Less MMOs, better for humanity

Wow, just wow. Here are my favorite parts:

But if you want to know what really went down with Warhammer, I’ll tell you right now.

First, the project leaders did not know what they were doing. Jeff Hickman was the saddest excuse for a producer I’ve seen. All he did was drink the Koolaid and suck up to the right people. He was the perfect yes-man, and this reached down to almost all managers.

My boss who will not be named, again and again would tell us that Rob Denton, one of the original owners, said we should “do this” and “do that” and we would say “omg it makes NO sense, please explain A, B, and C to him. “And then he’d come back and tell us, after we thought he had gone to talk with him,” No, Rob wants in this way. Jeff agrees, this is what we’re going to do. Understood? ” They never actually talked back to Rob. We didn’t talk back to them.

Rob said jump, our leaders said, “How high?! And on who?”

So we shut up and did what we were told, by people too afraid to tackle real problems. It is a culture of fear, especially since Mark Jacobs was fired.

Oh, he left voluntarily you say? No, he was fired, and everything placed on his shoulders by those closest to him so they could divide his salary and annual bonus. I bet Rob is enjoying that sweet new Maserati he bought after leaving the knife in his partner of 15 years.

Want to know more? Keep reading. I can keep ranting.

Rob was never there during the development of Warhammer. We always joked about when his next weekly holiday was coming. (Answer? Next week!) Mark was not available, was way too head down trying to design his own contributions or whatever. Rob always handled things. We were told NOT to speak with Mark in person, never, or else we would be explaining to Rob.

....

Ah, but could not do it alone. No, he needed Jeff Hickman, promoted from customer service to produce the Warhammer project. Wait, let me let you have that sink in. The man running customer service, on the theory that the management of a large team of CSRs qualified him to run a game development project, was put in charge of a $50 million project with no previous experience.

And he needed Eugene Evans, the man who brought you the almost non-existent marketing campaign behind Warhammer. We could not even believe how bad they fucked up the marketing campaign. There was almost none. We slaved for years, and this is how we were rewarded for it by Eugene and the people of EA? Being told that Warhammer was not “worth” a lot of money spent on it? LOL. Now he’s in charge of Bioware Mythic.

Oh yeah, and he needed Paul Barnett. You know him as the crazy British dude that appears in random videos at EA to promote his latest bullshittery. We know him as the crazy British dude who we have no idea of how he still has a job. This man was supposed to be the savior of Warhammer’s vision and design. Now all he can do is promote his strange ideas about his little secret project web Ultima game that’s been almost universally criticized by all of us and focus groups. What’s that? You didn”t know Paul loves one of those old Ultima games sooooo much he’s making a literal copy of it for Facebook? Well, the cats outta the bag. Too bad it sucks ass.

Source: http://ealouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/hello-world/

I, myself, have not given The Old Republic much thought. Almost none at all. This is coming from a gamer who played nothing but MMORPGs from 2007-2009.

So you're saying that GW2 and SW:TOR have different audiences because GW2 is cheaper? GW2 is looking to be far more revolutionary then TOR for the MMO genre, so I'd say the two are very much competing.

GW2 is looking better than several MMO's WITH Monthly Fee's {cough* FFXIV , Star Wars Galaxies*cough} so I don't see why its a separate crowd.

They are competing and GW2 could easily steal people from those MMO's.

Besides LOTR MMO doubled its revenue after going free I believe (not sure bout profits)....so it was embraced more in a way by going free.

Wouldn't be surprised if it will really become a failure.

I didn't say better, I said different crowds.

The uninformed person will assume that the free stuff is definitely not as good as the paid stuff.... this sadly is a fact.

they are competing, but i'm arguing that a significant portion of the crowd will not even consider the other game based on the pricing plan.

A lot of GW2 players will get it because of the no monthly fees. A lot of  players will not consider it because to them if it's free it'll mean it sucks too much to charge. I hardly doubt most of the WoW players even made research on MMOs before going there, they have premade opinions.

Wow, interesting read. And if it really cost that much, yeah it's gonna be a failure. At this point it's clear that you don't beat WoW by making a bigger and better MMO.

ToR will flop because it is a Multiplayer game that focuses on Single player stuff.

Story? Voiced Dialog? Who gives a damn.

Pepole play MMOs for pure, addictive gameplay, not all that other stuff.

Exactly. You play online to get together with your buddies (your irl buddies or web buddies or what have you) or random people to destroy stuff and get loot. This is the main model of every successful MMO, and if companies are having enough trouble selling high-quality story-heavy stuff outside the MMO sphere, i can't imagine the difficulty they're going to have in it.