Addressing @adzling, His Demeanor, and the Points He Raises

[rob]

First of all, apologies to everyone for taking so long to address this subject. I’ve been working around the clock on some time-sensitive items, and responding to this in a constructive manner required a lot of thought and consideration. Not only are there a wide variety of assertions across multiple threads that need to be rebutted, I also need to address the general approach taken by @adzling. Thanks for everyone’s patience!

The initial post below is addressed specifically to @adzling. However, I believe everyone will gain significant insight by reading the rest of the thread that follows. So here goes…

[rob]

@adzling: Normally, I would avoid handling something like this so publically. However, you’ve created a situation where I feel compelled to do so, and the reasons are two-fold. First, your penchant for belittlement and denigration runs rampant across numerous posts in multiple threads, so you’ve made it a very public thing. Second, it’s clear you’ve rankled other community members, and I would be remiss if I didn’t handle this in a manner that reassures those many good folks we won’t tolerate disrespect on these forums.

Before I respond to any of your assertions about Realm Works, I must first address the manner in which you frequently post. As you’ve seen in various threads, there are other community members who have not responded well to your comments. It’s not so much the message they react to as it is the delivery. In the interest of being constructive, I’m going to provide an example of what I mean. If I were to respond to many of your posts in a manner consistent with your delivery, it would probably start off something like this.

You’re arrogant, pompous, and condescending. You clearly think you know more than you actually do. Your myopic view of the product and market combined with your willful ignorance of things we’ve clearly outlined belie your professed expertise. Your blatant disregard for the myriad GMing styles and usage preferences that Realm Works must cater to, as well as your gross assumptions about the product and its necessary development, are a business fail on your part…

…and I would go on and on in a similar vein. I’d make sure to use derisive and patronizing language to demonstrate superiority. I’d belittle other community members that would dare to disagree by making sweeping comments that generally avoid directly calling them stupid but clearly imply it. And I’d probably end with a disclaimer along the lines of “I may be wrong, but I doubt it.” Since you seem to believe such a line takes the edge off of what preceded it.

That is how you come across in many of your posts, and I hope this example gives you some sense of the reaction you elicit in others. The bulk of many posts is simply disparagement, whether it’s towards the product, other posters, or people at large (or all three). The actually contributory portion of each post is only a tiny component of the overall post in many cases. That disparity should give you a very good clue where your priorities are in these posts. And the general lack of a constructive component to your posts cements that further. You seem to enjoy tearing down others and demonstrating superiority, but you’ve offered very little that’s constructive (there are exceptions).

Based on your responses thus far, I’m not sure you realize this is how you come across. Then again, this may just be your style and you like operating this way. Regardless, your continued participation here on these forums is conditional upon you revising this style. Focus on the valuable portion of your post and leave the rampant disparagement behind. Be courteous and respectful of other posters. Be constructive with any criticisms by outlining how things could be done better, and realize that you are quite possibly overlooking key factors that must be considered. Ideally, seek to understand instead of judge and pontificate. A few of your posts have exhibited these attributes, but they are the minority. If you need to vent, write it for the cathartic release, then delete that portion before actually posting. Bottom line: If you don’t make a fundamental change in your style, your posting privileges will be revoked.

Some of your points and the questions they raise are valid – it’s how you’ve presented them that I must take issue with. Now that I’ve addressed the problem with your recurring approach, I’ll now begin responding to those points from different threads in subsequent posts below…

P.S. Liz will be contacting you when she starts her day tomorrow. I’m posting this late at night because I’m a nightowl and this is the heart of my “day”.

[rob]

Realm Works is Many Things to Many Users

The goal with Realm Works is to provide a highly versatile tool that can be leveraged for a vast range of purposes and accommodate the approaches of virtually all GMs. That’s a tall order, but it’s one we’ve been steadily achieving.

Unlike most tasks that software strives to support, the role of the GM is highly personalized. In fact, there are probably as many different approaches and styles to creating an RPG world/adventure as there as GMs. This reality yields a simple truth. For every aspect of Realm Works that you consider to be wrong, there will be other GMs who consider it to be ideal. That doesn’t make them an apologist – it simply makes them someone with a different preference from you.

It’s probably best to think of Realm Works as an RPG content development tool. Just like virtually any content development tool, users need to learn how the tool works. They must then either figure out how to adapt their preferred style to the tool or beat their head against the wall (i.e. tool) until it hurts. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an art tool (e.g. Photoshop), a programming tool (e.g. Visual Studio), a web tool (e.g. WordPress), a video tool (e.g. Sony Vegas), a 3D modeling tool (e.g. Blender), or something else entirely. The tool works a particular way for a lot of very good reasons that are probably not evident to a new user. The user must learn the tool in order to exploit its benefits. I won’t be surprised if you to object to this philosophy, and you’re entitled to your opinions, but that’s all they are.

You expect Realm Works to operate the way your brain operates, but there are lots of GMs out there who think very differently from you and who also want Realm Works to behave the way THEY think. That doesn’t make any of you right or wrong, but it does make it impossible for us to create a product that caters to exactly how each user thinks. Instead, we’ve created a product that allows users to accomplish a great deal of powerful capabilities, but they have to adapt to how the product works if their personal way of thinking isn’t a match. This is no different from numerous other tools that strive to cater to a diverse audience (like the ones I mentioned above). If adaptation is something you’re unwilling to do, that’s entirely your choice. But the fact that we don’t do things exactly the way your brain works is not a flaw and anyone who characterizes the product as such is completely out-of-line for doing so.

This has already been borne out on multiple occasions in threads where you’ve declared Realm Works as flawed for the way it operates – or fails to operate from your perspective. As exhibited across multiple threads, the approaches you’ve advocated as being the “right” solution will actually hinder use of the product for other users. This clearly demonstrates that your perspective is narrowly focused on your specific needs and ignores the wants and needs of other users. We’re creating a product that excels for the diverse needs of virtually all GMs, and accomplishing that will often mean that the task of accomplishing something specific isn’t as obvious or simple as it could be.

[rob]

A Lot of Thought Went Into This…

Realm Works is comprised of generalized mechanisms that can be leveraged in a myriad different ways to support the needs of the entire spectrum of GMs out there. Nothing in Realm Works is narrowly focused to a specific use case, and it would be folly for us to do that. However, users like yourself have a single, narrow use case in mind and expect Realm Works to be specially tailored to their specific use case. That’s like going into Photoshop and expecting it to be tailored to your single, specific use case. The first adjustment is the hardest, since it entails learning how the product actually works. After that, you’ll quickly discover that Realm Works is capable of handling all sorts of stuff that you weren’t striving to do initially, but that will be extremely useful as you begin to exploit them. That’s because of the generalized mechanisms.

Just because something wasn’t done the optimal way for how YOU think does NOT make it “wrong”. If you’re like quite a few other users, once you get familiar with how Realm Works actually operates, you’ll grasp the thought that went into this product and realize that we did things in a very intelligent way. There have been many users who have felt we did things poorly when they first started and later said that we’ve actually done things very well. And when we haven’t done things well the first time, we’ve reworked them so that they ARE done well.

There are other ways of doing things than your preconceived notions, and those other ways might just be as good or even better approaches due to details you haven’t yet considered. Seek to understand – not reactively judge – and you’ll probably be happy with most of our fundamental design choices. That’s been true for quite a few other users who’ve come before you, after they’ve played with the product for a little while and understood the thinking that actually went into Realm Works.

[rob]

The Skyscraper Analogy

With Realm Works, we’re building a skyscraper. That entails building a foundation that runs extremely deep and upon which a massive structure can be solidly built. If changes need to be made to the foundation, there are typically ramifications all the way up through everything built on top. Some of the things you’re expecting us to have completed represent mid- to upper-level floors. However, only the first handful of floors have actually been built. If we were to jump ahead and build the mid-level floors now, any changes we need to make to the levels beneath would require the ripple effects to be dealt with for the floors above. So jumping ahead will actually slow everything else down in the long run. That’s a poor business strategy, so we’re building the skyscraper properly – i.e. incrementally. That, in turn, means various useful features don’t make sense to implement yet.

Another aspect of building a skyscraper is the disparity between the perceived progress from the outside and the actual progress made inside. A skyscraper’s foundation runs extremely deep. In order to add a feature that is only visible to the outside world (i.e. users) as the fifth floor of the building, extensive work is often required down in the depths of the foundation. So lots of work is done, but only a small portion of it is actually seen by users. It’s the iceberg effect, and we all know what happened to the Titanic, so it’s imperative that all the work below the surface gets done correctly.

[rob]

Evolution is Costly so We Strive to Keep the Costs Down

Realm Works is in its infancy. We’re creating something that’s not been done before, and we’re refining and evolving things as we learn more about all the different ways GMs are trying to utilize the product. It’s a complicated set of features that haven’t been woven together like this by any other tool, and we’re doing it for a market that has very diverse needs. So there’s no roadmap to follow, and there have been many revisions and refinements to get things “right” along the way.

When something is still being evolved and in flux, a great deal of work is involved in reworking the existing underlying logic, revising the interface, and in making sure everyone’s data is properly converted – all in concert. So it’s prudent for us to keep things lean in order to minimize the amount we need to rework during the evolution process. If we invested the time to make something “spiffy” prematurely, we’d be much farther behind as a result.

Based on this reality, it simply doesn’t make sense yet to add certain features that we’d ideally like to have in place. The same logic applies to the interface, since the more time we spend polishing something in the UI, the more time it will take when we need to rework it a few months later to integrate new capabilities and refinements. So we’re intentionally not spending significant resources in polish and refinement right now, as that isn’t a practical strategy with our very limited resources. We’re instead focused on making the product reasonable first and then polishing aspects only after we feel that the evolution has reached a point where we don’t expect potentially drastic changes.

[rob]

Sophisticated Tools Involve a Learning Curve

Given the immense number of hours GMs invest in prepping for games, it seems quite reasonable to ask a GM to invest just a couple of those hours actually watching some short videos and/or skimming through the documentation to get the basics of how the product works. Since the return on that investment will be significant, and the GM spent $50 on Realm Works, the expectation is that the GM will take the basic steps necessary to reap the benefits. GMs don’t expect to just fire up Campaign Cartographer and have it spit out beautiful maps an hour later. People don’t expect Photoshop (graphics editor), Blender (3D modeling), Audacity (audio editor), Sony Vegas (video editor), or the myriad of other similar tools to just work like magic. Realm Works is an extensive campaign development tool, and a learning curve is involved.

If someone truly can’t grasp how Realm Works operates, or if they choose not to invest the time to become familiar with the product, then there are other options they can turn to. Heck, GMs have been making do without something like Realm Works for decades. However, there aren’t any other tools in existence that do all the things Realm Works does, so a GM who wants those powerful capabilities will need to make an initial investment. It’s no different from the tools mentioned above. There are lesser alternatives available that consumers can make do with. If someone wants the power of the sophisticated tool, they need to spend some time learning to use it.

[rob]

Reducing Complexity is Itself Complex

Simplifying the interface in Realm Works is far from the trivial task that many believe it to be. Everything within Realm Works has a use, and there are users leveraging every one of those features. More importantly, all those features weave together. If we simplify things, it means getting rid of things. So either things are buried somewhere or the entire interface becomes silo’d. The latter approach eliminates the ability for users to access everything freely, which impairs usability for a significant number of users. The former approach effectively hides things, and, since many users aren’t willing to watch short videos or read documentation, a feature that isn’t immediately visible simply doesn’t exist. So now the majority of users aren’t aware of a wealth of features that they will probably find incredibly useful. And for those who do find the features, they are buried somewhere and less accessible.

One way to address this is to provide “modes” that strip away features and let users scale up the complexity (e.g. basic mode vs. advanced mode, or grouping functionality into usage scenarios). However, that takes a meaningful chunk of work and also entails figuring out the right mix of features for each mode – which is almost always going to be wrong for a meaningful percentage of users due to the way the features all weave together. The time needed to solve this would take away from adding important capabilities. Moreover, development time will increase when adding new features, as we’d have to reconcile their implications within and across the various modes. Since there’s no good solution in the first place, we simply haven’t tackled this issue yet.

Does the lack of all this streamlining increase the complexity for new users? Definitely. But, until we figure out a good solution that solves all the aspects presented, we believe a GM that really wants to create a world will invest a bit of time to learn the product, just like many other sophisticated tools.

Does this impact our market reach? Definitely. However, the GMs who want to build a meaningful world and/or substantive adventures need the current features of Realm Works.

GMs who don’t want all the features and just want something simple are going to be more interested in obtaining pre-built content. So we plan to have a vastly stripped down option available for these GMs in conjunction with the launch of our Content Market and the availability of pre-created settings and adventures. That’s not a content development tool, though. It’s a content consumption tool, so the focus and usage models are radically different.

[rob]

Business in this Market is Not What You Assume

You made the assertion that, if we did a poll of users, they would all be saying we should focus on the interface. Sorry to burst your bubble, but we DID do a survey, and there were multiple options that centered on improving the interface. They all fared very poorly. What users wanted most was more features. This clearly contradicts your assertion and reinforces the fact that many GMs are willing to invest a bit of time to learn the tool in order to gain the benefits it offers. [Note: The survey was also open and promoted to non-users, and there were many prospective users who participated. So the data we gathered was reasonably representative.]

I wholly agree that improving the interface would broaden the reach of the product. However, that’s not going to make Realm Works a financial success – not even close. Even if we sold a copy of Realm Works to 90% of the GMs that exist (a laughable goal even with the perfect UI), there just aren’t enough GMs. The financial model relies on the content consumption tool I outlined above. Most GMs want pre-built content, so this approach will dovetail with the content market and bring in a much larger number of GMs than simply refining the current interface. It will also provide a much more simplified introduction to the product and its core features, from which some of these GMs will choose to expand into the full product. And it will pay for refinements to the interface.

This ties back to your argument for “minimum viable product” (MVP). Well, in this case, there is no such thing as an MVP for a GM world-building tool, because there aren’t enough GMs to justify the investment. The MVP is actually three separate components. First, it’s a content consumption tool that allows all those GMs who want pre-built content to get it. Second, it’s a content development tool that allows GMs (including us) to create that pre-built content for distribution. Third, it’s the distribution mechanism for that content.

This line of discussion is now heading squarely into the market, its composition, and our business strategy, so it’s no longer a technical discussion that is suited to these forums. If you’re interested, there is some market data available on the web that you might find informative if you dig it up. Suffice to say, we have a plan that we are pursuing, and we’ve thrived for nearly two decades in an industry where very few other companies have survived doing software tools, so we have a pretty good handle on the market.

Declaring what our business should be and belaboring what we should be doing amounts to nothing but espousing your opinion – and we all know the general attitude people have to others’ opinions. Droning on and on with the same opinion serves no useful purpose – those who chose to listen already have, and those who don’t aren’t going to change their minds by yelling louder. Repeatedly demeaning others in the process of telling us how we should run our business is inexcusable and won’t be tolerated on these forums.

[rob]

Everyone is welcome to post questions and feedback on the above comments I've made. Be aware that writing up all of this consumed a meaningful chunk of time that derails my actual development efforts, so I'm already much farther behind than I should be. Consequently, please be patient for a reply, especially if it's something that will entail a thoughtful response.

Above all, everyone be respectful of each other when expressing negative views and disagreements with me or anyone else. As long as we all maintain reasonable decorum, just about everything is fair game, as I believe we've demonstrated over the years.

Lastly, I hope the foregoing posts afford everyone some useful insights into Realm Works, the vision, the approach we're taking, and the realities that we're faced with on this journey.