f13.net

Some people are expecting me to post something about this. So here goes.

There's a rumor going around that goes something like this:

1. SOE is going to buy out Vanguard.
2. SOE is going to merge down Vanguards servers.
3. Sigil is about to experience a massive... redundancies.

So, is there about to be a large influx of resumés floating around the MMORPG industry? Are some of them already flying about?

At this time though, I'm merely reporting what I've... heard. As such, do not consider this confirmation nor a denial.

That's all I have to say about it.

You know, I never thought I'd say 'Thank god!' about Sony taking over a game.

Farewell Vaguard, we barely knew you.

Well, at least a server merge might actually help that POS.

I lol'd.

Sounds like funny.

What's Vanguard ?

I hate to see anyone lose their jobs but Vanguard is one bloated, goat-corpse of a game.

Maybe on their next jobs the programmers will tighten their skills and code.

Is this going to make Vanguard playable, or will it just be used as a detention center for bad players in other SOE games?  Now that would be awesome, cheaters and assholes from Planetside and EQ exiled to Vanguard.  Somebody get Roosterteeth on the phone!

You could just ask yourself "Is the Matrix Online playable?" and answe your own questions.

So SOE is going to buy out Verant Sigil and take over the development of Everquest Vanguard?

Wonder if Brad will get his old job back - Chief Creative Officer, wasn't it? Something like that, anyway; whatever translates to "You can come up with ideas all you like, just stay the hell away from actual development"

No. He's going on his own to create the defnitive MMORPG he always wanted to do.
Right?

Yup.  It's Going to be a Totally Unreal Revolutionary Dynasty.

I think he'll shorten that tho.

Once again...

Vanguard, lol

Maybe he can join the Areola team with Raph. It can be a thejeni thing, all your old dev friends!

This is all the more amusing because I know a guy who quit to take a design job at Sigil just three or four months ago. He was all starry-eyed about the game, too.

I tried hard not to laugh, but it didn't work so well. We don't speak any more. :)

Ask the Matrix Online.

EDIT: Fuck, Slog beat me to it. DAMN YOU, SLOG!!!!

Can SOE realistically afford another sinking ship?

Fook, the have (rumored) two MMOs in development (the DC online and the spy espionage), SWG is in the toilet, EQ doesn't appear to be doing all that great, EQ2 is steady I think.  Planetside is, well...Planetside.  MxO appears to be on it's death gurgle.   

Sony as a whole seems to be tanking rather badly.  What am I missing?  Where are they getting all this cash?

The Station Access Pass can cover up a lot of stinkeroos.

It really makes me feel dirty.

EQ probably costs next to nothing at this point and is probably bringing in at least a hundred million a year.  I'm sure EQ2 is making a healthy profit also.

You can bankroll a lot of stinkers with that kind of cash flow.  Not only that but it makes gambling on future cash cows very attractive even when you have just had a recent spate of stinkers.

Last I remember, SOE claimed to have 600,000 subscribers on all of their games (before they stopped giving out numbers). This was before Matrix and Vanguard came out. If half of those are Station Pass customers, that's almost $9 million a month in revenue. That can hide a whole lot of fuckups, especially when Matrix, Planetside and EQ1 are all likely operating on skeleton crews.

Well, EQ1 just had Another expansion, so I'm not sure how sparse their operations are at this point.

Yeah, suppose you're right.

Given that a publish takes 3 months to come out for SWG, it seems it's on the 'skeleton crew' roster as well.

EQ still has 100K plus subscribers right?  Anyway you cut it thats around 100 mil+ a year into the system.  EQ has long since paid back any investment of capital, it's all gravy at this point.  Even if they are running a large team of developers and support and including the hardware support costs that still leaves a sizeable chunk of cash for (and lots of incentive to create) other projects.

(http://www.theoldcomputer.com/Libarary's/Pictures/NESGameCovers/D/Donkey%20Kong%20Jr%20Math%20E.jpg)

100 mil?

O.o

$15 x 12 months = $180
$180 x 100,000 subs = $18,000,000

/scratches head

New math?  Or am I doing something wrong?

Does this mean the no central community service "find your own damn information" test is over?

Viklas?

I imagine that Brad and company are standing around waiting to see if LOTRO will fall on its face. Since Turbine's latest effort seems to be widely regarded as decent (it's certainly more stable and feature-complete, with better word-of-mouth), there's really no chance of any significant migration of bored WoWers flitting over to VG.  Not that people have been leaving WoW in significant numbers anyway, but in Brad's shattered, grieving mind, that was going to be a big source of revenue.

And of course WAR is up next, with an actual PVP component and the expectation of a solid release a la DAoC.

Things look grim.   :heartbreak: 

For Brad, I mean.  Great for us. 

Yeah, that was pre-coffee break.  My bad.  Some how when I did it in my head I came up with a much higher number.  18 mil isn't nearly as impressive but you can still fund a lot of crap with that kind of steady income.

Those 20 and 30 million dollar budgets aren't all at once, they are spread out over 5-7 years.

I don't know why people always assume SOE is hurting for money.

I don't know. Huge budgets. Game after game falling apart. Two modest successes that would seem to only have enough revenue for their own good.

I can't think of an SOE game that didn't at least break even if not make money. I could be wrong, but it's not likely.

Edit: Hell, they probably even broke even on MxO. And that's not even their game. They bought the stinker. Just saying though.

According to this brief review of the launch (http://lotro.warcry.com/forums/read/116.41116), things went well on the first day, at least in terms of people being able to create accounts and log into the game and actually play.

Nothing about the dev team posting massive daily patch notes.

So, at least from a technical standpoint, it's doing better than Vanguard. We'll have to wait and see how it stands up in terms of subscriber retention, of course.

It's actually a pretty smart modus operandi, from a purely mercenary point of view:
Wait for MMOG to begin imploding.
Buy for a pittance when the original owners are desperate.
Sack 90%+ of the dev team & put development on minimal life support.
Outsource CS to SOE-Calcutta
Drop onto SOE All-Access.

Pretty much everything from then on is profit, minus a trivial amount of hardware costs and a handful of dev salaries (See: Planetside, MxO, SWG, etc).

People also forget that it wasn't Sony that put all that money into Vanguard.  MS wrote off millions.

I would pay hard cash to watch Brad bitch and moan and cry at this point.

The tears of that kind of agony and infinite sadness...they probably taste good, too. :evil:

Think of the epic-level armor polish those would make!

Brad probably made enough money in the 5 years of Vanguards development that the only tears he's crying are the tears of joy when ever he looks at his bank statement.

SOE isn't hurting for money, despite multiple failures. I'm sure EQ1's profit is enough to keep it floating for a while. And Gods and Heroes should be out this year as well, which is likely to do decent if not stellar business. I'm quite sure they paid diddly-squat for Vanguard: Brad essentially sold them the publishing rights for 9 months worth of dev money.

http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=8569

I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth starting up already.

I don't like being vague, but sometimes it really is best when coming out of the horse's mouth.

I can't wait to hear how he spins things. There's no doubt this was all part of The Vision or sommat.

ah but the trainwreck of a game is the vision: "..almost every aspect of what we sat down and envisioned when we were two guys in a garage talking about the game we wanted to make, has been realised..." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuO9JUqVEzg&mode=related&search=)

Still, i'm amazed that they have job openings on the company website (http://sigilgames.com/currentopenings.php)

Big long post, supposedly containing a quote from Brad Himself. VNBoards. Scroll down. (http://vnboards.ign.com/Message.aspx?topic=102628138&brd=22523&start=102628178)

Same topic, linked from FOH, so omg slow to load. (http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/28347-brad-posting-sigil-soe-future-monday.html#post718740)

Also, the "new home" of Brad McQuaid at SOE. (http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/forums/show.m?forum_id=17) He's scheduled to make an official post on Monday.

Oh lord, tell me they haven't completely lost their minds. A Console Programer  (http://sigilgames.com/displayopening.php?openingid=12) listing on Sigil's openings page.



Emphasis mine. Other duties will include stretching a 22A cup bra around Rush Limbaugh.

Hm.

Why would anyone allow him to continue making games?

Why are people still giving money to developers like, say, NetDevil?

He still doesn't get it. A 2400+ word post and nothing in there about actually making the game fun to play. It's all about "oh we need better marketing" and "we need everybody to buy completely new machines so that they can play our game".

Lol.

Edit: Should have read through the end before posting:


Hohohohohohohohohoho. Oh man. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh man. Too funny.

The funniest part was the line that followed:


Does he have any sort of understanding of retail at all?  You don't really get do-overs.  A year from now this game will be in the bargin bins and isn't going to have the shelf presence required to add a few hundred thousand subscribers.  They won't even be able to justify working on an expansion pack anytime soon in order to keep a box on the shelf because the core game is still so unfinished.  I'm sure they'll eventually offer free downloads of the game, but even that isn't going to create the kind of leap in subscriber numbers he's thinking of.

SOE aka Sony has enough pull to get/keep boxes onto the shelves. I can still buy a box for SWG at a local store for gosh sakes! I also recall seeing a "Station Pass" package that had multiple games in it so that sort of thing is an option as well if they want to keep the number of SKUs down.

I do agree another year from now isn't going to make a difference, especially if SOE is running things. Though they have improved EQ2 substantially since launch, they have not been able to improve the number of subscribers. That lack of marketing ability bodes poorly for Vanguard.

Pretty sure SCEA ain't paying for SOE's shelf space.

SWG has had a few expansions, plus it has the SW name on it which I imagine must still sucker people in from time to time.  How many places do you think you'll find Planetside or even Matrix Online at though?  Station Access is a possibilty, but selling the game as part of a package isn't going to do a lot for Brad when he wants to claim sales and subscriptions are up.

MxO was pennied out in EBStop. Planetside, eh, you see that around every now and then for $9.99.

And that's pretty much the fate that awaits Vanguard.  It's the game in the slightly worn box you see on the shelf for a few bucks, and ask yourself if you're bored enough to pick it up and play it for the free month.  SOE pushed this thing out the door rather than throw money at it until it was ready.  If Brad thinks SOE is going to want to relaunch the game in a year with a big marketing blitz he's in for a bit of a shock.  At most, maybe they'll fly you out there and tell you about all the dramatic changes they're making to the game.

Or they'll bundle it with an expansion of EQ2. Oh that would be so rich.

I was thinking about the ramifications of SOE taking over Vanguard and it dawned on me that the way SOE has handled things has been so cunningly evil EA is probably going "damn we wish we had thought of that first!". SOE forced Sigil to release the game early knowing the game sucked and would tank, and now they are in position to scoop up what's left of the flaming wreakage for a song. If they had given Sigil the money to let them keep working on the game for another 6 months (okay another year, at least), the game might have done better at launch and then Sigil would have some leverage to negotiate with SOE instead of basically being forced to give SOE whatever it is SOE wants.

BTW, AFAIK Sigil still owes Microsoft a crap load of money. MS basically allowed Sigil to write them an IOU to get back the rights to Vanguard -- that's how badly MS wanted to get rid of that thing. That's one of the reasons why Sigil went looking for VC money -- they needed to pay back MS. And now they are in a deep deep hole and the only one around looking down to see what's at the bottom is SOE.

EA, at least, buys up successful development houses before sucking all the life out of them by making them do endless sequels, working them like slaves, and forcing them to uproot their lives. Of course the fact that Vanguard sucks is not SOE's doing -- Sigil did that on their own -- but SOE cunningly took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself and sabotaged any chance the game had at doing well initially, as I said above, to minimize the acquisition cost.

As schild would say, "Well played, Mr. Smedley, well played."

That Sir Bruce translation by Itzena is comedy gold.

Here's the thing about Sigil and why I'm not really in the SOE is evil camp.

Vanguard wasn't going to be a good game. We knew that when we first heard about it, and every step of the way they proved us right.

That development, arguably, wouldn't have made the game any better had they had another 6 months to a year of money left. In fact, I'm not even sure that anyone in that development should be in gaming. The art is terrible, the concept art was terrible, the performance was shit, the optimization was shit, the music and effects sounded stock, the design was - at best - amateur hour. I'd like to see ANYONE, including members of the dev team prove me wrong.

Normally, I'm willing to bend over backwards to defend a dev team or game. But only 2 games in history have garnered as much distrust and anger as this one. Everything about the game, head to toe, was karaoke night at Applebees. It was a goddamn joke, and honestly, SOE should gut that team to hell and back and keep only the MAYBE talented but misguided few on board. And McQuaid should be sent to the London f'in Tower.

Edit: Just for the record, I'm sure a lot of blood, sweat and tears were put into Vanguard. I'm SURE there are talented people on board on the title. I'm SURE those people would and may still do great stuff elsewhere. Unfortunately, blood, sweat, tears and unrequited love don't make a good game. You have to know what fun is first, and the design team behind Vanguard doesn't have a fucking clue what fun even means let alone what it "is." And it's utterly fucking astounding that the person who is often credited as the brain behind Everquest couldn't make a fucking diku clone. COULDN'T CLONE HIS OWN DAMN PRODUCT WITH MICROSOFT BACKING. That man should be quarantined.

Oh, and get him off the internet, his posts are filled with more bullshit than anyone else's I've ever read. And I read some pretty arrogant, pompous trash.

What are the other two games ?

I was wondering the same thing.

Also, this seems like as good a time as any to drag this back out.
One year later, Brad is still SOE's bitch. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/05/10)

Brilliant.  Someone please give this man more money.

I am going to guess Daikatana and Battlecruiser.  Perhaps SoulReaver 2, but that may just be me.  No, wait, Blood 2... I am reminded of that one thanks to playing F.E.A.R. recently.  Stupid Monolith.

I'm still playing Vanguard. Am I enjoying it? Yes, I am. Why? Because amidst the continuous crashes, the nonsensical quest progressions and unprepared content, there's still a lot of love found within the game. Its easy to overlook when the whole process of playing the danged thing is so daunting to the average end user.

Can Vanguard be salvaged? In other words, is there enough in the game right now to warrant a salvage operation? That's hard to say, since I have no idea how endemic the problems are within the coding.

New Targanor, the main Thestran city, crashes and quite routinely kills dozens of players in it on a hourly basis. Its been dubbed the Targanator in my guild. This has been going on for months now, without any word from the dev team regarding the problem.

There are huge dungeons that are not strategically placed. There's an entire level 18 theme park area, complete with Diablo-like villagers wanting your help to rid the area of the evil denizens, in the middle of a mid 20s zone. Noone plays there, because some moron at Sigil didn't place it within the area designed for the teen levels. Its this kind of unbelievable mismanagement that has one scratching one's head. The area itself, however, is well developed, has a plot line, a decent mini story, etc. Its just completely unused.

Toons still routinely get a complete make over due to random server crashes. You can log in one day and find your toon looking completely different. There's no reset button, either. You have to go to the character select screen and remake your toon to your original specs. As if aware of this problem, Sigil hasn't bothered to fix the problem, but provided a 'save customization profile' feature at the char gen screen.

Its nearly as if the entire dev team at Sigil is operating at 1998 level of customer expectations, and has been blissfully in the dark for the last 9 years.

My only hope, since I personally want Vanguard to survive, is that SOE goes in there and busts some serious chops.

Well, you've sold me.

(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2001/20010618h.gif)

Thank you. :)

Indeed:
:-D

If you're subtly hinting that this was you :  Write more HERE.  That piece made me laugh long and hard and I don't do that much these days.

I am very rarely on that sort of form, unfortunately.

Your post is getting laughs and forwarded around on an internal company mailing list here. Two people just happened to be having a flamewar about whether/how much Vanguard sucks and one of 'em whipped out the FOH link.

I might grant you that the game is karaoke night at Applebees.  I did play it for the first month, I gave it an honest try.  Too painful.  The music and graphics ARE sweet though.  That's a fact.  As for the problems with the game, they are numerous and we don't need to really go into them.  The real issue is, of course, a lack of common sense.  Let's cut the hysterics.  What the fuck do you expect Brad to say?  Honestly?  I mean, not that I even care I just don't understand in what reality you exist that anyone would ever just come out and say "hey, my game sucks!  i suck too!  basically i'm so incompetent i deserve to die!" 

Whatev.   The point is, he's not the first to make a crummy game.  I think he's actually been pretty forthright about shit if you read between the lines.  Consider a company like Creative Assembly.  medieval 2 Total War is severely crippled by bugs, and the patch fiasco going on right now is sort of a paen to corporate incompetence and poor customer support.  And I think you'll find that's fairly common.  Whereas, this guy Brad actually cares/is desperate enough (same thing) to write his ass off all over the internet.  Why would you begrudge him for that?  Be real.

Edit:  The difference between old sites like Lumthemad et al. was that those people actually played the games they criticized in an effort to make them better.  I saw your Vanguard review, there's no way in hell you even gave it a chance. 

Brad talks game but has never proven us otherwise. While I can name a shitload of companies that do that, not many of them are public in the way MMOG companies are - especially in the way Brad and his Vision are. Basically, he needs to shut the fuck up and make something decent before he gets the time of day.

Also, Vanguard was pretty fucking brown ugly. But that's total opinion.

Unless cheddar bob finally bought you that new PC, you wouldn't have the specs to see the game in all its glory. Subjectively you might not like the graphics.  But subjectively I don't like Doesteovsky, even though objectively I can recognize him as a good writer.  I just don't get the Brad hate.  He seems like he has TTH (tries too hard) but at least he tries.

If he's trying too hard, maybe he's just not good at making games.

I can't see why anyone would ever claim that though...

Oh, and I didn't play it on my PC.

If it makes you feel any better I only singled you out because I knew you were the least likely to stub your vagina.

The problem is that he shouldn't say a god damned thing.  If he had kept his inept trap shut there would have been 1/10th the ridicule.  He is actually giving people a target to point and laugh at every time he opens his mouth.

He, and his game, would be in a better position in almost every way if he would just shut-the-fuck-up.

No, they aren't (at least the graphics aren't, I have no idea about the music).  WoW has good graphics because it had competent art directors even though it's only pushing 1/4 of the polys Vanguard pushes, if that.  You can have the most complex rendering system imaginable, but without competent artists you wind up with flat, uninspired shit and wolf heads on human bodies.

That isn't "sweet" graphically.

ETA:  I doubt that Warhammer has anywhere near the graphical bells and whistles that vanguard does either, but look at the screenshots...  That was artwork produced with care and love, and it shows.  It has a distinct style beyond the "blah" that constitutes the artwork of either Vanguard or EQ2.

To each his own. Wolf heads aside, the detail on many of Vanguard's art is stellar, imho. An industry first in many instances, from what I can see. Warhammer's art is the same fisherprice regurgitated codswaddle WoW offers the kiddies. You're welcome to it.

That said, the basic premise of the argument, that you don't need reams of polies to make good art, stands.

I think one reason Warhammer is going with the graphics they are, is that the focus of the game is big PvP battles, and having high-end graphics are sort of counterproductive to that goal.

They also mentioned that re-doing the artwork for Dwarves/Greenskins was high on their list of things to do (Early alpha movies and all).  I would expect it to change over the next coming months.

MMOG's are no longer special. They no longer get more than 30 minutes to not suck, just like every other type of game out there.

Besides, I played Vanguard before I ever actually played it, but I played it back when it was called Everquest. McQuaid needs to stop thinking it was his "creative genius" that made Everquest and MMOG's popular, instead of the perfect storm of timing, timing and timing.

What Dusematic sees as trying too hard, I see as:

(http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/5087/ineptitudecp5.jpg)
,
(http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/6682/incompetencebu2.jpg)
,
(http://img464.imageshack.us/img464/9585/irresponsibilityyn9.jpg)
, and finally
(http://img469.imageshack.us/img469/1952/overconfidencetz2.jpg)

You can't compare LTM and a modern MMOG site and completely ignore everything that has happened in the 7+ years between them.  At least not without sounding like an idiot.

Yes, when Lum ranted about EQ1, he did so to try to make the game a better one.  Do you think Lum would have kept playing EQ1 and ranting about it if there were dozens of other MMOG games out there?  He probabaly would have shrugged and found a game that was more to his liking (and then maybe rant at that one).

You win sir...

SOE has already started rezzing VG, with today announcing a HUGE server merge, giving a patch yesterday with 309 bug fixes, fixing what's left of hitching, falling thru world and into meshes, lowering amt. of crafting complications, fixing houses and even throwing in a few  new features.

And that's all before VG devs could get cozy in their new home (or lack thereof). Of course, it's probably already too late with the biggest servers pulling in just a couple hundred players at a time. That's what, 2-3 WoW servers?

That's one tenth of a single WoW server.

Yeah, I think queues on a WoW server cut in at 3500 players now.

Or roughly the number of people inside the Ironforge AH during prime time on a given realm.

Speaking of SOE server merges I heard an interesting thing from somebody while playing CoH a couple of days ago.

I've been creating lots of alts these days trying to figure out if there's a power set combination that's interesting enough to do the grind all over again and have been grouping with lots of people who are playing on Trial accounts, for some reason. I like to ask them what other MMORPGs they've played to get some idea of their general MMORPG experience and one person I talked mentioned Matrix Online and so we got to talking about that.

He said that the SOE server merges in MxO ruined the game by sticking more people in each remaining server than they could handle. He mentioned something about people standing on top of each in phone booths that I didn't quite understand but given how poor the networking code was in that game when I tried out the Beta I'm not surprised it was more than the server can handle.

This sort of thing reminds me companies that buy up other failing/struggling companies, fire most of the people, and keep just those assets that are profitable with high margins -- e.g. maybe the company had some lucrative service contracts or something. They are basically "efficiency" experts and are able to wring out profits from otherwise poor/failing/crappy products.

Apparently after the debacle that was EQ II this is what SOE decided they were going to change their business strategy to -- buy up crappy MMORPGs for really cheap, ruthlessly cut costs, and then just live off of the relatively small but steady stream of profits.

This is not to say that all server merges are bad but it's clear that that's one way SOE can cut costs. The probably even have lots of surplus server hardware lying around originally allocated to EQ II and SWG that they can use to move these other games onto.

Pardon, I meant all the servers of VG combined ;)

With the server merges, populations still shouldn't exceed that of launch. No worries of overpopulating.

They bought MxO to get to DC Comics.

They bought Vanguard as a last laugh.

They have 4 good sized offices and more games in development than any other American MMOG office.

As such, I disagree with what you said.

Maybe that's a strategy they are using as a revenue source to fund their new developments.

It's a legitimate strategy.

I think what's closer to the truth is that SOE realizes that a poorly launched MMO is an extremely undervalued property and that with a competent team of developers they believe they can make a profit off of buying these discounted properties and 'fixing' them to a moderate level of usability and completeness.

I don't agree that they simply buy them and then ride them into the ground.  All indications are that SOE invests a good bit of money into the games after they have picked them up.

I didn't say they weren't making money off of their strategy. But really their history other than EQ has been to develop or to buy up incredibly underwhelming games. SWG, PlanetSide, EQ II, MxO, Vanguard -- they are just missing AA and AC2 and their collection would be complete (I'm ignoring the crappy MMOs from the smaller publishers). I thoroughly expect their upcoming games to be underwhelming as well.