Jeff Freeman pulls the plug

I am also sad to hear you classify people who challenge Jeff's views on the forums as trolls.

No, the trolls are those who disrupt those discussions and start offending or mocking who is writing. With more or less "wit".

The most successful trolls are those that successfully manage to ridicule the other part at the eyes of everyone without the need to engage the arguments.

I know because I'm constantly trolled on the forums. I have plenty of dedicated trolls on Q23, for example, going like this when I write down some design ideas:

"It sounds like masturbation.

*fap fap fap fap fap*"

Or:

"HRose, with all of the hours you have spent pulling abstract design concepts out of your ass, you could have learnt a programming language or three, maybe some basic art and sound design, and be well on your way to developing your own games."

Or:

"HRose, armchair designer at work!

Come back to us when you are actually doing something with all these ideas of yours."

Or:

Windbag hRose = new Windbag();

hRose.addResponse( "TL,DR" );
hRose.addResponse( "OMGWTFBBQ" );

These are "trolls".

A troll isn't someone trying to have a discussion, a troll is someone who is trying to sabotate it.

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.

Wow, Brilliant post Morat...

I really don't blame Jeff for shutting down his blog, it was only a matter of time. I frequented his page and I was just waiting for him to crack.

I do have pity for him, It's not easy to be the Man that goes in the MMO history books as the one that said, "Hey guys, I got an Idea!"

Jeff in SOE/LA meeting...

Jeff: I was playing Doom last night with my buddies, we had a ball! I think we should change SWG into a FPS.

SOE/LA: With a change like that, How would it effect our current subscribers?

Jeff: Those losers? Bah.. who cares, they'll keep playing, they stuck with us this long.

SOE/LA: Can you Code this FPS game you speak of using the current SWG engine?

Jeff: No, but no biggie, I don't think anyone will notice.

Raph: mmmoo mmermm

Jeff: could someone please tighten Raph's gag?

SOE/LA: We like your Idea Jeff, make it so!

Jeff: YaY!

SOE/LA: YaY!

Jeff, Smed, Torres and Natalie all dance around.

Thanks Jeff... he deserves the flames. I do believe he will not be posting on the net again using his real name.

I got the same impression (that they were friends). Look, whatever you might think of Jeff's actual abilities as a designer, he's a flaming moron to think he can blog about game design under his own name and NOT get responses from people who have, you know, played his game.

There's a reason why many people who blog about their work -- either directly ("My job sucks because of X and my Company sucks for Y and Z") or indirectly ("The problem with companies in this line of work is...") -- often stay anonymous.

Gaming is worse because many gamers are quite computer literate. The odds of your boss stumbling across your little known blog are slim, but the odds of some of the players of your game -- a game YOU have a great deal of influence and responsibility for -- stumbling across your quite well known blog are pretty freakin' high. And once someone does, it's going to be broadcast -- especially if people are pissed.

Freeman's blog is public. He blogs under his own name, about the very industry he works for. It's not a freaking "private space" -- had someone hacked into a private forum he set up for him and his friends, there'd be grounds for complaint. He published his thoughts for the world to see, and then got pissy because people didn't react the way he wanted. They were MEAN. They compared his public words to his public works and spoke unflatteringly about it. There were even insulting trolls!

Boo-fucking-hoo. Welcome to the internet, Jeff. It's not a kiddie pool.

Boo fucking hoo indeed, the net is not for the weak.

Jeff is a vet on the net, you would think he would know better.

He's had some great accomplishments, but his failures outshines them now.

He did have his own webspace. The reason Freeman's blog is directly linked to SWG is because of a post he wrote called "Shenanigans" in which he pretty much stated that the NGE was his idea (management wanted higher sub numbers, Jeff's team developed and sold the idea to management as the solution). He was quite blunt -- it was developed because they wanted to see if they could do it, found it fun, and hard-sold management on the idea.

What pissed people off --- current gamers -- was that NOWHERE in his description of the NGE development was there even a hint of the question "How will the current players like this? Will they find it fun?"

It reeked of some dude coding his own free server --- no responsibilities to anyone but himself and what he wanted to do that day.

It was bush league. REAL bush league.

That's why SWG fans started watching his blog. WHen he posted on the forums several people -- myself included -- tried to get him to address his NGE blog post.

Funny. On the forums, he didn't want to take credit for it. On his blog, it was quite clear -- management wanted to increase sub counts (He referred to is as management saying "How can we make this game the funnest it can be?" -- but we know what that means) and his lead developer showed him an idea he had just been goofing with, and Jeff LOVED it -- and spent the next several weeks assuring everyone up and down the chain that it was doable, fun, and awesome and the coolest thing since sliced bread and that everyone would love it because it was so awesomely fun.

In terms of being good employees and following corporate policies, I think Smed and Jeff are doing fantastic jobs. Working for SOE is not any easy task. Lets look at Sony's history in the last couple of Years and how they value they're customers.

1. Knowingly Putting PS2's on the market that were defective (the famous "disk read error")

2. Planting Sony paid people to review Movies made by Sony to give them the "thumbs up!"

3. Encoding their music CD's with an embedded worm that jumps into your cpu and hides in your OS sucking a small amount of your memory speed to make sure YOU, their valued customer doesn't copy something that you purchased from them.

4. SWG... We all know about this one.

There is more, but these are the glaring examples of how Sony handles thier entertainment end of thier industry.

I think there is Pictures of Smed and Jeff hanging on the wall in some hall in Japan as "Employee's of the Month".

So maybe we should cut them some slack, they're moving up the corporate ladder...

I think the "Peter Principle" is the biggest problem with SOE at the moment. You get guys like Dan Rubenfield the lead designer who state one day decay is gone for good, then the next he says it is back in after reviewing what the players want. Shouldn't your lead designer have known that before they took it out in the first place?

I'm beginning to think the Austin office of SOE is much like the last place I worked. The company was filled with guys who stuck around long enough to the point upper management thought they should be rewarded with promotions. This meant that a group of 4 engineers had 2 supervisors, 1 division manager, 1 general manager and a director of engineering. These guys had great paying jobs, were never asked to work too hard, and the company grew more due to federal laws than anything they did. When the latest administration came into office with their views on the environment, well, the happy days for this company were over and most of these corporate leaches were finally canned. I can only hope the same happens with SOE, they have done enough harm to the MMOG world as it is.

I think we all have worked in a company such as you described Woody.

The problem with SOE/Austin is obviously it's management. There was alot of Talented people working on SWG in it's incarnation including Jeff Freeman. The popularity of WOW really hit a nerve with the brass at SOE Operations and Im sure Smed got a nasty phone call telling him to get subscriber numbers up. Im sure he was in a panic to find some way to make SWG more profitable, as well as he should.

This is where I blame bad management. Smed In his, I call it "Lazy" research of how to lure in more subscribers he descided to copy other games such as Planetside and WOW. Be damned the current customers. Jeff did come up with the Idea of making SWG a FPS so it would be more "Star Warsy" as he bragged about on his blog pre NGE and Smed gave the green light.

Running a Multi-million dollar Franchise with the Star Wars licence you would think the management of Austin would take the time to understand why they were losing the battle in the MMO gaming world. It wasn't because of SWG being a boring game, it was because of the non stop annoying bugs and the never ending changes that constantly changed game play. If Smed and the crew would have actually listened to their player base instead of hiring an outside consulting firm I believe that Jeff's Idea of turning SWG into a FPS would have never seen the light of day.

While I disagree with everything else you are saying, I definitely agree on the external consulting.

That was a total waste of time, money and resources.

Granted Im just makeing a personal observasion on my postings. I don't blame you for disagreeing.

But we do agree on SOE/Austin hiring an outside consulting firm to be a waste.

At one time, I worked for an engineering firm that was helping GM create a new vehicle. I gave my opinions as well as many others that were actual "car" guys... "car" guys meaning automobile enthusiast. We came up with a great concept and fully expected GM to use our Ideas.

I went to the GM plant in Warren Michigan for a meeting on the new vehicle. They showed me a full scale prototype. I actually said "What the fuck?" out loud. The prototype was nothing like our concept.

It turns out that GM went to an outside consulting firm instead of listening to us "car" guys.

The vehicle that GM came out with was the legendary Aztek.

My point is, SWG/Austin should be smart enough to not make the same mistakes as other companies did and to listen to their customers as opposed to hiring a consulting firm that has no passion for the product they're hired to create.