f13.net

... and I'm hiring for my new MMO social network games company. (http://www.bradmcquaid.com/Brad_McQuaid/Blog/Entries/2010/6/16_Back_to_Work!!!.html)

EDIT: No, I'm not actually Brad McQuaid. But it's the opportunity of a lifetime!  :grin:

(http://firstin.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/10743car-wreck.jpg)

Nothing screams professionalism like sending a resume to a hotmail account.

 :popcorn:

This could get interesting.

It's going to take some real work to get this guy some money again from investors.  Going the smaller, social game route is likely a better option to get his outfit off its feet.  Hopefully he just designs and stays the hell away from managing this time.

You don't think he has any investors? Surely he isn't funding the entire venture out of pocket, unless it's three dudes living on pizza hut and box chardonnay sitting on rented white plastic "outdoor" furniture with a 6 month renewable lease on a former massage parlor stinking of kimchee in a suburban mini-mall outsourcing all their actual development to rentacoder.com.

The image tickles me pink. I hope Abashi is one of the other two guys. I picture him staring at the peeling wall in that banal hellhole, 100 yard stare from vacant expressionless doll-eyes, round face shining like a donut glazed with fluorescent orange pepperoni grease, downloading tranny porn right in the open on 2PM wednesday afternoon, rhythmically tensing and untensing his thighs. Tense, untense. So close, so close. Tense, untense. Nobody notices, as Brad posts mindless self-important drivel to his blog in a haze made from equal parts percoset, lorazepam, and delusions of grandeur.

Then, in comes a Wolf that walks as a Man.

(I don't know what that last part signifies, but it seemed like it fit so I kept it. Be wary.)

The Wolf takes two sniffs, drops a deuce, turns around, and walks out.

(http://priceboys.ca/maxwell/dragon.gif)

That shit is publishable right there.  Bravo!

Sam the genius struck business model gold. McQuaid and co. should drop all pretence and start an actual massage parlour. Most social media is built on prostitution anyway, so why not embrace the basics. On a slow day they could take turns giving each other squeezers.

Imma make some games for the "facebook", gimme that sweet sweet dumb venture capital.

Oh god...The Vision 3.0...

My brother was eaten by wolves on the Connecticut Turnpike.

Someone here needs to send in an application. Post all the dialog after you send it in.  :grin:

I should make up a resume and say that I made and ran MUDs when I was 16 years old.

That's fucking awesome. :Love_Letters:

Does the job come with free blow?

But younger internet users seem to think GMail is cool and the sign of really "getting" the interweb. I don't get them. I'm sure they think Hotmail is uncool though.

They also think forums are uncool (but comments are cool).

The day I worry about what crotchmuppets think is the day I eat a bullet.

Nope, but you get free drug instead  :why_so_serious:

Long signature is long...and maybe you don't know what blow means...

Yea, that's multi-fail.

I don't see how he derives the equation in the signature from the two preceding statements.

On the other hand I think he'd be an excellent candidate for one of the vacancies at Bradville.

The factoring isn't shown. hardcore + no hardcore = life + no life
hardcore + no hardcore; factor hardcore out and you get hardcore(1+no)  Much like x + xy becomes x(1 + y), etc
Of course, the opposite of hardcore is casual or, at best "not hardcore."  Raping English to force funny isn't cool.

Don't know, but I'm fairly sure there will be plenty of suck somewhere especially in whatever they produce.

Too much brown....errrr.....too early for that?

The "Made on a Mac" logo, is that something slapped on by choice? I've seen it on a number of sites, and well, if I made a professional site for my endeavor on windows, I sure as hell wouldn't want a windows logo linking to Microsoft slapped on at every corner of it.

No(t) is a not an operand. It's a unary operator. Or in boolean logic, apple + no apple is not mathematically 0 apples, it's 1 apple + (a grape maybe)

Or,

apple = (not pear)
pear = (not apple)

not

apple = banana * pear
pear = banana * apple

We don't know what "not apple" is, but it's not the same as "not pear" unless we have a relation to show that apple = pear. Which in this case would be to start with the relation hardcore = life.

Edit: Added quote. Also: We should also define the total set, which can be anything in this case, but even if we make it binary (hardcore, life) we've just proven that a = not b, b = not a, or a = a, b = b (compare 1 = not 0, which is true.)

Aww, fuckit.

Did you change your mind because you misunderstood or because you couldn't be bothered? Because I read it and you have a point; it's just that in natural language, "not" means "not a subset of" rather than "negation of." For example, in natural language, "an almond is a nut" and "nut is not an almond" are both true - unless there are only two possible sets, when sub/supersets become meaningless. I should have made that clear, true.

It isn't like this thread will amount to much else than mockery of McQuaid anyway. :-P

I have no pants on right now.

You guys are no fun. :sad:

In short, I didn't want to start down the path of trying to determine if proof via exhaustive elimination is really a worthwhile way to describe negation.  I wasn't really thinking of discussing it from a set theory point of view.

But if you want to keep going then:

Uh, for apple -> not pear to be a usable distinction you are doing a lot of implicitly stating the things that make apples apples and the things that make pears pears and then comparing them.

I mean, there are a lot of things apples aren't but in the 'fuzzy' sense you could make an argument that apples are close enough to pears for apple = pear to be mostly true (i.e. the set of things that are in apple and the set of things that are in pear are nearly identical).  Apples are much further from airplanes than they are from pears.

Neither does McQuaid and the investor he's... ahem... servicing.

(http://ui01.gamespot.com/96/worstphotoshopever1_2.jpg)

<3
(http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h88/bzalthek/daffydoesit.gif)

Daffy's return will not end well.

No it will not. Anybody who uses that again as a avatar is going to get banned.

I thought this was the useless conversation thread, my bad. I was just doing my part to add to the randomness. :why_so_serious:

If there was some unspoken rule for not posting that gif again, I apologize.  Though I am confused as to how it came about.

Sky had it as his avatar for a while and about every other post of his during that period referenced that image somehow.

Edit: or at least that's what it felt like

Everyone suddenly wants to make a shitty facebook game.

(http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/8884/fbucks.png)

It's almost as if they cost practically nothing to make in comparison to other video games and have significant returns on that minimal investment.  :grin:

Social games are a new market. Much like iphone games a couple years ago and MMOs a few years before that, the first few to the gate do disproportionately well with comparatively little investment (but significantly more risk), and everybody and their mother flocks to the easy money, only to get there just as it dries up. This cycle repeats as each new market opens and is exploited. You only get the easy money if you're in the first wave. Mature markets act differently, and at this point I believe the first wave of social gaming exuberance has passed us by-- if you want that incredible return on investment, you need to find another untapped market. Sadly, that's astonishingly hard to do. They don't come along that often.

I believe that casual social gaming is real, large, and even growing. It's not a passing fad. But it's no longer easy money. You can't just outsource to rentacoder.com and magically make bank, you need to compete on a much higher level, and even then the risk is significant as nobody really understands how to effectively monetize social gaming without outright deceiving your customers, violating their privacy, or even ripping them off via trojaned browser toolbars and the like. You think Brad will succeed where Raph failed? Seems unlikely.

I think the strength of social gaming is that it doesn't compete entirely with the other video games in terms of the time slot it takes up. People who used to raid in WoW don't come home, have dinner, then log onto Farmville for 8 hours (on the whole). Instead it has extended gaming into previously non-gaming times like commutes, lunch hours, break time and (when the boss isn't looking) quiet times at work. As such it can't go away because people start making better MMO games for the PC. It only competes with activities like playing Solitaire, staring out of the window and gossiping at the water cooler. That's a low bar.

Garriott's excellent interview on Massively's 100th podcast saw the great man asserting a belief that this space would be colonised by veteran game designers making better more immersive games than the pioneer games. Sure the space is saturated, also game profits are now complicated by the desire of Facebook for a bigger share of the pie, but as the audience becomes more sophisticated the profits will go to people who make good games and have trustworthy reputations. People won't fall for spam your friends tricks and dodgy toolbars for ever.

You just have to synergize the Facebook gaming paradigm. With networking buzz and social dynamics.

Bringing the thread back to Brad...  He's on LinkedIn now, and actively making contacts.  I got an invitation from him earlier this week and accepted.  Checked the next day, and his connections list had doubled in size. 

Lastly, please remember that games are made by teams of people.  Focusing on Brad and totally ignoring everyone else with respect to how Vanguard turned out seems a bit much...

And the cycle begins anew

Dude.  Come on.

Fine, I'll do the newb advocate thingy:

Musashi, you jaded scoundrel , you. Most of us have seen our pipedreams fizzle and die, and are intimately familiar with the notion that we have learned less than we should have. Encourage the man. The interactive entertainment industry is nothing if not a spectator sport. There will be laughs either way.

So what you are saying is that a complete fuckup will attract even more complete fuckups to his side so they can completely fuckup yet another new property with someone else's money?

Ok, we'll go with that.

can we stop fucking feeling sorry for millionaire game developers who get more chances and more attention in life than they very probably deserve?  for fuck sakes people take it TN or Massively

Jerrith is reasonably proud of his contributiion to MMOs via SGO (he had a big hand in the Bard, Blood Mage (I think?) and Disciple class, as well as others).  I believe his point is that you shouldn't shit on everyone that worked at SGO just because Brad is/was, well...Brad.

I apologize for the bump but I ran into Brad's request on LinkedIn tonight.

That's part of it, but it's more how this thread was sounding like, "Oh, if only Brad wasn't at Sigil - Not a single bad decision would have been made and Vanguard would have been amazing!"

BTW, odd little bit of trivia:  When Vanguard went to SOE, I believe they didn't actually shut down Sigil.  The company was actually renamed to something else and kept around, at least for awhile.  No idea if it's still around or not, but I find the concept of it someday being revived / used as a real company amusing.

I don't think anyone has said (or even thought) that Sigil minus Brad = awesome.

It's an absurd thing to say. Didn't Brad found Sigil? Would Sigil and/or Vanguard have happened without Brad McQuaid? Were they not one and the same, right up until he ran away crying because he couldn't bear to fire his employees in the parking lot?

People do tend to forget that development groups and game companies are made of individuals, and not the Borg.

I'll remember that the next time a development or programming team gets canned.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah one of the most vivid parts of VG I recall was at the end how little he was around the final months and when it came time to sell it off to SOE those "individuals" were all let go in a pretty cowardly manner. 

No. Vanguard was fucked from the ground up.

Brad is just the icon of it's fail.  :awesome_for_real:

Brad McQuaid - The Fail Whale of MMOG's.  :why_so_serious:

I still have hard time believing that Vanguard would be made without Brad.  Who else would try to make an EQ-killer in the age WoW?

Vanguard had tons of innovative ideas, they just failed on execution. It can't really be reduced down to "EQ next".

Well OK, some of those ideas were failures in design too, like diplomacy. But still, it was an ambitious title.

If you have spectacularly poor leadership at the top the probability of the game being good plummets. So while Brad might not have personally made every bad decision as the captain and leader he still gets to take responsibility. And in practice he put the people in, let the project drift and didn't support / control the situation once things were clearly going seriously wrong. The final stage of taking everyone out to the car-park and firing them by proxy being enough to dry up any remaining sympathy.

That said, if he can get people to up the money so he can have another go that's all well and good. Maybe he'll hit pay-dirt this time. It won't be my money :)


The company was already gutted prior to the sale and the title has steadily diminished since then... to the point at which it must be on minimum life support. The probability of a company name with only one massive failure on its record being brought out again seems unlikely, but then this is SOE who have a very flexible definition of success.

Vanguard had tons of innovative ideas? I must have missed them... the foundation was pure EQ next. It was obvious some of the actual developers did their best. The game had some wonderful architecture, some nice class design and even the diplomacy and crafting showed that someone really cared for it. But it was too obvious that the scope was way bigger than the content and the pieces just didn't come together. Riding through the massive capital cities and realizing that all the custom art pretty much added nothing to game-play is a failure of project management and game design.

I do remember them being very impressed with the idea of public dungeons that would spawn content locked to the group... but I don't think it ever really worked or was widely applied. Also seem to remember them trumpeting the lack of zones which was only marginally true in practice.

Hey, who wants to go work for him  ;D

Damned with faint praise much? 

The fact that he was not the end all and be all of EVIL at SGO does not detract from his transgressions.

It's my understanding that SOE bought VG out from Sigil and then Sigil died. I'm sure someone still holds the paper to the name, but I don't think that it's SOE.

As I understood it, McQuaid and the upper management fiddled while Sigil burned, and the only reason Vanguard was a functional game at all is because those lower on the totem pole scrabbled nobly to pull it together in the last few months.

Yes, I should have been more clear.  When Sigil sold VG to SOE, it was the IP, not the company.  The company let everyone go, but it still existed.  The remaining Sigil management/owners didn't actually shut it down.  At some point around / after that it was renamed.  I find the idea that the company still exists (and could be used to start something new (which is what Brad's doing at the moment)) amusing.

The key is "his transgressions".  I exaggerated in my last post, but basically, I think some (by no means all!) of the things he's blamed for are really areas where he acted reasonably and trusted the intelligent people under him with skills he didn't have to do the right thing, but they (for whatever reason) failed.  Those shouldn't be included in "his transgressions" or if they are, then just as "fail to find / manage someone to do <X> correctly".  That's all.

I have to agree that was rather lame.  I was no longer at Sigil then, and so it's not as strong in my mind as the many things I was there for.  If I'd been a part of that, I might be much less likely to say anything positive.

Part of project management is finding the right guys with the right skills, as well as making sure the right tasks are being given to the right people rather than clueless fucksticks who are just scrounging a paycheck. If Brad assigned someone to a task they couldn't do, that's on him too.

Heh.

Indeed.

SOE bought everything Sigil that day that they shuffled us out to the parking lot to fire half the team.  Work within the building itself remained for about 4-5 months after, during which we were continually promised raises to put us on par with the rest of SOE.  After never receiving that said "raise," I left and went to work up the road in Oct. '07.  A week after I began anew up that street, SOE fired half the Sigil crew again and moved the rest down the Mira Mesa (to be fair, they should have moved us re-hired Sigil employees all down there the day that they bought us).

The only thing that remained thereafter was the building, which SGO had leased for at least another year more (I still chuckle when I drive by it to work).  So maybe that's what Jerrith is thinking about it?  Not really sure how much he knows, seeing as how he was let go before SGO was sold *shrugs*

Was the release date for VG announced before SOE took it over or after?   

The game had been out for a couple of months already iirc.

SOE bought the publishing agreement for Vanguard off MS; SOE was responsible for enforcing the release date. The January 30 2007 release was their choice (but it was probably a choice between launch what they had, pour more money and time into it or dump the title back to Sigil to publish).

I was going to Sir Bruce some of that but then I realized that it does not matter what I say or know and I shouldn't be talking about it anyway. :)

I'll say this instead: Some of you are wrong.

Welcome to F13.  :awesome_for_real: