181

Doesn’t CCP own White Wolf? I thought I had read somewhere they purchased the company.

182

Yes. That’s why people were asking how this affects White Wolf.

183

Ccp has trouble cause they are creatively dead, and it’s rubbing off on their partners. Instead of expanding what they are good at and gearing it for the PC they are still pulling out stupid of the hat.

184

After Monoclegate (which wasn’t really about monocles but about a whole bunch of things that had suddenly come to a head, with monocles being a symbol), I think it started to look to many players (myself included) that they had thought of EVE merely as their cash cow to fund new, exciting projects.

Players extended this to a feeling that EVE had been deliberately neglected (lots of long-standing problems seemingly unaddressed), and that their loyalty been taken for granted. It did seem like that from the way CCP were talking internally, judging by the leaked internal magazine.

They made a fairly quick recovery by paying attention to their space game again shortly afterwards. But I wonder if the damage had already been done by that point. The cream of the jest, though, was that the much-anticipated and much-touted “walking in stations” feature was a non-event in terms of EVE gameplay (i.e. there was no gameplay, it was just a room with a door) that looked like its sole purpose was to test some apparently pretty crappy, resource-hogging tech for WoD.

Personally, I think their biggest mistake was an apparently little one that had a bigger psychological impact than one might suppose: players were used to having their sense of “home” be their hangar, where they could idly spin their beautiful ships around while chatting. Then CCP forced them to use the lame captain’s quarters as their “home” - i.e. rather than make it an option that one could discover and explore, they made it unavoidable, thus you got a double-whammy of people being annoyed at being forced out of their “home” in the game (the hangar), and it being replaced by something that only highlighted CCP’s inadequacy (a barely-functional and resource-hogging “captain’s quarters”).

Even when they corrected that mistake and gave back the hangar as an option, they corrected it with reduced functionality (i.e. lots of shortcuts people had been used to using no longer worked).

Kind of hubris, I suppose.

185

Do anyone think that they outlined the Vampire MMO development wrong?

They did buy (or form, I’m not sure) a new studio in Atlanta to make the Vampire MMO. It would make more sense for the veteran devs in Iceland to make the new MMO, and for the new devs to be tasked the maintance / expansions of Eve.
Putting all their eggs in the same basket, Eve Online, will be their perdition on the long term.

186

Falcon only started in the last 18 months or so; he was previously the pirate known as Verone, and a frequent Alliance Tournament commentator, so I don’t think he’s who you’re thinking of. It was a pretty boneheaded way to treat this, though.

Pretty sure that’s the case. There’s a comment by one of the Onyx Path guys in that reddit thread where he says this has pretty much no impact on their stuff.

CCP is having some serious issues this year; they lost CCP Zulu, who was a longtime Eve producer, and CCP Soundwave, their lead game designer, both to Riot earlier, and yesterday came the announcement that CCP Unifex, the former executive producer who basically engineered the entire turnaround of Eve after Incarna and moved to mobile development last year around this time, was also out, though it’s not clear if he left of his own volition or he was laid off or what.

I have a lot of ex-CCP folks as friends on Facebook, many of whom worked in the Atlanta office, and to say their reactions to this were…harsh…would be an understatement. I get the feeling from what I see that they blame the fact that WoDO was evidently still in the design stage after 4-5 years of development (although it was also in FnF beta I guess, according to the reddit thread?) on CCP management being unable to focus their effort, which is not hard to believe. Those of us in Eve’s roleplaying community get told about new efforts to build up the Eve storyline every couple years and it always ends up fizzling because CCP doesn’t want to have a full time writer on staff.

As far as DUST, it sounds like it is profitable, but only just, and considering it’s now bound to a last-gen console, I wonder how long that will last. Console FPSes have a shorter lifecycle anyway, and that can’t help. Valkyrie might end up being big, but the Facebook buyout of Oculus has sort of thrown that whole thing up in the air.

I think the bigger question is how much longer the CCP management can keep having missteps like the Incarna kerfuffle, the collapse of WoDO, or the kind of stillbirth of DUST and continue to recruit top-tier talent willing to move to Iceland, Atlanta, or Shanghai, which seem like hard sells for most game devs, especially if you’re not sure about the health of the company or the strength of the leadership.

187

The inside story from The Guardian:

Plans for a swift ramp up to full production on the World of Darkness MMO faded as the pre-production and training phase dragged on.

There was another problem. Several members of the WoD development team told the Guardian that this early bump in the road was exacerbated by extreme disorganisation on the part of CCP’s Icelandic management. Very shortly after initial development began, the company started blurring the lines between the World of Darkness and Eve projects.

Repeatedly, staff were shifted over from the former to work on expansion projects for the latter. At times, our sources say, the entire WoD staff was put onto Eve, particularly during the development of 2009 add-on Apocrypha.

Sources report that, over the nine-year period, the game effectively reached alpha – the stage at which all the major features have been implemented - three times, only for each version to be scrapped.

“I tested it myself, on two different occasions out of those three,” says Blood. “With the first playtest, I was amazed at how little of the core game was there – at this point the game had been in development for over half a decade. I mean, there was just nothing, literally nothing, for someone like me, a complete outsider to the WoD IP, to appreciate.

"Other testers who were familiar with it thought it was great that they could finally see their avatars ‘diablerise’ – or consume – other player’s corpses, for health, or something. I just kind of shook my head and wondered how this would ever draw in anything other than die-hard fans.

And so it went…

188

And another 49 employees laid off today, including CCP Eterne (community/fiction writer), CCP Xhagen (associate producer, previously the CSM liason), and CCP Loxyrider (well-known video producer). And still no one from the upper management paying for these kinds of mistakes. :/

189

The Guardian’s posted a scathing behind the scenes look at The World of Darkness.

190

Just a couple posts above yours…

191

Your post was, like, so yesterday’s news, man.

192

Yikes! I have no idea how I missed that. I shouldn’t post just before I head to bed.

193

Nah, it’s fine. The article is great and should be getting more eyes.

194

Jeez, that article’s horrifying.

195

And yet, so unsurprising.

The games industry’s HR practices are still…well…“oh dear” cover it nicely.

196

On the one hand, we know EVE has always been CCP’s sole cash cow, and that everything else had to be related to it, or to be relegated to the back burner whenever EVE needed something new.

On the other hand, CCP seems to be aware that they can’t go on coasting on EVE forever. The game is a decade old, everyone has heard about it, and the people who don’t play it don’t do so not because they haven’t heard about it; they choose not to play it. Besides, there is no reason to join now. The large groups and their elites which wield power in the game started playing years ago, and they’re not going to change. Hence CCP’s attempt to get more money out of these people; Monoclegate happened because the company failed to understand what it was that its clientele wanted (which was game-earned standing), but EVE’s emphasis on multi-account gaming, screwing the game for people who don’t want or can’t afford to play a second or fifteenth account, has been a resounding success.

But World of Darkness, was it going to open up a new market for CCP, or just cannibalize EVE’s? That the games are in two different genres means nothing if the main attraction is a ruthless, dark world – that’s EVE with vampires. They might have gotten a few WoD aficionados - Nick Blood’s comment about the first alpha intimates that nobody else would have appreciated it - but I’m quite sure the EVE players, knowing what CCP’s brand of gaming involved, would have played it. Would they have retained their subscription to the older game? Not sure. It’s possible, in this case, that CCP became trapped by its own ethos, effectively turning away all those who shuddered at what went on in EVE and thought no, they wouldn’t risk running into similar sociopaths in World of Darkness.

197

I read it as appealing only to hardcore WoD fans.

198

I read it as appealing to the vampire fad, but that’s been over for a while now. If they’d managed to get it out when Twilight and all that stuff was a thing, they could easily have had a huge hit on their hands.

For me, this unfortunate affair just confirms what I said in another thread - when I was young, I used to be all “art rules”, and I used to think that creativity was the numero uno thing. But as I’ve gotten older, more and more I realize that everything is always about people, and people management. Creativity isn’t all that rare, but great people management skills are, and they’re what make all the difference between success and failure of most professional things.

You have to enthuse people, and keep them enthused, so their creativity flows, and they do things in good time. Also it’s the Daoist thing - you have to lead subtly, so that people think “I made this”. A good leader is almost kind of invisible.

199

Sounds to me like they never really knew how a WoD MMO should work. If they had a vision for it when they started working, it still might have died by mismanagement, but I bet it would have been a lot less likely: they’d be less likely to pillage staff from a project with direction, and they’d have things to show off to their current and prospective audience to get them enthused and start the buzz. Frankly, I never thought that the guys who made EVE were a good fit for WoD. One is an economic, systems-based game. The other is about characters, storytelling, and drama. Certainly not an impossible combination, but a bit at odds.

Also, sounds like they had one absolutely virulent manager.

200

I never really had a good idea what would work myself. I know I certainly didn’t want an MMO anything like Eve, or I’d play Eve. But I don’t know how well it would have suited a conventional WoW-style themepark MMO either, as a license, even if CCP were inclined or capable of creating such a thing.