Netflix decides to keep the profiles feature after all.
Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience. Simplicity is only one virtue and it can certainly be outweighed by utility.
* post title totally stolen from here — aside from many, many MMO examples, of course.
Pirates of the Burning Sea makes quite a lot of changes with the help of a patcher survey. Joe says:
The patch survey process is a new one for us, but so far I’m very happy with the results. This kind of feedback is a great complement to the information we get through the forums, support tickets, live metrics, and talking to players. I encourage you all to keep your eyes on the launcher once 1.5 is live. Your answers on the next patch survey will make this process even better!
We discussed a patcher survey in Lord of the Rings Online earlier this year.
Because these things are good to know.
Shadowbane’s combat outcomes were similarly based on ratings, determined by gear and base statistics, not level. But if I remember correctly, attack rating and defense rating only determined chance to hit. Damage wasn’t scaled.
Content density in Life in Vegas, an upcoming open world game that looks like it would be really cool if the tone weren’t so relentlessly immature:
Open world games have so much content, but do you ever worry that you’re working on this content that no one’s going to see, necessarily? Someone doesn’t go all the way down that tree?
[…] we’ve also made it a very big point for design, to make sure that the missions were covering — we literally have coverage graphs all over the map, how much time you spend in any given area, and when. So it’s all paced so that you’re going from location to location, and really utilizing the game environment.
It’s literally a tool that we’ve used behind the scenes, so that we can tell how people will play the game, basically, so we can tune the missions to make sure people are using the world appropriately. It’s completely transparent to the player.
The toolset that you’re using to design the game, you have this tool, so that when someone’s designing that mission tree, it will encourage them to place the missions in different parts?
AP: Yeah, exactly. So, when the designer is literally placing the missions, first we make up, “OK, we don’t really go to the Fremont area, you know, for the first two hours of the game, so let’s put a vigilante gig there that’s going to reward the players for exploring that area.”
And then, within the vigilante gig, we may go, “OK, in this area, no one’s really hitting that for another two hours, if people played linearly through the game, so let’s reward the player from that.” So you’re really making sure that players are hitting all locales within the open world, no matter how they play; whether it’s just going off the rails, doing gigs, which again are optional missions, or doing the narrative.
I’m curious about what the tool looks like. I’m picturing a room full of level designers working under density maps on monitors like the NYPD.
Netflix is eliminating their profile feature, where an individual account (say, two movies at a time) can be split up into separate movie queues (say, one for my movies and one for my spouse’s, in case our tastes don’t match).
At least, we assume that the reason the feature exists is a) because it’s a nice feature for households with multiple movie watchers who disagree on DVD priorities, and b) because it allows them to data mine individual preferences for said movie watchers. Without this feature, they can do neither, and they piss people off while they’re at it.
I wonder if maybe the data just wasn’t that useful (but I like seeing recommendations driven by my movies!). I wonder if the data storage was getting to be a problem (doesn’t seem like it’d be that much, aside from maybe the individual rating data). Maybe they never used it in the first place (ahh, the world of corporate “business intelligence”).
Like somebody points out in the Metafilter thread, it’s a bad time to piss off subscribers for any entertainment service. Food for thought.
In addition to your friends’ scores, Rock Band song leaderboards provide some interesting business data.
Every time you play a song in Rock Band while connected to Xbox Live, your score is applied to the song’s leaderboard. What’s interesting about that is that the number of entries on the leaderboard can tell us how many users have played the song. And what’s interesting about that is that it tells us how many users have purchased the song, if it was downloadable content. (Not counting people that purchased the song and never played it, and not counting if the users-played count is over 100k because the leaderboards don’t go that far, but hey.)
Rock Band DLC Statosphere adds it all up.
skedastic of the Qt3 boards massaged the numbers a bit to remove time factors and to group by artist. There’s some debate in the thread over his statistical methods. I would like to debate because Rush and Nine Inch Nails are relatively low, and goddammit, I want more Rush and Nine Inch Nails.
Am I not getting more Rush and Nine Inch Nails because the team can see that they’re poor investments? I don’t know, but I haven’t seen any patterns in the DLC releases that would imply they’re trying to provide more songs by proven bands — yet. I wonder what their lead time and content production pipelines look like. Is it harder to get assets out of studio musicians than it is artists? 
I played the demo for Civilization Revolution, Civilization revamped for the console. The demo’s up for download on Xbox Live. It is awesome.
From one playthrough, I get the sense that it’s been streamlined but not simplified. For example, the two biggest changes that come to mind, given the way I play: your newb galley ship now comes complete with exploration units — you don’t have to build a ship, then build guys to put on it. (Don’t know if that holds true for later ships, but it’s a very welcome feature in the early game.) And road building is automated — pay out some money in one city, pick the connecting city, and it’s done. (I’m actually kind of sad about that, because I goddamn love building roads … I goddamn loved building roads and sewer systems in SimCity when I was a kid too. Hmm.)
Still, it’s a thoughtful feature as well, because the game has lots more going on. There are events popping up all the time. It helps break up the early game monotony — okay, I moved my explorer warrior one space, I moved my settler one space, next turn, do the same thing again.
I’m really looking forward to the full game next month. I just wasn’t expecting a console revamp of anything, really, to turn out so well. On the next playthrough, I might notice more stuff I don’t like, but for now, I’m delighted.
Firaxis has also announced that the next iteration on Civilization 4 will be a remake of Colonization. I loved Colonization when I was a kid. I’m really looking forward to that too.
Subscribe