Last week we had an "Orange Day" and, while the media gushed over Episode 2 I was far more excited about the full version of Team Fortress 2, to be quite honest. Episode 2 will come and go but I suspect I'll still be playing 2fort for years to come. (Just like these die-hards.)

If you haven't had a chance to listen to the developer commentary included in Team Fortress 2 you definitely should. It offers a unique look into the minds of some very talented designers. Miss grenades? Learn why they aren't there. Curious about the choice of art direction when so many other games are going beyond photorealism? Hear why Valve scrapped their approach and went in the opposite direction.

Your personal best is tracked in TF.2

I was especially intrigued by the developer commentary Kerry Davis gave on the design of the stats system. Davis says something I've long maintained: global leaderboards are dumb.

Games usually approach stats by comparing a player to everyone else in the world. This is only really of interest to those who are near the top. With Team Fortress 2, we decided that a better approach might be to compare the stats to the players previous successes, turning them from a world-wide comparative system into a personalized motivational one.

The beginning player gets encouragement and acknowledgment, that while they are not highly skilled yet, they are getting better all the time.
Kerry Davis, Valve Software

What a global leaderboard lacks is context. I'm never going to be at the top of the list so it is irrelevant to me. Why show the top 100 to me as the default view? Are you trying to make me feel bad? Do you want me to give up on your game and go play someone else's game?

(Not only that, but it can encourage exploits and cheating. Witness Bungie outright removing leaderboards from Halo 2.)

By applying a buddy filter, for example, I'm no longer competing against 450,000 anonymous smacktards any more. I'm duking it out for #1 against my 14 closest gaming friends. Better yet, I've now got an acceptable joke about performance to throw out at meetings at my boss's expense. You can see this put to great use in the new Unreal Tournament 3 demo.

Or, if the information is available, a regional or zip code filter could, again, provide some context. Are you the best Madden player in Orange County? (I can assure you that I am not!)

While on the right track, I think Valve takes it a bit too far and eliminates leaderboards all together. Leaderboards themselves, of course, aren't all bad. With the application of a little context the information in a leaderboard can be relevant, interesting and a great community builder.

Word on the street is that there's this great new game in town. Halo something or other. I hear it is breaking all kinds of sales records, causing rampant truancy at schools across the nation and is also the future of gaming.

What impresses me most, though, about Halo 3 aren't the big things but rather the small things, the niceties, that most people are probably going to ignore.

The Forge? It reminds me of the skate park editors in early Tony Hawk games. I've seen better level editors and, let's face it, most user-created maps are crap. I admit, though, that I am curious to see what the little twist playing games while editing takes place will turn up. Those of you who played SourceForts can probably relate. An 8-player deathmatch with all eight players simultaneously editing the very same map has fascinating potential. A small twist sure to reap rewards.

The replay system, too, has all be done before. There's a long history in the Quake community of making games, Half-Life gurus took it to another level and then, of course, there's the rabid RTS replay-consuming community. (See also the great BattleCast feature we worked with Command & Conquer 3 on earlier this year.) What I love about the replay system in Halo 3 is just how drop-dead easy it is to use. A hallmark of the Halo series is the attention paid to usability. While usability is certainly no "small thing" it definitely is oft overlooked.

Truth be told, I think the matchmaking in Halo 3 is just average. It's fairly easy to find a match but, being the fast-twitch gamer that I am I'm frustrated any time I have to sit and watch my Xbox tell me "Searching for close match." Thankfully there's a gorgeous little map on the matchmaking screen that has little dots on the globe showing me from where online players hail. (We had a similar feature in GameSpy Arcade's lobbies - see "Playing Peer to Peer Games.") I love it! I could stare at this thing all day. It's a tiny little feature, but one that distracts me from the tedium of matchmaking and makes me feel connected to the community.

I haven't seen much hooplah about the player stats shown on Bungie.net perhaps that's because, given what the Battlefield franchise and others have done on the web many find it fairly ho-hum - aside from the slick presentation. What I absolutely think is a small but important feature is the feed available for every player. I can now add a friend's feed to my favorite reader and get hourly updates on his ownage.

All of these little things, along with dozens more, take a game that is "merely great" to all new heights. I hope that more developers take note and start sweating the small stuff. As consumers grow more savvy they're going to expect these niceties and, maybe, start to punish developers for "merely" making a great game.

I'm getting a little tired of all the hype over cross-platform play recently. First it was Shadowrun. Now people seem to be all gah-gah over Universe at War allowing PC vs. Xbox 360 play.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think cross-platform is a good thing, especially when it comes to building a community around a game. No more segmentation of audience by platform. You don't have a little group of Xbox gamers and little group of PC gamers; you have a great big, happy group of Universe at War players. Nothing but goodness, there.

We've been big proponents of cross-platform play for a long time. Together with Terminal Reality we successfully brought PC, Macintosh and Dreamcast users to play against each other in 4x4 Evolution... in October of 2000. Yes, the Dreamcast (R.I.P.) and, yes, in 2000.

4x4 Evolution multiplayer on PC, Macintosh and Dreamcast

Since then we've worked with a number of developers on PS2 vs. PSP games, including the World Series of Poker games. Our long-time friends at Aspyr do an admirable job of keeping PC and Mac users playing together in the same universe in the Civilization IV and Battlefield ports to the Mac. Hell, we even powered the cross-platform Halo on PC and Mac!

Cross-platform isn't rocket science. It's just smart community building.

What rubs me the wrong way about all of the recent cross-platform news is that it is being touted as something new and technically amazing - and that journalists seem to be buying it. I said "Universe at War allowing PC vs. Xbox 360 play" in the first paragraph and I meant it. There's nothing new here, other than a change in Microsoft's attitude.

The story really ought to be, "What's taken you so long?"

The always excellent Bokardo published the second entry in a series on Common Pitfalls of Building Community. (Look for part 1 here.) I thought the first point, not appointing a full-time community manager, was particlarly applicable for the games industry as more and more games look to build a vibrant community both inside and outside the game.

The MMO/persistent world guys have this all figured out. They appoint community managers from the day that a game is announced and carefully herd their community like a much-loved flock of sheep. That said, I still talk with developers on a nearly daily basis who think they can slam a server browser and some leaderboards into their game and - bam! - online and community is done.

Not so, kind sirs. Your community needs a manager, just as a party needs a host. They need an official representative to speak with, an advocate within your studio, someone to mete out justice, someone to set the tone and site mores.

Some of the folks we work with, like the Command & Conquer team, have known this for years and actively manage their community from the inside. (Hi, APOC!) APOC is in the forums every day talking with users, posting news and updates to the site and always on the lookout for troublemakers to punish and community stars to rave about.

For those who use our competition tech to create web-based ladders we offer community management as a part of our service. Take a look at the Star Wars: Empire at War space ladders for an example. [Guard]Valdimer is always there monitoring the ladders for suspicious activity and keeping the community up-to-date on ladder information.

One last thought: Don't make make the mistake of thinking one of your designers or developers can act as the community manager. Once your community becomes active, a place where thousands of users flock each and every day part-time just won't be good enough. Plan ahead for success. Build that CM into your live team's budget or give us a shout to help you out.

When I saw Chris Paladino's most recent post on Managing the 100-Person Friend List I had three thoughts:

1. God bless us geeks and our obsessive ways. Only the best among us would use Excel to scrupulously catalog their play habits.
2. Why on Earth is there a 100-person friend limit on Xbox Live?
3. And why on Earth must one keep a spreadsheet like that when software can do it for you?

Xbox Live attempts this last bit for you with their "Recently Played" list. That's a great feature and I use it all the time. It doesn't have all the detail that the spreadsheet contains, so I can understand the need, I guess. But why the 100-person limit? It seems antithetical to the whole concept of a buddy list.

I have 573 buddies on my list, gathered across 50+ games over the past 5 years. I met n3Eo playing Tony Hawk 4 on the PS2 back in 2002. I see him playing Command & Conquer 3 most often these days. BT_Davids owns me when we play Battlefield 2142. XchiN still pops up playing C&C Renegade almost every single day.

Do I play with n3Eo or XchiN? Nope, not in years. But their very presence on my list has a huge impact on my sense of community. I'm a part of a large - and growing - group with some real history. Limiting it to 100 would mean severing ties with people I gamed with in the past.

My Comrade Buddy List

Creating a vibrant community is, afterall, the whole point of a buddy list. Don't you have buddies from high school or college that you very rarely see or talk to? And when you do speak you trade stories about the crazy night when you trashed the quad after your football team won. (Or something.) Should you excise them from your life because you hadn't interacted more than 4 times over the past 3 months and 27 days?

No, of course not.

And you shouldn't have to with your buddy list in games, either.

Now Chris mentions "non-trivial technical hurdles" that are the source of this limit.

I'll be blunt and say that seems rather hand-wavy to me. We've been helping game develpers add buddy lists to their games for years now with no limitations at all.

It is our job as technologists to find solutions to the problems that users have. It is our job to enable them with tools and functionality to build a vibrant community.

"Non-trivial hurdles" be damned.