Ok, Last night, my orgs bots went offline. This was a great inconvenience to org members.
Here is some reasons why I think a few FC design cycles should be spent in integrating orgbots into the server farm. I have a background in quality assurance, marketing, sales and product management in a major telecom firm, in case you are wondering where these points are coming from.
Lets treat the orgbots as a third party appication.
Reason: No customer dissatisfaction about integrating a third party app. Unlike microsoft, which has a habit of integrating third party apps, such as compression utilities and media players into the operating system, There will be no resentment. These third party apps were written as to fill a perceived need. The companies that make them make thier livelyhood from them and have copywrites. Unlike Orgbots, which were written from a perceived need, but are done on a volenteer basis. The volunteers would be tickled pink if the functionality was assumed by FC. They could go on to bigger and better things.
Reason: Small design cycle expendature. The code is out there to be integrated, which would be a fast solution. A better solution would be to recreate it natively in the AO environment. You have excellent chat coders already who could prolly do this very quickly.
Reason: Resource conservation. At present, the org bots all have to make a connection to the servers. If they were integrated, then you would be looking at a slight increase in server load. Compairing the costs of connection versus server load, it would be cheeper to have the bots done native.
Reason: Increased gameplay functionality. The org bots do relatively simple functions that allow for greater game play. Often an org misses out if they do not have a computer savvy person with an always up link. This creates a situation of haves and have nots. Increased gameplay functionality increases the satisfaction with the game, increasing customer retention (and we all know that is a codeword for higher revenue)
Reason: Security and stability. The less outside apps you have working with your system, the less chance an outside app will cause problems in your system.
Design requirements:
I do not suggest that all functionality be copied, as some of the stuff that is being done is highly specific to org taste. here is what i believe your market wants.
-Online: This allows players to quickly and easily see who there is to talk to.
-Whois: My main reason to ask for this one, is the information being given by Helpbot is not being required in realtime.
-level
-oe
-alts
-members
-Headline / MOTD
-Alliences: the ability to connect bots to shuttle chat from one org to another. This is one area where the bandwidth argument becomes aparent. If someone types something in australia, it goes to fc in the states (?), then is sent to the org bot in another part of the world, repeated back to another orgbot via FC, and then sent off to the all the members of the org. If this were done at the server level, it would reduce up to four shuttlings off the same information. This argument could be even more convincing when you have large alliences like AP who have many orgs connected.
I feel those are the basic functions that most people use on a regular basis. As for the rest of the functionality that people use, i suspect that raidbot and itemsbot will not go away, but if this functionality was added to the server it would eliminate most of the need for bots as such.
Now: on a gameplay level::: what would be really cool is that if you made these game play elements, that the clan registration building in Tir is where leaders could go to setup their bots and alliences, perhaps allience tokens could be part of a quest, there is alot of fun that could be had when new items are added, but I would rather go without any new content, which has a higher possiblity of bugs, than adding a strickly chat solution which is has a much lower chance of non conformances.
As for the transition period where the new functionality comes online, with the old bots still in operation, I do not think the transition period would be all that difficult to manage, as long as message poisoning was added to stop message circles. I suspect that if you did introduce this functionality, many orgs would chose to try it out rather than restart their own bots.
What do you think?
Ani.
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