What’s a QA team without a spec?

Elder Game: MMO game development » What’s a QA team without a spec?

What’s a QA team without a spec? A goddamned nuisance and a waste of time, that’s what.

Man I hate when QA people do their jobs without specs! It’s so irritating. When Asheron’s Call 2 launched, there were thousands of outstanding bugs in the QA database that we opted not to fix before launch. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But if you looked at them, you’d understand. Hundreds of them were bugs about how buildings were floating 2 virtual inches off the ground; if you zoomed the camera down to the floor and looked up, you could see that these structures were very slightly hovering.

The cardinal sin of community management

Lessons Learned: The cardinal sin of community management

Yet few products these days can succeed without their online community, and the insight you can gain from interacting with that community is unparalleled, despite the pain. But to take advantage of that learning, you have to avoid the absolutely one and only cardinal sin of community management: not listening.

How the PK Mafia Ruins Business

How the PK Mafia Ruins Business « MMO Tidbits

No, I don’t mean gankers. The PK mafia I refer to is that school of game design which believe that the only “true” PvP game is the one where PvP death has a real penalty. The proponents typically urge very harsh penalties, as found in Darkfall (where all your possessions fall to the ground for the enemy to loot).

Some years back a school of thought argued that a “true” role-playing experience required fully open PvP (anyone can kill anyone else). The leaders of Funcom’s design department for Age of Conan must have been believers, since the only “official” RP server for Conan is also a PvP server. Curiously, I never saw a single PK on that server result from RP, despite spending months in a bloodthirsty, hardcore RP guild. I did see plenty of casual killing and suffered a predictable dose of gankings. Nobody bothered to “dress it up” with roleplay. They were too busy ambushing the next victim or getting to a safer spot ASAP. The only RP PvP fight I saw was a carefully arranged event by people who knew each other, like a virtual world LARP.

Localisation of games

ICO Partners » Blog Archive » Localise and shine: it may be easier than you think

A nice article by Thomas and Diane which covers all aspects of localisation. Its impact on the localisation of the game content, Customer Support and community management.