Bit harsh on Mr Halliwell there I think Scott. I read his comments as blaming a company wide culture which put people into silos with limited communication. That is, he’s blaming the structure, and the sets of top down rules that stopped devs doing X or community people doing Y, rather than the community team specifically.

> Bit harsh on Mr Halliwell there I think Scott.

I didn’t see his three followups before posting this, but yeah, pretty harsh. Admittedly he does not have the gold star for “everyone but me on my team screwed up” post-mortems, but there are a lot of fingers pointing outward in his writing, and none too many inward.

Erm. He’s pretty tough on himself in the followups, Scott.

And I think that he rightly places the blame on RTW in general for making a shitty game, not PR or marketing for “not getting people to give a shit about their game.”

Scott Jennings:

> Bit harsh on Mr Halliwell there I think Scott.
I didn’t see his three followups before posting this, but yeah, pretty harsh. Admittedly he does not have the gold star for “everyone but me on my team screwed up” post-mortems, but there are a lot of fingers pointing outward in his writing, and none too many inward.

I don’t know how you could possibly read his posts that way without living in a parallel universe. He enumerates a long list of structural and individual failures in relatively clear, level-headed English without particularly strong bias, and acknowledges his own failures where they factor into the picture. Almost all of the problems he describes are problems I’ve seen myself and the results he describes are not hard to imagine. I’m kind of shocked that someone with your history would bash him for being mean to community managers instead of sharing some of the insights from his posts with your readers. Gotta protect your own, I guess – CM solidarity!

*snicker*

Regardless of who is ultimately to blame, I think we can all agree on who is currently the most racked with regret:

Hey gasbandit, WWIIOL is still going very strong, updates constantly. I have a feeling its only going to be outlasted by WOW

“the desired launch date (set by the investors)”

i’m not a developer but it sounds like a bad idea to be letting investors dictate launch dates.

World War 2 Online wins Again

ethereal.wolf:

“the desired launch date (set by the investors)”
i’m not a developer but it sounds like a bad idea to be letting investors dictate launch dates.

It’s less terrifying than not getting investors at all.

In fact, I can’t imagine handing over a wad of cash for development of any project without having some idea of when the thing is going to launch. Else you risk winding up with vaporware.

“In any case, I don’t think specific design flaws were the root cause of our problems. While it’s true that without them, APB probably could have sold much better and I wouldn’t be writing this piece, it would be a very lazy attempt to explain our failure. It would be tantamount to pointing the finger at a small number of staff and saying “it was all your fault”.”

So, you got 100 MILLION DOLLARS and only a small number of staff was dedicated to your core gameplay? God damn dude, that’s retarded.

Oh, and the whole “not listening to your beta playtesters” is something that people do over and over again. That happened in Tabula Rasa too, for choosing an example.

Apparently, those 100 million dollars were expended in (as I guessed) hiring corporate dipshits of the nebulous art of management, that being professional bullshiters with hands softer than the Palmolive lady (to borrow a phrase).

“Oh, and the whole “not listening to your beta playtesters” is something that people do over and over again. That happened in Tabula Rasa too, for choosing an example.”

Beta might still be useful if:

1) Playtesters were truly dedicated to improving a game, rather than looking for loopholes and advantages to be used post-release, in which case pointing them out becomes counter-intuitive; and…

2) They knew anything about actual game development. By this, I don’t necessarily mean knowing computer programming, having a practical knowledge of the industry, or being well-versed in the theoretical literature; I mean, at its core, being *logical* — for example, taking the time to extrapolate on one’s reasoning to consider adverse consequences of what you are proposing. As most forum posts propose changes based on whim, very few players seem to bother doing this, which gives developers little incentive to start listening to them;

3) The concept of beta had not been turned into yet another step in the hyping/promotion of a game, especially when studios have, in at least one case, stooped to offering beta access to anyone who pre-ordered the game (Mortal Online was prepared to go up to 10,000 people); or…

4) Betas existed in more than just name, where the game is ostensibly live but the developers insist it’s still in beta just to be forgiven its bugs and faulty mechanics, while relieving your wallet (a dead giveaway is having RMT in place; if you’re charging, it’s not a beta). Now games could claim to stay in beta forever and we’d be hard-pressed to find a difference. Earth Eternal, for example, was still officially in beta by the time it went down, despite having been ten months in existence and with RMT in place.

Short version, nobody cares about beta anymore. And those few developers who might still find a use to it find it’s been hopelessly corrupted by greedy studios and gamers with a surfeit of entitlement.

The shortest-lived MMO ever, that’s an achievement right there. Just another example that if you develop a game and what it to be successful, than you should listen to the players.

The whole organizational fiasco story rings quite true from my experience.
I’ve seen now quite a few times how empowering people without strong core competences in whatever it’s actually being done is awful.
They try to manage by some book what can’t be managed, organize what shouldn’t be organized, bureaucratize everything and just engage in politics and sow discord to the point that you can’t get any work done at all because the most mundane step depends on 10 different people of wich you are forbidden to talk to 6 and can’t stand 3 of the remaining 4.

Possible last second of the last minute purchase – by Epic.

“UPDATE: Epic Games has emerged as a possible contender to make a last minute swoop for the title, and while a spokesperson for the company remained coy on the opportunity, the move wasn’t ruled out, either.

“Mark [Rein] absolutely loves the game, everyone loves what they saw,” Dana Cowley told the BBC. “We’ve got our hands full of Gears of War 3, Bullet Storm and the recently announced Project Sword. If any talks like that are going on, then they would be confidential.”

Fresh speculation – if any move does go ahead – links original APB creative director and former Realtime Worlds figurehead Dave Jones with a move back to the project under Epic’s banner, no doubt fueled by his move to the US and close friendship with Rein. “

I want to add something to this discussion, but I am still lawling at the idea of Scott as a CM.

Well, nobody has gone broke by doing a F2P WoW close.

So yeah.

I said WoW clone, not furry land.

Gx1080:

Well, nobody has gone broke by doing a F2P WoW close.
So yeah.

In Alganon’s case, they ended up with Derek Smart for a developer. Better or worse than going broke?
In any case, the larger point to bear in mind is that nobody who has cloned WoW has done significantly better than anyone who has cloned EverQuest.
Cloning WoW is largely considered a fool’s errand these days, but the armchair developers love to pull the “they should have cloned WoW card” on anything they don’t like which didn’t.

Scott, Just curious. Are MMO companies using schedulers at all in your experience. I mean someone who’s job is solely using a piece of software to compile a schedule and hold team meetings to get reasonable ideas of manpower and time management?

It seems like they don’t as I read time after time about companies looking like they were surprised at how much longer and more expensive a project turns out to be than they expected. Seems like the development of a modern day MMO has grown enough that such a position would be necessary, but I get the impression they still just hire and plan as they go.

Vetarnias:

@Geldonyetich
based on most accounts I’ve read, STO failed because of

Hold up, by “accounts” do you perchance mean “armchair game developer rants” and by “STO failed” do you perchance have a good definition of “failure” beyond “I didn’t care much for it?”

Me, I tend not to chalk up a game as a failure until the company goes under or insiders of that company reveal it did not meet their expectations.

VPellen:

You know, back when I was a young boy and a game fell flat on its face, we used to attribute it simply to the fact that the game was shit.

I know – then along comes casual-friendly mechanics, and suddenly a game being shitty appears to be a point in its favor.

I’m quite happy to say that a game has “failed to entertain me,” and no doubt I’ll have a long armchair rant to vent how disappointed I am that I wasn’t entertained. However, I think it’s important to bear in mind that my opinion is subjective, your mileage may vary.

If we’re going to stay “the design is failed,” it’s still too ambiguous:
* If a design as technically failed, than STO crashed and burned with inoperable servers. It did not, though I’d not be surprised to have seen a hiccup or two.
* If a design failed to innovate much, you’re going to have to tell me how it failed to innovate.
* If a design failed to capture its intended fanbase, you first have to establish that this did, in fact, happen, and second you have to establish that this is the fault of the design rather than external factors the sign could have no influence over.
* If a design failed to entertain you.. well, that goes back to the previous paragraph: it’s subjective.

So, which of these “failures” are you referring to when you speak of Star Trek Online and how it invalidates Emmert as being a credible source for identifying that emulating World of Warcraft produces no real advantage (as we can verify by looking at the subscription numbers of the MMORPGs that have)?