Developer Appreciation Week: Much Love for the SWTOR Dev Team

Blaugust continues, and it's Developer Appreciation Week! While my post on this subject last year was more general in tone and could be read as addressed to many developers, I do want to specifically give some love to the SWTOR devs this time.

It does tie into last year's post though in so far as I want to start with another lesson I learned at work in the past year: that it can be demotivating sometimes to work on a product/brand that is perpetually treated as an "also ran". It's disheartening to be strongly invested in something while constantly seeing that it's just not as popular as some of its "siblings", and feeling like you're caught in a vicious cycle where you sometimes can't do your best because of a lack of resources, yet because you're not doing so great you won't be given any more resources either.

That's definitely a place that everyone who currently works on SWTOR has got to be familiar with. EA likes to "forget" about it when they talk about their line-up of Star Wars games (though they've gotten a bit better at this in the last couple of years), while Bioware prefers to (understandably) focus on its own properties and tends to treat SWTOR as "that licensed thing we also do". Fans are so used to this that players positively freaked out from all the attention when Casey Hudson actually devoted a whole sentence of his 600+ word "Mid-Summer Update" on the official Bioware website to SWTOR. Long story short: SWTOR devs, I know your work often doesn't get much attention, but do remember that there are still hundreds of thousands us out there who enjoy what you do and are grateful for you doing it.

Next, let's talk about a few specific things that I appreciate about the SWTOR dev team.

First off, I love how passionate they tend to sound whenever they get to talk about the game. Charles Boyd in particular is a poster boy for doing what he loves, what with parading around as a trooper in his free time. (I think he builds blaster replicas in his garage too? Or am I confusing that with something somebody else said?) Every time he and/or Eric and Keith appear on a podcast I immediately get excited about the game again, even if I'd been in a bit of a lull before that. You can tell that they aren't just people trying to sell you something as good because that's what it says in their notes, but that they are genuinely into the game and care about all its little details.

At this point, can I also give a shout-out to Eric actually? I'm not really sure how good a job he's doing if you did a comparative ranking of MMO community managers as I'm not sure about everything that's involved, but I simply appreciate that he's stuck with the role for more than five years now (and he was already working at Bioware before that too). To this day he appears to remain completely unperturbed by all the toxicity he must undoubtedly be encountering on a daily basis, always letting it roll off his back while trying to focus on what people may be trying to communicate underneath their potentially nasty words. That's a really valuable skill, and with him having occupied the same role for so many years now he's kind of become "the face of SWTOR" to fans simply because absolutely everybody knows him, which is also nice in terms of consistency.

Tying into that, I'm always impressed by how much the SWTOR team tries to listen to the fans. They haven't always been great at this in the past, but they've been working on it for a long time now and things have improved a lot. I'm always baffled when people claim that the devs don't listen - mind you, listening to the players doesn't mean that everyone always gets what they want: in fact, that's literally impossible as some players' wants will be diametrically opposed to each other. However, so many things they've added to the game - especially more recently - have been directly based on player feedback, from larger changes such as cutting the "Knights of" story arc short and refocusing on group content to small things such as making previously static companions customisable or changing the colour of the sand in the Rishi stronghold. To be honest, sometimes I almost feel like they listen to players too much and could dare to do their own thing a bit more, haha! (I mean, just because people disliked Saresh that didn't mean you had to completely assassinate her character, you know...)

In conclusion: Thanks for continuing to be passionate about what you're doing! As long as you'll remain dedicated to making the best damn Bioware Star Wars game you can, us players will always happily come along for the ride.

Developer Appreciation Week: How Work Has Made Me More Understanding of MMO Devs

It's Developer Appreciation Week, and if you don't know what that is, Rav lays it all out in detail here. I've actually been meaning to take part in this for ages, but this time around it has come at a particularly convenient time for me as I've been bouncing around ideas for a post that fits the theme quite well.

You see, in the past year I've really developed an appreciation for the difficulties that MMO devs struggle with in terms of balancing new content with bug fixes, and just generally keeping an MMO running smoothly. This is due to things that I've seen happen at my place of work, even though my job has nothing to do with gaming at all.

You see, I work for an online business that sells opticals (glasses and sunglasses). Seems quite different from running a video game, right? Well yes, in the sense that we do deliver an actual physical product by the end of the day. But our entire image rests on our online presence, and before customers get to actually hold their purchase in their hands, it goes through several steps of electronic processing in our back-end system as well, as stock levels get updated and so on.

Even though that seems a lot more straightforward than managing a whole virtual world, I've been astounded by the amount of work it takes, and just how many things can go wrong. I don't work in tech myself, but we have an open-plan office and my department is right next to IT, so one can't help... overhearing certain things. Not to mention that we do our own share of bug reporting.

For example, our website was originally built something like a decade ago by the guy who started the whole business... and who isn't with the company any longer, so tech has been spending a fair bit of time cleaning up code that only made sense to the founder himself and generally been trying to understand how certain systems were set up. I'm sure that's also true for more than one MMO that's getting long in the tooth by now.

Then there are the constant small bugs. Like that certain page updates lose their header if you hit save first instead of hitting publish right away. Or orders getting stuck at a certain point in processing. Or customers sometimes being told that their payment failed even though it succeeded. Everyone is aware of them, but there just isn't enough time in the day to fix them all, considering how many other things take priority. People have just learned to hit publish right away. Orders getting stuck is bad, but you can always get customer services to manually kick them onto the next stage, and that solves the immediate problem, right? Problems with payments are really bad, but if it only happens occasionally and it's not immediately obvious what the issue is, IT can only waste so much time on randomly fiddling around with attempts to reproduce the problem - again, customer service can patch things up until there is a larger sample size to draw conclusions from.

These are things I always think of now when I encounter a long-standing and annoying bug in SWTOR. Is it annoying? Yes. But is it actually game-breaking for a sufficiently large number of people? Probably not... And I'd like to imagine that somewhere at Bioware, someone is also aware of that bug and wishes they had time to fix it or knew what exactly caused it to at least make fixing it faster and easier. But in a business with limited resources that has to prioritise things we can't always get what we want.

You'd think that if you "just" have a website to sell things, you shouldn't need that much tech to keep it running, right? But no, we too have our equivalents of "content patches", when the business decides that the product pages need redoing to entice more customers into buying or wants to add extra payment options to the checkout. None of these things implement themselves, so these projects constantly vie with attention for things like bug fixes. Until you have those days when something suddenly breaks down completely (e.g. the website doesn't work) and everyone needs to drop what they're doing anyway because that problem needs fixing more urgently than anything else. I imagine that's what things are like at Bioware when a server collapses or a major exploit gets discovered.

Basically, what I've learned in the past year in particular is that even something that looks relatively straightforward on the surface can hide a multitude of moving parts underneath, which require a lot of maintenance and are in constant danger of breaking. I imagine that this is multiplied tenfold when you're not just dealing with a website and an order system, but with a whole virtual world with dozens of interconnected systems.

I appreciate that the devs at Bioware work hard every day to keep things running while also adding new content to keep us all interested. I firmly believe that they're genuinely trying to do their best, but sometimes there are only so many hours in a day. Just keep up the good work.