The Dropbox Space Race

The Dropbox Space Race program ended on March 4 2015. This was a marketing event to get as many students as possible to install and use Dropbox. The more students of your university sign up, the more space Dropbox will give you. It was quite effective: the National University of Singapore had more than 20k students enroll, TU Delft 13k, MIT 11k, and so on. While the help page currently says that the extra space goes away after 2 years, it was not as clear at the time. So Dropbox sent an email early March 2015, titled Your Dropbox Space Race promotion has now expired, get Dropbox Pro.

I think the Space Race was a great marketing idea when it launched. It promoted school spirit as students united for a common cause. It was framed as a challenge. And it was free and fun. But Dropbox is pulling the space away, and I think it is a terrible move for several reasons. First, Dropbox gave a toy to the kids, and is taking it back just to make money. Students are realizing that the whole Space Race was a marketing scam. It was too free to be true. Second, I expect that most people were not even filling half of their Dropbox. What is the point of taking away something people are not even using? Third, the Space Race only involves cheap and broke students. How many are actually going to pay, rather than grudgingly shrink their Dropbox to fit 4 GB? And last, what does 8 GB of space cost Dropbox? Google offers 15GB for free, so if space really mattered to me, nothing prevents me from switching from Dropbox to Google Drive. I am giving a try to Copy, Barracuda Network's version of Dropbox, offering 20 GB for free. I don't need 20 GB, but Dropbox's move made me try others. My research lab switched to BTSync, with our own servers backing up our data.

So the Dropbox Space Race is like cheap wine: exciting at first, but bitter at the end.

The social strategy game genre

Here is a quick list of games that resemble Clash of Clans in some ways. Some wargame mechanics may date back from RPGs of the 90s, such as Age of Empires, or even from tabletop wargames of old. These old games are off-limits.

Released	Name	Theme	Description
Sep. 2004	Travian	Antiquity	The player can pick one of three tribes: the aggressive Teutons, defensive Gauls, and average Romans. Teuton players usually farm resources from Gaul players. Players can trade resources, message each other, and join alliances. Troops take time to produce, and can be unlocked and upgraded. A hero can equip gear, complete quests, and gain XP in battles. The game ends when a player upgrades a Wonder building to level 100. Premium accounts finance the game and have game advantages over free accounts.
June 2009	Farmville	Farm	Facebook game by Zynga. The player plants crops that grow with time, but wither if not harvested on time. Players can receive crops or animals from friends. In-game promotional campaigns for real-life brands like McDonalds or 7-Eleven. Reached 80M MAU and 30M DAU in Feb 2010.
March 2010	Backyard Monsters	Gory monsters	Facebook game by Kixeye. The design goal was to play an RTS game in short sessions. The game targets a hardcore player segment in several ways. First, the art is unusually gory, bloody, and industrial for a Facebook game, yet it was praised as the prettiest game on Facebook when released. Second, the monetization relies on the players who hate losing and are ready to spend money to gain an advantage. As a result, 85% of the revenues come from selling speed ups, retention is 5x longer than other Facebook games, 97% of the player base are males between 25 and 45, and the average user plays 3-4 session per day for 30 minutes per session on average. They peaked at 4.5M MAU and 1M DAU in Summer 2011.
May 2011	Battle Pirates	Warships	By Kixeye. Peaked at 1.6M MAU and 240k DAU in Q4 2012. The player controls a military island, and can be attacked synchronously, in real-time, by the boats of other players. Watch some gameplay.
Aug. 2011	Edgeworld	Aliens	Facebook game by Kabam. 610k MAU in Dec 2011. The developers did not expect players to be attacking each other for resources.
Sep. 2011	War Commander	Post-apocalyptic	Facebook game by Kixeye. Peaked at 5.2M MAU and 660k DAU in Sep 2012.
Aug. 2012	Clash of Clans	Medieval Norse	One month of soft launch: first released in beta on the Canadian iOS appstore in July 2012, then on all iOS appstores in August 2012. Released on Android in October 2013. Supercell had two goals: adapting the genre for the tablet, and bringing new segments to the genre. The name of the strongest unit in CoC, P.E.K.K.A., reminds of the name of the strongest monster in Backyard Monsters: D.A.V.E.. Some say that CoC is Backyard Monsters with polish. Troops are consumed if they are deployed in battle: even if it stays alive until the battle times out, the player loses the troop for ever. A lot of community management and communication goes on between SuperCell and the players through the forums or Facebook. Depending on where you look, CoC had 8.5M DAU in April 2013, and 4.3M MAU and 2.7M DAU in January 2014.
July 2013	Ninja Kingdom	Medieval Japan	Also called Dojo Mojo. Facebook game by Zynga. The Jade Mine can only be staffed with captured enemy troops, not with the player's workers. Each captured enemy troop generate 1 jade per 24h. If destroyed by an enemy raid, all the jade in the mine is lost. 4.6M MAU and 600k DAU in January 2014.
July 2013	Battle Beach	Modern warfare	The troops are a complete ripoff from CoC. 21k MAU and 9k DAU in January 2014.
July 2013	Jungle Heat	Modern warfare in a tropical jungle	Android game by Mail.ru Games. The troops are a complete ripoff from CoC. 260k MAU and 110k DAU in January 2014.
July 2013	Castle Clash	Medieval Fantasy	Around 20 heroes with different skills. Twelve troops: 3 tiers of power for each of the 4 attack types: heavy (strong against ranged), ranged (beats magic), magic (beats heavy), and heavy anti-building.
Sep. 2013	Amazing Clan War	Medieval Norse	Blatant CoC ripoff by a Chinese company. Even the loading screens have the same layout.
Sep. 2013	Kingdom Clash	Medieval fantasy	Soft launch in Australia in May 2013. 5k MAU and 2k DAU in January 2014.
Sep. 2013	Total Conquest	Roman Empire	iOS and Android game by Gameloft. Soft launch in Canada and New Zealand app stores a month earlier. The troops are very similar to CoC, except they don't seem to fly. 100k MAU and 30k DAU in January 2014.
Oct. 2013	Lord of the Guardians	Forest animals	Three solo campaign modes (normal, heroic, legendary), each with 150 mission. 5k MAU and 2k DAU.
Oct. 2013	Samurai Siege	Medieval Japan	iOS and Android (implemented using Unity). 1.2M installs and 300k DAU when it launched, 100k MAU and 44k DAU in January 2014. Same core units as CoC. Troops and buildings are unlocked through the solo campaign. The campaign has a (mediocre) storyline. Loot items are stolen from other players. When all 6 of them are gathered, they provide an extra army camp (more troops) or a cannon (more defense). Alliance War pits groups of players against each other for 12 hours. This was probably based on the periodic trophy push organized on the CoC forums to break the farming routine.
Nov. 2013	Call to Arms	WWII	Developed by GREE. Soft launch in October. Lets you simulate an attack on your own base.
Nov. 2013	Galaxy Factions	Space	A month of soft launch. 10 heroes and 12 units.
Dec. 2013	Boom Beach	Pearl Harbor	Soft launch in November. Developed by SuperCell. Troops that stay alive at the end of a battle are available in the next battle. The player can direct the units to attack a particular building through flares. Explore the ocean (at a cost) to find islands controlled by NPCs and other players. Attacking a neighbor player also has a cost. Nearby captured islands generate resources for you. The units are inspired from Team Fortress.
Dec. 2013	Dark District	Dystopian futuristic city	Developed by Kabam. 6 months of soft launch, probably because of all the crashes and bugs. Assign your troops a building to attack.
Dec. 2013	Sensei Wars	Medieval China and Japan	Soft launch in New Zealand and Australia in October. Developed by 2k Play. 3D graphics. One hero available from the start. Heroes gain levels and learn skills. There is a skill tree, and skills can be reset by paying the hard in-game currency.

Improving the genre

In-game base building: During the first few weeks, shuffling the dozen-or-so buildings around and trying a new base design is quick and easy. Three months later, the village holds around 80 buildings and there is little room to move buildings around. Since players can't design their base in-game anymore, they turn to unofficial websites where they can share their designs and receive feedback. This is bad because 1) it's a feature needed by the players, and it's missing from the game, and 2) the game developers lose touch with their players.

Community: CoC clones do not have a large community. In fact, very few of them have a community at all. The CoC player community is large, and provides valuable feedback and ideas to SC for free! The recipe is simple: the large amount of player suggestions and feedback is filtered by the community managers who then forward the key parts to the developers. For example, a player sketched out a very convenient in-game base builder in the SC forums on September 11. 20 days later SC released a patch with a simpler version of that player's idea. In my opinion, the community is crucial for innovation and polish, and none of the clones have it.

Innovating the core mechanics: The clones must innovate if they want to have people playing their game. A player wrote: if I had invested a ton of money in Clash of Clans, I would find it unlikely that I would do that again in a game that is so similar. I think there is a spectrum of innovation. On one side, Amazing Clan War is a blatant ripoff of CoC (see the CoC vs Amazing Clan War loading screens below). When your power in the game is all about how much time you have been playing for, why would you switch? Most other clones are heavily inspired by CoC, but add, tweak, or twist a couple elements. Yet the core mechanics remain unchanged since Backyard Monsters! For example, all games have the slow meat-shield troops luring defense buildings and the fast and weak troops targeting resources. On the other hand, the hero skill tree in Sensei Wars, the jade mine of Ninja Kingdom, or the 12-hour inter-alliance war in Samurai Siege are very promising PvP concepts, but they're too shy and peripheral to really matter.

Soft launches: CoC clones follow CoC's formula to launch the game in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand one or two months before worldwide release. But since CoC clones are all about time, soft launches give a head start of a couple months to some privileged players. That is probably why SC had no trouble giving new players 500 gems to catch up when they released the game worldwide. Of course the Canadian players who had started playing during the soft launch were not happy - they missed out on 500 gems! How could a game soft-launch and make everyone happy?

Dominion's ecosystem

Without going into too many details, Dominion is a medieval-themed deck-building card game designed by Donald Vaccarino. The base set was released in 2008 and received a bunch of awards. A total of 8 expansions have been following, released every 6 months. Most of the cards of the 8 expansions were already designed and bundled in sets since 2008.

In Dominion, the optimal strategy depends on which cards are already in your deck, what the other players do, what cards are available to add to your deck, and a small amount of (somewhat controllable) luck. The game has been so carefully tuned and playtested that some reviewers consider it too safe and overbalanced, overdesigned and overdeveloped. Dominion's balance is so interesting that it deserves an article in itself.

Looking at the complex interactions between cards, Dominion reminds of Magic the Gathering. For example, expert players talk about engines, a concept similar to Magic's deck types, but (I'd say) deeper. In fact, the MtG analogy is not surprising, given that Vaccarino is a veteran MtG player who pitched several design ideas to the MtG designers in the late 1990s.

After having played around 100 games, Dominion also reminds of Chess: it has traditional openings, annotated games, and a vocabulary very game-specific (e.g. greening or stalling). Dominion is a very deep game.

Expansions

Of the 8 Dominion expansions, some have been received more favorably than others. For example, Alchemy is the third expansion. It adds potions, a new currency, and not too many people enjoy playing just Alchemy games. On the other, the fourth expansion is called Prosperity, and it adds a lot of over-the-top cards: compare, for example, Market from the basic game to Grand Market in Prosperity. This expansion is certainly the most well-received.

The lesson here seems to be: make more awesome versions of what exists already, and adding extra currencies like Potions makes the game more complicated, but not necessarily more fun.

Dominion's unofficial ecosystem

A lot of unofficial projects emerged around Dominion. For example, a card set constructor helps you determine which cards to pick for your non-digital game(s) with friends. An AI simulator enables experts to polish their strategies by scripting basic AIs and running thousands of games between those AIs. The AI is provided from external files, and the returned graphs plot the average number of points earned per turn against the number of turns. As an example, this technique was used on the basic set of the first Dominion. There are also fan-made expansions, a zombie retheme, and a stand-alone program to play Dominion by yourself against AIs.

Since at least 2010, an online server called isotropic has been running Dominion games online. Its interface is very simple, and a lot of players have been enjoying the fact that it is free and of relatively good quality. Vaccarino has even been using it to playtest his expansions with select players. Along isotropic, there used to be councilroom, a website used to measure various statistics about Dominion cards from isotropic game logs. A lot of expert players seem to have enjoyed the stats reported by councilroom. And there used to be a free iPhone app that allowed people to play Dominion online with other people, but it was discontinued in April 2012.

Dominion generated dozens of projects run by motivated fans. How could a game publisher channel these fans? And how much control should be exerted?

Player-developer communication in EVE Online

CCP has an interesting take on community management. The developer's blog of EVE contains interesting behind-the-scene technical information. What is even more interesting is that these articles do not seem to be filtered or censored by any community manager. Articles are direct from the development team. I guess that the management team originally thought this communication policy was a good idea, and the developers were more than happy to post about their work. In any case, this communication policy has advantages and drawbacks.

Drawbacks

On the one hand, revealing to your players that a major database update requires a 14-hour downtime and may result in more bugs in the game (October 2010) is kind of risky. Another developer article (February 2011) started with:

Testing may show that the changes made are not safe and we won't be able to use them. I thought this would be interesting enough to share, but please do keep this disclaimer in mind as you read on.

Players start complaining on the forum boards, and it gets worse when the down time actually takes longer than the announced 14 hours. Moreover, when developers and players get close together, developers may get involved in the game and start giving unfair advantages to the players they like. This kind of cheating can get really messy (also look at the Wikipedia summary of the events).

Advantages, and why it works for EVE

On the other hand, EVE benefits from a huge support of its player base. A bunch of volunteer programs, composed of hardcore and loyal players, add content into the game, administrate a wiki, and provide player support at no cost for CCP. EVE designers targeted the game's steep learning curve for hardcore players. It's not because you are a hardcore player that you never need information or help. In fact, I think it's the opposite: hardcore players bookmark any possible source of information for their game. Therefore, EVE needs its active player community, and needs to keep a tight relationship with its player base. To receive fast and broad feedback, CCP opened nine player positions in the Council of Stellar Management in March 2008. Members of this council were elected for six months by all EVE players and invited to the development studio. They gave feedback to the developers in person. This council may have also been a marketing coup from CCP, as the studio also invited various journalists to cover the event.

So far, tight player-developer communication has been a winning strategy on many fronts for CCP. Yet, EVE does not put forward any charismatic developer. Maybe is it better like this?

What MEUPORG can teach us

Yann Leroux wrote on March 27th a blog article entitled Ce que MEUPORG nous enseigne (what MEUPORG can teach us). It is an account of what happened on the Internet after a French TV journalist tried to explain what MMORPGs were, and somehow failed. Since the article is in French, here is a (rough) translation.

The MEUPORG story is very insightful. There is not only in it about how video games are mistreated in our society. There is also about how gamers are organized today and how a TV channel reacted to a crisis that happened on the Internet. The beginning of the story is quite ordinary:

1. Journalist Nathanael de Rincquesen has one minute to summarize a topic in Télé Matin. In one single minute, he can but only rush through it.
2. He relies on a news article from a French newspaper - Libération - and copying-and-pasting does not help thinking.
3. He stumbles upon an acronym.
4. William Leymergie, the host of the morning TV program, interrupts him mischievously.
5. The journalist continues in his error.

Elements of popular imagination have always been attacked by the media. Then, those media become the elite's spokesperson. But the 21st century has something different; opinions are no more confined in pubs or workshops. The Internet is one of the places where they are created, transmitted and spread. We have now entered an era of commentary economics. It can be rejoicing or deplorable, but it is a fact that should be taken into account. Unlike the past century, the Internet offers a place where opinions can sprout nearly immediately. Some people in the audience are next to their laptop or their smart phone. They are looking for interactivity and will look for online places where they can express what they want to say.

The birth of a meme

A first video is posted on Youtube, it is soberly titled France 2 - télématin - MMORPG . Among others, Korben relays it. The video is seen and commented by a considerable number of people. Starting with this first video, the MEUPORG meme is born. Images, websites, tee-shirts or Facebook fan groups, all relay the journalist's error. The first Youtube video is edited and remixed.

The traditional media have not yet seized the strength of this movement. France Télévision stood silent on Twitter. Journalist de Rincquesen has not yet realized his name is now attached to MEUPORG. The program forum thread is burning and the journalist's Facebook page is filled with ironical comments. Certainly, one might bet this buzz is nothing more than another flash in the pan which the Internet is used to. However, the movement is much deeper. It is not a riot, it is a revolution sign. For those who would not take seriously the puerile lol machine, maybe the Union pour un Meuporg Populaire (translates as Union for a Popular Meuporg, a parody of the UMP French political party name) will provide fuel for thoughts. Gamers are not teenagers entrenched in their bedrooms and isolated from the outside world. Most of them are young adults, aware of what happens in their society. And they know how to make themselves heard.

The media side

The TV channel is living what Mc Luhan coined as the medium is the message: the shockwave has hit it so strongly that it is as if it were anesthetized. France 2 strikes one as being unable to take measures and handle the crisis. However, no doubt about it: crises like this one will multiply and grow in intensity. They do not only concern TV channels. Currently, Nestlé is the target of such an attack on Facebook. Online places are places not only to gather a passive audience but also to question and protest. Some end up finding themselves among wolves when they thought they could shear sheep. Internet will be one of the places where our societies' malaise will seep out.

Every morning, 1.4 million people in average watch Télé Matin. That means the first video posted on Youtube has generated 54% (760.000 views as of August 2010) of their audience. Obviously, this video was not watched 760.000 times in one day - but the 1.4 million do watch the program every day. Anyway, such an increase in the awareness of the TV program or channel among Internet inhabitants would be most welcome if it were positively conveyed. Unfortunately, it is more about destroying the image of the journalist, the TV program, the TV channel and mainstream media in general. The community managers of the TV channel would be expected to intervene and help get out of the crisis. Some are missing the opportunity to show how useful they can be in such undesirable times.

[Literature] Who owns the mods?

Who owns the mod? was written by Yong Ming Kow and Bonnie Nardi in May 2010. They conducted 15 interviews with WoW modders (ie those who make WoW add-ons) after Blizzard had decided to forbid modders to make money with or advertise in their mods. Currently, more than 4.000 mods have been coded by modders.

Blizzard's new policies

QuestHelper has 23.000 lines of codes and has been the most downloaded mod with 38 million downloads (and counting). QuestHelper, nUI and Carbonite were popular enough to support their owners full time with in-game player donations or for-pay versions with additional features.

But in March 2009, Blizzard posted in their add-on forum section a new set of add-on-related policies. Modders were particularly furious at 2 policies: Policy 1 — Add–ons must be free of charge and Policy 5 — Add–ons may not solicit donations. Only a few modders managed to live with the revenues generated from their add-on, and most modders did it for fun and for free. However, the whole WoW modding community felt betrayed and considered the new policies were a violation of modders’ trust. Modders started to see Blizzard as a company with intimidating lawyers rather than with friendly developers.

Modders reacted on the WoW forums. Cogwheel was a forum MVP and the author or useful mod tutorials and guides. His vehement reaction against the new policies only made Blizzard remove all his posts (ie stickies and normal posts) from the forum. Modders felt that they deserved a response from Blizzard. But apart from reprimanding Cogwheel and deleting the posts of critical modders, Blizzard chose silence.

The modding community

Modders respect each other's work. The ownership arrangement was not legally enforceable, but was upheld by the community’s own mechanics: websites such as curse.com or wowInterface, two key download sites supported by plentiful advertising, were able to remove non–conforming mods from their download sites. WoWMatrix, a download site that did not recognize the community rules, was shunned by modders. After the new policies, Blizzard stood quiet and did not debate with modders. Hence, the solution came from download websites. The requests for donation were relocated from inside the game to the download page of the mod on both WowInterface and curse.com. But mods are downloaded less often than they are used in the game, so this post-policies solution was still less profitable for modders.

Mods such as SellFish, Threat Meter or Group Calendar have been integrated into the official game by Blizzard. Blizzard does not infringe any copyright owned by modders on their work, they simply take the ideas seen in the most popular add-ons. Ideas are not protected by copyrights but by patents, and filling a patent is too administratively complex for a mod developer. Hence what Blizzard has been doing is perfectly legal. And modders never complained about it. Rather, it was a sign of their work done right. Modders were also recognized in their community if their mods had a high download count.

Conflicting interests

Players sometimes complained about bugged mods, or harassed modders for additional features with little respect to their efforts. In fact, many players considered they owned the right to use a decent mod with no ads or donation requests because they had paid for the game. Obviously, this kind of players was not very supportive to the add-on developers. As seen in the figure below, different conflicting interests aroused between players, Blizzard and modders.

In late March 2009, the GroupCalendar mod was removed from distribution. Its author protested against the change in Blizzard's policies. Players came to the authors website and asked for a come back of the mod on curse.com. The mod came back.

API = (developer) community management

Decursive was a mod that automatized many actions into a single click. Blizzard found it simplified the game too much, and the modder rewrote it. Moreover, it seems modders accept updates in the API very easily - after all, code is law. Instead of the highly unfriendly “You have 60 days to comply!” software platform changes are described in neutral, impersonal programming terms. Hence, a lot of the modder community management could happen through the API. [However, I think it requires a very complex mod platform/environment that Blizzard does not have yet].

[Literature] A qualitative study of Ragnarök Online private server in-game sociological issues

Back in November 2009, I mentioned the multiplayer game design issues impacting social life inside RO. The paper has been accepted at FDG2010. You can read the final version.

I conducted interviews and observed players' behaviors in an official server (2000 users at peak time) and two private servers (200 and 2000 users at peak time). On the examined private servers, the social environment and some of the game mechanics were more adapted to players' needs. Examples are:

• a broader choice in avatar customization
• the ability to observe parts of the game world while not being logged-in (the Control Panel)
• less constrained groups
• events and GM taking the player community more into account
• easier XPing (leveling in RO is the main activity, and it's a lot of grinding) thanks to rates and the Warpra+Healer combo
• @commands enabled to players so that they can see who is online, sell merchandises with a character while playing with another and compare prices

Clearly, the Warpra+Healer totally changed the game. Champions could camp the respawn of MVP (boss monsters) and kill them relatively quickly with Asura Strike. This left virtually no end-game challenge for guilds other than the bi-weekly War of Emperium (battles between guilds in castles lasting between two to three hours).

Vivox in SL: timeline, business and reception

Timeline

This article follows the one about Vivox integration.

As an introduction, a timeline and some figures:

• 2006: the Vivox-SL collaboration started (Joe Miller said in March 2007 that The program has been in development for over a year).
• 2007: voice chat is integrated into the SL Viewer in August.
• 2008: SLim is launched in September. It is a lightweight client that enables SL residents to interact with their Second Life friends without having to go inworld with the Second Life Viewer and the ability to leave voice mails for offline friends.
• 2009: AvaLine (beta) is launched in May. To encourage all residents to use Avaline when the beta ended in August, LL offered free communications to AvaLine subscribers the first month and free voice-mail for the rest of 2009. And a Hula Bear.

According to Linden Lab's blog and press release, Over 15 Billion Minutes of Voice Have Been Delivered in Second Life. In the entire year 2009, the number of voice minutes used by SL residents has remained around 3 billion per quarter and more than 60% of Second Life Residents are using voice at any given time. Vivox reported in July 2008 a daily average of 600,000 minutes of peer-to-peer calls, Over 1 billion minutes of voice communications per month, Group events as large as 400 Residents. As a comparison, Skype had 6 billion minutes per month at that time (according to Gigaom). The numbers extracted from the May 2009 press release (700,000 unique users consuming more than a billion minutes a month) mean the average resident using voice-chat spends 17h per month speaking or listening (and not 357).

Out-of-game messaging and calls

AvaLine is the name of the current virtual telephony system powered by Vivox. A timeline in the May 2009 press release indicates that sending SMS from inside SL to out-of-game mobile phones should become possible in 2010. AvaLine's extension will let residents call or send SMS to real-world phones. Since March 2007 (before the launch of the voice-chat in SL), SL residents were told they would have to pay to use out-of-game telephony features: Eventually, Linden plans to charge Linden Dollars for the service to be activated on privately owned land. People who own land can pay to have VoIP activated for all users on their property. For a single user, AvaLine costs L$14,400/year, ie US$70/year. Residents pay only for monthly flat-rate AvaLine service, regardless of how many calls are received or minutes are used. And

Before AvaLine was launched, other organizations had started to think and actually implemented out-of-game calls and SMS. For instance, in September 2007, NEC opened an island in SL. They offered the possibility for residents to make calls to another person in the real world and send text oriented messages such as SMS, email and IP Messaging [...] to the real world. Other organizations such as Swisscom (through Starfruit) sponsored 100,000 SMS that residents could send from virtual phone booth to out-of-game phones. Another system called SLFONE enables residents to send 120SMS to 240 countries and 700 networks for 8500L$/year (ie US$40).

Reception and adoption by the residents

Three major announcements were made by LL to their residents about voice integration in SL. The earliest news was a FAQ justifying the introduction of voice to SL. It was published by Joe Linden and received half a thousand comments. The second news was published in May 2009. It introduced the AvaLine beta and showed a lot of unsatisfied users as well. Third, the end of AvaLine beta in August 2009 and its introduction to all residents as one of the new bells and whistles brought a lot of concern as well. The residents' comments showed they cared more about stability than new features. Many of them wondered why they would pay to use a semi-working functionnality while they are currently doing fine with other voice-chat systems.

• When voice was first introduced the same arguments were made - LL said we all loved it, most people said they never/couldn't use it and some people said it was vital for them.
• This new shiny toy is just something to try to distract people from the real issues.
• We want stability before the introduction of new features.
• Utterly pointless and I bet you were told so in all those ridiculous surveys. And your call quality is awful, skype ftw.
• each shiny new toy gets lots of marketing attention, but fixing things that are broken in a product you've already sold isn't as sexy.

Unfortunately, one of the last word given by LL was: join me for Office Hours [...] we will discuss your ideas about what kinds of communications tools would best help you enhance your Second Life experience. A very interesting official Linden reaction to residents' complains was Partnerships, like the one with Vivox that helped bring us AvaLine, also greatly reduce the number of internal staff needed to deliver projects.
LL may have to keep bringing new content to its customers to keep some of them attracted. That is a perfectly normal marketing strategy in any MMOG. However LL is not an MMOG, and the average SL residents may differ quite much from the average MMO gamer. The obvious difference is: some of the residents work or earn money thanks to SL. So I think it might be more efficient to base a communication strategy on debugging or maintenance rather than on new features.

Finally, I am puzzled by the strange (or lack of?) community management style followed by LL. Joe Linden published "Over 15 Billion Voice Minutes Served", but he was not in charge of answering the comments although he wrote I look forward to hearing what you think. Instead, it was Jeska Linden (an actual community manager with 20 times more news posted than Joe) who stepped up to the plate. Is "what is rare is important" the point in Joe announcing new features to the community?

[Conf] Regulating Today for Tomorrow's New Technologies

Last Wednesday (ie on February 10^th 2010), Han Somsen talked about "Regulating Today for Tomorrow's New Technologies: The Challenge of Connecting Regulation to Technological Realities" at the UCI School of Law. Somsen is a Dutch researcher at the TILT of Tilburg University and an expert in the areas of biotechnology and environment regulation. In his talk, he managed not to focus too much on bioechnologies but more on the regulation issues of new technologies in a broad sense. From a MMOG perspective, this (great) talk brought a lot of interesting points.
Do MMOG worlds need to be regulated? Unlike traditional single-player games, MMOG gather thousands of players in the same virtual places. Hence, in order to prevent their virtual worlds to collapse in chaos, I think MMOG need regulations. My comments are [in square brackets].

Regulators have three ways to regulate A (A = anything that can be regulated) [for MMOG: bots, trade, leading a guild, ...] [regulators can be Game Masters: hunting bots, game devs: implementing an anti-bot system, game designers: designing the game actions so that a bot can not do them, etc.]

What the regulators can say	What enforces the regulation	[Examples in MMOG]
A is morally bad	society	[bot, cheat, exploit, hack, corpse camping]
A is not in your interest or A is useless/stupid	market and law	[weird character builds, tradeskills, AH]
A is impossible	code, encryption [or conceptual design]	[teleportation at will anywhere in the world, changing the public transportation destinations, destroying buildings, infinite inventory]

How can regulatees accept regulation? New governance can be a solution if adaptive mechanisms can be found to keep the machine running by itself and not crash. [As seen in the diagram, MMOG lack clearly-defined third-party actors. Are they game journalists? Add-on/Mod communities? Hackers??] [However: MMOG are games, and games can be artful. Art does not need third-party actors and new governance models at all, it is delivered to the end-user as it is. But MMOG gather so many people that they need a regulation of some sort.]

Conditions sine quibus none:

• all parties have to agree on the goals [we do not want cheaters/bots]
• Name and shame policies are unlikely to word, and sometimes regulatees do not have a reputation to loose [you never see "Dude987 was a bot!" in the news of MMOG websites for this reason, and also because there are too many bots banned at a time]
• communities must be mature

Sources of regulatory ineffectiveness
Regulators can be unclear about their goals [why do you enable a certain add-on/macro API function if you know it might be used to automatize actions that should not be automatically done?]. Regulators have to monitor efficiently [is everything logged?]. If the system fails, regulators must have backup/repair procedures [can you use a load-balancer strategy to host the map servers?].
Regulatees can try to resist the regulation a priori or a posteriori, or they can or comply only in the spirit of avoidance (this quote is taken from the paper from Brownsword and Somsen entitled Law, Innovation and Technology: Before We Fast Forward — A Forum for Debate).
And obviously, external factors (ie neither regulators nor regulatees) can threaten the regulatory system.

Questions raised: Does the introduced framework connect all parties? How do we keep parties connected? If there is a disconnection, should we reconnect?
Hints: The more vague your words are in the law, the more breathing space justice has in court judgements. But this solution relies on courts and legal precedents, not on law. More formal laws need to be updated more often and consume much more time. We have to think about what happens if we change our laws or policies, and what happens if we do not change them. Cooperation, education and persuasion are more effective than coercion. The more you educate people, the more cirtical they become [WoW Threat Meter used to be an empirical add-on and became provided within the game by Blizzard with the 3.0 update]. Better say "I do not know" than nothing [hmm... I do not know if this one always prevails in MMOG].

Sometimes it is hard to subscribe both to global values (human rights, WTO) and local values (EU, cultural differences) [global = MMOG should be fun, local = Hardcore versus Casual, Asian may prefer XP grinding and hardcore PvP versus Western players prefer PvE? Asian and Western do not see virtual property the same way].

Edited on February 22nd 2010 to add regulatees sources of effectiveness

Towards another community management feature

I detailed some of the current community management features in one of my previous post. Community management can also be done in an active and «preventive» manner instead of simply being reactive when events happen. For instance, Blizzard has organized its fourth BlizzCon in August 2009. During this, some Developer Panels showed to players how new levels were created. I do not know if there were particularly charismatic developers inside the Developer Panels. But if most of these panelists were unknown of the player audience, either work should be done to improve their visibility to the players or panelists should be people more visible. Also, I think that a close contact of the developers to the players from times to times may boost them because they see the mass of players they are working for and it is really rewarding. Including costumed players from the BlizzCon 2009 in game products like the Diablo III box is a very smart way to get Real-Life UGC and show your players/fans you care about them.

Moreover, I hope there were key players in the audience of the BlizzCon. By key players, I mean Tobold, Ensidia core guild members or Greedy Goblin. As an example, Greedy Goblin writes sarcastically about how to make money in WoW. His blog had 2k subscribers in June 2009 and 3.5k now in November 2009. His latest blog traffic graph shows peaks when he argued with Scott Jennings about layoffs in industry or when he showed his inventory and bank storage. Goblins are not easily one's friends, but if Blizzard manage to bring this Goblin to the BlizzCon in paying for him the flight and the hotel, Blizzard do not only get 1 more friendly player but 3.5k. Of course, each blog subscriber will not be affected the same way. But if the blog owner publishes nice comments concerning Blizzard, they will touch many players.
This point was actually suggested by Nicolas Ducheneaut in a discussion we had some weeks ago. I filled it with examples and included it into my post.

Finally, a crazy idea. Since MMO are attracting more and more people. Real-life player meetings change the way players see the game as they realize that there is someone behind the pixels. Some players even stopped insulting others after they met them IRL. So in a tupperware consultant style, why not organizing metings regularly in big cities? I heard about communities like DS in Paris who organize meetings in Paris Cafés where they play Nintendo DS games together. The Java User Groups (JUG) are monthly meetings where Java developers gather to talk about Java world news, learn new techniques, share knowledge or drink beers. Maybe MMO companies are not wealthy enough at the moment to pay for monthly buffets and refreshments in each of the 188 urban areas of the world counting more than 2 millions inhabitants. However, MMO companies could set up electronic tools on their websites to help their players organize local real-life meetings about their favorite MMO. This sounds like organizing raids, so developing the web app should not be too difficult.
I actually can write about the positive effects such IRL local meetings could provide as this kind of meetings actually happens/happened for some RO French private servers. Some active players or people in the server team sometimes organize real-life meetings called «IRLs» at Asian-culture conferences like the Japan Expo or simply in their home city when there are enough people to meet.

• The GM team (aka the community management team) knows players faces, discusses IG issues directly and more openly than on a forum
• The Development Team has direct feedback from players. Also, after the meeting, developers are no longer writing code for the fun of it, they realise that hundreds of people rely on them to have fun.
• players realise who are the people behind the game, and demystification of the work is sometimes followed by admiration of the people: «they are human, they are doing something fun for me and they spend so much time on it»

So even if no developers can attend the MMO meetings, which is likely to happen very frequently, such events are a good way to promote the MMO company, especially when this company has sponsored/helped organizing the event. This is the way to transform the video of the left into the video on the right. The video on the left was done by an active member of the Alliance-RO French private server community to describe the game and attract new players. This video was done by a fan of the game and the server. The video on the right was taken by an active member of the community in Alger, Algeria. Players say in the video and in the written comment that they have uncovered the secret reason why gentimouton (yes, it was me), a Game Master of the server, does not understand them: he is 70 year old (French quote: nous avons percé le mystere mysterieux du GM:gentimouton ! encore fois °° !!). If you want it, you can ask me for a full translation of the video dialog. This video of a meeting of players in their city brought a precious (but late) feedback to the GM.

Charismatic Game Developers

These guys radiate a kind of aura, they have a stature. Maybe being an actor helps. But John Romero (third photo) is not an actor, he is a game developer who has designed Doom and Quake. Maybe because of Romero's personality or simply for fun, Romero's team decided that in order to finish Doom II, the player had to shoot Romero's head in a secret room of the last level (see screenshot nearby). Currently, he is working on a MMO for Slipgate Ironworks to release in 2010 a groundbreaking MMO. In fact, Romero has such an aura that he has been at the center of a controverse concerning a game called Daikatana. The advertising (see image nearby) was a bit provocative and the game develoment took a very long time. Whatever the gossips about him, Romero definitely has an aura. It is up to Slipgate Ironworks to use it for their MMO launch campaign, but I believe this aura can impact a lot.

In-game famous MMO characters have sometimes been personified by game developers. For instance, Lord British in Ultima Online was played by Richard Gariott. The name became so famous that Richard Gariott retained the trademark rights on it and reused it in Tabula Rasa. But most of the developers stay in the shadow and play the game anonymously, like WoW producer J. Allen Brack who plays anonymously with his father.

Community Management

Until now, I have heard of 4 kinds of community management. Eric Heimburg explains 2 ways community managers behave with the community:

• denying the bugs and ignoring the feedbacks of the players: the example of Aion where the American community management team relies on the Korean technical team to do bug fixes. It is actually the same for the WoW European servers which do not benefit from the American development team on their forum.
• acknowledging their weakness, playing the crowd and feeding the forum trolls to keep them relatively sedated. According to Eric Heimburg, this strategy is followed by Champions Online and WoW on the American community forums.

Eric Heimburg also wrote that developers or support team representing the company to the community can screw up the consistency of the strategy, giving the example of a burning reaction of WoW Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler answering a Nerfs: Ghostcrawler, DIAF thread on wow forums.

Another kind of community management is the one followed by LambdaMOO developers, named wizards IG. Wizards have stopped to intervene in game problems since a LambdaMOO takes another direction publication of Pavel Curtis, aka Haakon IG. Julian Dibbell describes how this decision has impacted the community and how community leaders facing holes in the game case law sometimes act independently and in a non-concerted manner, leading to irreparable actions like the toading of a player. In the end, players are now in charge of their own problems in a participatory system where they only sporadically need wizards to enforce a decision the players' democracy has taken.

And finally, the way some efficient and very productive private servers of RO organize their team is interesting. This ideal structure is rarely entirely followed by private server teams. Even using only parts of this structure improves the productivity in giving each person of the team his/her appropriate place where he/she can play his/her role. On a beta server, developers can test their updates with a bunch of trusted players who are eager to test it. On the beta server, game developers are almighty like the Trainman in Matrix, they can create items, kill monsters, etc. with in-game commands. However, on the production server, they are normal players. The forum is cut into sections that enable the work to be shared among the different parts of the server team. Community managers watch the whole forum and report any valuable entry to the game devs or to the admin in a staff section. When community managers do not know how to answer a question, they post the question in the staff section so that a technical guy can answer it in person. Since community managers organize in-game events and have game master powers on the production server, community managers and developers are on an equal footing for the players. The server leader(s) communicate to everyone in the team, recruit new people and have in-game powers on both beta and production servers. They take important decisions like server policies and directions, future updates or the permanent ban of a player. They do not have to be technical or particularly present in the production server, but they must be aware of everything. Instead of spending hours reading the forum, they know what is going on thanks to the community managers. This hierarchy looks a lot like the scrum process of Agile development where the Scrum Master is the server leader, the Product Owner's feedback comes from the Game Masters/community managers and the Team is naturally the Game Developers.

I think which strategy to adopt depends on the size of the community and the skills of the team. As Eric Heimburg wrote, Aion is big enough to indulge a weak English customer service but less polished MMOG have to take care of their players. The RO private server hierarchy might work well for a community of a few thousands of players, but maybe not for bigger communities.