Monday
Endgame: How to Build High-End Gameplay for Your Most Devoted Players was the first talk of the conference, and a good one. I can’t always point to something new that I learned from Damion’s talks, but he puts it all together in a way that makes it interesting and useful because it triggers ideas.
At Their Service: Making a Difference by Putting Players First was a worthless keynote. The message was okay, but the talk had about 2-5 minutes of content stretched out over 40 minutes. The only part that was remotely valuable came from the Q&A at the end, because everyone was asking the questions they expected to be discussed during the keynote.
Modeling Infrastructure Cost for MMO Launch was a rather dull talk. I often like attending lectures outside of my area because there’s a better chance I’ll learn something. However, I already knew everything about servers that came up. It also didn’t address the part of the description about modeling costs for budget titles versus triple A titles. To be fair, this lecture was passed off from one speaker to another, and it’s got to be hard to make a good lecture when that happens. It also makes me sad because I wanted to see Sticky from the Start, but I attended this one in the interests of spreading out within the company.
I also attended Pirates of the Burning Sea: A Post-Partum, but I wasn’t there to learn.
Tuesday
Hardcore Games for Casual Audiences was an interesting talk - one of the better talks I saw. I particularly liked hearing about a ride at Disney that was very accessible, yet layered with depth for repeat play. I’m thinking about grabbing his book.
Computer Entertainment 35 Years from Today is another keynote that I didn’t expect to be worth attending, but I had nothing else to do. It turned out to be very mildly entertaining and totally useless. I don’t really care to get mild entertainment from a conference… I’m there to learn and network. This is why I like keynotes coming first, because I value that extra hour of sleep more than the worth of a typical keynote.
From Development to Launch: the Keys to Building a Successful Free-to-Play MMO was a useful talk, if not a great one. He provided some good information, and a lot of simple rules about microtransactions. For example, as a rule he said Nexon doesn’t change for content.
Pirates of the Caribbean Online: Lessons Learned was a regrettable talk. It was a postmortem without the postmorten. I got the impression there was a talk in there somewhere, and then it was so thoroughly scrubbed and sanitized that there was no useful content left.
Economic Design and Management of Virtual Worlds with a Large Shard Population wasn’t very interesting in itself. The only interesting part came from the conflict regarding economies and fun in EVE.
Wednesday
I slept through the first seession. Otherwise, I probably would have attended Wake Up and Smell the Metrics! A Rant on Metrics-Driven Development in Online Games. I’m not really the target audience though, as I already agree with the message.
I skipped the next keynote.
Sustaining Player Engagement by Designing for Intrinsic Need Satisfaction was my favorite talk at this year’s AGDC. That’s somewhat unfortunate, because it’s an updated talk of my favorite from last year. Still useful due to the updates.
Everything I Need To Know About Virtual Worlds, I learned at Theme Parks was the last talk I attended. I didn’t get anything out of the talk, but I honestly didn’t pay much attention. It lost to a combination of being boring, and the pull of coordinating a meetup and sorting out some work issues.