Just how new is that earth, anyway?
Today we got mentioned at TerraNova. I’d be happy with this mention, except that the post reveals a profound lack of information about our game. On the other hand, I got a backhanded insult from Bartle, which pleases me for some reason.
So, to clarify (and hey, everyone else at FLS wants to add their 2 cents, so why not?):
Yes, we have user content in our game. Yes, it is peer reviewed. Yes, the peer review process is mostly working. No, it’s not perfect yet; we’re not completely happy with the voting process for flags and sails yet. Yes, we retain veto power, and everything goes past a member of our team before it’s put in the game.
And yes, it’s a good use of our resources. It turns out, in fact, to have paid off much more than we could have ever anticipated. Our user created ships are as good, if not better, than the ships modeled by the contractor studio (you may have heard of them? Akella?), and they’ve vastly expanded the range of available ships in our game. We’ll probably be at double our target number of ships by launch.
But you know what? All of what I just said is not news. It’s, in fact, all over our website, all over our forums, in a bunch of different FAQs, and common knowledge to everyone involved in the process, from casual forum readers to our internal user content team.
Which makes me wonder: why didn’t the author of the article spend the ten minutes it would have taken to learn this? Or, god forbid, email me and ask? Wouldn’t actual, you know, comment from the designer have been a good addition to the article? Or was a mistaken impression of our user content system useful only as a jumping off point for a basically unrelated discussion of content creation processes?
As far as I can tell, TerraNova is to MMOs what The Forge is to RPGs. That is, it’s a bunch of clever people who think a lot about the subject, but in a kind of Platonic idealized space unconnected to the realities of development and implementation. In that way, it’s useful as an idea-factory, but doesn’t have much traction outside of the realm of pure ideas.
I ask ‘how new is that earth’ because, given that the commenters there seemed to think that user content was best locked behind a crafting grind, it doesn’t seem like new ground is really being explored. Seriously, a crafting grind? No thanks; I’m trying to make a fun game, not an effective world sim that punishes people for having ambition. If I want a world sim with an attached grind, I’ll go play DragonRealms.
Like I said, though, Dr. Bartle gave me an implied insult, which pleases me. So let me say, Dr. Bartle: If you don’t like the user content system design, it’s quite possible that ‘the rest of the design’ will not be to your taste, either. I’m gambling that your taste is divergent from those we’re courting as future customers.