Gamasutra has a brief article on production-phase metrics for single-player games at Bioware. I don’t know how true this is of the rest of the industry, but it sounds like theirs is driven by QA, rather than design.
Ideally, QA should feel comfortable giving subjective design feedback to the team — walking across the office to tell the designer that the new minigame sucks. Unfortunately, designers aren’t always willing to listen. Walking across the office with a printout of this chart could be more successful.
That kind of stupid designer pride leads them to be unwilling to back metrics initiatives or to listen to community feedback. Grow up and take advantage of the tools available to you — they make your job easier.
CCP has brought on an economist to monitor Eve’s economy. “His research is designed to provide players with information necessary to make strategic decisions, but is also expected to have an impact on future development of the game.”
He’s maintaining a blog.
I just rerolled on a new server in WoW, and I planned to get rich with skinning and herbalism. It’s only sort of working — ye olde bank alt has about 25 stacks of thick leather that I think I’m going to have to vendor. I wonder if leatherworking would get fixed if a goddamn economist pointed out that there’s no market in this shit.
A couple of weeks ago, SOE invited a bunch of players to San Diego for an “Influencer Summit.” Sounds like they nailed it. Read that guy’s escalating excitement about SOE as the event progresses.
The best part: he says that they were shown a REAL LIVE CSR at work. My god. Every time somebody complains about CS on the SWG forums from now until they forget about it, one of those players will pop in and talk about how those poor CSRs are real people and they work hard and they care, they really do. Man, that’s brilliant.
Also, he says they got a yacht trip with REAL LIVE DEVS. They’ll pop into “[dev handle] sucks” threads to say that those poor devs are real people and they work hard and they care, too, but I don’t think it’ll last as long.
Man, I want a yacht trip.
Fan events are awesome. They remind both players and staff that there are real people on the other side.
(link via f13)
In response to LOTRO’s community features announcement, I asked about the challenges of maintaining an official game wiki. Puzzles Pirates already has one, and Rob at pkurflax has kindly written an article about it.
” … the YPPedia is mostly a labor of love for a portion of our playerbase, who probably equate documenting the game’s history and features to a sort of ‘high-level game’.”
That’s explorers for you.
Let’s look at some stats.
I put them all in Excel.
I was curious if a more, uh, rabid fanbase lead to increased wiki activity. Discounting page views, since not all of the wikis provided them, and without any accurate subscriber counts, we’re left with ratios of wiki users to other stuff.
Well then. I don’t have any conclusions to take away about YPPedia, but I could use this data to back up some generalizations about Vanguard and EQ2’s fans.
What do you see in the data?
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