Data Integrity is King
WoW rolled out their 2.1.0 patch yesterday. Early reports from a co-worker suggested this was a patch day to skip.
In implementing a minor new feature in the auction house, they introduced a bug that sometimes causes stacks of items to vanish.
That’s fine; bugs sometimes slip past test (though that seems like a pretty serious bug to have made it through even cursory testing). What’s not fine is the CSR response.
“It’s a known issue. You will not be reimbursed.”
It must be nice to have rooms full of money to swim around in, so that you can feel comfortable alienating any particular customer.
I’m not a CSR type. I’m not a community type. So maybe there’s intricacies here that I’m not seeing. But it’s like this: we, the game creators, have an implied agreement with the players. We will let them use our software to create lots and lots of data. And that data is sacred. If we fuck up the data, we have to fix it. If we trash a player’s character through a bug or an unintended consequence of a change, we have to restore the character.
The illusion we’re trying to create is that our games are worlds, persistent spaces with predictable rules and behaviors. We have to maintain this illusion because, fundamentally, players are not actually accomplishing anything by playing our games. Their successes are basically meaningless, and their characters are ephemera. There is no such thing as a truly ‘persistent’ world; we’ll all eventually shut down, whether after a short time (AC2) or after more than a decade (Kesmai). All the players’ hard work is going to be lost. And if we pull back the curtain to show them this, ever, we will make them stop playing.
Here’s my assertion: Preservation of data integrity is more important than any other consequence of a game update. It’s more important than ‘users can’t log in’ or ‘this quest doesn’t work’ or even ‘everyone is mysteriously PvP+ everywhere on all servers.’ If you break someone’s data, and you don’t fix it, you’ve just demonstrated the transience and futility of MMO gameplay to them in an immediate and visceral way. You took their stuff, and you aren’t giving it back.
The course of action this suggests: Have your finger on the restore-from-backup button for days after the update. It’s even better if you can empower your CSRs to roll individual characters back (although there are potential pitfalls with this approach that need to be addressed; a dupe bug in early WoW resulted from CSRs rolling individuals back). Be prepared to spend a lot of money on data integrity post-update.
Because if you don’t, and you let the players in on the secret that MMO ‘progress’ can be stripped away from them at a moment’s notice through no fault or action of their own, it’s not just going to be a single bad experience; it’s going to color all future game experiences with the same shade of impermanence.