Lol, so Gaf, what would you rename WarZ?
Perhaps ZZzzZzzzZzzZzZzZzZzz would be suitable.
Lol, so Gaf, what would you rename WarZ?
Call it Daisy and make the logo a zombie duck
AwfulShitZ?
This guy.Dear fellow Survivors,
It has now been more than two months since we launched public access to The War Z. Weve definitely had our ups and downs, and I thought that this Holiday break was the right time for me to try to step back a little and think about our journey since it started. This may be a little long, but I would appreciate if you could stay with me for a few minutes as I try to go over the highlights of the game as well as some of the hurdles and controversies, how we have addressed that and what our plans are.
First of all a very big and sincere Thank You! to all of you. We are really proud of the community we have formed with you guys. Every day we have hundreds of thousands of players on our servers, and this is a life-changing event for the team and me. We are blessed to have you as members of the community and we are well aware that without you the game would be nothing.
Along with that thanks, though, I need to admit that we failed to effectively communicate some of our plans and actions to both our existing players and to our new prospective players. This failure to communicate resulted in some very negative feedback from some members of our community, but while it might be easy to label them as haters or some other dismissive term, in all honesty this is my fault. I became arrogant and blinded by the early success and quick growth of The War Z, our increasing number of players, numbers we were getting from surveys, etc., and I chose not to notice the concerns and questions raised by these members of the game community as well as others. This failure is entirely on my shoulders and if anything I owe thanks to that vocal minority and admit that I should have paid attention sooner. I chose instead to concentrate on the bigger picture my dream of turning The War Z from being a game developed by a small indie team into a large online venture, instead of addressing small things first and staying focused on the game issues. At the end my arrogance led us to the moment, when all those small things finally caught up and created a perfect storm that affected all of our community members. For that Im truly sorry and apologize to all of our community as well as the larger PC gaming community that is not yet playing The War Z.
I do not take this situation lightly, and last week events were especially humbling for me. Ive experienced a range of emotions, most of which centered on regret for not having addressed some of the issues differently than we did, but we cant change the past. The only thing we can do is to be sure that we wont repeat the same mistakes in the future. I have realized that as the leader of this ship, I missed all early warnings that were saying, Your community is not as happy as you think they are, you need to alter course. I was too focused on how great we are and how a small independent team got their first game to over 700,000 users in a two-month period. Though that is something to be very proud of, allowing that to overshadow the existing community and their satisfaction was poor judgment.
I want to give you some insight into what our plans are for the future, but before we get to that, Id like to clear the air with you on several important topics.
Community management and moderation the problem
Even since the early Alpha launch, this game has always cultivated a large and loyal player base that is very active in the game. Again, thank you for this. Unfortunately, we werent prepared for this large success and the way we managed the community was not the way it shouldve been. We relied too much on forum moderators, whose primary role was to punish those who break rules, not to engage the community and guide conversations into productive discussions about problems. There wasnt enough presence of the development team on forums, there wasnt enough updates on development of UPCOMING features. We failed to communicate our position and messaging on the outside platforms such as Facebook, twitter and various online websites, and when we did this we chose to rely more on arrogance rather than being humble and trying to understand why people were saying negative things. We chose to tune out negative reactions to the game, not paying enough attention to them and this, again, is my fault. We chose to rely too much on numbers percentage of refund requests, number and dynamic of our daily and monthly active users, etc. Well, in hindsight those things probably work well for more casual games, but the hardcore PC gaming community is much different and can be very vocal about what they feel. Even when the percentage of players with negative comments is small, as the community grows, even a small percentage can add up to be a very significant absolute number. And its not just a number those are real people with real issues they are having with the game. OP Productions (publisher for War Z) and me personally have failed to address those issues effectively.
Community management and moderation the solution!
Were changing our community management procedures and rules right now. Were going to reevaluate publishing and marketing team performance, and I will make sure that Hammerpoint Interactive developers will have a much stronger voice when it comes to community management and we wont rely 100% on OP Productions to single handedly handle this. Lots of changes will be happening very fast in the weeks to come. One of the ideas that I proposed was to select 10 players from around the world who can represent the player community and invite them to our offices in Los Angeles, to meet the team, check out what were doing, and share with actual developers their concerns, wishes and thoughts on the game. We also will involve community, to a much higher degree, in the process of making our next map for the War Z (called California). Well be discussing many of the aspects of the map with you and asking for feedback.
Were revisiting our forum policies; were going to bring on an additional community management team, additional moderators and well train them how to respond to things properly. There will still be restrictions on harassment, trash talk, etc. But well make sure that every opinion is heard. At the same time, I must also be cautious: we cannot address all issues and there cannot be only one voice. Please accept that. With hundreds of thousands of players playing, talking, chatting, voicing their strong opinions, there will always be diverging opinions. And some issues that are minor ones are sometimes brought to light by very vocal channels. I would even say there is sometimes a beginning of controversy because the game is now so popular. So there is sometimes a distortion between the severity of the issue and the attention it gets. But we will clearly implement steps to better listen to the community.
What is Foundation Release?
The most asked question of the last week was is this the final release? My answer has always been that for an online game a final release means that the game is dead so theres really no such thing, you never stop developing, making changes to and adding new features to the game.
This is how we came to call the current version of The War Z Foundation Release. We launched the Foundation Release on December 17, 2012 as our first-stage release that we use as a foundation to build upon. It does include the core features and a fully playable environment. This is our version 1.0, and of course we will continue to improve that version as time goes on.
Did we rush to get it done? That is a tough question, but to answer honestly I think that we all pushed very hard to be first to market and in time for the holidays. Our entire team was working late, long hours to iron out issues and include as many features as possible. This is part of the reality of being a smaller, independent game developer. If we had a larger team and more funding we may have done things differently, but Im not sure. I dont think it was a mistake because our numbers have been strong since day one and, even with the recent negativity, our metrics are really solid and weve been continuing to grow.
The negative opinions are always the most vocal, but most players are really enjoying the game and weve been attracting more and more daily active players every week. A lot of the gaming journalists that have been playing the game have also given us some great feedback. I realize that we will take a few hits from some of the traditional gaming press in terms of review scores, but Im hoping that even they will consider that this game is a living project that will continue to evolve as time goes on. We are very proud of our Foundation Release, and we do stand behind it like we have stood behind any previous version.
Whats on the Horizon?
As for what will happen next with The War Z? Were currently evaluating the relationship between Hammerpoint Interactive and OP Productions teams. I firmly believe that Hammerpoint Interactive should be playing a more prominent role in publishing/game operating process. Were in a process of adding new key members to our team, bringing on guys who have much more experience operating and growing successful online games and I know this is going to make a huge difference in terms of development. Well be making some big decisions in terms of leadership for both companies and I will personally change how I handle many things. Above all we will continue to develop and make this game the best that it can be.
I know that to some people my words wont matter much. I understand that. I hope that will change as we move forward and deliver the features that our players have been waiting for. I can promise you that from now on things will be much more transparent, and well provide better communication and engage our community to discuss upcoming features way before they appear in the game.
I do believe that we arent even close to uncovering the true potential for The War Z, and I hope that in the coming year, well be able to regain trust from people who were alienated by our actions and well be able to move forward and grow the game together.
Thank you for reading all this, thank you for supporting the game and thank you for helping us to change and realize whats important as well as what is not.
I hope you are all having a happy holiday and I wish you the best for the New Year!
Sincerely,
Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z
What peeves me off most about the situation is reviewers refuse to review the game because its now not on Steam, fucken pathetic. There are still people being scammed through the War Z website.
I got mine only after threatening to contact the Better Business BureauWheres our fucking refund? lol
What peeves me off most about the situation is reviewers refuse to review the game because its now not on Steam, fucken pathetic. There are still people being scammed through the War Z website.
to be fair anyone that thought the game looked good enough to buy deserves to be scammed.What peeves me off most about the situation is reviewers refuse to review the game because its now not on Steam, fucken pathetic. There are still people being scammed through the War Z website.
This entire thing would be a no-issue if the stand alone DayZ had already been released.
Box quote said:The War Z is a bad game that deserves all the controversy it's drawn, and you should avoid it like the undead.
Sergey Titov apologizes over being too focused on how great and successful they are to listen to the vocal minority raising concerns and questions about issues caused by Hammerpoint's failure to communicate effectively.
He's also hoping (even) critics will disregard whatever flaws it has. And rushing the release wouldn't be a mistake since the numbers are good. He says. After apologizing for prioritizing the numbers over the satisfaction of the community.
This guy.
To paraphrase: "We have hundreds of thousands of players, we're sorry we didn't communicate very well to the very, very few of the 700k players that had issues with the game. We let the 700k players get to our head and our ego was inflated by how many players were playing the game which is 700k'ish, i think at last count there were 700k. Our success in achieving 700k players was due to our original 2 year old zombie mmo idea and we will be transparent in the future with regards to updates, basically we'll just do whatever dayz already did or does. This will ensure our player base will increase from 700k to something beyond the 700k it is now. There's not really an apology in here and this was definitely not written by Sergey. Regards, Sergey. P.S. While someone else was writing this for me i checked the player numbers, we're at 700k."
Anyone knows if there's a world war z game(movie related or not) in the making?
[IM]http://thewarz.ru/themes/warz/images/buy_pack_super.png[/IMG]
75€ for :
- A medikit
- Goggles
- body armor
- Ak47
- M9
and more
So no Pay2Win huh? (http://www.thewarz.com/faq.html[url...h too, and they don't do shit about cheaters.
Remember that all that drops upon death too, and they don't do shit about cheaters.
Save the money for State of Decay PC.
This is currently less than $4 on Steam - to buy or not to buy? I'm so conflicted! Anyone have a spare key for this they never intend on redeeming?
Will the PC version have a multiplayer mode?
This is currently less than $4 on Steam - to buy or not to buy? I'm so conflicted! Anyone have a spare key for this they never intend on redeeming?
Game re-reasleased again for a 3rd time and is called Infestation: The New Z and now Valve let them remove all the negative reviews it had previously.
Wait...
was it free 2 play previously?
I mean, I'm not interested in it in any way and don't see myself playing it even though it's free, but I thought you had to pay for it before. Do you have to like... buy sub time?
Game re-reasleased again for a 3rd time and is called Infestation: The New Z and now Valve let them remove all the negative reviews it had previously.
I dont know whether to congratulate the con artists or the con con artists.I think its funny that this game was created to ride the DayZ wave, surfed it, and went home all while DayZ struggled to get it's board off the roof.
I'm thinking to myself "nobody could POSSIBLY fall for this NOW"
but then I remember how many people fell for it the first 2 times :\