Lhynn
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2013
- Messages
- 9,854
Found this thread on another forum
Its a fairly interesting read, but theres a lot of uninteresting shit there, a dude in a different forum went through the trouble of salvaging the good content and quotes from said thread. Basically butthurt veteran employee telling it like it is, i think he used to work in westwood or some shit. Anyway, great stuff for anyone thinking about getting into the gaming industry, its not just Turbine specific.
Continue in part 2
Its a fairly interesting read, but theres a lot of uninteresting shit there, a dude in a different forum went through the trouble of salvaging the good content and quotes from said thread. Basically butthurt veteran employee telling it like it is, i think he used to work in westwood or some shit. Anyway, great stuff for anyone thinking about getting into the gaming industry, its not just Turbine specific.
"But this is a good point to mention that WB didn't acquire Turbine for the sake of LOTRO. They wanted Turbine's technical expertise in supporting online games. LOTRO itself was just a fringe benefit.
Thus WB crammed dozens of new staff into the Needham building while keeping LOTRO bare bones, disconnected Turbine's NetOps from Turbine (and christened it WB Net), and, when I came back, had LOTRO QA testing the Batman online shooter.
But in a sense WB's disinterest in LOTRO and sheer wealth has probably spared LOTRO from being shut down. They don't care enough to kill it where a smaller company might have by now."
"A cynic might suggest that the Paizs had flat lined DDO already and when Ascherons Call's concurrency numbers are beating DDO on a nightly basis, you can only go up from there.
LOTRO was certainly ailing when they made the call to go f2p. We all assumed it would happen eventually but not so soon. In March or thereabouts in '10 an email went out from Crowley stating that LOTRO's US subs were down to around 85k (the only time specific sub numbers were ever mentioned even in-house while I was there) and could we maybe ask our friends to try the game?"
",,,in my experience, the devs tended to pick and choose what suited them on the forums-not hard since everyone on there has a different opinion or gripe and to them it's absolutely the most important thing ever. Good example was PvMP stars.
Shortly after I got to Turbine Jen removed them from the UI. Being a star hugger I charged over and asked for an explanation.
Jen: 'Players complained about all the star hugging.'
Me: 'Who?'
Jen: 'On the forums...'
So I went and checked the PvMP forums and found a single thread, at the top of the page, complaining about them (the OP incidentally was a champ...not a class known for being able to show off stars).
I realized that she had gone to the forums fishing for some easy change she could make that could be said to be addressing 'player concerns'. And that wouldn't be the last time by a long shot that I, as an active and socially connected player, would be told by a dev who didn't play LOTRO themselves 'what players want'.
So...yeah whenever I hear Turbine claiming it changed this or that based on 'feed back', I tend to roll my eyes."
"... bad news was usually couched in disingenuous terms designed to save company face. Public appearances were a major thing with the company and we were very good at maintaining an image of continued success.
Even within the industry I found that most considered LOTRO a major success and had no hint that we were in trouble. But keeping up appearances became just ingrained, inside the walls and out.
Mersky in marketing was constantly sending out company wide emails highlighting the latest nice things Ten Ton Hammer had to say about us, this online award or that...even as we, the QA and Devs, knew very well we weren't putting out the best product we could have been."
"DDO
I can say that nobody on LOTRO, especially the older hands in QA, was surprised DDO was a lame duck. As for the DDO team...Turbine was surprisingly ptovincial; there was a sense of a real rivalry between the LOTRO and DDO teams, probably because of the slender resources we were all vying for.
LOTRO tended to view DDO as a flop that was wasting resources better spent on LOTRO. DDO felt they were held back by LOTRO hogging resources.
As an aside, the Turbine/Codemasters relationship was downright acidic. We couldn't stand their often confrontational attitude and they felt we were (to put it bluntly) Yanks douching up Tolkien's vision."
"DDO was a bomb."
" Now I'm not a money guy, I don't know any more about the account books at Turbine than you do at this point. But 105 million a year would suggest LOTRO has well over 500k players paying 15 a month on average. Where are they? Now I get that some players might be 'whales'.
At Meteor Games a big chunk of our monthly revenue came from rich kids-the sons of Kuwaiti oil barons and the like-who would drop thousands of dollars a month just on Island Paradise. But LOTRO would need a lot of rich Kuwaitis running around in Bree to generate that much revenue for a game that is planning server mergers (and has practically no players on many of these servers to merge anyway).
Were that figure even remotely accurate-and it isn't-WB's acquisition of Turbine was the deal of the century. Funny though about all those layoffs...contraction is rarely a sign of great success."
"it was always a little hazy to me (I should hit up some old Turbine hands on that one) but the gist of what I heard was that the DDO team felt that WOTC was at best disinterested in DDO and provided marginal assistance in the lead-up to development (I do distinctly remember the QA director commenting that 'they really wanted nothing to do with us').
Not permitting the Forgotten Realms setting for the game was seen as undercutting the game right out of the gate. Maybe there were legal reasons for that restriction? I don't know. But for an old-timey D&D player myself (meeting Zeb Cook on ESO was a starstruck nerd moment for me), the lack of an FR setting turned me off on DDO certainly.
Also, let me say that the actual lawsuit was with Atari, not WOTC, so that should be clarified. All of that kind of blended together to me as an outsider (as a LOTRO person)."
"Based on comments from friends at the company since RoR LOTRO has been under the gun for a long time. As I mentioned elsewhere I was told over a year ago that LOTRO would be lucky to see another twelve months [counting from March 2015]and yet it remains.
But at this point the LOTRO team has been so gutted that it is hard to see how any more cuts could be made short of just pulling the plug.
When they do finally kill it I wouldn't expect much in the way of a warning: nobody is going to drop money on micro transactions for a game slated to shut down in two or three months."
"I returned to LOTRO in the fall of 2011: the company I had been working for, Meteor, in LA, abruptly folded and I got call from my old lead saying they were planning big things for PvMP and would I come back to help? I was really nostalgic for Turbine after ZOS and Meteor so said, sure-it was a big pay cut from what I'd been making since leaving the first time but that was fine.
But I found that WB's corporate influence, just barely nascent in the summer of 2010, had permeated the place. Basically all of the old headaches were still there but all the magic-the sense of family and genuine warmth you felt in Westwood-were gone. For the money offered it just wasn't worth it; I managed about four months and then put in my resignation. "
"Q: Aylwen, you said earlier that Turbine were running 3 mmos with similar staff levels of companies that only run 1 mmo. How did they manage to do that? Do you think Turbine stretched themselves too thin and should've just focused on one game?
Absolutely we stretched ourselves thin (and as previously mentioned not just with the MMOs) and I often wondered what could have been achieved if we had focused all of our energies on a single game. Needless to say, which game that should have been depended on which game one was working on! But it was almost as if it never occurred to anyone that we really shouldn't have been able to do what we did.
Three MMOs, a console project, downloader that would let you start playing before the installation was complete, LOTRO China...from a small company in a building sandwiched between a car dealership and Frugal Fanny's discount clothing...make it so!
Whatever may be said for the quality of LOTRO's development team (mixed to say the least) and leadership (or lack thereof), Turbine was blessed with some incredible talent, particularly on the technical side of things. Our NetOps guys worked wonders and by the time WB came along they had encountered every problem you could possibly experience and developed strategies to deal with them. It was hard earned wisdom that paid dividends constantly.
Once again I have to say that while as a LOTROer it was incredibly frustrating to see the quality of LOTRO diminish in large measure because we didn't have enough of the right people at the controls, on bar Turbine was an incredible operation. Note how I always say 'we' in referring to Turbine: for a long time the words 'Turbine family' weren't just an HR slogan: they really meant something."
" If a carpenter pisses off another carpenter in North Carolina and then moves to California there's little chance that will come back to haunt him.
Not so much in the game industry. And there's a very strong culture of secrecy there that becomes ingrained, especially amongst the rank and file. Forget that you're making video games that are often as not derivative rehashes of twenty other games; this is serious business!
And forget that a year from now your game will probably be pushing up daisies in the GameStop budget bin anyway. This same culture extends to marketing and community relations: never tell the truth, never admit a mistake, silence criticism, contort the facts even if it means blatantly insulting the intelligence of your customers. Release bogus screenshots of your upcoming product, happily collect the pre-orders, release a buggy unfinished product, and then sell everything you didn't get done on time as 'DLC'. But now I'm digressing a bit!
The take-it-as-you-can-get-it nature of the industry means that frequently people aren't necessarily working on the games they would ideally want to. "
"Q: You've mentioned lotro china a few times. Why was it canceled? And how different was it going to be from the western lotro?
Ah LOTRO China aka perrma-beta. They-CDC-were awful to deal with. Basically they didn't have to pay us as long as the game remained in beta. And so-surprise, surprise-every six months or so they'd come up with something they weren't happy with and needed to be fixed before they would end beta.
So for example, LOTRO had too much blood (seriously)...then too many undead (ancestor worship and all that-in fairness WoW had to address that as well)...then the lack of open world PvMP was unacceptable. So, hurting for cash, we dutifully spent a few months creating a system of rotating open world zones that would be opened for PvMP.
But in the end it was all for naught-they never paid us and all we got for our troubles were the castaway players when they shut down. Our negotiators who went over there came back with horror stories of their business practices and treatment of employees. So when the Chinese company Perfect World entered the competition to buy LOTRO it was a pretty unsettling development. "
"Whatever else may be said about Blizzard, their 'don't ship it until it's ready' philosophy has always been a cornerstone of their success in my opinion.
In the MMO business everybody was constantly trying to complete with WoW, copying their ideas, their look, even their fonts...but nobody seemed to step back and analyze how Blizzard was in a position to pull off WoW in the first place. It was like, 'here's some money guys, make us one of those wow things all the kids are playing-I want my yacht!'.
And there is a big disconnect between the executive branches of many of these companies and the development arms. Certainly the rank and file are often blissfully unaware of fires in the kitchen up until the pink slips hit their desks.
And sometimes there are good reasons for deadlines-they aren't just arbitrarily imposed by producers to make life hard for the widget makers. In fact one of the dirty secrets of the industry is worker productivity, or rather the lack thereof.
One hears about 'crunch time' constantly: the stories of poor developers being worked mercilessly around the clock, slave-driven away from their families by their heartless corporate overlords.
The truth is somewhat cloudier. Crunch is not an inevitable fact of game development. Ask a producer what it's like trying to get full productivity out of game developers and if they are feeling honest the term 'herding kittens' might approximate their response. At one company-not Turbine-we had an artist spend two weeks trying to get a bear death animation just right...ya can't make this stuff up!
In fact Turbine's crunch times were relatively mild: a benefit of being in the MMO business for years is having experienced producers who can look at the resources on hand and accordingly set milestones and triage features realistically.
In the case of Moria the product was rough at ship not because of poor productivity but rather inexperience in some quarters and a ship date that just asked too much out of the team. The following layoffs were explained to us as being a consequence of Moria's poor sales.
I didn't really buy that and I suspect that the staff reductions had been perculating for some time, perhaps to pretty up the account books as we geared up to shop ourselves around. But such is just speculation."
"I wish I had more to say about AÇ-by my day it had already faded into the background, maintained by a dev or two and a QA guy (they lost a guy with the Moria layoffs, I remember).
I couldn't have even located their nook in Westwood. As I mentioned at one point I was somewhat envious of the forgotten nature of their work, they seemed to be free to tinker with AC with no inference from Marketing or anyone else. I believe the hitherto lost AC2 code was found on Andy Gillis' old machine. His happening to have that build saved an entire game from oblivion."
"One time at Westwood I was out by an employee door having a smoke and a fellow walked up to ask where the visitor's entrance was as he was there for an interview (I don't recall which media outlet he was with). On a whim I said I'd bring him through the building to the secretary's desk and took him through the QA section, kitchen, dev pit, and so forth (Westwood was a bit of a maze).
He was obviously surprised by what he saw and commented that he had no idea how small we were. I always thought that if our fans knew what a shoestring operation we really were they'd have respected us more, not less, for what we did accomplish."
Continue in part 2
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