f13.net

Interview/Postmortem with Adam Carpenter of Auran

This was a one on one interview with Adam Carpenter. Everything after the bump are his personal thoughts on the development of Fury and how it evolved.

Prepare yourself, it's a long one.

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Nice to get a game out, then. Grats.

Interesting stuff.

I'm not really sure if the lone employee running off and whining really cost 20 more people their jobs.  More likely they're just inventing excuses because their game hasn't caught on to the point where they can afford to hire that many people.

That said, Fury is a case of a game that was made for me, the experienced gamer, and I totally missed it because it was being presented as a Guild Wars alternative that had an additional $9.99/mo cost if you wanted all the features in the game.  Meanwhile, if you're a hardcore gamer, you already own Guild Wars and it doesn't cost you anything beyond that (unless you wanted all the expansions).  There was no real room for me to get into it seriously.  Now, if it were cheap - say $20 or free - then maybe this $9.99/mo subscription idea might have been justified.

However, then you get into the game itself and you have trouble.  Hardcore, skilled players being lured in by lucrative cash prizes, exploiting every slight misbalancing of the game to rape everybody else, and probably using 3rd party cheating programs if they can.  More importantly, the unskilled players were being dropped immediately into the game with a trial by fire that ultimately frustrated them.  Solution? Less lucrative prizes and protracted and fun tutorial system geared to get the average player capable able to defending themselves before dropping them into the lion's den.  But it's coming late now, the main push of development is over, and they just dropped over half their development team.

Hmmm. A significant portion of the developers only wanted to be there until 5.

Now was this because these guys are lazy, unmotivated workers? Or is it because they were well aware that the design direction sucked and this game had no chance?

If it's the former, weren't these the same people who worked on the previous project and was there not ample time to weed them out?

As a rule I don't work more than 40 hours a week, except in rare circumstances. It has nothing to do with accepting someone else's vision or not - it's just that I don't believe that quality products are created by overworking yourself to the allusion of getting more done.

But, in any company, there are a lot of people who do it just because they got the job (and pay) not because they actually enjoy it. Welcome to the technology industry.

He's saying they were only there for the 9-5 pay I think. I didn't go further on it because that's how I interpreted it. 9-5 is what you make of it. The passionate, talented ones are obviously going to be more valuable during those hours. While people who are just there for the job are punks taking jobs from people who want them.

Not neccessarily.  It's true that you could say that people who are willing to sign away all their free time to their job want the job more.  However, that doesn't neccessarily mean you're in the wrong to suggest that you're both passionate about that work while wanting a little time to yourself.

Ooo, I betcha that's going to rub some people's parental engaged work ethic wrong.

To say what Geldon just said without sounding like a gigantic tool, I know people who are amazing at their jobs, love what they do, and are passionate, but generally only put in an 8-to-9-hour workday for family and personal reasons. There are also your only-care-about-promotions-and-pay people who will do 10+ hours of semi-productive work a day, and the same sorts who only do the 9-to-5 equivalent.

I'll take folks from the first category in every circumstance. Loving what you do but living a balance life is pretty much The Ultimate from a personal perspective. And, if your company thinks beyond the immediate-term, The Ultimate from theirs too.

(I seem get called a "tool" a lot.  I need figure out if that provides any more productive feedback to my failing.  I used to think I'm being called a, "One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used." (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tool)  But I'm beginning to think that people just randomly throw that out there as a generic replacement for 'dick', which is about as inciteful to me as a McDonald's commercial.  Anywho, thread not about me, lets keep it that way.)

To flesh out what I meant a bit more, it basically goes back to my "games as art" perspective.  You can't work somebody into the ground, EA-Spouse (http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html?thread=752658) style, and expect people to put out good games because you've basically crushed their artistic spirit.  It's not work ethic, it's lunacy.  You want something interesting that works, take a look at how they do things at Valve in Yahtzee's visit (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/2655-Yahtzee-Visits-Valve-a-Travelogue).

outlier
out·li·er (out'lī'ər)  Pronunciation Key
n. 

   1. One whose domicile lies at an appreciable distance from his or her place of business.
   2. A value far from most others in a set of data: "Outliers make statistical analyses difficult" (Harvey Motulsky).

From my understanding, working more than eight hours in the game industry is the norm rather than the exception. To me, this isn't a question of Auran being cruel taskmasters per se. What happened seems to be a failure of project management. If a substantial portion of your team is not "buying in", then it's incumbent on management to either get the wayward folk to buy in, or to replace them. It's unclear from the interview if this had been an ongoing problem, but as I've stated before if it was they had plenty of time to make a change when they changed projects.

 :awesome_for_real:

 :grin:

 :ye_gods:

 :grin:

 :ye_gods:

.........

 :ye_gods:

So.

Another game/pseudoMMO/arenawhatever that was funded with too much money that probably never should have gotten funded to begin with is released and fails to live up to investors expected return and has the plug pulled because it didn't generate WoW returns past a few months...

Amirite?

Also, only people that put in 16 hours a day love what they are doing.  Anyone else is just there for a paycheck.

I want to clarify that I use the phrase 9-5 to describe a mentality and work ethic equaling the bare minimum.  I don’t use the phrase as a literal translation of hours worked.

As you so rightly point out, there are vast differences between individuals who work at 95% efficiency for 8 hours a day, those who work at 75% for 10 hours and sadly those who work at 60% for <8 hours a day.

Now I've got that Dolly Parton song stuck in my head. Damn you all!

Has nothing to do with laziness. If one doesn't get overtime for going over 40, then the employer sucks balls (as is the case with most of the gaming industry). Simple as that. Fuck passion. Justice and self respect is more important.

I just recently went through an evolution with one HIGHLY (in the 200's) paid employee that worked 50+ hours a week.  He produced less than nothing, he produced obstacles and difficulties for everyone he worked with.  Because he was an expert on paper and had lots of experience (worked on USB) and worked so hard at being in early and out late and was very personable he was camouflaged to the upper level. 

Because he was so senior for a long time he only sat in on peer reviews and didn't volunteer to be reviewed.  People started to worry when pretty much nothing technical he said made any sense or when he would offer advice that would turn out to be utterly wrong.

Peer review after peer review showed, with different sets of peers and technical leads, that he didn't have a clue what he was doing.  Finally we had a review of his work, that I sat in on, and the first 10 requirement blocks looked at were wrong, his interpretation of the requirements didn't match the written requirements (different interpretations, as long as they can be vetted as achieving the same results are allowed, it happens when you work with lots of Ph.D's) and worse, his code didn't match either his version of the requirements OR the written requirements which was just inexcusable.

Eventually, with lots of office drama, he was moved to another team on a different project.  As that team ramped up production he was given small tasks of a basic level of competence and supervised closely, like you would a new college grad, to ensure he was working in the proper direction.  He produced nothing usable, stuff that would have to be redone by someone else.  Finally, after 18 months, he was let go.

Similarly, I work with another guy who has a vast wealth of experience and knowledge, he will not work more than 40 hours a week unless it's absolutely necessary for a hard milestone.  He finds solutions to problems before they hit the horizon because he knows what to expect and how to do the job.  If you ask him a question you will learn something new and useful.  It's like The Wolf from Pulp Fiction, "Why didn't you say Bob was on the job?  We cool man, we all cool."

Just because you work lots of hours doesn't mean you are any good.  Just because you write lots of code doesn't mean you are any good.  Even if you only work 40 hours a week you can still be a necessary component for the success of a project.

Also, if the schedule is such that overtime in necessary in more than just minor amounts then the schedule was wrong in the first place.

Perhaps I am biased, but I am of the opinion that you get what you pay for with free testers.  :grin:

First off.  Interesting read, thx f13  :awesome_for_real:  I found the bits about the realities of pvp, pvp'ers and gamers at large to jive with personal experience.  I've seen first hand the ugly results of the heavy churn in pvp-only games, it leaves most of them with much smaller playerbases then they deserve versus Lineage Clone#21,431 or Ragnarok Online Clone#453 now with more CUTE!

Its rare that a pvp-only game gets good word of mouth out the gate.  While almost every generic fantasy grindfest has fanbois and apologists coming out of the woodwork.

I will endeavour to bother to use the trial after this patch comes out, but don't count on it.  I have too much fun playing Rumble Fighter when I need my "arena combat" fix. 

I want to ask what you meant by the passionate statements.  I personally find that passionate people don't really add anything to a project over people who are competent professionals who simply care about doing their job properly.   John Carmack is a great example I think.  I don't think that guy is passionate about gaming at all.  He obviously likes gaming but I dont see him doing some stupid "games are art" rant every time I read an article on him.  He doesn't go flapping his jaw about how to make a good game either.  He simply does his job so well that shit gets done in time to fix any problems.  That to me is how you make a decent game without wasting a metric shit ton of money.  So are you talking about this sort of thing as "passion" or are we talking more like Brad McQuaid "this game will be so awesome" passion.

In theory I think your statement makes sense... but in practice I find that a passionate employee gets the job done despite his work environment. In my job, our processes and procedures are horrible. As a result, if I was very professional and just got my job done... things would fall apart. I routinely have to do all sorts of things that are outside the scope of my position just because I care about our customers.

Sounds like a problem with the company you work for. Not the employees.

Being professional and doing your job generally should NOT make things fall apart.  :-)

We're playing Fury right now as a continuous top 5 guild there, and the population is small enough to border on an extreme niche game. Many people may be waiting for the vaunted Dec 14th Age of the Chosen patch to make up their minds as to whether they are going to hang around, or depart for good while throwing Fury in the trash.

Adam is a good guy and maybe he just ran into issues within the company that he couldn't overcome.  I know that the beta community spoke out against things we felt were game ruining, and begged for the game to be delayed by about 90 days. Of course that didn' t happen, and Fury launched with a ton of tech issues, bad skill balance, no PVP ladders, no VOIP, and very little actual game content.

Because they released early reviews were terrible, a game that advertised itself for a year about being no grind released with a grind (gold and gear), they had a very confusing PVP ladder where you would lose rank for winning, and the subscription wasn't worth it considering most people could play GW/FPS games for free.


If the December 14th update isn't absolute perfection with all the supported features people expected at release, then this game will go downhill quickly as the veteran population will begin to leave enmass. Once that happens, the only way people will keep playing this game is if its 100% free for the game and all its features.

So my post mortem is simply that Fury fell victim to bad internal management, decision making at all levels, greedy investors who rushed it to release, and not delivering the product at release.  PVP gamers are fickle beasts, and they will quickly depart a game that fails expectations on multiple levels much faster than a PVE customer.

The average que in North American prime time is:

4 man Elimination x 8 = 32 players
8 man Vortex = 0
8 man Bloodbath x5 = 40 players

Its been that way since early November, and it will get worse if the Dec 14th update doesn't fix the issues the leading game players/guilds have been bringing up to them over and over since July.

My personal thoughts on the project

- A large majority of the Fury team had major issues with Fury.
- Lots of the feedback sent by other members of the team to leads was dismissed or flat out ignored. A lot of the changes at Beta were mentioned to design and production during Alpha. Some of this feedback never made it to Adam as it was shut down by other team members/leads. Essentially Fury was designed in a vacuum with little collaboration.
- 75% of the designers including Adam rarely played the game at Alpha and Beta unless it was one of the mandatory short 30min - 1hr playtests.
- None of the Fury team worked on Dark Reign, marketing should stop making these comparisons.
- For many of the team this was their first project in the video game industry. Most of the Fury team had never shipped a video game before, this includes the senior management and Adam.
- Props to the die hard members of Fury that put in the blood, sweat, and tears (maybe 10% of team). Overall a bold effort by a very inexperienced team which is represented accurately in the end product.

I've talked about Fury before so will only repeat my key complaint (which was well recognised after the fact): its high barrier to entry that stops new players from learning the game.

Thinking back to alpha / beta, I think that any new PvP game that gets developed should do the following thing:

1) Recruit gamers straight out of internet cafes, gaming shows, wherever, to play their PvP system from scratch (i.e. without pre-made characters).

2) Watch how they play and how they learn the game. With PvE, you can fudge it long enough that players can learn what to do. In PvP, where you will be immediately slaughtered for making a mistake, if the players can't pick the game up quickly, you're in big trouble.

I could play Exteel (shallow as that game is) because it was very easy to pick up and play. Fury didn't have that advantage.

I really hope Auran keeps going - it's one of the few Australian development houses to have made a name for itself internationally.

See, I like depth, I think Fury should endeavor to stay deep.   The trick is leveraging in that "easy to pick up and play" and then eventually allowing established players to get to the deep bits when they're ready for them.

That's important but it doesn't sound like they chose to have it that way.  They simply lacked enough proper professionals to finish the game at the cost of employing all of them it sounds.  Total management failure.  Some idiot probably thought getting it out on Xmas was more important even though this is probably the worst Xmas ever to release a game.  They should of fired the dud employees and continued finishing the game with the ones they had that didn't suck.  The development costs would of gone down and they could of released it 3 months from now during the gaming lull season.

It's almost never as easy as just "firing the duds and move on", at least here there's laws that makes it either very expensive or hard to fire selected people. Also, from the looks of it, a lot of the team members seems to be owners as well, making it even harder.

Great interview, another glimpse of the fucked-up world of game design and production.  I wish I could comment more directly on the game and the gameplay itself, but the "steep" system requirements wouldn't even get me into Beta.  My mind never even went back to this title until now...games with high system requirements seem to fail time after time.

The Fury design credo seems to be that an asstons of options is the same thing as depth in gameplay. It isn't. The gameplay was incredibley shallow. Jump into an arena, hit a bunch of buttons while running around. Having an asston of classes, and another asston of abilities for each of those classes isn't depth, and the way it was presented, it drowned all but the most dedicated player in numbers, skills and stats the player has no way of comprehending. All of that could have been alleviated if the matching system hadn't placed people in with one-shot one-kill beasts (i.e. skilled, experienced players) but really the problem was in mistaking tons of options for depth.

As for dogging 9-5 people, most have already said what should be said about that. But to add to the general thrust, the games industry's biggest fucking problem (and the tech industry in general) is that it too often equates passion with overtime, but refuses to compensate that "passion" accordingly. If you want your team to put in overtime, fucking pay them for it and don't bitch like a scolded dog when your team doesn't want to work overtime on a game it doesn't take Nostradums to figure out is a trainwreck.

Don't get me wrong - I liked the large range of powers to choose from (even if they are really recoloured versions of the same power for different mana types) - but being presented with 20 powers to choose from after you've been playing the game for less than an hour just leads to choice paralysis and not logging back in.

Also, I should have said yesterday - great interview.

Aside from the owners thing I'm not sure I understand.  Are these some Australian laws that make it expensive to fire people?  It depends on what state you live in but in the US it's usually pretty easy to fire someone for being a crap employee.   Sometimes they might have themselves covered somehow but theres almost always some other way to let them go.  Either way no matter how "hard" it is we can obviously see the results of refusing to jump that hurdle when it needs to be jumped.

I've never seen a game go free so fast in my life. Check out this latest scheme.

Until something like 2006, it was difficult to just fire someone who wasn't pulling their weight in Australia. Sure, if they are stealing from the company or doing something illegal, you could kick them, but it wasn't easy to just let someone go. Government legislation - called Workchoices - did make it easier to let people go, but it was also revised and I think its unfair dismissal requirements were tightened.

So two things:

1) it's not really in Australian company culture to treat workers as faceless resources as much as it is for the US (and until fairly recently it wasn't really an option - you parked someone in place until they left or backwards promoted them out of your hair); and

2) finding experienced games programmers in Australia isn't an easy proposition. Anyone Auran found to replace the person they dumped would likely need a lot of training time and education to bring them up to speed, which Auran didn't have in the lead up to releasing Fury. This isn't to say that Australia doesn't have programmers - we do - but tested games programmers? We don't have the industry size to provide a very wide talent pool of applicants.

I feel a rant coming on.  We have had 3 dismal failures in a row (Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, and now Fury).  All three failed as a *direct* result of the leadership of the projects.  All three said leaders have been all *over* the place pointing at everyone but themselves as the reason.  And they probably genuinely believe it, and that's what's pissing me off.

We have defined "Professionalism" as "Thou shalt not point out the stink of the boss's shit."  Adam, I'm trying hard to be calm here because you are getting loaded with a lot of baggage you didn't earn.  But I *have* to point some things out.

1) If your team lacked an understanding of the game design, and wasn't motivated to work hard to make it a reality, that was *your* failure, not theirs. That should be at least 50% of a Creative Director/Lead Designer's job, communicating what the game is supposed to become and getting people excited about making it happen.

2) If you had paid *any* attention to the last 10 years of PvP MMO's, you would have seen a direct correlation between the success of the game and the amount of things *besides* PvP the game allowed you to do.  The closest parallels to the game you were making were Planetside and Guild Wars.  One has nothing but gankage, the other has lots of PvE.  One is successful, one is not.  For a "Creative Director" of a PvP-oriented game, the conlusion should not be rocket science.

3) The 80-20 distribution of PvP success is not an aberration created by low numbers, but an inescapable fact of life known as the Pareto Optimum.  You have to design around it, so the game is fun for the 80% of the players who will lose 80% of the time.  This is why Little League gives everyone a trophy at the end of the season (American baseball for 7-10 year olds, I assume Australia has some kind of equivalent).

4) Teams of 40+ cannot be made up completely of highly motivated people.  Highly motivated people are motivated not only because they like the game concept, but because they have "bought into" it because they feel it includes a part of their own creativity.  This does not scale.  This is a management problem you should have worked around.  Some of your people are going to be there to collect a paycheck and not get fired, you have to figure out how to get useful product out of them.

Sorry, but it's a little disingenuous of you to spend 20 paragraphs explaining how the game failed because your subordinates were lazy and/or stupid, then get all self-righteous about the malcontent that went to Angry Gamer and spilled the beans.  How does Tantalus feel about their new employees now that you've just described how much dead weight there was on the Fury team?  Or are you only giving Tantalus the *good* employees, and keeping the 9 to 5 seatwarmer crew on?

--Dave

I agree, but it depends how you define PvE and PvP. I think you can add a lot more to a game while still keeping the focus on PvP, and that PvE doesn't have to always be some sort of idiot-proof quest/grinding system.

Otherwise you make great points. If things fuck up then a large part of the blame has to be shouldered by those with authority.

And when those people are idiots...


That isn't a Catch-22. That's idiocy. Using the one word to describe different things doesn't make those different things the same.

I feel like I just read a Mcquaid-sized wall of text that basically said "the team didn't completely see our Vision".

When are game developers going to learn what people actually want to play before  they begin creating a game.

It is imperative that game designers begin researching a playerbase and their habits/likes/dislikes before a single line of code is written.

Let me add to this one other observation.

If people, including reviewers, don't play your game "the right way" when they're given a chance to look at it, that's your failure, not theirs. And by your failure, I specifically mean the lead designers/creative director. There is simply no excuse at this point in the history of game design, particularly MMOG design, for walking down that path, or offering that as an alibi for commercial failure. If some players whom you need and want as customers aren't seeing "the real game", it's because you fucked up in some respect. And it's worth considering what quite a few people are noting in this discussion, that the reason some people on this project might have seemed unmotivated is that they could see this failure coming. Maybe some even tried to tell people above them in the management hierarchy about it.

Any company that blames the failure on a project on the desire of its employees to do anything but work 18 hour days deserves every bit of failure they get. To imply that if you're passionate about a project you are willing to sell your life out to get it made (so others will benefit financially and professionally from your sacrifice) is complete bollocks. EA Spouse lifted the lid on that type of thinking long ago.

Those of us who have worked in the industry for years, and who at various times have paid for the lack of leadership by crunching 16-18 hour days for months and sometimes years at a time, know the stink of this particular line of crap. Projects don't fail because people aren't willing to live and sleep at the office, and expect all their familial relationships to tolerate and understand that sort of insanity. They fail because of bad leadership, flawed premises, and bad ideas. You can't polish a turd - or you can, but it will still be a turd.

All I have learned from this article is that I never want to work at Auran (though I already knew that), and I will remember the name Adam Carpenter. If I see his name anywhere near a lead position on a company roster, I'll pass.

Tony Hilliam: The Facts About Auran's Closure (http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2007/12/tony_hilliam_the_facts_about.html)

What's done is done.  Hopefully the people that need to learn and grow from this experience actually do.

Edit by Trippy: fixed link

It's breathtakingly clear Adam Carpenter is kicking himself he didn't have the foresight of the 9-5ers he's blaming. They knew it was a pile from the start.

Seeing how they plan to continue Fury and their train simulator, they're probably going to rehire the folks that weren't the 9-5ers they blame for Fury's lackluster launch.

...or not: http://www.doolwind.com/blog/?p=86 (http://www.doolwind.com/blog/?p=86)

Noone should be surprised (the company has been propped up by obscene and dishonest siphoning of government funding for years), but still, it's a sad end. I remember the days of Dark Reign, and back then Auran was a really exciting company - possibly the first company in Australia to really do something big. It's all a sad shame, and a Scrouge-like parable of the evils of greed and mismanagement.

I want to know where Greg Lane is. He is directly responsible for a lot of the mess.

As far as I can see, Auran Developments is shutting down (which is why all those people are getting let go), but Auran Games continues. What the distinction is, I don't know.

To further explore some of t0lkien's claims about Greg Lane, I came across this (http://blah.planetcrap.com/topics/172/), but that was 7 years ago.

But anyway, Auran's failure will see those let go likely end up at other Australian gaming studios - as I said, the pool here of experience programmers is very small - which will hopefully see a boost to local output.

Your post is spot on...
It also brings me to this next point.  What's one of the main reasons games can and do get developed in America?  Unpaid, forced overtime.  Companies arent required by law to pay their employees for overtime, they can simply fire them if they refuse to show up.  The only folks who are exempt from this are those in Unions, and guess what... there arent any for game devs(at least in a REAL sense).

Soooo, as long as there arent any Unions and games keep getting made in America... we'll see unpaid overtime, no matter how good the game development is.  And the moment there are federal restrictions and/or Unions applied, the big-money guys will move offshore, or cut pay.

As for these 40 hour work-week statements, America's 40-hour workweek is amongst the most brutal in the developed world.  Most developed countries have moved to the 30-hour work week, with mandatory paid vacations, breaks, and/or daily siestas. (along with required overtime pay).  Many countries (especially in scandinavia) dont even work year-round...  yet it seems some of the best code there is comes from Scandinavian countries. 

So all this "extra overtime to make a game" bullshit is really just a function of good ol' American Capitalism, "phuck over as many people as you can so you can get ahead."

 

cause they live in the dark for 6 months... 
on the other hand Many countries  (china india) are becoming popular for sub dev /art ..

This thread is suddenly a knife's edge away from a split and Politics-ing.

If it was good ole fashioned Capitalism, then these companies (and the industry as a whole) would be running a helluva lot better. All I see is a general lack of business sense.

Wow, these guys made Dark Reign?  Man... that is a game worth talking about.  It is the ONLY RTS to date that I have seen implement certain very cool features... like "When you get x% hurt go back to the heal station".  They were also one of the first to be very liberal with the "auto-move-here" type of commands and queues for production.  Man, have not thought about that game in a while.

Not on topic I suppose, but the evil of the American work week is just not as interesting to me as new features in RTS games... those guys need to make another one!

Hmm. Sounds like a whole lot of ass covering and insubstantial evidence. He doesn't complain about specific issues, he blankets the whole project with negative projections. From a psychological standpoint I believe projection is the appropriate word. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

If he gave examples like, "Furys lobby failed because it was incorrectly implemented and was intended to be fun in these ways..." then maybe I would have some sympathy. As it stands he didn't say, "The swords didn't look sharp enough to kill people so I blame the art department." He didn't say "The balancing and skills economy failed because I filled it with fluffy bullshit in order to make it look like we have a progression and item wear was the only way I could think of to make people buy more shit."

The bottom line is that this game is not creating half the buzz they bought from the gentle pre-release interviews, people are not stark raving craving it as a business model, game type, or genre. When I played it at e3 it felt like button mashing and I'll be honest, I haven't picked it up since. If they are going to retrieve this, not just from the brink of disaster but wholly already going head first into disaster, they have a lot of customer inquisition to do.

In the end, it's probably tale told by an idiot...  "“It is a tale … full of sound and Fury; signifying nothing.”

(http://sbutler.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/spanish_inquisition_monty_python.jpg)

Ok the much awaited Dec 14th patch has ushered in the following:

Massive repairs for old gear = most can't afford to repair it
Low gold rewards for match victories = no real change here
Shitty loot for match victories = no real change here
Massive cost increases to create custom gear = big big change (requires you to buy gold from auran to keep up)

1v1 elim has sucked the life out of all other tournaments so no one's playing them

The gear overhaul was replaced by even more powerful gear (for those who can afford to make customized gear).

HP increases were negated due to the massive damage boosts from the new gear.


Now for those who don't know, you can basically go to an NPC called an Artificer in fury. You tell him the item you want, and select an approximate power level. You are charged gold, and then its pretty much an item lottery to see what you get. So you can spend massive amounts of gold to try to get uber gear, but walk away broke and with shitty randomly created items.

What this patch is going to do is drive away their few remaining hard core players probably by the end of the month. I had more gold than most people (400 gold) and I blew through most of it today just to get a few shitty mid tier items. Imagine how less fortunate players or new players are going to feel after paying 20 bucks for gold to Auran while getting virtually nothing due to the costs and randomness of the item generators.

I am probably going to end up writing a post mortem on how NOT to make a PVP arena based MMO.  There is a market for this type of play, but Fury missed the mark on nearly every level once they stopped listening to their tester community last June.

In a follow up to this horrible patch and change of direction Fury's top 10 guilds all publicly quit the game within 24 hours of this patch going live. Many are going back to WoW, CoV, and GW until something better comes along.  I'm not sure who's left at Auran to blame for this terrible patch, but it cost them the remaining loyal customers they had from their best competing guilds.

If newbs are getting rolled in 5 seconds then perhaps that was the intent.

Now there's a design strategy I can get behind.

Newbs or vets can be rolled in under 5 seconds, but that's a game play mechanic.  The reason that Fury couldn't attract enough people to create a low, middle, and high tier of competition is well documented in its many fansite reviews.  The average player played less than 1 hour, and then gave up on the game.  In some cases they were matched against vets due to low populations, but in many cases they got fed up with lag, crashes, a confusing skill system, a faction and gear grind, and lack of choice of PVP content.  So they didn't hang around to become veterans because the game itself wasn't setup to help people's PVP progression.  But over half the people we knew who picked up this game mainly left due to the horde of tech issues that were never ironed out, and that just comes from Auran's willingness to try to use a game engine they couldn't master.

For anyone who's interested, theres a podcast interview with an ex-employee of Auran at http://www.australiangamer.com/podcast/Australian_Gamer_Podcast_103.mp3 (http://www.australiangamer.com/podcast/Australian_Gamer_Podcast_103.mp3).  This was recorded on the day he was fired, so not surprisingly he's pretty drunk and rambling, but he blames the whole thing on the 'Lead Designer/Creative Lead/f13.net interview yank who screwed a good company with a good history and is hightailing it back to america'.  Vaguely interesting, but nothing earthshattering in it.

That sounds like a giant epic fail sandwich.

I hope there are a few more writeups about Fury around here, while the game itself never mattered much the lessons that will not but really should be learned from launches like this are plentiful.  I saw this type of amateur hour bullshit all the time back in the land of f2p K-MMO lobby+gameroom pvp-only games.  A genre I am quite fond of in many regards and always wanted to write something about but the lack of people who could get past the Korean part around here was always a stumbling block.