Subscribe
The Trouble With Handcrafted Content
March 19, 2008 11:28 am
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.
Darius K. wrote:
AC1 now has a live team of about 3, actually (at least that’s what it was when I was at Turbine). But they’ve been doing these updates FOREVER and pull through almost every month.
Of note, of course, is that content for AC1 is about 1000x cheaper to make in terms of effort than content for WoW.
Posted on 19-Mar-08 at 1:15 pm | Permalink
Marc wrote:
Pure ignorance coming from that guild…
4 5mans
1 10man
1 25man
1 bg
1 special encounter
all per month?
In the words of Jim Cramer, “THEY HAVE NO IDEA”! Good, let them go, ignorance can leave while the rest of us are in bliss.
Posted on 19-Mar-08 at 1:40 pm | Permalink
Dave Rickey wrote:
I am somewhat surprised at how comparatively little content Blizzard has added since release. Considering the resources available to them, even this guild’s high target should be at least approachable. And they are running an extremely slow pace on expansion packs, something that could be a strategy to slow down mudflation, except that it doesn’t seem to be.
The only thing I can figure is that every time they train new people to make more content, they get poached by one of the dozens of startups founded by “Key WoW Developers”.
–Dave
Posted on 19-Mar-08 at 8:40 pm | Permalink
Moorgard wrote:
J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame once said that his ambition was to write better than anyone who could write faster than him and faster than anyone who could write better than him.
Whatever you think of their pace, no MMO company releases higher quality content updates than Blizzard. Until someone provides updates of the same quality at a faster rate, arguments against their methods sound pretty hollow to me.
Posted on 19-Mar-08 at 9:36 pm | Permalink
Hermes wrote:
I remember reading a dev diary or something similar for AC2 back near its original release that stated that something as simple as making a sword for a monthly content update took five times as many man hours as doing the same thing for AC1.
As you say, I think it basically comes down to AC1 being a simpler looking game with far better content creation tools, making the comparison somewhat unfair. I think the monthly update might have actually hurt AC1 somewhat, as I seem to recall them having to delay some particularly large updates to the game a couple times due to a desire to get the regular monthly content patch out on time.
Posted on 19-Mar-08 at 11:19 pm | Permalink
Sara Jensen Schubert wrote:
The guild leader also doesn’t consider how that much new content would split people up — it’s hard enough to get groups for the content that’s already there.
The trouble is perception.
Posted on 20-Mar-08 at 9:08 am | Permalink
srand wrote:
I was the producer for the AC1 live team for a couple of years (as well as lead engineer, designer, etc.). I’d like to make a couple of clarifications:
For most of it’s history, the AC1 live team was in the 3-7 developer range. I know of at least one time when it dipped down to one lonely developer. I don’t know where it is now.
Most of the tools for AC1 when I was on the team were not very good. Many of them consisted of fragile chains of obtuse command line scripts. Ultimately, most content was created with Notepad. (No, seriously.)
The biggest advantage AC1 had in terms of tools was a decent if finicky dungeon editor that allowed us to snap together new dungeon layouts from pre-existing piece sets with relative ease. Unfortunately, this tool did not magically created new dungeon pieces, and art was still one of the most expensive parts of new content for us. When you have *at most* one artist, new art is of necessity somewhat limited. And that will limit new content: there are only so many dungeon layouts you can do before people start describing new dungeons as “a Virindi area, then a cave area, then that mossy texture set from the old Empyrean stuff, then another Virindi area — in other words, booo-ring!”
At any rate, I think a more important factor in AC1’s ability to put out a lot of content each month was organization. And no, I don’t say that because I was producer! :> The structure was there before I started. In fact, that’s important — from the beginning, the AC1 team had a clear vision for what an update looked like — and most especially what purpose an update served with the audience — and how to create it. I’ve worked with other teams since, and I’ve learned that this level of organization and purpose for live content is rare. To be fair, I think Turbine stumbled into it and then kept it going mostly via inertia, but nevertheless I believe it’s been a real asset for AC1.
In fact, comparing WoW to AC1 in terms of live content mostly illuminates the difference in philosophy between them. Live content means very different things for the two games — and that’s really what this guild is objecting to: WoW’s philosophy.
Posted on 23-Mar-08 at 10:29 pm | Permalink