0
I hope all is well. I'm writing today to share with you, and the MWO community, a recommended set of action steps to improve:
- Product development efforts
- Transparency and trust of your customers
- MWO is a service. The closest industry jargon would be SaaS or "software as a service". When operating a SaaS, the management team needs to adapt a best-practices-driven set of service-oriented operations mindset. This means adapting frameworks such as ITIL or a similar framework. If you don't know what ITIL is, do a little googling and figure it out. It's not that hard.
- You're on the right track when you set clear expectations around when you would deploy patches. This somewhat raises your maturity level in terms of service management. You now need to take it further and focus your efforts so that each release is two steps forward, zero steps backwards. One suggestion is to follow a tick-tock approach each month. (See Intel's tick-tock approach on processor release cycles) Certain types of fixes and content on first patch of the month, another type of fixes and content on the second. Don't budge on this policy even if it means waiting a little longer for new features. We'd rather have new features that work well out of the box over new features that introduce more problems. With the added time, QA the **** out of it, followed by public testing for a whole week.
- Your track record in terms of communication is inconsistent. At times you seem to be on the ball with updates, and then the next month, deafening silence. What gives? Consistency and predictability is what your customers expect from service providers. Your staffing levels, vacation schedules, and the whims of your business partners should not impact meeting customer expectations around service norms.
SO.. those specific suggestions? Here:
- Consistently deliver monthly communication on overall product development progress, preferably on the same weekday of the same week of each month. Inconsistent communication implies that you're disorganized and incompetent. (see June technical update command chair post, then nothing for July, and nothing for August yet. what gives?)
- Continue in-depth ad-hoc communication on specific issues where needed
- When making changes (LRM speed adjustments come to mind), make 1 variable change at a time. Anyone who passed high school algebra knows that you cannot solve for 2 variables with 1 equation.
- Produce more maps. If development efforts are focused on things that can be monetized, then figure out how to monetize the maps. People will pay for it. Oh, and price them so that it is easily accessible. Like 100mc per map. As a customer, I don't want to hear "but we didn't incorporate a way to setup paid-map players and free maps players". Figure it out. The game is becoming extremely stale, and even with CW, MWO with all but 10 or so crappy maps isn't going to cut it. MWO needs 50+ maps to make it feel like an interstellar war being waged across dozens of planets at once.
- Another thing about product development focused on monetization. Are you out of your minds? Maps, game types, CW - they are all FOUNDATIONAL elements of a good game. Without it, you'll see reverse conversion of paying customers to non-paying customers. Is this what you really want? You should try listening to your business development and marketing people. If they're responsible for the nonsense around focusing game dev on things that can be monetized, you should probably fire them. They have no idea how to sell a video game.
-signed,
a passionate Battletech fan
