Plus, "Elder Scrolls" Is An Awesome Name For A Blog

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 27 Comments

Eric Heimburg sets out to disagree with my 2009 wrapup, but I agree with pretty much all of it. Hah! Denied!

Gee, was WAR created by somebody who thinks people who disagree with him should be “burned at the stake”? Wait, and did that same article point out that WAR was developed primarily by inexperienced developers because they were easier to cow into obedience? Yes? Wait, literally? That wasn’t even exaggerated? Huh. And they said they hate playing other MMO’s because it “gives them ideas”? Weird. Maybe… maybe… could any of that have had something to do with the tons of newb mistakes they made? Nah. It was probably just the economic downturn.

In case you are confused by sarcasm, what I mean is the company deserved to fail due to their incompetence and they did, and anybody surprised by this is probably surprised by other predictable things, like the sun rising.

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  • Vereen

    Does this post means you also agree to his points? Sorry, I’m stupid about understanding sarcasm or not :) .

  • http://www.brokentoys.org/ Scott Jennings

    Yes, as I said, I agree with pretty much all of it. He’s a bit more optimistic about Facebook than I am (I’m working on my own labor-of-love hobby game on FB at the moment but I doubt it’ll ever see the light of day, and am running into all sorts of platform-induced roadblocks.) But overall, yeah, he was more willing than I to commit to “OMG you guys sucked!” in print. :)

  • ethereal.wolf

    so help me out here insiders: apparently PB at mythic likes to burn people at the stake and hire less talented people instead of more talented. yet he still has a job. how did PB not get canned?

  • Hatch

    @ethereal

    Are you assuming the people above PB have any idea what a good manager looks like vs a bad one to make the decision to let him go?

  • http://chrome.blogspot.com Chrome

    Facebook and Myspace need another text based game?

    Oh, PB got me on a rant!

    PB is like every other manager on the planet working for a company like EA. He has proven the peter principle is very, very real.
    All that remains is for the employees of the companies like EA to figure it out.

    What is, “it?” An example.

    The mega corporation I work for laid off inspite of being profitable (8%). A lot (I mean 50-60 people) of people here at my location figured out the company had just screwed themselves.

    Back in the day people would have just accepted the increased work load and carried on hoping that one day the company would hire more people.

    Of course after working in this industry for 15 plus years every last one of them knew the company would never re-hire people or add more people.

    The company laid off ~600 people in 2009 from my location. Funny thing is ~60 people quit, started up “consulting companies’ and were immediately “re”hired by the company at 2-3X what they were making before. They are probably going to work for as long as they would have as full time employees.

    Long story short it isn’t about doing a good job. It’s about getting something done well enough to turn a short term profit. This quarter is all that matters in America. People are just a resource.

    Another example, Ford Motor Company has a huge chance of saving itself… Ford won’t. They will make money for three or four quarters producing cars with transmissions that will die in a year or two and then word of mouth wil spread and American’s will once again buy Honda and Toyota. But hey, that is the American way.

    I personally know, three engineers who have tried to get Ford to make a few minor changes to their cars automatic transmissions and Ford management flat out refused due to the costs. I know about that because all three of those engineers are now consultant here… In a completely different industry.

    If you want to know what’s wrong with for transmissions, I’ll be happy to share.

  • Hatch

    Please share, I’m on the cusp of buying a new truck and would really like to know.

  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    I think a lot of people just don’t get Paul Barnett.

    He operates on a well-established English m.o. of “if it moves, take the piss out of it”. Everything is tongue-in-cheek, insincere, including this interview.

    When everything goes to plan it can make someone look very clever.

    For instance early last year there was some problem and he made a Youtube of himself bullying the chief coder. To his surprise (because it was obviously not serious) people were really outraged. So he and the coder made a new Youtube where the coder hit him with cream pies.

    So to literally believe that Mythic managers are burning employees at a stake in some basement is simply to fail to get the joke.

    It’s not a terribly good joke. But it is meant as one.

  • Gx1080

    That’s the problem of being chock full of bias, other people can call you on it.

    And this story sounds a lot like the 3 musketeers of 2008: Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan and Pirates of the Burning Seas. Is this it? Investors dumping a lot of cash in games and rolling dice to see if they do profit in the first quarter? (which they won’t, not as long as WoW exist) Is honestly dissapointing.

    Off topic, I would add that the manufacturing industry in the US is DEAD, unless US citizens want to work 13 hours at day at 2 yuan each hour, that being 13 cents. Until then, is going to the Chinese. Of course that means a lot of unemployed people. But Wall Street needs to have max profit, after all.

  • A lurker

    The elderscrolls rant appears to completely misses the point of the “heretics” remark, which is that no matter how talented a person is, they need to be team players if you’re going to have a successful project, or they’re more trouble than they worth. I believe this is been offered as one reason for Vanguard’s failure by Brad McQuaid. You can agree or disagree with the assertion, but to represent as firing all dissenters seems to be rather disingenuous.

    It also seems to project all the design and management responsibilities onto Paul Barnett (“Gee WAR was created by somebody…”). For example, Barnett says that *he* doesn’t play WoW, whereas the elderscrolls rant seems to imply that nobody at Mythic was allowed to. Nor did I see anywhere in that article did I see any support for the assertion that a bunch of inexperienced, easily cowed designers were used to design the game (in fact, looking at the “Meet the devs” page on the WAR homepage, a lot seem to have been there for DAoC). Those statements both may be true, but it seems more like the writer has a grudge against Barnett.

    None of this is to say that Mythic didn’t make a whole lot of mistakes in the design and execution, but I think that the blame lies across a whole lot of people from Marc Jacobs to Jeff Hickman (executive producer) to guys like Colin Shannon (lead programmer and featured in the youtube coding videos). But some of them are friends of Lum and so are utterly blameless. I also found it entertaining that MMORPG had a column from Justin Webb (credited with being “RVR strike team lead” and lead trophy system designer for WAR in various pre-marketing hype videos) on “Why Some MMOs Suck”.

    /resumelurk

  • http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org Sanya

    Methinks “A lurker” hasn’t read many posts here… or even this one, really.

    There’s a difference between declaring people blameless and not eliminating where you dine.

  • http://www.eartheternal.com Matt Mihaly

    Not sure what his point is about FB games. The game he points to as an example of a game he worked on that is a better-than-Farmville FB game (City of Eternals) is not a FB game. It uses FB Connect for login, but that’s it. It’s not built on the FB platform.

    He’s also incorrect about VCs being unwilling to give you $5 million to build an MMO. Both myself and Susan Wu (founder of the company making City of Eternals) raised around that amount to make an MMO.

  • A lurker

    I’ve been reading here for several years, and at Lum’s previous sites as well from the days of Shadowbane. And I remember quite well, as someone who has been playing WAR since launch (and still enjoys playing today, so yes I’m a fanboi and all) that

    1. Lum had a very passionate defense of Colin Shannon in response to when the YouTube video with him and Barnett came out, in which he also completely missed the “British humor”
    and
    2. The state of the servers, network lag, and generally bugginess of WAR at the time. I’m sure Shannon is a nice guy and all, but he was the one who was responsible for the programming in WAR (according to the website), not Paul Barnett. I ran WARs endgame dungeon two nights ago, and the main complaint coming out: “F*cking buggy mythic code.”

    As for decalring people blameless and not eliminating where you dine, Lum just said in the second comment that he more or less agrees with an article the calls the entire company a bunch of morons.

  • http://www.brokentoys.org/ Scott Jennings

    It’s safe to say I’m not going to be considered for any openings at Mythic any time soon.

    And yeah, I liked Colin Shannon, which is why I disliked watching him mocked on camera and then by the community (few of which shared Barnett’s penchant for overstated humor). The quality or lack thereof of the coding in Warhammer is seperate from that. As you yourself point out, one person doth not a game create.

  • A lurker

    Fair enough. After a bit of cooling off, I’m probably being to hard on Shannon, and not hard enough on the managers and process in general that let the game be released in the state is was in. Just as a current player who really does enjoy playing it, I’m sad and a bit angry at how much those initial mistakes hurt what’s turned into a really fun game for some of us, thanks in no small part to the hard work that those programmers have put in over the last year.

    I should also correct my previous comment to acknowledge after actually going being and reading the relevant post, that the “british humor” was not lost on Lum, just that he didn’t find it amusing.

    /resumelurk for real

  • ethereal.wolf

    @hatch: yes i suppose you have a point, corporate usually promotes and retains based on politcal ability and whether you hit target numbers, regardless of how arbitrary they are. although you could argue the product missed the target numbers. i guess i should assume that PB is a talented corporate politico.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    “Success” and “failure” are interesting labels, really, in that you can shift them quite easily depending on where you set the bar.

    Did WAR achieve its goal of being a WoW killer? No, it failed in that regard. But, hey, so did everybody else

    Did WAR manage, at least, to be an extremely popular MMORPG? No, it failed in that regard as well. However, you could count the number of extremely popular MMORPGs in history in the low double digits out of thousands of attempts.

    Did WAR fail in that they let a lot of the development team go? Yes… but, if that’s our criteria, there’s a lot of “successful” MMORPGs that are currently in operation right now who failed in this regard.

    Did WAR fail, as in, they’re shutting down the service completely? No. While they did trim a lot of fat, that they had some 750,000 players initially that had receeded only to about 300,000 players in March 2009 is actually quite successful. Even the original EverQuest only managed about 550 at best.

    The rest of Eric Heimburg’s critique reads out a lot like this to me. A lot of nice sticky barbs, but from a frame of reference that holds a typical stock holder’s obliviously outrageous expectations to be the norm.

    Granted, the way Champions Online turned out would certainly charge my vitriol reserves, and while a lot of what he says breaks down in the details it’s certainly close enough on the surface.

  • Guy

    Oh yes, do tell about the Ford transmissions.

  • http://www.cesspit.net Abalieno

    I appreciate the spirit of the rant, but not impressed by it.

    He says he didn’t want to say something too obvious, but that’s all he does and those things that aren’t obvious are wrong, like the conclusion.

    It’s The Game Design, Stupid.

    Not a coincidence that those people who are valid have been tossed randomly around in a myriad of smaller projects that in most cases will go nowhere.

    The MMO development is doomed until someone comes up and works like catalyst to group again those talented guys into one project.

  • Freakazoid

    Now see, that was the kind of post you should have made. You really held back, so someone else had to not hold back for you. Bonus that it’s a guy who used to work on AC2.

    Unfortunately, his opinion on facebook games is wrong. Kinda funny that a guy who saw and admitted the truth about the MMOs he’s worked on can’t see the obvious problem with facebook games.

  • dartwick

    I missed a bash paul Barnett thread. That sucks – but not as much as WAR.

  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    “And yeah, I liked Colin Shannon, which is why I disliked watching him mocked on camera”

    I thought you yanks were all about individual freedom.

    Colin Shannon, at least according to PB*, wanted to do the original youtube. Does he not have the right to send himself up?

    (*Source: No Prisoners No Mercy podcast, somewhere around episode 44).

  • http://chrome.blogspot.com Chrome

    Ford?

    The brake bands in Ford Transmissions are about a mm to narrow and the surface of the bands is made of sub-standard materials. This causes the transmission to work a lot harder when shifting.

    This causes the pistons in the transmissions to engage at much more pressure than they should require.

    That in turn destroys the Torque Converters and that causes a whole litany of other failures.

  • http://cnn.com ubvman

    If WAR is considered a success, I just don’t know whats considered a dismal abysmal failure around here. Frankly, according to the perverse (and IMHO a deliberately disingenuous) viewpoint adopted by some posters here to look insightful, WoW can be written up as a failure (oh there are many ways to do it).

    Anyways, WAR was not successful. This is by the criteria of its own publishers and creators (“if we aren’t adding new servers by six months, we are in trouble.”) Did it “deserve” to fail as the blog has it? No, of course not – but the devs and publisher sure made it hard to succeed! =)

    PS: Paul Barnett is an ass.

  • Tremayne

    Dismal abysmal failure = Auto Assault or Tabula Rasa. MMOs are a business, and the ultimate measure of business success is “staying in business”. WAR isn’t a massive success, but it seems enough people like it and are willing to keep paying subscriptions to keep some servers open.

    As for Paul Barnett – he’s a cocky jerk, but part of the problem is the cultural divide between the English and Americans. Over here he’d probably get the sh1t beaten out of him in a dark alley one night, while over there you lot don’t seem to do workplace violence (unless it involves exercising your Second Amendment rights… and shooting him is a bit of an over-reaction!)

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    ubvman :
    If WAR is considered a success, I just don’t know whats considered a dismal abysmal failure around here. Frankly, according to the perverse (and IMHO a deliberately disingenuous) viewpoint adopted by some posters here to look insightful, WoW can be written up as a failure (oh there are many ways to do it).

    Ah, but you too can be misinterpreted as a pretentious by the simpleminded mainstream on this topic. It’s easy and fun!

    All you have to do is try to define in certain terms what a ‘success’ for an MMORPG. Then you attempt to apply these rules you have created real MMORPGs using charts which somewhat reflect the reality and what little we know about WAR’s success.

    If you do a really good job of this analysis, what you should come to realize is that the rules you’ve come up with in regards to what’s a “success” or “failure” have very little bearing on reality.

  • EpicSquirt

    The guy is right and not right.

    Warhammer was indeed developed by the biggest incompetent idiots ever. In comparison to it Aion was developed by Michael Jordan (stable good looking & sounding client, nice huge world, working crafting system, balanced realms, adrenaline rushing PvP).

    The grind is there in Aion. But hey, I don’t see people rushing through the content or AoE’ing their asses to max level and complaining about lack of endgame. It’s the first MMO since EVE 2003 to make some sense for me.

  • Jenks

    The feeling I get from his article is:

    “2009 was a waste of time filled only with flops,” and

    “Aion is a success but I didn’t like it because it’s grindy”