Folks,

I laughed when I saw Lum’s remark.

Then I also went to read some of that “more of the same” that Mark is continuously rehashing EVERYWHERE. With more hadjobs to EA. With more silliness this time. It looks like that after all the money thrown in the eyes now not even Warhammer is enough for Mark’s ego. Now he wants more. And then MORE:

We have to create our own original IP, it is more than just words.

In terms of new IP, I can tell you that part of what drives me has also been to create new IP and not just do licensed games.

Now, for the first time in 20+ years in the industry (I’ve never worked for a game company other than one I owned), I’m part of a company that actually has the resources to bring some of my ideas to fruition and the corporate mandate to do just that.

Yeah, for a game company that cannot even support decently one game, let’s do DAoC, Warhammer, Imperator, Ultima Online 2 and even some brand new IPs. Let’s do five, six, seven… ten new mmorpgs.

Who cares after all? It’s EA now who is going to toss its money in the toilet.

With that claim he sounded exactly like that other idiot at Netdevil. They are also going to work on new games after that beautiful failure that was Auto Assault. After all what matters is wasting other people’s money without feeling responsible for it.

In terms of ToA, I promise. We learned our lesson from that as we did from Imperator. That was one of the things that made us more interesting to EA, the fact that we have learned from our mistakes and tried to correct them.

Ahh, the usual pure, empty rhetoric. How can people even take him seriously? Please notice how he obviously avoids to explain which lessons they’ve learnt. Because that would mean actually saying something in those paragraphs of texts he fills. But they have learnt those lessons. Mythic has, EA has. They are all cool and great, and you have to have faith in them. Why? Because he says so, obviously. Because EA is totally cool and you have to believe that. He’s seen so much money in the last few months, so many things that are now possible. He is completely ravenous. He’s gone completely insane.

Imho, ToA was DAoC’s best expansion. It was hugely successful and it brought many players to the game for the four months that followed its released. Then people started to figure out the huge design mistakes, and the whole thing spectacularly backfired. It was without a doubt one of their greatest efforts. To then be driven to the ground by shitty game design.

They learnt their lessons? Sure. Look at the other two expansions. I know I’m in a minority saying this, but Catacombs damaged the game far more than ToA ever did, despite, again, it could have been a great expansion if it wasn’t crippled again by bad game design. And the last one, Darkness Rising, was just so extremely lightweight to not have improved the game in the slightest. Some very good work from the artists, usually bad and pointless PvE, what else?

They just decided to not try anything at all. Doing the bare minimum. Avoid completely the game design. At least they wouldn’t even risk to damage the game even more. That’s what happened recently. They haven’t learnt anything as Mark claims. They haven’t improved. They just avoid mistakes since they aren’t doing anything at all if not when they are sure of an unanimous consensus.

Hell, now they don’t do anything without a preemptive poll. To listen the community? No, only because that way thay cannot be blamed for shitty decisions when who’s accountable is just a retarded poll. Competent game designers who have a plan for the game? Who are they? They come from QA and customer support, after all.

The game is barren and inhospitable for new players?

I have a love/hate relationship with DAoC as well. As far as newbies, when we opened the classic servers we had plenty of newbies in the starting areas but we’ll look into it again and see what we can do.

But the problem isn’t that there aren’t players. The problem is about design. It’s about the way the zones in Catacombs were planned, spreading the players thin and leaving those without the expansion basically alone and without being able to play the game properly. The problem is the task dungeons that killed in one step all the little worth there was in DAoC’s PvE.

Back in the day of Waterthread I remember distinctly how much I ranted about the /level 20 addition. I remember how I had EVERYONE against me. Lum included with who I picked a fight. Because at that time everyone thought that it was the BEST IDEA EVAR. BRILLIANT! REVOLUTIONARY! While I was saying that it was just an “opt out”. A way to dodge the problem and avoid to really address it for what it is.

Same retarded philosophy of the “free levels” and task dungeons. Instead of putting some value in the game, they remove it. Handing out free levels or even a stack of 20 levels all at once is just a way to acknowledge that the game is empty. And that they don’t have *any intention* of filling that void.

But now they learnt their lessons:

We feel like /level was not the best move we ever made. It had a brief, quick, positive impact on the game, but in the long run, it emptied out the newbie zones, making them less than inviting for the true newbies that continue to buy and try out the game. Removing it entirely might be the best thing for the overall health of Camelot. At the same time, we’re loathe to take something (that you’re used to considering as a reward) out of the game. So, we are presently at a bit of an impasse, philosophically. That’s the whole truth in a nutshell.

Yeah, they learnt the lesson. Now go buy their next game.

Mark is full with pointless rhetoric. You can never read anything he says that is even vaguely thought provoking or interesting. It’s true that he doesn’t usually say anything completely off, either, but people care about what he says simply because he is who he is, and not because what he has to say has an actual value. Common sense? Maybe. Insight? I haven’t seen traces of it.

Would I like to be number one? Absolutely. I’d be a liar if I said otherwise. Have I promised EA that we’d be number one? Was that even part of the deal? No. I’ll let you in on something. Not only did I never say we were not going to be number one, I gave them numbers that were so low, and I said you’re going to have to want to partner with us because you like what we’re doing, you like what we already have, and you like these numbers – because I’m not going to tell you that we’re going to get 10 million subscribers. Because if I’d sat here and really believed that we were going to get 10 million subscribers I would have taken my asking price, and multiplied it by 10. So we gave them numbers that were realistic.

So if you have the balls then tell what is that goddamn number. So that we have something tangible to judge instead of just endless, pointless rethoric.

If he was going to get 10 millions subs he would have asked 10 times more money? So can I guess that he promised EA around 1 million subscribers with Warhammer? HA! We’ll see.

Oh, I also wonder when Grimwell became a den of cocksuckers.