f13.net

Word is EA Mythic will be losing somewhere between 60 to 70 employees today. Rumor has it that EA hasn't cut costs in downsizing and will be having meetings that may or may not include a real, live executioner. This isn't the typical shedding of low-level QA/CS that's been happening a round the industry. Though they're letting go of more CS, they're also letting go of designers, artists, programmers, and community management folks - including some senior level employees. But no actual management! It looks as though famed jackass Paul Barnett gets to keep his job.

Edit: I can confirm that the numbers being tossed around on other websites are wrong. Also, other rumors:
 
Mythic, as of right now, is NOT moving to Austin, despite rumors.
Mythic, as of right now, is NOT closing CS, despite rumors.
Mythic, as of right now, is NOT going to get folded into another company, despite rumors.

Too bad we can't have the F13 tradition of schild interviewing some of the formers after they get the axe.  Those were always fun times.

As someone else said it "Mythic executives aren't going to fire themselves." Since no one at EA is canning them yet, no such interview could exist. Also, what could the interview possibly amount to? Mark Jacobs has a GIANT HEAD and Paul Barnett is an egotistical, irresponsible, unprofessional jackass with a propensity towards being a sycophant?

Yea, not exactly the most surprising of interviews.

Remember back when Mythic was bought-out and we said, "You're doomed" only to have Mark come out and say "No, no, they're different now.  It won't go down like that. EA's changed!  They won't force us to release the game early and then slash jobs when things go south.  They're totally different now! They mean it this time!"

Yeah. 

So you say you ran into a wall, Sally? Pity.

Err, how much of that is EA vs Mythic's dated understanding of the genre?

Does it really matter? Both places are clueless.

But it's the player's fault, I mean economy, I mean...

New fish, do try to keep up, we don't do green anymore.

Also, he said that these were - in short - planned.

http://warhammerherald.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=607

That company desperately needs PR people.

I was going to mention this. Claiming this is their shift from launch to post-launch is, sadly, bullshit I think most fanboys will buy into.

Sad and not surprising.  Which is all the more sad.

For the record, I hope they turn WAR around so I can try it.  But I also hope someone will stab Paul Barnett with a canoe and I'm not sure which is the more likely to happen first.  I can't wait forever.

He can always get a job selling used cars if this doesn't work out for him.

"So tell me again why gas mileage doesn't matter um... Mark?"

What a sad turn of events. Small fish gets eaten by big fish. I wonder if they would have been better off just doing their own thing like they were.

Don't you typically use your spare dev staff after a launch to, you know, start new projects? I can't recall any company I've worked for being in a good place, releasing a product, and then saying "thanks guys, great work! Clean out your desks."

You haven't worked for EA.

You could blame EA, but I recall Mark saying that Mythic was still his to run. Sometimes it hurts to open your mouth and say too much.

Since it hasn't been definitively pointed out yet, if Blizzard (and common sense) have taught us anything about staffing it's that once an MMO launches you should be resizing upwards. Mythic was trying to finish an MMO; now they're trying to finish an MMO and service millionsthousands of paying customers.

They still haven't made it out of the 90's era 'Make Game, Get Paid, Go Home' mentality.

Mark said recently Mythic weren't starting work on another game, as if that was a good thing.  Doesn't look that way now.

for whatever reason this statement was crosswired in my brain to the following imagry:

Blame me too.  I still use green.  I'll quit, I promise.

Elite management team still in place (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFBDxHyGGmk).

What... the... fuck?

he's now a vid-blogger, keep up.

PaulBarnett^TM wacky celebrity is his main concern.  The self-promotion train is now leaving for all parts new-work.

I haven't even started to use green yet!  This sucks.

It was Mark's goal to keep growing and adding servers, not the other way around. Seriously, he had no clue the game would bomb like it did, he actually somehow thought this game would continue to grow like... that other game did...

So really, it makes sense that they kept so many extra people on the staff. They were all planning for a million+ subs at the end of Q4 and thus their spots in the office were justified.

But not anymore. Now it's being spun to sound like "Oh, we were totally planning on cutting all these jobs."

edit: Dragon Age actually sounds decent. That combined with D3 could be fun...

What? When? How? How am I supposed to know sarcasm without color coding!

Seriously, when did we stop using green and why? Inquiring minds want to know and knowing is half the battle! Or is saying we're not using green yet more sarcasm that's not color coded? I'm so confused...

Someone pointed out to Schild in one of the WAR threads that VN started using green for sarcasm, too.

I look forward to his future Shamwow infomercials.

Dear god what the hell is that, and why is it not being burned with fire.

Somehow I don't think he's going to approve my comment.

I imagine you can make a comparison between Paul Bartnett and theatrics to explain his "success" the same way you could explain how theatrics applies to Chris Nolan's Batman.

Actually it was MMORPG.com forums I believe.

It doesn't matter. We should be able to just read and figure out when something is sarcasm.

My opinion, if sarcasm isn't immediately recognizable, the writer sucks.

What?  No.

What?

If sarcasm isn't immediately recognizable, it's good sarcasm.  If your sarchasm is too shallow for anyone to fall into, what's the fucking point of it?  Just say 'bad things are dumb' and get it over with.

I always figured green text existed because readers suck. It's the like a giant neon sign that says "take a deep breath internet tough guy"

I think these were the programmers who worked on the contribution code:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_8yPap-k_s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_8yPap-k_s)

He did, we laughed.  This is what I was referring to, earlier.  Everyone under the sun here and on blogs was like "WTF, Mark?" IIRC.  He proceeded to say lots of things disconnected from the reality of selling your company to another one.  Things along the lines of "We're still in control" and "We get to decide when things are go, not some corporate bean counter."

I laughed then. I figured everyone else was, too.

This thread seems to be full of suck!   (http://www.realitybbqforums.com/images/smilies/tease.gif)

The ego of Paul Barnett extends across the vastness that is the internet.

I hope you mean the mmo industry.

Mainly because a lot of MMO development spend all their money just getting to the point of launch and hope for millions of dollars to keep rolling in so they can keep the server lights on.

Unfortunately it seems the amount of money rolling in don't meet with business plan expectations (assuming there are real business plans - I'm looking at you, HGL) so MMOs just after launch can go straight into purgatory mode - enough money to keep going, not enough money to improve.

Yes. I totally agree.

 :grin:

What about WAR is EA's fault? They could have launched THIS Fall and the result would be the same. It was Mythic ignoring feedback from testers from back when something could have been done about it. If this was Mythic self-publishing, the only difference I could see is they probably would have started with fewer subs. Everything else about the actual state of this game lays entirely at their feet.

Seriously. For once it's not EA's bastard bourgeois stranglehold over the poor proletariat studios fucking things up. EA didn't hire Barnett, EA didn't have a sham of a beta, EA didn't increase XP needed to level with no testing, EA didn't force Mark Jacobs to act like a retard on every board imaginable, EA didn't spin things that the poor guys laid off somehow fucking deserved it because of some master plan whereby your company contracting is a sign of success.

As a general rule, I don't get MMO nerdrage. They're games, not lifestyles, and I treat them as such. But I've never wanted a group of idiots to get their comeuppance like Jacobs and Barnett. That spin on the layoffs tore it from me. Crash and burn, Mythic.

For the most part, Mythic itself doesn't deserve the ire.  It's mostly Jacobs, and to a lesser extent, Paul that are responsible for driving the game and the company into the ground.  If EA got rid of Jacobs and those in management who were his yes-men and put in someone who actually had a clue, the game could be much better off.

What a shocking turn of events.

Edit: The people running MMO numbers are like the people in 1999 who convinced everyone that if only 1% of pet owners bought dog food online then buydogfoodhere.com would rake in billions.

Instead of thinking "We need 5% of the subs of WOW to break even" they need to think "we need twice the subs of EQ2 and more subs than any game we've produced has come close to putting up even when there was no real competition."

That's essentially it for me as well. WAR is crashing and burning not because of the poor bastards who are getting laid off. WAR is crashing because of the fucktards steering the ship into a series of icebergs. EA should cut off the head and let, I dunno. Teletubbies or something run the company instead. Fewer people would lose their jobs and the game would suck less with someone else in management.

I don't care if Mythic is the House That Mark Built, he needs to go.

Mythic should have kept making smaller, more versatile online games.

The stuff they did in the 90s was revolutionary, and they could be making a killing on small mmo-like games with microtransactions. Aliens Online, Magestorm, Silent Death. These games fucking rocked. Warhammer sucks nuts.

I agree. Silent Death Online was fucking awesome. I remember playing that a long time ago.

Sanya's take on this (http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2009/02/04/if-ignorance-burned-the-internet-would-be-on-fire/) is telling. Basically, it was more than just some random QA guy hired on for the 'push' of release, it was some pretty high up senior people that were axed. And it wasn't EAs doing.

Been a bit of a (heh) trying day.  Paul Barnett 4th Feb 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkNwGwlRP9w)

Please tell me that isn't real.

Magnetic north of wrong, remember?  Of course its real.  How could it not be?

Look, when bank bosses fuck up and lose billions we heap money on them and give them another go. Why should it be different with MMORPGs?

Yeah, I was just reading that ealier.  Worth quoting for the lazy or those who might have overlooked the link:

I don't get the hate for Paul B. I understand you may not like his style. I like his enthusiasm. While I may not have the skill to determine whether he is good or bad in his career, I enjoy his excitement for the topic. I liked the tag teaming Paul and that other guy did.


Wasn't Sanya's Husband still employed by Mythic  thought I remember reading at the time she left Mythic, in a artist or designer role?

I think she's assuming the wrong thing about EA. I, personally at least, aim not to say that EA is evil. That's too easy. But they are terribly predictable. Obviously, even if Mythic was independent, these firings still would've occurred. They were staffed for easily double the number of subs WAR ended up with. Other companies however at least make some aim to restructure and reallocate where possible. I'm sure a number of people from Mythic could've gone over to Bioware Austin or Maxis or any of the other divisions that seem to be staffing up nonstop until the end of time. EA is content with completely cutting strings though.

If EA weren't involved it would've been a case of "lol, results of failed expectations are obvious results." I'm just cynical enough to side with corporations sometimes and say "if they were let go, there's probably a good reason beyond failing to meet expectations." I've seen lots of good people let go from companies, but I've seen many, many more bad ones who were just dead weight.

Also, I don't see the difference between posting on forum between bouts of masturbation and nosepicking and posting on a blog between bouts of masturbation and nosepicking. Though, if it's on a blog, you can feign superiority.

Edit: Clarity.

[/quote]

You mean standard corporate culture?  That these are seen as anything other than normal parts of having a job tells me the games industry is worse off than I ever suspected.

I see lots of talk of "loyalty" not being rewarded. Loyalty is for private firms, not publicly traded companies trying to stem the tide of red receipts.  Those axe jobs and whole divisions while the core executive ladder is reshuffled.  Perhaps all the Mythic alums shouting about how unfair this is are just too emotionally invested because these are their friends.  This is business as usual for EA or any corporation. This is why it was a 'bad idea' to be absorbed by the beast, because you lose options like they're saying "why didn't you cut pay, reduce executive salaries, etc." 

Then again, this could be a purely Mark fuck-up. As the division pres he could have seen if other divisions would hire, or offered some referrals.  However, we don't know if he looked into that and was denied. 

I never took part in any comments made about EA, now or back when they bought Mythic, I had no strong feelings either way. 

It strikes me as odd for Sanya to be defending EA now, when I remember lots of people predicting downsizing at Mythic when EA was first mentioned, kinda like "you might have been right but, it was for the wrong reasons".  If defending EA is meant to shift our nosepicking focus back onto Mythic management, A. it's not very subtle and B. If there are issues there (apart from the obvious game design/senior personalities), then someone needs to dish the dirt, just so we can have some real masturbation material.

The difference is blogging works best with two hands. The others work fine with one.

As for that video: amateur hour. Don't vidblog after a few drinks.

I read Sanya's post as placing the blame firmly on Mythic management. She's saying, "Don't blame EA for this - they weren't the douchebags here". Now, if Mythic wasn't part of EA they may have let fewer people go, but WAR was a flop. If 500k was break even, and they had visions of 1m subs, they are in a big hole.

Mythic is a independent studio made big. They released a big investment, it flopped, people have to go or the whole company closes. EA's probably a little busy elsewhere right now, but at some point Jacobs, Barnett et al will have to explain how things went so horribly wrong. After that point, they might not have a job anymore.

So yeah, it hurts at Mythic (apart from Party Time with Barnett) but that's business on a product with south of $100m invested in it.

I would be very depressed if WAR cost $100M to make.

It's still astounding how they managed to fuck it up. It's just, argh, it's just some of the worst design decisions shortly prior to launch and post launch I've ever, ever seen.

Hey we just laid off people! They're out of jobs in a depression and probably won't have one for four or five years! They'll lose their houses, cars, families! Probably end up on the street! But the game goes on! Let's party!

If one of the laid off devs shoots up Mythics HQ, all he needs to do is show that video to the jury.

Schild, just south of 100m I put the rest of the quote in here for... well just for laughs; "I asked if Mythic’s parent company EA spent $100 million on “Warhammer Online.” “No, but you look at what we did spend, it was lot of money,” he said. Jacobs would only tell me that they’ve spent south of $100 million on “Warhammer Online,” and that’s because he and his team have the experience and the technology behind the game. “We are one of the most experienced MMO teams in the industry, and we had to delay the game obviously more than once,” he said. “And if we had that happen, when you have an experienced team with great tech who’s done this before, how much harder is that for somebody who’s never done it? No matter how talented the team is, they’re going to make mistakes."

Linky: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/29/ea-mythic-activision-world-of-warcraft-estimate-is-overblown/

Did anyone point out to him that Blizzard had never made an mmo before?

That's the core problem with WAR: greed.  MJ wants a WoW sized playber, but he's not willing to put the effort into getting it. This occurred in DAoC with the ToA expansion.   I think he admitted that he did the expansion in an effort to steal subscribers away from Everquest.  Rather than improve on DAoC's RvR-based endgame, he created a cheap, buggy clone of Everquest that drove people awy from the game.  They can spin the numbers all they want, but when you create a "classic" server set that has the expansion's content turned off, and it become more popular than your regular ruleset, something is wrong.

Now, we turn to WAR.  MJ claims to have "learned his lesson", and that he would be satisfied with a niche playerbase.  300,000 is definitely a niche playerbase, and it is respectable number, but considering the drop in number from the game's release, it's nothing more than staggering.  Had MJ really learned, take the concepts of RvR that were good in DAoC, improved them, and then incorporated some of the ideas from WoW that are successful, and utilize more moden technology, the game could have had a much better start.  There would have been a drop in subscribers, but nowhere near as bad.   

I find it funny that for all the company's claims of "we're not competing with WoW", it tried to do exactly that - create a game that appealed to both WoW and DAoC players, with the emphasis on WoW's players. 

I also find it humorous that all of WAR's supporters are emphasizing that the playerbase size is respectable - which it is - but also ignoring the staggering drop that represents as well as the fact that the game was built to compete with WoW.

My pet theory is Tolkien Enterprises have been pulling the strings all along, they killed off Iron Crown Enterprises, which halted the Rolemaster/Mythic DAoC deal, which forced Mythic to go with a bad copy of EQ combat for DAoC.  Which ultimately leads to Mythic settling for a sub par engine for WAR as they think doing a similar poor imitation of WoW combat for WAR will be good enough.  All leading back to Turbine picking up a couple of dozen extra LOTRO subs, making more profit for Tolkien Enterprises.

Can you blame EA?  They forked over a lot of money and granted them a couple of delays only to receive an unpolished, Warhammer skinned DAOC.  EA isn't a charity, and when your project shits the bed your employees pay the price.

I can guarantee that were I EA overlord I'd be sending the hatchet man over to Mythic as well.

ETA:  I see others have already responded in a like vein.  Sorry for the redundancy.   :oops:

Look, that doesn't make Mythic unique. Everyone's doing a WoW knockoff, either in the combat mechanics or the quest based gameplay. Everyone.

What makes Mythic so monolithically unique is how absolutely amateur they are. Each and every decision they've made since release has been the wrong one. Without fail. And this layoff stuff is the icing on the cake: a cold as fuck press release and then a youtube video of Barnett partying in the office. This is Flagship stuff. Fuck, this is the kind of shit you expect from a shoestring Java company staffed by three neckbeards without a single bar of soap between them. But not a AAA super studio. Not from a group of guys who've been around for this long.

This was a slam dunk. An absolute slam dunk with the IP and WoW burnout creeping in for so many players.

As a denouement, I may be overly sensitive because I just got lain off from a game studio but that press release and video have me riled the fuck up. I always come back to MMOs. Always. I get a little bored with WoW or whatever and check in for a month to see how things have shaped up, sometimes two or three. I was considering checking Warhammer after this free expansion, maybe after Slayers, but not now. Not a dime of my money will go to them. Like I stated, I don't understand MMO nerdrage over companies and games like you're some sort of jilted lover if your class gets nerfed but this? Man, fuck these guys.

This is what annoyed me so much. Most of beta? Fun! It was DAOC again, with updates and all our old enjoyment and some battlegrounds that weren't Thid, wheee!

And then, randomly, they scrapped the whole system, threw some other shit in, cranked up the pve grind, and called it gold. What the shit.

The sad irony in that, is it failed to pull off a DaoC remake as well.

The problem is that the wrong people got the axe.

hehe well... not everyone  :wink:

Mythic is not alone in this.

No, for a supposed big boy, top notch studio they're pretty unique in how stupid they've been.

Destination Games/NCsoft and TR was an even more epic fail. So was Sigil and Vanguard.

I'll give you TR but Vanguard was strictly second tier material even at the height of its hype.

The thing about TR is that even with a shitty game at launch they at least made some feeble attempt to move the right direction. I would read press releases and patch notes and think, "Okay, not for me but that sounds like the right general direction to go in." I never read a single sentence by Mythic regarding WAR that made me think that.

It wasn't trying to imply that anything was EA's fault, just that i wonder how things would have shaken down if EA had not bought mythic. I would imagine that anytime a merge like that happens, the office flow that once was, will be gone due to the new overlords. I have seen it happen, and have been in it, its not really fun and a lot of things get shaken up. Not to mention that all of EAs' problems, are now Mythics too.

Yes, it's amazing how many of the issues that creeped up in DAoC are creeping up in WAR.  For me, what baffles me is how you can use the same graphics engine in one game and be successful with it, and the fuck it up with another game.  If you're making such drastic changes to your characters that you need to redo how you use the engine and the process spawn tons of glitches and are unable utilize things like SLI and Crossfire, maybe it's time to rethink things.

Wow, what a perfectly obvious statement. How could I have not seen this?

Addendum A: It is fairly standard with most companies these days, when leaving their employ, to sign basic agreements such as "I will not poach employees from you for X years" or, "I will not disparage you publically for Y years (or ever)". You might want to think of this before demanding, as you put it, masturbation material.

Addendum B: Since I did not actually sign any of these, I can safely say that Paul's video last night was ... well, I didn't sign anything, but I also generally don't slag ex-coworkers into nuclear glass, either. Generally. Yeah. You go, you rebel alliance leader, you.

Posting about how games suck is all fine until people start losing their jobs, then we are meant to feel guilty about it?  I don't really disagree with that, because yeah, it really does suck, but consider while looking around for someone to blame, hint, it's not the players, not even the vocal ones.  If the comment on the demand for masturbation material was aimed at me, it wasn't a demand, Sanya clearly wanted to make the point that EA wasn't at fault, fine, but finish that thought if you can.

While I agree that loyalty to your friends is a good thing, so is maintaining a bit of professionalism.  Barnett's actions/video are inexcusable, no doubt, but that doesn't make it right to turn it into a free-for-all against <whomever>.  

After all, I'm not quite sure that dousing bridges with napalm and tossing a match is the right way to go.

It's safe to say that in this case the bridges are charred, burning, smoking ruins and still have bombers running missions every half hour just to make absolutely sure.

But yes, your point is taken. Yesterday was fairly emotional for a lot of people involved.

Way to do it: We had to lay off some very good folks yesterday. Pretty cold, we know, but our hearts go out to them. We obviously didn't pull down what we wanted, that's on us but the future's bright and it's time to move forward.

Way to not do it: Press release devaluing those who left and trying desperately to have people not look at the numbers behind the curtain. Release a video of a fat sack of English shit yukking it up in the office the day a hefty portion of your co-workers got sent home to tell their spouses they can't make mortgage this month.



This is PR 101. The entire underpinning of the MMO is that there is a consistent community, in game and out, of players and company folks. If we take that as a starting point, if that's the entire reason MMO companies have to churn out daily press releases and forum posts, then you're automatically different than a single player games studio. Act accordingly.

Besides any of that, my pinko heart doesn't like seeing workers get shit on publicly. I can't countenance it in other industries, this is no different. That video was a big shit on the folks who lost their jobs.

Seriously, all of this is just further proof the wrong people got cut.     Rather than being open and honest about the state of the game and the contributions of those who were cut, MJ hid behind a claim these were planned cuts in line with some initiative, and then tried to claim that Mythic is "customer focused".  Seriously, no one but the fanbois is going to buy that.   If there is going to be any real change in WAR or Mythic, the person most responsible needs to go.

Personally I could care less and am not surprised at any of this from Mythic.
The plain, simple fact underlying ALL of this is:

We Nerds dont make good salesmen, and we definitely dont make good PR men.  You're asking momma's-basement coders to be in touch with reality... get real, aint gonna happen.  And if you wanted a real "philosophical" reason why MMOs traditionally fail, you could use the same logic.

 

Horrible generalization. There are a number of nerds that can sell and pitch just about anything. It's just a skillset. Mark and Paul have had a string of luck, their luck simply ran out. They don't possess that skillset. But nerds? Yea, that's a bit too broad.

Depends on your audience.

 :rimshot:  Sort of.

Many of the nerds on these forums have expressed how Mythic should have handled these layoffs.

 :awesome_for_real:

I keep forgetting that's what the internet is for.  Making statements at the height of emotion that are likely come back to bite you in the ass one day.  You go, bloggers union 504. Keep burning those bridges!

That said, Paul's vid was way out of line.  Not that anything is likely to happen to him about it as it's good to be one of the royalty executives.  Then again, being drunk on company property probably carries a termination penalty. Hope on that one.

We are actually asking them to shut the fuck up.

This is a great occasion to see the difference between how the game development community works and how players think.

Defending or vilifying EA is not a black and white thing. I know it's still fun to be all emo on big corporate America, but these days I find it little more than quaint. Every relationship is much more complex than the usual perception that some management team sits on a Mountain and gets their rings kissed by developers at whim. It's rarely that way, and it really isn't in this case.

Everything that is wrong with WAR is based on decisions before they were acquired. EA is no more responsible for pushing out a bad game early than Mythic is capable of having made a good one, in this case. They came to this game without the right insights and were incapable of adapting to the truth on the ground.


That's actually not as important. What is I think is these two truths:

• So many of the big launches were also based on decisions made before those developers got into WoW beta. Totally understandable of course. There are some things you simply can't change without a TR-style reboot.
  
• Just how many people learn the wrong things from WoW.
  
  

The first is a skill thing with talent. The second is purely a talent thing. You're either capable fo learning the right lessons as a team or you are not. Generally that means a lot of people DO know the right thing to do but are overriden by the cults of personality.

I think we're asking them to drop the smoke screen and be more honest with the state of the game and the importance of the work of those who left.

Total agreement on this one.  I don't generally get mad at anyone, and willing to give everyone a second chance further down the road, even if the market doesn't.  This is the first time I've quit a game angry at the developer, and I'm still confused over it.  The game is just one big muddled mess with no direction. 
Even Age of Conan had direction.  I quit that game happy, and with the understanding that it wasn't done, but with a pretty clear vision of what they were trying to do.  I quit WoW because the direction of that game was not for me.  WAR though... I don't even know what they were trying to do, and the fact that it launched in that state, and that people are now losing jobs, and that the crater from this will affect every mmo currently in development makes my head hurt.

Maybe they can get the guy in the video a big bonus and a junket to Vegas on a private jet. Seriously, this mirrored the greater economic world so vividly. A lot of people really hurting and some top level (but bottom feeders) who just plain don't get it. We all know how bad the economic climate is. All I could think of when I saw that was my friends who are out of work and unlikely to be back in work for quite a while. One's almost suicidally depressed and I can't even imagine what would happen if they saw the equivilent from one of their managers. That video really is one of the few times when I've looked at something and thought I'd prefer not to do business with a gaming company for moral reasons. It's unforgiveable and unacceptable.

Back to the actual game and trying to do WoW business without WoW level investment (time, resources, money etc.). Wasn't Mark babbling before release that the game was going to show you could have WoW polish without a WoW budget?

In terms of who is at fault, what I can blame EA for is pushing the game out and I don't think six months more of beta would have made any difference at all. The game design from basics was bad, too much in very small instanced BGs rather than a more polished mass RVR game and resources misplaced in vast (empty and unwanted) PVE resources. On the latter, people point a lot at TOA which was what DAOC got wrong, but what they should also point at was Catacombs, which is what they got right. Right in the sense that it made levelling simpler, faster, and trivial in terms of commitment. It showed and to an extent serviced the reality that nobody in DAOC gave a damn about the PVE game whatsoever. War's failure should be laid on Mythic's doorstep.

I completely agree, and even felt so much earlier (as a lot of folks did). Paul's video crucifixions of the coder and developer were inexcusable, especially when you look at what Paul actually does for the company which as far as I can tell is not a fucking thing.

How many times was the game's release delayed?  How patient do you want EA to be?

Mark says a lot of shit. He should tell people who he bets on for football games or the such so everyone can do the opposite.

Which does fuckall for anybody outside whatever company's payroll.

No one is ever going to come public with an employed mouthpiece and say 'Our game fucking sucks total donkey ass, bugged to shit, and there's so many problems with it that it would take a complete redesign and rewrite to fix'.  Not ever.  All you or anyone else will ever get, and all we deserve is 'We've got a game that has it's issues, no doubt about that.  But potential is there, and we intend to realize that potential.  You can be here and be apart of it, or watch it from the sidelines, but we're moving forward.'

The bloated sense of self importance and entitlement of MMO gamers hurts the industry more than it helps.  Pay and play if you like it.  Don't pay or play if you don't.  

Seems simple enough, eh?  But it's not.

Sorry I wasn't clear at all, what i meant was that if pushing it out the door had been the problem (but wasn't) that I could blame EA for, but that's not where I saw the major problems in the game. I saw the faults in basic game design, the things that Mythic (one assumes) were in charge of. The faults were not in systems that could have been fixed with more beta. Ie, I was giving EA a pass.

Back in the pre-WoW era, being able to vulture over an MMO trainwreck was a rare and delightful treat. Not as many of them seemed to come out, they weren't as expensive, and the standards for success were so much lower in those days. If something came out and it was kinda shitty, but still managed to grab 200 or 300k subscribers, you called it a success and moved on.

Now? VanguardAutoAssaultTabulaRasaConanWarhammerHolyFuckingShit! Has ANYTHING been a success since WoW came out? EVE is plugging along and trending upwards in its tiny little niche, and that's one of the few bright spots. Everyone talks about what a turnaround EQ2 has made, but it only wishes it had the subscribers of peak EQ1.

Also, it sucks that people have lost their jobs. But I've publicly cackled over the smoldering ruins of too many would-be blockbuster movies with more riding on them than any MMO for my condolences to carry much weight, so I won't really bother.

Are you that dense?  Simple PR, build the confidence of those who want to stay, and maybe net a few who are the verge if coming back.

The 2 issues staring Mythic in the face is the subscription numbers and the layoffs.  The latter were handled with an epic fail.  The former, well, while I think EA wanted those numbers to be a positive announcement, it also representes a staggering  drop from previously announced numbers, and the blogs and sites are abuzz with what it means.   Hell, a simple "300,000 - we're happy with that and working hard to get more!" would suffice.  

Acknowledge the bad, put a positive spin on it, and the use something like the Russian release to show the improvements of the game.  Let people know you are paying attention to the stories around your game, and use them to retain and maybe even snag a few back in.  Really simple PR.

Do yourself a favor and re-read what I wrote.  Then edit your post accordingly.

Normally that'd make sense. Not that easy in this case though.

You can often draw new users in through some clever marketing and whitewashing WAR's own marketing is what set them up to fail. The impression they gave as a viable alternative to WoW was not matched by the experience that was delivered. And being they hyped this directly to the veteran vultures AND the WoW player, you had millions of people watching. And these are the players not coming back without substantive changes to the core systems.

Which is the second problem. You need to have a team willing to a) admit there's things wrong at the most fundamental level; and, b) be willing to soak it up and go fix it. The reason they haven't done that to date revolves around the very people still employed.

PR can only open the door. It's the game that draws people through it.

QFT.

I love reading about how "They screwed us" and "They should tell us everything that goes on in the office" and, of course..."They owe us".

I'll agree that the MMO player base is whiny, demanding, and petulant.  I am one of the first to say if you don't like a game, don't play it, and more often then not, I'll try to defend a company's decisions. 
 
However,  this isn't self entitlement.  The PR statement on the Herald was a big shaft to those workers, and by not addressing the subscription numbers in light of all the other numbers and statements by MJ, Mythic has left the door open even wider to critics that is had to be.  Mythic had a chance for some PR spinining and improving their image a little... but then MJ had to open his mouth.  It's frustrating because I want WAR to turn around and succeed, because the concpt of RvR is fun.

For as many people that complain loudly and are completely irrational, I worry more about the ones that play, don't say anything, and disappear when things go south. For them it's pay, play, and pray.

That's the market that really exists. The vocal forum warriors is the one we deserve  :why_so_serious:

In all seriousness, even the most popular official board is a probably little more than a single-digit percentage of the playerbase. And they're vocal. And usually vocal about something that makes them angry. Because people don't yell from the tops of mountains about how good things are doing. So with this vehicle of self-expression comes the expectation that someone is listening.

Smart companies know how to listen to the right things from that base. But then, smart companies usually employ the type of creatives that often don't need to listen to them  :grin:

One could blame EA for not seeing past the bullshit that Mark has undoubtedly been feeding them over the past few months. How many expensive dinners did Mark have with the EA brass where Mark has said "Shit bro, we'll turn this around. This kind of player drop totally expected, its how MMOs work, we're professionals"? How many months of cutting-block pardon did the "Two new classes and a new dungeon in a few months!" and the "We just released in Russia!" announcements give him?

I'm sure it doesn't matter. Only way Mark and Paul are going to be shown the door is if everyone else in the office is shown it before them. Trimming the fat off the offices was expected. To say EA and Mythic are banking on the Russia launch and the 1/29 announcement fluff to cauterize the wound is an understatement however. I think we all know how that is going to turn out.

300k is enough to keep WAR afloat.  Despite the drastic downward spiral, I think it's enough to ensure MJ keeps his job steering Mythic into icebergs for a good long while. 

But is isn't at 300k. It was 300k sometime before the end of December and War sure as shit didn't gain any new players since then. As others have pointing out, Q1 is going to be very telling.

It seems some people are expecting the bleeding to stop, but I really don't see any reason for it to.

Korea, Russia.

There have to be at least 30,000 idiots on WHA and VN boards alone.  That would be, like, 10% :why_so_serious:

UO, DAoC?

LotRO is making money, apparently.  Maybe some other shit I don't play, too.

DaoC has pretty much bled to death at this point.


UO still has its absolutely crazy fuckers that wont leave till the power shuts off and roaches rule the world.

Likely. Just not gobs and gobs and gobs of money that people associate with WoW. But enough to support the business and fund extra development and let people keep their jobs.

LoTRO is one of those games where the argument that a non WoW sized playerbase is a sign of success.  Meaning, the people who built it released a fairly clean product aimed at a niche market, and manage to get them.  They experienced the normal loss, but they retained enough to release an expansion that was very well done and has resulted in an increase in their playerbase size.....

Basically, LoTRO did what WAR should have done.

That being said:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21567

LOTRO appears to be growing, as well.  Seems the MOM expansion has done well. 

Yeah, it has.  Three of the 11 servers have population issues from having too many people.  Only two are considered 'low' population.  It's a fun diku game.  As long as you know going into it that it's a B-rated WoW all is good.  Heck, I'm having fun with it which is more than I can say than any mmo released in 2008. 

And develop another game, and produce 4 new zones a year for free, and about as many new features.

Seriously, Turbine always gets over looked, and they do not care to correct anyone. They are about the only dev house other than blizzard that seems to know what the hell they are doing.


I strongly disagree, but that's another topic.

This game is so highly polished and well put together that to call it a B-rated WOW doesn't nearly do it justice.  The abilities are all well designed and every class is basically fun.  I personally think it is infinitely better than WOW already and it is getting better with time.  It probably won't ever get WOW numbers, but it will surely sustain over the long haul at this point.

Link (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/live-warhammer-online-interview-soon-live-q-and-a)

How much did LotRO cost to make compared with WAR's estimated "south of 100 million" budget, assuming the 300k WAR subscribers stays stable enough to say the two are comparable in size?

We might count LotRO a success, but they also had a lot less ground to make up before breaking even.

Well, also keep in mind, that Lotro also had a game engine that's already been through two major iterations (AC2/DDO) to reuse, as well as staff that's familiar in how to use it.  That likely let them jump almost straight to zone and class prototyping.  Turbine is proving they're fairly good at long tail development and code reuse, where Mythic pretty cleary isn't.  And by code reuse, I don't mean just simply reusing the engine and piling more shit that makes it run worse on top of it, but doing it in such a fashion that it's upgradable and fairly clean to work with.  But this is all speculation, the turbine engine codebase could be a house of cards for all I really know, but it doesn't feel like it.

I don't think it has anything to do with engines or the individual employees' skills. Someone (possibly Darniaq, can't recall nor find a quote) once said that Blizzard has the process of making a game down. I think that's something that Turbine has picked up over the years aswell. The amount of :uhrr: misses in patches and expansions keeps being very small.

Let's say I don't extend this courtesy of faith to encompass Mythic.

Maybe I'm dense (highly likely  :grin:) but how can your subscriptions be "growing" while dropping from 800K to 300K.  Maybe it's the new math.

Not disagreeing with you there.  This is really all part of that long development and maintenance pipeline.  Until you have an actually reusable set of code and tools, you can't ever get there, because your base for building everything off of isn't stable and well documented.  The other company that I know for sure had this pipeline down was ArenaNet, but they diverged from that plan into Guild Wars 2 land, and who knows how that's going to turn out.

Yeah, I retract my B-rated WoW statement above.  It's a lot better than calling it that, but it's missing a little something that WoW has.  Maybe it's that the animations aren't quite as fluid, or the minor hitching/rubberbanding I get with it.  Dunno. 

But my statement was a tad harsh. 

A good process compensates for a volatile development environment. It's about delivering in spite of the natural entropy and decay of year-long projects. That's why Blizzard can develop a game for five years without seemingly losing focus and just fudging the whole deal up. In Opposite Land, we got Duke Nukem Forever. It didn't reach the goal line in three or four years and now it'll never get there.

Also, it's not like WAR's engine is some kind some scratch-built monstrosity, it's based on the quite established Gamembryo engine (http://www.emergent.net/en/Products/Clients--Titles/).

That might have come off a little aggressive, which wasn't my intention. I just don't think Mythic has any techical excuses. It's just bad management.

As much as I like LotRO, it's a little more pretentious than WoW is. Well, quite a bit. That doesn't flow with everyone. Middle-earth is srs bssns.

LoTRO is no more b-rate than current EQ2. They just can't one-up the elephant in the room enough to get a bigger percentage of WoW players. Most of this is in fact due to game design (LoTRO combat which continues to get better) and aesthetics (EQ2 is largely still uninspired), and that's the message that is passed by word of mouth at a time when a significant amount of MMOers are new to the genre and playing their first game. And complicating even THAT is WoW quality. We all couldn't wait to jump ship from EQ1 to ANYTHING that did that type of game better. But there IS no better than WoW. There is merely slightly different with fewer players.

But that number is just the latest in a series of them that show double digit declines. They'd maybe be fine if they plateued here but I don't think anyone this is their plateau.

When I say engine, I'm refering to the client, the server, and the tools, all as one.  It's a bad misnomer on my part.  From what I remember reading from Lum, the Daoc source pretty much was a house of cards, but my memory might not be the best, and I'm too lazy to confirm it.

Isn't this the first subscriber number we've seen? I thought everything before was pre-orders and box sales and first-month-free stuff.

Can you explain what happened with AC2?

Not sure where you got that from, since the server was a stable code base derived from a decade-old MUD and the client was largely middleware (Emergent/Gambryo/NetImmerse).

Can I call sequel on that one? :why_so_serious:

Is that history written somewhere?  I remember trying it right before they shut it down and I enjoyed it a bit.  The monthly content/story is missing from current mmos.  I want to change the world.

It could certainly be argued that learning from the failures of AC2 (and to a lesser extent DDO, though I still maintain that DDO is a good game, it just isn't what most people wanted) is what has helped Turbine's process.

That's when they started to learn  :awesome_for_real:


Second as far as I know. The first was the 500k account registrants they announced after the confirmed 1.5mil units shipped to retail. I believe there was a claim of 1.2mil of those being sold through, but I can't find anything official to support it.

500k registrants doesn't mean 500k people paid for a subscription, does it? I could swear we got some free time with the box. I think with most games a certain amount of fall-off is expected from people who buy the box and make accounts to people who actually then pay for an ongoing subscription.

This isn't to say that I don't think they'll be down to 150k by next quarter anyway, but we should be careful about taking trends from things that aren't the same thing. It may be that 300k really is their stable point.

Yes, I never meant to say that Turbine had the concept of building MMOs in the mother's milk, but they've learned. Which history has shown us is still a quite unique talent in this industry. :grin: Only Satan knows what they did to stay afloat and develop both DDO and LotRO in parallell, though.

Short version:
- The game was at Anarchy Online/Shadowbane levels of instability at launch.
- The classes were incredibly bland, and some were broken/useless for months after release.
- Buildings didn't have interiors, no NPC's, poor crafting system, uninteresting loot, Asheron's Call in name alone, etc.
- Edit: oh, and the cherry on top was that the chat servers were completely fucked for at least 5+ months, as memory serves.

Chat wasn't working for months either.

That's funny.  I played AC2 for months and never even noticed that chat wasn't working.  Go go solo play!

WAR tops 800 000 active accounts. (http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/11/warhammer-onlin.html)

I actually would have expected to see a dip in figures after launch - lots of people buy it, some find they don't like it, things take a while to settle down. But according to the launches of both AoC and WAR, MMOs are going to lose about 60% of their launch numbers by the end of the third month.

Jacobs has previously indicated that 500k players was the break-even point, so 300k isn't enough. It's a sizeable base, but it is maintenance mode for the game. It's purgatory - enough money coming in to keep the servers up, not enough money to really develop it further (plus the massive reputation hit means you aren't going to be getting loans from the publisher to expand).

The design challenge for MMOs that want to make the mainstream now is: have a business plan that works with 50 000 players but have servers that scale to 1 million players. Lum has made the point a few times that trying to build massive projects is killing MMO development, so the focus needs to shift onto smaller projects that can be scaled upwards if demand exists for it.

Someone asked earlier have any successful MMOs launched since WoW. Arguably they have, but they are the MMOs we don't like to talk about: F2P, kid-friendly titles, browser-based, etc.

Well, I got my wish, and got spin on it, as well as some more unprofessionalism and smoke screening.  Of course people will return to WAR - the announcement of the 2 new classes, Darkness Falls redux, and people's boredom WoTLK and frustration with Blizzard's glacial response on PvP related issues means some people are bound to try it.  But, to claim that a drop is that expected, clearly something is getting lostin translation. At any rate, I'll continue to keep an eye on the game, and if things seem to be improving and MJ keeps his trap shut, I'll resub, although I wish they'd freaking stop abusing YouTube. 


Define success.  Do you mean size of the quality of the game, or the size of the playerbase? 

Success is profit.

Everything else is expectations. Those are often harder to manage than the budget, because the egos get in the way of reality  :awesome_for_real:

Well, I think we need some sort of stable definition of success.  How many would we call successes if WoW just didn't exist period?  I think WoW needs to be eliminated from the discussion when talking success of MMOs because its totally off the charts compared to everything else.  I think you've hit it on the head about smaller projects though.  TRYING to compete with WoW is the kiss of death.  The people that don't play WoW don't want to play something like WoW, and the people who play WoW PROBABLY won't leave it for a game thats only slightly different, especially if they have a high level character in WoW already.

Its possible to do ok, and LOTRO has proven it as mentioned earlier in the thread, but that is a rare case that has an extremely high quality IP behind it with a huge built in loyal fanbase that is even larger than the Warhammer fanbase I'd argue.

As long as soemthing is making enough profit to continue running the servers and work on new content, that should count as successful as far as I am concerned.  Maybe it isn't an unmitigated success, but people need to be realistic about what it out there.

I would add that the game needs to have recouped its initial investment/production cost as well.

Err, success is profit.

We can all spend paragraphs talking about it, but it's actually pretty simple:

• Did you design a game an audience wants? Calculates the type of talents and tools you need.
• Did you accurately predict how many would buy it? Calculates the up front investment including time, tools, and content.
• Did your audience know the game is coming? Launched? Calculates how much money you spend on marketing, RMO, etc.
• Did you work out a good flexible deal for hosting and maintenance? Calculates a good chunk of your monthly.
• Did you work out your strategic plan over a multiyear arc? Calculates your ongoing staff and sourcing needs.

Of course, it's easy to list. It's much harder to do. Most times, one of these questions is not asked, or someone lists them and says "you can have four of the five, choose which one to drop".

If you DO do all that though and are making a profit, you're successful.

Everything else is just scale. Eve is probably profitable. ATiTD3 is probably profitable. WoW certainly is. I'd imagine LoTRO, EQ2, DAoC, UO, all the old or old style games are at this point. TR was not. AoC probably isn't. WAR probably isn't. The reasons are obvious and plentiful.

What keeps leading to these failures isn't always the lack of profit. It's the missed expectations, the people overselling the potential success to unlock funds never recouped.

So no, games-not-WoW are not failures compared to WoW. If they're failures, it's because of things they themselves screwed up, and would have screwed up anyway, WoW or not.

AC2 was simply a terrible game. It just wasn't any fun to play. It was broken. It was sterile. It was cheap.

LOTRO is imho not a B rated WoW, more like a D, E or perhaps Z rated WoW. I know I'm in the minority but while pretty, sluggish client response, zero ability to customize the UI, no endgame, barely useable AH, and taking a year to put in the 40-50 level skills for all classes does not equal win to me. Forced grouping, no LFG system, and progressive TOA style quests? I just don't get why people praise the game.

It is beautiful. And it hits the middle earth buttons really well. It does housing well. They have the feeling of place. But as a game? It's 2002 technology with a pretty new shell and just not all that.

I'm pretty sure LOTRO has most of the stuff you are talking about there, including customizable UI, endgame comparable to other PVE games, etc. 

This would imply existence of B, D, E etc rated WoW-clones out there just to be put in-between these two. I really can't think of serious candidates for these spots. The gap between the 'real WoW' and LotRO may be huge in your eyes, but i'd say at the moment LotRO *is* second fiddle to WoW rather than 10th or whatever.

(and in some areas it's actually ahead of WoW. But i guess we can ignore these for convenience of the argument)

Success=profit is too simplistic. A game can turn a tidy profit and then get managed right into the ground. Or a game could turn out a loss and then get turned around. (Which would make it an investment.  :awesome_for_real:) Which means I agree with what you posted, except for the first sentence.

I say success=a game meeting or exceeding the expectations of it's developers. (Which would make WAR a failure  :uhrr:)

But it's a good starting point. Growth is also another consideration (since profitable but stagnant is a dangerous place to be). Profitable enough to continue development is also good.

Mythic has consistently made bad decisions over the course of WAR's development. I predict <200k subs at the end of FY09 Q1. It's a shame, no doubt, but who here is still subbed? Nobody really. The game is flawed and not getting better because, as some wag said, Mythic is following a compass that points to magnetic wrong.

Make no bones about it - 300 - 500k is not the success either Mythic or EA was hoping for, but it would be sustainable.

<200k will be difficult and that's where I think they are, possibly worse. The 3 month/6 month subs from launch are going to run out soon and I'd be very surprised if they are getting new blood at the rate needed to backfill.

Anyway, to add something to the discussion. Success != profit. Success is one of two things: It's either revenue greater than the cost of capital or it's a return with a positive Net Present Value over the term of the project.

In other words if EA/Mythic could have done something else with the money invested in WAR and gotten a higher rate of return in whatever time window they use as a measure then WAR is not a success, even if it's profitable. Now, given EA's income statement recently I think anything profitable is good, but overall success can't be measures by "did it cost less than it makes?" It has to be "did it earn more than the alternatives?" We don't know. But it's a tough question at this point.

Lastly, the layoffs were badly handled, badly communicated and badly managed from a PR perspective. Paul is a fucking douche who should never have been allowed near a computer during this process. This will bite them in the ass.

AC2 just didn't have any content, static mobs, group mobs a few set piece one trip dungeons, no npc's, no buildings with doors.  The engine itself was great, graphics top rate, it even handled a couple of hundred players fighting in one area very well (first few weeks darktide).  Chat worked pretty well using the Turbine basic chat system, the chat problems came in when they moved to the Microsoft chat system.  The few quests in the game were very exploitable, allowed you to level while grouped but not with the group, level 3 to level 35 via one quest while you went afk. Hit max level nothing to do, hence all the class balancing because of group mobs and tacking on of a 150 level hero grind.

This is a description of a terrible game based on an OK engine. I like AC (played a Life/Archer for years) but yeah, AC2 was broken. Mostly for the reasons you state.

Yeah, I think WAR has the wrong engine for what it's trying to do, can't cope with lots of players, AC2 had the right engine but no content.

Edit War was pretty good in T2 with lots of players for me, T4 seems to have too much going on.

There's also a huge gap between the real WoW and the mythical WoW that's used in most arguments.

After finally cancelling my War account, I decided to to give LOTRO another go.

It has substantially changed from when I last played (and abandoned) it back in beta. Most of those issues you listed no longer exist. Caters better to the solo crowd, much improved client response, developing endgame, easily usable AH, LFG system etc. My one real gripe at the moment is the lack of addon support.

Completely different game now, for me at least. I'm hooked - and I'd previously written it off as a somewhat boring diku with a cheap gimmick (PvMP). I hadn't realised how much I'd been missing a MMO with 'depth'. Both AoC and War felt kinda superficial. Light.

It still might not be for you, but is worth hooking up a free trial.

LotRO's great because it proves you can be a success while focusing more on atmosphere than anything else. It's not a world in the UO/EVE sense but it feels more like a world than most of the stuff out there due to the IP and attention to detail. Does it have the tight scripting and nifty doodads of WoW? No but then it's not trying to.

Which of course ties into the whole WAR thing because it reveals a difference in approach which is important. LOTRO never wanted to get WoW's numbers. They knew they couldn't and they acted accordingly. They probably would've liked to be a little closer to a million, sure, but there was never any dick waving on their part. They're chugging along in a respectable position with room to grow. MMO companies need to act a whole lot more like LOTRO era Turbine and a whole lot less like Mythic or Funcom.

No there was plenty of dick-waving by Turbine:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10782.0

but they kept it to their PR people.

Meh, some dick waving and numbers spinning is to be expected from marketing, that's what they do. I never really paid attention to LoTRO, but I don't recall much of the hype that came along with WAR's release, like Paul's YouTube video, or MJ "we're not competing with WoW but we really are" comments during interviews.  And if the stuff I am reading is true, Turbine does respond to player feedback, and does it well.  Overall, Turbine just seems to have far better PR than Mythic does, and they've built a quality product to boot. 

I like Turbine but there was a bit of optimistic marketing going on (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6640.msg178837;topicseen#msg178837) before release.

All right, anyone got a Cliff's Note version of how Turbine handled itself before and after the launch of LoTRO?  Maybe it's because I didn't play much attention to it, but it seems like the company handled itself much better than Mythic did with WAR.  I think the basis of it is that LoTRO is jusy a better quality product than WAR is, but I am curious if Turbine pulled the type of hype building Mythic did.

My opinion, short version.  They got punched in the gut with lower subs than expected.  They therefore decided to concentrate on improving their game instead of prancing around displaying an oversized ego on message boards or making wacky youtube videos.  Crazy plan, but seems to be working not too bad so far.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with setting your goal high, as long as you have an appropriate plan if things don't work out the way you thought.  It seems Turbine has done well with their contingencies. 

It's almost like you're speaking a foreign language to me...

This, though I stand corrected on the no dick waving thing. Less dick waving. Appropriate dick waving. It's not Barnett and it's not Gaute's steak vs hamburger comment.

But let's be real here: one million subs isn't competing with WoW. Shooting for a million is a fine goal and all but all the bleating in the world about competing with Blizzard with that goal doesn't make it true.

I think there's a lot of truth to Turbine's nimbleness post release being the difference. They seem to have adjusted quite well and, maybe more importantly, managed expectations. They were very up front about what sort of game they intended LOTRO to be and took over the bedtime story niche very well.

Are you sure you were playing LOTRO? Also, check the LOTRO forums here, i think you had posted that you couldn't move something, and posted an image of someone doing just what you wanted.

Also, the AH is one of the best i have ever used, i can just drag an item in the bar, and hit search... and posting is easy, if you keep adding the same item in the slot, it fills in the asking price you entered last time for that item. Not sure what the issue is.

What forced grouping?  :headscratch: The LFG system is good (the /lff chat is usually all that's required), the Quest Tracker system is superior to any other i have seen... Shit, i know what part of a chain you are one, and who/what/where/when/why...Sharing a quest also shares the first part of a chain if you don't have it....Its just brilliant.

Endgame? Endgame is a failure in the body of a MMO.

What i think you may really be complaining about, its its different then Wow. Expectations, and conditioning and all that.

Codemasters != Turbine.

Is that why there are a different number of letters and they appear to be in a different order?

I think so!

Turbine has some responsibility for what Codemasters says and does, the same way Mythic have some responsibility for GOA inventing the first bind on pickup game, by renewing the WAR subscription for everyone in Europe without their permission.

This is a great summary for all software development and why the process and tools are more important then what is built.  A great idea really cannot survive bad implementation today like it could ten or twenty years ago.  Bad idea will always be a bad idea.

It is so painfully obvious how bad a state WAR is in that how can it really be surprising to anyone not wearing WAR polarized glasses?

I bought into the hype and the concept is STILL awesome. But on nearly every level WAR failed when compared against "that other game". Mythic knew going into it that they could not match Blizzard feature by feature, they never had the resources, but they compounded this disadvantage by adding a mind numbing grind to the equation.

To be honest, I had to go back to WOW to see how much better it was, I would have probably stayed had Tiers 3 and 4 been more like Tier 1. While no part of the game matched WOW in terms of polish, at least Tier 1 was fun and different. But then they decided in all their wisdom to really make people work just to get to where the START of the game was supposed to be....RR 40-80.

Ranks 1-40 should have been a breeze. Then let people work for those renown ranks. But Mark treated his game like it was a PVE paradise. News Flash, your PVE sucks... Your game was supposed to be about PVP. Clueless!

I would not have cared if it took 5 years to get to RR 80 if 1-40 was easy...easy so we could have tested alts and experimented. But who in their right mind would actually level to 40 then DO IT OVER again and again?

Ranks 1-40 PVE centric...should be FAST

Renown Ranks 41-80 PVP centric...can be arduous.

Whats not clear about that? Why would Mythic make a game that is CLEARLY not the rich PVE experience of WOW (but could have challenged in terms of PVP mechanics) and yet make the grind 5x harder?

The logic fails.

Yes I am bitter, I really wanted to like WAR but its dreck and I do not see it improving as long as MJ has his fingerprints on the game.

The shocking thing is the same staff had a PVP game, added a PVE grind to it, it BOMBED, and they publicly admitted it was a horrible idea.

And then the same staff has a PVP game, suddenly adds a giant pve grind to it, it bombs, and dear god it's TOA from day 1 again.

That is certainly part of the fail equation. But whats intriquing is why everyone could see that except MJ and Co.?

I would hazard a guess that if they made the grind much easier (not 10% but more like 300-500%) more people would have created 1,2,3 or more max rank characters. Is that a fair assumption? That in trickle down fashion leads to more robust PVP while having 2 or more max rank characters makes you the subscriber more INVESTED in your account and would have provided some additional level of retention.

We can certainly argue if that would have saved 1k or 300k subs, but it would have helped. Who outside of MJ really thought the grind model they imposed would HELP retention? How do these people keep jobs?

Mind boggling...

I was just putting in my opinion that the game isn't all that and I know people here are really in love with it. So I don't want to derail, but no not really. It's done with smoke and mirrors, PM me if you want to know how. They're planning to replace the UI with a configurable one. It was talked about from launch, promised for MOM and bumped, and is supposed to be coming soon.

Yeah, i know about the UI...but uh... Clicky (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15568.msg575146#msg575146)
I'm Not in love with it, i just respect it, and turbine.

Actually, my theory is that if they simply had a better AI and improved the PVE mechanics a bit people would enjoy the game more.  The problem with PVP is that it is so dependent on people being online and available.  If the rest of the game sucks, you log on and say, "Eh, nobody is on................mmmmmmm guess I'll log off."  The basics are there to have an interesting PVE experience, but they just fucked it up royally with crap like public quests and a lame AI.

That's done by replacing the png's that define the bottom bar with transparent ones. It's still there and the buttons on it can't be moved or replaced, so you lose button access to social panel, character panel, quest panel etc. Well sort of lose them, since they're still there, when I tried a similar interface, I would occasionally have the icons on the bottom bar flicker into view when the mouse moved over them.

It's effectively the AC2 bottom bar with a bunch of new moveable elements. The new ones aren't too terrible to work with, but the blob on the bottom is a complete PITA and screws everything up.

And really, everyone other than LOTRO since Shadowbane has shipped with a fully configurable interface haven't they?

I'm sure LOTRO is a swell game, and it's apparently making enough money for the company to keep chugging along, but let's be serious. Turbine did not develop games around seemingly-golden properties like Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings hoping they would land in the same general subscription bracket as doddering "Is that still around?" relics like UO and EQ1.

Right. I am sure they are wishing DDO and LoTRO were doing better.  The thing, instead of cutting staff and posting YouTube videos, they shut up and worked on their games.

Nobody comes out with an MMO these days with that goal.  Clearly Turbine thinks they can improve their market share.  If they didn't, it would cease to exist although I certainly wonder about the longevity of DDO.

Actually, didn't they fire a manager or designer at some point early on?

But being unable to customize one part of the UI isn't exactly the same as "zero ability to customize the UI", is it?

I don't know, but I do know they did layoff people in December.  However, it's not like they gutted their senor design team..

I think it is quite obvious that what WAR desperately needed was another experience bar. 

I suppose I'm not adding anything new here but my Beta experience with the game was terrific, PvP was fun in Tiers 1, 2 and 4 (where I played) and there were glitches but overall the game seemed great.

Then they:

1.  Doubled the XP required to level and nerfed PvP xp making the grind incredibly painfully.
2.  Re-itemized everything so that to get decent gear you needed to wade through mind-numbingly boring PvE content.
3.  Decided what PvP gamers desperately want is a PvE cockblock to PvP content.

Any one of these mistakes is poisounous but all three?  I cannot believe those folks had any idea what they were doing or I will fall back to my original theory that MJ was being paid off by Blizzard to run the game into the ground.

I am a bit curious about the culture of Mythic, because surely there must have been quite a few subordinates aware of these issues.  Did they say something and were ignored or refused to say anything out of fear?

Actually, that's where "plan" ceases to be one and instead becomes "reaction".

Yea, you can react as poorly to a failure as you can to a success  :grin:

I'm pretty sure Turbine shitcanned it's CEO shortly after LOTRO came out. Enough of this "Anything that doesn't put your company out of business is success!" stuff.

I can think of another company that would do well to consider this bold move.

Even a week before launch they took out all the pvp gear you could buy and replaced it with shit.  I remember wanting to take over keeps in T1 so I could buy my blue pvp gear set.  I wanted to hit ranks 10 and 11 so I could be badass among that tier.

Then they took it all out and made it so any pvp outside scenarios was useless.

Fucking idiots.

Try not to puke on your shoes:

"Actually Jeff is quite right. First, our sub numbers have been increasing and second, we never announced our subscription numbers prior to the recent earnings call. Our news item from the Herald announced quite clearly that 750K registered for the game not subscribed to the game. This is no different that pretty much every other MMO maker has done in the past whether they call it players registered, boxes sold, etc. We would have done the boxes sold thing but we sold a lot of copies digitally. It would have been a really cool to have said we had 750K (especially that early in October) but to have 750K subs before even their free month expired would be impossible. Thus, I can say 100%, that we never had 750,000 subscribers. Keep in mind that there is a world of difference between boxes sold and subscribers. The percentage of people that become subscribers after their free month is generally called "conversion rate" and no game, not even WoW, had a 100% conversion rate. DAoC, which was quite successful by the standards of the times, had a very nice conversion rate but it was nowhere near 100% and neither was EQ or any other subscription-based MMORPG that I aware of. I've talked about this subject a number of times before and I'm sure my exact quote about DAoC can be found on the 'Net. happy

FYI, we are trying to contact the journalist as well so he can have the correct information.

Mark"

Linky: http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/110191818/p3

Anderson was the one who made the public claim that with 1mil "characters created", LoTRO was [then] officially the second largest MMO on the market behind WoW. I'm sure not meeting the expectations set by having the IP was a part of it too, but I remember wondering how long that sort of blatant spin would work for him (read: it didn't). If they hadn't let him go I'm sure we'd have seen months of forum dancing  :awesome_for_real:

And nobody's saying success = staying afloat at all.

Jeff Anderson, and I believe they did.  Good move on their part, too.  They promoted him for AC2 for chrissake.

Ok, wait a goddamn minute. Is Mark saying that 1) they sold 1.2 million boxes, then 2) converted that 1.2 million into 750k registered, and from THAT number they got 3) 300k subs. So is he trying to claim that 25% box to converted subscriber rate is GOOD? Because it's fucking not, in any way, shape or form GOOD. It is in fact SHIT, seeing as how that 25% is what you are counting on to pay salaries after launch.

They went from 800,000 current users in their first reporting quarter to 300,000 subscribers in their second reporting quarter .  As they didn't actually list subscriber numbers in the first reporting quarter, that means they can legitimately say their subscriber numbers have gone up.  Meanwhile back here on planet earth,  :awesome_for_real:

That dumb cunt really needs to stop posting on message boards.

Not current users, registered users.  I really do not know what that means.  Does he mean people who sign up for the newsletter?  People who created account at  EA Accounts?

At any rate, sounds like he's doing some numbers spinning like the Turbine CEO did...

No it was current users/players, see EA quarter link below.

Press Release September 19, 2008 (http://www.warhammeronline.com/pressreleases/20080915.php)

EA REPORTS Quarter to Sept 30 (http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/452566768x0x245319/f0a58760-2c38-408f-8779-2782cf681255/Q209%20ER_10.30_10am.pdf)

MarkJacobsEA VNBoards 11/3/08 3:17pm  (http://vnboards.ign.com/Boards/Message.aspx?topic=109280505&brd=22997&start=109283886)


MarkJacobsEA VNBoards 11/3/08 6:32pm (http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/109280505/p5)

It means people who bought the box and created accounts and were on their free month. Those people are not yet subscribers.

This just in: Mark Jacobs lies.

He wanted to be number two and now he is!  :awesome_for_real:
full of it that is

Number two is what comes out of his mouth when he opens it.

Seriously Mark you are coming off like a complete and disingenuous tool at best and someone with no idea how to run a gaming organization at worst. This sinking ship was directed by you and fails because of your warped sense on what players want despite Blizzard blazing the path for you.

Are you related to Brad McQuaid?

Why are you referring to him as "you"? He's not coming back, you know?

Indeed and these boards are better for it.
Just like a lot of former WAR players (like 500k) are not coming back to his shitty game.

As a friend of mine pointed out, there's some hefty spinning going on here.


These are some points a friend of mine made.  There's 2 things going on there - conversion rate and retention rate.  If I am reading this correctly, the conversion rate is the percentage of people who created and account and put in a code to activate their first month pf play.  Then we have retention rate, the monthly percentage of people who continue to play.  The game had 800,000 registered users, with 300,000 subscribers.  Assuming his 70% is accurate, that means, of the 800,000 that registered, 428,000 converted, which is about 53.5%.    Now, I just need someone to call me a fcking idiot and point out where I am wrong!  :drill:

I thought all the war "Hate" was confined to the sub forums.

Conversion rate is supposed to be the number of free monthers you get to give you a credit card number. I don't know what his numbers are, but that's the general use I've seen for it. I don't know if there's an industry term for people who bought the game and never created an account for MMOs.

Lighten up, Francis. It's just a videogame. Unless you were friends with Mythic ex-employees, this is hardly personal. The self righteous nerdrage is a bit thick in this thread. They got fired, it's a bummer, lots of people got fired in every profession, we're in a major recession.

As for the boards being better without the head of Mythic posting here, I'm just gonna go ahead and call shenanigans. Chasing away developers is just a sign of how inbred these boards have become.

This is MBJ hate, not WAR hate. The game is what it is, it's Jacobs's Iraqi Foreign Minister schtick that's drawing the ire.

So it wasn't just me.

Right, that's how he using it here.  He doesn't actually say what DAoC's conversion rate is, he's say the retention rate for WAR is slightly higher than that of DAoC's.  The thing is, he's actually right, WAR is slightly out performing DAoC.  The core issue is the conversion rate, where of the 800,000 who created an account, 428,000 stayed. WAR isn't popular around these forums, but it seems that Mark and the team are happy with it's performance.

Delmania, That's three times in one thread you have been mistaken, that's a lot, even by my standards.

His numbers don't make any fucking sense.

Let say he is right. On November 3rd he said War has a RETENTION rate higher than 72% FOR NORTH AMERICA. For this discussion, I'm going to assume the retention rate in Europe is the same. 72% of 1,200,000 boxes is 840,000. Which is about right since EA reported 800,000 current players on September 30th. (I'm guessing by retention he means people that bought the box are either on their first month or paid for a month...?)

So, in order for him to NOT LIE, on November 3rd they would have to had AT LEAST 800,000 current players that have paid for the first month (thus, a retention)

Lets say by November 3rd they had sold 1.5 million boxes (up from the 1.2 million boxes reported by EA on September 30th, 300k boxes sold in October sounds like a good estimate)
Lets say Mark is right, and they have a RETENTION rate of at least 73%.
This means on November 3rd they had 1,095,000 current players. You can't be a retained (sp?) unless you could log into the game right then and play, right? That means they would had to have had 1,095,000 players that either are on their first month, or have paid for at least a month.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Given the fact that EA/Mythic didn't release the 'OVER ONE MILLION PLAYERS' number at all, ever, I'll assume they didn't have that number and someone along the line is lying, either Mark, or EA.
However, lets say they had over a million players on November 3rd. From November 3rd to December 31st, Warhammer lost.... 795,000 players.

Holy. Shit.

Again, this is assuming they had a 72%+ retention rate in Europe.

The humor may have killed the meaning behind this statement, but seriously, when I am wrong, point it out, insult me, and then correct me.  No matter how retarded my fuck up is, no matter how stupid I sound, call me out, and correct me.  I prefer "shoving my ignorance in your face so you can beat me down and sharpen me approach*" any day.

* 10 no points is any knows where this comes from.

So, he's lumping Euro and US numbers for WAR, and then comparing them against the NA numbers for DAoC.  Tricksy, Mr. Jacobs, tricksy.

EA lumps the numbers, Mark appears to only talk about NA numbers. Which apparently were doing fucking tremendously at the start of November.

Assuming War had sold 1.5 million boxes WORLDWIDE by November 3rd (up from 1.2 million sold worldwide by September 30th), and assuming US had 900,000 out of those 1.5 million boxes, a retention rate of 73% would mean by November 3rd roughly 657,000 people were playing Warhammer in the US.

I'm going to bow out of this thread cos it's got a little silly.  I'll just say I don't think hes lying, spinning sure, but not lying.

1st quarter 800,000 current players, 0 subscribers.  They don't know how many subscribers they have because the game has been out less than two weeks.  Box sales don't count because not everyone opens the box.
Greater than 72% retention, he said that in November but when was it calculated?  Could be October 21st or so, not all 800,000 will have finished the first free month, so taking a figure from my arse, 400,000, 73% of that is 292,000 subscribers who choose to play past the first month.
2nd Quarter 300,000 subscribers, so they have increased, but the 292,000 figure doesn't matter, it could have been a lot more but because it's the first time they released a subscriber figure, therefore of course subscriber numbers went up, they couldn't fail to beat zero.

I'm going to assume that War never hit 1 million players. If they had, you can bet your last nut that they would have had announced it.

"Our retention rate is higher than 70% based on current data." I suppose Mark could be talking about a date sometime in October, or September, even though he posted that on November. The 'current data' allows him to weasel out of what he is saying if someone points it out to be a lie. If someone pins it down and says "You said on November 3rd you had a 72% retention rate on NA" he can turn around and say "I said that on November 3rd, but by 'current data' I meant sometime in October."

Regardless, I doubt he is lying. He doesn't strike me as THAT stupid.

What is going on in here? 

Srsly it's the God thread in Politics.

Let it go.

I can't find where I said it, but back in September I predicted WAR would finally dethrone SWG as genre whipping boy  :awesome_for_real:

In less than a year, it's passed both CoX and SWG for activity in the Graveyard.

Meh, it's just a videogame, yes, but it was one that had potential to be a bit of fun. Regardless, Jabobs and Barnett are clearly a pair of dumb mother fuckers as evidenced by both the direction WAR has gone in and the fact that they just can't keep their fucking traps shut - as in everything they say just reeks of 1) lies 2) complete stupidity. I doubt the nerdrage would be quite as bad if they had just released a shitty game but then figured out how to STFU about it instead of playing Iraqi Information minister.

This board is as it ever was. If we talk shit we get called on it, and the same applies to devs. They're equal here rather than put on a pedestal and fellated. Some can take it and are part of the community while some can only handle fawning praise - which is the actual reason that MJ won't be back.  

You might have a point if not for the fact that the guy posts (almost exclusively) on the fucking Vault.

Hey, Mark was happy as hell to post on these boards when he needed to hype Warhammer right before and right after release. He left when:

1) the drooling starfucker morons were linked from other sites and posted their pages of drivel about how to fix the game in the hopes he would respond to them and
2) the majority of the posters here got to tier 3 and saw what a shit-pile of grind and fuckupery the game was - and started telling him what was wrong with his game.

I used to respect Mark, but he doesn't love us anymore because WE AREN'T UESFUL ANYMORE. Mark has not ever really been involved in the discussions here like Raph or Lum are unless they are about his game(s). He mostly tries to use these boards to hype or defend his game but he fucks off when the criticism gets too heavy. To dredge up history, he did it on Slow News Day, and he's done it here.

And now he's working himself into a Brad McQuaid/Abashi phase, and in 6 months I expect him to retire from Mythic.

Nah, he simply doesn't have a point. When a developer gets driven away from here, 9 times out of 10, it's because they have a very sandy vagina from something that was said about them. Alternatively, the last two that got driven away (not counting MJ) simply didn't have any idea whatsoever what this board was about and treated it like the damn vault.

What the FUCK is your new image thing Schild?  :ye_gods:

Wow, such hate.

ToA broke my heart.  I loved DAOC until that abortion of an expansion ruined the game.  Shrouded Isles was fantastic.

I had high hopes for Warhammer.  I believed Mark was speaking truth when he said that Mythic learned their lesson from ToA.

I still believe he was speaking truth - but the lesson they learned from ToA was clearly not the lesson they ought to have learned, and not the lesson I wanted them to learn.

Warhammer's mistakes are at least as grand as those of ToA.

I don't hate MJ.  I think he's extremely misguided and wrong about what players want.

If I was him, though, I wouldn't post here either.  There's a huge difference between fellating devs and respectfully disagreeing with them.  (I also think both Lum and Raph are nuts as well as extremely thickskinned).

It's hard to respectfully disagree with outright stupidity and delusion. In other words, we didn't just "disagree" with MJ. We thought he was freaking nuts. And rightly so.

Very rarely do we get into pissing matches with Lum and Raph though, bad comparison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPlpkEJRGBo

 :ye_gods:

My god, that's fucked up.  
However, I present the original.  Whichever one is MORE fucked up is your opinion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbGkxcY7YFU

As for Mark, the man's got ambitions.  With both ToA and WAR, he was aiming for the top dogs: EQ and WoW.  In both cases he missed horribly and ruined a perfectly good game.  If he had some patience and wan't so fulloh himself, he might actually be able to build a larger following for his RvR concept, but that's not going to happen soon.

What has been seen, cannot be unseen.

I watched both.
I want to die.

Damn. And here I thought that song was a South Park original. I mean, it's just stupid enough that it should be. Still has nothing on Pickle Surprise or Strawberry Shortcut.

The use of that avatar could be one of the best shit-cannings of a thread, which deserved it, that I've seen in a while.  Even if you didn't intend it, Bravo!

edit'd for the sake of my sanity tomorrow morn

The disagreement was pretty respectful while he was still around. HRose even ate the banstock. Still, once there was too much disagreement and criticism for his thin skin he fucked off.

That's when the proper hostility started. Though to be fair to those being hostile, the hostility was in response to the series of icebergs they skillfully smashed the game into, Barnett's vifblogs becoming more andmore fucked up, and Jacobs himself morphing into some kind of amalgam of McQuaid and Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf.

That was truly horrifying. Anyone have the brain bleach?

I only watched about 30 seconds of each. Far more than enough, I might add.

If this becomes the new rickroll, people must die.

As a brief recap of Jacob's posting about WAR on F13:

Jacobs: HAY FOLKS, know things need to improve. How about some scenario-less servers?

F13: Really, scenarios are the symptom of a wider problem problem here.

Jacobs: Oh, I understand. How about some scenario-less servers?

F13: You really don't get it Mark.

Starfuckers: WE LUV U MARK SEE MY GRATE IDEA IN 15 000 WORDS NO PUNCTUATION

Schild: Starfucking not allowed.

 - End result: Mark chooses to post on the Vault where starfucking is full-time profession and fanbois rise up to fight any and all criticism.

Same thing is going to happen with Schilling. Just remember that I started hating him before it was cool to hate him. I always thought Mark was a jackass too.

No harm to MJ but he's the easiest dev to troll, like ever.  Even Blizzard devs like to troll him, for someone so experienced it's like he's new to the internet.  Plus, he'll likely be back here if Mythic manage to survive long enough to get a paid WAR expansion into the pre release hype stage.

And I expect Schild to mercilessly deprive him of his innocence when it happens.  Just like he did to me with that avatar.   :ye_gods:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwj0gLriTnk  :why_so_serious:

It cannot be said enough: Mark Jacobs does not get the internet. Not even a little.

He doesn't get it from the perspective of the CEO of a multimillion dollar company. As a forum warrior, he gets it just fine.

I'm not entirely sure he understands how to forum warrior either.

He's not a forum warrior. He uses forums as a marketing outlet.

He doesn't even do that real well.

Hence:

I never said he was a good forum warrior. But his whole pick which arguments to reply to, say he's got secret information that would cast a whole new light on the scene and ability to pick his ball up and go home are very well developed.

Just a comment that means nothing.

WAR had a big booth at NYC Comic Con.  There were a lot of people around it.  I chuckled as I walked passed it to go play Dragon Age.

You should have shit in a WAR box, given it back to them and then ask for your money back.

Well? WELL?

He's not even very good at picking his arguments. Even I would've avoided me when I went on the offensive.

Dragon's Age is basically MMORPGish in UI/controls.  WASD and numbers to use abilities.  Pause for party control.  Didn't get to try it much as there were crowds and too many kids due to it being right next to WAR handing out shitty posters in stupid boxes with arm straps.

But it looks and feels like pure win.  Think Baldur's Gate meets WOW with a little Mass Effect mixed in.

Oh, god. What the fuck? HIS BUTT... IT'S FULL OF STARS!!!!

Well obviously he isn't very good at picking his arguments.  He still lets himself get trolled by HRose.

I'm going to miss Ingmar. :(

Someone, anyone. Get me a goddamn Dragon Age beta. I don't care what I have to suck.

You know, I can help with that.

Apparently we now know what the key to getting favors from schild is.

How much for a grief title again?

(http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/7231/633568940400000000gn5.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

We'll keep you company until he tires of it. :|

I still think Dragon Age is the worst, most horribly generic title for an RPG I've heard in years.

I was in awe when they tagged Origins onto the end. Also, exhibit A:

(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3087/3161100490_5867350b1a_o.jpg)

My god, that's the best damn summation of the whole MMORPG genre.

Needs something about 10 rats.  Otherwise, it's beautiful. 

I think Sky made it. But now I'm gonna clean it up.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/f13/baldurs_f13.png)

All fixed.

late to the show, pages late and all.

Pretty fucking speechless... unprofessional doesn't even begin to touch on the mounds of douche baggery that guy is.

You know, just from his early youtube things, I used to think the guy was pretty cool - he was entertaining enough and since half his job was hyping the game, I thought it was a cool way of doing it. I didn't believe a word coming out of his mouth would actually make it to the final product, but that was pretty irrelevant back when all they had was concept art and cool ideas.

Then he started getting nasty, starting with the developer callout, and now it's clear the way he deals with pressure and failure is to take it out on others. Which is a shame.

put that image on Cafepress or Swag.com.   :why_so_serious:

Wasn't there already a cancelled MMO named Dragon Age? Dragon something... Big budget. Canned after a few years of hype.

I admit I know nothing about any new game actually called Dragon Age.

Dragon Empires.  I think.  Can't be bothered to look.

We fired people, lolz
I am drunk off my ass
Woooh... people are going to a Con.

I just,... I am simply unable to come to terms with the idea that that shit is allowed.  Any company/agency I have ever worked for would have fired the guy on the spot as soon as that video surfaced.  I am simply floored that nobody at Mythic hasn't keelhauled him for this type of stuff.  If this shit flies at Mythic, it is no wonder that the "The god damn plane has crashed into the mountain!"

I thought I read somewhere that ole PB got sanctioned after that infamous Gamasutra article (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19660) (below).  May be I just imagined it, but pretty sure he or MJ made a "clarification" or some spin.  Yeah, immature, unprofessional, low-skilled -- just a bully who claims to have played a lot of games.  Wonder if he would get a job today with that CV if he had to start over.

Yep. Dragon Empires, from Codemasters. Cancelled in 2004.

This Barnett guy keeps turning out to be more a fuckface than I'd ever thought.

He is/was a major part of Mythic's attempt to rebrand itself as a hardcore version of Blzzard.  The problem is, for those of us who don't own a wolf shirt* and demand quality over image, he's an obnoxious ass. 

* shameless stolen from another thread.

I'll take five-star talent with three-star drive and a producer who knows how to leverage it into something four-and-a-half stars anyday.

The five-drive, three-talent led by an ass obviously didn't work out so well.

Fuck, I'd trade them all for a team that does a good jerb. Having said that, any team led by an ass is going to get led right off a cliff.

At the very least you want 4-5 star talent engineers working on your game engine.  WAR is a shining example of what you get when you have 3 star (or very inexperienced) engineers working on your engine.

Well he succeeded, because if WoW is the benchmark for 5 star talent, WAR is at best 3 stars... and yet his minions do seem fervent, so viola!

Success is had, at least in the eyes of the believers. Too bad 3 star talent with 5 star myopia drive does not equate to anything more than 300k subs and "also ran" status.

If there weren't two million WoW players looking for another game to hook them, I'd say they would be extremely lucky to have 300k.

We know for a fact that there are at least 800k players looking for an MMO to play.  AoC and WAR both sold over 800k boxes. 

 :awesome_for_real:

So what you're saying is that if someone releases a MMO better than WoW, people will buy it, and it'll be successful?

Well, no shit.

No.  I was saying that there's a healthy market out there for a product not WoW that should be able to garner and maintain 1 million subs. 

But yeah, no shit to this too!

I actually disagree on this point.  A large amount of WoW subscribers aren't really MMO gamers.  They don't follow MMO news, then don't care about game mechanics, etc.  WoW is not just a game, its a pop culture phenomenon at this point.  Its building on its own success.   I don't buy that a game that is  "better" than WoW will necessarily be successful. 

This assumes you were talking about people from WoW switching and making it successful.  There are games that are better than WoW currently, but I wouldn't say that they are necessarily successful, or that the comparison is even warranted.  For instance is EVE "better than WoW" I'd say yes (in that I prefer it to WoW), and I'd say its successful, but "better than" implies "better at doing something" and since the games aren't even trying to do the same things, how do you say one is "better" really. 

So, I think games that will be successful and "better than WoW" will likely not be anything LIKE WoW to begin with.  A game that does everything that WoW does, only better, probably won't pull a huge amount of players from WoW.  That market is quite saturated. 

So, basically, i agree with Nebu

Better than WoW?  Jeez, I'd settle for not completely terrible.

If developers heed any of the bullshit we spew on here, that should be it.

Well yeah. You could say ten million WoW players are in it just for something to do. But that still leaves two million "MMO gamers."

(But then again I think "a large amount" is too imprecise, I'm curious what you're basing this "a large amount" on, and I'm also curious why the common belief is that we've run out of gamers and there will never ever be more than 12 million.)

I think in the interest of being fair, although I really don't want to stand in the way of the shit slinging, we have to consider the nature of those 800k WoW players looking for something new.  Sure they may be yearning for something else, whether it be better or worse than WoW.  However I think a large part of the problem for games that aren't WoW is that the demographics of those 800k are vastly different.  They all want something different.  So while on the surface it might seem to a dev house like there are those 800k ripe for the picking if we just make a decent game, it isn't quite as it seems.

So what ends up happening is what we've witnessed here in the numerous failures.  Sure you can point to numerous failings of management and engineering, but at the end of the day there's more to it than that.  A game goes into beta and hundreds of thousands of WoW burnouts jump ship.  Then they all simultaneously have one of the following reactions:

A.  This is not the next sandboxy Eve I was hoping for.
B.  This is not the more immersive min/max EQ successor I was hoping for.
C.  This is not the open PvP slaughterhouse I was hoping for.
D.  Your cause de jour.

Then those 800k collectively look around at bugs, poorly implemented features, etc. and wring their hands at themselves as they log back into their Utopian Warcraft paradise together and say, "Well, maybe next time."

I think when saying "Better than WoW" to try to attract that player base, you have to think that Step 1 is absolutely "better polish than WoW." If you can't even proceed past Step 1, you will end up in Warhammer and Age of Conan land. I.e. you will have pissed away a metric fuckton of development budget for niche market status.

I think the first thing in any MMOG after a working engine and art direction is if you have a function UI.  Chat systems, mail system, AH systems (if your game supports it), key rebind systems etc.  It's amazing that some games have shit for communication and chat systems and other customization.

MMOs aren't unique snowflakes just by dint of being online. They're video games, and thus entertainment, and that market is nowhere remotely near saturated. It's like pussy. Bear with me here a moment.

You can never, ever get enough new pussy. Even though new pussy is substantially quite similar to previous pussy, and the end result is the same, the thrill of exploring and conquering new pussy never gets old. Same deal with all pleasurable activities. We all chase that dragon, whether it's in our choice of video games, szechuan hotpot, or thai-style soapy massage. It's human nature to crave experience, it's how we grow and learn and deal with the monotony of day to day life. The entertainment market isn't saturated any more than the food market. We all gotta eat, fuck, and have fun.

The opinion of a WoW burnout shouldn't matter at all to Mythic or any game developer at this point. Anyone that has been playing WoW for years obviously has no self respect and their opinion about what is a good MMO is non-existent. Mythic's goal at pulling some of those players into their game is half-assed to say the least. Mythic had a niche, they had a dedicated player base willing to give them a second chance (after ToA) and they fucking blew it. Releasing a RvR niche game, which pleased their old DAoC fanbase while generating positive word of mouth is the way to 'come close' to WoW. Mythic HAD the fanbase from DAoC and blew it, no other games on the horizon have that.

I apologize for turning yet another thread about Mythic/EA/War into a 'What Mythic did wrong' The horse has been beat to death so I'll leave this:

It's like masturbating with your right hand for 4 years and becoming slightly bored with it. In a flash of genius you decide that using your left might be a fun change of pace and make things more exciting. However, after trying the same act with your left hand you soon realize that its just not the same. After a few minutes of awkwardness, you decide to go back to the ol tried n true right hand and everything feels normal again.
That is a WoW burnout.

Clearly this thread needs more conversation about fucking and masturbation

And more ambidexterity.

Just for kicks, do point out a better MMO than WoW.

 :awesome_for_real:

WoW ended the evolution of the side of the genre that purely focuses on character optimization. They did everything we ever wanted from EQ1, and we know how many people like this kind of game. It's not technically impossible to do a better WoW. But no other company has the will, even if they had the resources. So launching a new MMO simply because it's a dikuMUD isn't going to cut it.

But there's ample room to explore FPSes and try and achieve true RPGs: That magical combination of dynamic world branching story arcs where combat is something that occasionally happens.

The existing players who've been around since UO are older now. As each game needs to worry about attraction, retention and attrition, so does the whole genre. That problem was partly solved by the emergent desire by tweens to play light persistent worlds. But they outgrow those and have really only WoW as a solid option. Then they do the whole teenage angsty stuff, and who the heck knows if they'll come back to WoW after that. It's almost a certainty that they ain't going to some lesser-quality grind.

Whoever cracks that nut, whoever can make a truly nextgen title that works for the future young adults, and probably on a console, that will be the new game to compare the world against. Right now there's plenty to compare against WoW, but the numbers, business models, demographics, and play motivations make things all screwy.

E. This is not an updated version of what made DAoC wonderful.

By far this is the segment that most disgruntled WAR gamers fall into, regardless of what other characteristics of (A-D) they might also have. You are right that what "different" means varies from person to person, but the bias for (E) is huge by comparison to the other choices.

Open RvR; do it right or don't bother.

Assume EVE Online isn't a viable answer, I would say that Lord of the Rings Online is better than WoW. Better graphics, better crafted world, better story, better classes.  Similar gameplay.  Somewhat similar achievement system (and even did it first).  The only thing you might be able to say WoW has the edge on is PvP, and I humbly suggest that if PvP is your game, than neither WoW or LOTRO is your best option anyway.

Out of the 4 betters, 3 are completely subjective. One may be correct from a technical standpoint.

I'm certain you can see where this particular detour will end.

What he said. Or, to use market terminology, 8.64 million people disagree with you. Choose your poison.

Most of those millions of people have not played other MMO's. I am drawing this conclusion entirely by anecdotal evidence from my peers  :awesome_for_real:

Every performance metric other than '# of times it dropped to desktop due to sb.exe' is subjective.  If subjectivity prevents you from comparing MMOs, then you're excluding talking about them at all.  And saying that WoW must be better because it has more subs and it has more subs because it's better is canonically circular.

LOTRO is (now) a very good game and in a blind taste test I'm pretty sure it'd be WoW's equal.  The difference is that WoW came first, it benefited from a huge network effect, LOTRO took too long to get good, and it launched when people were still infatuated with WoW.

First mover is a huge advantage in environments subject to network effects.  MySpace is in every way a shitty experience.  The interface is shitty, the performance is shitty, the design is shitty, everything is terrible.  But it dominated social networking because it as the first one to hit it big.  It took a site as good as Facebook to knock it off, and Facebook is about 800 times better than Myspace.  Similarly, Everquest was a brutal, dumb game, but it got big first and it took a game 10 times as good in WoW to knock it off.  To knock WoW off you can't be a little better.  You have to be 10 times as good.  And good luck with that.

a frontal assault on WoW is pointless. They have evolved the Hamster wheel of greed to a high enough level that even players who burned out after the first 6 months of play would be very surprised how nice it is to play these days.

Fortunately there are still a lot of people who want more social involvement in their games, or pvp types. Who, (even though they might play wow and enjoy it for what it is) would still prefer a game that satisfies this desire more than WoW does.

I'm pretty sure that a game could take a lot of players away from WoW by providing what WoW doesn't, but not by copying what WoW does.

Numbers wise I don't think of WoW as an 11.5 million subscriber game I tend to think of it as a 5 million sub game and the rest eat rice every meal and breathe smog.

I like LOTRO a lot and am really playing this exclusively now, however I have to admit that it seems a little less (and I don't know how else to describe this) accessible than WOW.  Somebody mentioned this above, but WOW has managed to be interesting to the non-MMO player, something the other MMOs have been unable to replicate.  Why is this?  I really don't know for sure, but have some theories.  One of which is that the crafting in WOW is easy yet tends to be interesting to the average Joe.  Also, the introductory questing in WOW is very straightforward and they have managed to drum up a pretty interesting story line from their previous games.  Another reason could be that the cartoony, fun spirit of WOW appeals more to the average user than the darkness in WAR, Eve and the seriousness of LOTRO. There is a whole lot more to this, however, than simply being in the right place at the right time.  Sure, luck played a bit of a role, but WOW wouldn't have had the sustainability that it has enjoyed if it wasn't a fairly high-quality venture.

Before deploying WoW, Blizzard had developed a huge following with Starcraft, Warcraft, and the Diablo series, plus a reputation for just making fun games in general.  Those, combined with the fact that WoW's leveling is very accessible to anyone, managed to sends the game's playerbase into the stratosphere.  Hell, if they remove the cockblocks on gear and make it so you don't need to do the Arena for res gear, I'd go back in a heartbeat.

Endgame of WoW: kill bosses to get phat loot.
Endgame of Diablo II: kill bosses to get phat loot.

As much as people joke about purplez, BLizzard has a good precedent.

If WoW were more like Diablo 2, I'd play it. And by more, I mean Diablo online.

Does LotRO still have that bizarre lag/delay in the combat system? That alone drove me away from the game.

I suspect your (and thousands millions of others) patience will be rewarded.

I eagerly await F13 turning into a Diablo Online fan site when that day comes.

Shut up.

A game where you grind levels for loot.  Yes.  It makes perfect sense that everyone here loves that...UNLESS YOU CONSIDER EVERYTHING EVERYONE HAS EVER SAID IN THE MMO FORUM, EVER.  

Yes and sort of no. The delay thing if i understand it comes from game throwing in auto-attacks between the user-selected special moves, and its unwilingness to interrupt any ongoing animation for better visuals, so the length of auto-attack animation creates the lag before your queued special action executes. On the other hand though, the auto-attacks can be disabled in the options which could probably lead to the much snappier feel, similar to what WoW offers. But since that option is buried deep in game preferences panel and disabled by default it is mostly moot point.

Man, playing Diablo online would rock! Maybe Blizzard will put online multiplayer into D3!

This got them a good head-start.  It took being a good game for a wider audience to catch on and hit a critical mass that non-gamers (prior to WoW at least) make up a significant portion of the player base.

Any game launching now has more of an advantage than WoW started with due to the number of people who now know about MMOs and are looking for something else to try.  They still have to be good games in their own right if they are going to obtain that critical mass to do the same.  They can do it, but not with the half-assed shoddy releases we've seen in the last few years.

Being first is a huge benefit, but quality still trumps it.  Otherwise UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, or any number of others would be the game we're talking about.  For a while it was EQ.  When someone makes an objectively better game, as best that can be measured, it will make WoW's numbers look tiny.

Not what I meant. Not even anywhere near what I meant. However, your failed attempt at humorous sarcasm WILL go on your permanent record.

What of my chances of getting into Harvard now?  :heartbreak:

Srsly. What would a Diablo MMOG be if not World of Warcraft?

Um, Ok.  Better is a subjective term.  Bananas are better than apples.  Should i have to discuss molecular structure to argue my point.  Unless there is some baseline or accepted standard than the term better is always going to be an expression of personal preference.

I guess my point is...  how would one even prove one game is OBJECTIVELY better than another game. :uhrr:

I still just say WoW needs to be totally left out of MMO discussions.  Pretend those 10 million players don't exist and you want to make a game: Who do you aim it at?  What kind of numbers can you expect.  How do you make your design team/project sustainable with those numbers.

lol

Before I, or anyone, even starts - I have to ask:

Is that a joke post?

 :oh_i_see:


 :awesome_for_real:

Yes. I've heard the autoattack excuse, but the movement is similarly sluggish, so I'm not buying it.

I haven't played since shortly after launch, but - yeah.  There was more to it than just combat.  The general feel was ... not quickly responsive.

The other thing about it for me was that I always felt like I was playing on a painting.  Not in a painting, on a painting.  It seemed flat.  Beautiful but flat.

Did they ever fix the crafting system or is it still just a money sink?

WoW simply has more things to keep people hooked too. Many zones for explorers, raiding, hard-core raiding for the poopsockers, an auction system that works pretty well, crafting, etc.

Hell, the auctioneer economic domination meta-game is almost enough to keep me sub'd just for it. I heat my soul with the hate tells/mails from gold farmers.

WoW is one game repeated over scores of zones with a metagame of RMT and AH gaming. There's probably only two or three personality types in the game at all. Obviously there's a lot of people with those personalities though  :grin:


That's the different between purchase intent and purchase decision, and it applies to just about everything involving any type of polling and marketing.

We will gladly sit around all day dreaming of that magical combination of realtime deformable worlds that respond to thousands of concurrent fully-customizable characters living out solo and multiplayer branching story arcs while interacting with gruond and flying vehicles an economy that links every harvestable resource with every mega weapon and player house and city in Neal Stephensons own grand utopian matrix.

What we'll actually buy though is whatever gives us the best bling while we plod along on rails designed to make us feel slightly more powerful than whatever is around us at any given time.

Because the first is some pie-in-sky ideal we're still many generations of games away from while the other is what we can see and play today.

I usually get flamed when I say this to people.

Hmm? that's first time i see the complaint about movement, tbh. Can't say i've experienced this one, unlike the combat it feels no different than any other MMO.

I just played the trial a few days ago. Yes, it's sluggish. No, I don't see how you can't feel it at all.  CoH and even EQ felt more responsive than LOTR. I played a Champion and the shouts/ swings would often either not register or delay by a full second before going off.  Killed any desire I had to actually pay for a month or two.

I have never seen this as well, combat, sure...tad slower, gets better as you get higher because of reductions of induction times. But movement? No, sorry. Its quite responsive.

You guys do know that LOTRO uses a sort of LOD on its animation as well, its essentially the same as removing say, every 3ed frame or, every 3ed, 4th, and 5th frame..and so on (Depends on your machines and settings).

I have no idea what that even means.

What part?

Also, This. (http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Mechanics:Cool-Down_Timers)

Yea, when I need to read a multi page document to under stand how AutoAttack works in your game...



Mr.B: I don't know what 'LOD' means in reference to animation, nor do I understand why I should care as a player.

That's not movement, but the combat abilities. I'm not arguing there's delay with these, there most certainly is given how their system works. But the response to WASD etc doesn't strike me as any slower than any other MMO, so hearing that surprised me. (some of characters i play rely on positional damage and on getting out of way of incoming attack, so they have to move around a lot. The movement really always feels to respond instantly minus the obvious latency factor)

edit: just checked the latency out of curiosity, LotRO reports it at ~60-70 ms level for me. No idea how it fares against average, though.

Fordel: Level of detail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail) (wikipedia)

LOTRO combat is more tactical, it's slower, you could even say it's pretty boring at low levels, my personal opinion is that the tactical nature of queuing skills becomes clearer and more enjoyable as you level up, but having said all that, not liking LOTRO combat is fine.  It is slower and we have discussed this before.

I never had a problem with Lotro aside from the global cooldown bullshit.

However, its hard to convince your friends that a PvE 'Gay game with hobbits' is fun.

Movement in LOTRO is like a really old jeep or truck with 6" of play in the steering wheel. That's the best way I can describe it. AC2 was the same way.

Sorry. Had to.  :oh_i_see:

Anyway, what you're noticing as delay is largely animation. LotRO respects animation delay so a long combat animation means a long delay. If you pay attention, you'll also notice that damage isn't always dealt at the start at the animation, but at the point where your weapon is supposed to physically collide with the enemy.

Edit:
It's fine not liking this. But it's completely intentional on Turbine's side and it makes perfect sense if you watch the animations.

I don't think so.

Except...I really need to blog about this, but there's a great deal of research about "proprioception" that explains why this is just completely wrong.  To make a long story short, good game design requires that the players be allowed to make a connection between what they are doing (mentally and physically) and what is happening on screen.  It is better to have animations get chopped up, cut off, or just plain skipped, in the interests of maintaining that connection.  The cost is that to an external observer the action looks choppy and randomized, because they are not perceiving the internals of it the player is.

Game design and gameplay are not improvisational machinima.

--Dave

Yeah, pretty much I as a player don't care WHY it happens.  The fact that it seems slow makes it seem clunky and unfun.

You're saying in response that it's wrong but yet I never said it was right. :why_so_serious: Just that it makes sense from a certain perspective, that of animation.

It's my observation as well.  People who have gotten used to it may not notice it at all, but it's too large a hurdle for some of us, because we do notice.

For my part I wasn't trying to explain why it happens.  No doubt any combat system can be improved.  I just don't agree with people who want to defend LOTRO and say it's not slower, it is, it's just that slower doesn't always have to be a bad thing.  If there are x number of options available to you in a combat round, having an extra second or so to consider them isn't such a bad thing.  Unless, you think the extra delay is really annoying, in which case, it is really annoying.

Guys, are we talking about COMBAT, or MOVEMENT.

Because some of you are getting them confused.


Also, LOTRO has a unique animation for just about every ability.... I can't think of another MMO that does.

I'm talking about combat, that's why I keep using the codeword "combat", when/if I ever start to talk about movement I'll try to indicate that with the codeword "movement".

What is this Scanners, where combat has no movement?  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, wasn't looking at you Arthur.

Movement doesn't bother me, it might be slower but I'm used to it and it's been years since I played WoW.  If someone says movement is slower, that seems like a perfectly valid comment to me.

Edit And no, as a Guardian (Tank) I don't tend to move much in combat.

Is it just that running speed is a little slower relative to the environment? I don't remember noticing any particularly glaring issues with movement when I played LotRO.

Both, though Combat was the bigger sticking point for me.

It's not movement speed, it's movement responsiveness. It feels like you're walking in mud.

I'll tell you what it is and you don't even realize it. Tab target sometime when you have more than one mob. In fact, do it with three mobs and a squirrel. Turn yourself just a little bit so the squirrel is in your field of vision. Tab. Tab again. Tab five more times. You will target the squirrel. You will then go through your targets, EVEN ONES NOT IN FRONT OF YOU, in a preset order.'

That's not actually what you guys are talking about but we've turned into a LotRO kvetch thread now so I'm jumping in. And I both play and like LotRO. But there's little things, the mushiness, the tab target mechanics, the fact that you never really feel more powerful in combat, that can and do get under peoples' skins.

But mainly fuck tab targeting, especially as a tank, in that game.

I'm glad I read that whole little offshoot, because this quote right here finally explained the "movement" thing to me in a way that I could think back to playing and think, "Oh right, yeah." It does feel, at the very least, like when you push to run forward your little person takes a second to realise you want to move, then takes a couple of steps to actually start *running*. I can see why that makes sense animation-wise, but it does make the responsiveness feel shitty.

Still, that is SO overshadowed by the slow-ass combat (and yes, once I get used to it, it's "fine" but ... "fine" isn't really going to hack it, especially when Ingmar is such a damn WoW fanboy I'm lucky to get him into LotRO once a YEAR) that I really couldn't remember what about the movement would be slow.

I should go back and see if turning off autoattack helps my perception enough to get me into the 30's. I always peter out in the early 20's.

EDIT: Oh God, the tab targetting, I forgot about that. Although to be honest, most games I play I don't like the tab targetting, it always winds up targetting something a million miles away instead of the one closest to me/next closest/etc to me.

There's having the time to make tactical course corrections, and there's a non-instant feedback to your keypresses. These are separate impressions. LoTRO suffers from the latter.

When I click a key, I want to see an action. And I'm not zoomed in to see the tendons of my arm sync up with gripping a sword tighter while swinging it. I'm taking an action that's showing me a number or percentage and only tangentially supported by an emote of that event. I appreciate when they try to sync things up, but the number and instantaneous feedback is priority 1.

I was talking about the skill queue system they have, at higher levels I like it, at lower levels you don't have many choices to make so it doesn't work nearly as well.  I wouldn't advise anyone to stick with LOTRO or try to say it gets better as you level, because everyone has their own taste, LOTRO combat is just a bit different.

Man I know I was philosophical about it before, but I hope all this EA buttfuckery doesn't lead to UO getting shitcanned. I just resubbed and I'm having fun. The Valentine's junk this year includes a summonable cupid that recites lines of poetry you program it with. I'm having mine recite dirty lymericks at the bank.

It's people like you WHO WON'T LET THE FUCKING GAME DIE ALREADY that ensure UO will remain online for years to come.

We use our brief mortal existences so very well  :awesome_for_real:

Well, i just spent last 15 or so minutes trying to see this effect in game but unfortunately, plain can't. Was testing it with help of nearby walls and such as feedback, and as soon as i'd press the key, the stuff would start scrolling by. At constant speed, no less. So no pause to think, no acceleration, nothing of the sort.

The one part where i could spot the delay was perhaps coming to a stop after a longer run. If the movement key was pressed for long enough, if i let it go in mid-step, the character would complete that step moving slightly farther in the process, rather than stop immediately and reset the animation to idle stance. I can accept this could lead to feeling of sluggishness if one has expectation to have the character come from all-out run to full stop immediately, all physics be damned. From what i gather this is one of these things that split lot of games as well as their designers, into two camps.

I have mapped function to 'target the closest enemy' to ctrl+Tab in LotRO, saves me most of the belly-aching.

And that is what makes UO players totally awesome. They'll sit there with their gun and can of beans until the lights are turned off.

I will admit to feeling a certain sense of Schadenfreude when I realized that I was reading about the imminent demise of Tabula Rasa, looking at the picture of a Gamestop dumpster full of TR boxes, while tabbed out from banksitting in UO. (How's that taste, Richard Garriot? Oh, it tastes like money? Never mind then.) They could shitcan the game tomorrow and the real diehards would just go "I can't believe it lasted this long!", fuck off to some freeshard, and kill harpies in Covetous until they die of old age.

I agree with this as well.  WOW is pretty good with keypress -> something happens.  LOTRO puts the skill into a queue then executes at the first available time.

I played LOTRO as a guardian in open beta, and via a 'friend' key. 

I forget what level I got to, but I never bought it.

Main reason was my system could not handle it, even gfx turned down.

But the main reason:   I found, that I could just randomly 'drum' the special attack keys, instead of stare at them and hit them at the 'right' time - and be just as effective in combat.

Find target, approach, start combat, just randomly keep pressing 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 target dies.   I just didn't care for that.

I got a guardian up to level 30 something before quitting.  There was a certain rhythm to combat once you got into it that I enjoyed.  There were some reactionary skills and chains that you could use that was entertaining.  Like some say, there is a tiny flavor of strategy to it.  Like you're playing some sort of card game. 

But there is a definite disconnect to what you're doing and what your character is doing.

I think I'm the biggest hater of LOTRO on the forums, probably because I want to like it so much. But this is one they really did fix. I would say that from launch to the last time I played in December, my framerate probably doubled. At launch I had to significantly dumb down the dx9 graphics, when dx10 went in it was a total show stopper, and two months ago I was mid to upper settings, dx 10, with no framerate issues at all.

Wish I could say the same about Dalaran.

I played a Minstrel into the 30s, but my life did start at random keypressing. Then it evolved into something again to a slower EQ1 Bard songtwisting method. I'm one of those nuts that actually liked that, as it gets closer to player skill than just compartmentalization-by-stat. Also liked it as Mage Assassin in SB. Quick short-duration buffs that could be synchronized, and sometimes even build off of each other.

I can attest that they definitely optimized something. I played at the end of open beta and framerate was horrendous even on lowest settings (2 year old laptop GPU ftl) but I d/l'd the client and tried it again a day or so ago and it's much improved. I still don't think I'm going to go past the 10 day trial but it's more playable now than it was then.

I am trying to enjoy LotrO as a minstrel, I keep telling myself if I make it to 20 to get Warspeech, things will improve, but that disconnect between pressing a button and when the action occurs is getting to me.  There's also the fact that I am playing in Tolkein's world, in which the characters have no real depth.  They're either pure noble like Aragorn or Faramir, or utter douchebags like Saruman.  The only people who had eny depth to them in the books both died.

Who were the two? Thorin and Gollum?

Treebeard and Radagast.



Seriously, I have no idea what people are talking about with the muddiness.  I just fired it up again.  Its perfectly responsive.  We're playing different games.

Boromir maybe?

Whoever Delmania meant, they're probably still alive right now! LotRO's timeline is movng slowly.

I figured he meant Boromir and Theodan.

Seriously folks all  :Love_Letters: aside about LotRO what are you comparing it to?  Perfectly reasonable to say “It doesn’t work for me” but for those of you playing WAR or EQ2 it feels slow?  

Been too long for me since EQ2, but yea, LoTRO combat when I played felt more sluggish than launch-day WAR (after they fixed some things there).

I meant Theodan, too. Theodan and Gollum. Gollum was the most complex character in the series.

Hmm interesting, the WAR thing reminds me impressions from beta (right before the launch) The fight mostly felt somewhat hollow, in the sense i couldn't make much connection between the keys i've been pressing to activate the abilities and the actual damage done to the mob hp bar. That was minor though, the one thing that really stood out was awkward collision system, the way my character would get stuck on the weirdest things like thin poles and such even though i could swear there's enough space for me to fit.

Yes.


I can agree with this, but again, he died.  The surviving characters within Tolkien's world are really one dimensional.

Feh, Tolkien's world starts at the beginning of time. The Hobbit-to-RotK timeline is merely one segment. I don't know if Turbine has rights to all Tolkien's works or just the LoTR trilogy, but there's plenty of characters to throw around that are more than just strapping young men with dreams of swords and thrones.

I didn't find Gollum uniquely complex. Schizophrenic and constantly at war with the ring's hold over him against doing the right thing, but the same could be said of all of the ringbearers. Saruman is often written off as the token bad guy, but all he was trying to do was get both sides to play against each other, while being partially controlled by Mordor. Theoden King (good ol' whatshisname) had the same deal and spent the rest of the series seeking vengeance. Heck, his daughter had some depth to her as well.

Just to clear this up really fast, it's very specifically just the trilogy.  They're forbidden from using anything that comes out of the silmarillion or any of the other books at this time.

People who complain about lack of depth in Tolkien's literature are fucking insane.  It's there, Tolkien just never had a "I should dedicate half of my book to inane chatter, moody introspective bullshit, and tea pouring" phase.

Have you read The Lord of the Rings? There's a reason they left the Tom Bombadil section out of the films - it was as tedious as fuck. Plus, the Silmarilion is pretty much what you describe but with the local Elven Telephone Directory interspersed.

Tolkein wrote great stories and created a great universe but he wrote them really, really, REALLY badly. Lack of depth wasn't his problem, it was simple writing ability.

Just because they aren't written in the typical claptrap fashion of Kevin J. Anderson doesn't make them poorly written.  Tolkein doesn't write like a fiction writer, he writes like a historian.  And yes, it can be tedious.

Yeah, I'm in the middle of reading them again as an adult.  They're much deeper than I remembered. 

The films were good, but now that I'm reading the books I'm getting pissed about how much of the sheer amount of story was left out of the movies (or changed).

Sign me on with the "Tolkien wasn't the best story writer" brigade. Christ, I think we had to read about every single meal the characters ate all along every step of the way. And everyone skips over the songs.

I don't think people are arguing against that point WUA. It's not easy to get through a Tolkien novel because it's not written using typical storytelling devices. Like ghost said, it's more like an non fiction written with the thin veneer of a narrative, like some contemporary history books about the American 1700s and 1800s.

The world itself was a character, based on how it was formed. The Simarillion is incredibly tedious because it's basically the LoTR story over and over again. But there are sparks of depth throughout that bely the earlier contention that all LoTR characters are one-dimensional set pieces.

Ok that makes sense. So while they can feature artifacts of earlier timelines, they can only do so because the LoTR books do. Which sorta solves their The Hobbit problem too when that movie comes out, since the highlights of that were covered in Fellowship.

Ain't got nothing on Herbert with the Dune series.  Spends 3 pages describing a cave and 10 on a chrysknife.

Still haven't made it through the third book, but damn if I've tried a handful of times.

God, I ate up the Dune books. God Emporer of Dune was a bit hard due to it's sheer size, but I loved it. I really have to try to dig them up again (or at worst, re-purchase) and re-read them. I'll have to have another go at the Silmarillion at some point. I think I was way too young to 'get' it when I first tried. It was too dry compared to the more popular books. I dug the concept, but it was like reading Shakespeare. I like listening to and watching Shakespeare but reading it gives me a splitting headache.

Pretty sure they have The Hobbit, too. Just not the other stuff. I'm hazy on my recollection of the licensing stuff but I think they're technically owned by two separate entities, right? Maybe Chris Tolkien actively has the Silmarillion and others while Tolkien Enterprises has the trilogy and The Hobbit?

If you'll notice, this is how the license always shakes out. GW has Hobbit and Trilogy for the minis game, Decipher had the same for its pen and paper... the only folks I recall having all three were Iron Crown Enterprises way back in the day.

They only have LotR at the moment, but theoretically they could license the Hobbit aswell, because both are property of Saul Zaentz Company (in form of Tolkien Enterprises.) Everything else (Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, History of M-E et c.) is property of Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien family (in form of Tolkien Estate), who do not simply license their stuff away.

You gotta give Tolkien this -- he sure knows how to use a semi-colon. 

God Emperor is actually quite the literary masterpiece.  It is a time of intense dispersion, confusion and general "slowness" of the universe- much the same as how the book itself reads. 

I am happy, in a way, that they continued with the story with the new books, but man Kevin J. Anderson can't write.  It is like reading a romance novel.  I'm not sold on the final ending, either.  Without getting into it for those who haven't read them, I think that is where Herbert was going, but I'm not sure it was supposed to be exactly like Anderson told it.

I suppose my issue with Tolkien's characters isn't so much a lack of depth as more their one tendency to be very 1 dimensional.  They're either ALL noble and good, like Aragorn and Faramirall evil, like Sauron.  If they're appear to switch sides, it means they're being controlled and end up dead.

It's hard to write the kind of mind-bending shit that Herbert sr. engrossed himself in. He had certain themes and topics and a way of writing about them that Brian Herbert and KJA just couldn't replicate. Even in spirit.
That Anderson sucks monkey pole as a writer certainly didn't help. I've only read "Hunters of Dune" and that was quite enough for me. I went to Wiki to find out how they wrapped it up.

Feanor. Just to bring up one character who wasn't all good or all bad. I'm re-reading the Silmarillion lately.  :grin:

GW has licenced the lot of them at this point.

This thread: from WAR to cellar door.

EDIT: because this was better.

That's because you're comparing Tolkien to modern literature which is wrong. Tolkien wrote heroic epics in the style of Homer, de Troyes and the writers of Norse sagas, he was an awesomely talented writer but you will be disappointed if you're expecting a contemporary style.

Oh ho ho. I was not aware of that. That allows for some interesting possibilities. Fucking Morgoth and Ungoliant miniatures? They might get me to play it.

Even on those terms Tom Bombadil was a mess.

Tolkein went to great lengths not to make the central story simple allegory, to use the example of the time, the ring is not nuclear weapons. But he fucks it up on his pet topic of industrialisation vs nature.

I can't agree that Tolkien wrote the bookd badly, or that he was unable to write in a style that would appeal to more people.  After all, the Hobbit is far more readable than either the Silmarillion or the Lord of the Rings.  He wrote it for his son, Christopher, when he was a boy, but still, I'd say it's more well written than either of the other 2, as well as more self contained.  It draws on elements from the rest of his vision of Middle-earth, but not as extensively as LotR, and it does an excellent job of giving you necessary background information concisely. 

Tom Bombadil, however, well, h's supposed to represent the spirit of the natrual world Tolkien saw disappearing, but in al earnesty, even Tolkien said he wasn't able to develop a good backstory for him.  Also, anti-industrialism was far more than a pet-topic for Tolkien, it was present in almost every story.  Hell, the entire concept of the Middle-earth is just a retelling of the Genesis story with more detailed transition of how we got to now.

Anyone else find it funny that a thread about Mythic and WAR has generated a discussion about LotR?  I guess that's just a sign of the sad state of WAR. 

I was thinking about that but opted not to question it.

Source? I can't find anything suggesting GW has licensed anything from Tolkien Estate.

I dunno, there was plenty of nerdrage in the first couple of pages. I think the flames burned themselves out. What we really need to keep this thread going is for some magnificent bastard to come in and opine that all those guys at mythic deserved to lose their jobs because they were lazy, stupid, and smelled like goats, and then get flamed to charcoal from lum. That would be worth a couple of pages, at least, before degenerating into multiple separate disjointed discussions about the economy, what to do about the AIDS epidemic in sub-saharan africa, the columbine effect, abortion, jack thompson, the sad state of gaming journalism, and who to blame for high fructose corn syrup.

The fucking corn elves.

Lot of it is probably effect of 'different writing for different times' -- nowadays anything longer than 3 lines per paragraph is tl;dr. Parts of Tolkien's writing are 'tedious' by our standards and expectations, but compare that to say, Les Miserables with its constant dozen levels of distractions that take 50+ pages to wrap up each, and Tolkien is suddenly stellar example of brevity and focus. Attention span of the readers can change over 50-100 years to a surprising degree.

I blame the fact that the majority of the western world seems to embrace their own stupidity and illiteracy.  I grind my teeth when I hear college kids unwilling to read Crime and Punishment because it's too verbose.

That's some of it.  There's other factors as well.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

As I've said before, I'm a librarian and we're in a constant change state now because of the internet.  It's changing the face of what libraries are used for, and it's changing how we think and memorize things.  There's not much need to memorize things when we have instant access to the information, so our brains can wire themselves to being more adept at actually finding the information instead of storing it. 

Good or bad, we'll see. 

We had a thread go from Richard Garriot to the practicality of mecha in the real world. I don't blame WAR.  :grin:

That's cause they are licensed through Tolkien Enterprises. GW has licenses from both New Line and Tolkien Enterprises for their Lord of the Rings miniatures game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_Enterprises

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?aId=3800002

Shut up, Les Miserables was awesome.

I actually get a little frustrated with my lack of attention span these days. I can't read giant ass books like that like I used to. :(

I would like to add that I couldn't put the Lord of the Rings down when I first read it. It even felt rushed at the end and Tom Bombadil not being in the movie saddened me, still you have to make cuts someplace.

But seeing as this is a thread about Mythic's employees I won't say a thing.

I don't think going from talking about a person who lives in a crazy fantasy realm to discussing fantasy physics is all that much of a derail.

Me, too.  A large part of that is I'm not willing to 'waste' six straight hours reading since I don't stop once I pick up a book.  Instead I play fantasy games...

This was the quote I was referring to:


All three being Silmarillion, LotR and the Hobbit. The two latter and New Line's adaptation are easy to get and get licensed all the time. Silmarillion hasn't been licensed, ever. In fact, not even by Iron Crown Enterprises. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MERP)

Or, as this employee at Decipher says, a first step to getting to license Silmarillion is to kill Christopher Tolkien. (http://www.squaremans.com/?p=21)

Right, Christopher refuses to license out either the Silmarillion or the Lost Tales. 

Massive tangent I guess but Christopher is right.  There is nothing wrong with leaving things to the individual.  This material is still a part of the public awareness in printed form.  Books are not dead.  Having a fit because you are unable to profit from digital media recreation or interpretation?  No sympathy.  Yeah, we may not get to digitally mash about in the first age, but that is the playground of our imaginations anyhow.

meh. trippy already did it.

Except Christopher Tolkien is wrong.  Wrong because the LOTR and associated material is really only partially the product of his father's creativity.  The process the linked post describes, of how you do not really see the painting, but a mental model of it, is not, as Christopher Tolkien and most art scholars believe, a parasitic process that devalues the work, it is a creative process that enhances it.  Ideas have life only inside the minds of those that care for them, words on a page are simply ink and paper, dead and meaningless without a reader to give them vitality.

For most people, LOTR is the movies, maybe the books, perhaps the games.  The Silmarillion and the Lost Tales might as well not exist, because they have not been a part of the Tolkien universe they have observed.  And that means that the value to them of J.R.R. Tolkien's vision is much less than it might otherwise have been.  It is *not* "part of the public awareness", it is part of the awareness of a handful of people who have read that material (and who jealously protect it from those uncouth masses too coarse to do the same).

Eventually one of two things will happen: Christopher Tolkien will die, and through some chain of circumstance the rights will end up in the hands of someone less protective of them.  Or the process that was well underway before the release of the movies Christopher Tolkien would have stopped will play out to its inevitable conclusion, and Tolkien's work will become just another piece of forgotten ephemera, supplanted in the "public awareness" by the derivatives it inspired.

--Dave

I suspect "different times" and the style of writing has a lot to do with how the work is being published and distributed. The initial publication of  Les Miserable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Miserables) was in three volumes - the last volume printed several months after the first two. Never meant to be digested in one sitting, thats why you had huge asides into the Battle of Waterloo for instance. Almost all of Charles Dickens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens) novels were printed in serial format in monthly magazines; thats why his novels are riddled with mini-cliffhangers throughout - got to keep the readers coming back next month.

I suspect, in the next few decades "books" as electronic media will be the next big thing and they will get incredibly shorter and truncated to suit the format its published in. [SMS Novels (http://swongled.com/2008/01/22/sms-novels-making-japans-top-seller-list/) for instance. Also, I'm quite certain - there will be novels written exclusively for Kindle (I believe Apple is working on a 7 in. screen I-Touch type reader). Short sentences and paragraphs for easy reading on small screens!

On the other hand, I don't think reader attention span has taken that much of a dive. Not in the face of 10 year old kids devouring 870 page Harry Potter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix) novels. JK Rowlings can be just as tedious concerning Hogwarts and all that magic stuff (no, I couldn't plow my way through her books - I gave up after the first 2.)

But the linked article seems to try and make a point that Christopher Tolkien sees it as creative process indeed. And by refusing to license the other books he's trying to preserve that creativity in the readers of his farther's works. Rather than allow the situation where people simply take someone else's "mental model" from the movie etc, instead of forming their own from the original source.

How the Hell did MERP include all sorts of First Age and Second Age stuff then? There was a book of nothing but the Maiar and Vanir and they were never mentioned by name in the trilogy. Hell, half the story of Turin is in one of the supplements.

No matter how much of Tolkein's works remain unlicensed, it's already had a huge influence on many of the games we play now and in lots of other things.

Creative people are influenced by what they've experienced, and it seems no matter whether the real licensed versions of his works exist, or not. We are all immersed in his world just by having played any of the fantasy MUDs, MMOs etc.

I wonder if there is a trend for younger people to shy away from books that are slightly larger than the take out food menus these days, but I was pleased when one of my children recently asked for the LotR set for a gift. She still wanted a Mac computer too, but life is all about mistakes.

Make it so that it only boots into single user mode. When she learns to run with that, then she can have the GUI. Kidding of course. If nothing else, she won't be beset with all the foulware that comes with Facebook and Myspace and all that other stupid teenage shit.

There was quite an affair regarding what was and what was not considered part of the appendices back in the days; it may very well have been when I.C.E. dug a little too greedily into them. In short, they may have have breached their license but it wasn't revealed until later. Just a theory.

Or, as this suggests, most of it was made-up make-believe (worst kind!);


Link to source (http://nellardo.com/lang/elf/faq.html)

Oh they went quite a bit further than just mucking around with the appendices. I still have a fair number of MERP supplements. They've got the entire Morgoth Silmaril thing there... I could go on and on about stuff directly from the Silmarillion but citing examples would be insane because there's just so many. That's why I always thought they had the Chris Tolkien stamp of approval. It's fucking wild that they didn't because they sure as Hell acted like they did.

Just my guess, but at the time 1) nobody took gaming seriously and 2) nobody took Tolkien seriously.

1992?

Wow! I had to look it up, had no idea the license lasted that long. I remember it from the mid-80s and it faded off the radar pretty quickly as far as I could see. I figured it had a couple of year run like the Bond game had--had no idea it stuck around until 1999?! I still wonder how much of the off the reservation stuff came from the 80s when LOTRO and gaming were something freakishly odd.

It's no wonder no one was looking forward to Tolkein's licensed stuff in the 80's with games like these being released on the popular machines of that time

This one wasn't so bad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(video_game))

This was BAD (http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/lotr-gameone.html)

The better use of his works were the ones not licensed from the Tolkein estate at the time like this (http://mume.org/)

I was pretty sure that no one would ever do the books justice and when the Peter Jackson Movies were announced I was pretty much expecting the worst, after having seen a lot of the stuff that had gone before. Fortunately the films were quite watchable and as long as you aren't a complete LotR fanboi, the changes were acceptable for "arts" sake.

Even Turbine's licensed MMO is good, not my cup of tea, but not terrible at least. Was surprised they got this license at the time they did, must be some very persuasive guys.

Tolkein's license doesn't equal total crap anymore. That has to be a good thing.

So "art" is what they call shieldboarding elf dudezors now?  :grin:

I tend to agree with MahrinSkel, material being "protected" to the extent that it sits in a cryogenic vault is not doing it a service. Obviously you want to keep the material out of the hands of short sighted profiteering but if someone has a new way to tell the story (that probably suits their time better) then the whole becomes richer and the original is refreshed. It's not like the original is lost. Keeping the Silmarrilien unavailable has simply made it even less relevant than it was originally.

The medium I tend to follow (anime) still impresses me that they're willing to reboot, retell or refocus while keeping the world. Sure, 90% is crap (sturgeon's law), but the experimentation keeps the world alive and allows for the occasional gem. Heck, one series had three versions with the same characters and world but history was reset, focus changed and each character had a different role.

I don't think Tolkien was freakishly odd from the early 70s on. The hippies latched onto it in a weird way and it became kind of a cultural zeitgeist for awhile. Led Zeppelin, the animation, the songs, etc, etc.

As for gaming and LOTR, don't forget that the Tolkien estate sued the fuck out of TSR though the details are hazy to me. Given that lawsuit, I'm trying to wrap my head around a small company in Virginia making high profile gaming stuff (MERP was one of the big ones back in The Day) absolutely cribbed verbatim from a license they didn't have access to.

# of people in this thread who get a cellar door reference?  Hmm. . it's pretty geeky.  I say 5.

More beautiful than, say, Sky.

I'd say everyone in it.
I hate that reference sooo much.  :oh_i_see: