I cant believe some people here actually buying this stuff. It explains why some of the more outrageous conspiracy theories are so popular. Half of that stuff is slander and people would be sueing left right and centre. Please think and not take everything you read at face value.
All this talk about slander and defamation... If you print or say something that's true, it's not slander/defamation/lible, and there's no ground for a lawsuit. I don't know if any of this is true, but if it is, there's no legal recourse.
Agreed, but the burden of proof is on the person making the accusations. Has anyone got any proof that whoever wrote this was in any kind of position to have this kind of first-hand knowledge? If not then I think we should treat this as someone's personal rant against a game/person/company that they personally dislike. I am no fan of Vanguard, but I don't want to judge people I know very little about.
If it is true, and the author is telling this from his personal experience, it sounds like he would be able to produce many witnesses/coworkers to back him up. If it's not true, and Brad comes down from his "spirit quest" in a very bad mood and his rolodex in hand, God help this "developer."
With an entire dev team that Brad literally screwed over. I'm 100% sure if proof was needed. This guy can find it in many other co-workers. Even if it's fake. It doesn't matter. This isn't a murder trial. You won't get no CSI investigation. So FACTS don't mean squat, but several screwed over employees with sob stories of being out of the job and not being able to provide for their families will convince a jury any day compared 1 douche bag with a "Vision" and a drug problem.
I hope Brad never works in the gaming industry again. As a matter of fact I should put together a portfolio of his worst and send it to any investor or publisher he attempts to obtain. Why? Because this man boned a lot of good people. People that trusted him and put everything on the line for him. You see the dev team may have been amateurs or it may have been their first game and if that's the case then as a new dev your first game means A LOT, because it shows your capabilities to work with a team and your past experience. Having a failed game as your first game is NOT good in the game dev industry. It makes it VERY had to get another decent paying dev job. Most likely a lot of them are either currently un-employeed, working on a wannabe project again due to reputation, or are just doing programming/free lance stuff. He single handedly ruined several peoples careers. I don't even want to hear it's not his fault. He is the LEADER. The leaders job is to keep the team motivated and organized. When the leader is never there how the hell would you expect things like that to happen, they can't! An amateur designer can make an incredible game with proper leading. It's not hard to program, but it takes experience and leadership to give direction. You can't add a game mechanic without the ENTIRE team being aware of it and making sure it fits the game and the entire team can't be known about it without the proper leadership to organize it. (Remember not everyone speaks the same language.. in a sense an artist will hardly understand the language of a programmer..)
So for Brad ruining several peoples potential career, destroying a potentially awesome sandbox game, hurting SOEs reputation even more, wasting investors money.. what does he get? A FKING NEW JOB! This guy should be burnt at the damn stake for all I care. IMO he's a pathetic POS that doesn't deserve to work ANYWHERE NEAR a game EVER again. Sick of him and his fking vision, which he can shove up his druggy arse. Hope he ODs. Nuff said.
Anyway, VG is BECOMING a good game. The problem is now a days there are so many games to choose from the developers get ONE shot to make a good first impression. Once that shot has been taken. It's over. People will move on. The folks that stay are the dedicated dillusional and sorry, but that won't keep the bills paid. Over time it'll OBVIOUSLY improve as it should, BUT people still have a bad taste and are HIGHLY hesitate about trying it again without incredible incentive. So far SOE has only fixed what shouldn't have been broken. No real new content has been introduced. Some people even continue to play because it's the absolute closest you can get to a new sandbox MMO. The game is only still here, because 1 reason. Station Access. The more games SOE provides the more likely people are to get station access. Whether they play them all or not doesn't matter. They use small dev teams on each game and still rake in huge profits regardless. The more popular games will balance out the less popular. IMO if SOE wants huge profit. Release a pre-CU SWG server, but that's another story for another time.
[ Played ] 2Moons, Anarchy Online, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, Everquest II, Guild Wars, HellGate: London, Lord of the Rings Online, Rappelz, RF Online, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, Sword of the New World, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Last Chaos
What's really sad here isn't that customers who paid $50 bucks for this garbage, it's the developers who spend years of their life, blood, sweat and tears developing this turkey and being abandoned by their captain, and being fired from their job on the spot without warning whatsoever. Brad McQuaid did screw over a LOT of people.
Assuming it is real (I mean honestly, who lies on the internet? It's absurd to even think that!), since when would anyone have anything nice to say about a company that fired them? If you get fired from a job that you worked at for awhile, you wouldn't necessarily be praising them every chance you got. Also, if he worked for as long as the majority of the Sigil team did for Vanguard, he probably wouldn't of thought that it'd been a "failure" at the time, or he probably would of gone on to bigger and better things during the development of the game. Vanguard has made quite a bit of progression since its initial launch, optimizations, content added, classes getting balanced. The game still has quite a ways to go before appealing to the masses, (more optimizations (to reduce the horrid hitching), helmet graphics, Berserker and Inquisitor, more class balancing, more content) but considering how far Vanguard has come with what little dev team it has with what the "ex-dev" thought of as "0 experience" and how far Vanguard could go, it would be enough to make any former employee a little angry.
I cant believe some people here actually buying this stuff. It explains why some of the more outrageous conspiracy theories are so popular. Half of that stuff is slander and people would be sueing left right and centre. Please think and not take everything you read at face value.
All this talk about slander and defamation... If you print or say something that's true, it's not slander/defamation/lible, and there's no ground for a lawsuit. I don't know if any of this is true, but if it is, there's no legal recourse.
Agreed, but the burden of proof is on the person making the accusations. Has anyone got any proof that whoever wrote this was in any kind of position to have this kind of first-hand knowledge? If not then I think we should treat this as someone's personal rant against a game/person/company that they personally dislike. I am no fan of Vanguard, but I don't want to judge people I know very little about.
If it is true, and the author is telling this from his personal experience, it sounds like he would be able to produce many witnesses/coworkers to back him up. If it's not true, and Brad comes down from his "spirit quest" in a very bad mood and his rolodex in hand, God help this "developer."
With an entire dev team that Brad literally screwed over. I'm 100% sure if proof was needed. This guy can find it in many other co-workers. Even if it's fake. It doesn't matter. This isn't a murder trial. You won't get no CSI investigation. So FACTS don't mean squat, but several screwed over employees with sob stories of being out of the job and not being able to provide for their families will convince a jury any day compared 1 douche bag with a "Vision" and a drug problem.
Dont be stupid...someone writing "Brad Mcquaid didn't do shit. (News Flash?) He's had an opiate addiction for years now, which only got progressively worse as the project failed" would have to be a complete moron, he would not get another job in the industry. All the moaning he is doing now would make him the least sought after developer. And trust me in this industry this kind of stuff sticks everywhere. If he did say it which I highly doubt he must have alternate career plans.
Hmmmmm.... back stabbing, trying to get one up on everyone else, secretly hating everyone while smiling through your teeth and pay rises that never happen. Isn't that normal office life?
Yeah, these guys sound so inept I was starting to get scared they were talking about where I work. Scary stuff...
Wow. Look at all the people giving SOE a free pass because they didn't screw up Vanguard. That's not even the point. You heard what the guy said- SOE gave vanguard and unnatural and undeservedly longer life.
What SOE does is buy up the crappiest MMO failures on the market to bundle them together to sell it's 30 dollar a month all access pass as if it's some kind of deal to get a bunch of shitty MMO's for the price of 2.
What that does for you, the consumer- is screw you. SOE is in the top 3 for sure if not #2 next to blizzard for market share- and look at how low you are letting them set the bar. You might as well be telling everyone looking to make a game in this genre you don't expect much from them, because you're used to happily wolfing down the shit sandwiches SOE serves you.
Hope you got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die. Looks like we're in for nasty weather. ... There's a bad moon on the rise.
Game really felt, in late beta, like it was designed by less than elite designers. I won't say amateurs. A project like this one deserved elite programmers. And if this Teclisen guy is the good guy... poor Vanguard, small wonder it failed.
Ouch, that is some bitter venting. I hope the writer got away clean and safe because Smedley might not know much about games and the people who play them but he does know all about NDAs.
It was pretty shocking (and just lame) to hear John Smedly actually get angry and complain to people after the layoff's that he, "didn't know what he was buying." He even expressed anger at Jeff and Brad for bamboozlin' him. Poor guy. Maybe next time tough-guy Smed decides to spend several million dollars on something he'll expend some brain power figuring out what it is first.
lol
As anyone who has had any dealing with SOE at all, isn't that just so like Smed?
Hmm.. interesting..... altho they got some serious unverified/unproven accusations (aka slander) and shit.
Hmm, interesting, someone weighing in with a legal argument that doesn't know the difference between slander and libel. Internet lawyering for the win! BTW, true statements fall under neither category.
For those of you thinking that this story does not have merit, I have news for you it was pretty much stated by 3 other developers before this was put out also. In the early days, when everyone knew this game wasn't going anywhere a lot of this stuff was put out and then locked up on the fansites "when there was no official forums".
Originally posted by Nergle In the early days, when everyone knew this game wasn't going anywhere a lot of this stuff was put out and then locked up on the fansites "when there was no official forums".
You can learn two things from Journalism 101 here.
First. Never trust a story if it comes from a disenchanted FIRED employee. It's going to be biased at best. And at worst, lies and fabrications.
Second. If a lot of this stuff was "put out" on a public site, and then locked up (deleted?), there is likely a pretty good reason for it. That reason is lawsuit.
I still take it as a joke, and the joke's on anyone who actually believes it.
I think that you can believe a bit of anything but you also gotta run it through the BS meter. I think you are seeing a very frustrated ex-dev... Is he still unemployeed?
I certainly feel sorry for him and hope he does better in the future.
I bet Microsoft is making a call to Smed of SOE and saying "Told Ya So!". Everyone should have known all this stuff when Microsoft dropped Vanguard like a bad habit.
What was Smed thinking when he purchased this dog? How can the person who bought Vanguard keep their job?
So using the the tools for the UT II engine in one year Sigil was able to add 30k quests? Man...thats pretty good using noobs. Those tools feel like a mod tool btw. Imagine what they could do now if Smed wanted VGSOH to be huge.
First off.. no idea if this was accurate or a rant and now two comments.
1) This isn't an unhappy employee who was fired. Sigil games no longer exists... you can't be fired from a company that goes into bankruptcy or is bought out. Some employees were retained by the new owner.
The unhappiness wasn't directed at SOE whom would have had the option to "retain" this person.
Fired would seem to be a less accurate term than the article you claim to be inaccurate.
2) I don't believe they said 30,000 quests were created. They said that 30,000 database entries related to quests existed (entries do not have to mean individual quests...)
Wow. Just....wow. I don't know how much to believe, but let's not bullshit ourselves here-- if even half of what Teclisen says in that post is true, it's a freaking miracle that this game ever saw the light of day.
I dunno how much of that dev's post is true, but it certainly doesn't sound farfetched. So glad I did not resubscribe and only used some the free playtime. I don't want to support this uninspiring, embarassing mess of a game.
Fortunately, sometime this would result in getting played like a fiddle by whoever happened to be lovingly pulling the strings that day. But more often than not, this just meant people had to go around him to get something in, only without the help of (Place whatever department here) that was necessary for a game feature to actually turn out right. Imagine for a second people at Sigil actually knew how to do something right? (Believe it or not, we did on occasion) this guy would become the bottleneck to prevent that from happening.
Anyway, enough of my blabbering. The most shocking reality that I don't think anyone really ever understood is that Vanguard was made (exclusively the design staff, I should say) COMPLETELY by amateurs. People who had been hired less than a week with 0 prior experience were tasked with designing entire newbie areas that shipped. People who had never produced a game in their life were asked to fix a 40 million dollar fuck up. People with no experience were asked to fix the item, diplomacy, ability, content, quest and pretty much every system in the game.
The game that exists now was designed in a single year by people with 0 experience. If that sounds too vague think of it like this: about 1 year from release we had 0 quests in the DB because the tool didn't exist yet. When I decided to split the team there was over 30,000 quest object entries.Yeah, explains a lot doesn't it?
OK, so what parts of this sounds too far fetched to have delivered the game that was shipped? I have been asking myself for over a year how this game could have ended up like it did, and for me, I now have my answer.
You can believe this or dismiss it as a scorned ex-employee if you wish, but it's the only reasonable answer I can see. It's all been speculated before, and those who didn't believe it then probably won't believe it now either.
As far as addictions go, a lot of common prescription pain killers are opium based narcotics, and I'd be willing to bet every one of you knows someone who's addicted to them, whether you are aware of it or not.
Anyway, enough of my blabbering. The most shocking reality that I don't think anyone really ever understood is that Vanguard was made (exclusively the design staff, I should say) COMPLETELY by amateurs.
The game that exists now was designed in a single year by people with 0 experience.
And yet when the game was released there were all those hardcore players on Forums (like this one) claiming how great the game was, how they weren't seeing any of the bugs, and how much fun they were having.
All over a game designed by amateurs.
Just goes to show you how some people, esp. hardcore MMORPG players, are willing to eat any sewage and tell themelves how great it tastes.
Good games sell themselves. There was a reason why MMORPGs until recently only sold to a niche market and never attracted large number of gamers. Hardcore players can keep whining about how the genre is evolving while they keep eating the same slop that regular gamers were smart enough never to touch.
Now we know, all it takes is a bunch of amateurs to crank out a piece trash to make them happy. At least Developers are finally realizing that catering to them is the path to failure.
Comments
All this talk about slander and defamation... If you print or say something that's true, it's not slander/defamation/lible, and there's no ground for a lawsuit. I don't know if any of this is true, but if it is, there's no legal recourse.
Agreed, but the burden of proof is on the person making the accusations. Has anyone got any proof that whoever wrote this was in any kind of position to have this kind of first-hand knowledge? If not then I think we should treat this as someone's personal rant against a game/person/company that they personally dislike. I am no fan of Vanguard, but I don't want to judge people I know very little about.
If it is true, and the author is telling this from his personal experience, it sounds like he would be able to produce many witnesses/coworkers to back him up. If it's not true, and Brad comes down from his "spirit quest" in a very bad mood and his rolodex in hand, God help this "developer."With an entire dev team that Brad literally screwed over. I'm 100% sure if proof was needed. This guy can find it in many other co-workers. Even if it's fake. It doesn't matter. This isn't a murder trial. You won't get no CSI investigation. So FACTS don't mean squat, but several screwed over employees with sob stories of being out of the job and not being able to provide for their families will convince a jury any day compared 1 douche bag with a "Vision" and a drug problem.
I hope Brad never works in the gaming industry again. As a matter of fact I should put together a portfolio of his worst and send it to any investor or publisher he attempts to obtain. Why? Because this man boned a lot of good people. People that trusted him and put everything on the line for him. You see the dev team may have been amateurs or it may have been their first game and if that's the case then as a new dev your first game means A LOT, because it shows your capabilities to work with a team and your past experience. Having a failed game as your first game is NOT good in the game dev industry. It makes it VERY had to get another decent paying dev job. Most likely a lot of them are either currently un-employeed, working on a wannabe project again due to reputation, or are just doing programming/free lance stuff. He single handedly ruined several peoples careers. I don't even want to hear it's not his fault. He is the LEADER. The leaders job is to keep the team motivated and organized. When the leader is never there how the hell would you expect things like that to happen, they can't! An amateur designer can make an incredible game with proper leading. It's not hard to program, but it takes experience and leadership to give direction. You can't add a game mechanic without the ENTIRE team being aware of it and making sure it fits the game and the entire team can't be known about it without the proper leadership to organize it. (Remember not everyone speaks the same language.. in a sense an artist will hardly understand the language of a programmer..)
So for Brad ruining several peoples potential career, destroying a potentially awesome sandbox game, hurting SOEs reputation even more, wasting investors money.. what does he get? A FKING NEW JOB! This guy should be burnt at the damn stake for all I care. IMO he's a pathetic POS that doesn't deserve to work ANYWHERE NEAR a game EVER again. Sick of him and his fking vision, which he can shove up his druggy arse. Hope he ODs. Nuff said.
Anyway, VG is BECOMING a good game. The problem is now a days there are so many games to choose from the developers get ONE shot to make a good first impression. Once that shot has been taken. It's over. People will move on. The folks that stay are the dedicated dillusional and sorry, but that won't keep the bills paid. Over time it'll OBVIOUSLY improve as it should, BUT people still have a bad taste and are HIGHLY hesitate about trying it again without incredible incentive. So far SOE has only fixed what shouldn't have been broken. No real new content has been introduced. Some people even continue to play because it's the absolute closest you can get to a new sandbox MMO. The game is only still here, because 1 reason. Station Access. The more games SOE provides the more likely people are to get station access. Whether they play them all or not doesn't matter. They use small dev teams on each game and still rake in huge profits regardless. The more popular games will balance out the less popular. IMO if SOE wants huge profit. Release a pre-CU SWG server, but that's another story for another time.
[ Played ] 2Moons, Anarchy Online, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, Everquest II, Guild Wars, HellGate: London, Lord of the Rings Online, Rappelz, RF Online, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, Sword of the New World, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Last Chaos
[ Playing ] Everquest II
[ Waiting ] Aion, Age of Conan
What's really sad here isn't that customers who paid $50 bucks for this garbage, it's the developers who spend years of their life, blood, sweat and tears developing this turkey and being abandoned by their captain, and being fired from their job on the spot without warning whatsoever. Brad McQuaid did screw over a LOT of people.
Assuming it is real (I mean honestly, who lies on the internet? It's absurd to even think that!), since when would anyone have anything nice to say about a company that fired them? If you get fired from a job that you worked at for awhile, you wouldn't necessarily be praising them every chance you got. Also, if he worked for as long as the majority of the Sigil team did for Vanguard, he probably wouldn't of thought that it'd been a "failure" at the time, or he probably would of gone on to bigger and better things during the development of the game. Vanguard has made quite a bit of progression since its initial launch, optimizations, content added, classes getting balanced. The game still has quite a ways to go before appealing to the masses, (more optimizations (to reduce the horrid hitching), helmet graphics, Berserker and Inquisitor, more class balancing, more content) but considering how far Vanguard has come with what little dev team it has with what the "ex-dev" thought of as "0 experience" and how far Vanguard could go, it would be enough to make any former employee a little angry.
All this talk about slander and defamation... If you print or say something that's true, it's not slander/defamation/lible, and there's no ground for a lawsuit. I don't know if any of this is true, but if it is, there's no legal recourse.
Agreed, but the burden of proof is on the person making the accusations. Has anyone got any proof that whoever wrote this was in any kind of position to have this kind of first-hand knowledge? If not then I think we should treat this as someone's personal rant against a game/person/company that they personally dislike. I am no fan of Vanguard, but I don't want to judge people I know very little about.
If it is true, and the author is telling this from his personal experience, it sounds like he would be able to produce many witnesses/coworkers to back him up. If it's not true, and Brad comes down from his "spirit quest" in a very bad mood and his rolodex in hand, God help this "developer."With an entire dev team that Brad literally screwed over. I'm 100% sure if proof was needed. This guy can find it in many other co-workers. Even if it's fake. It doesn't matter. This isn't a murder trial. You won't get no CSI investigation. So FACTS don't mean squat, but several screwed over employees with sob stories of being out of the job and not being able to provide for their families will convince a jury any day compared 1 douche bag with a "Vision" and a drug problem.
Isn't kind of weird that most if not all mmo devs from the UO/EQ era haven't produced a single thing since then
Richard Garriot-Taula Rasa was a faliure
Smedly-Has legions of people that hate his guts and if he would offer a shake of hands they would spit on it instead of shaking it.
Brad-Wasn't he on the G&H team to?
Hell even Koster hasn't done anything since the NGE hit.
Yeah, these guys sound so inept I was starting to get scared they were talking about where I work. Scary stuff...
Wow. Look at all the people giving SOE a free pass because they didn't screw up Vanguard. That's not even the point. You heard what the guy said- SOE gave vanguard and unnatural and undeservedly longer life.
What SOE does is buy up the crappiest MMO failures on the market to bundle them together to sell it's 30 dollar a month all access pass as if it's some kind of deal to get a bunch of shitty MMO's for the price of 2.
What that does for you, the consumer- is screw you. SOE is in the top 3 for sure if not #2 next to blizzard for market share- and look at how low you are letting them set the bar. You might as well be telling everyone looking to make a game in this genre you don't expect much from them, because you're used to happily wolfing down the shit sandwiches SOE serves you.
Hope you got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die. Looks like we're in for nasty weather. ... There's a bad moon on the rise.
Ouch, that is some bitter venting. I hope the writer got away clean and safe because Smedley might not know much about games and the people who play them but he does know all about NDAs.
lol
As anyone who has had any dealing with SOE at all, isn't that just so like Smed?
Read it over at FOH site, but it was a good read!
Why not believe it? Of course the vanbois deny anything negative, but that older f13 interview said a lot of same things months ago.
Vanguard provides much more entertainment outside the game
Hmm, interesting, someone weighing in with a legal argument that doesn't know the difference between slander and libel. Internet lawyering for the win! BTW, true statements fall under neither category.
Why would Brad sue anyone ?
He should admit he was getting high while making VG.
It's better to let people think he made this turd while on drugs, than sane and sober.
This story lacks prostitutes.
For those of you thinking that this story does not have merit, I have news for you it was pretty much stated by 3 other developers before this was put out also. In the early days, when everyone knew this game wasn't going anywhere a lot of this stuff was put out and then locked up on the fansites "when there was no official forums".
The people that swallow this story whole are the same people that believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
You can learn two things from Journalism 101 here.
First. Never trust a story if it comes from a disenchanted FIRED employee. It's going to be biased at best. And at worst, lies and fabrications.
Second. If a lot of this stuff was "put out" on a public site, and then locked up (deleted?), there is likely a pretty good reason for it. That reason is lawsuit.
I still take it as a joke, and the joke's on anyone who actually believes it.
I think that you can believe a bit of anything but you also gotta run it through the BS meter. I think you are seeing a very frustrated ex-dev... Is he still unemployeed?
I certainly feel sorry for him and hope he does better in the future.
---
Ethion
I bet Microsoft is making a call to Smed of SOE and saying "Told Ya So!". Everyone should have known all this stuff when Microsoft dropped Vanguard like a bad habit.
What was Smed thinking when he purchased this dog? How can the person who bought Vanguard keep their job?
So using the the tools for the UT II engine in one year Sigil was able to add 30k quests? Man...thats pretty good using noobs. Those tools feel like a mod tool btw. Imagine what they could do now if Smed wanted VGSOH to be huge.
First off.. no idea if this was accurate or a rant and now two comments.
1) This isn't an unhappy employee who was fired. Sigil games no longer exists... you can't be fired from a company that goes into bankruptcy or is bought out. Some employees were retained by the new owner.
The unhappiness wasn't directed at SOE whom would have had the option to "retain" this person.
Fired would seem to be a less accurate term than the article you claim to be inaccurate.
2) I don't believe they said 30,000 quests were created. They said that 30,000 database entries related to quests existed (entries do not have to mean individual quests...)
Wow. Just....wow. I don't know how much to believe, but let's not bullshit ourselves here-- if even half of what Teclisen says in that post is true, it's a freaking miracle that this game ever saw the light of day.
I dunno how much of that dev's post is true, but it certainly doesn't sound farfetched. So glad I did not resubscribe and only used some the free playtime. I don't want to support this uninspiring, embarassing mess of a game.
You can believe this or dismiss it as a scorned ex-employee if you wish, but it's the only reasonable answer I can see. It's all been speculated before, and those who didn't believe it then probably won't believe it now either.
As far as addictions go, a lot of common prescription pain killers are opium based narcotics, and I'd be willing to bet every one of you knows someone who's addicted to them, whether you are aware of it or not.
And yet when the game was released there were all those hardcore players on Forums (like this one) claiming how great the game was, how they weren't seeing any of the bugs, and how much fun they were having.
All over a game designed by amateurs.
Just goes to show you how some people, esp. hardcore MMORPG players, are willing to eat any sewage and tell themelves how great it tastes.
Good games sell themselves. There was a reason why MMORPGs until recently only sold to a niche market and never attracted large number of gamers. Hardcore players can keep whining about how the genre is evolving while they keep eating the same slop that regular gamers were smart enough never to touch.
Now we know, all it takes is a bunch of amateurs to crank out a piece trash to make them happy. At least Developers are finally realizing that catering to them is the path to failure.