(Sorry this is a little disjointed. This originally started as the intro for my post about Tom’s anti-patterns, but it got WAY too long and I had to cut it, so I put it here instead.)
Let’s go on a fun detour and talk about Tom, what he meant for my career, and what a weird (but loveable) little gremlin he is.
Tom Cadwell started as a professional game designer at Blizzard, that once-great studio. He worked on Warcraft 3 and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, particularly on multiplayer balance. But much more importantly, he explained his thinking on the forums.
Back then, in the heady days of 2003, you didn’t get to hear from the people who made the games you loved, much less talk back to them. Hell, you probably didn’t even know their names, aside from the occasional Sid Meier or John Romero (who, if you bought Daikatana, absolutely delivered on that infamous ad’s promise).
But Tom was on the Blizzard forums, contextualizing his design choices for each patch they put out. Sometimes he’d show data to back up decisions. Sometimes he’d talk about intended gameplay and what they were actually seeing, and why that wasn’t good. Either way, he showed me the first glimpses into how a game designer thinks.
Now I don’t know if this apocryphal or not (I’ve heard it both ways), but apparently eventually Blizzard told Tom to stop talking on the forums about his design choices. My guess would be that there were players who disagreed or were upset with Tom’s work, and all the higher ups understood was “dude posts on forums, players are upset”. There’s a lot to say about interfacing directly with the playerbase, but I think I’m too traumatized to be the person saying it.
Fast forward a few years, and a weird little startup called Riot Games wants to do a better version of DOTA and hire Cadwell as a design consultant. He ends up getting hired as the Design Director and gets to building the Riot design department. And this time, he sets the tone he likes right from the beginning. There’s a lot of elements that went into Riot’s stellar success, and while “doing F2P right” was surely the biggest, I’d say the way that Riot spoke directly to players in their language was up there with F2P why the game took off so quickly. Nothing wins you advocates faster than speaking authentically and honestly to people.
But more importantly for me, Tom built a place that cared about design analysis and thought from a psychological and strictly provable perspective. If you expressed any strong design opinion, you were expected to be able to back it up, with either data, or a working theory, or examples from sufficiently similar mechanics in other games.
And he continued his practice of speaking directly to players on the forums, and more importantly, speaking to them as if they were peers, not dumb players to talk down to.
When Riot decided to make “DOTA but better”, there were a lot of very obvious improvements. To play DOTA, you had to buy a full price game and its expansion (depending on what version of DOTA you wanted to play), go into the custom game browser and either host or join a custom game. You’d have no idea who you’re playing with, people would regularly leave halfway through the game if it was going just slightly poorly, and you could be playing against people playing their first game of DOTA or semi-pros. Games regularly snowballed extremely one way or the other. And I probably don’t even need to mention the levels of toxicity; where Battle.net was already poorly moderated, I don’t think Blizzard did anything about the chat in custom games.
There were player-led workarounds. Most memorably for me, there were dedicated IRC channels (ask your grandparents) where you could register your Battle.net handle and be recorded as a player in good standing unless you started leaving games, and if memory serves they also started doing some kind of rough matchmaking; but again, this was all player-led and you had to find it in the first place and go through all that hassle.
By comparison, in League you clicked the PLAY button and loaded into a game with people of roughly your skill level. Leaving still happened, but there were strong incentives against it and it was way less prevalent. And of course, the game was free.
So I want you to keep these obvious improvements in mind and compare them to the (in my opinion) no less important design improvements and tell me if you think players would have been able to grasp these as easily. Design improvements like:
- Replacing the labyrinthine line-of-sight breaking forest system of DOTA with clearly delineated brushes and broad, wide-open passages through the jungle
- The absence of denying your own creeps.
- Bluepill as a way to return rapidly to base.
- The absence of couriers to minimize the number of entities a player was asked to control.
- And of course much more disciplined and well thought-out character design.
My argument is that these improvements can probably be felt in the long run, but not appreciated immediately the way a single play button and no up-front money investment can, but they’re maybe even more important for the long term survival of the game. If you’re really into DOTA, you eventually learn to deal with all these ear-flicks and the relative advantage of not having this frustration you no longer feel goes away; but weird, idiosyncratic design choices that mean sometimes you’re just fucked only become more frustrating with time spent.
Therefore it was all the more important for Tom to communicate these design choices and the thinking behind them on the forums. After all, it’s great to have happy players, but it’s even better to make advocates for your game, players who understand WHY they prefer League over DOTA and can express this to their friends.
There was, for a time, a Riot-internal leaderboard for who posted how much on the forums. Tom was usually at the top of that leaderboard. I cannot stress enough how atypical this is for a Design Director, or VP of Game Design, or whichever title he had at the time. I was usually somewhere in the top 5 as well, but it was literally my job in community to post on the forums.
This direct engagement with the playerbase was a very new thing. It created a lot of advocates for Riot; Riot developers were “different”, they were listening to the playerbase, they were explaining directly what was going on, they were fluent in the language of memes and weird forum in-jokes. Over time, this would create liabilities that no one then had anticipated. I suspect that this slow merging of devs and players contributed to gamergate in some ways, but oof, that’s too cursed a topic for me to write about.
Anyway, it’s really tough to figure out what to do. I think I laid out above how Tom’s guidance of the design department and his setting the tone of our conversation directly with players helped Riot succeed. I was absolutely one of the true believers in authentic, direct conversation. I used to believe things like devs should speak directly to players where they are, without a PR or community intermediate, that devs should openly talk to players about trade-offs and tough decisions, that they should openly tell players when something players pitched or asked for was bad, and so on.
I no longer believe most of these things.
Or rather, I believe that a version of them can still work for some people, but I’ve yet to see a mature studio understand how much support this requires for their devs and then commit to that level of support. Lots of places have paid lip-service to things like protection against doxing and stalking online; but when shit hits the fan and the playerbase is in uproar about something, studios always side with players and hang their devs out to dry. I don’t love this.
This is why I now advocate for mediated conversation. We need to recognize that specialists in community and PR (or comms or whatever your company calls it) bring special skills that help shield you from the worst of the internet and give you a level of internal liability protection; after all, if the post that set off a firestorm was okayed by community, yours cannot be the single wringable neck.
And let me be super clear: this fucking sucks. In the beginning, it was an incredible feeling to talk directly with players, late at night, from my own PC, letting them in on the secrets of how we were making the game and what we were thinking about. I used to be on the other side of that divide, begging for scraps of information from the people who made the games I loved. Now that I had crossed over to the game-making side, I could pay it forward and give people the thing I used to crave: electrolytes. And behind the scenes information.
The dangers outweigh the positives, especially now, and I don’t think it’s going to get much better. What we can do in game dev is invent authentic but safe ways of talking to our players. Respawn’s dev diaries for Apex was a great idea; moderated Q&As on Reddit worked really well for both Riot and Respawn (probably something to do with this Ryan Rigney dude who ran them at both places). I’m sure there’s more ways to allow for honest and sincere dev conversation in the future, but I don’t know if telling your entire staff to “just jump into the forums and shitpost” is a great idea anymore. If it ever was.
Anyway, where were we? Right. Fennel tea. Criminally underrated.
This was all a rather lengthy contextualizing pre-ramble (a rambly preamble? Is this anything?) to talking about Tom Cadwell’s anti-patterns, so go read that next!