One of the challenges of running an online game is it’s a service business. It’s not, uh, throw it over the wall and forget it business. And having -- particularly in the more complex environments where people can have more freedom and do more things, you need to have strong customer service in place. So, uh, one of the early - and customer service in the sense all the way through from someone answering complaints to the developers changing the game regularly an rebalancing it and altering things in order to react to the way players are playing. So, MMOs and virtual worlds have common problem with what they call [Griefers]. Uh, and the interesting thing about Griefers is that you might think, oh, they’re all bad and you should get rid of them all, but again, controversy feeds a lot of these games. The engagement players feel is often because they need -- they want --they look for a nemesis. They look for something to care about. And if someone is behaving badly then they, you know, they care about the game, they care about this person. And that introduces some very interesting questions. Do you want to ban the Griefer, or do you want to make sure that they can’t, you know, where is that line where they’re generating fun for other players, they go beyond that line, and they’re just, you know, annoying people and they’re just going to get people to quit? Um, and so adjusting the game to balance that was certainly a very important part of how we evolved Puzzle Pirates. We actually built the game with, uh, very open player versus player combat where you could attack other ships and so on and you could steal some of their booty. And, uh, they’re still in the game, but very few people do it. Um, and that was, again, an evolution of the social mores of the game. It was seen as not sporting somehow and it’s not proper. “Oh, you shouldn’t hunt other players. You know, that’s not nice.” And we’d intended the game to be, you know, not blood thirsty, but, you know, to have this element to it. And some players really ran with that. And they become infamous and, you know, they complained about them and so on. And you adjust it a little bit, but in the end it wasn’t something that we adjusted; it was just the player base decided, you know, that’s not really -- this isn’t that kind of game. It was the kind of game we made but it wasn’t the kind of game they wanted to play and they don’t play it that way.
