Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Dec. 21, 04)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Oh well, it was only 8 bucks

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The Master Server has been known to go down from time to time. What happens when the server is offline? No one can play their premium module?

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Yes.

Bioware's Comercial Campaign

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I'm not sure you quite understand why people don't like the advertising. A good comparison is the amount of budget tin-coated highway signposts the English government are putting in traditional English towns.

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Not sure how this can be a "good comparison", I have yet to see any advertisement signpost in an NWN tileset while playing... Don't get me wrong, it's quite flattering that you compare NWN's start menu to the panorama of traditional English towns, I'm sure our GUI artists will be thrilled about this.

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You see, Georg, the first tenet in business is "The customer is always right". Most children are aware of this, haven't you heard it before?

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That rule has been scrapped ... a long time ago. Feel free to perform a search on these boards about it.

Be happy that we're not playing by this "rule", because if we would, NWN wouldn't be what it is today.

If we would "LISTEN" to everyone in the sense they mean, NWN would be a hybrid MMORPG with a horses, cloaks, flying, swimming, and so on ... and it would not have been released yet. In fact, we would have gone out of business.

The whole "the customer is always right" line dies the first time someone sends your employees death threats on a board because you dare to say "No, we can't allow you to charge money for your Persistent World" or "sorry, but we can't allow your thief to dual wield without penalty".

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The tenet is built upon the premise that in business, you never want to lose a customer. Still with me Georg?

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No. There are people you don't want in your community (and I'm not talking about anyone in this thread) either because they are idiots or because they degrade the atmosphere on your boards to a point where your employees don't post anymore. Getting rid of them is good business. Sucking up to them builds agression and ultimately will lead to your employees no longer visiting the boards (since we do it in our free time).

Sometimes you have to chose between truth and the ideas of a so called "customer" who thinks he's the newly appointed CEO. Guess what we are picking?

The customer is always right might apply for cases of face to face contact in a supermarket, but it does not apply here. We won't pull our ad because 5 people out of 180k downloading the patch disagree with it, and I certaily won't tell them "sure, you are right, it's a horrible idea we should never have done that" when we think "Oh, nice download increase, that ad surely worked". I refuse to post crap on the boards on how horrible the advertisement are just because a "customer" has complained about it.

The customer is not always right, as the word "right" is a subjective thing based on your point of view, and on our boards we have a culture of open discussion rather than telling everyone how right they are and then igoring them (because if we don't ignore all those not so bright ideas that are voiced here every once in a while, we would be out of businesses soon.)

Finally, to the term customer - A gaming studio in general works more like the movie industry. You create games for the publisher according to the design plan. You do not tailor the game to the enduser. The enduser buys the game as he would buy a movie, he either likes it or not. BioWare has these boards to make the whole development cycle more open and allow input from the end user, but we are not running some weird experiment in group game creation democracy here.

The end users on this board can ramble as much as they like in regard of certain things (not all howver), we won't change them because it's still us creating the game, not the end user. As such, the "end user" is aways may be reserved for the interaction between the "end user" and the nice guy selling the game at the counter of a retailer.

Sometimes you have to chose between BioWare employees talking on the boards to you in a free and open manner, or just another game company forum on the internet where nobody posts.

I can understand that the concept of open communication without safety net is a horror to PR people and store owners whose customers can come back for their daily fix of "humiliate the cashier", but they'll have to get used to it as we value the open and sometimes blunt communication with our fans more than boards with communication except for "of course you are right (but we are still ignoring you) PR speech". I think the overwhelming majority of the people visiting our boards prefer the open and sometimes blunt atmosphere, and we would let these people down to please a small vocal minority if we would change that, so that's not going to happen.

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[] do and say whatever you please, and wonder why you're not working on NWN2

Make you choice, WotC already made theirs.

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Perfect example for just how wrong "the customer is always right" is. Should probably be "some customers talk without research and get upset when you tell them they are wrong". You are wrong.

georg out.

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Georg defends this alienation by blaming the customer for his/her opinon.

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really? Blaming for opinion? Interesting, but I think your concept of blame is different from mine.

More: First, Lord Sullivan, you are correct - people SHOULD come here and complain if they don't like something, because otherwise we don't know something is wrong.

However, and that's depending on HOW someone complains, they need to brace themselves for us disagreeing, which apparently is harder than it seems, probably because not a lot of people are used to get real opinions and reasons behind certain decisions these days.

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On the other hand Bioware could just as easily make such reverted 1.65 resource file with the original graphics (which wouldn’t cost them 100’s of dollars to do) and make it available through a link here on the website for their less knowledgeable customers who prefer the originals or don’t which to see these adverts. That, in my opinion, is reasonable.

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Err, I have to correct you here, creating a single patch, regardless of the changes, involves the work of several individuals at BioWare and our partners, not counting bandwith costs. Regardless of the change, it's more in the 1000's than 100's. (And no, we don't supply stuff people can put into their override directories, that's left for the modding community).

We don't issue patches for cosmetic issues, especially if they are based on opinion and nothing is broken, if we did that, next time people would ask, rightfully, why we don't issue a hotfix for a particular bug that has turned up.

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Well you do bring up good points.

So if I understand correctly then, if anyone in the community was to make available a slightly modified .bif file, they wouldn't get disapproval feedback form Bioware? or get in a legal predicament with Bioware?

Cause I'm not talking about "overide Dir" and I'm just not sure that it is necessarily custom content related.

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That would entirely depend on the contents of this .bif file.

To reiterate this (and "you" in this context is not pointed at anyone specific) - if you don't like something, speak out, otherwise, let's take the example of the online authentification, the reaction would be "hmm, that was surprisingly painless, much less complaints than expected" and the wrong message would be sent to us. Same with the advertisment - if nobody complains, it would be quite hard to tell PR "we really don't want to do that", if they came up with some weird ideas . We have a history of reacting to issues raised by the community if we think they are justified, starting pretty much with NWN's EULA which got some significant changes based on community feedback right before the game was released.

However, if you post about something you don't like, make sure that you understand that you can get open and unblunted answers on these boards, so don't expect a "Yes master, of course master, it will not happen again master" just because "the customer is always right". Your best chance to get us to change something you don't like it sto bring arguments that make us reconsider our position. Angry ramblings, generalizations and antagonistic posts ("NWN is swamped with ads", "My game experience is ruined") usually don't work for that very well and are more likely to spawn sharply edged answers.

We will discuss our reasons for doing certain things on these boards, because we think that both BioWare and the community benefit from a culture of open communication.


Missed that one in your first post:

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And on this subject, I’m making a suggestion to bioware to include the possibility to buy say a Bioware or NWN Baseball cap by mail order or even a t-shirt or a mug!

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We are indeed looking into this at the moment. I will try to sneak a "the customer is always right, eh?" t-shirt into the stock,

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Bioware are disagreeing with a *lot* of people here though Georg, and you absolutely cannot disagree with the fact that your advert annoys a great deal of people.

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Oh, I never said that. It's the nature of advertisement that people don't like it. Thus we won't hold polls here about the topic. We know that, we still do it, because it allows us to sell more modules and continue NWN support from the revenue.

So the question you need to ask is not "do people like ads", it's "is it justified to put a simple background picture on the NWN main menu to get more sales of premium modules to support NWN into the future?".

You can say "yes", "no" or "don't know" about this - we decided yes, it is justified, because the start menu of NWN has absolutely no gameplay value that would be touched through this simple picture on the background. Of course we decided it knowing that a hand full of people would complain about it, but we also know that more than a hand full of people would be unhappy when we decided to scrap the whole NWN support thing and all the upcoming content.

We are commited to do what's best for the NWN community, and this includes making choices that a few people don't like, yes. If the ad on the start menu annoys the hell out of you, I'm sorry, but we feel that this is the most productive and least intrusive way of delivering our message "premium modules available" to the patching public and while none of us here is a fan of ads in games, we don't consider the start menu of NWN part of the untouchable game experience.

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You cannot disagree with *that*, Georg.

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Why should I?

Business Prospectives on the Premium Mods
We are aware that the online verification method is does not offer us the broadest reach possible. If the premium module model is working - and the first few weeks were encouraging so far, the Live Team is willing to investigate further options in order to broaden the market - which is however a larger undertaking and won't happen from today to tomorrow. As mentioned, we use the online verification from NWN's multiplayer mode as it is a system that has proven itself working and reliable and was available to us at the least cost - compared to all other options. So far we are quite happy with it's the results, but again, we are not opposed to investigating futher options in the future.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

Can People Who Run a Server See Your CD Key?
The servers only see your public CD key, which is a coded version of your full CD key. For example, my student ID in University was something like 646717. The University's computer system could store all of my student information (program, grades, courses, schedule, etc.), but if someone saw my student number, they wouldn't be able to decode my name from it. The public CD key works the same way. You can use the public CD key to ban or otherwise mark a player, but you will never be able to get their full CD key from it. Hope that helps.