maradine
2012-12-25, 11:08 AM
Dear SOE:
Hi. I really like your game. I like playing it solo, and I like playing it in groups. I'm worried, however, about how long it's going to last. A lot of really smart people have identified a lot potentially lethal flaws in it. Maybe they're all being chicken little. Or, maybe they're all spot on and we're in trouble. I don't pretend to know myself; lots of problems look fatal when they effect your favorite pet issue, but aren't systemic. On the other hand, there's server populations, which are our only window into the true performance of the title. Are they shrinking? It looks that way. Maybe revenue numbers tell a different story. I don't know.
Which brings me to my personal crux - I am not inclined to throw any more money into something that may be a flash in the pan. This is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy: if people hold on to their dollars while awaiting signs of success or failure, no money comes in. Planetside is not a philanthropy, and that means the game fails. Developers get reassigned; infrastructure gets spending frozen. At my former studio, we liked to call that "maintenance mode." We sent a few games there a year. They don't come back.
So how do you entice investment while success is a quantum superposition? Communication. That's what works for me, anyway. I want to know where you think you are, where you think you're going, and how you think you'll get there. What I want is the Planetside 2 Roadmap.
It doesn't have to be particularly detailed. It doesn't have to have hard dates. It can change every week for all I care. You can miss targets repeatedly, and I'll still forgive you. It does however, need to contain the delta of what you think the game is now, and what you want the game to be, and when. It needs to be written by someone at Higby's level (I know, give the guy a break), and it needs to receive a free pass through the PR/corpcomm machine. It needs to be divorced from personal egos and stock prices, and represent the naked truth, what ever that truth might actually be.
That is, at least, what I want this holiday from the world of the Internet, where every problem is the end of existence as we know it. Also, cats wear bread on their heads. Happy holidays from me and mine to you and yours, and I'll see you next year.
~mara
TL;DR - publish a roadmap already.
Hi. I really like your game. I like playing it solo, and I like playing it in groups. I'm worried, however, about how long it's going to last. A lot of really smart people have identified a lot potentially lethal flaws in it. Maybe they're all being chicken little. Or, maybe they're all spot on and we're in trouble. I don't pretend to know myself; lots of problems look fatal when they effect your favorite pet issue, but aren't systemic. On the other hand, there's server populations, which are our only window into the true performance of the title. Are they shrinking? It looks that way. Maybe revenue numbers tell a different story. I don't know.
Which brings me to my personal crux - I am not inclined to throw any more money into something that may be a flash in the pan. This is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy: if people hold on to their dollars while awaiting signs of success or failure, no money comes in. Planetside is not a philanthropy, and that means the game fails. Developers get reassigned; infrastructure gets spending frozen. At my former studio, we liked to call that "maintenance mode." We sent a few games there a year. They don't come back.
So how do you entice investment while success is a quantum superposition? Communication. That's what works for me, anyway. I want to know where you think you are, where you think you're going, and how you think you'll get there. What I want is the Planetside 2 Roadmap.
It doesn't have to be particularly detailed. It doesn't have to have hard dates. It can change every week for all I care. You can miss targets repeatedly, and I'll still forgive you. It does however, need to contain the delta of what you think the game is now, and what you want the game to be, and when. It needs to be written by someone at Higby's level (I know, give the guy a break), and it needs to receive a free pass through the PR/corpcomm machine. It needs to be divorced from personal egos and stock prices, and represent the naked truth, what ever that truth might actually be.
That is, at least, what I want this holiday from the world of the Internet, where every problem is the end of existence as we know it. Also, cats wear bread on their heads. Happy holidays from me and mine to you and yours, and I'll see you next year.
~mara
TL;DR - publish a roadmap already.