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+ Show Spoiler +On December 26 2012 20:17 betaman wrote:
I don't care if they game is amazing fun, I will NEVER support a developer who have such an awful disregard for it's customers and the truth. A developer that is clearly only interested in making money as fast as possible.
- The game is a hastily made mod of War Inc, their previous game, to cash in on the popularity of Day Z. Yet they claim the game has been in development for a long time.
- They rush the game onto Steam to make money, when the game is still in Alpha. Calling it a "foundation" release.
- The original steam page, was one of the worst cases of flagrant false advertising I have ever seen. Staged screen shots, endless lies such as "gain XP for dozens of skills" (there are no skills) and "100-400 square kilometre maps" (there is ONE map that is roughly 15 square kilometres).
- They copy artwork and other assets such as LoL Terms of Service. Clearly demonstrating their lack of scruples.
- Not to mention all the other rumours such as banning people at random to scare people from hacking (which is apparently rife) and never giving refunds to disgruntled customers and instead insulting them.
Whatever happened to the customer is king? Yet we have people here and in other places jumping to their defence merely because they have had some fun with the game. These people should hang their heads in shame.
I enjoy the game. The problem is their PR and marketing department. They fucked up big time, but other wise the game is pretty decent.If you've never played this game and experienced it first hand, then there's no point.
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On December 27 2012 08:18 LiLSighKoh wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On December 26 2012 20:17 betaman wrote:
I don't care if they game is amazing fun, I will NEVER support a developer who have such an awful disregard for it's customers and the truth. A developer that is clearly only interested in making money as fast as possible.
- The game is a hastily made mod of War Inc, their previous game, to cash in on the popularity of Day Z. Yet they claim the game has been in development for a long time.
- They rush the game onto Steam to make money, when the game is still in Alpha. Calling it a "foundation" release.
- The original steam page, was one of the worst cases of flagrant false advertising I have ever seen. Staged screen shots, endless lies such as "gain XP for dozens of skills" (there are no skills) and "100-400 square kilometre maps" (there is ONE map that is roughly 15 square kilometres).
- They copy artwork and other assets such as LoL Terms of Service. Clearly demonstrating their lack of scruples.
- Not to mention all the other rumours such as banning people at random to scare people from hacking (which is apparently rife) and never giving refunds to disgruntled customers and instead insulting them.
Whatever happened to the customer is king? Yet we have people here and in other places jumping to their defence merely because they have had some fun with the game. These people should hang their heads in shame.
I enjoy the game. The problem is their PR and marketing department. They fucked up big time, but other wise the game is pretty decent.If you've never played this game and experienced it first hand, then there's no point.
You miss the point.
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I wish Sergey wouldn't talk with such an arrogant tone when being confronted about doing something wrong. Or maybe it is just the way I am perceiving it but still.
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I received this email from Sergey today:
Dear fellow Survivors,
It has now been more than two months since we launched public access to The War Z. We’ve definitely had our ups and downs, and I thought that this Holiday break was the right time for me to try to step back a little and think about our journey since it started. This may be a little long, but I would appreciate if you could stay with me for a few minutes as I try to go over the highlights of the game as well as some of the hurdles and controversies, how we have addressed that and what our plans are.
First of all a very big and sincere “Thank You!” to all of you. We are really proud of the community we have formed with you guys. Every day we have hundreds of thousands of players on our servers, and this is a life-changing event for the team and me. We are blessed to have you as members of the community and we are well aware that without you the game would be nothing. Along with that thanks, though, I need to admit that we failed to effectively communicate some of our plans and actions to both our existing players and to our new prospective players. This failure to communicate resulted in some very negative feedback from some members of our community, but while it might be easy to label them as “haters” or some other dismissive term, in all honesty this is my fault. I became arrogant and blinded by the early success and quick growth of The War Z, our increasing number of players, numbers we were getting from surveys, etc., and I chose not to notice the concerns and questions raised by these members of the game community as well as others. This failure is entirely on my shoulders and if anything I owe thanks to that vocal minority and admit that I should have paid attention sooner. I chose instead to concentrate on the bigger picture – my dream of turning The War Z from being a game developed by a small indie team into a large online venture, instead of addressing small things first and staying focused on the game issues. At the end my arrogance led us to the moment, when all those small things finally caught up and created a “perfect storm” that affected all of our community members. For that I’m truly sorry and apologize to all of our community as well as the larger PC gaming community that is not yet playing The War Z.
I do not take this situation lightly, and last week events were especially humbling for me. I’ve experienced a range of emotions, most of which centered on regret for not having addressed some of the issues differently than we did, but we can’t change the past. The only thing we can do is to be sure that we won’t repeat the same mistakes in the future. I have realized that as the leader of this ship, I missed all early warnings that were saying, “Your community is not as happy as you think they are, you need to alter course.” I was too focused on how great we are and how a small independent team got their first game to over 700,000 users in a two-month period. Though that is something to be very proud of, allowing that to overshadow the existing community and their satisfaction was poor judgment.
I want to give you some insight into what our plans are for the future, but before we get to that, I’d like to clear the air with you on several important topics.
Community management and moderation – the problem
Even since the early Alpha launch, this game has always cultivated a large and loyal player base that is very active in the game. Again, thank you for this. Unfortunately, we weren’t prepared for this large success and the way we managed the community was not the way it should’ve been. We relied too much on forum moderators, whose primary role was to punish those who break rules, not to engage the community and guide conversations into productive discussions about problems. There wasn’t enough presence of the development team on forums, there wasn’t enough updates on development of UPCOMING features. We failed to communicate our position and messaging on the outside platforms such as Facebook, twitter and various online websites, and when we did this we chose to rely more on arrogance rather than being humble and trying to understand why people were saying negative things. We chose to tune out negative reactions to the game, not paying enough attention to them – and this, again, is my fault. We chose to rely too much on numbers – percentage of refund requests, number and dynamic of our daily and monthly active users, etc. Well, in hindsight – those things probably work well for more casual games, but the hardcore PC gaming community is much different and can be very vocal about what they feel. Even when the percentage of players with negative comments is small, as the community grows, even a small percentage can add up to be a very significant absolute number. And it’s not just a number – those are real people with real issues they are having with the game. OP Productions (publisher for War Z) and me personally have failed to address those issues effectively.
Community management and moderation – the solution!
We’re changing our community management procedures and rules right now. We’re going to reevaluate publishing and marketing team performance, and I will make sure that Hammerpoint Interactive developers will have a much stronger voice when it comes to community management and we won’t rely 100% on OP Productions to single handedly handle this. Lots of changes will be happening very fast in the weeks to come. One of the ideas that I proposed was to select 10 players from around the world who can represent the player community and invite them to our offices in Los Angeles, to meet the team, check out what we’re doing, and share with actual developers their concerns, wishes and thoughts on the game. We also will involve community, to a much higher degree, in the process of making our next map for the War Z (called “California”). We’ll be discussing many of the aspects of the map with you and asking for feedback.
We’re revisiting our forum policies; we’re going to bring on an additional community management team, additional moderators and we’ll train them how to respond to things properly. There will still be restrictions on harassment, trash talk, etc. But we’ll make sure that every opinion is heard. At the same time, I must also be cautious: we cannot address all issues and there cannot be only one voice. Please accept that. With hundreds of thousands of players playing, talking, chatting, voicing their strong opinions, there will always be diverging opinions. And some issues that are minor ones are sometimes brought to light by very vocal channels. I would even say there is sometimes a beginning of controversy because the game is now so popular. So there is sometimes a distortion between the severity of the issue and the attention it gets. But we will clearly implement steps to better listen to the community.
What is Foundation Release?
The most asked question of the last week was “is this the final release?” My answer has always been that for an online game a “final” release means that the game is dead – so there’s really no such thing, you never stop developing, making changes to and adding new features to the game. This is how we came to call the current version of The War Z “Foundation Release.” We launched the Foundation Release on December 17, 2012 as our first-stage release that we use as a foundation to build upon. It does include the core features and a fully playable environment. This is our version 1.0, and of course we will continue to improve that version as time goes on. Did we rush to get it done? That is a tough question, but to answer honestly I think that we all pushed very hard to be first to market and in time for the holidays. Our entire team was working late, long hours to iron out issues and include as many features as possible. This is part of the reality of being a smaller, independent game developer. If we had a larger team and more funding we may have done things differently, but I’m not sure. I don’t think it was a mistake because our numbers have been strong since day one and, even with the recent negativity, our metrics are really solid and we’ve been continuing to grow. The negative opinions are always the most vocal, but most players are really enjoying the game and we’ve been attracting more and more daily active players every week. A lot of the gaming journalists that have been playing the game have also given us some great feedback. I realize that we will take a few hits from some of the traditional gaming press in terms of review scores, but I’m hoping that even they will consider that this game is a living project that will continue to evolve as time goes on. We are very proud of our Foundation Release, and we do stand behind it like we have stood behind any previous version.
What’s on the Horizon?
As for what will happen next with The War Z? We’re currently evaluating the relationship between Hammerpoint and OP Productions. I firmly believe that Hammerpoint should be playing a more prominent role in publishing/game operating process. We’re in a process of adding new key members to our team, bringing on guys who have much more experience operating and growing successful online games and I know this is going to make a huge difference in terms of development. We’ll be making some big decisions in terms of leadership for both companies and I will personally change how I handle many things. Above all we will continue to develop and make this game the best that it can be.
I know that to some people my words won’t matter much. I understand that. I hope that will change as we move forward and deliver the features that our players have been waiting for. I can promise you that from now on things will be much more transparent, and we’ll provide better communication and engage our community to discuss upcoming features way before they appear in the game.
I do believe that we aren’t even close to uncovering the true potential for The War Z, and I hope that in the coming year, we’ll be able to regain trust from people who were alienated by our actions and we’ll be able to move forward and grow the game together.
Thank you for reading all this, thank you for supporting the game and thank you for helping us to change and realize what’s important as well as what is not.
I hope you are all having a happy holiday and I wish you the best for the New Year!
Sincerely,
Sergey Titov
Executive Producer, The War Z
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Complete fluff.
the real Zinger in that Email
” I was too focused on how great we are and how a small independent team got their first game to over 700,000 users in a two-month period.
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lol yeah... the boast is strong with this one
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On December 27 2012 08:18 LiLSighKoh wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On December 26 2012 20:17 betaman wrote:
I don't care if they game is amazing fun, I will NEVER support a developer who have such an awful disregard for it's customers and the truth. A developer that is clearly only interested in making money as fast as possible.
- The game is a hastily made mod of War Inc, their previous game, to cash in on the popularity of Day Z. Yet they claim the game has been in development for a long time.
- They rush the game onto Steam to make money, when the game is still in Alpha. Calling it a "foundation" release.
- The original steam page, was one of the worst cases of flagrant false advertising I have ever seen. Staged screen shots, endless lies such as "gain XP for dozens of skills" (there are no skills) and "100-400 square kilometre maps" (there is ONE map that is roughly 15 square kilometres).
- They copy artwork and other assets such as LoL Terms of Service. Clearly demonstrating their lack of scruples.
- Not to mention all the other rumours such as banning people at random to scare people from hacking (which is apparently rife) and never giving refunds to disgruntled customers and instead insulting them.
Whatever happened to the customer is king? Yet we have people here and in other places jumping to their defence merely because they have had some fun with the game. These people should hang their heads in shame.
I enjoy the game. The problem is their PR and marketing department. They fucked up big time, but other wise the game is pretty decent.If you've never played this game and experienced it first hand, then there's no point.
I enjoyed some of the worst games I ever played, and uninstalled some of the best after only a few hours.
The thing that bothers me (not only in this case, it's pretty widespread) is the blatant rejection of objectivity. While I don't really care about people praising - or defending - the games just because they like them per se, it does have an unfortunate side effect of promoting the game to other people in an essentially dishonest way.
You can even see it here on TL in the Steam thread, or any other thread in which people recommend games to other people by saying "[game] is the best classic hardcore [genre] ever nothing like this new bullshit you have to buy it trust me", without ever bothering to warn people about the glaring design faults or technical problems with the game that might make it unplayable for someone who has a slightly different taste or quality standards.
While how one spend their money and the research involved in the decision is ultimately one's own responsibility, I don't really see the point of people acting (intentionally or not) like companies' salesmen or PR agents for no personal gain whatsoever.
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best line from that email
"I know that to some people my words won’t matter much."
you got that right bud. in fact i'm pretty sure those weren't even sergey's words. judging by the interview a while back his english is atrocious. i have a feeling his PR dude walked up to his desk and was like
"dude people are really getting pissed. we need to do something."
"but we aren't lose monehs yes?"
"actually we are"
"just make sorry letter and put sergey name on bottom"
and here we have it. an email that gave too little too late. sergey needs to just go away and come back when he can handle himself like a decent individual from the start.
in fact, it would probably be better if he just left the gaming industry entirely. guy is a fucking snake oil salesman.
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They can write all they want and it won't change anything. The only thing they can do to redeem themself is to deliver on their promises. In their pc gamer interview (here) they said they'd add leaderboards and improvements in clan system (whatever that means) by the end of december or early january.
Well, for anyone actually still playing, are leaderboards in the game now? Did they improve the clan system? Well, they still have a week.
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You have problems?
Sorry I was thinking about how great I am
-Sergey
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That e-mail wasn't too bad, although he is definitively very full of himself when the fact is the game is not very original at all. He also boasts about numbers when he would never have written something like that at all if it wasn't obvious to him that they are losing money and the game is going to die. I have no doubt that those numbers he cited are complete bullshit. Although that e-mail is probably the best move they could make at this point, I think it will be too little too late for everyone other than the current fan boys of the game that have supported it throughout even the most insulting and arrogant moments Sergey has had. Like he said he let his (little) success go to his head and now by his complete 180 in how he is speaking to his community he is panicking.
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On December 29 2012 02:36 Efekkt wrote:
That e-mail wasn't too bad, although he is definitively very full of himself when the fact is the game is not very original at all. He also boasts about numbers when he would never have written something like that at all if it wasn't obvious to him that they are losing money and the game is going to die. I have no doubt that those numbers he cited are complete bullshit. Although that e-mail is probably the best move they could make at this point, I think it will be too little too late for everyone other than the current fan boys of the game that have supported it throughout even the most insulting and arrogant moments Sergey has had. Like he said he let his (little) success go to his head and now by his complete 180 in how he is speaking to his community he is panicking.
I doubt the numbers are fake because of how packed the servers are constantly. Every day I play the 100 pops are nearly full and the 50 pop servers on EU and NA both hover at around 30 people with 20 being the least. The game definitely does have a big player base atm and seems to be growing as of late. Before there were only around 130 50 pop servers with the average being 15 people on a server.
Since Sergey sent this email members of the dev team have been on the forums replying to threads and criticism for their game which has been really interesting to read.
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This game is complete garbage and barely in beta stage, yet they charge upfront and have micro-transactions. Shameful development practices.
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I think the TB video was quite informative/"accurate". While there may have been some bad luck and.or bad gamer skills going on, overall it appeared to be a representative experience of the game, albeit with perhaps a showcase of some of some worse luck than average.
I really wouldn't call him biased. While expecting a poor result is indeed a form of bias, it's a very minor form of bias. if someone was to perform research on smoking, I don't think it's too wrong for one to be assuming it's unhealthy (even if it's not ideal). I think overall he gave it a fair shot, and he just got legitimately screwed.
That said, games do have room for improvement. If the game improves a lot, I think many people will give it a second look, and not just outright dismiss it because of a bad first release (not saying some won't).
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Im pretty frustrated atm.
I have some buddies that still continue to play this game. And whenever we talk about it, we always end up arguing about why I dont play this game anymore etc. Its tough dude, when you got friends who accuse you of not giving this game a fair chance, when the only reason you bought this game was because you thought there would be no excessive hackers. But ever since the Alpha stages hackers were so common. I always state how bitter I am towards Hammerpoint for not giving me a refund. They said I already played "X" amount of hours and that I should give it more time...--OKAY NO!!!
I bought the game, as a player coming from Day Z, because I wanted to play a hacker free environment. And it did not deliver. My friends then say that every game has hackers and that I need to give it time...
Motherfucker, I said, "When was the last time you died where you thought you didn't get killed by a hacker". Couldnt give me an honest answer. God. W/e, I just needed to vent.
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On January 05 2013 15:00 Emnjay808 wrote:
Im pretty frustrated atm.
I have some buddies that still continue to play this game. And whenever we talk about it, we always end up arguing about why I dont play this game anymore etc. Its tough dude, when you got friends who accuse you of not giving this game a fair chance, when the only reason you bought this game was because you thought there would be no excessive hackers. But ever since the Alpha stages hackers were so common. I always state how bitter I am towards Hammerpoint for not giving me a refund. They said I already played "X" amount of hours and that I should give it more time...--OKAY NO!!!
I bought the game, as a player coming from Day Z, because I wanted to play a hacker free environment. And it did not deliver. My friends then say that every game has hackers and that I need to give it time...
Motherfucker, I said, "When was the last time you died where you thought you didn't get killed by a hacker". Couldnt give me an honest answer. God. W/e, I just needed to vent.
try getting them into playing dayZ - wasteland.
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The devs really need to get their heads out of their asses. They know there is a lot of hate for them and when they say ridiculous things in interviews to piss people off ugh. It just causes more problems and I don't really know what to say, I have fun playing the game when I do but Sergey annoys me.
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God this game is fun with little to none hackers. Keep holding your breaths for the DayZ standalone. I'm having the time of my life while you guys bitch about the devs.
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i logged on the other day and it seemed like there was no hackers in campos (on a ~20ppl) server.
I killed 2 guys in the apts and they both prox chatted "fairfight 'my name'"
A lot of people were firing in campos and it seemed all pretty legit. I'm not sure if the anti-cheat is working or not, but it was a much better experience than a few days ago.
i stopped playing again though, i just bought borderlands 2 :D
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On January 08 2013 11:53 acidstormy wrote:
i logged on the other day and it seemed like there was no hackers in campos (on a ~20ppl) server.
I killed 2 guys in the apts and they both prox chatted "fairfight 'my name'"
A lot of people were firing in campos and it seemed all pretty legit. I'm not sure if the anti-cheat is working or not, but it was a much better experience than a few days ago.
i stopped playing again though, i just bought borderlands 2 :D
The anti-cheat is working, a lot of hackers have been banned. Also fairfight is to report someone soo they reported you for hacking.
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EPT
