60+ people laid off at Mythic today.
Edit: official comment.
Really. Freaking. Tired. Of. Posting. These.
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{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
The sudden but preventable bleeding of customers basically means they deserved it.
Response on the herald already.
http://www.warherald.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=607
Having worked for software companies for over 10 years – my translation on this official comment is “game isn’t nearly as profitable as we planned and we are shedding more employees to make the game more profitable”. I haven’t tried WAR yet – because I have a personal policy not to try any MMO that doesn’t have a free trial (I’ve been burned before), but can anyone comment on how responsive their customer care is?
As someone who has done technical support at most every level (front line, escalations, engineering liaison etc) I can tell you in any IT/Software organization – Tech Support and Quality Assurance is ALWAYS the first to be let go when things get rough.
It’s sad and unfortunate. I work at a corporation that is laying people of 2K at a clip. Those of us still there are fortunate but it’s depressing as HELL seeing people lose a job they’ve had at a company for 15+ years. Ugh.
The really unfortunate part is that some of the people that were let go were very experienced, smart and jaded senior designers and developers. I’m sure that the decision was not easily made, but… really?
Meanwhile, other designers who are obstinate, stubborn, unwilling to accept their own flaws and not willing to accept any criticism of their “pet” ideas, even when presented with an encyclopedia of evidence to the contrary… those guys are still working.
Life isn’t fair.
Now if they had official forums, they could have an alternate revenue stream from ad banners like Blizzard…
Yeah, I’m ready for this to stop.
I couldn’t help but smile at
Why not say that demand for customer service has gone down also because the number of customers has gone down?
The good news is, now that they fired all those people, they can take that money and spend a few hundred thousand dollars on official forums. Hire moderators instead of developers, yeah, that’s going to make the game better.
As much as Mythic tried to make Warhammer attentive towards the casual player, and make it easier for people to just log in and play some scenarios or a quick pve dungeon. They lost the most important thing an MMO needs to survive.
Its called IMMERSION and warhammer does not do that well.
That was one of my beefs with the game. All the zones just felt like they were stitched together, with no real flow. You go from A to B to C, like an assembly line. Things just didn’t feel like a “world”. So I went back to WoW. I would love to see exp gain from doing BG pvp, like in WAR. One of the things WAR did right was give you the ability to get experience just from participating in pvp battles. That was a great addition and would like to see Blizzard implement (though, that would kill twinking).
sadly expect to post more.
and it 100% sucks. i havn’t been as down about pc gaming since the closing of looking glass, but the simple fact that gmae projects, including and especially MMO’s have refused to adobe bare bones best practices and mangement techniques is only going to make the highs kinda higher, and the lows ever so much lower.
and we’re not even in the deep throws of the low yet.
This is affecting my potential for upward movement.
MJ’s bullshit bingo continues.
Maybe they will fire tha British tard who made WAR into his pet world instead of an MMO that people want to play.
Hope his old job still wants him back. He would have been good as a PR/community person, but putting him anywhere near the design was a very bad idea.
WAR does have a free trial via the recruit-a-friend program.
Their customer support is quite good, compared to the average MMO. Critical issues (such as being stuck in world geometry) are dealt with swiftly.
@Glasseye
The fact that they need human CS intervention for something that could be done by the user by providing a simple /stuck user function (like most other MMO’s I’ve tried) doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
the game picks up that you are stuck and asks you to log out, iirc. the problem is if you are stuck in combat, you cant log out, catch 22.
the one time I lost something (gold bag in keep taking), they were relatively quick to respond and polite but not willing to give me the bag I won. Supposely they dont track who wins, and they wanted me to possibly report/explain the circumstances of how it happened. Thanks but thats not my job as a paying customer.
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