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Title: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: ForumBot 0.8 beta on May 16, 2007, 12:25:49 AM
The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition

After the jump, you're going to read an interview with an ex-Sigil employee given just over 24 hours after being let go. I honestly don't have anything more to say than that.

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Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Adam_Carpenter on May 16, 2007, 12:43:18 AM
That's one hell of an interview.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Fordel on May 16, 2007, 01:31:25 AM
The one thing that really stuck out to me:

Quote
Ex-Sigil: There are a lot of people, Brad included who were certain it would be a short-lived game. Some, in fact, including Brad, never played it. WoW should have been the example of 'look at what a good game can do!' when instead it was often spoken of like a bad thing.


How could anyone sane NOT even look at WoW after it made umpteen million dollars? Even if you thought it was the worst hack job ever created, you would think he would at least check out what subliminal messages they hid to garner all the success.


Was Brad truly that deluded?  :-)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: damijin on May 16, 2007, 01:44:52 AM
 :-o

Wow...

You took it outside and shot it in the head alright, and I get the feeling that

Quote
Ex-Sigil: Well, worst of all.. at the end of Sigil, Brad wasn't even there to look us in the eye and apologize.

is going to be posted quite a bit in the next 24 hours. Out of all the clusterfuckery that was embodied in that interview, that one line will stand out.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Falconeer on May 16, 2007, 02:02:44 AM
Grats to Schild, awesome job.

The rest, uncanny. "HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE CRAZY?"

I really feel for those guys and girls.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 16, 2007, 02:26:27 AM
Wow that was even more dysfunctional than I had imagined. Only having one QA person for the vast majority of the development is just...remarkable.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 16, 2007, 02:49:22 AM
Quote
Ex-Sigil: Well, worst of all.. at the end of Sigil, Brad wasn't even there to look us in the eye and apologize.

If you're a grade one narcissist - and I'm certain that Brad should have his picture in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, illustrating the condition - then turning up for a meeting like that and accepting that all your deeply internalised bullshit from the last few years has been revealed as nonsense and lies is well beyond your ability.  And well beyond his motivation, anyway: he's probably already blaming the employees for letting him down.

Wow that was even more dysfunctional than I had imagined. Only having one QA person for the vast majority of the development is just...remarkable.

Absolutely.  We have far more testing resource available to us for projects with a tenth of the budget of his.

On the other hand, and I'm entirely serious here, perhaps the bottleneck wasn't testing.  Perhaps one tester was able to churn out enough bug reports to keep the entire development resource busy.  The game seemed to be in that sort of state.

No scripting language, though.  Say what?!?  Surely there was no scripting language for a sane, understandable reason?  Like "we won't need a scripting language because content creation will be handled by our revoutionary new drag-and-drop interface.  Or maybe it's like Eve, and the bulk of the game is written in something pretty close to a scripting language so a seperate one wasn't needed.  No way did you have to code in C++ to get foozle 1 to walk from A to B and say "numbnuts"?!?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 16, 2007, 02:58:04 AM
Wow that was even more dysfunctional than I had imagined. Only having one QA person for the vast majority of the development is just...remarkable.
Absolutely.  We have far more testing resource available to us for projects with a tenth of the budget of his.

On the other hand, and I'm entirely serious here, perhaps the bottleneck wasn't testing.  Perhaps one tester was able to churn out enough bug reports to keep the entire development resource busy.  The game seemed to be in that sort of state.
Possibly. But you need a QA department to handle all the incoming bugs from alpha and early beta testers -- otherwise the developers have to waste their time trying to reproduce the bugs and setup test cases for them. To me it's just another symptom of Sigil just trying to get it done something released rather than get it right which is something companies like Blizzard worry about.

Edit: modified wording



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 16, 2007, 03:11:30 AM
Possibly. But you need a QA department to handle all the incoming bugs from alpha and early beta testers -- otherwise the developers have to waste their time trying to reproduce the bugs and setup test cases for them. To me it's just another symptom of Sigil just trying to get it done rather than get it right which is something companies like Blizzard worry about.

Oh, I agree: a seven-figure project needs a testing department bigger than one cubicle.  But if you're Brad, and maintaining your Weltanschaung long enough to stop you retreating into the Fuhrerbunker in despair depends on retaining a positive view of the game, the last thing you want at board meetings is some QA guy saying:

Oustanding issues: 6,341
Issues cleared this week: 192
New issues added: 396

If they didn't have a scripting language, I'll bet a pounds sterling to well one of those funny, devalued dollar things that they didn't have automated test harnesses, and that their unit testing procedures were ad-hoc at best.  I nkow people kid themselves, but any experienced developer who joins up and then hears that he is sharing a single tester with 20 other guys, and the modelling team, and the server team, and the quest guys and so on is going to have to hear the sound of iceberg scraping along hull.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: DoppelGanker on May 16, 2007, 03:59:53 AM
This interview is, by far, one of the best read I had in a _long_ time. Thank you for doing such a remarkable job in keeping us updated particularly with such quality.

On topic now...

Of course, it's some real scary things that happened @ Sigil.

One QA Lead, One tester... it truly is remarkable as Trippy already wisely pointed out.

I also wanted to toss my personal view on Vanguard:

Even though I never got really interested in playing V:SoH, it surely did have some interesting twists.

Yet, the two things that made me raise an eyebrow (in the choices made in level-design) were the immense size of the world, and giganticness (?) of the graphics.

In my very humble opinion, these 2 things need to be thoroughly and carefully designed to avoid hitting walls at top-speed.

It's like a double-edged blade. Either it purely and simply rocks, or it doesn't, and then you're in some troubles.

A huge world needs to be and feel alive otherwise it's a huge _empty_ world = boring / dull.

Graphics-wise you need to adapt the art-style to the size of the world. Almost identical zones don't deliver as regards immersion in the game.

All in all, it reminds me of the so-called "second-system effect".



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Arthur_Parker on May 16, 2007, 04:10:43 AM
"Go design for Blizzard if you want a scripting language, Vanguard is hardcore."


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 16, 2007, 05:00:59 AM
Not going to comment on the firings really, since that's actually par for the course, but the whole ethos of Sigil quite literally defies my belief.  While I'm positive the guy was there and everything he says is correct, I'm still like, WOW, ZOMG.

Idiots.  I look forward to the next MMOG "Piss Up In A Brewery Simulator."


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Bandit on May 16, 2007, 06:09:11 AM
Great Job on the interview, great shit.

Brad just reminds me of some crazy cult leader, with no sense of reality.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Simond on May 16, 2007, 06:23:29 AM
You know, this is making me wonder how many of SOE's problems & mistakes are just holdovers from the Verant days.

I mean, SWG started off as a Verant game iirc (and quite possibly had a similar cult of personality around Raph), and the original design docs of EQ2 were put together around that time as well...and EQ2 has only been turned into a decent game by ripping out as many Verant-esque game mechanics as Gallenite possibly could.

Is it possible that we've been raging against the wrong machine all this time? Maybe Smed and the beancounters have been the only thing which stopped SOE imploding between the takeover of Verant & the final death of The Vision(tm)?

For example. this might recast the Shadow's of Luclin launch for EQ in a whole new light - instead of Evil Smed as The Man, forcing the poor, misunderstood artistes of Verant to ship an incomplete product; maybe it was Smed as a desperate manager, trying to shepard Brad's demented Vision Cult into releasing something...anything even halfway playable.

No idea at all how plausible this is, but it's certainly an interesting thought.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Pendan on May 16, 2007, 06:29:04 AM
Quote
Bill was there and actually made comments about how he was likely buying a house thanks to his stock.
If second tier management is making enough money to buy a house, presumably, in the San Diego area doesn't this mean Brad and Jeff made many millions from their stock?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: SnakeCharmer on May 16, 2007, 06:49:01 AM
Great, great interview.

Would have LOVED to see something like that for SWG, but oh well.  Fantastic read nonetheless.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Riggswolfe on May 16, 2007, 07:03:31 AM
It sounds like Brad and Raph have one thing in common: Awesome ideas, but they need someone in charge of them to keep them in check. (Other than that Raph seems to be about a 100X better person and designer than Brad easily.)

That interview...wow. If I worked for Sigil and that guy made the house comment I'd be tempted to go on a shooting rampage in the management offices. Just...wow.

The 1 QA thing...I don't have any words to add to the other comments.

And the rest of it? About all I can say is I'm surprised people didn't quit in droves as this thing went on. I'd ask that my name in the deisgn credits be shown as Alan Smithee I think.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Rodivar on May 16, 2007, 07:08:45 AM
I can't help but feel sad for the front line workers.  Like any big organization those who can afford it least are often the least protected.  

Having had to close a few shops myself, some like this with no notice some with the announcement and bonus to work through "go dark" , I very much perfer the work through "go dark" method, especially for a continuing business.  

In this situation I don't think the parking lot meeting was necessary.  It's not like people had not seen the writing on the wall, any IP or hardware assets they wanted to take was already long gone or on personal drives.  

I sincerly hope all the front line folks land on their feet, this is a tough time for them and I wish them well.  


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Venkman on May 16, 2007, 07:15:06 AM
Brad was not the only one in the industry to think WoW would peak early and fall off (a bit like CoX).

The standouts from this interview for me:
Quote from: Ex Sigil
He's got tons of crazy ideas but he really shouldn't be in charge of anything. He is great as a theorycrafter so long as he was tempered by people who could determine what was possible or not.

Sounds like a few people actually. What I think separates Brad from some of the others though is that the latter group will at least take into account the player actions. For example, Raph's systems are usually hampered by being extremely complex and difficult to fully realize in a development timeline. However, they are based on leveraging emergent behavior and trying to understand the true nature of fun. Meanwhile, Brad's ideas seem more focused on what he thinks is cool and the hope that others will as well. That leads right into:

Quote
I DO think however, that he believed people wanted to play a game that HE liked, regardless of the masses of people telling him they didn't like his ideas
Again, back to smart business. Regardless of what some old timers might think, to be successful you cannot merely design a game you would enjoy playing. In fact, I'd wager a lot that most successful games are not played by their designers very often. These are experiences that respond to both personal and business needs, and command budgets that require much more than just "do I like it?" for validation.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Sky on May 16, 2007, 07:35:14 AM
Nice interview, thanks for that.

You know, I can get people all worked up about stuff...maybe I should get into mmo management.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 16, 2007, 07:35:55 AM
Great job with the interview!

I can't believe they really only had one QA tester. That's astonishing.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ixxit on May 16, 2007, 07:37:52 AM
Great interview with really probing questions.

While 'how Vanguard turned out' is evidence enough that something wasn't quite right at Sigil games I think it is important to keep in mind the interviewee wasn't 'rehired' by Sony/Sigil.  There may be a very good reason for that and if there is one must weigh his/her responses carefully.

I know through my personal experience as both a front line employee  and  later middle management (thank God I do neither now) that the  'the reality' is sometimes  heavily distorted, especially if the employee is disgruntled.  At times he adopts the meme of the little guy down in the trenches  always fighting the good fight against  clueless and egotistical managment who just doesn't listen to him/her.  This is usually the common thread in these kind of situations. Nine times of of ten the hard reality is usually in the middle and could swing either way depending on the reasons for the employee dismissal, or in this case their failure to be rehired.

I want to emphasize that I am not disputing any of the claims because there is no way to prove them otherwise and clearly some of the stuff  is both  believable and shocking (the firing).  For balance though, it would be nice to hear from one of the  employees retained by Sigil/Sony but I'm sure no one is going to be getting that interview anytime soon.   :-)








Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nija on May 16, 2007, 07:48:06 AM
Great interview, appreciate it.

I'm still coming to terms with the fact that he refused to play World of Warcraft. I try to play everything involved in the discussion before I argue ON THE INTERNET and here he is refusing to play the biggest game of his genre.

Then again he drives a Ferrari, so I guess he had it coming. Enjoy those $7,500 strut replacements, sucker.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Simond on May 16, 2007, 07:53:33 AM
For balance though, it would be nice to hear from one of the  employees retained by Sigil/Sony but I'm sure no one is going to be getting that interview anytime soon.   :-)
There is a post on the FoH boards from Nino (who got rehired by SOE to be one of the four people in the 'secret project' team under Jeff Butler) which, while being deliberately vague and couched in generalities, could be read as possible confirmation to the general feel & sentiment of this interview. Especially the last paragraph of it.

(No link because I'm at work. Sorry!)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Rodivar on May 16, 2007, 07:55:15 AM
Great interview with really probing questions.

While 'how Vanguard turned out' is evidence enough that something wasn't quite right at Sigil games I think it is important to keep in mind the interviewee wasn't 'rehired' by Sony/Sigil.  There may be a very good reason for that and if there is one must weigh his/her responses carefully.

I know through my personal experience as both a front line employee  and  later middle management (thank God I do neither now) that the  'the reality' is sometimes  heavily distorted, especially if the employee is disgruntled.  At times he adopts the meme of the little guy down in the trenches  always fighting the good fight against  clueless and egotistical managment who just doesn't listen to him/her.  This is usually the common thread in these kind of situations. Nine times of of ten the hard reality is usually in the middle and could swing either way depending on the reasons for the employee dismissal, or in this case their failure to be rehired.

I want to emphasize that I am not disputing any of the claims because there is no way to prove them otherwise and clearly some of the stuff  is both  believable and shocking (the firing).  For balance though, it would be nice to hear from one of the  employees retained by Sigil/Sony but I'm sure no one is going to be getting that interview anytime soon.   :-)








True but the results of the project are consistent with the general tone of the interview.  The details may (are) diffrent depending on perspective but if even half of the observations are true, they were in for a big challenge.  

I would take the comments regarding the new leadership with the most doubt since it's unfair to blame the new SOE project managers for the failures of the game, that result was cast long before they came on the scene.  


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ixxit on May 16, 2007, 08:19:26 AM
Quote
True but the results of the project are consistent with the general tone of the interview.  The details may (are) diffrent depending on perspective but if even half of the observations are true, they were in for a big challenge.

I agree, but that is pretty much what I was saying  :-D


Also, the interviewee gives the impression that middle and upper managment are soley  responsible for the resulting mess, absolving the front line employee of any blame.   Making quests was hard because a tool wasn't created to make them;  still that doesn't explain why a great deal of the tests were broken.  Many of them worked after all.  Why was the engine so clunky and underoptimized (which is Vanguard's biggest and most publicsized problem)?  Maybe the coders weren't up to the task.  How many team leaders didn't get or demand the best from their people?

Vanguard had problems on so many levels I think,  I think now that fingers are starting to be pointed it is somewhat disingenuous to point the finger at 4 or 5 individuals.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hutch on May 16, 2007, 08:31:31 AM
For balance though, it would be nice to hear from one of the  employees retained by Sigil/Sony but I'm sure no one is going to be getting that interview anytime soon.   :-)
There is a post on the FoH boards from Nino (who got rehired by SOE to be one of the four people in the 'secret project' team under Jeff Butler) which, while being deliberately vague and couched in generalities, could be read as possible confirmation to the general feel & sentiment of this interview. Especially the last paragraph of it.

(No link because I'm at work. Sorry!)

This post? (http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/28627-soe-own-vg-sigil-fires-employees-32.html#post732163)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Comstar on May 16, 2007, 08:33:27 AM
Even if it was crappy low level people, they were hired and supposed to be lead by high level people. The responibility falls on thier shoulders, not the people in the cublices.

In any case, cases such as this are common in Every industry, it's not the sole province of online gaming MMOG's. You could eaisly redo the "smartest guys in the room" the MMOG version, though very few failed game companies reach the hight of Enron etc (the best example I can think of is the Original Warhammer Fantasy).

Mabye they thought their game was so good, they didn't need more than 1 QA tester. 

BTW, fantastic interview.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: croaker69 on May 16, 2007, 08:37:28 AM
mmmmmmmmmmm  tastes like Wolfpack.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Akkori on May 16, 2007, 08:43:55 AM
Great, great interview.

Would have LOVED to see something like that for SWG, but oh well.  Fantastic read nonetheless.
I agree completely. It was a bigger train wreck than VG, and I bet there are a lot of great stories there.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ixxit on May 16, 2007, 08:46:06 AM
For balance though, it would be nice to hear from one of the  employees retained by Sigil/Sony but I'm sure no one is going to be getting that interview anytime soon.   :-)
There is a post on the FoH boards from Nino (who got rehired by SOE to be one of the four people in the 'secret project' team under Jeff Butler) which, while being deliberately vague and couched in generalities, could be read as possible confirmation to the general feel & sentiment of this interview. Especially the last paragraph of it.

(No link because I'm at work. Sorry!)

Thanks for the head up, and Hutch for the link.  Lots of stuff there between the lines .


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 16, 2007, 08:49:41 AM
Vanguard had problems on so many levels I think,  I think now that fingers are starting to be pointed it is somewhat disingenuous to point the finger at 4 or 5 individuals.

From the Nino interview, linked above:
Quote
I promised not to be publically scornful, but I will say this: I hope those truly responsible for the deep rooted failings of the company lay in bed tonight and relive the events that transpired today in their heads, over and over. For not ONE of you is without your job come tomorrow morning.

Ixxit, I know what you're saying; I've been 'victim' of mass layoffs in situations where from a purely strategic position, it made sense of me and hundreds of others to be laid off. Naturally, there's still feelings of betrayal, and even a few outspoken disgruntled employees. Later, in the final analysis, it becomes clear that our positions were slated for the axe, due to the job we were doing and the sound fiscal decisions made by management.

That is not what happened here: The entire tragedy reads like a moral tale written by Maxim Gorky. It is clear that in this particular case, it was entirely upper management that had their heads in the sand, or worse, were willfully negligent of what they were entrusted to do. It happens often enough within corporate environments; there are droves of corporate class bums who always stay on top while mishandling the projects they are entrusted to work on.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ixxit on May 16, 2007, 08:49:56 AM
Even if it was crappy low level people, they were hired and supposed to be lead by high level people. The responibility falls on thier shoulders, not the people in the cublices.

Yeah, you are right about that.  Nino's post at FOH pretty much confirms it, and really  sums up the human cost.  

Quote
That is not what happened here: The entire tragedy reads like a moral tale written by Maxim Gorky. It is clear that in this particular case, it was entirely upper management that had their heads in the sand, or worse, were willfully negligent of what they were entrusted to do. It happens often enough within corporate environments; there are droves of corporate class bums who always stay on top while mishandling the projects they are entrusted to work on.

Yeah,  I can definately see that.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Zodiac on May 16, 2007, 08:50:15 AM
Excellent read. Thanks for the interview. It gave a lot of insights as to what happened. I sincerely hope the good people on the team find a suitable home.

There's really a big difference between a Leader and a Manager. A good Leader is not necessarily a good Manager, and vice versa. The best Leaders and Managers have qualities from both realms, but when a Leader who lacks managerial qualities is put into a position of power in management, disaster strikes. Interestingly, when a Manager who lacks leadership qualities is put into a position of power in leadership, more often than not you don't get disasters, but rather, simply mediocre products (but it will be finished to a reasonable extent).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Yegolev on May 16, 2007, 08:54:35 AM
This interview is, by far, much better than any other interview on the subject that I have read.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 16, 2007, 08:56:55 AM
Ya, I worry too. With an interview like that, Schild may get some hep job offer somewhere and abandon us.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: LK on May 16, 2007, 09:18:06 AM
This is why I'm gonna visit f13 forevah and evah and evah.  Getting first-hand reporting on a situation like this is 100x better than what I can expect from sites that regurgitate the news.

Excellent job and big kudos to schild.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lietgardis on May 16, 2007, 09:27:24 AM
No scripting language, though.  Say what?!?  Surely there was no scripting language for a sane, understandable reason?  Like "we won't need a scripting language because content creation will be handled by our revoutionary new drag-and-drop interface.  Or maybe it's like Eve, and the bulk of the game is written in something pretty close to a scripting language so a seperate one wasn't needed.  No way did you have to code in C++ to get foozle 1 to walk from A to B and say "numbnuts"?!?

You don't need a scripting language if you have an extensible, data-driven infrastructure.  It does require a commitment to developing that infrastructure in a smart, maintainable way, though, so it requires more foresight than "whatever, the designers will code what they need themselves."


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ixxit on May 16, 2007, 09:52:51 AM
One thing I find interesting is that Dave Gilbertson (the ex modeler cum VP of Sigil) who is singled out by the ex Sigil employee as being one of major factors in the massive management failure is being retained by Sony to assume pretty much the same role.

From Smed's statement:

Quote
Dave Gilbertson will be the person directly responsible for the day-to-day management of both the Sigil Carlsbad office as well as Vanguard"


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Frelorn on May 16, 2007, 10:03:20 AM
That was one hell of a read. I really feel bad for those people who put in a ton of work, only to get let go like that. Hopefully they will all find something better now.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 16, 2007, 10:08:17 AM
No scripting language, though.  Say what?!?  Surely there was no scripting language for a sane, understandable reason?  Like "we won't need a scripting language because content creation will be handled by our revoutionary new drag-and-drop interface.  Or maybe it's like Eve, and the bulk of the game is written in something pretty close to a scripting language so a seperate one wasn't needed.  No way did you have to code in C++ to get foozle 1 to walk from A to B and say "numbnuts"?!?

You don't need a scripting language if you have an extensible, data-driven infrastructure.  It does require a commitment to developing that infrastructure in a smart, maintainable way, though, so it requires more foresight than "whatever, the designers will code what they need themselves."
Jeez I'm in the wrong field. You guys get all the cool toys. If it wasn't for the fact that I have a family to support, I'd probably start pushing my resume around Austin in the hopes of getting my grubby little mitts on some of them.

Simond:
Quote
For example. this might recast the Shadow's of Luclin launch for EQ in a whole new light - instead of Evil Smed as The Man, forcing the poor, misunderstood artistes of Verant to ship an incomplete product; maybe it was Smed as a desperate manager, trying to shepard Brad's demented Vision Cult into releasing something...anything even halfway playable.
Interesting thought. I've always been of the opinion that there's a seriously sick management and design process at SOE -- I never could understand how the EQ2 team could be fixing a seriously sick game in a very professional way, while the SWG team was -- in essence -- taking a patient with a bad case of the flu and shooting him repeadedly.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Mr_PeaCH on May 16, 2007, 10:19:08 AM
This thread is worthless without pics (of giant stone penises).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nija on May 16, 2007, 10:39:51 AM
(http://imgred.com/http://www.newwest.net/images/thumbnails_feature/phallic_cairn.jpg)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Jerrith on May 16, 2007, 10:50:04 AM
Just a quick post, I'm at work, building atm...

As a former Sigil employee (gone as of mid-March this year), I'd say there are some points in there I disagree with.  Some of that is one person's opinion, not necessarily fact.

As for scripting, which would you rather use, something that requires you to type:

giveExperience(1000);

Or something that lets you:

click on a drop down, choose giveExperience, and then be presented with 4 radio buttons for tiny, low, standard, high, and a text field for level (with +/- buttons).

That's not exactly what it's like in Vanguard, but it's the general idea. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: darrenl on May 16, 2007, 10:50:15 AM
Well done good sir....well done.

D


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Yegolev on May 16, 2007, 10:59:02 AM
I like typing things, it takes much less time and effort than click-to-victory UIs.  Not everyone agrees with me, though.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 16, 2007, 11:02:04 AM
Ideally, you have both. See: NWN1


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ubiq on May 16, 2007, 11:24:38 AM
I like typing things, it takes much less time and effort than click-to-victory UIs.  Not everyone agrees with me, though.
In the example quoted above, though, you have to root through code to balance a quest.  This is less than optimal, especially if (when) you have to go on a large-scale balance pass, and ends up being how exploits or buggy quests sneak into the game.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Raph on May 16, 2007, 11:34:20 AM
I can't believe that this turned into a script vs datatable discussion. :)

Ideally, you data-drive everything that is data-drivable. This means everythign that relies on central balancing, everything with common datafields, everything that plain old looks like an Excel spreadsheet.

Some things, like quests, will be reduced in cool factor by compressing them into that. And that's where scripts can shine -- allowing flexibility and creativity in new behaviors.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Yegolev on May 16, 2007, 12:00:16 PM
I can't believe that this turned into a script vs datatable discussion. :)

It's one of my lovable charms.  I don't do the same sort of work that you (collective rednames) do, and for the sort of thing Ubiq and Raph describe then it is always nice to cut out the element of human error whenever possible, plus it's easier to work with and whatnot.  I assume.  In my case, a predefined menu just gets in the way unless whoever wrote the UI already knows what could be broken... in which case she should have just written an automated fix so I could keep surfing the net.  Being able to get to the guts of the machine is important for my work.  If I had to spend my days making sure rangers were overpowered in a fantasy MOG, I figure I would want a GUI as well.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ixxit on May 16, 2007, 12:12:23 PM
Just a quick post, I'm at work, building atm...

As a former Sigil employee (gone as of mid-March this year), I'd say there are some points in there I disagree with.  Some of that is one person's opinion, not necessarily fact.

Another thing is that he/she  name names, and some of the attacks are personal, a conevience that anonymity grants.  While I understant that the employee doesn't want to burn any bridges by identifying themselves I think perhaps it would have been much more professional to talk in generalities (insofar as the people's names) like Nino did, regardless of whether or not Nino still works for SOE.  Whether he/she is right or wrong there is a stench of sour grapes.

[EDIT]  PS just to be clear Schild, you did a great job with your questions to ellicit such candid responses.  I think you should be a member of the White House press corps. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Baldrake on May 16, 2007, 12:19:56 PM
Can anyone who's actually in the game describe what's fun about it (if anything?) After six months of polishing, is this going to be something worth trying out?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Margalis on May 16, 2007, 12:20:36 PM
No scripting language is absurd. If you want a graphical tool, make it work by producing script!

One QA person? LOL. Holy shit. It's even worse than I imagined. And not playing WOW. When one game does 20x better than its nearest competitor it is probably worth at least checking out.

Good job with the interview. Actual journalism - amazing.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Pendan on May 16, 2007, 12:34:38 PM
[I think perhaps it would have been much more professional to talk in generalities (insofar as the people's names)
Yea the managers should not only get enough money to buy houses after their mismanagement but also be able to keep their reputation intact. They deserve to have their cake and eat it too after all.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Kitsune on May 16, 2007, 12:42:34 PM
Can anyone who's actually in the game describe what's fun about it (if anything?) After six months of polishing, is this going to be something worth trying out?

I played it on a free trial after the release, and it boils down to 3D diku like every other fantasy MMOG out there so if that's not your tea of choice, skip it.  What it had going for it were some interesting mechanics (the diplomacy battles), interesting takes on classes (the psionicist for the crowd control-ish caster), and a big world that looked kinda pretty in places.  It felt fairly soulless, however; generic_fantasy_world_04.  At no point did I particularly care about any of the NPCs, cities, gods, or much of anything else in the world.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Tcharels on May 16, 2007, 12:44:14 PM
Well, with all respect to my old commrade Jerrith, while this is only one person's point of view, it is a very accurate point of view. The anonymous poster who did this interview.. definately biased, but.. very accurate. Yes, you can have both.

And I won't get into the scripts vs. data driven discussion, as Raph pretty much hit all the appropriate points.

Cheers.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Simond on May 16, 2007, 12:58:37 PM
By the way, if anyone wants some light entertainment after this drama, the Vanguard pre-launch forums (http://forums.vanguardsoh.com/forumdisplay.php?f=11) appear to be back up.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hazard on May 16, 2007, 01:02:47 PM
Well, it was as I  expected. Man I hate to have right sometimes. Poor sods that got fired, been there and hates the empty sinking feeling. Guys if you read this, I realy liked the game but the total ignore from guys like Brad about the issues like hitching and stutters got me to un-subribe. If they can't admit there are problems, then they aren't likely to fix the problems.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on May 16, 2007, 01:12:47 PM
Outstanding interview. 

What strikes me funny is just how similar this whole situation is to the Ivory Tower of academia.  You have people that are great at generating ideas leading hoards of people while knowing nothing about implementation.  I'm saddened by the waste of sheer talent due to bad decision making and implementation skills above them, but realize that this is an all too common scenario.  Ideas are easy.  The conversion of ideas to concept and concrete outcome, well... that's the hard part. 

I'm optimistic that there are some talented people from the Sigil team that will move on to bigger and better things.  I just hope that they don't have to deal with too much emotional stress in the meantime.  So much wasted talent/potential here.   


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 16, 2007, 01:13:18 PM
I like typing things, it takes much less time and effort than click-to-victory UIs.  Not everyone agrees with me, though.
In the example quoted above, though, you have to root through code to balance a quest.  This is less than optimal, especially if (when) you have to go on a large-scale balance pass, and ends up being how exploits or buggy quests sneak into the game.

Yeah, but you shouldn't have to root through code for apparently off-the-cuff numbers because you shouldn't be using literals in every quest.  It's facile, but

giveExperience(1000);

in your example, should be:

giveExperience(L_SCALAR_CONST * iThisLevel );

Or similar: you get the point: now you can find the level easily, and change the rate of advancement of the whole shebang with one altered constant.  And changing that might require ctrl-o, choose quest file, ctrl-f, but that's certainly no harder than (to vastly simplify the data dictionary involved)

select EXP_SCALAR, EXP_LEVEL from QUEST_REWARDS, QUESTS where EXP_SCALAR.QUEST_ID=EXP_LEVEL.ID and QUEST.FRIENDLY_TITLE="Whacking The Foozle"

and no more awkward than opening the quests interface, selecting the quest, opening the rewads section, pulling down the drop-down for the completion-step, opening the stage etc...  And that's what i referred to anyway in my "perhaps they had the other tools" bit.  Works, but too simple-simon.

Scrpting ftw.  I add scripting modules to most stuff I write, now, simply because I have the knack, and the class design on my library, down pat.

Edit: changed data-typing


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 16, 2007, 01:21:51 PM
Well, with all respect to my old commrade Jerrith, while this is only one person's point of view, it is a very accurate point of view. The anonymous poster who did this interview.. definately biased, but.. very accurate. Yes, you can have both.

I take it you were with Sigil for a while, before the axe fell?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: bhodi on May 16, 2007, 01:28:38 PM
I'm continually amazed that game companies routinely fight the same sorts of management challenges as everyone else providing service in a computer field. I guess that I always figured the vision or the passion of the people involved would bring them together and smooth over rough spots, because, from what I can tell, there is a lot more emotion involved in game design than any other company I can think of.

Since there's so much emphasis on the product as a love-child instead of a solution provider, I'm frankly surprised the internals were that bad. After so many obviously boneheaded decisions coupled with dismal benchmarks, I'm shocked that word didn't get forwarded to people equipped to make necessary changes. A working man down in the trenches has a lot more incentive to speak up and rail against such obviously flawed decisions such as a woefully underweight QA staff when they have more of a personal stake in the finished product.

I'd also agree that offhand comments about house purchases with stock when speaking in front of 104 people in a parking lot after being notified of layoffs wins the Michael Scott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scott_%28The_Office%29) award of the year from me.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Soulslinger on May 16, 2007, 01:42:20 PM
You know I've started thinking about the whole "Small group prototype MMO project" thing that Jeff will supposedly be heading up and remembered something very interesting. While I was onboard at SOE, there were a couple of small projects being worked on, mostly POC stuff, but kinda cool. One was called Tapestry and was going to be more of a virtual community ala Second Life... but on steroids. The other was more of an enviromental engine for a "living world". It would rain and rivers would swell. Leaves would fall from trees and pile up, creeks became rivers which became lakes and everything was affected by the climate. Snow would amass in drifts according to the wind etc etc. The demo I saw included rain puddling and washing out the sides of a dirt mound and some snow effect. This was over 2 years ago but I would not be surprised to see the environmental engine resurface. In terms of immersability, a game sporting that kind of environment control has incredible potential, imo. Then again, it could be a dead project and Jeff could be working on Epic Weapons for EQ3.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Margalis on May 16, 2007, 01:46:01 PM
QA team is a good litmus test for managerial competence. Bad managers almost without fail refuse to see the value of QA because QA does not product immediately tangible benefits or produce any new features. In fact QA slows down the introduction of new features.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Tcharels on May 16, 2007, 01:46:25 PM
I was. I'm about a year removed from it, but I still remember it clearly and know well what things were like, and that the interview was about as accurate a read on the situation as you could get.

I tried writing more, but, even after all this time, I find it hard to not sound a bit bitter myself, so, I'll have to leave it at that. I wish all the best for to my former colleagues and I hope they all land on their feet and soon. They are, for the most part, a great group of people.

Cheers.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 16, 2007, 01:46:56 PM
...The other was more of an enviromental engine for a "living world". It would rain and rivers would swell. Leaves would fall from trees and pile up, creeks became rivers which became lakes and everything was affected by the climate. Snow would amass in drifts according to the wind etc etc. The demo I saw included rain puddling and washing out the sides of a dirt mound and some snow effect....

Man, I'd pay cash to play even Vanguard if it had that sort of immersion.

Well, probably.  For a while.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 16, 2007, 02:06:31 PM
I'm continually amazed that game companies routinely fight the same sorts of management challenges as everyone else providing service in a computer field. I guess that I always figured the vision or the passion of the people involved would bring them together and smooth over rough spots, because, from what I can tell, there is a lot more emotion involved in game design than any other company I can think of.
I'm not. If anything, I would expect game industries to have worse management problems -- at least for anything over a five-man shop.

There are a lot of game designers who still hold to the old-school hacker style of development. That is, they think they can pretty much just eyeball it and make it all fit together through sheer talent and force of will and deep understanding of the vision.

Which is, to be blunt, bullshit.

Requirements documents aren't sexy. They don't feel like red-hot talent. Iterative development, artifacts, work breakdown structures -- they're not fun shit to do, and most people who got into the games design business got into it to design games, not fuck around with "milestones" and "use cases" and all that crap.

The problem is -- if you're working on a multi-million dollar project with dozens of people, you sort of need that crap. (Tangent: Developing MMORPGs, I'd focus on a really tight evolutionary model -- lots of iterations, early cycles devoted to prototyping key elements, heavy on early abstraction to allow layering of features, and a serious up-front investment in core architecture. You don't need to know every nook, cranny, ability, or class anytime soon. What you need is a tight focus on getting a working engine going that'll handle your projected load, tools that allow the customization you're going to want, and a basic framework that allows you to design the actual 'game'. Initial game design would be pretty abstract and very flexible.)

You need artifacts, use-cases, milestones, and actual software engineering. You need solid management -- and Sigil apparently lacked professional management.

They might have been kick-ass designers, but they weren't good managers -- and once you're fucking VP of this, or Chief of that -- you need to be a good goddamn manager or so hands off you're just doing PR.

The games industry is slowing embracing professional standards (they're about a decade or so behind the software industry as a whole) for development. The MMORPG buisness seems to be lagging even them. With Sigil -- they seemed really prone to the 'rock-star' fallacy.

They had something like 20+ designers, 10+ coders and god knows how many artists, DBAs, etc. I don't care how much of a fucking rock-star you are or how awesome the fucking vision -- you need all that goddamn boring paperwork to make sure those 30+ people are working together and actually creating, instead of constantly fucking themselves and everyone else over and wasting money.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 16, 2007, 02:18:56 PM
Requirements documents aren't sexy. They don't feel like red-hot talent. Iterative development, artifacts, work breakdown structures -- they're not fun shit to do, and most people who got into the games design business got into it to design games, not fuck around with "milestones" and "use cases" and all that crap.

The problem is -- if you're working on a multi-million dollar project with dozens of people, you sort of need that crap.

Dead right: that's why my evenings are spent doing a postgrad course towards my masters - M883: Requirements Gathering in Technology Management - for my masters.  It's not what I enjoy doing, but I know I need to do it better.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Mandrel on May 16, 2007, 02:32:37 PM
The one QA member is rather amusing, considering Sigil had openings for game testers posted on their website for over a year now.  I guess they knew they needed more, but no one got around to actually hiring them.

Another thing I never see discussion about VG is the lack of storyline or lore.  I don't think there was anyone who was the main writer for the game, and that the lore, what little of it there was, was written by any employee in their "free time".  I'm guessing this is just another symptom of the mis-management.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 16, 2007, 02:36:57 PM
Dead right: that's why my evenings are spent doing a postgrad course towards my masters - M883: Requirements Gathering in Technology Management - for my masters.  It's not what I enjoy doing, but I know I need to do it better.
I just slogged through (managed a B, which frankly was generous given my total lack of interest and corresponding lack of effort) my last graduate level project management course -- it was interesting comparing what we were learning to the mature processes that run fairly transparently around me -- and I learned an awful lot that might be useful personally (mostly that I am capable of doing my manager's job, and even his manager's job -- I just really don't want to). But still -- god is it boring. It's not bad if you're just using it as a template for personal development, but if you're actually leading a team -- it's got to be on paper, thought out for everyone, constantly updated and it's a ton of sheer work and very little fun-time.

If you're doing the software management, you're not going to have time to sling the code or design the cool quests or in fact do anything but manage. It's a lot of hard work, and about the only perk is when it gets done right and on time and on budget -- you can take some comfort in the fact that all those red-hot talented designers and coders only got there because you did a shit ton of heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Project managers rarely get named as influential. They're not rock stars. But fuck if they're not the keystone of whether your game is shit or not.

Of course, I'm just biased. My Master's is in Computer Science -- software management courses are more of a token gesture for me. I certainly don't want to do that heavy lifting. :)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Azazel on May 16, 2007, 02:43:42 PM
I have nothing useful to add for the moment on the topic, so I'll just say kudos to Schild. Good job on the interview, mate.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 16, 2007, 02:50:41 PM
Dead right: that's why my evenings are spent doing a postgrad course towards my masters - M883: Requirements Gathering in Technology Management - for my masters.  It's not what I enjoy doing, but I know I need to do it better.
I just slogged through (managed a B, which frankly was generous given my total lack of interest and corresponding lack of effort) my last graduate level project management course

Who did you do it with?  What you do as a job seemed not a million miles removed from my own work, even if the details of language and target are different.  I'm genuinelly intrigued as to your experience with it.

Quote
If you're doing the software management, you're not going to have time to sling the code or design the cool quests or in fact do anything but manage. It's a lot of hard work, and about the only perk is when it gets done right and on time and on budget -- you can take some comfort in the fact that all those red-hot talented designers and coders only got there because you did a shit ton of heavy lifting behind the scenes...Of course, I'm just biased. My Master's is in Computer Science -- software management courses are more of a token gesture for me. I certainly don't want to do that heavy lifting. :)

Yeah, I'm doing it for the same reason I learned C# when MS first released the language specs, or when Java first launched, or half a dozen stupider bets: paranoia.  I saw what happened to the Cobol guys in 2001 and I always want an "out" if the bottom falls out of what I am currently doing.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lietgardis on May 16, 2007, 03:01:28 PM
Yeah, but you shouldn't have to root through code for apparently off-the-cuff numbers because you shouldn't be using literals in every quest. 

That's what I mean by "data-driven."  I don't care how the server handles the data, I just want to connect modules and enter numbers, and I want to review and change them after the fact in a tabular format.  I think exporting it to some slow-ass scripting language is a waste of the server's time when it could just read from data tables, but hey, I'll let the server programmers make that call.  I just care that it's efficient to go back and change large chunks of data at once, and that it's compartmentalized in such a way that the QA department trusts that I haven't fucked up anything else in the process.

Efficient maintenance is critical to live service.  Data-drive as much as possible.  If you really want to maintain that bitch for the next 10 years with a billion tiny script files, good luck; you'll need it.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Raph on May 16, 2007, 03:03:39 PM
The other was more of an enviromental engine for a "living world". It would rain and rivers would swell. Leaves would fall from trees and pile up, creeks became rivers which became lakes and everything was affected by the climate. Snow would amass in drifts according to the wind etc etc. The demo I saw included rain puddling and washing out the sides of a dirt mound and some snow effect. This was over 2 years ago but I would not be surprised to see the environmental engine resurface. In terms of immersability, a game sporting that kind of environment control has incredible potential, imo.

That was my R&D group. We showed the environmental stuff in a demo reel for the PS3 announcement at E3.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Soulslinger on May 16, 2007, 03:08:55 PM
You know I've started thinking about the whole "Small group prototype MMO project" thing that Jeff will supposedly be heading up and remembered something very interesting. While I was onboard at SOE, there were a couple of small projects being worked on, mostly POC stuff, but kinda cool. One was called Tapestry and was going to be more of a virtual community ala Second Life... but on steroids. The other was more of an enviromental engine for a "living world". It would rain and rivers would swell. Leaves would fall from trees and pile up, creeks became rivers which became lakes and everything was affected by the climate. Snow would amass in drifts according to the wind etc etc. The demo I saw included rain puddling and washing out the sides of a dirt mound and some snow effect. This was over 2 years ago but I would not be surprised to see the environmental engine resurface. In terms of immersability, a game sporting that kind of environment control has incredible potential, imo. Then again, it could be a dead project and Jeff could be working on Epic Weapons for EQ3.

That was my R&D group. We showed the environmental stuff in a demo reel for the PS3 announcement at E3.

Did you guys do anything with it?  :wink:  It looked amazing.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Raph on May 16, 2007, 03:10:37 PM
The other was more of an enviromental engine for a "living world". It would rain and rivers would swell. Leaves would fall from trees and pile up, creeks became rivers which became lakes and everything was affected by the climate. Snow would amass in drifts according to the wind etc etc. The demo I saw included rain puddling and washing out the sides of a dirt mound and some snow effect. This was over 2 years ago but I would not be surprised to see the environmental engine resurface. In terms of immersability, a game sporting that kind of environment control has incredible potential, imo.

That was my R&D group. We showed the environmental stuff in a demo reel for the PS3 announcement.

Did you guys do anything with it?  :wink:  It looked amazing.

I can't tell you anything else about it, sorry. :)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Zodiac on May 16, 2007, 03:13:36 PM
If you're doing the software management, you're not going to have time to sling the code or design the cool quests or in fact do anything but manage. It's a lot of hard work, and about the only perk is when it gets done right and on time and on budget -- you can take some comfort in the fact that all those red-hot talented designers and coders only got there because you did a shit ton of heavy lifting behind the scenes.

I can't tell you how true it is that if you are manager, you have no time to code or design. I often joke with people that I program in Word and Excel, sometimes PowerPoint :) Coming from being an individual contributor myself, to not doing any of what I was good at was a drastic change for me. And it really takes a totally different mentality. A Manager is a leader but also an enabler. Without the enabler portion, a team can't function cohesively.

Did I mention you need to use Word instead of Visual Studio? :D


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: TGB on May 16, 2007, 03:21:28 PM
Project managers rarely get named as influential. They're not rock stars. But fuck if they're not the keystone of whether your game is shit or not.

They are also the ones who try to maintain the stupid Gantt chart and have to corner people on deadlines.  It's a thankless job, and it's miserable, but they are the ones who will update the docs, keep the team moving and be the all around bad guy questioning every little change and the reasons behind it.

No one likes the pragmatic voice when everyone else is spouting grandiose ideas, but they will try to keep things in check.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 16, 2007, 03:26:29 PM
Who did you do it with?  What you do as a job seemed not a million miles removed from my own work, even if the details of language and target are different.  I'm genuinelly intrigued as to your experience with it.
Hell if I can remember the professor's name -- it was done online (our school is getting big on that), and I rarely attended his face-to-face classes (they were awkwardly timed for someone having an actual day job). We used Royce's Software Project Management as a textbook, with a shit-ton of references to project documents (from DoD project guidelines to IEEE papers to 'amazing management solutions' some people were selling (that was done as analysis, not as 'hey, good idea!).

Our final project -- some 40% of the grade -- was a complete set of artifacts for a minimum 5 man-year project. (Mine turned out to be about 8). Had to do the whole damn thing yourself, too.

Mostly I learned a lot of proper names for things I did daily, and occasionally the reasons why. Even had an actual useful suggestion or two for my manager to streamline something.

From the class, I could basically see how all the stuff we covered -- from businesses cases down to work-breakdown structures and development cycles -- applied to what I was doing. In terms of my job, I didn't see 90% of it -- I did some architecture design, but someone else translated it into documentation to show our customers/bosses. I mostly did straight-up development and assessment work.

About the biggest surprise was seeing how much leeway our particular team had -- most of the stuff out here adheres to a very rigorous project development plan, but our team -- due, I guess, to the way we're tasked with working -- has the freedom to adopt those rigorous government standards to a very tailored process.

Also, Gantt charts are pretty useful.
Quote
Yeah, I'm doing it for the same reason I learned C# when MS first released the language specs, or when Java first launched, or half a dozen stupider bets: paranoia.  I saw what happened to the Cobol guys in 2001 and I always want an "out" if the bottom falls out of what I am currently doing.
My latest baby, a genetic program designed to mine financial data and construct trading models (I was doing day-trading AND a futures market -- talk about a cast-iron bitch. That sort of leverage means either you are solid fucking gold or in the toilet. Happily for me, I am solid gold -- although I spent six months learning a lot of 'What doesn't work' lessons) was done in C# -- not even remotely the best language for it (although it has a lovely GUI-driven operation to it that saved me tons of work). I did it in C# because I didn't know C# sharp and it was a perfect excuse to learn it.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: palmer_eldritch on May 16, 2007, 04:18:36 PM
Can anyone who's actually in the game describe what's fun about it (if anything?) After six months of polishing, is this going to be something worth trying out?

I am no longer in the game but played it for a while and enjoyed it.

The classes to me seemed as fun as any other game. They were not original, but did have a few original features (bards writing their own songs, which were effectively spells, for example - not as revolutionary as it might sound but more interesting than just getting this spell at this level etc).

I liked the random elements of the dungeons. Sometimes, in some places, a nasty named mob might appear, with the promise of phat lewt, and sometimes it would not. Go to an instance in WoW or LotR (great games both imho) and you always know what to expect.

I liked the fact that there were no instances and you could bump into other players at any time. The pros and cons of that are probably obvious, but for me it was good.

There is, in fact, a lot of content on Qalia, the continent I played on. It's not an empty place. I heard the same may not be true on other continents.

There are some fun quests. One where you spray a lizardman leader with pheremones and large monster of some kind emerges from the river to do something nasty to him comes to mind. Most of the quests are standard kill or fetch, but shouldn't upset you if you can accept that in other games.

I only played to level 20. However this is not like level 20 in WoW - it takes longer to level.

If you're wondering why I quit, it was partly the prettyness of LotR and the fact that my friends who didn't have high-end computers were playing it. Also, I was put off when I discovered just how long (as in lots of stages) and complex some of the higher level (20+) quests are.

I'm not disputing the faults other people have identified in the game, particularly the fact that much of it was damn ugly even on a good PC. I'm saying it's not total shite and if they offer a free trial in six months, my advice for what it's worth is that it may be worth trying.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: AaronC on May 16, 2007, 04:34:25 PM
There's really a big difference between a Leader and a Manager. A good Leader is not necessarily a good Manager, and vice versa. The best Leaders and Managers have qualities from both realms, but when a Leader who lacks managerial qualities is put into a position of power in management, disaster strikes. Interestingly, when a Manager who lacks leadership qualities is put into a position of power in leadership, more often than not you don't get disasters, but rather, simply mediocre products (but it will be finished to a reasonable extent).

QFT.

WTF was Fisher thinking bragging about getting a house while the company is being shut down?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: WindupAtheist on May 16, 2007, 05:20:58 PM
Nice interview.  The fallout thread at Silkyvenom was a riot.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on May 16, 2007, 05:30:27 PM
Nice work f13.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: KyanMehwulfe on May 16, 2007, 05:37:27 PM
Quite the intrigue.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Soulslinger on May 16, 2007, 05:40:28 PM
There's really a big difference between a Leader and a Manager. A good Leader is not necessarily a good Manager, and vice versa. The best Leaders and Managers have qualities from both realms, but when a Leader who lacks managerial qualities is put into a position of power in management, disaster strikes. Interestingly, when a Manager who lacks leadership qualities is put into a position of power in leadership, more often than not you don't get disasters, but rather, simply mediocre products (but it will be finished to a reasonable extent).

QFT.

WTF was Fisher thinking bragging about getting a house while the company is being shut down?


If you knew Fisher, you wouldn't be surprised.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Tale on May 16, 2007, 05:44:47 PM
Great interview Schild, good questions.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Sogrinaugh on May 16, 2007, 05:57:00 PM
Quote
I DO think however, that he believed people wanted to play a game that HE liked, regardless of the masses of people telling him they didn't like his ideas
Again, back to smart business. Regardless of what some old timers might think, to be successful you cannot merely design a game you would enjoy playing. In fact, I'd wager a lot that most successful games are not played by their designers very often. These are experiences that respond to both personal and business needs, and command budgets that require much more than just "do I like it?" for validation.
Im about to fuck up the spelling of his name, but "Shigeru Myamoto" - the designer (maybe lead programmer too?) of the original Super Mario Bros, Zelda, and Metroid, designed (maybe still designs?) with that philosophy.  I can still remember reading an interview with him in a Nex Gen magazine (dunno if that gaming mag still exists... haven't played consoles in like 8+ years) where he said that.  "I design games that i find fun to play."  I remember this clearly because it was in such stark contrast to the design philosophy of the lead designer (maybe also programmer?) of Street Fighter 2/trubo/etc etc.  He designed games he thought other people would enjoy...

Maybe the Shigeru/Brad way is only possible with single-player games?  Because you aren't competing against anyone else, you are just having fun in this little digital world, sorta like a glimpse into the creator's mind.  If that mind is very creative and imaginitive, you have alot of fun.

EDIT:  Scratch that above paragraph.  Shigeru also did Super Mario Kart, which was a competative game.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Margalis on May 16, 2007, 06:32:46 PM
A lot of really great things are the product of a singular vision. A lot of really lousy things are too. It really depends on what your vision is.

Designing for yourself is a lot easier than designing for a target customer that you can only theorize about. If you don't understand why they find something fun making something they find fun is going to be tough.

That said, listening to feedback from the people on your own team is something everyone should do. And feedback from players can be very useful as well if analyzed correctly.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Strazos on May 16, 2007, 07:14:25 PM
Well, it's clear that Brad too very little of the criticism and advice from others to heart. Comparing Miyamato to Brad really isn't fair, if only because we don't know precisely how the former handles other people on his teams.

Seeing as no game he has ever touched has ever been anywhere near the terrible quality of Vanguard, I can only assume that while it may be his singular vision driving a project, he probably does take what other people say into account.

I mean, really....Metroid, Zelda, Mario.....have any of their games ever been BAD?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Stephen Zepp on May 16, 2007, 07:27:05 PM
I'm in a unique position in that my (game development industry) job puts me in contact with developers from all walks of the industry--from educators to indie developers to AAA developers. (For those that don't know, I teach game engine technology, specifically our products, to new customers in 3-5 day intensive boot camps).

It's interesting that especially when I see AA/AAA teams that come together to a boot camp, I can pretty much tell who will be successful as a team and who will not--simply by how they approach learning a new engine. It's especially pertinent when I get an artist/producer/coder combination, because you can watch how they approach problems, and predict what will happen with their team.

What has surprised me over the last two years is that very commonly (probably > 80% of the teams that have come to my training), both artists and designers/producers have little to no understanding of the limits and best practices of the underlying technology, and basically say "coders make that shit work", and move on. The teams that I am confident will be successful are those where the coder(s) are strong enough personality wise to say "hey, no, that's not going to work, and here's why", and the producers/artists sit back and say "hmm, ok, how can we make it work then--this is what we want", and the team works together to solve the problem.

Little anecdote: back when I first heard about Vanguard, I checked out their web page, and the only team members that were listed were artists and producers--not a single "initial team" member that had credits on the web page was a coder by trade...and I said to myself, "I don't care if they are using Unreal, or any engine--this game is going to suck horribly"...and it turns out that what we got as customers turned out to be exactly what I predicted.

True story: I did an onsite training session for an AA dev studio who's VP was a name that pretty much everyone in the industry would recognize as soon as they checked him out--with some huge credentials. Their company was coder driven, and I gave them a 4 hour lab to do a mini-game using our tech. 3.5 hours into the project, the team lead (a coder) decided to re-write the entire game logic to handle an "off in the weeds" case that wasn't part of the original project requirements--and of course they didn't meet our self-imposed "deadline". What it demonstrated to me is that single person (or single division) driven "visions" are actually dangerous to any project's success, and I think Vanguard was simply this exact scenario on a $30 million scale.

Both innovation and pushing the bleeding edge of technology are good things--I don't think any of us would argue against that. And while most consumers (at least here on f-13) have been blaming "Teh Vision(tm)" for Vanguards apparent failure, what the interview told me is that it wasn't what they wanted to do, but how they approached doing it as a team that caused the ulitmate failure.

I think Morat discussed the "iterative process", which is something I personally recommend whole-heartedly when it comes to finding the fun factor in a game--and it sounds as if every time the team leaders got feedback that the fun factor wasn't there (or the technical capability wasn't, or whatever), they ignored it completely instead of applying the feedback to the product...and I hope that a lot of the red names posting here think about that 20 years from now (or 10, or whatever) when they are the team leads.

Great interview btw Schild...I knew you had it in you ;)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: McCow on May 16, 2007, 07:33:01 PM
Great interview.  Thanks Schlid.

I still can't get over the 1 QA comment.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: pants on May 16, 2007, 07:37:28 PM
I'll just echo the comment that EQ/Vanguard appears to be classic second-system effect, and that Fred Brooks really does know everything there is know about software engineering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Fargull on May 16, 2007, 09:45:55 PM
Nice.  Very nice.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Kalei on May 16, 2007, 09:54:08 PM
Informative interview to say the least!

Especially this part,

"Ex-Sigil: We gave demos to high-level Microsoft people frequently. These demos were often just dog and pony shows where content was created specifically for the demo. There was no intention that this content ever be used in game. When you spend 30+ million on a project, you want to see results. They became more and more suspect as time went on, and more and more people got involved."

This begs an answer on so many legal levels it's not even funny.

If Microsoft were to read that, they'd be wondering if they were set up from the beginning.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Jerrith on May 16, 2007, 10:21:08 PM
Quote from: Endie
giveExperience(L_SCALAR_CONST * iThisLevel );

As a programmer, that sounds great, however, you need to consider that while some of the designers had the technical mindset needed to do what you suggest, there were those that did not. 

Quote from: Lietgardis
Efficient maintenance is critical to live service.  Data-drive as much as possible.  If you really want to maintain that bitch for the next 10 years with a billion tiny script files, good luck; you'll need it.


Agreed.  When you find out that repeatable quests that give "high" experience are too good, being able to run a single query to track them all down and adjust them is huge.

In the end, if you were going to only have one or the other (a data table or script based system), I'd say the first is the better choice.

Quote from: Soulslinger
Quote from: AaronC
WTF was Fisher thinking bragging about getting a house while the company is being shut down?
If you knew Fisher, you wouldn't be surprised.

I do know him and I am surprised.  Sounds more like a misinterpreted, poorly timed attempt at humor.

Quote from: Ex-Sigil
Ex-Sigil: There was input all around, but at each level, that input was simply discarded by the decision makers. Basically there were a handful of people who made decisions, regardless of input from anyone else.

This is the sort of thing I consider inaccurate.  In my own experience, sometimes my input was accepted, sometimes it was rejected.  It's the decision makers job to do just that, make decisions, and sometimes they have a perspective you don't, and make a decision you don't agree with.

---

Rather than focus on Ex-Sigil though, and risk this post going excessively negative, I'll point out one thing I think I've learned from being a coder at Sigil about how Vanguard ended up:

There needs to come a point where iteration on systems stops, and polish and bug fixing takes place.  Sure, there are going to be ideas on how to make any iteration better, but there comes a time when the cost of implementing them is such that polish, somewhere, will be lost, bringing the whole game down.

Really, every department was at fault, in one way or another, and could have done things differently.  Design, pushing for the best systems possible, puts pressure on people to pass that stop point.  Testing, small as you were, you should have been more vocal, and in coding's face about issues so that people really knew just how much needed to be done.  Coding, you needed to have the discipline to stop when you knew there were major issues remaining.  Management, providing the necessary resources is only part of the equation (well done, except for staffing testing, and perhaps staffing management).  Keeping track of what is being worked on, and making sure people are working on the appropriate things is critical.  Being stretched too thin is no excuse, as you are the only ones who can fix that.




Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 16, 2007, 10:49:01 PM
Jerrith, were you even at Sigil 2 days ago?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Jerrith on May 16, 2007, 10:59:07 PM
Jerrith, were you even at Sigil 2 days ago?

No, my last day was 3/12/07.  I still keep in touch with people there though, via Email, IM, etc.  I was there from before beta started, to about a month and a half after release.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: DataGod on May 16, 2007, 11:09:15 PM
Interesting read. Nice interview Schild

Lots of really grat interesting posts here.

And what a classy way for the company to treat its employees, that "buying a house comment" just wow.....

Sometimes the best tools come in [small packages: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1206294

I started using that last year, its pretty damn amazing when coupled with a development paradyme like Feature Driven Development. OTOH I deal in data bases and software development.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Margalis on May 16, 2007, 11:23:30 PM
Well, it's clear that Brad too very little of the criticism and advice from others to heart. Comparing Miyamato to Brad really isn't fair, if only because we don't know precisely how the former handles other people on his teams.

I always wanted to make a large writeup out of this, but I'll condense it here. There are four types of talents:

1. People with no talent.
2. People with no talent who get lucky once. (Brad, most dot-com millionaires)
3. People with enough talent to repeat success in a narrow field. (ID, Tarantino)
4. People with enough talent to repeat success in a variety of pursuits. (Miyamoto, Isaac Newton, JMS)

The problem is that if someone has one hit to their name, you can't tell which one of these they are. They could be the guy who got lucky or they could be the genius who is just awesome at everything.

I always makes me really happy to discover that someone I am familiar with is responsible for something really cool that I had no idea they were involved in. For example JMS wrote some old cartoons including Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Who knew? Clearly the guy has talent. That sort of talent that can be repeated across project types is something to celebrate as it is quite rare.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Tcharels on May 16, 2007, 11:29:00 PM
Jerrith, you always have been a great guy, but you honestly had blinders on. People could have, all around, handled things better, but to claim this was the result of anything other than a massive deficit of leadership from Sigil's management is naive at best.

I may have left a while back, but I know, from talking to people who have left since then, or people who got hit with the inevitable two days ago, that nothing has changed since I left. Leadership, from the functional lead level to the executive management level, showed a remarkable inability to drive consensus, follow a schedule, work with the publishers, or treat the employees with respect. And honestly, even without that feedback, an environment like that doesn't change, unless management changes. Since I left, what has happened? A VP left.. other than that, it was "same as always" till the day they shipped. People like William Fisher, David Gilbertson, Todd Masten, and Lee Harker running the show, with occasional seagull management from Brad. The rest of the management team was... uninvolved in the game. Perhaps their way of sleeping at night while doing nothing to try and improve things.

Just a thought. Told you I was still a bit bitter, but only because if they had been willing to ditch some of their towering pride and ego, perhaps this never would have happened. That, and almost two years of non stop 80+ hour weeks, you always hope there's be more to show for it than "Special Thanks" and your friends being laid off, while the biggest problems in management go on to SOE to do whatever they'll do. Maybe they'll learn from this lesson.

Nah.

Cheers.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Falwell on May 16, 2007, 11:51:47 PM
Evening all,

In advance I apologize for the forum ID if anyone finds that insulting with current events being taken into account. I've been using this name for, Christ, 18 years roughly (feeling old again) and I'll be damned if I change it because another old fat guy bought the farm.

Anyways, just wanted to comment on this interview first and foremost. One of the best ones i've read in gaming journalism. Especially if it all passes muster. I think the thing that irked me, like so many others, the most was the manner of these people's dismissal. To do THAT to people who gave such a massive commitment of time, heartache and passion to your project is inexcusable. As the old addage goes, a companies integrity is evident first and foremost by the manner in which they treat their employees.

I'll cut it off here before I turn into mega-negative Nancy and just end it by, again, thanking you for a great interview.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: TGB on May 16, 2007, 11:56:10 PM


Quote from: Soulslinger
Quote from: AaronC
WTF was Fisher thinking bragging about getting a house while the company is being shut down?
If you knew Fisher, you wouldn't be surprised.

I do know him and I am surprised.  Sounds more like a misinterpreted, poorly timed attempt at humor.

I have been tossing ex-Sigil's statement around and it never jived with me.  The following are assumptions that are based upon both business knowledge and experience.  None of the statements should be accepted as fact, just well-founded educated guesses.

First, there were no actual stock options.  Stock options come into play once a company goes public.  The only options that Fisher would have would be common-stock and those would only be paid out if the company was actually acquired.  It wasn't.  Sigil's assets were acquired, and therein lies the key.

Ok, Sigil still has debt.  The only reason not to sell a company, but to sell its assets, is if there is so much debt that it's just too much of a financial burden.  Just playing with conservative numbers, let's say that Sigil still owes Microsoft 15 million not to mention quarterlies to the IRS.  Just because Sigil closed its doors, doesn't mean that the debt goes away.  The only way to erase debt is through bankruptcy, but bankruptcy won't just eradicate the money owed.  All of the assets, the amount owed, the time it has been owed, and even more factors regarding the debtors are taken into consideration.

The Cubs have a better chance of winning the World Series than Fisher has of actually getting any options.

Knowing what I do about business law, and the understanding I have in regards to business in general, well I can only come to one conclusion.

If the statement was actually made, it had to have been intended to be sarcastic.  While inappropriate and wrong on so many different levels, it probably wasn't intended to be a true statement.

There seems to be this feeling that those on the top are walking away with the bank.  They aren't.  They can't.  Well, technically speaking, they can, but they will probably find themselves in prison for embezzlement - granted it will be a country club prison.  In the next few days, expect there to be a bankruptcy filing, if it hasn't already been filed.  The dust hasn't even begun to settle yet and once it does, hopefully there will be a better understanding as to what actually happened, why it happened, and the mistakes won't be forgotten a few years from now.       


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 17, 2007, 12:04:33 AM
First, there were no actual stock options.  Stock options come into play once a company goes public.
That is incorrect.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 17, 2007, 12:24:17 AM
First, there were no actual stock options.  Stock options come into play once a company goes public.
That is incorrect.
Completely incorrect. Not just incorrect ;).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 17, 2007, 01:25:29 AM
4. People with enough talent to repeat success in a variety of pursuits. (Miyamoto, Isaac Newton, JMS)

Whoah.  Derail, but you are lumping Isaac Newton in with the producer of Walker, Texas Ranger?!?  I think you needa fifth category, there.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on May 17, 2007, 01:28:48 AM
I'll cut it off here before I turn into mega-negative Nancy and just end it by, again, thanking you for a great interview.

There's a difference between being cynical and a negative Nancy.  Most of us (like yourself) are the former.  

I'm finding much of this more interesting the more times I read through it.  Some questions have come to mind, particularly about the Microsoft involvement.  I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would be so blind to the early stages of this project and were so readily "duped" as it were.  I'm guessing that they knew what was going on and either a) hoped that it would resolve or b) that it was such an inconsequential amount of investment capital that it was worth it to walk away rather than attempt resuscitation.  If they were duped, it's a statement that Microsoft has gotten too big for its own good... but I rather doubt that's the case.  


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: ericw66 on May 17, 2007, 01:52:28 AM
What has surprised me over the last two years is that very commonly (probably > 80% of the teams that have come to my training), both artists and designers/producers have little to no understanding of the limits and best practices of the underlying technology, and basically say "coders make that shit work", and move on. The teams that I am confident will be successful are those where the coder(s) are strong enough personality wise to say "hey, no, that's not going to work, and here's why", and the producers/artists sit back and say "hmm, ok, how can we make it work then--this is what we want", and the team works together to solve the problem.

Little anecdote: back when I first heard about Vanguard, I checked out their web page, and the only team members that were listed were artists and producers--not a single "initial team" member that had credits on the web page was a coder by trade...and I said to myself, "I don't care if they are using Unreal, or any engine--this game is going to suck horribly"...and it turns out that what we got as customers turned out to be exactly what I predicted.

So true.

While I was a 'lead developer/manager' type for a small business doing business apps (wish I could break into game programming, I'm a good coder/designer/analyst, just not up to my C++ snuff anymore), the first word out of my mouth when a member of the support/analysis team came into my room was 'No, now what's your question'?  It irritated them of course, and perhaps I shouldn't have, but when it was me and 2-3 newbies vs 'almost no design documents' + '10+ year old code in DATAFLEX to be rewritten with tons of updated features and new stuff in 3 months' + 'Keep all our existing stuff up to date, and fix bugs in them too, in both DATAFLEX and VB (and SQL, and a few other things)' + 'help design the next project coming down the pipe' + 'keep all the PC's and servers running in the office' + 'help with every technical support call we get, even if it isn't our problem'... I had to. Sure, I didn't have to worry about how many poly's a given scene might have, but I did have to make sure everything came out clean as a whistle as having a city mail 100,000 tax bills wrong would REALLY irritate a few people...and when you have 400+ towns, cities, and counties using it, it wouldn't be just one client having a problem. And I had to design software (with huge amounts of fields of course) that could work in 640x480 resolution in 2002... I finally got that upped to 800x600 by the time I left lol.

Prior to my arrival there (I worked my way up), the coders were the 'bottom' end of the business, everything flowed downwards to them, they had no say in timetables, design, or anything else. I put a stop to that in a hurry. By the time I left (to assist my family, not because of the job) I actually had the coders *above* the telephone support people. And I had design documents that weren't just an email saying 'look at that DATAFLEX program written in 1985' or a single sheet of paper saying what the person thought would be nice. And I'd taught the tech support people the 4 'RE's' of support: 'Reboot, reregister (we used a lot of DLL's), reinstall, and reformat'. If those things don't do the trick, they need to buy a new PC ;).

But that comment about 1 tester, egads. Even in this small business, I had my own team do its internal testing (of course), and I had 6+ people in support to test as well. And this is a teeny tiny company. And when something was ready to ship, we'd test it in a town or two as a beta first. Sounds like we outdid Vanguard's testing by 1000x... and that scares me.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: tkinnun0 on May 17, 2007, 04:37:00 AM
Whoah.  Derail, but you are lumping Isaac Newton in with the producer of Walker, Texas Ranger?!?  I think you needa fifth category, there.

Whoah, I knew he has been involved in lots of projects, but that's a surprise. Still, apparently he wrote one episode, didn't get paid and left to make B5. Hardly a blemish.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 17, 2007, 06:13:05 AM
Whoah.  Derail, but you are lumping Isaac Newton in with the producer of Walker, Texas Ranger?!?  I think you needa fifth category, there.

Whoah, I knew he has been involved in lots of projects, but that's a surprise. Still, apparently he wrote one episode, didn't get paid and left to make B5. Hardly a blemish.

Oh, he doesn't get off that lightly: he may only have written one episode, but as the original supervising producer, didn't he pick up the idea initially (along with Broostad) and develop it?  He only left because of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shXK4SmpVlM]Babylon 5[/url].


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Tcharels on May 17, 2007, 07:45:38 AM
TGB, it's already been pointed out, but.. you are incorrect. There were options, though not necessarily in the traditional "sell on wall street" sense of the word. All the original founders and some small number brought on after were part "owners" of Sigil. They never hid that fact. I don't know anything about the specific ownership numbers, or if the company was bought, how their ownership shares would be bought out, but... it was the case.

Many private companies have concepts of shares of ownership and options, usually in case they ever plan to go public, but also because it's an easy way for a partner to have his or her shares bought out by one or more of the other shareholders if they decide to leave the venture. This is nothing unusual. Might need to check your references again. And for the record, Mr. William Fisher was one of those partial owners, a fact he never hid.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 17, 2007, 07:48:57 AM
Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?


I'm incorrect daily.  Fortunately, a quick trip to the toilet and I can get rid of that incorrectness.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: AcidCat on May 17, 2007, 08:36:32 AM
What has surprised me over the last two years is that very commonly (probably > 80% of the teams that have come to my training), both artists and designers/producers have little to no understanding of the limits and best practices of the underlying technology, and basically say "coders make that shit work", and move on. The teams that I am confident will be successful are those where the coder(s) are strong enough personality wise to say "hey, no, that's not going to work, and here's why", and the producers/artists sit back and say "hmm, ok, how can we make it work then--this is what we want", and the team works together to solve the problem.


Nice post, you made some really insightful points.

And damn, kudos schild, this is quite the scoop you have going on here, it's fun seeing F13 linked everywhere. :-D


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Yegolev on May 17, 2007, 10:04:10 AM
Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 17, 2007, 10:20:54 AM
I think Morat discussed the "iterative process", which is something I personally recommend whole-heartedly when it comes to finding the fun factor in a game--and it sounds as if every time the team leaders got feedback that the fun factor wasn't there (or the technical capability wasn't, or whatever), they ignored it completely instead of applying the feedback to the product...and I hope that a lot of the red names posting here think about that 20 years from now (or 10, or whatever) when they are the team leads.
Iterative development is pretty nice -- I can see ditching a lot of the things our text considered important (hell, we do ditch a lot of it), but in the end what it offers is the traceability and structure of the waterfall model with the flexibility and adaptability of rapid-prototyping.

Hell, it's the way I've always designed personal projects -- start small with proof-of-concept stuff, focus on the basic architecture (doesn't have to be optimal, tweaked, cover all the potential stuff -- just prove to myself it'll work later when I start building the good stuff on top of it), and slowly go through "design/develop/test/assess" cycles until I've got a nice feature-complete sort of thing that does everything I want it to do - by that point, I've probably added a dozen or more features, tweaks, changes, upgrades and the like that I came up with mid-development as I got a real handle on what I was doing and where I could go. Sometimes my end product looked nothing like what I had initiall envisioned, and it was almost always better than what I had hoped I'd make.

I'd think iterative design would be critical in terms of tools for designers. I'm not a designer -- I could, with a few conversations with them, rough out the sort of tools they'd want. BUt then I'd basically want to hand those tools off and say "Go build some stuff on our bare-bones engine, and see what's missing -- or what'd you like". A few rounds of back-and-forth on that, and hopefully we'd have something professional and I'd understand what the designers needed -- so as the engine evolved, I could slap on new functionality to the designer's tools to take advantage of it.

There was one point that class of mine really hit on -- the guy writing the textbook (Royce) had a serious fetish for "Architecture first". I agreed with him in the first place, but watching Vanguard's fall, I'm seriously inclined to think he's got a damn good point. If your architecture -- the underlying engine and the toolsets used to create the game -- aren't 100% rock solid, your game is going to suck. I don't care how vast it is, how pretty it can look. It's got to fucking run, and run well.

I've been playing LoTR and cursing the video issues I'm having with my wife's PC. I love the game, and the engine is pretty solid (and part of it is my PC's are almost three years old and I haven't upgraded them aside from an extra hard drive) -- but Turbine's engine simply isn't in the same class as WoW's. Blizzard's architecture is simply the best I've seen on an MMORPG. It's better than the vast bulk of single-player games.

Blizzard could have taken that solid architecture and still turned out a crappy game. But it would have been a crappy game that ran well, and probably done a shit-ton better in that respect than Vanguard did. And Blizzard could still reuse the engine (with better designers, of course) and turn out something great. The foundation of any game is it's architecture -- something I don't think Sigil's management ever really believed.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Sir Fodder on May 17, 2007, 12:30:01 PM
I think the references to failings in project management are right on, even with some of the wonky/broken design and horrible failings in community management, my sense is that by far VG's main failing was in projet management.

Also, yeah, design of game systems is not the same as content creation, and "game designer" used in common parlance seems to often lump the two together.

I liked VG before (yay for messageboard drama!), now I really like VG! :heart:  Many the of the new faces popping up are informed and interesting, keep those posts comin'.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Sairon on May 17, 2007, 01:24:41 PM
Traditional development methods works pretty bad for games since they aren't deterministic. The longer you can stay small and be in a prototype state the better. GDDs are a thing of the past, most studios seem to move torwards a design as little as possible from the get go and design as much as possible as late as possible.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: TGB on May 17, 2007, 01:41:49 PM
TGB, it's already been pointed out, but.. you are incorrect. There were options, though not necessarily in the traditional "sell on wall street" sense of the word. All the original founders and some small number brought on after were part "owners" of Sigil. They never hid that fact. I don't know anything about the specific ownership numbers, or if the company was bought, how their ownership shares would be bought out, but... it was the case.

Many private companies have concepts of shares of ownership and options, usually in case they ever plan to go public, but also because it's an easy way for a partner to have his or her shares bought out by one or more of the other shareholders if they decide to leave the venture. This is nothing unusual. Might need to check your references again. And for the record, Mr. William Fisher was one of those partial owners, a fact he never hid.

A stock option is a contract that gives the owner the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a particular stock at a fixed price for a specific period of time . The contract also obligates the seller or writer to meet the terms of delivery if the contract right is exercised by the owner.

What owners had were shares in the company.  Those shares, don't get paid out until after all of the debt owed has been paid off.  Any options that were issued aren't worth the paper they are written on because the company never went public and was never sold in its entirity.  Any shares or stakes someone had in the company itself won't be paid off until unsecured and secured creditors are paid off first.  After creditors are paid off, then investors get paid off, and the owners are last in line to be repaid if the company fails.  While someone may say they received options, they actually didn't. 

If Fisher did make that statement it was false on a few levels, first if he had stock options he won't see any income from them, second his stake or share in the company is paid back last.  At the end of the day he might walk away with some money, but I still think the Cubs have a better chance of winning the World Series.

If people refer to an apple as an orange it doesn't mean that the apple is now an orange.  The apple still holds the properties that made it an apple and the orange still has the properties that made it an orange.  You can call shares in a company stock-options, but it doesn't make those shares turn into options.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 17, 2007, 01:47:18 PM
Traditional development methods works pretty bad for games since they aren't deterministic. The longer you can stay small and be in a prototype state the better. GDDs are a thing of the past, most studios seem to move torwards a design as little as possible from the get go and design as much as possible as late as possible.
That is traditional development methods -- at least for anyone using a modern process. Rapid prototyping and evolutionary development has been pretty much sucked into the mainstream, except for a handful of shops where the old way is better (certain types of embedded systems, certain systems that lend themselves to really long requirements documents by the very nature of the product, etc).

You start small with a solid proof of concept. One group starts adding features/toolsets for the core, while another group refines and optimizes the core. That becomes the new "core design" and you rinse and repeat. Part of the process is sketching out the goals, timetables, and milestones of the next cycle. The "overall design" you're working from -- what guides your project total -- should be high-level and abstract.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 17, 2007, 02:17:31 PM
TGB, it's already been pointed out, but.. you are incorrect. There were options, though not necessarily in the traditional "sell on wall street" sense of the word. All the original founders and some small number brought on after were part "owners" of Sigil. They never hid that fact. I don't know anything about the specific ownership numbers, or if the company was bought, how their ownership shares would be bought out, but... it was the case.

Many private companies have concepts of shares of ownership and options, usually in case they ever plan to go public, but also because it's an easy way for a partner to have his or her shares bought out by one or more of the other shareholders if they decide to leave the venture. This is nothing unusual. Might need to check your references again. And for the record, Mr. William Fisher was one of those partial owners, a fact he never hid.

A stock option is a contract that gives the owner the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a particular stock at a fixed price for a specific period of time . The contract also obligates the seller or writer to meet the terms of delivery if the contract right is exercised by the owner.

What owners had were shares in the company.  Those shares, don't get paid out until after all of the debt owed has been paid off.  Any options that were issued aren't worth the paper they are written on because the company never went public and was never sold in its entirity.  Any shares or stakes someone had in the company itself won't be paid off until unsecured and secured creditors are paid off first.  After creditors are paid off, then investors get paid off, and the owners are last in line to be repaid if the company fails.  While someone may say they received options, they actually didn't. 

If Fisher did make that statement it was false on a few levels, first if he had stock options he won't see any income from them, second his stake or share in the company is paid back last.  At the end of the day he might walk away with some money, but I still think the Cubs have a better chance of winning the World Series.

If people refer to an apple as an orange it doesn't mean that the apple is now an orange.  The apple still holds the properties that made it an apple and the orange still has the properties that made it an orange.  You can call shares in a company stock-options, but it doesn't make those shares turn into options.
Wrong again. The company wasn't sold. Assets were sold. However for those major assets to be sold, a majority of the shareholders still have to agree to it. And there's nothing that says SOE can't give certain shareholders a chunk of cash (or Sony shares, or whatever) to agree to vote their shares in favor of selling those assets.

You are correct about options, though. Tcharels was confusing shares and options in his post.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Tcharels on May 17, 2007, 06:20:03 PM
Yah, sorry. I was using the wrong terms, even if the basics of what I was stating was correct. I should know better. It is teh intarnets after all.

Thanks for clarifying and not flaming. :)

I would put a wager on the fact that all the share holders, or stake holders, or whatever the exact term that would be most accurate, did see profit from this transaction. How much, I doubt I'll ever know, but I'm fairly certain they did.

Cheers.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 18, 2007, 01:46:51 AM
Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?

Hello, I'm a British Person !


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: denny2687 on May 18, 2007, 05:18:35 AM
Looks like another Sigil employee has posted on Slashdot:

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=235123&cid=19176759

Quote
I am also an ex-Sigil employee. I was not there for the mass firing... I left earlier. But I have no doubt that it went down exactly as this person says. That's how things are run at Sigil. It's the most unprofessional place I have ever worked. Hell, the McDonald's where I worked when I was a kid was more professional and had better morale than at Sigil. My quality of life went up about 100% after leaving there.

The meeting was even worse than this guy said. I heard that someone asked if there was going to be any kind of severence for people getting fired and when he didn't get an answer and asked again, Donna Parkinson... a direcor... managment... was overheard to say "would someone please answer this asshole." Nice touch, huh? That doesn't surprise me either.

There were dozens of problems with this project. But the bottom line comes down to mismanagement. Brad and Jeff isolated themselves from most of the company, leaving management of the the project, company, and personnel to the directors, namely Platter, Gilbertson, and Donna Parkinson (the former Office Manager turned Director of Business Development). And I can't think of one person at the company that has any respect left for any one of them.

The thing that sucks is that most of us there at Sigil left other jobs to be there. Some people turned down other offers and stuck it out to finish the project and finally get some kind of pay off for the rediculious hours and demands we had put up with. Now we all walk away with nothing. Oh, wait.... not all of us. Some people are house hunting with what they made from the sale of the company. The rest of us got nothing for our years of work and the sacrifices we made.

I keep reading comments like none of these people should ever be given management positions again. I agree. Hell, I wouldn't hire them to run a hamburger stand. And I will leave any project that they are ever attached to in the future. They don't deserve another chance or one bit of my respect.

To all of you in management that are moving on to SOE or got paid for your share of the company, I hope you all sleep well tonight and enjoy your new jobs and your money from the sale (I don't care how much you did or didn't get, you got more than the rest of us). I still believe what goes around comes around. So I am hoping that all of us that you have screwed over the past few years find a way to land on our feet again in spite of our names being attached to your company. And I hope other people finally see you for the back-stabbing, greedy, childish assholes the rest of us from Sigil already know you are.

Wow.... just wow.

Edit: Actual text added by schild.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 18, 2007, 05:29:10 AM
He doesn't say whether he quit properly or was fired. And is posting 2nd hand information about the meeting. Not a single person I've spoken to, WHO WAS AT the meeting said that. If she did, I have a feeling she would have gotten reamed in my first interview and I would've asked Brad about her in the second. Also, without Zonk backing this guy up or him contacting an outlet to do an interview (and THEN someone fact-checking the shit he says), well, I could have been the one to post it. Score: 0, Anonymous Coward indeed.

Not trying to be high and mighty, but if he has an axe to grind, there are better ways to do it.

Edit: Also, there are a number of people I've discussed ex-staff with and it seems there were a good number of jokers that were canned long before The Parking Lot Incident. And from what I hear, a lot of these people deserved to be fired. Though, I bet had they not, I'd have had a lot more people knocking at my door to get their story out.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 18, 2007, 09:22:58 AM
Edit: Also, there are a number of people I've discussed ex-staff with and it seems there were a good number of jokers that were canned long before The Parking Lot Incident. And from what I hear, a lot of these people deserved to be fired. Though, I bet had they not, I'd have had a lot more people knocking at my door to get their story out.
Tangentially -- I've heard the games industry can be more than a tad incestuous, and comments have been made that there's a lot of friends getting hired because they're friends -- not because they're skilled or suited for the job.

The impression I got was that it was something of a problem at Sigil -- frankly, you only need one or two of those guys in the wrong spot to really fuck over a large number of skilled people.

Admittedly, people bitch about "that fucking idiot the boss hired" and rarely praise "That genius the boss hired" (even if they were both friends of the boss), but the two games who personnel I've tracked even a little seemed to have a surprising number of unqualified or inexperienced people in odd spots. Is that churn? A buddy-buddy relationship among high-end designers?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Jobu on May 18, 2007, 09:58:54 AM
...but the two games who personnel I've tracked even a little seemed to have a surprising number of unqualified or inexperienced people in odd spots.

What's the other game?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Xanthippe on May 18, 2007, 11:30:18 AM
Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?

Hello, I'm a British Person !

I thought you were a Scot.  Furthermore, I thought Scots did not like to be called a "British Person."

School me please.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Roac on May 18, 2007, 11:36:50 AM
I thought you were a Scot.  Furthermore, I thought Scots did not like to be called a "British Person."

I think it means he's more the tea and crumpets type of guy, less the lumber tossing and skirt wearing type.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 18, 2007, 12:50:59 PM
...but the two games who personnel I've tracked even a little seemed to have a surprising number of unqualified or inexperienced people in odd spots.

What's the other game?
SWG -- I kept an eye on personnel and turnover because the game shocked me to crap. I kept seeing promotions that didn't seem to track with what I knew of their experience, and quite a number of examples of the Peter Principle. Developers, designers, and coders who did seem qualified and with relevent experience for their position didn't seem to last long.

Admittedly, I started keeping tabs on that about 10 months after launch.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Signe on May 18, 2007, 01:55:51 PM
British is okay.  Just don't confuse them with English or they'll go right off on you.  I have seen it happen!  (http://www.thesmilies.com/smilies/confused0044.gif)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Tcharels on May 18, 2007, 08:00:26 PM
Whoever the poster on Slashdot was, they chose a very bad forum to, as schild put it, grind their axe. In addition. I have no love lost for Donna Parkinson, but I've seen her close to tears at someone getting fired from the company (Long before any of this came down). Unless she was hopped up on goofballs, I call complete and utter bullshit on that particular account.

I've said my peace about the company, and my life is much better for having moved on. But I wanted to clarify that. Sigil had it's fair share of ego driven maniacs. Donna, for her faults, was not a nasty person.

And schild, for every "joker" who was fired and/or encouraged to leave the company, there were 3 more who quit or were fired because they either completely gave up hope or tried too hard to change things for the better. "Deserved" to be fired is a very subjective term, depending on who's side of the fence you're standing on.

That's all.

Cheers.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: T.King on May 18, 2007, 10:01:52 PM
The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561)

After the jump, you're going to read an interview with an ex-Sigil employee given just over 24 hours after being let go. I honestly don't have anything more to say than that.

» Read More (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561#more)


Well...I certainly hope a lot of that is not true. I don't remember things that way, but then again- I left long before some of that went down.

I’d like to extend my deepest condolences to those who were let go in that manner.

There are a lot of people ostracizing Brad McQuaid, Jeff Butler, Dave Gilbertson, Bill Fisher, Andy Platter, and Donna Parkinson. I simply don’t remember them the way they are being portrayed. Though I do personally believe that they made the monumental mistake of allowing some key people leave the company during development. People closely connected to EQ1, the very community that had once stood behind Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes can move forward with SOE’s backing, but they are going to have to make amends, and reach back out to that former community that once supported it. Performance and stability needs to be addressed first. The economy needs to be stabilized, and the treadmill needs to be adjusted so players don’t burn out before hitting level 50.

Vanguard was and still is an ambitious project. It required no less than a solid commitment from a publisher - beginning to end. I think that it is fortunate SOE picked it up. They have the potential to bring Vanguard to AAA status. Vanguard is by no means a failure. It really is a fantastic MMORPG, hallmark to the many creative individuals who worked on it. It just lacked a solid commitment from the original publishers beginning to end. Microsoft did the right thing; they focused on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, Vanguard suffered from this shift in mandate of making a AAA MMORPG, to making the Xbox 360 the success that it is today.

Brad McQuaid is an awesome and very talented guy. I have nothing but respect for him. He often mentioned his concerns for a team member, and their families. That he has to lookout for their livelihood while employed at Sigil. He'd walk around office, and tell people what a great job they were doing. Doesn't anyone remember this? If Brad said he was working hard getting necessary funding, that is precisely what he was doing. I know how much Brad cared about the project, and knowing him- he probably wasn't sleeping very well. The gaming community is coming down pretty hard on him for some of his decisions. He’s just going to have to make things right by the community not just through words, but by his actions here on out.

Dave Gilbertson is an awesome guy. I have the utmost respect for him. If anything went wrong under his supervision, he was probably over-tasked.

Donna Parkinson was the “mother bear” of the office. When people had problems, they went to her to talk about them (and to get their hands on the candy in her office). I find it hard to believe she would have referred to someone as an “asshole”, unless they were actually being one. She’s super cool, and married one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the honor to work under.

Bill Fisher is a fun outgoing- though eccentric guy. He’s also very sarcastic, as I remember him. If he made any bad remarks, it wasn’t because he’s being insidious. It was most likely a poorly timed sarcastic remark. Anybody that knows him totally understands that he had no ill intentions with any of his remarks.

Jeff Butler is a very nice guy. He was extremely passionate about Vanguard. Jeff is probably the most humble person I knew in his position at the time. I never got the impression that he took anything for granted. I am sorry to hear about his split with Michelle. She was truly awesome. Michelle is from the same area in the Midwest that I am. She once commented that she could still say “pop” around me and not get a strange look. She has a very outgoing and glowing personality; she’s fun to be around.

Andy Platter is a good guy. I remember him being kind of a quiet person. It seemed like he kept to himself- but did his job well. I don’t know him very well. But if he was the one that delivered the speech, he was likely asked to carry out that terrible task (I doubt anyone would want to do it). I don’t know what to say about that speech, other than perhaps it was for lack of better words. Sometimes telling people straight-up, as in this case- was profoundly prudent.

I do think the way people were let go was in bad form. It could have been done with more tact. It’s the least that could have been done at that point. But I’ve found in stressful times, not everyone says things with tact or eloquence for that matter.

The most important thing right now is that all those who lost their jobs at Sigil find great gaming companies to work at. The work they did on Vanguard is amazing, and any gaming company would be fortunate to have these talented individuals.

As for Vanguard, it has the potential (a lot of it) to become one of the best MMORPG’s. It stands as testimony of the excellence crafted by many creative individuals, and all of their hard work. It would be a shame to see that their efforts were in vain. So it’s important for so many reasons, that Vanguard reaches its full potential. I believe it’s in good hands now. So long as the lessons learned from past mistakes are given full consideration here on out.

Yours Truly,

~T.King


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 18, 2007, 10:23:05 PM
What.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: T.King on May 18, 2007, 10:25:58 PM
What.

...I hope I didn't reply to the wrong post. =/


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Signe on May 18, 2007, 10:38:13 PM
You looked like you were responding to the right post. 

Maybe you didn't type loud enough?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: squirrel on May 18, 2007, 10:40:58 PM
EDIT: Ooops. Wrong thread. See brad bashing thread. Carry on.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Mandrel on May 18, 2007, 11:42:46 PM
The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561)

After the jump, you're going to read an interview with an ex-Sigil employee given just over 24 hours after being let go. I honestly don't have anything more to say than that.

» Read More (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561#more)


Well...I certainly hope a lot of that is not true. I don't remember things that way, but then again- I left long before some of that went down.

~T.King

No offense , but from what I gather, you left the team 2 years ago in August, well before a lot of the problems seem to have fully manifested, and the reason you left was because you couldn't commit to working on site.  You weren't there when the apparent breakdown in morale and "crunch time" really hit, so I'm guessing your impressions of everyone are from the "golden age" of Sigil.

I can still appreciate your impressions of the people while you worked with them, but people can change quite a bit in that amount of time.  Given the strain they were under and the situations that changed, you may not feel the same if you were there for the whole project.

BTW, did you end up getting credited even though most of your work was scrapped to ensure artistic continuity?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: T.King on May 19, 2007, 12:27:31 AM
The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561)

After the jump, you're going to read an interview with an ex-Sigil employee given just over 24 hours after being let go. I honestly don't have anything more to say than that.

» Read More (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561#more)


Well...I certainly hope a lot of that is not true. I don't remember things that way, but then again- I left long before some of that went down.

~T.King

No offense , but from what I gather, you left the team 2 years ago in August, well before a lot of the problems seem to have fully manifested, and the reason you left was because you couldn't commit to working on site.  You weren't there when the apparent breakdown in morale and "crunch time" really hit, so I'm guessing your impressions of everyone are from the "golden age" of Sigil.


Indeed it was during the golden age as you refer. I really hate to think that people could change so drastically, but it does happen I suppose. I'm just having trouble coming to terms with the way they are being portrayed. I heard of troubles after I left, but didn't realize it was to the extent that I've been reading. The interview was definitely intriquing, and deliberate. I certainly wouldn't blame anyone in the parking lot that day for wanting to grind an axe, and an axe someone did grind.

There was an issue with rellocation, but for very personal reasons I won't get into here. I was never acredited, not even for the wallpaper I made in my sparetime that has been up on the official website. A lot changed after I left, and totally understand what needs to be done for the sake of continuity.

I wasn't there when things apparently headed south, and I guess that is a good thing. That doesn't mean I didn't have my own issues with the way things were at the time I was there, but that's another story. Believe me, it wasn't easy to come here and post what I did. But I did it out of respect, for people the way I had known them. I'd like to think anyone else who cares, would do the same.

~T.King


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 19, 2007, 12:27:53 AM
What's it like in the womb?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: T.King on May 19, 2007, 12:41:06 AM
What's it like in the womb?

A little hot and stuffy, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 19, 2007, 01:34:50 AM
Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?

Hello, I'm a British Person !

I thought you were a Scot.  Furthermore, I thought Scots did not like to be called a "British Person."

School me please.

It was a South Park quote.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 19, 2007, 07:38:05 AM
Indeed it was during the golden age as you refer. I really hate to think that people could change so drastically, but it does happen I suppose. I'm just having trouble coming to terms with the way they are being portrayed. I heard of troubles after I left, but didn't realize it was to the extent that I've been reading.
~T.King

Piggy, Ralph and Jack were all adorable little school children at the beggining of Lord of the Flies too :)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 19, 2007, 11:20:27 PM
The interviewee describes a "dog and pony show"; this sets of alarm bells for me.

With the exception of WoW, the MMOs alive today, especially the older ones, all developed like this. It's been one of the big differences between developing single, multiplayer and MMO games.

Consider games like AC2, Earth & Beyond, City of Heroes, Matrix Online...

WoW is the first MMO that was developed more systematically, but Blizzard is big enough to have overlayed that sort of development with tsunami waves of organic redevelopment.

This makes me think the interviewee was one of the newcomers in the sigil pack: he does, after all, show some of experience and understanding of the development practices that MMO devs have been slow to embrace and development - like scripting. The sort of organic ends-to-middle development that makes for a good MMO is perfectly complimented by a good scripting language that allows for rapid prototyping. But most importantly, it provides a platform for developing automated testing of both ends of the development process.

Programmers don't like testing, and with resistance on both ends, its something that usually gets nixed early on in the process.

His tale of tool-resistence isn't the least surprising. Tools are one of the most misunderstood aspects of this industry. Elitist programmers think tools are for losers ('use notepad', 'you have more control by hand'), others think they can knock tools up in their sleep (strange, I thought your speciality was writing shaders?) and there are the cowed - they've suffered so many evil tools that you might mistake them for elitists. Then there are the designers and producers, who believe all of the above, who have seen too many tools that were seperate in code and development from the actual product as to be more hinderance than help, and think that tools are just a waste of money.

The "hammer and screwdriver" analogy people draw for tools is flawed. A good development tool is not just about creation but also validation.

If you were building your game with scripting and testing in mind, you'd be taking a far more modular approach that utterly becomes the "dog and pony" style neccessary for MMO development, and you would be able to re-use your game engine code in your tools directly and avoid the heinous pain that comes from having seperately developed tools.

For example: Why does your terrain editor need you to "import" your art assets? Because it's not a part of your product. If you'd built it properly, you would have integration and synergy. The people working on and in your tools would be a part of the larger development process and less isolated.

How can that be unhealthy?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 20, 2007, 04:04:43 AM
(http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/9126/20070520pl2.jpg)

From thenoobcomic.com (http://www.thenoobcomic.com/daily/strip254.html).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Modern Angel on May 20, 2007, 07:23:11 AM
The interviewee describes a "dog and pony show"; this sets of alarm bells for me.

With the exception of WoW, the MMOs alive today, especially the older ones, all developed like this. It's been one of the big differences between developing single, multiplayer and MMO games.

Consider games like AC2, Earth & Beyond, City of Heroes, Matrix Online...


With all due credulity you work on WWII Online and you're aghast at how this thing was run?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 20, 2007, 07:30:19 AM
I wasn't going to point that out, but really, a dev from WWII Online saying "the MMOs alive today, especially the older ones, all developed like this. " should be the clarion call for all MMO companies to go out there and box their program managers about the ears.

If what's said here is true. Which I doubt.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on May 20, 2007, 10:47:00 AM
Cogent stuff about MMO Development

You do realize your product set the industry LOW standard for shitty launches right?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Modern Angel on May 20, 2007, 12:04:18 PM
See, I'm not sure if I mean:

a) Holy fuck, the guys who launched WWIIOL are saying this is a mess. it must be a mess.

or

b) Where does this guy get off?

I'm... man, wow. Just wow.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 20, 2007, 01:26:17 PM
With the exception of WoW, the MMOs alive today, especially the older ones, all developed like this.
So what you're saying is that outright lying to publishers is commonplace and accepted in MMO development? I find that incredibly hard to believe. Of course you put your best face forward when presenting milestones, spin is one thing, but spending massive amounts of time developing content that was never intended to be in the actual game? Bullshit. Just bullshit.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on May 20, 2007, 03:34:09 PM
Cogent stuff about MMO Development

You do realize your product set the industry LOW standard for shitty launches right?

I'd consider it a close tie between AO and WWII Online and only because I was such a huge WWII online fanbois.  The launch beat the love right out of me. 

What's left to be said here?  Sigil screwed up.  There was no apparent man at the helm willing to go down with the ship.  Their QA was abysmal.  I'm just hoping this serves as a lesson to investors. 

1) Focus on making a quality game rather than trying to compete with WoW.  Too many things to overcome. 

2) Trying to appeal to everyone will leave you appealing to a niche or noone. 

3) Remember that games are supposed to be fun.  The "delayed gratification" crowd is now grown up and raising families. 

4) Longer periods between rewards ! = hardcore. 

I could go to 100 easily.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 20, 2007, 03:57:04 PM
The interviewee describes a "dog and pony show"; this sets of alarm bells for me.

With the exception of WoW, the MMOs alive today, especially the older ones, all developed like this. It's been one of the big differences between developing single, multiplayer and MMO games.

Consider games like AC2, Earth & Beyond, City of Heroes, Matrix Online...

WoW is the first MMO that was developed more systematically, but Blizzard is big enough to have overlayed that sort of development with tsunami waves of organic redevelopment.
Did you work on all those projects? Have you talked in detail with developers who have? Or are you just making stuff up as you go along? MxO was a disaster as a game but CoH especially was a fine game when launched, and so was E & B except that it lacked enough content. AC 2 had its design issues but it looked and ran great.

Now if you said something like MxO, Auto Assault and Dark and Light I might have sort of believed you except that we still don't know what sort of development process those games went through. In other words you have presented absolutely no evidence that WoW was the first MMO that was "developed more systematically."


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 20, 2007, 05:20:55 PM
Quote
With all due credulity you work on WWII Online and you're aghast at how this thing was run?

Quote
You do realize your product set the industry LOW standard for shitty launches right?

Quote
Where does this guy get off?

Quote
Did you work on all those projects? Have you talked in detail with developers who have? Or are you just making stuff up as you go along?

Oliver ("kfsone") doesn't work on a game most of you find "cool" like WoW or Eve. He also is responsible in large part for turning around WW2OL into a playable game. But since it's on the "cool kids can bash this" list, clearly any of his opinions on development methodology (much of which he picked up, you know, before joining the MMO industry) or history (much of which he learned from, you know, talking to other coders, and which I can personally back up - tools development is traditionally the poor stepsister of game development among people without experience) should be ruled out because LOLZORS TAXI TO VICTOLY!1! Despite the fact that, you know, he has personal experience beyond laughing at people who play or work on games not named WoW.

I'm sorry, I missed where this board turned into FoH Annex. Which game is allowed to be cool again? Is LOTRO still cool? Or does that suck now? I've been busy.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Signe on May 20, 2007, 05:23:15 PM

I've been busy.


Wotcha been doin'?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 20, 2007, 05:24:02 PM

I've been busy.


Wotcha been doin'?

Workin on stuff.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Merusk on May 20, 2007, 05:34:05 PM


Damn tease.  It's like Jr. High all over again.  :mob:


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Murgos on May 20, 2007, 08:33:59 PM
C'mon Lum, you of all people know that when someone appears out of the woodwork and says "Listen to me for I have the gospel." and gives a questionable source for us to believe in his veracity there is going to have to be some "Uh, what?" going on.

Or, are you actually suggesting that every Tom, Dick and Harry that posts with an appeal to authority "I'm right because I work on a 3rd rate MMO" should be granted a pass and their views immediately, sans discussion, entered into the gestalt?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Modern Angel on May 20, 2007, 09:50:15 PM
No doubt. It has nothing to do with being cool: I was subbed to WWIIOL for a solid year, from release on. I don't care what's "cool". I care what's "good". If this becomes a place where asses are kissed just because it's a red name posting then it's a place that will be greatly diminished.

He's certainly free to post his opinion but people are equally free to post a little amazement that a guy who worked on WORLD WAR TWO ONLINE (or worst mmog launch ever) is throwing stones. Glass houses and all of that. And do note he's talking about development, not post release fixes; those may very well be amazing in WWIIOL. The release and prerelease process obviously wasn;t.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 20, 2007, 09:54:38 PM
I've tried to play WWII online, because I don't give a rat's ass about the 'cool' factor. I've also played Aces High II (http://www.hitechcreations.com/frindex.html), a persistent world PVP MMO, with tanks, planes and ships, much like WW2 Online, but with ten times the the playability. The latter is a well done small company production, the former, SB.EXE.

Perhaps you're feeling a bit of remorse for your trenchant 'Taxiing to Victory' comment from back in the day, so feel the need to stand up for the little guy. That's all well and good. But please, lets not compare the resources Vanguard had at its disposal with either of the aforementioned games.

Brad may wish to portray Sigil as if they were a duct-tape and spit production, but they had no excuse when companies with fewer resources pull off well conceived and executed games (see Turbine).

Vanguard launched despite incompetent, nepotistic and incestuous management practices, probably because of an exorbitant budget and the good will of Microsoft, of all publishers. Plenty of other MMOs, with fewer resources than Sigil, have done far better. Its not about the money; its about competence and talent.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: damijin on May 20, 2007, 10:03:10 PM
Oliver ("kfsone") doesn't work on a game most of you find "cool" like WoW or Eve. He also is responsible in large part for turning around WW2OL into a playable game.

I can confirm this wild accusation. I played WWIIOL off and on for several years, and each time I took a break I knew that when I came back it'd be like a whole new game graphically, and usually with tons of gameplay additions.

Although, after all the additions it still was mostly a running-and-dying simulator, but a playable one.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Azazel on May 20, 2007, 10:43:42 PM
Oliver ("kfsone") doesn't work on a game most of you find "cool" like WoW or Eve. He also is responsible in large part for turning around WW2OL into a playable game. But since it's on the "cool kids can bash this" list,
....
he has personal experience beyond laughing at people who play or work on games not named WoW.

I'm sorry, I missed where this board turned into FoH Annex. Which game is allowed to be cool again? Is LOTRO still cool? Or does that suck now? I've been busy.

I think you need to take your calming medicine, Lum. I'd personally love to play a good WW2 MMOG, but everything I've heard about WW2OL has been ..not that great.

There's a reason that WoW, and lately LOTRO are the games people point to, and that's because they worked on release and are polished games. Remember, LOTRO is from Turbine and noone here have AA or D&DO a free pass.


This doesn't mean that kfsone's opinions aren't valid, but by the same token, red names don't automagically equal fellatio on this forum. Ask Raph or that Curt Schilling guy about that.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 20, 2007, 10:45:29 PM
If this becomes a place where asses are kissed just because it's a red name posting then it's a place that will be greatly diminished.

red names don't automagically equal fellatio on this forum.

There's a world of difference between ass kissing and half a page of straight LOL YOUR LAUNCH THAT YOU WERENT THERE FOR FAILED STFU YOU. Then again, the folks from Vanguard posting (aside from McQuaid) don't seem to attract nearly that venom, either. Maybe it's just badly launched FPS sims!

Perhaps you're feeling a bit of remorse for your trenchant 'Taxiing to Victory' comment from back in the day, so feel the need to stand up for the little guy. That's all well and good. But please, lets not compare the resources Vanguard had at its disposal with either of the aforementioned games.

Oddly enough, the people left there seem to be quite proud of that drunken little harangue, go figure. Regardless, yes, Vanguard had a lot of money to work with. It didn't seem to help. Wow, throwing money at a problem doesn't fix things!


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Azazel on May 20, 2007, 10:54:57 PM
There's a world of difference between ass kissing and half a page of straight LOL YOUR LAUNCH FAILED STFU YOU. Then again, the folks from Vanguard posting don't seem to attract nearly that venom, either. Maybe it's just badly launched FPS sims!

I'll pay that. I actually have no issue with his post, it was yours going on the "cool kids" and the poor WW2 kids who everyone spits on. Seriously, you know as well as any of the rest of us why WoW and LOTRO have such a good rep, so making an issue out of why they get their kudos is disingenious of you.

As for the lack of venom towrads Sigil people, I think it's likely a degree of pity/empathy since they all got fired in the parking lot, combined with Brad being both a convenient whipping boy and a weak cunt of a CEO. Noone seems to know much about the WW2OL folks, so random_dev_02 gets the "your game sucks!" hate that is mostly flung at Brad in the VG example.





Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 21, 2007, 01:02:37 AM
See, I can still somehow respect WW2 Online, since, as unappealing as it was to me after a month or so of attempting to play it, it still wasn't a game that promised the moon and failed to deliver. I went into it knowing full well that it reportedly sucked. Then again, AO was also reported to suck, and within a few years of release it was a playable and fun game for some. Clearly there are some small minority of players that keep WW2 Online alive, but then again, I don't think the developers of WW2 Online ever expected to be a AA game, just a small audience attraction.

If Brad hadn't boasted, if their game play and graphics had offered something truely innovative, if their code hadn't been an unoptimized POS UR2 engine fiasco and they hadn't had a 30 million dollar bugdet, I might feel more forgiving.  All those things combined, it nearly smells of out-and-out graft on Brad's part. But I've been told Brad's a nice guy, and that he just 'cared too much', so I will just spray some air freshener about the place.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Furiously on May 21, 2007, 01:07:00 AM
TAXI TO VICTORY!

Damn - I wish I knew who said that first...


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 21, 2007, 01:51:38 AM
Cornered Rat aimed high - massively fucking high - with WWIIOL.  Too high, of course, it turned out. 

But I'd have been interested to hear more from someone who has worked in that project.  He might not have been around at the launch everyone is so hurr about, but he's going to have some insight into that and other stuff.  Of course, whether he can be fucked to share that when half a dozen twats decide to make the same, ill-informed snap judgement and related jokes about something he has no responsibility for whatsoever is a different matter.

My company, about 12 years ago, launched a CD-based, multimedia-rich version of its cash-cow product, which ploughed into the ground because the idea was technology-led, not demand-led.  Of course, I only joined them four years ago, but presumably I, also, inherit responsibility.  Does this mean that if I criticise a site for using flash too much everyone can go "how can you talk about that after your Energy Markets crap stfu tbqh kthxbye"?

And anyway, since when did learning from mistakes and being able to talk about what would make something better become a subset of the sin of pride, opening oneself up to jejeune critiques every armchair dev on the block?

Everyone remembers the word "cynical" in the board title, but seem to forget the word "usefully".  And there should be a warning when you create an account: "Caution.  Everyone on F13 is fully capable of designing, coding and executive-producing a multi-million pound software project."


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 21, 2007, 01:56:29 AM
No one here claimed they could execute any sort of etc. etc. project.

But, comeon. Don't be a fool. You know damn well that when you sign on with a company, you get the good and the bad. The WIIOL launch sucked and the entire product sucked for the bulk of it's life. It's largely irrelevant that he may have joined at launch or 3 days ago. It's like Mike Lescault (sorry for using you as The Example) in the MTGO forum. Yea, he just joined Wizards not too long ago and probably had zero to do with how shitty MTGO 3.0 turned out, but he's not insane enough to think he's not gonna get flack for it.

Also, aiming high isn't some sort of noble thing. It's all about actions in this industry. Aiming high and failing is worse than aiming low and suceeding. Dreamers don't sign paychecks for very long.

Edit: Now if this fellow had joined CRS at some other location working at some other project and he'd said that - I sincererly doubt anyone would have given him any sort of guff about WWIIOL.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 21, 2007, 02:10:22 AM
It's all about the Woodcock.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 21, 2007, 02:22:00 AM
But, comeon. Don't be a fool. You know damn well that when you sign on with a company, you get the good and the bad. The WIIOL launch sucked and the entire product sucked for the bulk of it's life. It's largely irrelevant that he may have joined at launch or 3 days ago. It's like Mike Lescault (sorry for using you as The Example) in the MTGO forum. Yea, he just joined Wizards not too long ago and probably had zero to do with how shitty MTGO 3.0 turned out, but he's not insane enough to think he's not gonna get flack for it.

Having had the spectre of SirBruce raised, I'll only answer one bit, rather than each in turn.

I agree: everywhere in life a few, vocal people are always going to get confused and go after someone for things that they have no responsibility for.  Decisions they didn't make, technology they didn't create or design elements they could not affect without access to a time-machine at the very least.  It just isn't useful, helpful, informative or valid.  That was just an example of some folks ignoring the content so they can play the "who can be the biggest flameboy in teh intarweb?" game.

How is it helpful when someone says "here's some stuff I've learned over time" to reply "stfu, you work for a company that made some mistakes before you were there?"  You might say it's inevitable, but since you also clearly think it's perfectly defensible, what is it adding?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 21, 2007, 02:29:16 AM
I think if anything it shows that PR is really, really important.

 :wink:


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 21, 2007, 04:33:16 AM
How is it helpful when someone says "here's some stuff I've learned over time" to reply "stfu, you work for a company that made some mistakes before you were there?"  You might say it's inevitable, but since you also clearly think it's perfectly defensible, what is it adding?
My beef with kfsone has nothing to do with the fact that he's working on WWIIO but that he's making sweeping generalizations about MMO development before WoW without any evidence to back that stuff up with.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 21, 2007, 04:42:15 AM
How is it helpful when someone says "here's some stuff I've learned over time" to reply "stfu, you work for a company that made some mistakes before you were there?"  You might say it's inevitable, but since you also clearly think it's perfectly defensible, what is it adding?
My beef with kfsone has nothing to do with the fact that he's working on WWIIO but that he's making sweeping generalizations about MMO development before WoW without any evidence to back that stuff up with.

That's certainly fair: I had big difficulty with the point that you raised in your post, for instance, about the line "WoW is the first MMO that was developed more systematically".  That needs evidence, a frame of reference, and a huge dollop more specificity.

But your post wasn't one of the ones that I was getting so hand-wringingly angsty about: you were just calling him on specifics of his own post, on its own merit.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hutch on May 21, 2007, 05:02:47 AM
The Noob's creator must read F13 (http://www.thenoobcomic.com/daily/strip254.html)

Edit: schild beat me to it several posts ago  :-(


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: damijin on May 21, 2007, 05:33:31 AM
The Noob's creator must read F13 (http://www.thenoobcomic.com/daily/strip254.html)

Edit: schild beat me to it several posts ago  :-(

What the hell does that post/comic have to do with World War 2 Online?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 21, 2007, 05:40:01 AM
What the hell does that post/comic have to do with World War 2 Online?
Nothing. This is a Sigil thread.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 21, 2007, 05:43:20 AM
Which means when it reaches 100 pages, we run out of money and have to fire half the thread.

Edited for reasons you should spot below.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 21, 2007, 06:34:53 AM
Which means when it reaches 100 pages, we run out of money and have to fire half the thread.

 :rimshot:

Thank-you ladies and gentlemen, he'll be here all week...  And please do remember to try the fish!


Edited to confuse latecomers and defy the guy who mocked his edufication.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hutch on May 21, 2007, 07:05:07 AM
Which means when it reaches 100 pages, we run out of money and have to fire half the thread.

Edited for reasons you should spot below.

Well you can't fire me, I'm the gimp QA guy!


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Stephen Zepp on May 21, 2007, 07:05:19 AM
I've tried to play WWII online, because I don't give a rat's ass about the 'cool' factor. I've also played Aces High II (http://www.hitechcreations.com/frindex.html), a persistent world PVP MMO, with tanks, planes and ships, much like WW2 Online, but with ten times the the playability. The latter is a well done small company production, the former, SB.EXE.


Wow...just wow. Small world! "About Us" (http://www.hitechcreations.com/frindex.html), especially this line:

"Recently, Dale fulfilled a lifelong dream when he took a ride in the P-51 "Mad Max" with noted aviation author Robert Shaw, flying alongside in the P-51 "Crazy Horse". Dale won the ride last year as a prize for taking top place in an eight man dogfighting tournament with Fighter Pilots USA. "

Dale beat me out for first place in that competition, and it was a blast!

To this day I bring up Dale's work in early internet simulation networking (specifically Warbirds), since he was one of the first to commercially recognize and adapt to the concept and implications of large data messages vs MTU size during the mid 90's internet.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 21, 2007, 08:04:15 AM
My original post could come across as a snipe against WW2 Online, but it came from the same place Trippy was; The vast generalization that all 'small time' MMO companies (like Sigil!) are walking icons of corporate incompetence and mismanaged disasters.

Sigil doesn't fit into the same category as WW2 Online. I have no insider knowledge, but I suspect that CRG had 1/10th of the budget, if that, to work with. I cut CRS some slack, give 'em an A for effort, and hope that some product of theirs some day evolves into something vaguely human, but I just can't get worked up about them. They tried their best during the nascent days of MMO development, and didn't do so hot. Not gonna get my panties in a bunch about that.

However, blandly stating that as a consumer, I should simply expect asshattery in the workplace of an MMO, when there are plenty of successful examples to choose from, got up my nose. CRS didn't have the resources and/or the professional expertise that's now an industry standard to work with. Sigil does not have that excuse in any category you care to pick.

Edit: my morning has been made complete by the word 'asshattery' being in the Spell Check files.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: DarkSign on May 21, 2007, 08:37:37 AM
I cant believe the sheer incompetence in the MMO industry based off this interview and Brad's interview/response.

When asshats get money and screw things up, the people with the money are less likely to hand out money for a good, non-dumbed down, sophisticated game that players really want.  How how how could so much incompetence be given so much power?

BTW, just joined here. My usual hangout is RPG Codex (http://www.rpgcodex.com), the grumpier, anti-MMO version of f13.
Fun stuff to read here since Im one of the lone MMO guys over on that board.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 21, 2007, 08:56:56 AM
My usual hangout is RPG Codex (http://www.rpgcodex.com), the grumpier, anti-MMO version of f13.

Wtf?  Grumpier?  Do they just eschew conversation and punch each other all day?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Signe on May 21, 2007, 09:13:16 AM
I went and looked and it's totally not grumpier than here.  I don't think there's any place grumpier than here.  Especially on a Monday.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on May 21, 2007, 09:20:43 AM
Oliver ("kfsone") doesn't work on a game most of you find "cool" like WoW or Eve. He also is responsible in large part for turning around WW2OL into a playable game. But since it's on the "cool kids can bash this" list, clearly any of his opinions on development methodology (much of which he picked up, you know, before joining the MMO industry) or history (much of which he learned from, you know, talking to other coders, and which I can personally back up - tools development is traditionally the poor stepsister of game development among people without experience) should be ruled out because LOLZORS TAXI TO VICTOLY!1! Despite the fact that, you know, he has personal experience beyond laughing at people who play or work on games not named WoW.

I played WWIIO years after launch. It was STILL terrible. Perhaps he learned how to make tanks not fly, but nothing in WWIIO is really that redeemable beyond the concept. It's a terrible, terrible game. But I suppose if he is responsible for the fact that it runs without crashing every 5 seconds and that heavy armor is gravity-bound, he can have a cookie. Just ONE cookie, though. Don't want to appear soft.

Quote
I'm sorry, I missed where this board turned into FoH Annex. Which game is allowed to be cool again? Is LOTRO still cool? Or does that suck now?

No, they all suck. Everyone. All of them. Except the ones we are playing now, but really that's full of future suck, the potential to suck once we get tired of it.

Seriously, it's a sad statement about the state of the MMOG world that he gets any credit for making WWIIO a stable product. MMO's by this time shouldn't have to claim that stabiilty is a triumph of development rather than a standard feature. That stability is STILL a welcome surprise is due to assheads like McQuaid still being given development money.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 21, 2007, 09:28:28 AM
Grumpy isn't necessarily pejorative, it implies a certain cantankerous charm which they entirely lack. The RPGCodex forum is full of elitist, nasty, navel-gazing, pathetic wankers. They would rather there be no RPGs created at all than those they deem unworthy. Examples of unworthy RPGs include baldur's gate 2 and oblivion.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 21, 2007, 09:29:56 AM
BG2 ?  Are you kidding ?  That's insane.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Comstar on May 21, 2007, 09:40:19 AM
Seriously, it's a sad statement about the state of the MMOG world that he gets any credit for making WWIIO a stable product. MMO's by this time shouldn't have to claim that stabiilty is a triumph of development rather than a standard feature. That stability is STILL a welcome surprise is due to assheads like McQuaid still being given development money.

It was my understanding, and note I failed my computer science degree some years ago, that MOST large computer projects fail in exactly the same ways large MMOG projects do.

The're just sometimes more entertaining to read about it afterwards.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on May 21, 2007, 09:51:14 AM
Seriously, it's a sad statement about the state of the MMOG world that he gets any credit for making WWIIO a stable product. MMO's by this time shouldn't have to claim that stabiilty is a triumph of development rather than a standard feature. That stability is STILL a welcome surprise is due to assheads like McQuaid still being given development money.

It was my understanding, and note I failed my computer science degree some years ago, that MOST large computer projects fail in exactly the same ways large MMOG projects do.

Sure. And they do so by not following the examples of those who have succeeded at that type of development, by thinking they know better than everyone else and not listening to people telling them they are wrong. Sound familiar?

MMOG development, game development, software application development, the development of any software follows a standard set of practices or it risks failure without some serious talent behind the development. Even though the MMOG medium is about a decade old, a decade should be long enough for these practices to get institutionalized. And yet the games industry as a whole still views QA as a dirty word. MMOG devs are expecting players to drop $50 on the box (non-returnable) and a nonrefundable $15-$20 a month for as long as we play. Amateur hour is fucking over, it's time to wear the big boy pants as an industry.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: DarkSign on May 21, 2007, 10:00:09 AM
Take the 1 person for QA thing for example...

Sure, McQ says M$ was going to do it all, but even when they went to SOE things didnt change. FFS, all you have to do is go to the Austin GDC once to find a company that sells a multi-tiered program that does an insane amount of QA for MMOs using an automated system. (My description isnt doing it justice - I watched it at work; it kicks ass)

Quote
a decade should be long enough for these practices to get institutionalized.
Agreed. And the tools/middleware is getting much more standardized too. Not just graphics apps but databases and networking protocols etc. At this point a game should rise or fall based on the gameplay - not middle-management screwups.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Modern Angel on May 21, 2007, 10:25:23 AM
If WWIIOL is now a playable game that farts rainbows when you boot it up is about six years of development time. That six years is not germane to the conversation or where I was coming from. I'm comparing WWIIOL from release to six months in because that's where Vanguard is. Vanguard may fart rainbows six years from now and we'll compare how swell they both are then.

So kfsone may be a swell guy (Hell, he probably is) and great coder but that doesn't matter. What matters is that both projects were monuments to how poorly run software of this medium is. That's what I was commenting on.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 10:39:48 AM
Lot of responses, so I'll write this all as one...

But a couple of general remarks: My working for WWII Online wasn't intended to impress you but to convey familiarity with "that failing feeling".

And the bulk of my post was concerned with something ex-sigil described in Sigil, and that I see all too often amongst MMO developers, that fear of tools and resistance to automation. Prior to working for WWIIOL I could only speculate, based on my experience as a developer and dev manager, as to this kind of thing: at my first AGC I got to see the blank looks on many MMO devs' faces when Larry Mellon tried to suggest what is basically fairly standard practice outside the MMO industry (http://www.maggotranch.com/gdc2006.ppt http://www.maggotranch.com/austin_2004.ppt).

Quote from: Modern Angel
With all due credulity you work on WWII Online and you're aghast at how this thing was run?

I didn't say I was aghast at how it was run. I recognize[d] many of the symptoms of looming failure that I did when WWII Online was being developed and for many of the same reasons.

Quote from: HaemishM
You do realize your product set the industry LOW standard for shitty launches right?

Yes, because I joined the team a year after launch and am "credited" with being responsible for getting the company out of Chapter 11 and staying afloat these last 3 years. (edit: put credited in quotes to convey the tounge in cheek sense it is intended in; a story for another time, although actually related)

Quote from: sam, an eggplant
So what you're saying is that outright lying to publishers is commonplace and accepted in MMO development? I find that incredibly hard to believe.

See my points about MMO devs being so resistant to concepts of unit testing and testing automation and scripting. Publishers are still used to building box games and so MMO devs have to translate their development into something a publisher can understand.

Aka lie.

You're dubious about it being commonplace? Maybe review some of the MMO publishing disasters you've heard of...

Quote from: Trippy
Did you work on all those projects? Have you talked in detail with developers who have? Or are you just making stuff up as you go along?

I picked games I was an avid fan of, personally, and which I've talked to a number of devs working on. I'm not trying to sully them with the same general brush, but to pick games I know took a far more traditional dev approach.

City of Heroes and Earth and Beyond were *splendidly* crafted games. If we had awards in this industry, and those games did not get the Raphies for development excellence, it'd be time to start lobbing nukes around. If either had been developed as a single or "co-op" multiplayer game, I suspect they would actually have been significantly more successful.

And look at AC2 - they'd made a reasonably successful game out of AC1, but in AC2 Microsoft were far more hands on and the result was a more traditionally engineered game which failed as an MMO.

Quote from: Lum
Despite the fact that, you know, he has personal experience beyond laughing at people who play or work on games not named WoW.

Maybe we'll call those awards the Lummies instead ;)

Quote from: Murgos
C'mon Lum, you of all people know that when someone appears out of the woodwork and says "Listen to me for I have the gospel." and gives a questionable source for us to believe in his veracity there is going to have to be some "Uh, what?" going on.

Or, are you actually suggesting that every Tom, Dick and Harry that posts with an appeal to authority "I'm right because I work on a 3rd rate MMO" should be granted a pass and their views immediately, sans discussion, entered into the gestalt?

I wasn't expecting to radically shift anyones perspectives about Sigil. I was merely trying to offer a little counterpoint to "ex-sigil"s perspectives before rejoining the "wtf, why don't MMOs learn some of these useful skills from traditional disciplines?" part on tools/automation.

CRS (WWIIOL's developer) had previous online game development history before WWIIOL, and they figured they could use it to march into the MMO sector by hiring up and assimilating warm bodies. That's what I take from ex-sigil's interview and from my general observations of Vg's development.

I've since read Brad's interview and I read exactly the same thing there when he describes his regrets about managing a larger team. I don't think it was the size of the team but a failure in integrating both sets of talent and transferring skills in *both* directions. There's no better way to turn a dev into an angry beastie than to try and foist your "superior skillz and experience" on him while suspending him on a spit over a chasm of absent skills that happen to be his speciality.

Like hiring an automation dev and saying "NO! JOO NO MAKE SKRIPTING LANGUAGE! WE WRITE ALL SYSTEMS IN ASS-EMBLER! NOW YOU TYPE 60,000 LINES OF SQL CAUSE WE NO HAVE ADMIN TOOL AND YOU NO REPEAT DIRTY 'T**L' WORD OR WE BEAT JOO ASS WITH MACINTOSH"

Quote from: Modern Angel
guy who worked on WORLD WAR TWO ONLINE ... is throwing stones

works - we're actually still in business.

I draw a comparison in my post between the mistakes made in WWIIOL and Vanguard - particularly in resistance to tools and automation, something that I have spent a lot of time correcting at CRS, although it is not my speciality.

So - the larger, second half of my original post is entirely in agreement with ex-sigil. So, quite contrary to your interpretation, my point is "even a guy who works for WWIIOL knows that", if you will.

Quote from: Engels
I've also played Aces High II, a persistent world PVP MMO, with tanks, planes and ships, much like WW2 Online, but with ten times the the playability. The latter is a well done small company production, the former, SB.EXE.

Now, this actually goes in-line with what I'm saying. Aces High is developed by a *very* small team; almost all the code is done by Dale "Hitech" Addink. Hitech is one of the same ICI/IMagic team that departed the old WarBirds project and formed a new company.

Dale scaled his experience with WarBirds and did a better version of what he already had done. He kept it small, he brought new team members in where necessary, and saw to an effective transfer of skills. AH goes under most people's radar. It's a well developed project.

Horizons and WWIIOL share a common flaw - both teams were actually trying to bottle and sell their experience as developers. The WWII team figured if they hired people and pointed them in the right direction, they could develop a suite of middleware systems roughly hewn into the shape of WWIIOL and rake in money from both angles. You will, perhaps, recall that Horizons was supposed to be the showpiece of AEs MMO engine... People recall the crash & burn of WWIIOL but they forget the laughable failure to corner the portal market that was PlayNet ;) It flopped that abjectly.

Quote from: Engels
its about competence and talent.

I think Sigil had talent, but my hunch is that they lacked the competence to bring that expanded talent set together coherently. And I think Brad's interview to some degree backs that up.

Quote from: Endie
Cornered Rat aimed high - massively fucking high - with WWIIOL.  Too high, of course, it turned out.

And the shame is that I think they actually had the talent on-board to deliver it, but they had too much - I'll be kind - "potential talent" - in the mix to realize the project. Ex-Rats are spread far and wide throughout the industry, from Blizzard to Microsoft.

Quote from: schild
It's all about actions in this industry. Aiming high and failing is worse than aiming low and succeeding.

I couldn't agree more. Puzzle Pirates?

Quote from: endie
That's certainly fair: I had big difficulty with the point that you raised in your post, for instance, about the line "WoW is the first MMO that was developed more systematically".  That needs evidence, a frame of reference, and a huge dollop more specificity.

That's understandable, because my statement as written is inaccurate and even contradcits what I say about CoH/E&B. It should say "first successful MMO". I'll have to go source hunting for interviewees/transcripts of the various individuals, conferences and seminars where these devs have expounded on the process.

Quote from: Stephen Zepp
To this day I bring up Dale's work in early internet simulation networking (specifically Warbirds), since he was one of the first to commercially recognize and adapt to the concept and implications of large data messages vs MTU size during the mid 90's internet.

Its worth noting that joint credit for much of that work goes to John MacQueen ("Killer") who was one of the instigators of the WWII Online project. Killer can be a wee bit the way Brad is portrayed - too much forum time and not enough hands on time.

Quote from: Engels
The vast generalization that all 'small time' MMO companies (like Sigil!) are walking icons of corporate incompetence and mismanaged disasters.

Sigil doesn't fit into the same category as WW2 Online. I have no insider knowledge, but I suspect that CRG had 1/10th of the budget, if that, to work with.

Actually, CRS had a pretty massive budget. Once they'd assembled the team, they were so overconfident about their ability to have their waldo-like team-extensions build the game of their dreaming that they allowed themselves to burn away much of that budget on their "Playnet" portal project.

"Vast generalisation ... of corporate incompetence"? No, I see a pioneering industry which hasn't yet found its formula. From inside the industry - and I'm not talking about my "throne" as host developer for WWII Online, but amongst the conferences, discussions, meetings, emails, blogs, etc it has given me access to - I still see much of what I was seeing as a player and beta tester and, primarily, a professional software developer/developer-manager, which is an industry that has in places thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Or - more succinctly - I don't think we've left the nascent days of MMO development. I happen to believe the next WoW is dependent not on copying its product but its methods.

On the one hand, ex-sigil points at one aspect of MMO development with fear and loathing (the "dog and pony" show) - I perceive that as his inexperienced perception of how the guys who knew what they were doing were doing. On the other hand, the guy points out the very failing I've speculated on in other MMOs and subsequently had verified by devs I've gotten to know.

That's where I draw my conclusion of a failure to blend skills from both sides in the largely expanded team Brad had working on Vanguard (over the team on EQ1).

Many years ago, I worked for a company that adapted a standardized product to serve as bespoke software for a variety of businesses. We expanded and took on new developers who were less and less a part of the specification process, and thus unaware that the use of preexisting code stock as a basis was part of our sell. The uncorrected belief that they were working on a dog & pony show, IMHO, was what lead to the final wind-down of that company. Our management made them part of the workforce, not brought them on-board the team.

Quote from: HaemishM
I played WWIIO years after launch. It was STILL terrible. Perhaps he learned how to make tanks not fly, but nothing in WWIIO is really that redeemable beyond the concept. It's a terrible, terrible game. But I suppose if he is responsible for the fact that it runs without crashing every 5 seconds and that heavy armor is gravity-bound, he can have a cookie. Just ONE cookie, though. Don't want to appear soft.

Nawh; I work on the servers - I put the "persistent" in "persistent world" there with server processes that run for years instead of days, and developed a variety of methodologies for detecting and preventing cheaters other than listing in plain-text the URLs of all the applications you don't want people to run in the .exe. Cause, no wily hacker would ever think to look there. No, sir!

Quote from: HaemishM
Sure. And they do so by not following the examples of those who have succeeded at that type of development, by thinking they know better than everyone else and not listening to people telling them they are wrong. Sound familiar?

Which is really the element I'm preaching. From down here in nowhere land ;)

Quote from: Modern Angel
So kfsone may be a swell guy (Hell, he probably is) and great coder but that doesn't matter. What matters is that both projects were monuments to how poorly run software of this medium is. That's what I was commenting on.

So how does my having the inside skivvy to how one of the two projects achieved it lessen my ability to comment on similarities in both?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 10:45:45 AM
Conclusion:

- Yes, I do infact think that working on WWFlopOnline qualifies me to smell a project walking down the same path when I see it, and I've barked at Vanguard in my time;
- I did actually believe that before I worked for WWII, and was very outspoken about my perceptions of shoddy development before I had any real insight from behind the scenes. I like to call this "15 years experience";
- Yes, I do infact think that some of the contributing factors to the less-than-blooming success of Vg is in part down to less than perfect development practices, especially those highlighted by ex-sigil in his post;
- No, I don't think Vanguard was a dog & pony show, rather I think that ex-sigils perception of it thus highlights a managerial failing within Sigil;
- If I wasn't egotistical enough to think I knew something about software development that was actually relevant to building MMOs I would never have crossed Scott's radar and I would still be developing business and Internet critical servers and applications... Or working for page3.com [NSFW!]



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Modern Angel on May 21, 2007, 10:49:00 AM
It doesn't lessen your ability to comment on it at all. I eat this stuff up and after a feelgood interview a few days ago I'm reasonably confident that I'm going to be a QA grunt for a big MMO type company soon so I'm interested in hearing the story in detail (just not in this thread). Comment away.

I'm just saying that comparing WWIIOL even two years post release to Vaguard/Sigil six months post release is a little off which is where Lum reprimanding us for being meanypants was coming from. If anyone wants to tell those of us who remember the release and sometimes very weird behavior by some of the Rats back in The Day to cool it, fine, but let's compare WWIIOL six months out instead.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 11:13:08 AM
I'm not talking as much about the development of the project as the management of the development of the project. I taught myself to program by writing a MUD language in 1984 which earned me an invitation to meet with Richard Bartle. But I went business/networking/systems dev instead for 15 years. During that time I've seen hits and misses and worked on the cutting edge of a pioneering industry - the Internet. (I'm the same Oliver Smith some people recall from AmiTCP and nascent domain registry days; not the EQ1 Oliver J Smith or EVE's Oliver Smith)

I'm the guy who replaced Pop Idol's 0.25 million pound online voting engine with a single Apache sever and a little CGI script consisting of little more than "echo >$VOTE_FILE" with delayed (non-realtime) voting adjustment based on the resulting apache logs. TTBOMK this was part of the franchise deal sold to American Idol and is used by Idol franchises around the world still, 6 years later. Something must be paying for my little annual royalty cheque.

But my goal was always online gaming - from the age of 10. So as many dev teams/projects/processes as I was able to observe up close and personal, it was always how it could be applied to game development that interested me. I just took too long making the Internet a household commodity and missed my chance to get in on the gaming wavefront ;)

Many of the people in managerial positions in MMOs today have come from the earlier days of garage game development, and are still indoctrinated with the philosophies of departure from convention that made early games possible. Case in point, Sigil's hostility towards certain types of development, described by ex-sigil. Larry Mellon, Austin 2004, had to overcome the same thing in The Sims Online to prevent a launch disaster - that said, if he hadn't had to, perhaps it wouldn't have slipped so quietly into the night.

Sorry if my posts have read like I consider myself to be game developer extraordinaire. I'm in the same boat as ex-sigil, I'm a dev with prior experience finding myself on the inside looking around and thinking "uh, guys?" but I don't see it as incompetance the way ex-sigil does; I understand why those devs are resistant to this last great stumbling block, the same reasons MMO devs went from not trusting databases with a 1000ft pole to not understanding how Scott could sit on a conference panel and proudly state his database was "flat text files". I went into CRS with a good idea of what to expect, but having not been on that side of the fence, without really understanding what lead to it.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 21, 2007, 11:20:17 AM
[snip]
So the short version of that is: "Most of the guys in charge started out by hacking shit together in their garage, and firmly believe that's all you really need -- a vision, a bunch of talented people, and some schmuck fronting the cash".

Color me shocked. It's like the entire software industry, only lagged. (Lagged by, I would bet, by almsot exactly the amount of time between the wide-spread production of software and the wide-spread production of games).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 11:36:44 AM
[snip]
So the short version of that is: "Most of the guys in charge started out by hacking shit together in their garage, and firmly believe that's all you really need -- a vision, a bunch of talented people, and some schmuck fronting the cash".

Color me shocked. It's like the entire software industry, only lagged. (Lagged by, I would bet, by almsot exactly the amount of time between the wide-spread production of software and the wide-spread production of games).


But that's the twist. The wave already passed thru Gaming. While its not unprecedented, MMO Gaming brings together the gaming discipline and more formal dsciplines (particularly in my area, networking/servers) but the gaming guys seem to predate the transformation of regular gaming (or never accepted it) and the older garage mentality somehow still wins out.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 21, 2007, 11:40:36 AM
not understanding how Scott could sit on a conference panel and proudly state his database was "flat text files".

Sweet, that's one person who was awake in the room!


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Furiously on May 21, 2007, 11:45:21 AM
But that's the twist. The wave already passed thru Gaming. While its not unprecedented, MMO Gaming brings together the gaming discipline and more formal dsciplines (particularly in my area, networking/servers) but the gaming guys seem to predate the transformation of regular gaming (or never accepted it) and the older garage mentality somehow still wins out.

Name me one famous database programmer. Name me a famous game programmer.

So you're saying the rockstar mentality needs to be replaced with a orchestra mentality?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Comstar on May 21, 2007, 11:51:47 AM
Sweet, that's one person who was awake in the room!

Why are flat text files good for a MMOG? On topic: I'm guessing Vanguard doesn't use them.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 21, 2007, 11:52:09 AM
Name me one famous database programmer.
Tom Kyte, Cary Millsap, Jeremy Zawodny, Mike Ault, Donald Burleson, and Steve Adams. These guys are all gods. Of course I'm a DBA by trade.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 11:56:40 AM
And anyway, bollocks to this :)

Color me shocked

... that someone would go to work for Brad McQuaid on "lets do everything wrong about EQ1 again" and be surprized that what they see looks like a dog and pony show :)

That anyone wouldn't recognize Brad for the forumite he is, the Raph who hadn't had his SWG ;) My stand on that goes back to MUD Dev and Brad failed to "prove [me] wrong with [his] next game" (BM, MUD-Dev, June 2004).



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 21, 2007, 12:01:40 PM
I'm starting to like Oliver.  Oliver can come round my house and fuck my sister.

I might even have a rational reply once I've fully digested that wall of text.  Can it be put in a flat file ?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 21, 2007, 12:02:04 PM
Sweet, that's one person who was awake in the room!

Why are flat text files good for a MMOG? On topic: I'm guessing Vanguard doesn't use them.

Speed. (Note that Moore's Law has gone a long way to making this obsolete in the 3-4 year interim).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 12:12:10 PM
Sweet, that's one person who was awake in the room!

Why are flat text files good for a MMOG? On topic: I'm guessing Vanguard doesn't use them.

Lum should answer that ;) Mostly it was the looks of horror on the faces of the rest of the panel. Lum, to me, was a voice of reason on that panel: Don't go Oracle because. Think about what your product needs.

I was awake Scott, just trying not to laugh; your message in that seminar, to me, was "don't move the goal posts just to excuse reinventing the wheel". There's a big difference between what databases can do for a game and what a game should do because a database can. SWG case in point, not least from that seminar. I felt that what Doug Mellencamp was espousing was the flip-side of the coin that leads garage-backgrounds to resist what talent from other disciplines has to offer.

Quote from: furiously
Name me one famous database programmer.

Not my background; I can name "famous" influences, but I suspect they are only famous in my circles, all of whom have developed systems/strategies for development that directly relate to translating single user development practices to massively/multi-user development disciplines that was too elite to embrace those techniques, all of which have relevance to developing MMO game systems: Richard Bartle, Alan Cox, Mark Kosters, David Kessens, Jon Postel, Ronald Khoo, Jef Poskanzer. (I've met all but two, both of whom I've had "origins" disputes with)

Quote from: furiously
Name me a famous game programmer.

Carmack? Mollyneux?

I'm not trying to preach that "mother knows better", ie "ditch the rockstar mentality". That gets the rockstar's heckles up and holds back the industry in the first place ;) But even big rockstars do coversongs, and sooner or later the rockstars need to learn some of the tricks of the guys in the first lists, at least when it comes to developing complex backend systems.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 12:13:42 PM
Sweet, that's one person who was awake in the room!

Why are flat text files good for a MMOG? On topic: I'm guessing Vanguard doesn't use them.

Speed. (Note that Moore's Law has gone a long way to making this obsolete in the 3-4 year interim).

=( I always thought it was just to make Doug Mellencamp look like a used-car salesman trying to convince you that this Oracle Mustang having 2 wheels was a feature that helped reduce running costs normally associated with tire wear ;)

[Apologies to Doug, he just had that vibe about him in that one seminar; I think Scott completely flumoxed the guy, and Scott's explanations and arguments were incredibly good, solid, basic development stuff]


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 12:17:54 PM
I'm starting to like Oliver.  Oliver can come round my house and fuck my sister.

I might even have a rational reply once I've fully digested that wall of text.  Can it be put in a flat file ?

I dunno, but if we put it in an ipod and wrap a condom around it, maybe your sister won't need me? :)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 21, 2007, 12:20:41 PM
And anyway, bollocks to this :)

Color me shocked

... that someone would go to work for Brad McQuaid on "lets do everything wrong about EQ1 again" and be surprized that what they see looks like a dog and pony show :)

That anyone wouldn't recognize Brad for the forumite he is, the Raph who hadn't had his SWG ;) My stand on that goes back to MUD Dev and Brad failed to "prove [me] wrong with [his] next game" (BM, MUD-Dev, June 2004).
That was sarcasm, I promise -- especially since I've been harping on the lack of professionalism and quality management processes for, oh, the entire time I've been here and a lot of this thread.

I've worked in IT a very long time -- in shops with loose, highly flexible processes that were basically a formal version of the "garage programming" to full-on DoD-specced crap wherein the request to so much as change a font required four reams of paper, six months of meetings, and a Vogon Poetry Reading.

So it doesn't really surprise me at all. My experience has been that the very, very, very cutting edge coders, designers, developers -- don't think they need that software management crap. They are generally quite capable of doing it all in their head, and sometimes can even lead a fairly sizeable team to do it.

But the thing is -- they're wrong. They really do need all that software management crap. Not for them -- but for everyone else. A good manager creates the framework in the background, gives the hot-shots room to do their shit -- and half the time the hot-shots never really realize how much work was done around them to make their little works of genius flourish and grow.

So seeing a bunch of Vision guys, a bunch of hot-shot designers and such, moving on to actually handle the nuts and bolts --- I'm not surprised at all how it turned out. Had Sigil simply hired an experienced, qualified management team --- they probably would have shipped with a playable, solid game. Maybe not a fun game -- maybe not a game with much of a market -- but it wouldn't have been a fucking joke.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 12:29:38 PM
That was sarcasm, I promise -- especially since I've been harping on the lack of professionalism and quality management processes for, oh, the entire time I've been here and a lot of this thread.

No, I got it, I was embracing your sarcasm rather than continuing my defensive ;)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: CharlieMopps on May 21, 2007, 12:45:20 PM
Sweet, that's one person who was awake in the room!

Why are flat text files good for a MMOG? On topic: I'm guessing Vanguard doesn't use them.

Speed. (Note that Moore's Law has gone a long way to making this obsolete in the 3-4 year interim).

I have to agree there... I kind of stumbled into being a Database admin for a couple years myself. I had written a program that tracked some basic crap for my company. The bigwigs liked it soo much they wanted it converted to a "Real" database. I personally had been storing the data in Text files. When we converted to Oracle suddenly my application was MIND CRUSHINGLY SLOW. We went from instant results to waiting up 3 seconds per query. Mores law doesnt really apply in a corporate environment... our servers arent the newest.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 21, 2007, 12:53:09 PM
Database vs flatfiles is actually an interesting microcosm of the whole argument about scripting vs hard coding, since SQL is basically a scripting language that allows you to do things with data.

Scripting means that your designers can offlload more of the game's "work" onto code that they write themselves. It makes it far more likely that you will see cool and interesting combat features, for example. However, a script will never run as fast as well-written C code. So, it's a tradeoff. How much do you let your designers script vs how much do you hardcode and rely on programmers to write everything. It's an argument I'm well enmeshed in right now (and ironically, I'm coming down more on the scripting side of the equation!)

Games (like any other large ungainly software engineering project) are the art of the possible. It's always a juggling act between features vs. speed vs. stability vs. efficient budget vs. time to market. You can't have all of the above - it's unpossible.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on May 21, 2007, 12:58:35 PM
Does this all mean you love us again Lum and you've forgiven us for thinking games that dont work aren't cool?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: DarkSign on May 21, 2007, 01:03:48 PM
So why does the "garage mentality" still abound in MMOs?  Is it because the product is such an undefineable beast? With profits so high that control over them never really solidified into a disciplined method?

Seriously, what parts of the production cycle should be concrete and where does improvisation kick in?

The modeling, texturing, and animation tools are all pretty standard. While the clients are different for each game, is there one game that has something so incredibly hard to code that it requires stepping outside of programming norms?  The AI? The networking? The database?

Or is it just that getting to control the production of an MMO has so many variables that it lends itself to being different every time and therefore requires a less disciplined approach?

If anything, both interviews taken together show that more discipline is needed in some areas, but it can be faked with dog-and-pony shows to the unwary.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 21, 2007, 01:18:28 PM
Does this all mean you love us again Lum and you've forgiven us for thinking games that dont work aren't cool?

No.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 21, 2007, 01:31:39 PM
Be fair - He's busy getting his own game that won't work out the door.

 :wink:


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: WayAbvPar on May 21, 2007, 01:33:33 PM
Be fair - He's busy getting his own game that won't work out the door.

 :wink:

Well played, sir.


To kfsone's credit, I was a subscriber when he came on board at WWIIOL. Things definitely turned around and started heading in the right direction soon after, IIRC. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 01:35:50 PM
So why does the "garage mentality" still abound in MMOs?  Is it because the product is such an undefineable beast? With profits so high that control over them never really solidified into a disciplined method?

Roots and balls. Those are the guys who broke the ground, and therefore have the standing experience in actually applying any kind of development to MMO gaming. I don't consider them incompetent, because they've done that. On the other hand, the paedophile clergyman doesn't prove all religion is excrement.

As Lum says, there is a time and a place for scripting, and the early attempts were attempts to reinvent the wheel and so reaffirmed existing ideas of it being unsuited to MMO development.

But if you build your game with scripting in mind - at least for the purpose of scaffolding your "dog and pony" during early development, and long term for unit, automation and QA testing, you'll build a better application.

There's no direct or immediate guarantee you will build a better game, but I think we're beyond the point where the quality of product counts now - cf WWII Online - where quality of product was everything; there must be something to the game itself, or it wouldn't still be around with enough customers to register on SirBruce's charts. But the product they shipped was ... abysmal. And that window of acceptance was gone.

E&B was the flipside of the coin; superbly developed but lacking the "spirit" of an MMO. I think a lot of people dropped out because the game shared more in common with Monkey Island than UO.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 01:37:50 PM
Be fair - He's busy getting his own game that won't work out the door.

 :wink:

Ouch :) I haven't shipped a game; in that sense I am as much a spectator as others here, that's perhaps why Lum made the point for me. Rather I've had the chance to confirm my speculative theories by working the other side of the fence; and in keeping WWII from the grave that was looming over its head, prove one or two of my others.

- Oliver


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on May 21, 2007, 02:41:14 PM
I'm starting to like Oliver.  Oliver can come round my house and fuck my sister.

I might even have a rational reply once I've fully digested that wall of text.  Can it be put in a flat file ?

I dunno, but if we put it in an ipod and wrap a condom around it, maybe your sister won't need me? :)


Ok, you've won me over with that comment. I still think WWIIO sucks it, but at least you recognize reality when it cockslaps you in the face. That means you have it all over some of the devs I've seen in the game industry, particularly the MMO Medium.

The rockstar mentality needs to DIE FUCKING DIE DIE DIE. There are few folks whose abilities I would trust to allow their ego to run rampant like that. Actually, I can't think of any. Warren Spector was responsible for Deux Ex: Invisible War. Garriot allowed Ultima 9 and lives in a fucking castle. Both Carmack and Romero have been responsible for shit like Doom 3 and Daikatana.

Your ego is always just one clusterfuck away from making mobile phone games.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: CharlieMopps on May 21, 2007, 02:56:02 PM
So why does the "garage mentality" still abound in MMOs?  Is it because the product is such an undefineable beast? With profits so high that control over them never really solidified into a disciplined method?

Roots and balls. Those are the guys who broke the ground, and therefore have the standing experience in actually applying any kind of development to MMO gaming. I don't consider them incompetent, because they've done that. On the other hand, the paedophile clergyman doesn't prove all religion is excrement.

As Lum says, there is a time and a place for scripting, and the early attempts were attempts to reinvent the wheel and so reaffirmed existing ideas of it being unsuited to MMO development.

But if you build your game with scripting in mind - at least for the purpose of scaffolding your "dog and pony" during early development, and long term for unit, automation and QA testing, you'll build a better application.

There's no direct or immediate guarantee you will build a better game, but I think we're beyond the point where the quality of product counts now - cf WWII Online - where quality of product was everything; there must be something to the game itself, or it wouldn't still be around with enough customers to register on SirBruce's charts. But the product they shipped was ... abysmal. And that window of acceptance was gone.

E&B was the flipside of the coin; superbly developed but lacking the "spirit" of an MMO. I think a lot of people dropped out because the game shared more in common with Monkey Island than UO.



I have to say that the more I read about this, the more beta makes sense. I've been in other betas... and when there was a problem, there would be subtle tweaks and changes to make it work. In Vanguards beta, they would introduce a quest or whatever... and if there was a problem they would just scrap it. BAM! whole thing gone... and they would come up with something entirely different. It just seemed horribly out of wack to me...


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 03:11:34 PM
Your ego is always just one clusterfuck away from making mobile phone games.

But thanks to the WWII Onlines and AC2s, and the many I never heard of except in someone later lamenting, Rockstars are neccessary to keep interest (particularly $$$ interest) in the market so we don't skip right ahead to the EA phase ;)

But then there are the SWGs and the Sagases of heroses. I dunno if they teach us to shun the rockstar or ... the spinal tap ;)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 21, 2007, 03:32:51 PM
It's not a binary choice between

a) Like SWG, every single action is a database transaction
b) Like EQ, everything is logged and saved to flat files

And not because databases are too slow to do it, you can always throw hardware and tuning at that, but because it simply isn't appropriate use of technology. MMOs should be built upon a distributed tiered environment built on inexpensive horizontally scalable linux boxes or blades. The thick client (yourgame.exe) connects to auth servers, which hand off to game servers, which then commit changes to the database in batches every so often. The DB doesn't need to be beefy, because it isn't asked to do very much. So you can use a cheap solution like oracle standard with a HA cluster on the backend.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Sairon on May 21, 2007, 03:38:29 PM
It's not a binary choice between

a) Like SWG, every single action is a database transaction
b) Like EQ, everything is logged and saved to flat files

And not because databases are too slow to do it, you can always throw hardware and tuning at that, but because it simply isn't appropriate use of technology. MMOs should be built upon a distributed tiered environment built on inexpensive horizontally scalable linux boxes or blades. The thick client (yourgame.exe) connects to auth servers, which hand off to game servers, which then commit changes to the database in batches every so often. The DB doesn't need to be beefy, because it isn't asked to do very much. So you can use a cheap solution like oracle standard with a HA cluster on the backend.

Wow, you really managed to get a lot of buzz words in there, lets see if anyone can top it  :-P


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 21, 2007, 03:39:59 PM
Not everything you fail to understand is bullshit. Words to live by.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: CharlieMopps on May 21, 2007, 03:40:08 PM
Database vs flatfiles is actually an interesting microcosm of the whole argument about scripting vs hard coding, since SQL is basically a scripting language that allows you to do things with data.

Scripting means that your designers can offlload more of the game's "work" onto code that they write themselves. It makes it far more likely that you will see cool and interesting combat features, for example. However, a script will never run as fast as well-written C code. So, it's a tradeoff. How much do you let your designers script vs how much do you hardcode and rely on programmers to write everything. It's an argument I'm well enmeshed in right now (and ironically, I'm coming down more on the scripting side of the equation!)

Games (like any other large ungainly software engineering project) are the art of the possible. It's always a juggling act between features vs. speed vs. stability vs. efficient budget vs. time to market. You can't have all of the above - it's unpossible.

I would, as an end user, come down entirely on the side of scripting. I mean, yea, the initial release of the game could possibly be cooler because of the lack of scripting... but you and I both know that no MMO is going to pay that kind of cash for expansions and whatnot. Wouldn't it make it a lot cheaper for the company to introduce new content? I think the main problem with MMOs now is they are too small... If someone just made a game in which creating lots of new content was easy and cheap, it would keep people interested a lot longer.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 21, 2007, 03:42:11 PM
It's not a binary choice between

a) Like SWG, every single action is a database transaction
b) Like EQ, everything is logged and saved to flat files

Yeah, generally my rule was, anything where the user is trained to expect a brief wait (opening a search window for a auction house, say) should be database-driven, while anything where the user does NOT expect a brief wait (say, examining a monster) should be the quickest access possible. Which may or may not be a SQL database, but 4 years ago (when I gave my DB talk) it absolutely was NOT -- even Oracle DB clusters had multi-second waits between queries for most MMO-scale applications. Now, not so much.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 21, 2007, 03:46:39 PM
then commit changes to the database in batches every so often.
At this point, basic transaction theory rears it's ugly head.

Are you holding the uncommitted transactions in server memory, bypassing the DB entirely? If not, how are multiple clients accessing the same data assured that they're getting the right data, that their transactions are parsed in the correct order?

You do what you just described, and either you'll have a fuck-ton of overheard in server memory (the exact sort of shit DB's exist to handle swiftly), or you end up with inconsistent states among clients and some sort of luck-based write to the DB based on first access, or last access, or whatnot.

You don't think EVE moved to solid-state RAM for funsies, do you? Their DB access was a real issue -- lots of micro reads and writes -- and their hard drives couldn't keep up with it. The DB handled it just fine -- the bottleneck was disk I/O.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: DarkSign on May 21, 2007, 03:48:24 PM
The really funny thing is, the most expensive part of making an MMO should be the art assets! Especially if you're doing something modern or futuristic with all the details and props.

BigWorld, Gamebryo, and the like arent the hugest dent in the budget. Even if you used Unreal3 (not a great engine for an MMO) you'd still only be paying somewhere between half and 3/4s of a million for an engine.

I really hope that McQuaid is never given the chance to make another MMO. Yeah one's accomplishments are worthy of praise, but if even half the stuff coming out of his own mouth are true, he should be done.  Not listening...willful ignorance...crying? Are you friggin kidding me with the CRYING?? :nda: :-o :evil: :roll:





Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Sairon on May 21, 2007, 03:52:07 PM
Not everything you fail to understand is bullshit. Words to live by.

I didn't call bullshit, in fact I don't even question your expertise on the area. But you DID in fact manage to squish a whole lot of buzz words into those few lines.  :-P


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 21, 2007, 03:54:39 PM
Searching for auctions is a perfect example of the kind of thing that really needs to hit the database. Basically you run everything you can at the app tiers. The database doesn't know about transactions until it needs to; changes are presented and processed at the app tier and committed when necessary on demand.

I haven't had the chance to examine CCP's environment, so I can't make an educated statement about their management. Maybe they did need solid state storage, but I really seriously doubt it. I know they're running SQL server on windows with support from IBM, so their IT staff probably isn't very savvy.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 04:13:46 PM
Worth adding that Lum did eventually point out that he wasn't just using flat text files; the text files were managed by a suite of code Mythic had developed on previous projects which more-or-less could be construed as a database ;)

Quote from: CharlieMopps
I mean, yea, the initial release of the game could possibly be cooler because of the lack of scripting...

Not sure if you're refering to client-side macros. I'm talking about building the game from the scratch with the notion of something that can dynamically run bits of the code. Building in the ability for the code to run headless.

That leads to an ability to automate the process of testing - either code or data.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Margalis on May 21, 2007, 05:17:22 PM
I don't understand the scripting convo going on here - even red names have been arguing that scripting is not good for a MMORPG. To me that seems incredibly silly. Sure, data-driven stuff is great but it isn't one or the other, and you can convert scripts to data stuff later. If you have a designer trying to make a quest what do you do:

1. Give him a scripting language and let him make the entire quest.
2. Have him request new product features, each of which need a full build before testing.

Hmm...tough choice. Easy instant turn-around that can be done by designers vs. slow turnaround that only coders can perform. And yes there is the testing aspect as well.

An MMO is a lot closer to system programming than app programming. It's just too much stuff to throw together without testing frameworks, unit testing, etc.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Phred on May 21, 2007, 05:55:44 PM

I have to say that the more I read about this, the more beta makes sense. I've been in other betas... and when there was a problem, there would be subtle tweaks and changes to make it work. In Vanguards beta, they would introduce a quest or whatever... and if there was a problem they would just scrap it. BAM! whole thing gone... and they would come up with something entirely different. It just seemed horribly out of wack to me...

I saw the same thing in WoW-TBC beta. There were a bunch of Hellfire peninsula quests that disappeared with no comment from the devs, and the quest rewards moved to other unrelated quests. Of course that's about the only similarity the two games have.





Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: robusticus on May 21, 2007, 06:12:00 PM
Scripts (client-side macros) get a bad rep because they are generally lower quality, and harder to maintain.  That argument is moot against code generators, however.  Excel, Test Automation, etc.  Flash is, like, a whole dev environment, it looks like, even though it is called ActionScript.  I wonder if Maya generates code?  It comes with a script engine too, I understand.

XML files in a DB gets my vote.  Ca-chunk-a-chunk.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 21, 2007, 06:48:48 PM
Searching for auctions is a perfect example of the kind of thing that really needs to hit the database. Basically you run everything you can at the app tiers. The database doesn't know about transactions until it needs to; changes are presented and processed at the app tier and committed when necessary on demand.

I haven't had the chance to examine CCP's environment, so I can't make an educated statement about their management. Maybe they did need solid state storage, but I really seriously doubt it. I know they're running SQL server on windows with support from IBM, so their IT staff probably isn't very savvy.
You might -- and this is just a tiny suggestion -- look it up before you talk about it. Their enviroment calls for 30k or so concurrent users working with -- among other things -- a highly detailed and realistic market. Imagine the mother of all fucking auction houses, running with 30k concurrent players who hit the DB every time they transition star systems, every time they move through the market, virtually everything they do. CCP's database needs are light-years ahead of what games like WoW requires -- their single-shard design ensures that, and their highly detailed market (and associated market tools) are just the icing on the cake.

As for transactions -- once again, I think you underestimate an MMORPG's needs and the savvy of a lot of people working in the field. Vanguard was a clusterfuck of monsterous proportions, but most MMORPG's require highly experienced and proficient folks for both the network and the DB layers -- MMORPGS without experienced DBAs (from design through Live) don't live long. Among other things, duping gets out of hand.

Oh -- if I played an MMORPG that did batched writes to the DB at intervals, I could exploit sixteen kinds of shit out of it. I imagine it'd be very fun at the zone lines.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 21, 2007, 07:19:47 PM
CCP's database needs are light-years ahead of what games like WoW requires
No, they are not.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 21, 2007, 07:30:27 PM
Oh -- if I played an MMORPG that did batched writes to the DB at intervals, I could exploit sixteen kinds of shit out of it. I imagine it'd be very fun at the zone lines.

Seems you would have benefited from the aforementioned Databases seminar.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 21, 2007, 07:33:53 PM
You're just guessing. You can't eyeball the gameplay and intuitively infer how many and what types of transactions it would require to create that experience without any knowledge of their architecture. I see no particular reason why EVE's DB load would necessarily exceed other games in the genre. If you work for CCP please feel free to shut me down cold.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Mandrel on May 21, 2007, 08:24:27 PM

As for transactions -- once again, I think you underestimate an MMORPG's needs and the savvy of a lot of people working in the field. Vanguard was a clusterfuck of monsterous proportions, but most MMORPG's require highly experienced and proficient folks for both the network and the DB layers -- MMORPGS without experienced DBAs (from design through Live) don't live long. Among other things, duping gets out of hand.

Oh -- if I played an MMORPG that did batched writes to the DB at intervals, I could exploit sixteen kinds of shit out of it. I imagine it'd be very fun at the zone lines.

Well, duping in Vanguard has been so bad, people are calling for a barter system of trade on some servers, ignoring cash transactions:

http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20248&highlight=gold+dupe (http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20248&highlight=gold+dupe)



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Jeff Kelly on May 22, 2007, 06:07:19 AM
Prior to my arrival there (I worked my way up), the coders were the 'bottom' end of the business, everything flowed downwards to them, they had no say in timetables, design, or anything else.

This has been the case in any business I have ever worked in. Every time management dreams up a new feature or sales has promised the moon and the stars to another client gullible enough to buy something the Coders just have to "Make It Work"(TM) somehow. We were never asked beforehand if the things they tried to sell were actually feasible to do or at least could be done in the time they promised our clients.

If the schedule couldn't be upheld because of management's or sales's limited grasp on reality, lack of basic understanding about our products and technologies and the absolute inability to actually listen to things engineers and coders were telling them it was usually development's fault.

Maybe that just shows my lack of skills to chose the right employer but I have heard something like that or similar from too many people already to believe that.

I had a strategic meeting once at one of my last jobs where we were discussing a new product that was still in the most basic development stages. We are talking Ideas jotted down in a word document here. Our manager asked us how long it would take us approximately to reach the first prototype that could be paraded around on trade shows and exhibitions. We were pretty tight on manpower so we thought up a basic plan, explained the options and the risks involved and basically came up with about twelve months until a first prototype system. (Mind you to even begin development we first had to build the custom hardware we needed for this and we hadn't even begun planning that)

The answer to that was basically "Well you need to get it done in 6 months because we already have a customer for it and we told him that he could have the prototype by that time". I learned a lot about corporate business that day. To cut a long story short development still took nearly a year to complete as we had projected.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: CharlieMopps on May 22, 2007, 07:20:57 AM
Yea, I write a lot of scripts and mini-apps arround my workplace to help my co-workers out. My Boss comes walking by one day and sees an app I had litterally just wrote... ask me what it does... he says: "Wow, that would save the team a lot of time!" 

I sware to God, 10min later he walks up to me and says "Hey, I'm in a meeting with 2nd shift right now... can you come in and train them how to use that app?"


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 22, 2007, 08:13:05 AM
Quote
- Mount masters have found a home near all rift way points. These masters will allow you to rent one of three flying mounts based on continent for a fee of 20 silver. You can use the flying mount as many times as you want within the 5 minute timer given. When the timer wears off you will be given a freefall effect for a short duration and the mount will be removed from your inventory.

Have fun and see you all in the skies of Telon!

A quick and easy way to ferret out the dupers? 20 silver for 5 min is a luxury only the very wealthy in game can afford.

I'm wondering if they've also fixed the Z axis issue, where flying over mobs, no matter how high up, would cause aggro down below. In any case, this is the first 'Sigil-free' patch for Vanguard.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 22, 2007, 10:24:51 AM
You're just guessing. You can't eyeball the gameplay and intuitively infer how many and what types of transactions it would require to create that experience without any knowledge of their architecture. I see no particular reason why EVE's DB load would necessarily exceed other games in the genre. If you work for CCP please feel free to shut me down cold.
I don't have to. CCP's been quite open with their DB design -- in fact, they had a number of really detailed Dev blogs last year as they were upgrading their systems to handle the lag.

They started having serious lag problems (multiple sources) once they hit about 20k concurrent. They had a number of consultants out to eyeball their DB server, their game server, their network setup, their threading  -- pretty much everything you can think of -- to look for problem areas and optimizaton possibilities. They ended up making a number of gameplay changes (most slashing down on the number of drones and finally getting around to handling bookmarks), I have no idea what sort of game server changes might have been necessary, but I recall their discussion of their DB woes quite clearly, as I was in the middle of a bunch of DB shit myself.

In short -- with a 20k+ concurrent user base, and the nature of their market and bookmark systems (other sources weren't as heavy a load), the DB was constantly being hammered for small requests that weren't inherently cacheable -- the requests rarely repeated over a short timeframe. The DB handled it well enough -- it couldn't effectively cache the requests, however, so it ended up reading and writing to disk a lot -- the bottleneck turned out to be disk I/O. IIRC, they stated write-queues were something like 10 to 13 deep.

Trippy:
Quote
No, they are not.
I would say they are -- they have 10 times the concurrent users WoW does, they're not planning on ever sharding it so concurrent demands are simply going to grow, they collect a LARGE amount of detailed data, and the market is one of the primary DB drivers and it's fully integrated into the game. At any given moment, more people are utilizing EVE's market alone than are on the average WoW shard. Now, I'm aware Blizzard shares DB servers across multiple shards, but I can't see any way in which Blizzard's design calls for even a tenth as much DB usage as EVE's -- it's just an entirely different design.

kfsone:
Quote
Seems you would have benefited from the aforementioned Databases seminar.
No thank you. I find DB design to be highly boring, and will only grudgingly have anything to do with it. We had to redesign one of our smaller databases, and I got tasked to do it -- I almost quit when my boss's boss wanted proof the new design (and the changeover) wouldn't lose data. Proving it was lossless wasn't that bad, but knowing the guy demanding it couldn't understand my proof or even really check if I did it right -- irks me. DBA type jobs seem pretty thankless, where you only get attention when it goes all fucked up.  I have a huge appreciation for the sort of serious database stuff that sits behind banking systems and the like, though -- and I know enough to appreciate the sorts of effort behind most MMORPG DB designs.

One of my gripes with the pre-Blizzard generation of MMORPGs is that it seems a lot of early DB design was done by programmers -- not qualified database folks. Database design is one of those areas where I'd want serious talent pretty early. It's not glamorous, but a poor design will hamper you for the lifespan of the game -- and changing it after the fact is a cast-iron bitch.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 22, 2007, 11:11:50 AM
I tried to read the dev blogs, but I guess you need to be a game subscriber. I'm incredibly skeptical that solid state storage was required. There are all kinds of things you can do to ameliorate physical I/O, but without the ability to make my own diagnosis I can't really make a judgment one way or the other. My off the cuff guess is that their consultants suck.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Roac on May 22, 2007, 11:26:04 AM
I tried to read the dev blogs, but I guess you need to be a game subscriber. I'm incredibly skeptical that solid state storage was required. There are all kinds of things you can do to ameliorate physical I/O, but without the ability to make my own diagnosis I can't really make a judgment one way or the other. My off the cuff guess is that their consultants suck.

Feel free to figure out why the design hosting a working solution is wrong after reading this (http://www.wwpi.com/SMS_Current/2006-q1ccpgamesl.htm).  Or google for the piles of articles on the subject.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: bhodi on May 22, 2007, 11:33:12 AM
The hardware involved in that article makes me drool. I may be a geek, fine, but holy crap. I would love to manage a system like that. I've dealt with blade severs and multi-terabyte SAN storage, getting my hands dirty trying to tweak it for maximum performance -- but I've never touched anything like solid state storage. The performance on that must be unreal. Sometimes, you've got to just love it -- that would probably be my dream job.

Maybe even unreal enough to make Microsoft SQL Server perform reasonably fast...

I tried to read the dev blogs, but I guess you need to be a game subscriber. I'm incredibly skeptical that solid state storage was required. There are all kinds of things you can do to ameliorate physical I/O, but without the ability to make my own diagnosis I can't really make a judgment one way or the other. My off the cuff guess is that their consultants suck.
Keep in mind Sam that they ultimately went for the "easiest" and most definitely fastest solution to the problem - a metaphorical "bigger box". There's really nothing wrong with that. When you've got time constraints that don't allow for a year's (optimistic) migration path from design to functional testing to transition, sometimes you can just throw a band-aid at the problem. A really, really BIG EXPENSIVE band-aid. Often, it will delay the issue past the life expectancy of the problem. It may not be the most elegant, true, but in the end it's the results that matter. I'm surprised that you can't see that.

That said, I personally won't play Eve because of the lag involved in large scale battles. I understand something of the issues involved in hosting such an event, but as the game is designed around it, and it's what I would like to be seriously involved in if I were to play (beyond my 2 week trial a few months back) half-minute delays on actions and screen updates every 15 seconds is not my idea of a good time.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 22, 2007, 11:49:03 AM
That said, I personally won't play Eve because of the lag involved in large scale battles. I understand something of the issues involved in hosting such an event, but as the game is designed around it, and it's what I would like to be seriously involved in if I were to play (beyond my 2 week trial a few months back) half-minute delays on actions and screen updates every 15 seconds is not my idea of a good time.
CCP is learning what every MMORPG game ever has learned about PvP. If you design to handle 20v20, they'll show up with 40v40. Work like dogs to make 40v40 smooth as glass, they'll show up with 80v80. CCP's performance for large scale battles is really great -- except then people made the battles even larger.

Right now, IIRC, they're trying to move in game mechanisms that discourage large-scale battles -- trying to keep fleet actions down to the 100v100 range where the servers don't choke.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Roac on May 22, 2007, 12:00:16 PM
MMOGs are the idiot's guide to non-linear performance issues. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on May 22, 2007, 12:13:36 PM
CCP is learning what every MMORPG game ever has learned about PvP. If you design to handle 20v20, they'll show up with 40v40. Work like dogs to make 40v40 smooth as glass, they'll show up with 80v80. CCP's performance for large scale battles is really great -- except then people made the battles even larger.

Right now, IIRC, they're trying to move in game mechanisms that discourage large-scale battles -- trying to keep fleet actions down to the 100v100 range where the servers don't choke.

They should chat with Mythic.  They've done an excellent job of keeping large scale pvp pretty manageable.  I've seen fights that were 120 vs 120 run pretty smoothly on what I'd consider a pretty modest machine. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 22, 2007, 12:14:11 PM
Keep in mind Sam that they ultimately went for the "easiest" and most definitely fastest solution to the problem - a metaphorical "bigger box".
I think you hit on the real answer. They threw money at the problem to fix the symptoms. It's not elegant or satisfying, but it does work.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 22, 2007, 12:27:04 PM
Keep in mind Sam that they ultimately went for the "easiest" and most definitely fastest solution to the problem - a metaphorical "bigger box".
I think you hit on the real answer. They threw money at the problem to fix the symptoms. It's not elegant or satisfying, but it does work.
I don't see another solution -- from the specs listed -- that doesn't require rewriting the whole back end, and cutting out a large swath of available functionality. Scaleability isn't infinite, and since the bottleneck was disk reads, that's the place to start.

I should note that they also made gameplay and design changes as well -- CCP has a three-pronged approach to performance issues. Upgrade hardware, alter gameplay, optimize code -- they do all three for any significant issue. (Currently they're working on gameplay an optimization for the fleet blob issues).

Given the expense of solid-state disks, they wouldn't have switched if merely hiring a good consultant or two would have fixed it. And after reading the article, I suspect the first thing a consulant would say would be "Have you thought about solid state disks?"
Nebu:
Quote
They should chat with Mythic.  They've done an excellent job of keeping large scale pvp pretty manageable.  I've seen fights that were 120 vs 120 run pretty smoothly on what I'd consider a pretty modest machine
That's where you get into the issues inherent in the specifics of how an engine was written, and the whole architecture of the system (and the problem isn't client-side -- it's server side). Generally a 100v100 battle is 100v100 ships, plus another 1000 or more drones and fighters. They also processor-limit themselves -- one server per star-system (multiple star-systems can run on a single server, but they won't break up a system onto multiple servers) -- and have huge overhead with the gang bonuses, AI for semi-independent pets (drones and such), massive AoE blobs, situational buffs and debuffs (EW ships swapping targets), turret tracking and traversal eats up a ton I'm told -- lots of independent and math-intensive stuf that changes constantly.

They just simplified the gang bonus system, which supposedly removed some of the server load for large battles. They cut down drones awhile back, and they constantly upgrade their hardware. I'm under the impression that code optimization is an ongoing process.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 22, 2007, 01:13:10 PM
I don't see another solution
There are TONS of possible ways to address physical I/O constraints; upgrading hardware is simply the most obvious and easiest answer. You don't see a solution because you haven't looked at their architecture; neither have I. You're falling into the usual internet armchair architect fallacy. You think you know stuff when all you know is what they told you. Which makes this an incredibly stupid argument. Lets stop wasting electrons and end it here, OK?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Roac on May 22, 2007, 01:22:13 PM
There are TONS of possible ways to address physical I/O constraints
...
You're falling into the usual internet armchair architect fallacy.

Too funny.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 22, 2007, 01:47:40 PM
I don't see another solution
There are TONS of possible ways to address physical I/O constraints; upgrading hardware is simply the most obvious and easiest answer. You don't see a solution because you haven't looked at their architecture; neither have I. You're falling into the usual internet armchair architect fallacy. You think you know stuff when all you know is what they told you. Which makes this an incredibly stupid argument. Lets stop wasting electrons and end it here, OK?
Wait, let me get this straight.

There are tons of solutions. But you don't know them, because you haven't seen their architecture. So how can you claim there are tons of solutions?

I've at least played the game, followed it's development, read a hell of a lot more on it than a single article, and have slightly more to go on than you. All the solutions I can think of are non-starters because they interfere with primary gameplay, or require multi-year rework of an established system, or require CCP jettisoning certain requirements that they have indicated are 'core' to the game.

I'm sure there are dozens of theoretical ways to fix it without hardware upgrades. For instance, we could eliminate the market entirely. That would fix the problem. I could shard the system -- break EVE up into a dozen or more systems with a peak concurrency of 3 to 4k. That would fix it. I could turn the market into a simple auction house instead of a functioning market -- that'd probably do it too.

However, given the existant game play -- the data and DB requirements necessary for a market, a single-sharded 30k concurrent game, you're still running into the same basic, common, simple problem -- the DB requests are frequent, small, and do not lend themselves to caching. There are only three ways out of that -- slow down the DB requests, make them larger (more data per request = fewer requests), or find a way to cache them.

You can't slow down the DB requests without sharding the game or removing the market -- that's the two primary drivers. You can't make them larger -- it won't slow down requests, which are driven by user browsing through market data. I'm sure requests are already cached, but given the nature of user browsing caching doesn't buy you much except not hitting the DB when you flip "back" to a previous item. User browsing is non-predictable, non-repetitive (over the short-term).


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on May 22, 2007, 02:13:21 PM
Guys, Guys, Guys; We Can't Fight Amongst Ourselves.

DON'T YOU KNOW THAT'S WHAT BRAD WANTS YOU TO DO ?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 22, 2007, 02:25:34 PM
Guys, Guys, Guys; We Can't Fight Amongst Ourselves.

DON'T YOU KNOW THAT'S WHAT BRAD WANTS YOU TO DO ?
I'm bored with Vanguard already. It doesn't have the staying power of a good UO/Trammel thread or your average SWG thread.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: cmlancas on May 22, 2007, 02:30:49 PM
Guys, Guys, Guys; We Can't Fight Amongst Ourselves.

DON'T YOU KNOW THAT'S WHAT BRAD WANTS YOU TO DO ?
I'm bored with Vanguard already. It doesn't have the staying power of a good UO/Trammel thread or your average SWG thread.

Even though I am still currently subbed to VG, a person has to not be shit on continuously by McQuaid to care.

I know I'm a newbie here, but I took a good chunk of my day reading the hilarity of that which is the f13 UO/Trammel. I just may have peed a little.

Edit: Typo.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: bhodi on May 22, 2007, 02:31:42 PM
LOL, Internet.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 22, 2007, 02:36:58 PM
You simply don't understand DB performance tuning. Which is fine since you're not a DBA. Take my word on it; getting faster hardware should always be the last solution. Or not, I don't give a shit. Wasting electrons, remember?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Engels on May 22, 2007, 02:43:57 PM
This is all very fascinating, but don't the performace issues with Vanguard have more to do with client side code than server side database access speed? Or have I just wandered into an entirely tangential conversation?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: bhodi on May 22, 2007, 02:45:08 PM
I wonder if they had any consultants or contractors come in to consult on aspects of vanguard's architecture?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on May 22, 2007, 02:50:45 PM
I wonder if they had any consultants or contractors come in to consult on aspects of vanguard's architecture?

Just Brad's ovaries.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 22, 2007, 03:45:05 PM
You simply don't understand DB performance tuning. Which is fine since you're not a DBA. Take my word on it; getting faster hardware should always be the last solution. Or not, I don't give a shit. Wasting electrons, remember?
Listen, numbnuts. I fucking understand DB tuning just fucking fine. I've had to do it on a number of occasions -- mostly because the DB in question had been designed by someone who fucking knew C, but his idea of a database schema was a spreadsheet. I can do it in practice, I can fucking do it in theory (fuck, I can turn it into fucking BCNF if you really want to, although I'd probably fucking quit first), in practice, and the only reason I don't make more money doing that instead of what I do is because I fucking hate it. Or did you mean just playing with Oracle settings? Been there too, although I finally convinced my boss Oracle was a waste of fucking money for what we needed.

And I'm also smart enough to know this: Upgrading to fucking solid-state disks is goddamn expensive. Buying them, maintaining them, replacing them -- Far, far, FAR more fucking expensive than a handful of experts and a few hundred hours of their time -- even at the godawful rates they're likely to charge.

And one last thing, moron -- if EVE's DB had enough wiggle room in performance to make a goddamn difference, it already would have shit itself and died by the time they were desperate enough to move to solid-state disks.

Engels: Judging by the proliferation and type of duping methods, it looks like their server-code wasn't all that great either. :)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 22, 2007, 03:50:08 PM
So who pissed in his cheerios this morning? What a spaz.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Rasix on May 22, 2007, 03:56:17 PM
So who pissed in his cheerios this morning? What a spaz.

Not enough fucks! More fucks now.  More fucks. More fucks. Common more fucks.  Ok, stop fucks.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Margalis on May 22, 2007, 05:26:31 PM
Are you two really arguing about how to optimize games in specific technical ways when you know nothing about the games at all?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Megrim on May 22, 2007, 06:27:44 PM
LOL, Internet.

(http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/2075/netspeak1xt2.gif)




Am i helping yet?  :-D


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 22, 2007, 06:27:57 PM
He was. I said the same thing, that we don't know enough to do that. Then he got some sort of irritant in his vagina, and that's where we are right now.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 22, 2007, 06:34:33 PM
Trippy:
Quote
No, they are not.
I would say they are -- they have 10 times the concurrent users WoW does, they're not planning on ever sharding it so concurrent demands are simply going to grow, they collect a LARGE amount of detailed data, and the market is one of the primary DB drivers and it's fully integrated into the game. At any given moment, more people are utilizing EVE's market alone than are on the average WoW shard. Now, I'm aware Blizzard shares DB servers across multiple shards, but I can't see any way in which Blizzard's design calls for even a tenth as much DB usage as EVE's -- it's just an entirely different design.
If you agree that multiple WoW servers share the same DB then it's the same problem.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 22, 2007, 06:35:04 PM
I'm wondering if they've also fixed the Z axis issue, where flying over mobs, no matter how high up, would cause aggro down below. In any case, this is the first 'Sigil-free' patch for Vanguard.
It wouldn't be a McQuaid game if it didn't have Z-axis aggro issues.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Raph on May 22, 2007, 07:29:57 PM
This thread provides evidence that we don't need MMOs to make infinite threads. We should start a perfectly good one about normalizing DB tables and probably start massive flamewars.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 22, 2007, 07:32:57 PM
MY DATABASE IS FASTER AND MORE STREAMLINED THAN YOURS, RAPH.

That's right.

GAUNTLET THROWN.

Let's go.

Playground.

3:30PM.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: slog on May 22, 2007, 08:47:57 PM
This thread provides evidence that we don't need MMOs to make infinite threads. We should start a perfectly good one about normalizing DB tables and probably start massive flamewars.

My current job is to gather requirements for reports that come from a  75 table relational SQL database thingy.  I tihnk the code monkeys hate me...


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 22, 2007, 11:04:43 PM
Listen, numbnuts. I fucking understand DB tuning just fucking fine. I've had to do it on a number of occasions

:heartbreak: Well pardon our confusion, you were the one that said

Quote from: Morat20
I find DB design to be highly boring, and will only grudgingly have anything to do with it.

Incidentally, EVE has often cited an improvement of 4000% / 40x, for which they give examples like (http://mmorpg.qj.net/Eve-Online-and-Virtual-Reality/pg/49/aid/10781)

Quote
Another database performance measurement, "latches/total wait time" went down from 25,000 to 4,000

Hmm. I'm gonna have to break out calc for this. Nope. That's just an increase of 6.25x. I've never seen them give figures that confirmed anything above 8x improvement.

They're still gonna run into the dual overheads of MS SQL and running it under Windows. And from conversations I overhead with CCP staff at a couple of conferences, it still doesn't sound like they've taken the approach that banking, military and gaming industries use of putting proprietary/custom authoritative proxies infront of the database.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: CharlieMopps on May 23, 2007, 04:51:51 AM
So wait... Eve has like the fastest, most expensive Database thingy on the planet... and yet it's still the most boring video game I've played since "Yu-Gi-Oh! Falsebound Kingdom"?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Murgos on May 23, 2007, 06:42:37 AM
Well, see, if you think Databases are exciting then you probably think Eve is exciting.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: bhodi on May 23, 2007, 07:14:33 AM
And if you like excel, it's positively orgasmic.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Endie on May 23, 2007, 07:22:00 AM
And if you like excel, it's positively orgasmic.

Actually, if you like writing import routines to get csv stuff into Excel in a usable form, it's a peach.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: cmlancas on May 23, 2007, 07:27:44 AM
And if you like excel, it's positively orgasmic.

I'm pretty sure they bundled EVE with MSOffice2007. I could be wrong though.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Bunk on May 23, 2007, 07:43:24 AM
I used to do maintenance on a DOS based Accpac db for a heavy equipment company, as part of my IT role. It consisted of running a maintenance routine that took about an hour, and then running a batch file that zipped the entire db up and copied it to another drive. That also took about an hour. I did this two hour procedure five days a week. I was doing this in 2001 - a DOS Accpac db.

It was awesome.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Lum on May 23, 2007, 07:58:46 AM
25 years ago I used to work in the data center of a mainframe for a medical insurance company. This consisted of users sending down punch cards requesting a given data tape full of records, at which point we would fetch the data tape off of a library shelf and load it into one of the tape drives.

That's right -- 25 years ago, I was part of a hard drive.

Data access techniques have improved since.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Glazius on May 23, 2007, 08:06:50 AM
And if you like excel, it's positively orgasmic.

Actually, if you like writing import routines to get csv stuff into Excel in a usable form, it's a peach.
Showing my terrible newbosity, what kind of CSVs need more than just opening the file with Excel (and thus implicitly accepting the import defaults)? Meaningful dates and times stored in strings rather than numbers?

--GF


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: DraconianOne on May 23, 2007, 08:50:48 AM
Data access techniques have improved since.

Yah.  These days, users just ring you up to find out what they want to know.  Phone > Punch Cards.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 23, 2007, 10:15:27 AM
Trippy:
Quote
No, they are not.
I would say they are -- they have 10 times the concurrent users WoW does, they're not planning on ever sharding it so concurrent demands are simply going to grow, they collect a LARGE amount of detailed data, and the market is one of the primary DB drivers and it's fully integrated into the game. At any given moment, more people are utilizing EVE's market alone than are on the average WoW shard. Now, I'm aware Blizzard shares DB servers across multiple shards, but I can't see any way in which Blizzard's design calls for even a tenth as much DB usage as EVE's -- it's just an entirely different design.
If you agree that multiple WoW servers share the same DB then it's the same problem.
They do -- and it's obvious when WoW's DB is under stress (I played on one of the older realms, so it was common for most of the servers to be sharing a DB server to be close to full). Mail lag, auction lag..ugh.

I don't recall the specifics on how many servers share a DB on WoW, but it'd have to be 10 or so to hit the same concurrency as EVE (fewer now -- they did up the players per server before they start a queue). Concurrency isn't the only issue -- it's DB accesses and whether it can be cached, and WoW pretty much only hits the DB when you're using the AH, your mailbox, the bank, or loading. I don't know if they sever the AH from the mail and bank systems (it would be pretty easy, but I'm not sure it's necessary) but the AH doesn't have nearly the same sort of load requirements as EVE's market. (Seriously, that thing has to be a cast-iron bitch. EVERYTHING is done through that. You can do a lot of caching for an AH-style thing, but for an EVE-style market that's going to be really limited).

That and their asset tracking system (I can find -- and often manipulate -- stuff all over the place, not just local to me) really adds a lot that WoW lacks.

WoW's got the better end of the stick by far, and it shows in gameplay. It took a lot to stress their DB systems to begin with, although it still took a year or two for them to finally catch up to the game becomming far more popular than they anticipated. (Which is a problem everyone wishes they had!).

kfsone: Sorry, I have good reason to hate it. I find it really boring, and I'm the only one qualified in my department to do it. Luckily it doesn't come up much, but some of our stuff is considered man-rated or is under FOIA requirements, so when I am called in to do something more complex than "add a field, please" it often requires a LOT of effort to prove to people up and down the chain that it won't break things, won't lose information, is in fact an improvement and will do what was required, etc. I've been trying to con them into hiring a full-time DBA, but since they'd just sit on their asses 9 months of the year -- not really viable.

As for the article -- I think you're reading too technically from what is more of a laymen's article. Latch/wait time improved 6-fold (According to the article), but I don't think that's where they were getting the 40-fold improvement numbers from. I think that was just them tossing in an example of something that improved -- it makes sense that not all performance measurements would change equally, and I suspect the 40x one game from the most improved performance indicator -- undoubtably an outlier. From a gameplay perspective, it looks to be a 10 to 15-fold improvement (judging by wait times for things like the market in Jita) -- which came despite an increase 33% increase in concurrent users. That performance was massively improved was pretty obvious. :)
Quote
They're still gonna run into the dual overheads of MS SQL and running it under Windows. And from conversations I overhead with CCP staff at a couple of conferences, it still doesn't sound like they've taken the approach that banking, military and gaming industries use of putting proprietary/custom authoritative proxies infront of the database.
Yeah, I'd like to corner their staff and ask questions -- not that I think they'd answer all the ones I had in mind. :) I'm not sure how much front-end work they plan to add later, but I suspect it's on their list. DB access is going to remain a bottleneck, and they've never shown any signs of being shy about hiring outside experts. (They grabbed one of the stackless python gurus to come verify their micro-threading approaches, for instance, back when they were doing the initial rounds of performance upgrades). Since performance upgrades are a near-constant fact of life for them (single-sharded design forces that), I'd suspect that their DBAs are not just sitting on their asses. :)

I said a long time ago that if I was going to design an MMORPG, I'd try to hire at least one DBA guy from the banking industry. Some of the requirements they work under are amazing -- so are some of the solutions.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 23, 2007, 10:23:37 AM
25 years ago I used to work in the data center of a mainframe for a medical insurance company. This consisted of users sending down punch cards requesting a given data tape full of records, at which point we would fetch the data tape off of a library shelf and load it into one of the tape drives.

That's right -- 25 years ago, I was part of a hard drive.

Data access techniques have improved since.
It seems "I was around for punch cards" is a bragging right in every variant of the IT field.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nevermore on May 23, 2007, 11:22:03 AM
About 2500 years ago I used to maintain a database using stone tablets and a hammer and chisel.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 23, 2007, 11:28:46 AM
About 2500 years ago I used to maintain a database using stone tablets and a hammer and chisel.
*sneer*. It was probably in 1st NF. Lazy-ass Babylonian DBA's, nothing more than spreadsheet jockeys.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Miasma on May 23, 2007, 11:33:37 AM
My old boss used to talk about his first job with the bank in the IT department, he had to pour palettes full of water jugs into the mainframe's cooling system.  Sometimes the raised flooring got badly gummed up and he would have to clean it out, six inches of cigarette ashes and all.  I can't imagine someone smoking in an office now, people would freak out and start fainting at the sight of it, the police would have to be called to make sense of the situation.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: kfsone on May 23, 2007, 02:47:12 PM
kfsone: Sorry, I have good reason to hate it. I find it really boring, and I'm the only one qualified in my department to do it. Luckily it doesn't come up much, but some of our stuff is considered man-rated or is under FOIA requirements, so when I am called in to do something more complex than "add a field, please" it often requires a LOT of effort to prove to people up and down the chain that it won't break things, won't lose information, is in fact an improvement and will do what was required, etc. I've been trying to con them into hiring a full-time DBA, but since they'd just sit on their asses 9 months of the year -- not really viable.

I've tried to learn what I know about databases from people who eat that crap up - aware that as a programmer I am automatically disqualified from being a good DBA. Old Bald Angus' writing style always reminds me of a scottish guy I used to work with at Granada Media, who was probably the best DBA I've ever come across; his eyes lit up at stuff that was stale enough to freeze the nuts off satan in the middle of a good blowjob.

But what made Angus different from a lot of DBAs was that he cared enough about his data to know when to tell the developers when something wasn't the databases job. Angus built scheduling and indexing maps, so that when you went to him to grovel for a new query, you had to present him with documentation of how it would be invoked, and he'd benchmark it during testing. But he could tell you what the effects were going to be - with a good degree of accuracy - before you started using it. And based on your PID, he could probably suggest an alternate approach of aquiring the data.

"Mah daytey'baase isn'y gonna do that"

As for the article -- I think you're reading too technically from what is more of a laymen's article. Latch/wait time improved 6-fold (According to the article), but I don't think that's where they were getting the 40-fold improvement numbers from.

That was just a link I had to hand - my point was that I've never seen any numbers, in any articles or blogs, that affirm a 40x improvement. And besides, take a moment to think about this. Those figures should be a little alarming... That solid state disk ought to be providing 100x and above performance increases. To be fair: maybe they have a lot of retuning to do - it could be that their disk-oriented tuning is more of a hinderance.

I'm also a little jaundiced about the bits and pieces I read about external consultants; I've always found that good consultants solve the problem you have rather than the problem that causes it unless the amounts of money are vast. The more of your problem a consultant tackles, the more she/he is lining themselves up for a fall. As well as having worked for several companies that threw millions at consultancy, I also spent several years as a consultant.

{O} If you aren't going to put a head infront of the database to "run" the economy, you are asking for commit pains. {R} If you're insistent on running the economy direct from database ... {A} case you can go for spatial tables (but not with MS SQL until 2005 and I gather they're running 2000) and partition them heavily. {C} Or you use the spatial attributes to partition which table/database/disk/dbserver items will be in. {L} Course you need a database that can do that kind of clustering for you transparently. {E}

Quote
I said a long time ago that if I was going to design an MMORPG, I'd try to hire at least one DBA guy from the banking industry. Some of the requirements they work under are amazing -- so are some of the solutions.

Aye, Angus was a banker. Well, a former banker. At his age, you tend to tone it down. I also did a 6 month stint with Barclays Bank in Warrington during my consultancy phase, and their DBAs were pretty good. Shame the hiring of coders wasn't as good as the hiring of DBAs ;)

There are also some pretty good DBAs in the "adult" sector. Their business seems to be capable of generating incredible access rates per site.

Not that I'd know anything about that.

- Fred "notkfsone" Jones


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Morat20 on May 23, 2007, 03:11:04 PM
{O} If you aren't going to put a head infront of the database to "run" the economy, you are asking for commit pains. {R} If you're insistent on running the economy direct from database ... {A} case you can go for spatial tables (but not with MS SQL until 2005 and I gather they're running 2000) and partition them heavily. {C} Or you use the spatial attributes to partition which table/database/disk/dbserver items will be in. {L} Course you need a database that can do that kind of clustering for you transparently. {E}
I don't disagree. I don't think CCP ever forsaw how big the game would get. They were probably hoping -- in their wildest dreams -- for a 12k concurrency game and a 60k user base. It would have kept them in vodka and hardware and spending money and let them just tinker with the game for as long as they kept their users. Once they hit 20k concurrents, a lot of early assumptions had to be ditched.

We are currently in the process of upgrading our DB servers, and it's been a PITA. (Part of that was it was part of a cluster of changes, including reliability and backup stuff that got folded in at -- as usual -- the last minute). Given none of the stuff we were moving is really that intensive on the DB end, it was still a surprising amount of work.

Trying to transition a mature game with a schema as complex as CCP's has to be, with that large a DB and a low tolerance for errors -- just upgrading your software is a lot of work. Trying to transition to an entirely different server as well (from MS to whatever) is something that's a major deliverable, on par with one of EVE's expansion-sized patches. And it's fairly transparent to users, which means that they're not going to want to feel they've been neglected with "real" changes while you spend the time and effort.

If nothing else, unless I was hiring outside talent either experienced with the new system or with transitions, I'd need to have a dedicated team and give them some serious time to familiarize themselves with it. Then there's designing the new systems, handling the transfer, all the inevietable errors, trying to fix those....Major effort. I suspect it's on their "to-do" list -- but faced with a critical and game-breaking problem (huge lag) that popped up over less than six months (they had a serious period of growth), if your current setup is even semi-competently done, hardware is all you can do -- especially if your main bottleneck is disk I/O. Everything else has a time-frame of six to 18 months (depending on what you're doing) and what that buys you is iffy. Probably much better scaleability, in the long-run.

I don't think CCP runs the economy directly from the DB, but it is by nature a transaction-oriented thing. No matter how clever you are, there's just going to be lots of micro-requests off the DB -- and because of the breadth of the market, it's not inherently cacheable. There's just no real predictability and little repeats of queries (at least in the short-term timeframe).

I don't doubt CCP's got long-term plans for updating and changing their DB solutions -- it's just not as sexy to talk about (at least as far as players are concerned) as enchanced graphics, avatars, new ships, etc.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Margalis on May 29, 2007, 04:30:10 PM
Rerail!

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3159832

F13 praise from 1up.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on May 29, 2007, 04:33:57 PM
Yea, Zonk. Saw that the other day. Was nice of him.

1up.com needs new, faster, more robust servers.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Zonk on May 29, 2007, 06:36:04 PM
/hattip

And tell me about it.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: CharlieMopps on May 30, 2007, 09:04:55 AM
That was a good Overview of what happened. I have to agree with everything he said there. I kind of wish someone would have mentioned just how much this sort of thing was brought up in Beta. There were literally dozens of us SCREAMING in the Vanguard Beta forums for them to put on the breaks, only to be repremanded by the Devs. I was told that "Maybe you aren't cut out for a Beta if you can't handle a few bugs." pffft


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Cyndre on May 30, 2007, 11:10:28 AM
That was a good Overview of what happened. I have to agree with everything he said there. I kind of wish someone would have mentioned just how much this sort of thing was brought up in Beta. There were literally dozens of us SCREAMING in the Vanguard Beta forums for them to put on the breaks, only to be repremanded by the Devs. I was told that "Maybe you aren't cut out for a Beta if you can't handle a few bugs." pffft

Thats funny, I never had a Dev tell me that, but the Beta population would jump on anyone that suggested anything wasn't working properly.   There was a forum mafia that canabalized anyone who wasn't a rampant fanboi of every failed design choice they failed to impliment.

[Cyndre] {Bug Report} I fell through the world while learning skills in...

[ForumMaggot213] Well maybe you aren't hardcore enough to understand Vanguard.  Go back to WoW if you aren't up to the challange this game provides true gamers..

[Cyndre] umm...  ok, I'm tired of falling through the world anyway, and we have a MC raid tongiht. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 30, 2007, 11:36:34 AM
There were literally dozens of us SCREAMING in the Vanguard Beta forums for them to put on the breaks, only to be repremanded by the Devs. I was told that "Maybe you aren't cut out for a Beta if you can't handle a few bugs." pffft
That happens at the end of every MMO beta. Vanguard was hardly unique.

Don't get me wrong, most of the time the users are right.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Mandrel on May 30, 2007, 02:23:55 PM
There were literally dozens of us SCREAMING in the Vanguard Beta forums for them to put on the breaks, only to be repremanded by the Devs. I was told that "Maybe you aren't cut out for a Beta if you can't handle a few bugs." pffft
That happens at the end of every MMO beta. Vanguard was hardly unique.

Don't get me wrong, most of the time the users are right.
While it does happen in most Betas, it happened early and often.  When your Beta community is so overtly hostile to any comparisons to other games, it doesn't bode well.  Heaven forbid if someone talked about how one of WoW's game mechanics was superior to one of Vanguard's, or suggested to implement something successful from another game.  I've never seen a more venomous, superior, holier than thou fanboi community than was exhibited in Vanguard.  That's probably part of the reason the beta populations were so incredibly low as compared to the number of invites sent out.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on May 30, 2007, 02:50:34 PM
To be fair, I took a lot of heat in the WoW beta for pointing out what I considered glaring problems... many of which were still present after release.  Fortunately, Blizzard is a lot more open-minded about the process and many of the holes were fixed (albeit slowly).  The Vanguard beta was similar in strength of fanboism, but had the blinders on a lot more tightly than I've seen in a beta.  The Vanguard tester base was bent of a penal system the likes that would never sell to a mass market.  It's a wonder noone figured this out earlier. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on May 30, 2007, 02:55:15 PM
The Vanguard beta was similar in strength of fanboism, but had the blinders on a lot more tightly than I've seen in a beta.  The Vanguard tester base was bent of a penal system the likes that would never sell to a mass market.  It's a wonder noone figured this out earlier. 

Lots of people figured it out, as evidenced by all the people who didn't buy the game. The only ones who seemed immune to this infection were the devs and vanbois.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on May 30, 2007, 03:07:37 PM
I guess my amazement is that none of the money people had enough of a clue to force the hand.  I guess the whole thing was such an admitted disaster at this point that the best way to slow the bleeding was to release anything and see how much it would recoup.  If we see another "shove it out the door in whatever state it is and we'll fix it later" projects, we'll know that noone learned a damn things from this debacle.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 30, 2007, 05:33:54 PM
That's probably part of the reason the beta populations were so incredibly low as compared to the number of invites sent out.
Not necessarily. I've been in tons of MMO betas, and it's very common for people to stop playing once the initial flush of "I'm in a beta, this is so cool!" dies out. Hell, in LOTRO they resorted to bribes to get people to play, giving out free ipods and best buy gift certificates and such. At the time I took it as a sure sign that the game was doomed to fail miserably. Shows what I know!


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Trippy on May 30, 2007, 06:39:04 PM
That's probably part of the reason the beta populations were so incredibly low as compared to the number of invites sent out.
Not necessarily. I've been in tons of MMO betas, and it's very common for people to stop playing once the initial flush of "I'm in a beta, this is so cool!" dies out. Hell, in LOTRO they resorted to bribes to get people to play, giving out free ipods and best buy gift certificates and such. At the time I took it as a sure sign that the game was doomed to fail miserably. Shows what I know!
They did that on the closed Beta stress-test days to encourage maximum participation (and it worked too). It wasn't a regular thing.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: sam, an eggplant on May 30, 2007, 07:57:29 PM
Well, I remember about one offer per week for two or three months, mostly $200 bestbuy gift certs but also ipods and wiis. At the time I thought it was a spectacularally bad sign, particularly since it immediately followed the DDO release.

Anyway, every MMO beta I ever played (and I tried a lot) had trouble getting people to login except for WoW. I wasn't in the UO or EQ betas.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Azazel on May 31, 2007, 01:21:07 AM
LOTRO's beta also coincided with WoW's opening-up of the PVP rewards to non-catasses and to the release of BC.

I can imagine either of those causing a drop-off, let alone both of them.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 05, 2007, 10:44:28 AM
To be fair, I took a lot of heat in the WoW beta for pointing out what I considered glaring problems... many of which were still present after release.  Fortunately, Blizzard is a lot more open-minded about the process and many of the holes were fixed (albeit slowly).  The Vanguard beta was similar in strength of fanboism, but had the blinders on a lot more tightly than I've seen in a beta.  The Vanguard tester base was bent of a penal system the likes that would never sell to a mass market.  It's a wonder noone figured this out earlier. 

I agree even in the OB the vocal minority (that I was a part of) asking just where the fuck this "pvp system" was were shouted down by fanbois to the point where I just gave up talking about it.

Also hunter bugs were reported for months and didn't get ironed out completely until well after launch.  Hunter being the last class (if I remember right) to receive talents.

*removed extra )*


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on June 05, 2007, 12:13:02 PM
Hunters were a shambles at release.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Cyndre on June 05, 2007, 12:19:12 PM
Hunters were a shambles at release.


To be fair, every class was pretty borked.   Warlocks were all but useless, Hunters were downright broken, Shaman could kill you from 12 zones away without targeting you...   the list goes on.

In all honesty, there arent major design issues, imo.  I feel like Blizzard launched a good product and then set about making it better.  Comparing the errors to Vanguards is like two people complaining about the water at a resturant.  One got lemon in his without asking for it, the other had fecal matter floating around.

Also, the Hunter community in Beta was almost unanimously pointing to the same flaws, as were the Warlocks etc..   The PvP system was acknoledged to be flawed by almost everyone, and most of the design staff.   In Vanguard, pointing out a class or design flaw made you the target of vehement protest and ridicule, rather than part of the wow rant machine.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on June 05, 2007, 12:56:30 PM
You project a LOT.



Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 06, 2007, 07:46:56 AM
Yeah dont get me wrong, WoW had the best pvp class balance at launch I've seen from a title worth mentioning.

But it still had some wacky bugs and pvp was obviously a last minute bolted on job.  Its a testament to how much better at their jobs Blizzard's people are when compared to say Mythic.  When WoW's balance (even w/ Shaman and Shadow Priests at launch) in pvp was better then DAOC's at launch.

Also Blizzard may be magical but their forum groupies are just as lame and fanboi as anyone else's also there are a shitton more of them.  If I had a dollar for every post that was "its just the beta" when it was obvious we were playing the current version of a game that was due to launch in less then a month...


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Cyndre on June 06, 2007, 08:10:03 AM
Also Blizzard may be magical but their forum groupies are just as lame and fanboi as anyone else's also there are a shitton more of them.  If I had a dollar for every post that was "its just the beta" when it was obvious we were playing the current version of a game that was due to launch in less then a month...

I guess I had a different impression but it was a while ago.  As a warlock, I felt pretty well unified with every other tester who was ranting about how stupidly broken the class was.  With regards to a lot of the other bugs the only place I encountered a lot of the 'its only beta' resistance was in reporting quest bugs.  I didn't spend much time in the PvP discussions, so I can't really comment there.  As a matter of fact I think I could count on one hand the number of times I've read any PvP forum for WoW.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on June 06, 2007, 01:05:12 PM
Yeah dont get me wrong, WoW had the best pvp class balance at launch I've seen from a title worth mentioning.

Balance how?  1v1?  5v5?  50v50? 

I think it's difficult to make such a statement as you aren't comparing apples to apples.  DAoC has 3 realms, each with significantly more classes.  WoW balance should have been near perfect given that there were fewer classes, two realms, and fewer abilities.  With such a significant decrease in the variables, I'd argue that they actually did a poorer job than they should have at release.  WoW also suffers from the fact that gear = toon.  This is much less the case in DAoC. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 07, 2007, 07:50:40 AM
WoW = Shadow Priest was god at 1v1, also Shaman's were pwning people pretty hard.  But everyone even bugged out hunters could have fun.  This is the key so let me repeat it for you.  EVERYONE COULD HAVE FUN.

This is 1v1 pvp (least fun cuz some classes would just pwn others) to GvG to large sized crazy battles.  This is pre-BG's back when we actually had world pvp mind you.


DAOC = So many classes were completely unplayable.  Clothies that weren't horribly overpowered (thurgs at launch) were just insta-gibbed by archers from stealth.  Everyone else was food for whichever group had the minstrel or the equivalent who hit aoe mez faster.  Then we all got to stand around and watch the group die one by one.  Fucking awesome.

Dont even get me started on light tanks at launch for Hib/Alb though the Thane was pretty pimp.

DAOC's balance sucked from pve, to 1v1 pvp, to full scale pvp.  I dont care if it was le awesome 6 months later or whatever you are going to tell me.

At launch IT WAS NOT FUN.  This is called bad balance.  When your choice of class can eliminate the fun from your game.  You have done a bad job.  Mythic did a bad job.  Blizzard did not.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on June 07, 2007, 08:23:24 AM
Balance = Fun ?

Dime Bar ?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 07, 2007, 10:37:16 AM
(http://www.yearssupply.co.uk/images/dimebar.gif)

That went right over my head.  Some kind of euro joke?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: schild on June 07, 2007, 10:43:09 AM
God I love that bar.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on June 07, 2007, 01:21:13 PM
DAOC's balance sucked from pve, to 1v1 pvp, to full scale pvp.  I dont care if it was le awesome 6 months later or whatever you are going to tell me.

At launch IT WAS NOT FUN.  This is called bad balance.  When your choice of class can eliminate the fun from your game.  You have done a bad job.  Mythic did a bad job.  Blizzard did not.

So, you're comparing PvP of a game made 4+ years later to DAoC at release?  That's silly.  Blizzard had DAoC, Shadowbane, Planetside, Darktide, and many other games to learn from in their development and they still released a pvp experience that was a mediocre tack-on.  I'm not even going to mention the differences in development resources. 

Compare PvP in DAoC now to PvP in WoW as both games are today.  I think you'd discover that it's a matter of taste.  I find DAoC to be a much richer and more complex pvp system that takes a long time to really appreciate.  There are many layers to it and the "sandbox" feel is definately more to my liking.  YMMV.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 07, 2007, 02:00:05 PM
So your counter point is four years ago class balance wasn't seen as important?  Or it just wasn't invented yet?

Did I not call WoW's pvp a tack on?  Yes I did, more then once in this thread I believe.  Did I not also point out how that makes it especially telling that they still did such a good job of balancing their classes for a tacked on, total afterthought type of gameplay?  Because they are good at what they do.  Unlike, well fucking damn near everyone apparently who makes MMO's.

The difference in resources may have been huge.  But you know what we always say around here.  Stop designing shit you can't produce.  Dont plan to patch in the fun later.  Fucking polish your core gameplay and make sure it works.  Dont just throw a bunch of pie in the sky halfassed innovations at the players and hope some stick.  Etc etc etc.

I dont need to compare shit today.  DAOC at launch is the only fucking thing I've ever been talking about.  If the fun had to be patched in, well l2dev.

Yeah dont get me wrong, WoW had the best pvp class balance at launch I've seen from a title worth mentioning.

But it still had some wacky bugs and pvp was obviously a last minute bolted on job.  Its a testament to how much better at their jobs Blizzard's people are when compared to say Mythic.  When WoW's balance (even w/ Shaman and Shadow Priests at launch) in pvp was better then DAOC's at launch.

Emphasis added to the statement I made that started this little aside.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on June 07, 2007, 02:24:00 PM
So your counter point is four years ago class balance wasn't seen as important?  Or it just wasn't invented yet?

My counter point is that it's a silly comparison.  The class balance in DAoC at release wasn't as good because they had a) less precident to draw from, b) fewer resources to draw from, and c) had fewer and less experienced beta testers to query.  It's not an apples to apples comparison.  Given the same 4 years of history to work with, DAoC created a superior pvp experience with fewer resources.  That's why I suggested that a better apples to apples comparison would be DAoC now to WoW now.   If you disagree, that's fine.  History is a very important resource to draw from.  It allows you to learn from the mistakes of others.  Blizzard had much more mistakes to learn from than EQ or DAoC.  They also had the resources to do something about those mistakes. 

If you want to make a better comparison, I'd argue that WoW vs Vanguard makes your point in a more compelling fashion. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 07, 2007, 02:51:54 PM
So the fact that there was no precedent prevented Mythic from guessing that AoE almost irresistible 30 second + cc coupled with the best run buff in the game was a bad idea?  Or stealth classes being able to 1-hit cloth wearers and remain stealthed was a bad idea?

Well look, since it was four years ago it was ok.  People were braindead back then.  Or pvp hadn't been invented or whateverthefuck.  Are you kidding me?

Its not apples to oranges at all, you sound like McQuaid.

"Waaa Blizzard had more money"  well design with your budget, time and talent restraints in mind.  If you can't execute 20 unique classes dont fucking try to.  If you don't understand anything about basic pvp mechanics dont make a pvp game.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Nebu on June 07, 2007, 04:17:28 PM
I'm not going to get into a VN name-calling battle with you Hoax.  It's not worth it.  We just happen to see things differently and I'm obviously not stating my views in a way that makes sense to you.   

As a researcher, I see things everyday and wonder "how did they not see that this was a bad idea?".  Sometimes it's because they lack the intuition to recognize the obvious.  Sometimes it's that they lack the data to reinforce the intuition.  Sometimes it's because they just didn't see a better way of doing things.  Making the first mistake always comes with a bit of latitude, because it wasn't necessarily as obvious then.  If you make the same mistakes after seeing someone else make them for years before you, then those errors seem a bit less forgivable in my eyes.  I'm more willing to forgive those that drive innovation than those that simply embellish.  I think this is where we differ in our philosophies. 

That's my last effort.  If you want to ridicule me more that's your call. 


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 07, 2007, 07:54:46 PM
That wasn't a fair post at all, I haven't personally attacked you at all.  My beef is with Mythic's incompetence not you e-personally.  But ok, play some kind of internet moral high-ground card or w/e just happened..

Sure you can assume that Blizzard would have made the same mistakes had they come first.  I can assume a bunch of things too.  The only facts I can present are the facts.  Blizzard's game at launch had class balance worlds beyond DAOC's.  So that's what I said.

I stand by it as being 100% true, you've presented a bunch of ifs, buts and thens to excuse Mythic of responsibility for there terrible balance at launch.  Which is your prerogative.  Dont act like I'm some crazed VN poster just looking to pick a fight though.  You're the fanboi here, I think both games sucked balls and said that from launch on  both of them.

DAOC sucked for sucking and having 1/3-2/3 of classes be obsolete at launch and needing several major overhauls get the balance into tolerable levels.

WoW sucked for killing world pvp and instead going for some kind of lame rpg sport pvp shit that has no place in a persistent world setting.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Simond on June 08, 2007, 01:37:11 AM
(http://www.yearssupply.co.uk/images/dimebar.gif)

That went right over my head.  Some kind of euro joke?

Armadillo?

Anyway, saying that DAoC didn't have prior experience to build on is provably false (one of the launch servers for EQ was Rallos Zek, and that was an excellent source of data on how not to balance PvP in a diku...especially in the first year or so), as is the "Well, they didn't have enough money/time/whatever" - their whole selling point was 'Team-based PvP endgame' and their PvE game suffered because of that. I mean, if they didn't spend their time on balancing PvP, and they didn't spend their money on PvE past about L35 or so, and if they outsourced their engine tech...what were they doing?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ironwood on June 08, 2007, 03:09:27 AM


That went right over my head.  Some kind of euro joke?


Dime Bar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83n3X0S_lFE)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: cmlancas on June 08, 2007, 05:50:49 AM


That went right over my head.  Some kind of euro joke?


Dime Bar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83n3X0S_lFE)

The more I live in the states, the more I question why I do.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Rannonzero on June 08, 2007, 06:15:47 AM
Hi, I'm completely new here, but I'll try not to rant like I do elsewhere (out of respect and politeness mostly). So let me get straight to the point as quickly as possible.

These posts a page back are a fanboi arguement. Both games had good points and bad, but comparing a game that is four years old that couldn't build off of WoW's launch to WoW is needlessly insulting. To both games and their respective companies, actually.

First, Hoax said this:

Yeah dont get me wrong, WoW had the best pvp class balance at launch I've seen from a title worth mentioning.

But it still had some wacky bugs and pvp was obviously a last minute bolted on job.  Its a testament to how much better at their jobs Blizzard's people are when compared to say Mythic.  When WoW's balance (even w/ Shaman and Shadow Priests at launch) in pvp was better then DAOC's at launch.

Also Blizzard may be magical but their forum groupies are just as lame and fanboi as anyone else's also there are a shitton more of them.  If I had a dollar for every post that was "its just the beta" when it was obvious we were playing the current version of a game that was due to launch in less then a month...

Not to nit-pick, but you did say "Blizzard's people ARE" and "compared to Mythic." Both are present tense, and thus pretty insulting to mythic. Not that you were attempting to hide your distaste for DAOC's launch. But your remembered bile from the time I think is clouding things up. Yes the game launch blew. It was in part if not largely because that launch (and nearly every single other major launch of an MMO up until WoW really) blew so hard that WoW was such an insane success. Because WoW's launch was riddled with problems as well, but because of their popular platform, massive fanbase, and excedingly simple game core, they didn't have nearly as much work to do relating to the gamer OR balancing the classes and fixing game mechanics.

That's not to say at all that the classes were balanced in WoW. They weren't. Fully half the classes were so out of balance as to be considered broken. Which Blizzard then fixed post haste. Or really, some what, 3-4 months into live? They weren't breaking any records for turn-around time on bug work, but they weren't failing either.

And neither was Mythic. They promised a PvP centric game, and they gave people one. Without the real asset of previous games having come and gone with THEIR dynamic of gameplay or anything close (feel free to correct me if they actually did rip off an MMO that worked that used siege battles, third/first person views, multiple solutions and obsticales in PvP objectives, and some 20+ odd classes to boot). I imagine they stole their fair share of ideas from previous games as well, but they didn't promise one thing and then deliver another. They promised people a car, couldn't get the frickin wheels on in time for it to leave the lot, and finally managed to get them on when the car was parked at the customer's house. No it wasn't perfect. But they didn't promise perfect. At that point in the MMO industry there was no such IDEA as a consumer-level perfect launch.

WoW meanwhile never fixed world PvP. And has yet to let PvP leave the battlegrounds and become anything more than a gankfest with zero strategy or incentive to form up into cohesive groups larger than 5. While wow is a juggernaut of an MMO and actually a great game, they still have a pretty crappy promise/delivery ratio. No better than Mythic really, but, because the classes were fun right out of the box, and somehow DAOC's weren't, WoW wins? Then you have to boil that argument down to "Fun when? 1-50/60? Only in PvP? 1v1? 8v8? Before or after the first balancing patch? Before or after the first-upteenth content patch/expansion?" and so on.

Pretty grey-area and frustrating.

So your counter point is four years ago class balance wasn't seen as important?  Or it just wasn't invented yet?

Did I not call WoW's pvp a tack on?  Yes I did, more then once in this thread I believe.  Did I not also point out how that makes it especially telling that they still did such a good job of balancing their classes for a tacked on, total afterthought type of gameplay?  Because they are good at what they do.  Unlike, well fucking damn near everyone apparently who makes MMO's.

The difference in resources may have been huge.  But you know what we always say around here.  Stop designing shit you can't produce.  Dont plan to patch in the fun later.  Fucking polish your core gameplay and make sure it works.  Dont just throw a bunch of pie in the sky halfassed innovations at the players and hope some stick.  Etc etc etc.

I dont need to compare shit today.  DAOC at launch is the only fucking thing I've ever been talking about.  If the fun had to be patched in, well l2dev.


I disagree. And you are fooling yourself if you think that WoW was a successful launch because the developers delivered all they said they were going deliver AT LAUNCH. WoW was a successful launch because the servers didn't die  and the massive amount of logins meant that Blizzard employees were going to head to the bank, and buy a house, not schedual a parking lot meeting. Not that this bad at all, but other than the fact that the launch wasn't a failure, the game WASN'T finished, blizzard DID use pie-in-the-sky advertising to get people to play their game at launch, and they DID plan to patch the fun in LATER.

But then we have personal opinion from there, don't we? Other than the fact that BOTH games didn't have even close to 100% of the content that the game was "Supposed to have" and other than the fact that both games still haven't delivered every single promised feature that was mentioned as a selling point pre-release, there's nothing concrete to go on except subscription numbers.

And subscription numbers are more product of addictiveness, accessablity, and familiarity than FUN, so good luck trying to argue that "8 million people can't be wrong."

So, my two cents? Both games have their merit. One group of investors is fabulously wealthy, one group is just successful. After that, we have fanbois chucking flaming ox paddies at each other 24/7. It's entertaining for a while, but not so much when the vein on the head starts to look like it might burst...



To the OP and the follow-up articles (yeah, I actually kinda read this whole thread mostly) awsome digging, and awsome journalism. The downside is that Brad's idea of a Vision is now going to be swept under the rug and made into an object of supreme ridicule when it really seems to be horrible communication, horrible company management, and a fundamental lack of appreciation for efficiency that were the main problem.

It's a pretty simple but hard-learned lesson that you need a solid foundation in any team to make that team successful. The vision is what keeps it going once it has it's footing, sure, but you need that foundation first and formost. And in MMOGs, that foundation is a solid engine, a good management team as well as a good developement team, and QA.

I just hope that companies don't lose sight of ingenuity and innovation just because one group (or actually, several groups) of people who couldn't build a solid core and stick with that BEFORE going off on a tangent and reinventing the wheel.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Cyndre on June 08, 2007, 06:26:52 AM
Anyway, saying that DAoC didn't have prior experience to build on is provably false (one of the launch servers for EQ was Rallos Zek, and that was an excellent source of data on how not to balance PvP in a diku...especially in the first year or so),

I played on Rallos Zek.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Simond on June 08, 2007, 06:43:54 AM
Yes, and I played on Vallon Zek. What's your point?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Vinadil on June 08, 2007, 07:11:55 AM
I think his point was that Brell Serelis was the only true server for a good comparison.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Cyndre on June 08, 2007, 07:35:40 AM
Yes, and I played on Vallon Zek. What's your point?

My point is, I played on Rallos Zek.




Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Hoax on June 08, 2007, 07:38:25 AM
Maybe his point is Necro's were broken?


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: cmlancas on June 08, 2007, 08:09:24 AM
Maybe his point is Necro's were broken?

The whole lot of you who played on PvP in EQ1 are insane in a good way, and when I was fifteen I wish I had the balls to play with you.

Unfortunately I didn't and I pansied my way to EMarr. (This is a derail to what EQ1 server you played on, right?)


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on June 08, 2007, 09:13:14 AM
I just hope that companies don't lose sight of ingenuity and innovation just because one group (or actually, several groups) of people who couldn't build a solid core and stick with that BEFORE going off on a tangent and reinventing the wheel.

If you are talking about Vanguard's group, they weren't reinventing the wheel. They were copying the wheel they'd already built 6 years before. Their vision was not anything innovative at all.

DAoC's launch WAS a successful launch. It was not a failure. The game ran well, the servers never crashed, and unlike WoW's release day, there were no server queues. At the time, it was the gold standard of MMOG launches. As for the PVP balance, Nebu is trying to tell Hoax that no game before DAoC had attempted PVP on that scale in that kind of system. The EQ Zek servers did not have such great level disparrities as one would see in the frontiers on DAoC. It also didn't have 3 different realms, each with their own set of classes and races with racial abilities. Their class balance did indeed suck on release and for many months and years afterwards, which led to all their fiddlings. And yes, WoW's PVP at release was much better balanced.

WoW at release had only 2 realms, with 10 races and 8 classes total, not to mention being able to draw upon the knowledge base of how DAoC had dealt with PVP class balance in the past. That knowledge base is invaluable. I don't doubt that's part of the reason there's little to no crowd control spells in WoW, something which still plagues DAoC to this day. WoW's PVP balance was better at release, but it had no excuses to not be, because of all the fuckups DAoC had publicly been chided for.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Rasix on June 08, 2007, 09:21:40 AM
I would seriously run out of red ink marking all of the spots where that post was wrong.   

Anyhow, yall have gone off the reservation with this.  Sigil's corpse needs more humpin'.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Harlequin101 on June 10, 2007, 11:55:26 PM
I just hope that companies don't lose sight of ingenuity and innovation just because one group (or actually, several groups) of people who couldn't build a solid core and stick with that BEFORE going off on a tangent and reinventing the wheel.

If you are talking about Vanguard's group, they weren't reinventing the wheel. They were copying the wheel they'd already built 6 years before. Their vision was not anything innovative at all.

DAoC's launch WAS a successful launch. It was not a failure. The game ran well, the servers never crashed, and unlike WoW's release day, there were no server queues. At the time, it was the gold standard of MMOG launches. As for the PVP balance, Nebu is trying to tell Hoax that no game before DAoC had attempted PVP on that scale in that kind of system. The EQ Zek servers did not have such great level disparrities as one would see in the frontiers on DAoC. It also didn't have 3 different realms, each with their own set of classes and races with racial abilities. Their class balance did indeed suck on release and for many months and years afterwards, which led to all their fiddlings. And yes, WoW's PVP at release was much better balanced.

WoW at release had only 2 realms, with 10 races and 8 classes total, not to mention being able to draw upon the knowledge base of how DAoC had dealt with PVP class balance in the past. That knowledge base is invaluable. I don't doubt that's part of the reason there's little to no crowd control spells in WoW, something which still plagues DAoC to this day. WoW's PVP balance was better at release, but it had no excuses to not be, because of all the fuckups DAoC had publicly been chided for.

1) WoW PvP was nothing close to balanced at release, and still isnt. ("ITS TEAMBASED!!!one1 We dont aim for 1 vs 1 !! wtf....)

2) WoW is FULL of crowd control spells, Ice nova, sap, seduce, blind, sheep..... unless you speak of AoE CC in which case there are to my knowledge only a few versions, Ice nova, hunter trap(AoE slow) and AoE fear.

The major diffrence is that DAoC was designed for PvP, WoW is nothing of the sort. DAoC focused on the Realm vs Realm thing more then any other western MMORPG had done before it Just look at the only large dungeon in DAoC at release (or close to it) Darkness Falls. This dungeon could be "taken" over by another realm and you would suddenly have to fight groups of mobs and groups of other players in the depths. EQ1, on the PvP servers had fights inside dungeons all the time, heck even raiding in Fear and Hate the first times were a constant battle. You had to try to pull mobs while fighting off other guilds trying to train you or outright slaughter you (good times, when I had time for it heh). WoW....lets just say that the moment they decided on private instances they removed any general PvP or PvP challange. Getting ganked by bored high levels in STV while they wait 1.5 hours in queue for a battleground instance is not PvP imho..


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on June 11, 2007, 08:55:26 AM
Darkness Falls was nowwhere near the release of DAoC. In fact, I think it was released either right after or right before their first expansion. I played DAoC for the first six months, and it was horribly balanced for PVP. The amount of crowd control spells, both single-use and AOE versions, was just obscene, especially because so many classes got them. WoW, even at release, had nothing like it. Sure they have a FEW CC spells, but none of what you mention has anywhere near the effect on the PVP game as DAoC's did (and still does last I played). I've never sat frozen for 20 seconds watching the enemy take out everyone of my group members one at a time in WoW. That was a common occurrence in DAoC both times I subscribed.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Vinadil on June 11, 2007, 09:20:03 AM
Nothing says Quality PvP quite like having one Sorceror (I think was the class in DAoC) step out of invis with an AE mez, then PBAoE your whole group down in 2 casts.  Mmmm... good times.  And yes, Darkness Falls was WELL into the release of DAoC.  That said, you could actually have some fun encounters in that game... sadly it just came down to "Whoever attacks first wins" because of the AE mezzes and such.  I cancelled when SB hit and never went back, so I am sure it changed quite a bit since then.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ozzu on June 11, 2007, 11:46:08 AM
Darkness Falls was actually out quite a long time before DAoC came out. I played it back in 98 that I remember for absolute sure on the Gamestorm service. Hell, their first game was Dragon's Gate which came out in 1991 or somethin. They've been around for quite a while and had lots of experience before DAoC was ever even thought about.

I was a big fan of Aliens Online when it came out in 1998. They've had the same damn Mythic Entertainment splash screen since way back then and the same sound to go with it. :) Splatterball was okay too along with Silent Death Online. I'm a MMO whore.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: HaemishM on June 11, 2007, 11:56:10 AM
He was talking about Darkness Falls, the dungeon IN DAoC, not the game they released before DAoC.


Title: Re: The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition
Post by: Ozzu on June 11, 2007, 12:02:10 PM
He was talking about Darkness Falls, the dungeon IN DAoC, not the game they released before DAoC.

Ugh. I r teh dumb.  :cry: Just ignore me.