Let’s stay on this handcrafted content thing. Let’s say you have awesome tools and a great pipeline, you have an enormous and productive team which never complains about having to make stuff they don’t like, and you’re just full of great ideas with what to do with it all.
Your bottleneck is playtesting. Not QA — your awesome tools help ensure that stuff is mostly not broken on the first iteration! You need playtesting to make sure that experiencing that content is everything that it can be — your awesome tools cannot help you.
Let’s say you’re, oh, working on a mature game and making end-game content to shut whiny guild leaders up.
Your QA team is a bunch of minimum wage temps who don’t actually play the game. They can’t help you test raid content.
You can round up the whole office and ask them to play through it a few times a week, but that’s time they could have spent coding or modeling or whatever it is they do. And they’re not top-notch players either.
You can recruit some player volunteers and ask them to please, please not tell anybody about your dumb first iterations. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t! At least they play the game. (And woe if anyone outside of the program finds out. It’s so unfair!)
Alternatively, you can throw it on test and move on. Then everybody knows about your dumb first iterations! It’s so embarrassing.
How can you solve this bottleneck?
Two weeks ago, one of the top World of Warcraft raiding guilds announced that they were leaving the game because they were unhappy with the current risk and reward ratio. Despite the fact that the next patch is probably next week, they’ve followed up with a tangent on the trouble with handcrafted content: (copy-pasting quite a bit because the link doesn’t look stable)
Do you want the truth? Blizzard is giving nobody that pays for a subscription to WoW what they deserve. With the amount of money they are making, they should be putting out at least 4 5-mans and 1 10-man per month and 1 25-man every-other month. Not to mention they should probably be adding 1 new battleground each month, and 1 special tournament every other month. […] To be honest, I’m more irritated with this badge loot bullshit […] No, I really really don’t want to do more Kara, more of the same heroics, or anything else that gives badges. That is OLD CONTENT, regardless of the rewards.
Do people that enjoy 5-mans and heroics not enjoy seeing different encounters in different instances? […] . As was said earlier, -everyone- should be getting content. […] It is all being put out in this game slower than it is in AC1, and AC1 has been out for what, 9-10 years, and has less than 1% of the player-base of WoW.
Asheron’s Call 1 has nine years of monthly content updates. They had what, a live team of ten? But they had a famously awesome toolset, and people said they had an obscene retention rate.
Our latest dev blog talks about our iterative design process here at Spacetime, including an application of a simple data mining system.
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