Here at Corpnews, we sometimes get it into our heads to delve into our past a little bit. Occasionally try to catch up with people. We haven't heard much from Dave "Mahrin Skel" Rickey in a while, so I got together a few questions and fired them off.

He's been a busy little bee, but he answered every question.

Here they are, in their entirety.

Corp: Not a lot of info lately...How're you, what are you doing now?
Dave: I've kind of gone under the radar the last year and a half or so. For most of last year, I stepped back and took some "personal development time", after 5 years of focusing completely on games and my career, my personal life needed a lot of attention. I got engaged early in the year, I got custody of my daughter from my first marriage, and married in December. Being a parental unit (to my daughter and my wife's boys) has been a *major* learning experience that has taken a lot of my focus while I tried to figure it out.

So after 5 years of having no personal life at all, I flipped almost completely the other way for a while. During that time I was trying to put together a project called Polaris, a Sci-Fi based world centered on the theme of exploring a really novel alien world with extensive advanced AI, but it didn't come together. Then, in December, I joined Orbis Games as "Creative Director".

Corp: What's the new job like?
Dave: Interesting. After being part of three large projects, with 7 and 8 figure budgets and teams of dozens, it's actually a lot more interesting and challenging trying to see what can be done with a small team and budget. I used to be very dismissive of the small MMO companies, literally saying that if you couldn't front millions of of dollars, you shouldn't bother trying. eGenesis (A Tale in the Desert) and Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates) have proven me wrong, and I'm starting to see how small can be beautiful. With fewer people and less at stake, it's easier to explore ideas that would be too risky for a big project, and aim at niches that could never justify a large budget. When you're the tiny mouse wandering a field full of elephants, you have to go where they aren't, so innovation isn't just an option, it's a requirement.

Corp: Any ETA on seeing something about it soon?
Dave: Right now we're trying to build on our base, upgrading Virtual Horse Ranch into a graphical game, we believe that if the same gameplay the text game already provides was available in a more visual environment, it would gain a lot more subscribers. It's a totally different kind of game, with a totally different target market (95% of the current players are female), so just getting a chance to see the near-mythical "Women Gamers" in their natural environment is letting me learn all kinds of things that don't show up when they're a minority in a mostly male playerbase. We're hoping to finish the first stage of the upgrade by the end of this year, and give everyone a (virtual) pony for Christmas.

Corp: What was it like working on Wish?
Dave: Enlightening and frustrating. For the first time, I was involved in the issues that go with being senior management for an MMO project, rather than just observing. There's a lot of non-game factors that go along with running a business, leases for office space, insurance benefits, and so on, that I had never really been privy to before. Just planning our E3 booth was a complicated quarter-million dollar project in its own right. So I got to learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of management.

On the other hand, it was incredibly frustrating because I was just starting to see the fruition of my efforts on the design front when I left. When I came in, there were just a lot of things wrong with the way the game was put together. The way the character models had been built was going to require hugely more artist time to complete than could possibly be allocated, the skill system contained fundamental logical flaws that could never have been fixed, the scale of the world was such that without a *major* rethinking of how the world was built and populated, we could never have provided enough interesting content, just some deep stuff that had to be rebuilt before we could even start making a game.

If I had it to do over again, I would have tried to get some flexibility in our "Beta 1" launch date, we finished the refactoring of the systems in time but with literally only days to spare. There just wasn't any time to build content to make Beta 1 a fun experience, never mind do any internal testing, so what we had looked sloppy, rushed, and unpolished, even by the standards of an early beta. I was spending my Christmas vacation planning out how we were going to fix that before the end of Beta 1, when my boss called me and told me that I didn't need to bother. There was literally no warning, even my producer didn't have a clue it was coming.

Corp: Is it true you were let go from Mythic? If so, when?
Dave: At Mythic, I was always in this sort of odd, undefined state. I usually didn't have a job title, and most of the time I didn't really report to anyone, either. I used to joke that I was the "resident malcontent", but I think it would have been more accurate to have called me a "troubleshooter without portfolio". I had nearly infinite discretion about what I could look into or work on, but when it came time to involve other people or make changes to the game, I had zero authority. So I spent about two years running around putting out fires, trying to balance out the classes and realms, track down and eliminate bugs, get the feedback loop from players to developers to work a little more smoothly, and so on. As I'd find things and eventually convince management that we needed to do something about them, we wound up creating 5 or 6 new positions.

After Shrouded Isles, a lot of things came to a head. I had just done the best I could to balance out the 6 SI classes in 6 weeks (they came in one realm at a time, I actually only had 2 weeks for the last 2), so I was really frustrated with solving problems I thought could have been avoided. I was finally given an official status, as "Content Designer", which I was told meant that I was responsible for the instigation and management of all the new systems and large-scale content initiatives for the game as a whole. The actual "Designer" tag meant a lot to me, it had been my goal when I first got into the business, and even though I had been promised credits as a designer for the original box and the SI expansion, somehow they never materialized. So this was the realization of a major life ambition.

I was (and am) a firm believer that the most vital aspect of MMO development is information. We'd set up the Team Lead program and the Product Quality group, in order to better process the incredible deluge of information the players were providing us directly, and that had given us a great return. We were able to identify and fix a huge variety of problems and issues that were important to the players. The ones that were talking to us, anyway, and that was where I thought I needed to focus next: On the ones who weren't talking to us, but were just quietly slipping away, cancelling their accounts without raising much of a fuss. So I started doing a lot of data-mining, looking at everything we had in the character database for differences between accounts that stayed and those that left. I also pushed to get the ability to poll the players, so we could do exit polls and start getting a more objective and scientific set of feedback from current players, rather than prioritizing the "squeaky wheels".

After about 4 months of that, I became convinced that we needed to focus on improving and expanding our RvR game, as our unique competitive advantage. PvE wasn't why our players were coming, and too long of a treadmill on the way to RvR was losing us a lot of them. This put my "malcontent" status at a whole new level, rather than pushing for 1 or 2 new positions, a few days of programmer time, or the reorganization of a half-dozen people, I was essentially saying that the entire strategic direction for the ongoing development of the game had to change, and since TOA (with a total PvE focus and a new levelling system to be stacked on top of the old) was scheduled to come out in 7 months, the change had to happen right *then* if we were to put anything else on the shelves that Christmas.

It just created an untenable situation, I didn't feel I would have been doing my job if I didn't do whatever it took to make the team change tracks, while management apparently didn't agree that the situation was so urgent. I was "invited to resign", exchanged a fat severance check for a non-disparagement agreement, and moved on.

Corp: What do you think of ToA?
Dave: Did I mention the non-disparagement agreement? I can't really say much about TOA without running into it. At an analytical level, TOA was an attempt to make Camelot more like EverQuest 1. Hugely complicated multi-step quests to earn "Master Levels", that required the cooperative efforts of large numbers of people, doing them over and over again, and a new set of items that were bigger, better, and more shiny to collect. It was the antithesis of what I thought Camelot needed at that stage, as it added yet another treadmill that players would have to climb before they could be competitive in RvR.

Corp: Is the recent decision by Mythic to release an altered-rules server a good move for them?
Dave: It's an attempt to "unring the bell", roll time back to when the population of the game was a lot higher. When the 800 pound gorilla of WoW stomped a 2 million subscriber hole in the market for EQ clones, with a budget in the tens of millions, it became a lot less viable to try to compete directly with that kind of gameplay. It's potentially a good move, the question is if it is already too late. The current Live team has their work cut out for them, and I wish them well (I still have several friends working on it).

Corp: What are your plans for the future?
Dave: Build up the VHR community and income stream, continue to enhance and expand that game. Once that is well in hand, start looking for other unserved niches that can be tackled for a reasonable budget. Even if Orbis eventually has the resources to build a 9 figure megaproject (which is where the EQ model is headed), I think we'll stick to multiple smaller projects instead. There are so *many* possible MMO's to make, and I really believe that in the long run the current run of ever-bigger EQ clones will burn itself out. Once every potential player has already played one to the point of burnout, we'll need to do something else.

Corp: What are you playing RIGHT THIS SECOND?
Dave: Right this second I'm playing "Game Designer Image Enhancement (B List Edition)". But for video games, I've been playing God of War. I haven't been a fan of the console beat-em-up action-adventures, but I think this one has converted me.

Corp: What direction do you see the MMOG industry moving in the next few years?
Dave: The big news is going to continue to be EQ clones. Fantasy themed clones will get ever more insane budgets and continue to be the biggest games. We'll see more variation of setting, like we already have seen a little of, EQ with guns, EQ in space, EQ in giant robots, and those games will dominate the middle third of the market, running a step behind the fantasy games on budgets. The bottom of the market will run the whole rest of the range down, and is where we'll see the real innovation. The economics of MMO's under the standard business model are pretty simple: For each $1M invested, you need 10,000 subscriptions to pay back the initial investment in a reasonable period (2 years, investors have a different definition of "reasonable period"). A game that costs $5M to make and maintains a 50K subscriber level for 5 years will make an overall return of $7.5M (assuming 25% is skimmed off the top for the investors). A game that costs $50M needs half a million subscribers to do the same trick. Somewhere in there, anything untried starts to look like an unreasonable risk.

But this math works *better* at a smaller scale. A team of 3 investing sweat equity for a year and getting 10K subs for 5 years will clear over $1M each, over paying themselves reasonable salaries and hiring a few CSR's. Smaller teams have less overhead, fewer management, less inefficiency in communication, less effort wasted on office politics. 10K is only a tiny, *miniscule* piece of the market, the US/European market is around 4M right now, the bottom 10% of that could support 40 such games. And I think the overall market will double at least one more time in the next few years, probably twice.

It's somewhat disappointing (but predictable) that games that don't hit or approach the biggest subscriber numbers ever are seen as unworthy of notice by the mainstream gaming news outlets. Hell, EQ2 is seen as a failure because it was only the second-fastest growing MMO in the market. UO is written off even though it quietly sits there and generates $30-40M in annual revenue, after 8 *years* on an engine that wasn't new then. But more disappointing is that so far we've seen few signs of an "alternative online gaming" movement, that ignores the blockbusters in favor of the smaller games. If such a culture could gain some momentum, great things could happen.

I and the rest of the staff at Corp would like to thank Dave for his time and energy. Good luck with VHR. I think there's great things ahead.

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