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Why does MHS have a team of ~80 people?
M4ko
Member Posts: 385
MHS probably knew that ER will not be a total success, so how did they manage to get so many on their team, how are they paying them?
THere are indie companies consisting of 1 to 10 people that had better games, but MHS decides to get 80 people, waht gives?
I think they thought that they would make enough money on ER engine by selling it to Fallout ONline together with ER, which would give em a head start. There is no way they would have a team so large if their only project is ER
Comments
80 people is like what AAA games have, why does this game feel like it was made just by a couple people. Perhaps it was b/c they made there own engine. They may have put alot of time into making the engine, leaving not as much time for the game. IDK though.
CCP was a group of some 20 people when the game launched back in 2003, so yeah... even building yuor own engine doesn't require this much people.
The 80 people are there, because Masthead works on other MMOs aswell and not just on Earthrise. They provide their engine and tools to other companies like Interplay and help them to develop their games aswell.
Masthead seems to care more about these licensees then about their own game currently.
So any game developer who works on several games at the same time intended one of their games to fail?
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not that they expected ER to fail, but they certainly wouldnt hire so many people to run one start up game. point i was making is that they did waste time on FO project V13 while neglecting ER development, which brings us to a failed launch today.
You have no idea what they spent there time on now your posting is getting rediculous. If you want to post on the known issues such as lag and desync whatever but enough is enough with all this theorycrafting BS.
oh i have an "idea" and so do others, this issue has been raised many times on ER forums. While MHS denied this like they did everything else, and was contradicted by reports from Interplay. Expecting a large profit is the only reason why they would create such a huge team, quarter of which probably consists of financial division only; and since ER could not have been considered to be a profitable product from the get go, there had to be other sources they were planning to profit from.
I saw this mentioned on the official forums, but it appears that if you view the credits, many of the people on the team have the same last name. It could be a common last name (in Bulgaria I think?) or they could have invited their whole family onto the team.
Could just be a "one big family" type of atmosphere (which is cool), or something tax related (which is not cool), if the team is even related.
They have 80 because they work on Fallout Online
This, they are programming the engine for it and I think it's the same one they use for ER. I think MHS has been working for alot of much larger studios probably to keep their own project ER afloat.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
That's not very logical, now is it?
You say yourself that 80 people is too many for one game. So they're making multiple.
This can't have been a problem for ER since they have a team larger than needed for one game.
If they were working on two games with a team sized for one, then yes, there might have been a situation of neglect.
However, since they have a large team, no neglect.
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Im gonna speculate here and use real facts. Aprox a year ago they had a team of over 30 people, and at that time they were working on FO already, so they were neglecting it back then. Now in a very short perdiod of time they swelled to 80. My guess would be that they decided to expand too early or simply mismanaged creating an efficient team. Why they decided to expand to such a large size because they have multiple projects, probably another 1 or 2 that we havent heard of. But whatever, yea its all speculation.
Or maybe community, marketing, content, VW/IT teams, PR and other departments really didin't need to be as large during earlier development as they did when the game ramped up toward release.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
exactly my point. but when you have an alpha worthy product to be released, you dont suddenly double up your team. What am i saying, of course they would, in order to have it marketed as a fully completed AAA product.
You dont have any clue what a game in the alpha stages has. ER has allot of problems and 95% of them are performance problems. If the game ran smooth it would be awesome simple as that. A game in alpha is missing things like textures, sounds, and MANY more key things that make up a game.ER at this point has a solid game foundation with all the key things in place, they just need to do some serious optimization before they do ANYTHING else.
Now please quit posting about things you know nothing about.
Darkfall - Sick
Earthrise - Sick
who cares what you call it, right now its worse than it was in OB, its unplayable garbage, whic is not a product you would release
please tell me, what you will be doing in game if all peformance issues are fixed, besides grinding PVE, Crafting, Exploring and PVP?
having more fun than i already am?
Pray, do tell me what else exactly are you doing in a MMO game that you like besides grinding PVE, Crafting, Exploring and PVP? I'll be waiting patiently for a non-retarded answer, take your time
In my experience, the amount of team members needed seems to ramp up significantly once the core development is done. For example, in the initial states you barely need content and art asset people because you're still building the systems. You also only need the most basic of animations and blocked out environments for your early builds. Once your core mechanics are all in place, then you start breathing life into your game world - creating animations, drawing art assets (2D and 3D needed), world building, content creation, etc.
These are massive teams of people that were not needed during initial development but are now needed in order to have those lush gaming environments, hundreds of animation, thousands of quests, a few gigs of sound effects and voice overs, etc.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Ok so they have 80 folks. That seams a bit bloated if all 80 are dev's.
So I have to ask how man of these 80 are actually dev's, how many are cs, forum mods, and so forth.
So if anybody has any real information as to what these 80 folks do, im not sure if its bloating or not.
However if 80 of these folks are dev's at an small company then something is way up. Not even lotro, or wow even has 80 devs working at one time. I think Turbine has like a total of 20 devs. Eq2 has like 10. So 80 you would go my gosh what are they up too.
So I have to think most of those are support type folks like cs, and forum mods. If not then there spending a load of cash, and I would bet there not going to be able to re-coup.
Turbine has about 350 employees. The WOW credits list goes on forever. It sounds like you are assuming 'dev' to mean programming and production. The 'dev team' for an MMO is pretty much everyone that works on the project.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
m4ko im really curious, you hated the beta, you hated the game, yet you still keep coming back {mod edit} boards here.
So what if they had 80 people? What are you getting at? Does anyone really know how many people are on the team? They obviously have multiple projects on the go. Not to mention those '80 devs' could be anything from art/cgi/programming/coding/office assistants/floor sweepers/coffee boy, etc, you get the picture. Earthrise will/is intended to be their bread-winner, so i highly doubt they intended for it to fail. {mod edit}
Fallout Online has about as much chance of being produced by MHS and IPLY as pigs do of flying out of my butt.
its not being produced by them, they worked on models for FO, beside letting them use ER engine, and who knows how much work they really put into FO. They also have said that they are planning other projects 2 or 3 years back.I dont know how they could be thinking or working on other projects while ER is about 20% complete?
To be honest i doubt they are doing much work on fall out online, interplay is still locked in court proceedings so there would be no point in continuing work if you dont even know you will get the rights to produce it, they still need to fix the engine first,
remember this is the engine being used in the fallout mmo so the performance issues and alot of the bugs er has now will be transfered to fall out, so its in their best interest to invest the most amount of time fixing those now for er so that they can then have a stable engine if the get the fallout online project going again so they dont make the same coding mistakes they did with earthrise.
They know what the causes of the bigest bugs are, server lag is caused by chat for some reason and fps lag is caused by the client being borked and loading textures straight from the hard drive, its just a question of how hard it is to fix those bugs, if they get stable fps and the ping down the game is actually fun, they still need a better ai but at least it becomes pretty enjoyable.
of course theres probably only quarter of them who are actual coders, but the rest still have to get paid.