m not aware that there’s a whole lot going on outside of a handful of MMO companies either.)
Tyler also talks about “sportscaster errors.” I’d just like to point out that I’ve had a link to Fire Joe Morgan on the sidebar for forever.
Update in the afternoon: there are comments at Slashdot, where people seem to have a hard time believing that “the stats guy” isn’t really a common part of most design teams.
Is iPhone as revolutionary as claimed? Is the multi-touch interface truly breakthrough as claimed? Yes and no. Let’s take a look.
Tog on the iPhone.
I love the way that he integrates reader comments and updates within the article itself.
The rest of the site is a worthwhile read, too. Check out this 2005 list of worst “design bugs,” detailing problems from fighter jet weapon interface to menu item conventions. Here’s a great article about a dishwasher.
Subscribe