Andy Brice recently posted on getting feedback from software customers. With Pirates, our options are similar but somewhat tweaked.

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 is what I looked like yesterday:

FLS had a Mustache Month contest in March.   I won the Teddy Roosevelt Memorial Prize.

I’m back to normal today. My wife is relieved. 

We are looking to staff up some more in the operations department in preparation for our launch.  If you’ve always wanted to work on an MMO and are a whiz at IT, one of these two openings may be for you:

• Windows System Operator
• Windows Systems Engineer

I’m not actually the one doing the hiring, so reply through the ads if you’re interested.

Scott Jacobs, editor of Game Programming Gems 7, posted the following to the gdalgorithms list:

Abstracts are now being accepted for consideration to be included in the 7th volume of Charles River Media’s Game Programming Gems book series. Original articles detailing techniques in the specializations of Graphics, Programming, AI, Networking, Scripting, Physics, Mathematics, Audio are desired. Preference is given to articles that conform to the Gems spirit of presenting practical ideas with working cross-platform code that can be put to use immediately in game projects that are currently under development. Submissions should be made using the form at http://www.gameprogramminggems.com/subform.html

The deadline for proposals is May 10th. (Please note that this date is one month earlier than some previously published submission deadlines, so if you had already been planning to submit, double check your calendar!)

For additional details, visit the Game Programming Gems website at http://www.gameprogramminggems.com/ or feel free to reply to me directly.

Submission Guidelines: http://www.gameprogramminggems.com/guidelines.html

I don’t think I’ll be submitting anything, personally. My experience writing those two articles in Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2 taught me that a “you should develop stuff like this” article with no code examples falls kind of flat. I wasn’t able to include any code for those articles because everything at FLS is dependent on Alchemy, which is redistributable. Since I’m not likely to come up with anything that I _can_ distribute for an article by summer, I’m going to let this one go by. Maybe GPG 8 will be accepting submissions sometime after Pirates launches.

Psychochild asks:

What goes into a good conference, and what would make a conference useful for game developers (particularly online developers)?

I answer:

1. Small size — This is the biggest thing that DICE and AGC have going for them over GDC. You can actually run into people you want to talk to.
2. No students allowed — It’s rude to say this, I’m sure, but I don’t give a rat’s ass what some 20 year old going to Digipen or Full Sail has to say. If I’m going to sit down with a bunch of random people at lunch I want most of them to have shipped a game.
3. Constrained subject matter — “Games” is too big for one conference as GDC shows us over and over. I don’t care to dig through piles of talks on BREW or the cell processor (or even graphics in general) to get to the talk on object databases or asset streaming over slow networks.
4. Shorter is ok — AGC is up to three days now, which is fine… I don’t mind a three day conference. A one day conference with a laser focus on talks I really care about would be better, however.
5. Talks about things people have actually tried in a real, shipping game — Half the talks at GDC are about pie in the sky new algorithms or high level design or art philosophies. Some of this is fine, but most talks should be about experiences, not theories.
6. Advanced talks on topics other than graphics and physics — I care just enough about physics and graphics (and let’s put sound in there while we’re at it) to hire somebody else to deal with them. Unfortunately those are the only topics that have advanced topics, probably because they’re also the most popular topics. I want advanced talks on databases, data-driven design, software engineering, networking, object persistence models, and load distribution.
7. More focus on failures — I want to know what happened with Horizons, Shadowbane, Asheron’s Call 2, Auto Assault, Matrix Online and D&D Online that caused these games to not meet expectations. I mean what REALLY happened.
8. Mandatory speaker preparation — Maybe there should be a required dress rehearsal of each lecture a week before the conference. I’m sick of going to lectures where a word document full of typos is what passes for slides.

The Online Game Development Conference is trying to do some of this. They require a peer review of every paper submitted to the conference (8). They are aiming at a more experienced audience (2, 6). They are in their first year so there are a couple of freebies on the list (1, 4). The conference is about internet games: (From their website)

The Online Game Development Conference is the first conference with a razor-sharp focus on the technology, art, design, production, and business of games delivered over the internet.

Will it work out? Will OGDC turn into the new AGC? Do we even need a new AGC? It’s not clear that the CMP purchase of that show is actually going to hurt it, after all. Well the jury hasn’t even begun deliberations on OGDC yet. The first one takes place on May 10-11 here in Seattle.

Hopefully we can get some of items 5 and 7 from talks like these: (I’m particularly interested in the second two since I hear that first speaker doesn’t know what he’s talking about. )

• Adventures in Middleware
• Dissecting our baby: AutoAssault Postmortem - the good, the bad, and all the ugly
• Everything but the Game

Here’s hoping it works out of OGDC. It would be nice to have a local conference.