Alganon

[sam, an eggplant]

It's like an inside joke except the insiders consist of every gamer over the age of 25. So awesome.

God, I hope they let him post on the forums. Please Jesus Mary and Joseph, I will pledge myself to you and join a monestary if you let it be so, I will tithe until I have nothing left, please let this happen, and I will adopt non-white non-asian autistic HIV-positive babies addicted to crack, please, I'll do anything, please. Amen.

[slog]

Serek Dmart making a WoW clone?  This is going to be a trainwreck.

[Fordel]

GAH 

[schild]

I'm making a new thread just for that forum post.

[tmp]

The comedy reaches a level of sublime I have rarely seen.

Well, if someone had any doubts the very existence of Alganon was in fact deliberate troll of the highest calibre...

srsly, this shit can't be for real  

edit: official company press release

[Khaldun]

He "brings a distinguished resume of over twenty years of game development and a reputation for getting the job done".

 

I guess they went outside and tried to see if any of the homeless people on their block would agree to be CEO and when no one would, they felt like there was no alternative.

[sam, an eggplant]

God, I hope they let him post on the forums.

THANK YOU JESUS!

[schild]

God, I hope they let him post on the forums.

THANK YOU JESUS!

There's a thread for that: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=18916.0

[Lum]

There cannot be enough threads for that.

[sam, an eggplant]

I guess now I need to pick me up some urban crack babies with AIDS.

You know what?

SO WORTH IT.

[Nightblade]

God, I hope they let him post on the forums.

THANK YOU JESUS!

How are these people getting hired? Where do I send my resume? Hell, I can use some easy money - all I have to do is act like a giant tool; right?

[Der Helm]

Well, downloader runs at 2 mb/s, there does not seem to be much stress on their servers. 

[Der Helm]

God, that was awfull. Not even Serek Dmart can save this game.

[Sir T]

Not even Serek Dmart can save this game.

 

Still, you cant fault their marketting. This is probably now one of the most famous games on the net. 

[Der Helm]

« Last Edit: Today at 10:32:06 am by schild »

Whooops... sorry. 

[Kovacs]

God, that was awfull. Not even Serek Dmart can save this game.

What does that mean?

[Aez]

For those that missed it, he commented on his Gamasutra article:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php

[K9]

God, that was awfull. Not even Serek Dmart can save this game.

What does that mean?

He comes if you call him

[Lantyssa]

I wonder if having this guy against you counts as positive resume material.

It also seems like he's straying awfully close to the "please keep talking, my lawyer is taking notes" line.

[Der Helm]

God, that was awful. Not even Serek Dmart can save this game.

What does that mean?

The game is incredibly boring. The classes are called: Soldier, Ranger, Healer, Magus. I kid you not.

They have subforums for Damage Dealers, Tanks and Healers.

I managed to get to level 5 (took about an hour, I guess) as a Magus. I spammed 1 spell for 3 levels, got an upgrade, spammed that for 2 levels and got an AOE variant of the same spell.

The graphics are bad. They look cheap and the design of the starting area is uninspired.

The quests are standard 10 rat tails and FedEx quests. There was one quest that made me almost quit right there, I was told to run to location X, the guy there told me to run to location Y. That's it. (Fed Ex gives you 50 xp, killing a rat 3 levels below your own gives you 150 xp)

The only good idea I saw was the option to train some skills offline (Think Eve's skill system). You could train things like Athletics (more Stamina), Intelligence etc. There also was something called Social Skills, according to the tooltip those open "special" quests.

Still an awful game, though.

[Kail]

The only good idea I saw was the option to train some skills offline (Think Eve's skill system). You could train things like Athletics (more Stamina), Intelligence etc. There also was something called Social Skills, according to the tooltip those open "special" quests.

Wait, so catasses will have to quit the game to go "level up" their "Social Skills?"  Is that actually as clever as it sounds?

[Sir T]

Well, its the only way cattasses will ever gain any social skills... 

[Der Helm]

The only good idea I saw was the option to train some skills offline (Think Eve's skill system). You could train things like Athletics (more Stamina), Intelligence etc. There also was something called Social Skills, according to the tooltip those open "special" quests.

Wait, so catasses will have to quit the game to go "level up" their "Social Skills?"  Is that actually as clever as it sounds?

Actually there is an ingame interface but the training keeps running while you are not online.

But your idea is better. I better run and link it on their forums. 

[Kovacs]

God, that was awful. Not even Serek Dmart can save this game.

What does that mean?

The game is incredibly boring. The classes are called: Soldier, Ranger, Healer, Magus. I kid you not.

They have subforums for Damage Dealers, Tanks and Healers.

I managed to get to level 5 (took about an hour, I guess) as a Magus. I spammed 1 spell for 3 levels, got an upgrade, spammed that for 2 levels and got an AOE variant of the same spell.

The graphics are bad. They look cheap and the design of the starting area is uninspired.

The quests are standard 10 rat tails and FedEx quests. There was one quest that made me almost quit right there, I was told to run to location X, the guy there told me to run to location Y. That's it. (Fed Ex gives you 50 xp, killing a rat 3 levels below your own gives you 150 xp)

The only good idea I saw was the option to train some skills offline (Think Eve's skill system). You could train things like Athletics (more Stamina), Intelligence etc. There also was something called Social Skills, according to the tooltip those open "special" quests.

Still an awful game, though.

I was thinking more broadly.  As in, what does it mean for all of us that there's still someone who thinks that adding this retard to any project, in any state could, even using the broadest imaginable definition of the word, save it.

[Draegan]

I didn't think the graphics were that terrible considering the game.  The font and it's size are horrendous though.

[hyuu]

Moving Lum's quote and the discussion here - since I'm taking the conversation in a general Alganon direction, and not about the "Forum Circus" like the other thread.

As someone who had the unique pleasure of watching 2 projects fail from a leadership role, I can sympathize.

Scope creep is constant (I wrote a bit about it) and there will always be pressures regarding scope creep. It's the role of the leads (and especially the producer) to fight against scope creep. Part of your job as lead designer is saying from the start, no, we can't have an eHarmony-for-guilds until we have a working quest system.

Very true. I had a slightly different issue, but it is very closely related.  For me, coming in late in the game, it was "Okay, we have a working quest system - but it works like WoW, the most popular MMO on the market. Do we make it work differently? Or do we add a social networking site? Both will differentiate us. Both will have positive results. Well.... why reinvent the wheel?"  and so I chose things like MyAlganon, Bind on Guild, Dual Roles, etc. instead of changing the UI or graphics. The idea was: if people already enjoy it, and use it, then we should use the cost it would take to change it to improve other areas instead. "If it ain't broke...."  FAIL. Lesson learned.

What I learned (and hope to share here) is this:
Simply post the headline "New Development Studio plans Fantasy MMO!" with no other information, and the first few pages on every MMO forum, and the "truth" in every MMO buyer's mind, will be that the game is another WoW clone. They've seen it too many times to think otherwise. It will take a difficult and challenging (and expensive) fight to prove to people that it is not. If you can't afford to fight that battle, you will fail.

Why? Because the clone label is a death sentence. If you can't break it, you lose. This isn't "Those cookies smell like the one's my grandmother used to make, they must be great!" In the MMO market it is "My grandmother wore an apron. You have an apron. DIE YOU MOTHERF**KING APRON-WEARING GRANDMA CLONE! DIE! DIE! DIE!"

Adding new features doesn't help in that fight - no matter how many you add or how much work goes into them, the words "tacked on" can nullify any new feature in the "Clone/Not Clone Debate." They can make the game fun, yes, but they can't stop people from stabbing you in the face for wearing an apron (metaphorically).

We made the mistake of rubbing our two nickels together and using the warmth to add new features. We should have used it to change the basics. The tech can do it, too, and that makes me feel even worse.

Example of how:
(Trying to avoid WoW language for you here - makes the post longer, but will do. I don't think in words very often, my brain tends to clump ideas together rather than just store them as words. I always have to translate before speaking anyway. Thus the wall of text I leave behind me.)

Winning a battle in Alganon is getting one of the variables of the enemy to 0 before they get yours to 0. We designed one style of play to be "reduce the variable on multiple targets" (Essence Magus) - so this style of play would be the beloved expert in "one-on-many situations where someone else can worry about your variable." Our dual role system meant we also wanted to give them a choice on a second role. The possible choices we decided on were "keep the enemy AI where you want it focused (Storm Magus)", "survive an attack from many opponents (Frost Magus)", "reduce that variable on single target as fast as possible. (Fire Magus)"

(Note: Certain encounters would have gimmicks that break this pattern, this is the "rule" that exceptions won't exist without.)

To handle the "survive multiple attackers" we created a status effect that would sit on enemies (Frostbite). Each time you used it, it would increase in value and if you used it on many enemies, you would soon be surrounded by many enemies with this status effect. You could even apply it to multiple enemies at a time, if you could skillfully manipulate their location in space. The status effect could then be "shattered" off the targets, and this would not only protect the variable of the Frost Magus, but also increase their variable - it keeps them alive. Gameplay would consist of trying to manipulate physical space and number of targets so you could apply this to as many people as possible, then weigh whether or not it was time to shatter them, or if you should build more... This process isn't effective at reducing the variable of the enemy, so the player would need to balance between the "stay alive" cycle and the "kill them" cycle - again, based on physical location, number of enemies, your own variables, and even the presence or lack of allies.

This cycle isn't WoW clone, it's definitely not "Wow Mage Clone" but that doesn't matter. In the ForumWars, it can easily be defeated by saying it is "tacked on" to one.

The cool thing is, that same technology can be used ACROSS teammates to create cross-player combinations. Maybe one player could apply the status, a second could "activate it" and the third can get the benefit. The same status effect can be used in multiple combinations, if I shatter it with action X, it does one thing. If I shatter with Y, it does another. We planned future classes doing this - but we didn't have the manpower (because of the small budget) to get them in.

EDIT- Chopping to split up the wall of text!
EDIT 2 - tried to make a phrase I used sound less "Ooh, he thinks he's so smart" and just point out "my brain is weird" like I meant.

[hyuu]

Part 2:

C++ is not a scripting language. (twitch) What kind of sandboxing did you do to keep rogue "scripts" from eating memory or other bad things? That alone makes AlganonTech or whatever it'll be called unsuitable as MMO middleware. There's a lot of people with experience in Lua (both in scripting it and in wrapping it in a sandbox to expose it to other systems) and reinventing the wheel isn't a good idea here.

Yeah. I didn't touch the code, but I was present in meetings where these concepts were talked about, and offline discussions were planned for solving these problems, and later followup meetings reported them as fixed. I know that we used C++ instead of LUA for speed, and there was much discussion and planning to make sure that the bases were covered and that it was a good decision.

Also, due to the low budget, pay at QOL was low, independent contractors get no benefits (instead, we get the joys of self-employment tax), and work-from-home sounds great until you realize you haven't left the house in days. It can be hard to find people who work well in that environment, so I would guess (but don't know on this one) that it wasn't exactly a cakewalk to find the talented employees we did find.

Reading your post, the impression I get above all is that you were speaking WoW grammar. Everything you describe is in terms of World of Warcraft. If I read a design doc that has the words "...like in World of Warcraft" and isn't intended for an executive (who scans for the "like thing that makes lots of money" keywords) I want to throw it at someone. As long as you speak in WoW grammar you will develop a WoW clone and it will be a poor WoW clone because you dont' have WoW's budget. That's not saying that something has to be different from WoW for the sake of difference, but taking 4 or 5 steps back and looking at a system outside of the WoW continuum might give you some room to look at things with a new perspective, and introduce gameplay that differs from WoW in a good way (and systems are a very cost-effective way to differentiate yourself).

I agree. Only once did I hear of us accepting "because WoW does it" as a valid reason to do something -- that was the fact that we wanted to make it a walk in the park for people to bring UI interface mods over from WoW. David's plan was: If you have a favorite UI mod in WoW, you should be able to make the Alganon Equivalent without starting from scratch. It still has to be changed to match all that we added and changed, but make that as easy as humanly possible to do.

The rest of the time, there needed to be another reason, or it didn't fly by me. I'm not a fan of "calling people out" in a meeting, but I always took people aside privately and made sure that was the case.

Unfortunately, "because players shouldn't struggle trying to figure out what to do" is "looks like WoW"'s conjoined twin. Often, you can't afford the bills it would cost to kill the monstrous one without also killing the good one - but dammit, if I had a time machine, I'd go back and force myself to kill them both. Good twin, be damned.

Hopefully this explains a lot - I'm willing to answer any other questions people may have in this post - in fact, to answer the question before you ask it: I am a "such a retarded ass clown" because I knew we didn't have the money to make a "WoW Killer!" but I didn't realize the hatred that came from the similarities would prevent us from being profitable enough to make better games. Totally my fault. Sorry. Please stop stabbing me now.

[Grimwell]

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo....


Aside from the what do you guys think about the Graveyard for this? 

[Sheepherder]

There's a reason Schild didn't create an Alganon subforum, I think.

I wanted things like: The Dual Role system - where your class (including the insanely simple class names) made it easy to find who you need. If you are losing the fight because you don't regain HP fast enough, you know to call in a healer. Always. You don't know that in other MMOs. (Rebuttal: Lolwut?) You'd assume you'd want a priest or paladin in WoW, but WTF, they are all shadow and retribution! ... Uh, which one is the healer? So, we gave them simple names and a primary role -- but one role per character is boring. So we made it so you have 2 roles - the first, "fits the name" role, you get just by leveling (level and the skills/actions/attributes are unlocked) and the second is a choice - not just a "pick one at level 3" but a "choose one skill at a time to make your own role!" choice.

Warcraft more or less does this: you're allowed two specializations you can swap while out of combat, most classes can fit two or three roles, they've recently updated all the class descriptions at character generation to tell you exactly what each is capable of, and the new LFG tool allows you to specify which roles you want / are capable of fulfilling.  Tank / healer / damage isn't new and exciting, and Blizzard hasn't been idle.  The only chinks in Warcraft's armor at this point is that some classes are single-role, that you need a tank/healer for most group content, and that the shortage of people willing to play tank / healer subjects DPS to longer wait times for instances.

DIKU is Blizzard's hunting preserve.  The only way to escape from being ran down and having your skull turned into a trophy for Blizzard's wall is to not go there, and it's only going to get worse as Blizzard continues to refine their system, the pace of which actually appears to be accelerating.

[Mrbloodworth]

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo....


Aside from the what do you guys think about the Graveyard for this? 

I think one thread is enough, It has always seems to me that the graveyard was for games who had such potential, or even some really compelling things about it, it just didn't live up to expectations (or the pulse here had weakened and the bat country party bus crashed).

I believe to get a graveyard plot, a game must first have a MMO sub forum.

[rattran]

Plus, these threads DELIVER. I don't see this fail-train coming to a halt any time soon.

[Azazel]

Why? Because the clone label is a death sentence. If you can't break it, you lose. This isn't "Those cookies smell like the one's my grandmother used to make, they must be great!" In the MMO market it is "My grandmother wore an apron. You have an apron. DIE YOU MOTHERF**KING APRON-WEARING GRANDMA CLONE! DIE! DIE! DIE!"

I skipped most of the wall of text after this bit, and skipped the following post entirely.

The quote above makes me feel that you still don't "get it". It's not the cloniness. It's the "like WoW, only not as good" factor.

I mean, I haven't played WoW for going on 18months now, and I do play around in LOTRO, which in many respects is a WoW clone. It does have some major points of differentiation though. Visually/Graphically, it's not like WoW at all. And the IP. Back in the day I'd have gladly played SWG if it were EverQuest 1 reskinned, but instead Raph clusterfucked it intop SimBeru, complete with Wookee hairdressers. With LOTRO, It's nice wandering around a 3-d representation of Middle-Earth. Going to Weathertop, visiting Elrond in Rivendell, and then reminiscing about the part in Peret Jackson's films where Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry grinded slugs and evil dwarf bandits for an hour and a half to achieve some deeds.


Didn't/wont play your game though. But here's an example of what BF:BC2 calls Epic Fail, that has nothing to do with Granny wearing an Apron.

The quests are standard 10 rat tails and FedEx quests. There was one quest that made me almost quit right there, I was told to run to location X, the guy there told me to run to location Y. That's it. (Fed Ex gives you 50 xp, killing a rat 3 levels below your own gives you 150 xp)

Yeah, that playerbase is just never happy..   

[Der Helm]

I never logged back on.

[UnSub]

As a rough rule of thumb, if you are cloning a competitor product (especially the market leader), you can't just make it a bit better and expect to see customers come on board. Customers already have things invested with the original product and, in the case of MMOs, that investment can be huge in terms of both time and money.

In order for a competitor clone to come in and start to grab some market, it has to be about 10x better than the original. How you define 'better' is hard, since it can involve a lot of different aspects, but I'm willing to believe that, having not played WoW in years and Alganon ever, that Alganon is not 10x better than WoW.

[raydeen]

The only word that comes to mind for this game is 'insipid'. It's like going from drinking the world's most wonderfully cold and full bodied bubbly lager to drinking some nasty warm flat metal tasting near-beer. It wouldn't have to be a WoW clone to fail. It just doesn't have any charm or depth and even if it were free, I wouldn't want to log in because there would be no enjoyment in it.