Expert Systems in the Face of Failure

As I noted yesterday, if there is one thing you can count on from CCP, it is an overly grandiose and technically incorrect name for something mundane.

Last week CCP announced a new feature called “Expert Systems,” which I immediately summed up as “rent skill,” as you’d be hard pressed to convince me it was anything else. (It was certainly nothing like an expert system.)

No expert that I know

It has been billed as a way for new players to try out skills they have not yet trained, which doesn’t sound awful on the surface.  The announcement, lacking in details though it was, did specifically mention the “magic 14” skills as part of the plan along with some industry stuff, but nothing about it was crystal clear.

The thing that got a lot of people riled up was the implication that this would be a paid service.  The gut reaction was “pay to win,” though “rent to be mediocre” might be more accurate, but the deeper issue on that front for me was the company having its hand out looking to make money from helping new players figure out the game.  That isn’t a good look.

Well, that and the whole thing seeming to add up a tepid and ineffectual compromise that won’t change anything, which got me back to the bigger problem of the new player experience and how it drives away pretty much everybody who tries the game.

We saw this chart back at EVE North in 2019, which was when CCP said they were making the new player experience a priority.

How many new players log back in as time passes

But we’ve seen charts like that in the past like this one from FanFest 2014.

New Player Trajectory – 2014 edition

CCP has been focused on the new player experience, the NPE, for a year and a half now, tweaking and making modest updates and generally trying to fix the issue without really doing anything too radical.

And it seems to have largely been a wasted effort so far.  CCP was given a golden opportunity during the pandemic to increase its user base.  Every month of the pandemic I have posted the revenue chart from SuperData which has indicated that revenues across the board have been up 15% for video games.  Even CCP has seen a bit of that surge, with the peak concurrent player count finally cresting above the 40K mark back in April as people sought indoor activities during the lockdown.

Hilmar himself was on a Venture Beat panel in late January where he said that EVE Online added 1.3 million new players in 2020. (This number gets mentioned again in the Expert Systems post.)  That was more that the previous few years combined, a gift to the company from the pandemic.

The question is, where did they go?  If CCP was running at the 4.4% long term retention rate their EVE North numbers suggested (which also didn’t seem bad compared to numbers I could find from comparable titles), that ought to have dumped another 57K players into New Eden.  That would be about a 20% boost over the approximate 300K monthly active users that Hilmar has mentioned in the past.

With that big of an influx of new players… so I am assuming they are not counting returning vets joining the war or looking for something to do during lockdown… the peak concurrent players online ought to be up enough for that surge to stand out.

But is it?  Looking at EVE Offline, it doesn’t seem to be.  After the great valley of the null sec blackout and Chaos Era, when CCP seemed keen to actively drive players away, the PCU climbs, sees a surge around April and May, then settles back down to about where it was pre-blackout.  Congratulations to CCP for flattening the curve?

Further evidence for CCP failing to capitalize on the jackpot scenario include the 2020 financial results from Pearl Abyss.  On the surface it looks like the EVE Online IP is growing.  But in we cannot forget that in Q2 2020 CCP was able to re-open the Serenity server in China and in Q3 EVE Echoes launched and attracted a couple million players on its own.  If you were to subtract those two items I suspect the EVE Online IP bit of the chart would be closer to flat.

And then there is the bottom line for the Pearl Abyss acquisition of CCP, which ended up with PA paying just $225 million of the potential $425 million price tag due to CCP missing performance goals, which I am sure included some revenue requirements.  Hilmar and some other big investors missed a payday there.

Fun times.

I don’t want to go all “EVE is dying” meme now.  But in the face of all of this, which stinks heavily of failure, the idea that CCP spent dev time to design and implement this new Expert Systems feature which allows new player to rent skills for some amount of currency in a game where skill injectors exist seems like a wasted effort.  It doesn’t feel like something that will move the needle at all on new player retention, in large part because it doesn’t feel like something that will impact a new player’s experience before they get frustrated or bored and log off.

I have bemoaned the fact that EVE Online is old and cranky and and has issues that will never be fixed because, after nearly 18 years, there just isn’t the time, money, or wherewithal to do it.  And I myself have been cranky about CCP in the past about things like selling skill points and the fact that when they say they won’t do something, that statement has a hidden expiration date of about a year.

But I try not to get too worked up about monetization.  This is a business and, frankly, the price we pay to play hasn’t changes in almost 18 years.  It was fifteen dollars a month in 2003, it remains fifteen dollars a month in 2021.  But I am going to bet somebody has gotten a pay raise or the rent has gone up or costs have otherwise risen in that time.  To balance that out you either have to make more money or have less staff.

So I am not irate like some about the real money aspect of this so much as being unable to see how this will make a lick of difference.  Software development is a zero sum game.  You only have so much time and resources, and if you waste them on things that don’t make the product better you cannot get that time back.

Now, maybe I am just not seeing the big picture here.  Maybe CCP has all the right data to hand and they know that this is a winning idea.  I’d like to be wrong in my assumptions and the announcement was vague enough for a lot of wiggle room as to how this will turn out.  Unfortunately, I have been party to way too many half assed, badly calculated products and features in my career to have a lot of confidence.

The real problem with software is that is written and designed by people who all have their collection of bad ideas.

Related:

• Nosy Gamer – Cultural Elements
• INN – CCP’s “Expert Systems”
• INN – Changing the New Player Experience
• INN – The Meta Show Feb 27

The Passion of the Overseer

The Overseer feature came into EverQuest II as part of the Blood of Luclin expansion back in November and I have been trying to pin down its raison d’etre ever since.

Snakes. Moon snakes.

My introduction to the Overseer feature involved the typical SOE/Daybreak muddled experience.  I had purchased the  collector’s edition of the expansion, which entitled me to three special Overseer agents.

The agents are available through the /claim interface, where EverQuest II keeps all the special goodies you have been awarded over the years… bonus expansion content and veteran rewards and the like… and fifteen years down the road with the game I have quite a bit of junk hanging out in that interface.

Account age as I started writing this

They used to give bonus age to your account for buying expansion, which meant they had to be a year ahead on veteran rewards, back when they were still doing those.  Veteran rewards died out at year twelve.

Anyway, I went to the /claim interface and went to the Blood of Luclin tab, because where else would I go, and saw my bonus agents.

Here they are…

They come in a box, which you unpack into three boxes, which you unpack in their turn.  Each of the three boxes lets you choose one agent.

Who to pick?

There isn’t a lot of guidance as to whom to pick.  Two of the packs contain agents with a single trait, while the third has agents with two traits.  The traits are things like “agile” or “noble” or “lucky,” but there isn’t any real guidance as to how those might work.  The agents have little descriptions as well, but those are meaningless as well.

So I picked one from each pack.  They end up in your inventory where you can right click on them to add them to your collection.  After that I went to the Overseer window from the main menu and… couldn’t figure out what to do.  I had three agents and no missions and nothing seemed to be going on.

As it turns out, in order to get started you need to pick up the starter pack which is in the Promotions tab of the /claim interface.

Start here

That gives you a starter agent and a starter mission.  When you add those to your collection then open up the Overseer interface, if gives you a quick tutorial mission, then sends you on your way.  At that point things worked.

I have, on a few occasions, compare this to the mission interface in the garrisons of the Warlords of Draenor expansion for World of Warcraft.  This is very unfair… to WoW.

Love them or hate them, the missions and minions in Warlords of Draenor were a big deal, a very deep system, and fully integrated into the expansion.

You could have dozens of minions, but had pick a select set for your active group.  Minions had to be leveled up, and then geared up, which made them more effective on missions.  Minions could also be used in your various garrison buildings.  Some minions could even be drafted to come adventure with you out in the game.  Even getting them was a “gotta catch em all!” game.  Some you could recruit, others came from quests, and more still from dungeons and raids.

And the missions… there were many missions, and picking the right minions was critical to mission success.  Mission availability ebbed and flowed.  Some missions lasted from couple of hours to a couple of days.  And eventually you even unlocked naval missions.  It was crazy complex, such that somebody built a huge addon (Masterplan) just to help you keep track of what was going on without needing to keep a spreadsheet.

If you want a metaphor, garrison missions were to the Warlords of Draenor expansion as the plumbing is to your house.  You could still live in your house without it, but you really get used to having it and come to depend on it… which was one of the problems of that expansion.

Even the pared down version of missions and minions that came with Legion and Battle for Azeroth were still heavily connected with the game and the story.  They were integral to those expansions.

When we speak of the Overseer feature and EverQuest II, the metaphor is probably different.  It is more like somebody attached a tube and a funnel to the side of your outhouse.  It is a nice little addition and adds a bit of convince, but it is a cheap, nailed on feature, and if fell off you’d just go back to going into the outhouse to take a piss.  You might miss it, but it didn’t change the basic functionality of things.  It isn’t an integrated part of the outhouse system, such that it is.

Okay, the outhouse metaphor probably sounds worse than I intended, but the point remains; Overseer is its own system pretty much independent of the game.  As I saw suggested elsewhere, it could have been a mobile app and maintained the same functionality.

While the Overseer functionality has gone through some functional gyrations since launch, it has remained mostly the same basic premise.  You open up the interface and you see your agents and your missions.

Welcome to the Overseer

You have a list of your agents on the left, with icons to indicate their special traits.  Most agents do not have traits.  To the right, in the main part of the UI, is a list of missions at the top, with details of the highlighted mission below.  Missions have a “Mishap Chance,” which is a failure, or 5% or 10%, which means the success rate is 90-95%.  That can be mitigated by a percent or two by assigning your familiar to the mission.

There is also a bonus chance, which stands at 5% by default, but which can be improved by assigning agents that have traits that match the mission, and further by assigning your mercenary to go along on the mission.

A mission with the odds changed

Neither your mercenary nor your familiar actually “go” anywhere.  They are still with you, so there you might as well click on the plus sign above the chance options and add them to a mission every day.

Missions vary in duration, running from one to three hours so far as I have seen.  The only exception is a rescue mission.  If you hit the mishap roll, you then have an opportunity to go rescue your agent.  Those missions run six hours or so and offer some special rewards if you hit the bonus, so maybe you don’t want to put your familiar in the mix just to get some more mishaps.

Missions themselves reference places in the game, like the Fool’s Gold Tavern, which I rob daily, but otherwise have no depth to them.

You are limited to 10 missions a day.  A real world 24 day, not a game day.  That 10 mission limit is account wide, so you’ll probably end up concentrating on one character to run missions.  There won’t be any need to log in all of your alts daily, which was one of the Warlords of Draenor grinds.

The mission list, which was per character for a while, are now account wide.  For a long stretch missions would come and go and I rarely had more than six on my list.  With the account wide change, I now have more than 10 missions to choose from on any given day.

Agents, however, are per character.  So, once again, you will probably want to concentrate on a single character to run missions.  I found that I could trade my special collector’s edition characters through the shared bank boxes, so some of my alts handed over better quality agents to my main mission runner.

The rewards vary.  You can get crafting materials, both common and rare, advanced crafting recipe books (which are so common that the market for those books has crashed), gear, collectables, and additional agents and missions.  The gear you get is better than basic crafted, worse than master crafted, and not always better than gear you might pick up on quests.  None of it was better than gear I got on the signature quest line.  But since you can salvage or sell the gear on the market, or just vendor it, it won’t go to waste.

I think the collectables are my favorite reward, though I say that now that my bank is overflowing with advanced crafting recipe books.

Overall, not a bad little feature.  I log on to play with it a couple times a week.  My crafters now all have their advanced skill books in hand.  But, as I noted, not exactly connected to the game in any meaningful way that I have noticed.  More of a mini-game with some rewards.

So I was a bit surprised to see the Overseer described as a “passion project” in the EverQuest producer’s letter I mentioned last week.  It isn’t bad, but it isn’t something that would keep me subscribed to the game either.  It is a little too simple and a little too limited to be a big deal to me.

But apparently it is a big enough deal that it will be coming to EverQuest this month as part of the game’s 21st anniversary.  I will still be subscribed at that point, my current three month cycle being good into April, so I will no doubt give it a try there.  I might even find it more useful in old Norrath than new, but we shall see.

Bhagpuss has been posting about the Overseer feature for a while now, and his takes are more complete, so visit his posts for a better look at it.

• My Future And My Past Are Presently Disarranged
• Get Lucky: EQII
• Familiarity Breeds Confusion : EQII

Quote of the Day – Possible Side Effects

Further, there can be no assurance that our business will be more efficient or effective than prior to implementation of the plan…

Activision Blizzard – SEC Filing about the impact of laying off 8% of staff

Activision Blizzard caught more than a bit of heat last month when it announced record revenue and layoffs in the same investor call when going over its 2018 financial reports.

But, you know, Activision Blizzard is a publicly held business and so cannot rest on its laurels.  It has to set expectations for the next period, which it said would see a decrease in revenue.  To show they were addressing that up front they opted to give the axe to 8% of the company.  It was their fiduciary responsibility.

I do wonder how fiduciary responsibility plays out when CEO Bobby Kotick is asked to explain the $33 million in compensation he received last year.  Is he really worth the 100+ senior developers that kind of money could hire?  That number was enough to earn him the #2 spot on the Top 100 Most Overpayed CEOs list, which ranked CEOs on the financial performance of their company relative to their compensation.  He is ranked worse than Virginia Rometty, the latest charlatan trying to keep the corpse of IBM shambling down the road just long enough to cash in.  Not a good look.

Anyway, people got the axe because the company needed to trim sails for 2019.  It was required.

And then this past week came the SEC filing that covered the planned staff reduction, which said this about it:

In February 2019, we announced a restructuring plan under which we plan to refocus our resources on our largest opportunities and to remove unnecessary levels of complexity and duplication from certain parts of our business. While we believe this restructuring plan will enable us to provide better opportunities for talent, and greater expertise and scale on behalf of our business units, our ability to achieve the desired and anticipated benefits from the restructuring plan within our desired and expected time frame is subject to many estimates and assumptions, and the actual savings and timing for those savings may vary materially based on factors such as local labor regulations, negotiations with third parties, and operational requirements. These estimates and assumptions are also subject to significant economic, competitive and other uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control. Further, there can be no assurance that our business will be more efficient or effective than prior to implementation of the plan,or that additional restructuring plans will not be required or implemented in the future. The implementation of this restructuring plan may also be costly and disruptive to our business or have other negative consequences, such as attrition beyond our planned reduction in workforce or negative impacts one employee morale and productivity, or on our ability to attract and retain highly skilled employees. Any of these consequences could negatively impact our business.

Basically, this planned layoff might not change anything and could possibly make things worse.

Now, I know that in the litigious world in which we live a public company has to cover its ass lest their publicly announced plans not go as expected, leading to lawsuits.  It is pretty much the same way that drug companies have to list all possible side effects… and I love when “death” gets its own spot on those lists… so that they can later claim that they warned you that you might end up with eczema, high blood pressure, sleeplessness, or death.

But it still undermines the confidence shown on the call that laying off almost 800 people from the company was necessary to see it through 2019.  And it further exposes the assumption that a CEO like Bobby Kotick is paid so much because he knows what to do, that his expertise is somehow worth all that money.  The ATVI stock price, the all important absolute measurement of a company’s value for Wall Streets, seems to indicate that over the last he wasn’t all that.

Meanwhile, as a side note, buried in that filing, is a statement about the top franchises of Activision Blizzard:

For the year ended December 31, 2018, our top three franchises—Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft—collectively accounted for 58% of our net revenues.

So if you’ve been gloomy about WoW, or worried that something else might be taking over the main focus at Blizzard, you can feel a bit better.  If you’re an Overwatch fan though… well… Overwatch made the “top franchise” cut in 2016 and 2017, but appears to have fallen below the line for 2018.  The line is apparently set at the 10% or more of total revenues mark.

Burn Jita Back for 2018

“BOHICA!” as they used to say at Lockheed back in the day.

Back when CCP would warn you about these things

For the sixth year in a row Goons and allies have staged themselves in Jita with thousands of cheap, expendable ships with an eye to destroying as many freighters, jump freighters, and other large industrial ships as possible via suicide ganks.  Burn Jita is on.

Gank fit destroyers on the move

Last year saw the event bring down the Jita node on the opening day as prime time hit.  We will see if that happens again this year.

As I noted in my reflections on the event last year, the process of singling out a target and killing it is ruthlessly efficient, with very little downtime between kills.  If you go along you are getting in on a kill about every 20 minutes.

Part of that is because the people who run this event are very good at ganking freighters now, but the other part is that people will continue to blithely continue to undock their ships full of valuable cargo even when local is full of characters named “BJ Bee…” who are announcing Burn Jita in chat over and over again.

An Obelisk learns about Burn Jita

You are not safe if you manage to get out of Jita.  Bumpers are waiting on the gates in systems around Jita.

The event is slated to last 72 hours, so if you want to be safe take the weekend off.

The Alola Pokemon Binge Continues

Enough about EVE Online this week, time for important topics, like Pokemon.

I have carried on in Pokemon Sun. with my pursuit of the Alola Pokedex largely because I have managed to make fairly steady progress towards finishing it off.  Since I last checked in on this, I have gone from the 57% marker to 83% of the way complete.

Once again, screen shots take of the 3DS with my iPhone

In actual numbers of Pokemon I went from 173 caught at that last post to 250 caught as of last night, and increase of 77 Pokemon over a 10 day period.  So I caught about 8 new Pokemon a day.  That is the sort of progress that keeps you hooked, keeps you going, keeps you opening up the 3DS every night for an hour or two.

Current Pokedex details

As part of that, I managed to finish up the Melemele island Pokedex, having caught all 120 Pokemon that appear on that island, including the ones that don’t actually appear on that island or that only appear on the island in Pokemon Moon.

I “saw” all the Pokemon for the island first and was curious to see if that was enough to get credit.  In past versions of the game, the regional Pokedex could be considered complete if you simply encountered all the Pokemon on the list.  That doesn’t cut it for Pokemon Sun & Moon.  You get a little silver crown when you have encountered them all, but you only get the gold crown and the official stamp when you have caught them all.

My stamp for Melemele… be nice if it was dated

That is one island Pokedex down and three to go.

All the Melemele Pokemon

And the other islands are pretty far along.  How I have been making that sort of progress has two branches.

First, I still had a pile of Pokemon that just needed to be leveled up or traded while holding a specific item.  Leveling up is fairly easy and I can do that while watching TV and not lose track of any dialog.  There are plenty of Pokemon that fall into that category.

The trading while holding an item required me to get my daughter to cooperate, which wasn’t easy.  Eventually, after days of “I don’t want to do it right now” and “I don’t know where it is, I’ll look for it later” I had to make her find her 3DS and hand it over so I could do the trades myself.  That was something of a bonanza day.  I took that oppotunity to pass Solgaleo and Lunala, the legendaries from Sun & Moon, back and forth between our games so we each have both covered.

I still have a number of Pokemon where I haven’t obtained the item yet, so couldn’t to the trade.  More work to do on that front, but that generally just involves some patience and a tolerance for a lot of wild Pokemon encounters.

But there are always some Pokemon that are difficult to obtain or where how to obtain them is not clear. (The Alola Pokedex site I have been using has been wrong, or at least at odds with the official guide, on some Pokemon such as Tirtouga.)  For those I have been relying on the Global Trade Station.

The GTS continues to be very good to me, and players in Japan especially so.  I would not be nearly as far along as I am had I not had access to it.  However, one of the long standing features of the GTS, something from the Pokemon Diamond & Pearl era, is that you cannot ask to trade for a Pokemon that you have not seen yet.  If you haven’t seen it, you don’t know about it, you can’t ask for it.  If it is just a generic blue Pokeball icon on your island Pokedex or question marks on the main list, you have to find a way to see it.

That icon, I don’t know about THAT Pokemon

Now, to be fair, the game is very good about showing you lots of Pokemon, generally via battles with all the trainers you pass by during your travels.  This is why it is important to not skip fights.  I got lazy for a bit and bypassed a couple of optional areas during the main story line, something I am paying for now.  It wouldn’t be hard to go back and do those fights now… my main party is all up past level 70 at this point, with my Snorlax at 80… it is more a matter of figuring out what I skipped.  There are even a few Pokemon that NPCs should have given me along the way that I somehow missed.  Sloppy.

However, Nintendo has something of a back door for dealing with Pokemon you haven’t seen yet.  If you have a friend that has seen the Pokemon in question, they can display a QR code on their screen, which you can use the camera on your 3DS to capture.  That gives you credit and you can now trade for that Pokemon.

Of course, if you are like me and have no real life friends playing Pokemon (or a child that won’t do that grunt work for you), the internet will provide.  Over on Reddit there is a post about QR codes for Pokemon.  This links out to several galleries on Imgur.com that have the QR codes.  So when I really wanted to setup a trade for a Pokemon, I went and used that.  See, you don’t need friends when you have the internet!

Of course, even with all of that you need to have something to trade.  I started out breeding Dratinis, the first evolution that leads to the ever popular Dragonite Pokemon.

Dratini to Dragonair to Dragonite

That seemed to be a popular enough Pokemon to get me trades.  The evolution process just requires leveling it up and Dragonite is a strong Pokemon.  However, you can simply catch Dratinis in the game, so I wasn’t sure this was my strongest play.  But I used one to get my hands on a Sliggoo, the middle evolution of three that is more difficult to obtain.

The Sliggoo progression

Then I started breeding that, which is the only way to get its first evolution, Goomy, and then started trading those.  They seemed to be a hit and I seemed to be able to get any trade I asked for… though I am always conservative on that front… in no time at all.  Plus the Sliggoo was friendly with my breeing Ditto, and that relationship dictates how fast eggs are produced, so I was trading away.

Some trades

That Gabite was a big trade for me, as it is another annoying one to get in the game.  Having a bit of backstock on Goomy, I switch the Gabite in to breed… also friendly with my Ditto… and started getting eggs for that.

Now the Isle Avue, the hot springs island in the Poke Pelago where you can leave eggs to hatch rather than dragging them around in your party for 5K to 20K steps, is filling up with eggs.

Eggs waiting to hatch… hope they don’t hard boil…

Once those start hatching I am looking at a weekend of trading to further my cause.  So long as I keep making progress, I should be able to keep focused.

Of course, eventually I will get to the last hairy few, the difficult ones.  Back when I did the then 485 strong National Pokedex in Pokemon SoulSilver I spent quite a bit of time getting those last few, with the last one requiring an item to be held to evolve.  And then I went the full completionist and got the last two for the full 493 achievement which required me to play Pokemon Ranger: Guardian Signs to acquire a Manaphy to transfer over to SoulSilver so I could breed it to get a Phione.

I am not sure I have that much fortitude anymore.  I should be able to hang tough through the Alola Pokedex.  I haven’t given up yet.  The full National Pokedex though, which stands at 802 Pokemon as of now, that might be too much to ask.