lockwoodx
01-08-2011, 07:09 AM
When tackling any professional project the manager is often caught in positions where the client needs a problem solved and also happens to know your expense budget so they tell you "why not just throw more people at the problem, you can afford it?" Well that's exactly the question asked to Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, lead game designer (last I checked) of Activision/Blizzard's popular mmorpg World of Warcraft in an interview (http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/10/10/27/1441243/Greg-Ghostcrawler-Street-Lead-Systems-Designer-For-World-of-Warcraft) just before the release of their newest expansion Cataclysm.
Slashdot: A lot of players, when they hear you talk about how you didn't have time to make a feature good, their question is, "Well, why can't you just go out and hire more people?"
Greg Street: Yeah. The mythical man-month.
Slashdot: Can you explain why you don't find that to be a viable solution?
Greg Street: The other example that gets used a lot is: if it takes a woman nine months to have a baby, then if you have two women, it'd only take four and a half! Our development process is hugely based on iteration and communication. It's more important — for, say, class design and item design — it's more important for me to have a small team that's totally in sync than to have a large team and have no idea what anyone else is working on. We would end up with Hunter talents working one way, the Priest would work a different way, and it wouldn't feel polished. It wouldn't feel good to players. Often, when we say, "We didn't have time," players say, "You shipped it before it was ready." That's not the way we look at it.
The way we look at it is: we are extremely critical of our own designs. We have very long lists of things we want to fix in the game. Some of these things have been around forever, and some of the things are new that we just added recently. If we waited until we addressed every single one of those things, we would never ship anything. It would be years and years before games came out, and that's just not realistic. That's not what players want; they're not going to wait six years for a new expansion. So, instead, we do what we can and we keep other things on the back burner. We've got Paths — this great idea. A dance studio — we're going to do it some day. Just not yet. We're saving it for the right time.
My reply to Greg would be:
When anyone on your small "synced" team gets beaten in pvp and butthurt you nerf a class across the entire game screwing up WoW's biggest feature "pve raiding" until several patches down the road when you realize the error apologize for it. Except that, your (blizzard's) team has been doing this for years cock-slapping loyal customers and being treated like the peasants you consider them. Maybe if you hired a few more people into your niche little circle-jerk of developers someone new might have the balls to stand up and call you an asshole for the sake and sanity of your customers.
lockwoodx
Slashdot: A lot of players, when they hear you talk about how you didn't have time to make a feature good, their question is, "Well, why can't you just go out and hire more people?"
Greg Street: Yeah. The mythical man-month.
Slashdot: Can you explain why you don't find that to be a viable solution?
Greg Street: The other example that gets used a lot is: if it takes a woman nine months to have a baby, then if you have two women, it'd only take four and a half! Our development process is hugely based on iteration and communication. It's more important — for, say, class design and item design — it's more important for me to have a small team that's totally in sync than to have a large team and have no idea what anyone else is working on. We would end up with Hunter talents working one way, the Priest would work a different way, and it wouldn't feel polished. It wouldn't feel good to players. Often, when we say, "We didn't have time," players say, "You shipped it before it was ready." That's not the way we look at it.
The way we look at it is: we are extremely critical of our own designs. We have very long lists of things we want to fix in the game. Some of these things have been around forever, and some of the things are new that we just added recently. If we waited until we addressed every single one of those things, we would never ship anything. It would be years and years before games came out, and that's just not realistic. That's not what players want; they're not going to wait six years for a new expansion. So, instead, we do what we can and we keep other things on the back burner. We've got Paths — this great idea. A dance studio — we're going to do it some day. Just not yet. We're saving it for the right time.
My reply to Greg would be:
When anyone on your small "synced" team gets beaten in pvp and butthurt you nerf a class across the entire game screwing up WoW's biggest feature "pve raiding" until several patches down the road when you realize the error apologize for it. Except that, your (blizzard's) team has been doing this for years cock-slapping loyal customers and being treated like the peasants you consider them. Maybe if you hired a few more people into your niche little circle-jerk of developers someone new might have the balls to stand up and call you an asshole for the sake and sanity of your customers.
lockwoodx