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Blixtev Leaves SWG
firefly2003
Member UncommonPosts: 2,527
forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m Read about it here on in the link.....
It's been almost 5 years since I was taking a nap on my couch at home and got a call from my boss asking me if I would go to Austin and help the SWG team out. The next Monday I ventured out to Austin and pitched in on what would culminate as Publish 9 "Secrets of the Force". Firsthand I saw the multiple systems that SWG was missing at the time and convinced the management that they could use those systems so much they asked me to stay on permanently and implement them. How similar then that a few weeks ago while sitting on a couch and in a relative sleepy state that my boss asked me if I would consider joining the DC Universe Online team and head up the Design Systems group.
No one departs a team they have been on for near 5 years and not contemplate what they have accomplished. That time period on this team has really been amazing for me on so many levels. I went from being a junior team member to cementing myself into a leadership role. The current team that I led for 2 years is the best Live team in the MMO business hands down. Not only do they continually put out quality new content and systems they are able to produce it in a reasonable amount of time. I know some folks don't agree with everything we have done nor how we did it, but the driving goal of the team has always been aligned with mine, "entertain our customers". If you make someone grin, clap their hands in glee, or feel pride over an accomplishment, the developer has done their job as an entertainer (Yes that's true, the Dev team really is a band of entertainers 
).
I will miss all of you fans who have devoted the majority of their after hours to SWG. Your continued support of this project is an amazing thing to be a part of and I will miss being involved with you all on a daily basis (even a middle of the night posting spree).
As a team the SWG Developers truly are a squad of ARC troopers, highly trained, elite and dedicated to accomplishing any mission. I hand that squad off to a very capable Loche, who will continue to entertain and immerse you in the Star Wars Universe.
May the Force be With You
Thomas "Blixtev" Blair
Comments
DC Universe eh?? Remind me to avoid that.
Anything associated with the SWG team is doomed.
He started on Publish 9? Isn't publish 9 the first patch that people hated?
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
Fixed
...The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
Was that the patch that implimented The old man to open force slot? with the village you had to go to?If im correct it was the begginning of the end. So i also will stay away from whatever game he is going to.
Ah...possibly, it was the jedi revamp...
swvault.ign.com/View.php
hehe..wonder if he now has to plant another toilet in DC MMO... when the Boss calls, he leaves the couch and becomes a good tool to his Boss doing every dirty job the Boss ask him too, like betray customers and ruin their fun..finally its his luxury to not have conscience , its all the Boss calls...he just leaves the couch..it can't be a crime...
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE--------------------------------------------------
$OE - eternal enemy of online gaming
-We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
Ah...possibly, it was the jedi revamp...
swvault.ign.com/View.php
Pub 9 is when they shut off Jedi unlocks, pub 10 was the Jedi revamp.
Another Rat jumps from the sinking ship.
Atleast he can be proud that he joined SWG when it was amazingly good and leaves it amazingly crap.
Fixed
Eh, 6 one way, 1/2 a dozen the other.
But I guess you're are right...the ORIGINAL SWG dev team knew what they were doing, so I should have been more specific.
Chris Cao is already with DC Universe, Blix is heading over, and Smed runs the show. Tbh, I'm glad I'm a Marvel fan. It still troubles me at times how Blix (Smed and others) continue to talk about how entertaining customers was/is their top priority. Blix has said in times past that he did what he did in SWG not because it was best for customers, but because his boss told him to, and if the boss says build a toilet in the living room, you do it. Those are close to his exact words actually.
I'm sure Blix put some good work into parts of this game (probably more than I'll ever know), and he has my thanks for that, truly. Unfortunately much of that seemed overshadowed by his company's goal to tap into someone else's share of the MMO market, at any cost.
Im my opinion, new leadership was definatly needed. This guy cut his teeth on NGE and CHANGES as such and made a post, about a year ago that CHANGES such as that, need to happen in an MMO.
I really would not want to be Loche with what Blix left him with.
I've heard it said, that all the rats jump ship as the water rises.
This is priceless and keeps getting better and better, I DID say a few days ago that SWG needs a change in dev leadership. Blixtev first came in around pub 9 as a BH focus dev needing to fix the broken droid tracking and a few other BH related things, he's the one that brought in gold chevron boss bounties and added BH armor schematics & loot tables to those NPCs in the CU and admitted his dislike for Jedi (and recently said he had 2 pre-9 Jedi, pfft yeah right). IMO it all went downhill the moment Blixtev took the helm with all those nerfs and constant revamping, and now I know not to even bother with DCU (I wasn't going to anyways).
That guy has probably done mroe damage to SWG than any other person at SOE.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I won't be playing DC Online, either, not if those morons are working on it.
And yes, Blixtev was the one responsible for the "AS Upgrade" as part of the CU, that was so terrible to that proff, that more than 90% of people playing one, quit over the changes. That included the AS correspondant.
Should we start a pool on how long he is going to be with SOE? The general path through SOE Austin seems to be SWG to DCU to unemployment. Hell, considering the lack of talent from at least two of the four (might be higher) lead designers that churned through the DCU project (Dan Rubenfield and Helios), chances are the game wouldn't be worth playing even if SOE wasn't the company behind it.
Of the former SWG staff that have gone over to DCU (Rubenfield, Helios, Cao and now Blix), how many of them are still there?
Tbh I don't blame anyone for wanting out of SWG. What a mess to try to clean up. I wouldn't want to be caught between management and the angry masses in a situation like that.
Rubenfield, Cao, Blix and Helios have gone to DCU? How many of them are still there?
Dan Rubenfield was the first lead designer on the game I think. He left early on and is now the lead designer on Earth No More.
Chris Cao is still the Creative Director at SOE Austin, as far as I know (his name is no longer red on the OBoards, but most former employees still have red names).
Helios was promoted to lead designer at the beginning of last year (actually the November prior), and he went silent on the OBoard like Blixtev did before being moved. Helios was unemployed last I heard. He was promoted well after Rubenfield was no longer at SOE, so there was at least one lead designer on the DCU project in between.
Rogue_5 was promoted to producer of the DCU project at the same time Helios was promoted (they cleard the way for Blixtev and Deadmeat). He is now working at Vigil Games.
The DCU dev team has had massive turnover, which has been rumored to be a result of SOE management directing the development because they view the game as their chance to be a major player in the MMO field again. They want to avoid all the mistakes they believe were made with the Star Wars license, so they are micro managing the project to the point where the folks on the dev team have been getting frustrated and leaving the company.
Thank God, that arrogant turd is finally gone.
And they just move from one crap product to another they can turn to crap......
Time to celebrate a little, na na na na hey hey hey goodbye www.youtube.com/watch wasn't planning on playing DC universe anyways.
Yeah. with the way DC has churned through lead designers, I think that game has some serious problems. Tom Blair is not a bad guy, really -- he just as that arrogance of youth thing going; and yeah he made a lot of SOE-type mistakes since taking over the game. He also did some good things as well. But you know, lipstick on a pig and all that....
I wish him luck either way, he's gonna need it in that job.
It seems like it's the -- "you get to be vader's next admiral" job......
fishermage.blogspot.com
He ran the best team in the industry?!?!?!?!?! Which is why they are still the laughing stock of the industry and the game hasn't been successful like other teams that actually make decent games. They couldn't even get the damn holiday event to work right....
Why not just say they have the best customer service in the industry while he is at it or maybe go back to calling SOE an industry leader in MMOs again. After making a statement like that how much bigger could the lie be?
The history of DCU's cycling dev team is just as bad as SWG's, makes me wonder how SOE is going to be handling any new games that they obtain in the near future. I bet DCU won't see any daylight until at least 2010, then fail within the first 4 months of launch like AoC did. I've watched videos of DCU, it looks a lot like the late 90's arcade action games, too arcade-ish.
I still vividly remember when Publish 9 went live on Ahazi. It was the first SWG Publish that gave me a sinking feeling when I logged in after implementation.
Jedi totally came out of hiding. Parading around in full public view, duelling in front of the Starports, etc. There were lots of them, I never believed there were that many before.
The safeguards against Jedi overpopulation were being removed. Many of us only saw this could lead to one result: Jedi dominating the game. And this they did. Gameplay and the attention garnered to them by the devs with all the Jedi Publishes.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
That is exactly the feeling I got when I saw it. I reminds me of that xman coin-op video game. The side scroller where you play a xman running around picking up objects and bashing random bad guys on the head as they run around the street.
I'd like to see a gameplay video of DCO that isn't dominated by focusing attention on DC named villians and instead game play/design.
Now that put a smile on my face!