A Detailed Game Management Methodology - "Saving" the game

[leftayparxoun]

Hello there.
I really didn't want to make this post.
I hope that this post ends up being completely useless.
But, due to the overall lack of transparency and communication, I cannot know if that will be the case.
Therefore, I felt compelled to make this post, just in case it is needed.

I apologise for the clickbaity second half of the title, but in this post I will attempt to show exactly how to solve that exact problem; "saving" the game. I thought about scrapping this post and just sending a private mail, but I am also curious to see whether this idea reverberates within the community. Any additional ideas/proposals to what I'm about to write down are also very welcome. So here we go.


WHY (the game needs saving):

It is no secret that the game is losing population lately. It is not (just) a seasonal issue, I assure you. Even last summer before the Cross guild showed up in the game, the population was larger. Unfortunately I don't have the documentation to prove it, but max 600 people at the game's primetime is a sign of underlying problems. Population matters because the game is designed to be an MMORPG and not a sandbox game.

And the current population is not my only concern. Just in the last week I've seen 2 instances of entire guilds seriously considering to take a break from the game with numerous more cases of inviduals considering to take a break. This situation is not something the game can afford to see going on for much longer.
But why is it happening?

According to what I personally observe in ROR discord, as well as via direct messages with people in the community, it can be mainly traced back to 2 things:

• Dissatisfaction with the current state of the game/management team behind the game, and

• Dissatisfaction with the trajectory of the game/balance&dev team deciding that trajectory

I will not attempt to answer why that is/play the blame game.
I will, however, try to provide a concrete plan on how to get back on track.
If there is such a plan already that is just not communicated to players for whatever reasons, that is (in my opinion) not currently sufficient. This post can provide instructions on how to proceed and where to improve the plan at any point.

DEVELOPMENT GOALS:
In an unranked (for now) order:

• Class & Faction Balance

• Gear & Itemization

• RvR system

• Scenario system

• General PvE system (PQs/Quests)

• PvE dungeons

• Events

• Transparency

• Eliminating Bugs

• Getting more manpower - Increasing the team

ACTUAL GOALS:

• Community satisfaction and player retention

• Fairness (in all game aspects)

• Eliminating all bugs

• Expanding the game content

CONSTRAINTS:
Here we have stuff that are either partially in the team's control (available manpower), or things that are out of the team's control (relevant existing bugs).

• Relevant bugs

• Total manhours needed to complete (estimate) divided by all the available manpower able to work on that (explanation later)

HOW (to solve the problem):
The aim is to rank the DEVELOPMENT GOALS in the optimal manner that maximizes the ACTUAL GOALS' completion in the shortest amount of time, all while factoring in the existing CONSTRAINTS.

This problem could be solved by linear programming methods if defined properly, but since time is of the essense (and since I started writting this at 1 a.m. on my phone during vacation), I will propose a simplified method of solving it. If you feel like this approach is too amateurish but think that the idea has potential, please let me know directly and I can provide the proper LP description of the problem after a week or so. Here's the "simple" approach to solving it:

All DEVELOPMENT GOALS are ranked accordingly to a point system where high score means great improvement of the ACTUAL GOALS in the fastest way possible, due to being subject to less constraints. After they have been ranked, you order them from high to low score and assign the team to them accordingly.
Here's how you do it:

• Examine each DEVELOPMENT GOAL one by one and

• Assign a score of 0 to 10 to each ACTUAL GOAL for that Development Goal where 0 indicates that the goal will get a lot worse, 5 means that the goal will not improve at all and 10 means that the goal will be improved in the most efficient way possible (4 to 1 and 6 to 9 are the inbetween degrees of worsening/improvement). For example, Eliminating bugs could have 7 in community satisfaction, 6 in fairness, 10 in eliminating all bugs and 5 in expanding game content.

• Then its time to repeat the process for the Constraints. You will be assigning a value to each of them in a similar way. Since this is the hardest part of the solution, up next is how to calculate these values for each constraint

• For the relevant bugs assign a score of 0, where an extreme amount of bugs that need to be solved are preventing/interfering with this, to 10, where no bugs are involved at all

• The manhours/manpower constraint basicaly represents the time it will take to finish the whole task:
  • First of all, assign some estimations of how many total hours it would take for 1 theoretical person, that knows how to tackle everything in a Development Goal, to completely solve it. E.g. for Scenario Rework: 500 h or for Transparency 10 h.
  • Then, send a survey to ALL active members of the team and ask them to answer on which Development Goals they wouldn't be opposed to working on.
  • In the same survey, provide them with a list of technical skills/knowledge relevant to all goals and ask them to check the boxes of the things they are competent at. From their answers, assign them a score of 0-100% for each development goal, describing how much of the task they could theoretically tackle on their own, given infinite time. Assign value of 0% if they are not interested in working somewhere despite having to skills for it.
  • In the same survey also ask them to provide an estimate for how many hours they can dedicate each week on average for working on that. For example, let's say that on the General PvE system goal only team members E and T want to work there. If E has the skills to do 90% of everything and can work 10h/week, T knows 30% but can work 40h/week and in total the goal requires 60h of work, then the calculation becomes:
    60/(0.90*10+0.30*40) = 2.86 weeks of work.
    If some members have the skills and are fine with working in any of more than one goals then use them in each of those goals' calculation.
  Then assign a score to each goal with 0 meaning it takes longer than 6 months and 10 that it takes less than a week.

• Now we are at the final steps. For each Development Goal you now have the scores (from 0 to 10) for how it affects each each Actual Goal and for how hard/fast it will be to complete.
  
  All we are missing now is a way to properly combine that data into a quanitative indicator for what to focus on. I am going with the following "rules":
  • All the actual goals and restrictions are equally important when deciding
  • Bad performance (e.g.3) in any of the goals/restrictions should not even out with similarly good performance (in this case 7) of another goal. Instead it should make prioritizing that goal/project less desirable. (e.g. if PvP Balancing would improve Fairness, scoring 7, but would be received quite negatively by the Community, scoring 3, then that would overall decrease the quality of the game as people would have no desire to play, despite the game being more fair)
  • A simple way to enforce the above rules is to define the total score function as such:
    F(x,y,z,w,x',y') = ln(x/5)+ln(y/5)+ln(z/5)+ln(w/5)+ln(x'/5)+ln(y'/5)
    where ln is the natural logarithm (log base e) and each score is divided by 5 so that they contribute positively above 5, negatively below it, and 0 at 5.
    Due to logarithmic properties, the total score function can be simplified further to:
    F(x,y,z,w,x',y') = ln(x•y•z•w•x'•y'/5^5)
    
    The use of natural logarithm here is not deliberate. Any base can be used (e.g. log2, log5, log10) and the larger the base is, the less forgiving the function is to "bad" scores (<5).

At this point we have graded all Development Goals in terms of how well they accomplish Actual Goals and how easy it is to complete them in terms of Restrictions. And all that is quantified in one value for each goal.

E.g. RvR system scores 8 at Player satisfaction, 5 at improving fairness, 4 at solving all bugs and 6 at expanding the game's content, while scoring 4 at existing bugs limiting it and 5 at the time it would need to be completed if all available team members focused on it, would have a total score of:
ln(8•5•4•6•4•5/5^5) = ln(6.14) = 1.82

So just calculate the total score for all Development Goals and rank them from highest to lowest. Then allocate all team members, that are willing and qualified, to the highest ranking Goal and keep going down the list until all team members are alocated. It would also make sense to arbitrality push up the priority of "Fixing bugs" and "recruiting more team members", as these directly reduce the constraints on all Development Goals.

You don't have to focus on completing entire goals but should instead break it up in smaller parts to be tackled 1 by 1. For example, "Class & Faction balancing" should be replaced by "completing the upcoming big update" (entire healer phase). If there are multiple upcoming parts in the same goal, for example "nerfing overperforming classes" in the "Class & Faction balancing", then they should be treated separately and their total score calculated individually to determine their relative spot in the priority list. As another example, in the "Transparency" Development Goal the upcoming part you could examine individually is "updating patchnotes" with reasoning behind changes or a new "development update" post.
Also, every time a project/subgoal concludes, you should replace it with the next/new one(s) from the same overall Goal, evaluate their score to rank them and then reallocate all members from top to bottom again in the updated list. If you aren't sure about what the next thing(s) in each goal should be, ask/poll the community and read up on past forum suggestion posts.

Finally, you shouldn't only rely on guesses for the scores of the Dev Goals in the Actual Goals and Restrictions. Drawing conclusions from previous cases, projecting past results of updates and even polling the community are ways to get accurate data for this predictive model.

WHAT (this methodology achieves if performed correctly):

• Organizes the team's action plan with the purpose of optimizing game and community improvement over time, without potential issues and inefficiencies about who works on what part of the project or confusion when the goals or other situations change rapidly.

• It is highly customizable and can accomodate as many development goals and subgoals as required (even ones I didn't include due to not being in the know about)

As I wrote at the start, I hope that a better or similar Development plan methodology is already in place and things are progressing smoothely behind the scenes with the game and community seeing the fruits of that plan when it pays off in the near future.
If that's not the case, I hope that this post might have helped you with formulating a good action plan. Time is of the essense.


Thank you for reading.
Sincerely,
a probably overzealous fan of your game, with too much vested interest to see it go to waste

[Moonbiter]

Ctrl+f 'money' has empty result on the post above.

So, the core of all the problems is a monetisation lack of this game. It must be monetized in some way. Team's work must me compensated in a fair way by money payments.
Money will give resources: time, specialists to solve any of the problems. Ad too.

I guess its forbidden in some way for now by the bl copyright holders. But its not impossible to overcome it.

[Lisutaris]

Well written.
.*nod*

[Everdin]

People seem to forget this is a private project people do beside work.

[Lisutaris]

[*]

People seem to forget this is a private project people do beside work.

That's why the content of this post is even more relevant. If you ask me. Time is a limited resource.

[leftayparxoun]

Ctrl+f 'money' has empty result on the post above.

So, the core of all the problems is a monetisation lack of this game. It must be monetized in some way. Team's work must me compensated in a fair way by money payments.
Money will give resources: time, specialists to solve any of the problems. Ad too.

I guess its forbidden in some way for now by the bl copyright holders. But its not impossible to overcome it.

People seem to forget this is a private project people do beside work.

Exactly because this is an unpaid side-project for the team, optimization is so important.

Which is especially why I listed "expanding the team roster" as one of the things that should be given priority in all cases. If expertise is not available even within the pool of available "hires", then sometimes all it takes is asking the community for it.
You'll find out that a lot of the people playing the game love and care about it equally as much, and are willing to help if their input is called for.

[Rotgut]

This "its a private project so we can't expect anything" is such an annoying argument. I do some work with philanthropic projects in real life that make use of volunteer work, and having zero expectations isn't how a serious organization operates. This isn't even how other successful private servers operates.

Precisely because you can't throw money at your problems is why being efficient with your time is so important. There are so many low effort but with a high impact changes you can make, and OP's post details a plan on how to find them.

[Garamore]

Before a change is proposed can a simple ‘would this be fun for all types of players’ be asked. If the answer is it just favours organised groups then can the change not be introduced. The game needs all types of players from people who spend 12hrs per day in game to those who log in play a few scens and log off. The recent changes heavily favour org groups and limit many play styles.

[Kaeldrick]

Before a change is proposed can a simple ‘would this be fun for all types of players’ be asked. If the answer is it just favours organised groups then can the change not be introduced. The game needs all types of players from people who spend 12hrs per day in game to those who log in play a few scens and log off. The recent changes heavily favour org groups and limit many play styles.

This game base (I mean the original WAR) has been designed that way, it's in the DNA of old school MMORPGs to favour organisation and communication. Casual players will lose, unbalanced pugs will lose, solo players will lose even more and all of this is normal. It's a tank-dd-healer game, if you don't play in a 2-2-2 it's perfectly normal to fail but people don't want to learn and commit. I say it's not a balance or code problem but a playerbase issue.

You want to save this project? Find people who really love this game and want to play it as it deserves and not as a random Fortnite or other LOL. But, this is an impossible task, game industry changed too heavily and players aren't used to difficulty anymore.

[Aethilmar]

You know what would help "save" the game? Volunteering to help fix some of the problems instead of volunteering to tell them how to do the work. It is difference between engineers and project managers.