Combat Arms Review: Pt 2, The Game

In my previous post “Combat Arms Review: Pt 1, Nexon and the business proposition” covering Nexon’s online First Person Shooter (FPS) game Combat Arms (CA), I covered the general economic model and the attraction for playing this very comprehensive of “free games”.

This 2nd part of the review is looking now to the game mechanic and the strengths/weaknesses of the platform and community. Specifically:

1. Is the gameplay any good?
2. How good is the user interface?
3. What is the community like?

Background
I’ve been playing first person shooters for a very long time, albeit I don’t profess to being particularly good at them. I still have a zipped up version of the original Wolfenstein and Duke Nukem for a historical laugh. Similarly aged FPS players like myself have a chuckle that as we upgraded our machines from 386 proccessors to 486 architecture, we would turn off the “turbo” button to slow the computer down so that they could comfortably play the game in its original game state. A whole new world was unveiled with the arrival of the Pentium Processors of the day. I’ve been in businesses which played networked versions of Doom, Counterstrike, different versions of Quake, Unreal Tournament 2004 & 2007.

Ironically enough I never got into Call of Duty or the Battlefield 1942 type of games, being what I class as just a “casual gamer”,  I just never quite had a computer “fast enough” to run such heavy duty graphics and support the game play comfortably and always seemed to be 2 versions of Direct X behind what was current and more to the point what my computer and video card could support.

Recent times, though I’ve managed to get a laptop with a solid state hard drive, which has made a huge difference in terms of my gaming ability, connected to a decent external monitor. This led me to my search for different first person shooters that were free and had reasonable graphics and gameplay which would entice me to play on a semi regular basis.

Is the gameplay any good?
If you like Counterstrike, you’ll like CA. Set in modern times, there is an array of maps and assorted weaponry which is accessible to all players. The ranking system is modeled after the US Military, with some variation at the upper echelon ranks. As discussed previously, as you progress through each rank, gaining experience you are allowed access to different maps and more importantly, different GP (Gear Point) based weapons of varying types and capabilities.

When you first start off life in the CA world, you are the rank of T = Trainee, having to go through the mandatory training and orientation battles. When I joined a couple of years back, they didn’t have this orientation, instead throwing you in the deep end into the battle servers instead. There are an array of servers available – at the time of writing, I’m playing on the US based servers and I tend to spend most of my time on Server West. Within Server West, there are a number of different servers groups – Alpha, Bravo, Foxtrot, Black Market and Papa – each with an array of game play servers underneath that you can join. Access to these servers is based on either your rank or your KDR = Kill Death Ratio or in some cases both. Starting off life as a modest T= Trainee and than graduating to P = Private, you start with a KDR of 1.00. KDR is calculated by your number of kills divided by your number of deaths (yours). So if for example you manage to kill 20 people in a game, but die 15 times, your KDR = 20/15 = 1.25. If conversely you kill 15, but die 20 times, your KDR = 15/20 = 0.75. Really, anything above 0.85 is considered pretty good.

Gameplay itself is simple – you pick a room, with the appropriate game mode you want to play and join it. With up to 16 players (multiplayer) in the same room, games in general are surprisingly lag free. I play at home over my home wireless and ADSL and don’t have any problems. In game, graphics is fluid, and very much focused on rapid, real time decision making, skill and good representation of graphics. This to me is the appeal of CA – the gameplay is very enjoyable, as on the whole, everyone is there to have a good time. In game chat options are 1/All 2/Team or 3/Clan, which you can interface with via either keyboard or voice microphone/headphones.

On the whole, I spend the bulk of my time playing Elimination, as I find that, particularly when you are playing with some friends, it is the most enjoyable from a casual gaming perspective, as you can work together.  There are a number of game modes:

Elimination: Which is you and a group of team mates against an opposing force of similar numbers. The game has a target number of kills e.g. 140 and its the first team to get there, which wins. Each time you kill, it adds to an overall game tally of “kills”, each time you die, you re-spawn about 5 seconds later and continue on, accruing a “death” = hence the capability to calculate a KDR. Probably the most popular of the game types.

Elimination Pro: Tougher. Again, you are separated into teams, but if you die, you don’t re-spawn – get a second life until the round ends. The game lasts as long as a team has a player in the field, who remains alive, with the winning team that which has the last player standing. Games on big maps can last for ages, as you run around “hiding” and trying to get a clear line of sight with the enemy, without them getting a bead on you. Much less forgiving of mistakes and tends to be played by better KDR players, who fave higher powered weapons i.e. shotguns, sniper rifles or have particularly good aiming accuracy.

Fireteam: You verses the computer and hoards of either a/ Zombies or b/ Computer controlled players. There are limited maps being available in this mode, those being Cabin Fever, Desert Storm, or Desert Fox. Team work rules the day here – much harder to play as a lone gunman, you will get over run and swamped by the opposition in a matter of minutes.

Quarantine: A variant of Fireteam, you have a time limit to destroy all the Zombie hoards attacking you from all points of the game – played on a limited set of maps, you have the opportunity to “hole” up in specific places. Again, a heavy emphasis on team play to defeat the enemy overall. My least favourite mode.

Capture the Flag: 2 spawn points, 2 flags, get the oppositions flag and return it to your spawn point. Simple.

One Man Army: As the name suggests, everyone to themselves. Weaponry and skill rule the day here.

How good is the user interface?
When you log into the platform, navigation around the servers is pretty straight forward – there are different areas where you can gather on the server to take part in community chat, there’s a section to look at your game character and fit out the weapons you accrue over time. In the 2 or so years I’ve been playing the game, the Nexon guys haven’t rested on their laurels – every 6 months or so, they update the game interface, based no doubt on analytics of what people are looking at and where they are spending their time. Each time they have upgraded the interface, I’ve been really happy with the evolutionary changes and incremental functionality introductions/deletions – it’s all very logical and straight forward.

In game play, user interface is the classic FPS keyboard/mouse combination which can be specifically configured to your own requirements i.e. invert the mouse so that forward is up and reverse is down or change the firing keys etc. Sensitivity in game can also be altered too in game which is nice, when you want to tweak your settings to a sniper type game where you want slow movements verses a Close Quarters Combat (CQB) battle with high sensitivity.

Game play is full screen and the array of information around the screen is clear an unobtrusive. I think this is where Nexon really got it right in the game play – I’ve since downloaded and tried a few of the other games that are available in the space like  Operation 7, Cross Fire etc but they just don’t have (In my humble opinion) as good a user interface in terms of design or usability. It makes a serious difference when you’re running around a map and someone is taking snipes at you, how easy it is to read and interact with the user interface.

What is the community like?
I’ve mentioned that games can have up to 16 players in them – if you play regularly enough, you often get to know players by their call sign, as they tend to log in the same time as yourself and you can get chatting to them. If you find a particularly good bunch of people to play with, you can join a “clan” which is a collective of people who play under the same team or clan name. There are some distinct advantages to this, not least of all co-ordinated game play. The camaraderie that occurs during a clan match with like minded team mates is also a lot of fun. Clan War’s between 2 opposing clans, with both clans communicating on their own private channels to each other during the middle of a game takes the gameplay and complexity of the game to a whole different level – it is fantastic, the blend of tactics, skill and thinking involved.

A by product of clan wars, is that clans are sectioned off into levels – Level 1 can have a maximum of 10 players, Level 2 = 20, Level 3 = 30 and so on. With the accrual of each level (by way of clan war matches) the clan members can access different weaponry and armament which is wholly unavailable from the store or via ranking up through the levels as an individual.

I’m the member of a clan which is quite small – only 8 members, but because we are all based in Australia and play at similar times, each time we log on its nice to have people around. It’s an adult clan – we’re all got kids and mortgages and chat about real world things over voice chat – with the common thread of interest being the game itself. Playing a clan war in a co-ordinated way is a whole lot of fun, particularly on the bigger maps and in the team mode maps like capture the flag etc.

Overall, if you like FPS – I’d highly recommend giving this game a go, particularly if you have an office environment where there are network games on a Friday night – it’s great fun.

The price of loyalty

In my case, $6.95 per month.

And the increase of my home broadband from 1,500Kb/sec to 20,000Kb/sec. THAT's worth alot more to me. The saving of $6.95 per month was just a bonus. 

I've been a home broadband user since 2000, when I first signed up to Primus Telecoms with a very humble 256Kb/sec ADSL1 Broadband connection which cost me (back than) $49.95 month. Circa 2001, I switched over to the new kid on the block – iiNET, mostly because they offered me 512kB/sec at the same price – still $49.95/month.

Over the course of the next 8 years 11 years, I moved 2 houses and ported successfully with no problems. iiNet were great. In this time, they upgraded me to the shiny new "high speed ADSL1" at a very rapid 8,000Kb/sec in 2006 and again upgraded me to ADSL2 in 2008 which cruised along at a very nice 24,000Kb/sec. Service across this time period was also excellent. We had a few speed bumps along the way, but they sorted it out and offered credits to my account and so forth as time progressed. It's nothing that was unexpected and the business was always interested in helping me out.

So earlier this year, when we moved to the country, I rung up iiNet and ported across our home phone and home broadband, having to go through the process of downgrading the internet speed we were on from 24,000Kb/sec back to 1500Kb/sec. I hadn't realised what a monumental pain that would actually be – not the downgrade and arranging for the port, but the actual reality of living with 1500Kb/sec after being used to downloading a 400Mb episode of True Blood in 10 minutes, as opposed to the 4 to 5 hours – if we were lucky – with our now default speed.

I don't even watch True Blood – my wife does – but I quickly found out the importance of these Vampire chronicles to her existence when suddenly she couldn't get her weekly fix and resorted to Facebook to vent her fury at our "slow internet connection". Suffice to say, you can't even watch YouTube properly at 1080p HD 1500Kb/sec, so our 3.5 year old son was saying the "internet was broken" when trying to watch Thomas the Tank Engine episodes on the "puter" (read: iPad)

So, not being in a "contract", it was now high time to upgrade our broadband speed, for our sanity.

Today I had a look at Telstra, Optus, iiNet contacted them all to check what I could do. Telstra could offer me at ADSL2+ at $6.95 month cheaper. I rung iiNet to see if they would match this deal, with their inferior offering of ADSL1+ at 8,000Kb/sec as opposed to Telstra's enticing ADSL2+ at 24,000Kb/sec. The response I got, after being put on hold for an extended period of time, was no, they wouldn't match it, not withstanding my 8 years loyalty, paying my bill on time (and often early) and ringing up on my own time to give them the opportunity.

Bad move. I've rung Telstra and sorted out my homebroad band and landline, all in 20 minutes and they'll be doing a rapid churn early next week.

iiNet in reaching #2 nationally for ADSL broadband services and getting to a 2,000+ staff capacity appears to have lost that agile hunger for customer satisfaction. For the sake of matching a $6.95 difference and upgrading my service to match a market leading competitor, they declined.

So iiNet has forfeited some $1,200 per year from me. A regularly paying, loyal customer.

I wonder what the cost of acquisition per customer for them is?

And I'm still paying $49.95 per month for my new ADSL2 + connection with Telstra. Result.

Bad luck iiNet, you had your chance. and blew it.

*** Update: 25/10/11 – iiNet rung be back again today – nice of them to do so and confirmed that I had actually been with them as a customer for not 4.5 years (on the account I had registered with them) but 11 years. Ouch. That's a long time. They also rung to confirm that they couldn't move on the pricing set out in stone on their website. Shame. Good customer service, good feedback, but poor adapting to the market. 

History on a website, for your business

Maybe it’s because I have a products & procurement background, but I always look for a companies history, irrespective of context, as part of my assessment criteria when selecting a new service, partner, supplier or pitch target.

A products business means that you are focused around reliability, minimising warranty claims and delivering value for money – fit for purpose – for what the consumer gets in hand, after shelling out their hard earnt cash. If the consumer can make the logical argument with themselves about the validity of spending X on Y, than you have done your job in creating a logical product, without the black art of marketing, the support of your inbound support enquiries environment or the depths of your R&D group adding value and insight to the suite.

Selection of Professional Services is a little different – you are making subjective calls based on other peoples assessment criteria to validate your own selection process. Part of this is talking to other business/people who have engaged said company in services and getting an understanding of the minutiae with which they focused their attention on. You than make a judgement call on the value of what they have experienced based upon your own ideal scenario. If you are smart you also project your worst case scenario and assess whether the same supplier can meet these requirements. Professional services is predicated by the notions of Intellectual Property designation, ownership and use, Regulatory Compliance (if in a regulated industry such as finance or construction) and Corporate Governance obligations.

So, considering the above points, it can be agreed that they are all complicated little scenarios to play out and explore. There’s a lot of hard work that demands care and attention alongside the intense concentration that needs to be devoted to fulfilling these activities succesfully.

With this in mind, you as a business, whether products or professional services based – why are you making it more difficult for your prospective customer by not including a historical narrative of your business successes, key moments and market leading thinking?

I’m a firm advocate of long established business creating a historical section on their website celebrating these highlights and adding a dimension of additional credibility for the business which different people resonate with.

If you are a new business, history is even more important in my estimation. The excitement and agility in your new venture being created out of the ether in itself is a story to tell. New business should have a dialogue focused around the people and WHY they got together to start the venture, a commentary on the gaps they identified in the market which coerced them to “take the plunge” and start up. Each person will have their own unique story to portray centered around their experience, their expertise and their points of difference.

The benefits are enormous:

• Removing a barrier to engagement when comparing against competitors – there is a good chance they won’t have a history on their site.
• Future staff. Prospective staff are assessing different things about your business when they visit your website. If they believe in the product or service  you offer, then you have half won them. If you can make them believe in the company, by way of illustrating your cultural traits of difference, than you have won them over and they’ll be fighting to get in. Better to fend them off than have to find them.
• If your competitors do offer a history, benchmark it and create yours as contrasting and either create your own niche against them or prove your value over them by noting more significant achievements
• It allows a company controlled distillation of your brand persona to be referenced and factually represented in the marketplace.
• It displays a substantive underpinning and psychological cornerstone to investors wishing to see the depth of your organisation.
• For products based business, having a historical archive of your products, specification sheets, PDF’s of your manuals, point of sale material for suppliers, is an invaluable resource for people looking to buy your products for the FIRST time, as they get the comfort that you support your consumers for the long term.

AMI Marketing Week “Coming Together” 2011

Leadership & Management are not the same thing

Due to my new found time to read and reflect on my daily commute from the CBD to and from my home, some 1 hours travel in a comfy V/Line train, I’ve found I’ve been able to catch up on piles of reading, that in all seriousness, has lapsed for years. Part of this, I’ve read a series of leadership and management books. Always illuminating, the below are some take homes I’ve articulated myself and come to the conclusion too, based on my experience over the years.

Leadership: Offers inspiration, vision, the structure that paves the direction which galvanizes people to follow and participate in the strategic vision.

Management: is the binding force whether activity, personality, measurement or which offers advice, support, guidance, discipline and assessment of quality/output and outcomes, in line with the strategic vision.

Good leaders have:

• Oratorical Communication Skills, excellent public speakers and confidence in speaking
• A distinctive (and hopefully aspirational) personal presence. This is a combination of grooming, body stance, dress style.
• Engagement – the very best leaders engage at a 1 to 1 level with key staff.
• An outlook of always offering encouragement.
• Never show negative emotions, contempt, disdain, doubt or anger. The energies that drive these are rechanneled into asking succinct questions to key staff and clients which are based on receiving direct, factual answers and then allowing them to afford insight and draw the strategic goals together.
• Rewarding – fiercely loyal to those who show loyalty to them and very obviously so, so that other people in the organisation can see the benefits of success and commitment.
• Consistent – being consistent is more critical and sustainable than having flashes of brilliance or success, as people learn to gravitate towards the measured pace of success and positive gain during the tough times.

Bad leaders are:

• Distrustful. Those that are distrustful in a public sense – people can sense that they are so – it doesn’t engender much trust to follow someone you know doesn’t trust you. It is very different in terms of people’s expectations that they expect to be distrusted. In the past for myself if people were nervous around me, it was their own standards (mediocre to high) which they were valuing themselves, not anything I had overtly said. Any actual comparison of standards was left in the area of performance and criteria matching for an expectation.
• Disorganized. Being disorganized as a leader sets the example to all that follow you that that is an acceptable standard of performance and therefore shelter within the standard set. At least give the appearance of being organized. This extends to every aspect of your being at work – behavior, appearance, desk, communications, follow up
• Inconsistent. Unfortunately the nature of being a leader means you are going to have people taking pot shots at you regardless of how good/bad you are. Being inconsistent only validates their viewpoint with the more positive and accepting types around you who rely on your equinaminous nature to endure the tough times.

Good managers have

• Patience; a mentoring outlook, a practiced, methodical manner in handling situations, whether mundane or under high stress. Because of this persona, they are inherently stable and staff build up a level of trust in them to discuss things which are outside of their comfort zone.
• Knowledge; understanding and clarity on what the staff they managing are doing at any point. This is NOT micro management, but rather regularly, scheduled reviews (daily, weekly) of activity and gaps.
• Ownership; key traits in successful managers I’ve always sought is a sense of responsibility as if the tasks, activities or projects were their own.
• Honest with their colleagues and themselves. An outstanding manager is one who knows they don’t necessarily have the “big picture” but trust those that do – the good leader.

Bad managers are:

• Same traits as a bad leader, but in addition:
• Unethical. This is an interesting one – an unethical manager is one who in the simplest sense, will blame and bury those around them, and entrap them with their role and seniority. At its most sophisticated, they lie, when they can’t be proven wrong nor found out and do so to suit their own selfish needs and career advancement.
• Amoral. In one sense, this is tougher to deal with than even an unethical manager. At least you can see this and they get a reputation for such and in the unfortunate circumstance you are saddled with a manager like this, you can at least watch your back. Their lack of insight and inherent understanding of what is right begets scenarios which because their wasn’t a clear path forward, from a moral perspective, they chart the course which is a means to an end, irrespective of the morality of the journey. The goal is the only thing that matters, and they cannot see that there is anything wrong with what they ordered/enacted/endorsed to meet this goal.

Business Contacts vs Personal Contacts

I caught up for lunch with a former work colleague last week and they posed this question:

“How do I manage personal contacts vs business contacts, specifically when one becomes the other?”

I was instantly reminded of an answer that I gave on LinkedIn a few years back (May 29th 2008 to be precise) to this very question. I got the added bonus it was voted the “Best Answer”

How do you manage your Business and Personal contacts?
For example, what software or online database do you use?
Do you merge business and personal contacts or keep the separate?
Sometimes business and personal contacts are one in the same, how
do you handle that?

My response was:

If money is passing hands and that’s how the relationship started, they are Business, irrespective if they get invited to a personal BBQ, a golf day with friends or a weekend at the snow with the family.I treat both work related and personal business contacts ie: the electrician for my house as Business contacts.

To differentiate, I append a note as to where I met them eg: Work or via a mutual acquaintance and the date I met them – “First Contact”. I always name the work place, so that as I change jobs, I build up a history and can search for them as needed.

If they are friends from my personal life read: school, university, hockey, adventure racing whatever, than they are Personal. If money is transacted, they stay friends, with a secondary note outlining the preliminary contact.

Outlook is capable of tracking all this. For online, if the contacts management is just for yourself, consider sites like HighriseHQ http://www.highrisehq.com or Zoho http://crm.zoho.com/crm/login.sas. For a sales environment, where you are tracking your sales teams and need to assign ‘accounts’ and track client interactivity, you need something a bit more battle ready, check out SugarCRM, Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. Each has its pluses and minuses, not least of all cost and complexity.The better CRM’s can sync with your Outlook Contacts & Email, export to a readily readible format like CSV (comma separated values) and manage complex relationships eg: multiple contacts within the same business, cross contacts, hierarchal relationships and allow data mining of your inputted data to identify sales or product/service trends.

Going to the next level, the CRM will integrate to your HR Payroll, ERP, Invoicing and capture web data from your corporate website. Additionally, good CRM’s can be keyed into a 3rd party analytics package (think: Google Analytics, Nielsen NetRatings, Omniture etc) to track user activity across your web site and customer Extranets – you can start predicting trends and unearthing opportunities for your teams. Smart companies are using CRM systems tied into their e-Newsletter environments to deliver custom tailored news content into end users mailboxes – and tracking their click through rates, reading patterns and user behaviour. I use a Blackberry, synced to Outlook, which is in turn synced with two CRM’s – HighriseHQ for personal and SugarCRM for work. I’ve used Act!, SalesForce, SalesLogix and Goldmine too in this fashion.

A final point – if you are deploying a CRM for your sales team, pay someone to implement it for you – their experience in avoiding the pitfalls will be invaluable. Nothing worse than shelling out $$$ for a system no one can use because it’s not setup correctly.

After my diatribe to said friend, we sunk a few more glasses of red to compensate for talking work in our off time. Was a good lunch.