<div id="post_message_549736"> Quote:
Originally Posted by Creediki
Brad in 1998 on Alchemy, "We have learned from our mistakes and changed our processes, this will not happen again."

Brad on 2006 on all the other dumb shit from EQ, "We have learned from our mistakes and changed our processes, this will not happen again.".


Sorry, you, personally, and everything you lead is not worth my time until I see some real, substantive examples of how you've changed. Someone who's CFO gets on him on long-distance bills incurred assiting the design of BOX ART, while large, grevious, mistakes happen in his organization does not inspire confidence. Utnayan went afield into the fuzzy bunny love area where you could respond without saying anything. Bad him. Of course projects change, of course you need to be upfront about it. I'm glad you've finally learned the lesson parents teach their 6year olds. His follow up questions you brushed off.

This entire industry needs to change from one that is focused on wasting players time, to one that is focused on delivering fun, enjoyable content. Playing QA is not what I plan on doing after work, and I have seen nothing to indicate SOH will be anything other given your past history.

How about you guarantee 1 day free playtime for every broken quest we run into, every tradeskill that is broken that we try to use, every time we are unable to raid during primetime due to server isses?


No clue about the CFO thing -- what are you talking about?

And you definitely misunderstood my taking responsibility, promising to be up front, etc. if you think that I'm promising a game as big and as complex as a 4+ year MMOG without any broken quests and such. In fact, to fulfill my promise of being up front, I promise there *will* be quests and other things that don't work. There is no way to make a game this big with the resources we have (or even Blizzard had, which was around double) and even approach perfection. Then, even as you fix things after launch or during beta, you continue to add content and tweak things post launch, which can then add bugs as well. So you never acheive perfection. But the cost for never acheiving perfection is a vast, living, breathing world that stays interesting for months and years.

If any MMOG developer commited to zero bugs at launch, putting quality of content that much more important over quantity of content, he'd not launch with enough content to entertain people long enough to start bringing in revenue, keeping his live and expansion teams paid, add to the game, keep balancing the game, launch expansion packs, etc.

There is a balance or ratio of quality vs. quantity with MMOGs that is different than, say, a console game, especially older ones were once you burned the gold master, it was fire and forget. (Thankfully, finally even now you can patch, say, Xbox 360 games because of Xbox 360 live, and single player PC games have been patching for a while).

Am I happy with the ratio? No, I wish there was more time, more resources, etc. It's better than it used to be, but we're still not there yet. It all comes down to what people will pay for, how much publishers will pay for development, how long they will allow a game to be in development, and how good the dev team is.

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