f13.net

The Hub of All Blame: A Postmortem

This is the transcript of an interview with Brad McQuaid via telephone which began at 1:40AM and finished at 3:09AM on May 17th, 2007. As before, I am adding no personal comments to this article outside of what is presented in the interview.

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Um.

What?

I don't actually know where to start.  Hence, Um.

That's, er, a stark contrast to the previous interview...


Bunker apologies for the most part.

That was fun.  Do you have his number?  Just for crank call purposes, of course.  Keep it up!  (not in a pervy way, of course)

I wish you had asked him if he every played WoW....

Other than that, good stuff.  While  I don't think he's lying at any part of the interview, I do think he just didn't know what was going on in his own shop.  For example, the one QA person.  He may have thought there was more than one but was too far removed from day to day operations to actuallly know....

He's either lying through his teeth or completely delusional to the point of Insanity.

I'm glad he missed the 3 big events because he's such a jolly old softy who'd have cried at all 3.

Give me a break.

Fantastic job, Schild.  I believe that it's very important for people to see this kind of information.  Learning from mistakes is crucial to becoming a more mature industry.

However, from reading this article, it doesn't look like a lot of learning is taking place yet.  The hiring processes and philosophies were eye-opening.  As was Mr. McQuaid's notion that he should still be operating in a public-facing role.  I don't know Mr. McQuaid and I really hope that everything turns out ok for him and everybody.  But he needs to stay away from message boards for a while, certainly in an official capacity.

But He REALLY ENJOYS posting on message boards ?

Why are you so mean ?

I'd vote c) Both of the above.
Jesus.

So, the project ran off the rails because god damn Microsoft switched management teams?

Shenanigans. Blaming M$ is easy; almost everyone in the target audience will happily believe that they were the bad guys.

(Note, by "target audience", I don't mean F13 regulars. Brad knows that the vanbois are still out there.)

It is impossible to believe that the change in Microsoft caused a destined-for-greatness AAA title to transform into an utter failure.
We already believed that no one at Sigil was performing any sort of project planning, or rigorous project management. This sort of blame-my-publisher spew will only reinforce that belief.

Also note how careful he was in implying that Sigil's problems were due to MS mismanagement, but denied it when asked outright.

I got alot of "It's Microsofts fault!" and "It's the 360's fault!!" out of his responses.

It was stand up of him, I suppose, not to throw named people under the bus within Sigil and instead blame the company that nearly everyone loves to hate.

A lot of the stuff that Microsoft was asking for, that Brad seemed to think was unnecessary or unrealistic for an MMO, seemed like exactly the sort of things you would need to have for any realistic chance of success for a 30 million dollar software project.

I'm an ASIC designer, the project I am working on blows the Vanguard budget out of the water, we have no less than 6 design teams just for the ASICs and 6 more for the software to run on the ASIC's and numerous other teams for the boards and everything else.  You may be able to argue that it's not as 'artistic' a process as MMO design but make no mistake it is a creative process.  None of this stuff existed before.  All those numbers that Microsoft wanted from Brad are all numbers we report on, meet and discuss weekly.

What if an idea doesn't work out?  You report it, what if you come up with a better way?  You report that too.  You give predictions on time and effort and cost and risks involved.  How long will it take to create a dungeon?  I don't know, but you can be damned sure that if I had been working on MMO's for 8 years I would have a ball park figure and a list of risks and what they would mean to the timetable and costs.  That he didn't know, or was unable to make an educated guess at, those numbers speaks volumes.

Good article Schild, it really shows that you put a lot of effort into knowing what to expect for answers before you started the interview and that is something you almost never see in game journalism.

Zoo Tycoon 2 killed Vanguard?

Awesome work Schild.

The thing that really gets me is his "problem" with having to fire people.  If you think you have the ability to hire and lead a group of over 100 people, you better be able to handle firing them when the need arises.  If it's your best friend, you have to be able to tell them that they aren't doing a good job.  It is a display of serious lack of leadership when firing the "person who really deserved it" tears you up so much that you have to take time off.  In that situation, you have to look at the bigger picture, the culture you are building in the office, and the image you are projecting to the rest of the employees.

Most people don't enjoy having to let people go from a job, but when it needs to be done the person responsible needs to do the deed.  I did notice the lack of an HR professional on the Sigil team.  Having someone in that capacity may have helped with some of the other office issues as well.

Floored. I like the end: the buck stops here...



...but I passed the buck to faceless people at Microsoft and ohgodI'macryercouldn'tbetheregottagoBYE!

I cannot express my feelings with a simple smiley.

It may, in fact, take two of them.

 :hello_kitty: :hello_kitty:

Jesus christ.

Well I don't own an xbox but I hope those of you that do now feel guilty   :roll:

Nah, man.  We Xboxers aren't to blame, it those damn Zoo Tycooners!  Hang 'em high, I say!

Murgos, you read the same thing I did and I could not agree more.  I work for a large corporation, at least in a bureaucratic sense since we only have 50k employees in The Company itself (yes, we capitalize it like that, go go Gadget Corporate Drone), and it is obvious that Brad just isn't cut out for Big Business.  It's cutthroat, it's ponderous, it's slow, it's the largest game of CYA and finger-pointing you could ever play (outside the government perhaps).  If he had to work here, he would lose his God-damned mind.

Management wants reports.  They also want things they can understand.  They are not technical people, they are business leaders.  Pie charts, Gantt charts, bar graphs, massive Powerpoint shows, weekly justifications... unless it's an important project, in which case daily briefings might be necessary.  I had to do that once, daily meetings about performance problems, it was ridiculous but all part of the job.  Yes, that shit totally interferes with doing "real" work but the fact is that 90% of the screwups in large projects are due to communication problems and the meetings are far and away better for the company than just sitting in your cube and pounding out something that doesn't align with the project.

The funny thing is that the reports and meetings held for the benefit of upper management are almost always there to ensure that the workers are aligned with The Project, and if you replace The Project with The Vision then the irony might just cockslap you.

Oh, yeah... good interview Schild.

To clarify, the relationship between April and Jeff was not some horrible saucy romance. It was an open secret in that they were dating and Jeff and Michelle were going through a divorce. This is absolutely confirmed by the people involved.

Doesn't really matter tho, does it ?

Professionalism and shagging your colleagues do not go hand in hand.

See:  Clinton.

Nice work, schild. And thanks to Brad for giving his version of things.

Bashing the Zoo Tycooners are you?! Well, we'll see how brave you are when you meet my pet elephant (a consultant on that game, I might add)! Get him Stampy! Kill!!!

Good interview. For what's its worth, I think he was telling the truth about why he wasn't there at the massive firing. At least partly. I think it really would have torn him up. Especially because that moment was pretty much the death of Sigil as Brad envisioned it and the sign that his dream was over. That had to be hard for him to deal with. So yeah, that part is very understandable.

All of the MS stuff...you guys are right. He just didn't know how to deal with upper management. From what I read it looked like Sigil desperately needed two people: An HR person and a project manager who would interface with upper management in MS. I think they cut Sigil loose not because of the 360, but because they weren't getting anything from them except "deadlines? goals? reports? We want money, you'll get a game eventually!"

One final note, the stuff about the QA guy actually sounds fairly plausible to me. To some extents Brad was counting on MS to be the infrastructure and Sigil was going to be the creative end of things. When that relationship fell apart...well...any chance at all was gone. I'm not even sure why SOE bought Vanguard.

I just want to post a thanks to schild for the two interviews, finest piece of MMO related internet journalism Ive read.


The big thing for me is the denial of culpability, he says the words that the buck stops here, but the preceeding dozen answers reveal he doesnt actually believe it.

The only thing I got is that he really isnt capable of holding a position of power within any company, he lacks the man management skills and temperament for it.

I also get that , given another $30 million, he would make the exact same mistakes again, because his denial suggests he has yet to learn anything.

Wow.  Just... wow.

Wow, nice job schild.

While I respect the fact Brad was willing to talk about the situation as much as he did, I really got the feeling there was giant disconnect between him and reality.

To be sure, he should never be in any sort of managerial role, let alone a position where he holds financial responsibility again.  The whole microsoft discussion show he honestly believes MMORPG development to be so different from any other sort of game development as to not have to abide by ANY development standards at all.  "When it's done and perfect we'll release; until then pay us more" is not a standard, nor an even slightly reasonable position.  

The rest of the Sigil inner workings are just a bonanza of poor management and leadership, capped by the back alley mass firing.

Rock star's make poor CEO's.

These are some pretty impressive interviews you're getting, schild.  Bravo, a really interesting read.

Wow, 1:40 in the morning.  I guess the only thing that could follow this is if Smedley posted tonight that Brad has been under great personal strain and has been regularly self-medicating with alcohol, last night was one of his episodes and he has decided to check himself into a treatment center while we add more sites to Brad's firewall blocklist.

I like this new guy.

     Very interesting read. Thanks Brad and Schild.

This was awesome.  I've got a lot of respect for you schild.  Very professional.

I'm about to explode from all the popcorn!  I suppose I should make another batch.

Going off on a tangent from part of the interview, I was wondering why no MMOGs have tried to tackle a more Christian mythology...then I realised that I was being dense. The backstory for The Burning Crusade is pretty much that - on one side you've got a huge demonic army lead by the fallen Titan (read: angel) Sargeras. The Burning Legion also tends to conquer by temptation and corruption rather than outright conflict.

On the other hand you have the Naaru, personifications of the Light (read: more angels) trying to help out the mortal races - especially the draenei, who've been exiled from their homeland, persecuted, and had attemped genocide practiced against them.

Anyone know if MADD and their ilk have protested against Blizzard yet?

Great interview, and kudos for getting Brad to give the answers to some hard hitting questions.

Someone needs to get a documentary crew to follow around the next MMOG to fall flat on it's face. I had no idea there was a sex scandel in Vanguards failure too. 

Brad, have you given any thought to calling each employee that you couldn't bring yourself to face and apologizing for not being there and explaining yourself to them?

I understand how hard it would be to be there to do it, it would tear me apart to have to let go 1/2 of a team that I put together, but I don't think I could face myself or any of those people in the future if I didn't.

Fantastic interview and tragic.  If nothing else, it provides some valuable insight as to how this entire thing got off the rails so easily.  Brad simply doesn't understand the roles and responsibilities of being a leader.  He owed it to those people in the parking lot to be there and to tell them that it was over and instead he ducked out of it.    Brad may or may not be a good creative type, but he should never be entrusted to run anything ever again.

Brad's ego is even more powerful than I previously believed. I could easily imagine him making all the mistakes he did given past performance, but the most surprising part of the entire vanguard debacle is this very interview. I can't believe he actually took an interview and believed he could successfully spin this debacle. That's just astonishing.

I reckon the ex-sigilites didn't sign a non-disclosure, given all the dirt that's being slung around.

These series of interviews, while interesting, confuse me a little.

Now bear with me. Who does this serve? I mean, the people at Sigil for the most part, know what happened and what put them there because they were there everyday witnessing it. The people most responsible for the Vanguard's mistakes know what they did, whether they want to accept it, well, that's a different story. So it seems that things like this, kind of airing the dirty laundry, are really in poor taste. Almost a selfishness to be the guy who reveals it all. Kind of like how Nino carries himself on FOH as the cool guy they can count on to talk about the inner workings. It's like posturing for the fan base and the internet, and there's no real point to it other than personal gratification. I can certainly empathize with the entertainment value it affords for people on the outside reading it. But I dunno. It just seems shallow.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving? Whaaa? What does that have to do with anything? Also, there seem to be a lot of hints floating around that the Naaru aren't actually good. (not evil either, more like "we will make the universe pure by purging it of all imperfection!")

You're right. newspapers should only be the front page, car rentals and stock quotes. Let's nix those local arts, leisure, food, entertainment, sports, and back pages.

After that, we can kill all the jews.

I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Sugar Tits.

It is shallow. It's basically malicious gossip. And it's entertaining, and for the most part newsworthy. Nothing wrong with that.

I'd like to thank Brad for actually talking to Schild and answering questions.

Schild you did an awesome job but you could have perhaps called him on how delusional he has always been with regard to WoW.  Great read though.

To the new lurkers, welcome welcome.

I don't mean to imply there's anything wrong with it. We've all gone through our share of corporate drama, and I certainly understand the urge to shout from the highest rooftop about all the white elephants in the conference room. Just kind of thinking out loud, I guess.

No way, this is awesome insight into the business of making these games and how it can all go terribly wrong. Good intentions/cool ideas aren't enough. There needs to be good business sense and management and discipline, and a team effort with the coders to do stuff that actually works. Such a tragedy is of interest and value to anyone with an interest in this industry - it's a huge cautionary tale on how NOT to do things.

For being shallow it got pretty deep into the Vanguard debacle. Props to Schild on the interviews, its the kind of stuff I had expected (or maybe hoped) to see since this is the only MMO discussion board I go to. ;)

Man, Schild, just too awsome for words.

I don't think folks realise the kind of Mad Skillz it takes to pull off what Schild did here. F13, probably one of the most hostile sites towards McQuaid, where even a token gesture of support for the man gets run out of town on a pole, tar and feathers, and Schild gets an exclusive interview, marked by probing questions while keeping McQuaid docile and as 'open' as McQuaid is able to be.

Schild, you are MAN ON FIRE!

As the Sigil turns...

What's next? Inoperable brain tumors? 

I always knew the gaming industry was small but now it appears it is more inbred than a mountain village in Switzerland.

I think it was fair that he was able to get both sides of the story.  Without McQuaid giving his opinion (as spun as it seemed to be), it would have been just a one-sided blame game.

Exactly, and I also think it finally puts the nail in the coffin in the beleif that you can still release an incomplete  game and finance it's completion with subs. Four years ago this was just par for the course, and I imagine Vanguard would have been quite sucessful.

Cautionary tale or not, I still feel for all  the various  parties. This has turned out to be a real tragedy for all involved, including Brad.

Thanks Schild for another great interview, and Brad for sharing.

I agree.  I think I said that might be the reason in the last thread.  Of course, the tendency to get visibly upset rather than offering at least a depiction of strong leadership is not a great thing in some roles (CEO) but on a human level, seeing someone try something and have it fail, I am glad I feel a bit empathic there.  I'd be worried if I didn't.


Again, I agree.  Though the quandary he faced is what leadership at that level is about: you have one QA person; your anticipated resource is gone; you seem to need all of the resources you have to continue what they are doing.  What do you cut?  The real gift is to be able to cut that Gordian knot.  Maybe someone with les of a commitment to making their Perfect Game (TM) would have seen more obvious solutions.

I think that anyone that imagines he won't get another shot in some capacity is kidding themselves due to continuing deep pain about what happened to their druid in EQ.  If he actually sits back and looks at what happened then he'll learn a lot of valuable lessons, not least about where his best position in the industry is, and what he's better finding others to do.

Yeah, i was sympathetic to Brad.  Flame away.

Great series of interviews schild. Rare to see the inside of this kind of event so close to it occurring. Kudos.

When you have a sick game, you have to invest in QA. QA are the team to figure out things to make a sick game healthy again. You can continue pretending your game isn't sick, and you get the now forseable results.

If you take the blinders off, you realize that everything has to come to a screeching halt and QA has to have several hands in the goings on, like a triage team at a hospital.

What we had here is quite simply an inability to see that your product was in crisis.

I don't pretend to know what was actually running through his head so I won't comment there.

Brad's explanation for lack of QA personnel is absolute bullshit. QA isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. If your toilet broke and the landlord refused to fix it, you wouldn't just let it go, right? You'd sue him, or move out, or maybe even pay for a plumber yourself. Because no matter what, you need a toilet. There's no debate.

How can you say Brad will get another chance after this incredibly expensive and public debacle? I'm not saying that he'll never work in the industry again, just that he won't be in an executive or lead design position.

That bugs me. In one sense, Brad is absolutely correct -- developing an MMO is totally different from making Zoo Tycoon. On the other hand, developing Zoo Tycoon is completely different from making Doom 3. Very, very, VERY few software projects are ever all that much alike.

There are ways -- people use them each and every day -- to actually forecast the stuff Microsoft wanted, even for an MMORPG. It required understanding the stuff Microsoft wanted, understanding the processes that you used to come up with that stuff, and tailoring those things to your particular project -- but it's imminently doable.

Brad just didn't know how. (Or he didn't want to do the boring work -- I suspect it was "Didn't know how", though). Which was why he was a very, very, very bad choice for that position. He should have hired an actual project manager to manage the thing, while he played company cheerleader and second-rate PR guy. I mean, especially for fucking Microsoft. On the one hand, lack of that documentation probably kept MS in the game a lot longer than they would have been, but on the other hand -- if they'd done the planning and management, Sigil might have been able to keep this from clusterfucking so badly.

So yes, Brad -- you can actually give Microsoft those things they want. In fact, they -- being a big grown-up software development house with actual successful products under their belt, are even aware of the exact sort of issues you bring up. They just expected you to be professional about it and basically manage the project. Depending on what you meant by "schedules going out for months that were fairly inflexible", it might have involved a bit of hammering out with MS about your actual process, but I bet they would have gone for that. BUt "schedules going out for months that were fairly inflexible" isn't really an obscene requirement for a multi-year project. In fact, if it's just "months" and not "years", you have all the damn flexibility you could want.

Surely you weren't developing it all in one go, right? You had to have had some form of internal goals and milestones -- features coming on line, tools becoming available to developers, game areas textured/populated, etc? You weren't just all hammering away at fucking random, were you?

If anyone is ever stupid enough to give this man money again, they better require he hire a competent, experienced manager with full authority to run the damn thing. Let Brad write all the vision plans he wants. Someone has to do the work.

Yea I figured that would be the one thing SOE would want to stop. Not trying to kick Brad while he is down, but his posts consistently had the opposite effect of what he was trying to accomplish. Constantly reminding players that the game is broken and why it shipped in a bad state isn't the way to build confidence. There didn't seem to be an overall strategy to the posts to help turn things around. It was all very reactionary.

I think they'd be MUCH better off letting a community person take over that role and drive the message going forward. I've never thought "higher-ups" should be on the forums. No matter how much they think otherwise, the will never know the communtiy as well as the OCR rep. If I may illustrate what I mean with a graph I recently posted on a community relations e-mail list:


(http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/4622/postgraphom5.jpg)

Trying and failing, I wont ever give someone a hard time for that.

I will criticise for the firing situation though.

Hiring staff is easy. Hiring the right staff, not so much.

Firing staff is the hard part, especially when its down to you not them.

To put it simply, someone who knows they cant face the hard parts of employing staff , if they have any respect for other people, should not employ staff.

If you cant say thanks and goodbye, you have no business profiting from their labour.

There is no excuse for treating people that way, none at all.

You may say he was upset, Im fairly sure the people losing their jobs were too.

I actually play Vanguard... and one of my thoughts these last few months was, "How do people spend so much time and money on a project and yet miss so many obvious things?"  The only answer I could come up with was that the project itself became the sole focus, and not the "real" project, as in what was actually being created, but this surreal project that existed in the minds of some of its creators.

But, the more I read about this whole thing, the real question going through my mind is... who in the world first looked at Brad and said, "Now that guy is CEO material... I think I will give him 4 years and $30million to create a game."  He might be the world's best salesman or pitch artist, but you have to think the guys at MS have been around the block enough times to see through that kind of junk and actually assess a persons ability to RUN a project like that.  Fact is, the buck doesn't stop at Brad... I think it goes to show a failing a step or two above him.

I've read posts from both Brad and Smed when they were obviously drunk - I remember one of Smed's being pulled by the moderators only half an hour after he wrote it - he was obviously steaming.

So....

Can someon please call to Smeds house tonight with something in a big brown bag? This has been better than Dallas so far and popcorn sales must be through the roof. Absolutely awesome reporting ;)

This will be remembered for the next 20 years in the industry for sure, as a lesson hom not to develop a game.

Thing is though - it's a good game. I've been playing since paper D&D 25 years ago and it has sound stuff. There is just this huge vacuum of content. Maybe it is a good thing that it didn;t limp on like a wounded thing under inept management - we might get the game now. Just MHO.

Again - well done in the reporting (go get Smed drunk!)

Microsoft is an enormous entity; its an entire city's (Redmond) engine. Think Boeing, not SoE. Sigil was just one of the flies buzzing about Microsoft's bovine tail. Within such an impersonal entity, its no wonder that Sigil got tossed out with yesterday's garbage if it didn't meet corporate expectations ASAP. Blaming it on Zoo Tycoon's team is a scapegoat; it would have happened to them eventually with any Microsoft supervisory team, regardless of expertise.

You are not allowed to say that. 

Responsible means you gave a shit.  Not being the one to fire them in PERSON means you didn't.

You can tell yourself whatever lame excuse you want.

I think most of you- not all, because a few of you are pointing it out in  a small way- but most of you are missing the most important point of all:

Brad is naive about the fact that has game ideas, philosophy, and systems are still a good thing! But what he doesnt get is that, even if MicroSoft would have stayed on-board, he made all the necessary deadlines, all the bugs were fixed and the didnt have the massive hardware issues- this game would still be a failure, and MicroSoft would be thrown under the bus with it....Why? Because its a piss poor game, period.

Lets not all get caught up in the 'MicroSoft/Zoo Tycoon killed it' debate, because 1) We all know thats not the case, and 2)This game was dead long before MicroSoft dropped Vanguard.

What we should all learn from Vanguards development is this: This MMO market and it's communities are just plain tired of the same lame shit like monotonous, un-inspired grindfests, boring MMO combat systems that we've had for going on 9 years now, clones of past ability systems (Vanguard = EQ2 ability system), harsh and overdramatic death penalties that further slowed down the game, mind numbing and slow travel, and the whole 'our world is bigger than yours and is seamless' BS that some devs actually think makes a difference when it doesnt.

This industry wants new and innovative ideas (like AoC's NPC hiving ability and mounted combat), new combat systems (like Tabula Rasa, AoC, PotBS), new MMO genres other than humans, elves, and dwarfs, oh my!, new ways of PvP implementation (kingdom and city takeovers like Warhammer) - these are the key things for new companies to remember in this MMO day in age...If new companies start developing the same old crap we've had for the past nine years, the gaming community will do exactly like it did with Vanguard, and reject the game completely- regardless of the outside distractiosn and intercompany drama and politics.

Vanguard has shown us that if the game is just a rehash of old ideas and brings nothing new to this MMO genre, we might as well go back to a polished WoW.

Whats even more hilarious is that Vanguard was originally touted as a 'Third Generation MMO'. Boy we're all getting a good laugh from that one right about now.

Trust me on this one - Brad's absolutely right.

Corporations and even divisions within corporations tend to build themselves towards a business model, and they tend to understand that business model very well.  They get kind of wierded out when presented with something different, and MMOs are VERY different.  It takes a ton of handholding to get a major corporating to understand something different.

Back in the day, Origin had a hell of a time getting EA to truly invest in UO in the way it deserved to be invested in - even though the game coasted over the $100M in revenue mark without breaking a sweat, and remains one of the most profitable franchises that EA has ever produced.  And given what EA has produced over the years, that's saying a lot.

A huge part of the problem is that MMOs look so different on the balance sheet.  Companies that ship a lot of console games like EA want to spend $1 buck to make $5 or $10.  In an MMO, spending $1 buck often earns you $2 or $3.  When you combine that with the fact that it cost $30M to make VG whereas it probably cost less than $3M to make Zoo Tycoon, and you can see how a number cruncher can easily get spooked.

Turnover on the publisher side tends to hurt as well.  Even if you manage to educate your liaison and convince him of the way the online world works, he'll often quit before the game is finished (not uncommon, given an MMO dev cycle is roughly 3 years), and you have to explain it all over again.  It also factors in the return on investment problem as well.  The $2-3 return on an MMO dev/live dollar spent is hugely profitable because of the long life of the game.  However, if your liaison is career-ladder-climbing, he doesn't expect to be there long enough to see the payoff.  To him, it's better for his career to turn around a fast buck, which means throwing more support to the Zoo Tycoons and less to the ambitious MMOs that may not turn a dime of profit until after being live 2 years.

This was all increasingly obvious to me when I was trying to get my startup off the ground.  It became quickly apparent that, despite any issues that SOE or NCSoft might happen to have, they were vastly superior partners for a 3rd party developer because they understood and were wedded to how MMOs get made and make money.

"But, the more I read about this whole thing, the real question going through my mind is... who in the world first looked at Brad and said, "Now that guy is CEO material... I think I will give him 4 years and $30million to create a game."  He might be the world's best salesman or pitch artist, but you have to think the guys at MS have been around the block enough times to see through that kind of junk and actually assess a persons ability to RUN a project like that.  Fact is, the buck doesn't stop at Brad... I think it goes to show a failing a step or two above him."

I can tell you from direct experiance trying to get money for a project or a business for that matter related to the games industry and NOT having a reputation within the industry or the relationships built up within it is absurdly impossible, without selling your soul to some VC. The Games industry like most others is about relationships, and exclusivity. The only thing this little debacle does is make the bar higher and harder to reach for people without those connections in the interim. Fortunately for the indie garage developers with good ideas, they're starting not to need those connections because theyre taking it directly to the playerbase sans the 30m deal, the publishing, and the distrobution.

As far as PM and ability, who knows, Brad might be great at both or neither. Being a CEO is knowing your limitations, and delegating control, while maintaining expectations. It doesnt matter if the project is 30k for a small client or 30m, you treat both the same and expect performance by your organization.

30m, 4 years and 100 employees? With rampant Nepotism, no apparent PM, no design paradyme, no professional HR person? Thats a complete CF, and shameful.

I'm trying not to kick this guy when hes down, I dont know him, hes probably decent, but those are some pretty expensive fucking lessons on the backs of 100 employees, some of whom have kids and a mortgage I'm sure.

Some people never have that luck and opprotunity for a shot like that.

This isnt a lesson in mismanagment its a lesson in hubris and ego. There are books I'm sure hes familiar with that deal with these two topics.

This is a fucking gem, because he compares QA to a toilet while making a good point.  I love it. :thumbs_up:

I want to restate again that at least Brad has guts, unlike say, the turdbrains who developed AutoAssault who have never even attempted to explain why that game became such an abortive pile of shit.  Or perhaps the people responsible for DDO explaining why there were no dragons in the game at launch.  Dont even get me started on the AC2 team...

I would like to see Brad get another shot, just because if he fails it'll be spectacular and he'll talk about it publically.  Also I think if Brad could get over the parts of his "vision" that involve cock blocking the fuck out of his players and stick to the "large, inspiring world" bits and made a third game that worked it could be kind of cool, in theory.  Cooler then LTRO or whatever the latest fucking existing IP cashcow regurgitation happens to be.  

Brad and George Broussard should team up.

Excellent read.

 I don't know how anyone involved in development of a MMORPG can disregard the good aspects of WoW. It would be interesting for some insights to future Vanguard plans after SOE has already licensed the Unreal 3 engine. I guess they now have some good people from Sigil that have experience with Unreal.


:Love_Letters:

I think he may have meant to refer to B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons), an organization formed by Patricia Pulling in 1983 as a misguided attempt to blame her son's suicide on something other than the fact that he was a persecuted closet homosexual with a poor home life.

I'm confused, I don't see anyway that point A relates to point B.

Corporate expectations may be for a certain economic model but that in no way implies that proper reporting of what you are doing with their money and time or even if you are on schedule or not is in any way an unachievable or unrealistic goal.

Maybe I'm wrong but I really doubt that the way to make a robust MMO is to hand a bunch of money over to some schmuck and then sit quietly and wait in the corner until he hands you back a finished product.  That Brad felt that the onus of proper project reporting was beyond reason for his project just tells me that internal lines of communication were probably muddier than anyone expected.

There is a semi-psychotic post above yours that tries to make the point that Vanguard was fucked simply because it was Vanguard and that no amount of visibility into the project by upper management could possibly have helped it.  The truth is that the process of creating clear, reportable goals and the objective reporting of the progress towards those goals along with solid metrics to show that you had met those goals would have not only gone a long way to helping maintain Vanguards funding through the turmoil of missed dates and milestones but also would have ABSOLUTELY provided a stronger more robust project as a result (No guarantees on it not still being a pile of poo as in this case the lack of ability to provide that visibility into the project was obviously a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself).

Truly you cant be serious? Read my post several above yours and you'll understand that Vanguard would have still been an utter failure, regardless of the out of game distractions. Why? brad's idea of a good MMO isnt the industry's idea of a good MMO any longer. Period. Give Brad another shot, and you have the same fundamental problem- his ideas are shit in today's world of MMO's-even his so-called 'epic' ones.

Thats the largest problem and most glaring thing that has come out of this drama- perhaps game companies were fooled during this process, but the players werent. We, as MMO community members, are no longer buying the BS Vision (TM) that Brad Mcquaid is throwing around. From 200k purchases of Vanguard to 90k subscribers in a couple of months speaks volumes about what the MMO market thought of his 'Vision' of a game. Its complete garbage.

Mmm, wreckage.  And newbs galore.  Fun stuff.

What a complete raging douchebag.

You couldn't be there at your own employee's slaughter because you would have cried? BOO FUCKING HOO, YOU DOUCHE. I love how he doesn't blame any of the failings of the game on his stubborn insistence on NOT LISTENING to anyone who doesn't agree with him. He says he accepts responsibility, but won't even be there when his employee's get the chop? Maybe they needed to see you cry, you sloppy cunt, just to see there was a human at the other end of the ginormous shaft they were getting.

Fuck you, douche. No one should ever give you money to make games again.

Awesome Schild. No matter what side people fall on, its really nice to see these interviews and get a glimpse of both sides. Keep up the good work.

Oh yeah, watch out for Chedder lurkers. He seems nice, but its only the first hit thats free.

Two quick points in semi-support of Brad:

1) QA--while I personally would have never made the same decision, I can absolutely see the decision to use MS's existing QA infrastructure with only a token staff on site. First, QA is freaking HARD, and costs a LOT of money, especially setting up the infrastructure. It would be a huge "win" from a business perspective to be able to avoid that up front cost in a new company.

That being said, while I can see the attractiveness from a business perspective, I will also say that making that decision was in my personal opinion one of the top two or three reasons why Vanguard/Sigil is where it is (or isn't), today. I got "lucky" when it came to learning how to respect the importance of QA: my first professional development job was translating patient data in hospitals from one computer system to another--and if there was a "bug", people literally died. Sure, people don't actually die in MMO development due to terrible QA, but the projects do.

2) While I personally think that it wasn't the controlling factor, I do agree with Brad and Ubiq about how hard the impact can be from a tough publisher/developer relationship, especially one that changes mid-stream. Hell, that issue alone is why GarageGames was founded in the first place (to provide alternatives to developers from the standard relationship model), and I personally have watched entire dev teams (Marble Blast Ultra) jam into an office for conference calls to MS--and MBU was (very) successful. Had MS been much more controlling instead of giving us pretty much free reign in MBU development, it could/would have gone very sour. The general nature of publisher/developer relationships in my opinion makes successful game development extremely difficult, and while MS is actually a great publisher to work with, just the nature of the relationship makes it difficult--and once you run into the "we don't understand why it isn't ready, and you need more money"--especially with a changeover at the same time--it would become an increasingly negative factor in the overall success of the project.

Just to reinforce--I don't think the relationship was the only reason, or even a major reason, why the whole thing failed, but I agree it was certainly a contributing factor in the eventual downfall.

I'm not sure we're talking the same thing -- you're talking about business models, I'm talking about development plans. I mean, they're interrelated -- tracking costs and keeping an eye on projected returns later is part of the whole thing, but it sounded like Brad was bitching about being asked to submit fairly short-term development plans -- which has nothing to do with what MS's expected ROI was.

You think their MS liasons were pushing them towards a more Console/PC development model? If that's the case -- Brad's right to bitch. But MS has eaten two or three MMORPG's so far, and I would have expected them to have grasped the differences between an MMORPG development model (and the associated developmental milestones) and a console title by this point.

Brad speaking of "Several months of milestones with little flexibility" sounds like a more MMORPG-friendly requirement (I would think console titles would have major milestones charted to the actual gold date) -- fairly short term focus (6 months, I would guess), easy to iterate on, etc.

Not having experience -- I'm probably ass wrong -- but a six-month milestone set with really generic true long term (1 year, 3 year, delivery, etc) milestones sounds perfectly suitable to an MMORPG. I mean, just out of my ass -- your first set of milestones (funding -> 6 months) should be talent acquisition, engine selection, a shit ton of management stuff (cost estimates), concept art, really long term shit ("We'd like a playable prototype at 18 months, we'd like full development suite ready 6 months after that, we'd want to be scaling outwards a year later, and in beta a year after that), and the general basic crap of an MMORPG. From six months to a year, it'd be "We'd like two iterations of the engine design, two iterations of the accompaining dev tools -- then on from there.

That's the sort of vibe I got from what was, admittedly, a throw-away comment.

It didn't seem like MS has unreasonable demands on MMORPG development -- it sounded like they simply wanted a real development plan, and for Sigil to create it and more or less stick to it. Brad complained about artistic vision needing flexibility, and the difficulty of actually forecasting those milestones. Which are, to be blunt, bullshit responses.

If MS was asking for a 5 year plan, like the old waterfall models -- yeah, Brad had a serious point. But it sounded like they wanted more short-term plans, in order to access progress in chunks. That's more than doable, and certainly workable in an MMORPG.

I'm sorry, but anything that Brad says in that interview illicits the following image in my mind:

(http://farm1.static.flickr.com/229/502446733_1b4cd0323c_o.jpg)

Sure, I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The concern is that they only had one QA guy for the last nine months of development at SOE because they "simply did not have the room to grow". Which is of course insane.

Dat's der bunny.

Fair enough, but when it comes down to firing 10 artists/coders (several) months before release to hire QA, it's a catch-22. You probably say to yourself "we'll just do our own QA, because I have no money to hire anyone".

Great job, Schild.  Terrific interviews.

I'll disagree with the above poster who said that Vanguard failed because nobody wants to play that kind of game.  It is nowhere near my perfect MMO, but had it been functional with a smooth launch, I would have been good for a purchase, and 3 months on a sub. 

I'll also disagree with the other above poster who claimed no point to these interviews.  The information gleaned here is very valuable - not just to mmo designers or players but to people in general.  If nothing else, this tale illustrates how important QA or a lack of it is.

It's amazing to me how delusional people are when they have a strong belief even when faced with direct counter-examples.  How people can just tune out anything not in line with their own beliefs while maintaining perfect tunnel vision.

One question occurred to me reading that - has McQuaid never heard of a college course entitled "Software Development"?  They actually teach people how to keep these metrics and complicated things.  It sounds like whatever process they were using at Sigil was not the SOP used by modern software businesses. 

Truly, I was only half serious, we haven't assigned a text color to that yet.  I think I specifically said that Brad needed to update the vision and ditch the part that involves things like corpse runs, spawn camping and ultra rare drops.  Instead he needs to focus on his solid ability to make interesting game worlds from scratch.  The few people who like VG have gotten away with saying that the world itself is fairly impressive at times.  EQ1 was quite impressive at times in terms of the world.  Its Brad's gameplay theories that blow nuts not his ability to inspire game environments.  So yes, if he was to get a third shot, perhaps after leveling a char or three to 70 in WoW and re-finding fun.  I'd be all for it.

Game sucks?
We get more of this, which is fun and entertaining.

Game doesn't suck?
We get a good game.

That's called a win-win, I never touched VG with a 10' clown pole, because I knew it was still based on Brad's stupid ideas of fun gameplay.  Having a bad game to laugh about and getting to watch it wreck itself now three times has been fun.  What's the problem?

It sounds like what Sigil was using could be sort of descrbed as agile development by someone kindly, or "bunch of people hacking away in groups" by everyone else. You had a Vision substituting for design documents, you had Management Fiat substituting for actual deliverables and milestones, and once MS figured out what was going on they dropped Sigil like a hot potato because you get consistent levels of pure shit when you use that as a design process in the real world.

Look, 5 guys coding a game together? You can do that. You can generally keep pretty good track of what the other four are doing and you know who to pester about interfaces, or when something's breaking something else. You know who to go hassle over expanding a tool or whatnot, and the five of you together sort of mentally hack together a "How do we want to put this together" plan that evolves over time.

A company of 100 with a budget of 30 million -- that's different. Vision doesn't substitute for proper management -- Vision helps management make changes, Vision helps everyone up and down the line come up with new ideas or float ways of solving problems, but Vision doesn't make a good product.

You know, Frank Lloyd Wright created some gorgeous buildings. They all started as Vision. But before they made it to reality, they got turned into blueprints, those blueprints were vetted, loads were calculated, changes were made, materials were selected, changed, selected again, the whole thing got started building, mistakes were found, things were changed again, building resumed, and after a really fucking large amount of paperwork, calculations, and drudgery -- he got his pretty buildings. (Although he probably could have hired a consultent -- he was a bit weak on interiors and functionality).

Brad had visions in his head -- what he didn't seem to have was the layer that turned that vision into something 100+ people could work on, in a way that the actual project leaders could check to see what was going on and where the problems were, and what needed to be assessed, changed, readjusted.....

Ahh so you're looking forward to more of this....I must admit, it is a bit gratifying, isnt it, after mostly all us of were flamed to hell by Vanbois on various sites after telling them that this game and Brads ideology would fail miserably....

Perhaps you're right, and we should be rooting for someone to give Brad more money and a new game to develop, just for entertainment value alone..hehe



Xanthippe - your opinion is very much the minority, proven by rapidly falling subscription numbers and ghostly servers on the VG client side. Look on virtually every MMO fan or information site and youll see thousands of threads talking about the piss poor game design and ideas that went into making this POS.

This is indeed a very bad game my friend. Vanguard has a great WORLD, and some good visuals, views, and neat sites to look at- but we're talking a game here....not a scenic painting. While you think a good launch would have saved it, that is nowehere near the truth. A good launch just would have made it impossible for the 'bad launch' excuse usage when everyone finally saw that the core game is just...well...downright terrible, and had been done over 3-4 times before with other MMO's....I mean the exact same game, except with updated graphics...people dont want that crap anymore...they have options now- and will have some very good options with the new MMO's releasing this year.

Besides- launch wasnt even THAT bad- the minor nuisances that became major annoyances didnt start hitting til a couple of weeks afterwards. My guild and I played the first 4-5 days without crashing for the most part, and without having any major technical problems. It was the EQ2 clone-like systems, boring combat, tediously slow travel, un-imaginative abilities and gameplay that did this game in (in general, brads ideas of 'fun' that no one else agrees with).... Anarchy Online shows us that games can survive bad launches and thirve for at least a small amount of time if they are fun to play or are innovative in some way or another. Vanguard had none of these qualities, and therefore is surely destined to fail because of a combination of technical diffculties and lack of inspiration.

Brad's an ar-teest.  Or maybe just an artist.  I haven't taken any business classes and it would acutally be a benefit to me, so I'm sure he did not either.  Unfortunately for many people, this was his big "Welcome to the real world, hippie!" kick in the ass.

Morat does a great job explaining these things.  Communication is key to any project, and when you reach a certain size then you have to have people and processes solely dedicated to that.  These processes and professions are not mysteries, either.  Good use of architect as an analogy in this case.

I am probably in a very small minority of people that chose VG as a PvP game.  I follow a VERY different game that is still in development, and when many of the people there said they were headed to VG to try out the FFA PvP server, well I went along.

What I found was a game that has the Potential to be the best PvP experience since Shadowbane... and a game facing many of the same problems as SB... it just won't run, especially when you actually try to play anywhere NEAR other players.  Combine that with the fact that most of the people developing the game don't SEE any of the same potential that exists on the PvP server and you have a game that has potential beyond just landscape... but will likely never realize it.

I'm with Xanthippe.  I never tried Vanguard because I could see what sort of game it turned out as.  But some of the ideas might have tempted me to try it if brought to fruition better.  I really do want a big world with "meaningful travel".  Eve has that, for instance: a very large gamespace with travel that introduces risk and costs, allowing for hauling as a way of making money, for instance.

Brad's ideas of how to keep people playing suck (make the goals take longer to get to), but there were elements of the dsign that could have been useful additions.  What these interviews are showing is why that wasn't the case.

And haemish, does the milkman of human kindness not deliver chez vous?  I could have written that post for you:

"[Opening, short sweary insult]

"[Longer middle paragraph, mainly just venting more Tourette's but pretending to be all hard-nosed about someone whose world just fell apart]

"[closing obscenity]"

I always love these rather vague explanations of 'potential'. You almost sound like Mcquaid there..exactly what potential do you see in the PvP aspect that you could not apply to any other game and say 'Oh this has potential!' ??? Sure, every game with PvP has potential to truly do something special, but I havent see anyone implement anything worth drooling over yet- the closest thing would be the city/kingdom/zone takeover possibilities of warhammer, or perhaps the Seige Tower/fortress system of AoC in their PvP zones- but Im a bit skeptical even of these systems. Vanguard would never come close to implementing something liek that, so Id love to see what kind of 'potential' you are referring to.

Now, I haven't heard a great deal about the actual gameplay in comparison to the showstopping bugs, crashes and game weirdness that people had actually trying to play the game.  The actual gameplay ideas I heard about plenty before launch.  So what I mean by good launch was being able to actually play the game for 4 hours without a crash, no showstoppers, and a steady march toward "betterness."

If indeed Vanguard wasn't that way (I never tried it) then my apologies.  But I would have played it despite my hating that particular style of hardcore/punishing playstyle even if all it was was a properly polished, working diku.

I probably am a minority in that I will buy and try any mmog that comes down the pike - but only if it actually works.

I actually edited my post while you were responding, and mentioned that I, nor my guild really had a bad launch at all. So yeah, if you didnt play it, I'll sum it up for you- you could go and play EQ2 and youll have a pre-beta beta of Vanguard with lesser graphics and a smaller world. A large world with good views and art was about the only thing Vanguard succeeded on, and Im not sure Brad can take the credit for that... See 'Keith Parkinson'.

On another note Im really glad Keith does not have to go through this debacle. He was a really good guy and is really the one who ended up making the biggest positive impact on a dev team full of negatives.

I know many that will say that the world, architecture, art, scenic horizons, and clever geography of some things are really why people stayed onboard for longer than several weeks. I will admit that some of the cities in Vanguard are breath-taking, but sadly, it does not last long to keep players from leaving. Art cannot save a game alone. It definitely helps immersion, but if the game is counter-balancing that aspect, it doesnt mean anything.

Kieth Parkinson's contribution is probably one of the only reasons to even play VG.

Amen to that.

I have to agree completely.  This was the only reason that I bothered to play VG at all.  It was an interesting new world to run around in and explore.  I must admit that the classes were at least moderately interesting as well.  Fairly balanced with some interesting abilities.  It was a pleasant surprise in a game I gravitated toward for world exploration.  

Not for McQuaid. He has now had 2 chances, and he's fucked them both directly in the clownass. He's not listened repeatedly when myself and folks less sweary than me have told him how misguided his ideas of game design are, and how his game would fail partly because of it. If I had been WRONG about any of the Vanguard predictions, then maybe I might have some kindness left for him, but I haven't been at all wrong.

His world fell apart long ago, he was just too much of an egotistical douche to see it. And he brought 100 people down with him because of said ego. There are 50 people out there without fucking jobs anymore because of his myopic ego AND he didn't even have the sack to go and face them when they got shitcanned. How much kindness should I have for someone like that?

You know, seeing the big boss break down in tears might have been classier than some dude making sarcastic jokes about buying a house (shades of needing an upgrade on a ferrari, eh?).

Tears or not, Boss Man should be there when you cut loose your people.

Another name for it is Extreme Programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming)  :roll:

Yeah its pure shit in a hippie-ish socialistic type of way.

One of the complaints about the firing was that it was emotionless.  Brad bawling certainly would have added some emotion to the scene.

The original post was edited and now this one no longer makes sense.  Have fun wondering what was here ;-)

Actually, it's not.  Not that QA isn't a necessity.  But that you could end up in this situation isn't necessarily a fault.  My company does only internal unit/assembly testing... we're a consulting firm.  QA is handled by the client.  If they decided to drop us, and we had to try to release the product on our own, we'd be up the creek.  Of course, in our case, it wouldn't matter, since they're paying for a product for their use.. we get our money no matter what.  But to bring this around to the case of Sigil...

If Sigil was depending on MS infrastructure for their testing, then they wouldn't need a large internal QA team.  But getting dropped would have exposed them to this issue.  What he can be blamed for in this case is not bringing it up as a risk to SOE and getting them to foot for QA if Sigil couldn't afford it.  You can develop a product without QA during the beginning of the development cycle- it increases risk, but it is possible if the project is planned well, which this one apparently was not.  You can't however release a product with no QA.

Yeah, because team work and communication are such awful pains in the ass.  I mean, if you worked in that type of environment you'd actually have to admit that you don't get things right the first time, or that some of your code might not be as fucking awesome as you think it is.  Fuck talking to other people and soliciting opinions, I'm a fucking rock star and I'm gonna sit in my cube with my head phones on.  You'll see my shit when it's done in 2 months.

Actually, XP does work, but it requires discipline.  Most people that claim to be following XP are actually just a

Some of those questions were out of line and I'm surprised Brad answered them.  Speaks to his character to be so forthright - regardless of what you think of Sigil, Vanguard or whatnot.

I'm sure he'll bounce back and learn from the Sigil experience.  He has had more success and given more to this industry than any of the snarky douchebags taking potshots on this forum, that is for-fucking-sure.

Even kindly described that's not what agile programming is.

You should have kept reading. Sigil's mistake wasn't initially relying on MS, it was failing to make arrangements during the last 9 months because they "simply didn't have room to grow".

Looking at the interview without context, some of Schild's questions sound unprofessional or prurient. Butler's affair is really none of our business, that's just gossip. But he was the executive producer, married to the lead GM, screwing the PR director, and my guess is that a lot of the emails flooding in from anonymous ex-sigilites mentioned it as a real problem. Same deal with the Christian references. Would be nice to get a comment on that by the way, Schild, although I can see not wanting to further push unsubstantiated gossip.

Or to frame your argument another way,  Reign's;  "Shadowbane's failure proved PvP games won't ever sell!*"

*(Just ignore Warcraft BGs, EvE, and all the nostolgia about 'old school' UO)

There's tons and tons of threads examining this subject in the MMO discussion & Development forums, please peruse & stay a while.

Anywho, Brad's delusional world of "it wasn't me!" shouldn't be surprising, and really it's not after seeing it for the 2nd time.   Anything else I had to say has been said better, or more profanity-laden already.

Good heavens.

 :-(

At least if he had joked about buying a Ferrari, you could look forward to the day he cracks up and gets arrested (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=8851).

It's my fault. I bought the first one and the second one! And every single expansion. Bwahahaha!

You drank too much of the Kool-Aid.  This isn't the first time for this type of behavior on his part, and what he gave to the industry vs what he took from games now 20 years-old is debatable.

Having the Ferrari and all the cool toys and the PC Gamer covers and shit is nice, but there's an actual job part to the "Boss Man" title. I think Brad might have forgotten.

You know why I've avoided management oppurtunities? I'd hate them. It'd spoil my pleasure in my work. Technical lead? I'm all for it. Project lead -- as long as it was in a leadership, and not a management roll -- bring it on. Put me at the level where I'm doing performance reviews, sketching out project documentation, attending boring ass meetings about budget, and hiring and firing people?

Fuck, you better have a sweet offer on the table, because while I can do it -- I sure as hell want some serious compensation for doing all the shit work.

On the other hand, if I got Brad's salary and his car (which I'd sell for something useful) -- I'd feel like shit if I wasn't doing the real work. Which included being there to deliver the news in person if my performance was shitty enough to lead to layoffs.

Wraith: Regarding QA, I can see Sigil's point --- but personally I would have wanted one or two full-time internal QA folks for peace of mind. Someone to basically backup the coders and designers and check for blindspots. No sense waiting to the end, when you can have QA slogging through early prototypes looking for sticky points in the design. Plus, they'd also fufill a useful roll in the "Is this fun? Is this intuitive? Does this really work for a player?" perspective.

Sauced: Dude, it pretty much IS pure shit. Yeah, it's got all the teamwork and communications buzzwards, but in practice it tends to suck donkey balls. Look, I'm sure there are managers -- and teams -- that can make Extreme Programming work. There are people who can turn street trash into fucking works of art. However, it's really fucking unlikely that any sizeable team is going to consist of geniuses, and it's really goddamn unlikely that any sizeable team will be able to actually manage the sort of teamwork and communication that Extreme Programming calls for -- you've got too many people, doing too many things, and it quickly gets too much for anyone to keep track of and falls apart.

If you're a 5 person shop -- Extreme it away. If you're employing 20, I suggest you look elsewhere. There's no way in fucking hell one person is going to be able to focus on his job, keep an eye on what 19 other people are doing so he doesn't break them, attend meetings with every other fucking group that might break him (or he might break), and get anything done. Fucking managers are there for a reason. Team leads, project leads, technical leads -- whatever you want to call them -- are there for a reason. If I am engine design, I do not give a flying fuck what the art people are doing 80% of the time. I do not need to keep track of it. I have more than enough shit on my plate. I DO need someone to be keeping tabs on them for me, so that if they have some suggestions about the toolsets they're using I can show up -- or if they're talking about pushing more polys and need an expert opinion on whether the engine can take it.

But everything else is a waste of my time. That's what managers are for. That's what actual processes are for. Extreme Programming more or less requires me to attend those meetings, in case the art people decide on something stupid (like insanely high poly models) OR I delegate a team member to go keep an eye on the idiots -- in which case I'm already instituting a management structure, complete with team interfaces, so I should fucking formalize it so the art people know who to pester when they hold their damn meetings.

Can you tell I've sat through more than one meeting I didn't need to be in, when I could have been doing something productive like downloading porn?

In any case -- communication and teamwork are a vital part of ANY process. Iterative/Incremental development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_development) is a much better choice -- and frankly the point is you tailor the process to fit your design needs, which means you can tailor it down to Extreme Programming if you have a tiny shop that doesn't require all those processes just to keep track of workflow and who is doing what.

You should have read my whole post.  Then you would have seen that I said the same thing.  What part of did you not understand?

Worrying that what you doing might break somebody else's work is a sign of bad software design, regardless of what software development methodology you are using. Also there's nothing about agile programming that says you have to worry about what everybody else is doing.

Discipline was mentioned before, and it is an important aspect of the process.  It's a different enough approach that it can take a while to change habits.  I want to say "bad habits", but that's just a personal bias.  I've been working in agile environments since 2000, at fairly large companies and teams.  Good testing habits (I'm a test-first guy, myself) and use of tools like Continuum are important.

Works for me.

I had been going to go do some RL stuff but this car crash is way more interesting...   Will there be a made for TV dranatisation one day?

Brad, quit posting with your alternate handle, get out here, and take your lickin' like a man..Dont bitch out of the process twice....

Thats about the worst wishful thinking I've seen in my lifetime.....

Yeah, that's the gist I got too. I thought I would be a bit more generous, because it really looks like "A bunch of people hacking away". I'm not sure what process they used -- if any. I kind of got the impression everyone was sort of doing their own thing, and probably the only real process was "Management decides and you do" and whatever the coders had to set up just to actually get work done.

I'd love to see their personnel records over time. Who they hired and when, and what their jobs were. I've seen a lot of projects go south because people were brought in too early or too late. DBA's brought in to design a DB schema when the interface guys had already done so much work the DBA was more or less stuck tweaking whatever the guy with the 1 DB class had put together. GUI folks brought in to try to assess a GUI that was so far into development that changing it was more work than it was worth, that sort of thing.

I'm sure they had basic stuff in place -- version control, that sort of thing. The interviews suggested they had some sort of communication channels in place that looked more or less right -- but management ignored them. Brad's comments about MS requiring them to have some formal documentation of what they were doing and when they planned to get there -- over what sounded the short term -- implied that either Brad was ignorent of management processes, or there were no management processes. You really can't ad hoc something that big, with that many people. You don't need 50 reams of paper, but you need some structure and some discipline.

Trippy: My understanding -- albiet limited -- of Extreme programming is that you better damn well be keeping tabs on everyone else, because they're expecting you to speak up if what's on the menu for today has some impact on you. I wasn't speaking to agile -- which I'm kind of viewing as a stripped down and faster version of iterative (is that right?) -- but with that sort of process, I'd be more worried about "Breaking someone else's work" in the sense that if I'm evolving core components, other programmers might be better off waiting awhile to use the better functionality I'm bringing online (as opposed to having to do rework), or that I might be adding features someone else is anticipating but not in the manner they're designing for.

Interface issues aren't a sign of bad software design, but general of poor communication. I'm not really talking about stuff that's avoidable by proper black-boxing and the like, but of problems where interfacing groups have slightly different ideas of what's going on.

Oh, no... I agree with you.  I was just saying pretty much the same thing... I can see Sigil's point.  If we were developing software for an external audience rather than a client, we'd have internal QA, no doubt.  And I agree with your point about management... I own my company, but I'm not a manager... just an architect and a tech lead.  I hired a manager, because I'm no good at that.  It's a matter of knowing your own limitations, and resisting the urge to be promoted past your competency, which so many people tend to do.

You're Special.

Will you be my friend ?

And for the record -- the stuff I've been personally working uses an agile programming process. The stuff the rest of my group works on uses an iterative process. We ended up at agile by stripping away all the iterative crap my stuff didn't need, and speeding it up. :)

Great work on the interview...

So I don't know that much about game development, but I do know a little something about management. I manage 120+ people (IT Industry).

No wonder the company failed. After reading this article I would not let this guy manage a popcorn stand for me.

I've decided to take a break from Vanguard. I cancelled my account. It will expire next week. I may or may not come back to it.

Obviously it still needs work, and I am tired of playing the potential game.

I am a long time player: MUDs, UO, EQ1, AO, EQ2, WoW, EvE, Vanguard and others...

Kill with Grace.

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/28686-vanguard-f13s-interview-brad-mcquaid-16.html#post734523 (http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/28686-vanguard-f13s-interview-brad-mcquaid-16.html#post734523)

Brad's reply to some of the interview/forum posts.

Yeah, I just feel sorry for him.  of course, I feel sorry for all of them.  And yes, his decisions mean they're out of work now.  But "entrepreneurs" try stuff all the time.  People say it won't work to them, and the stats show that those people are usually right.  And lots of people that took a punt on them lose their jobs.

I do think that he should have had the guts to be there at the end.  I totally understand why he wasn't, sure.  But he had responsibilities.  Literally: he was responsible.  Yes, it would have been horrible, yes he might have cried.  Suck it up.

So I suppose I kinda agree with you after all.  Ooops.

Pure Spin.  He's Cut & Pasted it to Silky Venom as well.

  It's a press release from the press master.

Sweet! Minor details!
How? Okay, sounds like a new MS liason. What did they want? What was incompatable?

I can read that in a lot of ways. Two that spring to mind:

1) The new MS guys come in, start telling Sigil they want a far more concrete and less flexible process that works for shit on the sort of development an MMORPG goes through, holds Sigils feet to the fire, screws everything up.
2) The new MS guys come in, take a look around, realize Sigil is fucking jerking their chain and starts demanding a less flexible process because someone is taking advantage of that process to scrap and rework constantly, never making real progress, and dictating real results and not -- just making up an example here -- mocked up 'demos' strictly for MS consumption.

I would lean towards the second based on timing. It seemed like MS kept Sigil on a very short leash for at least a year or two, all while funneling in cash. While I can see a new liason or MS oversight team being a real hardass and an idiot, I can see Sigil having a very solid response with "Look at what we've done and how far we've come" -- unless they haven't done much or come very far.

MS was on the hook for real cash. If they were happy with what Sigil had done, a new liason wouldn't have the weight to demand changing something so drastically. Ergo, it appears they weren't happy. As events turned out, it appears obvious why.

Communication is always an important thing in any software project where the number of programmers is > 1 unless they are working on completely orthogonal systems and even then they should be talking to each other. There's nothing about XP or Agile that says you have to keep track of what everybody else is doing. Regular meetings is a part of Agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum has very short daily "standup" meetings) but again that doesn't mean everybody has to keep track of what everybody else is doing. Fred Brooks proved long ago that that sort of thing is what actually slows down software development rather than speeding it up.

Modules should be loosely coupled, generally speaking. If a programmer A working on module A has to worry about the specific code programmer B is writing in module B then that's a sign those two modules are not perhaps as loosely coupled as they could be. Of course not all modules can be loosely coupled so this sort of thing doesn't always apply.

You got to it before I did.  Here it is:

------


I'd like to address something I've seen come up several times on different boards re: the interview:  The original MS team DID require milestones and a schedule.  By NO means did we ask for or expect free reigns.  In fact, we met every milestone and even exceeded the expectations and requirements for many of them.

I am all for schedules.  I am all for planning.  I am al for Milestones.  

It was the degree and detail level and how detailed they needed to be going way out into the future that changed and the assertion that MMOGs should be handled the same way as a single player game in terms of development and an apparent desire to not want to work collaboratively but rather dictate development (which was not part of the original spirit of the agreement, where we were hired on because of our experience) that became a problem.  We tried very hard to work with the new team but their approach to game development simply wasn't compatible with Sigil's, did not adhere to how we had worked with them previously for several years, and IMHO not compatible with how one (or at least Sigil) in our experience working on a LOT of MMOGs, some failures, one a huge success, some cancelled, etc.  

We were all for organization, scheduling, milestones, accountability, etc.  Up until the change I described we excelled in this process and were praised for our performance and progress.  When all of this changed, we tried to make things worked (as did the other side), but it simply turned out that the two teams were not compatible.  Again, I have nothing against MSFT or those people, etc.  They meant well and I'm sure were doing their best given how they were told to deal with an external developer.  Changes like this happen fairly often I would think.  Incompatibilities and disagreements on development (in this case MMOG development) happen.  

Thus it was time to move on.  I will also say that working with SOE later on worked out fairly well (not perfect, but perfection happens rarely).  My point is that we worked very well with the first group at MSFT and then we worked very well with SOE after we broke things off.  

That's it.  Again, while I am disappointed, I understand how things happen and that they are not all that uncommon.  A developer and a publisher must mesh and be able to work together as a solid team towards one solid goal (making a great game).  When that does not occur, or something changes such that it is no longer occurring, something needs to change.

Microsoft agreed with this and allowed us to switch to SOE in a very amicable way.  There are no hard feelings.  All the MSFT people are in the Vanguard credits in fact.  If anything my respect level for MSFT management for letting go of Vanguard to increase to the chance that it would become a great game increased greatly.  They are truly a class act.  They put Vanguard above politics and team issues and different development philosophies and did what was best for the game.  That is huge and I'm not sure if very many other publishers would have done the same.  So I remain eternally grateful for them allowing us to make the switch to SOE and getting the deal done so quickly so as to allow us to take advantage of E3 and to interrupt the development process of the game as minimally as possible.

I wish this part of the picture had been included in the interview and hope you all spread it around as it's an important piece that was missed.

thanks,

ps. I don't blame the interviewer for missing this -- we went over a lot of stuff.

It's a shame that Vanguard was his last project, in much the same way that it was a shame that Streetfighter: the Movie was Raul Julia's last film.

I think more then enough people have given Brad credit in this thread for actually talking to f13 and being honest in the interview.  Obviously nobody from M$ would talk to a site like this other then to tow some party line bullshit.  Ditto most likely for SOE.

Also most people here aren't taking potshots, we've been calling the completely whack parts of "The Vision" what they are, which is cockblocking at its worst since '99.  Nobody needs to be snarky about it anymore.

Thanks for trying to learn us though, perhaps next time you'll do better?

1. Schild deserves for sort of award for putting major websites to shame and showing people what actual game journalism looks like.

2. It is clear that Brad had emotionally and mentally checked out a long time ago.

3. The fact that Brad thinks posting on a message board is something he should be doing is quite frightening. His posts are absurd and at some point you have to think they are so long they are detracting from the actual work he should be doing.

4. CEO not showing up for major events like firings is just plain gutless.

I'm sure our perspective differes from others who were involved.  Like I siaid, in the end everything was resolved amicably and I have great respect for the Manager who did what he thought was best for the game.

As for how things turned out, I guess that's your opinion.  You may not like Vanguard, but it's a great game and many people agree.  Under SOE now I think it will continue to improve and evolve and get better and better, but I will always stand up and say, that even though we could have used a few more months, and even though it would have been preferable to not ship so close to TBC, etc. (see my post I made a few weeks back about where things screwed up and it's pretty clear that I don't blame any one entity over another and admit to many mistakes we made ourselves).  All that said, despite the game's issues which have been discussed in detail, we did launch an MMOG, a very compex and expensive one, a very ambitious one, and a very fun one for many people, and for that  I will always be proud, especially of the team, and then also thankful to both MSFT and SOE for giving us the opportunity to finish the game and realize a great many of our dreams.

Ouch.  Really.  Ouch.

I see what you mean. Even so, I think there's a natural team size that limits Agile or XP as an overall design methodology. But not for components -- Agile is an excellent way to develop subcomponents (or primary modules) of a large scale system. Care must be taken at interfaces, but there's absolutely nothing wrong (and a hell of a lot right) about using a very agile process down at the bottom where the real work is done.

And that applies to artists and designers as well as coders.

But you've got to have the large-scale processes -- specifically the management set -- to handle that for the project as a whole. One of the hardest problems I had with the whole "project management" concept was in trying to allow maximum flexibily for the individual aspects of a project, while keeping the bloody thing unified as a whole. Doing it with five people it's just a matter of keeping tabs on people -- doing it with 100, and I really need those papers, those Gannt charts, those milestones, those work breakdown structures.

Someone's got to be keeping a big enough eye on the picture to go down to the engine guys and tell them what they're doing is all awesome and shit, but the designers really need that upgraded toolset about two weeks ago and it's delaying the artists ability to do all the awesome stuff, and it's going to slip the whole bloody project so can they tweak the lighting code or whatever next week and please for the love of God get those tools done so the artist shut up and the money people stop screaming at me?

I'm more used to very large modules that often have highly coupled interfaces -- we try to do it through open APIs and the like, but more often than we want we're forced to go sit down with what is -- in effect -- an entirely different project's team lead and patiently explain that yes, indeed, we love their API but our respective bosses and payers of our salary really WANT that connectivity whether they want to open things up that much or not and we're about to start Pointing the Finger of Blame. :)

A good process, in the end, allows for maximum flexibility for individual components, a large scale of flexibilty for the overall system, but protects against feature creep and -- and this is a must -- makes sure the end result actually does what the thing was designed for. Whether it's control the Space Shuttle or makes a fun game.

I never actually expressed an opinion on Vanguard, just the way it's development appeared to the public. If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty much consistent in complaining that the games industry is the bastard child of software industry when it comes to professionalism, and that the software industry spent a few decades trying to pretend all that 'project management crap' the engineers did didn't matter for software.

If you did have a poor process -- you've got lots of company. LOTS of company. Games -- especially MMORPGs -- are just too big to get away with the sort of things that they could even a decade ago.

And hey -- your baby got out the door. I won't take that from you, seeing as how most people's don't.

But if you're still kicking around the industry, you owe it to yourself (at the very least) to do a very thorough and brutally honest personal post-mortem of the project. And it needs to focus -- first and foremost -- on the management processes you and Sigil implemented. Everything else -- from overly ambitious design, bad foresight on hardware advancements, architectural mistakes -- all that could and should have been caught by a mature process.

If you plan to oversee another game -- whether it's you and a few hobbists just doing it for kicks, or another MMORPG -- you need to think about where management screwed the pooch on this baby, and either figure out how to fix it on your own or identify the sort of people that can fix it for you. You owe that to your customers, to your players.

Oh teh irony.


Yeah and for the most part people have been surprisingly cool, considering... (http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20041103h.jpg (http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20041103h.jpg))  (http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20040319h.jpg (http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20040319h.jpg))

At the "first annual XP Conference" in 2001, I managed to get most everyone but Kent Beck (so Ward Cunningham, who is great, Martin Fowler, who is a savant, and Ron Jeffries, who is very "GET OFF MY LAWN") that XP only worked in large-scale corporate environments if teams were allowed to modify or abandon any of the 12 rules that did not or could not apply to the situation.  Beck's response was a hard line "you have to make everyone do everything, or it isn't XP".  The word "Extreme" was also a barrier for us, as it flat out scared the crap out of management.

Anyways - to me, an "Agile" methodology comes from this way of thinking.  XP is a great theoretical idea, but is not practical in it's full incarnation.  But neither of them would preclude the ability to effectively communicate schedules, deadlines, shifts in scope, etc. 

Did you bookmark those in 2004?

9 years ago, when I worked for Microsoft, when dealing with a 3rd party software company (such as Sigil), Microsoft would use its testers for (a) compatability testing with video cards and whatnot, and (b) sanity checks that the 3rd party was doing testing. At the time (and more specifically in the group I was with) Microsoft testing would not be responsible for detailed testing of the 3rd party software. Thus, I suspect that Microsoft expected Sigil to do the bulk of their own testing (... but I haven't seen the contract).

As a general rule, you want one tester per developer, starting fairly early on.

As a matter of good practice, with 100 employees, Sigil should have had 100 DIFFERENT graphics cards on all sorts of differnt systems. This is for added compatability testing. Part of what Microsoft was offering was its compatability labs where they have 100-isdufferent sound cards.

In some of the groups I was in at Microsoft, we'd have "testing days" where everyone in the team became testers. These were very effective. It's a way of getting testing done despite there not being many testers.

I see the whole "getting passed onto zoo tycoon" as a sign that upper management wasn't happy with Vanguard.  (Someone posted that upper management isn't technical and just wants gantt charts... At Microsoft, upper management tends to be very technical.)

My guess is that the request for more-detailed milestone schedules would have come about because someone in microsoft said, "These guys aren't performing. We need to put them on a tighter leash." The zoo-tycoon manager may have been the leash. When the tighter leash failed, they canned the project.

People can get very caught up in their own version of reality. I work with high risk offenders (I used to write code but I am now in the helping profession) What I find is that every high risk offender I work with (whether rapist, murderer or whatever else) has a very clear picture of themselves being a victim. It seems an absolute precursor to any crime. I have yet to meet a customer who doesn't feel he is a victim. In a way they are right, but in another very definite way it points out what is wrong.

When you look at what corporate society has become, Brad is a typical Sociopath Member of it. When I read this interview with him I was reminded of the kids I work with. To accept responsibility would just totally crush their whole self image - they can't do it, it would kill them. So they keep 'building' their image.

We are already creating a race of sociopaths in RL, do we need to let someone else away because he didnn't want to confront what happened and possibly 'cry' in front of his employees? Perhaps he would have needed to be a real person for that bit? The more I read it the more I think I need to trust my first judgement.

My last class (a fucking boring class to boot) on project management had a professor who drove home -- ruthelessly and with rigid focus -- the notion that shit like Agile Programming, XP, iterative programming, waterfall models (ugh!) isn't a blueprint for success. They're more like rules of thumb. They're a starting point -- more like a freakin' business philosophy -- from which a competent manager begins. Everything is tailored for the project at hand.

80% of the reading for that course was, in effect, articles, papers and software processes that were variations from the template. Most of our work was in discussing what changes were necessary, how they affected the processes and final products, and how and when you identify what to jettison, what to keep, and what to modify to the task at hand.

It helped working out here in the real world -- I've seen about 5 variations of the same process in as many years (same company, same department, different projects -- we have a very skilled project manager) and each was custom tailored to the project, personnel, and needs of the project. Management -- for all the damn paperwork, Gannt charts, artifacts, milestones, and the like -- requires a great deal of inventiveness and flexibility coupled with discipline and a great deal of skill. One of the reasons I avoid it like the plague. :)

Yes that's one of the criticisms of XP -- the practices are interdependent and it's very difficult to try and just adopt some of them to start even if you wanted to, it's kind of all or nothing. The Agile Manifesto is more general than XP and is a more useful starting point than XP for learning about agile methodologies.

I'm fortunate enough at the moment to be peddling my agile beliefs at a company that was in a "mini-Chrysler" moment about 18 months ago - they were falling on their faces, and the leading trade rag put their technology dead last in the industry.  So they rebuilt their tech org from scratch, and we were essentially given free reign thanks to the new CTO who wanted an agile dev team.  In the time it would have taken to write all of the design docs for the first release, we had won several large clients for the company with our finished (heh) product.

I used to be fairly big on paired programming, but I'm more of a special case only kind of guy.  A consensus during task planning can get a Jira task marked as "pair on this plz", but it's rare (and our tasks are usually 2-6 hours if we're doing it right).

I admit I'd like some experience with XP in a situation where it actually worked (the only time it's come up was in conjunction with something that Jesus himself could not have saved, much less a mere development process) but I have a hard time seeing it working large-scale, simply because no large scale project is built up of purely high-quality employees.

I've worked with several people who could probably do amazing shit in an XP enviroment, and just as many who would be aimless and lost (or at least need a ton of hand-holding). It's all well and good to want to staff your project with the cream of the crop -- I don't think it's feasible. I think working XP requires a level of skill and dedication that's rarely going to be achievable in larger projects.

In terms of communication -- that's more of a gut-feeling that XP in practice is going to cause problems along those lines, but that is probably just projection based off of my work enviroment and recent project history. If I were managing it from scratch, I'd still have concerns though. (Then again, if I was managing it -- I could make sure those concerns were addressed. So, a wash I suppose).

Sauced: Sounds like right man, right place. I had a much, much tinier moment like that about a year ago when I managed to pitch a machine learner to do insta sort-and-analyze of a reoccuring problem. Managed to scrape together a neural net that had about a 96% success rate (we were shooting for 90%) and sorts it out pretty much instantly. Was a hell of a lot of fun doing, too. DIdn't save the company -- or the project -- but it did knock off a really annoying problem. :)

My experience has always been that the people who are tracked very tightly against a schedule are the people not trusted to work without that tracking.

When people are not productive that is always the reponse - we need to break down the schedule into smaller pieces and track it much more finely. Which of course never works, but whatever.

Edit: Funny Slashdot post on the subject:

Sigil = Ion Storm
Vanguard = Daikatana
McQuaid = Romero
EQ1 = DOOM


Brad McQuaid is going to make you his bitch!

If it's not working already, and you're not ready to pull the plug or fire the employee or the equivilant -- what else is there? You either fix the problem (replace the poorly performing employee, replace the bad process, etc) or you pull the plug and cancel the whole thing. Or I suppose you can send them time management classes, which seems to be the current brilliant idea floating around upper-upper management these days.

Of course, my own impending enrollment in one of those lovely time-wasters is due to the fact that someone up the chain, whom I seem perhaps once a year during Ye Olde Fashioned Employee Performance Review -- confused "difficulting properly estimating development time" with "poor time management skills". They are two distinct things, and not all the classes involving jars, big rocks, small rocks, and sand is going to make up for the fact that my customers love nothing more than to tag "And can you add..." to the end of a meeting, throwing my schedule into the shitter.

I don't blame Brad for maintaining some PR speak. If he is still associated with the project, he is not free to speak openly. And it is unprofessional to just dish the dirt from a high level, as opposed to the rank and file Sigil employee previously interviewed. That's the nature of these things. You see the same professional courtesy from Raph and most other people who have been a figurehead in game development controversies.

Schild definitely did a great job on this one. It was nice to read about both sides in the Vanguard saga.

For the many people who think no one will ever give him 30 million dollars for a game again, I think you are dead wrong.

People like to give money to someone who has a proven track record for releasing games. Brad had one great game and one awful game release so far, but both of his games have been released. How many MMOs are aborted before they even make it to launch?

So in my opinion a company that wants to invest money to make an MMO is more likely to give money to Brad long before they give money to some unknown company with no track record. Investment companies are not going to scan the internet to find out how much people in EQ hated his Vision or how he did a terrible job as a CEO for Sigil. They are going to see someone that has started out to make two MMOs and launched two MMOs. Combine that with the comments about how he is good at making a sales pitch and how well he is at spinning things to show himself in a good light and it seems like Brad has a better shot at getting investment money than the majority of people currently in the MMO business if he should decide to go for a third release.

Now don't get me wrong, I think his next game will be just as bad as Vanguard unless he learns some valuable lessons. I just think he will get the money to make a third game if he really wants it.

I would bet that Brad will be posting about his next, next generation MMO within two years.

The good ones will (and they did when Brad went looking for VC money). The bad ones might not.

Did Vanguard raise any VC money, or was that all MS (and later SOE)? I wasn't really following it until around Vanguard's alpha, so my understanding of it's initial development is spotty.

Speaking of -- I bet the wikipedia entries for Brad, Sigil, and Vanguard are a fun battleground right now.

I don't know if he managed to raise some VC money, though it's unlikely since that typically gets a PR release if it's above a trivial amount of money. I do know for a fact that he wasn't having much luck convincing some of the better-known San Francisco Bay Area VCs to fund him which is how I know they did do background checking on Vanguard and Sigil.

*resists urge to join in on the agile development debate*

Every company, every team's different. But repro steps for everyone:

1) Read and study many different processes and frameworks
2) Adopt what you can
3) Make lots of mistakes inevidently
4) Learn from them and refine your processes
5) Repeat steps 1-4
6) Profit

Did you teach my class last semester? I'd have shown up to the face-to-face version! :)

Yar, that's pretty much the standard we got -- which fits nicely into my experiences. The class was real-world geared, not theory-oriented. About 2/3rds of the class was there out of the real world, and since discussion was a required element -- we spent a lot of time comparing and contrasting theory to practice.

It's dry stuff, and not any more interesting in practice. It is, however, really necessary.

I just want to chime in to let schild know he's doing the Lord's work.

::blinks::  ::doubletake::

Say wha...?

I've *never* seen this in real life.  *Never*.  I've been in QA and development (and various other positions).  And ... *never*.  Especially dedicated testers...  As sorry as it is, testing, even on large projects, is generally a bastard child of the software process.

What you want and what you get are two very different things.

LOL, somebody used the first interview as a reference in Wikipedia. f13 is authoritative!

A+ interview Schild, and some props to Brad for actually answering those questions.  Clearly he's in utter denial/shock right now.  If he can learn the needed lessons (1-understand what people actually liked and didn't like about his first game 2-learn how to manage a project that isn't you and your buds making something in the garage) he could make something good in the future.  Don't know that he ever will, though.  He and Koster are pretty similar in that respect imo.  

Extreme programming eh?  Not many programming methodologies have entire books published warning about how bad they are. (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590590961?tag=softwarereali-20&creative=373489&camp=211189&link_code=as3&creativeASIN=1590590961)  The similarities between the C3 project and Vanguard are stunning.  Both were very late, both never worked properly, both had obscene system requirements due to sloppy code and both wound up being total failures.  Hell, at least Vanguard managed to ship and see the light of day, the C3 project never even got that far.  And even Brad didn't have the balls to write a book about how awesome his way of doing things is a year before his project failed like Beck did.  The C3 program took days to run and only managed to generate 10,000 out of the 90,000 paystubs it was supposed to create before completely exploding.

And your earlier "Rock Star" comment is pretty amazing considering the XP three absolutely think of themselves like that,  to the point of naming themselves the best developers on the face of the Earth.

Agile programming is fine but if you actually drink the EXTREME programming mountain dew (in its entirety) you're insane.

And therin lies the difference between Agile programming and "Cowboy Coding" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding

Feature Driven Development is an excellent way to tackle large projects incrementally, especially when coupled with good PM

Excellent Article/Interview. Hard hitting and candid.

Only one question for me that was left unanswered,

Is Brad going threw with the operation to get Metal Legs ? I understand it's pretty risky.

Oh dear god, help us all.

EDIT: j/k schild, you've pulled quite the scoop. I haven't seen this many 1 - 5 post posters since, well, WAR beta signup...but I fear authority. And influence. And possibly even recognition, but then I'm flaky.

Brad,

You were a CEO!  I have to say it again....a CEO!  You left it to the office manager, the guy who checks the servers, and some other guy no one knew to inform YOUR employees they all just lost their jobs. Dude, a CEO...and your reason was that you might have cried????   

People several levels below you probably fired many people over the course of their time at Sigil, it ain't easy for anyone...but your're a ...well you get the idea.

I hope you never, ever, ever hold any kind of position ever again where you have to supervise or manage people.
And, the fact that you even comment on the relationship of your friend and business partner in his private life shows you have no morals whatsoever.  It ain't your business, and with all due respect it ain't the public's business ...these three people are just that...real people who have feelings and an absolute right to privacy from their...CEO!......and it has absolutely nothing to do with the rise or fall of the company you were CEO for.

What a moron.

So many new posters!

(http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/popcorn.gif)

I couldn't help it. You mess with Zoo Tycoon, you mess with me!

I wonder how much money/effort SOE will actually invest in Vanguard.  I have to imagine they're simply going to clean it up a bit, patch in just enough content to pass it off as a finished game, and then have it live on as a zombie ala Matrix Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

The thing is, why?  Even as mere zombified husks, MxO and SWG at least let SOE put the names "Matrix" and "Star Wars" out there when they're selling Station Passes, and give people burned out on EQ2 something different to do for a little while.  Vanguard has neither of those benefits.

Volume and low incremental cost? Think about it - SOE maybe a whipping boy around here but they have a tonne of experience in MMOG's and they've demonstrated some capability to revive sagging titles (no not SWG - don't go there - but EQII is greatly improved). Anyway I can only assume they got Sigil and the IP at firesale prices, and their financial commitment will be minimal - as befits a 250,000 sub title. It's an additional Pass title, nothing more. From what I can glean MSoft soaked up a lot of the cost, SOE likely bought it then at heavy discount and then got heavy discount on the remaining Sigil assets. From SOE's perspective it makes a lot of sense, what was the alternative?

EDIT: In my experience - limited in gaming but been in software 12+ years - recurring revenue makes investors and executives bums hum. For firesale prices VG may be a good buy on projected recurring alone.

Quite the contrary, Aaron was one of the more vocal critics of how things were going before he left Sigil last year. One thing I can tell you for certain, is Aaron does not pull punches and speaks his mind on what he thinks.

Hope you don't mind us poking our heads in and saying what an awesome job Schild did with these interviews!

The replies too are very insightful.  It has really answered a lot of questions people must have had in the back of their minds.

Very well done and very professional!  BRAVO to all of you!

Don't take anything personally my young friend. As you can see, Brad and many other people are partaking in this post-mortem, it's a healthy process. Brad's critics here have long-standing and fairly valid complaints, but I doubt you'll see a lot of 'pot-shots' as you term them. Criticism, yes, but then criticism is essential in a learning process.

Also you need to learn something - no question is "out of line". The interviewee can always decline to answer politely and a relationship can continue, provided the interviewer is professional and objective, which I think schild was.

Again kudos to schild for the interview, and thanks to all the rednames and Brad for the commentary, we're still a small community in the grand scheme of things and these events can only help us learn.

I honestly think a lot of McQuaid's mistake were simply in not planning enough.  I get the impression he spent more time running around reacting to situations rather than acting on his on initiative.  Like he didn't make any contingency plans or consider what would happen in a worst-case scenario.

While a lot of things contributed to the problem, a lack of foresight certainly seems to be the running theme here.

And seriously, the way that the firings were handled was just plain shoddy.  That shows very poor character on his part.  Hell, he could have at least paid for a last lunch together somewhere, so they could say they at least got that much at the end.  While they were out, his folks could have secured the building and network and such, and the others come back just to get their stuff and whatnot, say one last goodbye, and head on out.  Anything that would have at least given them one last good memory about Sigil.  Now, all they'll remember is how McQuaid didn't even show up, and how they were just told to get their stuff and GTFO.


The really funny thing is, the drama surrounding Vanguard is probably infinitely more entertaining to me than the game itself ever will be.

Funny... or sad.  Maybe both.

I've seen it, although it usually works out that 1/4 are full-time SDET (testers that can program an write automated tests), 1/4 are full-time employees, and 1/2 are hired temps for the last half of the project.

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir here, but if you start your testing early you're less likely to get to "code complete" and realize that your program crashes all the time and leaks like crazy. Having testers putting in "bugs" such as "This feature doesn't make sense" and/or "Gameplay is boring here" is a good bit of sanity checking even before beta players arrive. In a sense, it's the job of testers to be negative and point out the flaws, and they can do so much more clearly than beta testers, who just mostly provide usability bugs like, "It sux!", if that. (Mostly they don't report anything.)

WoW, for example, felt as though it had a good army of testers behind it. LOTRO has that polished feeling too. Looking at the LOTRO manual, I see 44 names under QA. Identifying programmer's is less clear because the credits use the term "game systems engineering", "technology platform", "technology engineering", and "service technology engineering"... which sums to 36.

A fascinating interview to be sure.

Of course Vanguard was probably doomed if it wasn't so borked out the gate.  Gameplay few people actually seem to want, coupled with almost no genuine buzz.  Nobody gave a damn really.

Listening to McQuaid it sounds more and more like Kevin Siembieda of Palladium Books.  Insistent his archaic game designs are still worth a damn, terrible management & organization, plus the inevitable "DONT YOU SEE ALL THE PEOPLE WHO LIKE ME?  WE ARE TOO LOVED!!" spiel.

Except Palladium at least releases inexpensive products and can (almost) support their niche group.

Vanguard was like Shadowbane which seems to have had similar problems based heavily on people not caring, poor management/money issues, and a design focus that was honestly not capable of sustaining the audience they desired.

Besides, right now making a fantasy MMORPG is kinda stupid anyhow.  WoW is just so huge its kind of become the D&D of MMORPGs.  (Everything else is niche.  Maybe profitable, but in market and mindshare it aint shit-dawg as some friends used to say.)

I don't know Microsoft at all, but from the "large company" angle, this is entirely believable. And you only need to look at Microsoft's MMO history before that to realize why the team Sigil was originally working with was so apparently keen to give him the extra time and money he needed.

In a sense, the old relationship sounded like a bunch of people who wanted a good MMO, and had made a bunch of high promises to management about all these whizbang nifty things when they had all the time in the world to work on it. But what isn't apparent, and probably could never be confirmed, is why the first team was replaced. My opinion is that their higher ups realized they weren't a strong enough force to deliver to Microsoft want Microsoft needed. Remember back in the day when VG was going to be an Xbox 360 launch title? Cost and schedule overruns to the degree seen by VG are often based on designers never stopping the design process.

More and more I believe the assertion from the second interview that VG was designed in 18 months. That's about when Microsoft pulled out, which means a serious company that knew how MMOs were built got in to start mandating, like, development actually get got.

As to him not coming to F13, I can completely understand that. I think we cover more diverse playstyles than FoH, for one, and therefore have less percentage of folks interested in uber time sink stand-around-and-wait pickup raids.

I haven't taken the time to read all your replies, so perhaps this has been mentioned.

Brad seems still to be completely delusional.

Premise #1: We are going to build a WoW beater by spending 30 to 50 mil on a hardcore fantasy MMORPG.

Premise #2: We have a completely wide open funding ticket. We will be the energizer Bunny of MMO development and MS will just keep the money coming and coming and coming.

Heap on tons of obvious mismanagement and it is little wonder MS ran screaming in the night.

Brad... You Did This. Good luck in your next industry.

I find myself skimming over all the old f13 posters and looking for ones by people with less than 10 posts here....keep em coming new guys/lurkers ;)

If you even try to convince them that UO is a good game, I will sock you right in the cock.

Don't drink this guys Kool-Aid, new kids.

They may have improved EQ II but as best as I can tell they didn't increase subscribers at all and it most likely has gone down since it's peak in early 2005. So no, I don't think SOE has shown it has the ability to revive sagging titles.

But mommy said it would be okay!


Another new kid here.  Have absolutely no interest in Vanguard but this is like watching a car wreck happen in front of you - can't help but slow down and watch.  Aside from anything, I still remember fondly how Brad was quite, um, negative about Age of Conan while singularly demonstrating how little he understood of the game and Funcom's plans for it. (Source (http://forums.vanguardsoh.com/showpost.php?s=7204ddb6a8c9683eb5c56483a1081e2c&p=1433479&postcount=78))


Good work, Schild.

I don't think they necessarily have to revive it to make money. It depends entirely what they paid for it.

My suspicion is it was so cheap, Smed charged it to his Visa after the agreement signing lunch.

 

Oh I agree that SOE has a plan for making money on Vanguard. In fact that is their business model now. Take crappy and/or mediocre MMOs and do just enough work to stem the tide of cancellations and let the games lurch around as the walking dead for as long as they can.

/derail

Everytime that organization and that bitch's name comes up I see red. She made my teenage years harder than they had to be because of her delusions.

/rerail

What they will do and what they can do are often different things.  I have really stopped talking about the "potential" of games that are not yet released... unless I am just day-dreaming with some friends about the "perfect game" or something.  I have watched too many projects with wonderful ideas stop production.  The fact that VG even released puts it in a different sphere from many projects.

But, to get more specific in some of the things they did that I have not seen since Shadowbane (and maybe there is a reason for that since both worlds share so many of the same problems):

Player-built, customizable structures.  Perhaps SWG has this, I did not play long enough to know, but there are not many games that have non-instances, player-built structures.  Not only that, but their systems allows for incremental building AND for destruction.  Right now the "destruction" seems to be tied to not paying for upkeep.  But, if there is a code that says (IF [upkeep not paid] THEN [house dies]) it seems that you could make it say (IF [siege engine = hit] THEN [house dies]).  I guess I look at the system and it is not difficult to see HUGE areas of the VERY empty world map turned into "guild cities" that have a "wall plot" built around them and then several plots inside that can be used for different things.  Add in a rather simple (hah yea I know it is only simple to think up not code) siege system where you do incremental damage to structures instead of incremental builds... and you have a newer type of SB.

There may not be a HUGE crowd of people looking for a world in which they can make their own mark and compete against other players who are doing the same... but VG is the first game I have seen in a long time that has the potential to allow it.  Perhaps AoC will... I won't believe it until they release it, same with WAR (though their track record is a bit more reassuring... but they don't have these features even planned), same with Darkfall, etc.

I am basically looking for an EVE in the fantasy realm... and I have yet to see anything that comes close.  I think VG could have been on that path, but it really seems that all of this potential was an accidental side effect, not an actual part of the plan.

Again, I call shenanigans. I reiterate: If Vanguard was on track to become a feature-complete, not-bug-riddled, not-frequently-crashing, well-tested AAA title with a smooth launch, then it would have survived the "regime change" at Microsoft, and it would have still been all of those things. At worst, the "regime change" would have delayed the launch.

Maybe you guys have already noticed this, but "Aradune Mithara" has now posted exactly two times on F13, both times in this thread, and both times to inject a few more words into his blame-Microsoft narrative. The man never shifts out of spin mode. I think spin was the primary motive for him to grant this interview in the first place. Hopefully, the next suckers investors will recognize that Brad blaming Microsoft doesn't bode well for how they'll be treated.

Too right.  I well remember, at 13 or so, my Dad rather formally asking me about the Deities and Demigods book (original, with Cthulhu and Elric deities!) and whether I was really Dabbling In That Which Ought Not To Be Dabblied In, thanks to this daft BADD leaflet he's been handed by a parent at the school.

Taught me to become good at citing Tolkien, Lewis, G.M.Fraser et al.  Fortunately, my father the headmaster and preacher just said something like "No problem, I thought it was nonsense anyway..." and left it at that.

Kind of strange how this applies to the current situation in a way...

I came from the same type of household that would Demonize D&D for its great evil, and then hand me Lord of the Rings as a suggested reading material.  I finally approached the parentals and asked what was different about LoTR magic and D&D magic...

But the point that applies is that often our Perception outweighs Reality.  When it happens in a game you get ideas like, "Hey, let's design this dungeon experience that will occupy people for 4-5 levels (read 40-50 hours) and let them get this cool gear and face these interesting gaming experiences."  Of course that really means doing the SAME experiences over and over in what becomes somewhat mindless repetition... you know sort of like Milestone reporting and paperwork.  How can a person who does not enjoy meetings, paperwork, and repetitive, non-creative tasks design a game that creates those VERY features for the players and calls them "fun"... the same way people could say D&D was evil but Tolkein was blessed I guess.

I would never say that UO IS a good game, though I'll say it was ;) "Your avoiding cock-sock skill has went up by .1 - It is now 0.2"

Like I said before, I'm done and over the whole UO thing. My Kool-aid is better than your Kool-aid anyways.

Vanguard wasn't built with PvP in mind AT ALL.  It was tacked on at the end of Beta without (suprise!) much testing.  There's no way in hell they were ever going to work on destructable buildings or any kind of conquest features.  Of all the things that Brad spouted, I don't recall him going quite that far.  He's a hard-core grindy PvE designer.

Was it planned? No.  Was it spouted?  Yep.

Then a re-launch towards the end of the year plus the first expansion (which is looking like first quarter 200, one that would add RTS style city building, ship to ship combat, jousting, and a second ‘half' of the Kojanese Archipelago that makes ship travel meaningful - and by meaningful I mean not tedious, rewarding exploration, with lots of new areas (both in the existing world and in the extension of the archipelago).  And I'm talking about some re-use of existing art, combined with new art that fits into the existing continents, and then finally some all out new stuff - different styles of terrain (islands) and ocean to look at while making your journey to found a new player city while constantly being attacked by exotic sea creatures, leviathans, and other traditional members of fantasy and crypto-zoology.  Not to mention pirates with canons, or other players and their ships on the PvP servers.

That is a quote taken from http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=8569 long-rambling post.

And Smed has subsequently said none of that is going to happen.  It was more of Brad being Brad, and wanting to keep things positive.  Pie in the sky dreamingand grasping at straws.  More land?  A majority of the land that is there now is empty.  WAR is offering some of those things, so I think Brad wanted to appeal to those who are looking forward to that game.  A relaunch of that scale would take a heck of a long time, especially with the work involved in fixing what is still broken today.

I will give Brad credit for coming up with some cool things, and the way he presents them, but his execution has been less than stellar.

Same reason Mark Jacobs wants to spit-shine UO, I would assume.  You basically have a launched and partly-functional MOG, the cost to bring it up to some level of quality can't be as huge as making one from scratch.

Man, this is like the king of all, uh, "rerail" posts.  You've taken the "poor planning" aspect of the thread, the "D&D is evil" side conversation, and the "grind-is-boring" conversation and united them by declaring them ONE AND THE SAME.  I'm not sure if you succeeded, but I'll be damned if it wasn't a noble effort.


So the challenging part of implementing siege combat is deleting an object from the world?  Seems reasonable.

Edit:  Heh, seriously with the green-colored sarcasm?  I like it.

Nice one.  But the tradition is to put stuff like that in green*, as someone will eventually miss the joke and write a massive "I am a developer" flame otherwise.

*This is not sarcasm.

Yeah, that's a pretty good analogy I guess.  It's just a little more understandable in the case of EA, since UO is the only MMO they've managed to launch so far that hasn't totally gone down the shitter and they're just working with what they've got.  Well, that and Camelot now that EA owns Mythic, but I think Camelot was a little behind even old UO for subscribers last I heard.

i like your style..

ill vouch for you :)


Cheers

Dre

It seems too many people here want the blame to fall in one person's lap or another.  It was some MS exec's fault or Brad's fault, primarilly.  Seems that there's more than enough to go around.

Communication issues seem to be rife all around.  I've never managed or worked on a project of even a modest size where performance metrics wern't required.  I demand them of any employee or vendor, and they get demanded of me.  The scope and formality varies, but it's always there.  QA would be one of the things I'm interested in; why, for example, wasn't MS aware of the effective lack of a QA staff?  Even if fairly informal, that sort of check should've fit in *somewhere* on the review.  This is something both MS and Brad should've been aware of, so the fact that it seems to have slipped through somewhere shows problems both ways.  While MS could have pulled the rug out from under Sigil, it would seem that it would be unintentional to do so; you don't purposefully sabotage your own product.

As for MS, it would seem mostly their fault if they put Sigil under an inexperienced team like Zoo Tycoon (I would agree with MMOGs being nothing like most other stuffs - order of magnitude difference here).  It doesn't really matter whether they wanted to put a "tighter leash" on Sigil or not, doing so was a mistake.  Not much to say here.  If I saw that change happen, I'd have bailed from Sigil and gone elsewhere.  People with experience in one of their enterprise apps would have been a better choice.

Where Brad is talking about having to routinely go back and ask for more money, I'm not sure what he means by that.  If he means going and constantly inflating the budget for the game, then yes, that is a problem, and Brad's fault entirely.  If he thought that he was going to compete with WoW on a budget basis, then he should've had the $80-100m lined up from day one.  If he didn't have that, he wasn't competing with WoW.  He should've known that, and made it clear to MS.  That's ok if they weren't; but again, communication.  If they were promised that figure and later cut off, that would be more MS' fault.  I doubt that's the case.

Another point; if Brad was aware of upper management sharing responsibility between the 360 and Vanguard, it seems a hugely missed opportunity to try to heavily tie Vanguard in with that console.  Maybe it was discussed and dismissed, but I'm surprised it didn't go down this road.

As for the firing thing... Brad, I'd really hope you read this part.  That was a shitty, shitty thing to do, and a lousy reason to not be there.  Because you might cry?  What the fuck do you think was on the minds of everyone else?  Or nevermind that, what about the minds of the people who wound up having to deliver the news, and make excuses on your behalf?  You don't put subordinates in the position of doing things you're unwilling do yourself.  Never, NEVER ask that of someone else.  You think it's too emotionally difficult for you, but you've no trouble kicking that to someone else to do?  Fuck you.  If this sort of approach was AT ALL similar to other areas of your management style, I think I have an idea where a good many of the problems originated.  

Are you a real doctor?

Don't get me started about MADD  :nda:

Oh... and a link to an interview with Smedley on Shacknews
http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2007/051707_johnsmedley_1.x

Personally, I don't think we'll ever know what really happened, because there's too much emotion, CYA, and obfuscation involved.

Smed is very good at his job. There's no reason to think that anything he did had a negative effect on the game. Anything.

Smed came of rather well in that interview. Definitely not very candid. But better than a lot of interviews I have read in the past.

Oh... I didn't mean to imply that at all, and I totally agree.  I was just saying in general, I don't think that we'll ever know.

Whatever you may think of Smeds and SOE (oooh, should I wax lyrical about EQ CS or sweeping changes from last day of SWG beta to release day, or my thoughts on 'keying' ... no, keep it short), their decision to stick with VG rather than close it down smacks to me of shrewd business sense - keep those folks who've been aching for the new EQ on your sites, looking at your forums, playing games under your 'single fee plays all' banner, until such time as you rollout whatever EQ/EQ2/VG replacement is sitting down the line somewhere.

All those you listed are engineering departments with all programmers (and a handful of supporting staff). Though contents from Design also need to be tested. We have outside testing as well from Midway. I would say in the end it's pretty close to the 1-to-1 ratio. And goodness, I will take more testers, more! more! :D

There's really no other way to test if you are in a rapid, iterating environment. Otherwise, your testing effort will never be able to keep up with development.

I don't know much about Mr. Smedley but reading that interview was like a fresh breath of sanity compared to much of the corporate pap that has been spouted about these issues lately; espciallay wrt community management/player perceptions.

Im new here, but I just wanted to express myself...especially after reading this interview.

First and foremost...I like Vanguard. I have 3 characters I play and I have fun with the game and really enjoy how the characters are developing. I can honestly say I hope the game is around for a long while and I hope SoE Can make it healthy and get the population numbers back up. Some may say Im crazy for liking the game, but to each their own.

Now its obvious that the management situation in Sigil was a complete and udder wreck. Typical of management these days there are people in charge who should never be. You still have to tip your hat to the grunts who were able to make everything go. There were still some very large patches going and alot of fixes and improvements that managed to go out even with the train wreck that was in progress.

But my main statement is this. I dont care what brad mcquaid ever does anywhere again. I will NEVER have any interest in any product he backs and puts his name behind. The guy is a first rate clown and couldnt lead ants to a picnic let alone manage something as complex as an MMO. And as for his creative side...sure there are some neat aspects to vanguard...but is there really anything that anyone else couldnt have come up with? I like the combat system, but come on, Ive thought of similar stuff over the years...I just wasnt bold enough to form a company and try to finagle people into thinking it was the next big thing. And I certainly dont fancy myself as being some sort of big time game designer/developer/snake oil salesman.

Brad needs to go take a flying leap because to me at least his name is mud. What an idiot.

Tev

Terevan, I'm not going to try to defend Brad or his actions, but as someone who's had, what I thought at the time was the 'next big idea', its all too easy to get folks to back you funding, doubly so if you've been tied to previous successes. However, its a whole different thing to be able to both run the business and turn that idea into reality. Brad's not the first designer who's tried and had things turn bad, and he wont be the last. Whilst I don't agree with his purported actions, I can understand them.

More surprising to me in this whole saga, is the apparent lack of oversight from the people who were providing the funding; the length of time and magnitude of the venture before people realised that the idea was not going to be realised is somewhat staggering given the fact that both MS and SOE have been through similar debacles in the past.

Smed is a douchebag just like Brad.  Smed is just better at it.

IMO, Smed saw this day coming as soon as Brad went to him with his hat in his hands.  It was an easy way of adding another game to the Station without laying out a huge amount of the initial funding and time.  Even buggy as hell as it is, if they got it for a song, it won't take many subs or much time to turn into profit. 

But we've covered that already.

You know- I've seen a lot of knuckle headed posts by Brad over the past few years, and I was one of the minorities in the Official VG boards telling him & the vanbois, in public, that his game lacked innovation and that AoC was going to quench the market thirst for that innovation instead of Vanguard re-hashing old elements. Then what does Brad do? Picks up the Hater-aid and starts gulping....I have never seen this post about AoC, but I am VERY suprised he didnt take a lot of criticism and 'boos' from a lot of the community for saying something like that about AoC at that time....I mean I look at it and I'm suprised a storm didn't follow him with that statement across multiple community sites...

Hes basically, in an underhanded way, telling Funcom they are not developing an MMO, and already putting Vanguard up with WoW. So, because it has instancing it's not an MMO??? He knows for a fact VG and WoW are going to be mentioned in the same breath?

Please....CoX is basically an instanced free-for-all mixed in with common PvE and PvP zones for all players to gather in, and I dont think you see many people NOT calling it an MMO- Hell, its much more massively-multiplayer than Vanguard ever will be, and I expect AoC to at least have double the CoX subscriptions....

Im glad he's eating his own BS right now, because, and hopefully its not just me who sees it, but he really seems to show his ass in that article by putting an un-released (at the time) game over one he obviously doesnt know anything about, and a game that, in the end, will make Vanguard look like a joke in terms of next-gen flavor and innovation.

Dont hate because Turbine and Funcom proved that your glorious vision sucked afterall Brad...my lord, what a son of a bitch cocky asshat he is....

I dont care what you do- you don't go around putting down other people's projects when you're in the industry as game developer- its piss poor manners, especially when you're in a CEO position like Brad was, and you burn bridges at a rapid pace. I guess the cockiness and 'can do no wrong' attitude finally caught up with the bastard.

I think this is the most awesome thing anyone has said so far today. Im just not sure if its awesome in a good way.

I give it 2 thumbs up. :thumbs_up:

I like that Smedley bloke.  He seems a happy go lucky sort.  Smeeee Heeee!

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v431/modrnangel/1742hatorade.jpg)

No, no, no. How many times must I say it?

Brad's the douche. Smed's the pigfucker.

(http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/7262/smedpigs2iw.jpg)

See?

Fucking art.

I believe Brad McQuaid played World of Warcraft. During my time at Sigil Games, there was talk about how well WoW's Quest System worked.

If there is anything I have to add, it's that there were some very poor decisions made.

~T.King

I take it your board name is the short version of "the king of understatement"?

Did everyone in this thread work at Sigil but me?

:rimshot:

Eh, even back when I was naive, or insane, enough to want to work in game development, I'd like to think I would have been wise enough to avoid working at Sigil.

Great interview, though.  It never ceases to amaze me just how much of a self-righteous twit Brad comes across as in his responses, or his novellas disguised as forum posts.

Hatorade aside, Reign's flogging of Brad's AoC comments is warranted now that we're looking down on the smoking wreckage of VG.  Back at the time we all ragged on how horribly unprofessional (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6843.msg221791#msg221791) it was of him to trash the competition, and of all the stupid words Brad has to eat, these merit special consideration.

Hey Brad, betcha AoC has more than one QA guy.  Haw haw.

More than you know. :)

I see you have two whole posts here, T.King, yet I am 90% sure I recognize your handle.

T.King did the artwork for what were probably the most popular UI skins back when I played EQ. 

LOL I get that a lot. I've been behind the scenes for a while now, keeping a low profile. :)

I also worked at Sigil Games in the early days of development, then did some work for SOE before moving on as a Senior Artist for next-gen console games.

~T.King

We don't discriminate against short people here.  We're very torlerant on F13.  Anyway who told you different is probably dead by now.

Really.

Or a zombie.

(http://www.razorfield.com/postimages/mcguevara.jpg)

I'm surprised some people actually found Vanguard "beautiful"... The graphic of this game seriously lack any sense of art direction. You go into a cave, you get ugly rocks with pure black shadows hoping normal map would do all the works... I did play this game for a little while but because I liked the grouping mechanics. I just tried not to let the graphics bothers me. The problem Vanguard has in terms of graphic, it's like giving a 5 year old kid a grade A profession oil painting set... You have all the next gen power and stuff, but isn't putting them to good use. A real artist will come up with something much better with just a 12 color pencil set.

It reminded me so much of a project I used to work on, where my project manager WAS also the lead programer. Once he wanted to try code an engine for a tree.
He first asked me to provide him with some leaf textures that are totally random in direction. So I copy and paste a single leaf around in photoshop, giving them random orientation and size, and send back to him.

"Oh so you can use single leaf to do something like this! In this case, I'll just code my engine to do it."

I was like, wtf, why did he even keep artists on his team then? This happenned to everything. We even had a meeting where he just showed the "source code" to artist team... being so proud of it.

For some reason this just reminds me so much of Vanguard...

OOOOHHH... T.King icons.  Yes.  I am on track again.

It's Tomas King, the UI/digital artist and interweb board nice guy. Also known as Greybur the Shaman, from either <Sojourners> or <Exemplar> who could be a rude cunt.


Obligatory, but serious "Well Done, Schild" note.

Agreed, on all points. I've done software QA. It's beyond vital, even in an application that is far, far simpler than a MMOG.

I feel sorry for the guy, but he does not need to be in a position of  control over other peoples' professional lives.

Brad McQuaid epitomizes the saying that "The perfect is the enemy of the good." He's too much of a perfectionist to work in the corporate world.

The whole QA thing reminds me that I actually applied for a job with Sigil. I can't remember if it was for QA or something else (I can't think of anything else I'd qualify for :P)  but about 6 months after I emailed my resume, I got a phone cal (somewhere around March of last year)l. By that time I already had a decent job, so I passed on the interview. Since that new job didn't work out, I obviously thought I made a serious mistake.  :-(

Bah. There are no nice guys on the internet. There are no nice girls, either. We're all flaming assholes here. It's what the internet is for. :)

I'm still LOLing

From the AoC community side, there just seemed to be a bemused raising of eyebrows.  As one of the Funcom devs, Athelan, put it:


General consensus was exactly that - he was talking out of his arse.

EDIT: FWIW - the AOC community response was mostly in this thread (http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=10353).

After reading the linked thread into the AoC forums I had 2 thoughts:

Might want to look at AoC a bit closer than I had.

Forum Trolls now have websites and fanbois???

I have an RSS feed that searches for my s/n on different sites, and was reminded today of a post on FileBlog, and my response on this very subject.

David Perry in an interview suggests that the day of the in-house tester may be gone:
  http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4954&Itemid=2

And the reply I posted:

So yeah, as management, Brad had a duty to make sure that no matter what happened internally or financially, the game was tested thoroughly, and that's what I hold him to task for, because it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that there were definitely some show stoppers in the game, which led to the sorry state Vanguard is in right now.

You must not have read my blog.  :evil:

I know I'm a noob here and all... but I have to step in and Call Bullshit when I hear it. Brad told me personally, via in-game chat around November of last year that the games' minimum system spec was supposed to be a Radeon 9800pro and 1gig of ram. I laughed and said "Ok, but what framerate do you really think we'll get with a setup like that" and he said "30FPS easily"  :roll:

They borked the engine, simple as that. When I first joined beta the game ran very well on my 9800pro. At the time there were about 20 people on at peak times of the day. Then they had this big patch one day, and at the same time invited a bunch of new people into beta... population jumped to around 80 and the servers started crashing... my framerate tanked. Not sure what they did in that patch, but it's what borked the engine. The game was ruined ever after that. I went out and got a $400 vid card to no avail. When they started selling pre-orders I'd had enough.  I told a couple of the developers that if they didn't get the engine fixed the game was going to tank... I'm not a prophet guys... just have common sense.

Thanks for wasting 2 years of my gaming life so you could swindle M$FT Brad.

Prophet.

Hmmm - I thought maybe he works for a dood bank.

lol, thanks, spelling corrected.

Would you believe I was an English Major? That whole "Study drunk, take your tests drunk" thing doesnt really work.

I decided to check out the frontpage after not having checked it in a LONG time. Glad I did. Great work Schild. Some crazy insight into the mess that is this industry.

For somebody new between that mix-up and the comment that VG wasted "two years of your gaming life" you are on the fast track for a grief title.

Also welcome.

hehe, I doubt any grief titel will be as humiliating as publicly admitting I fell for Brads con that long. It wasn't until I saw the pre-order for the game in best-buy that I realized it was all over. The guy is like Jim Jones or something... we're just lucky he couldn't post Koolaid in the Beta forums.

I like his name.  I think he is beer.

Or maybe fake Absinthe...

Maybe I should pick my first post better, but I hate these "I hate Brad" posts. Did he fail? Sure. Did he have me believing his crap? Yep. I had a pre-order, and I even saw the train wreck first hand in beta! Do I see what the real deal is now? Yes. But do I /really/ think Brad went out and tried to jack Microsoft? No way. Brad wanted to see Velious all over again. Also, what does your framerate have to do with server-side issues? I will agree with you that the engine has a lot of problems, but saying that Brad wanted to do anything other than create the next great MMO is in my opinion, falsehood. I'll even submit that he couldn't handle the truth when his game was a piece of garbage out of the gate, but this is starting to look like Jonestown with everyone bathing in hater-ade.

Just so you know, I was on an AGP 9800Pro and 1GB Ram and averaged about 25 FPS in the Dwarven starting area in beta 4; I'm not sure I know what you are talking about. I had crappy framerate in the cities with a bunch of people, but really, it wasn't so unbearable.

Erh, you sure you mean Velious? I'd been lead to understand that would be a bit like Julius Caesar's ghost getting up from his body and wanting to have a beer with his old mate Brutus.

Yeah, Kunark was really the high water mark for "the good old days" for EQ, and even then there was all the storm and thunder (IIRC melees were laughably overpowered due to new itemization).

Ahh Kunark. What was the quest where you had to get that spear from the king in the Sarnak Temple? Or the paladin quest where you went to the underwater city?

My favorite zone (Pre-Luclin) had to be The Deep...fighting the ThoughtOverfiend.
Post Luclin, I got the kill shot on Karana as a shaman no less.   8-)

The best 1H weapon before kunark was 8/24 (0.3333), requiring many, many days (not hours, days) of camping. Immediately after the expansion's release you could get 8/18 (0.4444) weapons off trash 2 feet inside of a dungeon, common drop. It was mudflation the likes of which had never been seen before.

See foot. *point* See foot in mouth. *point*  Yeah. That one! I like your analogy though :D

I think the point is still valid though; Brad's quest is what it is, and not $$ for teh house plz.

Actually Velious, yes.

Back when he was establishing the early expectations for Vanguard (well, it was the yet-to-be-named game at the time) among the faithful, he evoked Velious era EQ specifically.   That was the second pillar of his vaunted viral marketing strategy.  You know, the one he would later claim was misinterpreted on a massive scale causing a lot of his target market to never give the game half a chance because they thought it was "just gonna be another EQ".

I thought I had read something on a fansite somewhere where I had read that quote. Not going to argue with a dev though; I'm just a college student whose hobby is games :D

If we were reading the same site, didn't I read somewhere that Temple of Veeshan was designed by McQuaid? I think it was in the same forum topic that irked a lot of people. Nobody wanted to play crap like that again because it was mind-numbingly difficult. You had to die to get /in/ the zone. Yeesh.

I chatted with Brad a couple of times inside Beta (back when he was still logging in) and trust me... I don't think Brad coded shit.

Have you ever had one of those bosses that just sat arround all day and said things like "I think it would make your job easier if we started doing things this way..." and you're thinging "WTF are you talking about? You have no idea how to do my job! My job would be easier if got some god damned airconditioning in here rather than sit in meetings all day talking about virtual bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with me sitting here trying to get shit done while I'm sweating my ass off!"

Well, that's Brad.

Yes, that's the PHB (Pointy-Haired Boss).

Edit: typo

Fair enough on the coding part, but I meant designed. Like it was his idea of fun to have you die so you could get better gear. If he is really so much of a fuckup, why keep him as a creative consultant then? Or if they call him a creative consultant, can they just decide never to ask for his consultations?

Bingo.

Creative Consultant is one of those entertainment industry catchphrases that can be used like 'Executive Producer' as a way to give someone a more prominent spot on the credits.

Sure, some creative consultants actually do real work, but because the term is so vague it allows them to pretty much throw it around at whoever they want and not need to actually consult with them at all.

Art Designer: Hey Brad, you think this new armor looks cool?

Brad: No, I'd do it like...

Art Designer: Great, Brad! Thanks for your consult! {to artists underneath him} Ok Brad hates it, do it exactly like I said.

That's a creative consultant. As useless as art directors.

Great job Schild!

Reiterating what others have said - wtf was Brad thinking not to let his staff go himself?  Firing/laying off staff isn't fun, but damn, that is why you are MANAGEMENT - to do the hard stuff and make the hard decisions.  Nothing but complete incompetence there!!!!  Management 101 - you never ask something from your staff that you wouldn't do yourself.  Even if he was f'in clueless as a manager, you would think with all that religion, he would understand the golden rule at least and treat his staff accordingly!

Unbelievable that Mythica got canned for this pathetic pile of shit.

Yes I was an employee, and yes I did get layed off. Alot of stuff in that interview is really jaded. People were actually laughing and making jokes, everyone was, not just the managers, thats how some people handle situations like that. Also, Andy did not just say "your fired". If I remember correctly he said "The deal has been signed and will close tomorrow. Tomorrow everyone will be terminated because Sigil will no longer exist. Some of you will be offered employment by SOE, some will not" While he was saying this Jeff butler was standing right there but didn't have the balls to deliver the news. Andy and Dave were the only ones with the sack to tell the employees what had happened. There is really no other way to say it. Its sad that some people have to make more drama than there really is. This whole situation was a bad one but I don't want disgruntled employees to skew information because they are pissed off(I know they have a right to be, but at least tell the truth.)

I heard from way more than enough people to know that the phrase "fired" was used. if they were so eloquent, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have found out about the whole thing as fast as I did.

I take it the Fed-Ex'd SOE New Employee Package was waiting for you when you got home?

If I recall correctly I think the word "Fired" was brought up when some one said "So basically we are all fired?" and in return they stated "yes".

Regardless, best of luck finding a new job.

Sorry, good luck finding a new job.  Might want to stay out of games though.

Thanks all, on a bright note, all the managers I have got in contact in has been really helpfull, and to everyother one of my friends that were laid off. If you ask your old manager something they will try to do what they can. I have heard them writing letters of recomendations and personally handing in resumes to friends at other companys for ex-employees.

Your job wasn't writing quest text was it?

haha nope :P

Good luck with your job search.


You say this like it's unusual or something. 

I wonder how many recommendations Brad has written, and how much time he's personally spent helping former employees out.

That's not in the Vision.

the last Job that I had been layed off from, not only did they write us recomendations, but they kept us on for an extra 2 weeks without any work so we could use work computers and phone systems to call out job hunting. It's pretty handy when you're talking to a potential employer to be able to say "Oh, you want a refference? Let me put my current boss on"

and that was one of the worst employers I've had... I can't imagine what sigil was like to pull what they did.

Do programers ever put little easteregg timebombs in stuff? Just in-case they get canned? I've always wondered about that. hehe

Yes - and then dinosaurs eat them.

Vanguard is an easter egg.  Very pretty and breaks easily.

GD

Classic.

I've been going through the posts here for few days now, and I'm quite shocked what happened, both to Sigil, to its employees. Guys I feel with you, I know how does it feel to be made redundant that way.

What I want to say, as most of you guys are probably from the US, you might have different perception, you might be sort of .. more in. I am located in heart of Mid Europe, Prague (tough It is Europe and post- communist country, we have electricity, computers, broadband, we don't ride snakes).

We (me and my mate) have been playing online games since early UO (tough dial-up at those times was about 2USD per hour), through EQ, EQ2, Lineages, Wow, Vg and now LotrO. We started playing EQ when Velious came out and I was about 22 years. We didn't have jobs yet, so we really enjoyed the game, we had time to play. We didn't know who Brad was, Sony was just a big company that invented audio cassette and we cared nothing about it's gaming division.

Years passed, we are now older, we have jobs, we have responsibilities. Every trip to virtual gaming world now is more and more expensive and there's less and less time for it. When we hear about Vanguard, we were really excited about that. We read Sigil's (ugly) pages about how the game will be constructed, who makes it, who publishes it. We hoped out EQ experience will be repeated, and guessing from the opinions I read, not only us.

There it was! Right before public beta was released, I got myself a new 2000Euro PC... To make it short, we played for about a month, we tried, really tried. Exploring the land, game crashed. Going on boat, game crashed. Running thru lvl 27 spiders to port, game crashed, going to trainer, game crashed .. ugh. I played Wow right before VG. Technically you can not compare these games, performance-wise as well. So, we cancelled our subscription after first month, as well as 50% of the people who bought it. What's more - unsubscribe pages didn't work, which I found out on the bill of my Card next month. Then Sony said subscriptions are not refundable, then they cancelled it manually and someone was 13Euro richer for nothing. Poor game, very poor support, that's it for me.

I'm sorry we feel it like that. I can image how much time you guys spent on that. We really believed this will be a good game. Me and my mate we said we will give the game a year, then we try again. Seeing what happened to original game makers, I will pass that chance.

Fact is, that most gamer's only know two names from the gaming world- Peter M. from Bullfrog and Brad M. from Sigil, and wherever their name will be, the game will get sold well. If it's good or bad, I don't know ..

I'd suggest that a lot more people know of Sid Meier than of Brad McQuaid...

Will Wright too.

So wait... the page for canceling your subscription was broke and they kept charging people after they had cancled? WOW

That's a common porn-site scam. Nice one sigil.

I wouldn't know.

I've heard these horror stories about Sigil not cancelling the billing cycle before. I just cancelled my Vanguard subscription, which recurrs on the 7th of June. I'll let you guys know if SOE is continuing the scam.

I shiver with antici...........................................pation.

I cancelled my account the end of February, again in the middle of March, and again in early April.  I called SoE in early May and they informed me that the problem was on my end.  Good luck with that.

Hey, they had to pay for the severance packages somehow....  :wink:

Call the 800 number on the back of your credit card. File a complaint. They take this sort of thing very seriously.

And that Garriott fella.

It is unfair, I must say. When subscribe pages work fine, one would assume unsubscribe pages work fine as well. If they don't, I personally think it stinks and it's not coincidence.

If they wanted to make people angry even more, to pay extra for f***ed game, they did a good job on that. And this "non refundable" payments I'm sure they cover in EULA or somewhere ..  :heartbreak:

Might get cheaper to cancel your Credit Card than to wait for Sony to cancel your billing.

It's not a coincidence. They've been doing that sort of thing since their EQ days.

That's what I did.

That's exactly right. The problem is the kind of job he has to do often requires he bring professional and reality to situations fraught with gamerEmotion. Neither side can really walk away from those sorts of discussions (NGE, VG) happy because side A is trying to teach side B the realities of a business when the latter only wants their gamer needs fulfilled. There's still a lot of people who think games are garage-based labors of love built by people who have day jobs...

Greetings, I don't mean to necro this thread or anything (it's my first post here actually) but I just wanted to say this was a very interesting read. I noticed it on MMORPG.com

As many other users stated, I just don't buy into the whole "emotional" side. For someone who's so exceptionally empathetic, he certainly didn't have a hard time ascending into the creative idea role, or whatever it's official title was, at SOE. I'm sure he's losing tons of sleep while he's being paid a nice salary, and his staff are out looking for new jobs.

To be fair, it seems SOE did not bill me after cancellation. So maybe that got worked out.

Haven't had any problems with the billing from SOE, but I have only cancelled twice: once for EQ and once for EQ2.

And welcome to the new guy.

eh not to go off topic, my company has an HR dept of about 100+ people... they really dont do a damn thing. Who cares about HR? I just never got it. Do you really need an exit interview? lol.

 :|

I'm just going to leave this to someone else.

You're absolutely right. There's no need for an HR department.

Unless you company offers, mandates, requires, handles or considers: Health or dental insurance, 401ks, retirement packages, promotions, demotions, raises, bonuses, harassment charges, ethical and legal issues, hires people, fires people, trains people, moves people, sends people to other places....

Admittedly, I work for a very large company. My HR department handles my entire benefits package, training requirements, education (they are paying for a nice new degree for me), certifications, signs off and mandates things like raises and promotions, deals with ethical problems, handles harassment issues, and generally keeps themselves busy. Oh, and they handled hiring, firing, employee compliance, my security reviews, and a host of other legal, ethical, and "cover their ass" training, documentation, and issues associated with employing someone. AND they handle all that "withholding" portion of my taxes.

But I can't imagine any other company EVER needing those sorts of things.

You do if you want to get out of that rehab clinic, son.

Zing!

Has anyone looked at this tool's other posts? I'm surprised he didn't sign it with his character's name/server/level.

You should go learn what's been going on for the last 5 years in the MMOG forum.

I don't want to seem to align myself with the grunkmeister, but I work for a company that has grown massively over the last five years, and whose HR department has grown from "payroll" to "immensely powerful hub of all misfortune", formalising things (which means stopping us being a relaxed, fun company and making us a big, harshly uptight company).  When emails arrive from our head of HR, the mood across our entire open-plan floor sinks: I promise you that you can tell what's happened.  We have a saying that "nothing good ever comes out of HR".

Or you could be working somewhere else after the company is sunk by lawsuits and insurance.

That's because at least 2/3rds of HR's work is "ass-covering". It's all well and good to be a "relaxed, fun company" right up to the point where you get thes hit sued out of you.

Look at it this way -- I sincerly doubt your part of the company ever had a problem with racism, sexual harassment, ethical lapses, or any of the other things that can result in lawsuits. The bigger your company gets, however, the more people it covers and the more likely you'll end up with a few bad apples.

Take Boeing, for instance -- they lost billions of dollars when it came out that they had mishandled proprietary information. Not only did they face fines for it (they had access to the information through one contract, distributed to people working on the bid for another multi-billion dollar contract, and used that info to design their bid), but each and every freakin' employee was forced to take a 4-hour training class on business ethics. Given their size, they lost years of man-hours in addition to the fines because about 10 people played loose with the rules.

Oh, and the contract they won got yanked -- another loss.

HR's there to limit damage when some minor boss decides to play grab-ass with an employee or overlooks that habit in one of his employees. It's there to limit damage when someone wants to break the law, violate contracts, promote, demote, fire, hire, or otherwise fuck with other employees because of gender, race, sexual orientation, religious belief...you name it.

Yeah, HR cuts off the fun -- mostly because in a big company, if you allow to much "fun and relaxed" some jackass is going to open you up to a VERY expensive lawsuit.

Morat is correct.  Still...

(http://yegolev.com/f13/images/spanish_inquisition_hr.png)

HR became a problem the moment we allowed people to bitch and moan (legally) about things they probably deserve. Like being called fat, gay, or stupid. Or getting slapped on the ass, or whatever. Before that, they were the people who cut paychecks and made fun of the people who complained.

Basically, HR's motto should be, It's not our fault, it's the morons you work with.

HR's motto should be "tort reform".  It probably is, actually.

It doesn't even have to be anyone you work with. When I started moving up the corporate ladder in my previous career, I eventually started to get called in on interviews of new hire potentials, and had to go to HR for a 2 hour lecture on "how to interview".

Who knew that asking someone if they were married (in an attempt to discuss relocation needs, for example) could get your company sued?

Ok, then blame the legal system too.

HR isn't the enemy.

The girl that runs my HR department is pretty cute ^^


But I'm not allowed to tell her that.

You aren't allowed to ask what year they graduated college either, since that can be construed as a query about their age, according to this year's sensitivity training. The example dialog went something like "Oh, you went to X college too? Did you know Y? What year did you graduate?"

Schlid's more right than he knows. "It's not our fault, it's the morons you work with" is pretty accurate.

It's not like "Get another job if you can't handle your boss hitting on you all day, and telling you you'll get that raise if you fuck him" or "Get another job if you can't handle the fact that your coworker is a fucking member of the KKK and leaves nooses on your desk" is always a viable option. Between health care, regional needs for skills, that sort of thing.

I think those of us who work in the tech industry take a lot for granted -- it's easy for us to find new, equivilant jobs rapidly. IT needs arose after businesses and government started instituting bans on sexual, racial, etc, harassment. So it's real easy for me to blow off HR's damn sensitivity training because no one I work with is going to be chasing tail across the office.

But the way I think about is like this -- each and every fucking year I'm required to take an IT security course, that covers such basics as "creating decent passwords", "virus scans", "not fucking emailing documents labeled 'confidential' without encryption", "don't open strange attachments", "don't fucking forward that fucking stupid email to all 100,000 people on the global list", "RUN YOUR FUCKING VIRUS SCAN AT LEAST WEEKLY", etc.

It's a stupid waste of time for me. Each and every year.

To about 90% of the people I work with, however, it's shit you have to hammer into their brains at least once a year. If you don't, then the email system craters when 10,000 people email the entire company the same damn thing at the same time. Or some idiot opens and attachment and a particularly nasty virus is leaping across our sytem (or god forbid, it's an Outlook one and it's killing our email systems too). Or some fucker sends confidential information to our competitors, his kids, the local PTA, and the janitorial staff and it's not even encrypted.

Same goes for all that boring shit that HR puts you through. Just because it's stupid and pointless to you doesn't mean there's not a surprisingly large number of employees who don't need the reminder. And if worse comes to worse -- by pointing out they HAD the training, your company is absolved of a lot of responsibility.

I agree with your observations.  Last count I saw, we have 70k employees.  Half of those are certainly below-average intelligence, even without adjusting for the Marketing department.

Somewhat related, a coworker pushed another coworker backwards over a chair.  HR was OK with keeping him but Legal said he had to go.  Draw your own conclusions.

As for your IT infrastructure, I'm glad I don't work wherever you do.  Choosing between having my laptop handle all the virus scaning itself, a draconian internet proxy, and the dozens of other automated processes, or attending a yearly security class, that's not hard.

Edit: I need to come up with something snappier.

Let's put it this way -- my specific department loads our own machines (I did mine), runs our own internal network, and does everything ourselves. We are in a distinct minority, and get away with it only through daring, panache, and quick wits -- oh, plus we need to since we're developers and not users.

Our users get a pre-defined load with minimal permissions, with updates pushed to them. That does handle the virus scan problems (for the most part, though the idiots keep opening attachments, bringing shit from home -- we'd disable the drives if they didn't need them) for the most part, and certainly the patch process. And our network (our developmental one and the bigger one we're part of) are guarded by some serious firewalls. Our primary security vulnerabilities come from laptops (people take them home), jump drives (ditto), email, and just straightfoward stupidity.

The problem is laptops. One of our contractors uses preloaded laptops -- their security settings are locked down so fucking tight that we can't even get them to connect to shit when they bring the laptops in (none of us have admin rights, and the users have squat in terms of access). 90%+ of our IT headaches come from this group and their insano security settings.

The other 10% -- people from all over the country with laptop settings that range from "my home laptop that I've never scanned for viruses ever, but surf porn on at night, can I hook it up to your secure, stand-alone, and HIGHLY CRITICAL network please?" to "Oh, this, it's running Windows 95 SP1, but I'm sure it's fine".

And it's not even my real job -- we just do IT support during critical events, mostly to make sure people don't hook up their virus-laden laptops to our network and explain to users, once again, how to connect to the printers. I shudder to think what it would be like without the annual security briefings.

Frankly, it's the same for the ethics training, sexual harassment training, workplace violence training, standards and practices training, hazardous materials training ("Don't drink the toner!"), safety training (you'd be surprised at how many idiots hurt themselves in an office enviroment -- although half of this site is far closer to industrial.), disaster training...it takes a grand total of about a day a year out of my working to handle all that. It's really not too bad, and way too many people really need it.

I'm not saying stupidity should be a capital crime, but why don't we just take all the warning labels off everything and let the problem solve itself?

Survivors would sue.

I believe my corp is looking at supplying outsiders with prestaged laptops for use on the intranet.  Getting viruses onto our LAN is easiest done with flash drives, and even then it probably won't get far before the scans deal with it.  We haven't had a real virus problem in a couple years, but whereas you have it as a side job, we have an entire department for this.  They are pretty serious, too: they would take away my root password if they could but firecall would cripple this company.

We have serious, full-time departments for it for the vast (99%) of the systems here. It's just there's a set of isolated networks that users occasionally have need to access (sometimes 100 of them at once) and while the most secure stuff is done via workstations whose loads are determined and zealously guarded by Jesus himself, they do have need to access their own personal programs and utilities -- hence the laptops.

So my role -- when these users descend en masse -- to stop developement of the useful tools with which many of them do their job, and to go babysit them. To make sure they can hook up to the network, can access the printers, don't bring their nasty virus-infected laptop in and fucking everyone. Why do we do it? Because we were asked for 24/7 support during these events for issues regarding our particular toolset, and it was felt that as long as we were sitting on our asses anyways, we might as well help out with other things.

I much prefer development. I get to learn all that nifty ASP.NET 2.0 stuff AND get to write complex data miners for my Master's. I even manage to do that while on support sometimes. I wrote three papers last time I was stuck there.

Because most the really dangerous stuff that can kill you doesn't have warning labels that, in being removed, would make it any easier for people to kill or maim themselves.

If you're going to stick an appendage into the maw of a running lawn mower, there isn't a warning label in the world that can stop you.
Those labels are there to keep you from suing the manufacturer winning your lawsuit.

As far as it goes, warning labels are cheap CYA. I suspect many of them are there because one tiny bit is mandated, and the rest is tacked on just for CYA purposes.

For instance, the "Toxic/poisonous substances" label on stuff like cleaning supplies, or toner. Or "eye irritant, flush your eyes with water" stuff. That's really there for quick first-aid in case of accident (if I find my kid eating bleach, it's nice to have a nice label right there indicating what to do -- not that I'm stupid enough to keep bleach where toddlers can get to it, but you see the point).

After that, they just started adding more shit since they already had the label.

In that vein, some blogger was talking about ridiculous government specifications for contracts -- like 10 pages to define "toothpick" and speculating that the reason the government spends ten pages defining "toothpick" is because they learned (probably the hard way) that without it, some fucker will low-bid and show up with shit he calls toothpicks (like jagged splinters off 2x4s from condemned houses) and claim he fufilled his contract because no one defined toothpick. I know that's common enough out in private businesses -- you specify to a T because if you don't (Especially if you deal in large numbers of such contracts) someone's going to try to fuck you, and even if you win in court, it'll still cost time and money. Better to be painstakingly detailed and forego much of the pain and cost when some idiot gives in to human nature.

This is why I'm in favor of the death penalty. Hang those fuckers high.

Morat20 is so right. I've seen the ugly world of government contracting up close and personal.

I'm not going to pretend I'm fluent in tort law, but when it comes to being successfully sued due to someone doing something dumb, they have to show that they did not understand that there was a risk.  Definitions of what a reasonable person would think aside, companies put labels on things so that they can point to them and say "Obviously any reasonable person would have read this warning label and known about the risk of X".  This will keep them from being sued most of the time.

Yes.  I had to writeup a definition of "webservice" because of worry that some fucker would define it however they liked, regardless of its use in IT jargon.  And it's a somewhat real fear; the real issue are numerous small companies looking to get a slice of the pie, and who will do damn near anything to get what they see as easy money.  Most legitimate contracts aren't easy - unless you word-lawyer your way through a contract to cut every functional requirement out you can.  Oh, and the small fries that don't win contracts?  They start pulling every damn political string they can to leave bruises.  It sucks ass when a state legislator calls you up and asks why so-and-so joe startup was declined a contract.  They're in your state, you know, and the company you went with is in another state.  You know we're interested in keeping state money in-state where possible, right?