Originally Posted by Bags
I heard they had only a million pre-orders yet only enough server space for 75,000 players on release day.
Does not inspire confidence in their abilities as a company.
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That's because you're pretty much an asshole with an impossible myopic view of the world, like a Doubting Thomas who lives in a tunnel and has pipe dreams. Trion is taking lessons-learned from Mythic's launch of WAR. It's that simple. The key word here in what you said is "I heard". It's obvious you don't know shit about the subject, and given your condemnation it's more of the same horse shit which spews out of your mouth - you hate anything that isn't your specific brand of vanilla ice cream. I daresay you probably haven't even played the game. I see you screaming a lot and making a ton of arguments here, just like you do in the Planetside:Next forum, but it all adds up to this: what's your experience in the industry with the back side of things, and what's your experience with the game? Have you played the game? Go do some fact-checking first. They had more than 75k. You're either grossly exaggerating for the sake of making an argument or you got your figures off some haterade forum from some WoWtard. I can pretty much guarantee that number is way the fuck off.
Originally Posted by Vancha
I remember the queues for WoW on launch day.
No, not launch day. Launch week, and then some. That company now has over 14 million subscribers for an MMO that's 6 years old and still going strong...
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Blizzard loves to throw that number around. They've had that number of TOTAL subscribers, over the last 6-7 years. Impressive, but it's not 14mil all at once, not even 12mil.
Originally Posted by Bags
WoW released in 2004... Rift released in 2011. People's expectations are a bit higher is my point. Competition should set its sights higher than Blizzard's, not on par or below. [...] It could unseat WoW
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Yeah. That last bit? Also known as the Mark Jacobs Folly. People that advertise their game as the WoW-killer or even hint about being a competitor pretty much have short careers within the industry. The sole exception in my mind is probably going to be Frank Gibeau from EA Corporate, because he's got the ace of all aces - Bioware. EA basically fired Mark Jacobs for a number of things - one of them was his unprofessional conduct on forums, one of them dealt with his blatant stupidity at staffing and appointing positions (I can't really liken it to anything other than Office Space at the moment), and one of them was his trumpeting to anyone that would listen about how WAR was a WoW-killer even as the game was falling flat on its face. It was an embarrassment to EA, who really should have seen it coming considering the WAR devs were dead set against releasing when they did but were told "Sorry, we want the game out NAO."
I agree with you that people should set their sights higher. People should shoot to unseat WoW. The unfortunate fact is that they let THAT become their primary goal.
Originally Posted by Vancha
Supposedly some of the WAR guys are part of Trion (minus EA and the fail of Denton/Hicks/Barnett), so I wouldn't be surprised if the WAR public quests were their inspiration (as well as ArenaNet's.)
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A lot of WAR guys are in one of four places: Bethesda, Trion, Bioware, or still at Mythic. Unfortunately for WAR, the people who had talent were the ones who were laid off, because the shitty morons were the ones Jacobs promoted into leadership roles, and nobody's going to say "Yeah, I'm the one that made the stupid decision, lay me off instead of Sparky over there." As an aside... Paul Barnett really doesn't do ANYTHING. He's some funny little fat English bloke who, as I understand it, was originally a liaison from Games Workshop, who just sort of stuck around. Jeff Hicks, I can't say much about - he's actually a stand-up guy and he does what he can, given what he's got. I believe he's over at Bioware now. Rob Denton... well, he got handed what he got handed. He was basically promoted up to take over after Jacobs. He's like the president who inherits a shitty legacy and has to clean up - doomed to the annals of craptacular remembrance. The funny thing is, Denton is actually like a rocket scientist or something. He's not a video game developer. The whole debacle with WAR started with Jacobs and extended down to a lot of the loyalists who stuck with Mythic when it was struggling. A lot of the people who just hung in there were put into top positions when they really shouldn't have been. As a reward. And they knew a sum total of jack and shit. They then hired on great people, but when EA said "you're losing money, lay people off" what did they do? They laid people off. But the natural reaction is to cut people other than yourself. Nobody's gonna fire themselves and nobody's gonna take a paycut. There were a lot of people making an insane amount of money. Instead of cutting salaries, they just got rid of enough to put the company back in the black. Then when there was no one left to cut, they started eyeballing everyone with a fat paycheck.
Originally Posted by Traak
I have seen company after company I've worked for fail due to promoting or paying based on things OTHER than actual productivity.
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Pretty much ties in with my previous paragraph. When layoffs at Mythic came around, all the guys calling the shots had to pick who was getting laid off. They cut their underlings instead of themselves, naturally. It took an outside consultant hired by EA Corporate HQ to come in and get rid of the actual problems.
Originally Posted by KCTitan
Oh, and I'm gonna leave this here...
RIFT > WoW.  |
Pretty much. I mean, I abso-fucking-lutely *HATE* RPGs. I hate grind-fests, I hate PvE. I play games because of the human element - the human player is better than any other AI out there. I don't play to go farm rabbits until I have enough XP to level up. I cannot stand to run scripted PvE quests. And since there's no PvP in WoW, yeah. Pretty much RIFT's draw is that it's A) not WoW and B) it has PvP.
2011-03-03, 12:18 PM
Monty Python ftw
Linear Mode
