HISTORY OF IBGAMES AND FEDERATION 2
PART SIX
AOL
AOL had one game, Neverwinter Knights, and for years they weren't in the least bit interested in running any more. But then the wind changed, or something, and they decided to get back into the game business. The obvious move for them was to start poaching GEnie's games.
We had an advantage in that the person who persuaded them change their mind, and who was told to go and get some games, was someone who played Fed on GEnie. So the first deal he signed was with us, and we got to be the first new game on AOL. We were swiftly followed by the other refugees from the dying Genie... Gemstone, Air Warrior, Dragonsgate and so on.
So once again Fed was ported. This time the job went to Nick, who was sent over to AOL's offices and suffered six weeks in a motel in the middle of nowhere (Tysons Corner Va.) while he got Fed running on their system - Unix on Hewlett Packard machines.
The game went live in May 1995. It was immediately apparent that we were in a whole 'nother environment here.
First, the numbers were an order of magnitude higher than we'd been getting on GEnie. A hundred players, two hundred even, in the game at the same time. Putting a banner on AOL's front page just brought players flooding in, much faster than we could cope. (Remember - players were still being charged $2.95 an hour at that time.)
Second, AOL deliberately set themselves up as a system that was easy to use. We couldn't rely any longer on players being the elite - we were attracting ordinary people.
These two things meant the game management had to be beefed right up! First, the Hosts became much more important... they couldn't just be in the game for partying, they had to take on a management role themselves. And we needed to get 24 hour coverage of the game to help new players get started, and to keep a lid on bad behavior.
So we recruited Greeters (later called DataSpace Navigators) from the players.
Anyone who has only ever experienced Fed on AOL or later on the web will find it hard to comprehend just what a shock this was to us. We were astonished at the level of help new players required, where before they had been self-reliant and willing to figure things out for themselves - even (shock, horror!) reading the manuals before they started to play! The new generation of gamers had no conception of a text game (not having played Infocom's adventure games) and had to be led by the hand.
And we were horrified at the behavior of players. We couldn't understand why people would pay money in order to misbehave. It was a real culture shock.
The numbers had consequences in terms of gameplay, too. When there were at most 20 players running around the game, it was perfectly acceptable to have puzzles that required a specific object to solve them. But on AOL object shortages soon became critical and players found their advancement held up by lack of the item they needed.
Another culture shock for us was the prevalence of rank-racing. Players wanted to get through the ranks as fast as they could - get to the top, so they could win Fed. They didn't want to take time to understand thoroughly how things worked. This was when instructions to solve the puzzles, and even puzzle-solving macros, began to be freely distributed.
A great deal of design and coding work went into changing the puzzles in order to defeat this. The two puzzles required for promotion to JP and GM were merged into one puzzle, the GM puzzle, which was much more difficult.
Within a few days of the new puzzle being put in and solved, cheat sheets were circulating again. Even changes to make elements of the puzzles more random didn't help - it was clear that the puzzle just didn't work as a promotion mechanism. The only thing that held up the promotion was not trying to solve a puzzle, it was simply finding the objects needed!
So the puzzle was removed from the promotion ladder and put back as a separate entity - the Snark puzzle - which players could solve if they wished but were not required to do. Promotion instead was linked to company performance.
We had just retro-fitted what was needed to cope with 200 simultanious players and were discussing new material for high level players (the long-awaited Martian invasion, for example) when...
