Originally posted by nusquam

It's really quite simple. Gaute said there were "elements he was dissatisfied with." In the game he was Game Director for. He never said anything about the direction it was going. Feel free to fact check that.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/09/17/producer-and-game-director-for-age-of-conan-resigns-from-funcom/

To expand upon that, an expansion team was formed that I was not a part of for several months before I was brought onto the team as Lead Designer. They had been working from a vision document that was originally written by Gaute.

 

The new Game Director had no input into the direction things were being taken.  Between you all it was decided to continue to follow the path of a disillusioned man.  A game he quit because he was dissatisfied with certain elements. It had nothing to do with the turmoil you as a company was in at the time.  The 20million loss.  I notice Gaute has never said too much about this nor has it ever been mentioned, to my recolection, which elements he was dissatisfied with.  Did you fix those?

 

Yeah no offence, but I spent almost 4 years of my life reading all the versions of the stories - but our mandate from Conan inc was to use a particular set, the Del Rey published versions. 

 

Right or wrong I don't get the impression you are a Conan fan.  You appear to be somebody that had to do research for a project.  Fair enough you can learn to love something, but it raises more questions. If you are so versed in the Howard stories why did Age of Conan end up being Age of Harry Potter?  I will check out the 'Del Ray' published versions. Perhaps then I might be a bit more forgiving.

 

It being one of Howards weirder stories doesn't change anything. As for Vaghasan (not tigers and never referenced in the game as tigers) and the wolves, feel free to brush up on the in-game lore. We explained both their presence and how it all worked. The entire storyline was also run by various Howard scholars. I even did an interiew on The Cimmerian about it. I do find it odd that anyone could object to exotic mounts when Conan has been confronted with flying demon camels in one story. 

 

Who are the Howard scholars for reference?  The issue I had with Age of Conan, was an issue a lot of people had.  The game should of been about steel on steel combat.  The fantastical was always an element in Conan stories, but an element not a major part.    You took fantastical elements and tried to make them everyday Hyborian occurrences. Exotic mounts belonged in WoW not AOC.  Pets and minions, get out of here...

 

If over 8 months in beta is not enough testing for you, there is little I can offer to placate you. I had a very strong relationship with the beta testers, just like I did with the beta testers for TSW. I also submitted weekly lists of the top 10 issues with the expansion. Unsuprisingly, tech was the number one point on that list for months. We had most of our coders working on it. We also had iron clad default deadlines with our Korean partners. When the stability was deemed good enough, the expansion was deemed release worthy.  Release date was *never* the decision of the Lead Designer.

 

I can accept bugs, I mean software development is not an exact science.  But where Funcom lacked was in acknowledgement of bugs, in any sort of bug reference/booking system.   In any sort of ETA for a fix, or even a statement that things wouldn't be fixed.  There was a whole host of vagueness in this area. People reporting bugs that had been seen on test servers, making there way into final release.  I also don't accept bugs becoming 'features' because a company can not be bothered to fix them. 

 

Who deemed the expansion release worthy? When it launched it was crashing for everybody when changing zone.  That is your version of release worthy. It introduced a memory error to the 32 bit client.   If you company had been resident in the UK I would of reported you to Trading Standards for providing goods not suitable for purpose.    The dev team didn't even come up with a fix for the 32bit client memory issue at the time, a player found a workaround and posted it.   The fix from Funcom was upgrade to a 64bit client ... and this software had been tested!

 

I apologize for your customer service woes, but again, this is hardly relevant to your original post casting aspersions on my ability to design and lead a project. I don't run the customer service area of the company, but you will note that if you head over to the TSW forums, there are plenty of positive customer service experiences. Could you admit that it might have gotten better over the past few years?

 

I am casting aspersions on your whole company, not singling you out.   Yeah things might have got better, but that wouldn't be too hard.  Even a broken watch is right twice a day. Overall I didn't have an issue with customer services, you see they were fine.  It was the policy that was being dictated to them I had issue with.

 

So if the required faction points was lower, there would have been more content? Your reasoning is flawed. Read what I wrote again.

 

I don't understand that point at all.  You had tested this expansion according to you, yet you expected people to exploit the content.  So much so that you built in a grind, to slow them down.  I am saying there should have been more content, than introduced grind.  

 

Ah see I am not really making excuses, I am explaining the situation which led to your perception. I didn't apologize for it.

I'll ignore the melodramatic "Funcom doesn't care about players" stuff if you don't mind. Funcom is not a person. It is a company made up of individuals. I care about the players, and so do the rest of the design team. I'm sure the accountants don't and the chef in the cafeteria doesn't - but they are also a part of Funcom. It's essentially a meaningless statement.

 

Right so here you are trying to portray an image of an open caring 'Funcom' the business entity.   So you would say that the customer is king in Funcom land then?  All my time playing AOC it never appeared that this caring entity was bothered about it's user base at all.  They had a policy of banning anybody from their forum that said anything negative about the game.  The fans of the game always used one word when it came to AOC, 'potential' the fans saw what you as a business entity never did.  But you didn't listen, instead you introduced tons of fluff that nobody cared about.

 

Yes, our Korean Partners, Neowiz, made Age of Conan free-to-play in the east. They used their own store and had their own setup. The AoC F2P you see today is something entirely different. And yes, when I left AoC for TSW after Godslayer, there had been zero design plans around making the game F2P. You don't have to believe me, but at least admit that I know a lot more about the internal processes of our projects (and company) than you do.

 

Yeah I admit you know more than me, but I also think you are representing your company. They pay your salary, they don't pay me anything.   In fact I have given them money in the past.  So which side of the fence we are, I think has a mark on what can be said.   You would probably be on a disciplinary charge if you brought your company into disrepute. Funcom owns you to all intents and purposes. While I appreciate your candor now, this sort of open dialogue should of been happening years ago.

 

I'm sorry but your "feelings" are irrelevant. You can choose to not believe anything I say (and you've made it quite clear you won't) but again, one of us possesses knowledge and one of us is guessing at best.

 

Again one of us works for Funcom and is paid a salary.  I agree I will never know the truth behind a lot of things.   But lets just say recent events at Funcom involving senior management seem to cast a less than glowing light on the culture at Funcom.

 

Well again, there was a 360 port of the engine worked on for a long time. And then it was stopped because the memory requirements of Dreamworld exceeded what modern consoles with shared VRAM could handle.

I agree with you that marketing probably jumped the gun in announcing those versions. Ragnar set the record straight on TSW a long time before launch, however. I think it is a bit harsh to hold a grudge for an announcement that was retracted. Your call though.

 

It wasn't a long time before launch, we discussed it on this forum.  Again we were never given a proper reason.   We surmised that it was a problem with your game engine.  Yes it was wrong to announce a release platform before you can deliver.  Look at Bethesda, they are seeing repercussions with Dishonored on PS3 because of their failure to deliver the Skryrim DLC to that platform.   Customers are fickle, customers hold grudges.  I was sold on TSW being a 360 release in all your literature up until the point Ragnar pulled it.  I don't hold a grudge that it wasn't delivered but what I would of liked to have been told is the true reason.  Transparency is the word and not just when it suits Funcom.

 

Well, if you used to love it and you feel I had a large hand in ruining that, you might also consider that I had a large hand in the game that you loved in 1.5/1.6. The game went in a direction you didn't like, and I understand that can be frustrating. But at the end of the day, nobody makes decisions that everyone agrees with. And players are incredibly conflicted in what they want and how they want it.

 

Did you ever read the forums, to my recollection people were pretty in tune about the direction they wanted the game to go in overall.   It was Funcom who decided to take it their own direction.  Lets not forget some AOC functionality hadn't worked since launch. If anything people wanted what they had been promised and more PVP.  Funcom for some reason turned it into a PVE game, rather than going to the trouble of sorting out things like class balance.

 

As for "misinformation" it really does depend on things. As with the 360 example, for all intents and purposes people were employed to work on a 360 port. Does that mean Funcom lied when they announced it? And when it fell through, it means things had changed after the announcement. Then the announcement becomes "misinformation" but there was no attempt to mislead people purposely. On TSW we were very wary of "overselling" the game, and you have to admit that we promised nothing in the game that we didn't deliver (to varying degrees of success).

 

No I think it's about transparency.  If somebody had said with regards to the 360 port, the real reason I would have been more accepting of that.   But instead we are left to surmise why it has been dropped, if it was ever on the cards in the first place.  You announced the same for AOC as well, so a bit of a pattern forming.  As for overselling TSW, that is not a problem Funcom has overall. If anything you need to shoot your marketing department.  There was a serious lack of promotion for TSW which I imagine was reflected in your sale figures.

 

My point is that companies change, grow and evolve over time.TSW is *not* AoC - and the needs of TSW are not the same needs that Rise of the Godslayer had.

 

I agree, but history has an odd way of repeating itself.   Unless you learn lessons from the past.  If anybody should know this it's Funcom.

 

Anyway, let me end this now. I don't think we should continue to argue about this as you have made your standpoint clear and I hope I have made mine clear.

 

And here I thought we were having an open/honest dialogue.  You disappoint me.  Anyway I wish you luck I really do.  So TSW is not going free to play 'anytime soon' you know when I spoke about vaguenes.  It would be nice as a parting gesture to this dialogue to get some clarity on this point.  For potential customers.  What does 'anytime soon' actually mean? 3 months, 6 months, 12 months ...  Good luck with TSW, I think you are going to need it.

 

The new Game Director had no input into the direction things were being taken.  Between you all it was decided to continue to follow the path of a disillusioned man.  A game he quit because he was dissatisfied with certain elements. It had nothing to do with the turmoil you as a company was in at the time.  The 20million loss.  I notice Gaute has never said too much about this nor has it ever been mentioned, to my recolection, which elements he was dissatisfied with.  Did you fix those?

I never saw anything from Gaute outlining what he thought was wrong with the game. Perhaps he provided it to Craig? Keep in mind that I was simply a designer at that point - I was not in management meetings.

 

Yeah no offence, but I spent almost 4 years of my life reading all the versions of the stories - but our mandate from Conan inc was to use a particular set, the Del Rey published versions. 

 

Right or wrong I don't get the impression you are a Conan fan.  You appear to be somebody that had to do research for a project.  Fair enough you can learn to love something, but it raises more questions. If you are so versed in the Howard stories why did Age of Conan end up being Age of Harry Potter?  I will check out the 'Del Ray' published versions. Perhaps then I might be a bit more forgiving.

Your impressions are again irrelevant. I am a Conan fan, and I still reread the stories for inspiration even though I am no longer actively working on the project. You can believe me or not.

Your second question should be posed to the man who set the direction for the project. There were plenty of internal discussions about exactly that topic, with people well versed in the lore actively arguing against the magic system. A company is made up of individuals, as I mentioned earlier.

 

Who are the Howard scholars for reference?  The issue I had with Age of Conan, was an issue a lot of people had.  The game should of been about steel on steel combat.  The fantastical was always an element in Conan stories, but an element not a major part.    You took fantastical elements and tried to make them everyday Hyborian occurrences. Exotic mounts belonged in WoW not AOC.  Pets and minions, get out of here...

Al Harron and I had a long email exchange regarding the expansion storyline and I made a several changes based on his feedback.

However, every single Conan story involves fantastic elements. They are in fact at the core of every single one of the stories. That is a part of what makes the adventures of Conan so incredibly compelling - the sense of the weird hovering just out of sight. 

There are examples of exotic mounts, pets and minions in the stories. I understand why you think they were overused, it's the same discussion regarding everybody being the "hero" in an MMO.

I can accept bugs, I mean software development is not an exact science.  But where Funcom lacked was in acknowledgement of bugs, in any sort of bug reference/booking system.   In any sort of ETA for a fix, or even a statement that things wouldn't be fixed.  There was a whole host of vagueness in this area. People reporting bugs that had been seen on test servers, making there way into final release.  I also don't accept bugs becoming 'features' because a company can not be bothered to fix them. 

You really need to prove what you say here. I have been reading these same comments for *years* and they are pretty much baseless. The beta forums for Godslayer have been closed for a while, but again, go to the testlive forums for TSW. There are dev answers, comments and estimates in a lot of the issue threads.

Sometimes bugs appeared fixed internally and then reappear on the live servers. (We've had this on The Secret World with the Gear Manager bug and it is driving the coders insane). Nobody wants this to happen.

 Who deemed the expansion release worthy? When it launched it was crashing for everybody when changing zone.  That is your version of release worthy. It introduced a memory error to the 32 bit client.   If you company had been resident in the UK I would of reported you to Trading Standards for providing goods not suitable for purpose.    The dev team didn't even come up with a fix for the 32bit client memory issue at the time, a player found a workaround and posted it.   The fix from Funcom was upgrade to a 64bit client ... and this software had been tested!

A lot of people are involved in deeming a product release ready. QA, Operations, Management, Development. In the case of Godslayer, all of the right boxes seemed to have been ticked.

Yes, this software had been tested on the beta servers for 8 months. Client crashes and errors are regrettable. The expansion playfields had a larger memory footprint than the other playfields and it caused problems on live servers. It was not easily spotted in the beta, because we didn't have servers running 6 instances of different playfields.

You have every right to be annoyed about it. But it has been fixed. And our testing routines were changed. I would recommend anyone playing a Dreamworld game to run it on a 64-bit system as 32-bit just doesn't cut it with the memory footprint. But 32-bit is still a min spec because it does run.

 

I am casting aspersions on your whole company, not singling you out.   Yeah things might have got better, but that wouldn't be too hard.  Even a broken watch is right twice a day. Overall I didn't have an issue with customer services, you see they were fine.  It was the policy that was being dictated to them I had issue with.

No you literally did call me out personally. Check your earlier post re: Joel Bylos, korean grindfest yada yada. 

I don't understand that point at all.  You had tested this expansion according to you, yet you expected people to exploit the content.  So much so that you built in a grind, to slow them down.  I am saying there should have been more content, than introduced grind. 

Yes, and I am saying that we upped numbers which would not have changed the overall amount of content in the game. Here is the thing - players always follow the path of least resistance. That means as soon as one person finds a way to exploit, everyone is doing it 2 days later. Players always exploit. It's a sad fact that years in this industry have proven to me time and time again.

We put in safeguards to ensure the exploiting in Godslayer would not be rampant - and took longer to remove those safeguards than anticipated. It really shouldn't be harder to understand than that. 

Right so here you are trying to portray an image of an open caring 'Funcom' the business entity.   So you would say that the customer is king in Funcom land then?  All my time playing AOC it never appeared that this caring entity was bothered about it's user base at all.  They had a policy of banning anybody from their forum that said anything negative about the game.  The fans of the game always used one word when it came to AOC, 'potential' the fans saw what you as a business entity never did.  But you didn't listen, instead you introduced tons of fluff that nobody cared about.

Yeah, this is another one of those urban legends. Proof that Funcom banned people who were negative, rather than people who broke the forum terms of service would be great. 

As for ignoring players - no. As I said earlier, you cannot please all segments of a player base and someone always gets left out. Then it becomes the hyperbolic "ignoring the playerbase" but that just isn't correct. It's your perception, rather than a truth on any level.

Yeah I admit you know more than me, but I also think you are representing your company. They pay your salary, they don't pay me anything.   In fact I have given them money in the past.  So which side of the fence we are, I think has a mark on what can be said.   You would probably be on a disciplinary charge if you brought your company into disrepute. Funcom owns you to all intents and purposes. While I appreciate your candor now, this sort of open dialogue should of been happening years ago.

So don't hold me hostage to the mistakes of the past. Be open to the discussion. I can't change the past. I can only change things going forward.

 

Again one of us works for Funcom and is paid a salary.  I agree I will never know the truth behind a lot of things.   But lets just say recent events at Funcom involving senior management seem to cast a less than glowing light on the culture at Funcom.

Well, unfortunately I can't comment on this in any way as it involves legal stuff.

 

It wasn't a long time before launch, we discussed it on this forum.  Again we were never given a proper reason.   We surmised that it was a problem with your game engine.  Yes it was wrong to announce a release platform before you can deliver.  Look at Bethesda, they are seeing repercussions with Dishonored on PS3 because of their failure to deliver the Skryrim DLC to that platform.   Customers are fickle, customers hold grudges.  I was sold on TSW being a 360 release in all your literature up until the point Ragnar pulled it.  I don't hold a grudge that it wasn't delivered but what I would of liked to have been told is the true reason.  Transparency is the word and not just when it suits Funcom.

Well over a year before launch Ragnar said that the PC version of TSW was the focus and if we did a 360 version it would be a very different game. Feel free to fact check that:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-07-funcom-secret-world-different-on-console

 Did you ever read the forums, to my recollection people were pretty in tune aout the direction they wanted the game to go in overall.   It was Funcom who decided to take it their own direction.  Lets not forget some AOC functionality hadn't worked since launch. If anything people wanted what they had been promised and more PVP.  Funcom for some reason turned it into a PVE game, rather than going to the trouble of sorting out things like class balance.

Your recollection is again, just your perception. Funcom did not turn it into a PvE game, it always had elements of both since launch. Classes have all been completely revamped at least once since launch in an attempt to bring them into line. PvP was added, as was planty of PvE.

And yes, I read the forums. I do this on every project I work on to use it as a compass for understanding the direction the player base is swinging. Keep in mind that forums really are a very small percentage of players, and playerbase wide surveys usually show with much more accuracy the wishes of the majority.

 

No I think it's about transparency.  If somebody had said with regards to the 360 port, the real reason I would have been more accepting of that.   But instead we are left to surmise why it has been dropped, if it was ever on the cards in the first place.  You announced the same for AOC as well, so a bit of a pattern forming.  As for overselling TSW, that is not a problem Funcom has overall. If anything you need to shoot your marketing department.  There was a serious lack of promotion for TSW which I imagine was reflected in your sale figures.

And I have explained it, both the why it was announced (and that I agree with you it was too early) and the reason it was dropped. There is really nothing more I can offer on this topic.

I agree, but history has an odd way of repeating itself.   Unless you learn lessons from the past.  If anybody should know this it's Funcom.

My points and indeed this discussion have always been about that. The Secret World is proof in many respects that we learned lessons from the past. Now we have a different set of lessons to learn.

This is natural for any gaming company - hell even Blizzard have plenty to learn from each product they release.

 

And here I thought we were having an open/honest dialogue.  You disappoint me.  Anyway I wish you luck I really do. 

No offence but I am the one being open and honest here. You are just questioning my points. But I appreciate the good wishes at least :)

So TSW is not going free to play 'anytime soon' you know when I spoke about vaguenes.  It would be nice as a parting gesture to this dialogue to get some clarity on this point.  For potential customers.  What does 'anytime soon' actually mean? 3 months, 6 months, 12 months ...  Good luck with TSW, I think you are going to need it.

Again, I can only speak for what I know. F2P could happen in any of those timeframes and it wouldn't invalidate the fact that the only meetings I have been in to discuss it have ended with "not anytime soon."

It goes back to the misinformation example - things could change rapidly. Will you call me a liar if they do, or will you accept that I don't have a crystal ball and that decisions in a company are made on many levels and not all of them involving the development team?

This time I really will end this. If you want to continue the dialogue, I invite you to send me a PM on the official forums (same username). 

Originally posted by fallenlords
Overall I am grateful for the response it was insightful. Perception though is a two way thing, perceptions as a developer can be a lot different to that of a player.  Worlds apart even.

Originally posted by smh_alot

Heck, perceptions between players can even be worlds apart, even if they've been playing on the same server, then the perception of one player regarding bugs, gameplay experience and whether it was great fun or not can be a woeld of difference compared with another player.

Totally agree.  But there is a gulf in perception between developer and player.   Developer will see the technicalities of doing something, player doesn't care they just want it to happen.    Developer comes at it from a design point of view, a player comes at it from being a source of entertainment.   Never met a developer yet that liked taking ownership of anything. Unless you had documents written in triplicate with the blood of a slaughtered virgin and blessed by a holy man of the Hindu Kush.  Then it may be considered, as long as x number of customer can verify it with a signed statement written in Klingon.  That's just for the acknowledgement, don't even ask me what you have to do to get a bug fixed...

Wow, Joel. Props to you for coming out here and tackling the negativity.

TSW is an awesome game that has spoiled me for everything else. Thanks for that. :)

Originally posted by Jaedor

Wow, Joel. Props to you for coming out here and tackling the negativity.

TSW is an awesome game that has spoiled me for everything else. Thanks for that. :)

/signed

Also the level of communication, information, as well as the CS -> 10/10

And if I may add I haven't missed a single beer drinking dev live stream yet! Always exciting to hear the FC guys talk about TSW

Originally posted by nusquam

 

The new Game Director had no input into the direction things were being taken.  Between you all it was decided to continue to follow the path of a disillusioned man.  A game he quit because he was dissatisfied with certain elements. It had nothing to do with the turmoil you as a company was in at the time.  The 20million loss.  I notice Gaute has never said too much about this nor has it ever been mentioned, to my recolection, which elements he was dissatisfied with.  Did you fix those?

I never saw anything from Gaute outlining what he thought was wrong with the game. Perhaps he provided it to Craig? Keep in mind that I was simply a designer at that point - I was not in management meetings.

 

Yeah no offence, but I spent almost 4 years of my life reading all the versions of the stories - but our mandate from Conan inc was to use a particular set, the Del Rey published versions. 

 

Right or wrong I don't get the impression you are a Conan fan.  You appear to be somebody that had to do research for a project.  Fair enough you can learn to love something, but it raises more questions. If you are so versed in the Howard stories why did Age of Conan end up being Age of Harry Potter?  I will check out the 'Del Ray' published versions. Perhaps then I might be a bit more forgiving.

Your impressions are again irrelevant. I am a Conan fan, and I still reread the stories for inspiration even though I am no longer actively working on the project. You can believe me or not.

Your second question should be posed to the man who set the direction for the project. There were plenty of internal discussions about exactly that topic, with people well versed in the lore actively arguing against the magic system. A company is made up of individuals, as I mentioned earlier.

 

Who are the Howard scholars for reference?  The issue I had with Age of Conan, was an issue a lot of people had.  The game should of been about steel on steel combat.  The fantastical was always an element in Conan stories, but an element not a major part.    You took fantastical elements and tried to make them everyday Hyborian occurrences. Exotic mounts belonged in WoW not AOC.  Pets and minions, get out of here...

Al Harron and I had a long email exchange regarding the expansion storyline and I made a several changes based on his feedback.

However, every single Conan story involves fantastic elements. They are in fact at the core of every single one of the stories. That is a part of what makes the adventures of Conan so incredibly compelling - the sense of the weird hovering just out of sight. 

There are examples of exotic mounts, pets and minions in the stories. I understand why you think they were overused, it's the same discussion regarding everybody being the "hero" in an MMO.

I can accept bugs, I mean software development is not an exact science.  But where Funcom lacked was in acknowledgement of bugs, in any sort of bug reference/booking system.   In any sort of ETA for a fix, or even a statement that things wouldn't be fixed.  There was a whole host of vagueness in this area. People reporting bugs that had been seen on test servers, making there way into final release.  I also don't accept bugs becoming 'features' because a company can not be bothered to fix them. 

You really need to prove what you say here. I have been reading these same comments for *years* and they are pretty much baseless. The beta forums for Godslayer have been closed for a while, but again, go to the testlive forums for TSW. There are dev answers, comments and estimates in a lot of the issue threads.

Sometimes bugs appeared fixed internally and then reappear on the live servers. (We've had this on The Secret World with the Gear Manager bug and it is driving the coders insane). Nobody wants this to happen.

 

 Who deemed the expansion release worthy? When it launched it was crashing for everybody when changing zone.  That is your version of release worthy. It introduced a memory error to the 32 bit client.   If you company had been resident in the UK I would of reported you to Trading Standards for providing goods not suitable for purpose.    The dev team didn't even come up with a fix for the 32bit client memory issue at the time, a player found a workaround and posted it.   The fix from Funcom was upgrade to a 64bit client ... and this software had been tested!

A lot of people are involved in deeming a product release ready. QA, Operations, Management, Development. In the case of Godslayer, all of the right boxes seemed to have been ticked.

Yes, this software had been tested on the beta servers for 8 months. Client crashes and errors are regrettable. The expansion playfields had a larger memory footprint than the other playfields and it caused problems on live servers. It was not easily spotted in the beta, because we didn't have servers running 6 instances of different playfields.

You have every right to be annoyed about it. But it has been fixed. And our testing routines were changed. I would recommend anyone playing a Dreamworld game to run it on a 64-bit system as 32-bit just doesn't cut it with the memory footprint. But 32-bit is still a min spec because it does run.

 

I am casting aspersions on your whole company, not singling you out.   Yeah things might have got better, but that wouldn't be too hard.  Even a broken watch is right twice a day. Overall I didn't have an issue with customer services, you see they were fine.  It was the policy that was being dictated to them I had issue with.

No you literally did call me out personally. Check your earlier post re: Joel Bylos, korean grindfest yada yada. 

I don't understand that point at all.  You had tested this expansion according to you, yet you expected people to exploit the content.  So much so that you built in a grind, to slow them down.  I am saying there should have been more content, than introduced grind. 

Yes, and I am saying that we upped numbers which would not have changed the overall amount of content in the game. Here is the thing - players always follow the path of least resistance. That means as soon as one person finds a way to exploit, everyone is doing it 2 days later. Players always exploit. It's a sad fact that years in this industry have proven to me time and time again.

We put in safeguards to ensure the exploiting in Godslayer would not be rampant - and took longer to remove those safeguards than anticipated. It really shouldn't be harder to understand than that. 

Right so here you are trying to portray an image of an open caring 'Funcom' the business entity.   So you would say that the customer is king in Funcom land then?  All my time playing AOC it never appeared that this caring entity was bothered about it's user base at all.  They had a policy of banning anybody from their forum that said anything negative about the game.  The fans of the game always used one word when it came to AOC, 'potential' the fans saw what you as a business entity never did.  But you didn't listen, instead you introduced tons of fluff that nobody cared about.

Yeah, this is another one of those urban legends. Proof that Funcom banned people who were negative, rather than people who broke the forum terms of service would be great. 

As for ignoring players - no. As I said earlier, you cannot please all segments of a player base and someone always gets left out. Then it becomes the hyperbolic "ignoring the playerbase" but that just isn't correct. It's your perception, rather than a truth on any level.

Yeah I admit you know more than me, but I also think you are representing your company. They pay your salary, they don't pay me anything.   In fact I have given them money in the past.  So which side of the fence we are, I think has a mark on what can be said.   You would probably be on a disciplinary charge if you brought your company into disrepute. Funcom owns you to all intents and purposes. While I appreciate your candor now, this sort of open dialogue should of been happening years ago.

So don't hold me hostage to the mistakes of the past. Be open to the discussion. I can't change the past. I can only change things going forward.

 

Again one of us works for Funcom and is paid a salary.  I agree I will never know the truth behind a lot of things.   But lets just say recent events at Funcom involving senior management seem to cast a less than glowing light on the culture at Funcom.

Well, unfortunately I can't comment on this in any way as it involves legal stuff.

 

It wasn't a long time before launch, we discussed it on this forum.  Again we were never given a proper reason.   We surmised that it was a problem with your game engine.  Yes it was wrong to announce a release platform before you can deliver.  Look at Bethesda, they are seeing repercussions with Dishonored on PS3 because of their failure to deliver the Skryrim DLC to that platform.   Customers are fickle, customers hold grudges.  I was sold on TSW being a 360 release in all your literature up until the point Ragnar pulled it.  I don't hold a grudge that it wasn't delivered but what I would of liked to have been told is the true reason.  Transparency is the word and not just when it suits Funcom.

Well over a year before launch Ragnar said that the PC version of TSW was the focus and if we did a 360 version it would be a very different game. Feel free to fact check that:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-07-funcom-secret-world-different-on-console

 Did you ever read the forums, to my recollection people were pretty in tune aout the direction they wanted the game to go in overall.   It was Funcom who decided to take it their own direction.  Lets not forget some AOC functionality hadn't worked since launch. If anything people wanted what they had been promised and more PVP.  Funcom for some reason turned it into a PVE game, rather than going to the trouble of sorting out things like class balance.

Your recollection is again, just your perception. Funcom did not turn it into a PvE game, it always had elements of both since launch. Classes have all been completely revamped at least once since launch in an attempt to bring them into line. PvP was added, as was planty of PvE.

And yes, I read the forums. I do this on every project I work on to use it as a compass for understanding the direction the player base is swinging. Keep in mind that forums really are a very small percentage of players, and playerbase wide surveys usually show with much more accuracy the wishes of the majority.

 

No I think it's about transparency.  If somebody had said with regards to the 360 port, the real reason I would have been more accepting of that.   But instead we are left to surmise why it has been dropped, if it was ever on the cards in the first place.  You announced the same for AOC as well, so a bit of a pattern forming.  As for overselling TSW, that is not a problem Funcom has overall. If anything you need to shoot your marketing department.  There was a serious lack of promotion for TSW which I imagine was reflected in your sale figures.

And I have explained it, both the why it was announced (and that I agree with you it was too early) and the reason it was dropped. There is really nothing more I can offer on this topic.

I agree, but history has an odd way of repeating itself.   Unless you learn lessons from the past.  If anybody should know this it's Funcom.

My points and indeed this discussion have always been about that. The Secret World is proof in many respects that we learned lessons from the past. Now we have a different set of lessons to learn.

This is natural for any gaming company - hell even Blizzard have plenty to learn from each product they release.

 

 

And here I thought we were having an open/honest dialogue.  You disappoint me.  Anyway I wish you luck I really do. 

No offence but I am the one being open and honest here. You are just questioning my points. But I appreciate the good wishes at least :)

So TSW is not going free to play 'anytime soon' you know when I spoke about vaguenes.  It would be nice as a parting gesture to this dialogue to get some clarity on this point.  For potential customers.  What does 'anytime soon' actually mean? 3 months, 6 months, 12 months ...  Good luck with TSW, I think you are going to need it.

Again, I can only speak for what I know. F2P could happen in any of those timeframes and it wouldn't invalidate the fact that the only meetings I have been in to discuss it have ended with "not anytime soon."

It goes back to the misinformation example - things could change rapidly. Will you call me a liar if they do, or will you accept that I don't have a crystal ball and that decisions in a company are made on many levels and not all of them involving the development team?

This time I really will end this. If you want to continue the dialogue, I invite you to send me a PM on the official forums (same username). 

Funcom does ban naysayers and those with criticisms from their forum. If you say they arent then why did I get a 2 month ban for making a thread on a bug and then asking for resolution? Why do I put a ticket in to be handled by customer service it never gets answered? Why does is my best friend unable to submit a ticket because you guys have left his last ticket open for 3 months?

Originally posted by jayfeeler69

Funcom does ban naysayers and those with criticisms from their forum. If you say they arent then why did I get a 2 month ban for making a thread on a bug and then asking for resolution? Why do I put a ticket in to be handled by customer service it never gets answered? Why does is my best friend unable to submit a ticket because you guys have left his last ticket open for 3 months?

 

I call BS, I've seen the same handful of trolls posting their baseless criticism and company insults over there for MONTHS until it got unbearable, they must have been reported by users several hundred times until they got banned for good. And boy was I happy when they finally did. Terms of service are the rules, people need to hold on to it or or go away. They've got enough fun and company bashing on this forum.

Originally posted by Yakamomoto

I call BS, I've seen the same handful of trolls posting their baseless criticism and company insults over there for MONTHS until it got unbearable, they must have been reported by users several hundred times until they got banned for good. And boy was I happy when they finally did. Terms of service are the rules, people need to hold on to it or or go away. They've got enough fun and company bashing on this forum.

I agree with this.  If the developers weren't interested in feedback - pro and con - then they wouldn't devote entire feedback threads to that very purpose.  I've also been impressed with members of the dev team coming on and explaining why they did what they did - and even moreso, why they didn't do some of the things that posters were requesting.  In the Gear Manager issue threads, I could practically feel the frustration the devs were experiencing at how stubborn the errors have been, regardless of the fixes they threw at it.  Seeing a dev post something to the effect of 'Yeah, we're /facepalming and /headdesking too!' was a refreshing bit of honesty, IMO.

The only times I've seen threads get locked was when flamers made the same basless accusations over and over and OVER again, and other posters getting fed up with it... oh, and when threads are consolidated - and they even list the threads that were locked in the consolidation thread.  Pretty impressive, I must say.

Originally posted by jayfeeler69

Funcom does ban naysayers and those with criticisms from their forum. If you say they arent then why did I get a 2 month ban for making a thread on a bug and then asking for resolution? Why do I put a ticket in to be handled by customer service it never gets answered? Why does is my best friend unable to submit a ticket because you guys have left his last ticket open for 3 months?

Your post history makes it a bit hard to believe. Have any screen captures to prove your claim? After all receiving a ban for something petty is great ammunition for a negative thread and having screen captions of it would be icing.

Funcom is a different type of company. More mom and pop than chain. I hope my 15 helps.

BC

nothing much interesting me in this patch, but continue developing the game one step at a time, is the right way to go.

Originally posted by Yakamomoto

I call BS, I've seen the same handful of trolls posting their baseless criticism and company insults over there for MONTHS until it got unbearable, they must have been reported by users several hundred times until they got banned for good. And boy was I happy when they finally did. Terms of service are the rules, people need to hold on to it or or go away. They've got enough fun and company bashing on this forum.

Originally posted by Yakamomoto

I call BS, I've seen the same handful of trolls posting their baseless criticism and company insults over there for MONTHS until it got unbearable, they must have been reported by users several hundred times until they got banned for good. And boy was I happy when they finally did. Terms of service are the rules, people need to hold on to it or or go away. They've got enough fun and company bashing on this forum.

This. 

Originally posted by bcbully

Funcom is a different type of company. More mom and pop than chain. I hope my 15 helps.

 

BC

Never knew an international corporation beholden to investers was mom and pop. I think you dont understand what that means