Just to set the record straight on my opinion. It isn't that Crowfall doesn't have some good ideas for the crowd it is trying to reach. It is that these guys (I do not know them personally, so I am only speaking from a pen to paper professional point of view of what has been launched and gone live/on going) cannot manage game development or correctly manage a team because the bloat of corporate politics good ol boy syndrome plays, even into, a team of 30. For an organization, "Indie" but not really, this retarded mindset remains strong. Only a handful (Who are usually piss poor developers but are buddies/long standing relations in the industry) are the ones actively making game design decisions which are obviously fucking horrible, while the good ideas of the new and up and comers are flailed down to the wind, when they should be embraced. It isn't a team effort. It's a few drive down egotistical non game minded industry marginalized idiots that continue to think they know the right way to go about not only managing a team, but designing a game. And they fail horribly every single fucking iteration because even though they have seen failure, they never know why they continue to fail. They can learn all the lessons they want from game design perspectives, but they aren't learning shit on stashing that ego and letting new developers come up with ingenious ways to advance a design/genre.
So I always loved this when I read it the first time from GW:
One of the benefits of experience is the mistakes you've made along the way, and the pattern matching to avoid old mistakes. Of course this means that you get to make new and even more spectacular (but different) mistakes in the present!
The mistakes they
aren't learning from are mistakes in their process development and team relations/mentoring. And
THAT is why this will be just another Gordon Walton disaster. If he wants some real advice? Start learning from the PINNACLE of mistakes. His fucking ego. Know that many others down the line as associates have better game design and implementation/road map ideas than a 30 year veteran stuck in the past not knowing the cheese moved over 20 years ago and his shoes aren't even hanging on the hook anymore to give it a shot. Delegate, give them credit, and make it a collective team effort where all ideas from the entire team are heard and tried.
But you can't teach an old dog new tricks and this shit is lost on folks like Trammel, Koster, Vogel, Walton, Sage, McQuaid, etc. (Well, McQuaid MIGHT be coming around.... no one knows)
As a result? The MMORPG genre is pretty much dead as it stands and the "Bitching has stopped".
