SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

Thanks once again E Elidroth for the insightful info.

Elidroth said:

Honestly, nothing would have happened if they'd pumped money into EQ. IT WAS AN OLD GAME. People are fickle.. So many people want pretty over good. EQ could have the best gameplay mechanics ever in a game, and a subset of people would still not play it because it's ugly by today's standards.

The other problem is EQ was developed when nobody had a clue HOW to engineer a game for scalability or reasonable updates. They were shooting from the hip the entire time. I tell people this all the time.. To make major changes to EQ is an effort beyond description. Unless you've worked on EQ, and seen HOW the game gets made, you simply can't understand the difficulty of doing basically anything in the game. Simply putting an NPC into the world required entries into 7 different database tables, usually done with Excel. Before I joined the team, you couldn't export that data into the zone without preventing everyone else from doing the same thing. Here's an example.. I put a couple NPCs into a zone, and export the zone so those NPCs appear. In the early days of EQ, that export would take HOURS, sometimes DAYS to complete depending upon the amount of data involved. I'm not making excuses, just explaining how insane the game was to work on back then. The work the engineers put into making that easier over the years has been incredible. Oh, and when I first joined, if you made spell changes, and exported the spell files, NOBODY could log into the game until servers were restarted, because the system would see you had a different version of the spells file than on the system, and prevent you from logging in.

Every expansion made it even harder. People asked, "Why don't you upgrade EQ's graphics engine?" as if somehow a new engine would make the zones, character art, weapons, spells, etc update as well. EQ has over 1,000 unique zones now.. The amount of work to update it could simply never be recouped financially. Anyone remember the DX9 update? A HUGE percentage of the player base suddenly couldn't play the game at all because of performance. Granted, those people were playing on crap computers, but that's not relevant to them. One day they can play, the next day, they're getting 3-5 FPS. That's a REALLY good way for people to say, "Fuck off" and quit your game.

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This is really interesting, but why couldn't more money have fixed this? I worked at a big software company where the whole front end was in VB (Cache database) and they had a designated team rewriting everything into C#. Granted it was a decade long project, but an example of how far money could go to fix these things.

Because spending that money probably isn't justifiable, especially to short sighted thinkers.

gugabuba said:

This is really interesting, but why couldn't more money have fixed this? I worked at a big software company where the whole front end was in VB (Cache database) and they had a designated team rewriting everything into C#. Granted it was a decade long project, but an example of how far money could go to fix these things.

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The amount of money you spend on MMO servers is no joke, and income is limited for each project. It depends also on if you self-host or not. When my company was on AWS, we had to pay out the ass for servers that weren't even that great. When you're dealing with terabytes of TCP/UDP traffic, the constant threat of DDoS attacks, scheduling and prioritizing new content... bugfixes and rewrites are last on the list in terms of money spent. Unless they are required for creating new content.

For the higher-ups that control the money and investors, they don't see the amount of code you write, or the amount of bugs you fix. They see cash and either more of it or less of it, and that's what drives the entertainment industry.

Also, A simple rewrite in an MMO service is not so simple; rewriting some distant-past former employee's code is a bit soul crushing, time-consuming, may not even work, and a waste of resources if it works in some capacity that's acceptable. A decade isn't enough time with the over-saturation of the market, either. I think most games have a 1-2 year lifespan now, with the 'next big thing' being in development some time later. Most online-only, MMO style games that don't have a solid foundation end up getting sunset or abandoned if it's too time consuming or if it's not in a modern engine that everyone knows (ie; unreal, unity).

One of the biggest challenges when working on our game was finding competent folks who actually worked on older versions of Unreal and know the engine. Most studios abandoned older Unreal in favor of Unreal 4, and our studio was determined to make it work. Arguably, it didn't. That engine was a giant mess. I'm still surprised we managed to port an UE3 game to modern consoles. Also, the tools for interacting with the database were written in a language no one understood and one I personally hate (ruby on rails) with a contracted nosql-based database engine provider powering the engine. That engine ended up shitting the bed and wiped out a number of customer and transaction records, which most we were able to recover/repair, but after that we switched to Postgres and everything was fine... thankfully.

Then, when we recently moved services off of Amazon, some black magic fuckery happened and the C# project that was running fine on AWS didn't run fine on baremetal hosting. So we ended up having to rewrite more than half the codebase (I did it for like 9 hours while I was screensharing with the producer) and it worked again. If it were anyone else in that position, it would've taken 5 days out of a 40-day development cycle to even get that fixed up.

I used to taunt Daybreak/SOE for their tools and incompetence, until I stepped into industry and realized what undertaking they have to take to get things to work. It's maddening.

gugabuba said:

This is really interesting, but why couldn't more money have fixed this? I worked at a big software company where the whole front end was in VB (Cache database) and they had a designated team rewriting everything into C#. Granted it was a decade long project, but an example of how far money could go to fix these things.

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Because everyone was betting on the 'next big thing' to make EQ revenue unnecessary.

Free Realms. The game that shipped was probably the 4th or 5th reboot of the game. Yeah, EQN wasn't the first game to go through that shit. Great game, great press reviews, but nobody cared (well not enough people cared). Fun fact.. for a long time Julie Burness and I were the ONLY designers on the game who had children. Making a KIDS game. My daughter LOVED the game. Absolutely loved it. BUT, she was 5 years old, she was happy with the free content, and didn't care about buying anything. Death knell for a game that absolutely needed people buying things. In hopes of drawing people in, they gave away the coolest job in the game (Ninja) for free. Those decisions were made by Laralyn Williams. She got a pass for people a crappy designer because she was a woman. We've had some FANTASTIC female designers in the company.. She wasn't one of them.

Then we had Stephen Bokkes running the design team. He was kind of a hero to me at first since he was a designer on Planescape: Torment. My favorite RPG ever. Problem is, this shitbag used the Free Realms team like a dating service, and if you rejected him, you got a shitty annual review. 100% serious. He pulled this shit on at least 4 female designers before convincing one to leave her husband for him, and then bounced to SCEA when Free Realms didn't make him rich. Now I guess he's at Black Isle or something. On the design side, all he did was sit in his office with the door closed, and shit all over anyone's ideas that weren't his. Basically everything good that was Free Realms came under the direction of Terrence Yee, who both Laralyn, and Stephen shit all over. Terrence is one of the best designers I know. Happily, he's at Trion now I think.

Planetside 2. Another great game that could have been. It had everything it needed to be awesome, EXCEPT a reason to play long-term. Moment to moment play was amazing, and it was visually incredible at the time. But again, when you're pushing a free-to-play game, you need to give people reasons to spend money, and frankly PS2 was good enough as a free game that it just didn't give people much reason to buy things.

H1Z1. THREE YEARS before H1Z1 was even announced, a team of REALLY talented designers (like Bill Trost as an example), approached management with a game called, "Grave". It was a horror/zombie themed game WAY ahead of the curve. They had a prototype team, and then it was cancelled. By the time H1Z1 came along, the zombie thing was old and busted, and we were once again behind the curve looking like a bunch of followers.

Free to Play. I've never been a fan, and still am not. I think overall F2P is a shitty dynamic because while it has good intentions, ultimately what always happens is management starts pressuring designers to come up with ways to sell shit when the cash flow starts to wane. This means they have to stop focusing on making a good game, to try and sell shit. It's always been my opinion that you should let designers make a great game, and people will come to it. Pay Wall crap is just that. Crap. Let people play a demo/entry game to see if they like it. For an MMO, let people play any character, any class, any race, for 10-20 levels. If they're hooked, they'll buy the game. I'm also a fan of the subscription model still. These games aren't free to run. The bandwidth costs alone are gigantic. Then add in your servers and rack space costs if you're not wealthy enough to own your own data centers. Then you need "hands on" people at those data centers to help if things go sideways. Mo' money, mo' money! The money going out is insane.

I realize I'll probably never work in the industry again because of posts like this.. but I'm OK with that. There are some VERY talented people that got screwed over by con artists in management. Smed, for all the shit he takes from you guys, is a great boss to work for, and truly loves games. He unfortunately got conned by these shitbags like most of the rest of us.. Short version is I think you guys are too hard on him. Everyone wants that manager that lets you do your thing and isn't a micromanager. Smed is that guy. If he's guilty of anything it's giving people too much rope to hang themselves.

Secrets said:

I used to taunt Daybreak/SOE for their tools and incompetence, until I stepped into industry and realized what undertaking they have to take to get things to work. It's maddening.

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This. Fucking. Thing. Exactly.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Yeah it all really depends. S Secrets and tyen are actually harmless but some people can't stand personalities like theirs in any way. One interaction and they are running away because why have all that drama involved.

You can also look at this forum. Several people did not want to come on over because they were very worried that we would just shut down. You don't want to get invested into an Emu and then the admin just wanders off or actively shuts it down.

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Well I have nothing against Tyen personally, but from what I can tell he gives p99 admins headaches. It's not like he's involved with running anything over there.

I've had nothing but positive interactions with Secrets, so I don't see the issue with him. Regardless he's not in charge of anything on our server. Rob and Cavedude started TAKP, and they're nice people. If they weren't, I wouldn't have joined them.

As for servers shutting down: P99 has been up 9 years now, and TAKP 3.5 years. If you had to take your chances on either of those or Daybreak, I sure wouldn't pick Daybreak right now. If Al'Kabor hadn't of shut down, I wouldn't have gotten involved with developing in the first place.

Elidroth said:

I realize I'll probably never work in the industry again because of posts like this.. but I'm OK with that. There are some VERY talented people that got screwed over by con artists in management. Smed, for all the shit he takes from you guys, is a great boss to work for, and truly loves games. He unfortunately got conned by these shitbags like most of the rest of us.. Short version is I think you guys are too hard on him. Everyone wants that manager that lets you do your thing and isn't a micromanager. Smed is that guy. If he's guilty of anything it's giving people too much rope to hang themselves.

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Smed is the figurehead as the person who didn't allow EQ to compete with WoW. That's always going to be his reputation around EQ neckbeards.

At the end of the day, he was in charge of the financials for the company. He bet that EQ1 was a dying game and chased after blockbuster hits without success (because every MMO compared to WoW is a failure). Anytime you're trying to project financials, you're going to lose a lot. How many people invested everything they had into Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, Bitcoin, or generic_lotterypick_stock when they were dirt cheap and didn't diversify their portfolio? Smed is the scapegoat because he saw SOE's future as different from its present.

Smed looked at the MMO market and bet the company's money in future products in the development pipeline providing a better ROI than EQ1. If Vanguard or EQ2 or EQN or whatever had become the next WoW, he'd be heralded as a genius (though people on this board would still hate him). He doesn't deserve to be vilified for that, and people don't hate him because he isn't the Warren Buffet of gaming. Nerds rage against Smed because he tried to create the next hit MMO instead of doubling down on the 1999 hodgepodge he had in front of him.

No one here knows Smed. No one has worked for him. The worst part is that no one cares. He's just the villain who ruined EQ around these parts.

a_skeleton_02 said:

Yeah ok Smedly

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Actually there are quite a few who still play EQ who truly believe if Smed had just invested in EQ1, that it would beat WoW. They're dumb, but if recent history has shown us anything, it's people will believe what they want regardless of fact.

It's a pretty standard corporate stance:

If it makes money, spend money on it. If it just keeps things running, spend as little as possible to keep it running. Operation costs vs. development costs. Both are a cost, but one maintains while the other makes you money.

I definitely believe that the costs to turn EQ into an easy game to design for (all the talk of updating engines etc) effectively became a non-starter once it cratered after WoW's release. You can't sell "but this will cut dev costs 3-5 years from now by 10-30%!" when your payerbase fell off a cliff. I'm too lazy to look but EQ's population started plummeting right after WoW's release (or a couple of months after; my vgcharts memory is weak) and it literally never recovered; just kept slowly decreasing.

The people talking about the massive spikes is subs around the TLP stuff are also missing kind of an important aspect: A lot of those are windowed bots. There's like maybe 20-30k people still playing EQ, they just are forking out for 1-6 accounts each, and this number rises (not the people playing, but the windowed bots) around the same time TLPs come out. Shocking!

I don't think throwing money at EQ would have ever let it compete, realistically, with WoW and post-WoW games. It was 5.5 years old at the time and it looked like it. WIth as simplistic as the gameplay (on average) was, it's hard to sell it on a mechanic standpoint and overlook the graphics when other games are doing, relatively speaking, more complex shit and look better at the same time.

- Tyen:

Nah; you let people do whatever they want and EQ would not beat WoW. The same 20-30K people would splinter and DBQ would make even less money, as the guys who are multi-boxing 6+ chars at a time just run their own servers. And I don't know if even that would be that popular, as it doesn't mean much if you are "soloing" content when you can change the difficulty setting at will.

LOL at the idea of EQ1 being RPGMaker for MMO's being bigger than WoW. The number of people who have the technical skill and time to develop EQ code (especially the ancient stuff in the early days of the tech boom) is so small.

Everyone can make their own private server! Free development tools for everyone! That almost sounds like Landmark. That was super fun.

pharmakos said:

Sounds like EQEmu is significantly less difficult to dev for than EQLive. I think it might be doable.

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Tyen wants SOE to make a profit off of this. In this fictitious scenario they'd be using circa 2004 code to create their own servers in 2004 and overthrow WoW.

Being in software for 5 years I've ran into some of these guys like Elidroth is talking about and it always disappointed me. Every now and again you would go to a conference, vendor hall, gathering, whatever, and run into these guys thinking it was going to be the coolest thing ever but they were real turds. It doesn't surprise me when Elidroth speaks of guys using their power and position to take dumps on people's ideas, force dating situations, etc. after meeting some of them. However, I met some super people back when Diablo was just breaking through and early MMO's. It really came later, maybe 2-4 years after EQ released that a lot of these people came into power and really rained on your parade. Given I was an in-house developer for a financial institution, I loved gaming and just wanted to talk tech and geek out with some of these guys. For whatever reason, you give some people titles in the gaming circles and they really believe they're gods. I'm now a half-time director of technology at a school district and half-time game design teacher so i'm reaching out more and more to game studios to get guest speakers and resources for my classes. I have to say, Unity has really been the coolest company and connected me with really awesome people. They outfitted my entire school, and other surrounding schools, with Unity licenses at no cost, and we have a sister district at EA as we speak so i'm curious to see how those stories turn out. Anyway, my job today has brought me full circle and it's been really difficult to find people who will just talk to you like an equal or at least even fake it as a professional courtesy. Console people have been the best honestly. We had good experiences working with the division of EA that works with Simcity, Microsoft (Minecraft division), and several smaller, indie studios.

I attempted to reach out to some MMO people to see if I can get some Skype sessions with my classes but it hasn't really worked out just yet. I will say this, Holly and Hartsman are really professional and kind in their communications but I never had the nerve to just out right ask them if they had anyone that would do a little PR call for a district in Kentucky. lol

Muligan said:

Being in software for 5 years I've ran into some of these guys like Elidroth is talking about and it always disappointed me. Every now and again you would go to a conference, vendor hall, gathering, whatever, and run into these guys thinking it was going to be the coolest thing ever but they were real turds. It doesn't surprise me when Elidroth speaks of guys using their power and position to take dumps on people's ideas, force dating situations, etc. after meeting some of them. However, I met some super people back when Diablo was just breaking through and early MMO's. It really came later, maybe 2-4 years after EQ released that a lot of these people came into power and really rained on your parade. Given I was an in-house developer for a financial institution, I loved gaming and just wanted to talk tech and geek out with some of these guys. For whatever reason, you give some people titles in the gaming circles and they really believe they're gods. I'm now a half-time director of technology at a school district and half-time game design teacher so i'm reaching out more and more to game studios to get guest speakers and resources for my classes. I have to say, Unity has really been the coolest company and connected me with really awesome people. They outfitted my entire school, and other surrounding schools, with Unity licenses at no cost, and we have a sister district at EA as we speak so i'm curious to see how those stories turn out. Anyway, my job today has brought me full circle and it's been really difficult to find people who will just talk to you like an equal or at least even fake it as a professional courtesy. Console people have been the best honestly. We had good experiences working with the division of EA that works with Simcity, Microsoft (Minecraft division), and several smaller, indie studios.

I attempted to reach out to some MMO people to see if I can get some Skype sessions with my classes but it hasn't really worked out just yet. I will say this, Holly and Hartsman are really professional and kind in their communications but I never had the nerve to just out right ask them if they had anyone that would do a little PR call for a district in Kentucky. lol

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You should reach out to Scott, he's very approachable. Never tried to communicate with Holly.

Side question, and feel free to ignore as its personal, but what district/county in KY do you teach in? I'm kind of shocked to see that someone is teaching game design in the state.

Who is Ponytail?

NM, read the rest of the thread.