Slashdot Mirror
Wizards of the Coast Declares Gleemax Site a Critical Failure
In a recent blog post, Wizards of the Coast Vice President of Digital Gaming Randy Buehler announced that they were killing their Gleemax social networking site. Originally designed to create a central hub where gamers could meet, discuss, and play games online, it has thus far been unable to deliver on the grandiose promises made at launch. "The mistake that I made, however, was in trying to push us too far too fast. I still think the vision for Gleemax is awesome: creating a place on the web where hobby gamers (or lifestyle gamers or thinking gamers, or whatever you want to call us) can gather to talk about games, play games, and find people to play games with. But I've come to realize that the vision was too ambitious. We've made progress down about ten different paths over the past eighteen months, but we haven't been able to reach the end of any of them yet."
Wow, that site sounded like it'd be a lot of fun.
Trolling is a art,
...no wait, the other thing - tedious.
An online hub for gamers to meet already exists. It's called "World of Warcraft."
that sound like it could be kinda cool. In true social networking style it could never live up to the hype.
I'm sorry. There's a reason you failed. You called it Gleemax.
Now, the internet is full of stupidly named stuff - a side-effect of trademark law, particularly in the American Corporate Reich, sorry "USA" - but gleemax is really dumb. Like having a disgusting headless dog with a leg bone jammed down its neck as your mascot dumb.
Feminine sanitary towel with gentle vibrating action? Real estate that comes with free MDMA ? Either way, gleemax is a terrible name.
Crapmax would have done just as well
--- What?
Gamers don't want a social networking site - it's already been shown that we have a fear of girls.
as if anyone had any doubt with that horrid green and stupid brain it would fail? That site was designed to appeal to 5-9 year olds, not D&D Gamers.
The world wide web does no have enough social networking sites. It simply needs more. =D
I never heard about this one. As someone who plays games I don't see a need for a social networking site to talk to other people about games, I'd rather just play them.
Back then this COULD have taken off. But today, with a billion "social networking" sites (read: you make the content, I make the profit) around, hammering out yet another one is about as sensible as creating the better mousetrap or the better search engine. Yes, you could succeed. But the chances are so slim that you're better off trying something else. Why? Because EVERYONE does it. Everyone is out there creating the next better social networking page. With this bell or that whistle, but basically, in their core, they're just the same that myspace and its copycats have been for years.
How about trying something new instead of trying to recreate something that has been done so many times over that nobody cares anymore?
And no, I don't know what "something new" would be. If I did, I'd probably create it and become rich myself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Terrible name, imho. Better to spend the energy/resources on their other sites.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Randy Buelher is an idiot and has ruined WotC. MTGO, D&Di, Gleemax; they are all getting ruined by this idiot. Get him off the web!
Trying to establish a name as a place where idiots can blather mindlessly about irrelevant(though perhaps entertaining) subjects on the Internet?
That's not a crowded marketplace at all.
Buehler?
They roll out Tiny Adventures for Facebook (which is still having some issues it seems) then drop their social site. I wonder if this is part of a plan to focus on "apps" or ways of connecting to the already established bases of MySpace/Facebook?
1) I'm sure more than a few D&D/P&P RPG fans are on those sites already.
2) More visibility. Running your own site dedicated to just RPGs will only attract a certain crowd.
Regarding #2, I'm slightly above "casual" P&P RPG follower, but I hadn't really even heard of their site until this /. posting.
No sig for you!!
...who remembers a slashdot-like site named Planet Crap, where gamers, game webmasters, and game developers gathered, posted, discussed, flamed, and trolled?
I'd say 1999 called and wants its idea back!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Gleemax makes it feel like it 72 degrees in your head... all the time!
The mistake that I made, however, was in trying to push us too far too fast
More likely the reverse was true. Not enough promotion (to the sort of people who would use it) or that they were turned off by what it offered, or how it was presented.
You can never have too much progress, unless of course you outrun the capabilities of your website providers or programmers.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
www.boardgamegeek.com
'nuff said.
After 2 years of being in 'alpha' status with nothing spent on advertising...
hmmm. Imagine that.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
topic of discussion:
gleemax is neither glee nor max.
discuss.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Before this, I'd never heard of Gleemax, and apparently, so hasn't Slashdot:
I find it quite weird that there doesn't seem to be a post about Gleemax in Slashdot's history: I wonder how many other sites they missed out on.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Having written, albeit small bits, in the gaming industry, we often talk about crunch, the real rules and meat that you can really grip onto and take and run with. I mean, the backstory is nice on some products, but the crunch is the stuff I can use as a player or gamemaster.
Gleemax never had much in crunch. It was all fluff and drove me crazy. It had a crappy name. (Seriously, the concept of maximum glee brings up either the image of a hyperactive 5-year-old or a massive of singing sweater vest people - either way, not attractive.)
It also seemed to try to be everything to everybody, which is a failure.
They SHOULD have tried a scaled back thing oriented towards a product line and then expanded slowly to guarantee enough content and interaction. The way it was, when I first checked it out, was that I couldn't do anything, and there was rarely enough new to see, so I stopped coming back.
And seriously, if I play an MMORPG, then I already HAVE a community. I don't need a second. I play a few single/multiplayer games (Civ IV, NWN2, etc.) and one MMORPG (EVE).
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
They had well entrenched websites already that did a lot of what they initially offered.
www.enworld.org though simple, has a plethora of reviews, forums, news, chat
www.paizo.com was able to get interest because they carried more than just wizards of the coasts products.
It's a tough market I would think. People that want to socialize in an alternate setting probably use something like second life. People that want to mindlessly kill stuff and gather equipment and power game probably play warcraft.
For those who weren't members of the site, when they started their "Gleemax" project they replaced large numbers of the board staff, whom most members got along with well and respected, with new staff that nobody knew. The moderation process was changed, making it stunningly ineffective, and problems were handled in absurdly poorly-thought-out ways.
Wizards of the Coast seems to be trying to do as much as possible to damage itself online. Magic Online v3 brought a new client that almost everyone hated, has compatibility problems galore and was still delayed for something like two years.
It's pathetic.
Drop the snobbery. All that does is make you look bitter.
Do you really think your D&D character who you've been playing off and on for 30 years since BECMI is so much more legitimate than someone's Tier 6-geared character with thousands of hours of play time? Hint: it's not.
Disclaimer: I play WoW. I have 2 70s, neither of which are geared for raiding (yet...). I also run a weekly D&D game and I started a board game club at my college. So if you want to try and argue I'm not a gamer... Well, go right ahead. I don't need your validation.
Oh, and my penis is HUGE (in Japan).
There seems to be a fairly sizable community there though so I don't know exactly what the problem is.
With that said, their website is very poorly designed. As a newb going to the site I was totally confused. Too much crap all over the screen and clicking on stuff sends me to various different websites, very confusing. There is an overuse of graphical content, little consistency and poor organization.
As a new person coming across the site I can't even figure out what the point or purpose of it is and I'm not going to spend a bunch of effort learning about some random site that looks like an pop-up banner ad.
This is the first ive even heard of it. Try marketing maybe?
Is there a successful version of this? I've been interested in getting into some Pen and Paper RPGs, but I don't know anyone else who plays, and I've not found where geeks congregate in my town.
Magic Online version 3 was a critical failure too. If you ever want an example of a project gone wrong, Magic Online version 3 is finest example of ineptitude you'll ever find. Honestly, it is a piece of crap. The only reason anyone still plays Magic Online is because they're addicted to Magic and will put up with the slow, buggy, ugly UI, as well as the lag, instability, crashes, and whatever else went wrong. Wizards of the Coast isn't supposed to be a software development house. That's what you get when you have useless pro-tour Magic players doing your development.
It was set up and running by a friend of mine, before gleemax even launched. It's the same kind of blog/wiki/forum for gamers, except for it's meant for all kinds of games, and it's actually a good useful site.
Hiring gamers to do work on things that involve games. Good luck getting anything productive out of them.
There's a site by Signature Devices called Phat Yaffle (I know... Marketing must have staggered into the office from the prior night's coke binge just long enough to come up with that one) that is doing its best to actually integrate gameplay results into a commerce / community site. Kinda like an e-Chuky Cheeze with the tickets for prizes, but with less disturbing animatronics.
Perhaps more interestingly, the company has released a FOSS (as in beer) cross-platform SDK called Elemental Engine II which ties into the site, and distribution network for said games developed w/ their SDK. The developer gets a cut if the game makes money, otherwise it is playable/downloadable on the PY site. Neat concept, and technically much further along than a lot of other sites.
Did they put in a usable forum? Their previous site had a user discussion forum that spent years without a working search function. They'd tease about it coming soon, and occasionally turn it on only to have it crash their database.
I never actually looked at Gleemax, mostly because I haven't been able to muster much interest in 4th edition. How is their forum software working?
The problem with this is simply the fact it wasn't needed and, to make the move Wizards "archived" (see: deleted) all their older, popular forums. ENworld and the RGPA had active forums (which were both heavily supported/owned by wizards at the time). On top of that, Gleemax didn't support older or non-wizards of the coast games. I'm not saying they should support their competitor's directly, but little things like being able to list that you also play L5R or Pokemon would have drawn more people than just those who play only "hasbro owned games".
We're talking late nineties here. Before the phrase "social networking" was invented there was arcadium.com, a so-called "affinity networking" site for gamers.
It ended up being used just like myspace and facebook are used now. There was little or no gaming discussion, just lots of teenagers and cyber-sex.
And they're very happy with their own blogs, forums, and ways of doing things, thank you very much. Sites like Unclebear, Nuketown, and Musings of a Chatty DM already have a venerable history and vibrant user bases. Grassroots, professional, and otherwise: Gleemax was a Johnny-Came-Never compared to the great sites that are already around.
If you're looking for a way to concentrate all that good RPG chatter, look no further than your own RSS reader.
Or better yet, just plug into the RPG Bloggers Network. They've done all the RSS congregation for you.
Yes. Total shill. Right here.
No pussy for YOU!
I was actually excited about Gleemax when it was first announced. I haven't tried to use it recently, but when it was first launched it was lacking many key features.
When it launched it didn't even have a "friend" feature. Hopefully this was fixed by now.
What it really needed though was a way to list games you played, and a way to search for other gamers on the site by region and game. The site was supposed to be targeted to people who play traditional games (pen&paper, tabletop, board, card, etc). These gamers can't really play over the Internet, so they need to meet people in real life to play. A solid site to meet other people to play these games with would have been huge.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Not having heard about it before it was declared a failure is a bad thing, but even if I had, I wouldn't have used it because it's *hideous*! I'd prefer using something bland like Craigslist over that gaudy design any day.
Forget games, for a minute.
Is it really possible, here in 2008, to "create a central hub for XYZ on the web where XYZ-ers can gather to talk about XYZ, do XYZ, and find people interested in XYZ" and have it actually work? Does it work to start from scratch and plan such an empire, or do you have to have the patience to let these kind of sites naturally evolve?
Is it even possible to have a "central hub" of _anything_ on the web? What's wrong with this thinking?
He made this comment quite a long time ago now. Almost a month I think. The D&D community has known that the site was going to shut down for a long time.
Regarding the name, Gleemax.
I have to apologize, since I'm the one who came up with it. However, I neither work for Wizards of the Coast, or for Hasbro.
I came up with the name as a joke in a rec.games.deckmaster post in the late 90s in response to someone who asked who was running WotC. A few folks I knew at WotC (and many more that I did not) evidently took the name and ran with it as a long time internal joke. You can still find my original post creating the name in the archives on Google Groups.
So if you hate the name, blame me, except recognize that I never intended it for use as a Social Networking site, I intended it as a one off joke post on Usenet.
Jeff Franzmann
RPGBomb.com has been around for quite awhile as well and already
"creating a place on the web where hobby gamers can gather to talk about games, play games, and find people to play games with."
It's like FaceBook or MySpace but for Pen & Paper addicts
Ave Molech Setting
Short of the totally stupid name, it sounded like it might be a good place ... had anyone known about it.
When a multi-year project fails because geeks didn't know about it, it's been kept a secret.
Not even APPLE has that kind of security.
Surprise, surprise.
Maybe their overall vision was too ambitious, maybe the whole central hub idea was never going to work, maybe not. But if you can't focus and prioritize tasks so that you actually deliver real concrete value, rather than building pieces of lots of different features, you aren't going to have anything that's worth anything, no matter how acheivable your goal is.
But its easier to say the whole idea was "too ambitious" than to say "the execution was completely fouled up", especially when you are the one with management responsibility for the execution, but certainly people above you that weren't involved in the execution were involved in (or at least bought off on) the broad concept.
/tg/ called. They called to say you FAIL!
Oh well, it looks like someone will just have to break down and simply create a myspace group for gamers ;)
originality: FAIL
name: FAIL
marketing: FAIL
understanding of their demographic: FAIL
I don't know what they were thinking. If they had actually *asked* a gamer what they thought, perhaps this wouldn't have failed (because it never would have started).
Really. I mean, Gleemax? Maximum Glee? Or a Gleaming Ax? Who the hell are they aiming it at? Japanese girls, or violent barbarians?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
Gleemax is another casualty of Wizards of the Coast's tough reorganization this year.
Other changes that are percieved to be aimed directly at the bottom line:
Ending the Junior Super Series (Magic events where young players could win scholorship money. )
Ending State Championships for Magic.
Cancelling a Pro Tour event, and making that change permanent.
Relocating Worlds to be held in the U.S.
Releasing Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition.
Changing the card rarity in Magic to include 'Mythic' rares, a card twice as rare as 'Rare'
Changing the way Prerelease tournaments are run by encouraging more local events, reducing the cost of their support.
Many of these changes are part of their restructuring of the Organized Play program, and a change in focus to attempt to aquire new players. Spending money on Gleemax doesn't get new, younger gamers away from World of Warcraft, Pokeman, or Yugioh. Many of these changes were met with negative comments from the existing players, but may in the long run prove to be beneficial to Wizards and the players alike.
-Z
see www.boardgamegeek.com for what I think Gleemax was trying to be. The market was pretty well covered with a great site, for free, not limited to WOTC products.
wow I did not know that it was a social networking site . and i got one of the funny brain in a box promos they sent out . thought it was a goofy name for the Wizards board forum. Id say it bad advertising is the real reason. and the site looked like crap .
but Gleemax looked like it was made 8 years ago.
It doesn't even look like they had even seen any other social networking sites.
I joined, but I didn't use it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1) The name was a Magic the Gathering in joke, inside baseball references do not meet the goal of one stop gamer social networking.
2) The neon puke green color scheme was barftastick...
3) Failed to deliver a functional, easy to use blog app. Its really a bad sign when your own employees were mirroring their Gleemax content on their personal blogs. What really blows my mind they could have purchased a blog program off the shelf that would have been working from day one, ugh.
4) Over promised, under delivered.
5) Unrealistic deadlines.
6) Database problems. They have been combining multiple databases with mixed results.
7) Brain dead support for the site. I used the combine accounts feature and it killed both of my accounts. When I asked what was going on and please fix it, I was told it was a know issue and to create a brand new account. When I countered that they should disable the feature they told me that would be a good idea. The feature still exists to chew up other peoples accounts.
8) DDI is behind schedule and needs the bodies being sucked up in the Gleemax sea of failure.
Good Luck WotC... you are going to need it to deliver digital content.
Maybe that was their problem?
You know, the ones that tend to be the DMs, the ones who tend to have their houses open for gaming sessions?
When WotC was running their own forums, old gaming worlds that people kept converting to newer versions of D&D had their own forums, where people actively traded in ideas related to their respective game worlds (Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Planescape, Ravenloft, SpellJammer, Mystara/Known World), but Gleemax decided that if a forum's front page didn't refresh every day, that it didn't meet its advertising quota, so it should be merged with another forum.
What did the hard core gamers get when they hoped to do fourth edition conversions of their favorite campaigns (ensuring new 4E sales)? They got the DarkDragonPlaneLoftJammerWorld forum, and the only way to get a forum of their own was to out-post the other worlds in the forum. Gleemax was the Joker, the forum was the pool cue, and try-outs had started (to make allusions to a currently popular movie).
Only, the gamers didn't play. They left for The Piazza. I play GURPS now.
...for one reason and one reason only: WotC's official Magic the Gathering discussion forums, which I use, and used before Gleemax popped up. That's the first thing, to me (and presumably many others), that Gleemax seemed like an unnecessary wrapper for the forum content that we wanted. People who just wanna use those forums probably make up a pretty hefty percentage of the Gleemax registrations The forum moderation quality went way down; often problems were addressed with form-letter replies that didn't go anywhere. This didn't bother me too much, but it was definitely there, and other users were more aggravated than I was.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"Gleemax": an in-joke about an alien-brain-in-a-jar that supposedly runs the Magic the Gathering R&D department 2004's "Unhinged" card set (a self-parody released by WotC) contained this, a card representing the Gleemax character: http://magiccards.info/uh/en/121.html A MTG reference, and an in-joke at that, was definitely a bad choice for the name.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
They must have rolled a natural one on their skill check.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Ok, I just had to mention that I was one of the people who taught Randy to play MTG shortly after it came out - and now he's a Veep at WOTC. I haven't even owned a magic card in years. I think I missed the boat somewhere :( ...
That's the problem right there. It never looked like anything more than a fancy domain name to replace boards1.wizards.com, which is/was WotC's run of the mill vbulletin forum. Certainly it must be a failure if people don't even know what the site is for. At least part of that, I feel, was the shoddy attempt at viral promotion when the site first launched, in which nobody was actually told what the site was or would be about, and unlike the Matrix, you also could not just see it for yourself, as the pages were merely filled with cryptic messages. See, if you do that sort of thing for Halo 2, there's still a product for people to buy at the end. With Gleemax, once they reached the end of the tunnel all they found was a website that did nothing. Gleemax was designed as a gimmick, and once a gimmick is done, it's gone. The funny thing is, they could easily have linked the Gleemax site promotion to the giveaway card being handed out Magic Online -- and thereby created a dual promotion -- as in, sign up for the site and create a social networking profile, and get this free account and card on MTGO -- but instead, the two events were completely unrelated. A person who never visited the site could get the cards on MTGO, and a person who visited the site wasn't incentivized to get the cards being given away on MTGO.
The next time you try to launch a social networking site, I would suggest that you tell people you are launching a social networking site. Then, people who would be interested in social networking might know enough to sign up for the site. And, you'd save money on mailing foam rubber brains to people out of the blue.
Wow, will people never get tired of this? For chris`s sake, there has not been any real innovation on the internet for the last 5 years! Start thinking creative, people!
With a name reminiscent of the cancer drug Gleevec, who wouldn't want to try it?
This is the same company that wants to charge full price for virtual cards in their MTG online game. And AFAIK, there is currently NO way to convert those virtual assets into real cardboard.
With that as your benchmark, is there any expectation of sanity from these people ?
"Play When You Want, as Much as You Want -- Gleemax Never Closes"
Heh. You know your marketing sucks when you have target demographic like that, yet Slashot hasn't heard of the site until it closes.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
Have y'all seen the site? It looks like a joke
Who would take that seriously?
The biggest reason Gleemax failed was it replaced gold with Crap. Remember, Gleemax was the replacement for the two magazines Dragon and Dungeon. Dragon was a great captive audience where you could show new products, and then offer elaborative materials which would sell your original product. It was a supplemental games magazine that you could take with you while gaming, which was a big part of the allure - once a rule set is in print, the print can't be changed, while a forum can be changed at any time. Dungeon provided additional adventures and settings for D&D. And both Dragon & Dungeon were "replaced" with Gleemax. This strikes me as somebody in management saying "Hey, if we get all these damn kids to do all the work on their 'social networking site', we won't have to pay them and can reap the rewards!"
I've been a D&D player for years- this "we tried to do too much" is bad PR drivel. They tried to do too much stuff that not a single player wanted or cared about, that's true. And they kept doing it even after everyone told them to stop it. Not to mention Insider still isn't up to snuff this far after release (and nobody wants to pay for it when it does hit). Hell, the PHB4.0 only has 3/5 stars on Amazon, even 3.5 had 3.5 stars.
Gleemax is fail? I'm thinking 4.0 is pretty much a case of fail all over, and all of the side projects are going down with it, showing that really Wizards is fail. This far after release, it's clear 4.0 is meant to be a war game like 1.0 instead of a roleplaying game like 2/3/3.5. I'm thinking more D&D fans are roleplayers than wargamers at this point. Add that to all the side projects going down in flames, and sorry fanboys, but it's already time to head back to 3.5.
If you acquire a complete set on MTGO, you can redeem it for a RL complete set. But that's the only way, and for old sets, that option is gone.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
If I had known it existed I probably would have been all over that thing.