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Jeff Freeman took some flack -- most deserved, some not -- because his personal thoughts on game designer were 180 degrees opposite the latest interation of Galaxies.

Further, his previously deleted blogpost -- written well before he had any reason to suspect the NGE would be a CF of monsterous proportions -- quite clearly stated that while the driver for change in general was management concerns over sub numbers, the NGE itself was his brainchild. (In short, management wanted change that would up sub numbers. Jeff and his team created the NGE and decided it fit the bill).

When you are largely responsbile (his title is "Lead Game Play Designer") for overwhelmingly unpopular changes to a large game, the loss of 50k+ subscriptions in three months, AND what is ridiculed as "dumbing down" the game -- your thoughts on how complexity is "good" for an MMORPG are not going to be left alone. (For the record, I posted nothing on that thread or on his blog).

Jeff's problem isn't his blog. Jeff's problem is that -- despite his blog, his title, and his experience -- he is still an amateur at heart. Possibly a very talented amateur, one who -- probably supervised -- is capable of awesome feats that would make jaded gamers weep with joy.

However, he didn't have proper supervision. The NGE -- once again, according to his blog -- was written becuase HE felt it was fun -- not the customers. When you're designing for yourself and your friends (I believe he got started on UO grey shards), that's peachy keen. When you're designing for a game with 150k+ subscriptions, that's BAD. You're not designing for yourself -- you're designing for your customers.

In the end, Jeff's problem -- which was obvious with his Shenanigans posts -- was that the pre-CU game wasn't the game he wanted to play. Neither was the CU. The NGE was.

Of course, that's not the end of Jeff's problems. The poor man (Lead Game Designer means if people are unhappy about Game Design, you take the heat) never understood the PLAYERS either. If WoW shuts down tomorrow, there won't be half the outcry that happened over the NGE. Why? Because WoW isn't a virtual world design. Jeff never really grasped that virtual worlds are often closer to "hobbies" than games -- that virtual world players are attached to their worlds, their accomplishments, and their friends. The CU hurt it badly -- it broke a lot of the immersion, trashed accomplishment, and wiped out the playstyles of many. The NGE killed it. There's no "Sim City 3 sucks, I'm going to keep playing Sim City 2" possibility here.

Jeff's got tens of thousands of ex-players whose world is gone looking for someone to blame. And tens of thousands more who hope their world will come back and are desperate searching for ANY hint or information about what's to come. He's the lightning rod for all of this -- because of his job, and because of his title, and because of his own admitted role in all of this.

I don't think anyone over there understand WHO played there game and why -- or cared to find out.

Jeff's point man for all that anger because many players see him as the reason for their loss. And they see him as the one to blame because he admitted it -- not in his official capacity, but on his blog -- where one expects him to be semi-open about how things are.

Frankly, he's a freakin' moron for thinking he could post on game design -- under his OWN NAME -- without players from the game he's currently in charge of game play on coming over to talk about how he implements his ideas.

If he's getting a lot of bashing and little support, you'd think he'd reasses his design concepts. Instead, he's forting up and ignoring the peons -- the same insular, inword-looking groupthink response that cost SWG the bulk of it's playerbase.