Here’s a question about increasing the profitability and decreasing the development cost of any MMO, although probably no-one except the web-people will recognise it as such (and even some of them won’t get it):
How do you improve the customer support for an existing MMO?
[where do you start, and what do you target?]
16 Comments » Your possible answers include:
1. Because … Apple engineers have never heard of the concept of a “patch”, and require you to re-download the *entire IDE*, with all libraries, all documentation, all binary code – everything – when they release an update? So the current “SDK” for iPhone (hint for Apple: when most people say “SDK” they don’t mean “plus a copy of a bloody operating system”, they just mean “the few custom bits that are specific to that app”) is a whopping 1.6Gb?
[NB: actually in general I think that's a good thing - avoids a lot of mis-configuration / version mismatch problems - but as an MMO developer the idea of *not* patching gigabyte-sized packages horrifies me, and avoiding those problems actually isn't THAT hard (it's been solved many times by now!) these days. Writing (or buying) a good patcher is one of the first steps you do in MMO dev projects...]
2. Because … Apple didn’t think to split The Behemoth into multiple files, perhaps make them something reasonable, like a few hundred meg each?
3. Because … Apple decided to put this monster behind an authentication check on their website, presumably for legal reasons, and there is no other “official” mirror (all the ones you find on google are technically-illegal torrents or else, ultimately, redirect you back to the apple.com link), and their authenticated sessions TIMEOUT after 1 hour of “not fetching any new pages from the site” (completely ignoring whether you have any transfers in progress!), and refuse to send you data once your authenticated session runs out?
4. All the above?
NB: I wasn’t brave enough to try resuming the downoad without first re-authenticating and loading at least one web page from the apple developer site to prove I was logged in. I suspect (*suspect*) that the web browser would receive an HTTP 300 redirect to the login page, at which point most browsers are going to delete the partial download. Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAARRRRRRGHHH!.
Expect to see some comments/tutorials/advice on iPhone game development here at some point in the near future. If I can ever get the download to complete…
http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/8117
Dinowaurs Beta Testers Wanted
We’re now inviting Kongregate members to sign up to test the Dinowaurs Beta. If you don’t know what Dinowaurs is, go here for more info: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/3350.
Simply pop in to this thread and say that you want in and I’ll put you on the list for the test. Please, no conversations, as it makes it more difficult to pull all the names out.
We’d like to thank everyone who helped us test the alpha! Anyone who signed up for the alpha in the previous thread will be first in line, so no need to sign up again if you already did in the alpha thread.
Thanks, everyone!
(posted may 1st 2008)
Hello!
Thank you for volunteering to test Dinowaurs, an upcoming game on Kongregate. As of this email, everyone who volunteered to help test Dinowaurs will now get a chance to do so. We’re very grateful for all your help!
For those of you who have tested before, this is a different request than usual, and for all you new faces, welcome! What we need to do is load test the server – that is get as many feet stomping on it as possible and see if it crashes! Because of that, we’re going to try to stuff as many testers into the game at one time as possible. For this test, Dinowaurs will only be open on Monday, November 17 from 12 noon-2pm Pacific Time (All you non West-Coasters, take notice of the time!)
So we hope to see all 4000 of you Dinowaurs beta testers in here and playing the game on Monday! Don’t be late – our doors will close tight at 2pm.
Thanks again!
Kongregate and Intuition
(Fair enough, normal practice for stress tests, although it’s usually a good idea to let people in a few days in advance to ensure that they have working clients etc (less of an issue for a web game like this, but still probably worth doing).)
Read that email again. Do you see the magic URL? No? That’s because THEY FORGOT TO INCLUDE IT.
Some googling turns up various people asking for it, and some friendly Kong players answering with the URL here:
EDIT: they just sent another email which remembered to include the link.
Hello!
Today’s the day! At 12 noon Pacific Time (3pm Eastern), the doors to the Dinowaurs Beta on Kongregate will be flung open!
At that time you should make sure you’re signed in to Kongregate and go here to test: http://www.kongregate.com/games/intuition/dinowaurs-beta_preview
Make sure you’re on time! We will be closing doors promptly at 2pm (PST). If during gameplay you encounter any bugs, please click on the little bug icon at the top right of chat and fill out a bug report. The more actual bugs you find, the better the game will be!
We really want to thank all you beta testers. We really appreciate all your help!
Kongregate and Intuition
Could be they intended this all along. Given that the beta starts less than an hour after that email was sent out, I doubt it :).
(a FAIL using web-based meeting tools)
1) Make it look fun and interesting and seemingly inclusive:
“MiniBar is a social evening in East London which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, Creative Commons, web applications, social networking and general Web 2.0 (3.0) mayhem & fandango.”
2) …but require that signup has to be done in two separate places for two “halves” of the event:
“You can come at 5pm … You need to register separately here for this part.”
3) …and make the location a Secret, known only to the special few:
“Location
This location is shown only to members”
4) If someone attempts to signup for the (free) event, deny them, and demand 250 letters explanation (no more! don’t you dare go over 250 chars!) for why they are important enough / l33t enough to be allowed to come:
(the way meetup.com works, I can’t access this page from cache to copy/paste the text, sorry – you’ll just have to take it from me that it’s pretty abrupt, demanding you justify yourself without offering anything in return, or any kind of explanation of WHAT you are supposed to write, or WHY)
5) Finish your event description with not one but TWO content-less/broken links, and describe them as “more info”. For bonus marks: forget to hyperlink one of them:
“More Info at: OpenBusiness.cc and barcamp.org/minibar”
(the first domain there is hotlinked to: http://www.openbusiness.cc/minibar/)
NB: http://www.openbusiness.cc/minibar/ == a empty webserver directory on a webserver allegedly running Apache version 1.3.39 (!) – not impressive for a web/internet event.
NB2: http://barcamp.org/minibar == a webpage with adverts for 50 odd totally unrelated items, e.g.
“angled bob hair style
black braided hair styles
jc penny free shipping
trendy hair style
victoria secret free shipping”
(yes, really – Victoria Secret and JC penny. For a supposed BarCamp about startups and internet companies. Um … OK.)
I guess that’s another Web 0.1 example, then…
This is getting ridiculous. I just tried to post a comment on someone’s blogger.com blog, and I was forced to use either my gmail account or an OpenID account to post. When I tried to NOT use my gmail account, it force-logged-me-out of gmail in the other window! This is pretty incompetent.
Note to web companies: the days when normal people only had one online identity died ten years ago. We all have multiple identities today. Leave us alone, let us get on with our lives, and stop interfering with who we are and who we express ourselves as being.
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This week, I was at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco (my session writeups should appear on http://freetoplay.biz over the coming days). A couple of things struck me during the conference, including the large number of “payment providers” (companies that specialized in extracting cash out of your users via credit card, paypal, pre-pay cards, etc and crediting direct to you) and the large number of white-label “virtual goods system providers” (companies that were providing a turnkey (or near-turnkey) solution to “adding virtual goods to your existing facebook app” etc).
Which brings be to a recurring problem I’ve seen for a long time with the online games and MMO industry, which I suspect is going to cause a lot of damage to a lot of social games and virtual worlds companies in the coming years: online service providers are – in general – shockingly bad (lazy or plain stupid, usually) at handling their customers’ money.
And the result? Ultimately, it could drive increasing numbers of consumers back to preferring to purchase their games and other online content via retail, where the companies and transactions are more trustworthy. OH, THE IRONY!
From the latest newsletter, at the bottom (after the big graphics and announcement about “moshlings” – aka mini-moshi-monsters (my – this is getting a bit infinitely recursive, isn’t it? Now your child’s pet has a pet :). I’m still trying to attract an interesting Moshling (the minigame to get them is Animal Crossing crossed with a Fruit Machine / One-arm bandit – makes me think of ZT Online’s chests, although without the Real Money part), but already I find myself wanting the next hit: a moshi-mini-moshling-ling. Ling. Mini. *ahem*)).
ANYWAY … here’s the news bit – changes to the parental controls:
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