The Other Side Of The Door

Continuing the "riffing on the news" theme from yesterday and as Jeromai mentioned in the comments, Mike O'Brien has left ArenaNet. This is kind of a big deal, seeing as how he co-founded the company. He's been with it for what seems like forever. His leaving is almost like taking down the sign over the door. And yet in a way it's also kind of not so big a deal after all. We've barely heard a word from him for what feels like a couple of years now.

He's leaving to start a new company called Mana Works. There's a lot of that going on these days. Paeroka at Nerdy Bookahs has an excellent, fully researched post up with all the details on just who's going to be working there, along with some speculation on what they might plan on doing.

There's clearly a lot going on here that no-one's going to talk about. Paeroka lists the eight people who have apparently jumped ship from ANet to follow Mike O'Brien to the sunlit uplands of independent development. That's a significant defection, especially coming off the back of the massive job cuts imposed by NCSoft earlier in the year.

When we learned that NCSoft had brought the curtain (or was it the guillotine?) down on a number of unspecified new projects I wasn't particularly concerned or, indeed interested, other than for the usual human concerns over the impact it would have on the individuals concerned. As far as Guild Wars 2 was concerned, my feeling was that a renewed corporate focus on core activities could only be to the benefit of that game and its players.

I didn't know then and hadn't heard since, until I read it in Paeroka's post this morning, that one of those cancelled projects might have been Guild Wars 3. Now that does make a difference.

GW2 is seven years old. As we are all coming to understand, seven years is barely into middle age for MMORPGs. The market is saturated with games that date back a decade, a decade and a half, twenty years, even. We all tend to get worked up over the occasional "sunsets" but few of us give a thought for the plethora of games drifting through a seemingly eternal twilight, neither growing towards the light nor shrinking into the darkness.

A long while back ANet claimed they planned to run GW2 indefinitely as their only ongoing MMORPG (the original Guild Wars having been officially shunted into maintenance mode). All that dithering with "cadences"  and "seasons", shuttling between a "Living Story" and a "Living World", that was ANet trying to figure out how to keep the ship afloat. They had to. There were no lifeboats.

Except apparently there were. Mike O'Brien may have been building one that could have launched, sometime, on a course for an undiscovered land, which might or might not have come to be known as "GW3".

Baby, it's cold outside.

Well that, as they say, is a pisser. While it's self-evident that GW2 could, and no doubt will, carry on largely as-is for many years, my personal feeling is that its future lies in the cruise ship trade. It long ago ceased to be an expeditionary vessel, headed away from the safety and security of the shore towards an unknown destiny beyond the horizon. These days it's a super-annuated hulk, living out its days as a half-heartedly refurbished tour boat, visiting only the best-known, most familiar ports.

Whose to say whether a new MMORPG from ArenaNet would have been any better? After all, the fine promises Mike and his team made before GW2's launch came to nothing and his custodianship was, to put it mildly, uneven. Even so, I'd have liked to have seen it.

And maybe we will. The Mana Works website currently consists of a single page that reads "This website will return October 9th." I await that date with bated breath. There's also a sub-reddit, whose strapline, as quoted by Paeroka, reads: “We aim to create worlds to live in, skills to discover, and adventures to share with friends."

The Kotaku piece makes the point that the eight defectors, all of whom comprise the collective that "amounted to the early development team for a new Guild Wars project, potentially Guild Wars 3", didn't take any of the work they'd done with them. Like NCSoft would have let them!

I'm guessing that they also won't have any rights or access to the intellectual property that comprises the Guild Wars franchise, despite Mike O'Brien having co-created it all. As far as I can tell, gaming stil resides somewhere in that nebulous legal hinterland that was known in the comics industry as "work made for hire".

Years of legal battles, particularly by Jack Kirby and his estate eventually saw that tradition broken. Kirby lost his claim but new writers were able to sign contracts that gave them royalties and rights, sometimes including ownership of the characters they created, which they were then able to take with them to other companies when they left.

The upshot of that was comics writers and artists becoming millionaires. Also a lot of very bad creator-owned comics. Freedom does not always equate to quality. For good or ill, that kind of freedom only seems to accrue to video game developers if they're canny enough to own the company that makes their games. Which may explain why so many of them leve to start their own studios.

Onwards and upwards

Regardless of the legal issues, the Mana Works tagline suggests Mike and the rest of his freedom-loving crew will be staying in the virtual world business. Whether that's in the form of an MMORPG or a plain old RPG it's a fair bet it will have something of the feel of Guild Wars about it, even though I'm certain any overt references to that I.P. will be assiduously avoided.

As I was saying yesterday, older creators tend to polish and burnish their ideas. They don't usually spend much time or effort on coming up with new ones and why should they? Those that try usually end up embarassing themselves and alienating their audience. (Yes, I know I always link to that clip. That's because it's always true. Also because I'm old so I have no new ideas).

If Mana Works would care to come up with a small-scale MMORPG-like game that reminds us all strongly of games their CEO made in the past, well that would be perfectly fine with me. As I also said yesterday, there's absolutely nothing wrong with elder creators refining and perfecting their art for the pleasure and enjoyment of the audience that grew up with thier earlier works and would like some more, please. I'm looking at you, Brad...

If I had to bet on a horse in the non-existent race between Playable Games and Mana Works, on the equally non-existent evidence of what they're doing now and the rather more solid form book of what they've done in the past, I'd probably give it to Mike O'Brien by a nose. His project at least sounds less abstract and more feasible.

I hope they both make it over the finishing line. We could do with more passion projects by committed creators, regardless of their age or origin.

The New ANet : GW2

Since the departure of Colin Johanson as Game Director, ArenaNet feels almost like a different company. Both the tone and content of communication have changed almost out of recognition, along with the delivery of substantive and meaningful improvements to the game itself.

Following the successful and generally well-received systems overhaul of the Spring Update last week's regular bi-weekly patch added a neat teaser event for the return of what may or may not end up being called Living Story 3. It was only a small addition, flagged up with a single line in the patch notes, but it bodes well for the future.

The most striking example of the changed attitude, though, has been the arrival on the WvW Team and on the official forums of a developer who appears both to understand how world vs world is played and to be able to discuss it coolly, clearly and rationally. That is something the game has needed and lacked for the best part of four years.

With Tyler Bearce now fronting the discussion and the revitalized ANet seemingly committed at long last to a full revamp of what was at one time, supposedly, its flagship feature, the future for large-scale PvPvE competition in GW2 looks brighter than it has for years. We have already seen a very fast response to the opinion expressed by the great majority of interested players with the return of the original, "Alpine" borderland maps.

Before that the widely disliked and frequently shunned Desert Borderlands received a successful and largely well-received sense-check that made them much more fun to play. The plan is to bring both sets of maps into some as-yet unspecified rotation and my feeling is that it will come to be seen as a good and acceptable solution.

No sooner was that done than we had a poll on what we'd like ANet to do to improve WvW next. This is unprecedented. Unlike SOE/DBG, who will run in-game polls on what color hats they should put in the store (not an actual poll example - or is it?) ANet never poll anyone on anything. What ANet like to do is start interminable opinion-gathering threads on the forum, let them run on for weeks or even months, cherry-pick a few of the least relevant comments to reply to, generally stir up a huge amount of noise and then do absolutely nothing about it.

I should say, that's what the old ANet liked to do. New ANet is different. This time we got a poll with two choices and a third "I don't care what you do" option and about a week later we got a result. The choices were between a rag-bag of "Quality of Life" improvements and a revamp to the WvW scoring system. A do-over for scoring won and presto, another week later, up pops Tyler Bearce with a full, coherent, well-presented proposal for exactly what those changes might look like.

The Deserted Borderlands

I'm not going to go into the detail. I'll just say that if all those changes were made to the game today I'd be delighted. There are things I'd do differently but there's not one thing in the list that I dislike and almost all of it looks as likely to improve the overall experience of WvW as not.

The general response in the lengthy thread is very positive. Mirroring ANet's own change of approach player reaction is undergoing a sea-change. Astonishingly, when game-developers express themselves clearly and lucidly and talk to their customers as though they were self-aware, intelligent adults the response from the players becomes less defensive, more co-operative.

There's only one genuinely controversial element in the proposed changes: an adjustment to the scoring system that attempts to compensate for "night-capping". Night-capping isn't what our guild-leader was doing yesterday when he had one shot of whiskey too many and had to go and have a lie down (true story). It's when players in one time-zone hit their prime-time, all log in at once and find the players in another time-zone, who spent the last six hours taking and fortifying structures, have logged off and gone to bed.

"They say you can't go home again/Don't believe it" Quoting my own three-decade old song lyrics ftw!

GW2 is a globally-available game but it only has three data centers. You can discount the Chinese operation as a separate game. That leaves the rest of the world playing either on servers that are nominally either European or North American. Europe, by and large, manages to stay relatively coherent so the real problems are on NA servers.

There are by convention, four time-zones for WvW: EU, NA, SEA and OCX. You can sub-divide further but that's the baseline. This reddit thread explains it simply. The problem comes when a match takes place between servers whose major populations don't align. Players tend to cluster by culture or language or simply when they happen to be awake, so certain servers have far more players in one time zone than another.

In our current match, for example, Yaks Bend has a very strong NA, a moderate EU/OCX and almost no SEA at all. Jade Quarry is almost the reverse. In NA prime JQ lose everything; in SEA they take it all back and take our stuff as well. Most of that is large blobs taking undefended structures.

The problem is that you can't tell people where to play. There have been various incentives to get people to move about but nothing has really worked. As a massive believer in server loyalty I don't even admit to there being an option: I chose my server four years ago and I will play there until the server is de-listed.

Remember when we were excited for ranks? Thought not.

Recognizing the impossibility of moving the players ANet has decided to move the goalposts instead. Under the new proposals there will be a "Victory Point Multiplier" that attempts to compensate for map populations at various times of day.

Tyler Bearce describes this as potentially controversial in his opening post and he is not wrong. Much of the ensuing discussion focuses around this single change, with strong arguments for and against. Some "off-hours" players see it as a slap in the face. One even calls it "racist".

As someone who has literally never played a full session during Yak's Bend's prime-time, which starts just as I'm going to bed and ends just before I get up, I have no qualms about the proposed changes whatsoever. I don't feel for a moment that anything I do in my server's "off hours" will be less valuable or less valued than if I was doing it in prime time.

It's an emotional issue, though, and one that no-one at ANet has dared to address until now. Even if this doesn't turn out to be the best solution it's very good that the issue is out in the open being discussed and, at last, addressed.

Everything considered, this is a very exciting time to be playing World vs World. If we can just get this bedded down we should be able to move on to the return of Seasons. Season gameplay was the most exciting and involving competitive gaming I have experienced in a decade and a half and I'd love to have it back.

If this is the New ANet I have to say I heartily approve.