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Juc66 posted:I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption. Even assuming your math is right, keep in mind that the total number of North American WoW subscribers is less than edit: Holy poo poo, America has a lot more people than I thought. VVV He also erroneously assumes that the 72% figure are all hardcore PC gamers. I find it very hard to believe that like 350 million people are hardcore PC gamers and not just people who play Angry Birds or Farmville. emoticon fucked around with this message at 06:17 on May 16, 2012 |
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May 16, 2012 06:11
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Juc66 posted:Only 2.82% of americans have broadband in their home. So that reduces the number of potential customers from 72% of americans down to around 2% of total americans as potential customers. So you're turning your potential customer base from 72% down to 2%. That's a pretty massive reduction of potential users.
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May 16, 2012 06:15
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On a separate note from this Diablo 3 DRM conversation, I have a QA-related question for others who have been in a position where you need to coordinate with a team on playtesting multiplayer content: is it common to end up in uncoordinated teams that constantly have trouble dying to the most basic of challenges, and never knowing if your content is properly balanced for end-users? I really hope that's not the case. Because it was loving infuriating to never make a real dent trying to beat this stuff, influencing the devs to tone down the difficulty, then reading from players that the content was too easy. When I play group content in Blizzard games for example, I always get the impression that, aside from a few missteps (Cataclysm Heroic Dungeons), the content had a massive amount of playtesting put into it in order to give it the right balance of challenge for your average player getting to that point.
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May 16, 2012 06:15
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emoticon posted:I wonder how many publications will have the balls to reflect this loss of good-will in their Diablo 3 reviews. Not many, I assume. At least one so far. It's PC Gamer UK too so that's a pretty big deal. That said, it's still kind of up in the air whether or not it will significantly affect review scores. Theoretically it should, but game reviews are such a weird thing. I wouldn't really expect the game to get less than 80% on Metacritic.
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May 16, 2012 06:18
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The Cheshire Cat posted:WoW is losing players, that's true, but I think that's more of a symptom of the game being nearly 8 years old than because people have suddenly gotten really mad at Blizzard for their decisions related to the game
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May 16, 2012 06:30
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OneEightHundred posted:Anecdotally, a considerable chunk quit because they felt that Cataclysm was severely lacking in endgame content. The fact that it broke sales records and then went on to have a pretty heavy playerbase decline would support that, though stronger competition (mainly TOR) is another factor. TOR is also losing subscribers at a ridiculous pace. It lost something like 40% of them over a two month period.
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May 16, 2012 06:33
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emoticon posted:I wonder how many publications will have the balls to reflect this loss of good-will in their Diablo 3 reviews. Not many, I assume. Counting myself? at least 3 that I know of will most likely react negatively to all this, and one definitely has already. RPS is clawing the walls with their coverage, PC Gamer will probably at least mention it (although they did mention Blur's crappy netcode as "slight connection problems" that one time...), I've already blogged a bit about it, and it will probably get into the review too, if it stays an issue. EDIT: Yup, PC Gamer aren't too chuffed either JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 06:40 on May 16, 2012 |
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May 16, 2012 06:36
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miscellaneous14 posted:On a separate note from this Diablo 3 DRM conversation, I have a QA-related question for others who have been in a position where you need to coordinate with a team on playtesting multiplayer content: is it common to end up in uncoordinated teams that constantly have trouble dying to the most basic of challenges, and never knowing if your content is properly balanced for end-users? Oh hey something I can talk about with first-hand experience In my former studio, BioWare, multiplayer sessions were something of a gong-show until we did a couple things. We started scheduling multiplayer sessions with the leads, it was a regular group so they meshed, and could see from day to day what their decisions were doing for the difficulty first-hand. We also had regular QA test sessions, some with regular groups, other willy nilly. We would see the affect of coordination and chaos and feed this back into the main team. We also had a single QA guy who was coordinating all this stuff, managing feedback, and doing his best to facilitate testing with the leads, it wasn't me though. Once we had that dude, dear god did things go smoother and we started getting a lot more actionable feedback. We also were pretty lucky in getting a very useful retired military guy for the position. Lastly the thing that's super useful is this: analytics/ telemetry + beta Being able to see what folks are doing, where they're doing it, and how successful they are in doing it is very useful. You don't have to rely on people saying it's too easy or too hard and you take out the factor of the small subset of people you've had testing thus far being either really good or really bad. If you add on top of that the ability to modify the balance of the game without updating the client, it makes life much easier than it would otherwise be. But with that said I left bioware before the end of ME3, I think they got it right but if anything changed that made the multiplayer more balanced I didn't get to see it. so ... my mind's been wandering a bit today. Did I hit on what you're looking for? I don't think it's typical for testers to get reamed all the time, it should honestly be the opposite end of the spectrum.
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May 16, 2012 06:38
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OneEightHundred posted:Anecdotally, a considerable chunk quit because they felt that Cataclysm was severely lacking in endgame content. The fact that it broke sales records and then went on to have a pretty heavy playerbase decline would support that, though stronger competition (mainly TOR) is another factor. Additionally, despite an effort on their part to create a more even difficulty curve for players, there were a couple of major screw-ups that seemed to cause a lot of subscriber fallout: Level 60-80: 70-80 isn't too big a deal, but 60-70 is a miserable slog that is completely inconsistent with the leveling experience thus far. Heroic Dungeons: I mentioned this in my last post, whereas the normal difficult of these dungeons are generally a reasonable challenge for players who at least know how to use their classes, the Heroics are full of insufferable bullshit design; instant-kill mechanics abound and massive spike damage AEs that make healers life hell. You would never want to do these with your average LFG players. e: Juc66 posted:so ... my mind's been wandering a bit today. Did I hit on what you're looking for? It's funny because we were part of the same company, but different branches. The issue was that our team had trouble just doing some of the normal difficulty content. The weirdest part of it was that I seemed to perform the best/lasted the longest without dying on most occasions, but I got the impression that I was being singled out early on as the weak link due to not having much experience in the game's genre. On higher difficulties, they literally did want us to be able to complete the content, and seriously told us to report it to them if we could. 
miscellaneous14 fucked around with this message at 06:46 on May 16, 2012 |
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May 16, 2012 06:39
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miscellaneous14 posted:It's funny because we were part of the same company, but different branches. The issue was that our team had trouble just doing some of the normal difficulty content. The weirdest part of it was that I seemed to perform the best/lasted the longest without dying on most occasions, but I got the impression that I was being singled out early on as the weak link due to not having much experience in the game's genre. Ah, you were on sweater then? You got me for why things might be unbalanced then. Do you have numbers to back it up? Or is it just the vocal "nothing's ever right" crowd that some times pops up in forums that are talking? I think you guys had Georg and he was something of the telemetry pioneer so if something was off he should have seen it in the numbers. I actually got him to give every morrigan rabies once ...I thought it'd be hilarious, turns out my idea was awful and he had the data to back it up, since halfway through the game everything had contracted it at least once.
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May 16, 2012 06:57
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Juc66 posted:Ah, you were on sweater then? I understood "telemetry."
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May 16, 2012 06:59
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Juc66 posted:Ah, you were on sweater then? You're probably talking about a different branch. I actually try to avoid disclosing which one I worked at, considering managers there would often threaten to sabotage your career in the gaming industry if you let out any sort of insider information. 
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May 16, 2012 07:08
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miscellaneous14 posted:You're probably talking about a different branch. I actually try to avoid disclosing which one I worked at, considering managers there would often threaten to sabotage your career in the gaming industry if you let out any sort of insider information. Nice folks.
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May 16, 2012 07:10
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NINbuntu 64 posted:TOR is also losing subscribers at a ridiculous pace. It lost something like 40% of them over a two month period.
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May 16, 2012 07:16
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Paniolo posted:Anyway, Blizzard games are definitely up there among the most pirated ever, save WoW, so it's not like they needed Activision to come in and tell them that an online-required game is good for business. Pretty sure WOW was pirated based on those "vanilla wow private server" ads I saw at the bottom of these forums. Heard Diablo 3 was pirated not too long after it came out, also with private servers. Waiting to see if they're able to find a way to dupe items or otherwise completely subvert the RMAH. I mean, I don't know how this would even be possible, but it'd be pretty hilarious. I didn't get Diablo 3 because the only time I play a long-form singleplayer game on PC anymore is when my internet connection dies. NINbuntu 64 posted:TOR is also losing subscribers at a ridiculous pace. It lost something like 40% of them over a two month period. Are they finally forced to admit they're losing subscribers? The company line has been "we're doin great, got millions of subscribers, fastest growing MMO #1, what a success" last I checked. Which is pretty funny considering server load numbers show the servers bottoming out.
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May 16, 2012 08:55
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OneEightHundred posted:Oh definitely, but it was probably more successful at prying people off of WoW than any other game's been. A lot of F2P MMOs (including several that were formerly sub-only) have come out very recently, so there's that too, a problem made worse by WoW's unusually high cost of entry ($80!). Did WoW's loss of subscribers correlate with TOR's release though? TOR's drop happened pretty quickly - it wasn't really drawn out.
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May 16, 2012 08:59
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Dinurth posted:I find it incredibly hard to believe that anyone who has PC good enough to play Diablo 3 would either not have an internet connection at all, or would have one crappy enough to not play. Hi. I live in Ethiopia, a country of 85 million people in which there is 3% internet penetration, less than a quarter million or so of which is "broadband". I have been downloading D3 for like 3 days now. I'm still not done. I pay $250 a month in USD equivalent to get 135 kb/s downloads. My PC is good enough to play any game out right now on max or near max settings.
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May 16, 2012 11:27
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poptart_fairy posted:Did WoW's loss of subscribers correlate with TOR's release though? TOR's drop happened pretty quickly - it wasn't really drawn out. There's some of that to be expected though - TOR's drops are also in line with the 1 month/3 month subscription renewal times. You're going to see drops there anyway. The long term stability is in what comes next.
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May 16, 2012 11:34
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Dinurth posted:Yes, but that company was not Blizzard. Blizzard can afford to lose a potential %4 customer base and not give a gently caress. Remember how much people hated Steam when it first came out? "You mean I have to DOWNLOAD the game and be online before I can play it? gently caress THAT" Caveat emptor: You can run Steam in Offline mode and still play your single player games without fear of getting disconnected because your router just had a hiccup. Hell, you can run Steam in Online mode without that happening, depending on how the game handles CEG and disconnections. vvvvvv True -- I've only ever used Offline mode from my laptop, basically when I knew I'd be out of WiFi or network range. I suppose not being able to play during spurious disconnections is rather irritating. Jan fucked around with this message at 15:14 on May 16, 2012 |
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May 16, 2012 14:13
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Jan posted:Caveat emptor: You can run Steam in Offline mode and still play your single player games without fear of getting disconnected because your router just had a hiccup. Hell, you can run Steam in Online mode without that happening, depending on how the game handles CEG and disconnections. Actually I've been repeatedly buggered by Steam not allowing me to access my offline fully single player games purely because our router poo poo itself and denied me internet access for a week or two. To go into offline mode, you have to be online to verify that you want to go offline. If I suddenly go offline without notice and happen to log out of steam/turn off my PC, most of my game collection is completely unavailable. It's easily the worst aspect of Steam. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 14:32 on May 16, 2012 |
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May 16, 2012 14:29
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Shalinor posted:It's Activision
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May 16, 2012 14:57
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Aliginge posted:Actually I've been repeatedly buggered by Steam not allowing me to access my offline fully single player games purely because our router poo poo itself and denied me internet access for a week or two. Yeah, it is pretty ironic and stupid that you need to activate offline mode while being online. There are some games that you can still play by going directly to your steam apps folder but they are only a handful.
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May 16, 2012 15:19
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FreakyZoid posted:No, it's Blizzard. Apart from reporting to the same guy at the very top they are basically separate entities. ... and mind, I do try and strip all emotion from that statement. Activision makes money hand over fist, no matter how I personally feel about their policies - and they are public, so that has to be their primary driver. It just looks like Blizzard has started mirroring their approach to business, which is a shift from their previous consumer-centric model that got them such universal praise. But I really don't want to start another billion page derail, so, uh, how about them dodgers.
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May 16, 2012 15:27
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Here's a neat panel from PAX East about storytelling in games. It kind of applies to some comments made many pages ago. The panel is Ken Levine (Creative Director, Irrational Games), Chris Avellone (Creative Director, Obsidian Entertainment), and David Gaider (Senior Writer, BioWare) and some journalists driving. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=55CenBjJ7lw
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May 16, 2012 15:52
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In non-blizzard news, things are looking pretty bad for 38 studios. http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/16/the-scene-following-38-studios-emergency-meeting-with-rhode-i/
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May 17, 2012 01:25
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SGT. Squeaks posted:In non-blizzard news, things are looking pretty bad for 38 studios. They were pretty optimistic with loan payments of those amounts. I swear working in games is like being half gypsy. It hasn't been so bad for me, but I know folks who're in a different city every year.
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May 17, 2012 01:36
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As part of the deal they had to practically double or triple the number of people they employed. I remember they tried to recruit a friend of mine who was also being recruited by Blizzard at the time and offered him a really low-ball salary for the area... They always have given off these weird "stay-away" vibes since that whole Rhode Island deal went down. Poor guys.
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May 17, 2012 07:55
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This reminds me, the whole diablo 3 thing that is. Bobby Kotick really is a monster. He was spying on folks to break the deal for CoD. Saw some details of it on joystiq, figured it was exageration ... but nope. http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/16/ea-and-activision-settle-in-call-of-duty-lawsuit/
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May 17, 2012 07:58
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Any translators/localizers in the house that wanna be on a panel at PAX Prime? One of my panelists is apparently getting deported shortly after E3. Post, PM, or e-mail (my username at googlemail) if you're interested/want details.
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May 17, 2012 18:16
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Juc66 posted:Ah, you were on sweater then? If you remember some of the devs we worked with on past projects, Juc, many of them didn't believe QA balance reports even when you *did have those numbers, using telemetry hooks we implemented to their specifications. Not enough sample size, invalid testing, use of cheats, etc. were always common reasons given, but that left QA with basically having to resort back to "it feels bad". And, of course, in some cases, what feels fun *is unbalanced, in a strictly numerical sense, which just compounds the issue.
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May 17, 2012 19:21
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Okay, I am sure most of you will hate me for asking this but I am not quite sure of what my options are. I am a freelancer doing web designing/conception jobs and don't particularly see myself doing it for the rest of my life. I have no prior experiences in the VG industry but would love to find a career in it someday. I am not a 17 yo kid who fancies being a game-designer or 'idea guy' bs. I live in montreal and fortunatly its a pretty good place for someone that wants to works in the gaming industry. I have some vague idea's of what I would love to do but as I said I don't know much about the industry and would love to know all the careers paths choices. I just recently sent my applications to different game testing labs just by curiosity and don't mind running in the same wall for 8 hours if that means that I could meet different people make contacts and learn more about all this industry. I have been a spokesman/representative for different compagnies and would absolutely love doing it for this particular industry. I know how it works and if I could meet the right people it would be entirely possible to do it. That is why I wanted to ask you guys if its a terrible idea to start as a game tester?
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May 17, 2012 19:32
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Alca posted:I am not a 17 yo kid who fancies being a game-designer or 'idea guy' bs. It would help to tell us what you are. What skills do you have that might be useful in developing games. You mentioned being a spokesman, which in the games industry could be a PR position, but your post contains too many spelling and grammatical errors to really justify that.
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May 17, 2012 19:37
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Alca posted:Okay, I am sure most of you will hate me for asking this but I am not quite sure of what my options are. If you want to be a PR dude then do things that PR dudes do, which I suppose is lots of networking until you can get a producer job. QA, despite what some people will say, is a good foot in the door for a junior position like AP for example. Developer QA is better than publisher QA in my opinion, because it will give you more interaction with developers. With a production/PR goal maybe it doesn't matter too much though. It's not a bad idea to become a tester as long as you make use of that time Go meet the right people, they gather for game dev beer nights and at GDC and on forums. Network.
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May 17, 2012 19:55
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Birudojin posted:If you remember some of the devs we worked with on past projects, Juc, many of them didn't believe QA balance reports even when you *did have those numbers, using telemetry hooks we implemented to their specifications. Not enough sample size, invalid testing, use of cheats, etc. were always common reasons given, but that left QA with basically having to resort back to "it feels bad". And, of course, in some cases, what feels fun *is unbalanced, in a strictly numerical sense, which just compounds the issue. This is because most non-QA devs secretly think QA people are too anal retentive (and sometimes too big for their britches), and QA thinks other developers never listen or are too lazy/dumb to fix problems that seem very obvious. Alca posted:I have no prior experiences in the VG industry but would love to find a career in it someday. You say you're not a 17 "yo" kid who fancies being an idea guy, but why would you want to make a career in an industry you know nothing about? emoticon fucked around with this message at 20:38 on May 17, 2012 |
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May 17, 2012 20:35
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Resource posted:If you want to be a PR dude then do things that PR dudes do, which I suppose is lots of networking until you can get a producer job. QA, despite what some people will say, is a good foot in the door for a junior position like AP for example. Developer QA is better than publisher QA in my opinion, because it will give you more interaction with developers. With a production/PR goal maybe it doesn't matter too much though. I would say never go into a QA testing outsourcing house, no long term propositions and you'll have little to no way to interact with the development team. Dev QA is ok, but only if you want to do QA long term, if you want to learn stuff (QA gets its hands on a great deal of development) or if you're a tool who only wants to network. Seriously, if you go into QA with the sole goal of networking to be hired out of it then you'll likely be disappointed and take up a spot of someone who actually wants to be there, making the lives of the rest of the QA folks that much worse.
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May 17, 2012 21:36
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GetWellGamers posted:Any translators/localizers in the house that wanna be on a panel at PAX Prime? One of my panelists is apparently getting deported shortly after E3. If you can pay for my trip over there, sure 
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May 17, 2012 22:00
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I love our little QA sessions. Rather than enormous teams of people all secretly hating the other arm of the operation it's just me and Akuma, where I lean over and give him the knowing look which says  "IT CRASHED". Then I submit to our QA logging thingimibob and I move on 
GeeCee fucked around with this message at 22:22 on May 17, 2012 |
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May 17, 2012 22:04
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For the last 4-and-a-bit years, I've worked in the Customer Support department of a large game company, before recently being made redundant. I'm really keen to try and avoid re-entering the CS/QA side of things, and want to go somewhere creative. I've got a degree in Creative Digital Media, which covered most gamey-art stuff - I can model and texture props/environment stuff pretty well (I think) in 3dsmax/Photoshop. I'm concerned for two reasons: A) every job I see advertised wants experience/published product; and B) my degree is a few years old at this point. I've tried to self-teach myself some of the more up-to-date stuff that wasn't covered at the time (mine was the last year that didn't do normal mapping, for example), but I'm not 100% clear on what I should have on my portfolio. My current stuff is at https://www.ninchilla.co.uk - are there any arty goons who can give me some kind of advice, or feedback on what I have already? Thanks in advance!
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May 17, 2012 22:28
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Ninchilla posted:For the last 4-and-a-bit years, I've worked in the Customer Support department of a large game company, before recently being made redundant. I'm really keen to try and avoid re-entering the CS/QA side of things, and want to go somewhere creative. Hop on freelancer/elance/odesk and pick up some relevant jobs, or volunteer time to an indie who likes to get free art(I like to get free art), or saunter by the game jam thread and team up with a guy there. There's also that goon game challenge coming up, which I think will be really cool / fun.
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May 17, 2012 22:42
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Alca posted:Do you actually want to do PR \ marketing \ brand or (with your web skills) are you more suited for community management? Juc66 posted:I would say never go into a QA testing outsourcing house, no long term propositions and you'll have little to no way to interact with the development team. That said, my first QA interview wasn't hard (they wanted lots of testers, though they at least wanted non-casual gamers), but I made the effort of mentioning the single day's testing I did for a developer through my university - it certainly didn't hurt my chances. As for networking, that's true, but just being in a company puts you in a better position for advancing and QA is a good way of getting experience on the dev lifecycle too. I slugged it out in QA for 9 months before I got lucky with a position in one of the dev studios that came up and which matched my skills. Some companies much prefer hiring internally as it's a lot quicker to do and less hassle. Ninchilla posted:My current stuff is at https://www.ninchilla.co.uk - are there any arty goons who can give me some kind of advice, or feedback on what I have already?  I'd suggest you try and get your work into some mods or indie games, anything that demonstrates your art skills in an actual game more than samples on a website.
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May 17, 2012 22:50
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