No this is not about Blizzard as a company or glorifying this MMORPG publisher but more about the way they seems to think a MMORPG should be made/published. I never even had a look at WoW as a game so I am not a fanboy of that game.
I found this article a good read and I hope this does ring a bell at NCsoft Korea as we in NA do not have a Developer team.
Discuss?
Orginal posting at TheInquirer:
http://theinquirer.net/?article=42173
Blizzard gives 10 rules for WoW
Austin GDC 007 What they did wrong and right
By Charlie Demerjian: Thursday 06 September 2007, 07:48
THE KEYNOTE AT the Austin GDC was by Michael Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard. It was called How to Rule the World of Warcraft: 10 Lessons. In it, he chronicled a lot of the lessons learned in WoW and other Blizzard titles.
Blizzard started off with two UCLA grads in 1991 armed with $20K in starting money and two PCs, a 386 and a 386SX. Now they have thousands of people and more than enough servers to start a war. They have gone from ports to owning the online gaming world.
What happened along the way? More than this article can cover, but here are some of the highlights as Micheal Morhaime sees them.
1) Gameplay first. If you know Blizzard, they have the play balance thing down pat, or at least patted down better than anyone else out there. The Blizzard philosophy is easy to learn, difficult to master. They want you to come in easily and stay or a long time, appealing to the casual and hardcore gamer with the same product.
2) Build and protect the brand. For me, Blizzard failed miserably here, and they see this as a key goal. The idea is that you can go into a store, see a box with Blizzard on it, and know it is good. Why did they fail? They put the BNetD guys in an untenable situation, and then sued a bunch of open sourcers who could not afford to defend themselves. Bad Blizzard, no cookie and a boot to the head on top of it or this antisocial stupidity.
3) Resist the urge to ship early. This is kind of a 'no sh*t Sherlock' thing, but so many people get it wrong. A game is ready when a game is ready, not when a calendar point set years ago is reached. If you go by the calendar, you end up with Ultima IX, or worse yet, a buggy MS nightmare OS.
Micheal pointed out that companies need to think long term, not short. Short term thinking leads to bad things. Diablo missed a Christmas ship date, it shipped on Dec 31. Do you think of Diablo as the game that missed the Christmas season or a great game that sold millions of units? Burning Crusade missed Christmas too but still managed to ship 2.4 million copies on the first day. Funny that.
4) Resist the urge to do everything at once. The point is you learn from your past deeds, and if you shoot for the moon, you are likely to miss. Do things you know you can do, and do them well. WoW was not their first online game, Warcraft 3 was heavily online, as was Diablo II. From the lessons learned there, WoW was born.
5) Blizzard is a global company. It used to be US only, things were done in English and then localized. Games were sold in North America, then to Europe, then off to other places. This was bad on a bunch of levels.
Starcraft, the national pasttime of Korea, was not meant to display oriental languages. The only one it was localized for is Japanese, and that version is incompatible with others, Koreans play in English. The grey market meant that when a good game was released in the US, it made it's way to Europe before the official launch. When it launched there, people already had it, sales were bad, and retailers were not amused.
The solutions here were to treat all players equally. Have a simultaneous worldwide launch, it takes more time, but it is worth it. Diablo II was launched worldwide at the same time, and it worked out pretty well by all accounts.
6) The myth of regional taste, or lack thereof. Blizzard does not believe that there is a regional taste, the same tastes occur worldwide, just in different numbers. If you write a game that is enjoyable for a lot of different player styles, you won't have to make 15 versions for 15 markets, all of which are a bit different.
One thing you need to do however is be sensitive to cultural problems, like the panda race in WC3. The pandas in that game were Samuri's, dressed in traditional Japanese outfits with traditional Japanese weapons. The Chinese player community was not amused. This was swiftly changed to Chinese outfits and Chinese weaponry, and all was well. They turned a bad situation into one where the players were appreciative of the changes.
Blizzard is now a global company with offices in the US, Europe and Korea. WoW has servers in those areas, and partnerships with The9 in China and Softworld in Taiwan to do the same there as well. Blizzard has localized sales, support and administrative functions in all of those areas, and partners to do it directly where they do not.
6.1) Estimating global challenges is very different from doing a small game in your house. In WoW, they took WC3, the fastest selling game to that point, as an upper bound for the sales of WoW. Bad move, WoW outsold WC3 by a wide margin and Blizzard was caught with their pants down. For a while, they had to suspend shipping copies to stores because they did not have the capacity to keep up with the back end.
Blizzard had to scale up from a US company to a global one effectively yesterday, and went from hundreds to 3000 people overnight. They were not prepared for that, nor some of the other attendant problems that came with it.
7) Running a MMORPG is not game development, there is development and the attendant problems, but also many more. You are running a 24/7 IT operation with thousands of servers on three continents. You are also managing a community of fickle people with no lives.
One example of this is that you have a dev team to make and add to the game. If your dev team is fixing problems on the servers, they are not making the next expansion or adding features. Which is more important? Blizzard fixed this by making a dedicated live team that put out fires and patched the immediate problems so the main dev team would not be pulled off for emergencies every few days.
8) Communicate. Communicate internally, communicate externally. If you have a community, talk to them, often, clearly. If there is a bad bug, or the servers go down, the people working on it are working on it under great duress. They are not getting on the forums and talking about the problems, that would be a waste of time.
Because of this, the internal people not immediately involved do not know what is going on, the external people do not know what is going on, and the fanboi set just gets ****** off. This can lead to frequent checking of forums, addictive behavior is just that, and then forums crash.
To deal with this, Blizzard instituted a formalized email system for communication. With a little work, devs can tell the internal people, and word can be spread in an orderly fashion. If you don't know the nature of the problem, or have an ETA, saying that is much better than dead silence.
9) Avoid financial incentives. Any time you make it profitable to do something in WoW, people will exploit it. If you minimize this, you minimize the problems it brings. These things, gold farming, account stealing, credit card fraud, card fraud to make farming accounts etc etc all go away if the bad guys can't make money from it. This may suck for players who want to sell things personally, but for the majority, there are benefits.
10) Testing aka never trust V1.0. This one falls into the 'duh' category, the more testing you can do the better, but few ever do enough. At Blizzard, everyone tests, period. From there, you go to a closed beta, then a public beta, and then release. Hopefully, by the time you get to release, things are playbalanced, smooth, and bug free.
They never are, but for the Burning Crusade launch, they came pretty close. The server infrastructure was upgraded to remove bottlenecks, lag, and to provide more capacity. They padded the estimated capacity a lot, delayed the release until it was ready, and in general, tried to do right.
In the end, there was a midnight release at midnight local time. 2.4 million copies in a day, and all went well. Some admins likened it to a patch rollout it went so smoothly, and they all watched from the comfort of their consoles as the servers lit up one by one.
After 16 years and millions of players on line, Blizzard seems to have things pretty well down. There are always problems with any technology, but lately, Blizzard seems to have minimized them. Hopefully, many new MMOs will learn from their mistakes and their successesµ.