http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/message?board.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=1042414#M1042414

From the official forum->

This has just appeared on Jeff Freemans blog. It seems that he's not to blame for the NGE, the mystery deepens..

08.04.06Reading comprehension

Posted in Personal at 12:14 am by Dundee

If someone else (i.e. not you) designs a house and asks you to come look at their design, then it is not your design, no matter how long you look at it, no matter what you think of it. And you didn’t “come up with it” even if you like it.

If someone else asks if it is possible to build, and you say “Yes, that is possible,” then that is not the same as “pushing” or “selling” or “demanding that your design be built”.

No matter how many times they ask “Are you sure?” and no matter how many times you answer the question, and no matter even what you think of the design: it is not your design (keep up now, we just covered that) and even if it were your design, that’s not “pushing your design” but is, rather, answering a question.

If it is possible and you say it is not possible even though you know it is possible, then you are a filthy liar.

If they say “Ok, build that house” and you join a team of builders who all work hard to build the house then it is still not your design, you didn’t build it single-handedly, you didn’t shove it down anyone’s throat and it wasn’t your decision to build it.

If you make claims to the contrary then you are a filthy liar.

I’m not talking about anything in particular, I’m just sayin’.

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I’m not talking about anything in particular, I’m just sayin’

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Looks like the dogs are turning on each other.

I love it.

Grab a cold one, sit back and watch it implode.

Its great to see them start pointing fingers like the cowards they are.

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Originally posted by Concord7

http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/message?board.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=1042414#M1042414

From the official forum->

This has just appeared on Jeff Freemans blog. It seems that he's not to blame for the NGE, the mystery deepens..

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08.04.06Reading comprehension

Posted in Personal at 12:14 am by Dundee

If someone else (i.e. not you) designs a house and asks you to come look at their design, then it is not your design, no matter how long you look at it, no matter what you think of it. And you didn’t “come up with it” even if you like it.

If someone else asks if it is possible to build, and you say “Yes, that is possible,” then that is not the same as “pushing” or “selling” or “demanding that your design be built”.

No matter how many times they ask “Are you sure?” and no matter how many times you answer the question, and no matter even what you think of the design: it is not your design (keep up now, we just covered that) and even if it were your design, that’s not “pushing your design” but is, rather, answering a question.

If it is possible and you say it is not possible even though you know it is possible, then you are a filthy liar.

If they say “Ok, build that house” and you join a team of builders who all work hard to build the house then it is still not your design, you didn’t build it single-handedly, you didn’t shove it down anyone’s throat and it wasn’t your decision to build it.

If you make claims to the contrary then you are a filthy liar.

I’m not talking about anything in particular, I’m just sayin’.

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Originally posted by Ensnared

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I’m not talking about anything in particular, I’m just sayin’

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Cute... did anyone fall for that one? ;)


This contradicts what Brenlo posted though, as well as what Freeman himself posted on his blog and later removed.

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This also contradicts Jeff's own words on his own blog shortly after the NGE was released. I saw it ... I read it .. He was PROUD of his little creation. Granted he didn't have the "original" idea. But that person went to him and he spent weeks, day after day after day (in his own words) trying to sell the idea of the NGE. He finally got his way and we lost our game.

Jeff's quote: "My job was to be the guy to say, "Yes we can do that." I had to say this about forty times a day for two months."

His job was to stay true to SWG and not turn it into some POS MMO. Jeff Freeman PERSONALLY screwed Raph, SWG and all of us.

Jeff Freemans Blog entry

Friday, November 4
Shenanigans

SWG was my first job in the game industry. I had played UO for a couple of years or so and knew Raph Koster in that internet sort of way: everyone that visited or posted on any message board anywhere on the internet knew Raph Koster.

Played EQ to level 35, got killed by the same frickin' sand giant three times in a row trying to recover my corpse two weeks after a bug caused me to lose all my gear before EQ CS had the tech to undelete items and man that was it for me.

So I made a "grey shard" using POL (written by Eric Swanson, who also works at SOE now ? how weird is that?) and did that for a few years.

Those were Good Times. Friday I'd post a "Wishlist" thread and people would reply with a hundred things they wanted added to the game. And Saturday and Sunday I'd add hundreds of things to the game. Production on a single small server is pretty nice. None of this "Oh, that'll take 2 months to deliver and will require two programmers, a designer and three artists."

A lot of .broadcast "Hey everyone, brace yourselves, I'm going to replace the magic system in 3?2?1"-sorts of moments. Frequently doing development on the server that people were actually playing on, while they are playing on it, and only using a local server for really significant changes.

In terms of administration, the people were a lot harder to manage than the game. Not just the players either, but the co-admin's: the folk that hosted the server, gm "staff", and whatnot. Janey emailed Raph describing a pretty ugly situation, and he'd responded with just some no-nonsense advice on how-to-run-a-mud, which she forwarded to me, and to which I replied, directly to him.

That led directly to establishing, in writing, just what exactly the scope of everyone's responsibilities were, what the rules were, how they would be enforced, and so on. Simple stuff, right? We had none of that and, duh, we ran into a lot of problems 'til we did.

This had nothing to do with his position in the game industry and everything to do with his experience with MUDs, and my lack of it, and his willingness to share info with a fellow enthusiast. Great learning experience, should I ever run a MUD again: Sony hires professionals to do that stuff.

But it also opened a dialog between the two of us and I s'pose put my crazyass game design ideas on his radar.

Anyway, hadn't talked to Raph in a while (because, well, things had been running pretty smoothly) so one day I emailed him and asked how he'd been. He said if I sent him a resume then he could tell me what he was working on.

So I sent him a resume. And they flew me down to Austin to meet the whole SWG team and interview for a systems design position, which I didn't get. Heh.

Couple months later they flew me back again for a worldbuilding position, which I did get.

Within a few months or so I was scripting systems. Then within a couple years, lead content designer for JtL. Then a few months ago, "live lead systems designer". My titles were growing and growing!

As of last week or so, now it's "Lead Game Play Designer". A step backwards in terms of character-count, but not actually a demotion, or even that big a change in responsibilities.

Mind, we have a Creative Director and that isn't me, and a Lead Designer and that isn't me either. They're both my bosses, even though my title's longer. And there's a whole plethora of producers and executives and executive producers above that.

So don't get the crazy notion that I'm "in charge" here. "The Man" is a many-headed beast called Management. I just try to help it make good decisions. With regard to game mechanics, it even lets me decide, sometimes.

So a few months ago The Man comes along and says "What can we do to make this the most fun game it can possibly be?"

It was the lead designer who holed-up in his office for a few days and then said, "Hey, come look at this."

There's no way we can do that.

There's no way we should do that.

Man that's fun.

The Man will never let us get away with doing that.

We can't do it.

We shouldn't do it.

Oh man that is fun.

When an executive producer sees something that is impossible to do, but which is too fun not to do, he makes a noise like "Hoooooooooph".

My job was to be the guy to say, "Yes we can do that." I had to say this about forty times a day for two months. Lead Designer said it too, of course, but no one believed him, because he's crazy. Obviously.

And they would only believe me for a few minutes at a time.

It's frustrating to see the posts about Raph rolling over in his grave, crying himself to sleep, seeing all his design thrown out the window, etc. The notion seems to be that Raph's game is slow-paced, deliberate, social, "worldy", and in no case ever "fun" vs. this change which tosses-out everything Koster-esque about Galaxies. Specifically, that 'removing the Raph' is what makes it fun.

First off, Star Wars Galaxies is already a whole lot of fun for a whole lot of people. And it was very successful.

And Fast Action Combat and the introduction of classes based on iconic Star Wars character archtypes doesn't toss-out everything Koster-esque about Galaxies. Far from it.

The social elements of Galaxies' design remain, and for good reason. MMOs must be MMOs and not just big single-player games that everyone just happens to play all at once. We wouldn't have gotten things like player cities, entertainers and so on without Raph, and I wouldn't want Galaxies to be without them. Simply removing them wouldn't make the game more fun anyway.

There's a lot of cool in Galaxies. We're making all of it easier to see, easier to get to.

Honestly, I doubt I even have the capacity to design a game that is completely un-Raph like. Who do you think taught me this stuff? Over the course of years. Here's how you get X. Here's why you want X.

Yeh, I think I'm good 'nuff to see the 'why' and come up with 'Well if that's why, then we could do Z instead', but at that point it's a quibble over implementation detail, not design philosophy. I don't agree with Raph on every point about every thing, we're pretty much aligned in terms of high level game design.

For example 'Socialization requires downtime' is something Raph might say that I might not agree with. But 'MMO's require socialization, otherwise what's the point?' is not something we'd disagree about.

Many people have been influential in my personal development as a game designer and I've learned an awful lot on my own, but nothing and no other single person comes anywhere close the influence that Raph Koster has had on, in terms of game design from soup-to-nuts, what things I think about, if not in fact what I think about those things.

So I think these sorts of remarks are a little inaccurate, a tiny bit irksome, pretty unfair.



Shenanigans | postCountTB('113115312865670412'); Trackback (0)



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6 Comments:
I hope you ain't yelling at me man.

I feel bad that I might have forced you to explain this or something.

Yer my favorite dev, but I only give you credit for what I know you've done, which isn't much with SWG, but I don't really want to know more about that anyways, that's just distracting and awkward.

And I was actually trying to promote him a little on Halloween 'cause I felt like he slipped off the face of the earth, which means he's prolly working on something interesting.

Seriously I figgered pointing people to him would make them smarter, even if they feel like arguing with him or something.

And Halloweed was two days before I heard about the new SWG stuff.

If you ain't yelling at me, then I'm sorry for blabbering and maybe making things worse or something, please delete.

And if I did something horrible let me know more specifically so I can do something better about it than this.

I don't make fun of people I don't like, it ain't funny when I don't like someone.

And I give Raph credit for way the heck more in games than I give you, actually, if that makes you feel better.

By Ole Bald Angus the Monk, at 10:04 PM



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Heh. Nope, I aint yellin' at you.

By Jeff, at 2:39 AM



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I dont think its anything personal about Raph, but people like a figurehead to blame when things go wrong. You have to admit things went *very* wrong where SWG was concerned.

Players saw a game launched 18 months before it was ready. Who could they blame?

Players saw a SW game with such iconic professions as fencer, swordsman, pikeman, combat medic etc. The majority of the skill trees were poorly constructed or 90% useless (smuggler anyone?) Who could they blame?

Players saw a SW game with a complicated Health bar system which made no logical sense whatsoever. They saw a skill tree system that let them effectively boost their health by over 200 times by walking around with 3 Rancors. They had a world devoid of content. A game where getting buffs and travelling anywhere could take an hour etc etc.

Raphs world failed and im sorry he has to shoulder some of the blame. Obviously lots of other people deserve blame also, its just Raph is the most visible target.

You cannot make an argument that SWG was successful. It didnt come close to meeting its projected subscription targets. Not a failure on the size of Sims Online I admit, but a failure still. Thats basically the reason for these changes isnt it? Seems to me it was this or switching off the lights...

I really do hope this new version is a success, but after how badly SWG subscribers were treated, how bad the word of mouth is, how many of those 900,000 accounts are going to come back?

By Anonymous, at 6:10 AM




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Well, I'm one of those he is yelling to ;p

I've read your point of view and I don't have much to argue or criticize, but at the same time my own opinion didn't change, mostly because I wasn't really ranting, just expressing my perplexity.

On the other side I still believe that Raph should never have left the game, mostly because I believe in authorship and I wanted him to take the responsibility of the game and remain committed to it. I wanted and still want to see him discussing specific games instead of just dabbing on the high level theory. And I believe it's fair to admit that the game would be *nowhere* where it is right now if he was still at the lead. Good or bad.

Ubiq wrote:
"New blood coming onto a project bring their own ideas and ideologies."

This is undeniable. It's not "wrong" but it's a trait that cannot be dismissed. This is why I believe that Raph's SWG would be *very* different from today's SWG. And this also means that the scope and aim undoubtedly changed. The game had a rather high churn rate of developers and I'm sure it suffered because of this. It's the consequence of this.

What I believe is that after Raph left, he and the game splitted directions. It's a fact that most of the changes to the CU, professions, mechanics, PvP and this new last remodel are attempts to drag the game somewhere else. I'm not judging if better or worse, but undeniably different. I was the first to strongly criticize his ideas like I did on the thread on Grimwell and the following discussions so it's not like I'm trying to side with him. But I recognize this difference of opinions.

It's true that many elements of Raph's design remain, but what is also true is that the game didn't really try to build and improve them. We can say that some important ideas are still there, but many other were actually progressively eroded. Not expanded or made stronger. The game didn't move to bet even more on those points that made it unique, instead it was changed to move away from those positions and acquire more traditional elements (levels, simpler classes, more traditional combat etc..). Again this process was also excused because that design was being strongly criticized as "not fun". Hence the endless tries to simplify and streamline those parts that were perceived as too clunky and problematic.

It's not my intention to criticize this approach. It's like the father with the son. He taught you things, what you will do will be always influenced by what he did as also many others will feel that influence, me included. But this also fuels another personal point of view that is your own and must impose itself at some point.

And I really do hope this will go well, because if it doesn't we'll see the developers find yet another excuse to leave these game stagnate while all the work and resources are spent on stupid sequels. I wish they would keep the discussions and the development alive and vibrant, maybe without the need to change type of game and discard most of the work that was already being done...

By Abalieno, at 8:07 AM

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Originally posted by Concord7

http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/message?board.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=1042414#M1042414

From the official forum->

This has just appeared on Jeff Freemans blog. It seems that he's not to blame for the NGE, the mystery deepens..

---

08.04.06Reading comprehension

Posted in Personal at 12:14 am by Dundee

If someone else (i.e. not you) designs a house and asks you to come look at their design, then it is not your design, no matter how long you look at it, no matter what you think of it. And you didn’t “come up with it” even if you like it.

If someone else asks if it is possible to build, and you say “Yes, that is possible,” then that is not the same as “pushing” or “selling” or “demanding that your design be built”.

No matter how many times they ask “Are you sure?” and no matter how many times you answer the question, and no matter even what you think of the design: it is not your design (keep up now, we just covered that) and even if it were your design, that’s not “pushing your design” but is, rather, answering a question.

If it is possible and you say it is not possible even though you know it is possible, then you are a filthy liar.

If they say “Ok, build that house” and you join a team of builders who all work hard to build the house then it is still not your design, you didn’t build it single-handedly, you didn’t shove it down anyone’s throat and it wasn’t your decision to build it.

If you make claims to the contrary then you are a filthy liar.

I’m not talking about anything in particular, I’m just sayin’.

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Too funny...

If I was Jeff Freeman I would change my name if I planned to work in the industry anymore. I know that if I saw his name in the credits I'd think twice before subscribing.

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Originally posted by iceman00

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so Brenlo blames Freeman, Freeman says nope not my fault.  Smedley blames LA.  Seems nobody can get their stories traight.

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Originally posted by Malickiebloo

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Originally posted by iceman00

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so Brenlo blames Freeman, Freeman says nope not my fault.  Smedley blames LA.  Seems nobody can get their stories traight.

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Thats what happens when the hangman comes looking for his neck .

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I like what Fishermagi had to say about it. Wait for Wepps to spawn in the thread anytime now

http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/message?board.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=1042505#M1042505

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Originally posted by tillamook

I like what Fishermagi had to say about it. Wait for Wepps to spawn in the thread anytime now

http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/message?board.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=1042505#M1042505

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I think he is just saying that it was a team effort. 

They all managed to screw it up together.

lol, he updated it now

UPDATE:

Now see, this is just the sort of thing I’ve been talking about. Ya get misunderstood, post a clarification, that get’s misunderstood, so you gotta post a clarification to that, and on and on forever. Better off just leaving the misunderstood thing out there and letting people assign their own meanings to it.

Don’t try to read so closely between the lines that you fail read the lines themselves.

All I’m saying here is: When I wrote “I looked at what this guy designed” it should never have been interpreted to mean “I designed that and everything else”.

But it was taken to mean just that. Seems a little crazy to me.

So I finally wrote that it shouldn’t have been taken that way (since it keeps getting trotted out and about) and now some folks are taking that to mean something other that just what it says.
C’mon now.

I'm so glad i don't pay their bills anymore

More doublespeak, deception, and deflection.

By the time this bunch is done they are going to be claiming there was an unknown developer on the grassy knoll responsible for the NGE. 

Sounds to me like its time for a progress report on the NGE to some higherups in SOE/LA and the picture isn't so rosy.  Also sounds as if they are failing to meet some kind of anticipated goal for subscriptions and the tension is getting thick. 

Just a matter of time before somebody gets canned methinks.  And good luck to that sorry sucker trying to find a new job in the MMO industry.