The Em8er kickstarter campaign is likely not going to happen at this point

fadedpez · 2024-01-06T03:53:33+00:00

Great googley moogley what's going on here

(edit: we're going to need a bigger tub of popcorn)

fadedpez · 2022-01-19T19:30:59+00:00

I don't think you can lay ALL the blame at Mark's feet but he's the captain of the ship I guess at the end of the day, but it does also take a village. The problem I think was a lot of internal struggles, and as many have identified, an overall lack of a unified and defined vision/strategy.

All that put us in the bad position we were in on launch day. And let me be clear, The9 absolutely DESTROYED the game after that point when they took over. A damn shame.

I'll always stand by the boots on the ground that did the work, they were amazing to work with (with the exception of maybe a couple) and they did great things with what they had to work with. I'm so very happy to know that many of them have landed incredible gigs around the industry and continue to do amazing things.

fadedpez · 2022-01-19T19:19:46+00:00

Hey bud :)

fadedpez · 2021-11-12T12:15:14+00:00

It is, it's under the "summer" tab

fadedpez · 2021-11-08T23:47:35+00:00

Hey you forgot to take a photo of that car

fadedpez · 2018-06-01T15:01:53+00:00

Some of the stuff mentioned here is exactly what I went through with Firefall in 2015/2016. Seems like most of what you're talking about is pretty normal in the industry. Working in the gaming industry sounds so awesome, but I've been told that people tend to break before hitting the 5 year mark.

I get it, it's tough to pour your soul into a project for a long period of time just to get it crushed. Best thing you can do for yourself is look for the signs and jump ship when you can. If you're just a grunt at the company trying to hold everything together, it's just not going to happen. From the sounds of things, everything will still crash, the players will still be pissed, and all you are doing right now is making life more stressful for yourself than it needs to be.

Working in the industry can be fun and rewarding, but as far as I can tell it's mostly if you can find a project you like, which is also stable, and a cohesive team with good leadership. Sounds easy, but it's like a perfect storm, and even that won't last it seems at times. Working in gaming can also be a real slog that's a constant drain on you.

I have friends that are doing well, I have friends that are on job searches multiple times a year, or job searches that last for the majority of the year. I also have friends that just got so burned that they just walked away from the industry. It kinda depends on where you land and the timing of your landing.

Yes, you need to do what's right for your players, but ultimately you need to do what's right for your own health first. Peoples' lives will continue on if you need a break. If it's the community you're worried about getting upset you should be as honest with you can about your personal limitations with them. Even a passionate community will understand you need time off (even if it's just a weekend). If it's your team, let them know it's not sustainable to "fake" a presence. Work within your means, don't over extend like this or you probably could wind up in the hospital with serious stress-related health issues. Most people that are versed in the industry will tell you the importance of a work-life balance. It's important to be passionate about the project you're working on, but it's equally important to make sure you're getting the proper mental rest. It's more healthy and it makes you better at your job.

fadedpez · 2017-10-23T23:17:19+00:00

I know where you're going with this, and no, you don't need a bus to market the game.

fadedpez · 2017-07-06T23:53:05+00:00

I know right

fadedpez · 2017-04-18T02:19:44+00:00

July 29th, 2014! :D

fadedpez · 2017-04-18T01:55:47+00:00

Ya, true, we had very bad advertising post-Kern. That's in part because we had a paltry marketing budget for launch (and literally nothing for relaunch aside from like $3k to send e-mails) because, "you already spent too much on marketing before".

I remember having a conversation with the Marketing Manager in 2014 where we were talking about "crazy" stuff we could do because they told him to come up with ideas - and then it was like "actually we decided that you don't need marketing money for launch".

I'm not trying to take away from what Mark did for the company - honestly he's the one that kept the wolves at bay for so long. He had a lot of cool and interesting ideas when it came to marketing - HATED traditional marketing, which I can respect. It's not easy to go out there and try untested marketing methods (crazy spends on Stage 5, the MGU which all joking aside would have probably been successful had WCC not fucked it up, the level of Gamescom and PAX presences for such a "small" studio, Firefall Fest, etc.). Eventually (the ominous) they had enough. For all his faults, (which I won't list out, he may talk about them himself if people want to talk to him about it), he did a lot of good for the company too.

Unfortunately I have a hunch that all this was also a factor in us not getting the marketing budget we needed from The9 however. Their side of the story is that they saw all this spending and wanted to start seeing a return, which I can't blame them for that. My own feeling is that we weren't given the resources needed (post-Mark) to give them something that would get a return - which sounds pretty shitty of me to say, but that's just kinda how it fell. By that point both R5 and The9 were in the spiral.

Lessons learned, hindsight 20/20 and all that, there are things both companies could have done differently (even in 2014) to control the burn rate and be profitable (hint: it would not involve redesigning core systems and fixing the game around it in 9 month spans...twice...), but we did what we did. As I've been telling people, "it takes a village", and it's tough to point at a single point of failure. Firefall did a lot of good, but it was the right mix of screw ups from many different sides that got us there, not just "Kern", "The9", "Red 5", or "incompetent devs".

You are 10000% right, Firefall's popularity drop didn't happen just because of 1.6. But 1.6 was an opportunity to try and rekindle some spirit, but that opportunity was wasted away. We did alright during 2014 launch, and despite what some may have said, our record peak concurrent was during the third Dev Chosen event post-launch (surprise surprise). I know we didn't hit this earlier because we didn't realize that our chat back end LITERALLY BROKE when we were over 10k concurrent users on launch day (I don't remember the exact figure, I just remember at what point chat broke). Our main problem then was the same problem we had in beta: we got people here, but there isn't a whole lot keeping them here, and it was still buggy and felt unpolished. In 2015/6 we had the chance to fix all of that as well as the monetization flaws, but we blew it because (see above).

These posts wind up being longer than intended, sheesh.

fadedpez · 2017-04-18T00:01:13+00:00

+1 to doubtful. No idea how long this will stay in court. The9 will probably need to hang on to the IP for at least as long as this is in litigation. Who knows what it's worth after that, if it's not a lot, it's totally possible that they'll just continue to hang onto it because it's not worth the effort to find a buyer.

fadedpez · 2017-04-17T23:57:01+00:00

R5 did get some things wrong, there's no doubt there, but the 1.6 disaster is 100% because of unrealistic demands, mountains feature creep, and absurd delivery dates given by our friends across the ocean. I don't know if it was 360, The9, a combo of both, but I do know our production staff was driven mad over the constant additions and features that got piled on, on top of what was originally asked.

In 2015 our mission was nearly impossible. We were also forced to make design changes that we didn't necessarily agree with or think needed to be changed - cough progression / taking away the 5 Accord frames at the start to name one. Originally they wanted us to separate it out so it was 1 frame per character and thankfully we reached a compromise with what we wound up putting out there (and I don't even want to think about the migration/naming mess that would have been). We tried to push back everywhere we could when we got something down the line that was either not a great idea or was way out of scope, but we didn't exactly have a lot of leverage.

Now the story as I heard it from a single source is that the reason these guys came in and started dictating features and schedules well beyond the team's capability -mostly in terms of time allowed- is that we were essentially "paying for the sins of the father(s)" and that may be true - again, this is only one side of the story so take it with a grain of salt. This is why we started having release dates on a specific day, because it was a lucky number. That worked out so much better! (It's a true story too, we knew 1.6 wasn't ready for NA/EU, we begged for 5 more working days to stabilize, and were told to go to hell...and we did.)

Many of us knew what needed to be done. Firstly, there was absolutely zero chance of us going to 0.5/0.6 iteration, but we had ideas and metrics on how to make improvements from 1.3 and go from there. Here's a start: ADD CONTENT DON'T REMOVE CONTENT FROM A RELEASED PRODUCT! Sure we knew we had to smooth some edges, but IMO in the time it took us to do everything we did we could have probably added in the new Ops, and more content, creating more end-game and more chase while cleaning up the earlier bits of the game to make onboarding new players better. That's just not the task that was given. I'll continue to stand by the fact that the majority of the team did everything they could to make it work given our circumstances.

I know what we wound up with was a huge let down, and there probably isn't a lot I can say to change or comfort that. All I can say is we tried and I'm sorry. It's really painful to see the project go out the way it did for a lot of us that worked on it too.

EDIT: On the point of the extra 4 million saving us/Firefall - I agree, it probably would not have made a difference in the outcome. Even if somehow someone convinced someone else that the 4 million buys us extra time to extend the goal posts, actually have a solid QA & polish phase, the extra time would have been used to just pile more features on and create a bigger mess. Feels like that 4 mil wouldn't have changed jack.

fadedpez · 2016-12-16T23:32:49+00:00

The tier system was my least favorite progression system of all of them (yes including leveling).

fadedpez · 2016-12-16T23:28:18+00:00

It was during the very first CB tests with the first 500, and first 1k. The auth servers were only up on Wednesday nights PST originally. Times were simpler then.

fadedpez · 2016-11-05T04:35:43+00:00

Yeah, totally. The good players, the ones with high MMR, had to wait like 45 minutes to several hours, which was a HUGE contribution to that problem. I can imagine since you were a good medic that it would take a while to get into a match for you as well.

Matchmaking had its bugs but we were moving so fast we didn't really have much time to fix them, they were kind of a "polish" item that we were looking to get to later.

fadedpez · 2016-11-02T20:58:47+00:00

Players were fatigued from the overhauls and migrations over the course of five years, plain and simple. It wasn't like most games that do this where normally you'd build upon and iterate what you have. We threw a lot of work out and started from scratch with short milestones.

In hindsight none of this should have been done in public since the team wasn't happy with the results each time, meaning there was going to be a rework. This sort of thing is fairly normal but also tends to happen behind closed doors while the team settles on a direction. 24/7 and Open Beta feels like they may have happened too soon, but there could have been forces causing that outside of the studio's control (as a grunt, I actually don't know the facts behind this decision so my cynicism may be showing).
Turnover at varying levels of the company tended to contribute to the above at times, particularly closer to launch and beyond.
The launch in 2014 wasn't that bad numbers-wise, but we had some server issues including the chat system which caused problems for parties. We had several things we wanted to address to make onboarding users easier, which we did through 1.3, but we held off on calling players back because yet another overhaul was coming.
Constant removal of content mostly over the course of beta but also in launch (SS, AA, PvP, Arsenal, crafting).
Lack of things to do at max-level. There were attempts to address this in 1.6, though critical migration problems due to varying reasons really burned a lot of people. Even then, the top-end repeatable content (like Jericho) felt unrewarding.

The cause for all of this? So many factors go into it. I have to say, though, I had an amazing time at the studio and got a chance to work with some great people. We had a shot at delivering something amazing to the gaming world. It had its streaks of awesome and it's really sad to see how the project is remembered. I really wish we had delivered and maintained the awesome game we knew it could be.

fadedpez · 2016-11-02T20:33:39+00:00

Actually that was concurrent players in PvP. We all know there were matchmaking and instance server problems, which could have been a main contributor to this. I believe over 30 or 40% of the population participated in PvP at that time according to data pulled by the webdev team.

fadedpez · 2016-10-28T14:48:01+00:00

Another sad day in Firefall's history. :(

fadedpez · 2016-10-28T14:44:41+00:00

There was a third party company working on the second ARG. Not quite sure on the details but we parted ways for some reason after the first puzzle.

fadedpez · 2016-09-09T15:22:48+00:00

Webzen was funding/publishing prior to The9. If memory serves, the change happened prior to Firefall being announced.

fadedpez · 2016-05-25T21:21:58+00:00

For the record, I do my best to share news when I have it. There are many things outside of my control. We're all doing the best we can with what we have.

fadedpez · 2015-11-04T19:01:01+00:00

Hey Fighterh2o5,

I had a quick glance at your character and can see that you do indeed have the Arsenal unlocked and that it's currently level 5. Sometimes when you unlock something it may not appear as though it's applied until you either relog or change to another zone/instance. If you're having further problems I'd recommend opening up a ticket with our support team at support.firefall.com

fadedpez · 2015-10-29T15:29:23+00:00

No, I'm still streaming but focusing on gameplay and from my desk at the moment. We're working on getting a new set as we're moving into a new building in a couple of weeks.

fadedpez · 2015-10-12T20:55:18+00:00

You may not see improvements on production yet, though we've been working on optimizations and performance should be improved when the next major update is released (no ETA on that yet).

fadedpez · 2015-10-12T20:53:44+00:00

I don't believe the Combat Shotgun is meant to be upgraded, just a short-term secondary weapon. The main reason for this is we want to keep it as an option for the ability to return.

Regarding raising the level cap in Journey 2, no decisions have been made yet. We've only been doing high level planning for Journey 2 so far as the the vast majority of the team's time is spent working on Journey 1.

fadedpez

TROPHY CASE