Vanguard Round 2 - Post Mortem

[Morat20]

Sigil deflating is just an event, and an inevitable one at that.... There's still lots of entertainment left in watching the wreckage settle.

Heck, look how durable the SWG thread has been.

Yeah, but to be fair -- I think there were a lot more Wookie hairdressers alone in SWG than played Vanguard.

[Kitsune]

Inevitable is right, I feel bad for the laid-off people.  It's not as if there was another course for them to choose; there's only one road to follow with Vanguard: finish the game.  If Sigil had enough money to pull it off, they would've finished the game.  Now, instead, they're all canned and Sony's going to finish the game.  Either way the end result will likely be identical from the players' perspectives.  If Sigil just had the capital to stay in operation to the holiday season, I think there would be good odds that Vanguard would've been finished enough to be a decent game that makes money.

But, down the hatch.  So, has Brad posted anything amazing and insightful about sinking his company over on the FoH forum?

[Furiously]

Is this the thread where we sit in a circle and get to tell Schild what we really think about him without getting banned?

And you think he cares what you think about him because...

[Signe]

Shockeye was the one who used to ban people and the only person I remember schild banning was Shockeye.

[Miasma]

He eventually, mercifully, banned tele/hyu.  I think you would have to reach that astonishingly high level of raging asshole before Schild would ban you.  It seems to be extraordinarily difficult to truly piss him off, he lets almost everything just roll off his back.  Even with tele I think he mostly did it because he was making everyone else on the site miserable, not because he personally cared about tele one way or the other.

[Nebu]

I thought Schild also banned "The poster that will not be named" and maybe Boog.  Of course, I could be wrong.

[WayAbvPar]

Most of schild's permanent bans are of people who repeatedly proved that they can't play nice with adults. He is always extremely reticent to do anything that drastic; it is usually the mods screaming for blood that get him to take action (Rasix and I in particular  ). He likes to give people lots of rope with which to hang themselves.

That being said- repeatedly pissing in his face to try to evoke a reaction probably isn't the most prudent course of action.

[Nebu]

Most of schild's permanent bans are of people who repeatedly proved that they can't play nice with adults. He is always extremely reticent to do anything that drastic; it is usually the mods screaming for blood that get him to take action (Rasix and I in particular  ). He likes to give people lots of rope with which to hang themselves.

I agree 100%.  I was just pointing out that Shockeye wasn't the only one to wave the ban stick around here.

[Issele]

Looks like this is totally SOE's now:

Hello Everyone,

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

We are also officially opening up forums. In the past, our deal with Sigil didn't allow for this, but as with our other games we feel this is an important part of communicating with the playerbase. You can expect a strong presence from our community team as well as the development team members. While we realize that Sigil had said they wouldn't open up general forums, at SOE we feel this hampers our efforts to communicate effectively with the players. We will continue to support the fansites in a big way, and will be contacting many of them directly to discuss what this change means. By no means do we want to lose the strong fansite support by making this change, but we do think it's important to have a forum for players to communicate directly with SOE.

A few other items I wanted to mention

1. Brad McQuaid will be consultant to SOE as a creative advisor for Vanguard. Dave Gilbertson will be the person directly responsible for the day-to-day management of both the Sigil Carlsbad office as well as Vanguard.

2. We do not plan on making any major changes to Vanguard. Any changes are going to come from the team itself. We aren't mandating any big changes to the game. We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.

3. We do plan on spending a lot of time cleaning up legacy issues with Vanguard and making sure the game's performance improves.

By way of comparison, this team is approx. the same size as the EQ2 team and I feel like that team has done an amazing job improving EQ2 since it's launch. We intend to do the same thing for Vanguard and it is our hope that the players feel like we're doing right by them.

Smed


http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=9105

[Morat20]

SOE is in ur game
killing ur Vizion.

[WayAbvPar]

SOE is in ur game
killing ur Vizion.

Classic.

[Venkman]

Good. The game has always smelt of hobby. Now a real business running it may do things different.

This still competes with EQ2 though, and EQ2 is largely a better game. Maybe that's the point. All Access let's people experience both, and I can seriously see VG dipping below that "bother keeping up" breaking point. And unlike SWG, SOE can pull this one's plug.

I wonder what Brad is going to do now though. I don't expect him to tell us of course. It's not like we're not curious, it's just that I can't imagine we're necessarily on his good side anymore.

[Venkman]

Just read the GrouchyGamer thing someone linked to. All of it interesting, and already discussed. The part that therefore stuck out for me was different:

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I'm pissed that I wasted 2 years on developing a community at my site for a game that is nothing more than a steaming pile of shit.

I always find it interesting when new fans learn old lessons. VG was never worth getting that worked up about, for a zillion different reasons.

[Merusk]

Just read the GrouchyGamer thing someone linked to. All of it interesting, and already discussed. The part that therefore stuck out for me was different:

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I'm pissed that I wasted 2 years on developing a community at my site for a game that is nothing more than a steaming pile of shit.

I always find it interesting when new fans learn old lessons. VG was never worth getting that worked up about, for a zillion different reasons.

I always suspect fansite operators of secondary motives.  Those being, getting bought-out if they've become a popular, central site for information. Lord knows it's happened enough to feed my cynicism.   So I read it not so much as a fanboi crushed, but a gambler pissed he lost.

[sam, an eggplant]

Looks like history is repeating itself. He never did any work, and his ego got the better of him, again!  Unfortunately I don't know anyone working at Sigil for the inside scoop, and all of those fired were probably given incentives to keep quiet. I guess in this case there probably is no inside scoop; the game faced significant problems in development, was dropped by MS, picked up by SOE for a song, released unfinished with insanely high system requirements, cannibalized for the station pass, and Brad put back out to pasture. Where he belongs.

(forgive the censorship, I don't have the original post, a link to a copy was forwarded to me)

OK, here's the story I heard, from someone still working at SOE SD. I'll start from a couple of years ago.

Kelly Flock spins off redeye/verant basically to give Smedley an object lesson-- surrounding yourself with talentless friends leads to ruin. Brad McQuaid was, and is, one of Smedley's talentless friends. Smedley is a stand-up guy. He'll always protect his friends... especially when he thinks they're directly responsible for making him a millionaire! Verant, the company, was just enough rope for Smed to hang himself. Kelly Flock assumed Verant would fail and Smed would learn his lesson. It didn't.

Brad McQuaid got lucky.

Prior to 1996, he had developed a shareware RPG in his spare time, and he played the hell out of a popular DIKUmud set in D&D's Forgotten Realms called Sojourn. In 1996, he was in the right place at the right time, and seized the oppurtunity to create a graphical version of his favorite MUD. After years of work with a huge team, with a huge budget, with a huge fanfare, Everquest was released in 1998. It made a gazillion dollars and is still raking in the cash hand over fist this very day.

Things weren't coming up roses at 989/redeye/verant. Brad himself had basically done no work whatsoever since Everquest's release, and many (including Kelly Flock) think he didn't do anything *before* its release. Brad thought of himself as infallible, and Everquest's incredible success, his millions, and his ferrari were all proof of his greatness. Being crowned a "Game @#%$" by PC Gamer didn't help either. His self-aggrandizement cannibalized Verant's customer relations for its entire existance. He insisted on being the sole point of contact with the public to promote his own name, and he did a miserable job.

Just this past week, he released Luclin screenshots without authorization and got incredibly defensive when SOE PR got upset. He sent out an email with a smarmy "I've been doing this for years, and the fact is that the screenshots were fine, people just hate change." His first hire for player relations, Gordon Wrinn, was, unbelievably enough, worse.

But people don't, as a rule, get fired from Verant. They quit. Like the lead graphics programmer, who quit a week after Everquest shipped. And his replacement, Brian Hook, who quit in disgust mere months after being hired. Then another EQ programmer left. And another. Then many others asked to be moved off the team.

(edit: as of today, SOE is beginning a round of layoffs. SOE is losing money. This is probably due more to the advertising crash than the pushed-back release dates, though.)

Smedley thinks everybody's happy because Verant had a low turnover. Even though everybody there is miserable, even the staff artists are making $125k/year and can't find a better job elsewhere.

Some were "promoted" off the team. Like Brad McQuaid. He was moved because they were "borderline ready to revolt". They "hated Brad so much they wanted to puke and constantly bitched about him." Now the EQ Live team is "busy hating Jeff Butler with a passion". Butler is a "major Brad lackey". The factions are split "more like 90:10 on the hate Brad/Jeff vs. like Brad/Jeff side. It was BAD." He is "so hated at Verant that out of a team of 60 people less than 10 would go with him. Probably closer to 5."

Note the quotemarks.

So anyway, Everquest made money like crazy, and Flock admitted his mistake. SOE bought out Verant for a tidy sum and Flock accepted Brad because he thought he was "part of the magic". Today he admitted his mistake. Sony Pictures (SOE's parent company) looked at the balance sheet, and Brad's salary, and the fact that titles kept getting pushed back. They essentially accused Smedley and Brad of lying to them about Verant's condition before the purchase, mainly the ship dates for Sovereign, EQ2, SWG, and Planetside. None of these games will ship before 2003, mostly through gross mismanagement.

Sovereign, for example, is Smed's baby. Smedley is Executive Producer on the project, and the producer is his lackey. The producer has absolutely no experience whatsoever in management. He's a former QA tester, 22 years old. The lead programmer is talented but anal and non-decisive. They already sacked the former lead programmer and two designers. The problem is really Smed, but he'll never admit it.

Anyway, Sony Pictures @#%$ itself, and Kelly Flock, who never liked Brad, feels the heat. In the meeting yesterday, Kelly says "Okay guys, this is @#%$, what the @#%$ are you doing?!" Brad and Smed get flustered, some words are thrown around, accusations are made of Brad being a no-talent weenie, and Brad decides on the spot to leave.

When SOE bought Verant, they gave both Smed and Brad three year contracts. Sony Pictures and Kelly Flock were *so* incensed at the cluster!$!% that is Verant that they basically said "@#%$ it guys, you wanna leave, fine, we need to clean up this mess and you're not going to be much help."

Verant as an entity, much like Origin, no longer exists. It's been disassembled and absorbed into Sony Online Entertainment.

The EQ live and EQ2 teams are in shock. Nobody knew that Brad was going to leave. They heard about it the same time you did.

And that's it.


Sam

[WindupAtheist]

*runs to silkyvenom to bathe in fanboy tears*

[Lantyssa]

I always suspect fansite operators of secondary motives.  Those being, getting bought-out if they've become a popular, central site for information. Lord knows it's happened enough to feed my cynicism.   So I read it not so much as a fanboi crushed, but a gambler pissed he lost.

Some really do it out of a love of the game.  At least the site I had the most experience with was that way.  Maybe the owner secretly harbored that hope, but the enjoyment was real enough.

[SnakeCharmer]

Just read the GrouchyGamer thing someone linked to. All of it interesting, and already discussed. The part that therefore stuck out for me was different:

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I'm pissed that I wasted 2 years on developing a community at my site for a game that is nothing more than a steaming pile of shit.

I always find it interesting when new fans learn old lessons. VG was never worth getting that worked up about, for a zillion different reasons.

I always suspect fansite operators of secondary motives.  Those being, getting bought-out if they've become a popular, central site for information. Lord knows it's happened enough to feed my cynicism.   So I read it not so much as a fanboi crushed, but a gambler pissed he lost.

Or the owners of said sites were trying to get a gig as a Customer Relations/Thunderheart/Bloodguard type thing.

[Venkman]

SND post from back in the day

I love that stuff. Thanks for posting! People who lament the "commercialization" that has come to the genre need only review the darker side of the garage-band origins of some of these companies. I don't know Brad at all, but I work with someone who sounds very much like this.

In any case, some people change. Others don't.

[robusticus]

I used to have this theory.  It went, never post on the atranet if you be DRUNK.

However, given recent events I feel the need to REVERSE said theory to ONLY post on the atranet if you be DRUNK!

So...

Brad made some bank there.  It was a sale.  And foregoing any information on debt, I'm gathering SOE (apologies i am a citizen from the land of norrath) is bidding a pretty penny for that pretty artwork.  That's stock for cash.  Who is the majority shareholder of Sigil? 

Smed says Vanguard ain't gonna be a Carebear game.  Well, halahfuckinyulah to that, brother.  Can I resub EQ2 now, or should I wait for the next expansion?

Sad that half the people lost their gigs.  Unnecessary.  But chalk it up to the irony of SOE CCO (er, um, creative consultants) alumni figuring out x8 and x16 raiding "is clown shoes".  But have they figured it out?

A rising tide floats all boats but I didn't notice Blizzard exclaiming any 10 million subs for that ABOMINATION OF THE GENRE *I* ACTUALLY LIKED AND AM GOOD AT bullshit.

They say put out to pasture.  Can the stud eat forever on this sale?

On to workin' the WoWbois.  Cause there is only a "radian of difference, from without".

Don't MAKE me break out the Beyonce lyrics.  Viva, baby.  Just fucking viva.

[Azazel]

I find that even now, I still don't much care and am still only watching this go down as popcorn entertainment.

Viva la suck!

[schild]

Post Mortem you say?

I'm locking this thread, because I'm pretty sure with the above link, we just took it outside and shot it in the head.