I've talked to Smed a lot over the years, and one thing I know about him is that he gives his people a lot of leeway. He doesn't seem to want to disrupt innovation. So they have a lot of leeway. Giving employees carte blance is fine, but you have to measure results. It seems as if he gives too much power, but doesn't hold them accountable.
Not at all, he has less control over the company than I'm personally comfortable with. For fucks sake he said h1z1 isn't an MMO on twitter and it's still advertized as one.
To be fair, he's had a lot of games to keep track of, and that's made even harder to do when you report to Japan in person.
You're defending the guy who ran his company from #1 in market into an also ran? That's not how running a company well works.
I don't beleive this is the case. One of the issues with ponytail was how he shouted down employees during meetings. Basically ending any creative conversation. No innovation in that. Sounds like SoE was a boys club and Smed was the king.
By all accounts Smed has had a small coterie of folks he liked and that's who got promoted so you get idiots like Thom Terrazas as EQ Producer. #NotWinning
The people around him don't tell him what's really going on, they tell him what they want him to hear. For instance, in DCUO, speed hacking ruined the game for awhile. Both in PVE and PVP, it was ridiculous. It didn't even make sense to PVP, as there were so many cheaters. Cheaters could kill you in two seconds, as they were hitting for 5-10x damage. I remember, I was in an email chain with Smed, the head CS guy, and the Lead Dev of DCUO at the time over the issue. The Head CS guy was bragging to Smed about how they found a way to stop the cheaters. It was like a 300 word essay on how sophisticated it was. I told them that they did a great job, but as I was reading their email, I was speed hacking to prove a point. There was no answer after that.
I've been busy. Those six-packs of Lone Star couldn't drink themselves. #caring
Yes he was. All over the streams, answering questions and garnering feedback. The problem is, once released Smed was gone. Where was he answering questions then? To me that smells like a worthless marketing campaign. "See the CEO really cares about his games"
That's interesting - I'd like to hear more about that (re: Georgeson's behavior) because I've heard the opposite. The narrative I've been told is that EQN was a trainwreck and it was Georgeson who hit pause and said: "Let's do something radically different." None of the ideas - fully destructible world, emergent AI, changing world, etc - came from him (most of that was Talisker), but he created the space for those ideas to be put out on the table. That's what I've been told, at least, so your own information is surprising to me Convo. (Not saying it isn't true - just that I haven't heard it and would like to learn more.)
And this was likely during a time when SOE was fielding offers for a sale correct? My point still stands then.
I actually think Paul Sage is a fairly talented design mind - far more than Butler - but some of the design decisions at the core of TESO were just fucking absurd. You have one of the greatest open-world sandbox franchises in history and so you focus your efforts and finances on porting over the linear story aspects that were ignored in the single player installments by a massive percentage of the playerbase, break the seamlessness of the world, and incorporate a restrictive class system that was called out for being broken and ill-advised on the very first day of external alpha testing? Stupid.
lol. No one on that list other than Butler even know what EQ did right all those years ago.
I'm proud you came out of lurker status to make that point. You're probably right.