Mmmm Gud hits the nail on the head with the blog post "Maintenance mode? Absolutely incorrect".
But of course the doom callers will say the post Lokax links to is just from some community manager, so what do they know eh? Random forum troll #11678 knows much more, they have secret sources in Mythic, not that they can ever reveal them or give anything to validate their expertise. Oh, you used to work on MMOs? And that one over there is a financial expert? And chugnuts in the corner, a business analyst on Wall Street? Accurate estimates? Yeah we like those!
You know bugger all. Stop making shit up and stating it as fact.
The people stumbling across the interweb screaming "the end is nigh!" are exactly like the people with placards doing the same crap on city streets.
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About Me
- Bootae
- Half man half pixel. Music obsessive, likes a drink, occasional bastard.
You will never get rid of the doomsayers. Especially of those who know everything...better.
ReplyDeleteThe doomsayers are here to stay and all you can do is ignore them until they show some fact to fit their so called statements.
ReplyDeleteI've been drinking, fucking around and sure as hell is taking the lift down a few levels when the world ends. anyone up for one hell of a BBQ? heard they have splendid grills down there.
PS. Bring some ribs.
I'm playing and enjoying the game quite a bit, and don't think it's in any danger of being shut down in the near future, but its not obvious to me why I should view these messages as particularly reassuring. Given the PR spin that all companies have to use these days, these sort of content free statments (the CM post cited, latest letters from Hickman and Skalski) don't really reassure me overmuch. To me, it just says that the plug isn't going to be pulled today or tomorrow; I fully expect them to say new and exciting things are coming, and development continues in all areas, up until the moment that they regretfully announce the shutdown date of the servers. Until I hear about a real expansion pack, or at least Lotd scale addition, I think where WAR is on the maintaince mode/active development continuum is a bit of an open question. There's any number of things we've heard about, even post launch (wasn't there supposed to be a Nemisis system coming in at some point, or the armor redesign, community initiatives from one of the community people who appears to have just been laid off) that seem to have fizzeled out.
ReplyDeleteWAR may not be shutting down anytime soon, but it's not clear that they have the resources to do much beyond the stated goals of bugfixing/polish/balancing; whether that's ongoing development or maintaince mode is also semantics in my opinion.
I really want to believe they are still fixing the game, and working on new content. I have to agree with Chris above that the letters were not too convincing, but I am still holding out hope for the game.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is something needs to happen quick though. You will have STO, SWTOR, Cataclysm all coming out in 2010, and who knows what else. They will all draw players from other games.
TBH I'm not really saying we should take the comments from Mythic as reassurance, more that we shouldn't take all the negative bollocks being spouted by other people as meaning anything. Many people are assuming it's all bad, but it geuninely could be either.
ReplyDeleteI used to work for an IT/marketing firm, times got tough and people got made redundant around me, but financially we were stable. I thought I was ok, we kept things ticking along and we still had the majority of our development team. Then suddenly it went tits up and the whole company folded.
Right now I work for a large UK local authority, but thanks to the credit situation we have a HUGE amount of money to trim off our budgets and to meet that we're closing 15 offices and making over 400 people redundant, this has effected every single department of our organisation and is a far harder ask than the previous example. However, in this case we have actually improved the way we work, become more efficient and are actually implementing dramatically improved services to our subscribers (tax payers ;) )
Either situation, or something entirely different could apply to Mythic. We simply do not know. Companies downsize all the time to find efficiencies, they don't all fold or pull their services.
It's not clear what resources Mythic have for good or bad. It's a shame people just assume bad, based on not a lot.
Three things that should give you hope:
ReplyDelete1. Launching in Korea. They loves them some games in Korea and I'm sure WAR will get some love there. Not saying it will draw millions but quite possible 100k players.
2. New User Journey. They just spent a lot of time and resources to make this and to roll out the Endless Trial. This alone should mean the game gets another year or two of life.
3. Mac Launch. There are roughly 70 million Mac users ... of which let's say 10 million are gamers. And of those probably 2 million play MMOs. Many of which probably played WoW. So if they are looking for PvP ... WAR is the answer.
And perhaps a 4th item is that to maintain and add to an existing game, you simply do not need as many resources. I work in IT as well and my current project we had a large team to devlop and roll out a web-based app. Now that it's in production we don't need as many people so many have moved on. That said, we are still developing new things for the system ... it just takes a little longer.
Forget to add to the Mac entry ... why launch on a new platform without planning on the product being around for a few years?
ReplyDeleteKnowing EA and how they tend to run business, it's only a matter of time before they rehire younger, less experienced and thus cheaper staff members.
ReplyDelete