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Armored Warfare: World of Tanks formerly from Obsidian

WhiskeyWolf

RPG Codex Polish Car Thief
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It most certainly is the case.

- T-54 ltwt nerf, Mäuschen, the entire rubicon patch (w. the p2w emblems and inscriptions) etc. etc.

There is a very clear and established process for pushing through changes and you know years ahead that they are coming (WTF E-100 removal, Action X etc.). The problematic part is that you either have to learn Russian or read blogs to stay in the know. And changes can take ages to come through.
Sorry but WoWs works a bit differently.
 

Idiott

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One of the items in the current Humble Bundle is a code for Armored Warfare that grants:

- 2500 gold
- 30 days of premium time
- Chieftain Mk. 6 (supposedly, already had it so I can't confirm CONFIRMED)

If you're still playing the game it's definitely worth getting as you can get it for as low as $1.
 
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Idiott

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Makes me wish they really focused on PvE rather than trying to fix the clusterfuck that is PvP right now.
 

Haba

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Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Obsidian Entertainment has laid off an undisclosed number of employees who were working on Armored Warfare, its free-to-play team shooter that features tanks, not soldiers.

According to studio chief executive officer Feargus Urquhart, Mail.ru subsidiary My.com has taken away some of the work from Obsidian and moved it back to its Moscow home base. Obsidian did not reveal how many people it laid off or if any of these employees were offered positions at My.com in Russia.

“This week we let some of our developers on Armored Warfare know that they are being laid off early next year. The publisher of Armored Warfare decided to move a portion of the development of the product to their headquarters in Moscow,” Urquhart said in an emailed statement. “We remain extremely proud of Armored Warfare and all the work we have and will continue to put into it. None of the other products at Obsidian were affected by this. We wish our people the best, and are working with them to find homes with other developers.”

http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/08/obsidian-lays-off-undisclosed-number-of-its-amored-warfare-staff/

:deadtroll:
 

Abu Antar

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://aw.my.com/us/news/general/mycom-adopts-future-work-armored-warfare


MY.COM ADOPTS FUTURE WORK ON ARMORED WARFARE

Amsterdam, The Netherlands – February 11th, 2017

Developer Obsidian Entertainment and global Publisher My.com are announcing impactful changes to the development structure of Armored Warfare. From today on, the future development and update plans will be carried out entirely by My.Com.

The restructured Armored Warfare development team will be delivering on all of the new features and content previously announced.

batumi11.jpg


“At Obsidian, we are grateful to have had the opportunity to work on Armored Warfare over the last four years. We are happy to hand off Armored Warfare to the talented developers at My.com who, we know, will deliver incredible updates and content to Armored Warfare fans across the world. Our focus at Obsidian will turn to currently announced games such as Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, Tyranny, and Pathfinder: Adventures along with other unannounced projects. We are proud of everything we did on Armored Warfare and want to thank all of our dedicated fans for their involvement and support.“,
said Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment.

“We are grateful for all contributions made by everyone on the Armored Warfare development teams, past and present. The restructured Armored Warfare development team is continuing the current development and update plans and will be dedicated to deliver content to our worldwide players in the most consistent manner.“,
said Yuri Maslikov, Publishing Director of My.com.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArmoredWarfare/comments/5thjdv/armored_warfare_what_went_wrong/

Armored Warfare: What Went Wrong

Preface
As a select few of you may already know, I've been a design consultant for Obsidian Entertainment/My.com since the beginning of Early Access (was around for the alpha tests too). Needless to say, I've been invested in this game more than just monetarily. I met a lot of wonderful people along the way– my clan mates (KEVIN started out as a group of us design consultants, with Obeyrist, Kilo, and Illusionalsgcty - my officers - helping just as much if not more), those I met later on (XDMR, Urallfish, other EU friends), and of course the Obsidian/My.com guys (Thank you Rich, Josh, and Michael for all you did- your passion for the game was just incredible, and I truly believe that we could have had an amazingly successful game without MailRU being in the way). I hope to keep my ties with most of them, and for those who are without a job, I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

So, why am I writing this?

I'm writing this because I think everyone who stuck around, everyone who held out waiting for the game to be popular, deserves to know what happened. I'm not an actual developer, so I will be missing a few things. I've had more than enough people from both Obsidian and My.com vent to me their grievances about nearly everything development-wise. I also don't care about the NDA I never actually signed (I don't think anyone was aware of that), I know my AW account will likely be nuked and the only thing that makes me said is the history that will go away with it.

Who To Blame
I've read a lot of misinformation that I couldn't respond to over who was to blame for the game dying. The reality is everyone: MailRU, My.com, and Obsidian, some (MRG) more than others.

Obsidian (OEI): Obsidian failed to grab MailRU by the balls early on and say something along the lines of "We're the developers, we've been in this industry longer than you could ever hope to be." Now, I'm not saying that that's what they should have done. MailRU pays good, Obsidian needed money badly. Standing up to them could have meant their contract was pulled early on. With Felix (Nakoomba) joining Obsidian, he was actually able to do that. It was, however, too late.

My.com (My): Despite what people think, My.com had very little to do with the failure of the game because they really didn't have any control over the game. In fact, all you can really blame them for is shitty events and server crashes. I suppose they could have advertised a broken game and gotten us nowhere.

MailRU Group (MRG): Ah, here it is. The big one. How did I not see this coming, I played ArcheAge– I knew what they were capable of, and Obey reminded me numerous times of it. The rest of this post will be about how they ran this game into the ground because they simply lack the vision to see past the Russian market. They thrive on incomplete features and shitty knock off mechanics.

What Went Wrong
In order to understand everything that's happened, we need a history of Armored Warfare's development. It all started out with MailRU submitting bids to multiple companies to see who would be able to develop a tank game for them. Obsidian, short on cash and in need of a new challenge, took them up on it. They developed this magnificent plan for Armored Warfare– what could have been is not at all what we have today. In fact, I'm not even sure if you would have been able to call it a World of Tanks competitor as the games only had tanks in common.

So, what happened to that? It's simple. MailRU said they wanted none of that, and they tasked Obsidian with making a "World of Tanks clone." Yes, it was supposed to be as close to World of Tanks as they could get with modern tanks and without getting their asses sued off by Wargaming. Just look at the "Limited Technical Alpha" they had. It was clear to everyone that it was a World of Tanks clone and the backlash from it convinced MailRU that being basically a Chinese knock-off wasn't going to cut it. So, they let Obsidian have a little more freedom- not much, it still had to feel like World of Tanks, but it didn't have to be World of Tanks. This, right here, is where you can say Armored Warfare died. The day MailRU made it clear (privately clear, this was never public knowledge) that they only wanted a cut of the massive amounts of money Wargaming was raking in with World of Tanks.

It was more than that, however. MailRU never seemed to realize that they should have tailored the game towards the NA/EU markets. Going the WoT route when their NA population was already really poor was never going to work out, and given how much money the NA market spends you'd think that developing for them (and, by extension, EU) would be the priority. They weren't, and MailRU chose Russia as the only market they cared about, to no ones surprise. This meant that instead of taking the time to have polished, well thought out features we got rushed, half baked features. Why? The Russians loved it. The terrible, terrible base system that was envisioned to be so much more was because MailRU was fine with the preview version that was introduced in Early Access, and decided it would be the final version.

My group and I wrote up 60 page documents (5 in total I believe) on this game detailing every little thing that needed tweaked, removed, or added. From our feedback documents alone we could have practically made our own tank game. We began feeling ignored as much of our feedback wasn't bearing fruit in game, and that was when Obsidian finally cracked- they let us know that MailRU didn't want it, they were happy with the shit state the game was in. In fact, MailRU wasn't even aware of our existence (and they weren't very happy about it afterwards- we aren't Russian, after all).

Where We Are Now
I'll clarify briefly since I've seen a lot of confusion- MailRU canceled Obsidian's contract, Obsidian didn't quit. They wanted to continue developing the game as far as I can tell.

At the beginning of the month, there were massive layoffs at My.com– one of which being Josh Morris (Jinxx71), the only person I would say was truly sane there (aside from the CMs, of course– you've been amazing, Freitag). He shared the same vision as Obsidian and in the end was let go for disagreeing with MailRU one too many times (note: I don't know if this is the actual reason, I just know that he had made a lot of enemies at MailRU over time). They were replaced by people from MailRU itself. What we have come to know My.com as is no longer My.com, but rather a puppet of MailRU headed by Yuri Maslikov, the person quoted in the news post.

MailRU had already had a much larger development team than Obsidian was willing to admit (or even knew about). In fact, this whole time they have been working on Armored Warfare for Xbox One and PS4 (I'm going to get a lot of shit for mentioning its existence). I imagine that will be their main focus, and they might even release the game on Steam (the Steamworks framework has been in place for quite some time now, Obsidian has wanted very badly to put the game on Steam since the early access days). Ultimately, I don't see the game going anywhere. MailRU is very shortsighted and their world view ends at the CIS regions borders.

Conclusion
My interest in this game from the very start was due to Obsidian. The first time I heard of it, I thought it was just a Chinese knockoff. When I heard Obsidian Entertainment was developing it, I signed up for the alpha immediately. With Obsidian out of the picture, I see no future for this game. My only hope is that Wargaming can learn from the many good things that this game got right and also see the many things this game got wrong. I'll be waiting to see what game Wargaming Seattle announces in the future (hint: It's not WoT 2.0 anymore).
 

J_C

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Sorry if anyone lost his/her job because of this, but other than that, good riddence. This project just wasted Obsidian's talent and resource, which could be used on actual RPGs.
 

Idiott

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Potatoland
Some new info:
http://www.kitsuga.com/index.php/20...mycom-are-lying-to-you-about-armored-warfare/

Edit: This is likely false information as there's some debunking going on on Reddit.
Edit2: Turns out it may actually be true.

Update:

One Source May Been Fired For Speaking Out to Myself or Others on this Issue

Update: Official Statement from Community Manager at My.com

“What I can say from my side: wait for further information regarding the future coming from My.com/Mail.ru or even Obsidian Entertainment. Ex-employees or volunteer counsellors breaking internal NDA’s and stating their subjective, filtered sentiment, currently use the time to either damage both companies or mail.ru/obsidian’s reputation.
More official information will follow, and I suggest to rather focus on the future and content, than focussing on why how end when for things that at irreversible.”


We have all known for a while about tensions between Obsidian, My.com, and mail.ru. I have spoken to many anonymous sources inside of Obsidian Entertainment and My.com. I can say this, take a look at these pictures below delivered from 2 separate people:

What is this new Premium? OT-65A In the Flesh This was in the test server

OT-65A Confirmed again T-72B3? T-64BV? KPz 70? KTO Rosomak?
Nothing special here except this was in December!OT-64A ? OT-65A?

You will notice all of these are vehicles on the public test server yes. But under them are garage bars indicating other vehicles we have not yet seen nor were announced. These include: KTO Rosomak, OT-65A (Featured in full here as well as on many of the garage bars) T-55M1, OA-82, KPz 70, T-64BV, T72B3, and OT-64A. The KPz 70 was just announced as in development last week. These pictures were delivered to me on December 12th 2016.

Personally speaking to two sources inside Obsidian I got two different answers to when the patch was to be done. One person “The Patch has been done for weeks, My.com and Mail.ru just refused to pay us for it.” Another individual source has stated: “We didn’t give them a patch for 3 weeks now cause they wouldn’t pay.” A third person followed up stating: “I haven’t had anything to work on since New Years because we were basically done and applying polish.” My.com and Mail.ru according to these sources never received the 2nd version nor the final version of the existing patch for 0.19 and balance 2.0.

This isn’t where this rocky relationship over Armored Warfare stops. I have had it circulated from all of my anonymous sources that “We were being setup to fail.” The current version of the Public Test Server shows a different version of the Crisis Engine. Knowing full well it is almost never a good idea to change an engine a game exists in as this can compromise everything about the game. This was a decision ordered by mail.ru.

This would require reprogramming of every single graphical asset in Armored Warfare. It is the reason the current Public Test has the Chieftain 900 hull being completely invulnerable from all sides. Furthermore all of the playtest staff for Obsidian were ordered fired as well as all supertesters from My.com were fired several times according to my sources during the development of patch 0.19. This again from either mail.ru or My.com’s orders. The sources in this case gave two different versions of the same story.

Apparently after 5 months of development, we are left with Obsidian still holding onto the final patch version of Armored Warfare 0.19 while mail.ru has taken to part ways. This final version is likely to never see the light of day. To illustrate how much of a snap decision this was, the weekly developer stream was cancelled less than an hour before it was suppose to start.

We will never know the full story of what went on behind closed doors. But now with this information from several employees in Obsidian Entertainment as well as My.com we know a lot more than either party has been telling us. I personally am still in shock at the snap decision much less all the pouring out of information from the inside from my various friends in all the companies involved. I feel for them in this case and it appears mail.ru was just making a power play to create a World of Tanks 2.0 with modern vehicles. While Obsidian Entertainment was working on an Obsidian game with a greater vision than that. Neither party willing to compromise and a game that had so much promise is now left on it’s last legs before a death nail may strike to finish it off.

I personally am doubtful mail.ru will even concern itself with the American or European markets and Armored Warfare is likely to become a Russian only with maybe Eastern European access to the game. I would rather not see this happen but at least now we know some of what was really going on behind the doors of Obsidian Entertainment, My.com, and Mail.Ru.

We have reached out to Mail.ru, Obsidian Entertainment, and My.com and received no response from any of their PR representatives at this time.

Article Written by

Rena Miller
 
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stony3k

Augur
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Messages
470
Strap Yourselves In
Damn! Sorry for all those who lost jobs, but it looks like this was a deal with the Devil (mail.ru). Obsidian keeps making these bad management decisions that seem good in the short term but completely stupid in hindsight.+M
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-02-14-obsidian-armored-warfare-contract-termination

"We might not tackle a game like this again"
Obsidian opens up after Armored Warfare contract terminated.

Obsidian Entertainment has assured Eurogamer it is "doing fine" following the announcement it will no longer develop Armored Warfare, the free-to-play tank game. Those duties will move wholesale to Russian studio My.com, owned by the Russian company bankrolling the whole operation, Mail.ru.

In an official statement the two companies suggested the split was amicable but in a conversation with Eurogamer, Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart said it's unlikely the independent studio will ever tackle a game like Armored Warfare again.

But however unusual Armored Warfare might have seemed for role-playing specialist Obsidian, it was paying the bills. It was the bedrock of Obsidian operations for the past four years, the main project at a studio of nearly 200 people. Productions like Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny were small by comparison.

There being no further Armored Warfare paychecks will inevitably have wider repercussions for Obsidian, a company that came perilously close to closure in 2012.

Obsidian hasn't announced new layoffs - despite online reports of them (a producer from Turtle Rock told Chris Avellone, former Obsidian creative director, the studio had hired some laid-off Obsidian staff) - and when I asked CEO Feargus Urquhart whether Obsidian would downsize his reply was, "We are doing fine."

It's worth noting that Obsidian laid off an undisclosed number of Armored Warfare staff in December 2016, as development was partially moved to My.com in Russia.

Of Obsidian's in-development games, the currently-in-crowdfunding Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire stands to be most affected. However, Feargus Urquhart assured me Pillars 2, which has raised a meaty $2.6m with 10 days to go - well over its $1.1m goal - was "totally fine".

"Everything is totally fine on Pillars 2," he said. "Between royalties from Pillars 1, and the Fig campaign, we will have all the funding we need to finish the game without changing anything about the team or our plans."

Besides Pillars 2, Obsidian is working on card game Pathfinder Adventures as well as "other unannounced projects", according to a comment Urquhart made in the official Armored Warfare statement. Whether those unannounced projects are big enough to fill Armored Warfare's void remains to be seen.

Why did Mail.ru and Obisidian part ways over Armored Warfare? A number of reports cite a Reddit post by an Armored Warfare "consultant", who suggested mounting tension from creative differences drove the two companies apart. Allegedly Mail.ru wanted a World of Tanks clone whereas Obsidian wanted Armored Warfare to be something more, so Mail.ru terminated the contract and moved development in house.

But the person who wrote the post was not an employee of Obsidian nor My.com/Mail.ru nor privy to inside information. Both Feargus Urquhart, and the person who wrote the post, confirmed this to me. The person was a voluntary member of the community, a superuser, and much of the post is supposition.

"When it comes to what happened between My.com and Obsidian," Feargus Urquhart told me, "we jointly decided that Obsidian would stop working on the game. They have a great team in Moscow that has been ramping up for almost a year, and there are some people there who have been working closely with us for upwards of three years.

"We are going to support their team over the next while and help them get up to speed on the last few things they need to understand about the game. I don't think any of the Armored Warfare players are going to see a lull in the support of the game, or in the release of announced features, while this transition is going on."

Monetary concerns aside, the move away from Armored Warfare sounds in some ways like a relief. Massively-multiplayer online games are complicated, ongoing services, and it sounds as though Obsidian has had its fill.

"It's funny you should ask about whether Armored Warfare was an unusual project for us," Urquhart told me. "It really was, but we are super proud of what we did with it. Going from nothing at the end of 2012 to launching out to the world for open beta by October of 2015: that was a pretty amazing feat for a non-MMO studio.

"What we did learn is we might not tackle a game like this again. Large MMOs are really beyond the ability of an independent developer to manage unless that developer gets huge and brings in all the other aspects of the business: operations, customer service, live operations, etc.

"Those things all sound interesting, but what is more interesting to us, and to me personally, is focusing on the making of a game. When a studio begins to focus on all those other things, you are all suddenly in a lot of meetings every day that aren't to do with game development.

"So, the answer here is we love making games," he added, "but the challenge with making a large MMO is you can't [help] but get dragged away from the game-making part."

It's tempting to look at this as Obsidian returning to the kind of games we want it to make - games like Fallout: New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic 2, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Alpha Protocol and so on. Role-playing games with a proper budget. But those budgets come from publishers, and although Obsidian has worked with most of them, few appear to have asked Obsidian back.

Our best wishes to any Obsidian employees affected by layoffs.
 

Nirvash

Liturgist
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Jan 20, 2017
Messages
1,108
This game was bad from the conception, they wanted a more"action" gameplay than WOT but the "server latency" (what's the technical term?) made subpar hit/collisions registering.
 

LESS T_T

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Messages
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Codex 2014
Now out on Steam:



Developer: Obsidian Entertainment, My.com

© 2017 Obsidian Entertainment. Published by My.com B.V. All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Is Obsidian own (some parts of) this game, I wonder.
 

Idiott

Arcane
Joined
Mar 4, 2011
Messages
490
Location
Potatoland
Russians only work on what Obsidian developed in the fiirst place, so maybe there are legal reasons for that?

Also, you can't use your old account to play using Steam and there is no way to link them, so Steam is only good for the new players. Genius.
 
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