There’s a lot I can’t say about Mythic right now. But there are three points I can make, in direct defiance of silly children on message boards:
One, the people who lost their jobs today were not just a few extra QA folks, or a couple world devs hired on for the big push to completion. The pile included some very senior people, people who expected to stay at Mythic until they retired.
Two, many of them were good people who deserved the loyalty they’d been told so much about. If anyone reading this happens to be hiring (people still do that, right?), please give me a buzz.
Three, um, and I say this with love, but the mouth breathing troglodytes who post on boards in between bouts of masturbation and nosepicking should probably shut the hell up about how this was EA’s evildoing at work. I don’t know firsthand what EA was like before they bought out Mythic, but if “acting like adults” and “allowing the studio to set their own expectations” and “paying a decent wage by the standards of the game industry” are bad things, I don’t want to work for a good company again.
[...] Must….resist…saying….anything…. [...]
[...] DAOC’s former community diva Sanya Weathers defies the message board trolls [...]
EA was good for Mythic.
Living wage – good HR practices – good level setting and expectations for people about jobs and roles.
Training – and a hands off experience.
EA was good.
I’m a bit ashamed to have supported Mythic both through subscriptions and hopeful words over the years after seeing how all of this went down. Many of these people deserved a lot better than this, and I simply don’t see how the decision makers can justify how shamefully they walked away from their promises. I guess it’s just unacceptable to admit failure from the top down, roll up your sleeves and let the talented people you work with get down to the nitty gritty of helping you build a sustainable studio.
I don’t see EA’s hand in this… mistake of a situation. I lay that responsibility directly at the feet of the one person who will never begin to grasp how lucky he is to have been in the situations that he was, and how much of a fool he has been for not working with people instead of carrying a bucket of sand around both to bury his head in and to consult for advice, often after talented people have done good work which he seems drawn to thwart.
But hey, I’ve been wrong before~
How does one give you a buzz? I don’t see a contact email anywhere…
nm =/
[...] since Massively posted (and withdrew) their names. Twitter accounts seem to verify this, ex-Mythic employees are spitting mad, and there’s a huge negative whiplash going around the community right [...]
I’m not sure what everyone expected, honestly. Current MMO business models don’t take into account the WOW horde that will descend upon any new MMO and inflate the starting sub numbers. So everyone assumes WAR is a failure because the subs dropped to 300k, and huge layoffs ensue.
Is anyone really surprised? We all knew the subs were falling, EVERY MMO’s subs fall dramatically a couple months after release in this post-WOW world. Since I’ve never seen any official recognition of this fact, I assume MMO studios just don’t want to think about it, and don’t incorporate it into their expectations. Hence, huge layoffs when people realize OMIGOSH most people who bought the game never intended to play it more than a month, because they have lvl70s and they’re adding 10 more mins of grinding to lvl80! Add a neverending recession to that, and you have this little story.
It sucks that it happened, but it seemed pretty inevitable to me.
I’m of the opinion that most people working at game studios are good people, and I know first-hand that they never start with the people they SHOULD be laying off. This is just sort of a fact of layoffs, and derives from the only real fact, which is that layoffs suck.
I don’t think loyalty has anything to do with it either. If you have to cut people, does that automatically make you disloyal? Do you only cut people that haven’t heard much about the company’s loyalty?
Off-topic, I love reading your site Sanya, and still wonder why Mythic ever let you go. I hope you get some satisfaction out of the fact that it takes 5 “community managers” and a few other “announcement people” to do the job you were so good at, and that nobody really knows their names. I remember checking the herald every night before I went to bed, just in case Sanya Thomas (as I knew you then) had posted anything.
First off, look at who was cut. It wasn’t the people who were brought in to help launch the game. It was long time, hardworking people who did their jobs well. Many of the newer people (at whose feet could be laid a good portion of WAR’s lackluster numbers) are still onboard.
Second, these are people who were long promised a forward thinking working environment, who then showed up to work and were told they could make an appointment to come clean out their desks. All this followed by an announcement that this was somehow an expected post-release downsizing. If it was so expected, why weren’t any of these veteran employees given any warning? Yes, these are tough economic times… all the more reason to treat the people who helped you shape your studio with teh respect that they not only deserve, but have certainly earned.
No one I knew on WAR (not senior management) has been surprised by the numbers. 1M+ box sales in 2008 and around 300K-400K subscribers after 3 months was the general prediction. Of course one gets the sense that Jacobs and Barnett tend to drink their own KoolAid, so it may have been a complete shock to them.
Does anyone have a list of people who were let go in this round of layoffs? It seems many are talking as if everyone knows, but I am truly interested in seeing how bad of a decision Mythic did, in fact, make.
Ugh. Managing the forums has been difficult today. Point number three is something I was tempted to type in all caps and at the loudest font size but there is such a thing as providing an example.
My Twitter and Facebook were inundated today with notifications regarding the fallen. My best sympathies and good luck for those who will need to seek other work.
I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that so many people were let go or that certain people posting on forums don’t miss a beat in our layoff threads with the nonsense epic fail/insulting junk, not having a care in the world that people’s livelihoods were overturned. Livelihoods, you know, that thing you do where you pay bills to eat, live with a roof over your heads and generally get through life?
The insensitivity of the anonymous mass on the internet is staggering. You can only banhammer so many of them.
Your blog has really set off some fireworks over on the main WAR VN board Sanya. So far 3 threads referring to it have not only been locked but deleted. You’ve obviously hit a nerve that deserved to be hit. It’s sad to see MJ and Co. resorting to VN thread deletion as a method of PR control. I’ve been a loyal Mythic player since the SI days – I’m *quickly* losing faith in their ability to deliver promised fixes as well as their “working as intended/borg the naysayers” response to constructive criticism. My thoughts to those affected by the layoffs.
Re: Paul, It’s been linked over in our neck of the woods too. I’m a regular reader, but managed to follow the link here.
What’s written here at Eating Bees and the main Broken Toys site is always an interesting read.
Concerning Mythic’s new product, and its relationship to Wow. Before playing Warhammer, I honestly expected them to retain more of their initial playerbase. My reasoning is that is assumed that any given MMO has a retention of it players on average of about 3 to 4 years and it thus becomes a bit stale. Given that WoW has been out for approximately that long and has brought in such a massive influx of new players, there should be ample opportunity for a well executed game to pick up 500k or more subscribers.
Concerning the layoffs, I am said to hear when it happens to undeserving folks. As a person who has worked for an aircraft engine producer I have been through several layoffs, and they always seem unfair.
Am I allowed to say <3? Because I’d rather like to.
I’m a long-time fan of Mythic, at least since the launch of DAOC. And I was really, really looking forward to the launch of WAR.
When Sanya left aburptly, I was really worried about the company and the game. When I got into the early beta, I was pretty disappointed with what I found. Now to see that the laid off Spyke (among many others). Wow! These are the folks that built Mythic.
Time was I thought Jacobs had a head on his shoulders. Now he seems to have lost it (literally… as a corporate leader, his behavior is downright irrational).
Im deeply sorry for the layoffs and my thoughs are with you guys, but i cant simply understand why are all of you so negative about us, the forum posters.
WAR is figthing tooth and nail with Age of Conan for the “worst MMO in history” award.sadly the hundreds of flaws it shows cant be excused when most of the are CORE design NO-NOs.
Maybe in a post-WoW world going from 1.2m to 300k subs is ok. or maybe not.
but for sure you are dead on spot when the game is a half assed WoWish that doesnt please anyone and fails to deliver a third what it promised.
WoW players will rather take WoW’s PvE over WAR’s since is far better executed, richier and more diverse. DAOC players wholeheartly hate a game that managed to prostitute the RvR term into what we are showed here.
It is the chronicle of a death foretold.But as i said, im sorry for those fired, since they probably had nothing to do with the terrible way the game has been designed. Hope you all find a decent studio and make great games in the future.
Xavi said: “WAR is figthing tooth and nail with Age of Conan for the “worst MMO in history” award.sadly the hundreds of flaws it shows cant be excused when most of the are CORE design NO-NOs.”
That’s the kind of overstatement that’s helping no one.
WAR is no where near “the worst MMO in history.” Not even close.
What it *is* is a major disappointment to Mythic’s core fanbase. Seeing how many of the talented people who built Mythic are no longer with the company (and were being ignored while they were with the company), I’m beginning to understand why that is.
It is enormously unfortunate that this has transpired. I feel truly sorry for those who are losing thier jobs.
Over the years I have watched the decline of customer service that contributed to making Mythic Entertainment a great company with a great product in DAoC.
The upside is Blizzard is hiring. Wonder how that would go over with MJ? lol
Nice blog, got some firepower still i see, and the famous humour
Im sorry i must have missed when you left mythic, but you know how narrowminded europeans are :p And ofc its been a while since i played dark age…
The news of the layoffs are frightening to say the least, that was the last thing i was expecting from mythic right now. But i must agree with the game has 2 points, pve and pvp. Pvp is broken at the moment, and the pve in warhammer is…well…stupid. no fancy words for it, it just lacks any suprises or original ideas. DAoC was laced with great variety even in pve encounters, what happened to those? And 1 thing i have always wondered, who was the genius who came up with the 3 specline/baseline idea? the man should have a medal. The whole mechanic gaming system behind DAoC was a well designed as AD&D….mostly great, some flaws too, but always fun!
Best of wishes from denmark to you sanya
It’s pretty evident that this brew began bubbling long ago, and isn’t the concoction of the peons ordered to amass and measure its ingredients.
Re: Xavi
Unfortunately the reason for the issue, at least as far as our forums are concerned, is not that people have a negative opinion, but that some of them both do not know the time or place to convey it nor can do it in a manner that isn’t overly dramatic or productive.
Saying the game is “the worst MMO in history” is unhelpful. Saying the game has underperformed in subscriber numbers due to stability and content issues in T4, crowd control imbalances that need to be addressed, and the general state of MMO development/player feedback cycles is.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s a small merit to the “angry mob” mentality, but I’d take 1 well-worded, constructive criticism that is negative over 100 “epic fail” posts any day.
But those things have a limit to being discussed in a thread where people lost their jobs, in my opinion. I literally had to moderate something someone said today about literally wanting to punch developers in the face for failing to QA their game, hence the layoffs. I mean, really? Those people can get bent.
[...] two most recent posts at one of my new favorite blogs, Eating Bees, sets an interesting stage. Sanya [...]
As a side note, the VN boards are the Tortuga of warhammer forums. The best utility WHA added was the dev tracker that pulled all dev posts from VN, so people don’t have to break out an enviro-suit to see what MJ has to say for himself. That’s how bad things are over there.
Back to the point, layoffs are by their very nature unfair. If they were fair, they’d be calling them bonfires, and people would be “fired” instead of “laid off”. But they can’t do that, because most of the people that work there are great people, and deserve their jobs.
It’s kind of silly that MJ tried to spin it as “pre-release” and “post-release” staffing, but what do you expect? He’s not going to come out and say “Sorry folks, we’re only making 3M a month, and we expected to make at least 5M a month, so here are the people I booted today: . That’s really the only reason these guys were let go. It sucks, and the game will suffer for it, but there it is.”
And Sanya, I’m wondering what you would propose they do in the face of cutbacks. You have written huge essays about how the little devs with families get paid in peanuts, while the “very senior people” get paid 10x that to do less work and take all the credit. So what’s the right answer? Sacrifice 10 or 12 QA interns for every senior guy that’s oh so loyal and deserves his loyalty returned?
@Malaal: That’s an excellent point, and I blush to admit that in my first reaction I didn’t think about it. In my defense – this layoff caught both category one and category two, and a few category threes (loyal people who were paid peanuts). So it was all over the map.
But that’s not really a good excuse for allowing an emotional reaction to override internal logic. Mythic WAS a family for the first few years I was there, so I’m afraid the news had an extra dimension for me.
Now that I’m calmer, I think you could safely describe my point of view as that I feel, in general, that layoffs should focus on those who made the decisions that created the need for layoffs – and that in a layoff year, senior executive bonuses should under no circumstances be given. And please note that I have no personal knowledge of what bonuses went to whom in the last three months, so don’t take that comment as a specific indictment.
@Sanya: I agree with you there, at least in theory. The people that caused the layoffs should get them. Reality is seldom so accommodating though, and I’m of the opinion that there are many reasons behind the “need” for layoffs in this case, and very few of them have to do with the performance/decisions of the employees.
The WoW-player tsunami is a very real part of the MMO landscape now, and needs to be taken into account when a new MMO comes out. This is something Mythic failed to do, and it led directly into these layoffs. They can’t really be blamed 100% for that however, because the WoW-tsunami was only really a suspicion after the release of AoC; Warhammer was the release that proved its existence.
Once MMO studios learn to compensate for the WoW-tsunami, you’ll see less of this “pre-release/post-release staffing” nonsense. However, you’ll also stop seeing large spats of hiring shortly after a release (remember all the new community people back in Nov-Dec?).
Part of the problem some of these companies are facing is the fact that they think their game is going to be a WoW-killer. History has shown that anyone who tries, fails and fails hard in the end.
Take a look at Eve. They don’t even being to try to be a WoW-killer. Their subscriptions are fairly stable (some say growing), and the game still gets updates and improvements. I’m not a fan of the game, but many of my coworkers are. By not trying to “dethrone the champ”, they’ve carved out their own little corner of the MMO-universe for themselves.
My deepest sympathies to those who got let go. May they find something that suits them soon.
Ah, Calarius, but therein lies the very nature of the problem (especially when dealing with a strategy by heavy capital rollers such as EA’s lead Trip Hawkings) – they don’t seek out to carve a small niche, retaining a small staff and making a good, moderately profitable, livable income.
They look to charge on the walls and swing for the fences, creating the next WoW, making millions.
This is what the VCs and DeepPocketsMan(tm) which invest in them are looking for (or were, before the latest economy crash).
And when one project takes a dive, it is written off as a tax exempt and the losses are covered by the one project that does manage to kick off and rakes in an obsene amounts of money.
The irony to all of this is that, before WoW, Blizzard were releasing “smaller” games, slowly and steadily, and building up their income and consolidating their fan base, while turning good profits considering all factors involved.
After a decade(?) of doing this, they launched their MMO, by then they had all the finely tuned experience and potential customers to make it a success.
Origin also had somewhat of similar experience with Ultima upto UO.
Something a very old man, who came to the country with absolutely nothing as a holocaust survivor and worked his ass off and saved penny to penny until he had enough to invest further and ended up creating a nice small local “empire” (a family business and owning lots of real estates) with decent pockets, told me is that “with small profits there are no losses”.
And EA, too, started as well from merely publishing “small” games and making decent profits.
Certainly, their strategy has netted them quite a nice fund, but as anyone can see this just isn’t working anymore.
Neither is the ever-rising costs of game development to meet the so-called demands of a gamer public, which doesn’t even know what it wants really.
And until it is realized that blowing up the budgets and making better graphics just aren’t going to cut it when attempting to spend five million to make in fifty million with the same old publishing model that isn’t applicable at these scales , companies are going to rise and fall like mushrooms in the rain.
@Ramification, You hit the nail on the head about Blizzard. They already had the Warcraft franchise well established before World of Warcraft was released. With the success of Starcraft and the Diablo franchise as well, Blizzard set themselves up for success from the beginning. They already understood adventure, player-vs-player, online gaming, and they had a universe rich in story and legend to work with. Plus, they have the benefit of having still much more to offer players in the form of additional story lines that they’ve only slightly touched on. WoW is by no means perfect, but Blizzard did it right by leaving room for the game to grow and evolve over time, while adding content for everyone to enjoy.
It is possible to make the “next big MMO”, but the only way to do it is to not try to go after what WoW is, but to try to find a new direction to go. I believe there is some promise in pending games like SW:TOR, Stargate Worlds, and Jumpgate Revolution. Two of these franchises already have a large following and a lot of story to work with, while the last is a newcomer with some promise. We’ll see if any of them have learned anything.
Hello Sanya, see you’re still alive and kicking over here. I visit now and then to see how you’re doing and to read what you have to say…
Being a computer programmer supporting DaoCamelot via a template maker (GearBunny), I pay close attention to Mythic sites on a daily basis. There are many threads on the VN-Camelot General boards referencing this article, and much speculation going on about this. I’m not sure what to believe regarding these layoffs so far, but hopefully sometime soon there will be more official word (Not to disbelieve you in a bit, I will look upon official word with a touch of skepticism thanks to this article.)
Thanks again Sanya, I shall be checking your blog here a bit more often now…
[...] Link [...]
@ Malaal
Speaking as a member of the so called “WoW Tsunami”, I can tell you this much:
I went over to WAR with a lot of in gmae friends from WoW. We were expecting a pseudo DAoC 2 with a new IP, but instead found a game that was missiing a lot of what made DAoC great. All of my friends, along with myself, ended up back in WoW within three months. Most of my WAR guild moved back to WoW.
But before we start being dubbed a “WoW Tsunami”, let’s be clear on a few things. We WANTED to love Warhammer, we had old school table top Warhammer fans, former Games Workshp employees, DAoC RvR fans. They had us at hello.
We were met by a watered down PvE experience, an imbalanced RvR experience that got worse the higher up he ladder you climbed, and a game that in many ways felt unfinished. We were very, very dissapointed.
We came from WoW. We are back in WoW. But here’s the real secret of your “Tsunami”:
Make a good game, and people will stay. WoW set a high bar, we expect a polished experience for our $15 a month, Release a pay to play unifinished beta and you will lose a lot of people that trusted you enough to buy the box and play a month or two.
(Maybe if MJ , Barnett, and co. had listened to the heretics instead of “burning” them, these layoffs would not be happening. Makes you wonder exactly WHO should be getting laid off, doesn’t it?)
I think Sanya hit the nail on the head, the people that made the decisons that brought about the sorry state of affiars should be the ones laid off, not the poor people that did.
Another thing that I think Mythic had going against them in general, was that there wasn’t much fan buildup of the Warhammer IP. Even when I was a dedicated DAoC player, all the way through ToA, I didn’t even HEAR about the Warhammer game until a friend of mine (who was massively into Warhammer 40k, and knew a ton about the backlore) told me about it and that it was Mythic that was putting it out there.
If Mythic had offered free sneak peaks (Exclusively to members of the press and DAoC players) of the game several months before the Beta opened up, that would have been a good way to generate consumer interest.
Releasing a game that was at BEST buggy, unfinished, and untested reminded a LOT of ex-daoc players (myself included) of the DAoC launch, at least from the Hibernian point of view.
@ Ashendarei
You hit the nail on the head. The Hibby experience at launch was a painful one, I remember being in dungeons that had no loot tables. All that dropped was coin, while all the while Midguard was looting weapons and armor.
I think there was enough of the game that was different from EverQuest that a lot of us stuck around during the growing pains. In a post WoW world, where people are used to a highly polished game, devs can not expect that a majority of us will be willing to do that again. I understand now that Mythic ran out of money and launched DAoC. With the deep pockets of EA behind them, and an experienced team, you have to wonder why one reminds us of the other.
Again, I think it is sad that the loyal footsoldiers are the ones paying for mistakes that were clearly made by those in charge at Mythic.
@Jeff R: Your example is my point exactly. A bunch of people just like you “left” WoW to go try this new MMO, didn’t like it, and went back to WoW. That’s the WoW Tsunami. It’s going to keep happening with new MMO releases too, because it’s ridiculous to expect that all WoW players will leave for a different MMO. You’re always going to have a large group of WoW players that aren’t actually going to leave WoW, even if they buy another game and try it out.
The reason you in particular left WAR really doesn’t matter that much in this context. Lots of people had their own perfectly valid reasons for leaving, just as they do for staying. It doesn’t disprove the existence of the Tsunami, because again, it’s ridiculous to expect that no one will return to WoW even if they release “the perfect MMO.”
I learned a long time ago that a lot of things in life are like football teams. People just have their team, and everything else is just inferior to them. A friend of mine grew up playing EQ, and I grew up playing DAOC. We used to get into bitter almost-screaming fights with each other, because we didn’t understand how someone could like such a stupid game compared to ours. The WoW-WAR debate is very similar to this. Neither side is wrong or right, they just have their team. Both games have problems, depending on who you are and what you like.
I personally couldn’t stand repair costs, and buying ammo, and instance-grinds, and money-grinds to get my mount, and daily quests, and pvp-grinds, and my-gear-is-better-than-yours-so-i-get-the-terocone gankers, and what-is-your-AP-lol-you-can’t-do-karazan group leaders. But it all boils down to this: WoW is not my team, WAR is. You feel differently, and that’s OK. It’s great even! It means neither of them has taken over the world yet.
@ Malaal
RE: People loving different games, I could not agree more. I think it is great to have choices. Some people, God bless ‘em, are still die hard Ultima Online fans after all these years. I moved on to EverQuest when it launched. And that’s the problem with your theory.
I could just as easily flip it and proclaim a “Crappy Unfinished Games Tsunami”. We all get tired of the current MMO we play eventually. It’s a simple fact of MMO life, thus the need for expansions. Their are more than a few WoW people looking for a new home, not just looking to try whatever is new for the sake of trying, but they have standards. They are used to a certain level of polish.
I am talking basic things here, like being able to link an item in chat, along with more refined levels of polish. WAR didn’t even have simple little polish items like that at launch. When all my friends and I left UO for EQ, we stayed for a long time. We were looking for a new home, and found one, that in our opinion offered us more.
The WoW vs all other Western MMOs debate boils down to one key factor in my mind. You may not like some of what WoW does, or a lot of what WoW does, but if you are even within a field goal’s range of being open minded you have to admit for the most part what WoW does it does very well, with a high level of polish.
What WAR did it did with varying degrees of polish, or complete lack of polish. It’s one thing to say you don’t like buying ammo. (Which is going away in 3.1 btw).
It is another thing to say what most MMOers consider basic UI features are missing at launch, the core of the game, being RvR, has severe balance issues that they are STILL trying to address, along with the watered down PvE, lack of real low level dungeon crawls, etc.
Grind is in every MMO to varying degrees. I never really feel like I am grinding in WoW. I can quest, I can dungeon crawl, I can fish, I can cook, I can do a lot of things. I don’t rush to max level. It felt more like I was grinding in WAR because when I wanted to PvE all there was PQ’s, which were generally to empty to complete, or quests. The crafting system lacked real diveristy, there was no real genuine dungeon crawling in the first several tiers.
Is it a “WoW Tsunami” or a “Crappy Game Tsunami”?
I lean toward the later, because your basic hypothesis points to the fact that there are many WoWers looking for something new to call home. Most of my friends wanted nothing to do with WotLK. We worked hard for our arena gear. To have to level up and start fresh in the arena was not something we looked forward to. There are many other reasons people are looking for a new MMO home, regardless of flashy new expansion, that is but one. But the reality is we are waiting for someone, anyone, to hit the damn MMO ball out of the park again. Give us a base hit launch, with promises to work hard and patch in, and we will walk back to something more polished.
People are willing to try, but the patience for empty hype has grown thin. Honestly, as I cast a jaded eye out at the MMO landscape, I have been burned enough that the only MMOs I really want to try at launch ar DC Online, though even that scares me because it is SOE, and SW TOR.
Bioware has always delivered the goods. The IP of course is firmly in place. It would be silly to label anything a WoW killer, but if anyone can make a game that is polished enough to hold WoWers looking for a new home, it is Bioware.
@Jeff R:
Sounds like you would enjoy a game that’s been out a few years better than one that was just released. I would suggest waiting 2 or 3 years before trying a new MMO if a high degree of polish is what you’re looking for. Linking items really isn’t something I was ever interested in; it’s a nice feature, and they added it eventually, but overall I don’t really care.
The horrible rvr imbalance you’re talking about, in my experience, is basically that the other team worked together better in that situation, or just has significantly more numbers. It’s frustrating, and it makes me want to grab everyone’s controls and take over, but I never got the impression that things were horribly imbalanced.
Good luck finding that game that springs fully-formed from the heads of the devs, with all content in place and perfectly balanced classes; I think you’ll be looking awhile. Or maybe you’ve found it, and you can keep playing WoW forever.
@Malaal
It is a shame that you decided to be condescending. The mindset of developers needs to change. The MMO market will no longer put up with games that are released terribly unfinished and without the MMO basics in place and working well. The average MMO player does not like frustration, the game is there as an escape from everyday life, as a way to relax.
The games that have not done well recently have not lost subscribers because they were inherently bad games (Vanguard had some great ideas). It is because they were terribly unfinished and people will no longer accept that. These days there are a few alternatives for videogame entertainment and they are not necessarily all MMOs.
Until developers actually realise that unfinished products are not acceptable by the mass market then games will continue to struggle to wrest players away from other titles. We all know that MMOs are harder than other games to produce, and that they can never be perfect at release. But knowing this does not give developers carte blanche to put out whatever they feel like and expect the playerbase to pay to play while they continue to develop.
I hope those that were laidoff can find a good studio to work for. Hopefully there will be a paradigm shift for MMO developers and in the coming years the genre will be able to grow and flourish and job security will be available once again.
I’ll be blunt. Why didn’t Paul “Turn ‘em into a Chicken!” Barnett get laid off? If WAR flopped or floundered and he’s the guy who claims responsibility for the creative direction… it seems to me you put 1 and 1 together and get 2.
But what the hell do I know?
@ Malaal
If you don’t notice the imbalances in RvR, which even MYTHIC has acknowledged, you either have not gotten past Tier 2, or are a fanboy to the extreme.
The simple fact of the matter is if you release an unfinished, unpolished game, you’re going to lose a lot of subs. Period. You’re not doing anyone any favors, you’re certainly not helping the developers, especially the ones getting laid off. You don’t think that they knew the game wasn’t finished?
Until we as a consumer base force the suits that make these release decisions to realize most of us won’t accept an unfinished, unpolished game, history will keep repeating itself.
In the long run, resorting to oversimplified arguments and blaming it solely on WoW will only result in more of the suits that run this company thinking they can release shoddy software, and sadly, more layoffs. Notice that the suits never lay themselves off for poor decisions?
You may like WAR. Great. But the simple fact of the matter is several months after release there are only 350k out 1.4 million + that bought the game. If you read around other message boards, and listen to what the majority of the people that left WAR think about WAR, I think you will find many agree with me. We are not wrong for demanding quality for our hard earned money.
The thing about management though is it never sees itself in the wrong… one of the nice perks about being self-employed or in management is you can’t really fire yourself. Firing/layoffs always go down the chain…
Read a quote that one of those ‘in trouble’ bank ceo’s that asked how he was expected to live on 18 million a year…
@Sasquia:
My point is that MMOs are never “finished.” they are always unfinished, by their very nature. The idea that WAR was “terribly unfinished” at release is silly in my opinion. All the basics were there (the real basics, not the silly linking items basics), and the game was stable relative to all other MMO releases in history.
Also, Mythic never admitted to losing subs, or at least I didn’t see that in the report. Since they never gave sub numbers, there isn’t a number to compare 350,000 subs to. What they had was a lot of people buy the box, and either sub for a month or 2 or never sub. We’ll probably have to wait till next quarter to see conclusively if sub numbers are going up or down.
The problem I have is with people calling WAR unfinished. OF COURSE it’s unfinished. If it was finished, EVERYONE would have gotten laid off. All supported MMOs are unfinished. WoW is unfinished (quite terribly so atm i hear). DAOC is unfinished (they still release patch notes last I checked). Not finishing the game is what keeps MMO devs employed. The fact that they’re unfinished is what makes playing MMOs the awesome hobby that it is.
If you want a finished, fully realized game; don’t buy an MMO. A finished MMO is a dead MMO. (look at HG:L)
@Jeff R:
Imbalances in RVR (especially perceived ones) are a fact of life, it’s not something that will ever go away, no matter how tweaked your game is. Look at WoW: are they all perfectly balanced after all these years? And that’s a game that has identical classes on each side! It’s not REALLY a problem as long as they’re working on it.
As far as the sub thing: as above, we don’t actually know that they’re losing subs. they “lost” a bunch of people who bought the box, and that’s about all we can derive from the numbers they’ve given. This is the problem with the execs as well: they don’t know the difference between “box” and “sub” so the numbers look horrible, and they lay people off.
Also, no one is blaming WoW for any of this; it’s a great game that brought a lot of people into the MMO genre. The WoW-tsunami isn’t evil or wrong by any means, it’s just a natural byproduct of a very successful game. The point of the WoW-tsunami phenomenon is that MMO studios need to take it into account when releasing their games.
The idea that all the former WoW-players would have stayed in WAR “if only they had gotten it right” is overly optimistic to say the least. We now have a large population of people who’s only experience with MMOs is WoW. When they hear about a new MMO coming out, they try it out for a bit, and either they stay because they like it so much, or they go back to WoW because they didn’t like it. Because WoW is so successful, the number of people who do that is higher than at any other time in history, and they create what I call the WoW-tsunami. It’s not malicious or ill-intentioned, no more than an actual tsunami is. It’s not even a bad thing, and some would say it’s a good thing (myself included). But it does need to be taken into account, and it doesn’t seem like MMO studios are doing that. So you end up with these problems with layoffs and such.
While we’re pointing the looking glass at the WaR release can anyone explain the release date. Six weeks before WoW’s second big expansion went live which was also pretty much the same date as LotRO’s first big expansion. Sure you are most likely to have a bunch of players who are bored with current content having reached whatever their play style limits are but in six weeks time their favourite game doubles up. These are really the people you’re trying to build a stable player base from? They’re going to turn up, play their free month and then quit surely?
In context I wasn’t playing either when WaR was released and I had a blast in T1&2 got somewhat bogged down in T3 and was entirely demoralised by T4. I lived through the attack of the tumbleweed servers once WotLK came out and consolidated looking for a fair fight but eventually decided “It’s broken, I don’t need this” and am now happily playing through LotRO’s MoM expansion.
@LabRat:
I wondered that too, but I’m thinking that was a waiting game Mythic couldn’t have won. WAR didn’t intentionally release 6 weeks before WotLK, Blizzard intentionally released shortly after WAR. If they had waited, Blizzard would have as well, or even worse, would have released just before WAR to kill WAR’s box sales.
So they had a dilemma: try to wait out blizzard and release WAR after WotLK, or try to set a release date that Blizzard can’t preempt. If they had waited, Blizzard would have as well (They could afford to, they had active subs accruing and they know Mythic couldn’t wait forever). So they opted for box sales and took the hit with Wrath shortly after release.
Just to be clear, this doesn’t make Blizzard evil. It’s what I would have done if I was top dog and a major competitor was releasing. They know WAR isn’t a real threat, but any money going to WAR is money NOT going to WoW, so if they can minimize the loss they will.
@ Malaal
I find your attitude a rather disturbing one. I feel that attitudes like yours are part of the problem. You play with semantics on a serious issue affecting the MMO industry when plain talking is what is needed.
We know that MMOs always require balancing and tweaks as problems are found with aspects of the game. Everyone accepts this and is not what is meant by saying a game is unfinished at launch. You know this and all you do is demean the entire argument by playing with semantics – which is a shame because this is a really nice discussion.
We all know WAR was not ready for a release. Nor was Vanguard, nor was AoC and nor will Darkfall be. WoW was not ready for release when it came out either. It has become the standard to release a game early with a lot of unfinished content because the longer you delay the more money in monthly subs you can see you are missing out on. Non MMOs do not have this problem as the revenue stream is only from box sales so a delay won’t hurt it as much.
Mythic made a big deal of saying they were only going to take 3 years to develop this MMO when most other companies take 5. I fervently wish they had have taken the 5. I probably still would not be playing as I have fundamental problems with the game design (zone segregation etc). But I wanted the game to be successful whether I liked it or not. We need more successful MMOs that can push the genre forward and actually add some innovation to make each successive MMO just that bit better.
Some people at Mythic were so adamant that this would not be DAOC 2 that they lost sight of making a good game. It was only from massive and vehement feedback during beta that got keeps introduced to the game. It is a shame that for DAOC players the RvR and play experience is such a watered down version. Mythic did it much better in DAOC, and that isn’t just nostalgia talking.
The MMO market will no longer put up with unfinished games. The average MMOer has changed a lot in the last 10 years. They are now much more representative of an average consumer that wants value for money and a product that works. MMOs are for entertainment after all. If they frustrate and annoy the player then it makes them question why they are paying for that when what they were looking for was entertainment and a release from the stresses of everyday life.
I do not think that it is a coincidence that the majority of MMO releases in the last few years have not had successful launches and have lost a large amount of subs.
When WOW was released they were at 1.5 million subs at the 5 month period. They were steadily increasing – and remember this was just the NA/EU. And yet WOW was very buggy, laggy and crashy at release. The difference was that there was this hook there, there was something inherently fun that drew you in and made you want to play despite all the problems (I sometimes think there is some kind of subliminal hypnotic message in WOW). Sadly WAR did not have that for a large number of people. Word of mouth has become negative and the game will struggle to gain subs, other than those who left initially and want to give it another try before writing it off for good.
Well there are some interesting opinions being expressed here. Some I agree with and some I do not, however what made me decide to close my two War accounts was quite simple; The game was not fun for me.
War had incredible potential as far as I could see but it “feels” like it was rushed out the door at the last moment despite the fact that the game was not ready for release. Too bad really. A lot of lost potential.
@ Sasqia
I couldn’t agree more. Nice post.
I guess the reason I’m making what seem to be semantic arguments is that I’m trying to reconcile your comments with what I see in the game. Saying the game is unfinished just makes no sense to me, all semantic misunderstandings aside. It was by far the best release I have ever experienced (only other release I was there for was WoW). All the critical bugs were fixed pretty much in order of precedence IMO, and they’re stomping out the annoying ones as we speak.
I don’t believe it is possible to release a bug-free, perfectly polished MMO right from the start. There is no way to predict what will be important to the paying customers in development, when all they have are a couple closed-beta testers. There is too much risk of polishing and developing something that people don’t actually like. Case in point: scenarios. The focus on the game was going to be primarily scenarios. It sounded like a good idea, and everyone was all for it in beta/the community, because it allowed equal forces to fight each other, etc. Then, after release, people realized they’d be running SP the rest of their lives, and started complaining about ORVR. So now the focus is changed, and ORVR is being tweaked (I’m actually quite excited about it, looking at the 1.2 notes
).
People might complain that the Mythic should have seen this coming, blah blah blah, but the fact is they had no way of knowing, because they didn’t have anyone that was paying to play the game. There are countless examples of this throughout WAR’s release. The mail system, crafting, WBs avoiding each other, CC, etc. are all things that unhappy people brought to Mythic’s attention. It’s not realistic to expect all these things to be working right, because they didn’t have a large population complaining about them before release, so they didn’t know what “right” was.
And regarding WoW’s subliminal addictive message: I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I’m eternally grateful that WAR doesn’t have it. It makes WAR a hobby rather than an addiction for a lot of people, myself and my wife included. They may lose a few subs because of it, but I think overall it is a good thing. Back with WoW, if I only had an hour to play, i just wouldn’t bother. With WAR I’ll go see how many scens I can fit in, or see if I can get a PQ group together quickly.
Things like linking an item in chat are the polish that makes a game worth playing. WAR’s major mistake, beside the horrible RvE End-Game and now capped Fortress fights…was simply one of socialization.
Many of us came with guilds and alliances already formed. We had our server picked out and were ready to play. However, soon after we started it was too hard to stay connected.
We couldn’t form our alliance until each guild reached a certain level. So, many of our guild’s quick starters were hitting T4 days/weeks before the rest of us. But, without an alliance channel to reach out to for others around their level they were essentially forced to do scenario’s as the thought of joining the ‘noobs’ we didn’t know was a crap shoot at best in PQs and/or oRvR.
So, one by one, they hit 40 and within a few weeks to a month they simply stopped logging in…This all happened just about the time our guilds reached the alliance level. By now, the majority of the talk was about how crappy T4 was or how the grind from T3 onward was horrendous…which only fed more into doom and gloom feelings about the game.
Had Mythic allowed us to form our alliances sooner, rather than later, we would have been sharing all the oooh’s and ahhhh’s about how cool this or that was in T1 and T2, but instead by the time we re-engaged with our alliancemates, too many were already jaded.
To be sure, much of this can be attributed to the seemingly A.D.D. afflicted mindset of those over-achievers that were hellbent on getting to 40 within 3-4 weeks. However, had we been allowed /as chat from the outset we could have kept the various stages of players interacting with others their relative level.
I have found that players tend to be more forgiving of a game when there’s more than just 2-3 of us sitting around griping about a game and instead there’s 6-24 of us all working together toward a common goal, keeping each other entertained in chat/vent. While some annoying bug might have stopped the 2-3 in their tracks, the 6-24 brainstorm a way out of the annoying situation while the 2-3 will not always see a way around it as easily and just write the night off as a waste of time.
For a game that’s supposed to be a Realm vs. Realm game, to not allow us to form alliances and find players we feel confident in their abilities from day one is a bit of a huge oversight, IMHO.
Maybe I was a bad beta tester but I cant recall ever doing a scenario in beta (I only got in just before guild beta). I did plenty of ORvR and provided a ton of feedback about how I could already see the dynamic of what they had designed causing problems. I wasn’t alone however. Bugmans had a few people posting their concerns until they were told that even Bugmans was not for feedback because it was off topic.
The beta process and beta forums was the most restrictive gaming experience I have ever had. I was in Vanguard and AoC beta and participated in WoW beta (but only through watching a friend). I believe that having such a restrictive focused beta caused a serious case of tunnel vision during the design process and the game is paying for it now. I was personally threatened with expulsion from the beta for providing feedback that was not on topic – not harping about it but just the one post.
They never allowed the beta testers a full experience of what the game had to offer. Even so a number of people saw the writing on the wall and tried to shed some light on the ORvR issues. Everything else aside the game needed another 12 months of beta, long periods of gameplay uninterrupted – not 3 days between character wipes. AoC and Vanguard were terribly buggy and should never have been released. Yes WAR had a much more stable release but just as much content was missing.
Some say that removal of cities and classes does not factor into the game being unfinished as they were removed well before release. But the removal of the cities dynamically changed the entire ORvR campaign. It focused all the players into the one zone and ultimately into the one fortress. The removal of so many melee classes provided a similarly disruptive influence to combat dynamics.
You cannot design an endgame around a concept of 6 cities, remove 2/3 and then expect it to perform the same. It would be like Blizzard adding Molten Core and having the entire instance full of trash with Rag right at the end. Anyone going to have fun running that?
Honestly, no one expects an absolute perfect release of an MMO. We wont expect it in 10 years time. However we should all expect a game released today to have the same basic building blocks of the MMOs of today. Not of MMOs of 5 years ago. The industry must look forward. You can’t say “well WoW didn’t have Factor A at release”. The fact is that WoW has Factor A now and that it is expected to be seen in any MMO that is released now.
It is like a car being released today with an 8 track player or without seatbelts or airbags but with a promise of upgrades in the future. No one would put up with that in other industries but some MMO players seem to have a mindset whereby they are willing to put up with anything just to have the game released. The problem is that many of these people are MMO veterans, they are the ones that get chosen for beta and they are the ones that are contributing to a stagnation of the industry.
I personally find AION to be exciting as by the time it reaches the west it will already have been played for 9 months by hundreds of thousands of players. This should be a good release. Similarly Star Wars being made by Bioware instils much confidence.
I really agree with Skeetarian. The ability to socialise in the game was very very poor. I loved the idea of the “living guild” but was terribly disappointed with its implementation.
The ability to chat with those outside the guild was impeded by the clunky interface and horrible design. Chat is really one of the easiest things to get right so it is even more boggling how Mythic managed to get it so wrong.
It was a real detriment to the game in those early months and I believe contributed to a number of people leaving. The amount of threads started on forums about the inability to chat and hence the inability to group up with people turned a lot of people off. The open party system was not enough to combat this as an increasingly larger number of people closed their warbands or made themselves anonymous to prevent gold spammers.
An atmosphere of isolationism entered the game and guilds and alliances became little oases in the desert. MMOs by nature are social games. When you can’t socialise your enjoyment is detrimentally affected.
Sure it was a small error in the overall scheme of things but it was such a basic oversight that it shed quite a bit of light on the design ethic that seemed to pervade Mythic. These are outside obersvations though.
The fact that it made it all the way through both closed and open beta into the release of the game indicates, to me, that Mythic truly does not understand the MMO market.
“The fact that it made it all the way through both closed and open beta into the release of the game indicates, to me, that Mythic truly does not understand the MMO market.”
Good Sentance!! I couldn’t agree more on that one.
DAoC had a decent amount of points in its favor (although launch made me want to punch a puppy) right from the beginning, but when I tried WAR I found myself wishing for those broken buggy days in Hibernia.
@ Malaal
“There is no way to predict what will be important to the paying customers in development, when all they have are a couple closed-beta testers.”
This is sadly a pretty typical statement of the average fanboi.
The facts of the matter at hand are quite different. I seem to recall being in beta and poiting out every issue I have poited out these last few days. I seem to recall my entire GUILD being in beta and giving feedback on the issues I and others in this discussion have pointed out.
Let me pull out my BS card and lay it on the table. Mythic knew dang well what these issues were. They had more than enough feedback to delay and fix them. They chose not to, plain and simple, and paid for it as nearly 3/4 of the people that bought the game left it in a few months. You can come up with as many pompous tsunami theories as you want to, but the plain facts are they released a buggy, unfinished game, and worse yet for most of us there wasn’t enough “fun” there to hook us, because they were too busy “burning the heretics” too listen to their testers.
“There is too much risk of polishing and developing something that people don’t actually like. Case in point: scenarios. The focus on the game was going to be primarily scenarios. It sounded like a good idea, and everyone was all for it in beta/the community, because it allowed equal forces to fight each other, etc. Then, after release, people realized they’d be running SP the rest of their lives, and started complaining about ORVR. So now the focus is changed, and ORVR is being tweaked”
The focus was always on ORvR. One of the things Mythic actually listened to was that ORvR was stale and boring. Hence them relenting and introducing keeps. Now we don’t know if they were holding keeps for an expansion or just didn’t think they were a good idea. What we ended up with was a concept that was butchered into uselessness and outshined by a lego castle made by a 9 year old.
Mythic may have trademarked RvR but I don’t believe they understand it.
There was no preconceived notion of ORvR being a huge “zergfest” in beta. The population simply wasn’t big enough to see even a shade of this. Phases did not last long enough for groups to become comfortable with the mechanics and starting from scratch time after time began to wear on peoples patience. Many beta testers I conversed with lost interest in the process and logged in less and less. We even put together a petition to Missy (who responded in a very lovely way) about the overly restrictive beta design not allowing proper feedback on a multitude of issues.
The fact is that the closed beta had many thousands of participants signed up. However many of these fell by the wayside due to the actual process that Mythic designed for them. A more open beta would have provided for a better game.
No one tested zone control dynamics. No one tested the RvR campaign. The closest we got were tiny focused city sieges that lasted a couple of hours. Outside of some internal testing the ORvR campaign was based simply on the designers vision pre-release. It was untested waters under live conditions. The shortfalls of the design were only barely perceived by some beta testers. Now it is too late.
Many people are now looking to the next “big hope” of the MMO scene. I fear that Mythic have really missed their chance at capturing a wider audience. The silver lining – hopefully developers will begin to learn that an MMO is just like any other computer game. It is not some sacred object that is somehow immune to market trends and consumer needs.
Well then. I guess since the game is so crappy, these people deserved the layoffs. The kind of systemic failure you’re describing can’t be achieved with ONLY the higher-ups frakking up, there had to be some contribution somewhere, otherwise what is everyone getting paid for, right?
That certainly makes the reasoning easier: They screwed up and released a buggy, unfinished game -> layoffs.
Millions of screaming WoW players flooding the playerbase of EVERY RECENTLY RELEASED MMO probably had nothing to do with it. Mythic deserved what they got, and by extension, so did the people w/out jobs atm.
It’s a nice simple theory, I’ll give you that.
Since the people who make the mistakes are also qualified to fix them, having written the code/script/whatnot though, they usually won’t let them go though… Instead, people doing support services are generally the ones let go.
Honestly, if they would just fix or have the appearance of trying to fix the problems then no one should *have* to be let go. If companies were like ships, then layoffs would be like throwing useful crewmembers overboard in the hope of making the rations and water last longer for everyone else. Yet if they would listen to their customers and sail appropriately, they would arrive well before the rations ran out and not have to let anyone go. By throwing their ears overboard first, they show that they are not willing to listen, which is the sure sign that a ship is going to sink, because they are so ‘proud’ or whatever of their design and unwilling to change it even though there is water pouring into the hull from dozens of leaks. But by golly, they are proud of their ‘great design!’
Sheesh
Guys, I have been getting increasingly uncomfortable with this conversation. It’s a good conversation, and no one is getting psychotic. Indeed, this conversation should be held. But my blog is not the place for it, for a lot of reasons that I can’t explain.
I’m really sorry.
If you all resume the conversation somewhere else, please bear in mind that you shouldn’t be tossing around “Mythic” so casually. That might have worked back in Camelot’s heyday, since there were so few of us making up the entity of Mythic. Even then the actual decisions were made by a tiny handful of people – and incidentally, while I often disagreed with those people, I also wouldn’t try to run a company any other way.
Mythic is now a huge studio, and while the ultimate decisions for WAR are made by the Executive Producer (the same person was also the final decision maker for TOA and New Frontiers, incidentally), there are dozens of factions. There are… committees. By reducing the responsible factor to a faceless monolith with a single name, you’re overly simplifying the problems and the solutions.
Anyway, if you guys could take this fascinating chat someplace else, I’d be grateful.
At the risk of sounding like a pimp – a friend of mine started up Unmoderated, as a place for people to talk about games without moderation. That doesn’t mean without banning, but the tolerance bar is pretty crazy. I’m writing rants and humor for him on Mondays, but since I’m not the owner, there’s less potential for drama.
No worries Sanya. I love your blog. As an impulsive lass I just have to say though that I think we all know that by using Mythic we know we are talking about a company comprised of many people, just like when people talk of “the government”.
I was really enjoying the discussion and it is a shame that some people cannot remain logical and continue to discuss without ranting.
I shall toodle off, maybe check out that link. Thanks.
@ Sanya
Sorry for making you uncomfortable. That was the last thing I intended, as the one time I did meet you in RL you were very gracious to me. I’ll head off to that link as well.
“…while the ultimate decisions for WAR are made by the Executive Producer (the same person was also the final decision maker for TOA and New Frontiers, incidentally), …”
ohmai
There was another MMO that EA owned / launched / f’ed up. Earth and Beyond. I was fortunate to get to play with the beta for that one. Problem was, once released, EA did nothing about the game. Didn’t fix bugs, didn’t enhance gameplay, didn’t offer anyone anything of value. Earth and Beyond died quickly, and quietly.
The point is, you can say any MMO isn’t “finished” when it’s released, but some companies put more into “polish”, look-and-feel, and nuances that make a game worthwhile. When these things are ignored, failure is pretty much a guarantee, no matter how big your company is.
The sad point of all this is that the people who made the decision to ignore these points still have their jobs. Blizzard has always looked to making their products of a certain production quality. Sure, there will be bugs, there will be tweaks, and there will be enhancements. But they are never pushed to the side just to get the boxes out the door. Remember Burning Crusade? Blizzard put of release for what, 6 months, to get it to what they wanted. They missed out on Christmas sales completely, and still rocked sales numbers.
The moral of the story. Put the quality of the finished product FIRST above all else, and you just might have a winner. Put it at the bottom of the list, and you are doomed.
@Mordur
lol I noticed that little ZZZZING! too.
@Sanya
I’m looking forward to someday seeing a “Sanya Unleashed” blog so I can find out what you really think about all this stuff. Perhaps when we’re all retired and gray. The community manager thing is nice, in a general way, but sometimes it’s a little too obvious that what you write isn’t really what you think. Or at least it’s not ALL of what you think.
Unfortunately, as a public representative of any company a level of discression MUST be maintained, even post-employment.
A lack of discression causes problems, not just for the previous employer, but it also shows prospective future employers that the spokesperson can not be trusted with information and can thusly prevent said person from obtaining a job in the future.
Indeed Ash.
Sorry we made you uncomfortable Sanya, and my appologies if I’ve said anything wrong.
My feeling though, is that with this new person, a new leaf is starting to be turned… Not sure what will happen on that new page, but a new page was definitely needed. Whether it is the final page or not, remains to be seen.
See ya later Sanya, I look forward to the next article
Once again, this blog is a slap in the face to masturbating, nosepicking, mouth breathing troglodytes everywhere.