Darkfall Forum » General Discussion » Claus Grovdal, Creator of Darkfall and its Lead Designer/Producer and other Darkfall developers CV's.*Update Razorwax AS Bankrupt 2006

A very brief mention of Razorwax’s move to Greece due to lack of investment used as an example in an article bemoaning the general state of MMO game investment in Norway.

From a Norwegian science and technology magazine from June 2005.

http://www.tu.no/a/00023/Teknisk_Ukeblad_1605_23505a.pdf

"The company Razorwax came capital from Norway to Greece."

Originally posted by Polarization

 

 

 

A very brief mention of Razorwax’s move to Greece due to lack of investment used as an example in an article bemoaning the general state of MMO game investment in Norway.

From a Norwegian science and technology magazine from June 2005.

http://www.tu.no/a/00023/Teknisk_Ukeblad_1605_23505a.pdf

"The company Razorwax came capital from Norway to Greece."

 

yea we know that...

http://katalog.nol.no/tornado-design-kjetil-helland_b984756356.html

http://w2.brreg.no/kunngjoring/hent_nr.jsp?orgnr=984756356

I wonder if this is the very same Kjetil Helland who’s also a “lead programmer” for Darkfall.

Originally posted by Polarization

http://katalog.nol.no/tornado-design-kjetil-helland_b984756356.html

http://w2.brreg.no/kunngjoring/hent_nr.jsp?orgnr=984756356

Name / Company: TORNADO DESIGN KJETIL HELLAND

 

Purpose: Design and design of the Internet pages, web design.
 

Holder: Kjetil Helland

 

Started on 2002-08-31

 

 

 

I wonder if this is the very same Kjetil Helland who’s also a “lead programmer” for Darkfall.

It certainly fit’s the pattern of developers involved with this project that I have already shown have started and owned other company’s with only one employee that don’t appear to be very successful .

Of course it could just be another coincidence.

Pol your really grasping. that has nothing to do with anything...
 and its sad how much time your spending finding this weird info that has nothing to do with darkfall.

your really going to feel bad later

Originally posted by Polarization

http://katalog.nol.no/tornado-design-kjetil-helland_b984756356.html

http://w2.brreg.no/kunngjoring/hent_nr.jsp?orgnr=984756356

Name / Company: TORNADO DESIGN KJETIL HELLAND

 

Purpose: Design and design of the Internet pages, web design.
 

Holder: Kjetil Helland

 

Started on 2002-08-31

I wonder if this is the very same Kjetil Helland who’s also a “lead programmer” for Darkfall.

It certainly fit’s the pattern of developers involved with this project that I have already shown have started and owned other company’s with only one employee that don’t appear to be very successful .

Of course it could just be another coincidence.

I know several 3D artists, animators and programmers that are self employees. Hiring themself out or have a full time job at another company and doing small jobs on theirs 'spare time'.

Originally posted by Silvarch

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Question: Where do programmers come from?

Do they spring up out of the ground over night?  Do they evolve naturally out of the ocean?

In most cases probably not.  What about engineers?  Do they fly in from space?

You have to go to school to be proficient in programming, engineering, and most technical jobs.  So what you're saying is you probably don't consider programming done in a learning environment experience.  Just because and/or even if Bjorn didn't have any prior experience on any game in production, its not to say that he doesn't know what he's doing.  All the 20+ years experience guys had to start somewhere too believe it or not.

 

The vast majority of your arguments are only backed up by logical fallacies, I called you on it on the thread where you say Polarization also decided to ignore you but you gleefully ignored my post so I just reckoned it wasn't worth it to bother any further, however this post shows a degree of ignorance that is both amusing and scary at the same time.

See, you see it as a logical fallacy, Polar always sees it as a strawman argument, and I would believe you if Polars jumping to conclusions from what little information he has really would be considered "educated" in any way shape or form and hardly logical but, perhaps, a bit propagandist.  All you seem to do is agree with him which makes me think, A) you are Polar, B) you;re sleeping with polar, or C) you actually believe everything polar posts without thinking for yourself.   Any one of those are possible at this point. Some of your posts scream Polarization right down to the wording and format.

To put it bluntly, it leads me to believe you don't posses any kind of post-secondary education, and 0 or negative experience in programming (real, by the way, not HTML or CSS, or JS, or batch files etc.) or the video game industry.

Which would make you extremely wrong, I've been working with HTML, CSS, Java, and XML before I became a consultant many years ago. I was hired on by a company when I was 18 that hired me because of my experience in what I created at school. I did advertisements for their personal auction site as well as Ebay sites, and redesigned their website as well. But you must be trying to insult my intelligence or something because when you and polar can't win an argument you resort to childish tactics, so please continue.

You're comparing time spent in a learning environment with time spent in a working environment for an industry markedly underrepresented in academia. Even in the more general IT business, tertiary education only prepares you for, at best, an entry level position in any serious/competent IT company. Where you go from there, if anywhere at all, is mostly dependent on work experience. This is even more conspicuous in the video game industry, where even fewer institutions have custom tailored programs for it, or better yet, majors in Revolutionary MMO Design and Development. That's not to say you can't get an entry level job for a Revolutionary MMO fresh out of school and be good at it, but the entire team, including some leads? No real surprise it's taking this long. It's not indy, it's amateur. I'd even say hobbyist seeing how at least one of their leads has to rely on 2nd(1st?) jobs to sustain himself, by his own admission.

Well, you could argue that point, since I've been working in the field for just about 10 years, and entry level position requires no technical knowledge in most cases in many IT companies.  But they would simply answer phones providing the base level support, or basically do geek squad work and say reinstall to everything that goes wrong.  But you would be wrong to assume that all you would receive out of school would be an entry level job.  Especially in the IT field its what you know that makes you important, and how you can prove you know it.  The fact of the matter is, he doesn't know what experience Bjone possesses, and if the designs aren't good enough compared to what else you've seen in MMOs then I'm pretty appauled. 

 

The 20+ years experience guys started 20+ years ago, when only Nostradamus had heard of the term "MMO" and the most complex of games took at most 5 people and a few months to create and even then the more experienced programmers outranked them in the quality and scale of their work and were overall such a desirable commodity that some big (relatively, in the industry back then) companies didn't even credit them in fear of having them stolen by rival companies. They certainly didn't start in one of the most demanding market segments of the industry, both in overall experience and budget, to compete against and promise more than people who have orders of magnitude more of each. It was a lot easier to create what would be considered a AAA game back then, for example Will Wright single-handedly developed SimCity, but now, well, Wright's or Carmack's brilliant (downright scary) talent alone wouldn't suffice.

"So what you're saying is you probably don't consider programming done in a learning environment experience." If by "experience" here you mean "work or industry experience in relation to games development", then no, and I don't see why anyone would consider it so. If by "experience" you mean "part of the curriculum, and thus hardly adequate for a project of this scale to challenge the actual experts in this particular field" then I'd disagree with your statement, because I do consider it such. You need to add a qualifier to experience otherwise it's meaninglessly vague, considering everything that is perceived, understood and remembered is experience.

You can say that its hardly adequate, but again you'd be guessing, and no I didn't say that.  You can't say person A is better then person B when you don't know all their qualifications or their actual quality of work, you're guessing, like you and polar (or if you're one in the same) always do.

"Just because and/or even if Bjorn didn't have any prior experience on any game in production, its not to say that he doesn't know what he's doing." And no one claimed he didn't, I assume we're not mind readers (speaking for myself here) to know what he knows but hasn't yet demonstrated, while he might be one who siphoned the knowledge off some expert. Just pointing an obvious red flag based on the empirical evidence that anyone who has met success in this specific market segment of the industry has had at least some of said experience (even CCP of EVE-O) and none of them were even trying something as huge in magnitude and scope as Aventurine is. Not evidence of impossibility, but implausibility, and if anyone considers that irrelevant or doesn't consider it at all then that person is extremely optimistic (and definitely not a "devil's advocate"), to the point of being unreasonable.

Implausibility is acceptable, so prove implausibility.  Point out the reasons why its implausible, but what you're doing is jumping to conclusions and making statements with minimal evidence.  It may be the only evidence you have, but does that mean that thats the only evidence there is?  I seem to believe that you disregard all the videos, screenshots, dev journals, and forum updates, and rather take personal networking sites as the supreme word where this game is involved.

PS: Contrary what you may believe, (understandably, since you seem to know nothing about it) you don't have to go to school to be proficient in, or even a master (a title always coveted but seldomly achieved) of, programming or engineering, but that'd require that elusive work experience so oft mentioned and underrated (and apparently not possessed by the object of our discussion), as well as some natural talent. John Carmack stands out as a shining example of it, though there are countless others more...mundane. Hell, most related job requirements ask for work experience more than they do degrees, including ones at companies like Blizzard. Generally speaking a degree alone is only good for an entry level job.

I know a lot of programmers, a lot of engineers, and a lot of IT people.  A degree definitely gets your foot in the door, but the question is, without that degree would you still have a shot?  Basically you can start out in a small company then move up... I mean thats what I did, but I had school and experience when I got this position.  The guy before me was fresh out of school though, a director of a mid size company with 3 locations across the nation.  The only reason he left was for medical purposes.  There are many different possibilities here on ways to make it in this world, I'm not contending that, I'm just saying we're not sure where Bjorns previous experience comes from.

You once asked me if I knew more about game development than you did. At the time I told you I couldn't answer because I didn't know what you knew. Since I can now infer from your comments your related knowledge, or lack thereof, I can safely say that I do, considerably.

Well then you must obviously KNOW that Darkfall isn't going to launch.  I should have known, you were hiding it all along.  We should have listened to your oh so logical conclusions over these "facts" that you post.   What are those "facts" that we "know" by the way?  And how does that correspond to Darkfall not releasing?   You're saying Bjorn doesn't have enough experience to complete a project of this magnitude, so the project won't complete.   thats fact right?

Another brief mention of Darkfall and Razorwax from the same Norwegian magazine this time from April 2005, containing some interesting comments by Claus.

The fi kk the crazy idea to fl provided for money to Greece. -- We had been to meet in Athens with our investor and thought it was warm and comfortable there, "he says. He admits later that the the real reason is that it is much cheaper to drive fi rmaet in Greece than in Canada.

Yep, I'm sure it certainly is warm and comfortable in Greece for you, as well as "being much cheaper" then Canada, hopefully it wont turn out to be a "crazy idea" though eh?

http://www.tu.no/a/00022/Teknisk_Ukeblad_1105_22450a.pdf

More delightful Darkfall weirdness, from

http://www.horror.com/forum/archive/index.php?t-8119.html

Claus Grovdal creator of Darkfall and founder of Razorwax actually personally responding to the “troll V word haters” on this forum from 2001.

http://www.planetcrap.com/topics/287/

One of the "troll V word haters" response to the recent announcement that Darkfall was in development.

Razorwax is comprised of a couple guys who couldn't get jobs at Funcom, I was talking to them and their Funcom chums back in beta 2 of AO. Read into the fact they couldn't pass FC's "stringent" hiring practice however you want. At the time, they said "It'd be really neat to make a mmog" (except in broken english).

I label Darkness Falls: "Dawn-like, but well-intended".

Claus Grovdals personal response to that and the other less then positive comments about his project

Morn dropped me an email about the thread, so I had to come check it out.

We announced the game yesterday because we really want the input from potential future players. Obviously the buzz doesnt hurt either, but we have no illusions about landing a phat publisher deal just because we have a nice webpage and some screenshots.

We seriously want to give a more open development cycle a shot. You may call it an act of desperation, but for us it feels really great to finally get to talk about what we have been working on fulltime for 12 months.

Exactly how "open" it is can be discussed. We have 400 pages of game design, so we have a pretty good idea about what we want the game to look, feel and play like. But since we are geared towards the PVP market, game balance is extremely important, and for that we do need player input and player testing right off the bat.

Fuzzie mentioned that it took us 12 months to get here - please note that we made it all from scratch: 3D Engine, tools/worldbuilder, art, design and server. We are 4 people fulltime man, give us some credit here :)

And please dont compare us to Dawn Mr Eric Fate, our screenshots are real, and you can come try the engine in a couple of weeks ;)

Seems even fellow Norwegians were just as skeptical about this projects prospects of success in 2005 as many people still are 3 years later.

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Silvarch

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Question: Where do programmers come from?

Do they spring up out of the ground over night?  Do they evolve naturally out of the ocean?

In most cases probably not.  What about engineers?  Do they fly in from space?

You have to go to school to be proficient in programming, engineering, and most technical jobs.  So what you're saying is you probably don't consider programming done in a learning environment experience.  Just because and/or even if Bjorn didn't have any prior experience on any game in production, its not to say that he doesn't know what he's doing.  All the 20+ years experience guys had to start somewhere too believe it or not.

 

The vast majority of your arguments are only backed up by logical fallacies, I called you on it on the thread where you say Polarization also decided to ignore you but you gleefully ignored my post so I just reckoned it wasn't worth it to bother any further, however this post shows a degree of ignorance that is both amusing and scary at the same time.

See, you see it as a logical fallacy, Polar always sees it as a strawman argument, and I would believe you if Polars jumping to conclusions from what little information he has really would be considered "educated" in any way shape or form and hardly logical but, perhaps, a bit propagandist.  All you seem to do is agree with him which makes me think, A) you are Polar, B) you;re sleeping with polar, or C) you actually believe everything polar posts without thinking for yourself.   Any one of those are possible at this point. Some of your posts scream Polarization right down to the wording and format.

I knew you'd say something like this the moment I saw Polarization thanking me. Rest assured though, I'm not him, and I posted in this thread not to agree with him but to disagree with you because you've systematically used every logical fallacy in the book to support your arguments. I generally agree with his opinion, though, and I'm not surprised to see that for you the only possible reasons why someone would agree with him is if they shared an identity or bed with him, or didn't think for themselves, fond of logical fallacies as you are. All he does is post some information he found and present his interpretation, in some cases I agree, in some others I don't, but in all of them I form my own opinion. You'd just disregard them while attacking Polarization.

To put it bluntly, it leads me to believe you don't posses any kind of post-secondary education, and 0 or negative experience in programming (real, by the way, not HTML or CSS, or JS, or batch files etc.) or the video game industry.

Which would make you extremely wrong, I've been working with HTML, CSS, Java, and XML before I became a consultant many years ago. I was hired on by a company when I was 18 that hired me because of my experience in what I created at school. I did advertisements for their personal auction site as well as Ebay sites, and redesigned their website as well. But you must be trying to insult my intelligence or something because when you and polar can't win an argument you resort to childish tactics, so please continue.

Wait, childish tactics? Where did I try to insult, or even mention, your intelligence? I merely conjectured on your level of education and working experience, and from what I can tell I was exactly right. I specifically said not HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc, because that's not "real" programming in the professional sense of the word. Nothing to be ashamed about, you should be proud of your accomplishments, but they're not what I mentioned before.

You're comparing time spent in a learning environment with time spent in a working environment for an industry markedly underrepresented in academia. Even in the more general IT business, tertiary education only prepares you for, at best, an entry level position in any serious/competent IT company. Where you go from there, if anywhere at all, is mostly dependent on work experience. This is even more conspicuous in the video game industry, where even fewer institutions have custom tailored programs for it, or better yet, majors in Revolutionary MMO Design and Development. That's not to say you can't get an entry level job for a Revolutionary MMO fresh out of school and be good at it, but the entire team, including some leads? No real surprise it's taking this long. It's not indy, it's amateur. I'd even say hobbyist seeing how at least one of their leads has to rely on 2nd(1st?) jobs to sustain himself, by his own admission.

Well, you could argue that point, since I've been working in the field for just about 10 years, and entry level position requires no technical knowledge in most cases in many IT companies.  But they would simply answer phones providing the base level support, or basically do geek squad work and say reinstall to everything that goes wrong.  But you would be wrong to assume that all you would receive out of school would be an entry level job.  Especially in the IT field its what you know that makes you important, and how you can prove you know it.  The fact of the matter is, he doesn't know what experience Bjone possesses, and if the designs aren't good enough compared to what else you've seen in MMOs then I'm pretty appauled. 

I'm sorry, there seems to be some misunderstanding. By entry level job I didn't mean tech support, I meant a real IT job, like junior programmer or network administrator or DBA. That's as much as you will get at a competent and serious IT company (different from the IT department of a regular company) with just a degree. Indeed what you know is what's important, and a degree is merely saying "I should know at least this much".

 

The 20+ years experience guys started 20+ years ago, when only Nostradamus had heard of the term "MMO" and the most complex of games took at most 5 people and a few months to create and even then the more experienced programmers outranked them in the quality and scale of their work and were overall such a desirable commodity that some big (relatively, in the industry back then) companies didn't even credit them in fear of having them stolen by rival companies. They certainly didn't start in one of the most demanding market segments of the industry, both in overall experience and budget, to compete against and promise more than people who have orders of magnitude more of each. It was a lot easier to create what would be considered a AAA game back then, for example Will Wright single-handedly developed SimCity, but now, well, Wright's or Carmack's brilliant (downright scary) talent alone wouldn't suffice.

"So what you're saying is you probably don't consider programming done in a learning environment experience." If by "experience" here you mean "work or industry experience in relation to games development", then no, and I don't see why anyone would consider it so. If by "experience" you mean "part of the curriculum, and thus hardly adequate for a project of this scale to challenge the actual experts in this particular field" then I'd disagree with your statement, because I do consider it such. You need to add a qualifier to experience otherwise it's meaninglessly vague, considering everything that is perceived, understood and remembered is experience.

You can say that its hardly adequate, but again you'd be guessing, and no I didn't say that.  You can't say person A is better then person B when you don't know all their qualifications or their actual quality of work, you're guessing, like you and polar (or if you're one in the same) always do.

I'm not guessing about it being hardly adequate, I know the average level of preparation on game development you're left with after tertiary education, I've dealt with it many times, and I know what a project of this scale takes as well as the sort of qualifications the competition has. Show me a game that competes with AAA titles made by a completely new crew. I've never said person A is better than person B, but if person A has published his qualifications and has shipped quality works while B hasn't done either, then yes, I can safely say so, at least until B proves otherwise (by shipping better quality works and/or publishing better qualifications).

"Just because and/or even if Bjorn didn't have any prior experience on any game in production, its not to say that he doesn't know what he's doing." And no one claimed he didn't, I assume we're not mind readers (speaking for myself here) to know what he knows but hasn't yet demonstrated, while he might be one who siphoned the knowledge off some expert. Just pointing an obvious red flag based on the empirical evidence that anyone who has met success in this specific market segment of the industry has had at least some of said experience (even CCP of EVE-O) and none of them were even trying something as huge in magnitude and scope as Aventurine is. Not evidence of impossibility, but implausibility, and if anyone considers that irrelevant or doesn't consider it at all then that person is extremely optimistic (and definitely not a "devil's advocate"), to the point of being unreasonable.

Implausibility is acceptable, so prove implausibility.  Point out the reasons why its implausible, but what you're doing is jumping to conclusions and making statements with minimal evidence.  It may be the only evidence you have, but does that mean that thats the only evidence there is?  I seem to believe that you disregard all the videos, screenshots, dev journals, and forum updates, and rather take personal networking sites as the supreme word where this game is involved.

I already pointed out the reasons why it's implausible. All successful MMOs have been made by teams with previous experience in game development and so far Aventurine has not demonstrated to have any. I did not jump to a conclusion, it's empirical evidence. We can only make judgements based on the evidence we have, not on hypothetical evidence that potentially exists but that for some reason hasn't been revealed yet. For it to stop being implausible at least 1 of 2 things must happen, either they release the game and are successful, or new evidence is found demonstrating said experience, thus conforming to the empirical data on successful MMO teams that we have so far. Until then it remains implausible. "I seem to believe" does this mean you are not sure whether you believe or not? Or do you simply don't want to make yourself clear? In any case, all the video, screenshots, dev journals and forum updates, while nice, are not evidence of anything, because many games that never released or failed had all of those, including publisher and a beta in some cases. But in all cases of successful MMOs they had experience that Aventurine seems to lack.

PS: Contrary what you may believe, (understandably, since you seem to know nothing about it) you don't have to go to school to be proficient in, or even a master (a title always coveted but seldomly achieved) of, programming or engineering, but that'd require that elusive work experience so oft mentioned and underrated (and apparently not possessed by the object of our discussion), as well as some natural talent. John Carmack stands out as a shining example of it, though there are countless others more...mundane. Hell, most related job requirements ask for work experience more than they do degrees, including ones at companies like Blizzard. Generally speaking a degree alone is only good for an entry level job.

I know a lot of programmers, a lot of engineers, and a lot of IT people.  A degree definitely gets your foot in the door, but the question is, without that degree would you still have a shot?  Basically you can start out in a small company then move up... I mean thats what I did, but I had school and experience when I got this position.  The guy before me was fresh out of school though, a director of a mid size company with 3 locations across the nation.  The only reason he left was for medical purposes.  There are many different possibilities here on ways to make it in this world, I'm not contending that, I'm just saying we're not sure where Bjorns previous experience comes from.

Yes, you would still have a shot, though a degree increases your chances. Once you're out there it doesn't matter that much. The concern is exactly that, we're not sure where Bjorns' (or the rest of the team's) previous experience comes from, or even if he has any, but we do know the others competing in the same market segment have it and we know where it came from, the game industry.

You once asked me if I knew more about game development than you did. At the time I told you I couldn't answer because I didn't know what you knew. Since I can now infer from your comments your related knowledge, or lack thereof, I can safely say that I do, considerably.

 

Well then you must obviously KNOW that Darkfall isn't going to launch.  I should have known, you were hiding it all along.  We should have listened to your oh so logical conclusions over these "facts" that you post.   What are those "facts" that we "know" by the way?  And how does that correspond to Darkfall not releasing?   You're saying Bjorn doesn't have enough experience to complete a project of this magnitude, so the project won't complete.   thats fact right?

Your words, not mine. I've never said or implied or done anything of what you're accusing me of here. This is just another strawman.

Originally posted by Silvarch

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Silvarch

 

The vast majority of your arguments are only backed up by logical fallacies, I called you on it on the thread where you say Polarization also decided to ignore you but you gleefully ignored my post so I just reckoned it wasn't worth it to bother any further, however this post shows a degree of ignorance that is both amusing and scary at the same time.

See, you see it as a logical fallacy, Polar always sees it as a strawman argument, and I would believe you if Polars jumping to conclusions from what little information he has really would be considered "educated" in any way shape or form and hardly logical but, perhaps, a bit propagandist.  All you seem to do is agree with him which makes me think, A) you are Polar, B) you;re sleeping with polar, or C) you actually believe everything polar posts without thinking for yourself.   Any one of those are possible at this point. Some of your posts scream Polarization right down to the wording and format.

I knew you'd say something like this the moment I saw Polarization thanking me. Rest assured though, I'm not him, and I posted in this thread not to agree with him but to disagree with you because you've systematically used every logical fallacy in the book to support your arguments. I generally agree with his opinion, though, and I'm not surprised to see that for you the only possible reasons why someone would agree with him is if they shared an identity or bed with him, or didn't think for themselves, fond of logical fallacies as you are. All he does is post some information he found and present his interpretation, in some cases I agree, in some others I don't, but in all of them I form my own opinion. You'd just disregard them while attacking Polarization.

To put it bluntly, it leads me to believe you don't posses any kind of post-secondary education, and 0 or negative experience in programming (real, by the way, not HTML or CSS, or JS, or batch files etc.) or the video game industry.

Which would make you extremely wrong, I've been working with HTML, CSS, Java, and XML before I became a consultant many years ago. I was hired on by a company when I was 18 that hired me because of my experience in what I created at school. I did advertisements for their personal auction site as well as Ebay sites, and redesigned their website as well. But you must be trying to insult my intelligence or something because when you and polar can't win an argument you resort to childish tactics, so please continue.

Wait, childish tactics? Where did I try to insult, or even mention, your intelligence? I merely conjectured on your level of education and working experience, and from what I can tell I was exactly right. I specifically said not HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc, because that's not "real" programming in the professional sense of the word. Nothing to be ashamed about, you should be proud of your accomplishments, but they're not what I mentioned before.

You're comparing time spent in a learning environment with time spent in a working environment for an industry markedly underrepresented in academia. Even in the more general IT business, tertiary education only prepares you for, at best, an entry level position in any serious/competent IT company. Where you go from there, if anywhere at all, is mostly dependent on work experience. This is even more conspicuous in the video game industry, where even fewer institutions have custom tailored programs for it, or better yet, majors in Revolutionary MMO Design and Development. That's not to say you can't get an entry level job for a Revolutionary MMO fresh out of school and be good at it, but the entire team, including some leads? No real surprise it's taking this long. It's not indy, it's amateur. I'd even say hobbyist seeing how at least one of their leads has to rely on 2nd(1st?) jobs to sustain himself, by his own admission.

Well, you could argue that point, since I've been working in the field for just about 10 years, and entry level position requires no technical knowledge in most cases in many IT companies.  But they would simply answer phones providing the base level support, or basically do geek squad work and say reinstall to everything that goes wrong.  But you would be wrong to assume that all you would receive out of school would be an entry level job.  Especially in the IT field its what you know that makes you important, and how you can prove you know it.  The fact of the matter is, he doesn't know what experience Bjone possesses, and if the designs aren't good enough compared to what else you've seen in MMOs then I'm pretty appauled. 

I'm sorry, there seems to be some misunderstanding. By entry level job I didn't mean tech support, I meant a real IT job, like junior programmer or network administrator or DBA. That's as much as you will get at a competent and serious IT company (different from the IT department of a regular company) with just a degree. Indeed what you know is what's important, and a degree is merely saying "I should know at least this much".

 

The 20+ years experience guys started 20+ years ago, when only Nostradamus had heard of the term "MMO" and the most complex of games took at most 5 people and a few months to create and even then the more experienced programmers outranked them in the quality and scale of their work and were overall such a desirable commodity that some big (relatively, in the industry back then) companies didn't even credit them in fear of having them stolen by rival companies. They certainly didn't start in one of the most demanding market segments of the industry, both in overall experience and budget, to compete against and promise more than people who have orders of magnitude more of each. It was a lot easier to create what would be considered a AAA game back then, for example Will Wright single-handedly developed SimCity, but now, well, Wright's or Carmack's brilliant (downright scary) talent alone wouldn't suffice.

"So what you're saying is you probably don't consider programming done in a learning environment experience." If by "experience" here you mean "work or industry experience in relation to games development", then no, and I don't see why anyone would consider it so. If by "experience" you mean "part of the curriculum, and thus hardly adequate for a project of this scale to challenge the actual experts in this particular field" then I'd disagree with your statement, because I do consider it such. You need to add a qualifier to experience otherwise it's meaninglessly vague, considering everything that is perceived, understood and remembered is experience.

You can say that its hardly adequate, but again you'd be guessing, and no I didn't say that.  You can't say person A is better then person B when you don't know all their qualifications or their actual quality of work, you're guessing, like you and polar (or if you're one in the same) always do.

I'm not guessing about it being hardly adequate, I know the average level of preparation on game development you're left with after tertiary education, I've dealt with it many times, and I know what a project of this scale takes as well as the sort of qualifications the competition has. Show me a game that competes with AAA titles made by a completely new crew. I've never said person A is better than person B, but if person A has published his qualifications and has shipped quality works while B hasn't done either, then yes, I can safely say so, at least until B proves otherwise (by shipping better quality works and/or publishing better qualifications).

"Just because and/or even if Bjorn didn't have any prior experience on any game in production, its not to say that he doesn't know what he's doing." And no one claimed he didn't, I assume we're not mind readers (speaking for myself here) to know what he knows but hasn't yet demonstrated, while he might be one who siphoned the knowledge off some expert. Just pointing an obvious red flag based on the empirical evidence that anyone who has met success in this specific market segment of the industry has had at least some of said experience (even CCP of EVE-O) and none of them were even trying something as huge in magnitude and scope as Aventurine is. Not evidence of impossibility, but implausibility, and if anyone considers that irrelevant or doesn't consider it at all then that person is extremely optimistic (and definitely not a "devil's advocate"), to the point of being unreasonable.

Implausibility is acceptable, so prove implausibility.  Point out the reasons why its implausible, but what you're doing is jumping to conclusions and making statements with minimal evidence.  It may be the only evidence you have, but does that mean that thats the only evidence there is?  I seem to believe that you disregard all the videos, screenshots, dev journals, and forum updates, and rather take personal networking sites as the supreme word where this game is involved.

I already pointed out the reasons why it's implausible. All successful MMOs have been made by teams with previous experience in game development and so far Aventurine has not demonstrated to have any. I did not jump to a conclusion, it's empirical evidence. We can only make judgements based on the evidence we have, not on hypothetical evidence that potentially exists but that for some reason hasn't been revealed yet. For it to stop being implausible at least 1 of 2 things must happen, either they release the game and are successful, or new evidence is found demonstrating said experience, thus conforming to the empirical data on successful MMO teams that we have so far. Until then it remains implausible. "I seem to believe" does this mean you are not sure whether you believe or not? Or do you simply don't want to make yourself clear? In any case, all the video, screenshots, dev journals and forum updates, while nice, are not evidence of anything, because many games that never released or failed had all of those, including publisher and a beta in some cases. But in all cases of successful MMOs they had experience that Aventurine seems to lack.

PS: Contrary what you may believe, (understandably, since you seem to know nothing about it) you don't have to go to school to be proficient in, or even a master (a title always coveted but seldomly achieved) of, programming or engineering, but that'd require that elusive work experience so oft mentioned and underrated (and apparently not possessed by the object of our discussion), as well as some natural talent. John Carmack stands out as a shining example of it, though there are countless others more...mundane. Hell, most related job requirements ask for work experience more than they do degrees, including ones at companies like Blizzard. Generally speaking a degree alone is only good for an entry level job.

I know a lot of programmers, a lot of engineers, and a lot of IT people.  A degree definitely gets your foot in the door, but the question is, without that degree would you still have a shot?  Basically you can start out in a small company then move up... I mean thats what I did, but I had school and experience when I got this position.  The guy before me was fresh out of school though, a director of a mid size company with 3 locations across the nation.  The only reason he left was for medical purposes.  There are many different possibilities here on ways to make it in this world, I'm not contending that, I'm just saying we're not sure where Bjorns previous experience comes from.

Yes, you would still have a shot, though a degree increases your chances. Once you're out there it doesn't matter that much. The concern is exactly that, we're not sure where Bjorns' (or the rest of the team's) previous experience comes from, or even if he has any, but we do know the others competing in the same market segment have it and we know where it came from, the game industry.

You once asked me if I knew more about game development than you did. At the time I told you I couldn't answer because I didn't know what you knew. Since I can now infer from your comments your related knowledge, or lack thereof, I can safely say that I do, considerably.

 

Well then you must obviously KNOW that Darkfall isn't going to launch.  I should have known, you were hiding it all along.  We should have listened to your oh so logical conclusions over these "facts" that you post.   What are those "facts" that we "know" by the way?  And how does that correspond to Darkfall not releasing?   You're saying Bjorn doesn't have enough experience to complete a project of this magnitude, so the project won't complete.   thats fact right?

Your words, not mine. I've never said or implied or done anything of what you're accusing me of here. This is just another strawman.

I'll cut it short.  Answer the questions on what facts we have in regards to the development of this game.  Tell me what facts we have about Bjorn and Tasos, and all others here that can be proven.  All the rest of this is filler, you say I use strawman tactics, well I could say the same about you.  I have the very same information thats posted here, not different, I just interpret it differently.  I use your own posts to point out the pitfalls.  What you're trying to accomplish here is that what polar is posting shows Darkfalls development is in a poor state.  See as I said before you think polar posts his information and just lets everyone decide for themselves unobjectively, unfortunately as I said before, and shown in example before, he's not unobjective... he's completely biased, and he'll follow the game back to when they first had an inkling of the game in the 90s and post it if he thinks he can spin a bad word on it.

Secondly, I apologise to you if you weren't trying to insult me, I may have jumped to the conclusion because of the posts which Polar has attacked me in the past... twice, instead of answering the questions.  Try to understand, I'm not trying to pick a personal fight with anyone, nor have I insulted, or personally attacked Polarization or you for your posts.  At best I'd be slightly condescending but never a personal attack.  I'm just here to debate the game.

dont worry pol just like to assume the worst

Erik Sperling Johansen Darkfalls Lead network and Server programmer since 2001, credentials and experience from Jan 2007.

http://www.efnetcpp.org/wiki/User:Einride

User:Einride

I'm one of the ops on #c++, a norwegian with a danish passport living in Greece. I go by the nick einride on irc, my name's Erik Sperling Johansen, and if I won't talk to you on IRC I'll be happy to also ignore mails sent to einride@einride.org

• My primary job is linux server programming for a (for now) totally unknown game developer.
• I also maintain and develop several commercial windows applications, mainly file recovery related
• I run a few of the #c++ channel bots, and the googlebot nervous.
• I'm one of the admins of the EFnet irc server irc.efnet.no

Considering this, how likely do the claims like Darkfall and its servers/network code being capable of successfully hosting at least 10,000 concurrent users seem?

Not very likely in my opinion, of course you can decide for yourself.

http://www.efnet.org/

"The oldest and one of the largest IRC networks in the world."
 

Some highlights from a Gamdev chat log from May 2006 containing some “interesting” comments by “Einride” (Erik Sperling Johansen).

Originally posted by Polarization

 

 

 

cool

Originally posted by Isane

Originally posted by Vansinne

Polarization needs a medal for creating a thread here with over 300 post and actually some intresting posting from several users.

 

The skill with which he types everyone into submission is scary.

He even types himself into submission.  So far he has proven Jade Mehdawi is a major figure in greece,  that razorwax was bought out by aventurine.    If he did not post crackpot theories along with his damn insane googling skills I would actually have a lot of respect for the fellow.

Originally posted by gotha

Originally posted by Isane

Originally posted by Vansinne

Polarization needs a medal for creating a thread here with over 300 post and actually some intresting posting from several users.

 

The skill with which he types everyone into submission is scary.

 

He even types himself into submission.  So far he has proven Jade Mehdawi is a major figure in greece,  that razorwax was bought out by aventurine.    If he did not post crackpot theories along with his damn insane googling skills I would actually have a lot of respect for the fellow.

me too
 

Racing horses, MG rally cars, super bikes, the Olympics and Pentathlon, the ESWC, hiking on mount Olympus and now scuba diving.

George Ballas listed as “Office Manager” for Aventurine 2004, and one of Ricki Sickenger’s friends on face book.

http://profile.ak.facebook.com/v230/1669/29/s1328079939_223.jpg

Obviously enjoys scuba diving, and he’s probably even done so in the Great Barrier Reef.

http://www.sharksavers.org/content/view/265/9/

Signers of Great Barrier Reef petition

3331 George Ballas, Athens, Atiiki, Greece

It appears many of the people involved with Aventurine certainly seem to be enjoying themselves in Greece or elsewhere.

Hopefully whilst being involved in these various activities over the years, they have also managed to find or commit the amount of time and money necessary to make Darkfall’s successful launch sometime this year a realistic possibility.

Looks like some more Darkfall developers have been updating their linked in profiles since I posted them here.

Ricki Sickenger

Lead Tools Programmer

Co-founder & Senior Java programmer at Razorwax AS

Originally posted by Xxeon

Originally posted by gotha

Originally posted by Isane

Originally posted by Vansinne

Polarization needs a medal for creating a thread here with over 300 post and actually some intresting posting from several users.

 

The skill with which he types everyone into submission is scary.

 

He even types himself into submission.  So far he has proven Jade Mehdawi is a major figure in greece,  that razorwax was bought out by aventurine.    If he did not post crackpot theories along with his damn insane googling skills I would actually have a lot of respect for the fellow.

me too
 

Yes, totally over the top not worth even debating it's just wall of text after wall of text, nice to see MaekedWeasel putting up a good fight.
 

Originally posted by kinghakuby 

 

Seriously don't you people get tired of being lied to 24/7 by this blatently lying manipulating failure named Tasos? Do you not have any kind of self worth or class left in your body's whatsoever?

seriously don't you people get tired of creating new forum alts just to flame this game?

lol e3girls.com

interesting read though.

*back to browse this e3girls site* 

Undeniable proof in there own words that at least one of the people who has visited Aventurine and apparently seen Darkfall and written an article about it is not impartial or objective at all in any way.

Because in this case they actually are “long time friends” of some of the developers of Darkfall, Henning Ludvigson and his partner Natascha Roeoesli.

Bakatron’s article about his visit to Aventurine “Darkfall is coming” from 2006, talking about how awesome and fantastic everything was.

http://www.bakatron.com/?p=43

And a journal entry from his page on DeviantART.

http://bakatron.deviantart.com/journal/15023920/

"I visited Europe last month which was ultra uber cool. Also met up with long time friends *Kyena and *henning."

I wonder if all the other people who have visited and written articles about how wonderful and impressive Aventurine and Darkfall was are not all “long time friends” of the developers as well.

That would certainly explain a lot in my opinion.

give it a rest geeses christ