Doesn't matter how great the games are if they can't get a launcher that doesn't wig out every time there is a new patch for any of them.
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it." -Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity." -Raph Koster
yeah give it a few months, china version will be added the same crafting chance increase and upgrade chance increase item like korea cash shop, it has been confirmed. But please continue with your trion hate train.
Well now, I wasn't aware I was on a train of any kind. However based on your sheer amount of comments on this article you are on some kind of Trion hype defense train of some sort. I'm just stating facts lol, and I am not the only one who can see that Trion ruined AA in their hands and also that they don't deserve any customer loyalty after the way they've treated their customers and games. I mean come on, Scott even says it himself here that he is more focused on the finances instead of the game.
Are you one of them or something? Becoming so defensive when people are pointing out what Trion and Scott Hartsman did wrong? Instead of blindly defending them, why don't you give us some facts to prove your point? Because as far as I've seen, all Trion tries to do is publicity spin. Trion is not a company that cares about their games.
If they had focused even half as much time on listening to their original playerbase in AA as they did on marketing tricks and PR, then maybe they wouldn't be in the situation they are in now with having to arrange the server merges.
Wow - CEOs have to be aware of financial issues so that's normal. A CEO who is keeping track of finances, come on now, you are going to bring this up as a negative?
Trion "ruined" AA - how? It's not their game, they have zero creative control there XL commands that ship. Trion asks XL to make changes, XL says yes or no. If you are going to blame Trion , do it for their own games.
What facts do you bring? "Trion is not a company that cares about their games" - what nonsense is this? Every game company cares abut their products, .... Umm. It's how they make money. Hello?
Archeage server merges would have happened no matter what, your assumption that "listening to the playerbase " would have avoided merges is pretty ridiculous. The playerbase you listen to a point but never on issues of server capacity planning when they have zero view into analytics and metrics.
Slow down there, you can't really believe that Trion could not address major issues with AA themselves. Surely you jest. There are lots of things Trion can do to fix things. Just changing how often things drop(putting items in the shop in the drop table), changing the stats on equipment, changing the labor rate, etc.
That is exactly why Scot Hartsman is an idiot, thinking he can get away with lies in an interview. Defending him is a losing proposition.
Slow down there, you can't really believe that Trion could not address major issues with AA themselves. Surely you jest. There are lots of things Trion can do to fix things. Just changing how often things drop(putting items in the shop in the drop table), changing the stats on equipment, changing the labor rate, etc.
I actually did ask Scott about Trion's role in the continued development of third-party games, especially ArcheAge. He said that all game development happens at XLGames. Tencent, Mail.Ru, and Trion Worlds are the publishers who each push for features and content that would be ideal for their markets, but XLGames doesn't have the manpower, resources, or time to build fully customized versions of the game for each publisher, so everyone ultimately has to compromise. That process does include the public test server which is where they decide whether they're okay with what they've been given and whether they need to go back to the developer to push for something different. Trion Worlds can't directly fix what you want fixed, but they can and do champion your interests.
To be honest this company never impressed me...I felt they stole way too much from WoW and WAR when they made Rift....It looked like parts of Rift were literally copied and pasted to me.....
Slow down there, you can't really believe that Trion could not address major issues with AA themselves. Surely you jest. There are lots of things Trion can do to fix things. Just changing how often things drop(putting items in the shop in the drop table), changing the stats on equipment, changing the labor rate, etc.
I actually did ask Scott about Trion's role in the continued development of third-party games, especially ArcheAge. He said that all game development happens at XLGames. Tencent, Mail.Ru, and Trion Worlds are the publishers who each push for features and content that would be ideal for their markets, but XLGames doesn't have the manpower, resources, or time to build fully customized versions of the game for each publisher, so everyone ultimately has to compromise. That process does include the public test server which is where they decide whether they're okay with what they've been given and whether they need to go back to the developer to push for something different. Trion Worlds can't directly fix what you want fixed, but they can and do champion your interests.
By all means, please give us some concrete examples of how Trion has championed our interests as AA players.
You mean XLGames. And no, they can't just force XLGames to do anything, nobody can. Do you know that XLGames changed publisher twice in China because they asked too much change to the game? Trion can not change the coding of the game or how the game works in general, they need to ask XLGames for changes, that is why there were lots of APEX duping while the similar item REX in Rift was never duped once. And it seems you have knowledge on RIft, so you can see there is nearly 0 problem regarding botting and cheating in RIft, same goes for Defiance while AA is filled with these, did you ever ask yourself why? It has nothing to do with Trion's mismanagement and everything to do with XLGames' client coding and client side instruction based system, crack the client and you crack the game and let's face it; gameguard never works in NA/EU region because of how server structure is totally different there. It doesn't work in korea or japan or china too but these countries have some digital rights management laws that can send people to jail if they crack the client of a game and get caught. the only thing Trion can do is keep pampering XLGames and influence them into changing things the way Trion gets feedback from player base.
I dont really know if they can try to force changes on XLGames, but trion screw it up really big with archeage, not just in game, they promised things they could not deliver, they refused to refund to the people that got their stuff with false promises, as much as trion can try to put the blame on XL i do remember that the microtransaction part was theirs when the economy of the game went to hell because they had the "great" idea of putting one of the more important items in economy in the ingame store (the ingame store was only trion doing not XL they removed many items from it when communty asked but they totally ninjaed this item), i do remember when they offered a 10% discount on any purchase u made in the ingame store if u where a founder, and as much as they want to blame that one on XLGames it was their own fault, they sold it like that and then they could have simply fixed it by just returning the 10% after the purchase was made, but they decided to change what they offered to a 10% bonus on Trion currency purchase (they said solution was going to leave everyone happy, i feel soo mad at my old self for trusting) wich is a looot diferent from what they offered and reassured me during the 2 months i played, i still feel like they screw me in that game and i refuse to play any other Trion game since, its a shame but i think a lot of ppl feel like me, so please PLEASE dont ever think of Trion as a white sheep they are the wolf and a big ugly one.
In korean version of f2p they sell several items on top of labor pots, like crafting success chance increase item, gear upgrade chance increase items. Compared to that Trion's version of f2p is very tame.
And what did you not get when you bought the stupid founder packs? Everything that was written on pack description was provided to players. Nothing was cut, they never promised players that there would not be any cash shop, it was you who thought they would. It is totally your fault for not researching AA properly and thinking you were getting a sandbox savior when the game itself by design was and is a pay2win game. Trion just made it less pay2win in their version.
And as for the problem with 10% discount, i have already already said it, everything you do in AA is done through client, so if you were trying to buy something from store hoping you were going to get 10% discount but the client coding was not properly written for it, thus it did not tell the server to give you the discount, if this system was done through server side script like the patron bonus system then this would not have happened. Your entire argument about 10% discount leaves me to say that you yet again did no research even on Trion, all the patron perk in AA have been available in Rift long before they brought AA, you never bothered asking yourself why the same perk works perfectly on another game from the same company while they don't work here? You did not even bother reading my explanation and even if you did you brushed it off with your "trion hate". Your post only speaks ignorance.
No i will not think of Trion as a big bad wolf for they did nothing wrong to me or anyone, people who dreamed out of their ass that trion was going to provide them with a sadbox savior are at fault here, not Trion. Trion never promised me anything and did not deliver, in fact they delivered more than i hoped for. I wish you luck with your "trion hate train" propaganda.
i dont really hate trion, i just dont trust them anymore, i never commented on their f2p, wich is not the worst but is not close to being the better either, the game in Korea is total shit in the P2W deparment, but that doesn't make what trion is making any better, its just better than the thing AA publisher is doing in korea, sory if i dont really feel like paying for something a lil better than the worse model ever. First of i was totally ok with the cash shop as it was before they added p2w stuff(in a really ninja way) they posted "Hey here is what we gonna put this week on the ingame store" and then put that plus a shitton of p2w stuff, i did not want to have to pay for power and the game was really awesome so i was hoping for it to keep being P2W free, it was p2w free but they screwed it, they said they where going to remove any p2w element of the game and guess what that was a biiiig lie.
You know the first paragraph of your post was not so bad, the second its just funny, Bait and Switch is Illegal, if you offer something you either deliver EXACTLY what you offer or u refund the money, thats true in my country and thats why i got a refund even if trion was not issuing one my bank made the charge back. if you sell something and then fail to meet the requirements its your problem not mine, and you are being really naive, at some point of those microtransaction they have to go throw trion System, since they need to remove the money from your balance, if they really wanted to fix things it was as simple as refunding 10% of that after charged to your balance, its inside trion and they dont need XL To do that, so belive what you want but they could have fixed it they just did not care nuf, the big thread bout the 10% discount said: we will apply the discount backwards so you get everything u spent back so keep spending dont worry, they did not make it backwards and they did not give the discount so here is another of Trion big Lies.
Worst part is this is not all bout my bad time with AA and Trion but i dont really want to make a longer post.
So as much as ur a fan of the game or the company that cannot restore my trust in them and i advice anyone who is even considering in buying something from trion to not do so because they lied to me on multiple ocasions and they failed to respond.
After re reading this post i just wanted to add if you see a Hate tendency against something its normally because they made something wrong, but the same in politics there are just some people that dont want to see, so they keep defending the totally undefendable.
By all means, please give us some concrete examples of how Trion has championed our interests as AA players.
Scott gave an example in the published interview on page 2.
I assume you're referring to Scott pushing XL Games to not offer a Chinese pay model to NA and EU players. His efforts in this area are considered by many, many players to be sorely lacking. A great deal of content (mainly land ownership) that was necessary for players to compete was restricted from free players and a number of players were/are able to purchase items from the cash shop that directly boosts a player's performance. This is why so many players have labeled AA as Pay to Win and have stopped playing, myself included.
Scott could have demanded from the onset that this type of payment model was unacceptable and required XL Games to either alter the code or have their contract dropped. Instead the Pay to Win model received Trion and Scott's blessing. This is the very reason why so many players are disgruntled and turning to Kickstarter to bypass greedy publishers in the game making process.
It's really unfortunate that he came back. He basically presided over the destruction of Archeage in the west. His decisions were all about money grabbing and nothing about the game. He was a failure the first time around and an even bigger failure the second time around. Trion's best day was the day Rift released. It has been a long downhill slide ever since. This company has had a string of failures since Rift. Their Glyph was a pitiful attempt to reinvent steam and that failed too. If I was a Trion investor I'd be asking Scott to go back to his "thing" and take his fail with him.
For sure, if there investor was losing money they would say something but it seem there not losing money then the days of rift SL expansion, in how much money it cost them to put that expansion out was not cheap as there mostly losing money making that expansion.
But with Glyph seem a hit and miss with people. Is not so so bad but I know it still have alot problems but pretty happy they gave up on trying to be steam like.
“We’re very impressed with ArcheAge, and the level of anticipation for the game is absolutely astonishing,” said Dr. Lars Buttler, CEO and founder of Trion Worlds. “We are very proud of the catalog of world-class games we will be offering through Red Door. Now, with ArcheAge, we are bringing the best in Asia onto our platform.” http://www.trionworlds.com/en/news/2013/01/trion-and-xlgames-bring-archeage-to-west/ January 24th, 2013 Scott is not CEO at this point. He's not even with the company. Even if he was, he would of still had absolutely nothing to do with this deal.
Based on these facts, attacking this guy for ArcheAge being screwed up seems unfair to me. They didn't have control of changing things. XLgames did. It appeared like they didn't have much power. That means they signed a crappy deal and gave too much power to XLgames. So that bad contract is Trion Worlds' screw up on that issue. Whose fault would that be again? The Executive Producer of Rift at the time? Really? Cause the guy that was CEO 'resigned' 6 months later and Scott replaced him making some big moves right away.
However, contracts are contracts. No matter whom the new CEO happens to be. You have to ride it out the best you can.
Trove is a sad game and easy to make. The fact that this is the only thing they actually made since rift should say a lot about the company. I'm not even counting Defiance since this was a complete failure.
Trove is a sad game and easy to make. The fact that this is the only thing they actually made since rift should say a lot about the company. I'm not even counting Defiance since this was a complete failure.
I am glad i am not the only one that sees the truth.Not many remember or realize they quit making their military game and were actually struggling for cash.They have also released every single game without enough server space,that has to be a record of some sort of incompetence.I think it spells more to the theory they were and still are strapped for cash so they nickle and dime the server capacity on every release. I will even point back to Rift's release....Rift's GREAT concept done cheap and automated.Invasions pretty much the least amount of effort that could put into that system was.
What i see is a developer/publisher that rushes into things without thinking first.Archeage again a great game put some effort into it...geesh.From the minute word got out "in the press" not via Trion they showed no care they actually got the game.It took about 2-3 months before they spit out a word about AA and that was because they were bantering around Rift and the f2p switch.Then why did you grab AA then,easy answer a developer that needed money saw an easy cash grab because AA had some hype behind it.
Since Trion arrived on the scene i have not seen a quality developer,i see more a dev that looks like SOE during it's down swing.
I notice some like to defend Trion blaming their new games AA and next to be Devilion,you need to remember nobody is twisting Trion's arm,they should be competent in their research of a product and they also have the final say in how it is delivered.Like i said they are ONLY after a cash grab VERY similar to how SOE was operating and still operates.
Now i realize the gaming business is VERY tough,no easy market there but i also have forever said,if you can't handle the market ,stay out.The problem as i mentioned in the first paragraph is that developers see one fast gimmick and decide,great let's build a game.They see what they perceive to be an easy buck waiting around the corner.It is not easy even if your game is solid,there is still a huge luck factor.None the less ,this is a business,put some effort into whatever your selling or you will lose your shirt.If you can't afford the effort,then gaming is not your business.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
The turd in Trion's punch bowl. Unsubbed from all Trion games after this nonsense. Great potential, awful implementation and zero reparations or remorse. A silver tongue won't take away from the fact AA was the single worst thing Trion has done to their customer base.
All this "Is not his fault, XL Games are in charge of everything" is nonsense. Scott Hartsman is the CEO of Trion, he is responsible for the decisions he takes as the Commander in Chief of the company..
He decided to bring AA to the western world. He decided to accept all XL Games terms without any possiblity of putting any input on their part, like for example dropping the F2P model at least for release, or having some kind of control on the Cash Shop. He didn't pulled his weight with the Koreans enough when shit started to hit the fan and things started to go really bad, like the huge bugs and the unforgiveble repeated exploits (which by the way were caused by the Cash Shop itself)
Scott should have agreed to buy the licence only if they could Westernize the game properly, and have partial control over it. I am sure that Trion developers were more than capable of fixing all those problems if they had the chance to. Unfortunately Scott is not much of Leader in terms of business negotiations and he basically bought a defective game (that needed so much TLC before being released in the West), without being able to agree more reasonable terms with XL Games. The result is that his company reputation is in tatters, and he is the only one to blame.
AA in my opinion is still the best game (on paper) released in the last 10 years, the Cash Shop and the way it heavily influence the economy (with its many exploits), ruined it for me. Personally, I would be back in a heartbeat if they drop the F2P model and make it subscription only, but I know it will never happen, because Hartsman signed a binding contract with XL Games, where the Koreals call all the shots.
All this "Is not his fault, XL Games are in charge of everything" is nonsense. Scott Hartsman is the CEO of Trion, he is responsible for the decisions he takes as the Commander in Chief of the company..
He decided to bring AA to the western world. He decided to accept all XL Games terms without any possiblity of putting any input on their part, like for example dropping the F2P model at least for release, or having some kind of control on the Cash Shop. He didn't pulled his weight with the Koreans enough when shit started to hit the fan and things started to go really bad, like the huge bugs and the unforgiveble repeated exploits (which by the way were caused by the Cash Shop itself)
Scott should have agreed to buy the licence only if they could Westernize the game properly, and have partial control over it. I am sure that Trion developers were more than capable of fixing all those problems if they had the chance to. Unfortunately Scott is not much of Leader in terms of business negotiations and he basically bought a defective game (that needed so much TLC before being released in the West), without being able to agree more reasonable terms with XL Games. The result is that his company reputation is in tatters, and he is the only one to blame.
AA in my opinion is still the best game (on paper) released in the last 10 years, the Cash Shop and the way it heavily influence the economy (with its many exploits), ruined it for me. Personally, I would be back in a heartbeat if they drop the F2P model and make it subscription only, but I know it will never happen, because Hartsman signed a binding contract with XL Games, where the Koreals call all the shots.
Good luck with it Scott.
What are you talking about? Lol. Scott had nothing to do with bringing AA to the western market. It was the CEO before him.
What a crap interview. If you threw your balls any softer than this they would be nerfs. Seriously, you did not ask him about the Archeage debacle and how Trion destroyed the game while cash grabbing from us? Wow.
All this "Is not his fault, XL Games are in charge of everything" is nonsense.
The same guys who are now constantly defending Trion with their two phrases "they can't do anything about it" and "it's all XL's fault" were the ones that were previously yelling allover the forum that "it's Trion's AA", "it will be a totally different game for the western market", "Trion will westernize everything about it", "Trion is in charge of the game over here" etc.
"With our partner games, we can continue being an advocate for how we want them to present their games when they ship on our platform"
The very reason I will never install the platform or support this company again.
The last thing the gaming industry needs is another company becoming large, and over-reaching, trying to force itself onto other companies. We need to BREAK big gaming companies and free the industry, not create another Valve and EA.
Anyone using Trions platform instead of going kickstarter to remain a free company, is just asking to have chains put on them.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Slow down there, you can't really believe that Trion could not address major issues with AA themselves. Surely you jest. There are lots of things Trion can do to fix things. Just changing how often things drop(putting items in the shop in the drop table), changing the stats on equipment, changing the labor rate, etc.
I actually did ask Scott about Trion's role in the continued development of third-party games, especially ArcheAge. He said that all game development happens at XLGames. Tencent, Mail.Ru, and Trion Worlds are the publishers who each push for features and content that would be ideal for their markets, but XLGames doesn't have the manpower, resources, or time to build fully customized versions of the game for each publisher, so everyone ultimately has to compromise. That process does include the public test server which is where they decide whether they're okay with what they've been given and whether they need to go back to the developer to push for something different. Trion Worlds can't directly fix what you want fixed, but they can and do champion your interests.
Editiing loot tables and changing drop rates or labor rates is EASILY done at Trion. If you can't grasp that, you have no clue about game coding and should not be defending an answer meant to decieve.
As someone already pointed out this felt very much like a "PR PUFF-PIECE" and not what I have come to expect from the mmorpg.com guys and gals.....
What should have ensued, in my humble opinion, was a, where/what/how, dissection of the games released by Trion by both the interviewer and Mr Hartmann probing where either party felt they had failed the MMOrpg genre, community and IP in the greater scale.
Scott has obviously had a succesful career in the industry but sadly I can't help but have the opinion that his time @ Trion has been poorly spent with some very "good in theory" games that have failed to deliver.
I was a both a beta tester and head start player and even returned to Rift after an initial 6 months then quitting for 2years+. Rift absolutely COULD have been the game to knock WOW off it's perch.
But Trion fell into the trap of delivering what they think the players want rather than delivering the game that should have been!!!!
Dont get me wrong I loved Rift the content was great, for the whole 3 weeks it took me to do EVERY single quest in every single map (i could have done it in 14 days if I hadn't bothered to go to every map). The next 5 months was spent grinding gear and running the limited raids...... NOT FUN.
But on returning after a 2yr+ hiatus the game had moved on to more reflect what it should have been at the launch........... I managed to eek out another 6 months, still mostly subbed, playtime bringing my total to about 12months.
But the cadence of updates had dropped to the annual/bi-annual model due to the now F2P model. Ensuring that the grind returned with a vengeance.
I appreciate that its the eternal bane of ALL MMOrpg's how to balance the EXPERIENCE Vs GRIND Vs CONTENT but with 30 years in the industry, using a monthly subscription model AND delivering the right game from the outset the income from both boxsets & subs should be able to fund regular (monthly/bi-monthly/quarterly) content updates......
Defiance......... hmmm
Touted as the "new best thing since sliced bread" it failed to deliver on pretty much all fronts from the outset - (with the exception of the TV Show). Personally I didnt even make it out of beta and whilst it has undoubtedly come a long way since then, the core direction and vision of the entire game was based upon a faulty premise from the get go.
I do think that there is a market/audience for an FPS Centric style MMOrpg but if you take the "rpg" out of that, all you are left with is a Massive "MANY-player" Online FPS game and lets be honest there are many more and better implemented FPS games with persistent worlds already.
Currently the only company to come close to hitting the mark on that genre is Firefall and it's taken them nearly 3 years of about turns and re-design, presumably on a shoestring budget. But with games like Hitman due perhaps this genre will get a much needed boost (depending on actually how customisable your Avatar is).
Trove is simply a clone of a Minecraft inspired game - nothing particularly new there.
ArcheAge - i'm not even going to bother commenting.
In summation Scott Hartsman actually has a lot to answer for. So far in his Senior roles he has managed to put the MMOrpg genre back almost a decade. Why do i think that? Rift (and the subsequent ESO failure) have shown that the established publishers (well Trion/Zenimax at least) don't know how to create MMOrpg's and their failures will affect the future funding of all new projects for many years to come.
But then what do I know I have only been playing games since the launch of the ZX Spectrum and on the recieving end of MMO's for the past 15 years........
Comments
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it."
-Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
-Raph Koster
That is exactly why Scot Hartsman is an idiot, thinking he can get away with lies in an interview. Defending him is a losing proposition.
First of i was totally ok with the cash shop as it was before they added p2w stuff(in a really ninja way) they posted "Hey here is what we gonna put this week on the ingame store" and then put that plus a shitton of p2w stuff, i did not want to have to pay for power and the game was really awesome so i was hoping for it to keep being P2W free, it was p2w free but they screwed it, they said they where going to remove any p2w element of the game and guess what that was a biiiig lie.
You know the first paragraph of your post was not so bad, the second its just funny, Bait and Switch is Illegal, if you offer something you either deliver EXACTLY what you offer or u refund the money, thats true in my country and thats why i got a refund even if trion was not issuing one my bank made the charge back. if you sell something and then fail to meet the requirements its your problem not mine, and you are being really naive, at some point of those microtransaction they have to go throw trion System, since they need to remove the money from your balance, if they really wanted to fix things it was as simple as refunding 10% of that after charged to your balance, its inside trion and they dont need XL To do that, so belive what you want but they could have fixed it they just did not care nuf, the big thread bout the 10% discount said: we will apply the discount backwards so you get everything u spent back so keep spending dont worry, they did not make it backwards and they did not give the discount so here is another of Trion big Lies.
Worst part is this is not all bout my bad time with AA and Trion but i dont really want to make a longer post.
So as much as ur a fan of the game or the company that cannot restore my trust in them and i advice anyone who is even considering in buying something from trion to not do so because they lied to me on multiple ocasions and they failed to respond.
After re reading this post i just wanted to add if you see a Hate tendency against something its normally because they made something wrong, but the same in politics there are just some people that dont want to see, so they keep defending the totally undefendable.
Scott could have demanded from the onset that this type of payment model was unacceptable and required XL Games to either alter the code or have their contract dropped. Instead the Pay to Win model received Trion and Scott's blessing. This is the very reason why so many players are disgruntled and turning to Kickstarter to bypass greedy publishers in the game making process.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/22/scott-hartsman-leaving-trion-worlds/
His position: Executive Producer of Rift (note his title and for what game.)
January 22nd, 2013
“We’re very impressed with ArcheAge, and the level of anticipation for the game is absolutely astonishing,” said Dr. Lars Buttler, CEO and founder of Trion Worlds. “We are very proud of the catalog of world-class games we will be offering through Red Door. Now, with ArcheAge, we are bringing the best in Asia onto our platform.”
http://www.trionworlds.com/en/news/2013/01/trion-and-xlgames-bring-archeage-to-west/
January 24th, 2013
Scott is not CEO at this point. He's not even with the company. Even if he was, he would of still had absolutely nothing to do with this deal.
Here is his return.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/08/scott-hartsman-returns-to-trion-takes-ceo-role/
August 8th, 2013.
Based on these facts, attacking this guy for ArcheAge being screwed up seems unfair to me. They didn't have control of changing things. XLgames did. It appeared like they didn't have much power. That means they signed a crappy deal and gave too much power to XLgames. So that bad contract is Trion Worlds' screw up on that issue. Whose fault would that be again? The Executive Producer of Rift at the time? Really? Cause the guy that was CEO 'resigned' 6 months later and Scott replaced him making some big moves right away.
However, contracts are contracts. No matter whom the new CEO happens to be. You have to ride it out the best you can.
I will even point back to Rift's release....Rift's GREAT concept done cheap and automated.Invasions pretty much the least amount of effort that could put into that system was.
What i see is a developer/publisher that rushes into things without thinking first.Archeage again a great game put some effort into it...geesh.From the minute word got out "in the press" not via Trion they showed no care they actually got the game.It took about 2-3 months before they spit out a word about AA and that was because they were bantering around Rift and the f2p switch.Then why did you grab AA then,easy answer a developer that needed money saw an easy cash grab because AA had some hype behind it.
Since Trion arrived on the scene i have not seen a quality developer,i see more a dev that looks like SOE during it's down swing.
I notice some like to defend Trion blaming their new games AA and next to be Devilion,you need to remember nobody is twisting Trion's arm,they should be competent in their research of a product and they also have the final say in how it is delivered.Like i said they are ONLY after a cash grab VERY similar to how SOE was operating and still operates.
Now i realize the gaming business is VERY tough,no easy market there but i also have forever said,if you can't handle the market ,stay out.The problem as i mentioned in the first paragraph is that developers see one fast gimmick and decide,great let's build a game.They see what they perceive to be an easy buck waiting around the corner.It is not easy even if your game is solid,there is still a huge luck factor.None the less ,this is a business,put some effort into whatever your selling or you will lose your shirt.If you can't afford the effort,then gaming is not your business.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
All this "Is not his fault, XL Games are in charge of everything" is nonsense.
Scott Hartsman is the CEO of Trion, he is responsible for the decisions he takes as the Commander in Chief of the company..
He decided to bring AA to the western world.
He decided to accept all XL Games terms without any possiblity of putting any input on their part, like for example dropping the F2P model at least for release, or having some kind of control on the Cash Shop.
He didn't pulled his weight with the Koreans enough when shit started to hit the fan and things started to go really bad, like the huge bugs and the unforgiveble repeated exploits (which by the way were caused by the Cash Shop itself)
Scott should have agreed to buy the licence only if they could Westernize the game properly, and have partial control over it.
I am sure that Trion developers were more than capable of fixing all those problems if they had the chance to.
Unfortunately Scott is not much of Leader in terms of business negotiations and he basically bought a defective game (that needed so much TLC before being released in the West), without being able to agree more reasonable terms with XL Games.
The result is that his company reputation is in tatters, and he is the only one to blame.
AA in my opinion is still the best game (on paper) released in the last 10 years, the Cash Shop and the way it heavily influence the economy (with its many exploits), ruined it for me.
Personally, I would be back in a heartbeat if they drop the F2P model and make it subscription only, but I know it will never happen, because Hartsman signed a binding contract with XL Games, where the Koreals call all the shots.
Good luck with it Scott.
1) Stop localizing crap Korean games,
2) Stop showing this mans face! Seriously, he is creepy.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/