Funcom gutted.

[Nija]

That has to be the worst "We just fired an ass load of people" statement I've ever seen.

My CEO had a bad one awhile back. The terms "right-sizing" and "realignment" were thrown around.

[WindupAtheist]

WW2OL has volunteer GM's, there's only 15 people working on the game total so it's the only way CRS can handle it.

'Corse most of the time I get a GM warning in game, it's from a guy already on my Mission channel.

Too easy.

I keep hearing that WW2OL is kinda good now, or at least much better than it used to be. Turrets pop off tanks when they get hit hard enough, they don't fly, etcetera.

[Comstar]

Hitting a tank in WW2OL hard enough won't cause a turret to pop off...you need to hit the *ammunition* to do that. Tigers, with their large ammo trays like to do that a lot.

(Apologizes for Thread derail)

1.29 Patch for WW2OL came out today: FPS is up (especially for older machines) there's now a training instance for noobs, all but the big cities have nice looking 3D buildings (as does some largish parts of Antwerp), 2 new fighters (and a rebalancing of the fighter progressions) and hopefully with the Chinese version going out CRS will be able hire more than the current 15 people they have.

[Arthur_Parker]

A few posts by Koshira on ten ton hammer forums, maybe I missed it but didn't see this posted.

These are from 21st to 23rd Nov.

Funcom has been laying off staff for the past few months. They did a round of layoffs in early September and did indeed let another large chunk of people go again on Wednesday morning.

Funcom also offered a severance opt-out to the QA and CS personnel in the states, which seems to have been a very popular choice. At a guess, it would appear that 90% of their workforce in the states is or will be gone by Monday.

Fortunately, almost no one actually plays AoC anymore so this shouldn't affect their ability to handle Customer Service; AO has a higher petition load. I imagine the volunteer programs will pick up the slack, though quality of service will suffer quite a bit since they are not even remotely empowered by Funcom.

This is all thanks to some wonderful decision-making on the part of the management team, whose 1337 skillz should have been evident to anyone who has played AoC or paid any attention to the launch.
__________________
Former (NDA lapsed) Aliases:
GM Rakoshi - AO and AoC Fraud Investigator
Assistant Director Divergence - ARK Academy

I don't have exact numbers, but about 60 people were laid off on Monday.

After September the CS levels were consistent for a game with a population of about 200,000. Many of the GMs who were cattle-called in directly after launch, when petition levels were higher than could be handled, were fired before then as well for misconduct (cyb0ring anyone?) or were generally incompetent and a drag on the system.

The current US department is now about the same size as it was for AO alone. By the way, the US wages are the lowest in the company, but the job protections are not even reminiscent of those available to the Norwegian employees. I'm sure the Norwegian side of things is getting hit pretty hard as well, but I can't speak to that.

The main problem is that FC has always used an approach of relying on CS to put out the fires that are the result of bad coding and sloppy testing. They'd rather spend dollars on stop-gap measures than on fixes. This is why after several years it still requires a GM to update the Uncle Bazzit quest if it's dropped at a specific time and why Afirce's book 4 never spawns properly; this is why the Dust Brigade quests give the wrong nanos and why if you're not close enough to the Beast on a kill you won't get credit for the Profession Star quest. AoC has some of these as well, and with a lower CS staff the support will simply not be there to put those fires out.

It's definitely a financial situation. If you've looked at stock prices lately you'll see why, the company has lost a load of value since going public. If I were to guess, FC is preparing to either hand off US licensing to another company or sell the game altogether. Time will tell.

Edit to add, I didn't play AoC, is this video fairly accurate?

[Zzulo]

I never met a roleplayer

[Falconeer]

[Falconeer]

Edit to add, I didn't play AoC, is this video fairly accurate?

Never met a single roleplayer in the two different servers I spent the last 7 months on. I guess they are all on the carebear RP server though, for all the good reasons the video explained very well. Cool one, by the way.

[Soln]

"AO has a higher petition load"

that can't be true.  ?

[palmer_eldritch]

Edit to add, I didn't play AoC, is this video fairly accurate?

Never met a single roleplayer in the two different servers I spent the last 7 months on. I guess they are all on the carebear RP server though, for all the good reasons the video explained very well. Cool one, by the way.

There were roleplayers on the RP PvP server I played on. People would write in-character stories on the forum about their guild receiving a quest and going to kill some monsters only to find “a band of foul interlopers were already fighting the ettins, trying to steal our glory! Seeing this insult, we drew our swords” and PKd the other players etc.

Edit: Ie, they would go around killing other people in roleplaying fashion.