Life In Wartime

The bosses knew that if there’s anything CSR should never be short on, it was corniness.

It’s always sad to see layoffs – familiar friends being shown the door.

Interesting how much of it he’s pinning on The Lich King.

@Matthew: I beta tested Wrath, and had already cleared through all of the content in the process of getting the new Death Knight class to level 80. As a result, I was in no hurry to do the same thing over again, and my money really was 100% Mythic’s to lose. Then I actually played the game, and I would have reached the same conclusion (canceled after the included month) even if there hadn’t been a WoW expansion anywhere on the horizon.

In the end, the game needed more time, and could not have it due to the economic era in which it arrived. If you don’t want to be used as a placeholder for a major release two months down the road, you simply can’t launch with 3-6 months of work to get your game up to par and expect that people will sit around and wait. The sad part is that many people who had no responsibility for the situation, such as this former CSR, are the ones who end up suffering the most when it comes crashing down.

Is it normal to have such “enthusiastic” workers? To me, it just comes off as creepy as fuck. Maybe the writer was just embellishing, but that would explain the game’s shortcomings. If you’re so busy being convinced you’re working on the best shit ever, you may not be able to see the forest for the trees.

@Freakazoid:

That sounded normal to me for a group of people that have very similar backgrounds and close to the same interests, placed into an environment where they did a support job that did not take their full attention and they could chat during that timeframe. It is more that you make friends while doing the work, which makes the work much better – when I held a job at the AOL online tech support some 10 years ago, it was much the same situation. Rose colored glasses enter into it as well, as you remember the fun you had more then you remember hating the job.

I think watching how Aion sells will be interesting indeed. It is currently gaining hype around the blogosphere but the hype is nowhere near as high as WAR was. And while Blizzard will most likely be announcing their next expansion at Blizzcon in October, Aion is releasing in September and any upcoming WoW xpac will be 6-9 months down the road at minimum.

@Freakazoid:
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard enthusiastic workers being construed as a BAD thing. Especially when you’re the Customer Service department overseeing the populace and making sure they’re having fun, you know?

Oh come on, WAR first and most notoriely fail was imply that they would beat WoW into submission.

All the game defects could have been tanking longer if they wouldnt imply in every single chance that their game was better. I mean, they do layoffs and then they do that e-peen contest of buying publicity vs. Blizzard??

Im sorry for him and all the guys that got fired, but there its the typical failures that we all are tired of watching, the usual overhype, not listening to the testers when they said “Dude, this isnt ready” (i mean it would have been such a tragedy launching in March-April with even a little of all the money that went to publicity??).

An then we got their original failures, creating Trials of Atlantis AGAIN despite the fact that the original version almost sunk DAOC, creating a game that demands waaaay to much to your computer and your connection, creating a game when it was ABSOLUTELY NECESARY that all the servers have THE EXACT SAME population in both sides(related to the TOA fail) and of course, creating a game where many classes just dont cut it in the “end game”.

I could say that they didnt learned jack since ToA, but they did, the only problem it that all the people that could have told them about the fail were fired.

To Monken and all the guys that were fired in that mess: I am sorry for that, I cannot imagine what it feels being in the wrong end of a recession, but you need to realize that you were in the Titanic.

If anything, the captain of the ship should have dodged the Lich King iceberg(heh) instead of driving at full speed into colission course.

As others have pointed out the end game is just not fun at all. The lag, game breaking bugs, the game engine, realm and class balance, only 2 realms, boring pve, drastically over using a good idea in public quest, not using another great idea enough tomb of knowledge. I can go on, you could write a book on things Mythic did wrong with WAR.
*
As to Aion it is getting a lot of community driven hype and it is releasing in NA at the perfect time. However Aion is already a big hit in Asia, it has I think close to 4 million subs. WAR has failed in every international market it has released. So you really cannot compare one to the other. One epic fail, one already big success by any measure you want to use. Aion also has Lani Blazier as one of the front people for Aion in NA, beats the hell out of listening to the random musings of the idiot that EA allows to speak in public on behalf of WAR.
*
It will be interesting to see if a Korean MMO can be a big hit in NA. After playing the first few beta’s the game play is fun all be it nothing outside of the box, the game works and lag/bugs minimal, after WAR and Conan that alone will make it a short term success. Long term it has potential to hook people if they enjoy and DAOCish/L2 end game.

Epic fail. Trying again:

I LOL’d at this:

“Our game had been beaten into submission by gold farmers, cheaters and WoW’s new expansion.”

Uh……….. yeah. That’s why Warhammer failed…….

Actually, I think what that particular quote is mostly referring to the things that the lack of customer service resulting from layoffs was now unable to combat effectively.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but I think WAR could have really knocked it out of the park if it had released around March/April of this year. People who have not played WoW didn’t get a chance to see the first really big cracks in Blizzard’s armor- the expansion’s content was near-exhausted by Christmas, most casual guilds were crushing the same end-game content that “uber” guilds were, PvP was an absolute disaster with everyone dying in 20 seconds or much less… I actually ended up quitting in April because the game became so boring and frustrating (this is after beta-testing WoW for 8 months before initial release, and then playing for another 4 years.)

WAR could have taken that extra six months, really polished their PvE content, saw what WoW was doing wrong and capitalized during a major stretch of nothing coming out of Blizzard. Instead, it was rushed to market… and I think everyone understands now that first impressions are everything in this industry. I really think that the reason WoW is such a force is that it’s probably the only MMORPG to ever come out that didn’t disappoint many people within the first month. Every other MMORPG’s flaws are very obvious in almost no time, word travels, and the ship is sunk.

If it helps IainC, you WERE part of something remarkable.

… just not in a good way.

“Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but I think WAR could have really knocked it out of the park if it had released around March/April of this year. People who have not played WoW didn’t get a chance to see the first really big cracks in Blizzard’s armor- the expansion’s content was near-exhausted by Christmas”

Agreed very much.

@IainC: This is what I predicted before last fall. It was obvious that (editorial huzzahs notwithstanding) Lich King was going to suck by the standards of longtime WoW players. Probably even more than Burning Crusade, since even more of the original Blizzard team had by then moved on to Starcraft and Diablo.

For WAR, then, it was vital that they be positioned positively in players’ minds when players blew through all the WotLK content as fast or faster than they did Burning Crusade. They could have accomplished this in 2 ways: 1) by winning the game of chicken and absolutely refusing to send the game to print before Lich King released 2) by insisting that their game actually be fun and worthy of being released in the Year of Our Lord 2008 or 2009.

They needed at least 1 of those 2. They could have accomplished both by waiting. They did neither.

The way you wrote it says this:

* There have been layoffs.

* There are less people doing customer service.

* As a result, gold farmers, cheaters, and WoW’s expansion are *NOW* beating WAR into submission.

Actually, what I’m saying is that this is the way the writer of the article wrote it.

You don’t have to agree with it, just try not to misinterpret him.

I was one who was not really ever very excited while playing Warhammer; it being a part of the EA megamachine was a bit of a turn off from the start but I gave it a chance. My first day of playing (right at launch) was getting plagued with a seriously detrimental FPS issue where even on spectacular hardware the game stuttered so badly it was unbearable. I got better FPS using a laptop with shitty integrated graphics. The problem was never fixed during the first month I played it and support alternated from pretending there was nothing wrong to offering stupid advice about defragging your harddrive. There was an enormous thread about it on one of the third party forums which I happened to look up the other day to see people still complaining about the problem. In the end it took me buying another computer for things to get better and even still the game doesn’t run anywhere close to WoW, and both machines were total gaming monsters.

Then the game itself is just really so much WoW with a different UI that going back and forth between the two feels like I’m essentially playing the same game with a different class. There’s not enough differentiation between them that makes it worth maintaining a subscription to me. I restarted a couple weeks ago to give it a try post bugfixes and big content patches and there’s really no big differences. The game (and this is sadly the case for pretty much all the MMOGs post-WoW) just doesn’t divide itself from WoW enough to be compelling to me. Fancy PvP additions and UI tweaks aside, every time I play it I feel like I could be doing the same thing in WoW where at least I’d be leveling my character.

To quote a former veteran DAoC player: “Mythic have lurched from one disaster to another since the TOA release in DAOC, they are a joke, end of.”

This one is good: http://gucomics.com/comic/?cdate=20090625

I wouldn’t expect the cook to know why the ship sunk, but he can still have an interesting story to tell about the sinking. Good read, from an interesting perspective.

Excuse me while I over simplify the shit out of this.

1. War Hammer online failed because it was “essentially” broken on several levels of game design.

2. World of War Craft succeeds because it isn’t broken on most levels of game design.

As far as the CSR spillage… Grain of salt.

@Muckbeast

Well he may have not been privy to the inside details of design. I have a friend at Blizzard (who is a developer on Starcraft) who says there are place’s he’s not allowed to go inside the building.

I know if I were to talk about the short-comings of my former employer (Adobe) and reveal all kinds of inner secrets they’d probably sent me a cease and desist.

On second thought, it actually makes quite a lot of sense that Lich King would impact them quite severely. Warhammer Online was largely molded around the idea of being a World of Warcraft clone that fished in World of Warcraft players… but WoW was not so very out of its prime as to not reel in the vast majority of its players by simply releasing an expansion.

It would have helped Warhammer Online’s case if it was significantly better than World of Warcraft. They had Public Quests, Scenario PvP from anywhere, robust Realm Vs Realm, and a relatively novel class balance, but once you’ve cashed in those chips, it was a modest sum at best. The core gameplay is always the thing, and WAR had imitated WoW to enough of an extent that it just wasn’t novel enough for a player to see the point of transitioning to.

Deep down, I want to blame EA. I’m not sure that’s fair – they’ve been trying to reform since the days they would put Ultima Online 2 on the chopping block, twice. However, I can’t help but think a great deal of corporate expectation is what pushed WAR to be such a blazen WoW imitator that we were saying, “OMG, guffaw, it’s WoW” when preview gameplay videos were being released.

@Muckbeast

I had exactly the same thoughts when reading the article. The closest you get to an insightful commentary is the segment quoted in this blog entry.

I suspect two things:

The first, that the NDA which Electronic Arts has in place is so exhaustive that the guy couldn’t comment on the weather without an attorney showing up on his doorstep.

The second, that he was just a lowly peon, so expecting him to have anything insightful to say about Warhammer Online is like expecting a Private in Iraq to comment on the entire theatre of operations. And what can he safely say, except “it’s great” or “it sucks”? He probably couldn’t get clearance to say either anyway. And that’s the problem; we read this for the “screw you, sir” moments, always few and far between.

So you get exactly what that italicized paragraph at the beginning describes: Press-release material and lots of I-thinks. Not worth four pages, let alone one.

Still, we have a few interesting points to discuss. The first seems to be this belief that a CSR job is the gateway to game designing, even though I’m pretty sure that people who design games are directly hired from technical schools and universities which teach appropriate courses (especially, I surmise, programming).

That reminds me of a retail place where I worked, where they’d hire people with sales experience, didn’t matter whether it was in shoes or real estate, or any unrelated product, as long as they had experience with sales with commission pay. I, on the other hand, worked in the storeroom, knew every last thing about a large part of the goods in our regular inventory, and had to make sure everything was tidy in the showroom; when the sales personnel were too clueless to figure out what they were selling, they often sought me out, not just on S&H matters (also part of my duties), but on the product itself.

Yet when I asked, not particularly seriously, whether I could transfer to sales, the predictable response was, sorry, but you don’t have sales experience. They’d sooner get a door-to-door cosmetics peddler who knew nothing about our line of products than someone like me, who was knowledgeable about what the company was selling. But hey, at least I was spared having to lie about the genuine quality of what we offered, even though my pay was shit as a result of being overhead.

So yeah, if Monken had continued working at EA (or, I suspect, any other place in the games industry), he would just have earned points as a CSR — meaningless in the larger scheme of things. Maybe they’d have given him a nice little promotion, but I suspect it would have been like the Army; even if he had had job security and spent twenty years there, he’d have ended up as Sergeant Major, perhaps an object of respect among lowly CSR’s, but with every immature loudmouth right out of West Point barking orders at him nonetheless. Experience means nothing, for they always know better.

As for WOTLK and its impact on WAR’s subscription figures, I really can’t say. I played WoW for the first time a few months after WAR, and the games were too identical to make a difference — in which case, the incumbent wins. Still, I remember that when I saw WAR being discussed in the months leading up to its release, those who were most interested in it were people who despised WoW and all that it stood for, and who definitely wouldn’t be standing in line to get a copy of Lich King; so I would think that, at the exact opposite of Monken, WAR’s problem was not a case of losing players who returned to WoW with WOTLK, it was a case of losing players who wanted something else than WoW (perhaps a 2008 version of DAoC, which I never played), and, finding a clone with perhaps somewhat better PvP, said, “no, thank you”.

@Vetarnias

I can’t think of a single game designer I’ve met who has any formal training in game design itself – and I’ve met Jeff Kaplan. Also I met a designer on Lineage 2 (Korean guy) who was a former GM.

You’d honestly be surprised what tech support has to offer program designers and developers – after all they hear whats wrong with your game all day long and have plenty of time and incentive to think of ways to fix it.

Is there even much of a demand for RMT gold in Warhammer Online?

I don’t know how much demand there was for RMT, but the RMT purveyors were harassing the players (at least, me) since before day one of WAR’s release. It was the major topic of more than one Mark Jacob rant, and I believe this guy 101% when he says they were beating down the game at all hours.

The lesson I get from this article is not even that, to enter the games industry, I should take my time, study broadly and start small, but that I should never even bother entering it.

For me, it was “screw the by and large gaming industry, it’s a madhouse producing games for sheeple by sheeple” — but the never ending deluge of clones on the market might have been a biasing factor that pushed this impression.

I remember a previous discussion we had, where I compared an early Garriott selling his games out of Ziploc bags, and Yahtzee’s independent games. Garriott was one those pioneers I mentioned above; he was there first, and he helped form the industry (and I’m a bit sad for him that it had to end like it did). A guy like Yahtzee is twenty years too late to hope for this sort of career.

Personally, I’d say it has more to do with where you look. Look at something like Spiderweb Software or Moonpod.

The gaming environment has changed in that we have these big monolithic gaming companies, but by and large these companies cater to a completely different niche of gamers. Consequently, smaller companies still survive because they go for the niche that the big companies miss.

It’s not that they can’t make it big, either. Look at something like PopCap games. Founded in 2000, pumping out easy but personable casual games, they’re now pushing revenue that rivals (and probably exceeds) that of the giants. Sure, they might have 180 employees, but how many show up in the credits of Peggle? About as many as Garriott and friends on those early Ultima games.

So, the way I see it, it’s not so much that getting a career in gaming is hostile, so much as people’s vision of where to find those careers is in dead-end jobs built around becoming nameless_grunt_392 getting exploited and chucked out the door.

I agree with the “ship’s cook” opinion. I don’t know why some people think everything they read on the Internet should be belligerent investigative Watergate reporting with a touch of tabloid gossip. He’s just telling you a story – and Lum’s linking it – about getting fired from a job he liked. If you don’t like it, go read Kotaku; they’ll make up some accusation laced story for you that will probably involve Killcreek.

As for the game itself, of course WotLK bears some responsibility. The games were direct competitors. It wasn’t for nothing that Blizzard kept their release date under wraps until LK went gold.

As for Gold Farmers, they certainly harassed the **** out of me on par with Stormwind. I’m sure you can see why a CSR would consider them a problem out of proportion to their place in academic discussions of game design. Odd as it sounds, I’d agree and raise him one more: having to drag down of the scrollbar to the bottom of the EULA before hitting “Accept” for several months was a total pain in the ass that did little to improve my mood when logging in.

@Zur
I’d like to say that’s your opinion, but actually, that’s true enough.

The last 10 levels were mostly morale ability and specialization points – your core abilities were largely gained by 25. The equipment has a largely secondary focus. The class balance was really tricky business – even if it was balanced, it would be perceived as unbalanced because of the gung ho rock/paper/scissors design. Realm point game – being an end game activity – of course would be a monotonous grind. And – I’ve been wanting to get to this one – keeps sure were difficult to hold on to, they’d just zerg it with four times more people than were necessary and move on.