Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
Take it as you may:
More Q&A on the comment section.
I'll just copy his posts on the comment section before it's taken down as it always does:
Hi everyone,
I would think myself to be part of some noble cause, like the original EA Spouse trying to save her husband from a hellish work environment at EA. That had a happy ending, however, with tons of publicity and a total change of overtime wages and salaries and how they are handled within the company. I do not expect a happy ending, so Ill be personal and selfish, and this is just for me.
So just call me EA Louse.
I found out recently that I will be dismissed from Bioware Mythic during the next round of layoffs EA coming this November. Im sick of seeing EA outsource their art and find every excuse to get rid of us and still not achieve anything. Mythic is dying, and its not us who killed him but were taking the fall.
But if you want to know what really went down with Warhammer, Ill tell you right now.
First, the project leaders did not know what they were doing. Jeff Hickman was the saddest excuse for a producer Ive seen. All he did was drink the Koolaid and suck up to the right people. He was the perfect yes-man, and this reached down to almost all managers.
My boss who will not be named, again and again would tell us that Rob Denton, one of the original owners, said we should do this and do that and we would say omg it makes NO sense, please explain A, B, and C to him. And then hed come back and tell us, after we thought he had gone to talk with him, No, Rob wants in this way. Jeff agrees, this is what were going to do. Understood? They never actually talked back to Rob. We didnt talk back to them.
Rob said jump, our leaders said, How high?! And on who?
So we shut up and did what we were told, by people too afraid to tackle real problems. It is a culture of fear, especially since Mark Jacobs was fired.
Oh, he left voluntarily you say? No, he was fired, and everything placed on his shoulders by those closest to him so they could divide his salary and annual bonus. I bet Rob is enjoying that sweet new Maserati he bought after leaving the knife in his partner of 15 years.
Want to know more? Keep reading. I can keep ranting.
Rob was never there during the development of Warhammer. We always joked about when his next weekly holiday was coming. (Answer? Next week!) Mark was not available, was way too head down trying to design his own contributions or whatever. Rob always handled things. We were told NOT to speak with Mark in person, never, or else we would be explaining to Rob.
The coup began long before Warhammer, and Jacobs did not even realize it.
And yet, this is common gossip in the company, and nobody in this industry seems to get it. So get it! Rob was responsible for the entire project, then blamed Mark when things went wrong.
Ah, but could not do it alone. No, he needed Jeff Hickman, promoted from customer service to produce the Warhammer project. Wait, let me let you have that sink in. The man running customer service, on the theory that the management of a large team of CSRs qualified him to run a game development project, was put in charge of a $50 million project with no previous experience.
And he needed Eugene Evans, the man who brought you the almost non-existent marketing campaign behind Warhammer. We could not even believe how bad they fucked up the marketing campaign. There was almost none. We slaved for years, and this is how we were rewarded for it by Eugene and the people of EA? Being told that Warhammer was not worth a lot of money spent on it? LOL. Now hes in charge of Bioware Mythic.
Oh yeah, and he needed Paul Barnett. You know him as the crazy British dude that appears in random videos at EA to promote his latest bullshittery. We know him as the crazy British dude who we have no idea of how he still has a job. This man was supposed to be the savior of Warhammers vision and design. Now all he can do is promote his strange ideas about his little secret project web Ultima game thats been almost universally criticized by all of us and focus groups. Whats that? You didnt know Paul loves one of those old Ultima games sooooo much hes making a literal copy of it for Facebook? Well, the cats outta the bag. Too bad it sucks ass.
So what do they all have in common? All of them failed, badly, in Warhammer, and each of them is in a position of authority in the new company, while the rest of us are facing pink slips. How do they sleep at night? They spin aruond, blame everything on Mark, divide his old salary between them, and never speak about it again. Oh, and they fuck us little guys as well.
Almost makes me congratulate them for having the balls, but after watching them work, its obvious they dont have any. Theyre cowards running scared trying to hide under the wing of Bioware, now that Rob has become a general manager of EA.
And Bioware? Dont make me laugh. Theyve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. Shit you not. More than $ 300 million! Can you believe that?
And you know what theyre most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work. Thats the best they have. The rest of the game is a joke. EA knows it and so does George Lucas,theyre panicking , and so most of Mythic has already been cannibalized to work in Austin on it because they cant keep pushing back launch.
Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too
Anyway, back to Warhammer. We shouldnt have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasnt done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out.
We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down every since. Its stable now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade make more money than our biggest project.
So there it is. Rewarding the incompetent. Firing the competent.
I say it anonymously so I can keep my next few paychecks coming.
So Im a louse. A big fat EA louse.
Want some more questions answered? Ask away.
More Q&A on the comment section.
I'll just copy his posts on the comment section before it's taken down as it always does:
Question: Curious as to why there seem to be so much distance put between Warhammer and DAoC? As a long time player of DAoC, I found Warhammer was modelled after another game. Certain aspects of Warhammer seemed to honestly be a less polished version of DAoC, almost as if the current developers had never experienced DAoC and what made RvR such a success for Mythic. Was there a decision to not model their new game after DAoC and more curiously, why? Reason I am asking is during beta, mythic had asked people not to post about DAoC comparison and if they did, they would find their beta forum account closed.
ealouse says:
Panic set in, and it suddenly had to be WOW 2.0
Almost none of us actually played Warhammer while we worked on it, it was so hard to get into, let alone Dark Age. DAoC was like UO to Mythic. They gave them tiny tiny teams, stole the best people and left people they didnt care about behind. Everyone else was on WAR.
Actually UO got better treatment than DAoC I think.
I dont really know how all the Anti-DAoC politics worked, I admit. I dont think it was malicious as much as stupidity. People looked to managers for answers they didnt have, but they had to say something! And that became law.
Question: Tell us more how was the Art Direction?
ealouse says:
Oh. My. Gawd.
Im not going to rag on my old boss, but lets just say that Mythic screwed the pooch on this one. Wait, why dance around it?
OK. So some devs tried to blame Games Workshop for all their restrictions but that was just bs. Utter bs. Paul Barnett wanted this game to be DARK. The management demanded dark, chaotic settings and ugly ass character models.
Paul, fist in palm, told us how WAR will never have dancing! There is no dancing, these people are in a WAR! So brilliant. BRILLIANT. Copy WOW and abandon everything that made DAoC great, but leave out dancing the one place where artists really get to express ourselves.
FU Paul and your arrbitrary stupidity.
So many other bad examples. Irony? When we did the international releases we were told we needed to make the models prettier because they were too ugly. Gee. Ya think?
What Im saying is that it wasnt the art management, but the direction was fucked from day one.
Question: Can you elaborate on what happened with Sanya to get her to leave so suddenly? Also, any further information on DAOC?
ealouse says:
Wow, Sanya. That was a long time ago.
Yeah, that was actually not Rob Denton. That was her having a fierce, loud fight with Mark Jacobs about forum postings. Sanya had a very hard line stance on developers posting on the boards.
They shouldnt. Thats communitys job. <- Is what I'm sure she would say.
But Mark Jacobs, who loved posting, especially about things he couldn't guarantee and made our lives hell because he would essentially promise them, did not like having to play by her rules. She totally called him out on it in an embarrasing way and too many people at the company knew about it, so she was out the door.
They replaced her with a really nice guy but he was a puppet who couldn't make Mark abide by the rules. Arguably though, he did a great job, but Eugene wanted community to be under marketings control, so when the big anti-Mark coup occurred they also fired all the community representatives left, and put one of the marketing lackeys in charge of all three Mythic products.
Lets see. Other crazy things Mark wanted to do what Blizzard announced with Real ID like, years ago, and Sanya fought him on it. Mark also hates when devs post with fake names, and forced everyone who posted on boards to use real names (which created drama and stalking opportunities, which discouraged devs from posting).
So, all in all, Sanya stood up to him in a public space, and the next thing we knew there was a "mutual parting of ways." Also, her husband worked with us too, veteran, and he left later.
