The Darkfall Lottery
Posted by Stropp on March 6, 2009 It really looks like Aventurine are shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to releasing Darkfall places. On the one hand, it looks like there is a ton of demand for Darkfall when Aventurine open up their ordering and it gets completely swamped in the ten minutes that it's open. On the other hand, you have to wonder how much longer potential customers will put up with continually missing out and end up leaving the process altogether. Since I certainly don't have the level of patience necessary to keep refreshing web pages waiting for an announcement that the ordering is going to open at some random time. Then to take a chance on getting a sub, and if I'm not successful to try again day after day. (Hmmm. It looks like Aventurine has taken MMORPG grinding to a whole other level.) If I do end up trying Darkfall I'll probably wait until it quiets down and the sub-rush is over. The problem is that Aventurine only have one server, and they need to limit their intake in order to prevent server meltdown. I've written about The Darkfall Release Model before, and I do think that limited intakes in the early stages of a MMORPG release is a good idea, but I think Aventurine are hurting their release by the way they are doing it. A much better way to have gone about releasing new subscriptions to Darkfall would have been to have a lottery system. Potential players would have been able to register their interest, perhaps through a pre-order, a month or two before the game was due to be released. Then, on release day, a number of players would be randomly selected and sent emails with details on how to register and access the game. This process would continue until all pre-orders had been exhausted, at which point the website would open up for general ordering. If access limitations are still required, the same process could apply, or perhaps it could then be a FIFO queue with players gaining their account in the order they subscribed. The problem is that Aventurine brought this problem on themselves. They prefered spending all of their effort on the game, but forgot that the front-end web experience is almost as important. If you frustrate your customers and make it hard to get your game, then you are shooting yourself in the foot with your marketing. Of course the hardcore players over at the Darkfall forums think that websites and marketing don't matter. Are they right?Posted under Other Games
It’s not a matter of being right. It’s the only way they can do it.
Their a small company, and they never planned to generate this much buzz. They had a really hard time making their deadlines. So hard they didn’t had time to do a proper beta, or really test their billing system. Or fix some nasty bugs before release. Or even communicate properly, or to manage the building of their new website. But they said februari so februari it is.
They had lots of plans, and they really wanted to do all this, but they just didn’t make it. I’ve done projects just like this and it’s all so familiar.
Their game is not really finished yet, and they know it. They have 1 game server-cluster and don’t have the manpower to open the next one. And you can’t just hire people and be done twice as fast (read The Mythical Man-Month by Brooks), training people cost much time. And I guess their PR person (Tasos) has many other functions, most of which are aparently more important than writing clear updates.
But to their credit, they did release _something_, just one day late, and technically it runs pretty smooth now, even though the game itself needs work. Yeah, I won the reload lottery and am playing since the first public night, and I’m pretty happy I’m not working at Adventurine.
I imagine the hours at Adventurine at the moment make staff hours at a hospital emergency room look like part time casual. Mega-crunch time!
I appreciate what you are saying. I’ve worked at small software shops too, and what you say does happen. Corners get cut, communication both within the team and externally don’t seem important, and things, often important, don’t get done. Product features get cut, but unnecessary gold plating gets added. It all gets rationalized away at the time, but comes back to bite the backside later.
The thing is, that it’s probably more important for a small operation to get all these things right the first time than it is for a big company. A company like EA or NCSoft can wear a bad launch, or some of the other issues, longer than a small company can. (Selling a million boxes at launch helps a lot.) Sure, people cut the little guy some slack for a while, but that only lasts so long.
The Mythical Man Month Mantra (like my alliteration?) talks about how adding manpower to a late project only makes it later. That does depend on where you add the manpower. If Tasos was so busy with other tasks, and Aventurine employed a full-time community manager to handle that side of things, it would have given Tasos more time for his other tasks and improved efficiency. Same goes with getting a web guy in (assuming they didn’t in the first place) to handle the web and business systems. On the other hand adding programmers to the game engine late in the game would have reduced efficiency.
I’m not sure that releasing something, anything, just because of a promised date is that great of an idea these days either. I think the gaming public has had enough of games being released in a poor unfinished state.
Keep in mind they have yet to actually market DF, all of the current interesting is user generated. I doubt they have spent a single dollar on advertising.
And while it would be nice if the website loaded faster, the limited time the shop is up is because it sells out that quickly, not because of some technical issue.
Word of mouth can be a powerful tool. Just an announcement in the right place can generate years of buzz. They did spend time marketing though, setting up the forums, commenting in the right places, and making announcements on the website; those are all marketing activities, and still have a cost associated.
I probably should have been clearer on the limited availability of the shop. Yep, it’s designed that way — probably not the best way of doing it, but it’s done now.
BTW Syncaine, did you get your account yet?
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