Over the past eleven years I have worked with many great people on many great projects.  While there has been plenty for those teams to be proud of, I have never worked on a hit.  I have never worked on a game with a marketing budget to speak of. I have never worked on a game with a 90+ Metacritic rating. I have never worked somewhere that could really afford to push a game back just to make sure it was right before it came out. In other words, I have never been to The Majors.

Well that is all about to change:  tomorrow is my first day at Valve Software as a programmer on Team Fortress 2.

I am excited to be going to Valve for many reasons.  I love their games. I am hugely impressed by their consistently high level of quality. I am excited to work with a whole new pile of very smart people. I am excited to learn how their freaky “we don’t have managers, or pure designers, or even job descriptions, really” development process works. I love their dedication to playtesting and really taking playtest feedback to heart.  This is a big opportunity to learn from people who have built some of the best games out there.

My career is about to take a big step forward. I am excited, nervous, and more than a little intimidated. I feel like I’m finally going to the show.

There are a bunch of reasons for me to make this change, but the biggest one is this:  I’ve been at Flying Lab for almost nine years. In our ever-changing industry it’s extremely rare to be at one place for so long. Even outside the game industry, it’s not really all that common.  Have you ever worked at one company for more than eight years? When you stay in one place for that amount of time, your view of the world tends to crystallize and you forget that the rest of the industry doesn’t work exactly the same way you’re used to. You are also unable to spread your network nearly as far since all of the people at the “I’ve worked with that guy” level of familiarity are at the same company.

There is also something to be said for getting to switch projects. I was the guy who suggested making an MMO in the first place so I’ve been on Pirates since before there was even a project. By going to DbZ, I am able to apply the last five-plus years worth of lessons at the start of a new game. We made plenty of mistakes on Pirates that still haunt the game, so a big part of my role on the new project will be to avoid making those mistakes again.  Instead DbZ will make plenty of new and exciting mistakes.

There isn’t much I can share about the new project at this point. There’s basically nothing I can say that isn’t on the website: It’s a strategy MMO. We will probably pull off the covers sometime next year. In the meantime I’m hoping to be able to post a bit about the underlying technology without giving away much game design or business stuff. We’ll see how that goes.

The years I spent at Flying Lab were very fun and incredibly valuable to me. I’m really going to miss seeing the people over there every day. I’m hoping to still make it over there for Game Night, so I will still get to see them every week or so. I wish Misha and her crew the best of luck and hope Pirates treats them as well as it’s treated me.

I’m giving the same talk at AGDC this year, so if you missed me at ION you can catch it there.

We host our own forums for our user community to hang out on. On most MMOs about 10% of the player base actually uses these, and they self-select into a very hard-core and usually unhappy group. We can use the forums to find out what they’re unhappy about, but they probably don’t represent the actual player base very well. Still, listening to this segment of our community is important.

Click-cancel surveys are another common option. When someone goes to your site to cancel their subscription you ask them why they’ve canceled. SOE isn’t currently set up to run these, so we don’t have that data available, but many games do this kind of survey. This information is useful for finding exit points for players so you can eliminate them.

Recently I’ve started doing something a little different. I show up in game with no warning whatsoever and announce that I’m running an impromptu devchat. I offer to teleport any players who want to attend to an out of the way spot and then spend an hour or so answering their questions. I’ve run four of these so far (with one of our designers helping out on all but one of them.)

The biggest difference between what I hear in these impromptu devchats and what I read on the forums is the tone.  The forums are all about this OMG important issue or that OMG important issue.  The devchats have all been players asking about various new stuff that we might add to the game. (The answer is almost always “That’s a great idea that we want to implement, but we don’t know when we’ll get to it.”)  I think to get more feedback from players I’ll need to actually ask them some questions.

Maybe I’ll have to try that in the next one…

This isn’t actually as big a change in duties as it might seem at first. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past year dealing with our partnerships with SOE and others. I’ve also always been a meddler, so I was always sticking my nose in Rev’s business anyway. Now it’s my business instead.

It did get me thinking about the difference between the two and the big change we’re going through when our first paying customers log into the game. The shift in vocabulary is really the least important change that launch day will bring. The biggest change is that we shift from doing players a favor by letting them play to them doing us a favor by being our customers.

When you’re in closed beta you have a huge pile of applicants begging for a small number of beta slots. They have to play by your rules or you will kick them out, and those rules are pretty draconian.  They can’t let anyone know they’ve been accepted to beta. They can only play during select hours. Their characters could be wiped at any time. They work for you.

When horrible bugs or completely broken builds happen in beta, people are upset, but they understand that such things are what they signed up for. The people who rant about stability problems in the beta forum are invariably attacked by other testers with cries of “It’s a beta!” These “beta-cops” have much more tolerance for downtime than the developers do, and often need to be reined in.  Extending downtime to debug a serious server problem is a frequent occurrence in beta. Beta downtime is often unpredictable and usually not announced more than a few hours in advance. You also tend to push the limits of your systems to see where they break, even though the breakage means hardship for players.

All of that changes when you go live. Once your game is live, yours is just one of many ways your customers can spend their time and money. You are lucky they picked you, and if you want to keep them, you will treat them well. You can’t tell them what they can say or when they can play. You can’t ever delete (or lose) any of their data without serious repercussions.  You work for them, and can’t ever forget it.

Your game must be up as much as it possibly can be. If another half hour of downtime will let you diagnose a problem that will take two days to figure out otherwise, tough.  (Obviously exceptions can be made if the half hour of debugging will save you a hour of downtime down the road.) Planned outages have to be announced at least a day, and preferably a week, in advance. Major changes can’t be on the test server for a few days, they need two or more weeks. Nobody gets check-in permission on the closest-to-live branch(es) unless multiple high-ranking staff members have signed off on the change.

Some things don’t change when you go live. Communicating honestly and frequently with your community remains essential. In fact, communicating with the community gets much more interesting after your NDA drops. They start to have an idea what they’re talking about when they can see what game you actually made. Of course keeping them involved in your decision making process is just as important in beta as in live, the audience just gets larger because the whole world can see the discussion.

At least I think that’s how it will go. I’m still 14 hours from launching my first MMO. Maybe those of you who have done this before can tell me how far off I am.

Sorry this has kind of been All PotBS News All The Time of late. We’re working crazy hours to get everything ready for launch and I haven’t had time to breath, let alone blog.  Turns out that launching an MMO is hard.

Of course with the open beta in full swing and the pre-order head start just 24 days away I don’t have time to post much more than that.