f13.net

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_213/6341-Casualty-of-Warhammer

How about "the game was beaten into submission by itself".  

Don't bother reading this trash.  It's written by someone that can't see the obvious design flaws in the game that they worked for.  

Author's delusional.

Meh, he's under an NDA and fairly neutered in what he can say about Mythic.  Plus he was a low man on the totem.  I just though it was interesting from an employee's POV.

It's always good to get an insider's view.  Sadly, this article just reads as 4 pages of "The job was fun until we all started getting laid off."

I appreciate the link, but found the content to be lacking.

Well someone just cut his job pool in the gaming industry down.

:why_so_serious:


Are you kidding me that no one, even the CSR's post launch had ideas of customer gripes? Even this "journalist" which by definition requires you to find an unbiased point of view or research?

Game journalist.  Even worse.

A broken pencil of an interview.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting much and he delivered.

Fuck I just read the whole thing before reading everyone's comments.

This guy seems pretty clueless of a lot of things.

It's not an unrealistic expectation. Generally very few people work as a CSR with no aspiration to do anything else (the few that do are rapidly promoted to lead roles in CS). Given that CSRs are the people who know the game the best it's also not a bad place to look for new content developers, assuming they are otherwise qualified.

Most of the mid-level producers on Warhammer in 2008 (including probably every name you can reel off from people who've appeared publically) were CSRs on DAOC in 2001. Jeff Hickman, who currently is #2 at Mythic, was hired to create their CS department and moved to game development from there. It's certainly not unreasonable for the new hires to see that history and go "hey, that could happen to me, too!".

This is also not unique to Mythic. In fact the only company I know where CS isn't seen as a stepping stone to bigger and better things is Blizzard, because Blizzard has several hundred (if not more) CSRs and there's no way they can all get promoted into development (plus, most of them are here in Austin, several time zones away from Blizzard's game teams).


Of course they did, but you have to balance the "we're all in a bunker together" mentality against that. Also, the really caustic gripes didn't start echoing outside the hard core until about a month after ship.

I spent a lot of my time in Mythic with CS, and in fact was hired to do the CS tools they used for DAOC (I would hope to god EA got them better ones than what one crazed Delphi programmer could crap out in 3 months for Warhammer, though). The CSRs I knew had a *very* realistic appraisal of the games' faults and virtues, far more so than anyone else on the development team.

That last part would make a story worth reading.  Shame that isn't what came forward.  I understand why he didn't choose to tell the story this way.  Burning bridges and all that.

Not only would it not be terribly different from what you read here, it would not surprise me if some posted here anonymously. It's not like hardcore MMO gamers suddenly stop being hardcore MMO gamers when they get hired.

True story - a developer at another MMO studio (whom I won't name - he was fairly high profile as was the game he worked on) was a avid - RABID - player of DAOC. He played a high RR hunter. Constantly gave me flack about it too (Midgard often percieved itself as the poor stepsister - sometimes accurately, sometimes not). He also posted on the VN boards (which were the main DAOC community) constantly, which I would read.

After a particularly harsh hunter nerf was announced, he posted a long diatribe about how Mythic never played their own game, didn't care about their customers, was completely clueless, and it was all just a slap in the face to players. I immediately IM'd him when I read it. "Dude. You KNOW that's not right. You had your OWN players say that about you. DUDE."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. But come on, look at those patch notes!"

I bet I could get different answers out of that guy.

By different, I mean better.

And by guy you mean semi-sentient glob of goo?

Well. It's hard to talk about. They let him write it himself and represent himself, so there was no need to get verification on anything. Easy way out for Escapist imo.

Someone there should've interviewed him FOR REAL and put it together and actually gotten more than one side of the whole thing. Meh. Whatever. Not even worth talking about really. Not even really an interview.

From the article:


And suddenly I understand MMO CSRs that little bit better.


Uhh, I got concentrated nerd on me. It stains.

The story - "I had a great job that was peachy until the customers came along and the game failed then I got fired" - isn't that interesting. What is interesting is that it shows how much Kool-Aid was being drunk inside of Mythic about how big WAR was going to be. It certainly doesn't seem that they were sparing any expense internally prior to launch.

This little story gave a great deal of insight into how fucked up everything was at Mythic.  The dude probably would like to get hired again doing something so I don't think he would come out with all guns blazing. 

I must have missed it.  He liked his job.  The atmosphere was fun.  Then people got fired.

The only bit of information I got from the story is that noone will comment on the trip WAR took from 1 million boxes sold to a small fractions of remaining players.    The author was either in denial about this or is being candid to keep his options open.  I respect him for the latter, if that's the case, but the story wasn't all that informative. 

and


tell me quite a bit.  Huge disconnect between reality and the people running the show.  I thought it was an interesting, if not particularly shocking, read.

MMO CSRs are a bunch of $8-$10 an hour gaming nerds who don't get benefits. All those other things used to describe them are just sensationalism on the writer's part.

Those who DON'T want to be CSR's but take such a job because they need one, probably - more often than not, do a bad job.

Yes, Ghost - to this:


Except, you have it backwards. The CSR sounds relatively deluded.

Edit: I should point out that I don't think it's fair that CSRs and QA folks in gaming - the bad and the good - get paid and treated the way they do. Generally considered contractors, Part-Time with Full-time hours, and always second-class citizens, they are the morlocks of the gaming industry. The ones that aren't stupid learn things they shouldn't learn and use that knowledge to gain a leg up in the industry. Others that may or may not be stupid get turned off of the industry so hard, they leave. And then there are others that are just like "AWESOME, I WORK IN THE INDUSTRY." The latter group is who I'd want as CSRs. The first group is just creepy and the second group is probably the most common. It's depressing.

I wonder how much time he spent on whacky pranks with developers.

Really what you describe, Schild, is true of any CSR job for any industry.

This isn't completely true. A guy I know who was pasting funny Diablo 2 / Battle.net support email issues into IRC in ~2001 ended up landing on the team that did monster pathing and spawn locations in WoW, and dropped off the radar about 3 years ago - which is pretty much what he did pre-WoW announcement too. I only "know" the guy through IRC.

I know.

I liked this review, but it struck me as being written more for someone like me (someone who has no idea what the hell the inside of the gaming industry is like), as opposed to a person in the know.  He styled it more as a reporter, with his cheezy analogies and whatnot, than as an actual CSR.  He made little specific reference to what his job was in game.

After I read all your posts it did then occur to me that he was either skirting around the true reason WAR flopped, or he truly didn't know.  I mean, he does mention several times that he was a console gamer and not an MMORPG one.  Still though, as a CSR he must have had some clues that the game wasn't up to par when people petitioned him to free them from being stuck inside the ground, or why their chat box keeps reseting and what not.

I don't think it is an either/or situation.  Probably plenty of delusion all the way around. 

I agree. There were about 2 sentences in that whole article that were illuminating in any way. The rest was some "games journo" trying to be eloquent and failing miserably.

He really didn't. It was like an adult version of "How I Spent My Summer Vacation."

Nothing informative here.  Ok, they had a party at launch, things were good for a while so they ate and drank, things turned to shit and people got laid off, life sucked he got laid off, Aion came out and kicked WHO's ass.  The end

I enjoyed reading it as a puff piece, but it certainly wasn't illuminating in any way. I think it was kind of like if our First MMO that we all think back on fondly was one where we were a CSR.

This is about as good as saying someone did an interview with McDonalds, but instead of interviewing the CEO they interview the assistant fry cook at chain# 45,889.

Doesn't Blizzard treat CS like a real job/career and not just bitchwork as well? Or was that QA?

QA doesn't make shit at Blizzard.

Even with a CEO, the story wouldn't be much different.  The problem is at this point, many people want to see a verification of statement "The game is sinking due to poor design, and management knew it".  However, no one is going to do that while the game lives.

Hell I would have been happy with a few CSR war stories about dickwads and how they were handled/tortured and maybe an anecdote or two about clueless newbie mistakes he made dealing with live customers  during launch week.  Capping it off with the story of how he and the intrepid band of CSRs he was part of finally convinced the developers that contribution points were in fact busted would have been icing on the cake.  Instead he chose to waste a 1000 or so words on a story that could be summed up with "I got a job at a game company, it was cool until they laid everybody off."

Exactly. Nobody knows what's going on at ground level more than QA and CS. Nobody. Nobody else stares at the game for a straight eight hours a day. Nobody else plays it more as an actual game in order to do their jobs. There was a great story to be told, he squandered it and we got a piece of shit.

That's what makes it so :why_so_serious:

No doubt plus its a great for management to see how committed someone is to their product and the company's lifestyle. But there was delusions of grandeur
"we all knew we would be promoted to development within a year"


I have no doubt there are very smart people there that fought for the game and i'd rather hear postmortem stories. That was my major problem with his article that he totally whitewashed the product. He blamed gold farmers/cheaters/wotlk for his job demise without mentioning any faults and how the front line tried to resolve it, or even mention why they were bleeding numbers

Of all the problems that led to the game's failure, gold farmers would have to be about 29th on the list. 

I still say the article had the feel of a writing exercise along the lines of 'explain working in the gaming industry to someone who has no idea'.  Someone like me.  In that sense, it worked.  Had I only read it and no other source, I would have said, cool article.  It's only after I read all your comments that I said, they're right, this dick was trying to pull the wool over my eyes.


Lol.  It's funny you should mention that.  In one way they were the last straw in this game for me and my roomate.  While were were getting spammed by gold (which by itself was harmless), we said to each other, is their anything in this game worth buying with gold?  Any gold?  :oh_i_see:

I read the "we would all be devs in a year" thing as a tongue in cheek, almost wistful throwaway. As in "I'm going to be homeless but my friends and I were all bright eyed and innocent this time last year even though deep down we knew it was a sham". Because that's what EVERYONE on the lower rungs of the gaming industry feels like when they start. Read in that sense it's the only rhetorical flourish in the entire piece that works.

Speak for yourself, hombre.

Have you been building stills in your cubicle again?

Alright, EVERYONE may be hyperbole. But there are a ton of fresh faced young turks chomping at the bit to do the whole elbow grease rags to riches thing while the old hands knowingly nod to them... "Oh, wait until crunch time. Wait until the rumored layoffs." And then the old hands kill themselves or leave to do something else or shoot their families in fits of madness only to have those young guns become the grizzled vets. The cycle starts anew and the industry continues to eat its own young in a smorgasbord of terrible MMOs and retread shooters.

That's not even cynicism. It's just ridiculous.

I am being completely serious at all times.

Don't pretend like that post wasn't serious until I pointed out how ridiculous it was. I know exactly the type of people you're talking about. They don't belong in the industry and neither would the ones that follow in their footsteps.

Look, everyone that's been around here a while knows you've got some serious fucking bad blood worked up over injustices in the industry - particularly given recent events. Fine. Great. Now get over it. Shit happens in the gaming industry and every single other industry.

My intent was serious but the tone wasn't. It was hyperbolizing. I'm not as worked up as the character I play on television.

But since we're talking about it, the lower and middle tiers of the industry are driven by it. I'm not sure how anyone could say it's not or that it's so controversial a topic that industry work standards haven't been written about before, at length. Whether we're talking about crunch time horrors or a constant churn of ex-Gamestop employees with enough coding knowledge to do simple scripting most companies are horribly broken. This isn't about Bioware or Blizzard; this is about Mythic or whatever horrible budget deer hunter studio is down the street. It's an industry where the head of the organization in charge of developer advocacy publicly said that if someone isn't willing to work 80 hours a week they can fuck right off.

So if something is wrong and part of that wrongness is that a lot of companies give a wink and a nudge to the new meat that of course they'll be on the dev team in a year and of course CS is a great way to run your own dev house someday when the new meat has a journalism degree then, yes, that's worth mentioning.

he has a point

My previous software companies 30+ CSR's got full medical, 401K, vacation time, and other benifits. Sometime after I left the company they got rid of all of them and hired workers in India. So is this a post India CSR thing?

My current software company has only 1 CSR who gets full benifits but I guess that is also a special case.

There are always exceptions to the rule.  Mostly though, the rule holds.

Insightful.

Somewhere, on that doll, someone touched you. My first experience had a bit of crunch, but who cares, I wanted to be there. On top of that, no one promised anything. Sure, it probably happens here and there and sure, absolutely, I'm not as much a naive fool as 90% of the lower level game dev folks probably are, but at the same time you're evangelizing for the little man. Yea, they're put through shit, and unfortunately 90% of the ones encountered are shit. If half the QA/CSR industry had their shit together, they'd have demanded something better from companies a long time ago. It's a case of reaping what you sow.

Also, no one in the history of Work has ever put 80 hours of ACTUAL work into something. Maybe something they loved - but labors of love tend to be the OCD focus of people who can do 80 hours of work. But your average employee? GTFO with that. They can say to expect to work 80 hours, but at least 25 of those are dicking around.

This actually isn't about me. I was treated extremely fairly from a labor standpoint when I was working in the industry. I didn't work 80 hour weeks. Trite dig about dolls and touching does not a point make.

Let's look at the phrase we love to jump on in the WAR forum. The one about the three star talent with five star drive. That frame of mind ONLY works in an industry where you're willing to drive away five star talent. It was revealing not just for Barnett's little Napoleon complex but because he said what a lot of devs think: give me a dude who can do 85 hours of work in 80 hours silently instead of a dude who can do 100 hours of work in 80 loudly.

That's fucked. And it's widespread. There are well meaning people who paid their dues with promises of one more title being the thing that would get them out of the crunch hangover only to never get the carrot and burn themselves out. This isn't some mystery. And I'm going to bat for the little guy here knowing they're mostly not deserving; it takes two to do this and it would be nice if there weren't some seat filler in the next mall over willing to start the whole cycle over again but there always is. But there always will be and at some point someone in a position of power might figure out that maybe it would help cut down on the increasingly buggy games if you had reliable, experience low to mid range QA, tools coders, CS, etc instead of constantly churning.

As to the point about actually putting in 80 hours of WORK, that's irrelevant. At some point the guy in the office that 80 hours is going to want a family. What if the guy is a girl and wants to start a family? Are we going to essentially tell everyone over 30 or with a real life not to apply? If so what does that say about the industry? Because it's one thing to be a hotshit banker putting in the 80 hours willingly to make enough to secure those things on his own terms but it's entirely another thing when it's 25k a year and threats of firing when the entire crunch time cycle could be prevented if everyone stopped playing Quake in Year One of development. The former is real life with real choices, the latter is a kids' industry made to be staffed by kids. If everyone agrees that it's high time the industry grew up maybe we should expect a little better instead of excusing those sorts of dysfunctional relationships.

Any industry with a chance for advancement is going to have heavy hours for newbs. 

The video game industry is completely fucking dysfunctional. Management treats the QA guys like the casting couch whores and the idiotic QA guys take it because they one day hope to be video game rockstars. The industry produces things that gamers dream about, and as such, management treats the naive little tits like cumdumpsters.

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa not really.

It's more like the QA knows they're replaceable, the management know they're replaceable and every time they post an entry level position, they get flooded.

They're really not treated poorly in a social sense, they're just not paid well enough - mostly because they'll never band together and ask for more because right when they do, a bigger group will band together and take $8 an hour.


What bothers me is how many inept people get hired.

I wasn't talking about socially. I was talking about how QA is expected to work.

I hate to see intelligent people rip each other for no reason. Here:

Praag folded. (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=883)

If that's not enough of a distraction, you can yell at this noob for double posting. I put that in another thread too.

I thought this was my entire point?

And we're not ripping each other. We're having a debate. Sort of.

The similarities between the porn industry and the gaming industry revealed. (http://www.killtenrats.com/2009/04/13/game-developers-and-porn-stars/)

Allow me to play the world's smallest Linkin Park cd for you.

I'm doing my work for companies that make "casual" games nowadays. Less bullshit rockstar mentality, more stable hours and a decent wage.

No gamer is going to be impressed that I worked on "Jizz Mopper 5", but it's better than working QA on some big title anyday. Better being defined as "I'm not going to get shitcanned next week because the funding dried up, or the manager OD'ed on coke over the weekend and now no one knows what the hell to do next..."

My new worries are about outsourcing and the casual bubble bursting.   :|

Ride it while it lasts! I'm sure by the time casual games dry up, there will be a new thing called something like e-Web, everybody will flock to it, and it'll be all about the synergy!

 :ye_gods:  I'm not sure if I want to know if thats the real name, or something that just spawned in your imagination . Especially with the previous linking of porn stars with game devs. :ye_gods: 

It used full mo-cap technology and the Wii version was particularly interactive.

Every part of the industry has that shit, including the casual part.